Too much inhuman degeneration in my first game?

[Glaaki]

So, me and some friends have been planning to play our first CoC game for some time now, and I am going to be first-time GM. Most things are done, all the characters but one is finished, I got a pretty good grasp of the first scenario (Edge of Darkness). There is one thing that irks me, however. One of the characters has an NPC wife that is suffering from a somewhat strange, alien look and a debilitating illness(We rolled up the characters in a gaming aid called Heroes Now) so my first thought about her was "Deep One hybrid". It seemed a good idea, it tied nicely into the story, as I intend to introduce the order of dagon later, its suitably horrific, and the guy playing the character knows nothing about lovecraft, so he wont emmidiately realize what she is turning into (though when I described her looks, his first reaction was "cute goldfish" ). The problem is that I got another character with an inhuman lineage, a player character. She is a weird little girl who´s ancestors interbred with "fairies"(Degenerate descendants of the people who inhabited britain before the anglo-saxons) and I imagined that in future adventures she would have to go on a horrible journey of self-discovery and then try to deal with the implications (assuming she is still sane or alive enough), but Im worried that having two characters with the same theme might dilute the potency of the horror, kind of like having your characters go into a haunted house in every adventure. So I am wondering: what do you think I should do? Remaking the PC is not really an option, but maybe changing the wife into something different? Or maybe I should have both of them in the game, as long as I make their situations different enough? What do you think?

[Careless]

Why not leave one of the characters as a red herring?

As in, yes that person looks alien/weird....and that's all there is too it. No corrupted ancient lineage, no curse, etc.

HOWEVER - despite that being the truth, you could tailor future NPC reactions in mistaking that "unique look" to be signs of something else. Perhaps for instance, an assault by a future Cultist of Cthulhu leaves the NPC wife alive because he or she thought the person was "of the blood."

Or..you could have another group of NPC Hunters/Scholars/etc. who are demanding that the PCs hand over the "Hybrid" so she can be terminated.

Horror doesn't always have to be a Monster in the Closet so to speak. Sometimes the most horrible things we encounter is what humans do to each other when motivated by fear.

[Emrys]

I'd second Careless's suggestion of using the NPC wife as a red herring. For added fun and moral quandries, if the player begins to suspect anything, have his wife delightedly announce that she's pregnant.

I'm not familiar with Heroes Now (and my google-fu seems to be failing me) but I'm not sure how appropriate it is for Call of Cthulhu if it throws up inhuman lineage as a possibility for PCs. The new Cthulhu by Gaslight book's traits does include a Dark Ancestry option, but even that stops short of suggesting that the character isn't wholly human.

[Edit] My google-fu recovered. I'm still not convinced that inhuman ancestry should be an option for CoC, though.

[csmithadair]

I think you could go any number of ways with it based on what you personally think works best for you and your group. In my Shadows Over Filmland campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, two of the Investigators were revealed to have Mythos-tinged backgrounds (these were both based on specific scenarios in the book). This worked fine for that campaign, though it wouldn't necessarily do so for all.

As you say, it's your first game, so with that in mind, you may want to make things simple. Will it dilute the horror to have both ideas present in one game? Potentially. If you choose to use both, you may want to have the "hybrid wife" event occur first, since the other investigator's own ancestry is in question in the other situation. The other way around, it might have less impact. Though the pregnancy angle can go a long way here, and, while the "fairy-folk" are degenerate, depending on your interpretation, they may be more-or-less human.

You can also play with the idea that the characters' backgrounds are at least partially responsible for bringing them together. This may increase verisimilitude and provide a rationale for the players rather than make it a strange coincidence. (In the campaign I ran, the two Investigators in question weren't drawn to each other because of their backgrounds, but it was part of the reason they were drawn on a subconscious level to investigating the Mythos.)

[Aklo]

As per everyone's suggestions, playing with your players expectations, and carefully timing any and all revelations will be the key to making the whole eterprise "click" but I don't think the impact will suffer much from two characters having simmilar backgrounds. (they sound diseperate and interesting enough to support a scenario on their own) I would however caution gainst using "traditional" RPG tools to generate COC characters more thought and careful planning are required Imho.

[ElijahWhateley]

Sounds like the wife just has a bad case of ichthyosis to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyosis

Or, on the other hand, the girl believes she is descended from fairies, and becomes increasingly convinced of this as she loses sanity. But sadly, there are no such things as fairies, and when the SAN hits zero...there's an obvious fate for people who believe they can fly...

[PhoneCallOfCthulhu]

I know that changing the PC's background isn't really an option, but all that inter-breeding with fairies in Britain could just be another way of saying that her parents/clan/etc... planned for her to become a Blessed of Shub-Niggurath.
Either as a GOF’NN HUPADGH SHUB-NIGGURATH (p.46 of the Malleus Monstrorum) where it was planned that she'd be sacrifice to Shub-Ni or she's the human offstring of a Blessed father with a human mother Tatters of the King (p.121).

[Noble]

I would change it around on the guy with the 'fishy' wife, I would convince him his wife is a deepone, while the sad fact is she is just a normal woman! Get the player around to the thinking that killing her, is freeing her!

[Fredde72]

Keep both.
Develop the "Fairy" character first and if that character dies before the true horror becomes apperent, then go on with the fishy wife.
If the fairy survives long enough, have the fishy wife get pregnant and have the player kill her, just to discover that she was normal enough..

/ Fredrik

[PhoneCallOfCthulhu]

Also, his wife might look like a Deep One Hybrid, but not actually be one.
Hybrids from Innsmouth (or a young one who fell in love at first sight ) might believe she is one and kidnapped her to bring her back to her "kind". The PC will have to decide as he begin the unravel the mysteries of the Deep One if she's actually one or not. And whether to save her or ...

[Emrys]

In the "is she/isn't she a deep one" scenario I think it's vitally important that the players never know the answer, otherwise it'll make any decisions they're forced to make too easy.

I wouldn't use the PC with fairy ancestry anything other than a family myth (and red herring). Whether anyone else believes the character if they're told of the inhuman origins is another matter, but the effects of any interbreeding that took place 1,000 or so years ago would have been diluted away to neglible levels by now.

Besides, if the theory that anyone of European origin is descended from Emperor Charlemagne is accurate, then pretty much everyone of European origins in the 1920s would also be descended from the same fairy hybrids too (unless I've misunderstood something fundamental).

[Glaaki]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions! I will probably go with the red-herring wife, it is a really good twist, and can connect them to the Order/MiB/other mythoshunters in a nice way. You also made me think on how to structure the adventure, when to introduce Deep Ones and how much the Top Men know about them(specifically, since the campaign starts in 1930, I planned for the Innsmouth raid to have alredy happened, but finding the wife would be a good reason to take part in it). The pregnancy scare will also come up, I had alredy planned it before writing this, and it would provide some delicious moral conundrums.

[Glaaki]

I had imagined that the "fair folk" are a sort of underground, troglodyte race, once human, who live in tunnels under the hills, practice foul magic(they are shubby worshippers, as someone above me suggested the girl was a child of) and occasionally interbreed with humans. The idea was that her family were interacting with these creatures as part of their common worship, her birth were a part of said "interacting. I got the inspiration from Arthur Machen, especially from his stories "the shining pyramid" and "the white people", and from the gurps horror supplement, that discusses the idea a bit.

[Emrys]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions! I will probably go with the red-herring wife, it is a really good twist, and can connect them to the Order/MiB/other mythoshunters in a nice way. You also made me think on how to structure the adventure, when to introduce Deep Ones and how much the Top Men know about them(specifically, since the campaign starts in 1930, I planned for the Innsmouth raid to have alredy happened, but finding the wife would be a good reason to take part in it). The pregnancy scare will also come up, I had alredy planned it before writing this, and it would provide some delicious moral conundrums.

If your campaign postdates the raid, where/how will the PCs meet Deep Ones or Hybrids in order to leap to their wrong conclusions about Mrs PC? Won't Innsmouth be pretty taint-free by then?

[Emrys]

I had imagined that the "fair folk" are a sort of underground, troglodyte race, once human, who live in tunnels under the hills, practice foul magic(they are shubby worshippers, as someone above me suggested the girl was a child of) and occasionally interbreed with humans. The idea was that her family were interacting with these creatures as part of their common worship, her birth were a part of said "interacting. I got the inspiration from Arthur Machen, especially from his stories "the shining pyramid" and "the white people", and from the gurps horror supplement, that discusses the idea a bit.

Ah, that's made it clearer to me. I take that the inbreeding's still going on (or has, at least, gone on until relatively recently). I'd misread the first post and thought the ancestry was pre-Anglo Saxon (which isn't what it actually says).