Ripped From the Headlines (Halloween Edition)
In the world of The Esoterrorists, a cabal of high-placed sorcerers weakens the membrane between this world and the dreaded Outer Dark by launching operations employing media saturation to subvert the populace’s collective sense of reality. The heroes, the dedicated men and women of the Ordo Veritatis, confront these plans, in plot hooks which have been... ripped from the headlines. These are their stories… [CHA-CHUNK]
An Internet hoax, in which a faked news story describes the work of nonexistent conceptual artist Nero White, causes continent-wide trouble for the Ordo Veritatis when it metastasizes into an urban legend. The original article, claiming that White has designed an art piece called a rape tunnel, in which any viewer who makes it through the tunnel is sexually assaulted, is quickly exposed as satire. But when it spreads via social networking sites, it enters the consciousness of students on far-flung campuses. Within weeks it evolves into a rumor about a team of serial killers who use a Halloween fun house to capture victims. The PCs are called to the campus of Strunk College to check out persistent sightings of a phantom fun house, from which entrants never emerge. The Esoterrorists have used the psychic energy generated by the urban legend to summon an intermittent gateway to the unspeakable hell that is the Outer Dark, which appears in the form of a plywood Halloween funhouse. It’s up to the team to find and stop the rogue magicians, and deal with any ODEs (Outer Dark entities) who may have escaped into our reality through the tunnel.