Adventure Seed idea: The Eschatological Convergence Machine.

Inspired by this.

The Eschatological Convergence Machine

This writeup is designed with the Esoterrorists RPG in mind, but it will work in any modern horror RPG campaign that has an active conspiracy dedicated to ripping big supernatural holes in Reality so that Things come out of them.  Which is to say, probably most modern horror RPG campaigns. It’s a pretty common trope, after all.

The concept behind the Eschatological Convergence Machine (ECM) is simple: clearly there is an optimal way to end the world (note that it is assumed here that ending the world is actually possible).  It merely needs to be discovered.  Using a brute-force method of trying everything and seeing what happens is theoretically possible, but impossible on a practical scale because it would take too long – and nihilist death cultists are typically not renowned for long-term thinking. So research along these admittedly repellent lines traditionally only took place sporadically, and for as long as the researcher could maintain functionality, which was typically for not very long.

All of this changed in the 1950s and 1960s, when people realized that computers were exceptionally good at doing boring and repetitive work very, very quickly.  Some unknown madman decided that a supernatural computer could do supernatural boring and repetitive work just as quickly; and creating a device like that was indeed within the capacity of a nihilistic death cult. They’ve been tinkering with it for going on half a century now, in fact.

Basically, the ECM works like this: every so often, it stops its calculations and will not continue until it is provided with a specific set of illegal, depraved, decadent, or simply unusual items. Sometimes the cultists overseeing the ECM somehow know what the device ‘wants;’ sometimes they just guess. A few suspect (but do not care) that it doesn’t matter what the item to acquire actually is, as long as the item or the act of acquisition is sufficiently heinous. Once the item is reacquired, the ECM powers up again and resumes its calculations.  It’s not an oracle or a predictive device: it is merely the occult embodiment of the desire to End All Of Existence, and eventually it will supposedly succeed.

In the meantime, what do the cultists get out of it? Endorphins, mostly – but basking in the miasma that the ECM generates seems to be significantly and supernaturally rejuvenating and restorative, at least if you’re evil. Plus, the process of plugging a ‘repair’ item into the ECM typically allows the cultists to mystically access that item’s secrets, which is of course handy if the item is, say, a living human brain. Lastly, of course, there’s the satisfaction of knowing that you’re contributing towards your chosen goal, even if said goal is the destruction of everything, everywhere. Some types respond well to that kind of motivation.

Physically speaking, people cannot typically actually see the ECM, mostly because it consists of a ramshackle, erratically wired and powered building full of rusting, corroded, mildewed, oily, and occasionally foul-smelling pieces of salvaged mechanical and electronic computing devices.  The more technologically savvy the onlooker, the less rational the whole thing looks; dot-matrix printers publishing gibberish while old-style reel drives spin madly and play atonal dirges is the least of it.  The few actual working monitors and keyboards in the whole contraption are particularly disconcerting. Some of them display on the monitor what you were about to typed on the keyboard, or what you wanted to type. At least one of the monitors will change your mind so that it agrees with what has just been typed on the keyboard.  And don’t look in any of the filing cabinets – or, God help us all, the card catalogs…

On the plus side, permanently blowing up the ECM is trivial. As is setting it on fire, or even running a car through its front door.  The device has pretty much no supernatural defenses at all; it’s protected by nobody knowing what or where it is.  That means that cultist security on the ECM is exceptionally tight, as well as remarkably proactive.  Of course, killing people who look like they might be on the verge of discovering why a cult is going around killing people runs its own risks, but the cult has gotten away with it.  So far.