Nightmare Opium of Leng
Origin: scenario "The Ferry Ride" by Cody Goodfellow
Description
The Nightmare Opium of Leng is a tainted hallucinogenic narcotic supplied by the Tcho-Tchos through San Francisco, and popular among certain artistic groups favoring darker moods and subjects in art. Taking the drug exposes users to nightmare regions of the Dreamlands, inducing vivid "hallucinations", "dreams", or "visions" of the Outer Gods, requiring the user to succeed on a CON x5 roll to avoid total paralysis. If this roll fails the victim asphyxiates within a number of rounds equal to his CON, then dies frozen in a posture of unspeakable fear. Even if the roll is successful, the smoker’s mind is ripped from his body to jaunt among the Outer Gods in the court of Azathoth, to plunge into the abyss wherein are sealed Lloigor and Zhar, or to commune with Nyarlathotep. The experience costs 1D10/1D1OO Sanity points and is extremely addictive. Once bitten, the victim must make a roll of his POW x3 (POW x2 the next time after a failure, then POW) to resist the temptation to use it again. In exchange for addiction, the drug confers awful Mythos lore, such as spells, a fundamental revelation, the location of a powerful tome, etc., but only insofar as it more completely enslaves the user to the Outer Gods.
The drug may at first serve as an inspiration for artistic vision, but users soon lose interest in their art, with addicts becoming lost increasingly deeply in the effects of the drug, and losing contact with reality. Users feel that the drug separates mind from body to visit things and places beyond human comprehension, a way to commune with the gods of a greater reality.
Some users may experience extreme reactions to the drug, ranging from temporary or permanent partial or complete paralysis (if limbs are moved, they may stay in the last position), coma, or death by respiratory or heart failure; some of these symptoms are, in reality, a reflection of the fact that the user has become severely detached from waking reality, perhaps lost permanently in the Dreamlands. (The condition of temporary paralysis and coma might be described by early 20th century analysts as "catatonic schizophrenia and waxy flexibility, with brief periods of lucid thought".) Occasionally, victims of traumas inflicted in the Dreamlands may express those bizarre nightmare injuries, alterations, or transformations upon their waking bodies.
So powerful is the drug that anybeen manufactured or stored becomes tainted with its essence and causes nightmarish phantoms and paranoid thoughts to invade the mind of anyone who comes near. Anyone who comes in contact with objects handled by addicts or used to store or prepare the drug for a prolonged period of time must roll POW x5 or start having paranoid hallucinations of nightmarish proportions for 1D4 hours (SAN Loss: 1/1d6), as a "contact high".
Appearances
- "The Ferry Ride" by Cody Goodfellow
- "Horror Stories from the Red Room", by Simon Yee
