Project Nemesis is a fan driven website for games that use the One-Roll Engine (like Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign and Monsters) or Chaosium's Basic Roleplay System (BRP) (like Call of Cthulhu) and the Delta Green setting.
A series of twelve home-made pornographic film reels shot in 1922 by
land developer Donald Cardiss, featuring his friends, a nephew and his
daughter. The films were made in Cardiss' home for distribution among a
close-knit circle of 'cinema enthusiasts', in semi-open defiance of the
authorities while he was awaiting trial on an obscenity charge.
The contents wouldn't be considered particularly racy by today's
standards, being spliced together from scenes of unattractive naked
people staring at the camera in drink- or opium-befuddled complacency,
or having unenthusiastic sex in twos and threes. The most interesting
moment is when one girl who's sampled too much of Cardiss' inducements
over-balances and slides right off her partner, knocking herself
unconscious on a coffee table.
The bumping and grinding in the foreground is just a distraction,
though. Set up behind the participants and carefully framed in every
shot are a series of canvas dropcloths crudely painted with erotic
symbols. The symbols are texts, disguised by a simple substitution code
which protects them from casual viewing but wouldn't pose a challenge
to anyone familiar with the basic concepts of cryptography.
The texts are spells, more than a dozen of them, in haphazard
order. Many of them mention Y'Golonac. Most simply don't work, but a
few are genuine.
Cardiss himself appears only once in the entire work, at the start
of the first reel. He is fully clothed and looks directly at the
camera, mouthing what could possibly be a long poem. None of the reels
have sound or subtitles but a lip reader could, with difficulty, make
out a chant calling on the viewer to 'make a weapon of the flesh'.
It isn't clear who Cardiss was trying to pass his knowledge on to,
but the making of the tapes contributed to his conviction on the
obscenity charge, and during a three year prison sentence he appears to
have had a change of heart. He spent his remaining years before dying
of a heart attack in 1937 trying to re-acquire and destroy all the
tapes. There were too many copies made, though. A few reels still exist
in the hands of collectors or sit forgotten in attics somewhere. For
anyone hunting the tapes, the issue can be confused by the fact that
Cardiss made an unknown number of other skin reels as well.
Study time: 4 weeks
Mythos knowledge: +1%
San loss: 1/1D6
Spells include Shrivelling, Hands of Colubra, Wither Limb, Wrack + six incomplete + three that don't appear to have any purpose
I would love to see players try to roleplay decoding a tome like this one.
ORE Horror 
