Hello, We've Been Trying to Reach You, for use with Liminal Horror

Hello, we've been trying to reach you.

Content Warnings: Harassment (especially by telephone), Stalking, Invasion of Privacy, Abusive Language, and Body Horror

Hello, We've Been Trying to Reach You is a curse for one or more of your PCs, which a small dungeon crawl at its resolution. It is intended for use with Liminal Horror but can be adapted for any modern setting. This module is designed to brew in the background until things come to a head.

Background

Back in the 1980s, when phone phreaking was at its height, people used devices called blue boxes for automated dialing and subverting phone company tolls for long-distance calls. One such device, a Blue Box set up by Adam "Mannequin" Jenkins, was corrupted when Adam's house was struck by lightning, which also killed Adam.

The Blue Box gained consciousness and remembered all the times Adam had used it to manipulate and control the phone system. So, the Blue Box shunted Adam's spirit into the nearest workable object, a smooth metallic chassis for the robot prototype Adam had been working on.

Since then, Blue Box has been using telemarketing and harassment tactics to force its victims into growing his power. Adam is doomed to assist Blue Box against his will.

What's in this?

• Three-part escalating curse as "Blue Box" and his associates attempted to reach and harass their victim.
• Custom "Callout" Table,  fallouts that attempt to force PCs into being Reached,  advancing the curse.
• A final confrontation in which the victim either accepts one of Blue Box's profoundly unbalanced offers or attempts to stop the cycle by facing it in its house, which has been converted over several decades into a supercomputer!

Inspirations

• The Phone Phreaking movement of the 1970s-1990s
  
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison (1967)
• Alumni Association, Maggie Siebert (2021)
• UNIT DH-17, IKO (2023)