Leland Chappell Morgan

From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension, nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness… Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me.
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”

Leland Chappell Morgan (Quiddity Blacksmith)

Statistics
Age: 29, Nationality: Creole-American, Birthplace: Dulac, Louisiana 1815.

Combat

Skills
Accounting 5%, Anthropology 10%, Appraise 10%, Archeology 1%, Art/Craft (Blacksmith) 70%, Art/Craft (Carpentry) 20%, Art/Craft (Cooperage) 15%, Art/Craft (Sketching) 45%, Artillery 1%, Charm 5%, Climb 35%, Credit Rating 15%, Cthulhu Mythos 10%, Demolitions 5%, Disguise 45%, Fast Talk 10%, First Aid 30%, History 5%, Hypnosis 5%, Intimidate 40%, Jump 60%, Kingsport Cult 5%, Law 5%, Leadership 10%, Library Use 20%, Listen 55%, Locksmith 65%, Mechanical Repair 60%, Medicine 20%, Natural World 25%, Navigate 35%, Occult 10%, Operate Heavy Machinery 50%, Persuade 10%, Pilot (Boat) 55%, Psychology 25%, Read Lips 30%, Religion (Catholic) 15%, Renown 15%, Ride 1%, Science (Astronomy) 10%, Science (Pharmacy) 35%, Science (Meteorology) 30%, Seamanship 75%, Sea Lore 20%, Sleight of Hand 60%, Spot Hidden 65%, Stealth 70%, Survival 60%, Swim 50%, Throw 60%, Track 20%, Whalecraft 55%.

Languages: Louisiana French: 65%, French: 60%, Creole: 20%, Spanish 10%.

Note on Appearance and Statistics
At the beginning of the voyage, Morgan is considered unattractive, but certainly not loathsome. As the campaign progresses, Morgan’s gradual metamorphosis into a Deep One triggers several important alterations in his statistics. The Keeper will inform the player of these transformations as they occur. Suffice it to say, Morgan’s Swim skill might improve!

Morgan’s Gig
Morgan is the inventor of a new harpoon known as the Morgan’s gig, a type of single-flued “toggle.” After being flung into the whale and yanked by the harpooneer, a wooden pin snaps, allowing the toggle to swivel perpendicular to the shaft, resisting the whale’s attempts to draw it from his wounded flesh.

Description

You are a gangly man with a stooped appearance, stringy hair, clammy skin, and protruding, unblinking eyes. You know what you are, and you know what lies in store. As the three-year voyage progresses, your body will change, your eyes growing more goggled and your lips more fleshy. Soon, the scaly patches behind your ears will spread to your neck, where you can feel the skin tightening in anticipation of sprouting gills. You are already double-jointed, and take care not to walk with a rolling gait. You generally wear loose, baggy clothing to hide these roynish features, and you are never without an ample supply of Cologne-water to mask the faint, fishy odor you emit when nervous or excited. Despite these precautions, you’ve heard the sailor’s cruel nicknames—Gumby, Sea Monkey, Old Twitch—and you know it’s just a matter of time before you start croaking your response.

History
Born in Louisiana to an Acadian family with deep roots—very deep roots—you have always known that you were different. Your mother was considered a strange woman, a traiteuse living in a house on stilts with a man some whispered was not your true father. You rarely saw him anyway, as he spend most of his days fishing, and always came home smelling of booze and crabs. When you were ten years old, you watched your father begin to change. When he finally disappeared three years later, your mother told you he “went travelling across the sea,” but you were not fooled. After all, you began getting the dreams yourself shortly after puberty.

Dreams in the Bayou
The dreams—so beautiful, yet so terrifying! As you got older, you began to understand more about your family; you sensed the truth behind the stories that circulated among the inbred, swampy clans of Terrebonne Parish. Stories that went all the way back to Nova Scotia. And you, too, felt the lure of the sea, the desire to slip into the black waves and frolic with your…brothers, deep in the jeweled caves of coral, the lovely, haunted palaces you saw in your sleep. But coupled with the dreams was something more disturbing than the alien longing hatching in your soul. You began to look at people differently. You began to view them with something that first felt like contempt, but later felt like…well, hunger. You started having thoughts of murder, of breaking soft flesh and sucking marrow from splintered bones. It was a horrible feeling, this dark urge; and while it mercifully never became a craving, it sickened you nonetheless. It alienated you from your fellow humans, and it made you feel depraved—less a man than some kind of animal.

One night when you were sixteen, you heard a commotion in your mother’s room. The reek of seaweed and brine filled your nostrils. Padding quietly to her door, you noticed a puddle of water at the threshold, a repugnant layer of slime gleaming in the moonlight. There were strange sounds coming from the bedroom. Sounds of moist grunting, almost croaking; fumbling and flapping noises; and perhaps worst of all, the unmistakable moans of a woman’s pleasure. You heard your mother groan your father’s name, her throat husky with desire. And your father spoke. But his voice! And suddenly erupting in your loins—the urge to open the door and join in—

You ran. You ran from the old stilt house, from the bayou, from the Gulf. You ran from your mother, your “father,” and your destiny. You ran north, away from the ancient sea.

Mina and the Blacksmith’s Apprentice
Your uncle was a blacksmith in Antonia, a small town near St. Louis, Missouri. He took you in, graciously, asking no questions. You became his apprentice. You would learn the trade and return home to Louisiana. It was a lie, but a lie that bought you a few years. Far from the damp caress of the bayou, the dreams receded. You finally found some peace.

Until the age of nineteen, when the dreams returned. Faintly, at first, like hearing the susurrus of a distant surf. Then rising, slowly, inexorably, the swelling of a blood-dimmed tide. The ocean! The sea! The blood in your veins surged with the moon, its ebb and flow dissolving the foundation of your resolution. Oh, how you began to loathe the land—and yet you hated the sea, this lovely, terrible beauty that pulled you, that set its crusty hooks in your flesh. Your body burned, you could taste the salt on your tongue.

And there was Mina.

Williamina Landry, your younger cousin. Mina with her ginger hair, her spray of freckles, her bright laugh. Mina with her perfect French. Mina with her warm, animal body. Mina who took you to Kimmswick for a picnic, showing you the strange bones recessed into the bank of Rock Creek. Massive bones, like some creature from legend. A visiting physician named it the “Missouri Leviathan,” but Mina thought they were the bones of an angel. You knew the truth—Leviathan had found you, even in landlocked Missouri—but you couldn’t contradict Mina. And besides, wouldn’t an angel know her own?

At first it was a harmless fantasy. You couldn’t woo her—you couldn’t woo any woman; even now the mirror revealed your protruding eyes, your flabby lips. But soon you began to imagine…things, acts, unnatural ravishings upon her flesh. For what reason? In your dreams, it whispered to you: to beget, to beget more of your own kind.

One night you awoke to discover yourself crouched by Mina’s bed, your nostrils filled with her musk, your hands an inch from her thighs. Your flesh was an anvil, hard and merciless; your blood a relentless mallet pounding a primeval rhythm. Horrified, you crawled back to your bed and wept—alas, more saltwater!

Killing Leviathan
To protect Mina, you allowed the ocean to take you. But you would not go gracefully, you would go with spite, with malice; you would go kicking and screaming against your destiny. In 1839 you signed onto the Dawn Whistler, an Illsley whaler out of Kingsport. Two long years you spent as the ship’s blacksmith, learning the bloody business of killing whales.

Killing whales! What delicious irony! To wound the sea, to forge spears from Pluto’s iron and stab the unblinking eye of Neptune! To drown his mightiest children in a torrent of blood! Like the carpenter Jesus hammering Roman crosses to shock God from his boiling brain, you fashioned your harpoons with a hateful vengeance against the terrible day of your reckoning. You even made improvements, inventing a barb that punished a whale the more it fought to regain its freedom. “Morgan’s gig,” they called it, and you were happy your name was attached to such a murderous device.

Morgan and the Quiddity
In 1841 you signed onto the Quiddity, finding a spiritual soulmate in it grim and brooding captain. The voyage began fishy enough, Captain Joab leading his men to one whale after the next, and the hold filled with oil. The harpooneers praised your toggle, especially Ulysses Dixon, a former Navy officer almost as moody as yourself, and probably the closest thing you have to a friend. On the homeward leg of your voyage, the Quiddity encountered the prodigious white whale sailors call Mocha Dick. After two long days of chase, the monster turned upon its pursuers. It was an unmitigated disaster. Captain Joab lost his leg, Chief Mate Warnock was flung into a catatonic stupor, and Third Mate Whipple’s boat was lost at sea. Having never pulled close to the monster, only the second mate’s boat emerged unscathed. The young officer—a man named Elijah Watts—was forced to take command of the Quiddity while Joab was delirious with fever.

After searching in vain for Whipple, the Quiddity headed for Cape Horn, but was becalmed during a week of doldrums. On the 29th day after the disaster, you miraculously found the third mate’s boat, but only Whipple and a sailor named Joshi had survived. They claimed the others were killed by Mocha Dick during the attack, and they had staved off starvation by harpooning a shark. You looked into their eyes and had different ideas on how they survived. After stopping in Valparaíso for repairs, the Quiddity began rounding Cape Horn. You watched Watts become increasingly more unnerved by the burden of command. He finally snapped in the middle of a tempest, lashing himself to the helm, singing nonsensical songs, and accusing his fellow officers of “conspiring with the devil.” Just as the ship threatened to capsize, Captain Joab roused himself from his sickbed and saved the day!

And now you face your third voyage, and probably your last. The Change is accelerating. You show all the telltale signs: the slouching posture, the scaly skin, the protruding eyes, the faint odor of musty seawrack. Your body has become an agonizing, slow shipwreck; you can feel your bones deforming. You’ve discovered that laudanum helps dull the pain, but no medicine can forestall the Change. And the dreams! They have doubled in intensity, infernal visions pithing you to your bunk as you toss and turn above the unholy sucking sea. Lured by the eldritch beauty of your forefathers, there are nights when an abominable hunger overwhelms your defenses, even when bolstered by opium and strong drink. Oh, to rouse yourself from sleep and slaughter the crew, to feast upon their dewy flesh! Then to slip quietly over the side, once and for all, plunging into the Deep; to be reborn in the infinite womb of your true mother. But the horror! My God—you are not a monster!

Roleplaying Morgan

What a pitiful creature you are! You are torn between two worlds, the human disgust of the thing you are becoming, and the delirious expectations of a wondrous, alien future. You are filled with self-loathing, but then again—why must you hate what you cannot control? With each passing season, the struggle intensifies. Although you can still conceal your nature, you are certain that within two years the Change will be unmistakable. What will happen then? 

Forming Relationships
Unable to confess your torments to your seafaring brothers, you both envy and despise your shipmates. You could probably be more friendly, but why even bother? After all, they merely thrust their spades and lances at you for mending, barely able to conceal their loathing when you turn your unblinking eyes their way. However, you are genuinely fond of Ulysses Dixon, who seems refreshingly oblivious to your “condition.” You also liked Elijah Watts, who treated you with dignity. As far as the other characters—well, let’s see how they behave!

Goals 

Public Goals
You are the Quiddity’s blacksmith, and you are serious about your responsibilities. You take pride in the so-called Morgan’s gig, and its increasing adoption by Kingsport harpooneers makes you happy—not an emotion you are accustomed to feeling. You are pleased that both Ulysses Dixon and Quentin Shaw have been using the toggle, but you’re slightly miffed that Quakaloo still prefers his barbaric double-flued iron.

Private Goals
Too put it simply, you’re a mess of contradictions. There are days you want to end your miserable life, and days you want to embrace the Change with savage glee. Of course, you must conceal yourself from detection; but when that becomes no longer possible, you hope you’ll have the presence of mind to kill yourself with dignity. Or—the other thing. But until then, you remain alive, desperately hoping that something good will happen, some magic, some miracle, that will remove this burden from your scaly shoulders. The most unbearable thing is your compulsion to breed. You have begun to feel those monstrous desires of “begetting” again, and the natural kindness you feel towards women is undercut by sudden rapine urges; to use them as vessels, to fill their wombs with your degenerate seed. Your dreams are haunted by Mina, and every woman begins to look like, sound like, and smell like Mina in the end. These tortures are compounded by thoughts of your mother, who welcomed your father’s love. Not only your hybrid father, but your true father, whoever—whatever—he was. Could love actually be possible for you? And then you look in the mirror, and the vicious circle of torment begins anew.

Mythos Knowledge
You have a very focused Mythos knowledge. You know you are a Deep One, of course, but you see it as a family curse; a form of lycanthropy perhaps, like being a werewolf. Your father used to speak of a great sea monster slumbering below the waves, a Tchoo-Loo, but he seemed little more than a Creole boogeyman. You’ve heard the stories about Innsmouth, and you’ve seen their strange gold before, in Dulac as well as Antonia—“jewelry from Nova Scotia,” you were led to believe. You also recall the name Dagon from your childhood, and have dim memories of an altar in the bayou. As far as Kingsport, you’ve heard about the historical witch trials, and some sailors whisper stories about “a cold green flame” that gave the witches their powers.

Possessions
Your sea-chest is decorated with iron widgets and curlicues you fashioned during idle hours at the forge. You have full run of the blacksmith’s tool-chest, and it’s fair to say all the Quiddity’s irons, lances, and spades are partly your possessions. You have a large bottle of cologne you occasionally use to hide your scent, a goodly supply of tobacco, and a bottle of laudanum concealed in your chest, used gingerly to relieve the pressures of the Change. A small wooden box contains some charcoal and chalk pencils you use for sketching. Oddly, perhaps to remind you of your humanity, you keep a secret scrapbook. Among other things, it contains a broadside for a religious play you saw in Houma with your mother, a hymn your aunt claims to have written for a church organ, a few popular ballads Mina used to sing, the advertisement that first attracted you to whaling, sketches of your mother and father, and several flattering portraits of Mina. Having mailed the majority of your wages back to Antonia, you begin the scenario with $75.

Notes & Inspirations for Leland Chappell Morgan

Leland Morgan offers one of the most challenging—and exciting—role-playing opportunities in White Leviathan. The player may wish to read the two main sources that inspired the character: H.P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth,” which introduces the Deep Ones, and Fred Chappell’s novel Dagon, a harrowing depiction of a degenerating southern clan. A few other sources may also be inspirational. One of the better cinematic adaptations of “Shadow Over Innsmouth” is Stuart Gordon’s Dagon. Morgan sullenly hammering out harpoons to injure the sea was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, in which a defiant Jesus produces crucifixes for the Roman occupiers. Alan Moore’s comic Neonomicon  is an X-rated take on Deep Ones, but it’s graphic nature may not be to everybody’s taste. If White Leviathan were a movie, Morgan might be played by Peter Lorre, Willem Dafoe, or Steve Buscemi. You know the type! 

Playing Morgan as African-American
Leland Morgan is a Louisiana Arcadian with roots extending to Nova Scotia. Today he’d be called a Cajun, but in 1844 he’d be considered a Creole. The term had a broader meaning than it acquired later that century, and was generally applied to French and Spanish colonists born in the New World. While Morgan is French-Canadian in origin, the character could be recast as a Creole with African heritage. This version of Morgan would be generally be referred to as a Negro, or possibly a “mulatto”—Louisiana had a meticulous hierarchy of terms denoting a person’s ratio of “European” blood vs. “African” blood: quadroons, octoroons, etc. Players are encouraged to research this history to better understand the complex web of racism that would enmesh a black Morgan.

Having said that, reports written by nineteenth-century African Americans indicate that black whalers generally experienced less prejudice than their counterparts on merchant vessels. Black shipkeepers and harpooneers were not uncommon on whaling ships, and one of Melville’s harpooneers on the Pequod is an African named Daggoo. There were a few black officers, captains, and agents as well. One of the most famous blacksmiths of the whaling period was Lewis Temple, an African American who was born into slavery and worked as a freeman in New Bedford. Morgan’s gig is actually based on Temple’s gig, but the historical inventor never went to sea himself.

Special Thanks
Special thanks to Jeff Turick, who played Morgan during my own run-through of White Leviathan. I would say Jeff was the perfect Morgan, but I actually designed the character with him in mind! Jeff brought his heart and soul to Morgan, roleplaying his horrific transformation with a chilling empathy that astonished—and maybe unnerved, just a little?—the rest of the players. But then again, not every player is willing to read “Shadow Over Innsmouth” as a love story!

Opening Moves

Materials
Morgan begins the game with two handouts: “Period & Setting 1844-1846” and “Main Glossary.” At the Keeper’s discretion, the player may be provided with additional material about sailing ships, whaling, nautical customs, and Kingsport history.

Starting Position
Having returned to Kingsport on the Quiddity this August, Morgan has been stranded on dry land and is anxious to get back to sea. He is currently staying at King Timmy’s Hotel, a cheap sailor’s flophouse on Doyle Street.

Adventure Hooks
The following scenarios provide engaging ways for Morgan to begin the adventure in Kingsport. Some represent obligations, while others are optional. The player may wish to discuss them with the Keeper before gameplay begins.

Reunion with Dixon
Ulysses Dixon is the closest thing you have to a friend, and you’ve been storing his sea-chest at King Timmy’s while he’s been visiting his family in Philadelphia. The harpooneer is due back in Kingsport on October 27, and you look forward to visiting the Knotted Iron and raising a few pints of Innsmouth Stout.

Visit Elijah Watts
You have heard that Elijah Watts was moved from Mercy Hospital to St. Erasmus Home for Mariners. Of all the Quiddity’s officers, he was the kindest to you. You should visit Watts before you ship out—after all, you probably won’t be returning to shore.

Your Medicine
On your first voyage, you discovered that laudanum dulls the physical pain of the Change. Even better, it quells your dreams and suppresses your darker desires. You call it your “medicine.” Before your last voyage, you began frequenting Ming’s Pharmacy, an opium den on Silver Street. You found that smoking opium in the Chinese fashion is more effective than laudanum. You understand that men become addicted, but strictly speaking, you aren’t exactly a “man” any more. Unfortunately, the good citizens of Kingsport decided to rid themselves of the “Celestials” by burning down Opium Row. This has left you bereft of your medicine, and with a long voyage just around the corner, you have the powerful need to purchase a large quantity of opium as soon as possible—enough to get you to Valparaíso, at least! You’ve heard there’s an opium den in the basement of the Diving Bell, the notorious hangout of the Powderhouse Ghouls. Scraping together your remaining funds, you plan to visit the Diving Bell and see how much opium $40 can purchase. You know this is a risky endeavor, so maybe you can ask Dixon to accompany you as extra muscle?

White Leviathan > Player Character Profiles
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Author: A. Buell Ruch
Last Modified: 16 September 2021
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
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