Is it me, or are there some silly things that can happen with a bank loan? I ran out of cash last night and lost my Yithian Rifle, among other things. Couldn't I have just, um, taken care of the collectors with the thing?

We also created a house rule that made sense to us: you don't have to make a Bank Loan roll in an Other World. I mean, is the bank guy really gonna come through the Gate to collect?

Yes the Bank guy will. Just stay away from Bank Loans or go to Newspaper and try your luck at retainer.

we always laughed that the guys at the train station apparently have Photo-ID for their rail passes (since a rail pass is a special card, it can't be traded between investigators).

jhorner said:

Since both the Univeristy and the Newspaper keeps sending you money when your in the Other Worlds, it seems quite possible that Bank Guy could also reposses you stuff on Yuggoth.

Coyote''s Own said:

When was direct deposit invented?

As to the OP, everyone knows bankers are aliens.

I kind of see it as the loan accumulating interest. So whether or not you are in other world, the money is still gone.

Although I don't know how the repo man gets there. And I think you just go pick up your paycheck when you get back, for retainers.

It makes sense thematically more to me to think of each turn as like an entire day, or at least a few hours. Well, it makes sense for everything but movement. Like the characters in a Lovecraft story, they spend the rest of their turn taking care of the mundane.

There are about a million ways of explaining it. A debt collector falls asleep and travels into the Dreamlands, where he recognizes you. Or the bank's board of governors are possessed by Yithians or by Insects from Shaggai. Or your banker is actually a Mi-Go wearing an artificial human face. It happens all the time. My local branch of the Halifax is staffed exclusively by Mi-Go.

lol... of course! it all makes sense now! The weird lighting and drab faced bankers... I should have seen it coming!

jhorner said:

Probably, but Lovecraftian stories are about people desperately clinging to their sanity and their humanity in the face of unknowable horrors. As an investigator you spend all day killing evil, terrifying beasts that lurk in the shadows of this simple little town. If you start killing human beings too, just because they want to collect on something they're legally entitled to, then you risk losing yet another of your tenuous holds on reality. Going all Dark Side is not going to help you retain your sanity in the long run. There have been discussions in the past about how some rules simulate the investigator's survival instinct - an instinct that you as player don't necessarily share. I would say this is one of those things. The investigator chooses to just let the guy have the gun because he needs to keep the lines clear about what constitutes an unspeakable horror that he must kill and what constitutes a good, natural person, the sort of person he's trying to protect from the aforementioned horrors. Besides, he knows good and well that he'll turn the next corner and trip over some ancient artifact that will work just as well as the gun did at killing evil monstrosities.

jhorner said:

Maybe not deliberately, but you obviously found a way to get there. The bank guy lives in the same world your investigator does, he has all the same opportunities to get sucked into some magnificent and terrifying landscape, and maybe he'll bump into someone whose loan is overdue while he's there. I also happen think its perfectly thematic for your investigator to be wandering around some long-abandoned cyclopean ruins (as Lovecraft might say), exploring horrific artifacts and pouring over dusty tomes with accounts of fantastic happenings. Then he steps through a gigantic archway and sees Bob, the bank manager, standing there with a ball point pen and a sheaf of papers. Ahhh! AHHH! Abedeebledeebledeeble.... (other noises meant to indicate him going insane.)

I also like the other poster's idea of the bank guy being a Mi-Go in disguise or something. Makes sense that fiendish horrors from outside time and space would infiltrate the bank to tighten their grip on your feeble mortal mind. =)