Madrid, an unspecified autumn evening. The Prado Museum has announced a private reception ahead of the long-planned restoration of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights — a triptych that has spent five centuries accumulating interpretations, none of them satisfactory.
The guest list is curated: collectors, critics, museum trustees, and the particular sort of patron whose interest in art is inseparable from their interest in influence. The painting, which has not been moved in decades, dominates its gallery wall. The panel depicting hell faces outward.
Whatever was planned for that evening — the speeches, the wine, the careful negotiations between old money and new — none of it comes to pass. Something anticipated the gathering. Something that recognized the painting not as a masterpiece to be preserved, but as a threshold to be opened.
Earthly Delights is a scenario for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, playable alternatively with Pulp Cthulhu rules.