Captain Obed Marsh

FC-55: Captain Obed Marsh [R]
File:Captain Obed Marsh FC-55.png
Type		Subtype
Character		High Priest
Faction		Cost	Skill
Cthulhu		4	2
0	2	2	0
Card Text
Action: exhaust Captain Obed Marsh and sacrifice a Deep One character to choose and destroy a character or support card with printed cost X or lower. X is the printed cost of the sacrificed Deep One character.

Captain Obed Marsh is a Character Card that appears in the Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game Forgotten Cities.

Artwork

FC-55 uses an illustration by Rafal Hrynkiewicz.

Mythos

Captain Obed Marsh first appeared in the story The Shadow over Innsmouth (H.P. Lovecraft, 1931).

Captain Obed Marsh was Innsmouth’s most prominent merchant-captain and founder of that town’s Esoteric Order of Dagon. Obed’s three ships, the Columbia, Hetty, and Sumatra Queen, did a brisk business in the Pacific trade beginning in 1820 and lasting for over twenty years. As a result of this prosperity, the Marshes became Innsmouth’s most powerful family.

On one of his early trips, Captain Marsh stumbled across a group of Polynesian islanders in Ponape, who possessed a large number of golden ornaments. According to Walakea, the tribe’s chieftain, a race of fish-beings had brought these to them in exchange for human sacrifices. For a few rubber and glass trinkets, Marsh procured a large amount of the natives’ gold.

In the following years, Obed visited the islanders many times, trading for more gold and listening to their legends. When Marsh journeyed to this island in 1838, however, he found that natives from the surrounding isles had killed his trading partners, and that his source of revenue was lost. The repercussions of this disaster were felt throughout Innsmouth, and the town soon plunged into a depression.

It was then that Marsh began to preach a new religion based on the Polynesian’s beliefs. If the people of Innsmouth followed the gods of his islander friends, he proclaimed, they would become rich and the nets of the fishermen would always be full. After a while, Marsh’s Esoteric Order of Dagon became so popular that all of Innsmouth’s churches were forced to close down due to lack of worshipers (or the Order’s strong-arm tactics). During the chaos instigated by the plague of 1846, in which half the town’s people died, Marsh became the town’s de facto leader, a post that he held until his death in 1878. Following his demise, the Marsh family kept its hold on local power until the government raids of 1928.