Today's reviews are a little different in that you're getting three - these scenarios all come from White Dwarf Magazine and their Call of Cthulhu Omnibus. While most of this Omnibus is helpful articles, some are scenarios, and it's from two article sources, Trio of Terror and Ghost Jackal Kill, that I draw the reviews here. Think of them as rapid-fire mini-reviews, meant to showcase what I thought was some interesting creativity from the CoC community long before the Miskatonic Repository was a gleam in Chaosium's eye. Join me after the jump, won't you?
The Book is simple enough - the Investigators acquire a book from a friend after he pulls a Jackson Elias and dies mysteriously. Armed with the book in question, a tome involving Shub-Niggurath worship, the Investigators soon learn that their friend obtained the book accidentally and the local Shubby cult du jour is willing to do anything to get it back. The cult itself spans back for decades, and includes high profile members of the local government, one of whom is actively hunting them down for the book. So, not only do you have a mistake with dire consequences, you also have a little bit of government conspiracy thrown in, too. It's now up to the Investigators to expose the cult and their government leader before they get in major trouble, and the results of this will of course vary greatly depending on the Keeper...
The Seance, on the other hand, presents a much more ready mystery. The Investigators are asked to look into the events surrounding one Hermione Elsenham, a medium who recently had a seance go very, very awry. Instead of contacting the dead, she accidentally managed to Contact Nyarlathotep, who offered to make her the next Keziah Mason for only three easy payments of $19.95 plus child sacrifice. Hermione refused, and in anger Nyar cursed her by sending a Hunting Horror after her. Now she's half-mad and about to die horribly in the local asylum, unless the Investigators can prevent it or somehow know how to tame a ropy dragon thing. The fun, of course, begins with the Investigators speaking to Hermione in the asylum, and from there the extent Nyarlathotep himself gets involved and when, or if, they meet the Hunting Horror stalking the poor woman are all left to the gentle Keeper's discretion.
Now, these scenarios are a bit like sandboxes, they give you the basic threads and expect you as a Keeper to pull it all together to make a satisfactory end. This isn't too hard to do, but can be difficult for newer Keepers to grok. Then again, their purpose is not to be fully fledged games out of box; these scenarios are intended to be short one-night one-offs at most, likely filling in as scenes in a bigger campaign or short flash-scenario diversions in the same manner as Fear of Flying/Falling are. They also make good springboards for other scenarios or freshly hatched ones of the Keeper's own devising. I could easily see The Book being the catalyst for a Shub-Niggurath campaign, or The Seance tying into Masks of Nyarlathotep somehow. If expanded, they each can easily last about a half a session to a full session. So, let's talk about how I expanded them.
For The Book, I had no grand overarching plans. I decided to loosely connect it to Painted in a Corner from Minions, another scenario seed supplement. The two meshed surprisingly well, and from there I decided the cult was ultimately trying to get this artist to bring Shub-Niggurath to earth via a modified, city-wide Call Shub-Niggurath spell. They gave the artist some sort of drug so he'd paint prophetic visions into reality in his sleep, then they set about tracking the book down. My players didn't quite cotton to this, but they did connect the "saturnine, goat-like man" from Painted in a Corner as one of the same people involved with the conspiracy in The Book. I threw in a showdown with this character earlier, allowing the players to not only see his garden of Dark Young in their first stages of growth, but also let me play around with what very young Dark Young might look and act like. I decided they could root themselves into the ground to obtain nutrients, could photosynthesize like plants, and when very young, could even awkwardly puppet human corpses by rooting into their bodies. Tell me you wouldn't shit a brick the size of a Honda Accord if you saw a shambling corpse flopping towards you with a miniature tree from hell growing out of its eye sockets. Add in some good old fashioned child sacrifice, let them go fuck up the cult, and you have yourself a very functional and downright interesting little one-night scenario!
For The Seance, I had a player who gave himself the useless but character defining skill of Tarot-Reading. I know a decent amount about Tarot-Reading myself, so I was very excited to finally throw some of that lore into the Mythos, too. I altered the seance in question slightly so that it appeared as if Hermione had done a Tarot reading for her guests as well, then made sure after her refusal of the Crawling Chaos my Tarot-savvy PC found a set of three of the Major Arcana I thought best fit were prophetic of her future and of what Nyarlathotep stands for. Those cards were The Tower (a dramatic upheaval), The Moon (illusions and trickery), and Death (change), a combination I had previously used in conjunction with Nyarlathotep. I later had Hermione in her cell keep compulsively drawing those three cards as well as The Devil (something detrimental that leads to a downfall, plus here it foreshadows the Black Man), which created a great little overarching theme that scared the crap out of that player. Shortly after meeting Hermione, chaos struck when all of the lights in the asylum died and the gates locked on them, trapping them in the madhouse. From there, I sent in the Hunting Horror to finish the medium's pitiful shreds of sanity off, then chase them around in a game of cat and mouse for a bit that only ended when Nyarlathotep himself intervened. This altogether made for quite the little scenario, and really left my players confused. "What? He's not trying to kill us?" my sister asked, confused. "Why would he be?" I responded. "He's a busy god, you're not even on his list of important things to fuck up this century..." Well, at the least I thought it was funny, even if my players were bewildered!
These were fun to play around with, even if short, and I'd certainly recommend any Keeper give them a look. The major problems I had with the scenarios in Trio of Terror were basically about lack of props (which I easily remedied) and lack of any sort of idea how the Keeper could end them, which is kind of annoying when you're just looking for a short scenario seed you can pick up out of the box and play. I didn't have too much trouble with them, though. I found The Seance to be the strongest of the three scenarios due to its clarity, followed by what I read of the witch cult one, with The Book being weakest since it lacked a punchy hook for the players to latch onto. In a short flash-scenario, it's really important to have something to hook the players in quickly to get them on with the story, because if they don't engage with something so threadbare there really is no story. Taking all this into account, I would give Trio of Terror a 6 shrieks out of 10 - that's from a 3/3 for The Seance, a 2/3 for the witch cult one, and a 2/3 for The Book, minus one point for not finding a good way to string these little drabbles together or help aid the Keeper further. Then again, that's not really the point of a collection of scenario seeds, is it?
Next up I want to discuss is the scenario Ghost Jackal Kill, a game with a fairly dangerous premise that was meant to be run as a prequel to another scenario put out by Games Workshop, The Statue of the Sorcerer. It follows the Investigators after an actress asks them to look into a supposed translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs that is to be used as a chant in a movie script for a ritual mummification scene. She is unfortunately wrong, as the chant in question actually is the spell Summon Hound of the Tindalos, and since there's no way to control these time-jumping predators, as soon as either she or anyone else reads it aloud, they draw the attention of one of the Hounds themselves. It's later revealed that the chant killed the actor who would have performed it and was culled from a copy of Nameless Cults that accidentally got sent to the wrong person. Now the Investigators need to piece together the clues, comprehend the danger, and prevent the chant from being used in the movie altogether, all while possibly battling their own Hound troubles.
A simple plot, a simple setup, and a bit railroady even with the illusion of choice (there's only a few places they can check with the clues they get, and they can be gone to in any real order they like), this is not a very complex story. I really love the use of the Hounds here. They're certainly a unique, fun enemy to use, and really give a sense of pure danger to the game. The trouble is that, in the hands of a Killer Keeper type, the Hounds can end up having the same problems as the Shan do - that is, they become a cheap way to kill off or incapacitate a PC who has nowhere to run or hide. This is certainly not a good prequel to a scenario if you kill the PCs off that fast, unless that's your goal here or unless you want to have that PC be terrified of angles the rest of the game, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I got clever with this, because I knew at least one player would be stupid enough to read the chant aloud, and let them discover the Hound's weakness to curves. They followed through on this by luring the Hound into a sort of Anti-Seabear-Circle setup and trapping it there, an effect that caused it to become confused and sent it back to its own dimension, at least this time.
Ghost Jackal Kill also has the distinction of not being all that hard to shift into a different time period or circumstance. I placed it in London, England during a Cthulhu by Gaslight setting, changing the movie into Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra, and renamed the actress Isadora Camilla Turner (whose favorite color is yellow) just for giggles and red herrings. It actually tracked quite well and my players never noticed the difference. The players also concluded that a Tcho-Tcho cult, which I had used in a prior scenario, was behind the events with the book; that theory aligned well enough with the overarching campaign that I just ran with it. I also added an ending where the players confronted the Hound with the understudy for the deceased actor, because if you're gonna use a monster you might as well have it show up even if the players succeed, right? That's the money shot, baby, you can't just not have the monster of the week be there; the players came for a creature and Azathoth Willing, they're getting that creature.
Now, that leads me to the main issues with Ghost Jackal Kill, the fact that there's really not that much of a satisfying conclusion to the scenario as written. I had to add one to make it feel truly climactic, and even then I feel as if I could have done better. I also didn't think the Egyptian theme was very well utilized here and could have been connected better; maybe you could even use it to fool the players into assuming Nyarlathotep's involvement somehow, and as we all know, assuming makes an ass of you and me. One of the bigger disappointments is also in the scenario's length. It feels very short, something more like a light prelude to The Statue of the Sorcerer, to the point the game's nearly joined at the hip with it. In the wrong hands, Ghost Jackal Kill could be a sort of boring trip before the main event, but in the right hands a creative Keeper can do a lot with it. This can make for a challenge, especially if you're altering the time period and some minor details like I did, but it's not too difficult to do. The Hounds are so rarely utilized in CoC that it feels like they get the shaft half the time, and this scenario doesn't really assuage that underutilization much.
And all that's unfortunate, because the Hounds are cool! You want a good Hounds scenario, go with Gaslight's Signs Writ in Scarlet, written by the ever capable and ever clever Kevin Smith. He also did Escape from Innsmouth and Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?, both of which I've discussed on this blog before, as well as The Dreaming Stone where he gives Nyarlathotep the absolutely hilarious to me trait of "Skills: Nearly everything at 100%." What exactly is the one thing the Crawling Chaos can't do at 100%? Who comes up with this sort of flavor text in the stat blocks? God, I love older Chaosium supplements so much.
Getting back on track, however, Ghost Jackal Kill will give you what you put into it, but it feels weak in comparison to other scenarios in this compendium of White Dwarf articles. It's similar to The Madman in that it needs some Keeper TLC to make it shine better, but where The Madman makes that simple, Ghost Jackal Kill struggles a bit. It never quite felt like it gelled right with my group; it always felt like something was off when I ran it and like something needed to be fixed, but I just wasn't skilled enough to figure it out. It has some good moments and it is pretty decently structured, but I can't really call it a good scenario. Then again, I can't call it bad, either, because it tries so hard to be decent and just kind of doesn't quite get there. I'd eschew this one or cannibalize it for scenario seeds and the sum of its parts; I give Ghost Jackal Kill a 5 angular time canids out of 10.