Well, all good things must come to an end... and my campaign reviews for the piecemeal campaign Rise Of the Old Ones, must too. It's been a wild ride that has taught me a lot about different styles of campaigns and different kinds of horror stories. There's been laughter, there's been tears, there's been spills and chills galore, but now it's time for the final review - "The Plantation", from the supplement Mansions of Madness (do not confuse with the awesome Fantasy Flight board game of the same name). As always, spoilers abound, so tread lightly if you haven't played this one yet! Now, let's all curl up with everyone's favorite Papa Snek, Yig, and take a closer look, shall we? I hear he makes a killer hot cocoa!
Now, I know I said that this scenario isn't Lovecraftian in setup, but earlier said that it was a classic CoC tale. The plot seems pretty cut and dry, but the way it plays out and the set dressing is absolutely eerie. Strange sights and sounds abound, and stranger still lurks below the swampy plains the Serpent Men once called home. The Gist plantation is a rotting ruin, barely still alive and overrun with creepy cultists. There's dangerous things in the swamp, ready to take a bite out of unwary Investigators even before they find the Serpent Man and the altar. And if those don't get them, there's always the Homunculi, bird-beaked and Naga-like, ready to drag down and peck the face off of anyone they can get their scaly claws on. The pitfalls are common, and danger is everywhere, but not from human cultists. Just because Yig's taken a bit of a shine to your hapless gang doesn't mean he'll save you from certain death!
The characters are, as in so many of these well-made campaigns, memorable. Little Joe is adorably brave, The Reverend is a badass, Rafe Bodeen is sure to make your players absolutely loathe him, Caleb is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and the Butler is a sheep in wolf's clothing. Even the sharecroppers and the rest of the Help aren't what they seem. Take the maid, Elly, for example - she's a pretty young dark-skinned thing, confident, but she hides a dangerous charm and a very special position in the cult as its priestess. The characters make the story just as much as your Investigators do, and the settings are just as memorable. The cult rituals, the rotting mansion, the Obeah Man/Serpent Man's house, the giant crumbling limestone-caked ruined city - all these are most excellent setpieces, and really seem like they belong in a bigger campaign, making The Plantation a great endpoint for a long-running game. Make the characters believable and describe the scenery porn/gore in all of its glory, and you have one hell of a mental Lovecraftian drama for the Theater of the Mind. And you should run it like that, there are only two props and they are both paper props, meaning you're essentially doing all the clues and emoting yourself. Either think to make more props (maybe more newspaper clippings or photos?) or resign yourself to the paucity of creative prop-storming opportunities here.
It's probably important that I nitpick one thing before I get to some of the more egregious chinks in this scenario's armor, and that's the arguably unnecessary number of abilities Elly has. She keeps an enchanted coral snake on her person (Which, why? What purpose does that serve when she can enchant any snake out in the swamps herself?), and has the ability to brew her own little Love Potion #9, sure to lay low any Investigator who isn't thinking with the right head so to speak. I personally find her a little overpowered and unnecessarily distracting from the main plot, causing players to go on a wild goose chase trying to deal with Elly instead of the plot at hand. If you want that, by all means, do it, but I would recommend against it. At the very least, choose whether she has spells and the enchanted coral snake, or will brew her love philter - I personally would use the philter, because it can lead to absolute hilarity, drama, and general debauchery. Use it with care and only on players that won't be distracted too much. I would also very much recommend making it also affect female Investigators, if only for humor, role-play reasons, and confusion on the part of the rest of your presumably heterosexual party - but I would ask players if they're comfortable with this sort of thing first and the inevitable potential jokes or comments that might follow. After all, plenty of LGBT+ folk role-play, too, and homosexual slurs/jokes are an unfortunate part of our reality. If that sort of joking around will hurt or trigger someone too much, don't do it, just as you would be judicious about using themes concerning hurt children or sexual abuse in your campaigns. Remember: hurt Investigators, not feelings. :)
Now for the weaknesses in the scaly hide, the first of which is pretty similar to the gripe I had about Escape from Innsmouth - the way this damn scenario is written drives me up a wall. It's broken into five parts, which makes no sense to me when it's really three - meeting Gist and agreeing to help Little Joe, traveling to the plantation, and the events on the plantation proper. Why is the incident with the zombie a whole section itself? Why is the incident with the happenings in the towns before Waltersboro also its own thing? I can see the Yig Rites and finale being their own bit, but why the travel adventures and mishaps? I personally lumped all travel things together and was fine with it, as that part plus the intro shootout at Professor Gist's was about a session. The happenings on the plantation were also about a session, making this a two to three-session scenario. The way the campaign is written makes it seem like a much longer scenario than it really is, almost like the author really wanted to stretch this campaign into something bigger, or that this was a scenario culled from a larger campaign that was never published. It doesn't flow like a mid-length scenario should, and whether that's due to it being an earlier supplement or just a quirk of the author, it's irritating to me. Maybe it's just my quirk that it bugs me so much, but why on earth are some of these early supplements so damn obtuse? The other scenarios in this supplement aren't like this - Mr. Corbitt is pretty easy to understand, The Sanatorium isn't this contrived and it's pretty mid-length too, so what's going on here? Chaosium, you have editors, there's no excuse for this stuff!
That leads to the other real gripe I have with The Plantation in comparison to several other of the scenarios I have run - it's pretty linear until you hit the plantation and even then it's not got a lot of player autonomy. Run into Little Joe, go to Professor's house, do shootout, travel to South Carolina, there's a zombie, research the Gist place, go to rest stop, go to plantation. Once there, it's meet Caleb, go investigate any of three places in any order you choose, learn about what Yig wants you to do, deal with another zombie, then Yig Night happens. And it's even worse than how linear Tatterdemalion was because it's longer, so it has more time to wear on you - and even worse, this one wasn't made for a con like Tatterdemalion was! It's hardly a fitting fight for your players when they don't control much, and yes, I know it makes sense things progress that way because in game, Yig's pulling the strings to make it happen, but come on. You could make the same exact argument of Tatterdemalion, or Still Waters, or The Madman or Dead Man Stomp, and all of those (except maybe Tatterdemalion because con game) are much better at hiding it. You don't have to go to Carcosa, fight the Mi-go, deal with the Rosethorne sisters, or go to the funeral Leroy plays at. You have to do what Little Joe wants or there's no plot. You have to deal with the happenings on the plantation or there's no plot. This is not good for a mid-length, multi-session campaign, especially one that looks so much like it should be a scene from a grand epic like Fungi from Yuggoth or Beyond the Mountains of Madness. If it's gonna have a high quality plot and characters, you better believe I'm holding it to a higher standard.
All that aside, this is a quality scenario. It is good, and you absolutely should run/play it. Its strengths make up for its weaknesses and there's nothing really wrong with the story itself, just the way it's written which I find makes it hard for the Keeper to organize. The small number of props for the length of the campaign is very disappointing, especially when other long campaigns like The Spawn and Yellow Sign had such an abundance of them. Run this, but with a few more investigation-tweaked changes, and you should be just fine. 7 Children of Yig out of 10.