Starting out the London chapter was easy, I found - the Investigators got off the ship, had a direct place to check, and knew where to go. This early in the campaign, it's not likely your Investigators will have any problems with their items or weapons, but if they do have heavy weapons it's important to note the customs rules for Great Britain at the time. Certainly no rifles or shotguns, but handguns at this time would be feasible. No explosives obviously - in general, nothing you can't carry on a ship. If they have artifacts or special equipment, it will need to be marked as fragile and handled with care; this could provide some fun roleplay opportunities. The MoN Companion does a good job of discussing facets of London life, travel, and culture, so I won't repeat all that here - just do your research on the place and make sure you know what you're talking about. Everyone has That One Player Who Is A Living Factbook, and in my group that role is filled by Kat. Oh Kat, you have been so helpful, but also have derailed things so much. I've learned so much from you, though. Never change.
It should be damn obvious to anyone considering this campaign, but you really do need to figure out how to do a British accent - and there are several. If you're really picky, learn several different ones: Cockney, Scottish, Liverpudlian, Yorkshire, etc. You can then use different accents for different NPCs as needed. Otherwise, just crack to it and find a basic accent that works for you, then practice. Don't forget to learn the slang and lingo of London, especially some Cockney Rhyming Slang if you are going to do a Cockney accent at any point. It doesn't need to be over the top, but knowing that "head up the apples" comes from "apples and pears" rhyming with "stairs" is not only fun but important for flavoring the location, just like the description of London proper. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street said it best after all - "There's no place like London." Let your players really get the feel of it, for better or worse!
It isn't likely that London will be anything other than a second port of call after another city. If it is, definitely dial back the Brotherhood aggression here. You don't need to kill half your party so soon in the game, and it's unlikely if this is their second stop that the Brotherhood will know of them, anyway. They have bigger fish to fry, and more important concerns - plus, Gavigan and his ilk have reputations to uphold. Speaking of them, it's important to decide how the London Branch feels about the Cairo Branch - my Gavigan absolutely hated my Shakti, and the same the other direction. Additionally, Tewfik and Gavigan didn't really get along, either, being somewhat of rivals. This tension and in-fighting certainly goes a long way towards explaining why the London Branch was so easily subdued, despite otherwise being well-organized and clever about their mind-games and sneak attacks. To make them even more threatening and harder to identify, I gave them masks - similar to a Pharaoh's death mask in my design - and had them follow, stalk, intimidate, and otherwise harangue my players. I wanted them to feel persecuted while in London, a feeling only intensified after they finished up their errands at the museum and found out Gavigan's dirty little secret...
As for the newspaper leads, I altered the possible side-quests somewhat. London for whatever reason has a glut of little side-quests you can do, more than most of the other chapters I think, and almost all of them are red herrings or just not related to the main issue at hand. The Derbyshire Monster in particular I found ill-fitting for MoN - it's a Gothic Horror tale in a Pulp Horror campaign, and it just doesn't work well at all. I ended up scrapping it for later use in a Gaslight campaign (where it fit much better), and replacing it with the much more interesting The Burning Within from the Companion. I really liked the idea of introducing Fire Vampires early for whenever they got to Kenya, and liked the idea of connecting it into MoN proper. I kept A Serpent in Soho, planning to have it be a fun side-quest for a single session, but my players just got too unnerved by the events therein and didn't want to pry any further, so I dropped the rest of it. They got the clues they needed, and I got to replace the Old Lady Serpent Man with a Little Girl Serpent Man, which was all I even wanted out of it to start with. Reasoning? I just like creepy children in horror. What more can I say?
I won't rate Derbyshire or Serpent here because neither got a fair shake, but for what it was, The Burning Within was excellent. Tense and a lot of fun, with potential for serious death and maiming, I found it to be a great little one-off. There was even a very clever moment where Clayton used Mists of R'lyeh to confine the Fire Vampires with moisture and even hurt them somewhat, something I hadn't anticipated. Fortunately, I am a kindly Keeper that rewards quick thinking and outside the box solutions. Unfortunately, I lost a character to this scenario, which I anticipated but had hoped would not happen. Levi's dice just didn't agree with him, and wouldn't let him Dodge the Fire Vampire that came at him. I tried to save Dr. Baker, I really did, but then the doctors at the hospital - which I rolled for - got a 98% on Medicine. Well... sometimes, there's just no saving 'em, and the dice are the dice. Gotta live by them or die by them, after all... Aside from Dr. Baker's demise, the investigation was fun, the combat was fun, and the connecting to MoN was fun. Burning also has enough merit to stand on its own if you take out the MoN connection, but if you plan on using it that way I would be cautious - especially for new players. Otherwise, it makes a very fun one-night event similar to Dead Light or could be slotted into a Cthulhu Brittanica or Cthugha-centered campaign. If it were standalone, I'd give The Burning Within a solid 7.5/10 Curious Fire Vampires. Enjoyable, but needs work to be even more enjoyable.
Back in the A-Plot, most of the rest of the scenario went as planned - sneaking into the museum went off entirely as expected, as did the continued Brotherhood harassment. Brad ended up going insane after seeing what was in Gavigan's cache, so I decided he became obsessed with the Black Pharaoh as a result and started to worship him. This came to more of a head than I expected later on, resulting in the deaths of both Brad (accidental) and later Ralph (suicide out of remorse). I hadn't expected to lose three Investigators in London, but there you go. Maybe I should have calmed the group down a bit before anything went too far...?
Nah.
After once more getting characters regrouped, and introducing yet more new characters, things got back on track as before. The stuff with the Ivory Wind was mostly unplanned, but I knew I wanted to have cultists ambush the group and give the captain a reason to possibly pilot them to Misr House later. I also wanted an excuse to show off the properties of the new knife that Aidyn as Sarah McCain inherited from Brad. I thought it was amusing that she specifically said she used the knife while focusing, which gave me an excuse to have her accidentally learn how to Summon Dimensional Shambler. Fortunately, she had more than enough POW to keep the thing bound, and thus Shelly the Dimensional Shambler was born and soon became a player favorite non-human NPC. Was it silly? Maybe. Was it fun to have happen? Oh, absolutely, and the ways Shelly would come into play later were just so damn creative...
When I used the Thing in the Fog, I decided it was Gavigan lashing out in retaliation at them snooping in his stuff at the museum. Aaaaand here is where I first discovered that, apparently, letting Investigators blaze their own trails can sometimes lead to it severely backfiring, because not a single person picked up on the fact that you can disperse fog with light. They also didn't realize the connection that Hunting Horrors in my previous uses of them also didn't like light, thus establishing that some creatures can be defeated by alternate means. They tried every trick in the book, too - throwing a tarp on it, shooting it when they saw it had tendrils of a sort, splashing water on it... I eventually threw them a bone when they began to panic by suggesting it stayed away from the fireplace. Yeah, I'm fairly certain a good chunk of my players felt pretty stupid for missing that one...
Speaking of creative, as you might have guessed, the Sweeney Todd knockoff subplot was 100% my own creation. I think either Chance or Levi were to be absent for that week's session, leaving me needing to create another subplot in order to stall for time. Then, inspiration - you see, I had actually gone with Aidyn to see a performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street put on by my university's theater students (and yes, it was an excellent performance for the record), and from there the story kind of wrote itself. The idea for ghouls being attracted to the meat pies was obvious, with characters basically the same as in the musical and some roles altered. For example, the villainous Judge Turpin became a villainous priest instead, while the Mrs. Lovett analogue remained roughly the same. Toby was the exact same down to his planned tragic demise, but the Sweeney analogue was changed into even more of a tragic and sympathetic character who really was innocent (if insane). Joanna and her admirer were cut from the story entirely because I just didn't have a feasible analogue for them or their subplot. And of course, the time period was changed substantially, and references were added to an in-joke about "a map on the back of the Magna Carta" that Rob came up with to explain how Clayton got arrested and needed saving. That latter bit was inspired by The Mummy's intro as well as by National Treasure, and the combination had us splitting our sides. I actually thought it was so goofy I incorporated it into the plot! A few connections between the priest and Gavigan sealed the connection to the Penhew Foundation and the rest of the plot, and from there it was ready to go.
One of the great pleasures for me as a Keeper is coming up with fun madness mantras for the insane or doomed to spell out or feverishly mutter. One of my favorites was "The pies are a lie so wickedly fresh, The Father has sinned the sins of the flesh", which eventually informed the title of the scenario - Sins of the Flesh. Another favorite was a reference to both the song "Green Finch and Linnetbird" from the musical as well as to Stephen King's IT with "It beats its wings against the cage but still cannot escape their rage." Yet another was an obvious reference to a certain Lovecraft story with "Warren is dead, fools." All of these were scrawled in the eventual ghoul lair to be found later. If you're curious, Sins of the Flesh is available for download at my Dropbox, and could even be run standalone or set in Cthulhu Gaslight with little to no effort. Sure, your Investigators will see through the paper-thin references, but I guarantee they will trust the wrong person - the priest rather than Charley - thus throwing them for an unexpected curveball for being Wrong Genre Savvy... Plus, accidental cannibalism. That's always fun to stick into a CoC campaign, right? My players certainly liked it, and I hope yours will too if you decide to run it!
Now, the rest of the chapter basically went off without a hitch with two exceptions. The first was, the gang never fully investigated Tewfik in his spice shop, so I reasoned he had time to evacuate with all his stuff, including the Mirror of Gal which I used only once to give a PC a heart attack scare. He survived that ordeal. This meant I had to plan around both Tewfik and Gavigan being at Misr House with a bunch of cultists, which meant I basically couldn't go with the Lesser Other Gods/Servitors plan for the sex rite, and had to do the death rite with the Shantaks instead or risk a possible TPK. The other reason I chose the easier of the two options was to avoid too many deaths in London as well as to avoid any icky rape scene connotations between the creatures and their, er, consorts. Funnily enough, there was eventually a rather horrible (but of course not fully described, because who the fuck does that to their players?) rape scene in the campaign, just not in London - but that's a story for when I discuss Shanghai.
On Misr House, it's a very good idea to decide three things:
- How your Investigators are getting on the island.
- Which rite you're using, as above.
- How difficult the cultist threat itself will be.
The auction event, in case you're wondering, was not based on The Auction. I just did not have access to that scenario at the time, but it was inspired by the idea of it and by a need to cleverly transition between London and Cairo, where my players next chose to visit. It also gave me an excuse for Walter Kimble to return for the continuation of his little plot with the Nyarlathotep idol, an excuse to stall for time as needed and wrap up loose ends, and most importantly, an excuse to give Clayton a cursed artifact and thus use nightmares against the group. And boy, did I start them with a bang... Astute Lovecraft fans will notice that I pretty much shamelessly stole the entire plot of Nyarlathotep for the dream sequence in question, solely because it's so topical, surreal, and perfect for the situation. This is, in fact, recommended as a dream sequence by the MoN Companion, and it along with other nightmare sequences became common ways to mess with my poor Investigators' heads throughout the campaign. Of course, I had things get a bit more brutal and a little more disturbing for the sufferers of the nightmare than in the original story, plus even got in another Nyarlathotep cameo, which ended up becoming a theme in the campaign - he'd show up, say something, then vanish just to set everyone's teeth on edge and ramp the paranoia. Yes, it's scary to know you're being watched - now imagine being not just watched, but outright stalked, by a god... all because you dared to interfere with his plans. Shudder.
All in all, despite the Interrupting Chaos and deaths, things ended well and the group - and myself - really enjoyed our time in London. They got to Cairo no problem via the Ivory Wind, and everything wrapped up nicely. MoN's London chapter really does feel like your cozy, welcoming Call of Cthulhu standard Investigation-Leads-To-Horror plot, and that makes it welcoming, but the problem is it's also not risky. It just doesn't take any of the real chances that make campaigns so memorable, which is fine, but not when the chapter itself is so long and has so many tempting red herrings. Speaking of those, there's way too many of them for what London is, and I question what the authors were thinking throwing a random werewolf and a Serpent Man Easter egg type cameo into a game where they don't need to be. It's also questionable in that it isn't very Pulp until the end, which may bore some players, but I can see why a lull before the storm is a necessary thing at times. Besides, a frantic car chase or a well-placed battle with the Thing in the Fog at just the right time can mitigate this issue.
If MoN: London were a standalone campaign, I would give it 8/10 Union Jacks for being a decently well-structured scenario in its own right. What it does, it does very well, but it also tries too hard to make up for its calmer pace by throwing in too many red herrings that can easily be cut with no consequence. Hell, even Tewfik and the Ivory Wind can be cut out, if you so desire! It's just all way too much and serves to clutter an otherwise good campaign segment, so trim the fat and decide what's right for your campaign.
Now then, onwards to my favorite chapter of the campaign, and into the shifting desert sands of that Land of Ancient Secrets, Egypt...