Hell Freezes Over in Finland, and other 2016 Things to Watch

Since I've started blogging again, and the calendar turned to 2016, there have been a whole series of announcements on things I didn't expect to see this year.

Jim LOTFP is Going to Gencon
I was really surprised to see the news that LOTFP is going to Gencon.  I ran some LOTFP at Gencon years ago, and there were controversies a few years back where some prudish Gencon organizers didn't want the LOTFP games or modules on display in the dealer hall and whatnot - can't have gore, horror, and boobs on display in Indianapolis!  I never expected to see an announcement that Jim LOTFP is making the long haul from Finland to Indianapolis.  I'd love to make it out there - get a bunch of missing LOTFP stuff in person.  My teenager is looking to play some "edgy" D&D with his friends, and LOTFP's early stuff (Tower of the Stargazer, Grinding Gear, Hammers of the God) strikes a good balance between classic dungeons, weirdness, and horror, so I have him checking out Stargazer (he played through all those, plus Death Frost Doom, back during a game I called "Gothic Greyhawk").

Does that mean the long-awaited Referee Book is getting done this year?  That one's been kicking around a few years now.  That seems like the kind of product and release that would warrant an appearance at gaming's biggest convention.

Delta Green Trail of Cthulhu?
I like the Delta Green world, but haven't played BRP in a long time; any recent horror games have been Trail of Cthulhu.  One of the bits of news coming out of the recent Delta Green kickstarter is that Pelgrane Press is doing a 1960's Delta Green setting book (written by Ken Hite, naturally) called The Fall of Delta Green.  That one is going right to the top of the pre-order list.  Maybe we'll see a full-blown Gumshoe Delta Green book at some point, too.

The Auran Empire for ACKS
The guy(s) over at Adventurer Conqueror King are making some moves; the president of a video game company joined the management team, they just had their Lairs & Encounters kick starter clear $25,000, they're publishing articles via a decent-sized Patreon, and now news that the Auran Empire setting is coming this year.  I've played ACKS intermittently since it came out in 2011, and I thought the Auran Empire was going to be the company's "Castle Greyhawk"; that product that was talked about since the early days but never managed to see print.  2016 could prove me wrong!

The Return of Strahd
It's been all over the blogosphere, the next 5E sourcebook \ adventure is a return to Barovia (The Curse of Strahd).  Love it!  Looks like it's going to include more about the lands of Barovia and an updated delve into Ravenloft in an adventure for levels 1 - 10; I guess they need something for those low level guys to do before they can fight Strahd.  My players had a lot of fun beating that guy a few years ago in Gothic Greyhawk.

5E OGL?
I'm doing school on the weekends so there's no chance I'll be working on any grandiose 5E megadungeon this year.  I eagerly await the efforts of an enterprising 5E designer with old school sensibilities who creates a (good) epic 5E megadungeon - I've got some money right here.  5E doesn't play out the same as the old school clones because of the power levels and wahoo magic stuff, but it's a really fun game and I hope this OGL brings some good things to the market.  Splatbooks and rules bloat need not apply - although I could be persuaded by an updated setting like 3E's Midnight, or a well done Asian-themed setting.  Speaking of which, I need to pick up a copy of Yoon Suin this year and check out Stonehell 2 - those were a few old school products from last year that slipped by while I wasn't blogging.  I may get my first Indie game this year too, something like Dungeon World (after some recent recommendations here).

Now if someone could announce they got a Traveller license for Star Wars or Star Trek, 2016 would be completely bananas.

What are you looking forward to this year in the RPG game-o-sphere?

Gencon 2103 Reflections

We're back from another annual sojourn to Indianapolis.  This year was a lot different for me; over the winter, my oldest son became strongly interested in Magic, and since  I was a card player "back in the day", we've been going to Friday Night Magic fairly religiously for the past 4-5 months.  We made playing in tournaments a big focus for this year's Gencon.  Nonetheless, we did wander around (a little bit).

D&D NEXT
I had drifted from downloading the WOTC playtest packets of D&D next, so our group was excited to get into one of the playtest sessions.  Overall, it was a fun playtest and the action moved along quickly - I was Spock the Elf, a few guys were named Red Shirt 1 and 2, and the star of the night was Sulu, the monk who embodied the drunken master style.  Combat was abstract and fast-moving, and had quite a bit to endear it to the old school crowd.  No need for minis or grids or excruciating tactical movement.  The action was fast and furious.  Thought the combat was great.

On the other hand, it still has clerics with searing laser-pointer-fingers and wizard characters that shoot fearsome magical blasts every single round like the Gauntlet video game.  I don't know enough about 5E to say whether only the player characters are the special unique snowflakes that walk around with such reality-bending powers of destruction at 1st level, or whether the entire implied setting is like an over-the-top high magic comic book.   I have a hard time envisioning a class-based world, with sensible demographics, where characters with such flashy powers rub shoulders with ordinary folks, but it could be an interesting thought exercise to imagine a place where a plurality of characters float around and can blast things at will.  To try and rationalize how society functions with such powerful individual characters,  I keep coming back to the Marvel or DC universes and the comics.

Anyway, it sounds like the multiple years of play testing is coming to an end this fall, so perhaps WOTC has it figured out.  I loathed 4E as a world-building system, and I'm strongly suspicious of 5E due to the character power levels (but I'm not writing it completely off, either).  We'll see.

There were multiple times we found ourselves wandering by the gigantic Pathfinder hall late at night on our way to the parking garage, and couldn't believe how packed it was around the clock.  There are no edition wars; Pathfinder has won, plain and simple.  It's all over but the crying - the anemic D&D Next crowd isn't any competition.  At least WOTC keeps doing one thing right (Magic, below).

HOBOMANCER
While four of us spent time in the Magic Hall grinding out games, a couple of the guys wandered the RPG areas trying to find pick-up games, and they came back from one such venture as devotees of the cult of Hobomancer.  Apparently, Hobomancer (an actual, real, I'm-not-kidding RPG) involves a secret society of 1930's era magic-wielding Hobos, fighting to save the American Dream while riding the rails, calling on such uncanny skills as Beard-Magic or Stinkomancy or the Shakes.  Despite the absurdity, a couple of the guys are all in on the Hobomancer now, particularly after playing through an intro scenario, "The Town That Loved Hobos".  One of the players kept wearing his "My Name is Harmonica Jones" name tag for the rest of the con.  I have a suspicion  that getting roped into a bizarre one-shot play test and embracing some silliness is now lurking in my future.

STUFF TO GET
Last month I wrote a review of Eternal Lies, the upcoming campaign for Trail of Cthulhu.  The book was on sale at Gencon and I picked up my pre-order copy - it's massive and spectacular.  This is probably next in the gaming queue unless we get back to some fantasy gaming as the season turns to autumn.  Either way, I'd like to start this one before the year is out - it looks challenging and fun.

MY MANA-SOAKED BRAIN
We've been "winning" (or at least going 3-0) at just about every FNM draft or constructed we attend, so I was looking forward to playing a diverse and competitive field at Gencon.  Plus, the kiddo wants to start attending some larger tournaments in the area, and needs seasoning (he's 11).  It's funny how many 'serious' players figure it's an auto-win when they sit down across from a goofy kid (in a Legend of Zelda Lync costume, no doubt) and get surprised when his Domri Naya beats down with the Thundermaws.

I was on Jund for the weekend and got knocked out of a top 8 on day one due to some really questionable opening hand keeps on my part.  That was my wake up call that you needed to make strong technical decisions and the margin for error was much lower than the local scene.  Sometimes you just need to get punished to learn.  On day two, the boy changed up his Naya deck for R/G Dragonmaster Aggro (after a dealer-hall quest for a 4th copy of Burning Earth in the board) and we played in a standard grinder to win a box.  He beat an American Flash deck before getting combo'ed out by the Black-White Humans deck (with Blood Artist triggers), while I beat that deck in the finals to win the box - it turns out Curse of Death's Hold and Olivia Voldaren are pretty good against tokens and humans.

The kid really shined in Sealed Deck, getting 4th place in a large 72-person sealed (I was merely 20th), and then winning a sealed grinder outright.  I played him in one of the games; he dropped his Kalonian Hydra, swung next turn for 8.  Swung on the following turn for 16 (the Kalonian doubles its power every turn).  Meanwhile, I was holding Act of Treason and chump blocking just enough to stay alive.  I stole his Hydra for a turn, swung for 32 damage lethal, and he calmly played his final card - a Fog spell - and took his hydra back with a slight smirk.  Funny stuff.  Needless to say, I didn't survive the 64 power crack back - Kalonian is a bomb.  On the last game of that match, there was no stopping his Vampire Warlord with Mark of the Vampire and an endless supply of sacrifices to keep regenerating it.  It just kept beating down.

Here's our booty:

I've been thinking about starting a Magic blog to catalog our quest to graduate from FNM heroes and join the spawning masses trying to land in the money of an SCG Open or top-8 a PTQ by navigating the ever-changing standard meta.  (Hah - If you're reading this and can even wade through that jargon, let me know if that's remotely interesting.)

Back to regular RPG posts this week.

Review: Eternal Lies from Pelgrane Press

I love campaigns for Call of Cthulhu.  Since the early 1980's, one of Chaosium's advantages was putting together those campaign-length, multi-stage horror investigations like Shadows of Yog Sothoth, Masks of Nyarlathotep, Brotherhood of the Beast, and many more.  The upcoming publication of Eternal Lies, from Pelgrane Press, is a clear statement that Trail of Cthulhu is not only going to deliver the same kind of epic experiences, but they're going to continue to refine the form and push adventure writing into new places.

After spending the past few weeks reading this 400 page monster, Pelgrane has far exceeded my expectations.

Let me start by saying that Eternal Lies is the latest work I've seen that takes a self-referential approach to the "Cthulhu investigation genre".  A group of investigators, much like your typical 1920's Call of Cthulhu characters, failed spectacularly at disrupting a cult summoning in the year 1924.  (I believe the cover image up there shows the 1920's guys about to get handed their rear-ends).  Shattered and disbanded, the few survivors have malingered in the asylum or home care, unable to come to terms with the horrors they experienced all those years ago.  (I've known some PC's that ended up like that, too).

Now it's more than 10 years later.  A wealthy patron hires a diverse set of characters to investigate the affairs of her late-father, who was never the same man after a mysterious event in 1924 (the botched Cthulhu investigation referenced above).  Starting with a pair of simple interviews at an asylum in the deep South, the campaign quickly thrusts the player characters into planning a series of world-spanning explorations that take them from a South East Asian pit fighting arena (ala Blood Sport), to the deserts of the Great Rift Valley, the jungles of the Yucatan, even to the peaks of Tibet.

Masks of Nyarlathotep is arguably the greatest Cthulhu campaign (it certainly headlines most of the discussions), and this campaign is a descendant and successor in a few of key ways.  It involves a world-spanning cult with unique, local iterations and challenges, much the way the cults in Masks are facets of a whole.  More importantly, the early locales give the players enough pointers to the global destinations that the players can prosecute their investigation of the cult in any order.  That right there is the classic Masks structure.

The overarching theme of Eternal Lies is corruption, and the adventure does a fantastic job of grinding stability and sanity from the investigators and threatening them with effects that corrupt their character's thoughts, souls, and ultimately, their physical bodies.  It wouldn't be surprising if one investigator ended up in the asylum, only capable of babbling incoherently in "the Tongue of Lies"; a second is forced to assume the ascetic life of a monk; while the third spends their remaining days covered up in heavy clothing, unwilling to show the mouth-like growths that grew on their forearms and must remain forever gagged lest they spout gibberish from beneath the sleeves.  Of course, that character could choose... amputation.  Gruesome stuff.  I'd anticipate a high body count and a fair amount of investigator "turnover" over the course of this particular campaign.

I'm not going to spoil the identity of the godlike horror behind the cult, nor discuss much about the end of Eternal Lies.  The identity of "the Liar from Beyond", the object of the cult's veneration, is one of the central mysteries of the campaign.  The ending holds plenty of surprises and twists that should be saved for play.  I'm satisfied with how it concludes.  Longtime fans of the genre will guess the identity of the "the Liar" long before the ending.  They'll still be unsettled by the twists before the final credits roll.

The rules set is Trail of Cthulhu.  Trail uses a resource management approach such that players are constantly making choices to deplete their resources (and have an easier time in the early going) but risk needing those resources later and having a tougher time.  Depending on your point of view, the resource system is either designed to give players equal spotlight time, or challenge group planning and strategy with resource management - game-style.  The authors do a good job of addressing both philosophies, with frequent "antagonist reactions" that maintain pressure on resources.  As the first Trail of Cthulhu published setting, the campaign includes advice on managing character Drives, Pillars of Sanity, resource pool refreshes, pacing, along with the aforementioned antagonist reactions.  The presence of Drives and Pillars of Sanity are important factors that tether the characters to their regular, day-to-day lives back home.  They're one of the important differentiators in Trail of Cthulhu, so it's nice to see them featured prominently in the campaign.

Eternal Lies is 400 pages, divided into 9 separate adventures.  Playing once a week, I'm thinking it'd be a 6-8 month endeavor to run this end-to-end.  Or longer.  Since I preordered, I've been reading the black & white PDF, with layout and art; the hardcover should be available later this summer.  You may still be able to preorder here:  Eternal Lies.

I'm on my second read-through.  This is an excellent campaign, highly recommended, which confronts the players with a diverse series of locales and investigation types, while showing off the strengths of the Trail of Cthulhu rules set (ie, Gumshoe).  I imagine a fan-conversion to Call of Cthulhu will be along shortly after publication.  Eternal Lies is right at the top of my queue for next games to run, and I plan to kick it off as a regular game as soon as we wrap up our current thing (probably early August).  Unfortunately, this one is on the mature side; the cults the players investigate involve plenty of drugs, sex, violence, drugs, violence, sex, and more drugs.  And big freaky mouths that try to eat you.  We won't be letting our younger players in on this particular campaign.

I may not be able to hold out for the hardcover edition, and could need to start running it off the pre-order PDF.  Now, if I were really lucky, some kind-hearted Pelgrane chap would pop in over here and let us know it would be ready for Gencon and that I can pick up a copy right there at the Pelgrane Booth, like Night's Black Agents last year.  Sometimes the stars are right.

Nyarlathotep Made Me Do It

All my recent business travel has given me a lot of time to get caught up on RPG reading, but not as much time for blogging.  I'll be able to put up more reviews coming in the next few weeks.  One thing that's been strikingly clear re-reading pieces from the Chaosium back-catalog is that many writers suffer from "too much Nyarlathotep" syndrome.

Lovecraft's Mythos is indifferent to humanity - or at least, his most powerful tales express cosmic indifference.  The frightening beings of the Mythos are either powerful aliens or totally monstrous gods that are oblivious to us.  Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, Nyarlathotep, the supposed Crawling Chaos and messenger and soul of the outer gods, morphed into the boogeyman.   Nyarlathotep is the one that left the toilet seat up, let the air out of the tire, or drank the last of the milk and put an empty back in the fridge.  Every oddball demon is an avatar of Nyarlathotep, and every cultist plot is being moved along by Nyarlathotep like a 4-color super villain.  Muhaha.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling investigators.

It's convenient to have a personal adversary for humanity, if you're writing a pulp action campaign and/or supernatural horror.  I happen to love Supernatural Horror; I've been digging the world of Innistrad, for instance, from the Magic the Gathering card game.  It would make a fine D&D setting.  The protector of the world, a powerful angel, was trapped in the selfsame prison she was using to exile demonkind.  Humanity has been left alone to fend for itself in a  nightmare world of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night.  Everyone is a victim.  It's a great set up for all the gothic horror tropes, and the fall of the world's angelic guardian creates a sense of both loss and hope in the setting as humans cling to their lost faith.  No matter how dark the setting appears, players could always hold out hope of learning how to restore the lost guardian and return light to the world.  It would make a spectacular campaign arc for dark fantasy.

Yeah, but none of that belongs in a Lovecraft setting.

It's not particularly easy to run a bleak campaign built around themes of cosmic horror, I get it.  Much easier to write something with two-fisted action and guns blazing, and this is the form of many of the larger Call of Cthulhu campaigns, like The Masks of Nyarlathotep.  (Although I do think it would be super cool to convert Masks to a fantasy rules set and run it like a D&D game - brothers and sisters, can I get a "Huzzah" for a "Lamentations of Nyarlathotep" game?)

So yes, I blame Mythos adventure writers looking for a convenient way to string together their convoluted plots with a supernatural puppet-master pulling the strings and twirling his moustache.  But Nyarlathotep-made-me-do-it is also a problem with trying to be inclusive with all of Lovecraft's writing - does the high fantasy of the Dreamlands really have anything to do with the author's later works, which express a scientific world view and the passage of geologic time?  Nyarlathotep's speech at the end of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the most exposure we get to the being, and he's downright chummy with Randolph Carter in a good-on-ya-chap-sort-of-way, in the final sequence.

Individual referees can apply their own interpretation to reconcile the Nyarlathotep-boogeyman with their perspective on cosmic horror in the campaign, so I realize there are apologists out there; in Trail of Cthulhu, Ken Hite offers a wide range of ideas to help sort the mess, from 'Nyarlathotep is human perception anthropomorphizing cosmic reality' to a telepathic construct of the Great Old Ones, the true form behind all the gods, or even just a powerful agent.  And yes, he can even be The Boogeyman.  If you must.

Cthulhu Gaming Roundup: Pelgrane and Chaosium news

Here is some hearsay and news coming out of the Pelgrane and Chaosium booths at Gencon, as well as a reader request for more Pagan Publishing news.

Pelgrane Press
I spent some time at the Pelgrane booth, and Simon Rogers, the owner of the company, is always approachable.  Rumors on the message boards have been swirling of excellent play test reports about Pelgrane's epic sized Trail of Cthulhu campaign, Eternal Lies.  They've been suggesting a publishing date of November 2012.  The new piece I heard is that Pelgrane is considering a slip case with multiple books, since boxed sets would move it into a different tax classification.  Personally, I'd much prefer a slip case for multiple books than a boxed set, so that's all good.

Kenneth Hite was at the booth and was willing to discuss his upcoming projects.  Mythos Expeditions is a campaign frame where a university group, like Miskatonic University, sponsors archaeological expeditions to far off places.  I'm stunned it's taken 30+ years for someone to build out a published campaign around this theme of exploration, and I can't overstate how much I'm looking forward to this one.  Many of Lovecraft's best stories invoke the theme; At the Mountains of Madness, The Nameless City, The Shadow Out of Time.  It should be full of ideas that are useable across game systems and genres.  Ken indicated he's wrapping up the rules, initial scenario, and scenario guidelines, and then the Pelgrane freelancers would fill out the remaining scenarios.

Being an OSR aficionado myself, I had to ask about the LOFTP adventure in Ken's queue.  (Mr Raggi roped in Ken to write an adventure as part of his hardcover LOTFP indiegogo campaign a few months back).  Ken described it as a mashup between Apocalypse Now, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; an adventure across a scarred battleground in a fantastic war between godly arcane wizards.   Sounds intriguing;  we don't have a lot of fantasy adventures with the horrors of war in the backdrop, and earth-blasting magic is a viable stand-in for the destructive power of 20th century technology.  Queue Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries".

A few other Pelgrane projects were discussed; Dreamhounds of Paris is underway, Robin Laws is writing that one.  Although I enjoyed Bookhounds, I find I'm much more interested in Pelgrane's adventures than settings, so I'm cautiously interested.  For Night's Black Agents, Ken is working on The Dracular Dossier, a book similar in theme and approach to The Armitage Files, but involving a hunt for Dracula in the modern world, using NBA's spy thriller rules set.  Gareth Hanrahan will take it forward.  My need to mash up Delta Green and Night's Black Agents is currently a faint siren song in a distant room; soon it will be an unavoidable symphony, driving me to madness.  I better start reading Night's Black Agents in earnest.

Chaosium News
The big news is that Chaosium has launched a Kickstarter.  A few days ago, they announced a push to get Horror on the Orient Express, a classic boxed set campaign that's been out of print for 20+ years, updated and back in circulation.  View it here:  Orient Express Kickstarter.  They've neared $40k in two days with a month and a half to go, doubling their $20k goal.  Good to see.

I never owned Orient Express myself, so it'll be excellent to get a shiny new copy of one of Chaosium's classic campaigns.  More importantly, it shows that Chaosium is paying attention to the game-o-sphere and willing to crowd fund some much-sought after reprints.  One can only hope an updated, deluxe version of Beyond the Mountains of Madness is next in the queue.  Alas, Orient Express is targeted to be ready for Gencon 2013, a year away.  Better funding won't necessarily improve their production times.

Pagan Publishing
The guys at the Pagan booth were chatty and willing to talk about various Delta Green campaigns and adventures, but very noncommittal about the timing of the reboot.  (On various podcasts and going back to Gencon 2011, Pagan has been discussing a new version of Delta Green that updates the setting for the post-911 world scene and the USA's 'War on Terror').  My appeal to readers is whether anyone made it to the Pagan Publishing seminar Saturday night and could post some news?  My group hit the road after dinner Saturday, and I had to miss it; there's still a chance it was recorded and will make it out on a podcast feed.

Liao Now Brown Cow

The exciting conclusion of our last Trail of Cthulhu game.  By way of recap, the basic situation was this:  ritual murders were happening around New York City, and the thread that tied them together was that both victims possessed a book called The Invisible Path; in fact, they were obsessed with it.  It seemed the killer was destroying or stealing the victim's copies.

A visit to the university revealed The Invisible Path was the last book of poetry self-published by a horrid 19th century poet, Martin Bellgrave, shortly before he died.  It featured otherworldly images of the primordial earth.  But copies are hard to find!  An eccentric Providence industrialist, Lewis Holland, had been buying all available copies for the last 20 years.  The characters found themselves on a train to Providence, both to visit the millionaire Holland, and to ask questions at a rare book dealer in Providence, Gollam & Sons.

When we left off, the group was getting ready for dinner at Lewis Holland's sprawling mansion.  A burglar had broken in some weeks ago, and Mr Holland's hired gumshoe would be joining everyone for dinner.  Meanwhile, the party's criminal, O'Grady, had secretly filched a copy of The Invisible Path from Holland's secret library, and took some time before dinner to quickly read the notorious volume of poetry.

O'Grady's world changed.  By the time he turned the last page, he was seeing the red primordial sky out the window and hearing the slurping sound of blasphemous slimes slithering across a humid plain.  O'Grady stumbled downstairs for dinner, pale and shaken, as if he had seen a ghost.

Over dinner, conversation turned towards the efforts of Francis Moon, the private detective hired by Lewis Holland.  "I've been unable to recover any of your books, Mister Holland.  Nor have I been able to find any more copies of The Invisible Path.  Some kook out there is knocking off owners and stealing it from libraries."

Holland started ranting about how important it was to make sure no on else read that horrid book.  "I knew Martin Bellgrave when I was a youth in the 1870's, and he's the greatest embodiment of evil I've ever met in my life.  It's a small thing, for a wealthy man like me, but I've made it my crusade to eradicate the memory of Martin Bellgrave and destroy every copy of his book ever published".

O'Grady had been experiencing strange, distracting thoughts… like there was another personality in his mind.  "I've been dreaming of red skies above a torrid primordial jungle".  Holland went bizonkers, since he knew O'Grady had read the book by some of the phrases he was dropping.  "How is this possible that people are still finding and reading copies of The Invisible Path, when it's my life's work to eradicate this book?"

Meanwhile, one of our absent players was back, taking on the role of Meg Meadows, a forensic scientist that works with the SCD.  Meg was on the train to Providence and arrived the next morning.  Meg had news from the city; there was another ritual murder the previous day, and it was someone that had taken The Invisible Path out of the library recently.  She was able to get the copy from NY public library and had read the book on the way to Providence.  She too was experiencing slight hallucinations, had found thoughts of unknown origin streaming across her consciousness, and dreamed of a red sky.

The next day, Francis Moon was off to Arkham at Lewis Holland's behest, to see if he could make an offer for the university's copy of The Invisible Path.  The party suspected Moon; the detective was a bit creepy and his stories placed him in the same vicinity of each crime.  O'Grady decided to go with Moon on the train to Arkham to keep tabs on the detective.

Everyone else decided to go to the ruined house of Martin Bellgrave.  Bellgrave died in a house fire in the 1870's, and the property had lain fallow for many years.  Holland now owned it, and let it continue to crumble into overgrown vegetation.  As they walked the grounds, Meg had a bizarre experience, like a time-slip.  She found herself in the mansion as it was 60+ years ago, Victorian décor and Oriental carpets in a shadowy study, where Martin Bellgrave sat in a high backed chair and spoke with her.

This session featured heavy roleplaying, and writing about dialogue in a game report is yawnstipating.  I'll convey the facts as briefly as I can.  Meg learned that Bellgrave was literally a figment of her imagination, a piece of her brain that began to think like the author after reading his book of poetry.  Rereading the book and visiting the ruins strengthened the connection.  The shade of Bellgrave explained how he experimented with strange drugs from the Orient, like the mythical Liao Drug, which unfettered his consciousness from the modern age and allowed him to cast his vision back into prehistory.  He learned the primal tongue, a sorcerous language that allowed him to tap into the racial knowledge of humanity and implant thoughts and ideas directly into his readers.  He poured his mind and soul into his poetry.  This explained some of the gibberish littered throughout the book.

More importantly, he explained how there are things that live in the angles of time, lean and athirst, that can follow a dreaming consciousness back to the modern age and consume it. The man that sold him the Liao Drug warned of this hazard, but it was worth the price of immortality through art.  Meg and the other characters had noticed strange lights in the sky, like distant fireworks slowly getting closer, and Bellgrave confirmed he too had seen such things after his Liao-induced trips to the distant past.

The players eventually snapped Meg out of her apparent trance and learned about her intense inner vision with the ghost of Martin Bellgrave.  They completed their investigation of the ruins, concluding that the mansion was destroyed by other-worldly heat that fused rock into glass and left radioactive traces, even 60 years later.  The party did some other things during the day, errands and other investigation-related snooping, returning to Holland's mansion near dinner.  When Waltham the butler met them, he indicated that the master was in the study with Francis Moon.  The group was surprised to hear Moon was back from Arkham already - it was supposed to be an overnight trip.  Where was O'Grady?

Holland was dead in the study, his blood cooling on the floor, his gouged eyeballs propped on the desk.  Moon leveled his pistol at the group and asked them to come in, slowly.  "I'm going to have to kill Meg", he pointed out.  "I am the real Martin Bellgrave inside Moon, and when all the other figments have been destroyed, I can live fully again.  Everyone who has read the book must die."  O'Grady was dead already, dumped in a private train compartment on his way to Arkham.  (Never send someone off alone with the serial killer).  There were a few half hearted attempts to go for weapons, only to be shot by Moon as the thought crossed their mind;  there was a line of clues earlier in the adventure that Moon was somewhat lucky, psychic, and uncanny, and being possessed by the ghost of the dead sorcerer increased his prescience.

The ending was a bit deus ex… the Flames of Tindalos, the hungry things from beyond space and time, foreshadowed as those ever present fires in the sky, arrived in our time continuum and began consuming Francis Moon to destroy the consciousness of Bellgrave they were following.  The party watched as the flaming motes darted around his body, igniting his flesh while he writhed in torment.  At one point, Moon's personality resurfaced, "I'm not him, I'm not him…" but it was too late for Moon.

The flames retreated but were still in the night sky, seeking the final threads of Bellgrave's consciousness.  Meg realized that she still had a ghost of Bellgrave in her head, and it was inevitable that they would catch up with her soon.  Snyder handed her his pistol.  "Better to go out with a bullet, than writhing in pain like Moon".

At this point, the party came upon an awesome solution, and it was really my favorite part of the adventure. Both Trevor (the occult dilettante) and Father Vinny (the exorcist with a background in psychology) knew of a hypnotist in the city capable of suppressing memories.  The adventure ended with Meg building a brick-encased wall in her brain through hypnosis, Cask of Amontillado style, where she sealed in the screaming shade of Bellgrave and all that happened the past few days, one brick at a time. She awoke with no memories of the experience.  "Why do we have our suitcases and travel clothes?  Did we just get back from a trip?"

Meanwhile, the others wonder… will the mental prison keep Bellgrave suppressed?

They put all the confiscated copies of The Invisible Path into a vault.  They knew, if they ever needed to consult with a sorcerer from the 1870's, they could read the book.  Bellgrave knew a handful of useful Mythos spells and had a fair store of Mythos knowledge.  But the Flames of Tindalos would rejoin the hunt.

I really enjoyed this adventure, with its theme of viral knowledge transmitted through reading a book, and the idea that consuming art can change the thought patterns of the viewer.  Good stuff.

*Liao Now Brown Cow:  this was O'Grady's player, Adam, getting into the spirit of bad poetry when he learned his thought patterns were channeling the dead poet, and he started stringing bad rhymes together.

Converting Call of Cthulhu to Trail, an Example

Folks had mentioned they'd like to see notes on converting Call of Cthulhu adventures to Trail of Cthulhu adventures, and how I converted one of the recent scenarios I ran, "Mister Corbitt".

As a preface, I think it's valuable to take a step back and look at the philosophical differences between the games.  In Call of Cthulhu, most attempts at information gathering require a skill roll - a spot hidden check, a social check, a read language check.  Trail takes a different approach, categorizing information as either a regular clue or "core clue".  Core clues are necessary for the investigators to move forward to progress through the mystery, so there's no roll - they automatically get them if they have the right skills.

A scenario can be diagrammed like a flow chart, and a flow chart is basically a dungeon - like these examples: mapping the investigation like a dungeon.  In other words, a scene or location where something happens is a room, and a clue is the door or passage that leads to the next room.

Let's say there are 3 pieces of information at a murder scene; 2 provide insight into the murderer's identity and will give the players facts to puzzle over, but 1 of them provides information that ties this crime to a second murder, which is another scene possibility.  In this situation, I'd treat the clue that leads to one of the other scenes as a free "core clue" and the other two clues would require spends and player choices.  (In Trail of Cthulhu, players manage resource pools over the course of the scenario, spending points to use their ability to get nice-to-have pieces of information - thus called "spends").  Of course, I'm assuming here that in future scenes there will be additional opportunities to pick up bits about the murderer's identity.

Once you equate core clues to mean, 'provides the way to get to the next scene', it's fairly easy to convert Call of Cthulhu scenarios to Trail on the fly; as the group encounters opportunities to pick up information, you just answer this question - do they need this to get to the next scene, if so, it's a core clue, otherwise they'll find it with a resource spend.  I do recommend converting monsters and key NPC's in advance, just because the numbers are different and you'll want them handy for the action scenes.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

If you happened to read our game reports on Mister Corbitt (here is Part One and Part Two) I added a handful of scenes up front to make the investigation work with the campaign frame - police detectives and consultants working for a special crimes division in New York.  Corbitt is still a creepy guy spied on by a neighbor across the street, but instead of the neighbor being a PC, the neighbor is a teenage babysitter.  A cop investigates Corbitt's place after the babysitter's call, gets dosed with some of Corbitt's psychotropic substances, and gets mauled in the city by one of the interdimensional beings From Beyond that are visible to those using Corbitt's drugs.  From there, it had the opportunity to become a case for the players, and they did some preliminary scenes interviewing witnesses to the cop's murder, visiting the morgue, doing lab work, doing some narcotics and botanical research, and speaking to the police dispatcher, all before getting to the regular start of the scenario.  Worked out fine.

Here are conversions of some of the mechanical bits:

The Orange Vine
The orange vine is one of those substances that can bring on psychotropic visions of Beyond, and draw the attention of dimensional beings.  Instead of a roll, there would be a spend opportunity to see Beyond if anyone experimented (I'd use spends in occult, theology, or art).  Seeing Beyond grants +1 Mythos, and requires a stealth check (difficulty +1) to avoid being noticed by a dimensional being.  Escaping the vision entirely is a stability check difficulty 6.

Dimensional Being stats:
Athletics 10
Health 10
Scuffling 21
Hit threshold 4
Alertness +1
Stealth 0
Attacks - 2 claws, damage +1
Stability loss +1

The Purple Flower
The other nasty bit was the white and purple flowers in the green house that spray a cloud of pollen that forces rapid decomposition of organic matter, dissolving anyone in the cloud - really nasty.  I made it a Sense Trouble to notice the flowers moving (difficulty 8) and a Flee or Athletics to dodge the cloud and escape (also difficulty 8).

Here were stats for the things in the house:

Scampering Woman-Thing
Athletics 9
Health 5
Scuffling 10
Hit threshold 4
Alertness 0
Stealth 0
Attacks  knock down, damage -2, simple athletics check to stay up
Stability +1

Man-Bagari, the Child-Thing
Athletics 9
Health 20
Scuffling 16
Hit threshold 4
Alertness +1
Stealth -1
Attacks - up to 3 targets, damage +1
1 grapple, automatic damage each round from bite suck
Stability loss +1

I feel like there's a bit more to say on running Trail of Cthulhu, so I'll get my thoughts together and put up another post this week - like how do spends and general abilities work at the table, how did my players do with the system, is it still frightening when the players have more control on their successes, that kind of stuff.  I'll be back with part 2 later in the week.

SCD Game 3 for Trail of Cthulhu: The Eyes Have It

Cast of Characters


Detective Snyder, officer in the SCD (police detective):  Smitty
Father Vinny, trained psychiatrist and church exorcist (clergy):  Mike
O'Grady, burglar turned SCD informant (criminal):  Adam
Trevor, professional occult debunker (dilettante):  Keyser

Game 3 of our side trek into Trail of Cthulhu.  This scenario is quite a bit different than the first - I wanted to dip into something that involved tracking down old books, forbidden knowledge, and an intriguing mystery, to emphasize clue gathering and investigation.

Time passed since the previous investigation concluded, so we did some wrap up.  After his mind-warping experience at the hands of the sorcerer Corbitt, Trevor needed a stay in the hospital, then time out on his yacht. Both Trevor and Father Vinny pored over the pair of eldritch tomes they recovered from Corbitt, which contained spells and rituals such as 'call forth the dark one' or 'bring down the air walker'.  The party joked:  Snyder is the fighter, O'Grady is the thief, Father Vinny is a cleric, now Trevor is a magic user.  Even in Cthulhu, they made a D&D party.

Trevor's book was a 17th century tome, True Magick, and he learned that one of his social contacts, a man named John Scott, had familiarity with old tomes and grimoires, and helped him read faster.  Scott is a luminary at the Silver Lodge, one of Trevor's social clubs.   (In game terms, Scott and the Silver Lodge act like a dedicated investigative pool for poring over old tomes faster).  The parent organization for the Silver Lodge is the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight, a fraternal organization of seekers into esoteric knowledge; old time Call of Cthulhu players may be familiar with some of these names, so let's keep direct spoilers out of the comments - just seeding some interesting characters into the background of the campaign in case we do more than one-shots.  Plus it gives the group an awesome resource.

The new session kicked off with a phone call from another detective, Kroeger.  "This is a weird one Snyder, one of those crimes the boss is going to want to keep out of the papers.  That makes it more your area than mine.   You'll see what I mean when you get here."

A book to die for...

The crime scene involved the eyeless corpse of a Fordham student whose neck was also slashed.  After the forensics, evidence collection, calming the landlady, tracking down the skeevy roommate/suspect, following up on contacts at the university, and so on - all the good detective/gumshoe type of stuff - the unusual clues the group was left with were these:  the dead student, Geoffrey Hill, was obsessed with a book of bad poetry called The Invisible Path, such that he'd taken it out of the library continuously for 4 months.  He had been trying to buy a rare copy from a Providence bookseller.  The library copy, and his diary, were apparently torched in the fireplace after he was murdered.  The killer doesn't like bad poetry.

A second murder was called in from Brooklyn at a low rent tenement, a corpse that had sat undisturbed for a few weeks and began to stink.  Snyder's group got the case because it was another body where the eyes were crudely gouged out and the neck slashed, another ritual type killing.  After forensics, evidence, an autopsy, and so on, the accumulated facts indicated this was 'Jim Brown', professional burglar, and a pair of archaic tomes were found in his belongings (an English translation of De Vermiis Mysteris, and Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New England Canaan).  The books had book plates indicating they were the from the library collection of a Providence, RI industrialist.  Mister Brown had been shot recently, and there was evidence he was holing up to recover from his bullet wound before the killer caught up with him and took his eyes.

After a call to Gollam & Sons, the rare book dealers in Providence, the party found themselves packed and riding the train to speak with the book dealers and also pay a visit to Mister Lewis Holland, the Providence industrialist who previously owned the copies of De Vermiis and Thaumaturgical Prodigies.  Trevor and Holland knew each other socially through yachting competitions, and felt that would be a suitable introduction.

At Gollam & Sons, they learned a bit about the student's mysterious book, The Invisible Path.  (The players had tried unsuccessfully to find a copy at some of the other university libraries in the city).  The book was written by a bad 19th century local poet, Martin Bellgrave, a wastrel that squandered a family fortune in the 1870's and ultimately degenerated into substance abuse.  But the book was notorious locally; while it was sought by collectors outside of New England, that local industrialist, Mr Lewis Holland, had bought nearly every available copy some 30 years ago for his private collection, draining the market.  Gollam & Sons still hadn't found a copy for the deceased student.

The book shop had a small list of extant copies, mostly in a few well known public or university libraries that weren't selling their copies, and a private copy in the hands of a local farmer that the shop was trying to purchase.  The group jotted down the list and decided to go visit Holland.

After arrivals and introductions, they waited in Holland's spacious library, served refreshments by the butler while his master returned from an afternoon drive - testing his latest sporting motor car.  The library was filled with scientific and engineering references, none of the rare occult books that were known by Trevor to be part of the storied Holland Collection.

O'Grady picked the lock on an adjacent door, letting himself into a private study that held Holland's rare books.  Beyond shelves of rare tomes, there were dozens of copies of The Invisible Path, neatly lined along the bottom row.  O'Grady surreptitiously filched one and quickly hid it in the small of his back, as the roar of a returning motor car rumbled on the gravel outside.  He quickly locked the study and stepped out.

Holland arrived, removing his driving scarf and goggles, and he and Trevor went off, bragging about their respective boats and discussing that summer's boating cup competition.  The group was invited to stay for dinner, although Holland apologized that they'd have a guest that evening - he was currently employing a private detective, to help track down some stolen books.  His man had some news about the burglar and was coming in to make a report.

That's where we stopped for the evening .  There's a killer out there, the victim's eyes are gouged out, and the connections between the two victims are scant.  One of them stole books from Holland; Holland collects copies of an odd book of poetry called The Invisible Path; the dead student was also obsessed with that book.  Now that O'Grady was able to pocket a copy, they're eager to read it and see what the fuss is about.

*Image is from "The Book" in Pelgrane's Arkham Detective Tales

SCD GAME 2 - Showdown on Beacon Hill

Previously:  The strange murder of a beat cop led the group to a house in the Bronx belonging to Bernard Corbitt, a mild-mannered gardener and good neighbor… who apparently harvested illegal body parts from a run-down Hell's Kitchen hospital and patched them together in the basement using re-animator fluid.  The first report is here:  SCD game 1, An Arm and a Leg

Cast of Characters

Detective Snyder, officer in the SCD (police detective):  Smitty
Father Vinny, trained psychiatrist and church exorcist (clergy):  Mike
O'Grady, burglar turned SCD informant (criminal):  Adam
Trevor, professional occult debunker (dilettante):  Keyser
Meg Meadows, forensic scientist:  Olivia


When Game 2 started, Corbitt was in lock up and the group returned to his house to look around.  "This is a horror game, so it would be best if we split up," quipped one of the players.  Well said.

But first, they waited for the arrival of Meg Meadows, a forensic scientist with botany experience called in by Detective Snyder.  Meg had the chance to do some library research before driving over, and was able to give a report on Corbitt's import business, his wife's obituary, and the death of his father, all culled from the archives of the paper.

Then Meg and O'Grady went to the dark greenhouse while the others searched the house itself.  In addition to finding various narcotic's plants, Corbitt was growing some otherworldly plants like a white-flowered bush that sprayed pollen at them.  They fled before they were coated by the spray and reduced to a rapidly decomposing pile of fertilizer.

In the house, Corbitt's study was piled with interesting books - a Sanskrit tome named The Key and the Gate, covered in cobra skin; a 17th century grimoire on devil worship, True Magick; Corbitt's botanical notes; 14 years of Corbitt's journals.

While the players got the dramatic approach to learning the facts - handouts and madness-tinged 1st person journal entries - here's the basic fact dump:  Corbitt became a worshipper of a Hindu demon called Rama Sekva on a trip to the wilds of India; Rama Sekva ate his father but granted Corbitt power as a wizard.  Corbitt was a failed med student that knew enough about pharmacology to eventually synthesize Soma, a drug that allowed him to commune with his demon god.  Rama Sekva's guidance helped him create the alchemical formulae to graft together dead flesh into living constructs.  Worst of all, the demon spawned a child on Corbitt's wife, who died in childbirth; the horrible thing was still living in the basement, and Corbitt was grafting body parts onto the child as it grew!

The descent into the basement revealed the creepy alchemical lab, the rudimentary surgery with it's operating lamps and bone saws, and the whimpering gurgling sound coming from a hidden panel in the basement's false wall.  In the secret room behind the wall was this thing:

The Child-Thing, from Mansions of Madness

It gurgled toward the players, "Papa, Papa…" blowing out of its sphincter mouth, and they started blasting it with pistols.  It barreled through the door, grappling with multiple limbs and attempting to slurp flesh off the bone using those sphincter mouths.  There were sanity rolls, stability checks, guns blazing, and Trevor the dilettante running the thing through with his sword cane.  O'Grady needed quite a bit of first aid after getting pulled into one of the mouths and slurped.

"We need to burn this place to the ground," was Snyder's opinion.  I've observed that arson is a Cthulhu gamer's good friend when they need to hide evidence of occult horror from an innocent world.  While the group loaded Snyder's trunk with things they wanted to salvage from Corbitt's house, like the rare books, a message blared over the radio - "Corbitt is on the loose!  Floyd (the desk sergeant) is dead, Corbitt's stolen a car, and be on alert, he's probably on the way home!"

In the journals, Corbitt had mentioned a few times that the when the time was right, he'd climb to the top of Beacon Hill in the nearby Jamaica Park north of Fordham and call out to the thing's father, Rama Sekva, to return to the world.  Lightning and flashes of light swirled to the north in the area of the park, and the group piled into their cars and sped off into the night to stop a summoning.

Snyder was an excellent driver, and Trevor sprinted up the side of Beacon Hill; the other guys weren't as athletic.  Meg and Father Vinnie followed in the other car.

Trevor avoided looking at the swirling vortex above the hill where the six-armed god slowly descended a wormhole tunnel toward the mortal plane, and he stabbed Corbitt with his sword cane.  The sorcerer, oblivious to the intruder while he chanted the sanskrit spell, was only grazed by the thrust, and he turned to face Trevor.  By the time the others got near the hill top, Trevor was on the ground, blood coming out of his eyes and nose because Corbitt was cooking his brain by revealing to him the last syllable of the Dread Name of Azathoth.

Snyder dropped to a knee, took careful aim, and shot the sorcerer in the head before he could completely fry poor Trevor's mind.  O'Grady managed to avoid looking up into the vortex and seeing the 6-armed demon quickly scurry back along the tunnel like a spider, and with the death of Corbitt, the unsustained ritual dissipated into the night air.  Case closed, except for the clean up and filing the false reports with the department.

That's pretty much where we needed to end things - it was getting late.  I took a quick straw poll to decide if we should resume the AD&D game for a bit or play another Trail of Cthulhu scenario set in the Big Apple, and the group voted for another Trail game.  So it'll be at least a few more weeks before we get back to Gothic Greyhawk.  See you next time.

Keeper's Notes:
This was an adaptation of "Mister Corbitt", from Mansions of Madness (a Chaosium book for Call of Cthulhu).  If folks are interested, I'm glad to put my Trail conversion notes together, but it was pretty basic stuff.  Since these are meant to be episodic one-offs, we'll probably run something from Stunning Eldritch Tales or Arkham Detective Tales next.

SCD Game 1: An Arm and a Leg

We started our episodic Trail of Cthulhu game last weekend, called "Welcome to the SCD".  One of the regulars had to miss, we also had a new guy, so here was the crew:

Cast of Characters:

Detective Snyder, officer in the SCD (police detective):  Smitty
Father Vinny, trained psychiatrist and church exorcist (clergy):  Mike
O'Grady, burglar turned SCD informant (criminal):  Adam
Trevor, professional occult debunker (dilettante):  Keyser

Here’s as good a blurb for the adventure kick-off as any:

"We've got a report of a patrol officer being lifted into the air and ripped to pieces by an invisible monster in downtown, in broad daylight.  Snyder, why don't you take someone over to the morgue and check it out.  They've got a witness down at the precinct giving a statement - the gas station attendant.  Make sure you test him for booze.  If he checks out, it sounds like we might have a case."

The SCD - Special Crimes Division - is a sub-department in the NYPD that investigates crimes that are either weird, sensational, or involve the occult; the scant number of detectives consigned to the SCD are expected to work anonymously and keep the weird stuff out of the newspaper.  As such, they get to bring in a lot of contractors, and Snyder likes to work with the priest and O'Grady, and the occult expert, Trevor.  That's how the players justified the make-up of their group.

I'm not sure how I want to approach game recaps for Cthulhu… investigative games require research, facts, interviews, etc, and usually revolve around a big reveal, that moment when the players connect the dots.  It seems like a lot of work to do it in detail, and a recap still wouldn't do justice to the table top experience.  I think I'll try to quickly move through the facts each week, and just focus on one or two key scenes.

Snyder gathered his team, and the group performed the following actions:  interviewed the gas station attendant, visited the morgue, the gas station, performed some lab work on an unidentifiable botanical substance, visited the Columbia U library, spoke with dispatch, and ultimately found themselves driving out to the Jerome Park neighborhood in the North Bronx, armed with the following facts:  the dead cop, Weidner, was torn to bits in broad daylight and exsanguinated by an unknown assailant.  He had an unidentifiable plant-based hallucinogen in his system.  His last call was a neighborhood check in the Bronx to calm down a worried teenager.  Apparently, she thought she saw a dead arm flop out of a package being hauled into the house by the neighbor across the street, and called the police.

When Snyder pulled off of Grand Avenue into the neighborhood, a pair of gangster started up their sedan and drove off - O'Grady identified  one of them as Hammerfist Dempsey, an enforcer who works for a small time loan shark in Harlem, Fat Lips Louie.  Snyder let them drive off, and the group interviewed the mom, son, and babysitter that lived across the street from the suspicious Mister Corbitt.  Regarding the gangsters, O'Grady figured he could get in to see Fat Lips sometime later anyway, but they did wonder why a loan shark would be after Corbitt.

Barring the babysitter's tale, Corbitt had a sterling reputation in the neighborhood.  When they learned that Corbitt ran an import business, and often brought in rare orchids and tropical plants for his extensive green house, they saw a connection with the hallucinogen found in the dead cop, and decided to visit Corbitt's place.  Corbitt wasn't home.

Corbitt had spectacular flower beds and gardens, and his reputation as a green thumb was well-earned; the greenhouse door was open.  Trevor stayed back to peer into the house, and thought he saw something through a window - an odd glimpse of a leg or foot leaving a room backwards.

O'Grady went around to the other side and peered in another window - and shouted in fright.  Staring back at him through the window was a disembodied woman's head; attached to the sides of the head, where the ears should be, where a pair of hairy man arms, holding up the head like legs.  Sticking out the back of the head was a backwards woman's leg, with the knee sticking up and the foot facing back.  The head swayed back and forth, screeching at him through the glass, balancing on the tripod of arms and a leg, until it launched itself back into the house hopping like a freakish toad or startled cat.

O'Grady convinced Snyder there was a creepy thing in the house, they jimmied the lock to the back door, and Snyder entered, with his revolver drawn.  The head-thing scampered into the kitchen, and Snyder blasted it in the skull, "killing" it.  Green ichor dripped down the wall behind the twitching collection of ill-matched parts.

Snyder had O'Grady roll up the remains of the scampering thing in Corbitt's table cloth, so they could throw it in the trunk.  "Evidence".  Snyder thought he heard a noise in the basement, and after reflecting on the hopping woman's head, decided he didn't want to know what Corbitt might have in his basement, at least not yet.  They threw the head in the trunk and waited at the car to see if Corbitt came home that night so he could be brought in for questioning.

Corbitt returned home shortly after dark, and the cops were waiting for him.  He went quietly to the station with Snyder and Father Vinnie, and seemed genuinely surprised to hear there was mischief in the neighborhood and he was a suspect.  Either that, or he was a sociopathic liar and fooled them with his kindly old gardener act.  Corbitt was taken down town without incident, and left in a holding cell at the station after some cursory questioning.  Snyder went back out to the house where Trevor and O'Grady were left watching the place.

They sat in the darkened yard, watching the creepy house without any lights on, and kept wondering if maybe they should check out the greenhouse, or poke around the house.  Finally O'Grady had a flash of insight, and decided to break into Corbitt's trunk.  There was a pair of galoshes, heavy rubber gloves and a dripping burlap roll… inside the burlap were body parts, a human heart, a liver, and the severed leg of a child.  It was wrapped in disposal plastic from one of the city's poorer hospitals, Polyclinic over on the west side.

We stopped there, after Snyder and Vinnie got back out to the house.  They decided it wouldn't be a horror game if they didn't venture into the creepy house and greenhouse in the dead of night (bravo, fellows), and decided they could leave Corbitt overnight in the station as a "person of interest".  (No Miranda rights in the 1930's.)

The group is thinking that Corbitt cut a deal with the mobsters to get access to body parts for his gruesome experiments, and that's why a loan shark is after him.  They learned from the neighbor that he lost his wife and unborn child years ago during her pregnancy, so they're expecting to see a surgical laboratory in the basement where Corbitt is working on building a new wife, Herbert West style.  Tune in next week.

Dracula Meets Cthulhu

"You play Conan, I play Gandalf.  We team up to fight Dracula."*

D&D is a kitchen sink game - the core books and monster manuals are an eclectic mix of genres, mythologies, cultures, and legends that create a generic fantasy soup where anything goes.  The Cthulhu genre has a different aesthetic - man is alone in a hostile cosmos inhabited by inimical alien beings.

It always seemed a bit odd to me that the Call of Cthulhu book had stats for vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, supernatural monsters from the gothic tradition.  Traditional monsters never seemed to fit into the alien cosmos implied by Lovecraft's mythology.

On the other hand, a few tales cross genres; Dreams in the Witch House features a "satanic" witch, driven off by a crucifix, and rites to the Black Man (a persona of the devil).  It's an odd tale for Lovecraft; explicit references to Christianity or Judeo-Christian mythology are conspicuously absent throughout Lovecraft.

One of my upcoming books I'll be looking at is Shadows Over Filmland, the collection of Trail of Cthulhu stories that take the gothic monsters of 1930's Hollywood movies and presents short scenarios featuring them, each with a Lovecraftian twist that attempts to blend traditional (romantic) gothic horror with the Mythos.

That seems to be a common approach for inclusion  - allow the "traditional" monsters but give them an origin or explanation that ultimately aligns with the Cthulhu Mythos or eldritch sorcery.  These days, I also find myself putting more traditional monsters in Cthulhu games, but developing my own explanation for them.

There's a big problem with overthinking it, a trap I often fall into - the trap of explanation, the trap of classification.  Monsters don't need explanations or justifications; they just exist.  The players don't need to know where they come from, and it's usually better if they don't. Our need to classify and explain and have a "grand unified model" undermines the sense of wonder and terror.  Keep it WEIRD.  I need to come up with a pithy motto along those lines, tape it to my monitor when I'm writing.

Anyway - today's woolgathering was inspired by a more articulate post over at Ephemera on mixing demons into a Cthulhu game; (Hauntings the Final World). Ephemera is an intermittent blog that features excellent ideas for Bookhounds of London (for Trail of Cthulhu).

*The immortal description of everything awesome about D&D, from Jeff's place.

A Review of Stunning Eldritch Tales

We're kicking off our New York City pulp detective campaign for Trail of Cthulhu later this week, so I've been reading through some books I had previously overlooked in the Pelgrane Press catalog.  Let's start with a look at Stunning Eldritch Tales (available at the Pelgrane Site: Stunning Eldritch Tales).

Stunning Eldritch Tales is a Robin D Laws book, 82 pages, and covers four scenarios featuring different themes in the pulp style of adventure.  Here's the blurb on each from the Pelgrane site:

Devourers In the Mist
A rugged adventure tale in which the survival of island castaways is tested not only by the elements — but by the twisted shapes of half-seen, sadistic entities who haunt the atoll’s jungled interior!

Shanghai Bullets
Guns-blazing danger portends and international intrigue unfurls in the city of conspiracy, the licentious, opium-infused Berlin of the East. In the shadow struggle between nations, no weapon is more fiercely coveted than the star mirror. It brings blood-draining death from beyond the stars!

Death Laughs Last
When philanthropist and gadabout Addison Bright is found bizarrely murdered in his own New York mansion, only a team of doughty investigators can protect his reputation—and the sanity of mankind—from the awful truths lurking in his tragically colorful past.

Dimension Y
A scientific experiment yields the promise of a glimpse into an adjoining reality, a repository of man’s dreams and memories. But when the heroes peer through this window… they find cosmic horror peering back at them!

We played "Devourers in the Mist" as a one-shot a few years ago, and it works really well in that capacity - it's short, self-contained, comes with pre-generated characters, and super deadly.  I'd dare say it would be difficult to fit into an ongoing campaign without stretching credulity.  It has a strong theme of man-against-nature, with hideous monsters.

"Shanghai Bullets" introduces an element of underworld treachery, smoky nightclubs, and frequent betrayals and reversals.  "Death Laughs Last" involves big city criminals and a masked vigilante in the style of the 30's pulp action heroes.  "Dimension Y" is weird science run amok.  While "Dimension Y" is creepy and stressful, the Mythos is very much a secondary element to "Shanghai Bullets" and "Death Laughs Last" - these are pulp adventurers first and foremost, with a side serving of horror.

As Gumshoe adventures, the collection does an excellent job of presenting the strengths of the system, blending core clues, investigation, and resource pool spends to navigate complex plots with lots of non-player characters.  Using "investigative spends" is one of the more free form areas in the rules, so it's valuable seeing how the designer suggested them in his own published scenarios.

I previously bypassed running the other pieces in Stunning Eldritch Tales because they were so action-oriented compared to my regular tastes; my usual approach to Cthulhu gaming has been with "accidental investigators" like professors or antiquarians or unlucky journalists stumbling unwittingly into the world of horror investigation.  But the new campaign is going to feature a lot more "badges and guns" action, and I'm finding the tone of this collection is perfect for inclusion.

What goes around comes around.  I wouldn't have recommended this book when it came out a few years ago (not bleak enough, I guess...) but I appreciate that Cthulhu gaming is diverse and supports different styles like "pulp" or "purist".  Now I find it's an absolute perfect fit for the new campaign since I'm running something on the pulp side of things.  I'm glad to see there are plenty of scenarios out there to support the style - a few of these stories are going right into our queue.  The investigations in Stunning Eldritch Tales are intricate, sophisticated, full of action, and effectively capture the pulp vibe implied by the title - I recommend the collection to fans of crime novels and 1930's action serials - or if you just want to put more bullets and fists into your Cthulhu gaming.

A Review of the Black Drop

Shortly after reading The Black Drop, I knew it was one of the first Trail of Cthulhu adventures we had to play.  It has the right blend of exotic locale, real world history, weird horror, and moral difficulty to generate a memorable horror game.  Plus - for the D&D and fantasy gamers out there - the ideas behind this one make for a great inspiration in your fantasy or weird horror game, if you don't mind filing off the serial numbers.

The adventure involves the Kerguelen islands, a small cluster of islands in the far south of the Indian Ocean just outside of the Antarctic circle.  A steamer (with the characters on board) is headed to the islands to retrieve a failing French colony of shepherds, while across the islands are littered encampments from the age of whaling.  Unbeknownst to the players at the start of the adventure, a sinister group of Nazi scientists are on their way to the islands as well.

The Kerguelens are the topmost remains of the sunken Kerguelen plateau, which was home to the ancient Lemurian empire; as the players explore the island, they even encounter Lemurian artifacts.  The adventure revolves around the stirring of an ancient god, a 30 year astronomical cycle, ambiguity whether the colonists or the scientists can be trusted, and some difficult moral choices that force horrible decisions on the players.

The scenario is fairly open ended, and the players have a lot of choice around where they want to go and how they want to explore the island.  Time is a factor, as there's an impending astronomical event that drives some of the action, and antagonist reactions also drive some events, but otherwise this is a freer structure than many investigations.  It also offers a lot of interesting role playing situations for the keeper.

Some groups don't like body horror, or psychological horror, or having to do bad things, and this adventure confronts the investigators with decisions concerning the latter, so there's some fair warning.  My own group is not comprised of horror enthusiasts, and they thoroughly enjoyed the scenario, although the body count was quite high.  I'd recommend using the pre-generated characters and running this one as a one-shot, rather than integrating it into a campaign.

I highly recommend the scenario, it's one of the strongest in the Trail of Cthulhu line, and the investigation ends up feeling quite epic and action oriented for such a short jaunt.  I've often called it the "lite" version of Beyond the Mountains of Madness.  It's written by Jason Morningstar, an RPG designer in his own right (Fiasco), and the PDF format makes it a great way to test drive Trail of Cthulhu - the adventure is 40 pages, with 6 pre-generated characters, maps and handouts, and should cover two nights of gaming (6-8 hours).

A Review of The Armitage Files

As I embark on a series of Pelgrane Press reviews over the next few months, The Armitage Files is a good place to start.  It illustrates Pelgrane's reputation as a risk-taking publisher willing to break new ground.  I had never encountered a game book like this one.

Consider this premise:
A pair of bizarre, disturbing letters arrive, in Professor Armitage's handwriting, describing an apocalyptic future in which he failed to avert a monstrous tragedy.  The unbalanced writer behind the letters claims they're being sent back through time, in the hopes that investigators receiving them in the past will be able to stop the coming horror the writer himself couldn't prevent.

BAM!  There it is - the type of elevator pitch that could launch a whole TV series - or at least keep a role playing campaign going for a long time.  Handwriting analysis and other tests seemingly prove the authenticity of the letters, and the player characters are approached as trustworthy outsiders that can investigate the disparate facts and clues revealed in the letters and solve the mystery.  The clock is ticking, and more documents materialize from the future as the situation worsens.

In case you didn't know:  Professor Henry Armitage is the protagonist of Lovecraft's tale "The Dunwich Horror".  In the years after dispelling the Son of Yog Sothoth, Armitage has formed a discrete group of professors to investigate the Mythos.

Here's a sample of what one of the letters looks like - this one is later in the timeline, when the author's coherence is diminishing:

And the readable version:

The new sanatorium on the outskirts of town. When I was there, I sensed that something had gone awry. Yet I was distracted by my fruitless attempt to find men who had been at the circus that October night. That is a dead end, I am sure, or at the very least a counter-productive one. The circus may figure into it, but October is a blind alley. Or rather a trap. It is your minds you must preserve above all.


IF YOU SEE THE RED BOX, DO NOT OPEN IT. The contents will permit you a brief advantage, but you will pay in the end. IT IS THE RED BOX THAT ALLOWS THE HORNETS IN.


I am sorry. They are at me, making me think of them, preventing me from writing what I must write. EVERYTHING I WRITE HERE MAY BE A DECEPTION. RELY ON THE NOTES TO COME

The handouts are spectacular.  Each full letter is a sheaf of pages, revealing a handful of plot hooks and clues.  I've used the term "target rich horror gaming" to describe my goal of building a sandbox that gives the players many options, and every letter of this campaign supplement provides numerous clues, plot hooks, people, and locations to investigate.  It's the ultimate horror gaming sandbox.

But there's a massive caveat; The Armitage Files is presented as a giant toolkit for running an improvised horror campaign.  It includes write ups for many people, organizations, places, tomes, and magic items, and each one comes with an option for being used as an ally, enemy, or innocuous bystander - but the actual structuring of the campaign is very much left up to the referee and the vicissitudes of player choice and inspiration.

There is a lot of advice on running an improvised game, guidelines on how to structure an improvised narrative, and tips for encouraging the players to take the reigns in the sandbox.  There's a section on the pacing of a traditional horror investigation, how to improvise scenes that lend themselves to the structure.  There are also plenty of 'actual play' transcripts in the book.  If you ever wondered about running an investigative scenario sans script, this is the book for you.  But my own anecdotal observations lead me to believe that many referees adopt a hybrid approach to the campaign, letting the players guide the sandbox action and improvising along the way, using the time between sessions to embellish some the potential upcoming challenges in the traditional "prepared beforehand" style.

The physical book itself is excellent.  It's a 152 page soft cover, with glossy heavy weight magazine pages, and that beautiful dark sepia art by Jérôme Huguenin that's come to characterize the vintage look of the Trail of Cthulhu line.  There are 10 letters from the future in The Armitage Files, and you can download nice looking color versions of the pages from the Pelgrane site (you need a copy of the book to unlock the file).  Long time Call of Cthulhu players are familiar with the ubiquitous hand outs and clippings that accompany most scenarios, and this product takes the handout concept and turns the dial up to 11 with these spectacular props.

The book is written by Robin D Laws, Gumshoe designer and a long time Pelgrane author.  Robin has a list of credits around game mastering advice that encourages players to co-create the game world, so an improvisation heavy campaign is a logical extension. The Wise Google tells me this The Armitage Files book won an Ennie award.

So, how would I rate or recommend this book?  Let's step back and think of the many famous campaigns or illustrious adventures that are published for my favorite games; we've played Ravenloft, but haven't made it to the Vault of the Drow; I've run Shadows of Yog Sothoth and Beyond the Mountains of Madness, but just haven't gotten around to running Masks of Nyarlathotep.  That kind of stuff.  I put The Armitage Files in similar standing, a paradigm-changing campaign that redefines what's possible on the table.  It's gone on my "Must Try" list, too.  The gamer bucket list.  I'll see where our upcoming Trail campaign goes; even though I've done some improv theater, the thought of an improvised campaign is still daunting.  It's not an approach for the faint of heart, or slow of wit, or something to do on a night when the tank is half empty.  But I'm looking forward to the challenge.

We Choose You, Trail of Cthulhu

We're planning to start an episodic Cthulhu game sometime next month, so we discussed choice of system at the end of last week's D&D session, weighing the pros and cons of Call of Cthulhu versus Trail of Cthulhu.  The players are more enthusiastic and familiar with Trail, so that's where we're starting.

Trail of Cthulhu's clue system works really with my proposed campaign setting, a home brew built around a special investigative unit in the NYPD, the Special Crimes Division (the SCD).  I've been re-reading my backlog of Cthulhu books, and I was delighted to see that Arkham Detective Tales has ideas for running a police-heavy Cthulhu game.  Pulling the campaign together will be a cinch.

Trail of Cthulhu shifts much of the action to the players to choose how to push forward and when to spend resources, but it also demands more improvisation by the referee as well - I'm looking forward to the challenge.  It's a perceptual adjustment to stop thinking of the game as a simulation (the way we use D&D to simulate a fantasy world) and instead consider it a recreation of a certain style of fiction, in this case, a blend of pulp detective stories, film noir, and Lovecraft horror.  Kind of a less campy version of the HBO movie Cast A Deadly Spell.  I'll continue to log some notes here as I build out the setting.

Pelgrane Press is an active publisher turning out  a lot of high quality supporting material, so there's no shortage of scenarios to steal.  I'd rather adapt published stuff than create whole cloth, since it lets me put more time towards writing my Black City D&D setting.  I've got a Black City post in the queue next, but will  start doing some regular Pelgrane reviews as I re-read many of the Trail of Cthulhu books for scenarios that play well in The Big Apple.

I'm also scanning the Chaosium backlog for adventures that are a good fit; I found an overlooked gem in the book Fatal Experiments called "The Lurker in the Crypt".  It's exactly the kind of adventure structure I love; it describes a corrupt cemetery and mortuary in the heart of NYC's East Side, managed by a powerful sorcerer and various undead assassins, with ties to a Great Old One and a massive infestation of ghouls in NYC's abandoned sewer sections.  But there's no real plot; the adventure basically describes the myriad forces associated with this extremely powerful conspiracy and their plots and machinations.  I imagine the lack of a linear plot and the huge danger presented by this cult have contributed to it's obscurity, but it'll be spectacular in a 1920's Badges and Guns campaign.  It's a super dangerous situation to plunge into blindly, so this would have to be the capstone to a campaign.  I'm always delighted to encounter a published horror scenario that omits a linear bread crumb of scenes, instead presenting the inhabitants and their motivations sandbox-style for insertion into a campaign.