By Malcolm Harbrow
Self Published
Call of Cthulhu
Howard Elbridge, a writer of weird fiction, has disappeared. Looking into his disappearance, the investigators will uncover his links to Miskatonic University’s “daring” set, and the history of a mysterious painting.
This 22 page investigation is … the usual Call of Cthulhu stuff? The usual adventure with the usual wordiness and lack of care in usability. Yeah?
We haven’t check in on the big boy for awhile. Let’s see what he’s up to! Here’s one that is, quote “a Refreshingly different mystery… Excellent low-key investigation with a claustrophobic feel” according to another review site, as quoted by the product blurb on DriveThru. I’m sure the marketing is correct. It must be, right?! Off we go!
We’ve got a nice timeline, along with when recent newspaper stories appear. That’s good! And a nice selection of handouts. I always appreciate handouts in adventures. More adventure, D&D or no, should include them. They’re fun. Soak them in tea and burn the edges! The main plot is … fine, I guess? People get trapped in a painting. If you stare at it long enough them you can get trapped also. Or, maybe, swap places with someone in it. There’s a line or two in the adventure which does a good job conveying a wolf-like creature chasing people in a maze. Indistinct, eerie, a nice little job of conveying that. That is, alas, the last nice thing I have to say.
This is the usual Call of Cthulhu mess of an adventure. Everything done in paragraph form and just tossed in willy nilly. Repetition beyond belief. “As noted above (in “first impressions of the painting”), the painting is striking and disturbing, depicting a number of tiny yet terrified human figures fleeing through some sort of angular labyrinth, pursued by the shadowy impression of a wolf — or maybe a wolflike beast?” That description must be repeated about eight times int he adventure. I get it, man. I get it. Everything is just tossed in. The painting, murders, newspaper offices, breaking, a faux secret society and pi … it’s just all THERE, in their own sections. So, eventually, you get to a section heading for the secret society, or onefor the pi. These are nearly the last pages of the adventure. There’s absolutely no attempt to integrate things in to the adventure, to make it a cohesive whole. I can’t imagine the amount of page flipping required to run this. What’s the PI doing now? How about sticking it in the main text with some suggestions? Or, you can just say there’s a gruff PI and let the DM do everything else … as the adventure does.
Seriously, it’s the designers job to assist the DM in running the adventure. I don’t HAVE to do what you tell me, but, also, its up to you, as the designer, to stick something in that I CAN use if I so desire. Give me something to work with! This is all abstracted ideas.
They might show at the apartment and ask questions” Well then have he two fuckers do that in the text for the apartment. Fucking Christ man.
And, of course, it’s the classic Call of Cthulhu “just write a paragraph” style. No use of whitespace or bullets or bolding or anything else to help call attentinto things and/or make the judges life easier when running the adventure at the table. Just write a paragraph and hoe someone printed this out and used a highlighter, I guess. There’s offset boxes to describe people, but, really, its all the same information that is also presented in the main text of the product. “If persuasion fails, they could try their luck with Hans Trager, Schneider’s underpaid assistant.” Well maybe tell us about him when you’re describing the shop, not at the very end of the description when we’re talking about success rolls? Jesus. Have you never set a scene? Have you never Run a Cthulhu adventure before? Do you think somehow that this mindless vomiting of text is somehow conducive to running things.
The adventure, proper, is pretty straightforward. Once you get in to his house, which is pretty immediate, you see the painting and his journal and its immediately obvious what is going on. It’s gonna take seven days, in the presence of the painting, for anything interesting to happen. This seems like a loooooonnnngggg time, given the depth, or lack thereof, of the investigation. This doesn’t seem to me like it will work.
Worry not, OSR crowd, Just about everything ever produced by the OSR at this than every Call of Cthulhu adventure ever made.
This is $5 at DriveThru. Your four page preview shows you nothing of the adventure, making it impossible to judge ot before buying it, which is the purpose of a preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/417454/The-Wolf-in-the-Labyrinth?1892600
Took me until almost the end to realize Pi meant a Private Investigator. In my defense, it’s a CoC adventure so it really could be talking about the number…maybe because it was a picture you could do some measurements of circles in the painting and realize some shenanigans were going on…
I will only note that CoC and AD&D are two utterly unconnected games. Writing a CoC scenario like a D&D module would be a disaster, just as a D&D product written as if it were a CoC scenario is unworkable. Just utterly different games.
Bryce’s often posits a Platonic Ideal of a D&D product, where a DM opens it for the first time at the table and runs it without prep. CoC can’t be played that way (or, at least, certainly not played well). No Keeper has ever run a CoC game “out of the box” without reading it through several times, so paragraph form is actually the best format for THAT system.
And, as a game, CoC scenarios run into their own issues. They tend not to have Orcs in a Hole, or You’re Hired to Guard a Caravan, but they, too, have their own tired tropes: a relative has died, leaving you a disquieting inheritance; your professor has gone missing; the FINAL HORROR is always in the attic or the cellar (just once I want the Insects from Shaggai to be waiting in the kitchen).
However, since any combat in CoC means that the Investigators have done something wrong and about to die horribly, the lengthy background info is all about the investigation, which is to CoC what the exploration component of D&D is.
Yes, CoC and D&D are different games, but organization still counts. I recently ran a CoC adventure that I read through twice, but come game time, I had difficulty running it. Important stuff was buried in or between long paragraphs full of unimportant details to be skipped over. Skill checks detailed on rather unimportant information/activities. Overall, it made the game difficult to run.
As for the final horror, percentage wise, I have not found many CoC adventures placed in home settings, at least not for the final horror. I think Lovecraft himself placed most of his horrors elsewhere although I have not done an inventory. Cthulhu was not in a home for example. In fact, it seems to me that most designers don’t study and follow Lovecraft’s works very well, making their games lackluster.
Really? I have a gigantic collection of CoC materials and, time and again, whether it’s library, a museum, a crumbling mansion, a San Francisco townhouse or a delapidated cabin, inevitably the VERY TERRIBLE THING is in the cellar or attic. It seems to be a humorous habit of the published adventures.
There’s only one published adventure featuring the Big C and that’s obviously for good reasons. If your Investigator is heading to R’lyeh when the stars are right, those are the last few moments for that investigator.
I suppose these authors spewing out publications have never read “The Thing on the Doorstep”.