Miskatonic Monday #442: The Drowned Thorn

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

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Name: The Drowned Thorn

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Stuart McNair

Setting: Lancashire Coast, 1926

Product: Scenario

What You Get: Ninety-Four page, 107.00 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: The secrets of the sands, fear of the foreshore.

Plot Hook: A missing rifleman on the shifting shore.
Plot Support: Staging advice, six pre-generated Investigators, 

sixteen NPCs, six handouts, three maps,  and three Mythos entities and monsters.

Production Values: Good

Pros

# Littoral horror where the intertidal edge keeps shifting

# Brilliantly nebulous

# Well worked through conclusion that presents the players and Investigators with concrete options

# Useful set of extra locations

# Decent handouts

# Thalassophobia

# Ammosophobia

# Epistemophobia

Cons

# Annoyingly repetitious in its use of NPC descriptors

# Needs an edit

# Brilliantly nebulous

Conclusion

# Challengingly off-kilter and nebulous environmental scenario whose sparseness may be difficult to impart

# The investigators will have to supply the emotion and thus the contrast