Lovecraftian Fantasy

It is due to a matter of simple copyright, but Dungeons & Dragons never truly explored a fantasy infused with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft or the Cthulhu Mythos. The only time that it really ever did was with the first edition of Deities & Demigods, and that was to present the “gods” of the Mythos as a pantheon, complete with write-ups and stats for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. In subsequent editions of this source book, this content was removed as its inspiration, the works of H.P. Lovecraft were not then in the public domain. With the passing of the millennium, they are now in the public domain and ready to serve as inspiration for an array of RPG writers who since the publication of Call of Cthulhu in 1981 have steeped themselves in the “Cosmicism” of both his fiction and the RPG it inspired. Thus the Mythos has appeared in what is a classic just ten years on – Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport Trilogy for Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition (and others) – as well as increasingly so in support material for the successor to Dungeons & Dragons, 3.5, Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Carrion Hill is an example of this. Published in 2009, it is an adventure for four characters of fifth level written by Richard Pett, an English author who has written innumerable adventures for both Dungeons & Dragons and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and whom I had the pleasure of editing for his contribution to Goodman Games’ Age of Cthulhu Vol. V: The Long Reach of Evil. That contribution was indeed his first adventure for Call of Cthulhu, the quintessential RPG of Lovecraftian investigative horror, but it was not his first that involved Lovecraftian investigative horror. That was Carrion Hill.

Carrion Hill is itself a wind and rain sodden city looming up out of the swamps of eastern Ustalav, located on the southern bank of the Kingfisher River. It has a long, dark history having been occupied by one flock of worshippers after another, many of them devoted to even darker gods. The original inhabitants were even worse, all of them vile and depraved cultists of the Old Gods. Except to the singularly sinister scholar, such information has long been forgotten, as has the existence of a network of tunnels, temples, and tombs that run deep under the city. This morning though, something rose from those depths, an irruption that caused buildings to implode and left the surrounds as little more than slime slathered scree. The cream of The Crows – the city watch – is already missing, having come to combat the cause of the calamity, so what is Carrion Hill’s mayor to do if he wants to delve to the bottom of this catastrophe.

Enter the player characters. They are tasked to investigate these upward attacks from below whilst the Crows attempt to keep the peace and prevent the citizens of Carrion Hill from panicking and fleeing the town. The adventurers’ delving uncovers dastardly doings deep underground – cultists have summoned something that they should not have done, and now it is loose! Armed with the evidence of the cultists’ doings, the party must track both them down and discover a means to end the explosive eruptions of the summoned thing before it is too late. So far, so much like a Call of Cthulhu scenario…

Well, no, not really. Carrion Hill is after all a Dungeons & Dragons – or rather a Pathfinder Roleplaying Game adventure. The emphasis is more on combat than investigation, with the adventurers encountering and facing the surviving cultists one-by-one in mortal combat until they have acquired the knowledge and means to end the thing’s tentacular thrustings. These encounters are actually quite small and they can be done in any order, providing the heroes with a degree of free action. All the whilst being chased by the thing that the cultists summoned, of course. That said, impinging upon said degree of free action is the unstoppable nature of the thing – at the party’s expected level, it is unstoppable, so the party has no choice but to determine a means of stopping it. Were they to going charging in without tracking down any of the cultists – essentially the combative equivalent of conducting research and an investigation in Call of Cthulhu – the player characters would be dead.

Physically, Carrion Hill is as well presented as you would expect for a release from Paizo Publishing. Both of its art and its maps are done in full colour with both being pleasingly attractive. In addition to the adventure itself, Carrion Hill includes four pre-generated player characters and a two-page appendix describing the city of Carrion Hill and its history. The information given easily allows the GM to place the city in Paizo Publishing’s campaign setting of Golarion or drop it into one of his own devising.

As the author of the adventure states, Carrion Hill is the first adventure from Paizo Publishing to draw explicitly from the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Thematically, both dwell on matters of madness and decay, but the adventure lifts elements wholesale from the fiction, most notably the thing threatening the city and a certain tome. Its inspiration is Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” though to be fair, only the latter half of the story, and to be fair, the combative nature of the latter half of the story is better suited to the combative play style of Dungeons & Dragons and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and so does not jar with what would otherwise be a more investigative scenario.

Thus it is not truly Lovecraftian, for the heroes of the adventure can only die rather than have their sanity torn asunder. It hews to the heroics of its core genre, even despite the addition of the horror elements. That said, the adventure would well in other fantasy settings, perhaps even the Dreamlands themselves, or the Ditlana built cities of Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne. For the most part, releases from Paizo Publishing have always meandered towards dark fantasy as a genre. With Carrion Hill, both the author and Paizo Publishing fully embrace it, presenting a well written, grim, horror bent adventure.

By Jove... Cthulhu in Space

Here is a sad piece of news. There is no official Science Fiction setting for Call of Cthulhu. Although over the years, the genre has been visited rarely, most notably in the scenarios, “Blood Moon” in Strange Aeons and “The Last Log,” Marcus L. Rowland’s fondly remembered contribution to White Dwarf #56, the genre itself remains ignored and its potential undeveloped. That said, the genre has not been ignored by Chaosium’s Miskatonic University Library Association series of monographs, which since 2003, has been the publisher’s means of making other works available to players of both Call of Cthulhu and Basic Role Play. Bar the printing, each monograph’s author is responsible for the writing, the editing, and the layout, so the quality of the series varies widely and has led to some dreadful releases. Notable Science Fiction Monographs include End Time, Once Men, and Cthulhu Rising. None of these three are being reviewed here, but rather a supplement for Cthulhu Rising, entitled Jovian Nightmares.

Cthulhu Rising: Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying in the 23rd Century describes a near future set in 2271, inspired by movies such as Alien, Aliens, and Outland. In a time when the United Earth Federation together with innumerable corporate interests have explored and colonised the Solar System and beyond, it asks the question, “If in aeons past, entities and races of the Mythos have filtered down from space and distant stars to Earth, what happens if humanity follows them back into space and discovers them?” The setting supplement provided everything necessary to play – background, the Mythos of 2071, and character generation – bar actual scenarios. This is an omission that Jovian Nightmares: A Sourcebook For Cthulhu Rising — Call Of Cthulhu Roleplaying In The 23rd Century addresses. That said, as a single setting, Cthulhu Rising is superbly supported by the author’s own website, including standalone adventures and campaigns that involve civilian and military characters.

As its title suggests, Jovian Nightmares focuses on the gas giant Jupiter and its sprawling system of rings, moons, and other satellites – a region known as Circum-Jove – as well as all of the settlements and outposts that mankind has established in the previous 150 years. These include the cities that hang from the underside of the ice mantle that cover Europa’s world ocean; Nanotech Valley on Ganymede, home to a high tech hub devoted to nanotechnology; and the Orbital Gas Mines that float through the upper reaches of Jupiter’s atmosphere mining for Helium-3. Circum-Jove is home to numerous organisations, from the governmental like the Circum-Jove Administration and the Federal Law Enforcement Authority (FLEA) to non-government organisations such as the criminal Estrella Negra, Covenant Europa, the latter a terrorist threat dedicated to freeing Europa from human occupation, and the Ganymede Club, an invitation-only, private members club dedicated to radically dangerous sports such as interplanetary shuttle racing in the upper Jovian atmosphere and diving in the Europan World-Ocean. This is in addition to numerous corporations, companies, and combines that have a presence in Circum-Jove.

Much of Jovian Nightmares is devoted to detailing both these organisations and these places in Circum-Jove, with each of the Galilean Moons receiving several pages each. The background also includes a lengthy history, covering the years between 1973 and 2271. In terms of character support, Jovian Nightmares adds several new Occupations particular to the Circum-Jove region, although most work as equally well elsewhere, including Black Marketeer, Docker, FLEA Field Agent, Interstellar Colonial Marine, and Terrorist. Both Keeper and players will need access to Cthulhu Rising to get the full use out of these, although a Keeper could easily use them as inspiration for his own Science Fiction Call of Cthulhu setting.

Roughly half of the supplement is for the Keeper’s eyes only. It details many of the secrets to be found in Circum-Jove, some of them of a Mythos nature, others more mundane. These are organised first by planet, and then moon by moon, in turn also dealing with the various Mythos races that have a presence or an influence over the region. Some of them are obvious, such as the fact that Europa being an ocean world means that it should surprise no-one that the moon is also home to a certain species of ultra-terrestrial batrachian humanoids… Other secrets what or whom has been causing the disappearances in the labyrinthine catacombs beneath Ganymede and what caused the Red Eye of Jupiter, but fortunately, none of the secrets here are particularly radical, nor do they jar with the feel of the setting, which would have perhaps been worse.

The scenario in Jovian Nightmares, “Escape Velocity,” casts the player characters as convicted criminals sentenced to lengthy terms of Penal Involuntary Servitude aboard the Jovian Discoverer IV, an orbital gas-mining platform. Backgrounds are given for six pre-generated characters, though the Keeper will need to download the actual characters. After been  punished and sedated following a fight between their number, the characters awake to find their cell hatches open, a klaxon sounding in the distance, and a body outside their cells… Although they will not know it initially, this scenario is a race against the clock to determine what happened aboard the platform and then get off to safety. It is a detailed affair that the Keeper will need to handle it with care to keep up the pace, especially if he wants to fit into one session as the author suggests.

Rounding out the supplement is a septet of Adventure Seeds. These cover a range of set ups, from corporate troubleshooters and security personnel to surveyors and members of a salvage team, so it is unlikely that a Keeper would use them with the one set of characters. Each of the Adventure Seeds comes with several options as to what is going on, but each will need no little development upon the Keeper’s part.

Physically, Jovian Nightmares is neatly and tidily presented. In fact, it is much better laid out and edited than the average Monograph. The maps are perhaps a little workmanlike, the lack of detail not quite matching the grit and grift of the genre. That said, the artwork, which is drawn by the author, does, and it is a pity that there is not more of it. The scenario handouts could have been a bit more interesting too.

Ultimately, Jovian Nightmares leaves the reader wanting more. Whether that is more detail, more background, more secrets, or more scenarios. Actually probably the latter in favour of dropping the fiction, which does not necessarily add all that much to the setting or the supplement. The issue really though, is that Jovian Nightmares can only provide an overview – and it should be said that it is a good overview – of Circum-Jove. Jovian Nightmares is indicative of the potential in the setting and the failure to see it properly developed into an official Call of Cthulhu setting.

Beware Parties Bearing...

The truth of the matter is that Dungeons & Dragons has always had a slightly awkward relationship when it comes to Oriental fantasy. Whether it is the “Kitchen Sink” and complexity approach of Oriental Adventures for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition; the combination of the dual stats and the rich setting of Rokugan that brought together Alderac Entertainment Group’s Legends of the Five Rings and Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition; or the woefully underdeveloped, if brilliantly titled, Ruins & Ronin, written for use with the Swords & Wizardry White Box; the end result has never really been all that satisfying. So the fact that Rite Publishing has published a trilogy of adventures for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game set in its own Japanese style milieu, Kaidan (currently on its own Kickstarter program), was not necessarily encouraging. The trilogy, entitled Curse of the Golden Spear is available in print via Cubicle Seven Entertainment.

Inspired by Japanese folklore as much as its history, the setting of Kaidan – which means “Ghost Story” in Japanese – consists of a number of islands that have long been isolated from the rest of the world for three basic reasons. The first is political, as gaijin or foreigners are forbidden from setting foot on Kaidanese soil by Imperial Decree; the second is physical, as the islands are surrounding by a great wall of forbidding fog that few sailors dare to penetrate; and the third… Well, that will be discovered by the player characters as they play through the events of the trilogy, beginning with Curse of the Golden Spear: Part 1 – The Gift. Given the name of the setting, it is no surprise that it focuses on horror and mystery as much as it does adventure and combat.

As the trilogy opens, the political bar that previously prevented entry onto the islands of Kaidan has been lifted. By Imperial decree, Kaidan’s ports have been opened to gaijin sailors and merchants; which is why at the beginning of The Gift, the party is aboard a ship sailing towards Kaidan. It is accompanying a merchant, Marl Tyro, who has an important gift that he wishes to deliver to Lord Hachiwara of Tsue-jo, daimyo of Oniba province on Yonshu Island. The player characters have been hired by Tarl to serve as bodyguards, not necessarily his bodyguards, but bodyguards for the gift itself, which is contained in a heavy mahogany chest.

Initially, the scenario focuses on the attempts by Marl Tyro and the player characters to get further than the “Foreigners’ Port” of Gaijinoshima as the papers necessary to travel beyond its limits and onto Yonshu Island seem to be unavailable. Mostly this will involve their dealing with some of Kaiden’s less than savoury inhabitants, though in Kaidanese eyes, they are only marginally less savoury than the gaijin player characters! Once off the island and onto Yonshu Island, the party must make its way by road to the city of Tsue-jo, their journey punctuated by various odd encounters or harried by bandits and other threats.

For the most part, The Gift is a “Road Trip” style adventure. For the most part, it reads and plays as standard Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder Roleplaying Game scenario, but the author does add elements that impart the difference of the setting compared to other occidental fantasy settings. Most notably in the dealings with the actual masters of Gaijinoshima, in an overnight stop at a cursed inn, and a contest with some of Kaidan’s outré inhabitants. The second of these, the overnight stop at a cursed inn, is perhaps the scenario’s set piece and its horror highlight, more than any other in the scenario, promising a night of bloody terror and nightmarish dread.

Despite these highlights, The Gift is not wholly satisfying as an adventure. Its central villain seems wasted, and its conclusion fails to answer any questions that the events of the adventure have raised and despite a final confrontation with the adventure’s villain, just seems to fizzle out. In addition, the adventure leaves it up to the GM to address the motivations of the individual player characters, The Gift not only suggesting several, but also working them into the four pre-generated adventurers that the adventure comes with.

In addition to the pre-generated adventurers, The Gift also comes with an array of Kaidanese monsters, a glossary, and an explanation of Kaidan’s cosmology. The latter is definitely different and it certainly figures in the course of the trilogy.

Physically, Curse of the Golden Spear: Part 1 – The Gift is neatly presented in full colour. The artwork is variable in quality, with some of its feeling a bit too randomly Japanese. It is a pity that not all of it is in colour though. The maps are decent though, but in places a little too large given the amount of information that they have to impart. Overall, the contents feel a little stretched over the course of the book’s sixty-four pages.

One of the reasons for examining The Gift was to see if it was in any way compatible with Alderac Entertainment Group’s Legends of the Five Rings and its setting of Rokugan. Although Kaidan and Rokugan share similar sources, the differences between the two are many, not least of which are the differences in their cosmologies and their effects on their respective settings, and their respective attitudes towards gaijin. Indeed, the presence of gaijin on the Emerald Empire’s soil has only been acceptable during very short periods in Rokugan’s history. Of course, the acceptance, even if only grudgingly, of gaijin on Kaidanese soil is the exact reason why The Gift works as a scenario. Nevertheless, there are scenes in The Gift that would make for interesting encounters in a Legends of the Five Rings campaign.

There is no doubt that the author of The Gift imparts the cultural differences between the oriental fantasy of Kaidan and the occidental fantasy of standard Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Another pleasing aspect of the setting is that Kaidan’s isolation makes it easy to slot in a campaign of the GM’s own devising, and thus would make for an interesting and perhaps lengthy excursion for a traditional Dungeons & Dragons style party. Although, moments on the journey are more interesting and more exciting than the journey itself, Curse of the Golden Spear: Part 1 – The Gift is a solid start to the trilogy.

Dave Gorman versus Boardom

Dave Gorman is a comedian who likes doing things. He hates to be bored. He is also a comedian who likes a challenge. He has in the past set out to prove that there are more people in the world named Dave Gorman than himself. Similarly, he has travelled the world in the search of “Googlewhacks.” Some of these have formed the basis for his comedy shows, in the case of former, “Are You Dave Gorman?”, and in the case of the latter, “DaveGorman's Googlewhack Adventure.” In both cases, the comedian has turned the activities into books as well. Sometimes he combines his activities with a comedy tour, such as “Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop and Stand Up,” in which he combined a comedy tour with a cycle ride from Britain's southernmost point to its northernmost tip. For his latest book, Dave Gorman has taken an activity and written about it, but not turned it into a comedy show. In Dave Gorman vs. The Rest Of The World, Dave Gorman is so bored that he goes out and plays an awful lot of games – with us.

As a kid, Dave Gorman liked playing games. He liked going round to friends’ houses to see what they were playing, and then joining in. His starting point in Dave Gorman vs. The Rest Of The World is that as adults we do not do that. Playing games is not an adult pursuit, whereas going out for a pint or to a nightclub is, though of course, as you, the reader of this blog and I, know that to be anything other than the case. Plenty of adults do get together every week and play games. Sometimes more than once. It is just that such activity is not seen as normal or ordinary when compared to say, watching a football match or going to nightclub, but I digress... So the author decides to see if he can pop round the corner to friends’ houses and see what they are playing. Rather than ringing the one bell of the one house, and when the door was opened, asking, “Would you like to play a game?”, he asked on Twitter and got an awful lot of responses.

Born out of a desire to do something between the time that he arrives in a town and the time when he needs to be on stage to perform, Gorman finds himself travelling the length and width of the country – and not the world as the title of the book suggests – at what are essentially people’s invitations. So the question is, what does he get to play? He starts off with The Laser Game: Khet in Didcot and Ping Pong in White City. He plays Kubb in Milton Keynes and Kensington – not actually in Kensington, but near Liverpool Street Station. More interestingly for us he does get introduced to Settlers of Catan and plays it not once, but twice. Perhaps the book’s apogee when it comes to this type of Eurogame is when his holiday collides with that of Tim Harford in the Lake District. A well-known economist, Harford presents series on Radio 4 entitled More or Less, which discusses numbers and how they bear on recent news stories. Bar the likes of Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, Tim Harford is perhaps our best known board game player, having confessed to being a boardgamer in public. He exposes Gorman to Agricola.

It proves to be all a bit much for our Mr. Gorman. He does play other Euro Style games, and some are even mentioned in the back cover blurb, but none of them are mentioned in more than passing. Instead, the author concentrates on pub and garden games, and there is nothing as such wrong with that. Except that, if a game is mentioned on the back cover blurb, surely it deserves more than a mention in the book itself? After all, it might be that the reader wants to read about what a known comedian like Dave Gorman thinks of such a game. It might be that the blurb suggests that he tries a whole lot more of the games that the reader likes if that game is not all that well-known. It is not entirely fair to criticise the author on the basis of his preferences and experiences when it comes to playing games. It is clear that he has a preference for something that he can grasp immediately, usually something with a physical element, whether that is Darts, a game that he is known to be fond of, or Smite, a game that is wholly new to him.

Despite the slight interest that Dave Gorman vs. The Rest Of The World will have for anyone who enjoys board games, the book itself is well written, the author’s voice gently carries you along with an observed humour about the places he visits and the people that he meets, and he does include the rules for many of the games that he played – though not Agricola obviously. That would be bulk up Dave Gorman vs. The Rest Of The World enormously given density of the  Agricola  rulebook's rules. Yet given the array of games that he plays, the author leaves it up to the reader to go and find out more about them. An appendix detailing a little more about each game and where the reader might go to purchase said game would have been more helpful than the rules given for Texas Hold ‘em Poker given in the one appendix. Why not help the reader find these games for himelf?

Ultimately, the point behind Dave Gorman vs. The Rest Of The World is that there is no point to it, at least in comparison to other Dave Gorman projects. Can he find enough people named Dave Gorman in “Are You Dave Gorman?”? Will he find enough Googlewhacks in “Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure”? Or rather that there is no drive to it, no sense of urgency. It is as meandering as the author’s journey up and down the country, a lazy if pleasant travelogue of a read that matches the holiday that the author took in getting to play the games described in the book. That is, until the book’s penultimate game, the playing of which takes an unnerving and unsettling swerve… This swerve though, is the book’s counterpoint to its actual point. That playing games as an adult can be as fun as when you were kid, that it is as fun as any other social activity.

In the meantime, Dave, if you are ever at a loose end, would you like to play Cards Against Humanity?

Once in No-Man's Land

Call of Cthulhu has visited the Great War before, most notably with the scenario, No-Man’s Land, as has Trail of Cthulhu with the recent Flying Coffins and the scenario, "Not So Quiet" from the anthology Out of Time. Yet neither has approached this period in as interactive a fashion as in Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. This is a computer RPG which uses Call of Cthulhu for its mechanics under license from Chaosium, Inc. and is available for several platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows, so can be run on your computer, your smartphone, or your tablet. The latter though, is the game’s natural home. That said, The Wasted Land has taken a while to get to the Android platform and be debugged, which has delayed my getting to write this review.

Anyway, as much as Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land employs the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu, it is not a true RPG. Not in the sense of a pen and paper RPG such as Call of Cthulhu, nor in the sense of a computer RPG. Rather it is a skirmish combat game, one that is Action Point driven and turn-based, much in the same mode as the classic computer games, Laser Squad and X-Com. The game has the player control up to six characters, and on each turn, the player will expend each character’s Action Points to move that character and have him attack his opponents – with an option for taking time to aim at his opponents – as well as to heal and even psychoanalyse his allies!

The setting is the Western Front in 1915. As related in his diaries, a British squad under Captain Hill must defend against a German attack that grows stranger and stranger. Not just ordinary German soldiers, but cult fanatics and zombies too! Fortunately, Professor Brightmeer, a Miskatonic University scholar on attachment to British Military Intelligence is on hand to inform Captain Hill and his men that a German occultist has turned to more outré means to bring about victory for the Kaiser! So begins the desperate search for the means to stop this dastardly villain, which will take the squad out of the trenches and into No-Man’s Land, before going underground over the course of eleven missions. Along the way they will avoid things as ordinary as poison gas and barbed wire, and things as otherworldly as spiders from Leng and giant walking tentacle plants.

Most of the eleven missions involve holding off the Hun, either to defend a location or to get to a location. This has the characters dodging from cover to cover, searching for strongpoints where they can heal, researching documents, and more. For the most part, the missions are very linear, often with one safe path through the mission zone. Even when the characters have to enter patches of poison gas, they can be equipped with gas masks.

In between missions, characters are taken through two upgrade steps. The first sees their stats and skills improved. It is here that the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu are at their most obvious, though in a slimmed down fashion that focuses on those numbers necessary for combat. Skills, rated on a percentile skill, are arms and equipment, along with the First Aid Skill to heal the sick and the Psychoanalysis Skill to heal the mentally disturbed. Stats are rated on a 3 to 18 scale, and are improved to one of two ends. The first is to increase the number of Action Points that a character has in combat, whilst the second is to increase a character’s Sanity and thus his ability to withstand mental shocks.

A Sample Character: Captain Hill

The second upgrade step deals with equipment. Here a character can upgrade from his trusty Lee-Enfield rifle to a Hotchkiss M1914 heavy machine gun or a Winchester Model 1912 pump-action shotgun. There is a small armoury of weapons available, both guns and melee weapons, as well as gasmasks, armour, and even homing pigeons which will deliver requests for artillery support. Medical kits are also available as are books derived from the works of Freud that will help restore a character’s Sanity, whilst it is possible in later missions for characters to learn spells, although casting these greatly deplete the Sanity of the caster.

The mechanics of Call of Cthulhu also show within a mission. First in the use of the skills, though you see no percentile dice being rolled, and second, in the Sanity mechanic. Sanity is lost when attacking and being attacked by forces of the Mythos, and when too much is lost, a character can be paralysed with fear, sent catatonic, or even sent manic! The latter is incredibly taxing on the body, the sufferer usually ending up dead, but whilst manic, a character becomes a force of nature, able to charge the enemy and deal out damage aplenty.

The redoubtable Sid Brown alerts Captain Hill as to the imminent danger!

Whilst game play is simple, it is actually quite challenging in places, the final mission overly so, and it might take a restart or two to really get into the game. It does not help that game play is hampered by slightly clunky controls that sometimes will have you stabbing a stubby finger at the screen of your tablet in frustration. Another often annoying factor is that the missions tend to be very linear in nature – “Go there!”, “Do that!”, “Now exit over there!” – such that there is not a great deal of variety in terms of play. This is exacerbated by the fact that a lot the spells do not become available until last quarter of the game, limiting the option of creating variations upon the gun toting characters that dominate game play.

Inspired by the events of Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, the game’s treatment of the Mythos is more pulp than purist as it mixes a number of Mythos entities together and its game play is all combat. Where The Wasted Land shines is in its detail and its atmosphere. Although a little anachronistic in places (easily portable machine guns in 1915?), all of the characters are well defined, and the battlefields feel suitably ‘gone to hell,’ literally a wasted land. The animation is good too – there is something quite unnerving to see a Dark Young lumbering towards your squad as they attempt to blast it to bits before their sanity is blown too. Overall, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is an engaging electronic treatment of Lovecraftian horror worthy of your time and a sequel.

By the way, perhaps Red Wasp Design and Modiphius Press should get together. A World War II Lovecraftian horror game for your tablet would make a great sequel.

Good Georgians Aghast

Just as Call of Cthulhu has its classic time frame of the 1920s, so too does Trail of Cthulhu with the 1930s. Yet just as with Call of Cthulhu, the clue orientated RPG of Lovecraftian investigative horror from Pelgrane Press can easily slip the bonds of its natural home in the Desperate Decade to visit other periods. One author to follow this trend is Adam Gauntlett, who has already given us a a scenarios set during before the Great as well as a pair set during the Great War, such as the recent Flying Coffins and “Not So Quiet,” from the anthology Out of Time. Like those scenarios, Hell Fire is a one-shot affair designed for use with the six provided pre-generated investigators. Further, Hell Fire not only continues the trend away from Trail of Cthulhu’s core period, but exacerbates it by setting it in the 1760s, a period never visited by either Lovecraftian RPG, or indeed, rarely by any RPG, Rogue Games’ Colonial Gothic and the self-published indie RPG, Sons of Liberty, the Roleplaying Game of Freedom and Badassery, are rare exceptions.

Welcome to the mid-eighteenth century, an age of enlightenment and ennui, of privilege and propriety, of associations and assignations, of virtue and vice, and of scientific enquiry and salacious pornography. This is the age of the “belle époque” for the first British Empire, when there is much wealth to made from the colonies in the Americas, but the colonists themselves chafe under governance from London and will openly rebel within a decade or so. The protagonists of the scenario are all men and women of good standing, as well as members of an exclusive Hell Fire Club. They share an interest in fine dining, the finest of pornographic literature, Rational debate, and politics. Membership is of course by invitation only, and should word of their activities comes to the attention of society, then their fall from grace is assured, at best, scorned by society, at worst, locked up in gaol.

In order to fit the period, the author has radically altered the Skills list. Modern skills such as Psychoanalysis and Archaeology have been removed, the Piloting skill only covers boats, and the science skills have been amalgamated into one, The Sciences. Traveller is added as a new skill representing a character having visited countries and colonies outside of Europe and the Grand Tour, whilst Politics is a new interpersonal skill that allows characters to navigate the intrigues, politics, and careers of the period. Lastly and most importantly, the Evidence skill has been added for Hell Fire as well. It is not about collecting proof of certain activities having been carried out, that still being covered by Evidence Collection, but rather the evidence of the characters’ ill doings. Which of course, they will not want to be brought to light…

As in his previous scenarios, Gauntlett gives us the history too. Hell Fire comes with extensive notes on the place and manner of the Club during the period, as a guide to the pornography available and the art of duelling. The latter is accompanied by a simple set of rules to handle such matters of honour.

As the scenario opens in London, the “investigators” are at a meeting with fellow club member, Bubb Pearce. The man has been placed in terrible bind. The notorious, though fashionable Lady Mary Protheroe has in her possession letters belonging to Pearce with which she is blackmailing him into marrying her with a threat of his Breach of Promise. The Lady also has knowledge of doings at their Club, and Pearce entreats his friends to obtain the letters for him so that he can break the woman’s hold over him. Yet it seems that the player characters’ efforts are insufficient, for Pearce quickly vanishes, leaving in his wake, the body of Lady Mary Protheroe… Worse still, this brings the activities of the Hell Fire club to the attention of the authorities, were its secrets to become public knowledge the scandal would be the undoing of them all. As trusted club members, the “investigators” must uncover the cause of Lady Mary Protheroe’s death and the whereabouts of Pearce, all the whilst ensuring that knowledge of club’s doings remain out of the limelight.

Chasing down Pearce leads the characters to investigate his activities, both commercial and covert. This reveals ties across the Atlantic to England’s colonies and across the Channel to England’s greatest enemy, but worse to London’s sordid and malodorous underskirts where something lurks working to find fresh hosts and vectors that it will see it spread its infection far and wide.

Structurally, Hell Fire is presented as a series of lines of investigation that the player characters need to follow if they are to reveal the nature of the threat. For the most part, the scenario is very player driven, with the antagonists rarely moving against the player characters. This gives it a more languid feel, with the danger that the characters could lose their way unless they are pro-active in their investigation. The upshot being that this potentially indolent nature of the investigation when combined with the occasionally prurient nature of the scenario means that Hell Fire is best suited to more experienced players and a more experienced Keeper.

Physically, Hell Fire is neatly presented, although in comparison with other Trail of Cthulhu scenarios, is missing the artwork of Jérôme Huguenin. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the art of Olli Hihnala, but rather that it feels more traditional in comparison with other Trail of Cthulhu titles. The issue with Hell Fire is one of history. The period will not be familiar to every gamer and an introduction to the period might have been useful to the less knowledgeable so as to get across the nature of the period’s political and social clime. Such information would have also helped should a player want to create a character of his own. Similarly, a map or two would have helped, especially later in the scenario when it crosses the Atlantic to the Colonies. That said, the history presented here is interesting and the scenario does include one of the period’s odder figures.

Overall, Hell Fire does a good job of bringing Lovecraftian investigation to an interesting period of history, whilst the period itself brings a sense of Hogarthian horror to Lovecraftian investigation.

Wizards Go Euro

As the owners of the great Avalon Hill brand, it is no surprise that the board games published by Wizards of the Coast to date have fallen into the “Ameritrash” category. To label them as such is not denigrate them, for their emphasis has been highly developed themes, characters, heroes, or factions with individually defined abilities, combined with player-to-player conflict and a high level of luck. The publisher’s latest title has proved to be anything but an “Ameritrash” board game, but is instead a classic style “Eurogame,” which means relatively simple rules, a short playing time, a degree of abstraction rather than simulation, player interaction, player competition rather than player combat, and attractive physical components. What is more, this is a game based on Dungeons & Dragons, and specifically on the Forgotten Realms setting. Its title is Lords of Waterdeep.

Most Dungeons & Dragons deal with the themes inherent in those two words – “dungeons” and “dragons.” So they focus on delving into dungeons, facing dragons, and so on. Not so, Lords of Waterdeep. It is set in Waterdeep, the City of Splendors, the most resplendent jewel in the Forgotten Realms and a den of political intrigue and shady back-alley dealings where powerful, but masked lords vie for control of the city through of the region’s organisations that include the City Guard, the Harpers, the Knights of the Shield, the Red Sashes, and the Silverstars. They send out their Agents to acquire Buildings and access to better resources; gain Gold to make the many purchases necessary to ensure their rise to power; the means to Intrigue with their fellow Lords; and hire Adventurers whom they can send out on missions or Quests that once completed with spread their influence and gain them true power.

Designed for play by between two and five participants, aged twelve and over, once learned, Lords of Waterdeep can be played in an hour, no matter what the number of players. The box contains a game board, a rule book, five player mats, one hundred Adventurer cubes, one-hundred-and-twenty-one Intrigue, Quest, and Role cards, thirty-three wooden pieces that include the game’s various Agents and the score markers, and one-hundred-and-seventy card tokens that include the Building tiles and Building control markers, and plenty of Gold. All of which fits easily and neatly into the game’s insert tray that holds all of the game’s components almost perfectly.

Lords of Waterdeep’s game board measures 20” by 26” and depicts the city port of Waterdeep in Faerûn. Besides the Victory Point track around its edge and the spaces for the Intrigue and Quest cards, most of board has spaces for various Buildings that include Aurora’s Realms Shop, Castle Waterdeep, and Waterdeep Harbour as well as empty spaces where the players can put up Buildings of their own. Each of the Buildings provides a specific benefit. For example, the Aurora’s Realms Shop gives four Gold; the Builder’s Hall lets a player purchase an Advanced Building and bring it into play; Waterdeep Harbour allows a player to use an Intrigue card; the open-air stadium that is the Field of Triumph is where you can hire Fighters; new Quests are available to take at Cliffwatch Inn; and taking control of Castle Waterdeep lets you go first on the next round and draw an Intrigue card.

Besides the nine Basic Buildings marked on the board, Lords of Waterdeep includes twenty-four Advanced Buildings. These work in a similar fashion to the Basic Buildings, but the benefits provided by each are usually better. For example, when a player visits the Smuggler’s Dock, he can spend two Gold in order to hire four Adventurers, although only Clerics and Fighters; The Waymoot accumulates Victory Points that any player can visit and collect; and when at The Palace of Waterdeep, a player can direct the Ambassador at the beginning of the next round – and the Ambassador always acts before anyone else can take their turn. A side benefit to owning an Advanced Building is that when another player uses it, the owner gains a small benefit. For example, when another player uses the Smuggler’s Dock, its owner receives two Gold, and with The Waymoot or The Palace of Waterdeep, he receives two Victory Points. (This does not happen when a player uses his own building).

Like the game board, the twenty-four page rulebook is done in full colour. It is well written, with quite a lot of information that includes plenty of examples. There is also a reasonable amount of background information too; enough that fans of the Forgotten Realms will appreciate the references, but not enough to overwhelm the casual player who does not roleplay, or who does not play Dungeons & Dragons. Overall, the rule book requires a careful read, but the rules themselves are fairly easy to grasp.

There is a player mat colour coded to each of the game’s five organisations – the City Guard, the Harpers, the Knights of the Shield, the Red Sashes, and the Silverstars. Each mat has spaces for his Agent Pool and other resources, plus his Completed Quests, as well as indications around the side to place his Active Quests, Completed Plot Quests, and his Lord of Waterdeep card.

The game’s one-hundred Adventurer cubes are divided into four colours – white, orange, black, and purple – representing Clerics, Fighters, Rogues, and Wizards respectively. These are the game’s primary resources, which along with Gold, are what a player will need to complete Quests.

At the heart of Lords of Waterdeep, and what the players are trying to complete, are its Quests, represented by the Quest cards. There are sixty of these and they come in five types – Arcane, Commerce, Piety, Subterfuge, and Warfare. Each Quest card gives the requirements necessary to complete and the rewards it grants when completed. For example, the “Domesticate Owlbears” Arcana Quest card requires one white and two purple – or one Cleric and two Wizard cubes, and rewards the completing player with eight Victory Points, one Fighter or orange cube, and two Gold. A second type of Quest card is the Plot Quest card, which when completed gives an extra reward throughout the rest of the game. For example, the Skulduggery “Install a Spy in Castle Waterdeep Castle” Plot Quest card requires four Rogue or black cubes and four Gold to complete, and when done do so, not only rewards a player with eight Victory Points, but for every subsequent Skulduggery Quest completed, rewards him with another two Victory Points.

The cards that the players will use throughout the game are the Intrigue cards. These tend to grant a player extra Adventurers or extra Gold, or penalise rival players. For example, the “Spread the Wealth” Intrigue card gives both its player four Gold and another player of choice, two Gold; whilst the “Assassination” Intrigue card forces every other player to discard a Rogue or black cube from his tavern on his player mat. If a player cannot discard a Rogue, he must pay two Gold to the player who put the Intrigue card into play. Another type of Intrigue card is the Mandatory Quest which when given to another player forces him to complete that Quest before any of the others before him. For example, the “Stamp Out Cultists” Mandatory Quest Intrigue card forces a Lord to expend a Cleric, a Fighter, and a Rogue cube to complete it before moving onto his other Quests. Sadly, he only receives two Victory Points for completing it.

The first card though, that each player will receive is a Lord of Waterdeep card. Each one of these depicts one of the members of the secret council that governs the city, along with their name, some flavour text, and an effect that in providing a benefit at the end of the game will influence a player’s actions during the game.  For example, Nymara Scheiron gives a player an extra four Victory Points at the end of the game for each Commerce and Skulduggery Quest completed, whereas Larissa Neathal gives six Victory Points for each Advanced Building she controls at the end of the game.

At the start of the game, each player receives a player mat, the Building control markers, and Agents, all of the same colour. The number of Agents received varies according to the number of players. With fewer players, each player receives more Agents; with more players, they receive less. This is the game’s core balancing mechanic. However many Agents a player starts with, every player receives a further Agent at the start of the second half of the game. Each player receives two Quest cards, two Intrigue cards, and a single Lord of Waterdeep card. This last card is kept hidden until the end of the game when everyone works out their final score. Lastly each player receives some Gold, the amount varying according to play order. The player who goes receives just four Gold, the next five, then six, and so on until the fifth player – if there is one – receives eight Gold. This is the game’s second balancing mechanic.

The game is played over the course eight Rounds. In each Round, the players take it in turn to assign a single Agent and then if they can, complete a Quest. Each Agent is assigned to a space on the board in an available Building or Advanced Building space. When he does, the Agent gives the player the benefit from that Building. Most Buildings have a single space, so that once an Agent has been assigned there, no Agent can be sent there to make use of its benefit, though some Intrigue cards allow a player to assign an Agent to an already occupied building. Thus if a player wants to purchase and construct an Advanced Building, he must assign an Agent to the “Builder’s Hall” before anyone else, or wait until the next Round. In which case, he probably wants to assign an Agent to Castle Waterdeep gain the opportunity to go first at the start of the next Round. Otherwise, a player must assign an Agent to another Building.

Two Buildings – Cliffwatch Inn and Waterdeep Harbour – have multiple spaces, so that more than one Agent can be assigned there, even by the same player. The former is the source for new Quest cards, while the latter allows a player to use an Intrigue card. Once an Agent is assigned, if a player has sufficient Adventurers, and sometimes Gold, to complete the requirements given on a Quest card, he can complete it and score Victory Points for doing so.

Lastly, and after all of the Agents have been assigned, any player with an Agent assigned to Waterdeep Harbour can reassign that Agent to any remaining unoccupied Building. This rewards the player for his cunning in sending an Agent to Waterdeep Harbour and playing an Intrigue card. The Round is over, everyone receives their Agents back, and a new Round begins until all eight have been played. At game’s end everyone counts up the Victory Points gained form completed Quest cards, plus unassigned Adventurers and unspent Gold, and the person with the most is the winner.

Lords of Waterdeep plays at reasonable pace, once the rules have been grasped, and offers a decent amount of game play and replay given how simple the rules really are and how light the game is. This is helped by the variety available in the Quest and Intrigue cards, but mostly in the Advanced Building cards. With twenty-four available, it is unlikely that all of them will come into play. The game also scales well, playing as well with two players as with five.

In terms of game play, Lords of Waterdeep rewards careful planning. Each player needs to be looking at what he needs to complete the Quests that he has in front of him. Of course, he also needs to get to the Buildings that he wants, but with rivals competing for the same space, this is not possible, so a player should also try and get the best out the available Buildings that he can. This can be alleviated if a player goes first, but in general, the closer a player is to going first the better. There is also some advantage in purchasing and constructing the Advanced Buildings as they provide more spaces where an Agent can be assigned. Further, if another player uses one, then the owning player also gains a small, but sometimes important benefit.

All of the Buildings in Lords of Waterdeep can play an important role during the game, but three tend to be more favoured than the others. They are the Builder’s Hall, because it allows Advanced Buildings to be purchased and constructed; Waterdeep Harbour, not just because an Intrigue card can be played, but also because an Agent assigned there can be reassigned; and lastly, Castle Waterdeep as it grants a player an Intrigue card and means that he can go first in the next Round.

Agents though, are in short supply, even after the extra one is gained at the start of the game’s second half. This means that the players must assign them with care so as not to waste their action.

Physically, Lords of Waterdeep is very nicely put together. All of the playing pieces have been done in wood and the rest of the pieces in sturdy card, though the Intrigue, Quest, and Lord of Waterdeep cards have been done slightly too thin a cardstock. The rulebook itself is bright and attractive and easy to read. For an American game, the look and feel of Lords of Waterdeep is anything but that. It has the look and feel of a Eurogame.

In terms of theme, the grimy fantasy of the Waterdeep of the Forgotten Realms does not feel pasted on, a common complaint with this type of game. This is not to say that the mechanics behind the rules of Lords of Waterdeep could not be taken and have a new theme applied to them. It would take some effort, but in the meantime, the Dungeons & Dragons theme is applied with great care, and it is a theme that avoids many of Dungeons & Dragons’ clichés, primarily because it removes the concept of going on adventures and down dungeons. This is done by placing the players in the role of hiring the adventuring parties rather than being part of them – as in so many other games.

What is telling about Lords of Waterdeep is that Wizards of the Coast describe the format of this game as being “Non-traditional.” This is an odd claim for the publisher to make. Lords of Waterdeep is not a Non-traditional game. It is more or less, a traditional Eurogame, with worker placement and resource management mechanics similar to those found in well-known Eurogames such as Agricola, Caylus, and Puerto Rico, amongst many others. All games and mechanics that the designers at Wizards of the Coast and in particular, the designers of Lords of Waterdeep will be familiar with to some degree. The only way in which Lords of Waterdeep is Non-traditional is that it is not a classic American or Ameritrash design, and to describe it as “Non-traditional” is to belittle both this design and Eurogames in general. Certainly, it shows a wilfil ignorance upon the part of the publisher.

Although its various bits and pieces and possibly the business of the rulebook make Lords of Waterdeep look more intimidating than it really is, Lords is really a medium to light Eurogame that is just a step on or two up from introductory games such as Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride. Certainly, it is much lighter and less complex than similar games such as Caylus and Agricola. Similarly, the game’s Dungeons & Dragons theme might be off-putting, but it never imposes itself on the game or its players. What is pleasing about the game is that the designers have achieved a balance between the theme and the mechanics that will attract both Eurogame players and players of Dungeons & Dragons players, but whilst both will be attracted to the game, Lords of Waterdeep is still more Eurogame than a Dungeons & Dragons game. Above all, Lords of Waterdeep is an enjoyable, decently themed Eurogame that uses familiar – almost traditional – mechanics to good effect.