Propping Up Your Pocket

From the moment you see the words “Gleason’s Department Store. Arkham, Mass.” on the lid of the patterned box you know that you have something special in your hands. Open it on the inside of the lid it says “Arkham Leather” above the wallet itself, wrapped in red tissue paper. There is a ‘User Guide: Read Me First’, but honestly, you are not going to read that first. You might look at the ‘Automobile Bail Bond Certificate’ or the ‘Operator’s License’ as issued by the ‘State of New York—Bureau of Motor Vehicles’, with actual headshot photograph attached, but what you are really looking at is the wallet. The brown, real vintage-style leather wallet is also marked with the ‘Arkham Leather’ stamp and inside can be found an embarrassment of riches. There is a ‘Motor Vehicle Registration Card’ issued by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Dept. of Public Works Registry of Motor Vehicles, a ticket to the ‘Miskatonic University Exhibit Museum’, membership cards for both the ‘Arkham Historical Society’ and ‘The Eye of Amara Society’, a card for the ‘Grafton Diner’, a ‘Locker Rental Assignment—Men’s Gymnasium’ for the local YMCA, a ticket for the ‘Northside Line’ of the ‘Arkham Transit Company’. There is matchbox* for a restaurant, amusingly called ‘The Red Herring’. There are coins and tokens, and even a genuine period key, as well as several dollar bills, and a ‘Prescription Blank National Prohibition Act’ so that the holder can legally drink!

* This is a prop set. Of course, there has to be a matchbox.

The attention to detail is genuinely verisimilitudinous. For example, the card for the ‘Grafton Diner’ has loyalty program punches around its edges, whilst the card for ‘Fennel’s Roadhouse’ has the name ‘Betty’ handwritten on it. The fact that it says, “For Good Time ’Phone 8031’ suggests that this is more than a simple roadside stop offering fuel and lodging.

This then is the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet. It is stunningly stuffed full of things, prop after prop. Things that you and perhaps your players—if you ever let them get their grubby hands on it—are going to be amazed by what they find. Lastly, when you do get to the ‘User Guide: Read Me First’, it explains its use and more. On the back of it is the ‘Arkham Investigator’s Wallet Prop Inventory’, which lists all forty-seven items. Many of them are marked in green, indicating that they can be downloaded and printed out again.

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is best known for servicing the great campaigns for Call of Cthulhu with amazing props and objets d’art, such as the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set and Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set, but with the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet, it has done the reverse. It has provided the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet, not with a campaign, but a scenario which makes use of many of the items to be found within the pockets and folds of the wallet. This is The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’. As the title suggests, this takes place in Arkham, so you can make use of Chaosium, Inc.’s Call of Cthulhu: Arkham. It begins with Charlotte Foley, a precocious young dog walker and would-be detective, out walking one of her canine charges behind Christchurch Cemetery when she encounters a man acting strangely as if having some kind of a fit. Rushing to the nearest house—where the occupant, Madge Tomlinson and her friends are discussing plans for the neighbourhood’s annual Halloween party—for help, when she returns, the man has entirely disappeared. All that is left behind is a pair of spectacles and a wallet! What has happened to the man? Charlotte is determined to find out.

The Dog Walker is designed to be played with between two and six Investigators. Six pre-generated Investigators are provided in the book. They include a journalist, a history teacher, a retired cook, a retired professor of physics (with a drinking and gambling problem that may actually help the investigation in certain locations!), and a civil engineer, as well as young Charlotte. This is a nicely genteel selection of Investigators notable for the fact that all but one of them is unarmed, so the scenario is not one designed to be concluded through force of arms. That said, six Investigators does feel slightly too many for the scale of the scenario and perhaps some advice as to which of the six pre-generated Investigators to use with fewer players would have been helpful. The scenario is designed to be played solo, the player taking the role of Charlotte and using the ‘Solo Player PDF’ available to download. Alternatively, a Keeper can run The Dog Walker with the one player who can take the role of Charlotte. Lastly, the Arkham Investigator's Wallet Prop Set does require some customisation and set-up upon the part of the Keeper, removing certain props and adding details to others. The Dog Walker includes full advice for the Keeper as to what needs to be done as part of this set-up. An alternative option might be to combine the scenario with The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection and turn it into an all ‘kids-as-Investigators’ scenario.

The items in the wallet are all clues of course. Some, like the Bail Bond Certificate will hint at the missing man’s background, others such as the key enable easy entry to his nearby home, and still more grant access to otherwise closed locations, the Eye of Amara Society membership card granting the holder entry to the otherwise private members’ society. The clues will take the Investigators back and forth across Arkham, from dives such as Irish mobster Dan O’Bannion’s Lucky Clover Cartage Company to the Orne Library where they might meet Professor Henry Armitage. As the scenario progresses and the Investigators follow up clue after clue, location after location, The Dog Walker becomes a MacGuffin hunt as well. Ultimately though, everything leads back to the missing man and his home.

The Dog Walker is decently supported beyond the solidity of the props from the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet. There is a breakdown of all of the clues and how to prepare them for play—as well as a checklist for those that are pertinent to the scenario, the NPC stats, a timeline, and a map of the Lower Southside neighbourhood where the scenario begins. Physically, the scenario is cleanly laid out, very nicely illustrated (only one piece of artwork lets the look of the book down), and the props to be used in the scenario are also illustrated as well.

It is notable that Charlotte, the young girl and dog walker who makes the discovery of the lost wallet that triggers the mystery in The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham is a fan of detective stories and Sherlock Holmes in particular. This is because the story itself is reminiscent of one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories, or rather one of the best pastiches. This is The Abergavenny Murder, the first episode in the second series of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which continued the very fine BBC pairing of Clive Merrison and Andrew Sachs as Holmes and Watson—and Clive Merrison and Michael Williams before that—with stories based on cases mentioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but never expanded upon. In The Abergavenny Murder, the duo are at home at 221b Baker Street with nothing to do and lamenting the lack of crime to investigate, when a man rushes into their sitting room and drops down dead. Holmes and Watson then have forty-five minutes in which to solve the crime entirely based on the man’s corpse in front of them and what is on his body. It is a delightful ‘ship-in-a-bottle’ style episode and two-hander, displaying all of the personalities of the two men and the author’s inventiveness.

The Dog Walker feels much like this, though much more expansive than four walls of the sitting room at 221b Baker Street, and of course, having a wallet of clues to go on rather than a corpse and the contents of its pockets. Quite so too, since it would hardly be the done thing for young Charlotte to discover a corpse! That though highlights an issue with the scenario in that how does the adult world react to the inquisitiveness of a twelve-year-old? Apart from one NPC whose reaction to Charlotte may play an important role in the scenario, the issue is not addressed.

The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham is a charmingly parochial mystery, its revelations hinting at the true nature of the universe, rather than fully blasting the minds of the Investigations with its actual uncaring majesty and the insignificance of humanity’s place within it. In fact, the scenario is almost gentle by other scenarios’ standards, there being only the one possible Sanity check in its telling. Which, of course, is how it should be given that Charlotte Foley is just twelve. All of which is supported by the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet and its marvellous props—of which, it should be noted, The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham uses barely half, enabling the Keeper to return to the wallet to create his own mystery or the author to write a sequel. Above all, together The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham and the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet are a wonderfully crafted combination that will provide a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging evening’s worth of detective work that will introduce one young lady to the mysteries of the cosmos.