Miskatonic Monday #300: Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa

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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Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa: A 1930s Grindhouse Scenario is a chase scenario. A chase scenario across the width of Mexico aboard a party train at the height of the Great Depression in which a bunch of Hobos with the courier job of their dreams find themselves at the mercy of five different factions all wanting what they got and none of them wanting it for good. Drawn in by the promise of two weeks’ wages—if they had a proper job that is—they will find themselves literally hounded from one location to the next, visiting a smokeshop that is both the classiest and the seediest in all of Tijuana, finding respite at a Hobo shanty and getting served a bowl of Squattin’ Pete’s Mulligan Stew, and all that before a showdown on the dance floor! Imagine if you will, if Alfred Hitchcock decided to co-write From Dusk to Dawn with Quentin Tarantino and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen shot the resulting script instead of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and that just about gets the tone of Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa.

Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa is a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and the winner of the 2024 Gold Ennie Award for Best Community Content. From the author of The Highway of Blood and The Grindhouse: Ultimate Collection – Vol. 1-3, it is thus another scenario inspired by the grindhouse genre of cinema—low-budget horror, splatter, and exploitation films for adults such as Duel, I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and the more recent Death Proof, which had their heyday in the seventies. However, it shifts the action to the Desperate and Dirty Decade of the thirties and the height of the Great Depression with the Investigators as Hobos, the signature figures of the period.

The scenario has quite a bit of background to go through, from all the way back to the first performance of The King in Yellow forward to The Carnival of Madness. There are also a lot of NPCs, on and off the train. The ones that the Investigators will have the most ongoing interaction with those wanting the MacGuffin they are ferrying across Mexico. They include a slinky Serpent-person Hybrid and her knife throwing circus minion, a maniacal luchador, a group of Deep One hybrids a la Peter Lorre, a private investigator who is probably going to be out of his depth as much the Investigators are, and the wolves of the title, icky, maggoty hounds that will chase the Investigators all the way to the climax of the scenario. Now many of the NPCs and all of the Investigators have a single special ability each. The Investigators include a Skywalker with the ‘Acrobat’ special ability, a Stage Actor with the ‘Bullshit Artist’ special ability, a Boxer with the ‘Sucker Punch’ special ability, and a Farmer with the ‘Bowie Knife’ special ability. The inclusion of these special abilities moves Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa away from traditional Call of Cthulhu and more towards Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos, but not all the way. An option for the Keeper might be to shift Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa all of the way to be playable as a Pulp Cthulhu scenario. In the meantime, Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa is more of a hybrid between the two.

Once the scenario gets started, there are some great scenes from San Diego to Tijuana and from there to Ensenada and finally Mexicali, aboard the Mexicali Express, a party train set up for tourists who had originally wanted to drink free of the limits of Prohibition, but that has changed by the time the Investigators board. This includes a scene in a Tijuana tobacco shop whose proprietor is quite willing to sell the Investigators a whole more (necessitating a mature themes label) and the actual showdown at a Mexicali night club, whose name, The Crossroads, might just well be too much on the nose. The NPC motivations and possible actions are all nicely detailed, as is the Mexicali Express itself, helping the Keeper a great deal to run these encounters. Should the Investigators decide not to take the train all of the way or miss the train there is advice too on getting them to catch up or back on track, if not the railroad, to Mexicali.

For the benefit of both the Keeper and her players, there are excellent handouts and background on hobo life. The handouts include some period menus and part of a Tijuana Bible that will have both Keeper and player wondering about the author’s browsing history. The background on hobos is quite short, but it is not the only scenario for Lovecraftian investigative horror that has featured hobos. Golden Goblin Press has published one scenario in which they feature, Riding the Northbound: A Hobo Odyssey and dedicated an article to them in Island of Ignorance – The Third Cthulhu Companion. Included in Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa is a list and explanation of Hobo Signs, to which it adds some new ones—one of which veteran Call of Cthulhu fans will appreciate spotting.

Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa is described as a ‘Sandbox on a Railroad’. This suggests a wide area where the Investigators are free to come and go as they please and that the whole of this sandbox is on a track with a definite beginning and a definite end. It is a description that only just about works because it is both narrowing and stretching the concept of a sandbox an awful lot to get it to fit what Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa actually is. Upon first glance, it looks like a railroad whose action takes place mostly on a railroad. The structure is more akin to the plot of a computer game in which the story is a thread which connects a series of cut scenes. Like most cutscenes there is exposition which moves the plot forward, but the actions of the Investigators are limited. They can ask questions, but little else. Where they can act is in the threads connecting these scenes, the scenes aboard the train. Do they hide from the train crew like any good hobo might or do they ride the rails like normal folk with a ticket and all? Which faction do they interact with? Which one do they fight? Which one do they run away from? And of course, once they get to the Crossroads, they have choices to make.

So, the question is, does this make Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa a bad scenario? If this was a traditional scenario of Lovecraftian investigative horror, then perhaps. Yet it is not that. It is a one-shot horror scenario designed to tell a particular tale, tell it at pace, and whilst there are points where the Investigators have little agency, there are plenty more where they do. The point is, the threats are coming to them, and it is how their players decide their Investigators react and decide what they do that drives the story forward as much as the Mexicali Express carries them forward.

Physically, Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa is very well presented. The artwork is decent and the handouts add a great deal to the atmosphere of the scenario. The scenario does need an edit in places.

Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa: A 1930s Grindhouse Scenario is a fast-playing scenario that works as a desperate one-shot or convention scenario. It is surprisingly direct in its confrontation with the agents and entities of the Mythos as they worry at the Investigators on a thrilling chase through the underbelly of 1930s Americana.