Miskatonic Monday #381: The Bride of Pendle

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.

—oOo—

Contrary to what the title might suggest, The Bride of Pendle has nothing to do with witches or the Pendle Witch Trails of 1612. Rather, it is a scenario set during the Jazz Age, the classic period for Call of Cthulhu, which takes place around, in, and on Pendle Hill in the county of Lancashire in the north of England. The year is 1922 and a group of friends are attending the wedding of their friend, Thomas Byrne, to Mary Osegawa, whom he met as an Embassy Clerk whilst posted to Japan during the Great War. They all met whilst studying at University College London following the war. This sounds like the start of a classic country house murder a la Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers, and whilst it has a little of the schemes and rivalries of that subgenre of detective fiction, it is far from that. The Bride of Pendle combines what would be a joyous event and local folklore with horror and revenge that have been brewing for centuries, and which will explode in the bloodiest of massacres since the Red Wedding on the day before coming to a climax on the magnificent, windswept Pendle Hill.

The Bride of Pendle: 1920s Folk Horror in Rural Lancashire is divided into three substantial sections. The first gives the background to the scenario, describing in some detail the NPCs and then in even greater detail, the scenario’s various locations. The maps of each are excellent, but the standout being that of Pendle Hill, imparting its sense of scale and bleakness, and how it imposes itself upon the landscape, whilst the scenario rips open the hillside to reveal its secrets hidden under layers of peaty morass. There is a lot of information that the Keeper will need to work through as part of her preparation to run the scenario.

The plot to the scenario itself concerns the long gestating plans of the daughter of a local cunning woman who turned to black magic when she fell under the influence of and began worshipping Selfæta, the ‘Self-eater’, a god of gluttony and narcissism, trapped behind a gate below Pendle Hill, and whose presence in local folklore is that of a boar god due to his appearance and a reaper of the Autumn Harvest. Every three centuries, at the Autumn Equinox, The Veil Between Worlds weakens enough that his cult can open the gate and allow him into our world to let him feast. She failed to bring this about the first time she tried and now is trying again—and of course, in 1922, a certain wedding takes places on the Autumn Equinox. Backed up by her cultists, she will trigger events that nobody will forget and potentially involve the loss of many lives.

The scenario plays out over the course of the Friday and Saturday of the wedding weekend. The Investigators arrive in the village of Downham below Pendle Hill where Tom Byrne and his brother have family. The events of the weekend are unsurprisingly tightly scheduled, but there is room in the schedule for the Investigators to look into the strangeness that pervades the village. The stampede by a herd of bedraggled sheep, the surreptitious manner of their host’s daughter, the unsettling outburst of the vicar, and so on, perhaps combined with a bracing walk up Pendle Hill or undertaking some light ecclesiastical research at the village church. Nevertheless, the Keeper will need to maintain an eye on timing as the Investigators are expected to be at certain places at certain times. That is, up until the scenario’s penultimate scene, the very strange, quite macabre events at the wedding. After that, the Investigators are free of the timetable, but will have a greater urgency to act.

The Keeper is ably supported throughout. Sections advise the Keeper on what to do if the cultists’ plot does not go to plan through the efforts of the Investigators and there are notes too, if the Keeper wants to run the scenario using Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos. In the third part of the scenario though, there are stats and names for generic NPCs as well as the named ones and the Mythos entities, as well as table for ‘Bouts of Madness’, descriptions of the various Mythos tomes, artefacts, and spells. There are versions of the maps for both the Keeper and her players, and six pre-generated Investigators, all friends of the groom, and representing a good mix of character types and origins.

Physically, can be no doubt that The Bride of Pendle is exceedingly well appointed. It is an attractive looking affair with a stylish layout and judicious use of period photographs. The few pieces of artwork are reasonable, but the handouts are also particularly good, but what really stands out are the maps of the various locations for the scenario. These are of near professional quality, barring the lack of lavatories at the town’s public house and inn!

If there is quibble with The Bride of Pendle, then it is that the Sanity loss for the bloody wedding scene is low given how shocking it is. If there is an issue with The Bride of Pendle, it is that is almost overly detailed which gives a lot for the Keeper to study and prepare in order to run the scenario. Also, as written it suggests that it is a one-shot scenario, but it is long for a one-shot, likely taking four or so sessions to complete. One thing that the scenario does not address is the aftermath, that is, what happens as a consequence of the Investigators’ actions. Depending upon the group, this can be explored on a player-by-player basis, but some suggestions in the scenario would not have gone amiss.

The Bride of Pendle: 1920s Folk Horror in Rural Lancashire is a richly detailed, very well appointed scenario. Although that detail does require a high degree of preparation and it is tightly scripted in places—as befitting the event at its heart, The Bride of Pendle serves up a weekend of rural oddity and genteel propriety and joy, undone by the squealing horror of the boar from beyond!