Peril in Punjar

“Murder!” is the cry as death stalks the squalid and stinking streets of Spittle-Fields. As fog swirls around what light they carry in the dark and dingy alleys of the district abutting the Plague Gate, the Player Characters discover what will be the first of several bodies of women, accosted on the streets, their bodies slashed open far from where eyes can see, and internal organs cut free before the culprit flees back into the night. It is one hundred years since there were last such killings, a spate of brutal deaths called the ‘Autumn of Terror’, also of women, attributed to a killer never caught, but known only as the ‘Ripper’! Has he returned once again to strike fear into the good folk of some of the grimiest and grimmest quarters of the city of Punjar—Spittle-Fields Market Quarter, bustling by day, abandoned by night, the narrow alleys of Tenements Quarter, the sinister strangeness of White Chapel Quarter, and the bleakness of the Benevolent Craftsmen’s Quarter—or is some manic killing in his name? Can the Player Characters track down the killer down before he strikes again? Can the Player Characters uncover his motives and what they mean for the future of the city? Can the Player Character survive the horror revealed as they discover more? This the set-up for Return of the Ripper: An urban horror investigation for character levels 1-3.

Return of the Ripper: An urban horror investigation for character levels 1-3 is a mini-campaign published by Strange Quark Games following a successful Kickstarter campaign for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics roleplaying game from Goodman Games. It is also a curious beast. It takes place in Punjar, a city that has been the setting for multiple scenarios in the Dungeon Crawl Classics line, but has not been detailed as a setting apart from Punjar: The Tarnished Jewel. It is a homage to the scenario, Dungeon Crawl Classics #24: Legend of the Ripper with which it shares the same theme. It is also inspired by and a prequel to Dungeon Crawl Classics #75: The Sea Queen Escapes! in that its events can lead into the events described in ‘The Sunken Kingdom of Ru’ in the scenario.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Return of the Ripper is that it is inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders in Victorian London in the late 1880s and it avoids all of the dangers of such adaptations such as giving a rationale behind the killings, such as the Cthulhu Mythos. Its primary method of doing so is by shifting the story to another genre and another city, although one heavily inspired by the London of the Ripper murders and the Victorian era. Its secondary method is to shift the story forward by a century, so what the Player Characters are investigating are murders inspired by Jack the Ripper rather than the murders that he committed. That said, Return of the Ripper is heavily inspired by two deeply connected works. One is Alan Moore’s comic strip, From Hell, and the other is Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. These are not the only influences upon Return of the Ripper, but together they underpin is cosmology and its architecture. All those influences from Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana to ‘Talon of Weng Chiang’ for Doctor Who are listed in the campaign’s own and extensive ‘Appendix N’. What is clear from this is that the author is fascinated by the Jack the Ripper murders, Ripperology, and its associated conspiracy theories.

The campaign opens with the Player Characters discovering the body of the Ripper’s first victim, Marianne Nickel. They have the chance to examine her corpse and talk to the crowd who have gathered around in the midst of Spittle-Fields Market and gain their first clues. This will give them a name and the details of a witness, which will lead them through Spittle-Fields Market and in and out of the other quarters as they trace Marianne’s movement and history. From there, the trail runs, if not cold, then at least cooler. The problem is not that it is designed as a free-form investigation with the Player Characters free to go where they will in pursuit of clues and further information, but it is written like a free-form urban sandcrawl rather than a dedicated investigation. What this means is that the murder mystery lacks structure that the Judge can easily navigate and follow the clues to reveal more of the mystery behind the murder. The plot and the motivation for the murders are both explained well and there is ‘The Murder Map’ which links the clues. Unfortunately, it is placed at the back of the book and it is not as clear is could have been.

The consequences of this are that the Judge is going to have to study Return of the Ripper quite closely in order to grasp the ins and outs of its plot, do some deconstruction of her own, and put it back together to get the best out of it. Besides ‘The Murder Map’ and the breakdown of the plot, the Judge is given three more victims whose deaths can be used to push the plot further long and a big table of rumours (for which she will need a thirty-sided die) that can be learned from NPCs (named and unnamed) and used as prompts to give the characters and their players a little nudge here and there. Plus, there is another agent with a deep interest in the murders, who may be a help or a hindrance, but is ultimately, a victim.

The investigation will ultimately reveals the culprits behind the deaths, a misogynist cult with grand plans that harness the geometric magic of the architecture of Spittle-Fields and its four quarters. From there, the campaign takes a strange turn, less Victorian urban sandcrawl, first above ground and then below, but a literal sandcrawl across a dimension beyond before delving deep into a pyramid that links to the events of Dungeon Crawl Classics #75: The Sea Queen Escapes!. Here is where the Player Characters will confront the survivors of the cult and its leader and hopefully bring the murderous reign of the Ripper to an end.

If Return of the Ripper is challenging to digest and so present to the players and their characters, it is not a challenge when comes to either detail or flavour. The people and places of this grimy, grotty quarter of Punjar are lovingly and engagingly detailed. There are places described in the write-ups for each of the quarters, such as Value Second-Hand Goods, the Ratcatcher, The Blackguard’s Bar, and others that could appear in future adventures without any changes. This is not to say that Return of the Ripper is the definite guide to Punjar’s streets, but it is a start. Perhaps the oddest addition though, is that of the Butcher of Brisbane from the Fifty-First Century, Magnus Creel, along with his murderous homunculus, Mister Sin! One other aspect of the campaign to note that it is humancentric. All of the NPCs are human, making you wish that there was the Victorian era setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics which would work with the campaign rather than playing in the fantasy genre.

Mechanically, Return of the Ripper details some thirty diseases, from the inconvenient to incurable, that the Player Characters might encounter, or worse, catch and suffer whilst in Punjar. They include Cholera, Dropsy, Typhus, Small Pox, Great Pox, Black Plague, and Bubonic Plague. This is in addition to the minor ailments like Beggar’s Boils, Gout, and Soot Lung listed earlier in the book and which the Commoners might suffer. Given the horrific and bloody nature of the campaign, it also adds rules for both Fright and Nausea. These come into play when the Player Characters encounter something horrifying or revolting, for example, being in an ominously dread place like a fog-swirled graveyard or discovering an eviscerated corpse or viewing disgusting disease symptoms such as maggot infested wounds or being doused in foul liquids like tanning fluids or sewage. This triggers a Difficulty Check and if failed, the player rolls a die equal to the value of Difficulty Check to determine the effect, making full use of the dice range in Dungeon Crawl Classics. This gives a wide variety of checks, from bring anxious for a number of rounds to actually mad (the Judge is recommended to consult The Cthulhu Alphabet for further details) for Fright and from being queasy for a few rounds to catching disease for Nausea. Nausea has an area-of-effect and does not stack, whereas Fright is time-based and does stack, so if a Player Characters is already affected, both the Difficulty Check for the next situation and the associated die rolled for the effect if failed are increased. There is a nice escalation to the effects from Fright so that a Player Character can go from jittery and unnerved to hair turning white and going mad with a lot of different effects in between rather than foisting madness immediately upon them, saving that possibility for towards the end of the campaign.

The campaign is ably supported with a lot of back matter. Not just the Appendix N, which details all of the inspirational reading and watching for the campaign, effectively serving as the designer’s notes, but also a ‘Murder Map’ that links the clues to campaign’s mystery, guides to disease in Punjar, the rules for fright and fear, a glossary of architectural terms, the campaign’s handouts, and a list of sobriquets, or first names. Unfortunately, the latter feels half finished without a list of accompanying surnames.

Physically, Return of the Ripper is a good-looking book. The cartography is clear and easy to use and the writing decent, though it needs an edit in places. The main issue with its organisation is a lack of an index.

That Return of the Ripper: An urban horror investigation for character levels 1-3 needs effort upon the part of the Judge to pull it apart and understand its plot and its various parts is disappointing, but that plot is actually a rather good Ripperology pastiche and the parts do show off the author’s fascination with the subject matter. If not as easy to prepare and run as it should be, Return of the Ripper: An urban horror investigation for character levels 1-3 has the potential to be a great adventure, a Victorian horror fantasy rife with grit and grime, determination and degradation, and eventually, hope and redemption.