Miskatonic Monday #474: The Black Tide Engine

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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A dockside explosion in which labourers and stevedores are killed is undoubtedly a tragedy, but when strange effects are reported and it appears that someone is attempting to cover up the cause and those effects, it becomes a mystery. A mystery which attracts the attention of the Bureau of Occult Clearance whose mandate is to investigate events that cannot be readily explained through conventional means. Witnesses reported their ears popping, headaches, dizziness, watches appearing to lose time, lights flickering, and metal vibrating, close things suddenly appearing faraway and faraway things suddenly appearing close, and the explosion itself was unlike anything they had ever witnessed—it seemed to explode both outwards and inwards! It is 1934 and on the docks of the city of Liverpool, a deadly explosion has been reported unlike any other. What is the cause of the explosion? Who is trying to cover it up and why? To gain answers, the agents of the Bureau of Occult Clearance will find themselves investigating a deadly accident and a desperate coverup in the city of Liverpool that hint at the activities of a dangerous conspiracy in the northwest of England and ultimately following the conspiracy to the Lancashire coast and beyond in an effort to thwart science so ambitious it threatens the fate of the world!

This is the set-up for The Black Tide Engine: An Industrial Horror Investigation, a four-part mini-campaign set in the northwest of England for Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos. Ordered by their superior in the Bureau of Occult Clearance to investigate the explosion at the dockyards in Liverpool, the campaign proper begins there two days after it occurred (though feeling as if it took place only hours before). After experiencing some of the strange effects described by the witness, the Investigators help in a rescue mission before having the chance to properly investigate the cause and who might have been behind the explosion. In traditional Call of Cthulhu, this would have involved interviews and visiting libraries for access to newspaper reports and occult tomes, but not so in The Black Tide Engine. Whilst there are plenty of NPCs to ask questions, the industrial nature of the campaign means that they are not consulting libraries or Mythos tomes—in fact, there is no Mythos involvement in this campaign—but looking through shipping manifests and railway timetables that point to conspiracy not of esoteric scale, but industrial scale. Whilst ‘Act 1: Smoke Over Liverpool’ begins in Liverpool, ‘Act 2: The Terncross Problem’ takes place in rural Lancashire where it becomes clear that the conspiracy has been operating as part of the country’s railway network and behind the cover of a former Admiralty programme which took place during the Great War and was subsequently and hastily shut down.

Along the way, and again and again, the Investigators will run into the agents of the conspiracy, revealed to be the Prometheus Foundation, a conglomerate of military, industrial, and criminal interests, whose total scope lies outside of the campaign. Their aim is harassment and diversion rather than termination, and whilst they are loyal to the Prometheus Foundation, they are not fanatics or insane. This is only one sign that there is a lack of madness to the campaign in comparison to others for Call of Cthulhu or Pulp Cthulhu.

If the first half of the campaign seems oddly geographically focused and bureaucratically obsessed with railways and railway timetables, it is in the second half where it begins to become clear why and the efforts of the Prometheus Foundation take on a scale previously imagined. Previous encounters and locations, like the furloughed construction sites, surely inspired by the shipyards of Barrow-in-Furness in neighbouring Cumbria, only hinted at the scale of the Black Tide Project and the aims of the Prometheus Foundation. The incongruous discovery of an underground railway like the London underground echoes both a James Bond villain’s lair and the BBC television series, Edge of Darkness, but until the ‘villain’ of the campaign is confronted in its final scene, it has more of a blue collar feel. There are yet more discoveries to be made alongside some moments of respite, but as the Investigators and the campaign hurtle towards the climax, the weird environmental effects escalate and the Investigators need to withstand them if they are to successfully confront the mastermind in his lair!

As a horror campaign, The Black Tide Engine leans more into its conspiracy and its industrial elements rather than its horror elements. It often feels as if the Investigators are facing the thirties equivalent of the ‘Men-in-Black’ rather than a horrifying threat. There is a surprisingly Sanity loss rate across the whole of the campaign and much like a ‘Men-in-Black’ style story, The Black Tide Engine is ultimately more about prevention and containment to the point that whatever the Prometheus Foundation is attempting to do or connect to, it is beyond the pay grade of the Investigators to know (or really, the Keeper).

Throughout, the staging advice for the Keeper from one act to the next and from one scene to the next is excellent. For the act, this includes its tone and feel, what the Investigators’ objectives are, and what they discoveries they might make and what they should have learned by the end of it, whilst for various scenes, it includes typical heroic actions that the Investigators might do depending on their role—physical, technical, social, and so on, staging particular scenes, whether it involves combat, action, or a chase, and also opportunities for them to learn more. Overall, the campaign goes out of its way to help the Keeper run it moment from moment.

One quarter of The Black Tide Engine is dedicated to support for the campaign and the campaign is for the most part, very well supported. There are eight appendices in total, the first of which details all of the campaign’s NPCs, including the leaders and notables of the Bureau of Occult Clearance and the Black Tide Project, as well as the subsequent Prometheus Foundation conspiracy, and other NPCs. The writeups for some of them include roleplaying notes too which nicely supplement the quotes given for each earlier in the campaign. The ‘Adversaries’ appendix covers the lesser figures in the Prometheus Foundation and its weird technology, whilst the third appendix presents the campaign’s technological wonders. First with an overview of the devices and weaponry developed by the Black Tide Project, though the Investigators are unlikely to get their hands on most of it during the campaign itself, and then with the Bureau of Occult Clearance experimental technology, which the Investigators do get use some of (and are amusingly given some warnings about their use at the start of the campaign). The fourth appendix details the campaign’s organisations, both the Bureau of Occult Clearance and the Prometheus Foundation, and their means of operation and this is followed by a detailed historical timeline for the campaign, the campaign’s handouts, Keeper Reference Sheets, and the pre-generated Investigator details in the remaining four.

The six pre-generated Investigator consist of an experienced sailor and salvage diver, an ambitious photo-journalist, an absent-minded scientist, a retired semi-professional boxer, a mystic and diviner, and a less-than retired smuggler and thief. All come with detailed backgrounds and some definitely have decent scores in the Electric Repair, Mechanical Repair, and Science (Engineering) skills that the campaign demands. These skills are likely to be the most useful throughout The Black Tide Engine.

Although the introduction to the campaign does prepare the Keeper, there is a lot in the appendices that she will need to read to fully understand the campaign and the motivations of the NPCs and the Prometheus Foundation as it gives more context and background. In terms of organisation, it does mean that initially, the campaign feels underwritten.

However, despite all of the background material presented, The Black Tide Engine lacks verisimilitude, feeling as if it was shot on a soundstage or film backlot like a Saturday morning serial in many cases rather than in actual places. This is not an issue in the campaign’s second half, as both ‘Act 3: The Deep Works’ and ‘Act 4: The Black Tide Engine’ are set deep underground, so there is a sense of unreality to them. Whereas in the first half, which is set in Liverpool in ‘Act 1: Smoke Over Liverpool’ and rural Lancashire in ‘Act 2: The Terncross Problem’, there is no real sense of place. There is no background to Liverpool or the Lancashire of the period, let alone England, so that the Keeper is likely to struggle to bring these parts of the campaign to life. More so if the Keeper is unfamiliar with either the period and the city and its adjacent county. Bringing the ordinariness of the setting of the campaign’s first half would arguably contrast very nicely with the outré nature of the second half.

The campaign’s maps and handouts are very well done. Many of them capture the bureaucratic nature of the campaign’s backstory and its current events very well. That said, it is a pity that the railway network map for ‘Act 3: The Deep Works’ is done across two pages rather than one and that there are no maps of the city of Liverpool and the county of Lancashire across which the events of the campaign play out as they would have also been useful

Physically, The Black Tide Engine: An Industrial Horror Investigation is well presented in an easy to read fashion. It uses period photographs rather than illustrations and these are generally well chosen. It does need an edit in places.

There are disappointing elements to the campaign such as the lack of period setting detail and ultimately the nature of what the Prometheus Foundation is trying to harness. In the case of the latter, how disappointing depends on how much the players and their Investigators want answers. It is in keeping with the conspiracy genre that the Investigators may never know, but for some players that may not be enough. However, The Black Tide Engine: An Industrial Horror Investigation has an energy pace and bureaucratic structure that gives it a markedly different feel in comparison to other campaigns for Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos, a surprising combination of the Pulp conspiracy and the railway timetable versus Pulp science!