Nightmares From The Depths: Cthulhu and the Mythos in Massachusetts is an epic campaign. Not of scope, not of scale, but of detail. Not of scope, because rather than taking the Investigators around the world on a globetrotting campaign against some inhuman and inhumane conspiracy, it dares not stray beyond the state lines of Massachusetts. Not of scale, because it does not involve an attempt by some crazed madman to bring about the end of the world as mankind knows it because the ‘Stars are Right’. Rather, its events may be seen as peripheral to such attempts. Nor will it encompass months of the Investigators’ time to complete. It begins on Tuesday 17th March, 1925 and ends on Thursday 2nd April, 1925. Fans of H.P. Lovecraft and his ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, will doubtless recognise the latter date, for it is the very day that Norwegian sailor, Gustaf Johansen, at the helm of the yacht,
Alert, rammed it into “The Thing cannot be described…” In doing so, he drove great Cthulhu back under the sea to his tomb on the previously aeons-long sunken island of R’lyeh and thus disrupted the psychic signal that for weeks had been emanating the middle of the south Pacific and inflicted feverishly irrational nightmares upon psychics, artists, and occultists, whilst attracting the attention of his most devoted adherents and worshippers. In this perhaps,
Nightmares From The Depths is a call-back to
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, the very first campaign for
Call of Cthulhu. A call-back that is actually six times bigger than that 1982 release!
Nightmares From The Depths is a campaign for
Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition published on the Miskatonic Repository. Inspired by the short, ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’ by H.P. Lovecraft and S. H. Greene, it is set over the course of fifteen very specific days in the March and April of 1925 and for the most part, is firmly set in Boston, from Brahmin high society and the shock of the new in its arts to the seedy seam of small time crime and greed and out to the bracing spray of sea and salt on the Massachusetts coast. This is a campaign on a par with
A Time to Harvest: Death and Discovery in the Vermont Hills – A 1930s Era Campaign Across New England and Beyond and
A Cold Fire Within: A Mind-Bending Campaign for Pulp Cthulhu, but far more geographically and chronologically constrained. Consisting of seven chapters, the campaign opens with ‘The Dreamer’ in which the Investigators as Private Detectives are hired by a family lawyer to find Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Jacobson, a poet, arts journalist for The Boston Herald, and Naval veteran of the Great War who has gone missing. The trail will lead from his work to his psychiatrist—it appears that Jacobson is possibly suffering from another bout of shellshock again—and into the orbit of one of the villains of the piece and his various contacts, rather than him directly. This is Ernest Armenfelt, a former Navy officer who served with Jacobson during the Great War. Initially, the campaign is more Film Noir than Mythos investigation, as barring a nasty side trek scenario, there is a little to no Mythos involvement at this stage. That changes with ‘The Murders’ as in some shocking acts of violence, the scenario’s antagonist moves amongst the avant-garde artworld of Boston, members of which have fallen under the influence of strange dreams. Following the acts of violence and their perpetrator leads to a nasty encounter with his acolyte in ‘The Shadow of Mather’. Both of these chapters do veer away from the actual search for Jacobson, but ‘The Lure of the Sea’ puts the Investigators back on track as a sighting sends them up the Massachusetts’ coast to the sleepy village of Pigeon Cove, where the inhabitants have their own problems and may benefit from the Investigators’ help. Though in some cases no less horrific these problems contrast with the malignity of the Mythos elsewhere. Primarily what the Investigators will learn is the location of Ernest Armenfelt and thus in ‘The Truth Revealed’ discover how far his greed has taken him. This is a short, one location chapter involving a confrontation in some fashion or another—Armenfelt versus the Mythos, Armenfelt versus the Mafia, or Armenfelt and the Mafia versus Mythos—which all depends on the actions of the Investigators. More news of Kenny Jacobson’s whereabouts returns the Investigators to ‘Death on the Coast’ and the coastal resort of Martin’s Beach. This is perhaps the most staged of the scenarios in the campaign as a torrential storm rolls in from the sea, the Investigators are split up to help lead search terms to save the villagers, and the Mythos runs wild as one of Cthulhu’s greatest servants smashes his way across the land Kaiju-style! Finally, in ‘A Bitter Pill To Swallow’, the Investigators confront the campaign’s villain as he seeks his ultimate triumph on Calf Island in Boston Harbour. It is a classic
Call of Cthulhu finale, big, brawling, and bruising encounter held on an especially significant day, and though likely to be more physical than previous scenarios in the campaign, if successful will likely be most cathartic.
In addition, the campaign is supported by several Sidetrack Scenarios. All are optional, but the best brings out the monstrous in Humankind as well as the Mythos, some driven by the Mythos, others not. There are also two extra scenarios in
Nightmares From The Depths which take place after the main campaign and are only tangentially connected to it. The first is the touloungeaphobic ‘The Sisterhood of Dreams’ which takes the Investigators to a Chicago under the thumb of Al Capone and his mob to investigate a series of murders at the hands of what turns out to be a feminist cult, whilst ‘The Stories of the Dead’ takes them further west to San Francisco and dark underbelly of Chinatown.
Secrets of San Francisco will be both a useful reference and extra source of scenarios for ‘The Stories of the Dead’. These are two very solid scenarios, but they are extra to the campaign and if they had been omitted, it would not distract from the campaign as a whole.
Lastly, the campaign is supported with a set of six appendices. These in turn list new spells—
Cast Away Flesh and
Return to the Sea are particularly nasty, new artefacts, and Mythos tomes old and new specific to the campaign. There is also a list of scenarios set in Boston should the Keeper want to continue her own campaign beyond the pages of
Nightmares From The Depths. The lists include those from Chaosium, Inc., from magazines, and from Stygian Fox Publishing as well as many from the Miskatonic Repository. Most notable are the ‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’ chapter from
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and ‘The Haunted House’/‘The Haunting’ which is currently in the quick-start for
Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, as well as ‘Boston’, the article in
The Unspeakable Oath Issue 16/17 from Pagan Publishing. There is no advice, sadly, as to whether the scenarios listed are suitable to add to the
Nightmares From The Depths campaign, though it is such a chronologically constrained campaign that there really is little room to add extra scenarios. Other appendices list all of the NPCs by chapter and give easy-to-read transcriptions of all of the campaign’s handouts, whilst the last presents six pre-generated Investigators. These are a good mix and there are notes too on how to adapt them to
Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos.
If there is a downside to Nightmares From The Depths it is its size. It is four-hundred-and-fifty-four pages long and it does present the Keeper with a wealth of detail on Boston and its environs and it could very easily be argued that the campaign is probably the best sourcebook for the city of Boston in the Jazz to date for Call of Cthulhu, let alone Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Yet it is also an embarrassment of riches at times. Every place, every NPC, and so on is presented in detail and there is often too much information and that it is in places overwritten, both of which hinder the efforts of the Keeper to read and prepare the campaign.
Another issue is the campaign’s timeframe and structure. Although the campaign looks to be linear, threads link one scenario to another—as they should—actually create more of a sandbox and this can often lead to the Investigators following a lead into another scenario before finishing the immediate investigation. This is due to the lack of geographical constraints within the campaign. Since it is not a globe-spanning, world-trotting campaign there is no need to take a journey lasting days or weeks to follow a particular clue, the need to commit to such a journey invariably driving players and their Investigators to complete their inquiries in a particular location before moving onto the next. Almost all of Nightmares From The Depths is set in Boston which means that every location is just a taxi or tram ride away and there are no such geographical constraints.
The timeframe means that the Investigators need to be proactive in their inquiries. Although neither the players nor their Investigators know it, Nightmares From The Depths does have a deadline. So, the Keeper needs to push her players to investigate and to keep on investigating—literally to pick up the pace, as well as split up. The consequences of the need for this pace and geographical structure of the campaign means that the Keeper has to prepare a lot of the campaign upfront. That said, the content is decently organised with every NPC showcased at the start of each chapter, flowcharts to show connections, and indications of where threads link to and where they are linked from.
Physically, Nightmares From The Depths is impressively presented in sepia tones. It is profusely illustrated with period photographs of Boston and that in addition to the excellent maps and other period documents. The artwork, some of it by Paul Carrick and Earl Geier, is also good. The handouts are similarly very good. Some of the portraits of the NPCs do show evidence of some touch-up. The writing is clear, but overdone in places and it could have benefited from tighter editing.
Nightmares From The Depths is a really strong investigative scenario with lots of clues and strands to its mystery and mysteries. There is a lot here for players who like to play detective to get their teeth into, but it is a campaign for Call of Cthulhu and thus a horror campaign too. Nightmares From The Depths underplays its Mythos elements for much of the campaign, having them lurk at the periphery of the Investigators’ inquiries. This makes their presence and their influence when they do appear have much more of an impact and there are some great set pieces littered across the campaign. Such as discovering artist Maria Camhurst in her pain and agony; the séance at the Wavecrest Inn at Martin’s Beach which goes blazingly wrong; and the assault on the Boston docks warehouse by Deep Ones! Of course, the campaign does end in a big set piece, a summoning in classic Call of Cthulhu style.
Ultimately, Nightmares From The Depths is not a campaign about a madman working to summon a great evil in the demented service to his alien and uncaring master, although as the campaign progresses, that is its plot, but about the effects of the Mythos upon society at large. How the actions of the foolish and the greedy unleash consequences upon the innocent and how the emanations of a mind so incompatible with that of humankind bring out or exacerbate the worst in those it touches to the detriment of themselves and those around them. NPC after NPC suffers because of both and whilst that might be wearisome or overdone in another campaign, in Nightmares From The Depths it works because of the narrow timeframe, quite literally because the ‘Stars Are Right’ and so many can be touched by Cthulhu’s otherworldly influence. Other scenarios have touched upon it, but the authors of Nightmares From The Depths are to be commended for taking the dreams of “great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths.” described in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and building a whole campaign around it.
The truth is, Chaosium, Inc. could have published Nightmares From The Depths, as could any Call of Cthulhu licensee, and it would not have not only passed muster, it would have been recognised as a good campaign. That it is not published by an actual roleplaying publisher and put on its schedule of releases is all but astounding, because Nightmares From The Depths is almost as professional a product without it either being official or professional. That applies to the look and production values of the book as much as the campaign itself. Both are of a high standard.
Make no mistake, Nightmares From The Depths: Cthulhu and the Mythos in Massachusetts is an impressive and richly detailed campaign, horrendously human in its horror and monstrously malign in its application of the Mythos, and ingenious in exploring the vile influence of Cthulhu’s dreams at a signature point in Lovecraft’s fiction like no campaign or scenario before it. That it brings the city of Boston to life in the Jazz Age and gives the city its first campaign is a bonus.
