Achtung! Ardennes

Achtung! Cthulhu is the roleplaying game of fast-paced pulp action and Mythos magic published by Modiphius Entertainment. It is pitches the Allied Agents of the Britain’s Section M, the United States’ Majestic, and the brave Resistance into a Secret War against those Nazi Agents and organisations which would command and entreat with the occult and forces beyond the understanding of mankind. They are willing to risk their lives and their sanity against malicious Nazi villains and the unfathomable gods and monsters of the Mythos themselves, each striving for supremacy in mankind’s darkest yet finest hour! Yet even the darkest of drives to take advantage of the Mythos is riven by differing ideologies and approaches pandering to Hitler’s whims. The Black Sun consists of Nazi warrior-sorcerers supreme who use foul magic and summoned creatures from nameless dimensions to dominate the battlefields of men, whilst Nachtwölfe, the Night Wolves, utilise technology, biological enhancements, and wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) to win the war for Germany. Ultimately, both utilise and fall under the malign influence of the Mythos, the forces of which have their own unknowable designs…

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is the seventh release for Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20, and the second campaign following on from Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis. It shifts the action forward by three years as previous releases for the roleplaying game are set earlier in the war, even during part of the Phony War, in 1939, 1940, and 1941. It is set in the Ardennes, in the weeks and days leading up to the Battle of the Bulge in late November and early December of 1944. It is also a sequel of sorts, to Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Assault on the Führer Train, which the Game Master can run as prologue to the main campaign, although that will be with pre-generated Player Characters, or Agents. The campaign, presented in eleven parts, requires experienced Agents with a good range of skills, including ideally, an Occultist with the ability to cast magic. At several points in the campaign, there are scenes of mass combat, so the Game Master may want to check the rules for handling such incidents in the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Gamemaster’s Guide. The campaign also differs from more traditional campaigns of Lovecraftian investigative horror in four ways. First, it is heavily directed. Being a military-style campaign, the Agents will find themselves being either ordered to investigate and act by their superiors or being asked for help by the forces of local Resistance, rather than directing or leading the investigation themselves. Second, the campaign environs are limited to under the canopy and under the ground of the forests of Ardennes. This gives it much more of a localised feel than the traditional globetrotting campaign, which is what Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is. Third, the campaign develops into two parallel plot strands, one of which explores the relatively recent—in Mythos terms—history of the Ardennes as the German factions in the Secret War—Nachtwölfe and Black Sun, dig and in some cases, quite literally, bulldoze their way into the region’s prehistoric past. Four, the Agents will find themselves making alliances with some very strange bedfellows…

The set-up for the campaign echoes that of the Ardennes Offensive launched by Nazi Germany at the end of 1944 to stop further Allied advances and attempt to bring them to the table to negotiate. The desperation of Germany extends to its two factions in the Secret War—Nachtwölfe and Black Sun, and despite having been rivals for years, the need to defeat the Allies has driven them to do the unthinkable, that is, to co-operate. Their plan is known as Operation Brute Stärke, or Brute Strength, a secret coda to Hitler’s Operation Watch on the Rhine. The Agents are operatives for the British Section M sent to a field base ten miles behind Allied lines. There, Major Archibald Strang, codenamed Hunter, will brief them about the disappearance of Resistance leader Marta Archambaud—as detailed in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Assault on the Führer Train, about the sightings and co-operation of Nachtwölfe and Black Sun, and the lack of intelligence about the region coming from Majestic, the American equivalent to Section M. Could the Americans be up to something? Major Strang would appreciate anything that the Agents can learn, but their primary orders are to investigate Nazi activities behind enemy lines in conjunction with the Resistance.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear starts with a good introduction to and explanation of the campaign and its background, along with some decent staging advice. The campaign proper begins with the Agents being sent behind enemy lines to ascertain enemy activity in the region. After making contact with the Resistance, they will be led to a remote farmhouse that serves as their base of operations for the campaign. In comparison to the missions to come, it is an intentionally quiet opener, but the Game Master is given several adventures to enliven the Agents’ stay at the farmhouse or visits to the nearby village. These can be used throughout the campaign, although the timeframe does tighten up near the end. The majority of the missions call upon the Agents to investigate archaeological sites, castles, ritual sites, and so on, often hiding entrances to cave networks that lead deep underground to the discovery of the Elder Thing undercity of Karvarteeli, which the Nazis have been surveying and plundering. The Agents will often find the Nazi efforts in disarray, the enemy either under attack by or having been attacked by eldritch forces. The often-brute force method of the Nazis have unleashed the dread servants of the Elder Things—the Shoggoth! Later in the campaign, it will become apparent that the Shoggoth—or at least the means to manufacture them—are what the Nazis are after, as well as the fact that not all of the Shoggoth are loyal to their former masters. There is even the possibility that the Agents might be able to communicate with the rebels, with one of the more horrifying moments in the campaign being faced by a Shoggoth holding a German soldier up like a puppet and having penetrated its brain, using him as a communications device!

In addition to investigating Nazi activities, the Agents are asked by their Resistance contact, Gaston Moreau, a Druid and secret follower of the goddess Arduinna, to help him in the ongoing fight between the Ardui, Ardenne Forest’s native Celtic deities, and the Crimson Brothers, a cult of evil monks, led by the Cowled Sorcerer, who want to free the Sleeping Horror, Chartotharkis, a godling imprisoned within the catacombs of a nearby ruined abbey. This is the second strand to the campaign, with the missions alternating between the two over its eleven missions, including the Agents actually meeting the Goddess Arduinna and the Ardui in person in their Sacred Grove (though this does involve a fair amount of exposition). The primary aim of the Ardui followers is to prevent the Crimson Brothers from succeeding and securing possession of three artefacts sacred to the Ardui—The Cauldron Which Never Empties, Flesh Drinker Sword, and Trident of the Dark Lake. One problem here is that the Agents cannot succeed in this. The Crimson Brothers do get hold of all three despite the Agents’ efforts and only in the final confrontation do they have a chance to reclaim all three.

The addition of the Ardui is not out of place in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear as Achtung! Cthulhu has always had a folkloric and pagan element whose traditions have run parallel to that of the Mythos and which an Agent Occultist has been able to draw upon to be able to cast spells of his own. Often based upon Celtic and Viking traditions, as well as Hermetic traditions, the presence of the Ardui in the campaign brings this aspect of the roleplaying game to the fore and enables the Agent Occultist to interact more directly with those he owes fealty to—especially if he follows Celtic traditions.

The final confrontation with the Crimson Brothers also suggests an interesting interaction with the Nazis as an option. This is to form a temporary alliance with them in order to defeat the Crimson Brothers. It is suggested that this will add extra spice and roleplaying opportunities, the latter in a campaign where roleplaying and interaction with NPCs and the enemy is underplayed in favour of exploration, stealth, and combat. Of course, that is the nature of a more action-focused and combat driven roleplaying game like Achtung! Cthulhu. Nevertheless, it also highlights the underwritten nature of the campaign’s enemy NPCs in terms of roleplaying and their portrayal. Ultimately, if the Agents can help defeat the Crimson Brothers and prevent the summoning of Chartotharkis, they will gain the aid of Ardui in the final confrontation with the Nazis.

Penultimately, the Agents do have a chance to rescue Resistance leader Marta Archambaud, who was captured as detailed in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Assault on the Führer Train. This is a big battle, potentially one of the most confusing ones to stage in the whole campaign as it involves a lot of forces. However, much of the battle takes place just slightly offstage to the Agents, so the Game Master could simply narrate it or she cut back and forth between the action. This would work well if the players were given control of the different forces on the Allied side. This also involves the Americans and forces from Majestic, the only time they appear in the campaign and even then, the mystery of what the Americans and Majestic are up to in the region, alluded to as a potential issue at the start of the campaign is never really explored—here or in the rest of the campaign. The campaign itself will come to a climax in a Nazi base atop a mountain, complete with cable car, so it ends more in the style of Where Eagles Dare than the style of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that pervades the rest of the campaign.

Each mission follows the same format. Each starts with an introduction and a brief summary, before breaking the mission down scene by scene. There are typically details of encounters along the way, scene Threat spends for the Game Master, lists of adversaries, details of Truths that can come into play, and perhaps most importantly, the ‘Key Intelligence’, which summarises the important information that the Agents will learn as result of their completing the mission. Throughout there are also ‘GM Tip’ sections which give further information and advice. Some of these can quite extensive.

Rounding out Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is set of six appendices. These in turn list all of the spells and spellbooks; treasures, artefacts, and tomes; arcane and esoteric technology; both allies and adversaries of the Ardennes; and handouts. The ‘Treasures, Artefacts, and Tomes’ in particular provides the details of artefacts sacred to the Ardui—The Cauldron Which Never Empties, Flesh Drinker Sword, and Trident of the Dark Lake, whilst the ‘Arcane & Esoteric Technology’ includes numerous Elder Thing devices which the Agents can recover, such as the Sensory Augmenter, Stasis Field Projector, and Ultrasonic Wardstone. For the Nazis, there are detailed write-ups of the Grendel Earth Mover, which Nachtwölfe used to bulldoze into the ruins and cavern systems of the Ardennes, and the Panzer VII Sabre Tooth Tiger, with which Nachtwölfe and Black Sun aim to stop the Allied advance on Germany. The handouts consist primarily of maps of locations where the action of the campaign takes place. All together the six appendices take up a fifth of the book.

Physically, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is cleanly and tidily laid out. The illustrations and the maps are excellent. However, there are two omissions in terms of the campaign’s items and NPCs. None of the new items and certainly none of the NPCs, whether an ally or an adversary, is actually illustrated. This is a less of a problem for the various items, but for the NPC, it is more of a problem, especially for the campaign’s main villains. It does not help that their physical descriptions are limited, leaving a lot for the Game Master to do in trying to impart to her players what their Agents’ foes look like.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is a big bruising campaign, played out on an ever-bigger scale even though it is geographically limited to the Ardennes forest. The authors admit the campaign is linear and that is certainly true. This is very much a campaign where the players and their Agents are not going to direct the action, rather the reverse, being directed on missions and then fighting out the action. Once at a location, the Agents will have more agency, but on a strategic level, none at all. This has the possibility of frustrating players and it is not helped by the occasional heavy doses of exposition and travelogues before their Agents can get to the action. In effect, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is more a series of connected big scenes and confrontations in which the Agents get to battle it out with ever bigger threats. If the players are happy uncovering ever nastier secrets and punching out ever nastier Nazi threats, then there can be no doubt that Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear delivers that and delivers that very well, but any Game Master or player wanting more will be disappointed.

Atlantis Abides

Achtung! Cthulhu is the roleplaying game of fast-paced pulp action and Mythos magic published by Modiphius Entertainment. It pitches the Allied Agents of Britain’s Section M, the United States’ Majestic, and the brave Resistance into a secret war against those Nazi Agents and organisations which would command and entreat with the occult and forces beyond the understanding of mankind. They are willing to risk their lives and their sanity against malicious Nazi villains and the unfathomable gods and monsters of the Mythos themselves, each striving for supremacy in mankind’s darkest yet finest hour! Yet even the darkest of drives to take advantage of the Mythos is riven by differing ideologies and approaches pandering to Hitler’s whims. The Black Sun consists of Nazi warrior-sorcerers supreme who use foul magic and summoned creatures from nameless dimensions to dominate the battlefields of men, whilst Nachtwölfe, the Night Wolves, utilise technology, biological enhancements, and wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) to win the war for Germany. Ultimately, both utilise and fall under the malign influence of the Mythos, the forces of which have their own unknowable designs…

Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is a world-spanning campaign and the fourth release for Achtung! Cthulhu. An adaptation to the 2d20 System of the earlier version for Call of Cthulhu, the release of a campaign so early in the line makes sense chronologically. It takes place between August, 1939, before the start of the war and May/June, 1940, the period of the Phoney War when full hostilities had yet to break out and France was not yet invaded. The campaign will take the Player Characters or Agents from Vienna to Greenland via Rome, Cairo, Nepal, India, Persia, and more, in a desperate effort to prevent an incredibly ancient artefact from falling into Nazi hands. The period is rife with tension, but the Player Characters have a greater freedom of movement than might be imagined during the rest of the war and whilst they are not in danger of running into German military forces, they will be stalked in the shadows by Nachtwölfe agents and encounter many of their proxies.

In addition to being set early in the war, Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis not just the first campaign for Achtung! Cthulhu, but also the first campaign for the Game Master and her players. This shows most obviously in the series of three sets of boxed text. ‘Roving Red Line’ handles the travels of the Agents around the world, summarising the options, but also giving a nod to those interstitial moments of map movements in the Indiana Jones series of films; ‘U.L.T.R.A.’ gives the Game Master extra details about NPCs and plot information; ‘Basic Training’, a simple guide to handling the mechanics of the 2d20 System in Achtung! Cthulhu in a particular scene as well as possible Threat expenditures for the Game Master to make the Agents’ more challenging. It also shows in the path and tone of the campaign. Apart from a framing device, the individual chapters of the campaign are not connected and there is no set path from its start to its end, so there is much less of an emphasis upon the collection and analysis of clues to move from one chapter to another. The tone is muscular, very much more action-orientated and in the realm of the Pulp genre rather than the horror genre. This is not to say that the campaign is not lacking in monsters or scary situations, but Shadows of Atlantis primarily involves encountering Nachtwölfe agents and its local, sometimes indigenous proxies as well as monsters based on local legends. Thus, there is a marked lack of monsters and entities drawn from the Cthulhu Mythos. In fact, almost none of the classic creations from H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre appears in Shadows of Atlantis. This does not mean that there is not a Mythos presence in the campaign, since Nachtwölfe plays a major role in the campaign, whilst Black Sun plays a minor role, but it remains offscreen for much of the campaign and the backstory to the campaign is unlikely to be revealed to the Agents. This does, however, fit the period, that of the Phoney War, when there is a high degree of uncertainty as to the nature of the enemy faced by the Allies and what that enemy would do next.

The campaign opens in August 1939. The Agents are in Vienna, Austria, working for Section D before what becomes Section M is established, to contact a German agent who feels betrayed by her masters following the death of her husband, Doctor Botho Ehrlichmann, under strange circumstances. He was a noted archaeologist and she believes that he was killed to keep his research a secret. This research concerned the translation and study of the scripts carved on an ancient black stone found in Egypt by a previous German archaeological team. Now his notes are missing and his wife does not want the Nazis to have them. The paper chase will lead the Agents across Vienna with the Nazis at their heels and subsequently out of Austria, south to Rome. By this time, war will have broken between Germany and Great Britain, but no such state exists between Italy and Great Britain. Nevertheless, Italy under Mussolini is a police state and the Nazis are already in Rome, conducting an archaeological dig deep under the streets of the Eternal City. By now, the preliminary research that the Agents will have done into Ehrlichmann’s notes reveals that the stone was linked to a powerful ancient artefact that was split up into five parts and hidden in various locations around the world. One of the locations was in Rome, which is why the Germans were digging into the tunnels under the city.

This sets up the framework for Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis. Researchers back in Section D in England will continue to translate and decode Doctor Ehrlichmann’s notes. This provides the clues as to the next location where another part of the device can be found and what it is called. These assignments will take the Agents to Cairo, Nepal, India, and Persia, but beyond Vienna, these can be tackled in any order. In many cases, the Agents will find that the Nazis already have their own operatives or proxies on the ground, conducting archaeological excavations, often oblivious or uncaring of the dangerous consequences they are triggering. All involve fantastically monstrous situations, whilst the Cairo and Nepal chapters stand out for their weirdness. The Nepal chapter takes the Agents to an almost Shangri-La-like location, whilst the Cairo chapter sends the Agents into a version of the Dreamlands. The latter is the more engaging of the two, the other often exposition heavy and reading more like a travelogue.

Prior to the campaign finale in Greenland—and beyond, Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis includes an extra location, new to this version of the campaign. This is British Honduras. With the Agents busy in Asia and the Middle East, when Section M learns of the location of another part of the artefact, it sends another team to secure it. Unfortunately, nothing has been heard from this team, ostensibly conducting an archaeological dig, for quite some time, so Section M arranges for a second expedition to locate the missing team and recover the piece of the artefact. However, word has got out about the missing team and the authorities have already agreed to an offer of help in finding it from the German Ambassador. Though this is with the proviso that neutral observers accompany the rescue mission. The twist here is that these neutral observers will not be the Agents who have been following up on details from Doctor Ehrlichmann’s notes in Vienna, Cairo, Nepal, India, and Persia, that is, in the rest of the campaign. They will instead be entirely different and new Player Characters. This is intended to provide a change for the players, both in terms of perspective and challenge, in roleplaying other characters, but it is a jarring shift. It is also a shift in tone, since the characters and the players will be dealing with Germans and German agents, not as direct threats, but as individuals—supposedly—helping to find missing archaeologists. So, this sets up some tensions between the Player Characters and the NPCs, as well as presenting more roleplaying opportunities than in the other chapters. However, the chapter does take the campaign to an off-scene location and so out of the flow of the campaign’s story. Alternatively, it provides a change of pace and focus before the big finale.

The finale takes place in Greenland and beyond—way beyond. The finale delivers on the title of the campaign and drops the Agents into the most mythological of places. In other words, Atlantis. Since this is Atlantis, this is on its last day, the day of its collapse. As the city falls apart around them, the Agents need to rush through the panicking and fleeing citizenry to stop Nachtwölfe from bringing its plans to fruition. It is a big, exciting conclusion to the campaign and there are some pleasing payoffs to the rest of the campaign as well as little Easter eggs for Achtung! Cthulhu as a whole. The campaign finale discusses various outcomes including failure upon the part of the Agents.

In terms of support, the appendices for Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis provides stats for the major NPCs and monsters in the campaign and details of the new tomes, spells, and artefacts that appear in the campaign, including the one that forms the major driver for the campaign. There are also several related scenario seeds, quite detailed, but take place after the events of the campaign, all of the handouts, and four pre-generated Agents. They consist of a German émigré Private Investigator, an American secret agent, a British engineer and explosives expert, and an Irish-Czech circus performer turned mystic! If the players are choosing to create their own, then an Agent with knowledge of archaeology will be useful, as will a mystic.

Physically, Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is a great looking book, neatly laid out and illustrated with some excellent artwork. It is also well organised, each chapter opening with a Mission Overview, followed by its three scenes, and then brought to a close with a Debriefing. Where the campaign is lacking is in illustrations of the moving parts of the campaign, all the parts that the Agents will interact with. So there are no illustrations or portraits of the NPCs (though some do appear in the artwork) and certainly no illustrations of the various objects and parts of the artefact to be found. This is a major omission in either case, as the illustrations would make the identification of both objects and NPCs faster and easier and so made the campaign more real for the players and their Agents. There is also very little in terms of text to be read out or paraphrased by the Game Master, leaving her with quite a lot of description for her to parse and present to her players. Overall, given that Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is intended as a first campaign, certainly for Achtung! Cthulhu, the campaign is not always as helpful as it could or should be.

Given the Pulpy tone of the campaign, what is surprising about Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is the lack of good NPCs. Or the lack of scenery-chewing villains who appear over and over to make the lives of the Agents difficult before making their escape vowing to have their revenge after being defeated by the Agents. Part of this is due to the lack of illustrations to help the NPCs to life in general, but it is also due to the true villains of the piece working through proxies—often over-the-hill archaeologists with questionable morals—so they do not get a chance to strut their stuff as much as the style of the campaign warrants it.

Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is a campaign of the opening moves in the secret occult war between the Allies and Nazi Germany, but very much one of Lovecraftian action horror rather than Lovecraftian investigative horror. Not without its moments of intrigue and stealth, especially in the opening chapters in Vienna and Rome, Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is action-orientated, fists-flying, pedal to the metal, cosmic horror.