Magazine Madness 34: Wyrd Science Issue 4

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

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Most magazines for the roleplaying hobby give the gamer support for the game of his choice, or at the very least, support for the hobby’s more popular roleplaying games. Whether that is new monsters, spells, treasures, reviews of newly released titles, scenarios, discussions of how to play, painting guides, and the like… That is how it has been all the way back to the earliest days of The Dragon and White Dwarf magazines. Wyrd Science is different in that it is about gaming and the culture of gaming as well as the games themselves rather providing support for specific titles—and Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 4 is different to the previous issues. Where both Wyrd Science Session Zero and Wyrd Science – Expert Rules adopted the ‘BECMI’ colour coding of the colours and the focus upon fantasy and the Old School Renaissance, and Wyrd Science – The Horror Issue (Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 3) focused on the horror genre, Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 4 comes with no announced theme. This does not mean that there are no themes with the issue, but rather that they are simply part of the issue rather than a feature. Thus, Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 4 is very much more of an ordinary issue, setting the standard for future non-special issues to come.

Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 4 was published in April, 2023 by Best in Show. It opens with a quartet of interviews. ‘PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED: SoulMuppet Publishing’ is with Zach Cox and explores how he co-founded the company and has developed it to the point where he began to experiment and begin to support authors from outside of the English-speaking hobby, such as with the ‘LATAM Breakout series’ for South American creators. Cox gives his views on the then changing nature of the hobby, how Kickstarter is being used by fewer and fewer would be publishers, who are then looking for other options. Nevertheless, he offers advice on how to run a successful Kickstarter project, but also highlights the difficulties in distribution that affect retail in particular. Although two years old, there is much within the interview that are still pertinent now. ‘CAST POD: What Am I Rolling?’ is part of the magazine’s regular series with podcasters, this time with Fiona Howat of the What I am Rolling? podcast, which hosts and runs one-shot games and in the process, showcases a wide variety of games. It is a nice introduction to the podcast and includes advice on trying new games and introducing new games to other players. ‘MAGIC GATHERINGS: Big Bad Con’ interviews the organisers of the California gaming convention which in recent years has shifted to offering a safer, more diverse, and inclusive space and encouraging the participation of persons from minority and LGBTQI+ groups. This showcases a fantastic effort to make the hobby a more welcoming place, one that should perhaps be looked to by other conventions.

Where the interviews are conducted by John Power Jr., Stuart Martyn kicks off the first of the issue’s themes with ‘The Game is Afoot’. As the title of the article suggests, that theme is investigative games, Martyn highlights roleplaying hobby’s fascination with mysteries and investigations. It pinpoints the issues with this type of scenario—their inherent logic puzzle nature which can frustrate some players and the capacity to miss clues. The primary solutions are twofold. First is to make the clues easy to find or automatically found, as in the GUMSHOE System, or have the solution to the mystery determined through play, as in Brindlewood Bay. Both feature heavily in the article and show how to date, the hobby has yet to come up with any better for the investigative style of scenario. ‘Scry Me a River’ by John Power Jr. neatly complements ‘The Game is Afoot’ and continues the investigative theme. This is a look at Rivers of London: The Roleplaying Game, which is based on the series of Urban Fantasy procedurals by Ben Aaronovitch and includes an interview with its creator, Lynn Hardy, exploring its genesis and development, made all the more interesting because the author has experience of gaming. There is even a list of tips from Hardy about running investigative games to go alongside it.

‘Bandes On The Run’ by Luke Frostick brings the investigative theme to a close with a look at and interview with Krister Sundelin, the creator of The Troubleshooters: An Action-Adventure Roleplaying Game, Swedish publisher Helmgast’s roleplaying game based on French and Belgian bande dessinée comics. This covers a wide range of inspirations from James Bond to the action-adventure television of the nineteen sixties and explores the heavier feeling mechanics. The Troubleshooters is a great little game that has not made the impact it deserved and it is nice to see it covered here. ‘Bad Moon Rising’, Mira Manga’s interview with Becky Annison, author of Werewolves of Britain for Liminal, continues the Urban Fantasy theme of Rivers of London: The Roleplaying Game, in exploring her inspirations for the supplement, some of it quite personal, in creating a very good expansion for the game and its setting.

‘Now is The Time of Monsters’ takes interviewer John Power Jr and Dave Allen, producer for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition in a then totally different direction, something that the roleplaying game had been waiting decades for, despite the wargame it is based upon, visiting it more than once across its numerous editions. This is the supplement, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Lustria, which details the mysterious continent far away from the Old World. It quickly catches up with the history of the current edition in publishing what is a director’s cut of the classic campaign, The Enemy Within, and then moves beyond that. It explores what an updated version of the Lustria looks like for the twenty-first century hobby and how it presents the players and their characters with a very different, but no less deadly environment to explore.

Walton Wood’s examination of the retroclone, Errant, and interview with its creator, Ava Islam, ‘Dragons Are Fucking Cool, Man’ starts off in slightly abstract fashion, explaining it pushes away from the classic design of Dungeons & Dragons-style play, attempting to be rules light, but ‘procedure heavy’ in terms of scope. The explanation is not really clear enough, but once the article begins telling you what you play—downtrodden outcasts ever wanting to improve their lifestyles and fund the lifestyles they have combined with Levelling requiring high expenditure of gold pieces in acts of ‘Conspicuous Consumption’—it does impart a sense of what the is about at the least. Ultimately, what is clear is that Errant is the designer’s commentary on the Old School Renaissance movement and it is far from a positive one. This combined with often obtuse explanations upon the part of the designer and the reader is left feeling dissatisfied.

‘Veni, Vidi, Ludo’ by Ciro Alessandro Sacco presents a fascinating history of the Italian gaming and roleplaying hobby, beginning with the importation of Avalon Hill and SPI wargames in the nineteen sixties and seventies and moving through bootleg versions of Dungeons & Dragons to early roleplaying games such as Signori del Caos—or The Lords of Chaos—published by Black Out Editrice in 1983 and then most spectacularly, the Mentzer version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Editrice Giochi in 1985. It is a great introduction and it is a pity that there is not scope for further examination of these early Italian roleplaying games. The breezy article comes to a close all too soon, leaving the reader with any interest in the history of roleplaying games wanting more. It is followed by a short overview of some of the Italian roleplaying games and settings then available in English, including Lex Arcana, Fabula Ultima, and Brancalonia.

The last few articles in the issue explore a handful of boardgames that are very close to the roleplaying hobby, whether that is because of their subject matter or because their publisher also publishes roleplaying games. Three of them combine to give the magazine its second theme—dungeon crawling and board games. The first, ‘Dungeon Crawling Classics’ by Matt Thrower is not, as the title might suggest about the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game from Goodman Games, but a history of the dungeon crawler board game, from Dungeon!, published by TSR, Inc. in 1975 to Descent: Journeys in the Dark published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2005 and its more recent 2021 update, Descent: Legends of the Dark. Also discussed here is HeroQuest, the boardgame from Milton Bradley and Games Workshop that introduced dungeon exploration-style play to a wider audience in the early nineteen nineties. It explores the enduring appeal of the format—its familiarity, excitement, and camaraderie—combined with a physical format that leans into the roleplaying style of Dungeons & Dragons, whilst providing a ready realisation of the action that Dungeons & Dragons does not (at least not without a lot of extra accessories). There are a lot of dungeon crawler board games that the article could have covered and it would have been interesting to look at those options, but overall, this is good introduction to the genre.

Matt Thrower follows this up with ‘The Big Chill’ in which he interviews Isaac Childres, the designer of the mammoth dungeon crawler and adventure game, Gloomhaven, discussing its development and that of its follow up, Frosthaven. There is some similarity between this and other interviews with the designer, such as that which has appeared in the pages of Senet magazine. What this means is that there is not much being said here that is new, but for anyone unaware of Gloomhaven and its heft and effect upon the hobby, this is worth reading. Andi Ewington returns to the classic HeroQuest with ‘Quest Drive’ and how he brought the new version of the board game from Avalon Hill into his home and got his family, some of them slightly reluctantly. It is a fun piece that brings the theme to a close with large dollop of nostalgia.

Finally, the issue comes to close with ‘Trading Places’. Here Emma Partlow talks to Max McCall from Wizards of the Coast to explore how Magic: the Gathering has with its ‘Universes Beyond’ line, produced expansions that draw on the intellectual properties of other publishers. For example, the television series, Stranger Things, and the miniatures wargame, Warhammer 40,000. It does point out that the response to these expansions have been mixed, some embracing them, others seeing them as a distraction from the more traditional fantasy releases for the collectible trading card game, but the point is made that the ‘Universes Beyond’ sets are attracting the interest of fans of the universes they are based on and thus attracting new players. The article is illustrated with some great artwork drawn from the series, but does not show how that artwork will be displayed on the cards, which would perhaps have sold the idea better.

‘LOOT DROP: Automatic Dice Roller’ and ‘LOOT DROP: More Random Treasure’ highlights some gaming knickknacks that might appeal to some gamers, the former also including an interview with the creator of the electronic dice roller from Critical Machine for those who want another means apart from rolling dice, whilst the latter includes a The Wicker Man-style effigy wax candle, complete with wax Sergeant Howe and the Win or Booze beer from brewery

Deviant + Dandy which has a game on the back of the label. The best though is the Githyanki action figure from Super7 based on the Erol Otus’s classic cover image for the Fiend Folio. More interesting though, is ‘Hit Points’, the reviews section which takes in a good mix of board games, roleplaying games, and books. The board games include Undaunted Stalingrad from Osprey Games and the magazine’s ‘Game of the Month’ and Rebellion Games’ redone Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One, whilst the roleplaying games reviewed range from Cy_Borg and The Blade Runner – The Roleplaying Game Starter Set to Out of the Ashes and A Folklore Bestiary. Of course, reviewing reviews is something of a busman’s holiday, so ultimately, although the reviews all both interesting and informative, the most interesting are those of the books, Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s The Ballard of Halo Jones, and Michael Molcher’s I Am The Law about 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd and how it influenced modern policing, both from Rebellion, are the more intriguing.

Physically, Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 4 is clean and tidy, neatly laid out and well written. The artwork is well judged too and overall, the magazine looks great.

Wyrd Science Vol. 1/Issue 4 is a good rather than great issue. It is at its best when exploring something lesser known like Big Bad Con in ‘MAGIC GATHERINGS: Big Bad Con’ and its diversity programme or the look at Italian roleplaying games in ‘Veni, Vidi, Ludo’, but also taking a sidestep to look at something familiar, the dungeon crawl style game, in a different format, the board game with ‘Dungeon Crawling Classics’ and ‘Quest Drive’.

Machenesque Mysteries

In the wake of the Great War, men brought the horrors of the trenches on the Western Front home with them. Yet there was no respite, for there were horrors on the home front. As the Jazz players trumpeted a new golden age and the Bright Young Things danced into the light, some returned to the dark, bucolic wilds of Wales. Promises of sleep free of terrible memories lead to labour of another kind to build edifices deep mountains, of solitary walkers dragged away by creatures out of legend never to be seen again, of young girls playing with new friends in the woods only to return the following day having aged years, of witch-driven cults dedicated to ancient practices that promise healthy harvests. Others returned to the metropolis to become ensnared in dark doings in grimy alleys and fog-shrouded back streets, dank basements, and behind the façades of genteel clubs and societies. Scientists explore beyond the rationality of reason in pursuit of knowledge that only their ancestors understood the dangers of. The Cult of Dionysus spreads its influence as it inducts civil servants and other officials into its ranks. Creatures out of myth and legend prey on the lonely and the lost, unnoticed amongst the city’s teeming masses. There are signs of the occult and weirdness everywhere if you know what to look and have had your eyes opened. There is worse beyond, for on the other side of the Veil lies the Otherworld, which goes by many names—‘TírnAill’ in Ireland, ‘Annwn’ in Wales, ‘Avalon’ in Arthurian legend—and is a strange and twisted domain, home to gods whom our ancestors gave form and name, such as Arawn, Pan, Nodens… There are points where the Veil between this world and the Otherworld is at its weakest and that is when the influence of the Otherworld begins to seep through and worse, even let its gods in.

Fortunately, there is a group of people who know about the Otherworld and investigate signs of the weird and the horrific and the terror it triggers. The Gold Tiberius Society was founded in 1906 as a collective to investigate such occurrences and as these took their toll upon the founding members, it began to look for new members at the beginning of the Jazz Age. Those it invites are of independent means and have the time and inclination to investigate, delve deep into the society’s archives scattered across London, and continue working on the Scarlet Map, a geographical representation of the Veins that seem to connect and criss-cross the capital as well as lead back into the Welsh countryside.

This is the set-up for The Terror Beneath: An Investigative Roleplaying Games of Weird Folk Horror. Published by Osprey Games, best known for roleplaying games such as Hard City: Noir Roleplaying and Jackals – Bronze Age Fantasy Roleplaying, it is written by the author of Romance of the Perilous Land: A Roleplaying Game of British Folklore. It is roleplaying game based on the works of Arthur Machen, the Welsh horror writer, author of books such as The Great God Pan, The White People, and The Inmost Light, who explored themes such as decadence, the degeneration of the human soul, the corruption of the innocent, scientists combining technology with the occult, the revelation that murderous beings from the other side lie behind common folklore, pagan practices to ancient deities, and more. There are elements of folk horror here, but also eldritch horror, such that Machen’s work is seen as a precursor to and influence upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The latter is important in The Terror Beneath in several ways.

The Terror Beneath is written for use with The GUMSHOE System, most notably used in the roleplaying game Trail of Cthulhu, published by Pelgrane Press. Originally designed for the roleplaying games, The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself, the concept behind The GUMSHOE System is that investigative scenarios are difficult to run with most role-playing games. What it does is make sure that not only are the clues needed to push the story and the investigation forward easy to find, but also that the Investigators are competent to find them. Further, if the players and their Investigators want more information, they can look for it and if they have the area of expertise and the points to pay for it, they find that too. Then it is up to the players to interpret what their Investigators have found. The Terror Beneath uses the most recent version of The GUMSHOE System, most recently seen in Cthulhu Confidential and Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. What this means is that Investigative Abilities do not have points, but instead have Pushes, which the player can spend to gain the extra information or a benefit. Nevertheless, this means that The Terror Beneath is compatible with Trail of Cthulhu, Pelgrane Press’ roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, and as its inspiration is the precursor to much of Lovecraft’s fiction, it has links to Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition published by Chaosium, Inc.. For example, Noden appears in the Keeper Rulebook for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, and Machen’s ‘Little People’ appear in the scenario, ‘Plant Y Daear’, in the anthology, Sacraments of Evil.

In terms of framing, The Terror Beneath is set during the 1920s though much of Machen’s fiction was written and takes place before the Great War. The Gold Tiberius Society is a device designed to facilitate investigations and provide a reason for the Investigators to delve into the horrors that lurk in the shadows. It is thus set a decade before Trail of Cthulhu, which takes place in the Desperate Decade of the thirties, but it shares the same squalid metropolis as Bookhounds of London and perhaps a reverence for Britain with Fearful Symmetries. Perhaps as the Roaring Twenties draws to a close, a campaign for The Terror Beneath could dovetail into one or the other, if not both?

What The Terror Beneath does share with Trail of Cthulhu is Modes of Play. In Trail of Cthulhu, these are ‘Pulp’ and ‘Purist’. In The Terror Beneath, they are ‘Terror’ and ‘Pulp’. In ‘Terror’ mode, the Investigators can suffer less Shock and fewer Injury Cards than in ‘Pulp’ Mode, which is slightly more forgiving. That said, The Terror Beneath draws a distinction between ‘Terror’ and ‘Horror’. Terror is the feeling of dread and uncertainty before the actual horror is revealed, and it is this terror that the Game Master should be striving to invoke in her players and their Investigators.

An Investigator in The Terror Beneath is defined by two types of Abilities—Investigative Abilities and General Abilities. Investigative Abilities, such as Assess Honesty, Essayist, Folklore, Occultism, and Streetwise, are used to gain information. If the Investigator has the Investigative Ability, he receives the information or the clue. General Abilities, like Driving, Fighting, Health and Sense Trouble, are more traditional in that their use requires dice to be rolled and a test passed to determine the outcome. He also has a name and a Drive, which motivates the Investigator to expose himself to the terror of the horrors that lie out there, such as ‘Adventure’, ‘Duty’, or ‘Morbid Fascination’. Investigator creation is actually easy and fast. A player selects an Occupation Kit like Antiquarian, Museum Curator, and Scientist, and combines it with a Background Kit such as Conscripted Soldier, Farmhand, Munitions Factory Worker, and Shipbuilder. The Occupation Kit provides the Investigative Abilities, whilst the Background Kit provides the General Abilities.

Name: Winifred Messam
Drive: Show-Off
Occupation Kit: Bright Young Thing
Background Kit: Silver Spoon
Investigative Abilities: Charm, Culture, Inspiration, Society
General Abilities: Athletics 5, Composure 7, Driving 4, Fighting 5, First Aid2, Health 6, Mechanics 0, Preparedness 2, Sense Trouble 1, Sneaking 0

There are some notably different Investigative Abilities. ‘Dérive’ is the ability to notice the strange changes and differences in London from walking the streets regularly, whilst ‘Essayist’ represents the writer's ability to navigate literary London, understand its numerous figures and their relationships, and present a coherent argument on the page and in person.

Mechanically, an Investigator in The Terror Beneath only spends Pushes for Investigative Abilities to gain extra clues beyond the basic, and then points from the General Abilities to perform actions. In general, an Investigator does not necessarily fail in a task, but instead fails forward, perhaps finding another way to approach the task or succeeding with a complication. A Push is used in conjunction with an Investigative Ability. For example, if used in conjunction with Linguistics, the Investigator might acquire an occult tome for a better price, set up a working relationship with an expert philologist, notice that a tome is a palimpsest, and so on. Once spent, there will be moments in play when the points from General Abilities and Pushes can be refreshed.

Combat in The Terror Beneath is designed to have a narrative flow and be brutal. Initiative order is determined by the number of points from the Fighting General Ability invested in the fight and then the progress of the fight is tracked by the margin between the Difficulty number for the foe and the die result each player rolls. Individually, if the result is less than the Difficulty number, then the Investigator will suffer the effects of the foe’s Minor Injury or Major Injury Card, depending upon how low the margin is. If the result is equal to, or higher than, the Difficulty number, then the Investigator succeeds and the player can narrate how his Investigator carries out the objectives set out at the beginning of the fight. If it is three or more, it is kept at three and the Investigator will receive a Fight Benefit, such as a Push or a refreshed General Ability, at the end of the combat. Even if the Investigator succeeds, he still suffers a Toll, the effect of actually fighting the foe. Typically, this will be a levy of a single General Ability Point, which can come from Athletics, Fighting, or Health. At the end of the round, the running total the margins determines if the fight is going in the Investigators’ favour or against them.

Injuries are handled as Injury Cards, which can be Major or Minor. For example, the Minor Injury Card for a Hound of Annwn is ‘Annwn Bite’ and the Major Injury Card is ‘Annwn Paralysis’. Mental hazards require a Composure test and, on a failure, the Investigator will suffer a Minor Shock or a Major Shock. For example, when the Investigator enters a foreboding place, the Minor Shock is ‘Foreboding Place’, but the Major Shock is ‘Terrible Place’. These typically last for the length of an investigation, and impose penalties upon an Investigator’s actions. An Investigator cannot have three Injury Cards or three Shock Cards, although he could have two of either. However, if the third and final Card is an Injury Card, the Investigator is dead, or loses grip on reality if a Shock Card. Either way, the player has the opportunity to narrate the outcome. The Terror Beneath lists all of the Shock and Injury Cards in the back of the book.

Combat focuses on brawling rather than shootouts. In fact, there are no stats for guns in The Terror Beneath, but this does not mean that they are not present in the Roaring Twenties it portrays. Rather they are in the hands of NPCs rather than the Investigators. For example, the Gangster is armed and it is possible for an Investigator to be shot. This is represented by a Minor Injury Card and a Major Injury Card, ‘Grazed’ and ‘Shot’ respectively. Melee attacks are handled in the same way, such as the ‘Cudgel Blow’ and ‘A Thorough Thrashing’ Injury Cards. There is thus a brutality to combat and the Investigators are trying to avoid suffering damage and its deleterious effect as much as inflicting it on their foes or stopping what they are doing. Combat in The Terror Beneath is something to be avoided.

Similar to a Mental hazard, it takes a Composure test to perform sorcery and if failed the caster suffers a Major Shock. There may also be a Toll on the caster’s Athletics, Fighting, or Health, even if successful. This can be one, two, or three points, so it is often better to cast spells as a group. Some spells require a higher Bleed value for the spell to be cast without penalty. The list of spells in The Terror Beneath is not extensive, but this is not a roleplaying in which the Investigators will be casting a lot of spells.

In terms of setting and background, The Terror Beneath presents a broad overview, that over the course of the book looks at Arthur Machen’s fiction, weird folk horror investigations, the Gold Tiberius Society, and both London and Wales, the two contrasting locations for Machen’s fiction. For London there are descriptions of the various cults and secret societies in the city, whilst for Wales there are the places of power in the rural countryside and the pagan cults found there. Both cults and societies provide numerous human threats with links to the Otherworld and the terrors that the Game Master can develop as the basis for her scenarios. Besides the gods of the Otherworld and numerous creatures drawn from folklore and definitely dark and dangerous, there is advice for the Game Master on handling both Terror and Horror, primarily by building points where Terror might strike into a scenario, building backwards from the horror to create the mystery and basis of the investigation, laying out clues, and so on.

The Terror Beneath includes a scenario, ‘Mystery: Don’t Sleep’. The Investigators are called in to look into the sudden disappearance of a London dock worker. This is set in the capital—there is no mystery set in rural Wales in The Terror Beneath—and takes the Investigator into the communities of London’s docks and veterans of the Great War to discover the consequences of a secret military project conducted during the war. It explores Machen’s theme of misused science and its vile consequences.

Physically, The Terror Beneath is a relatively slim book. The book is well written, though lightly illustrated with dark, murky artwork which swirls with threat and peculiarity.

The Terror Beneath is published at a time when the interest in folk horror continues to grow and grow, yet it offers more than that. Its horror is eldritch and ancient, verging on the unknowable, yet rooted in folkloric explanations for the unknown, so there is a familiarity to elements of it. This is more cultural in origin as opposed to the unknowable we have learned from the pen of H.P. Lovecraft and through roleplaying games such as Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu. Setting The Terror Beneath in the Roaring Twenties means that we can explore a period normally associated with Lovecraftian investigative horror and do so without the negative aspects of Lovecraft’s writings. Ultimately, The Terror Beneath: An Investigative Roleplaying Games of Weird Folk Horror enables us to explore the horror of Arthur Machen, his precursor, primordial and peculiar, veiled and vile, and regarded as the first modern writer of the genre.

Solo Stakes

You wake. You are in a hospital bed. There is an IV in your arm and you are pretty sure you have been shot from the injury in your side. From the voices and the view from the window, you think you are in Hungary. You have no idea how you got here… Do you have amnesia? You can recall the sharp taste of blood, running through some woods, something swooping down at you and shrieking… Did you bite your tongue? Were you chased? And if so, by what, a bird? This is the set-up for ‘Never say Dead’, the first of three scenarios, which together form the basis of a mini-campaign for Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. Published by Pelgrane Press, this a campaign framework for Night’s Black Agents: the Vampire Spy Thriller RPG, the roleplaying game in which the Player Characters are ex-secret agents who have learned that their former employers are controlled by vampires and decide to take down the vampiric conspiracy before the vampires take them. Night’s Black Agents offers a range of tools which the Game Master, or Director, can design the vampire conspiracy and the vampire threat, from psychic alien leeches to the traditional children of Transylvania, and set the tone and style of the espionage, from the high octane of the James Bond franchise to the dry and mundane grittiness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. What Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops does is combine Night’s Black Agents with the GUMSHOE One-2-One System first seen in Cthulhu Confidential. This enables the Director to run and the player to experience the intensity and intrigue of an action-horror film.

Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is more than just the set-up for a trilogy of scenarios. It provides the rules for the GUMSHOE One-2-One System—adjusted to fit the setting of Night’s Black Agents—and the means for the Director to create her own. Just like Night’s Black Agents and the GUMSHOE System, an Agent in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and the GUMSHOE One-2-One System has two types of Abilities—Investigative Abilities and General Abilities. Investigative Abilities, such as Cryptography and Negotiation, are used to gain information. If the Investigator has the Investigative Ability, he receives the information or the clue. General Abilities, like Driving and Sense Trouble, are more traditional in that their use requires dice to be rolled and a test passed to determine success or failure. Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops then deviates from this in order to account for the fact that there is only the one Investigator rather than many as in Night’s Black Agents. With multiple players, all of the Investigative Abilities would be accounted across the Investigators. Not so in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. So, when an Agent lacks an Investigative Ability, he can instead turn to an NPC or source for help as a Contact. A Contact can be written into a scenario, but an Agent can convert an NPC into a Contact or a player can create one during play. In Night’s Black Agents, Investigative Abilities have pools of points which can be spent to gain extra clues about a situation, but in Night’s Black Agents, the Agent has Pushes, which the player can spend to gain the extra information or a benefit. This applies to any Investigative Ability and could be used to gain the Agent extra information using the Interrogation Investigative Ability, gain greater insight into a suspect using the Detect Bullshit Investigative Ability, and so on. An Agent begins a scenario with three Pushes and can earn more through play.

In Night’s Black Agents, General Abilities also have pools of points, which are then expended to modify dice rolls for tests. In Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, General Abilities have two six-sided dice, which are also rolled on Tests. Tests are rolled when there is the possibility of failure in a situation, such as getting past a doorman to break into a suspect’s office or fleeing from the inhuman monster found in said suspect’s office, and are divided into two types. In either case, the player rolls the dice one at a time and totals their values. This is important because some Tests can be overcome with the roll of the one die rather than two dice. The Challenge is the more complex and more interesting of the two.

A Challenge gives three results—‘Advance’, ‘Hold’, and ‘Setback’. The ‘Advance’ is the equivalent of ‘Yes, and…’ and indicates a successful attempt with an extra benefit. This benefit is called an Edge and can prove useful later in the investigation. In addition, if the Challenge was overcome with the roll of a single die, then the Investigator is rewarded with an additional Push. The ‘Setback’ is the equivalent of ‘No, and…’ and indicates a failed attempt with an added Problem that will hamper the investigation. The ‘Hold’ lies somewhere in between with the Investigator no better or worse off, and also without an Edge or a Problem. It is also possible for the Investigator to suffer an Extra Problem in order to gain an additional die to roll in the hope of gaining an ‘Advance’. A player can gain extra dice for a Challenge by accepting an Extra Problem or having his Agent perform a Stunt, which uses dice from another General Ability. This requires a little explanation of how it works and it depletes the use of that General Ability until the Agent effectively rests. Effectively, what a Challenge does is codify a set of narrative outcomes that can help or hinder an Agent, whilst still pushing the narrative of the scenario forward.

In comparison, a Quick Test requires a simple roll to gain an ‘Advance’ result. The structure of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and its scenarios presents Challenges in clear test boxes, and both Edges and Problems as essentially cards that are given to the player to add to his Agent. Fights, chases, infiltrating a base, and so on, are all handled as Challenges. Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is action-orientated, so there is the possibility of an Agent getting killed. The consequences differ greatly between Night’s Black Agents and Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. In Night’s Black Agents, the death of an Agent can easily be replaced whereas in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, the death means the end of the investigation and the scenario, so whilst fights are dangerous, they are not lethal—and that applies to the NPCs or vampires as much as the Agent. The Agent can suffer debilitating injury or loss, but can recover through the ‘Take Time to Recover’ action. Similarly, the antagonist, whether mundane or monstrous, is not killed, but suffers a loss that will benefit the Agent in some way, represented by an Edge. However, this only applies in the early scenes of a scenario, and as a scenario progresses, fights and confrontations become increasingly deadly.

An Agent also has Mastery Edges which are attached to specific General Abilities. These reflect both the Agent’s intensive training and experience, but also how capable the Agent is in terms of the cinematic genre of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. They typically provide a one-time effect which ignores the rules in a particular situation or grant a bonus to the dice rolls on a Challenge. For example, ‘The Nick of Time’ is a Preparedness Edge that enables an Agent to have done something retroactively that helps him in his current situation, such as planting a bomb, bribing a custom official, reconnoitring an avenue of escape, and so forth, whereas ‘Intuition’ for the Sense Trouble General Ability grants an extra die on a Challenge. An Agent begins play with three Edges and discards them after use.

As in action films, there are consequences to an Agent’s activities. These are tracked by three cumulative factors. Heat is gained for public fights or explosions, people getting hurt, and committing criminal acts, and as it rises, it can trigger Problems that affect an Agent’s progress or actual Challenges. Injury represents physical impairment, whilst Shadow determines how aware the supernatural threat is of the Agent. It is gained by encountering supernatural entities, attracting their attention, thwarting their conspiracies, and recalling previous encounters with vampires. The latter is important for the Agent for the three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, since she begins play suffering from amnesia. Shadow will also Problems to an Agent’s progress, but can be lost by killing vampires or fleeing to another city, or suppressed by using garlic or crossing running water. Both Heat and Shadow can also trigger another effect, and that is Blowback. This can be a repercussion, retaliation, or unintended consequences of an Agent’s actions and is typically framed as a Blowback scene that the Director inserts into the narrative.

In Night’s Black Agents, an Agent has the Stability General Ability, which is used to measure an Agent’s ability to withstand the supernatural abilities of the vampires he will face, as well as those of the other monsters that he might encounter—demons, ghosts, and ghouls, as well as Renfields. In Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, the Agent instead has the Cool General Ability. This is used to overcome stressful situations and resist the compulsions that a vampire might place upon an Agent. Mechanically, it will use Challenges in most situations and poor results will trigger problems for the Agent. Many of the powers and effects that a vampire can have on an Agent are modelled through Problems.

For the player, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops presents a good explanation of how an Agent is presented, how the rules work, and on how to play. This includes details on tradecraft and notably, the ‘Bucharest Rules’. These are akin to the ‘Moscow Rules’ that guided Cold War operations in Eastern European and they are similar, but given a suitably vampiric twist for Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. They emphasise that although the situation is dangerous and that the Agent can die, he can win, that he needs to be proactive, he should follow the money and use HUMINT, build networks of contacts and allies, and always know where the exit is. This is supported by several factors. First, that the play is more about interpreting the clues found rather than the finding of them (and that if unsure of where to go next, looking for more clues is always a good choice), and second, that the Player Character, the Agent, is the hero of the story. This is contrasted by the fact that Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops literally pulls the safety net out from under the player. No longer can he rely upon his fellow players and their Agents for advice or help. Barring contacts and allies within the game, the player and his Agent is on his own. That is a scary situation for the player—in addition to his Agent facing vampires—and the player is being asked to be proactive from the start of a scenario to the end. In other words, he is always in the spotlight.

For the Director, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops explains how the rules work and gives advice on how to run the game. This applies not just to the three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, but also in general as the advice includes a guide to creating and designing vampires, conspiracies, scenes, Challenges, Problems, and more for her own scenarios. This includes a full range of sample Challenges. Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops still employs the ‘Conspyramid’, the pyramid structure used to map out the vampire conspiracy, with the vampire leaders of the conspiracy sitting atop both the structure and the organisation and the base containing the outer edges of the conspiracy. However, here it is much narrower, reflecting the tighter focus upon the single Agent and his investigation in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. The advice throughout the section for the Director is fulsome.

Half of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is dedicated to its three scenarios. The protagonist for these is Leyla Khan, an ex-MI6 officer who has been a thrall of the vampires of the vampires for several years at the start of the first scenario. Not only will she have to confront her former masters, but she will also have to deal with the consequences of her own half-remembered past and its own monstrous activities. The antagonists are vampires, Linea Dracula, descended from Vlad Tepes and surprisingly ‘vanilla’ in terms of their design and abilities. This, though, works for an action-horror like that of the three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops because it does not complicate the story or the antagonists. Plus, there is plenty of scope for the Director to modify them if she so chooses. That said, the Director could easily ignore the vampire aspect of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and create scenarios focusing on more traditional espionage stories and they could be as tense and as exciting, though not necessarily as horrifying.

The mini campaign opens in classic The Bourne Identity style in ‘Never Say Dead’. Leyla Khan is in hospital with no memory of how she got there and very quickly she receives a message that someone is coming for her. ‘Never Say Dead’ is about escape, discovering the first hints of the vampiric conspiracy that Leyla has been enthralled in for the past few years and a conspiracy within the vampiric conspiracy, and perhaps arm herself to take the conspiracies down. Having escaped Hungary in ‘Never Say Dead’, Leyla Khan begins to do what she is trained to do and that is follow the money. In ‘No Grave For Traitors’ this leads her to Spain where she gets caught up in a drug war and from there follows a courier to London and an auction for a number of odd antiquities, and ultimately to their strange origins in Transylvania. Although there is plenty of action, there is more of an emphasis on investigation in this second scenario. The third scenario, ‘The Deniable Woman’, Leyla is given a mission by her former employer, MI6, to look for a missing agent in Moscow who has his own preoccupations. The investigation leads in another direction away from the central conspiracy, though it is tangentially connected. All three scenarios are very good, being tense, fraught affairs with a mix of exciting action scenes and tight interactions. Some of the scenarios are truly memorable and consequently, definitely not worth spoiling. All three are part of the same conspiracy involving Leyla Khan, but together, they do not form a beginning, a middle, and an end. They are definitely a beginning, perhaps with a middle, but leaving the end for the Director to create.

All three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops are well organised. They include a backstory and an overview of the objectives that Leyla will be aiming to attain—even though she may not be aware of them at the beginning of a scenario, entry vectors for Leyla, a flowchart of the scenes, its cast, and then the various scenes with their associated Challenges and Problems and Edges to be gained through play. Each scenario’s range of Problems and Edges is given after the end of the scenario. Each scenario ends with a discussion of its aftermath and possible Blowback scenes and consequences. ‘No Grave For Traitors’ and ‘The Deniable Woman’ also add starting problems which the player can choose from as a consequence of her ongoing story and confrontation with her past.

One aspect of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops—and also of Cthulhu Confidential—is that the GUMSHOE One-2-One System and having a single player and a single Game Master, is that it can be played online just as easily as it can face-to-face. Playing online means losing a certain degree of interaction between the players and the Game Master, both because of the technology and the loss of visual cues that act as a buffer, but Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and GUMSHOE One-2-One System ameliorates that because its focus is always on the one player and the one Game Master and their focus is on each other.

As good as it is very much all about Leyla Khan and it does leave her story hanging, unfinished. There are rules for a player to create his own Agent, but that really, is the focus of missions created by the Director rather than those in the book. It is possible for the three missions to be played using a player-created Agent, but this will require some adjustment upon the part of the Director. The three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops are really the start of a campaign, rather than a complete one. Essentially, it is up to the Director to create the next parts of the campaign. She is given all of the tools and advice to do that, but at the same time, it is disappointing not to be able to pick up where ‘The Deniable Woman’ left off and quickly find out what happens next. There is another scenario for Leyla Khan, ‘The Best of Intentions’, but that is all so far. There can be no doubt that a sequel to Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, bringing her story to a close would be more than welcome.

Physically, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is very well presented and written, and the artwork is decent. The book itself is a pleasure to read.

In comparison to the earlier Cthulhu Confidential, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is a much tighter, more focused affair. This is due to it being focused on the one protagonist and the one antagonist, essentially, the single Agent and vampires. This also has the consequence of making Leyla Khan’s story more personal for the player and more involving. The result is that Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops provides a great playing experience, tense and exciting, telling the player to, “Buckle up, you’re in the spotlight now and your fate truly is in your hands” all in readiness to make his Agent the star of their own action-horror film.

Terror for Two Again

Even Death Can Die is an anthology of scenarios for Cthulhu Confidential, the GUMSHOE One-2-One System version for Trail of Cthulhu, the roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Published by Pelgrane Press, Cthulhu Confidential is designed to be played head-to-head, with the player and his Investigator delving into a mystery, the Game Master helping to facilitate this and tell the story of the Investigator’s efforts. In addition to the new rules and a guide to Cthulhu Mythos and Cosmic Horror for beginners, Cthulhu Confidential also included three scenarios that were the highlight of the book. Each includes a different protagonist and is by a different author, and each brought noir horror and a different code of honour to a different city in the thirties and forties. The three Investigators are Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond, a Private Investigator in Los Angeles, 1937, obviously inspired by works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet; Vivian Sinclair, an investigative journalist and lady detective in thirties New York, inspired by Kerry Greenwood and Dorothy L. Sayers; and Langston Montgomery Wright, an African American invalided veteran Private Investigator in Washington D.C. towards the end of World War II, inspired by Walter Mosely and Chester Himes. These are created and written by Robin D. Laws for Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond, Ruth Tillman for Vivian Sinclair, and Chris Spivey for Langston Montgomery Wright, and in each case, the authors also address the social and cultural aspects of their settings. This is where Even Death Can Die picks up.

Even Death Can Die consists of not one, but nine scenarios. Three for each of the three investigators. Over the course of the nonet, the Investigators will get thrown across time and space, back into their memories, and confront some familiar creatures and entities of the Mythos, get involved in local and national politics, and more. Each of the three scenarios for each Investigator is designed to be played as their first investigation or as sequels to the scenarios in Cthulhu Confidential for their respective Investigators. Thus, ‘The Fathomless Sleep’ in Los Angeles as Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond, ‘Fatal Frequencies’ in New York as Vivian Sinclair, and ‘Capitol Colour’ Washington DC as Langston Montgomery Wright. All nine are complete with their own protagonists, settings, and Problems and Edges, and all the player has to do as part of his preparation is ensure that the Investigator for the scenario being played has a Problem that will make the Investigation all the more personally difficult. This can be a new one from the scenario, or the one carried over from the investigations in Cthulhu Confidential. In addition, throughout the anthology there are sections marked as ‘Handle With Care’, which are entirely optional, but which highlight a social situation or attitude that was unfortunately prevalent during the period when the individual scenarios are set.

Even Death Can Die does not waste any time in getting down to business. Following a quick explanation, it opens with ‘One For the Money’, the first of three scenarios for Langston Montgomery Wright, set in and around Washington DC. It opens with him being hired—in a menacing manner—by Rhino Jones, a local gangster, to find out who and why some attacked and killed his men just as they were conducting a robbery on a truck. This gets the anthology off to a great start as our protagonist attempts to locate the bodies of those killed, possible survivors, and whatever it was that was in the back of the truck. The scenario not so much veers into the Pulp genre as leans into it with its combination of corrupt businessmen and politicians, gangsters and the Mob, Nazi spies, and what those in the know hope is a war-winning secret weapon prototype. It all feels just a bit like a combination of The Rocketeer and ‘From Beyond’, made all the more woozy when the device gets turned on and sends everyone’s senses for a loop.

If ‘One For the Money’ is a just a bit bonkers, then for Langston Montgomery Wright ‘The Shadow Over Washington’ gets weird. He is hired to investigate why a young engineering student, placed in a sanatorium by his parents on medical grounds, is not getting better and does not appear to be receiving the treatment he should. Surprisingly, getting to the patient and to the doctor treating him is relatively easy, but only in following up on another private investigator’s enquiries does look like there are others suffering from the same problem as the student. Langston Montgomery Wright finds himself on bloody trail that leads to a strange youth movement, even stranger doings at Washington National Airport, and then an utterly weird situation in which he is both someone else and somewhere else. Similar situations have been depicted in many a scenario of Lovecraftian investigative horror, but always to NPCs. Here the author makes it both personal and desperate and it will probably the standout scene for the scenario.

If ‘One For the Money’ is bonkers and ‘The Shadow Over Washington’ weird, the third scenario for Langston Montgomery Wright gets horribly personal, delving back in his own terrible memories and those of others, depicting the terrible racism of their respective pasts. In ‘Preacher Man Blues’, Langston Montgomery Wright is hired by a number of different denomination churches to investigate a traveling fire and brimstone preacher who has come to the capitol. They want him gone because he is attracting their congregations and the police want him gone—at the very least—because he is disturbing the peace. This is a nasty scenario with some shocking scenes (with more shocking content in the optional descriptions), plus a very chilling interview with J. Edgar Hoover that results in our private investigator having the full weight of the law upon his back. Fortunately, the shocking scenes are handled with care and the cultural aspects of Langston Montgomery Wright’s own community portrayed with sensitivity. Which really does make the horror of ‘Preacher Man Blues’ that much worse…

‘The Howling Fog’ shifts the action to New York in the first of the three scenarios for investigative journalist Vivian Sinclair. An undercover investigation into the city’s mob run clipjoints where the male clientele are fleeced for as much money as possible turns nasty when the boss, a Made Man, is found dead on the street with his head all bent out of shape. As the mobsters begin to circle each other, Vivian Sinclair widens her investigation to include Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, but the investigation will ultimately lead back where she started. There is a pleasing contrast in interreacting and roleplaying with the women who work in the clipjoints and the increasingly wary members of the mob in the scenario, and as a whole, the scenario also contrasts with the previous three in being a much smaller scale investigation. It is also much grubbier and sleazier as you would expect given its setting and subject matter.

Labour relations are the subject of Vivian Sinclair’s next investigation in ‘Ex Astoria’. Reporting on a riot between striking labourers working on a big tunnelling project under New York and scab labour brought, reveals that the labour dispute is not without substance. The labourers, many of whom suffer from the bends due to rapid changes in pressure working underground are suffering from other injuries and a strange wasting disease following a badly handled demolition in the tunnel and exposure to an acidic fluid. Investigation means getting into the site itself and there Vivian Sinclair will discover the source of the corrosive liquid and a malign influence, which if not contained, will result in an environmental disaster for New York. The scenario has a neat epilogue which foreshadows a great event in the city in 1939—the World Fair—and it would be interesting to see a sequel to ‘Ex Astoria’ set at that event.

Vivian Sinclair gets some time off—or at least, she almost does—in her third and final scenario in the anthology. In ‘Boundary Waters’, she accepts an invitation to a benefit gala aboard a gambling ship out in international waters off New York, hosted by her third cousin, society heiress Tabitha ‘Tabby’ Sinclair. However, Vivian Sinclair has got wind that ship is doing more than just hosting booze, dice, and dancing parties, it is regularly making a diversion to offshore Long Island, where it locks the passengers in their cabins because of the weather and even has passengers who do not play the tables. What could the Buena Vida being doing in international waters off new York in 1938? The scenario balances dealing with Tabitha and her charity event, the private investigator hired by Tabitha’s father to keep a watch on her, a murder, and the odd activity of several illegal aliens aboard ship. It is a really good mix and having it set aboard ship—sadly without any deckplans—serves to keep everything shipshape and Bristol fashion and the investigation focused. If things do not go her way, there is a potentially nasty ending for Vivian Sinclair, but otherwise this is a nicely done period piece made all the more sparky by the presence of a noted literary wit.

The last trilogy of scenarios begins in traditional fashion when a widow walks into the offices of Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond and asks him to confirm that the death of her husband in a car accident was not a suicide, which is what the insurance company suspects. ‘The House Up in the Hills’ looks at first to be an ordinary case, but when the private investigator visits the house of the husband’s new client, it begins to look stranger. The house itself is not only strange, but the background to its original architect took a tragic turn with a suicide attempt—as when explained by the architect from the high security cell of the psychiatric ward that is his home now—the house itself wanted to kill itself! Further investigation points toward the client’s friends and colleagues, who together once formed a sorcerous coven. Are any of them still practicing is a question that Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond will have to answer as he suffers attacks by swarms of rats and illusions. The scenario—the only one in the anthology to include the traditional handouts of Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying—crosses elements of The Dreams in the Witch House with Rats in the Walls, but has potential to end as a weird whodunnit.

Film props are the MacGuffin in ‘High Voltage Kill’, the second scenario for Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond in the anthology. Inspired by the film He Walked by Night and the true crime case which inspired that, the private investigator is hired to locate several key set pieces from 1931’s Frankenstein, all with an electrical theme, and all recently stolen him in a stick-up robbery. The clues all point to a desperate crook, who will stop at nothing to achieve his aims and who somehow is connected to some ordinary folks turned strangely unstoppable killers. This is the most complex of the nine scenarios in terms of its scene timing and the Game Master will have a good grasp of the options provided. More Science Fiction horror than eldritch horror, ‘High Voltage Kill’ is also the most combative scenario in the anthology.

The final scenario in Even Death Can Die is also the third of Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond’s three cases. In ‘Skin and Teeth’, gangsters hire him to do them a favour: find out exactly what it is that a maid found under a bed of a hotel that they own. What she found looks like the completely flensed skin of a human male! From this gruesome start, connecting one crook to another, points to the involvement of a former city councillor whom the last crook is definite about said former city councillor being an imposter. He is also absolutely definite about wanting the names of board members at the city’s Department of Water and Power, likely connected to an environmental disaster about ten years before. Much like ‘The House Up in the Hills’ before it, ‘Skin and Teeth’ involves interviewing multiple persons before Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond can locate and confront the ancient forces behind the bloody skin bag left behind, who can be found deep under the city, in a temple to an alien god. As with the scenarios before it, ‘Skin and Teeth’ is a rich and meaty investigation.

Physically, Even Death Can Die is as crisply presented a black and white book as was Cthulhu Confidential. It needs a slight edit in places, but is well written and engaging. It is very lightly illustrated and there are relatively few maps in the scenarios. The Game Master will definitely need to refer to Cthulhu Confidential for details of the three cities where the anthology’s scenarios are set.

One of the great features of Cthulhu Confidential with its use of the GUMSHOE One-2-One System, is that it makes Lovecraftian investigative horror a much more intense and personal experience in terms of both the investigative process and the horror itself. This feature is undoubtedly upheld in this anthology. The result is that Even Death Can Die makes both its horror and its roleplaying much more personal, as well as challenging because the player is on his own, and thus more intimate, and it does so with great set of scenarios, all strongly grounded in their time and place. Cthulhu Confidential, the combination of the background to Trail of Cthulhu with the GUMSHOE One-2-One System, is very well served with Even Death Can Die.

Terror for Two

The aim of Cthulhu Confidential is to take a player and a Game Master “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” And it is specifically a player and a Game Master, for Cthulhu Confidential is designed to be played head-to-head, with the player and his Investigator delving into a mystery, the Game Master helping to facilitate this and tell the story of the Investigator’s efforts. Published by Pelgrane Press, Cthulhu Confidential is set in the same world as the publisher’s Trail of Cthulhu, the roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, but with major changes—most of them mechanical. This is to facilitate the change from the clue-orientated nature of Trail of Cthulhu using the GUMSHOE System and for several Investigators to the single player and single Game Master and the GUMSHOE One-2-One System. In addition to including the new rules, Cthulhu Confidential includes a guide for the Game Master to create her own GUMSHOE One-2-One System scenarios, a guide to Cthulhu Mythos and Cosmic Horror for beginners, and three scenarios. These are the highlight of Cthulhu Confidential, each with a different protagonist and by a different author, and each bringing noir horror and a different code of honour to another city in the thirties and forties.

Cthulhu Confidential assumes that the Game Master and player alike are familiar with both roleplaying and the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. There are introductions to both in the book, but they are not its starting point. Similarly, there is a set of Starter Notes for the experienced GUMSHOE System Game Master in the appendix, but again this is not the starting point in Cthulhu Confidential. This the nature of the Investigator and the investigative process for one. Just like Trail of Cthulhu and the GUMSHOE System, an Investigator in Cthulhu Confidential and the GUMSHOE One-2-One System has two types of Abilities—Investigative Abilities and General Abilities. Investigative Abilities, such as Assess Honesty and Research, are used to gain information. If the Investigator has the Investigative Ability, he receives the information or the clue. General Abilities, like Driving and Shadowing, are more traditional in that their use requires dice to be rolled and a test passed to determine success or failure. Cthulhu Confidential then deviates from this in order to account for the fact that there is only the one Investigator rather than many as in Trail of Cthulhu. With multiple players, all of the Investigative Abilities would be accounted across the Investigators. Not so in Cthulhu Confidential. So, when an Investigator lacks an Investigative Ability, he can instead turn to an NPC or source for help. In Trail of Cthulhu, Investigative Abilities have pools of points which can be spent to gain extra clues about a situation, but in Cthulhu Confidential, the Investigator has Pushes, which the player can spend to gain the extra information or a benefit. This applies to any Investigative Ability and could be used to spring the Investigator from jail on a bogus arrest using the Law Investigative Ability, persuade the doorman at a suspect’s office that you have not been asking about his whereabouts, and so on. An Investigator begins a scenario with four Pushes and can earn more through play.

In Trail of Cthulhu, General Abilities also have pools of points, which are then expended to modify dice rolls for tests. In Cthulhu Confidential, General Abilities have one or two six-sided dice, which are also rolled on Tests. Tests are rolled when there is the possibility of failure in a situation, such as getting past a doorman to break into a suspect’s office or fleeing from the inhuman monster found in said suspect’s office, and are divided into two types. In either case, the player rolls the dice—if his Investigator has more than one—one at a time and totals their values. This is important because some Tests can be overcome with the roll of the one die rather than two dice. The Challenge is the more complex and more interesting of the two.

A Challenge gives three results—‘Advance’, ‘Hold’, and ‘Setback’. The ‘Advance’ is the equivalent of ‘Yes, and…’ and indicates a successful attempt with an extra benefit. This benefit is called an Edge and can prove useful later in the investigation. In addition, if the Challenge was overcome with the roll of a single die, then the Investigator is rewarded with an additional Push. The ‘Setback’ is the equivalent of ‘No, and…’ and indicates a failed attempt with an added Problem that will hamper the investigation. The ‘Hold’ lies somewhere in between with the Investigator no better or worse off, and also without an Edge or a Problem. It is also possible for the Investigator to suffer an Extra Problem in order to gain an additional die to roll in the hope of gaining an ‘Advance’.

For example, Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond, the Private Investigator presented as the first protagonist in Cthulhu Confidential has been hired by the wife of Lorenzo Calderone, nightclub owner and suspected mob associate. She wants a divorce and suspects her husband of cooking the books to reduce her settlement and alimony. She does not think that the real account books are kept at home or the nightclub, but at the office of her husband’s lawyer, Crispin Grimes. To get those books, Raymond needs to get past the doorman and into the office. So, the Challenge could look like this:

COOKED BOOKS
Stealth
Advance 6+: You get past the doorman and into Grimes’ office where you find the account books. No one knows the books are missing and when they find out, who took them. Earn Edge: ‘Crooked Books.’
Hold 3-5: The doorman does his rounds just as you are about to break in and you are not going to get past him now.
Setback 2 or less: You initially get past the doorman, but just as you are about to get into Grimes’ office, he spots on his rounds. Triggers Challenge ‘Flee the Building.’
Extra Problem: ‘There was this one guy poking around…’

EDGE: ‘Crooked Books.’ You got the account books Mrs Calderone wanted, so case settled. But if you keep a copy yourself, it could keep her husband or his lawyer off your back.
PROBLEM: ‘There was this one guy poking around…’ The theft puts Lorenzo Calderone and Crispin Grimes on edge. A Push is needed to successfully use any Interpersonal skill with both.

In comparison, a Quick Test requires to simple roll to gain an ‘Advance’ result. The structure of Cthulhu Confidential and its scenarios presents Challenges as clear, black boxes of test and both Edges and Problems as essentially cards that are given to the player to add to his Investigator. Fights and both Horror and Madness, key elements of the two genres for Cthulhu Confidential—noir detective stories and Cosmic Horror—are handled as Challenges, typically using the Fighting General Ability for combat and the Stability General Ability when confronted with something horrifying. This is another place where Cthulhu Confidential differs from the multiplayer Trail of Cthulhu, because in Trail of Cthulhu, the Investigators can afford to lose one of their number, whether from a fight or madness, and such a loss is easily replaced. Not so in Cthulhu Confidential. Here a loss means the end of the investigation and the scenario, so whilst fights are dangerous, they are not lethal—and that applies to the NPCs or monsters as much as the Investigator. The investigator can suffer debilitating injury or loss, but can recover through the ‘Take Time to Recover’ action. Similarly, the antagonist, whether mundane or monstrous, is not killed, but suffers a loss that will benefit the Investigator in some way, represented by an Edge. Encounters or confrontations with horror work in the same fashion, although a ‘Setback’ will penalise the Investigator with a ‘Mythos Shock’ Problem. These cannot always be countered with the ‘Take Time to Recover’ action and instead require an Edge capable of countering a ‘Mythos Shock’ Problem. This is not to say that the Investigator cannot die or be sent mad, but this does not happen mid-story. Instead, it can become all too much at the end. This is especially so if the Investigator is left with a ‘Mythos Shock’ Problem or two or more that he has been unable to deal with in the course of the investigation. The remaining Problem cards will affect the narration of the investigation’s outcome and ending, typically in downbeat fashion to fit the twin genres of Cthulhu Confidential. If the Investigator survives, his player can retain these Problems to carry over into the next scenario—some he has to and some he can choose—and they will continue to influence the Investigator’s efforts until addressed. Even at the start of the first scenario, an Investigator has an ongoing problem, although the player is typically given a choice as to what that problem is.

For the Game Master there is advice on running the GUMSHOE One-2-One System. This covers guiding the player (gently) and avoiding the sticking points common to mystery and investigation scenarios, taking into account the nature of its single player and Investigator play style. This includes advice on running both sources and challenges and there is similar treatment on creating scenarios, building Challenges, and designing Edges. This is backed up with numerous examples which the Game Master can use for inspiration as well as model for her own scenarios. The appendix for Cthulhu Confidential includes a Rules Quick Reference, a Handout for New Roleplayers, lists of sources for all three protagonists, a guide to solving cases, sample Player Characters from other GUMSHOE System roleplaying games in the GUMSHOE One-2-One System format, such as an Ordo Veritas Agent from The Esoterrorists and a Mutant Cop from Mutant City Blues, and a set of generic Edges.

Two thirds of Cthulhu Confidential is dedicated to its three investigations and their protagonists, settings, and Problems and Edges. The three Investigators are Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond, a Private Investigator in Los Angeles, 1937, obviously inspired by works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet; Vivian Sinclair, an investigative journalist and lady detective in thirties New York, inspired by Kerry Greenwood and Dorothy L. Sayers; and Langston Montgomery Wright, an African American invalided veteran Private Investigator in Washington D.C. towards the end of World War II, inspired by Walter Mosely and Chester Himes. Each Investigator is accompanied by detailed descriptions of his or her sources and exceptionally good write-ups of their respective cities—Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. The write-ups are so good, they are better than the actual supplements dedicated to those cities previously published for Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying, and in the case of Washington, D.C., the definitive guide Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying, since no sourcebook has been published for the city, let alone an actual scenario. In addition, all three authors—Robin D. Laws for Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond, Ruth Tillman for Vivian Sinclair, and Chris Spivey for Langston Montgomery Wright—address the social and cultural aspects of their settings. So, there are discussions of whether Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond should be a ‘straight white guy’ or not; of Vivian Sinclair’s bisexuality and how to handle violence against women; of handling the racist attitudes that Langston Montgomery Wright will face. The advice is excellent throughout, being inclusive and helpful.

Then each Investigator has his or her own scenario. As Dexter ‘Dex’ Raymond, the player will investigate ‘The Fathomless Sleep’. Fast-living society girl Helen Deakin has fallen into catatonia and her smouldering sister wants to know how this happened in this classic, hardboiled tale of blackmail and dirty money with a dollop of weird mysticism. In ‘Fatal Frequencies’, Vivian Sinclair helps out Sadie Cane, whose fiancé, George Preston, disappeared three days after a murder in his apartment block. What has George got himself messed up in? Langston Montgomery Wright investigates another disappearance, that of Lynette Miller, a riveter, in ‘Capitol Colour’. Last time her father saw her, she had a new job, secret, but highly paid. Where has she gone and what does her disappearance have to do with the war effort? All three scenarios are excellent, detailed and involving, and should keep the player and his Investigator intrigued and enthralled to the end.

Physically, Cthulhu Confidential is a crisply presented black and white book. It needs a slight edit in places, but is well written and engaging. It is not extensively illustrated, but what artwork there is, is not only good, but also captures the shades of grey in the three North American cities and both the protagonists and antagonists the supplement depicts. The use of period maps and other illustrations also enforces each setting’s sense of place.

Cthulhu Confidential provides an intense roleplaying experience. It has elements of classic solo play because of its set-up, especially in the structure of its Challenge mechanics and the Edges and Problems gained through play, but the intensity comes from working with the Game Master and interacting with the NPCs she depicts and doing so alone, pushing the player to rely upon himself and his Investigator’s Abilities rather than having to work with other players and their Investigators. Of course, the involvement of the Game Master means there is more flexibility and scope to adapt when investigating a mystery than there would be in a solo adventure. The end result is that Cthulhu Confidential provides an enthralling and engaging means of play and a one-on-one experience that pushes Lovecraftian investigative roleplay closer to its cinematic and literary influences and models.

[Free RPG Day 2023] Losing Face

Now in its sixteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2023 took place on Saturday, June 24th. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. Thanks to the generosity of David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3, Fil Baldowski at All Rolled Up, and others, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day, both in the USA and elsewhere.

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Losing Face is a quick-start and adventure for Swords of the Serpentine, the swords and sorcery roleplaying game using the GUMSHOE System. Published by Pelgrane Press, this is a roleplaying game of daring heroism, sly politics, and bloody savagery, set in a fantasy city full of skullduggery and death, inspired by the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Thieves’ World stories. Since, it uses the GUMSHOE System, Swords of the Serpentine is an investigation-orientated roleplaying game, which means that if a Hero has points in a particular Investigative Ability, he will always be able to find clues related to the ability, and if he has points in that ability, can gain further clues, and then it is up to the players to interpret the clue or clues found to push the story along. Alongside that though, it mixes in social and physical combat so that the Heroes can defeat their opponents through wit, guile, and intimidation as well as with a blade, and sorcery powerful and easy enough to tear a tower apart, if the sorcerer is prepared to accept the corruption to both his body and soul. Losing Face presents the rules for Swords of the Serpentine sufficient enough to play through the scenario, a five-scene mystery which has scope for expansion by the Game Master and for plenty of input by the players, and six pre-generated Heroes ready to be played as part of the scenario.

A Hero in Losing Face and thus Swords of the Serpentine is defined by his Investigative Abilities and their associated pools of points, General Abilities, Allegiances, and Corruption. Investigative Abilities, such as Charm, Vigilance, Forgotten Lore, and Skulduggery, enable a Hero to find clues related to the ability and when spending points from their associated pools, to gain bonuses of various types. This includes increasing the amount of damage inflicted, increase the effectiveness of a General Ability, gain temporary Armour or Grit, create a unique special effect, and more. Investigative Abilities are divided between four categories or roles—Sentinel (a cross between a private investigator and a ghost hunter, because they can sometimes see ghosts), Sorcerer, Thief, and Warrior—and a Hero can rating in any of the Investigative Abilities across the four categories or roles, or specialise in one or two. Allegiances are with factions within the city, like the Ancient Nobility or The Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers, and can be spent like Investigative Abilities. General Abilities require a six-sided die to be rolled and a player can expend points from the General Ability pool to improve the roll. Typically, the target for this roll is three or four, and for each three points the roll exceeds the target, the attack can affect an extra target. A result of five or more higher than the target indicates an attack is a critical and inflicts an extra die’s worth of damage. Attacks use Warfare, Sway, or Sorcery depending on whether they are physical, social, or sorcerous. These three can also be used to perform Manoeuvres, which do not inflict damage, but do have an effect, like disarming a foe, persuading them, and more.

Corruption represents a Player Character’s capacity to perform sorcery. Points from its pool can be spent to cast powerful spells, but expending Corruption like this triggers a Health check. Whether this fails or succeeds, it causes Corruption, either ‘Internalised’ or ‘Externalised’. If Internalised, it changes something physical about the Player Character, but if ‘Externalised’, it can affect the other Player Characters’ morale or sickens and pollutes the reality in the immediate area. Overall, there is a lot of flexibility to how the players describe their Heroes’ using their Investigative Abilities and General Abilities, and so on.

‘Losing Face’ is the eponymous scenario in the quick-start. It takes place in the constantly sinking city of Eversink where funerary statuary ensures the deceased persons’ place in heaven, but if broken, their spirit is broken or flung out of heaven. Unfortunately, the statues are everywhere and breaking them is both a sin and a crime. The scenario begins with a contact or patron bring them the body of a woman who is all but lifeless, and left without a face! Who is she and how did she end up like this? Numerous clues are provided as to what and who she is. Plus, who did this to her and why? The antagonist of the scenario does indeed have a grand plan, and determining what that is and stopping it will challenge the Player Characters. It is a really good piece of investigative fantasy that should take a session or two to play through and in the process show of the investigative process of Swords of the Serpentine.

Losing Face also includes six pre-generated characters. These include an ageless warrior, a retired church prophet, an under-acolyte in training, a likeable thief, a disinherited noble sorcerer, and an intimidating inquisitor or sentinel. These are slimmed down versions of the full character sheets, but more than adequate for the scenario.

Physically, Losing Face is speedily presented. It rushes through the rules for Swords of the Serpentine in six pages, including quick reference tables for difficulty numbers, sorcery, health, and morale. These are quite handy, as the rules will need careful study to comprehend as there is fair number of options in the terms of ways that the players can spend their characters’ Investigative Ability and General Ability points.

Losing Face is a good introduction to Swords of the Serpentine. The rules are presented in handy, if speedy fashion, and once the players grasp how they work, they provide scope for improvising details and aspects about their Heroes and bringing dynamic action—whether physical, social, or sorcerous—into play. This is packaged with an engaging scenario which again allows scope for some improvisation whilst still having plenty of meaty investigation to get involved in.