Propping Up Your Pocket

From the moment you see the words “Gleason’s Department Store. Arkham, Mass.” on the lid of the patterned box you know that you have something special in your hands. Open it on the inside of the lid it says “Arkham Leather” above the wallet itself, wrapped in red tissue paper. There is a ‘User Guide: Read Me First’, but honestly, you are not going to read that first. You might look at the ‘Automobile Bail Bond Certificate’ or the ‘Operator’s License’ as issued by the ‘State of New York—Bureau of Motor Vehicles’, with actual headshot photograph attached, but what you are really looking at is the wallet. The brown, real vintage-style leather wallet is also marked with the ‘Arkham Leather’ stamp and inside can be found an embarrassment of riches. There is a ‘Motor Vehicle Registration Card’ issued by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Dept. of Public Works Registry of Motor Vehicles, a ticket to the ‘Miskatonic University Exhibit Museum’, membership cards for both the ‘Arkham Historical Society’ and ‘The Eye of Amara Society’, a card for the ‘Grafton Diner’, a ‘Locker Rental Assignment—Men’s Gymnasium’ for the local YMCA, a ticket for the ‘Northside Line’ of the ‘Arkham Transit Company’. There is matchbox* for a restaurant, amusingly called ‘The Red Herring’. There are coins and tokens, and even a genuine period key, as well as several dollar bills, and a ‘Prescription Blank National Prohibition Act’ so that the holder can legally drink!

* This is a prop set. Of course, there has to be a matchbox.

The attention to detail is genuinely verisimilitudinous. For example, the card for the ‘Grafton Diner’ has loyalty program punches around its edges, whilst the card for ‘Fennel’s Roadhouse’ has the name ‘Betty’ handwritten on it. The fact that it says, “For Good Time ’Phone 8031’ suggests that this is more than a simple roadside stop offering fuel and lodging.

This then is the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet. It is stunningly stuffed full of things, prop after prop. Things that you and perhaps your players—if you ever let them get their grubby hands on it—are going to be amazed by what they find. Lastly, when you do get to the ‘User Guide: Read Me First’, it explains its use and more. On the back of it is the ‘Arkham Investigator’s Wallet Prop Inventory’, which lists all forty-seven items. Many of them are marked in green, indicating that they can be downloaded and printed out again.

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is best known for servicing the great campaigns for Call of Cthulhu with amazing props and objets d’art, such as the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set and Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set, but with the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet, it has done the reverse. It has provided the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet, not with a campaign, but a scenario which makes use of many of the items to be found within the pockets and folds of the wallet. This is The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’. As the title suggests, this takes place in Arkham, so you can make use of Chaosium, Inc.’s Call of Cthulhu: Arkham. It begins with Charlotte Foley, a precocious young dog walker and would-be detective, out walking one of her canine charges behind Christchurch Cemetery when she encounters a man acting strangely as if having some kind of a fit. Rushing to the nearest house—where the occupant, Madge Tomlinson and her friends are discussing plans for the neighbourhood’s annual Halloween party—for help, when she returns, the man has entirely disappeared. All that is left behind is a pair of spectacles and a wallet! What has happened to the man? Charlotte is determined to find out.

The Dog Walker is designed to be played with between two and six Investigators. Six pre-generated Investigators are provided in the book. They include a journalist, a history teacher, a retired cook, a retired professor of physics (with a drinking and gambling problem that may actually help the investigation in certain locations!), and a civil engineer, as well as young Charlotte. This is a nicely genteel selection of Investigators notable for the fact that all but one of them is unarmed, so the scenario is not one designed to be concluded through force of arms. That said, six Investigators does feel slightly too many for the scale of the scenario and perhaps some advice as to which of the six pre-generated Investigators to use with fewer players would have been helpful. The scenario is designed to be played solo, the player taking the role of Charlotte and using the ‘Solo Player PDF’ available to download. Alternatively, a Keeper can run The Dog Walker with the one player who can take the role of Charlotte. Lastly, the Arkham Investigator's Wallet Prop Set does require some customisation and set-up upon the part of the Keeper, removing certain props and adding details to others. The Dog Walker includes full advice for the Keeper as to what needs to be done as part of this set-up. An alternative option might be to combine the scenario with The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection and turn it into an all ‘kids-as-Investigators’ scenario.

The items in the wallet are all clues of course. Some, like the Bail Bond Certificate will hint at the missing man’s background, others such as the key enable easy entry to his nearby home, and still more grant access to otherwise closed locations, the Eye of Amara Society membership card granting the holder entry to the otherwise private members’ society. The clues will take the Investigators back and forth across Arkham, from dives such as Irish mobster Dan O’Bannion’s Lucky Clover Cartage Company to the Orne Library where they might meet Professor Henry Armitage. As the scenario progresses and the Investigators follow up clue after clue, location after location, The Dog Walker becomes a MacGuffin hunt as well. Ultimately though, everything leads back to the missing man and his home.

The Dog Walker is decently supported beyond the solidity of the props from the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet. There is a breakdown of all of the clues and how to prepare them for play—as well as a checklist for those that are pertinent to the scenario, the NPC stats, a timeline, and a map of the Lower Southside neighbourhood where the scenario begins. Physically, the scenario is cleanly laid out, very nicely illustrated (only one piece of artwork lets the look of the book down), and the props to be used in the scenario are also illustrated as well.

It is notable that Charlotte, the young girl and dog walker who makes the discovery of the lost wallet that triggers the mystery in The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham is a fan of detective stories and Sherlock Holmes in particular. This is because the story itself is reminiscent of one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories, or rather one of the best pastiches. This is The Abergavenny Murder, the first episode in the second series of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which continued the very fine BBC pairing of Clive Merrison and Andrew Sachs as Holmes and Watson—and Clive Merrison and Michael Williams before that—with stories based on cases mentioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but never expanded upon. In The Abergavenny Murder, the duo are at home at 221b Baker Street with nothing to do and lamenting the lack of crime to investigate, when a man rushes into their sitting room and drops down dead. Holmes and Watson then have forty-five minutes in which to solve the crime entirely based on the man’s corpse in front of them and what is on his body. It is a delightful ‘ship-in-a-bottle’ style episode and two-hander, displaying all of the personalities of the two men and the author’s inventiveness.

The Dog Walker feels much like this, though much more expansive than four walls of the sitting room at 221b Baker Street, and of course, having a wallet of clues to go on rather than a corpse and the contents of its pockets. Quite so too, since it would hardly be the done thing for young Charlotte to discover a corpse! That though highlights an issue with the scenario in that how does the adult world react to the inquisitiveness of a twelve-year-old? Apart from one NPC whose reaction to Charlotte may play an important role in the scenario, the issue is not addressed.

The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham is a charmingly parochial mystery, its revelations hinting at the true nature of the universe, rather than fully blasting the minds of the Investigations with its actual uncaring majesty and the insignificance of humanity’s place within it. In fact, the scenario is almost gentle by other scenarios’ standards, there being only the one possible Sanity check in its telling. Which, of course, is how it should be given that Charlotte Foley is just twelve. All of which is supported by the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet and its marvellous props—of which, it should be noted, The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham uses barely half, enabling the Keeper to return to the wallet to create his own mystery or the author to write a sequel. Above all, together The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham and the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet are a wonderfully crafted combination that will provide a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging evening’s worth of detective work that will introduce one young lady to the mysteries of the cosmos.

Propping up Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu is a literary roleplaying game. Its play is predicated on the ability of the Player characters—or rather the Investigators—to be literate and so be able to read the array of clues to be found as part of the enquiries into the unknown. Newspaper reports, diary entries, letters, notes and marginalia, books and scrolls, and of course, the much-feared Mythos tomes such as the dread Necronomicon and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Just as the Investigators—or at least some of them—are expected to be able to read them, then so are their players. Thus, we have clues and handouts, especially if the roleplaying game of our choice involves a mystery—mundane or Mythos related. There had been clues and handouts before, for example, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, the 1981 scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition from TSR (UK), included a clue showing the pattern of signals needed to contact a smuggling ship, but Call of Cthulhu took the role of the clue and the handout to new heights as they became more and more integral to game play. And since newspaper reports, diary entries, letters, notes and marginalia, books and scrolls, and more are all modern, the Keeper can create her own—such as soaking paper in tea and then drying it to age it—and easily copy those provided in particular scenarios or campaigns. Which is what the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has done, and not just for its own campaigns, but your campaigns.

Of course, what the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is best know for is the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set, a big box of handouts and clues designed to be used with Masks of Nyarlathotep, the classic campaign for Call of Cthulhu, often regarded as one of the greatest ever produced by the hobby. This no mere set of tea-soaked, faux-aged handouts and whatnot, for just as Call of Cthulhu took the role of the clue and the handout to new heights, the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set takes the clues and handouts for Call of Cthulhu to new heights. There are over one hundred props in the box—telegrams, letters, a match box—just like in the original boxed set for Masks of Nyarlathotep, maps, charts, diary and ledger entries, business cards, photographs, memos, and newspaper clippings, oh so many newspaper clippings. However, Masks of Nyarlathotep is not the only campaign to receive the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society treatment.

The Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set though is not a prop set for the one campaign, although it does include a campaign within its pages. Rather, the Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set literally provides physical support for two supplements, two anthologies of scenarios, and a campaign. All published as part of the Call of Cthulhu Classic boxed set, funded via Kickstarter as part of the venerable roleplaying game’s fortieth anniversary, and consisting of not only the Call of Cthulhu, Second Edition rules, but also the Cthulhu Companion, Shadows Of Yog Sothoth, The Asylum & Other Tales, Trail Of The Tsathogghua, and Fragments Of Fear. Thus the two companion supplements, the two anthologies, and the campaign. Open up the Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set and what you find is sixteen-page broadsheet newspaper, large format maps, a nautical chart, sheaves of handwritten letters, diaries, and notes, numerous brochures and photographs, police forms, legal forms, excepts ripped from terrible tomes, and more. These are all neatly organised into five folders. The first contains all of the handouts from the Call of Cthulhu, Second Edition rules—including the infamous ‘The Haunted House’, home of the late Walter Corbitt, the Cthulhu Companion, and Fragments Of Fear. Both Shadows Of Yog Sothoth and The Asylum & Other Tales have their own folder of handouts respectively, and lastly, the two scenarios in Trail Of The Tsathogghua have their own folders given the sheer weight of clues in both.

The Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set starts with the ‘USER GUIDE: Read Me First!’ which explains how the props are organised, notes that there are clues in code and other languages as per the relevant scenarios, and there are English versions of the clues in other languages in the box, but decoded versions of the encoded clues. The biggest bundle of clues in one prop can be found in the sixteen-page Clipmaster broadsheet newspaper and there are instructions on how to use that. Being broadsheet-sized, the Clipmaster broadsheet newspaper is huge and unwieldy, but can be quickly cut apart so the Keeper has the right newspaper articles in the right folder. Plus, there are numerous other articles in its pages, and very much part of the fun of reading is not finding the articles directly relevant to the scenarios or campaign, but reading the other articles surrounding and the other relevant ones. These add flavour and verisimilitude, as do the various advertisements alongside, to what are intended to be period pieces. Further, open up each folder and there is a Clipping Guide for each scenario which shows the Keeper where to find and then cut out the pertinent articles. This is a very handy piece of backwards design.

Folder Two is far more expansive. Dedicated to Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, the first campaign for Call of Cthulhu, here what were the blandest of handouts in the original campaign, have uplifted with detail and substance. Newspaper articles of course, but also letters and diary entries and book excerpts. There are a couple of points where the props suddenly astound you. The first is the ‘Computer Printout’ from ‘Look to the Future’, the second scenario in Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, which is done as a green bar printout on classic computer paper. It stands out from the other handouts because it is incongruously modern, as it should have done in the scenario itself, but here given brilliantly contradictory physicality. The other is from ‘The Worm that Walks’, the fifth chapter in the campaign. It is a simple letter from Christopher Edwin, inviting the Investigators to join him in Maine. Enclosed with the letter is a set of train tickets, and indeed, they are attached to the letter itself. They add nothing to the story or the plot, but they enforce the message of the letter brilliantly—Christopher Edwin is genuine enough to want to help!

Folder Three, dedicated to The Asylum & Other Tales contains some outstanding props, some of them actually better than the scenario they support really deserve. Starting with ‘The Auction’, set in Austria, at an auction for some quite outré items, there are not one, but two auction catalogues and they are honestly great. This scenario perhaps is the only one where the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society could have gone further, but would anyone have actually wanted a Riveted Brass Head? ‘Black Devil Mountain’ is a poorly regarded scenario, but surprisingly, it has a brilliant set of letters, a death certificate, a mortuary bill of holding, legal invoice, and a deed to a property. It could be argued that the scenario would be worth playing simply to get the props in play, but that is definitely not the case. In addition, the foldout ‘Cunard Line Brochure’ is the only prop for ‘The Mauretania’, but to be fair, it is all that it needs and quite perfect!

Folders Four and Five, rounds out with Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set handouts and props from the three scenarios in Trail Of Tsathogghua. Across the three scenarios, there are loads and loads of newspapers, plus handwritten letters and diary entries. Relatively few of the props here have physical impact found elsewhere in the other folders. They include Morris Handelman’s Notebook from ‘The Curse Of Tsathogghua’ and an actual 8-page legal contract and the awful verse from ‘The Poetical Works of Maurice Van Laaden’, both from ‘The Haunted House’, but in general, the props are not quite as interesting.

Physically, Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set is an excellent presentation of the clues and handouts to the many books supporting the Call of Cthulhu Classic boxed set. However, in comparison, the Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set is not as good as the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set. This is not to say that the prop set is bad, but rather it does not quite have the heft or physical presence. This is primarily due to the nature of the clues in the individual scenarios and the often plain format of the original clues, although in some cases, the props here gild the lily in turning clues and handouts for poor scenarios into some things compelling.

The Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set is definitely not needed to run the many scenarios and campaigns to be found in the Call of Cthulhu Classic boxed set. It will, though, definitely help and add verisimilitude to any one of the scenarios or the campaign, developing a great many clues and handouts into impressive, in-game items, often from very plain origins. Although it lacks the physical impact of its predecessor, the Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set will still help bring the scenarios and campaigns it is based upon to life.

Propping up Nyarlathotep

Call of Cthulhu is a literary roleplaying game. Its play is predicated on the ability of the Player characters—or rather the Investigators—to be literate and so be able to read the array of clues to be found as part of the enquiries into the unknown. Newspaper reports, diary entries, letters, notes and marginalia, books and scrolls, and of course, the much-feared Mythos tomes such as the dread Necronomicon and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Just as the Investigators—or at least some of them—are expected to be able to read them, then so are their players. Thus, we have clues and handouts, especially if the roleplaying game of our choice involves a mystery—mundane or Mythos related. There had been clues and handouts before, for example, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, the 1981 scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition from TSR (UK), included a clue showing the pattern of signals needed to contact a smuggling ship, but Call of Cthulhu took the role of the clue and the handout to new heights as they became more and more integral to game play. And since newspaper reports, diary entries, letters, notes and marginalia, books and scrolls, and more are all modern, the Keeper can create her own—such as soaking paper in tea and then drying it to age it—and easily copy those provided in particular scenarios or campaigns. Which is what the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has done, and not just for its own campaigns, but your campaigns.

The Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a big box of handouts and clues designed to be used with Masks of Nyarlathotep, the classic campaign for Call of Cthulhu, often regarded as one of the greatest ever produced by the hobby. This no mere set of tea-soaked, faux-aged handouts and whatnot, for just as Call of Cthulhu took the role of the clue and the handout to new heights, the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set takes the clues and handouts for Call of Cthulhu to new heights. There are over one hundred props in the box—telegrams, letters, a match box—just like in the original boxed set for Masks of Nyarlathotep, maps, charts, diary and ledger entries, business cards, photographs, memos, and newspaper clippings, oh so many newspaper clippings. Then there are bonus props. 

Open up the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set and the first thing that you see is a scroll, from the Shanghai chapter. It is not simply presented as a scroll on heavy paper, but done on cloth with actual wooden rollers so that it can be unfurled with ease. Of course, few of the players are going to be able to read the Chinese script, though some of their Investigators might (so there is a translation), but putting that down on the table gives it an immediacy that no mere sheet of paper would. And once given to the players it is going sit there, a constant reminder of both just how brilliant the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is and the fact that their Investigators really, really want to get it translated.

Alongside the scroll is an ‘Ediphone Wax Cylinder Case’ containing not a wax cylinder—as after all, who owns a device capable of playing one of those these days outside of a museum?—but a USB drive with eight MP3 audio recordings which can be played at the appropriate points in the campaign. And these are not done by anyone, but professional actors, so instead of having the Keeper portray Jack Brady telling the players and their Investigators what is going on once they eventually find him, the Keeper can play the recording and so pull them both into his story.

 

Below that are a set of six Nansen Passports, issued by the League of Nations and recognised around the globe plus a set of passport stamps. What this means is as a group begins the campaign, each player can record the details of his Investigator in the Nansen Passport and as he travels around the world as the part of the campaign, from Peru to New York to England to Cairo to Kenya to Australia to Shanghai and back again, the Keeper can affix the right stamps—which come on sheets designed to be peeled off and stuck in the passports—to indicate the Investigator’s entry and exit from each country. It is a fantastic physical record of an imagined travel and achievement, one that does not actually directly relate to the campaign itself, but it is a lovely bit of verisimilitude. As is the fact that the stamps include options for ‘Cancelled’, ‘Expelled’, ‘Deported’, ‘Return Forbidden’, ‘Code 1644 Psych. Hold’, and more is just a delight. Of course, six passports are not going to be enough unless the players and their Investigators are very lucky because Masks of Nyarlathotep is a notoriously deadly campaign and Investigator deaths, and retirements are highly likely. So, replacements are probably going to be needed.

Below that there is a double-sided sheet of paper detailing everything in the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set. This lists everything folder by folder, according to which chapter each handout appears in. Now unlike the props included in the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign itself, none of the props are numbered. Thus, they are more realistic and both Keeper and her players will need to keep track of which props their Investigators have discovered so far and which ones they have. Open up the first folder, for the new Peru chapter in the most recent edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep. A clipping has been torn from a newspaper, but it is no single article, there are others surrounding it as well as on the reverse. None of them have any bearing on the campaign, but they impart a sense of the wider world in 1925 and they are simply fun to read. The clipping is also on the right paper, so it has a flimsiness just as it should. Below that, there is a letter in Spanish, clearly torn from a notebook, then copies of period maps and of the scenario maps. The Peru chapter is quite short, but it sets up expectations for the rest of the campaign. The players will be wanting to see what is next and find out just how good each handout feels.

After Peru, the chapter of Masks of Nyarlathotep get progressively more complex and so each corresponding folder in the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is thicker, the New York one notoriously so. The original start of the campaign in previous versions of Masks of Nyarlathotep, the discovery of Jackson Elias’ body in his Chelsea Hotel room is combined with a welter of clues and a corresponding torrent of handouts. So what the Investigators know about Jackson Elias, almost all of the front of a newspaper—with articles front and back, numerous other clippings, a business card or two, several slightly crumpled letters (one of which includes the letter it came in), a telegram, one photograph of Jackson Elias dead on his bed and another of the Dark Mistress in Shanghai (infamously poorly portrayed in previous versions of the campaign), a submission from Jackson Elias to his publisher, Prospero House, an excerpt torn from Nigel Blackwell’s Africa’s Dark Sects—complete with book stamp, maps of New York and Harlem, and even the book cover to Jackson Elias’ own work, ‘The Hungry Dead’. It all culminates in a folder containing the patient records for Roger Carlyle and the folder is sealed. That is just the one folder. There are seven folders, one for each chapter in the campaign, and they are all like that.

Physically, Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a superlative presentation of the clues and handouts to the campaign. The right paper, a letter slightly crumpled as if pulled from an envelope (plus the envelope torn open itself), papers ripped from a diary, but held together by a paper clip. Perhaps the plainest of handouts are the ones that provide written copies of the audio files and details of things that the Investigators already know. They are the simplest and they do break the in-game feeling of the campaign, but they are all necessary. 

The Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is definitely not needed to run the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. It is entirely optional. Yet the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a physical reflection of the effort which Chaosium, Inc. put into upgrading the previous version of the campaign to Masks of Nyarlathotep, Fifth Edition. It would seem almost like an oversight for the Keeper to keep the campaign’s improvements in terms of its presentation and support to herself and not share them with her players through the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set. Then there is the fact that Masks of Nyarlathotep is likely to provide somewhere between sixty and seventy hours of gameplay, so why not match that investment in terms of time with the physical investment of the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set?

There is, of course, precedent for all of this. When Masks of Nyarlathotep was first published in 1984, it was a box set which famously included a matchbook from the Sleeping Tiger bar in Shanghai as amongst its first set of clues. It was an oddly physical thing to include, but it showed how clues and handouts could be presented and from that matchbook, H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has taken the idea and run and run with it… The resulting Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a magnificent presentation of the clues and handouts Masks of Nyarlathotep, bringing the investigation in the greatest roleplaying campaign ever published into a physical reality barely even imagined when it was first published in 1984.