Petersen's Fantasy Fears I

Although there is no denying that the preeminent roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying is Call of Cthulhu, there can be no denying the links between the Cthulhu Mythos and the world’s preeminent roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons. They go all the way back to the original version of the Deities & Demigods, the pantheon guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. The connection would come to the fore at the end of the millennium with Death in Freeport from Green Ronin Publishing. It moved back and forth with Realms of Crawling Chaos for Labyrinth Lord and other retroclones and with adventures like Carrion Hill for Pathfinder, before coming up to date with a supplement and set of campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition written and published by Sandy Petersen, the designer of Call of Cthulhu no less!

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is the first part of a four-part campaign for use with Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos. Published by Petersen Games, this Mythos-inspired campaign as a whole takes the Player Characters from First Level up to Fourteenth Level, via milestones, with Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen taking them from First Level to Fourth Level. The campaign makes extensive references to Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos, and ideally, the Game Master should run the campaign using its rules to get the fullest out of it for her players. However, it is possible to run Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen without reference to Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos, but some details and nuances representing the corrosive influence of its Yog-Sothothery will be difficult to implement, if not lost. Either way, Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen and the Ghoul Island campaign is a combination of heroic fantasy with horror, rather than the other way around. That said, some players may find that the heroic fantasy is not as supported in Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen as it could have been given the dearth of physical rewards or treasure to be found. There is advice to counter that though, and the downplaying of such rewards means that the Game Master and her players can instead concentrate on the adventure and the story.

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen begins with a sea voyage. The Player Characters are aboard the Hazel’s Folly, carrying a cargo for the far-off Farzeen, a city on a distant volcanic isle. This may be as investors or as crew—there are several plot hooks given, and they have plenty of opportunity to bond with the crew and potentially make friends before the action kicks off. This is with a calamitous storm which threatens to batter the ship to pieces and all but throw them ashore. The calamities continue once they are ashore as the rest of the crew turns unexpectedly nasty and potentially, the Player Characters, find themselves in trouble with the local law! Once in Farzeen, the Player Characters should be able to straighten their circumstances out and then explore the town. It is strangely clean and tidy, standing on the shore all but surrounded by jungle over which towers the volcano. The plot kicks up a notch and some of Farzeen’s secrets are revealed when the commander of the city watch requests their aid. Bodies have been disappearing—including the mutineers! As the title suggests, there are ghouls on Farzeen Island and they provide a vital mortuary service for the city. Could they be responsible for the disappearances?

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is a fairly strongly plotted and linear first part of a campaign. Throughout there are opportunities for action and roleplaying and some investigation, with options for exploring a little of the city as well. There are suggestions also to expand the campaign in other directions and full stats for all of the crew of the Hazel’s Folly (oddly bar one) and the various other NPCs in Farzeen. The best of these is Upton, quite literally a downtown Ghoul dressed for a night out on the town! Certainly, the Game Master should have fun portraying him. As generally easy and straightforward as this opening part of the campaign is, it is very much an introduction and never gets beyond hinting at the greater plot behind it all. Also included are the stats for a magical item or two—including one fantastic weapon which will draw comparisons with Elric’s Stormbringer, which sadly, the Player Characters are unlikely to get hold of in this act of the campaign. Another issue with the campaign is that it is missing rules from Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos which would have made it easier to run. Now this is deliberate and understandable, because obviously, the publisher wants the Game Master to buy a copy of Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos in order to get the most out of the campaign. Arguably though, the publisher has gone too far. Options are discussed which consider the possibility that one or more of the Player Characters could be a Ghoul or have Ghoul blood, but that is an option, and absolutely not necessary in order to play and complete the campaign. Yet rules for Dread—the mechanic for handling the Player Characters’ reaction to Yog-Sothothery—are pertinent, almost intrinsic, and if it is a case of their definitely not being included, then at least some designer notes could have suggested ways of handling the horror and the fear that is very much part of the campaign if the Game Master does not have access to Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos. Or at least discussed in terms of the rules on horror and madness in Chapter Eight of the Dungeon Master’s Guide? 

Physically, Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is slim hardback, done in full colour and very well presented in the Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition style, although with much darker, Mythos-infused artwork. It needs an edit in places, but is generally easy to read and to prepare from.

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen should provide four and eight sessions of play, it being possible to play through each of its four chapters in a single session each. It could work as a crossover between Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, perhaps as a variant upon a Dreamlands-set series of adventures? Or just simply as an introduction from one game to the other? It is fairly straightforward in terms of its plotting and story, so it should be fairly easy to run. It does take a while for it to really drop any of hints as to what is going on, at least in play, and hopefully they will be more explicit in the next act. Overall, Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is a solid start to its campaign and a solid introduction to facing the Mythos in a fantasy setting.

Bud’s RPG Review for Free RPG Day

Now in its twelfth year, Saturday, June 15th is Free RPG Day, and to promote tomorrow’s event, Reviews from R'lyeh has got together with Bud of the YouTube channel, Bud’s RPG Review to share each other’s review of a highlight of a previous year’s Free RPG Day. Our choice is The Derelict: A Tale of Terror for Call of Cthulhu, the first release for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition from Chaosium, Inc., now available as part of the anthology, Petersen’s Abominations: Five Epic Tales of Modern Horror.

Bud has been kind enough to present a video of my review from Friday, 19th August 2016 which you can watch here as well as find other great videos of his hands giving insightful thoughts on roleplaying games, card games, and board games. In return, Reviews from R’lyeh presents the text of Bud’s own review from Tuesday, September 6th, 2016.

—oOo—

Hello, and welcome to Bud’s RPG review where I give my thoughts on roleplaying games, card games, and board games.

Today’s review is the Free RPG day adventure The Derelict by Chaosium for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. In the UK, Free RPG Day is something I have difficulty with. In the city of Liverpool, we don’t have any gaming shops that support it – the nearest shop is Fanboy3 which is 45 miles away in Manchester, so the logistics involved in getting to the shop in order to get a free adventure, even for a collector like myself, were just not feasible. I searched eBay for this, to no avail. So, you can imagine my delight then when Chaosium announced that they would make this available to buy on Print-On-Demand from Lulu. This was further bolstered by the news that the adventure was written by the Godfather of Call of Cthulhu (as it says on the cover), Sandy Petersen with Mike Mason.

Now, I have never bought a POD title before and I have to say, I am fairly impressed. The book itself was £3.16 (just over $4) and the postage was £2.99 (about $3.90). That is less than it would have cost me to drive to Manchester and back and pay for parking – so no complaints on the price. Having not seen the free version, I can only imagine that it looks pretty much the same as this version. 

Right – from this point there will be spoilers, so if you have plans to play this, then this is your one and only warning to stop.

So to the cover – I noticed the absence of the Call of Cthulhu logo on the front – for some reason they have only put it on the back. Not sure why. Onto the art – I love this cover. For me, it harkens to the golden age of roleplaying and those early 1980s adventures.

Okay – so onto the inside. There are spoilers from this point forward, so don’t say you weren’t warned. 

The basic premise of the adventure is a combination of John Carpenter’s The Thing combined with a slasher flick. One scenario has the group – a gang of rich Hollywood stars travelling across the Atlantic to the port of Liverpool on an expensive yacht in order for the owner to sell it to a buyer there. On the way, they stumble upon a refrigerated cargo liner called the Groenland Tropisch between Greenland and Iceland that has run aground of an iceberg and looks deserted. The salvage for towing a huge ship like this back to report is a lot, so the guy who owns the boat decides to investigate.

The second scenario they present is one of a salvage team that has been sent to collect the vessel and tow it back to port.

All good so far.

Upon boarding the ship, the investigators find it in a state similar to the Norwegian’s camp in The Thing – blood and damage everywhere.

Unbeknownst to the investigators, the ship and its crew stumbled across a creature from Norse mythology called the Sciapod, which the writers have pulled from Erik the Red’s Saga. The Sciapod itself is a fearsome opponent that has to be defeated by the investigators by using guile and coming up with a plan – which is hinted at using the C02 bottles contained within the cargo hold – I imagine a straight fight with the Sciapod would lead to a few party deaths.

As adventures go, I can’t imagine this lasting any more than three nights. It’s pretty straightforward as Call of Cthulhu adventures go – but that is not to say it is poor. It is really well fleshed out throughout – even the pre-generated characters are pretty well done, and all have interesting back stories. One interesting point to note is that the adventure is set in 2007-8, which would imply that it is Delta Green friendly, but I – m not entirely convinced that it is suited to that setting.

In conclusion, this is not a bad excursion. If I had received this on Free RPG Day, I would be pretty pleased as it is pretty decent and it is for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition which doesn't have an abundance of adventures available for it currently. As a free RPG, I would give this an 8 out of 10 – as a paid for adventure, I will give it a 7 out of 10. It really is for collectors only, but you shouldn’t feel like it isn’t worth buying – it is quite cheap.

Petersen's Pentacular

It is rare that you get to see new scenarios from the designer of Call of Cthulhu, but that is what you get with Petersen’s Abominations: Five Epic Tales of Modern Horror. Published by Chaosium, Inc., this new anthology brings together five scenarios set in the here and now that have been designed by Sandy Petersen and run by Sandy Petersen at conventions. Each has been developed from Petersen’s notes and written up by Mike Mason—the Line Editor for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition—so that any Keeper can now run them as one-shots or at conventions. In turn, they take the Keeper and his players to Canada, the Atlantic Ocean, a research facility, a North Sea oilrig, and inner-city Dallas. Each comes with enough pre-generated investigators for six players and sufficient horror and danger to put them in fear of their sanity and their lives, for as Sandy Petersen makes clear, the scenarios in this book, ‘…[A]re usually horrendously violent because people seem to expect and look forward to “being killed by Sandy Petersen in Call of Cthulhu.”’ Also included with each are notes for running the scenario with existing investigators and extending the scenario so that it can played with a normal gaming group as part of an ongoing campaign. It should also be pointed out there is a ‘haunted house’ aspect to three of these scenarios and that not all of the scenarios involve the Mythos—others are simply horror scenarios—but when they do involve the Mythos, they are really are quite horrifying!

Petersen’s Abominations opens on a lighter tone, with Petersen explaining how and why the anthology came about and Mason explaining the process of how they worked together. It gives the book a rather personal touch which is continued with a foreword for each scenario. Each scenario is neatly organised with everything needed to run it, plus advice on running it and events to stage as it is being run. All five scenarios are rounded out with six all but ready to play investigators (they just require the distribution of a few points). One issue with these investigators is that in some scenarios, they are not given backgrounds, which is a shame because for one-shots and convention scenarios pre-generated investigators really do need hooks.

‘Hotel Hell’ is the first scenario. It is set in British Columbia, Canada where one of the investigators has inherited an old run hotel out in the middle of nowhere and decides to take his wife and friends there to do it up and run it. From nothing, this is a slow-build affair as strange things begin to happen and escalate—birds flying into windows, strange smells occur without apparent sources, strange paintings are found, and so on—as the investigators look over the hotel and begin work on its renovation until it is very obvious that something really weird is happening. In the main the Keeper will be reacting to what the investigators do and say as they wander around what is a mini-sandbox, because he has few NPCs of his own to roleplay and push and pull the investigators in certain directions. Although there is a link to outside world, it really only serves to emphasis the horrific situation the investigators are in. ‘Hotel Hell’ does live up to its name though and serves as a dependable opener for the anthology. That said, experienced players may find it a little familiar in its structure, so it may not be as enjoyable for them to play through. Once thing the scenario is missing is an image of the hotel that the Keeper can freely use. There is one, but it does depict an event which occurs later in the scenario.

If the structure of ‘Hotel Hell’ feels familiar, then the likelihood is that players will have the same feeling with ‘The Derelict’. Devotees of Call of Cthulhu may well be familiar with this scenario as well, as it appeared in print for Free RPG Day 2017. In this scenario, the investigators are passengers aboard a yacht crossing the Atlantic when they come across the wreck of another ship. By law, they are bound to investigate to see if anyone is still alive, but what they find is an abandoned ship and bodies and blood. The question is, what happened aboard this ship and will it now happen to the investigators? If ‘Hell Hotel’ was a haunted house in a hotel, then ‘The Derelict’ is a haunted house aboard a ship—or is it Jaws or Alien aboard a ship? Soon the investigators find themselves being hunted by something faster and stronger than they are and if they are to defeat it and escape, they are going to be inventive! ‘The Derelict’ is nicely appointed with some ship’s deck plans and probably the easiest scenario in the anthology to run as the Keeper only needs to handle the monster. 

If there has been little to no Mythos in Petersen’s Abominations in the first two scenarios, it makes up for it in the third, ‘Pancea’. The investigators all have connections to or an interest in a pharmaceutical development company called ZyMedBio Corp which recently began conducting tests on human subjects of a new drug called ‘Zylactis’ and the results are looking near miraculous. Yet the strange behaviour of one of these subjects at a party suggests that something else might be going on and so ZyMedBio Corp might warrant an investigation. This scenario has more scope for an investigation—with potentially more clues to find—especially if the Keeper wants to open it up to run longer scenario. It also feels much more traditional in terms of Call of Cthulhu even as Petersen takes a creature drawn from Greek myth and twists it to fit the Mythos. The result may not please purists, but if the result is at least goofy, it is actually a lot of fun. If the Keeper does not open up the scenario, then it feels rather linear, especially once the investigators get into the ZyMedBio Corp building. Of all the scenarios in the anthology, this one has the most potential to develop or be worked into a campaign should the Keeper so desire.

Petersen returns to a haunted house situation in ‘Mohole’, but instead of a ship or hotel, the haunted house is on an oilrig in the middle of the North Sea. This has a sort of dated British feel, drawing as it does quite heavily from the Doctor Who of the Jon Pertwee era (there are some very obvious Doctor Who references in here) and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass, as a scientific team is sent to conduct an audit on a government-backed Top Secret project to drill into the earth’s crust to tap into a new energy source. This situation has it all—weak-willed bureaucrats, obsessed scientists, twitchy security, and bolshie workers as well as machines in danger of overheating and going bang, plus an Old One—and it is the situation into which the investigators are thrown. This scenario has the greatest potential to tip over into chaos as there are a lot of NPCs for the Keeper to handle, especially everything starts to go wrong (and it will!). This scenario very much feels as if it was written to actually go ‘boom!’. A more immediate problem is the lack of backgrounds for the investigators who feel very flat otherwise.

It is clear that the scenarios in Petersen’s Abominations have been increasing in their complexity from the first to the fourth, and now the fifth, ‘Voice on the Phone’. Here author brings the Mythos to inner city Dallas and its gang culture, combining a classic H.P. Lovecraft story with the Crawling Chaos for an interesting timed effect. It casts the investigators as members a gang who ordered to deal with a splinter gang which has been making moves recently, expanding quickly and bloodily, with no-one it seems being able to take them down. Alternatively, the investigators might actually be investigators—or rather policeman, part of a taskforce assigned to deal with the increase in gang violence, but no pre-generated investigators are provided for this option. Now investigating as gang members makes for an interesting set-up and roleplaying challenge and as much as it allows the investigators to legitimately get away with applying more direct methods as part of their investigation, it forces them to be subtler in other ways in order to avoid the notice of the police. The other danger in that is that the players are asked to play Hispanic gang members and violent ones at that, so this might not sit well with some players. In fact, this probably the most violent scenario in the anthology, involving as it does a lot of ‘body horror’. The scenario is also quite complex in terms of its timing, so the Keeper really needs to maintain a track of things as the investigators work out what is going on. Get this timing right and the Keeper gets to escalate the Mythos elements in this scenario to great effect. Overall, this is a very good one-shot and should be huge fun to play.

Physically, Petersen’s Abominations is well presented in what is now the publisher’s house style. Which means that it is clean, in full colour, has great artwork, and lots of attention has been paid to the player handouts. This is all behind a decent cover which features mugshots of both Petersen and Mason! The book is well written, but it does need another edit and feels slightly rushed in places. One notable omission is the use the NPC collages which put all of their thumbnail portraits in single pieces of artwork thus rendering them utterly useless as props to show the players. This is an enormous improvement over recent books for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and let us hope that this is a sign that Chaosium has dropped that practice for good. Otherwise, Petersen’s Abominations is an attractive, sturdy hardback which looks great and feels good in the hand.

Of the five scenarios in Petersen’s Abominations, the last three scenarios are better than the first two, which feel rather workmanlike in comparison. In particular, both ‘Pancea’ and ‘Voice on the Phone’ stand out as effective pieces of weird body horror and if you get a chance to play these, then you really should. If you are a Call of Cthulhu devotee, then you are of course, going to want to have copy of Petersen’s Abominations on your shelf. After all, this is an anthology from the designer of Call of Cthulhu and they do not come along every day. Fortunately, you do not just get the name with the supplement, but a good set of one-shot scenarios each of which will deliver a sharp, short horrifying gaming experience—even if Mister Petersen is not running them. Petersen’s Abominations: Five Epic Tales of Modern Horror delivers some impressive horror one-shots and some fun twists upon the Mythos and shows how the creator of greatest horror roleplaying game can still scare us decades later. Can we have Petersen’s Abominations II, please?

High Seas Horror

Originally made available in print on Saturday, June 18th, 2016 for Free RPG Day 2016—though in lamentably limited quantities—the good news is that The Derelict: A Tale of Terror for Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium, Inc. is now available in print to everyone. Or rather, it is available to order as ‘Print on Demand’ via Lulu.com and at a very reasonable price too, even taking the cost of postage into consideration. So having got both the grumble and the good news out of the way, what is The Derelict? Well, it turns out to be scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition penned by Sandy Petersen, the RPG’s original designer, together with Make Mason, one of the co-designers of the new edition. And indeed, The Derelict carries the strapline, “By the Godfather of Call of Cthulhu”. Set in the modern day, it is a one-shot scenario that takes place on the high seas that can be played in a single session or two. Designed to be played by between three and six players, it comes with six pre-generated investigators that can either be used or the players can create their own. This can be done using either the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Quick-Start Rules—free to download here—or the the Call of Cthulhu Investigator Handbook. Likewise the Keeper can run The Derelict just using the rules provided in the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Quick-Start Rules or he can use the full rules from the Call of Cthulhu Rulebook. The advice for the Keeper includes suggestions for what type of characters should be created for use with the scenario.

As The Derelict opens, the investigators are passengers aboard the Delilah, a luxury yacht sailing across the North Atlantic bound for Liverpool in the United Kingdom. There the owner—one of the investigators—is due to sell his boat, but both he and his guests are taking one last opportunity to avail themselves of a pleasure cruise. Even if it is in the mid-Atlantic… Which is where the investigators spot a ‘reefer’ or ‘refrigerated cargo ship’, stranded on an iceberg. According to the Geneva Convention on the High Seas, the crew of the Delilah—and that includes the investigators as one of them is likely the owner—is responsible for rendering the crew of the beached vessel assistance. If that is not motivation enough—and it is a moral and legal obligation, then there is the possibility that under the Law of Finds, the ‘refrigerated cargo ship’ and its cargo might be salvage. If the investigators can get the ship off the iceberg and take it under tow back to a port, then they stand to make themselves rich indeed. (An alternative set-up suggests that the player characters are a salvage team coming to investigate the stranded vessel, but this is not the default set-up in The Derelict.)

The cargo ship turns out to be the Groenland Tropisch, a Norwegian vessel headed for Greenland. Aboard the cargo ship the investigators will find the crew missing, the vessel seemingly abandoned. Which means that under the Law of Finds, both vessel and cargo belong to the investigators as salvage. All they have to do is re-float the ship and take it under tow. There is of course the matter of the missing crew, missing lifeboats, the doors ripped open, the vandalised controls, and the bloodstains in the ice of the cold, cold ship. What did happen to the crew of the Groenland Tropisch and are the investigators in danger themselves?

What you have in The Derelict is an ‘it’s locked in here with us’ situation. Isolated and very far from rescue finds themselves prey to an unnatural alien creature out of legend. It feels reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing from another World, but that is as much due to the isolated location and the low temperatures and the Norwegian thing as much as anything else. Of course if the players want think that… Nevertheless, the monster in The Derelict is nothing like that of any film, being instead drawn from Norse myth. This may be an issue for the purists, who may have preferred to seen something from the Lovecraftian Mythos appear here rather than a creature from another source. If that is the case, then they can replace the thing faced here with something of their choice, but to be fair, it is highly unlikely that they will have come across something like it in their gaming lives and so facing it will present them with a fresh rather than a familiar challenge. Just as it will for anyone else coming to play The Derelict. Plus, the scenario is a one-shot and it is meant to last a single session that, so the issue is moot anyway… (Plus it shows that Call of Cthulhu can work with other monsters, though a suggestion or two is given if a Mythos explanation is demanded.)

Since the scenario is an ‘it’s locked in here with us’ situation, the creature is difficult to stop. Not unstoppable, but difficult. The means to deal with it are provided in the scenario and discussed for the Keeper’s benefit, but this will require the full exploration of the Groenland Tropisch and a little investigation. The limited extent of the latter may again be disappointing for Call of Cthulhu, but again, The Derelict is a one-shot scenario designed to be played in a single session. This and the setting for the scenario limits possible investigative options anyway. Plus as a one-shot, The Derelict needs to get to the action and the horror with some expediency.

Physically, The Derelict is well presented. The layout is clean and tidy, the few illustrations are good, and the deck plans of both vessels excellent. If there is anything odd about the scenarios, it is the backgrounds of the six pre-generated investigators. Too many of them seem to have odd military or espionage connections and most of them come armed with an array of handguns. Working the scenario into a campaign would be a challenge, but it would be easy enough to adapt The Derelict to the Jazz Age of the 1920s or the Gaslight Era of the 1890s if the Keeper wanted to run it in either of those periods.

The Derelict is a suitable to run for either experienced or inexperienced players of Call of Cthulhu. The Keeper though, should ideally have some experience under his belt as essentially once the investigators are aboard the cargo ship, since he will be reacting to their actions as the thing hunts them down… Overall, The Derelict: A Tale of Terror for Call of Cthulhu is a solid one-shot, good for one night’s icebound horror on the high seas.