Miskatonic Monday #353: Fear Jet 1975 – Hijack!

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: Fear Jet 1975 – Hijack!

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andy Miller

Setting: 1975 USA and beyond...

Product: Expansion to Fear Jet
What You Get: Thirty-four page, 31.94 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A flight into The King in Yellow via hijack-horror horror!

Plot Hook: When fear of flying takes you out of this world with a gun to your head...

Plot Support: Staging advice, six pre-generated Investigators, six Investigator portraits, and one handout.

Production Values: Decent

Pros

# Mad Men meets the Mythos

# Can be run as a convention scenario
# Can be run over and over until some Investigators escapes...

# Easy to adapt to other periods during the Age of Flight

# Pre-built tension and secrets

# Extensive playtest notes

# Xanthophobia

# Aerophobia

# Katagelophobia

Cons

# Very similar sequel to Fear Jet

# Challenging to run as a convention scenario

# What happens next?

Conclusion

# Mad Men meets the Mythos in mid-air

# Character-driven re-iteration that a group might not want to play again

Miskatonic Monday #325: Fear Jet

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: Fear Jet

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andy Miller

Setting: 1970s USA and beyond...

Product: Scenario
What You Get: One-hundred-and-twenty-four page, 97.64 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A flight into The King in Yellow via the liminality of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here and Groundhog Day

Plot Hook: When fear of flying takes you out of this world...

Plot Support: Staging advice, twenty-four pre-generated Investigators, twenty-four Investigator portraits, five handouts, one map and one deck plan, fourteen NPCs, two Mythos tomes, and one Mythos monster.

Production Values: Excellent

Pros

# Bizarrely, fantastically detailed scenario

# Can be run as a convention scenario
# Can be run over and over until some Investigators escapes...

# Easy to adapt to other periods during the Age of Flight

# Has extensive notes to adapt it to other eras for Call of Cthulhu

# Xanthophobia

# Aerophobia

# Fasciphobia

Cons

# Highly detailed scenario

# Challenging to run as a convention scenario

# Would not work half as well without the pun

# What happens next?

Conclusion

# Weird flight into unreality and back again. Possibly.

# Enjoyably, constantly creepy, but too wearing to run again and again?

# Reviews from R’lyeh Recommends

Miskatonic Monday #245: At the Gates of Carcosa

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: At the Gates of Carcosa

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Quico Vicens-Picatto

Setting: 26th Century colonial space

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-one page, 640.22 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Groundhog Day-style horror on the edge of reality.

Plot Hook: Investigate a sudden anomaly before it becomes a threat to the colony.
Plot Support: Staging advice, six pre-generated Investigators, two maps and deck plans, and eight Mythos creatures.

Production Values: Serviceable

Pros

# Intriguing setting and ideas

# More scenario and set-up than plot

# Potentially fascinating new system of magic

# Entomophobia

# Mycophobia

# Chronophobia

Cons

# Needs a strong edit

# More scenario and set-up than plot

# Undeveloped presentation impedes comprehension

Conclusion

# Potentially interesting Science Fiction horror setting and ideas impeded by lack of clarity and clear implementation

# Scenario needs stronger set-up and staging in terms of plot to be run effectively

Memetic Madness

Impossible Landscapes is a campaign like no other. It is a campaign of cosmic horror investigative roleplaying rather than Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying that forgoes much of what we expect to see in other campaigns for Call of Cthulhu or other Lovecraftian horror investigative roleplaying games. It does involve an uncaring threat to humanity, but this is not a threat whose presence on Earth can be merely forestalled until such times as the Stars are Right. This is a threat that seeps into our world, spreading like a meme before the concept was defined, infecting and altering reality over and over, changing our perceptions, making us vectors, its influence spiralling and twisting until everything we see is connected by it. Mankind cannot stop it. At best we can curtail it—temporarily, for it always finds other vectors. At the very least, we can survive it, but we will not be the same as before, for we will have seen the Yellow Sign. The threat is the Yellow King, whose influence spreads via The King in the Yellow, the story collection by Robert Chambers, from the ur-city that is Carcosa, standing on Lake Hali, out through the surrealist region that lies between Carcosa and our world and into our minds. It is in this surrealist region, this ‘Carcosa Country’ where much of the events of Impossible Landscapes take place.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow is a campaign for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, published by Arc Dream Publishing. Its origins lie not just in Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow Mythos, but also in the writings of two Delta Green stalwarts. First in John Scott Tynes’ own attempts to write a campaign focused on the King in Yellow that would lead to both short stories and his lengthy exploration of ‘The Hastur Mythos’ in Delta Green: Countdown. Second, in Dennis Detwiller’s ‘Night Floors’, a highly regarded scenario for Call of Cthulhu, also found in Delta Green: Countdown in which the Agents investigate the disappearance of a tenant from the Macallistar Building in New York and discover how easy it is to get lost in the building and its new floors at night. It is ‘Night Floors’ that forms the basis of the opening part of Impossible Landscapes, greatly expanded and connected to the rest of the campaign. In terms of scope, Impossible Landscapes is both a small campaign, encompassing just New York and Boston as its key locations, and a huge campaign, taking in as it does, the whole of unreality.

The campaign opens in 1995 with the reiteration of ‘The Night Floors’. Abigail Wright has gone missing from her New York apartment in the Macallister Building. As part of Operation ALICE, the Agents are to assist the FBI in collecting evidence from her apartment connected to her disappearance and determine whether or not there is something unnatural behind it. Almost from the start, the collection of evidence will appear strange, a random assortment of oddities glued to the wall in layers, but the building itself is stranger still. The other residents are initially recalcitrant and self-absorbed, but they seem to change at night, as does the building itself. There are new floors to the building, which seems to go up and up, yet never changes from the outside. ‘The Night Floors’ lays the foundations for the campaign, showcasing a duality between night and day, between reality and unreality, between rationality and irrationality, all of which runs throughout the initial parts of the campaign until they all begin to blur into one another. ‘The Night Floors’ is creepy and weird—and whilst the rest of the campaign is also creepy and weird, here it seems constrained and containable. Of course, it is far from that, but it does not seem to sprawl as it does in the rest of the campaign. The scenario also shows the Agents for the first time, that survival is their best and only hope.

‘The Night Floors’ is likely to end without a sense of any real achievement. It is not intended to, but this is not helped by the radical shift as the campaign jumps forward two decades for the second part, ‘A Volume of Secret Faces’. The options here are the Agents to have been deactivated during the intervening twenty years or the Handler to run some cases set during that period. The jump in timeframe has another effect though. It enforces the sense of unreality as connections begin to be spotted between the encounters in the here and now of 2015 and the past investigation of 1995,and that the Agents are being called back to that sense of unreality, and for them, that it truly never went away. In the second part of the campaign, the Agents are asked to investigate Dorchester House, a Boston psychiatric facility dealing in trauma where other Delta Green agents have been committed and disappeared. What the Agents will discover is a similar, but worse duality to that of the Macallister Building that will draw them deeper into the Impossible Landscapes. Here the campaign seems to pulsate with its unreality, expanding out to some utterly bizarre and frightening encounters, before contracting again to focus solely on the corridors and rooms—and beyond—of Dorchester House. Ultimately, the Agents will find themselves trapped in Dorchester House and its duality, but they will be able to escape.

The third part, ‘Like a Map Made of Skin’ turns the Agents’ paranoia back on themselves and sees them hunted, any trust issues they have fully justified now. The Agents will find themselves pushed and pulled, and though there are chances to revisit previous locations, ultimately, they have one choice and one destination, from where they can push on through to the other side—perhaps in pursuit of answers or even Abigail Wright still. This location, the Hotel Broadalbin, is one of many places in the campaign where it possible to transition between times and places in the campaign itself. Many of these are optional, and may or may not be discovered by the Agents. Hotel Broadalbin is not. Transitioning here will enable the Agents to make the final crossing into the Impossible Landscapes in the campaign’s last part, ‘The End of the World of the End’, and onwards towards Carcosa itself. Here the Agents will find war and despair as they search for a way to attend the court of the King in Yellow.

In terms of what the players and their Agents will confront—or is it what will confront the players and their Agents?—it is primarily a sense of the ineffable, of uncertainty, of never knowing quite what is going on and who to trust. That lack of trust has always been present in Delta Green and in Delta Green, but here the author winds this up so that it is not just a case of the Agents barely being able to trust who they work for as operatives of Delta Green, but they can no longer trust reality. Once exposed to the influence of the Yellow King, the surrealism never lets up, the motifs of Carcosa and The King in Yellow seeping in everywhere. Nowhere does this show more than in the clues the Agents will discover and the cascade of connections between persons and places in the campaign that never once seems to let up. There is moment at the beginning of Masks of Nyarlathotep in which having confronted the killers of Jackson Elias, the Investigators are presented with a thick wodge of clues that connect from New York to the rest of the campaign and in its opening moments threatens to overwhelm the Investigators with too much information. Impossible Landscapes is like that moment, but it never seems to end.

As a consequence, Impossible Landscapes all too often actually feels impossible in terms of an investigation. Although the campaign is quite linear in structure, determining where and what to investigate, what clues to follow up, can be daunting for the players. At other times, the campaign funnels down to one choice, and whilst the Keeper is provided with suggestions and tools with which to push the players and their Agents forward, this does undermine the agency of the players. To an extent this fits the campaign and its intentional uncertainty, but at the same time, it feels as if the author is writing the Agents and their players into a labyrinth, thus getting them lost, and then having to force them out again via a deus ex machina and into the next…

The campaign is also deadly. There are scenes and moments where it is physically deadly, but these seem almost inconsequential to the way in which the various encounters, discoveries, and more importantly, the realisations about the connectivity of one clue or fact or encounter to another constantly threatens to scour away at each Agent’s Sanity. Actual Sanity losses are individually low throughout the bulk of the campaign, but they are ever present and they mount up over the course of the Agents’ investigation. In addition, the influence of the Yellow King and each Agent’s susceptibility is measured by a separate track—Corruption. As this increases, invariably through actions and decisions upon the part of the player and his Agent, each Agent has the chance to learn more and access other locations, thus encountering ever greater moments of surrealist uncertainty. There are moments—few and far between—when an Agent can regain Sanity and lose Corruption, but once gained, Corruption can never be truly lost. Any Agent who actually survives Impossible Landscapes will be both scarred and corrupted by his experiences in the Impossible Landscapes, but to be clear, when the Handler decides to run this campaign, there is no play beyond it.

Physically, it is clear that Impossible Landscapes is not just a roleplaying campaign or a roleplaying book. It is a tome in and of itself, subtly recursive as if trying to infect the Handler as she reads and prepares the campaign. Images are not placed in the book, they taped in place haphazardly with masking tape, as if some unknown Delta Green agent is attempting to put together a file on the investigation for the archives. The influence of the Yellow King seeps into the pages with every mention of him marked and appended with the question, “Have you seen it?” There are subtle changes throughout the volume that startle both Handler and reader, just further adding to its atmosphere and tone of uncertainty. Throughout, the book is annotated by different voices whose identities can only be guessed at, throwing in weird anagrams and comments that suggest further connections, and suggesting that somehow, these annotations have been made post publication to the copy in the Handler’s hands. And then there are the handouts. There have never been handouts like this before. They are used to enforce the campaign’s surrealist uncertainty for much like the campaign itself, they are layered, they cannot be taken at face value, and they hide their ‘true’ information. In essence, the handouts have to be investigated in themselves in order to become useful clues to the investigation. For all this, as well as the fantastically accessible, but layered graphic design and the excellent artwork, it is no wonder that Impossible Landscapes won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. (It is also a travesty that Impossible Landscapes only won the 2022 Gold ENnie Award for Best Graphic Design and Layout. It deserved more.)

As to the writing, Impossible Landscapes is well written and easy to grasp. This does not mean that the campaign is far from challenging to prepare and run, given the complexity of the connections that snake back and forth across its length—though there is good advice given to both ends. What it does mean is that the writing does not complicate the process of either preparing to run or actually running the campaign.

Impossible Landscapes – A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow begins with surrealism and uncertainty and never lets up on either, let alone the tension. This is superb creation, one which supplants the very way in which the King in Yellow is presented as a threat in other scenarios—typically as an attempt to stage a performance of The King in Yellow, with or without the Investigators’ involvement, to pull them or others into Carcosa. Impossible Landscapes does that to an extent, but always seems to be skirting the performance, instead focusing on the reality destabilising/unreality enforcing that takes place somewhere between our world and that of Carcosa. This is not an experience that any Agent can win nor does it involve a threat that any Agent can defeat. Rather it is an experience to understand and survive, a threat to be avoided, knowing that its infectious, reality warping surrealism is never going to be stopped. As a result, Impossible Landscapes elevates the Yellow King and his influence into an existential contamination that unbinds, rebinds, and connects reality and truly delivers a superlative cosmic horror campaign and playing experience.

Tell me, have you seen the Impossible Landscapes?

Miskatonic Monday #100: Dockside Dogs

The set-up will sound familiar. A gang of besuited, well-dressed criminals arrive at a warehouse having just pulled off an extraordinary crime. Before planning and committing the crime, they had never met before, and even afterwards, they only know each other by their pseudonyms—Mister Black, Mister Red, Mister Green, Mister Purple, Mister Beige, and Mister Silver. The crime has been successfully committed; all they need to do now is follow the boss’ instructions. Lay low in the warehouse until midnight, when he will come for them and ferry them to safety across the bay. It is only a few hours, but not everyone in the gang likes each other and not everyone trusts each other. Perhaps with good reason, because some of them have secrets—and that is before the strange things which seem to be happening in the warehouse. The loot is not what it was when it was stolen—but now it definitely is. Time seems to pass really slowly or really quick. The sound of sirens can be heard right outside the warehouse—but the cops are nowhere to be seen. A baby crying can be heard, but never found in the warehouse. Mister Grey keeps copious notes, but comes and goes. Was he in on the robbery, and if so, should he not be staying in the warehouse like everyone else?

If that sounds like the plot of the first film from a nineties wunderkind, then you would not be far wrong.

This is the set-up for Dockside Dogs, a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition from its co-designer, Paul Fricker. It is a gangster themed, single-session, one-shot scenario which more or less follows the plot of almost any ‘Heist Gone Wrong’ film, from Rififi to Reservoir Dogs—though more the latter than the former. It is set in the nineties, but could just as easily be set in other time periods, and whilst it has obvious American trappings it could be easily adjusted to almost any other big coastal city. As a one-shot, it is designed to be roleplayed by six players and to that end comes with over twelve Investigator sheets so that each of the six gangster Investigators can be played as male or female. There are guidelines for running the scenario with fewer players, but Dockside Dogs is at its best with the full cast of six players and thus six gangsters. Each Investigator sheet includes a personal description, backstory, treasured possessions, and traits for that gangster, as well as a list of what each gangster thinks—and in some cases knows—of his or her fellow crew members.

Dockside Dogs begins with the gangsters arriving at the warehouse in two groups. Exactly what happened earlier in the day will be established through flashbacks and here Dockside Dogs begins to diverge away from what the traditional Call of Cthulhu investigation. The investigation, such as it is, is not through newspaper morgues or in libraries, but into each other. This is spurred on by events which the Keeper slips into the scenario exacerbate the sense of paranoia and uncertainty which pervades the scenario. Another difference between Dockside Dogs and other scenarios for Call of Cthulhu is that it encourages creativity and improvisation upon the part of the players and the Keeper. The effect of these scenes is twofold. First, they strengthen the links between the gangsters, and second, they call back to the film which inspires the scenario and enforces the genre.

Physically, Dockside Dogs is well presented, clearly written, and consequently easy to run with relatively little preparation. The Investigator sheets have all been customised for the scenario and are nicely individualised from one character to the next. Interestingly, there is some foreshadowing on some of the Investigator sheets, which effectively calls for the players of those Investigators to go along with the plot, again to enforce the genre and call back to the scenario’s inspiration.

Just as the genre and film inspiring Dockside Dogs is obvious, so is the Mythos inspiring it. However, just as the scenario asks the players to lean into its genre and filmic inspiration, it is also asking them to lean into the Mythos inspiration as well, though that inspiration is used in a markedly different fashion. With its combination of genre and single-session, one-shot format, Dockside Dogs is reminiscent of the Blood Brothers and Blood Brothers 2 anthologies, but is a more modern, storytelling-influenced version of that format. Dockside Dogs involves ‘blood brothers’ of a different kind in what is a tense and potentially bloody character study.

Miskatonic Monday #99: Carnival of Madness

The carnival is everything that society is not—exciting and exhilarating, romantic and raucous, uncertain and unsettled, even freakish and fearful. It seems appropriate that the modern idea of the carnival—at least the travelling carnival—would be propelled out of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition with its rides, games of chance, freak shows, and burlesque, let alone the horrors it would hide. From Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes to the television series Carnivàle, the carnival and its workers, the often-mistrusted Carnies, have always been something to fear, the apprehension of the unknown tipping over into abhorrence as this classic slice of Americana slipped into our consciousness, set up its booths and displays, switched on the bright lights and jaunty pipes, barked out its delights, promised gaiety and fun, before switching off the lights and slipping away in the morning, leaving behind just memories and the promise of a return the next year. Almost from the start, the carnival became a vehicle behind which the horrors of the Mythos could wend their way across America, their impact barely felt from one town to the next, including in Call of Cthulhu with David A. Hargrave’s scenario ‘Dark Carnival’ from Curse of the Chthonians: Four Odysseys Into Deadly Intrigue. However, that was all setting with neither narrative nor background; the setting populated by a gallery of grotesques devoted to an unexplained cult – the Society of the Great Dark – and sitting over what is essentially a dungeon. Fortunately, the newest scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition to offer a carnival of consternation is far more chilling and much more cunning. Welcome to Carnival Pandemonium.

Carnival of Madness: A Call of Cthulhu Scenario for the 1970s is from the same team behind Highway of Blood and The Pipeline. It is inspired by the low-budget horror, splatter, and exploitation films of the period, shown in a ‘grindhouse’ or ‘action house’ cinema, such as Duel, I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and the more recent Death Proof. Carnival of Madness is a one-session, one-shot which takes place on the Friday the day before Halloween in 1970 just off the Aylesbury Pike in western Massachusetts. The Player Characters—who may or not be investigators—are visiting a carnival which has set up there, whether for fun, looking for Alice, a little girl who has been abducted from Worcester State Hospital (she will come to play a significant role in the scenario whatever the Player Characters’ motivations), or to investigate a curious cluster of similar dreams in the area. This is as either a quartet of ‘Meddling Kids’ in the mode of Scooby Doo—though minus the Great Dane, a team of Mythos dream investigators, a pair of Massachusetts State Police detectives, or a team of Private Investigators. Of these, Carnival of Madness includes pre-generated Investigators for the Meddling Kids and the two Detectives.

Carnival of Madness opens with the Investigators on the road and directed onto the grounds of the Carnival Pandemonium to the sound of jaunty party pipes and encouraged to play games such as Whack-A-Monkey, Ring Toss, Duck Pond, Wheel-O-Fortune, and more. They are pushed, even pulled towards various booths and other events, including a series of performances announced by a classic carnival barker, as well as a Fortune Teller and the Asylum, the carnival’s Funhouse and Freak Show. The Freak Show contains the most obvious and most immediate evidence of the presence of the Mythos at the carnival and despite being a cliché, is appropriate. Yet there are oddities amongst the Carnies too, some of which are obvious and perhaps easily passed off, but if the Investigators look close enough (or is that too close?) many have something disturbing about them... The Asylum is subtler in its horror, being based on the classic facility for the mentally disturbed which constantly seems to play with the Investigators’ sense of perspective and that runs throughout Carnival of Madness.

Carnival of Madness is also a timed event and as the Investigators spend more time on the carnival grounds, reality seems to slip in and out around them, and they seem to slip in and out of reality. In actuality, they are descending deeper and deeper into Pandemonium, a space which distorts the world around them. What is pulling them is a vector, an Unreality, an infection which is making them more susceptible to the effects of the Pandemonium. At first there are only minor differences—colours not as bright, flavours blander, and sounds flatter, whilst those around the Investigators who are already one of the Infected, will seem to act strangely and see madness in everyone but themselves, but further and further in, the world will wear out, the people will disappear and reappear, the sun will take on a golden corona, chaos reigns as thoughts and emotions run rampant and have a physical presence, until the point where they are no longer at the carnival, or even on Earth. In and out of this slips Alice, sometimes taking an Investigator by the hand, sometimes stepping out of sight… The Investigators’ descent into Pandemonium is measured by Sanity loss and requires some extra tracking upon the part of the Keeper, the effects of any occurrence of any Bout of Insanity being marked by a drop further on that descent and a roll on the provided Unreality Tables.

For the players and their Investigators, Carnival of Madness comes with some excellent handouts, including tickets, photographs and images, posters, and maps, one of which delightfully hints at the Mythos entity at the heart of the scenario. The standout handout is the leaflet for the Carnival Pandemonium itself, which definitely needs to be printed out and handed to the players as it adds so much verisimilitude to the scenario. Six Investigator sheets—though only the front of the sheets—are given for the four Meddling Kids and the two Detectives.

For the Keeper there is the complete background to the scenario and the antagonists’ plans which come to fruition at the climax of the scenario, an explanation for Pandemonium is and how it works, a complete description of all the booths and events at the carnival—including all of the games, so the Investigators can get involved, stats for the major NPCs, descriptions of three Mythos artifacts, spells, and tomes, and a new Mythos creature. There is also advice and a warning or two—all of which are needed. Carnival of Madness is upfront about the fact that it involves body horror, graphic violence, drug use, adult language, gaslighting, and mental health issues—the gaslighting in particular. Across the course of the evening on which the scenario takes place, the Keeper is constantly presenting the players and their Investigators with seemingly false narratives and manipulating and misleading their perceptions. The scenario advises that the Keeper should be upfront with her players as well.

Carnival of Madness is a busy scenario, perhaps too busy to run in a single session and the Keeper will need to maintain a tight rein on the pace of the scenario as it drives to the climax. There is the suggestion that it could be run in two or three sessions, though that may lessen some of the scenario’s impact, for this is a scenario which is designed to build and build in intensity and some of that may be lost between sessions. The scenario is flexible enough that it could easily be set at any time from the Purple Decade of Cthulhu by Gaslight to the nineteen eighties without any real changes.

Physically, Carnival of Madness is a fantastic looking book. The artwork is good, the writing decent, and the handouts excellent. Perhaps an index or a cheat sheet of tables to cover the rules additions would have been useful, but the book is relatively short.

Carnival of Madness is a scenario whose fantastic atmosphere and creepiness and weirdness grows and grows in intensity as the Investigators descend into Carnival Pandemonium and madness. It not only brings the raucous and rowdy nature of a carnival to life with all of the games and performances and booths, but infuses them with an unmellow yellow that will play and play again with the Investigators’ perceptions like a carousel of consternation.

Miskatonic Monday #97: Yellow Death

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was a Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: The Yellow Death

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Batu Bozoglu

Setting: Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Kentucky

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Fifty-two page, 30.37 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: What if the terror of tuberculosis could be infected by something more terrible? 

Plot Hook: A brother dies too early and too crazy. The Investigators will have to follow in his footsteps to find out what happened.

Plot Support: Detailed plot, staging advice for the Keeper, twelve handouts, one map, fifteen NPCs, and four pre-generated Investigators.

Production Values: Decent.

Pros

# Interesting historical setting

# Self-contained hospital hell

# Detailed plot

# An expectorantly vile one-shot

# Could be adapted to Cthulhu by Gaslight or any time up to the 1950s

# Getting in is easy, getting out (and in what condition) is another matter

Cons

# Needs a good edit

# Illustrations do not always match the period

# Potentially overly plotted?

# No Sanity rewards?

Conclusion

# Interesting historical setting

# Detailed period one-shot

# Presents a vile vehicle for the King in Yellow in an expectorantly horrible hospital horror

Carcosa in Carcassonne

Originally published in 2000 by Hans im Glück in German and by Rio Grande Games in English, Carcassonne is one of the early, great Euro-style board games. Currently published by Z-Man Games, it won the Spiel des Jahres in 2001 and has since gone on to become a classic and is rightly regarded as a gateway game to the hobby. Based on the town in south-west France, it sees the players attempt to build the town of Carcassonne using the game’s tiles as they see fit, constructing cities, completing roads, surrounding monasteries, and occupying farms tile by tile, and then claiming them with their knights, thieves, monks, and farmers. Since its initial release, there have been both multiple expansions for the game and multiple versions of the game, but what if Carcassonne were to fall prey to a malign meme, an insidious influence, a yammering yellow? What if there were men and women desperate enough and ready to drive themselves mad in service of a greater goal, to make the ancient Roman city not ‘Carcaso’, but Carcosa?

This is almost the setup for Carcosa – A Lovecraftian board game of Cults and Madness published by One Free Elephant. It does not actually see the Yellow Sign subvert the town of Carcassonne, but it does take the same tile-laying, area control mechanics of Carcassonne the game and build on them to see rival cults—or players—race to bring the Tattered King to Earth, commanding cultists to control ley lines, conduct rituals, explore the districts of Carcosa itself as they replace our reality, and even sacrifice them to the dark waters of Lake Hali for the pleasure of the King. 

Designed for two to four players, aged fourteen and over, Carcosa can be played in about hour, sometimes less. It consists of eight-four Carcosa tiles, four Hastur tiles, a Cult Mat, four sets of ten ‘Cultists’, four sets of Ritual Stones, four Chapter House cards, four Forbidden Lore cards, and the rulebook. The four Hastur tiles are the game’s starting tiles and show parts of a District in Lake Hali. The eight-four Carcosa tiles show several types of features in Carcosa. These are Districts, Ritual Sites, Confluxes, Ley Lines, and Lake Hali. When placed each tile must be placed adjacent to an existing tile and the sides of the tiles must match. Notably, each of the Carcosa tiles is double-sided and has ‘Stable’ and ‘Unstable’ sides. When a player draws a tile, he examines it and places it so that its ‘Unstable’ side is face up. Only when a feature is completed—Districts built, Ley Lines linked, Ritual Sites surrounded, and sections of Lake Hali enclosed—will it stabilise so that the feature’s tiles can be turned over and its controlling player can harness its power.

The Cult Mat is divided into two sections. The outer section is the Occult Power track which is used to track each player’s progress towards the Summoning Ritual which will bring the King in Yellow to Earth. The inner section is the Ritual Chamber with spaces for the Carcosa tiles to be placed ‘Stable’ side face down. The middle of the Ritual Chamber is marked with the Yellow Sign. This is where potential Cultist recruits can be found and ultimately, the Summoning Ritual is held to bring the King in Yellow to Earth.

Each player’s ten Cultists consists of a Prophet, who sits on the Ritual Mat and controls access to the undrawn Carcosa tiles; an Oracle who keeps track of a cult’s score and progress towards the Summoning Ritual; and eight Cultists. Three of these wait on the Ritual Mat, ready to be recruited and two wait in the Cult’s Chapterhouse, one in the Asylum and one in the Recovery Room. This leaves a player and his cult with just three Cultists at start of play.

Each player has access to a set of six Ritual Stones, each numbered from two to seven. By completing Ley Lines, a player can imbue these with power, the longer the Ley Line, the higher the number of the Ritual Stone which can be imbued. On subsequent turns, a player can use a Ritual Stone to gain an advantage. For example, ‘We Are Legion’ allows a player to add a Cultist to an uncontrolled feature, whilst ‘Shape the Beyond’ lets him take a Carcosa tile from the stack currently controlled by his Prophet and save it to be played later. Notably, possession of a higher numbered Ritual Stone means that it can be used as a lesser numbered Ritual Stone. Each player has a Forbidden Lore card which details the powers of all six Ritual Stones.

Lastly, each cult has a Chapterhouse with two rooms, an Asylum and a Recovery Room. When a Cultist completes a feature, he is sent to his Chapterhouse’s Asylum. On subsequent turns, he will move to the Recovery Room before becoming ready to play again. This strengthens the resource management aspect of the game, since completing features will temporarily limit the number of Cultists he has from one turn to the next.

A player’s turn consists of five steps—Recover Sanity, Tile Selection, Tile Placement/Replacement, Cultist Placement, and Tile Resolution. In the Recover Sanity step, Cultists are moved from the Asylum to the Recovery Room and from the Recovery Room to a player’s supply, enabling Cultists who completed features in earlier turns and were sent insane, to gain their semblance of sanity—after all, no sane man wants to summon the Yellow King. In Tile Selection, a player takes a tile from a stack which does not have a Prophet belonging to any player on it and then places his Prophet on that stack. This blocks access to that stack until after the current player’s next turn and adds a resource denial aspect to the game as the players block and unblock access to the stacks. Having drawn a tile, a player examines its Stable side to determine where to place it in the Tile Placement/Replacement and adds it to the tiles in play with the Unstable side face up. Notably, he can use this tile to replace an existing Unstable tile—as long as the sides match with the tiles it is being placed alongside. Replaced tiles are not lost, but added to the bottom of a stack to be drawn later. In the Cultist Placement step, the player can add a Cultist to the feature he has added or extended—on the Ley Lines, Districts, Ritual Sites, or in Lake Hali—as long as there is not a Cultist already on it.

In the Tile Resolution step, if a feature is completed, all of its tiles are flipped over from their Unstable to Stable sides. The Cultists who completed the feature go insane and are sent to the player’s Asylum. Power is then drawn to various effects, depending upon the type of completed feature. Districts score points and advance a player towards starting the Summoning Ritual. Some Districts contain ‘theatres’ which allow a player to recruit additional Cultists. Ritual Sites are completed when surrounded by eight other tiles. This scores a player more points, but if the Ritual Site is home to a feaster—something that only the placing player will know—it devours the Cultist on the Ritual Site and any Cultists in the surrounding waters of Lake Hali. Although this scores points for all players whose Cultists are devoured, these Cultists are sent to the Cult Mat and cannot rejoin the game unless recruited via a District with a Theatre. Although this scores points for everyone involved, it can be used as a means of denying Cultists to a rival player. A player can sacrifice a Cultist to Lake Hali to score points, though this will reduce the number of Cultists he has to hand. By completing a Ley Line, a player will imbue a Ritual Stone, unless it is connected to an ‘Empowered Conflux’, in which case, he will imbue a Ritual Stone and score points.

Play continues until one of two conditions are met. If two stacks are depleted on the Cult Mat, the game ends, players score for any incomplete features they control, and the player with the most points takes control of Carcosa and wins the game. This is the less interesting of the two conditions. The more interesting condition occurs when a player’s Oracle reaches the end of the scoring track on the Cult Mat and so can begin the Summoning Ritual. This requires him to complete three more features and send their corresponding and now insane Cultists to the Cult Mat (instead of the cult’s Chapterhouse). The first player to do so, brings the Yellow King to Earth and wins the game.

Carcosa quite literally brings several new twists to Carcassonne and its style of play. Cultists being sent insane by completing features and their need to recover imposes a strong resource management aspect, whilst the ability to complete a Ritual Site and sacrifice Cultists of any player enforces this—though they do extra points for these sacrifices. So a player needs to be very careful not to overcommit his Cultists lest he exhaust the numbers he has to place. The ability to block access to the tile stacks gives another tactical aspect to play. The Unstable/Stable aspect of tile placement adds a sense of mystery and hidden play to the game, but being able to replace an Unstable tile can be very powerful, especially if it changes the effect of a tile, such as connecting a Ley Line to an ‘Empowered Conflux’ or changing a Ritual Site to one with a Feaster—or vice versa. That said, while the Stable/Unstable tile mechanic is clever, it can be fiddly when it comes to flipping them over, so players do need to be careful. Above all, the Summoning Ritual as the end game condition makes the game a race, one that any player can still catch up to if he is behind as well as slowing a player down who is attempting the Summoning Ritual. In addition, the Ritual Stones can give a player an advantage just when he needs it. All of those does mean that there is much more to learning to play Carcosa than Carcassonne and that the game’s full details will really come out after a few plays.

Physically, Carcosa is a nicely presented game. Everything is in full colour, the tiles are beautiful pieces of artwork, dark and moody, even ominous, each presented on thick card. The Cultists are wood—as they should be for a Carcassonne-style game—but pleasing cut to represent berobbed cult members. The rulebook does look a bit plain though and although it does explain the rules well enough, it is not the easiest set of rules to read or indeed use as a reference guide to the rules. The Cult Mat, though sturdy, feels a bit cramped in play. (Note that this review is of a pre-production copy, so the ultimate design will vary, most notably the rulebook will be presented in full colour and redesigned.)

Thematically, Carcosa is a delight. Its artwork and the Cultist meeples—this is a Carcassonne-style game, so each player’s Cultists are always meeples—bring an ominous sense of dread and doom to the game play, yet without overpowering it. There no great Mythos creature or entity lumbering into view, but always a sense of building towards something insidious and despairing. At its core, the game play remains simple, but Carcosa does add several degrees of complexity to Carcassonne’s mechanics, moving the game well away from being a gateway game as does the theme, which is more adult and darker in tone. Another reason it is not a gateway game, is that the complexity means a greater range of tactical options, perhaps slightly too many for casual play. That also means though, that the players have more opportunity to be tactical—not just in terms of their tiles and where to place them, but also which tile stack to block, when to play a Ritual Stone, when to sacrifice everyone’s Cultists, and so on. 

Of course it could be argued that Carcosa is an overly complex version of Carcassone, but then the players are trying to perform a Summoning Ritual and what ritual is ever easy? Yet the complexity is born of a design combination that is clever and in places novel, bringing both mechanical depth and thematic depth to a design classic. Ultimately though, the cleverest aspect of One Free Elephant bringing Carcosa to Carcassone is not noting the connection, which was there for all to see, but making the connection in terms of theme and game—such that you have to wonder why no one made the connection before.

—oOo—

Carcosa – A Lovecraftian board game of Cults and Madness is currently being funded via a Kickstarter campaign.