Gibsons 100: L'Attaque

Gibsons is one hundred years old. Founded as H. P. Gibson & Sons Limited in 1919, it is the oldest manufacturer of board games in the United Kingdom as well as a noted manufacturer of jigsaws. In its time, it has been famous for publishing the classic strategic games of the 1970s and 1980s—Civilisation and Kingmaker—but before World War II, it was famous for publishing a quartet of early military strategy games. Known as the ‘big four’, the quartet consisted of Dover Patrol, L’Attaque, Aviation, and Tri-Tactics. Of these four, Gibsons has published L’Attaque in a brand new edition to celebrate its centenary. Originally marketed as the ‘game to rival chess’, L’Attaque is an abstract war game designed for two players, aged eight and up. The new edition remains relatively unchanged bar the inclusion of a set of the rules rewritten for clarity and a facsimile of the original 1925 rules.

Originally, a French game designed by Mademoiselle Hermance Edan who received a patent for a ‘jeu de bataille avec pièces mobiles sur damier’ (a battle game with mobile pieces on a game board) in 1909, the game was named L’Attaque by its French publisher, Au jeu retrouvé, before H. P. Gibson & Sons Limited purchased the English language rights to the game and published it in 1925. In this game two armies will face off against each other over a set of three rivers. In the original, the opponents were the English and French armies, but they have since been simply named the red and the blue armies. Played out on a nine by ten grid of squares with three rivers at its centre, the aim of the game is to defeat your opponent by either capturing their Flag or forcing him into a stalemate where he cannot move his pieces.

Both armies are identical, consisting of thirty-six pieces made up of the following in ascending order of value and rarity: Scout (2), Sapper (3), Sergeant (4), Lieutenant (5), Captain (6), Major (7), Colonel (8), Brigadier (9), and Commander In Chief (10). Each army also has a several Mines and a Flag. Although the artwork on the front of the pieces is the same for both sides—essentially an interwar period style English army—the backs of the pieces are either plain blue or plain red. A higher value piece beats a lower value piece, but several pieces have special moves. Thus, the Spy is easily defeated by every other unit, but defeats the Commander In Chief; when revealed, a Mine blows everyone up in adjacent squares, except a Sapper who defuses the Mine; and Scouts have unlimited, orthogonal movement. All other units are capable of moving just the one space, either backwards or forwards, left or right.

Set-up is simple enough. Each player takes his army and places its pieces on his side of the board, keeping all of the fronts and thus the types of pieces facing him, and the plain, coloured back facing his opponent. He is free to place his pieces where he wants, although Mines cannot be placed near the rivers. In general, each player will place his Flag at or near the back of his forces, as far away from his opponent’s forces as possible, protected by one or more Mines. On his turn, a player moves one piece. If it is in front of an opposing piece, then the player can declare an “Attack!” When this happens, both attacker and defender reveal the attacking and defending pieces, the highest ranked piece typically beating the lower ranked piece. Pieces of equal value defeat each other. The beaten piece or beaten pieces are removed from play, but a good player should endeavor to remember which pieces have defeated his own and so work to bring a piece of a higher value to defeat them. During the initial stages of the game, the two armies will be probe each other’s forces attempting to defeat or determine which pieces are which, whilst in the later stages, players will bring up their heavier units to defeat their opponents’ stronger defenders.

Some pieces are easier to identify than others, of course. The Scout is easy to identify simply by his extended movement, so a player may want to be more circumspect in revealing that until necessary. Similarly, Mines and Flags can be identified by the fact that neither moves, but that sets up the possibility of a trap. A player could keep a high value unit immobile throughout a game to lure his opponent in and so eliminate a piece attempting to locate and capture his Flag or locate a Mine. This can be effective if the attacking unit is a Sapper, which would deny a player the all important ability to defuse Mines. Once this trap is sprung, the high value piece is free to move and openly attack and defend.

With a playing time of twenty minutes, L’Attaque is surprisingly playable for a game that is over a century old. It is not a sophisticated game by modern standards, but it has given rise to many imitators, most notably Stratego, and was highly popular in its day. Nor is it a particularly deep game and the suggestion that it is a ‘game to rival chess’ is really hyperbole upon the part of the publisher.

Physically, the production values of the centenary version of L’Attaque are really quite lovely, whether that is the rich red box, the artwork on the playing pieces, and the heavy mounted board. The rules are printed on a slim, but heavy card sheet, whilst the inclusion of a facsimile of the original rules is a nice touch.

Of course, there is a wonderful sense of nostalgia to L’Attaque and this centenary edition does much to enforce that. As an artefact in itself, the game is nice celebration of the publisher’s birthday, but L’Attaque can still serve as an introduction to both early games and to wargaming, to bring new players into the hobby, and with a short playing time, to serve a diversion between longer games too. L’Attaque is a lovely piece of history—both gaming and ordinary history—which plays up to our nostalgia.

Sweet Charnel Decay

The primary focus of Pelgrane Press’ clue orientated RPG of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Trail of Cthulhu is the desperate decade—the 1930s. Yet it is no stranger to other time periods, in particular, the Great War. Author Adam Gauntlett has penned a number of scenarios set within the four years of the global conflict that took place between 1914 and 1918 that have taken the investigators soaring into the skies in Flying Coffins, diving into the depths in Sisters of Sorrow, and slipping behind the trenches in Not So Quiet, each time to face a strange new sanity searing threat to humanity that is taking advantage of the carnage and chaos of the Great War.

With Dulce et Decorum Est: Great War Trail of Cthulhu, Gauntlett revisits the conflict to further explore the advantage taken by certain entities of the Mythos and in the process present rules for handling the conflict in the air, at sea, and on land in this new mechanical age of war; set out a campaign framework and give scenarios old and new. In previous visits to the Great War by Lovecraftian investigative horror—in particular by No Man’s Land for Call of Cthulhu—the Mythos entities associated with such mass conflict have been the feasters upon the dead, that is, ghouls. Here the author takes this to the next logical step and places the Great Old One, Mordiggian, as the Great War’s darkest celebrant and patron. The Charnel God was not the instigator of the Great War, but it is pleased to participate and further encourage the loss of life on a massive scale—one more sign that the End Times near?

Thus according to Dulce et Decorum Est, the greater the devastation and the greater the scale of death, the more likely that Mordiggian will manifest. This might be as simple as the ghost-like Angel of Mons, but it might a personal manifestation. Either way, the aim of both is to drive men to greater acts of death and destruction. Whilst Mordiggian shares an interest in mankind with Nyarlathotep, unlike that of the Crawling Chaos, he is not malicious and manipulative, but malign and monomaniacal, concerned only with death. Often worshipped by those with an interest in necromancy, Mordiggian rarely dispenses boons, but nevertheless, given the patriotic fervour with which the war is supported at home by both sides, it is no surprise that the Charnel God is worshipped by cultists on both sides. Thus cultists are given for both sides in Dulce et Decorum Est. One, Agathe von Plon, previously appeared as the villain in Flying Coffins, whilst the others, the Balfour sisters, are distant relations to the author of the infamous tome, Cultes des Ghouls and together lead The Order of the White Feather, which actively supports the war and decries any signs of cowardice.

Dulce et Decorum Est offers four campaign settings and three scenarios. The four campaigns start with ‘The Home Front’, amidst the burgeoning feminism and sexuality of women doing men’s job as the popularity of the war grows and grows, before moving closer and closer to the Western Front. This is exacerbated in the second campaign setting, ‘Paris: The city of Tears’, and combined with the whirlwind chaos of soldiery passing through, nightly bombing, and keeping the troops entertained. The third, ‘15th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment: A Season in Hell’, sees the Charnel God take advantage of, and drive on, the pride of an African-American infantry regiment, whilst the fourth, ‘Sinai and Palestine: Shadows in the Desert’, mixes espionage and guerilla warfare of Lawrence of Arabia with the Mythos.

‘Vaterland’, the first of the three scenarios is a prequel of sorts to Flying Coffins. It is set in 1914 aboard the Vaterland, a German passenger liner that has been chained up in New York harbour to prevent it being used ship supplies in support of the German war effort. The investigators are ‘yellow journalists’ sent to attend a concert being held aboard the Vaterland in support of Germany, one that is being attended by William Randolph Hearst! Is the concert a cover for a German spy ring? If so, could Hearst be German spy! This is why the investigators’ editor sends them aboard the Vaterland, but the truth of the matter is that the investigators are unlikely to uncover exactly what is going before everything goes awry. As the lights go out in the bowels of the passenger liner, the investigators find themselves trapped in the visions of the horrors to come and must find their way out of those as much as the ship itself. A relatively short, straightforward and confined affair, ‘Vaterland’ is a primarily interesting because of its setting, one that plays against our anti-German notions of the period. The inclusion of Hearst as an NPC adds an interesting wrinkle and a certain impetus to the scenario.

The second scenario is ‘Dead Horse Corner’ and fits more readily into our narrative of the Great War. The investigators are soldiers, members of the Royal Engineers, sent up the line to a forward observation post to re-establish contact with the unit assigned there and repair a broken telephone line. Under intermittent shell fire and sniper fire, the investigators find themselves isolated and at first haunted, then hunted by something in the valley. Again a relatively short scenario, it nicely builds on a strong sense of isolation and of the three scenarios in the book, is probably best suited to add to an ongoing campaign set during the Great War.

‘Sisters of Sorrow’ is the third and final scenario in Dulce et Decorum Est. It is also the only reprint and thus has already been reviewed here. Set aboard a German mine-laying submarine,  ‘Sisters of Sorrow’ is all about the infectiousness of paranoia and desperation in confined spaces. After all, nowhere could be more confined than an Unterseeboot in the middle of a Royal Navy blockade in the North Sea when the danger comes from below.

As well as a timeline of the war, the supplement presents a number of new rules. This includes the Military Talk and Battlefield Lore Abilities—the former for interacting with members of the military and its bureaucracy, the latter for knowing about and the way around a battlefield. For the most part the new rules consist of subsets for handling the different physical environments that the war is fought in, that is, on land, in the air, and at sea. The rules for both aerial and naval combat are not new rules, having been drawn from ‘Sisters of Sorrow’ for the naval rules and from Flying Coffins for the aerial rules, but their inclusion here is fitting. The new rules for ground combat cover the digging of trenches and laying of fortifications, trench warfare—including gas warfare, and the first incidences of armoured warfare—including both tanks and armoured cars. Whilst all these rules are appropriate, what is missing is a guide to creating investigators for any of these theatres of conflict, since many of the participants will be new to the military life and had jobs before enlisting.

Physically, Dulce et Decorum Est is solidly presented.The art is excellent, though the writing feels a little rushed in places. If the supplement is lacking, it is in the lack of overarching advice for the Keeper on running a campaign set during the Great War, but as a whole though, Dulce et Decorum Est gives the tools for the Keeper to run scenarios set during the war, plus numerous good ideas and three solid, though all too short scenarios. 

AAA-LARM!!

With Sisters of Sorrow, Adam Gauntlett takes Trail of Cthulhu and Pelgrane Press back to the Great War for a third time. Previously, in Not So Quiet – available in the anthology, Out of Time, the author had us visit a field hospital on the Western Front, whilst he let us take to the air in Flying Coffins to serve with the Royal Flying Corps and face an aerial antagonist the like of which the pilots had never seen. For this third scenario, the author switches to not just another theatre of war, but another side too! The protagonists of Sisters of Sorrow are part of the crew of UC-12, a U-Boot in the service of the Kaiserliche Marine. In other words, the players get to be the Germans! This is not as radical as it sounds, after all, the very first story that H.P. Lovecraft had published was “The Temple,” which related the events that led to the loss of the U-29.

In Sisters of Sorrow, the UC-12 is a mine laying Unterseeboot, an unarmed submarine tasked by the Kaiserliche Marine to cut its way through the nets that protect England’s harbours and lay mines as close as possible to disrupt shipping. This is a dangerous task. Not only is there the possibility of the detection and being sunk by the Royal Navy, but the actual laying of the mines can sink the submarine too! There is supposed to be a delay before a laid mine rises to the surface, but sometimes the delaying mechanism fails and the mine rises under the submarine and detonates! (This is where the title of the scenario comes from, for such mine-laying vessels were known as “Sisters of Sorrow”). For the crew, live aboard is damp, smelly, and unpleasant.

Assigned to penetrate the North Sea defensive zone and lay mines off Tyneside, UC-12 and her crew must contend with more than the routine of avoiding the Royal Navy and other shipping on its way to England. Strange noises seem to reverberate through the hull from the outside – could they really be whale song? This and other strangeness seems to be affecting the crew – have they been cooped up too long in the noxiously narrow atmosphere of UC-12? Or is it that water has been splashed on the batteries and they are giving off chlorine gas?

Structurally, Sisters of Sorrow is a reasonably straightforward, somewhat linear adventure. That though, is due to it being a military based adventure and not a criticism. Within the linear structure though, there is never time for the story to lag and there is always something for the player characters to do. If there is a criticism of the scenario structure it is that the player character roles are primarily reactive, although this is primarily aimed at building atmosphere and tension before there is the opportunity for more proactive play towards the scenario’s climax.

One interesting aspect to Sisters of Sorrow is when it is set. Not just during the Great War, but in the war’s early years. The submarines of the Kaiserliche Marine follow a nineteenth century Prize Code under which her crews must warn those of the ships that they attack so that due time is allowed for them to abandon ship. Although the UC-12 does have a machine gun, it is by no means an attack boat, which together with the terms of the Prize Code mean that the crews’ actions will be limited against the outré threats faced in Sisters of Sorrow. This complication, in combination with the descriptions of life aboard the Unterseeboot, is counter to the romantic, almost chivalrous notions that we have about submarine warfare.

Sisters of Sorrow is a one-shot scenario designed for play with six characters, that should not last more than two sessions. The scenario includes six pre-generated “investigators” – the Executive Officer, Chief Engineer, Radio Operator, Helmsman, Engineer, and Mechanic. As written, the scenario tells the story of their first, and quite possibly their last, mission. No advice is given on how to create characters if the players do not like the pre-generated ones included, as essentially they could take the role of any one of the fourteen man complement of UC-12. That said, the Military Template given in Trail of Cthulhu will probably be all that a Keeper and player alike will need. It is intimated though, that the role of the Kapitan be not taken by a player, primarily in the short set of play test notes that should help the Keeper further when it comes to running Sisters of Sorrow.

Although there are no notes on whether or not it could be run using a British crew and a British submarine, there is nothing to stop an inventive Keeper from adapting it so. Similarly, an inventive Keeper could easily adjust it to the Second World War if he so chose. One of the issues in changing both sides and period is that the limitations of the design of UC-12 would be lifted. Submarines operated by the Royal Navy in the Great War, and by all sides in World War Two were substantially better armed and this has the potential to curtail certain elements of the scenario.

Physically, Sisters of Sorrow is a twenty-three page, 4.26 Mb PDF. Done in murky grays and greens throughout, it is well written and neatly presented. It is lightly illustrated, but every piece by Phil Reeves is excellent, and even if the cover is perhaps tentacularly misleading, elsewhere he draws more inventively from the text to more disquieting effect.

Like the previous adventures, Not So Quiet and Flying Coffins, this scenario could easily work as a flashback to explain how a character became aware of the Mythos. The character does not even have to have been aboard UC-12. It could be that the character’s brother or father was aboard and that in playing Sisters of Sorrow, what is being played is not a flashback, but the events of the father’s or brother’s journal which was recovered… Sisters of Sorrow is all about the infectiousness of paranoia and desperation in confined spaces. After all, nowhere could be more confined than an Unterseeboot in the middle of a Royal Navy blockade in the North Sea when the danger comes from below.

Once in No-Man's Land

Call of Cthulhu has visited the Great War before, most notably with the scenario, No-Man’s Land, as has Trail of Cthulhu with the recent Flying Coffins and the scenario, "Not So Quiet" from the anthology Out of Time. Yet neither has approached this period in as interactive a fashion as in Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. This is a computer RPG which uses Call of Cthulhu for its mechanics under license from Chaosium, Inc. and is available for several platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows, so can be run on your computer, your smartphone, or your tablet. The latter though, is the game’s natural home. That said, The Wasted Land has taken a while to get to the Android platform and be debugged, which has delayed my getting to write this review.

Anyway, as much as Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land employs the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu, it is not a true RPG. Not in the sense of a pen and paper RPG such as Call of Cthulhu, nor in the sense of a computer RPG. Rather it is a skirmish combat game, one that is Action Point driven and turn-based, much in the same mode as the classic computer games, Laser Squad and X-Com. The game has the player control up to six characters, and on each turn, the player will expend each character’s Action Points to move that character and have him attack his opponents – with an option for taking time to aim at his opponents – as well as to heal and even psychoanalyse his allies!

The setting is the Western Front in 1915. As related in his diaries, a British squad under Captain Hill must defend against a German attack that grows stranger and stranger. Not just ordinary German soldiers, but cult fanatics and zombies too! Fortunately, Professor Brightmeer, a Miskatonic University scholar on attachment to British Military Intelligence is on hand to inform Captain Hill and his men that a German occultist has turned to more outré means to bring about victory for the Kaiser! So begins the desperate search for the means to stop this dastardly villain, which will take the squad out of the trenches and into No-Man’s Land, before going underground over the course of eleven missions. Along the way they will avoid things as ordinary as poison gas and barbed wire, and things as otherworldly as spiders from Leng and giant walking tentacle plants.

Most of the eleven missions involve holding off the Hun, either to defend a location or to get to a location. This has the characters dodging from cover to cover, searching for strongpoints where they can heal, researching documents, and more. For the most part, the missions are very linear, often with one safe path through the mission zone. Even when the characters have to enter patches of poison gas, they can be equipped with gas masks.

In between missions, characters are taken through two upgrade steps. The first sees their stats and skills improved. It is here that the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu are at their most obvious, though in a slimmed down fashion that focuses on those numbers necessary for combat. Skills, rated on a percentile skill, are arms and equipment, along with the First Aid Skill to heal the sick and the Psychoanalysis Skill to heal the mentally disturbed. Stats are rated on a 3 to 18 scale, and are improved to one of two ends. The first is to increase the number of Action Points that a character has in combat, whilst the second is to increase a character’s Sanity and thus his ability to withstand mental shocks.

A Sample Character: Captain Hill

The second upgrade step deals with equipment. Here a character can upgrade from his trusty Lee-Enfield rifle to a Hotchkiss M1914 heavy machine gun or a Winchester Model 1912 pump-action shotgun. There is a small armoury of weapons available, both guns and melee weapons, as well as gasmasks, armour, and even homing pigeons which will deliver requests for artillery support. Medical kits are also available as are books derived from the works of Freud that will help restore a character’s Sanity, whilst it is possible in later missions for characters to learn spells, although casting these greatly deplete the Sanity of the caster.

The mechanics of Call of Cthulhu also show within a mission. First in the use of the skills, though you see no percentile dice being rolled, and second, in the Sanity mechanic. Sanity is lost when attacking and being attacked by forces of the Mythos, and when too much is lost, a character can be paralysed with fear, sent catatonic, or even sent manic! The latter is incredibly taxing on the body, the sufferer usually ending up dead, but whilst manic, a character becomes a force of nature, able to charge the enemy and deal out damage aplenty.

The redoubtable Sid Brown alerts Captain Hill as to the imminent danger!

Whilst game play is simple, it is actually quite challenging in places, the final mission overly so, and it might take a restart or two to really get into the game. It does not help that game play is hampered by slightly clunky controls that sometimes will have you stabbing a stubby finger at the screen of your tablet in frustration. Another often annoying factor is that the missions tend to be very linear in nature – “Go there!”, “Do that!”, “Now exit over there!” – such that there is not a great deal of variety in terms of play. This is exacerbated by the fact that a lot the spells do not become available until last quarter of the game, limiting the option of creating variations upon the gun toting characters that dominate game play.

Inspired by the events of Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, the game’s treatment of the Mythos is more pulp than purist as it mixes a number of Mythos entities together and its game play is all combat. Where The Wasted Land shines is in its detail and its atmosphere. Although a little anachronistic in places (easily portable machine guns in 1915?), all of the characters are well defined, and the battlefields feel suitably ‘gone to hell,’ literally a wasted land. The animation is good too – there is something quite unnerving to see a Dark Young lumbering towards your squad as they attempt to blast it to bits before their sanity is blown too. Overall, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is an engaging electronic treatment of Lovecraftian horror worthy of your time and a sequel.

By the way, perhaps Red Wasp Design and Modiphius Press should get together. A World War II Lovecraftian horror game for your tablet would make a great sequel.

Not Just the Hun in the Sun...

The year 2012 happens to be the centenary of two major events. The first is the more well-known sinking of the RMS Titanic, the world’s first palatial ocean going and proclaimed unsinkable liner. Pelgrane Press has already celebrated that event by releasing RMS Titanic: The Millionaires’ Special, a scenario for its well-regarded RPG of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Trail of Cthulhu. Now it follows it up with a second scenario, one that unknowingly celebrates the other centenary, the founding of the Royal Flying Corps, the arm of the British Army that would support it from the air throughout the Great War, and at war’s end would become the basis for the Royal Air Force. The scenario in question is Flying Coffins, a one-shot affair which for the first time in any scenario for Calll of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu, lets the investigators take to the air. Of course, there have been several scenarios that have involved flying, but in every case, the investigators have been passengers. In Flying Coffins, the investigators take control of their own flying machines, joystick in hand, rudders at their feet, and fingers curved round the triggers. In addition, both scenarios share the same author, Adam Gauntlett.

The setting for Flying Coffins is the Western Front in late 1918. The pilot protagonists or player characters are members of a Royal Flying Squadron serving a sector of the front to which a new enemy squadron has been assigned – Jagdstaffeln or Jasta 32. A specialised fighting squadron of the “Imperial German Flying Corps," Jasta 32 is commanded by the noted ace, Ernst Becker, and it is known as the Lightning Hussars after his old regiment. Sent out on daunting mission after daunting mission, the pilots must conduct bombing strikes, patrols, raids, and reconnaissance, in the face of not just determined German opposition, but also an otherworldly threat, one that willingly strikes at their fragile aerial steeds in an effort to pull them from the sky. With next big Push rumoured to be about to begin, it is vital that the Allies gain control of the sky.

Although Flying Coffins is more of a Purist than a Pulp scenario, its focus is very much on combat, and the edge that the player characters has over the NPCs in this scenario, does it bring back towards the Pulp. This is understandable, in terms of both the scenario’s military nature and the threat faced by the player characters. Obviously, this is an aerial threat, but it is one that is normally seen as a weaker foe in terms of the Mythos. That said, given the fragility of the aircraft of the time, the scenario’s outré antagonists are more than capable of downing the player characters…

With flying and aerial combat being the focus of Flying Coffins, it is understandable that the scenario goes into some detail about how to handle this in Trail of Cthulhu. As such, aerial combat in Flying Coffins is not that much different to the ordinary Firearms and Scuffling combat of Trail of Cthulhu, but with the aggressor attempting to sneak up on the defender so as to get in a burst of fire that the defender cannot avoid. If the defending pilot survives the attack, he can attack himself or flee, but if he enters the fray, a dogfight ensues. Naturally, this involves both participants attempting to outfly each other – handled by the players bidding points from their Piloting skill, with advantages granted from stunts attempted and from both the manoeuvrability and speed of the aircraft being flown. Additional dangers come in the form of Archie and ground fire. These rules are supported with entertaining period examples.

The scenario itself is tightly wound about its “Spine.” This Spine has an opening scene and a closing scene, but between them the Keeper must slot scenes that alternate between combat and investigation or interaction. For the most part, the Keeper will be deciding the nature of the combat scenes, whilst the players have more choice in terms of the investigative and interactive scenes. In fact, there is only the one set scene that does not involve combat, an interesting and unexpected encounter with a notable personage whose appearance is actually foreshadowed through another NPC.

The scenario allows for some flexibility in how the player characters are set up. There is room here for them to be all pilots serving with another nation, not just British or from the Commonwealth. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the player characters could be German! This will require a little adjusting upon the part of the Keeper, as Flying Coffins is written for use with Allied characters. Nevertheless, the scenario includes stats and short write-ups of some fifteen aeroplanes of the late war period. Also included are six pre-generated investigators. Flying Coffins is designed for play with this number in mind, so will need some adjusting if there are fewer players.

Flying Coffins is not the author’s first foray into writing scenarios for Trail of Cthulhu set during the Great War. His “Not So Quiet,” a scenario from the anthology Out of Time set at a field hospital behind the frontlines could possibly form the basis of a sequel to Flying Coffins if any of its protagonists are injured. As with the author’s previous scenario, RMS Titanic: The Millionaires’ Special, this aerial affair could easily serve as a flashback for an investigator in a later campaign. Flying Coffins though, does betray the author’s age and nationality. Certainly there are references in the scenario’s examples that only an Englishman of a certain age will recognise, and will probably do so with wry amusement.

Flying Coffins comes as a thirty-five page, 17.9 Mb PDF that is pleasingly illustrated by Jérôme Huguenin. It does need another edit and perhaps the pre-generated investigators tend towards the bland. Plus it would have been nice if they had been illustrated as that would have accorded them a little more flavour. Then again, inclusion of details of how the players could create their own aerial investigators would have been a nice touch also. Nevertheless, its contents do a good job of supporting the scenario and a good job of providing period detail aplenty, including a set of period photographs. Clearly, the author’s fascination, if not fondness, for the period, is evident throughout.

Surprisingly, given that Flying Coffins is a one-shot, there is the possibility of sequel, one that would involve a certain NPC mentioned in passing. Should any of the investigators survive this aerial affair, then that NPC should certainly have her revenge in later years… Overall, Flying Coffins is a very different one-shot, one that captures both the uncaring nature of the Mythos and the uncaring nature of early aerial warfare.