Scouting for Scares

The concept of children versus Cthulhu is not new, but it is challenging when it comes to roleplaying, since it has to provide rules for playing children in Call of Cthulhu, a roleplaying game in which the Investigators are adults, and also make adjustments for the lethality of encountering its alien races and cosmic entities—both mentally and physically. Publisher Trepan’s The Haunted Clubhouse: The Little Play House of Horrors made few changes, whilst The Dare from Sentinel Hill Press stripped the rules back with ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’. Both of those are single scenarios, whereas Golden Goblin Press’ The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection explored the young lives of scions of the Mythos, making adjustments in terms of the amount of Luck that the youthful Investigators can spend and receive and its campaign framework. Campfire Tales: Scouts Against Cthulhu goes even further. Inspired by the likes of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books, films E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies, as well as the more recent Stranger Things and even Scooby Doo, Where Are You? presents rules for creating pre-teen and teenage Investigators, gives them an Investigator organisation, and the Keeper a complete setting and campaign that plays out over the course of several years.

As the title suggests in Campfire Tales: Scouts Against Cthulhu, what the supplement for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition from Chaosium, Inc. does is make its Investigators the young members of a Scouting organisation. This gives them the reason to be together and bond together, because over the course of their time as Scouts, they will discover strange things in the ‘Westhaven Campaign’ about their hometown, things that few, if any, adults will believe. Then perhaps as result of their experiences in their formative years, they might become adults who will investigate the Cthulhu Mythos in the traditional sense and go on as adult Investigators looking into the mysteries of such campaigns as Masks of Nyarlathotep or A Time to Harvest. To do that, Campfire Tales and the ‘Westhaven Campaign’ shift the story back a few years from the Jazz Age of classic Call of Cthulhu, to the late 1910s and the end of the Great War. This will add its own tensions to the ‘Westhaven Campaign’ in terms of the relationships between the Scouts—both the junior Investigators and NPCs, and adults in the setting, but it also means that if the Scouts graduate from Campfire Tales, that they can attend college and gain some experience and life skills before diving into the myriad of options in terms of scenarios and campaigns set during the Jazz Age. Essentially, instead of a player describing his Investigator’s backstory, he and his fellow players can roleplay it.

Campfire Tales: Scouts Against Cthulhu begins with an origin of the project and a history of the Scouting movement, and also the ‘Wayfarer Scouts’, the fictional organisation that the junior Investigators belong to in the campaign. Notably, the founder’s wife is a supporter of suffrage and thus the organisation allows both boys and girls as members. The Scout-Investigators will all be members of the same patrol and as they age and learn—and also play through the ‘Westhaven Campaign’, they will move through four ranks. These are ‘Wanderer’, ‘Rover’, ‘Ranger’, and ‘Warden’. As a ‘Wanderer’, a Scout-Investigator will be eleven or twelve years old, but by the time he is a ‘Warden’, he will be seventeen or eighteen. As he progresses, each Wayfarer Scout will learn new skills, improve the skills he already has, and earn badges. Badges provide an important benefit during play.

To create a Scout-Investigator, a player rolls for characteristics as normal, although Strength, Size, and Education will vary depending upon the Scout-Investigator’s age and rank in the Wayfarer Scouts. Instead of an Occupation, a Scout-Investigator has a Hobby, such as Amateur Sleuth, Farmhand, Junior Photographer, Junior Police Corps, Library Helper, Religious Assistant, or Shop Assistant. Each suggests the obligations that the Scout-Investigator has, lists eight skills, suggests an associated ‘Trusted Adult’, and a badge that the Scout-Investigator can start play with. All Scout-Investigators receive a set number of points to assign to their Hobby. The ‘Trusted Adult’, whether that is petty criminals or local police for the ‘Street Punk’ or a boat owner, fisherman, or navy veteran for the ‘Junior Sailor’, is an adult that at least will listen to what the Scout-Investigator has to say and trusts them, whereas other adults do not trust the Scout-Investigators and will be wary of them. Through events and roleplaying, a ‘Trusted Adult’ relationship can be soured, but it provides each player and his Scout-Investigator an NPC to interact with and the Keeper with an NPC to portray on a regular basis. In addition, the Scout-Investigator has a ‘Fear’ that can make certain situations for him more stressful.

Henrietta Brinded
Age 11, Hobby: Amateur Sleuth
Family Credit Rating: Average
Trusted Adult: Local Librarian
Badges: Wayfarer Scout Badge, Wanderer Badge, Reading Badge

STR 18 SIZ 36 CON 40 DEX 70
APP 75 INT 75 POW 65 EDU 30
Cool 65 Luck 80 Damage Bonus -2 Build -2
Move 8 HP 5

COMBAT SKILLS
Dodge 35%

SKILLS
Law 30%, Library Use 55%, Locksmith 26%, Persuade 35%, Read Lips 26%, Spot Hidden 50%, Stealth 45%, Track 35%
LANGUAGES
Other Language (French) 11%, Other Language (Latin) 11%, Own Language (English) 30%

BACKSTORY
Personal Description: Tall and skinny, sandy haired and freckled.
Treasured Possessions: Latin-English Primer, magnifying glass
Traits: Honest
Phobias: Heights

Mechanically, Campfire Tales makes a change to one skill and adds three others. The Credit Rating skill is shifted to reflect the status of the Scout-Investigator’s family rather than the Scout-Investigator himself, since he will likely have a few cents in his pocket. ‘Language (Signals)’ covers Semaphore and Morse Code; is imported from Cthulhu Dark Ages and replaces Psychoanalysis, but is more immediate in its effect; and Ride (Bicycle) is self-explanatory. Campfire Tales otherwise lists all of the skills in Call of Cthulhu, but many are marked as uncommon for Scout-Investigators or as suitable only for adults. Luck can be more readily spent to adjust skill rolls and if a Scout-Investigator gets stuck, the Keeper can ask for a ‘Leap of Logic’ roll, enabling the naïve eleven-year-olds to connect the dots in a televisual or cinematic way.

When out camping or hiking, a Scout-Investigator can suffer ‘Adversity’. This comes in the form of five forms—cold, hunger, lost, overburdened, and sore. Campfire Tales details their individual effects, but in addition, the more of them that a Scout-Investigator is suffering, the more penalty dice that a player has to roll for Cool rolls for his Scout-Investigator. However, if a Scout-Investigator overcomes one of the five adversities, it encourages the player to describe what his Scout-Investigator actually does to overcome them.

The major addition to Campfire Tales is that of ‘Badges’. All Scout-Investigators start play with the Wayfarer Scout Badge, Wanderer Badge, and an Ability Badge from his Hobby, and will go on to earn Rover, Ranger, and Warden Badges. Each of which will replace the previous rank Badge in terms of the ability it grants. Every badge gives the holder benefits, which will often alter traditional Call of Cthulhu play. The Wayfarer Scout Badge lets a Scout-Investigator spend Luck to help others; the Wanderer Badge enables Scout-Investigator to succeed at one roll once per session; the Rover Badge to refresh the Scout-Investigator’s Luck; and so on. The Ability Badges include Animal Friendship, Crafting, Cycling, Hiking, Knot-Tying, Nature, Orienteering, Public Speaking, Radio, Signals and Codes, Weather, and more. Each of the Ability Badges grants an increase in an associated skill and an extra bonus once per scenario. For example, the Animal Friendship Badge lets a Scout-Investigator understand whatever it is that a dog or cat is trying to tell him; the Camping grants a bonus to the Mechanical Repair skill; and the Weather Badge to correctly forecast the weather. All of these badges bring a strong narrative element to the play of Campfire Tales as well as enforcing the world of Scouting with its culture of self-improvement and self-reliance.

In terms of combat, Campfire Tales makes some pleasingly thematic changes that both account for the size of a Scout-Investigator and the Scouting ethos. Unlike traditional Call of Cthulhu, in Campfire Tales the Scout-Investigators can not only work together, but are encouraged to do so to gain the benefits of Assisted Fighting Manoeuvres. These are not set in stone, but dependent upon the situation, the imagination of the players, and the goal they want their Scout-Investigators to achieve. Examples given include entangling an enemy in a bedsheet to give time for the Scout-Investigators to run away or pushing an enemy down the stairs. The rules for handling Assisted Fighting Manoeuvres are slightly complex, relying upon the Scout-Investigators’ Builds to determine if they gain bonus or penalty dice, but they do include a fully worked out example which is helpful. Further most weapons are cumbersome for Scout-Investigators and require a Strength check to wield without a penalty. When hurt, a Scout-Investigator heals faster, ignores Major Wounds, and at zero Hit Points is unconscious, not dead. Unless a Scout-Investigator suffers damage equal to his maximum Hit Points in one go or under certain circumstances, he cannot die. Spending thirty points of Luck will also allow a Scout-Investigator to escape death.

The last big change to Campfire Tales is to Sanity. It replaces Sanity with ‘Cool’. A Scout-Investigator’s Cool is equal to his Power and unlike Sanity does not go up or down. Instead of losing Sanity points and going insane if a Cool roll is failed, a Scout-Investigator can suffer one of five involuntary reactions—‘Fawn’, ‘Fight’, ‘Flight’, ‘Flop’, or ‘Freeze’—which the player is free to choose from (though the Keeper can dictate which reaction a Scout-Investigator has), and his player must tick a Distress Box on the Scout-Investigator sheet. These are labelled ‘Stressed’, ‘Jumpy’, and ‘Upset’, but have no mechanical effect, though of course, they should be roleplayed. When all three are ticked, the Scout-Investigator is ‘Distressed’ and possibly subject to ‘Delusions’ as per standard Call of Cthulhu. A Scout-Investigator’s Fear will make a Cool roll harder. Ticks can be removed from Distress Boxes with a night of rest at home, a good night’s camping round the fire, or at the end of a scenario.

The setting for ‘Westhaven Campaign’ is Westhaven, a quiet town some forty miles west of Arkham, Massachusetts, near the border with New Hampshire. So, on the edge of Lovecraft Country. The notable locations, including the scout hut, and NPCs, including any ‘Trusted Adults’, are all detailed, as is the ‘Sons of Seth’, a branch of a secretive cult with Egyptian origins that governs the town. Also detailed are the members of a second, rival Wayfarer Scout squad in the town, a very helpful Hobo, Boxcar Jim, and there are also options for shifting the campaign to the relative metropolis of Arkham and the heart of Lovecraft Country.

The ‘Westhaven Campaign’ is divided into four parts, one for each Wayfarer Scout Rank and thus two years apart. All four scenarios include ‘Leads’—obscure and obvious clues—at the end of particular key sections to help the Keeper each run one. They start with ‘Tremors Below’, which is for Wanderer scouts. The Scout-Investigators are taking regular hikes to work towards their Hiking Badge in the nearby Orth-Beane Forest Preserve when the fog sets in and suddenly, Don Blackwell, the assistant scout leader in charge of the hike, is grabbed from below and pulled under the earth, leaving his scout hat behind. Lost out in the woods, the Scout-Investigators must find their way back to Westhaven, perhaps plagued by bad dreams and fears of what exactly it was that attacked Don Blackwell, but a friendly and desperate dog leads the Scout-Investigators to what is both a bloody discovery and a potential source of solutions. The scenario culminates in a chase back to town, the Scout-Investigators harried by the thing from below.

Two years later and the Scout-Investigators are Rover Scouts when one of their number’s curiosities are aroused by the arrival of a large car from which two men in dark suits deliver a wooden crate to the home of Colonel Grimm, local celebrity author and semi-retired explorer, and they seemed to be talking to the crate. The scenario plays better if one of the Scout-Investigators is related to Colonel Grimm since it makes it easier for him to gain access to his house and strengthens the reason why the Scout-Investigators want to, and otherwise, the Scout-Investigators will have to break in, which may not be in keeping with the Scouting code of conduct. The Scout-Investigators do have a potentially sympathetic ally in the house in the form of Colonel Grimm’s housekeeper, but they also have to get into Colonel Grimm’s study where the crate is kept. Get past the possible issues with the set-up and the scenario has some nasty secrets to unleash within the house, which the Scout-Investigators will need to battle to defeat.

As Ranger Scouts, the Scout-Investigators can discover the ‘Treasure of the Secret Way’ after Boxcar Jim gives them a map to an old mine marked with the word, ‘gold’. Worse, after some research, the Scout-Investigators learn that it is also haunted. This is an exploration scenario, as much like a dungeon as a children's adventure film from the eighties, one filled with secrets, some mundane, some connected to the Mythos and the history of nearby Westhaven.

More secrets of Westhaven are revealed in the fourth and final part of the campaign, ‘Shadow Over Westhaven’. This is a two-part scenario and will take longer to complete than the previous three scenarios. In the first part, ‘Lakeside Horror’, now Warden Scouts, the Scout-Investigators as well as the Scouts from the other patrol are invited on a three-day camping trip to New Hampshire’s Green Mountains, and everything seems to be going well when two Scouts go missing from their tent. This combined with the odd behaviour of the brother and sister hosts and strange discoveries made in the woods, puts everyone on edge, with good reason as the trip comes to a brutally nasty conclusion.

If the first part sees the Scout-Investigators acting directly against adults in the form of the sinisterly bucolic brother and sister, the second part escalates this as they act against many of the adults in Westhaven. In ‘Hands of Winter’, when they return to town, the Scout-Investigators find it in an icy grip—figuratively and literally—as fires are banned, the temperatures drop, and many of the townsfolk are driven to construct a series of wooden towers, whilst the rest cower in fear. The Scout-Investigators’ inquiries point to the home of the brother and sister hosts of their ghastly camping trip and potentially one of the creepiest scenes in the campaign. The scenario ends with a traditional summoning ceremony which requires careful staging by the Keeper. However, one advantage that the Scout-Investigators have is that they can ‘Be Prepared’ and have to hand many of the items and artefacts that they gathered in the previous three scenarios. The scenario includes notes on how each of them can be used in the finale to give them all manner of boons. The scenario does suggest what happens if the Scout-Investigators fail (and if they do fail, it could set up a more traditional Call of Cthulhu campaign with the town under the sway of an evil cult), as well as what happens if they succeed. A nice touch is that if they do succeed, the Scout-Investigators earn the respect of the adults in Westhaven.

Rounding out Campfire Tales is a set of four appendices. These provide extra scenario seeds, a glossary of Scouting terms, a list of spells in the campaign (including three new ones), and a quick reference guide for the campaign’s new rules. These are all useful.

In addition to the fact that it is designed to be played with teenage Scouts, the ‘Westhaven Campaign’ is not a traditional campaign for Call of Cthulhu. Its story is more physical than mental and what holds it together is not the Sons of Seth as a threat, but the presence of the Scout-Investigators and what they experience in and around the town. Indeed, the Sons of Seth as an organisation does not play a role in the campaign, though several of its members do. Where in a traditional campaign for Call of Cthulhuu, the Investigators would be directly making enquiries into the cult, here the Scout-Investigators are never given the opportunity and it is not part of the campaign as a whole. Consequently, the ‘Westhaven Campaign’ is more a series of adventures with some occurring adversaries, than a campaign with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Mythos is also non-traditional until the very end.

The ‘Westhaven Campaign’ is relatively straightforward and the experienced Keeper could run it without reference to the Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook (though the Keeper may want to refer to the Chase rules for the first scenario). However, Campfire Tales is not a standalone book. It just could have been. One thing it is missing is advice for the Keeper on writing and creating more for the genre. So, Campfire Tales is a campaign with a very specific set-up rather than a supplement. Had it had that advice it might better have lived up to its tagline.

Physically, Campfire Tales: Scouts Against Cthulhu is well presented. In particular, the artwork is some of the best of any supplement for modern Call of Cthulhu. It is directly inspired by the work of Norman Rockwell—and this is intentional. Rockwell painted scenes of Americana and pastoralism and had a strong association with the Boy Scouts of America, illustrating covers for the organisation’s publications and calendars. So, it is fitting that his style is adhered to here.

Campfire Tales: Scouts Against Cthulhu is the most radical campaign and supplement for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition since Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England. The latter forced the players and their Investigators to think about their social status and their reputation in investigating the Cthulhu Mythos, but Campfire Tales forces the players to think about investigating the Mythos from a very different position where the players cannot bring the force of the adult world to bear and must see things from a child’s perspective. It counters this with the narrative elements such as the effect of the Badges and the Assisted Fighting Manoeuvres that also reinforce the Wayfarer Scouts set-up and the Investigators as Scout-Investigators. Campfire Tales: Scouts Against Cthulhu presents and supports a great set-up and a different way in which to play Call of Cthulhu, and does so with some entertaining scenarios rather than a campaign in the traditional sense.

The Other OSR: Welcome to Strangeville

Strangeville is a town like any other, which means that it is beset by monsters and robots and dinosaurs and aliens, and because the adults never believe in monsters and robots and dinosaurs and aliens until it is too late, the only standing between the monsters and robots and dinosaurs and aliens and Strangeville’s doom are the kids! Young teenagers on bikes or skateboards or even roller-skates with the curiosity to notice that something strange is going in where else, but Strangeville! Welcome to Strangeville then, an Old School Renaissance compatible roleplaying game based on Knave. Published by Doomed Wizard Games, it is obviously based also on the television series Stranger Things as well as Paper Girls, The Goonies, and just any adventure film or television series set in the eighties in which the kids are the heroes. Being based on Knave it offers fast-playing stripped down mechanics, whilst also suggesting collaborative worldbuilding between the players and the Game Master. What it does not do is provide anything in terms of spells or monsters beyond advice on how to adapt them to Welcome to Strangeville. Thus, the Game Master will need access to a bestiary and a source of spells of some kind. That said, the Old School Renaissance is not exactly short of those.

In Welcome to Strangeville, a Player Character has six abilities—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma—each of which has a Check Bonus and a Save bonus. The Check Bonus ranges between one and six and is added to the die roll when a Player Character undertakes an action. The Save Bonus is equal to the Check Bonus plus ten, and it is what the Player Character rolls against when tyring withstand various dangers or effects. He has an Alignment, either Nark, Slacker, or Bogus. Nark indicates that the Player Character believes in the greater good rather than the individual, a Slacker cares more about himself, but can be roused to action, and if a character is Bogus, he is definitely selfish, if not downright evil. He has a number of Traits such as Age—between twelve and fourteen, Physique, Hair, Virtue, Vice, Speech, Parents, and Parent Occupation, and so on. He will also have some gear which will include either a bicycle, a skateboard, or a pair of roller-skates so that he can get around.

To create a character, a player rolls three six-sided dice for each ability and assigns the lowest rolled as the Check Bonus. He adds ten to the Check Bonus to get the Save Bonus for the ability. Having done this for each ability, selects an Alignment and rolls for Traits, Gear, and means of transport.

At thirteen Terrell Thompson is beginning to get big and broad, which has made him a pick for the high school football team. He tries to keep himself out of trouble, but as the new kid in the school—his mom having moved to Strangeville to work in the town pharmacy, together with his size, he feels he gets picked on when things go wrong. So, he is not always trusting, but when he does make friends, he stands by them.

Terrell Thompson
Level: One

Strength Check +3/Save Bonus 13
Dexterity Check +3/Save Bonus 13
Constitution Check +4/Save Bonus 14
Intelligence Check +2/Save Bonus 12
Wisdom Check +3/Save Bonus 13
Charisma Check +1/Save Bonus 11

Hit Points 8

TRAITS
Age: 13 Gender: Male
Physique: Towering Face: Wide Skin: Perfect Hair: Dreadlocks Clothing: Torn
Virtue: Loyal Vice: Prejudiced
Speech: Breathy
Misfortunes: Suspected
Parents: Widowed Mother Parent’s Occupation: Pharmacist
Alignment: Slacker

GEAR
Swiss Army Knife, lantern & oil, caltrops, perfume, skateboard

Mechanically, Welcome to Strangeville is straightforward. To have his teenager undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die, adds the appropriate ability check and if the result is fifteen or more, he succeeds. The target may vary—primarily in combat because the target is likely to have a different value for its Dexterity Save, but otherwise, Welcome to Strangeville uses the standard Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic. Strength is used for physical actions, melee combat, and extra damage, Dexterity for speed and reflexes, Constitution to resist diseases and poisons, Intelligence for anything involving concentration and precision, including tinkering with machinery or picking pockets, Wisdom for perception and ranged attacks, and Charisma whenever a character interacts with someone else. Thus, there are some minor changes in how the abilities in comparison to more traditional Old School Renaissance retroclones.

Combat uses the same mechanics, with the defender’s Save acting as the target. This can be to inflict damage, and Welcome to Strangeville suggests that firearms be extremely be hard to hold of as the Player Characters are teenagers, or it can be stunts such as disarming an opponent or knocking them over. Most weapons inflict a four- or six-sided die in terms of damage, whilst rifles and shotguns do more. When a Player Character’s Hit Points are reduced to zero, he is unconscious and if they are reduced to his Constitution Check as a negative value, he is dead, that is if he has a Constitution Check of +2 and his Hit Pits are reduced to -2, he is dead. Critical hits occur if the player rolls a twenty and a fumble occurs if he rolls a one.

Other rules are quick and easy. Stunts on bicycles, skateboards, and so on, require a Dexterity check, it is possible to subdue an opponent, and a Player Character has a number of item slots equal to his Constitution Save. There are narrative elements too. For example, Group Advantage can be gained for everyone’s next action two or more Player Characters declare a collective action and their players narrate how a previous incident helps them with this one, but the primary narrative element to Welcome to Strangeville comes in the set-up when the players and the Game Master work together to create and describe the town of Strangeville. During Session Zero, each player also creates a handful of rumours and urban legends about places in the town, monsters that lurk, houses said to be haunted, serial killers believed to stalk, and so on. The Game Master takes these and deicides which are true and which are false, using as many or as few as she likes to both establish a sense of mystery and weirdness about Strangeville, whilst also using some as the basis for adventures. Beyond this, the advice for the Game Master is fairly brief, primarily focusing on how to adapt and use monsters and spells from other sources, noting that a spell takes a slot in a Player Character’s inventory.

Physically, Welcome to Strangeville is a bit scruffy in places and the artwork does vary in quality. It is clearly written and anyone with any experience of the Old School Renaissance will grasp how it works with ease. The cover though, is good.

Although it uses the stripped back mechanics of Knave, what Welcome to Strangeville is not, is an introductory roleplaying game. It is not written as such, and is more aimed at the experienced Game Master who can develop the ideas suggested by her players during their Session Zero. Given that it does have to rely on other Old School Renaissance sourcebooks for its content, Welcome to Strangeville is underwritten in comparison to other roleplaying games in its genres and a group looking for a more rounded treatment of the ‘kids in peril’ genre may want to look elsewhere. However, for a group that prefers Old School Renaissance and is prepared to put the development work in to create their own setting and the Game Master their ‘kids in peril’ adventures, Welcome to Strangeville is a succinct little choice.

Star Trekkin’

These are the voyages of the starship FSS Brazen. Under the command of Captain Wayjane, the ship has been directed by the Federated League of Planets, to undertake a mission of exploration beyond the frontier to discover strange new worlds, weird never before encountered species, and promote the benefits of life in Federated League of Planets (a.k.a. FloP). With the engines primed and ready, the crew buzzing with exciting, the FSS Brazen is ready to set out from Near Space 9 and begin her five-year mission. However, this mission will not be without its difficulties. The crew will have to learn to get along as it discovers mysteries and uncover strange stellar phenomena and faces numerous enemies. These may be mighty starships from the martial Kulkan Empire or the devious infiltrators from the Boredian Dominion, but they could be old enemies too, such as Duchess Ali Cann, a super soldier who served FLoP until a truce was signed with the Kulkan Empire. Now she feels abandoned and has sworn her revenge, so guess which FLoP vessel she has in her sights? Then there is ‘R’, a super being incensed that the members of FLoP even exist and could even go so far as to put them on trial to prove that they have the right to continue living in the same universe! This is the continuing mission of the FSS Brazen: to recklessly go where plenty of people have probably been before… and hope that nobody gets too upset to start major interstellar war! This is the set-up for Beam Me Up, a scenario and mini-supplement for ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—the roleplaying game of fast, cinematic, action comedy. Published by EN Publishing, best known for the W.O.I.N. or What’s Old is New roleplaying System, as used in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, where previous entries in the series have tended to be one-shot, film night specials, here the given scenario (or scenarios) is more expansive.

Beam Me Up is very obviously and unsubtly inspired by the Science Fiction franchise, Star Trek. Which has the advantage of making everything in Beam Me Up more than a little familiar to most people. As with other supplements for ACE!, it very much wears its inspirations on its sleeve—or in this case is that on its spandex one-size too small, but still fits all, jumpsuits? Whilst a player may find it just a little too familiar, he will also find the genre and setting very easy to grasp. Similarly, as with other supplements for ACE!, a set of pre-generated characters is available to download to use with Beam Me Up, but the players can create their own. Several new roles are suggested. These include Captain, Chief Engineer, Comms Engineer, Hologram, Gunner, Ship Counsellor, and Pilot. The simplicity of the ACE! system means that whilst Beam Me Up defaults a mish-mash of elements drawn from across multiple different iterations of the Star Trek franchise, the Game Master and her players could easily adjust their game to fit whichever era of the setting that they want to game in.

Given that this is a Science Fiction roleplaying game involving starships and high technology, there are some details on its role in the game. The setting is post-scarcity, starship crews can replicate almost everything bar weapons of mass destruction, and are usually armed with blazers, which they should mostly use with the stun setting. Also, translocators enable crews to beam up and down from planets and even move instantly within a ship. Beam Me Up also defines its starships and provides rules for starship combat. A starship has four stats—Science, Shields, Size, and Warp—typically rated between one and ten—plus ratings for Health, Defence, and weapons and damage. Where a ship’s stats are higher than those of a Player Character for a particular action, then they can be used for a skill check instead. For example, the Chief of Security might want to use the ship’s scanners, but his Smarts is lower the ship’s Science, so his player can roll using that it instead. It is a nicely little levelling effect and it highlights the fact that the Player Characters are aboard an advance starship. Combat is handled in a narrative fashion and each Player Character have a particular role when it comes to combat. Thus, the Chief Pilot will fly the ship, the Gunner will fire weapons, the Chief Science Officer will operate the scanners, and so on. Here Beam Me Up is underwritten, really relying on the skill of the Game Master to adjudicate the different roles and how they affect combat. Some pointers as to what the roles might do would have been helpful. Should an attack hit a starship, it will reduce the shields and then health, and once the latter has gone, the ship will suffer critical hits.

The scenario in Beam Me Up is in line with its inspiration, episodic in nature. Effectively, its three acts are separate and the first two can be run in any order (though they are written and presented in a simple and playable order). In the listed first act, ‘Shotgun Ali’, the FSS Brazen sets out on its maiden voyage and is sent to check up on a missing vessel, the FSS Independent. When the crew find her, they are suddenly attacked by the ship and then boarded! After driving off the super tough boarding party, the Player Characters need to return the favour and beam aboard the FSS Independent to find out what is going on. The second act is ‘Incident at Boredia I’ when on a trip visit the world, the crew’s weekly report time is interrupted by the appearance of ‘R’, an alien super being who puts the crew and the FLoP as a whole on trial. To do this, he drags a ship from the Kulkan Empire to Boredia I and the Kulkan Empire vessel has the manpower to invade and conquer the planet below. Effectively this is a test to see how the Player Characters and the crew of the FSS Brazen will react to the Kulkan interference. Lastly, in act three, ‘Gunfight at the Brazen Corral’ in which the Player Characters get trapped in the holosuite and themselves cast as members of the Clanton-McLaury gang an hour before they face Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday on October 26, 1881. Events occur again and again until the Player Characters can spot and break the pattern and find out who or what is responsible.

None of the three acts are connected except for the FSS Brazen and the obvious inspiration. For example, ‘Shotgun Ali’ is drawn from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; ‘Incident at Boredia I’ is inspired by ‘Encounter at Farpoint’, the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation; and ‘Gunfight at the Brazen Corral’ is based on ‘Spectre of the Gun’ from the original Star Trek. These are not the only Science Fiction references in Beam Me Up, but they are, of course, the big ones. Both the Game Master and her players will have fun spotting the rest, likely groaning at them, as they appear.

Physically, Beam Me Up is a bright and breezy affair. The artwork is decent and the supplement is well written.

Beam Me Up veers widely between being cringeworthy in the broad parodying of its inspiration to actually being amusing. Part of the issue is not just the familiarity of the source material, but also with the parodying of it, so both feel over done and not really all that funny. What saves Beam Me Up are the three different episodes which dig deeper into the source material and play around with it to elevate the humour a little. In some ways, Beam Me Up is the most accessible and the least accessible of the supplements for ACE!, being too familiar, too on the nose, its humour underwhelming as a consequence.

Weirder Wonders

Wilden Falls is a nice town. It is surrounded by rich forest and sits on a lake with a waterfall that brings tourists all summer long. Out on Route 767 stands the Osterman Labs Research Facility, but it has been closed since the sixties and nobody goes there. The kids of the middle school and the high school get to enjoy the countryside and time to ride their bikes or drive their cars, free of parental supervision for much of the time. Located in the Pacific North West, the town also has a Mines & Mining Museum dedicated to the region’s played out silver mines, KWF Radio on which DJ Cherry Kilbourne plays the latest hits, Camp Whispering Pines where all sorts of fun activities take place over the summer—except five years ago when that terrible thing happened that nobody talks about, and when the kids get bored, there is the Pastimes Amusement Arcade where all the latest video games can be played for a quarter at a time and Sal’s Video where the newest releases on VHS can be hired for the night. Though you may have to wait until next year for the release of Spirits of Manhattan and Montana Drones and the Raiders of the Cutty Sark. This is the eighties, the best time for any kid to have an adventure and also the setting for Strange Science. This is a scenario and mini-supplement for ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—the roleplaying game of fast, cinematic, action comedy. Published by EN Publishing, best known for the W.O.I.N. or What’s Old is New roleplaying System, as used in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, the scenario is primarily intended as a one-shot, film night special.

Strange Science is inspired by all of the kids in peril adventures of the nineteen eighties. The Goonies, Weird Science, and Back to the Future, with just a suspicion of Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, Eerie, Indiana, and A Town Called Eureka. Like all of the supplements for ACE!, it very much wears its inspirations on its sleeve, but as much a player may find it just a little too familiar, he will also find the genre and setting very easy to grasp. Wilden Falls itself is quite nicely detailed, including all of the notables places in town and in its surrounds that all together capture the feel of small town America. The set-up is also flexible in that the Player Characters can be either Middle School kids or High School kids and Strange Science and its adventure, also called ‘Strange Science’ can run without any changes. All that changes is the age of the children and just how aware of the world they are. What does not change are the roles that the Player can be. There are six, consisting of Brain, Cheerleader, Outsider, Protector, Radio Presenter, and Tycoon. These are classic archetypes of the ‘kids in peril’ genre.

As with other releases for ACE!, the eponymously named adventure in Strange Science, is a three-act affair. It specifically begins in April, 1984, when odd things begin happening at the school. There is the arrival of an odd new pupil, ‘Steve Twentyseven’, the replacement of the regular science teacher, Mr. Goodall, with a substitute teacher, and a van turning up outside the school handing out free protein shakes. Fortunately, the protein shakes taste of sprouts and cayenne pepper, so are positively disgusting and no kid in their right mind would drink one of them. Plus they look like snot. If Steve Twentyseven acts oddly, then his parents—dad ‘Steve Radioshow’ and mom ‘Steve BakingSoda’—are even weirder... Investigating the ‘Steve’ family will lead to the mall, revelations as to what is going on, a lot of exposition, and some time travel. This is back to 1884 and the town of Wildenville where with the help of the missing Mr. Goodall, the kids can prevent what is going on in the future and hopefully get back to that future. Sadly, this does not involve a steam train or shouts of “Great scot!”

‘Strange Science’ is a surprisingly lengthy and detailed adventure that will take two or three sessions to complete. For the most part, the scenario is very obviously inspired by its source material and the Game Master and her players should embrace wholeheartedly the eighties it depicts. However, given the lack of a DeLorean, the Player Characters need another way to travel back into the past, which is to have their minds cast back rather than their bodies. When this happens, their minds occupy the bodies of the men and women of Wildenville, which should lead to some roleplaying opportunities as the children of 1984 suddenly find themselves occupying the bodies of adults of 1884!

Written as a one-shot, Strange Science does include some notes on how to expand it. These are brief, but include adding in supernatural elements and possible sequel and crossover with Spirits of Manhattan. These are only suggestions though and the Game Master would need to develop and write it on her own.

Physically, Strange Science is a bright and breezy affair. The artwork is decent and the supplement is well written.

Strange Science is not a ground-breaking or even a great adventure, but then it is not trying to be. It is a little supplement and scenario that delivers exactly what it promises—eighties nostalgia, plus plenty of weirdness and a mystery that only the kids of small town America can see and solve. This is a great little combination that will be fun to play and fun to go back to if it gets the sequels it deserves.

Tales from Spaaace...! (Part One)

For fans of Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was and Things from the Flood, the roleplaying games based on the paintings of Simon Stålenhag, as well as other titles from Free League Publishing, there is the Free League Workshop. Much like the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons, this is a platform for creators to publish and distribute their own original content, which means that they also have a space to showcase their creativity and their inventiveness, to do something different, but ultimately provide something which the Game Master can bring to the table and engage her players with. Such is the case with Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One.

Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One takes the kids out of the Loop and throws them into deep space. It takes the traditional stories of Tales from the Loop, which contrasts the wonder of strange technologies and mysteries with difficult, often fraught home lives, away from Sweden and Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, the site of the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’—to the west of Stockholm, and sets those tensions in an alternate timeline, very far from Earth. In this timeline, at the end of World War 2, Maximillian von Grau, a German scientist took advantage of the Nazi desire for more wonder weapons to develop an engine powerful enough to get a probe to Proxima Centauri. No one believed he succeeded, until pictures were received on Earth in 1977. There the story would have ended, but for eccentric entrepreneur billionaire Elton Dors. He offered to fund further research and development by von Grau. With the new engine, developed by the German and known as the Max Drive, Dors then built The Argo, the world’s first interstellar starship, capable of travelling to Proxima Centauri in thirty years, with its crew and passengers—the first two hundred colonists on a whole new world—in deep sleep. The Argo is regarded as the eighth wonder of the world and it is aboard this vessel that Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One begins.

The kids are the children of the crew and the passengers—or colonists—aboard The Argo. They and everyone else aboard the starship wake up and very quickly there is a lot of hustle and bustle around the children, though it is not immediately obvious why. They are quickly taken to the ship’s school room where their teacher, Miss Lovely, can keep an eye on them. It soon becomes apparent that The Argo has not reached Proxima Centauri, having stopped in deep space, and that one of the children aboard is missing. Could the two be related? Well, the answer is, of course they are. Exactly how is another matter, but the plot is relatively straightforward, whereas getting to solve it is not. The biggest obstacle for the kids is not the mystery itself, but getting round the adults to investigate the mystery, and then once that is revealed, solve the problem at its heart. The adults are preoccupied with the technical problems aboard The Argo, so will either ignore the kids or send them back to the supervision of Miss Lovely, who is definitely not as nice as her name suggests. The Game Master should have some fun roleplaying her.

Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One is a solid one-session scenario. It makes use of a range of different skills, so every kid should have an opportunity to shine. If it is missing anything, it is advice on creating kids for this scenario. They would still use the same rules from Tales from the Loop, but some questions related to who their parents are aboard The Argo and what they think of travelling to another star system could have helped set the scene. Perhaps a set of pre-generated kids could help with that? The only real issue with the scenario is with its aftermath. Even solving the problem is underwritten, and by comparison, the cost of failure is glossed over. This is severely disappointing, since the cost of failure in Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One is a tragedy that is very likely to be emotionally devastating for the kids as well as the adults. It may well be campaign ending were the Game Master to want to run the sequel to Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One.

Where Tales of the Loop captured the feel of Sweden of the eighties, Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One instead captures the feel of positive, even homely Science Fiction of the period, whether that is Space: 1999 or Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yet, there is a sly dig at its retro-optimism with everything being a triumph of design over practicality and it is not too difficult to work out who Elton Dors is a parody of.

Physically, Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One is well presented, but needs a slight edit here and there. The artwork is excellent, whilst the overview of The Argo gives an idea of the layout rather than specifics.

Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One is undeveloped in places, but contains everything that the Game Master and her players have to roleplay a mystery scenario in space from their kids’ perspective. It can be run as the first part of a campaign or it would work as a convention one-shot. Overall, Deep Space Blues – Journey To The Stars: Part One proves that some things do not change, no matter how far you are away from home, it is just a case that the consequences of failure are bad—really bad.

Petrarchy

For fans of Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was and Things from the Flood, the roleplaying games based on the paintings of Simon Stålenhag, as well as other titles from Free League Publishing, there is the Free League Workshop. Much like the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons, this is a platform for creators to publish and distribute their own original content, which means that they also have a space to showcase their creativity and their inventiveness, to do something different, but ultimately provide something which the Game Master can bring to the table and engage her players with. Such is the case with Puppy Love.

Puppy Love is written by one half of the hosts of the podcast, What Would Smart Party Do?—the other half designed King of Dungeons and presents an engaging and entertaining mystery with lots of Mats and puppies, plus a dilemma or two. It could easily be played in a single session, perhaps two at most, and would make a good option for a convention scenario just as it would for the Game Master’s own campaign.

The scenario begins at the start of the new school year, with the Player Characters all eager to return and catch up with friends at least, if not necessarily return to their lessons. However, on their way to school they spot two things. First, posters for a missing puppy belonging to a boy at school, Mats, and then further along and second, the missing puppy, Petra. Problem solved then. All the Player Characters have to do is take Petra back to Mats when they see him at school. Except, when they get there, Mats is nowhere to be found, and oddly, another pupil, the popular, but catty Doris, also has a puppy—a puppy which almost looks like Petra! What is going on? Is there more than one Petra or just more than one puppy? Where did Doris’ puppy come from? Where is Mats and is his puppy still missing?

The scenario takes an even odder turn—no surprise there, given that it is for Tales from the Loop—when the Player Characters attempt to find Mats. For when they get to his house, they find not Mats, but Mats and Mats. Two of them! Really what is going on?

Of course it has to do with the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’—the world’s largest particle accelerator, constructed and run by the government agency, Riksenergi, and since shut down. The question is how and then how do the Player Characters get in? Actually the latter is relatively easy, but the former will take a little more investigation. The actual difficulty comes in interacting and dealing with Mats—multiples of them, because all of them are slightly different and slightly wrong. The Game Master is accorded a pair of tables to randomly determine the appearance and personality of each Mats, though the scenario does come with a warning because the personality traits are potentially a little extreme for what is still a little boy.

Physically, Puppy Love is decently presented with the usual plot diagram for Tales from the Loop scenarios, nicely done artwork for each the scenario’s NPCs, and clear maps of the location for the scenario’s denouement. It is also well written and easy to read.

Although Puppy Love is set in Sweden on Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, which lies to the west of Stockholm, which is the site of the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’, it actually has an English sensibility to it. There is a mystery, and this being a scenario for Tales from the Loop, a countdown which escalates the situation, there is no real threat, and so it has the feel of Children’s Film Foundation television series or film. Certainly as weird as having multiple Mats and Petras is, having multiple Petras gives it a certain cosiness or cuteness.

Puppy Love presents a thoroughly charming, even cute mystery for Tales from the Loop. It is easy to add to a campaign and just as easy to use as a demonstration or convention scenario.

A Holiday Horror Quartet

Imagine growing up in Lovecraft Country? What sights and hints of the Cthulhu Mythos might the children of that benighted corner of New England been exposed to, growing up as they have in or near its darker and more mystical corners—Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport? Since being coined by the late Keith Herber, the setting has been more widely explored in supplements for Call of Cthulhu, such as Arkham Unveiled and Tales of the Miskatonic Valley during the nineties, and relatively recently in New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley and More Adventures in Arkham Country in the noughties. The point of view for all of these is always that of the Investigator core to Call of Cthulhu, but the very latest campaign to explore the region does so from the point of view of children, who perhaps suspect that the world around them is probably a little stranger than some of the adults around them would know or even admit, and in investigating that strangeness, may lay groundwork for their becoming fully fledged Investigators as adults. This is the set-up for The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection, a campaign which takes place over the course of a single year in New England, at four family get togethers, that will see cousins come together to discover dark secrets about their family and truths about the world around them, and confront mysteries and the Mythos, wonders and magic, horrors and truth, ultimately to form friendships which will last long into adulthood.

The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection from Golden Goblin Press, best known for titles such as An Inner Darkness: Fighting for Justice Against Eldritch Horrors and Our Own Inhumanity, The 7th Edition Guide to Cthulhu Invictus: Cosmic Horror Roleplaying in Ancient Rome, and Tales of the Crescent City: Adventures in Jazz Era New Orleans. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is a campaign for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, which is set in New England in 1925 and 1926 and which requires the players to take the roles of six eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old children. They each live and have relatives in the towns of Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, and during the course of the year will spend Halloween in Dunwich, Christmas in Kingsport, Easter in Arkham, and Independence day in Innsmouth. The campaign consists of ‘Halloween in Dunwich’, ‘Christmas in Kingsport’, ‘Easter in Arkham’, and ‘Innsmouth Independence Day’. Of the four lengthy scenarios, the first two are not new. ‘Halloween in Dunwich’ originally appeared in the Miskatonic University Library Association monograph, Halloween Horror, one of the winners of Chaosium, Inc.’s 2005 Halloween Adventure contest, whilst its sequel, ‘Christmas in Kingsport’ appeared in the 2006 eponymous Miskatonic University Library Association monograph, Christmas in Kingsport, following Chaosium, Inc.’s Holiday Season Adventure Contest. For the Keeper who has access to them, the following supplements will be useful in adding colour and detail to each of the four scenarios in The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection. These are Return to Dunwich, Kingsport: The City In The Mists, Arkham Unveiled, and Escape from Innsmouth, as well as Miskatonic University, but whilst they can be a source of colour and detail, none of them are necessary to run the scenarios in the campaign.

Interest in combining horror and playing children in roleplaying games has picked up in the last decade, with television series like Stranger Things and roleplaying games like Kids on Bikes and Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was. For Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, scenarios like The Dare and The Haunted Clubhouse have explored the more modern periods, but The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection predates them all—not only in the genesis of the four scenarios in the anthology, but also in the period they are set. Further, as much as the players are called upon to roleplay children in the campaign, they will be confronted with elements of the Cthulhu Mythos and cosmic horror as well as horrific elements of the mundane world, including racism, prejudice, child abuse, bullying, and worse. Whilst none of these elements are specifically aimed at the Investigators the players will be roleplaying, they are present in several of the scenarios and they are likely to witness them. Consequently, many of the scenarios do carry warnings and both they and the pre-generated Investigators are designed to be played by mature players.

The six pre-generated Investigators consist of Donald Sutton, Gertrude ‘Gerdie’ Constance Pope, Gordon Brewster, Edward Derby, George Weedon, and Alice Sanders. Donald Sutton, the son of Kingsport artists and gallery owners, is a sensitive artist who is also friends with a ghost; Gertrude ‘Gerdie’ Constance Pope is from Dunwich and has strange white hair and ice blue eyes and has the gift of knowing things she should not, but does not know who her parents are; Gordon Brewster is also from Dunwich, a sturdy and hardworking farm boy who knows that the local hills are home to strange things; the studious and intelligent Edward Derby lives just off campus from Miskatonic University in Arkham, and has managed to read the strange books his father left him; George Weedon, also from Arkham, is athletic and principled; and the oldest cousin, Alice Sanders is a resident of Innsmouth, sturdy and stocky, but with keen mind and a slightly devious streak. All six are given full Investigator sheets and more—the more of which comes at the end of the book.

The campaign opens with ‘Halloween in Dunwich’. As members of the extended Morgan family, the cousins and their parents or guardians are invited to spend Halloween at the farm of the family patriarch, Great-Grandpa Silas. As the adults gather and catch up with the family gossip and rumours—some of which the Investigators have an opportunity to overhear and presages plots and events to come in the rest of the campaign’s scenarios—Great-Grandpa Silas takes the children away for a day of activities, games, and competitions. These include apple picking, pumpkin harvesting and carving, singalongs, and more, ending with a family feast and ghost tales round the fire. These activities serve functions in and out of the game. They get the Investigators to interact with each other and with their family, to begin forging relationships with each other in play rather than simply as written. They also serve to get the players rolling dice and have their Investigators be active and gain Experience Checks so that they are more skilled as the campaign progresses, and they also show how children’s lives can be fun, especially in a period where the fun was not so technologically sophisticated to what it is today. This is a device which the author pulls again and again as the campaign progresses, but each time the setting is different, the family dynamics are different, and the activities are different.

The activities also establish a very nicely balanced contrast between the mundane and the Mythos, again a device which will be used in all four scenarios. Of course, when it comes, the Mythos is no less horrifying than you would expect. One of the old family ghost stories told round the fire proves to have more than a ring of truth to it as a vengeful spirit returns from the family’s past to enact a ghastly plan. The adolescent Investigators are the only ones capable of defending their family against the predations of this spirit, and must fight through a swarm of Halloween-themed threats to confront the evil spirit and put an end to its dread ambitions.

If the Investigators looked forward to spending time with Great-Grandpa Silas in Dunwich, they are resigned to spending ‘Christmas in Kingsport’ at the home of their joyless Great Aunt Nora. She expects children to be ‘seen and not heard’, so there is little likelihood of any laughter or fun. Fortunately, Aunt Nora’s ward, the Investigators’ beloved older cousin Melba, a carefree flapper and black sheep of the family, comes to their rescue. She sneaks them out of the house and takes them on a guided tour of Kingsport—sledding, visiting friends, feeding cats, snowball fights, and more. There is something delightfully picaresque about this day out and despite her reputation as the black sheep of the family, Melba is a very positive character who likely reminds both the players and the Keeper of someone in their own family and childhood. Unfortunately, the joie de vivre of the cousins’ grand day out comes to a crashing halt when they are discovered and then the opprobrium heaped upon them and their cousin, Melba, is upstaged by the arrival of their uncle, who has returned from Europe with his new wife. Who is German, no less! Which all threatens to sour Christmas even more.

However, ‘Christmas in Kingsport’ takes a stranger and more wondrous turn when cousin Melba leads the Investigators Beyond the Walls of Sleep and into the Dreamlands. This strange realm of sleep and dreams has always been portrayed as strange and weird, but ‘Christmas in Kingsport’ focuses on the magic and the joy of exploring a mythical, almost Narnia-like, realm. Having made their day in the mundane world, Melba makes the Investigators’ sleep a magical holiday adventure, but it suddenly takes a scary turn when a party in their honour is literally crashed by Christmas demons! Captured, they must find out by whom and why, using clues they have learned in both the waking and the dreaming world—the Investigators will definitely need to listen, and hopefully solve the mystery before they wake up on Christmas morning. Ultimately, there is a great deal at stake in ‘Christmas in Kingsport’, but it is a wonderfully entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable scenario.

The third scenario, ‘Easter in Arkham’, is darker in tone and pulls the Investigators deeper into the Mythos and the secrets of Arkham. Staying at the homes of both Edward Derby and George Weedon, the Investigators have a lot of freedom to visit some of their favourite places in the town and get up to a lot. These include going to the cinema to see films such as The Thief of Bagdad or The Gold Rush, getting ice cream, visiting the penny arcade, bicycling, and more. Chief amongst these though, is attending and even participating in the Miskatonic University Easter Parade, there being opportunities for the Investigators to bake goods, paint Easter eggs, and make Easter bonnets, as well as enter their associated competitions. The pleasure of these activities is first interrupted by strange rumours of missing pets, evil lunch ladies, swarms of killer rats, and worse, and then fraught encounters with one of Edward Derby and George Weedon’s classmates playing truant and a horrid attack by one of the animals in the petting zoo at the Easter Parade. Investigation will reveal that recently departed pets have been returning to their owners, but changed, tainted, and unstable, which for Call of Cthulhu veterans can only point to one cause—and they would be right! However, the Investigators do not know that and getting to that cause will entail dealing with terribly afflicted animals, making friends with a gang of would-be members of the feared O’Bannion mob each of their own age, and negotiating with a figure out of witch-haunted Arkham’s past in a very nicely judged and staged encounter.

The fourth and last scenario in The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection is ‘Innsmouth Independence Day’. Almost like the film Jaws, the Investigators get to spend and celebrate the Fourth of July on the New England coast, but this takes place on Haven Cove, an island opposite the harbour of Innsmouth, the most shunned and reviled towns in New England. This is a chance for the Innsmouth side of the Morgan family to meet the rest of the family, and vice versa, and do so on neutral ground, just sufficiently far away from the mildewed and mouldering seaport and its strangely inbred and evolving inhabitants, to gain the grudging acceptance of the High Council of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. However, one of the Investigators, Alice Sanders, a resident of Innsmouth has a plan. Once all of the competitions—swimming, sailing, fishing, sandcastle building, and more—are out of the way, she wants to sneak off the island and into Innsmouth and locate her family records. There are elements of The Shadow Over Innsmouth here, but the Investigators are sneaking in as well as sneaking out, and whilst there are plenty of watchful eyes who will alert the authorities to their presence, the Investigators can find allies too—and make friends. ‘Innsmouth Independence Day’ culminates in some quite nasty confrontations with some family secrets and truths, and whilst the protagonists are children, the scenario does not shy away from the sometimes brutal and inhuman way of life in Innsmouth.

Almost the last fifth of The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection is dedicated to Investigators sheets for the six children at the heart of the campaign. This is fifty pages long, which is somewhat unnecessarily over the top given the size of the cast. However, The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection does not just give Investigator sheets for the six children for the four scenarios in the campaign, but for later in their lives as well. The first set take the sextet into their early twenties, whilst the second presents them as Investigators for use with Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos. Hopefully, their inclusion will see the Investigators who have come of age and aware of the Mythos during the events of The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection return again to conduct further investigations.

In terms of staging the four scenarios in The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection, the Keeper will need to do some preparation. Primarily this will be to create the various adult members of the family in addition to those mentioned in the text. In terms of running the scenarios, the Keeper is encouraged to have his players spend Luck as needed on their Investigator’s tasks and actions, and in return be generous with restored Luck between adventures. In terms of staging the scenarios and the campaign there are, nevertheless, a number of issues with the campaign. First, The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection really only works with the full six players. Second, the scenarios are linear in places, though this is offset by the fact that there is a lot for the Investigators to do throughout, both in the linear sequences and in the sequences where they have greater freedom of action. Third, the campaign negates the parents and guardians of the Investigators. They are named, but they are never really developed and it would have been useful if the Keeper had been given some roleplaying notes about both how to roleplay them and how each of them feels about the Investigators.

Physically, The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection is very well presented. In contrast to most releases for Call of Cthulhu, there is a sense of warmth to the book and a vibrancy to its illustrations. Many of these are taken from period festival illustrations of the day, whilst the illustrations of the Investigators have a suitably slight cartoonish feel to them that enhances the childhood sensibilities of the campaign. Not all of the illustrations quite match the text, but that is a minor issue. 

As a piece of writing for a roleplaying game, The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection is simply an entertaining read. There are moments of tragedy and joy and outright humour in the writing and it is easy to see that the author is actually enjoying himself in writing the four scenarios in the campaign. As a campaign, The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection is linear in places and it does demand all six players, but it captures the feel of being a child again and pulls the players into roleplaying children again with all of its fun and disappointment and excitement and frustration of dealing with adults—and it does this without being patronising or belittling any one of them. It also brings alive a sense of family, with its gossip and secrets and difficulties. All of which will be familiar to so many players and Keepers from their own childhoods. As individual scenarios, The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection adeptly contrasts the mundane with the Mythos, whilst giving time for the Investigators to be children and revealing step by step some of the darker secrets about the world around them.

Golden Goblin Press has a well-deserved reputation for publishing excellent anthologies and campaigns for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, but The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection is the exception. The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection is a superb piece of writing, which in capturing our childhoods and in taking a new, fresh angle to Lovecraft Country, brings charm to Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. The late, much missed Keith ‘Doc’ Herber would have been proud.

Whimsy and Wonder, and Yet?

Neverland is that faraway land where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys frolic and play, fairies gather in revelries, Captain James Hook connives and seeks vengeance against Peter Pan for cutting off his hand, the mermaids croon and scheme—and of course, children never grow up. As told in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, it is also the island and land to which Peter Pan brought the Darling children—Wendy, John, and Michael—to be the family that he never had. It is a story of growing up and accepting the responsibilities of becoming an adult, and putting childish things behind you, that is, part from Peter Pan himself. In the process, they lose the way to Neverland. In other tellings of the tale, Peter Pan becomes a story about what is lost—which of course, is childhood—and then reclaiming it. Yet what if the adults could find their way to Neverland, three adults in particular, and grow old? What if Wendy, John, and Michael Darling found their back to Neverland? What would they become? Would their presence change the island? Would Peter Pan notice? These are some of the themes explored in Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting, a hexcrawl designed for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition.

Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting is published by Andrew McMeels Publishing—best known for publishing ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG—and features a roleplaying interpretation of Neverland, richly detailed across twenty-four hexes, over one hundred monsters, creatures, and NPCs, fourteen or factions, and numerous locations. The latter includes coral caves, Gnome hamlets, the Home Underground where Peter Pan and his Lost Boys have made their hideout, an inverted home to a lich, an amphitheatre dedicated to mermaid performances, Captain Hook’s ship the Jolly Roger, and the very Crocodile who hunts for the rest of Captain Hook, which can actually be explored as if it was an actual dungeon!

From the outset, Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting is very much a book for the Dungeon Master, beginning with a very clear explanation of who’s who on Neverland and the various factions on the island. They include all three of the Darlings—all grown up, Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, Captain Hook and his crew, and much more. There is a wide array of factions on the island, all of them drawn from Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, but many of them unlikely to be unfamiliar to the players since they are more likely to be familiar with works based on the play rather than the play itself. It should be noted that in drawing from the original source, Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting also updates one or two of them, since attitudes towards certain groups and words have changed in the century or so since the original play was performed.

Rules also cover travelling and exploring across the island—including, if the Player Characters can get sufficient fairy dust, the ability to fly, and using the Mermaids’ secret whirlpools and the Lost Boys’ hollow trees, the island’s daily cycle and movement of the Crocodile. Fun and recreation includes games of Hurling, Gnome Fairs, and Pirate Parties, whilst advanced rules cover chase sequences, and the dangers of harvesting from the dead—also pointing to a scarcity of resources on the island, and of harnessing the powers of a star, which can be used by non-spellcasters to cast spells appropriate to their personality. The huge Cast covers numerous monsters and creatures, as well as the various characters from Peter Pan, including the eponymous hero, the Darlings, Captain Hook and his crew, and more…

In comparison, the section devoted to the island of Neverland feels a little short, with just the one page devoted to each of its twenty-four hexes. Each page includes a larger view of the hex in question—taken from the larger isometric map of Neverland, a short description, a note of the timed events which occur twice daily, and a quintet of tables which can be used to generate encounters. These can occur every hour, and since it takes four hours—or a Clock in ‘island time’—to cross a hex, every hex can be very busy. Many of the hexes are also the locations of key places on the island, and whilst these are mentioned, they are not cross-referenced, making the flipping between the two in the book that little bit awkward. The various locations, whether a dungeon or a ship or an inverted tower or a mine, and so forth, are each given a page each, so feel a little more expansive than the pages devoted to individual hexes.

Besides various tables which provide adventure hooks, animals, fairy trades and tricks, locations, loot, Lost Boy traps, Mermaid games, objects, trinkets and trophies, and more, the book comes with ‘Tales from Neverland’, a set of eight short stories presented as extra chapters to the original Peter Pan story. They are each a very quick read, and can serve as inspiration, hooks, clues, and the like. They do add some flavour and perhaps a little context for the Dungeon Master, but nothing more. Rounding out Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting is not only a bibliography, but also a sketchbook. This collection of sketches, finished pieces, and notes nicely charts the development of the look of the book and its art. Its inclusion undoubtedly adds to the charm of Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting.

However, as rich and as well-presented as Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting actually is, there is a handful questions that it does not effectively address. These include, “What do I do with this?”, “How do I get there?”, and “What do I play?”. There is some initial discussion of the book’s themes, but it is all too brief. Then, at the end of the book, the author provides six ready-to-play pre-generated Player Characters, ranging from a Big Game Hunter or Ranger and Child Pickpocket or Thief to Holy Orphan or Cleric and Stranded Pirate or Fighter. All of these are done as Humans and all have reasons for being on the island, and together the hextet feel just a very little like the adventurers from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon in being from the ordinary world and cast into the land of dreams that is Neverland. They also suggest reasons why Player Characters might end up in Neverland, but beyond this, there is a lack of advice for Dungeon Master on what Classes and types of characters the players might play, how they might get to Neverland, and what they do when they get there. To some degree this is offset with tables of random and specific adventure ideas, plot hooks, and rumours, but whilst the author states that they are there if the Dungeon Master is stuck as to what to do next, what if the Dungeon Master is stuck at the start?

Another issue is with the monsters. Including variations, there are over one hundred of them, and whilst that gives Neverland and the Dungeon Master variety aplenty, it does feel like a lot for a twenty-four hex hexcrawl and the likelihood is that many of them the Dungeon Master may never bring into play. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing, but with that many entries in the bestiary or cast list as Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting terms it, not all of them are given the descriptions that they deserve, forcing the Dungeon Master to rely upon their illustrations to describe them. Which is disappointing.

Physically, Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting is a beautiful book, done in rich blocks of greys and blacks, reds and green. The layout is crisp and clean and the book itself is an easy read. The cartography is also good. However, the book could have been better organised, especially when it comes to cross referencing the locations in the text and the placement of the random tables which come in the middle of the book rather than at the end where again they might be easier to find.

Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting is a rich and detailed setting, one which takes the whimsy and wonder of the source material, Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and makes it somewhere that the Player Characters can explore and perhaps discover the darker secrets of the island. It is beautifully presented, but ultimately, it needs more effort upon the part of the Dungeon Master to bring to the table and to draw her players in than perhaps it should.

Halloween Horror '86

The Dare is a Call of Cthulhu scenario which very much wears its influences on its sleeve. It is a horror scenario of Cosmic Horror, so obviously H.P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu. It is a haunted house scenario, so obviously any number of haunted house horror films and short stories, but also—just a little bit, ‘The Haunting’, the classic introductory scenario for Call of Cthulhu, which goes all of the way back to 1980 and Call of Cthulhu, First Edition. It is inspired by Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition, Call of Cthulhu, Fourth Edition, and Call of Cthulhu, Fifth Edition—certainly for its look. It is inspired by the horror films of the late 1970s and 1980s, including Halloween, Poltergeist, Evil Dead, The Lost Boys, and more. Above all, it is inspired by the kids’ adventure and kids in peril films of the 1980s, so The Goonies, Stand By Me, Monster Squad, E.T., and more. This rich source of inspiration has been mined in recent years by Roleplaying Games such as Free League Publishing’s Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was, Renegade Game Studios’ Kids on Bikes, and Bloat Games’ Dark Places & Demogorgons: The Roleplaying Game, but also most obviously on the silver screen by Stranger Things.

So The Dare is a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, in which the players take the role of preteens who are dared by a school bully to enter a haunted house on Halloween. Published by Sentinel Hill Press—best known as the publisher of the Arkham Gazette, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, The Dare is written by Call of Cthulhu veteran Kevin Ross. Designed as a one-shot, ideally for four or five kids and ideally to be played on Halloween, it began life as a tournament scenario, which has now been updated to be run for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. As a one shot set in the eighties, The Dare works as a palette cleanser for veteran players, likely going all in on the period motifs—Sony Walkman, leg warmers, genre knowledge gleaned from video nasties, and so on, but it also works as an introduction to Call of Cthulhu for new players, made all the easier by its parred back ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ mechanics designed to fit the genre. It could in fact, be the defining experience with Cosmic Horror for the kid investigators, who as adults grow up to become investigators into the Mythos in the nineties, noughties, and beyond!

The set-up for The Dare is simple. School bully Roger Simmons has dared several of his victims to enter the Barnaker House, an abandoned and dilapidated home on the edge of town, and spend not just any night there, but Halloween! As the house wheezes and groans around them, their senses assaulted by the stench of mould and decay, of animal urine and faeces, the sound of scuttling in the walls and from room to room as the light from their torches skitter about them, a storm blows up and it looks like the investigators are there for the long haul… As they suffer the taunts and jibes of their bully, will the investigators find out if the house is really haunted? What horrors await them as they try to last the night?

To support this, The Dare is fully plotted out together with floor plans of the Barnaker House, stats and descriptions of all of the NPCs and the monsters. This includes suggestions as to what the NPCs will do location from location, but also gives suggestions as to how to adjust the tone of the scenario from location to location. These are set at the US film ratings of PG and R, the former minimising the violence, the gore, and the death, emphasising menace and anxiety, the latter being more visceral in its inclusion of gore, violence, and injury. Essentially, the difference between The Goonies and Evil Dead.

Mechanically, The Dare uses the Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition rules. It presents the core rules to the roleplaying  game, but it also strips them back to present what it calls ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’, a simplified version of the rules. Notably, the rules condense the eighty or so skills of Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition down to just fifteen. So instead of Psychology, Be a Pal, Be Bossy rather than Intimidate and Persuade, Sneaky in place of Sleight of Hand and Stealth, and Spooky Stuff rather than Occult and Cthulhu Mythos. The most notable addition to these skills is Play with Matches, which covers setting things alight, building traps, using chemicals, and so on, all of which should serve as a spur for the investigators’ invention. Overall, these stripped-down rules could easily be used to run other ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ type scenarios, or even slotted into an anthology of ‘Gateway’-type scenarios in which the investigators are kids.

Rounding out The Dare is a short essay by Brian M. Sammons, ‘Grab the Machete or: How I Learned to Stop Going Insane and Love 80s Horror Movies’. It provides a brief overview of the genre and suggests ten films that the Keeper and her players should watch as inspiration. The Dare also comes with ten ready-to-play ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ investigators. These are all designed to be played as girls or boys, and come with alternative names and space for boy or girl photos. There are some thirty or illustrations included in the pages of The Dare—each based upon a photograph submitted by one of the Kickstarter backers, which can be used by the players to illustrate their kid.

In terms of its horror, The Dare really revolves around its PG and R ratings and the classic confined space of the haunted house. Played using just the PG rating and it would even work as a scare ridden one-shot suitable for a younger, even preteen audience. Switched to the R rating and The Dare becomes a more visceral affair, much in the mode of the film It—though without the coulrophobia—and so is better suited for mature players. For the Keeper there are plenty of staging notes throughout, though she will need to handle one NPC with care. One option might be for the NPC to be played as a Player Character Investigator working hand-in-hand with the Keeper, but if not, and the players work out what is going on beforehand, it really is up to them to roleplay within the genre until their Investigators know. 

Physically, The Dare stands out because although written for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the layout for it is of Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition. It not only fits the period setting of the scenario, but it fits the scenario’s sense of nostalgia too and gives it a certain, delightful charm. The maps are perhaps a little plain and it needs a slight edit in places, but the artwork is excellent. The theme is applied to the front and back cover, which is done as the cover of a video cassette.

The Dare is a superb one-shot, one that manages the odd combination of being both nasty and charming, all infused with eighties nostalgia, from start to finish. Not just in the style of the story, its tone, and set-up, which can be creepy or horrible depending on the rating selected, but very much with its look. The Dare also suggests a style of play and provides a set of mechanics to support that, both of which deserve revisiting in future releases. Whether you are visiting the eighties for the first time or going back again for another go around, The Dare successfully double dares you with a one-shot of Halloween horror.