[OSSR]Green and Pleasant Land

[Ancient History]

I've been thinking about doing a yearblog for 2015. Specifically, I've been thinking of doing one for something Cthulhu RPG-related; Call of Cthulhu is due to have its 7th edition out sometime this year, so that might be a good alignment of forces. I've been plotting out an outline, because I want to do something a bit more ambitious than Farcast, and maybe avoid some of my mistakes with that blog. Although I still probably won't get enough people to read it.

Anyway, long story short I've been delving back into my old Call of Cthulhu RPG supplements. These are all pretty much terrible, no matter what anyone else tells you, but some are worse than others. You would never know this based on the price, however. Nostalgia and the general crapitude of CoC products means that a lot of books which would at best be considered middle-of-the-road in other game lines are revered as classics and priced accordingly. Supplements like The Golden Dawn by Pagan Publishing are routinely listed for US$100+, and people rave about the magic system - which is, to put it mildly, a fucking joke. But I'm not here to rave about that, I'm hear to rant about something much, much stranger.

Set your Wayback Machine to 1987.



This is Green and Pleasant Land, put out by Games Workshop under license with the permission of Arkham House, because August Derleth was fifteen years dead but his ghost still demanded a royalty cheque or something; I don't know how it works. Nobody likes Games Workshop from a business angle because they're a bunch a bastards, but then again, Chaosium is such a weird, pathetic company that you sort of hate them too. This was the mid-80s, though, and in 1986 you had White Dwarf publishing articles for games like Call of Cthulhu alongside Warhammer Battles minis and material for the brand-new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game; put it another way, it's five years after TSR stole the Githyanki from the pages of White Dwarf.

So I can sort of see how an American and Brit company might have gotten together and said "hey, we have a lot of creative fans/semi-pro writers in our fledgling RPG industry here, why don't we write a few supplements and publish them?" And so they did. And this was bad.

System woes aside, Call of Cthulhu only does a few kinds of books: setting splats (Secrets of New York, Secrets of Kenya, Secrets of Tibet, Miskatonic University, etc.), adventures/scenarios (including the massive campaigns like Horror on the Orient Express or Masks of Nyarlathotep), unrelated conglomerations of articles (various Investigator Companions) or monographs (the notorious give-us-your-stuff-and-we'll-print-it-and-call-it-official ripoff), and variations on the standard setting (Cthulhu Now, Gaslight, etc. - I'm including stuff based on the system like Delta Green, the Laundry RPG, Trail of Cthulhu and Dark Ages Cthulhu). The thing is, these books are rarely if ever done well, even when a second or third party is doing the actual work.

I think the essential problem lies in the Call of Cthulhu concept: you're roleplaying in the Cthulhu Mythos. When you have that much rich material to draw on, there's never any real effort to build your own setting or build up metaplots or any of that crap. Setting books in particular are usually primarily concerned with giving as accurate a possible look at a specific location at a given period of time, and if the authors remember to throw in a few Mythos hooks there, all the better. It's not something that CoC has really outgrown, although some of the sidereal projects have at least gotten better at presentation - Bookhounds of London by Pelgrane Press for example is leaps ahead of the standard CoC book - but you're still stuck reading often mind-numbing condensations of places during periods your great-grandparents probably lived through, and any RPG that could be effectively replaced with a wikipedia article and listening to stories from Nan has serious fucking issues.

But I digress. Let's start with dimensions: this book is 8.25" x 11.6". Who the fuck does that? That is not a standard size! There's a grass-colored tentacle in the grass clutched around a cricket ball, which is actually nice. This is a book made back when all layout was still being done by hand, so it's 80 pages, and I swear to Tsathoggua that it uses the exact same fonts and headers as WFRP.

There's no editor mentioned. It is instead stated that the book was "Compiled by Pete Tamlyn," and then lists 10 writers, including our old friend Marc Gasciogne, and Pete Tamlyn himself. The reason that this book has a compiler instead of an editor quickly becomes apparent: each fucking section is its own stand-alone article, most of it in a three-column format that fucks with my counting but let's call it about 1,250 words for a full page (although there is no such beast, because there are a lot of illustrations).

Speaking of the illustrations, there's another bit from the credits that catches the eye:

Photographs & Reproductions
Courtesy of the Illustrated London News Picture Library, A Pictorial & Descriptive Guide to London, Harrods Catalogue 1929, Advertising: Reflections of a Century.

Excepts from the Harrod's Catalogue courtesy of Harrods and David & Charles Publishers. Excepts from Advertising: Reflections of a Century courtesy of William Heinemann Ltd.

Which is to say, this is the 1980s equivalent of illustrating your book using clipart and WikiMedia Commons. If this were an American production, the equivalent would have been taking out black-and-white adverts from 1920s Sears & Roebucks catalogues. I'm not saying it's ineffective, but it is unexpected; I guess I would rather have black-and-white photo reproductions alongside the text instead of really crappy pre-DeviantArt fanart, but I also hate to deprive poor Earl Grier of his pittance.


Shutup, I like Earl.

They also managed to rope Brian Lumley in to do a story in the back of the book. That's probably what ate up so much money that they couldn't afford much in the way of an art department. Lumley is noted as the second most popular British Mythos writer, after Ramsey Campbell (and now with Neil Gaiman and Charles Stross, probably somewhere down around 4th). But his novel The Burrowers Beneath did inspire the Mindflayers, so there's that.



I'm still not out of the credits page yet. There's a listing in about 3-point font for Games Workshop - like the entire staff of Games Workshop, from Bryan Ansell ("Da Boss") down to the typesetters and "Invaluable Support," which I can only assume is 1980s RPG-speak for groupies and fluffers. The GW writing staff has a some overlap with the writers of this book, but it's obvious Rick Priestley didn't have any interest in it.

The disclaimers - I do like a good disclaimer - are worth reading:

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publishers.

The mention of historical characters is not intended to imply any connection between them and the fictitious events, characters and places of the Call of Cthulhu game.

All characters in the adventures Horror Of The Glen, Death In the Post, and Shadow Over Darkbank are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or to major star-faring races with unmentionable powers is purely coincidental.

All new rules implied or presented in this book should not be regarded as official additions to the Call of Cthulhu rules.

...because that would be wrong.

A final bit, because this is still half an epoch before the internet is a thing:

Any questions or comments about this product should be address to: Green and Pleasant Land Questions, Games Workshop Design Studio, Enfield Chambers, 14-16 Low Pavement, NOTTINGHAM NG1 7DL.

If you require an answer, please try to phrase your question so that they can be answered 'yes' or 'no', or by a short sentence. Also, please enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope or 2 IRCs, and we'll do what we can to deal with your query as quickly as possible.

"Fuck off," he hinted.

Okay, we're almost out of the credits. But one more thing!

Product Code: Games Workshop 004450 CHaosium 2320

Product Codes are the little codes on each book - usually the spine, and the upper right hand corner of the front cover, and the bottom left of the back cover - which contain secret information on the product, as far as where it was in the production schedule, which line it goes to, and what to put down on the form when you're trying to order the fucking thing through a paper catalogue because it's the fucking 1980s and if you want a goddamned book and they don't have it in the store your only hope is to stick your money in the goddamned mail and prey to your distant and unforgiving idiot god of chaos that Nyarlathotep can decipher what the fuck you want.

Anyway, there's like 21 chapterettes/articles, 3 scenarios, and Lumley's piece of fiction, and this is only an 80 page book. That means the meat of it is about 30-40 pages, and I'll do that next post, then a post for each of the scenarios, and call it done in a week.

[name_here]

But I digress. Let's start with dimensions: this book is 8.25" x 11.6". Who the fuck does that? That is not a standard size!

That's actually kind of hilariously appropriate given the subject matter.

[Red_Rob]

Being English and a fan of CoC I'm interested to see what you make of this. I seem to remember flicking through a copy once and being greeted by pages and pages of small font writing that looked like it had been badly photocopied. I can't remember any of the content, which doesn't bode well.

Anyway, long story short I've been delving back into my old Call of Cthulhu RPG supplements. These are all pretty much terrible, no matter what anyone else tells you

I found Cthulhu supplements were excellent for giving a sense of the expected ambiance and providing inspiration, which is 9/10ths of what supplements for a rules-lite game like CoC are for, really. Given the amount of detail an investigative game requires pre-written scenarios are a Godsend too.

[Ancient History]

Haha...CoC isn't rules-lite. My ghost, the main book's massive. The thing is that...it's sort of like the issue that Shadowrun or White Wolf runs into, since they're set in something resembling "the real world" - lots of information is available about those cities already, so in part you're copying what's already there and presenting it in an easily-digestible overview, with emphasis on the stuff the PCs need to know. But with Call of Cthulhu, the fantasy elements are diminished to the point of being...well...almost nonexistent. We'll get into it tomorrow, and I'll give an example of what I'm talking about.

[Ancient History]

Introduction

To die: to sleep; to sleep;
perchance to dream;
Ay, there's the rub; for in that
sleep of death.
What dreams may come...
William Shakespeare

I his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Ancient Chant

Those are real quotes from the sidebar of the one-page introduction by Pete Tamlyn. The skinny on this book is that it's inspired by (and very slightly overlaps with) Cthulhu by Gaslight, which was about gaming in England in the 1890s, so that investigators could investigate Britain from 1918 to 1939.

Having said that the book is not fully comprehensive, I must now apologise for leaving so much out. With the material available I could have easily filled two books of this size, but compromises have to be made somewhere along the line. For the benefit of keepers who wish to delve further into the subject I have included a biblio-graphy of helpful titles. If any readers have ideas for substantial and useful additions tot he information contained herein, I am sure that Games Workshop will be pleased to hear from them.

That's precious. Remember, this is an 80 page book, I'm pretty sure White Wolf could have squeeze that out in less than a week, three days if they prevented the writers from wanking until it was done. It's a book that could only have been written before the internet, because I think Wikipedia pretty much renders all of it obsolete.

Okay, so how this works is that each individual section, which runs at most 4 pages, was written independently by one or two individuals, probably without talking to each other, and the individual authors are noted at the bottom of the final column at the end of each section. This is really a book that could have been written by mail, and maybe was.

There's a table of contents after the introduction, although "table" might be a bit generous. It'a three-column grid with each section title centered, and "Page XX" underneath that. After this we get the Bibliography (half a page, and including the Hay Necronomicon under "Factual" sources).



Then, on the same page we start with...

Biographies
These are paragraph-long micro-bios of notable 1920s and 1930s individuals, like Neville Chamberlain, Howard Carter and George Carnarvon.


Yes, the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb is mentioned.

The stickler complaint about this section is that for some reason the explanatory block is broken across the tops of two columns. The main complaint is, well, what's the fucking point? Yes, these are dozens of prominent Britons, but none of them are ever given any actual connection to the Mythos. I suppose it's nice to know about Sir Donald Bradman, the champion Australian Cricketer, and Agatha Christie and occultists like Dion Fortune, but there's never really given any idea for how to use these characters. Fuck, the section had entries for fictional characters like Miss Marple, Bertie Wooster, and Hercule Poirot!


I guess that mustache might be non-Euclidean.

Characters
Mostly a rehash of an article called Gentlemen & Players from the pages of White Dwarf. If you're unfamiliar with Call of Cthulhu, it doesn't have classes as such, but it has investigator types called Occupations which help determine starting skills and income. Given the era, this means the listed types include "Gentleman" (as in, gentleman of leisure), Butler, Valet, Sleuth, and Sportsman. Because the designers think it's perfectly fine that one player starts off with £2,300 while another starts off with £300. There's some shenanigans for adjusting material based on on war experience or starting out upper class vs. lower class, and two statless character sketches of typical villains, including Fu Manchu.


No, seriously.

Social Life
One page blink-and-you-miss it sum up of 20+ years of changes in British society. The effects of war gets 2 paragraphs, as does the Emancipation of Women. Religion gets three, and actually gets some facts wrong and never mentions anything besides various branches of Christianity anyway.

Again, no mention of the Mythos. This will be a theme.

Communications
This includes a list of postage rates, a list of popular newspapers, some notes on telephone, radio, and television, and a list of principal libraries in the UK.



Crime & Punishment
Three paragraphs on the police (Scotland Yard, basically), excerpts from a 1923 lecture on forensics by Inspector Carlton of Scotland Yard, and two paragraphs on corporal and capital punishment. Not that the latter should come up much.

"Having found what you believe to be a blood stain, you can take a sample for analysis. You place the blood in a solution of potassium cyanide and water (adding ammonia to the solution if the stain is on dyed material). If the stain is blood, it will release bubbles of oxygen. How much depends on the type of blood - human blood has the most oxygen of any creature.

Entertainment
Another one-pager. Half of it is devoted to sports, including Australia's Don Bradman "the premier cricketer of the age." Unless he grows fucking gills, and croaks out a prayer to Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, I don't care.

Publich Health
One pager. Most of these are written by Tamlyn. This page covers the National Insurance act, the temperance movement, and asylums.

In 1911, the Liberal government brought in a National Insurance system. This was compulsory, but it applied only to workers who earned less than £160 a year. Under the scheme, workers and their families were entitled to free use of a General Practitioner, sickness benefit for up to 26 weeks a year if they were too ill to work, and maternity benefit. Anything serious that required specialist treatment still had to be paid for. In order to save government money, Lloyd George, who was in charge of setting up the scheme, choose to administer it through Friendly Societies.

...and so on, and so forth. This would maybe be helpful if there were costs for medical services, but other than the fact that most investigators' "retirement plans" pretty much consist of the asylum, there's not much use here. The illustrations include an advertisement for the Cancer Hospital.

Money & Prices
An explanation of £sd for those who forgot how they work (basically, 1 £ = 12 shillings = 240 pence; one guinea = 1 £, 1s or £1.1.- or 13/-, etc.), and a list of prices for common goods taken from the 1929 Harrods catalogue, including shotguns (£22), cricket bats (33/-), pith helmet (27/6), 20 cigarettes (1/-), 10 day Mediterranean cruise (20 Gns), 3-bedroom semi-detached house (£600.0.0), etc.

No stats for any of the weapons, of course, but presumably you could look them up in the Call of Cthulhu rulebook. Where they already have prices, but in dollars. Oh well.

History
Two pages, from the Treaty of Versailles to the Abdication of Edward VIII, with a couple bare paragraphs on the British Empire. My favorite bit:

Code: Select all

Country     Area/sq. miles Population
Antarctica   2,970,000         0

The Occult
The chapter that gets the most love, Aleister Crowley is given most of a page to himself, the Witchcraft Revivals about half a page, and Secret Society and The Society of Psychical Research about half a page between them. Harry Price of the Society is given an entire page (though no stats) if you count the 1/3 of it given over to the Borley Declaration and illustrations.

Unlike the rest of this book, this chapterette is okay. They actually remember to give references to the Mythos, particularly in the end of Crowley's section, and suggest a connection between Shub-Niggurath and the revival of the witch-cults. It's still ridiculously small and leaves you wanting more, but it's the best section yet and we're over a quarter of the way through the book.


Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner tapped more ass than you can imagine.

A Timeline For Britain and Europe 1918-1939
What it says on the tin. Two pages. A typical example:

1936 George V dies - accession of Edward VIII.
Germany remilitarises the Rhineland.
Experimental video-phone system between Leipzig and Berlin.
BBC adopts 425-line EMI TV system.
Edward VIII abdicates, accession of George VI.
First Spitfire fighter flies.
Spanish Civil War begins.
Jarrow hunger march.
Olympic Games in Germany - Hitler uses them for propaganda purposes.
First London-Paris night ferry service.

The last entry is "BBC TV shuts down for duration of war (in the middle of a Mickey Mouse film!)."

Fortean and Disasters Timeline
Nominally another 2-pager, but about an entire page is taken up with a blurry black-and-white photograph of the aftermath of a zeppelin disaster. Typical example:

1938: Coelocanth skin discovered off South Africa - this fish was believed to have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. Aurora Borealis seen in Britain.

1939: Rabies epidemic in Poland.

Really? There's an inch of white space there. You can't think of anything else to cram into 1939? Shame on you, Marc Gasciogne.



Archaeology
A page on the pre-history of the British Isles, mostly talking about the barrows, Stonehenge, and Romans; then they skip to contemporary excavations in Egypt and Greece.

Follies

This is the Sugar Loaf, in Dallington, East Sussex, built by "Mad" Jack Fuller. It's one of those things that happens when you have a small island nation of very eccentric people with too much fucking money, the equivalent of car elevators today. All of the follies covered here are authentic, but this is the only one with an actual suggested Mythos tie-in, so it gets a nod.

A simple, conical building, it looks just like something the Great Race might have produced.

Britain int he Mythos
This is a one-page sketch-map of Britain, with a bunch of numbered circles. These correspond to locations mentioned in various Mythos stories involving the UK, as well as various Call of Cthulhu scenarios (listed on the opposite page). There's no distinct pattern here except maybe "Gee, London should really have gotten it's own sourcebook."

Aviation
... long story short: commercial air travel sucked, flying was dangerous. They do give some brief tables which gives readers an idea of speed, cost, range, and passenger size by year, as well as a brief note on prices (basically, the Keeper pulls a number out of their butt.

The Inland Waterways
One-pager on hiring boats for Britian's rivers and canals. Meh. I really wish these sections had just been combined as "Travel."

Motoring
2-pager on period automobiles by Marc Gasciogne, plus an entire page taken up by a full-age ad for Rolls-Royce - and yes, they really did reproduce a blurry black-and-white photo of a color Impressionist oil painting used as an advert for a fucking car. On the other hand, the table actually contains valuable information like name of model, years of production, country of origin, number of seats, top speed, cost, and prestige.


Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B. 1937-1939, Italy, 2 seats, Speed 130+ mph, £2,100, prestige *****.

If I were re-doing this supplement - probably something closer to 160 pages - I would have this entire section as nothing but vintage car porn, like the Rigger's Black Book of 1937.

There's also some notes on motoring laws, buses, lorries, taxis, motorcycles, and q uite forlorn paragraph on bicycles. Mechanically, it's not a bad chapter.

Railways
As air travel and water travel, but with a map of rain lines that Gasciogne could have stolen for the ley line map when he was writing the London Sourcebook for Shadowrun a few years later. Next!

Sea Travel
The last section in what amounts to the main thrust of this book...and I'm left looking back and realizing that the actual substance of the book comes to something like 37 pages, and about a quarter of that is devoted to travel. This really is the lowest information density I've ever seen in any RPG book ever. The amount of material actually relevant to the Mythos is less than five pages. Seriously, there's nothing after this for playing in Britain in the 1920s and 30s, it's just three scenarios and a short story. This isn't even a good fan project by modern standards. I've written more original material for CoC than this book contains. Even given the age of the product...the period...this is just appalling. Even compared to other Games Workshop books this is sad and inadequate. How thin it is, and how little it covers.

What the fuck do readers actually want when they pick up these books? I'd expect the average bit about living in the period, major events, important skills and technological developments...but why wouldn't you mention the various Mythos influences on the island, the libraries and asylums and occult societies and cults? Why not explore it, like, a little? This is the kind of shit that pisses me off about Call of Cthulhu books, which focus so much on verisimilitude and so little on...well...the Mythos. Plot hooks. Mysteries to investigate. Forces to oppose. Resources to consult. Even by Games Workshop standards this is bad; they'd have done better to release a collection of White Dwarf articles than this. I am appalled at the money I paid for this.


Just for comparison: this is in every way a better book, and I still bitch about it.

All I can think of is that people just didn't understand what went into a placebook. Everybody was an amateur, and the people writing this, in bits and pieces, understood that this was a real place and time rather than some medieval fantasy world, and wanted to get things correct. I can appreciate that, but my fuck - there's nothing here to actually play with. I guess I'm spoiled when I expect, y'know, some Mythos in my actual fucking Mythos sourcebook.

Okay, next up is the first scenario.

[Username17]

Books like this help promote the idea that CoC is a rules lite game simply by forgetting to mention the rules. An actual character sheet has 65 numbers on, not counting age or any numbers associated with the character's possessions. Every weapon has seven stats. Many of the numbers on your sheet are calculated from other numbers using multiplication and division in addition to addition and subtraction.

CoC is a horribly complicated and dated system. The fans continue to put up with it largely by ignoring the system most of the time. It's like a giant Oberoni fallacy. The CoC community doesn't demand better rules because they barely touch the ones they have.

-Username17

[JigokuBosatsu]

I think a lot of CoC players have graduated to serious LARPing or beyond, for that very reason- if you're going to spend so much time doing research to create an authentic atmosphere for your game, why confine it to the table where you are at the whim of dice and shitty rules? Why do that when you can do this?

[Maxus]

Wow, Jigoku. Thanks!

Man, get distracted and not pay attention to some guys for four or five years and see what they sneak behind your back.

[Ancient History]

Horror in the Glen
This 13-page scenario is about a heretofore-unknown version of maneating tree-spirit imported from Africa by one of those Dr. Livingstone types.

No'quite.

Of course, they don't actually come out and tell the Keeper this. No, the scenario starts off with the PCs hearing of a brutal murder up near a reputedly haunted house in Scotland, and deciding they want to go investigate. At which point they're supposed to be evaluated by an NPC named Harry Price (remember him from the section on The Occult?), to see if they're suitable to participate in the investigation. It's enough to make you sigh and wistfully long for the days when the game started in a bar, talking to Mr. Johnson or being approached by a mysterious stranger with a map. In this scenario, the basic expectation is that the investigators sniff a mystery and go, well...investigate.

There's a lot of backstory, a lot of solid information on the history and motivations of the PCs, some small but-serviceable maps and things, some long diary excerpts that probably should have been player handouts...but there's not really a lot of point. Yes, there's some man-eating tree spirits up in a remote village in Scotland, but by the sound of things they're not actually eating a lot of people and spend most of their fucking time in the trees anyway, only attacking people that attack them first and the occasional stray sheep (and how did they survive being transplanted to fucking Scotland?) The guy that brought them here is long dead, there's no spell presented to control, bind, banish, summon, or ward them off... aside from some asshole playing Scooby-Doo villain and trying to prove he's Laird of the Manor because he's a descendant by virtue of his great-grandmother being shagged by his Lairdship, there's not even much in the way of a proper antagonist.


Hell, the trees don't even look particularly evil.

It's not cosmic horror, is what I'm saying. There's no looming dread of the unknown impinging on the known. Thomas Carnacki could have solved this one with a couple sticks of dynamite. In fact, there's not really anything holding this to the 1920s at all, since the guy that brought the tree spirits here were eaten back in 1815. In fact, why wasn't that played up? I don't understand.

Anyway, there's a slew of abbreviated NPC statistics in the back, by which I mean really shortened...here's an example:

Annie Stewart

Wife of Willie Stewart.

Code: Select all

STR 11  CON 9  SIZ 6   INT 7  POW 10
DEX  8  APP 8  SAN 50  EDU 3  Hit Pts 8

Age 25

Skills: Theology 35%; Debate 20%.

Equipment: Rolling Pin.

Which is to say, this is a useless fucking NPC that can do nothing and why does she have stats? Also, a point on why roll-under is useless: Annie has a 35% of knowing the answer to any question on Theology. A third of the time, she'll know it, no matter how obscure or common the information is. If somebody asks her to name the members of the Trinity, she's got a 35% shot. If somebody asks her to name who wrote the Doctrine of Immaculate Conception, she also has a 35% chance. It's bullshit and weird for people to think that makes sense. It's bizarre to expect somebody to come out of Sunday school with Theology 5% and they have any chance at all of knowing about an obscure gnostic sect. It buggers belief.

There's also not really any connection to the Cthulhu Mythos in this piece. There's some talk about a lost city (that no one else has mentioned), and some lost relatives of the deceased Scottish gentry in Arkham (and, if you are leaving the British 1920s setting, what is the fucking point?), and the tree dudes don't like Cthugha and the fire vampires...but that's it. No grimoires, no lead-ins, just a standalone haunted house in Scotland. Whoo.


One of the NPCs is Mother Brodie, "The oldest woman in the village. Age 65." This isn't here, but I went looking for a picture and this one looks like a winner.

[Night Goat]

I've never played with a roll-under system, but I'd assumed there would be modifiers based on the difficulty of the task. That they don't have those is unbelievable.

[kzt]

It's essentially RuneQuest minus the magic. 1979 was not the high point of game system design. I bailed on AD&D for RQ about 1981, but AD&D was really pretty awful and the whole "everyone uses magic" of RQ was kind of cool.

Typically, in actual play, you used knowledge skills in a more intelligent way, but that's not how they were actually written up in the rules IIRC. However, when you compare to AD&D - which had no skills, just class features - it seemed OK at the time.

Champions (aka HERO) I think was the first game (at least was the first game I found) that had a vaguely reasonable skill system.

[Orca]

[
Annie Stewart

Wife of Willie Stewart.

Code: Select all

STR 11  CON 9  SIZ 6   INT 7  POW 10
DEX  8  APP 8  SAN 50  EDU 3  Hit Pts 8

Age 25

This does tell you something. It tells you that the writer didn't know the system he was using; adult humans get 2d6+6 each size and intelligence. 6 and 7 for each either isn't adult or implies she has a terrible developmental disorder which really should be mentioned if present.

[Ancient History]

Death in the Post
Seven pages long, we're warned at the beginning:

Death in the Post is not a scenario in the classic format. There is very little to be discovered, and most of that can be found out very quickly and easily. However, the investigators will soon find that knowing what is going on and being able to do anything about it are two quite different things. A large amount of the latter part of the scenario is left to the Keeper to prepare or improvise. Feel free to alter the number and nature of encounters as you see fit.

Which is a long way to say that this is actually something more typical to an actual adventure, instead of fumbling around in the woods or going through lady's underwear drawers looking for their diaries.


It's actually not a bad setup. Noted collector of occult junk George Edmundson contacts the PCs to authenticate an Egyptian magical papyrus someone gave him. It's basically the opening to The Ninth Gate.


No, seriously, if you light that up here six librarians will tackle you.

Tracking down the origin of the papyrus reveals that similar strips are connected to a series of ghastly murders (including Edmunson), and it turns out their source is a Mr. Briggs, a dabbler in Mythos magic who uses the strips as part of a spell to target creatures for a Mythos monster called a Hunting Horror. Briggs sends the strips of papyrus through the post, shortly thereafter the monster shows up and kills them, then vanishes. Pretty straightforward, refreshingly. All the investigators have to do is put the pieces together, find Briggs, and stop him before the Hunting Horror kills them all. Simple enough. There's also a nice red herring in that the investigating police inspector also suspects Briggs, but thinks he's getting a cult to commit the murders for him so he always has an alibi.


Seems legit.

It is unlikely that the investigators can muster sufficient firepower to beat the Hunting Horror in a straight fight (and if they do, they obvious-ly have totally the wrong approach to the game).

Typical CoC mindset, just because you come loaded for demon bear you're playing the game wrong. Well, Bram Stoker thought it was a good idea to carry guns and a big god-damned knife around London, so I don't see why the PCs should get dinged just because they can lay some hands on a Maxim or a couple sticks of dynamite.


Okay, so heavy weapons are out of the question. Do any of these books have a spell useful against a...what, there's no grimories in this scenario at all? What the hell am I supposed to do, tell it a joke and hope it laughs itself to death? How many pounds for a pair of 1920s running shoes?

Points are deducted for not actually giving Briggs any spells. What the hell? He has Cthulhu Mythos 50% and can summon Hunting Horrors. Give the Keeper something to work with.

Points are also deducted for referring to obtuse rules in another godawful Games Workshop product that the scenario doesn't actually use:

For more information about target items for spells, see the scenario, The Statue of the Sorcerer from Games Workshop.

He doesn't have any spells, asshole!

Bonus points are given for actually making a (weak) effort to tie this in to established games:

Chaosium's campaign scenario, Masks of Nyarlathotep involves a group of African Nyarlathotep worshippers, the CUlt of the Bloody Tongue, which is close to the sort of organisation Carlton suspects of commiting the murders on Briggs' behalf. Enterprising Keepers may wis h to include the cult as a red herring.

...or he could just be a member of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharoah, which is an Egyptian cult that worships Nyarlathotep and would make perfect fucking sense. You know what? I take it back. No bonus points.


Seriously, it's not that fucking hard.

Okay, that was a short one. So I'm just going to do the last scenario now and put this review to bed.


Look, a canal!

The Shadow over Darkbank
Nine pages long, and...eh...I'm of mixed feelings about this one. I mean yes, it's shit, but I'm of two minds about the quality of the shittiness. The PCs are in the Midlands for <insert_whatever_fucking_reason>, there's been a cave-in at the local canal, the local workmen are superstitious and won't go near it, would the PCs please go take a look and assure the Midlanders that everything is talright?

Now, there's not much in the Midlands except sheep and rocks, so the whole canal thing threw me. I was expecting maybe a cult, or maybe a sheep-person.


Fancy a pint?

Instead, we have this canal, and the canal broke into a subterranean cavern immemorial to man inhabited by some quite frankly unimpressive amphibians that expressly aren't Deep Ones who decide "hey, cool, let's go conquer the surface world!"

No seriously, that's it. Also, how the fuck did the canal get built, if the locals are so superstitious about it? Why are they even superstitious, if these fucking troglodytes never crawled out of their home cave in the millions of years since they apparently fucking evolved there? How did the assholes build a canal right next to a giant fucking cave complex that no-one knew about?

But I digress.

So yeah, this is an effort to actually utilize the stupidest section of the book, the one-page chapterette on canals. If I drank, I would need a drink.


I try not to get started collecting rums, because where would I stop?

Anyway, one of the locals is in league with the amphibious dudes, and totally tries to murder them. The hilarious part is, this can totally work as written. The PCs are given some science-y equipment to go take measurements of, which are actually a detonator connected to a bunch of kerosene and explosives in the canal tunnel. If the PCs fail an Electrical or Mechanical Repair roll, then the first time they take the measurement it explodes and kills them all.


Well, that was quick.

Rolls should be made secretly by the Keeper so that he can make sure that someone succeeds.

Why tell them to fudge it? Isn't failure just part of the fucking game? You pussies.

There's actually more on Canals and the Midlands in this scenario than there is in the actual chapterettes. Sad.

The local library has many books available on canals and the local area, which are listed by title and with contents, and even brief synopses are given on the authors of the books who (still living) might be contacted for more information. None of them are actually very useful, since nobody knows about the amphibians.

The best part about this scenario is the actual NPCs, because the main guy working with the amphibians is a complete asshole named Stanley Grift, and the shit he's doing to cover up the whole underground-civilization thing and fuck with the players is excellent. Just a couple of examples:

The hold which Grift has over him is evidence of a homosexual affair between Longthorpe and his young clerk, Simon Jones. At this time, homosexuality was a criminal offence which could result in a lengthy prison sentence.

Inspector Robert Morris, the senior officer at Cuthdon, is having an affair with Grift's wife, Lavinia. Grift is well aware of the need to keep the police on his side, and encouraged his wife to start the affair.

It's just nice to see someone make a realistic use of sexual relationships in their games, especially without passing judgment.

The Tunnel Dwellers - which look like giant frogs with optional face tentacles - are blind, and die if the slime on their skin dries out. They're not terribly impressive or numerous, and they have no magic or technology to speak of.


The common bullywug is in everyway a more advanced and dangerous opponent.

There's a map of the canals and some typical statistics for random NPCs, and that's the whole scenario. Find out Grift is behind it, do <something> about it, probably wall up the canal tunnel and wait for the Tunnel Dwellers to come back the next time it falls down. There's no magic, or connection to the Mythos, or tomes, or alien technology here - just a rather half-arsed invasion from below in the Midlands. They don't even want to breed with the women. It's enough to make you weep into your pint of Tetley's.

Now, back to what I was saying: I hate them for not using Deep Ones, and yet I don't. I can understand why you wouldn't use Deep Ones. I like to see the Mythos expand beyond the familiar (and often hackneyed) horrors. But if you're not going to use something that fits the bill, you need to put a little more fucking effort into it than a blind frog-race with nothing going for it except the giant brass balls to think they can take on humanity. Seriously, this is a race that can go extinct if you dump a couple tons of borax into their underground lake. So either way you look at it, they failed.



I like to think the sheer shittiness of this book and the overwhelming desire to roleplay Call of Cthulhu in the British Isles is part of the reason so many new RPG supplements aimed at that exact market have come out...but it has to be remembered, for the longest time this was it. 80 pages, half of it taken up by a rather shoddy history, few if any Mythos references to speak of, no new rules or mechanics...what the hell was the point? If this was a special issue of White Dwarf I'd probably praise it, but as an actual "professional" game product, this just is not acceptable by today's standards - I'm amazed it was ever acceptable.


The King says this product represents a fundamental lack of effort.

[tussock]

I'm amazed it was ever acceptable

Like you said, 1987 is forever ago. Just not as long ago as 1927. Information technology is absolutely amazing, Star Trek is backward compared to now.

Half of it is devoted to sports, including Australia's Don Bradman "the premier cricketer of the age." Unless he grows fucking gills, and croaks out a prayer to Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, I don't care.

If you fail to piss your pants because you can't pull yourself away from the fine gentleman retelling his tale of watching the Don score a double double at Lords, you're not a real Englishman. He condenses it so well besides, three days at the crease told in just a few hours. Glorious. The stroke quality, you can almost see it in his words, there's just no setting a field to the man. Son of a strong Englishman, eh, what.

[Laertes]

I quite agree. Bradman was the greatest man of his age. You can argue about Autobahns and suchlike, but Hitler cannot be excused for starting a war which interrupted Bradman at the peak of his career. It's unacceptable.

[Meikle641]

I try not to get started collecting rums, because where would I stop?
[/i]

Kraken is indeed a tasty beverage. I've slain quite a few Kraken while gaming online this year alone. Brugal Anejo kicks its ass, though.