OK, last week it was all about the books and blu-ray. This week it's the RPG stuff.
Cranfield was ... odd ... in the vendor hall department. I mean, the establishment's huge. But the vendor section was a room behind the bar. Nice room. It got a little hot in there, not much air flowing through. I wouldn't want to be in there all day. Drifted in and out a couple times, was tempted by this and that, thought of my suitcase with tears in its nonexistent eyes, that sort of thing.
Yes, I know. I know! But some temptations can't be resisted. I really admire Aaronovich's work. That's why I agreed to write for the setting, but I never did get the physical of the main book and Underground/Overground collects all the short scenarios including the one I wrote. I already have the physical of Liberty's Shadow. That's enough for now.
Plus, Underground/Overground has variant spell rules and a system for playing foxes. How hard can any gamer's heart be? Could you resist those soulful brown eyes? I remember seeing Reynard all over London, when I lived there. A natural fit for the game.
I wasn't that tempted by the pleather version. Granted, pretty. But our climate is death to that sort of thing. That said, your milage (and climate) may vary.
OK, this one had to sell itself. I enjoy a bit of nonsense. But this was setting off alarm bells. Honestly, if several of the organizers hadn't turned up in full Scouting rig (mentioning no names, in part because I can't remember them) I might have turned my head. I shan't say they inspired me. I shall say they caught my attention, and the book did the rest.
This is meant to be a more survivable kind of BRP, which I think probably suits it best to an in-between kind of game. A relaxing change of pace between more grueling adventures. But I could be selling it short. A campaign of this might be what the doctor ordered.
I'm not sure how much use I shall have for Westhaven, the setting in the book. I mean, this is Cthulhu. Arkham's right there. Kingsport too. It makes more sense to my addled mind to use those locations. But your milage may vary.
Malleus Monstrorum. Because you need something with tentacles in your life. Plus, it was on sale. It did force the Arkham book out of my hands, though. There wasn't a chance I'd squeeze both this and the Arkham book in the case. Hard decisions had to be made. Over 150 entities gruesome and otherwise? OK, sold. I didn't pick up the cards, though. Again, suitcase. There are limits to any creature's endurance and I knew I'd be going to Birmingham later.
Speaking of.
That is the queue for badges and entry passes, Thursday afternoon. Good night. The picture does not convey the heat. There was very little air down there and no air conditioning. It was no joke. I flat out do not understand how anyone thought building an Expo center like that without functioning HVAC was a good idea. You might as well fling gunpowder into a furnace.
But!
The queue moved quickly. I picked up the bits for myself and a mate, and we braved the nonsense on Friday from the moment the halls opened.
Did I buy books? I did not.
Was I severely tempted? Yes. But not by books, so much. I did get a small pile of other stuff, special dice, mats, that sort of thing. You can't find these down here. Cons are the only chance I have to get them.
Now, this might in part be because I was with an old tabletop buddy (Keiran, you villain!) but I felt the tabletop urge again. I used to be an enthusiast. No good at painting, mind, which is about 90% of the hobby as far as I can make out. Much like about 90% of tabletop RPG is talking about playing, rather than actually getting around a table and playing. But it was a big part of my life. Skirmish gaming is always easier to find a group for than Napoleonics because, although the Napolean crowd is dedicated, it takes a lot of time to set up and play. I still shudder at the memory of one dark day when we spent the better part of an hour setting up and placing units, only for the other player to concede two turns in. No, the other player did not help put the terrain back.
Whereas a brief skirmish between two or more factions on the streets of Rome (or in my case back in the day, a gunfight in a nameless Western town) is much quicker to arrange and play.
Pictures like these are the crack in the cocaine. You look at something like this and inspiration hits. Never mind that my painting skills are not up to the task. I can see this, in my minds eye, spread across a table at gaming night.
I did not buy it. Nor did I buy any of the solid, paintable Bloodbowl (or possibly Bloodbowl knock-off) stadium sets I saw on sale. I still have a team hiding in a box somewhere. Two, actually. Nor did I buy any of the Chicago Way stuff, tempted though I am by its setting. I think I still have the ruleset somewhere, though that may have changed.
That's the rub, honestly. You get to a point in your collecting career where you look the temptation square in the eye and say, I haven't the space or the time. Other things bring me joy. I shall pay attention to the other things.
There will be a period, about a month, where I wonder whether I ought to have done thus or so.
Then the image will fade and I shall go on to other things.
Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen's England, Chaosium 2022, Andrew Peregrine, Lynne Hardy & Friends
This is a fun one!
I'm always happy to see Cthulhu taken to new and interesting historical periods. Setting an entire campaign in the English Regency (late 1700s early 1800s) has a lot of charm. If you're a fan of the old Gothics (Sheridan LeFanu, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley and the like) this is meat and drink to you. Ghosties, ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties! What could be better?
Peregrine does the Keeper an incredible favor by including the setting of Tarryford, a quaint little town in Wiltshire, partway between Bath and Salisbury. Lots of valleys, high downland, and remnants of ancient forest to get lost in, plus the occasional barrow mound, dolmen and stone circle to marvel at. Even if, as Keeper, you never use either of the scenarios in the book you still have plenty of material to draw on for your campaign. Peregrine also updates it for 1913, which means if you want to have a century-spanning game with dark secrets from the past looming over the 'present day', you can have that and welcome!
All told, you're looking at a little shy of 80 pages worth of history and setting, with two substantial scenarios and a further 35 pages of Appendices - equipment tables, pregens, maps, handouts and the like.
I'm going to start with the things I didn't love and then pass on to the things I did.
Personally, I'd have liked to see a little more history outside England proper, for two reasons: first, this is when England fights a lot of the wars that will define it, and the Empire. Second, this is the period of the Grand Tour, when well-to-do Englishmen went abroad for their education. The English are going damn near everywhere, establishing colonies where they please, and it seems a pity not to explore that.
It might also have been interesting to go into a little more depth about what it means to be a town in England. As opposed to a Cathedral town, or a village. It feels at times as if the book assumes you already know a lot of things that aren't really common knowledge outside England. The history of Catholicism in England, for instance, is something that people outside England might not understand, and it could have been interesting to explore that.
The scenarios are both solid, with lots for the characters to do, but I didn't really fall in love with the opposition. I dunno; I'm sure it's me, but it felt a little as if the core concept went ahead of its skis. The second scenario, The Emptiness, seems stronger than the first.
It’s difficult to get into this without spoilers, but to misquote Stephen King a little bit: these concepts do not come up to you, grab you by the lapels and say: ‘I have this story. I want to tell it to you.’ They stand at a respectful distance and whisper ‘if it’s not too much trouble, I would like to menace you now.’
The art is solid and serviceable. No real standouts. It does what it was supposed to. There are a few moments where the artist clearly draws on art ideas from the period, which is an excellent way to go. I would have liked a little more creepiness; the cover art for Green and Pleasant Land is more inspiring, for instance.
OK, having said all that …
I think the historical information that is on the page is great. I wish there were more of it, but if wishes were horses, then writers would ride. I especially liked the section on Race and Ethnicity and appreciated the reference to Mary Prince, since her day is coming up (2nd August) – she’s an important part of our history.
I think the extra Regency rules are interesting, and the section on Reputation could be very valuable if played out. It’s ideas like this that sell a setting. If you’re going to have a campaign set in a particular period, you need to be able to say what makes this time different from any other and having the option to make Reputation a kind of extra Sanity pool (slowly it drains away …) is clever. It implies penalties for character missteps, but unlike Health or Sanity if the Reputation pool drains the character is still alive and (theoretically) capable of taking action. It’s more of a roleplay tool than anything and encouraging roleplay can only be a good thing.
The idea of a fictional town that isn’t Arkham, Kingsport or any of the usual suspects as a setting for an extended Cthulhu campaign is stellar! There’s a lot of information here for the Keeper to use as they see fit. This could have been twice the length and I’d have enjoyed every bit, but as with the historical info I shall take what I can get.
Would I recommend this? Yes, to people looking for something a little different. If it has one besetting sin, it's that it doesn't feel all that different from Cthulhu by Gaslight, though there's a new edition of that coming soon so it's possible my opinion may change when I see Gaslight. The Reputation rules are its main standout, the thing that makes it different from other eras. What might have made it a little more interesting is using those rules in one of the scenarios; a touch of Wicked Little Letters, for instance.
It's not a must-have in anyone's collection, but it's a useful add-on.
I held off getting a blu-ray player for a long time.
I didn’t see the need. Drives are dead. DVDs are yesterday’s tech. Physical is so last century.
Then those wicked pork buns drew me back in.
See, physical is still the best way to get hold of anything that isn’t Main Street USA. If I want Hollywood, if I want anything North American really, it is easily had. There are any number (God, oh God, so many) ways to get that content. Streaming options beyond the dreams of avarice.
But.
If I want, say, The Untold Story, how do I get that? If I want any kind of non-English language media, how the hell do I get it? There must be Spanish, German, Italian streaming services, and I shall want a VPN at the very least to access them, never mind a working knowledge of the language to understand the menu options. Netflix is a gateway but it offers only a glimpse; besides, damned if I’m paying $22/month for yet another streaming service.
No, if I wanted my pork buns – hot from Terracotta in the UK – I’d have to get an external blu ray drive for my PC. Which is exactly what I did.
The Untold Story is a retelling of the infamous Eight Immortals killings in Macau. Two high stakes gamblers, one a restaurant owner with a family of ten, argued over debts. The restaurant owner Zheng Lin refused to pay Huang Zhiheng so Huang, in a fit of rage, tried to force Zheng to pay up. That went badly wrong and Huang killed Zheng’s whole family, thus becoming the owner of the Eight Immortals restaurant. Briefly.
How do you get rid of all those bodies?
Well, there’s a perfectly good restaurant in need of meat for its famous pork buns … or so the story goes. That part may be apocryphal, but it became part of the narrative.
The 1993 film version won awards and made a ton of money at the box office, but due to its graphic scenes of rape and murder – plus, of course, those buns – it was age restricted to 18 and up. It’s mildly notorious as a slasher, but difficult to get hold of. Unless you buy from an outlet like the folks at Terracotta.
Having seen it, my review:
It’s an odd little duck. The killing scenes are about as bloody and nasty as anything you’re going to see on screen and Anthony Wong Chau-sang as killer Wong Chi-hang is a standout. The comedy cops in hot pursuit are an incompetent bunch of bozos; they’re all stereotypes of one kind or other, led by their fearless Lieutenant Lee, and there’s a peculiar running gag where Lee parades around with a host of prostitutes on his arm much to the disgust of his only female subordinate Bo (Emily Kwan) who wants Lee all to herself. It doesn’t pair all that well with the main plot. That said, it does end in a stunning moment when all those same comedy cops realize that the pork buns they’ve been chowing down on free of charge came with a hidden cost.
Cheap, nasty, entertaining. It may be the unrelenting realism of the gore scenes (a stark contrast with modern cinema) but it really does stick in your mind in a way that few other films can.
If you want a good retelling of the pork buns saga I recommend Kento Bento’s version, which I believe is on Nebula; not sure as it’s been a while since I watched Nebula.
From a gaming POV there have been plenty of examples of suspicious meat on the menu. Sweeny Todd, Telltale’s Walking Dead (the comic too, for that matter, in a different plotline), Fritz Haarmann the Vampire of Hanover, who allegedly sold the meat of his victims on the black market – take your pick, really.
There haven’t been as many haunted restaurants.
There is a starting Call of Cthulhu scenario in the main book, The Haunting. It’s been around for donkey’s years. You can find it in the free-to-play Quick Start rules. In that scenario the investigators are called in to investigate a haunted house. So far, so normal – at least, normal in a Cthulhu-esque way.
What if it wasn’t a haunted house? What if it was a haunted restaurant? What would need to change?
Not much, really. The Keeper would need to change some of the details of the ground floor plan. But the plot would tick on regardless, and you’d have some interesting horror options – particularly in the kitchen. The family would live above the restaurant, so you wouldn’t have to change much about the upper floors.
The Macario family would be the ones running the restaurant of course; a nice little red-sauce-spaghetti joint. Until Mr. Macario decided to add a little extra to the Bolognese. Then there’s a discreet pause while the place is shut up for … let’s call it redecoration. At that point Mr. Knott, the building’s owner, calls in the investigators. He wants to rent the place out to new tenants but the restaurant’s reputation frightens off any interested parties. If they could just give the place the all-clear, he could rent the place out.
A potential plot change: as written Vittorio Macario, the former restauranteur, is locked up in the asylum. His only plot function is to hint at a way of defeating the evil.
Suppose he has a secondary function. Suppose he escapes from the asylum with one thought on his mind: a grand reopening of Macario’s Restaurant.
OK, it’s end-of-session. The characters have triumphed. Or at least they aren’t dead, which is a triumph in and of itself. The time has come to divvy up the good stuff – or whatever passes for good stuff in your campaign.
What does that look like?
Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy games have a definite advantage here. Everyone knows what the good stuff looks like. It’s shiny and spendable, glows with magic power, or increases your character’s level and therefore prowess. It’s all easily quantifiable. A +1 sword is a +1 sword, which by default is better than that nasty old ordinary sword you were using five minutes ago. Gaining 500 experience points is an undeniable rush, particularly when you can look at your current totals and think ‘I’m only a few hundred more points from the next level!’
Call of Cthulhu has a similar reward system, where at the end of the scenario your characters get Sanity rewards depending on what they did and how well they did it. Sanity, for those not in the know, measures the characters’ mental state and can be reduced to 0, through various shocks and trauma. 100 is the theoretical human maximum. 0 = time to book you into a long-term-stay at Casa de Soft Walls, from which you shall not be returning. Nobody’s ever explained what 100 =; I presume you leave your physical body and ascend to the heavens on a cloud of sunshine and rose petals, at which point something quite nice happens beyond the ken & barbie of mortal folk.
Point being that, in theory at least, if you gain enough rewards you can exceed your original Sanity total. Which in a game like this, where Sanity is the oil that keeps the engine going, is a reward prized above rubies and titles.
However, there aren’t any other rewards. That’s pretty standard for horror games. You’re not meant to be the dashing hero; you’re meant to be the weedy academic, or similar. Victory for you means survival, not advancement. Sometimes you get to save someone’s life, which is great; saving lives is a good thing. However, it doesn’t fatten your wallet.
Nor does it have the same impact as that +1 sword or those 500 experience points. It’s not easily quantifiable. The gold you swiped from that dragon all adds up to a total which can then be spent on goods and services. The fuzzy warm feels you got from saving little Suzy from the shoggoth cannot be spent on goods and services. Not unless your in-game economy is radically different from the norm.
So, to the question: in games where the reward isn’t easily quantifiable, what will make those rewards fun?
Sometimes the game makes it easy for you. Bookhounds of London is a little like that. You have a shop, which your players are constantly trying to improve. That shop has stock, which your players are constantly trying to get. The obvious reward there is more stuff for the shop, more stock to sell. Replace that dingy little cash box with a shiny new cash register. Design custom book covers for your collection. Thanks to your efforts the shop now has a valuable collection of grimoires on vampire lore (effective increase 2 points Occult). That sort of thing.
However, as a rule rewards can be characterized as one of three things:
Reputation
Resources
Shiny Things
Reputation is a bit like pornography. Nobody really knows what it is, but they know it when they see it. There’s a really good reputation tracker in 13th Age which has since been ported over to Night’s Black Agents and other GUMSHOE systems: the Icon system. There are a number of Icons – powerful entities or organizations – whose favor brings a range of powerful rewards, and whose enmity can bring terrible destruction. Your reputation with that Icon helps determine whether or not that Icon will lend aid.
Point being that reputation is useless without someone to acknowledge it; if, however, the CIA knows you and respects you that could mean you can rely on the local station chief for aid, or get a cache of weapons at just the right time, or transport, or whatever it may be. Reputation = tangible reward.
This can apply to pretty much every gaming world. Cyberpunk has its corporations, gangs and medias; City of Mist has its avatars and proto-demigods; Troubleshooters has world governments and sinister organizations. Any and all of these can become Icons, which in turn reward gains in Reputation.
But! It follows that a gain in reputation for one Icon results in a loss for another. If you gain reputation with Scotland Yard because your actions helped foil a cult conspiracy, those cultists are going to have an unfavorable view of you. That can lead to future plot – conflict often does. But it’s something worth bearing in mind.
Resources are those things that the characters can use either in the current adventure or in future adventures. GUMSHOE has a habit of reducing these things to pool points rather than specific items, which is useful. Pool points can be anything; a gun can only ever be a gun.
Night’s Black Agents has a fun idea which could probably be ported over to other systems: excess funds. For whatever reason your characters have money to burn. Maybe they had a good run at the local casino; maybe they stole it from some luckless villain. However they got it, they have it and more.
In fantasy this is often the reward that a swords and sorcery campaign gives. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were always rolling in excess funds after a job, and by the start of the next story they were broke again. Easy come, easy go.
The great thing about this kind of reward is first, it can be abstracted, but second, you can make it more concrete by asking the players how they want to represent this resource. It’s one thing to say you have excess funds; something else to say you have a bag full of cash. That bag can be stolen. It can break open mid-chase, scattering bills all over the street. It can be given to someone else. It can be gambled at the casino.
Alternatively, it’s one thing to say you have transport; something else to say you have a cherry Ford Mustang with custom detailing. One is an abstract. The other is style.
Bullitt
Let the player choose the physical representation. They’ll have more investment in something they chose as a resource reward. You can abstract it initially if you like, or need, but they give it form.
Finally the Shiny Things.
Those are a little bit like Resources in that they have value, but really, they’re trophies. Let’s say that the characters come away from an alchemist’s lab with a half dozen jars that contain God Knows What, but it’s glowing and has little eyes. Fine. It probably has value to someone. But really, it’s the in-game equivalent of a lava lamp. Pretty, meaningless, and there’s a non-zero chance it might explode showering hot wax everywhere.
It’s often the case that characters choose their own trophies, but it can be fun to design a few as rewards. The hat made entirely of shadows. The golden spider pendant. The illustrated scroll with alchemical writing on it that nobody living can read. The crystal skull that glows in the dark. The mirror that shows your reflection as it appears in an alternate dimension. The framed Nosferatu poster signed by Bram Stoker. These are the meaningless in-game things that players find attractive; they make excellent rewards.
I started by asking: in games where the reward isn’t easily quantifiable, what will make those rewards fun?
The answer, ultimately, is by giving those rewards weight and attraction. Reputation has weight: it confers easily understood in-game benefit. Resources also have an in-game benefit. Shiny Things are a bit different but can be equally useful, because they have attraction. The cool tchotchke that they put in their office, to impress visitors. Nobody asks why the hell Batman wants a giant Lincoln penny in his cave; but all eyes go to it whenever they walk in the room.
This post is inspired by Lucy Lethbridge's book Servants, which I'm reading for research purposes. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting period information on the Victorian era, the 1920s and 30s.
Lady-help is a catchall term for an unmarried woman without financial resources, who works as a kind of servant but isn't really from the same social class as a servant. Consequently they balance precariously between the group they feel they belong to, the middle classes, while at the same time not having the same claim to membership of that group as the people they work for. Lethbridge describes this as 'living on a social mezzanine floor, between one world and another.'
Often they do not, or cannot, perform the same tasks as a servant, having not been taught the necessary skills. Nor did they want to be taught. That's the whole point of being a lady; you don't have to do manual or domestic labor. So in practice the lady-help is a paid companion or quasi-governess, someone who can be set administrative tasks, like managing a diary or arranging train tickets and hotel stays, but who has no practical function, like laundry or cooking. Agatha Christie often makes use of the lady-help. Hildegarde Schmidt and Mary Debenham, who appear in her novel Murder on the Orient Express, are examples of the type.
In the Victorian and early Edwardian period, the lady-help's a bit vulnerable, particularly since they lack the money and the opportunity to save that guarantees a modest comfort in retirement. Again, going back to Agatha Christie, this is why legacies gifted in the master or mistress' will are so important. However for those not lucky enough to get a legacy, the best they can hope for is to live on charity - or, more likely, slowly starve on charity.
Things change in the 1920s. There are fewer men, thus fewer opportunities for marriage. Moreover the declining economy means families need cash, however they can get it. Unmarried daughters must work. At the same time, there's an innate horror in letting social standards slip. The middle class must remain the middle class; there can be no question of blurring the line between servant and master. Then there is the war, which among other things taught a whole generation of middle class women new skills, and confidence.
Enter new temporary employment agencies, like Universal Aunts.
'Britain's first personal service bureau' opened in 1921, on Sloane Street. Its founder, Gertie Maclean, wanted to create a venture "which will, I hope, fulfil my search for an opportunity to use my time and intelligence. I would hope too, that other like-minded ladies can become involved." They did, and soon Universal Aunts had a full catalogue of women capable of performing any task. Women with Zoological Society certificates, expert researchers fluent in many languages, women who knew about physics, spiritualism and foreign missions, who were qualified car and boat mechanics, and pilots.
Women who would make excellent investigators in any period horror game, especially Trail and Call of Cthulhu.
These kinds of agencies turn up in fiction now and again. Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey owned and operated an agency like this, with Joan Murchison, former secretary with a background in stock broking, as its founder member. However it wasn't until Servants that I realized this was an actual, historical event, not some backstory invented by a mystery writer. It opens up a range of options for the Keeper, or even the Night's Black Agents director. Consider:
The agency can be a source of information. You can justify any skill set you care to name - Archaeology, Accounting, History, Library Use, Bureaucracy, High Society, Surveillance - and the agency can meet that need. So if the investigators pick up an interesting doodad, and don't know what it is or what it does, ask Universal Aunts to look into the problem. Or need someone followed, or something looked into.
The agency can be an employer or patron, for female investigators. That former Dilettante who lost all her family money in the great Crash can find a new sense of purpose, and employment, with Universal Aunts. It might work even better with a group of all female investigators.
It can be a clue dispenser. Are the investigators getting bogged down in minutiae, or lost in the weeds? Universal Aunts might point them in the right direction, albeit indirectly. Say the investigators are having trouble tracking down Stanley Fentiman, or they want to know why he was kicked out of his old College, or what he's been up to recently. Universal Aunts may know, because one of its members knows Fentiman, or used to work with him, or has connections with the College that chucked him out. Or Universal Aunts may come to the investigators and ask their help with Fentiman, thus giving the investigators a clue as to his whereabouts or plans.
It can be a training facility. If the investigator needs to brush up on her Latin, History, Vampirology, or whatever it may be, there's bound to be an Aunt who knows all about it, and can help.
It can be an occult investigative agency. This is similar to the employer or patron option, above, except that it exists to combat occult threats. It hides this mission under some discreet front, but imagine a Universal Aunts founded, not by Gertie Maclean, but by Wilhemina Murray. Or Dion Fortune, or anyone with occult interests. Universal Aunts wouldn't be up there with Delta Green, sending out hit squads to eliminate threats, but there's all kinds of trouble it could get up to. That mysterious Count, for example, with his business interests in Whitby - no doubt the Aunts have crossed swords with him before.
The best thing about Universal Aunts, of course, is that it still exists. Anything For Anyone At Any Time is one heck of a motto to live up to for over a hundred years, but Universal Aunts has managed it. 'Universal Aunts still endeavors to rise to any challenge.' I bet it does! This means it can be a resource in Call, Trail, and Night's Black Agents; plausible in any era.
First this week, a teaser. You may be aware that, over at DriveThruRPG, Chaosium have opened up what it calls the Miskatonic Repository, an official online collection of user-made content. Sounds like fun. I thought I'd dip my toe into those unholy waters, and see what develops. Hopefully not some kind of fungal infection, but you never know ...
At any rate, consider this your official notice. The scenario's written, formatted, and almost ready for prime time. There's a few last tweaks I need to complete before sending it off into the great unknown. This is an experiment, to see just how viable the platform is. If it looks as if it's a winner, I may put more resources into this. Being more of a GUMSHOE fella, I'd love it if Pelgrane did something similar, but I'm a CoC guy from way back too, so writing this material is no great hardship for me.
Those of you who've got copies of The Long Con and The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby, both of which were originally written to help fund YSDC and which are now available via Pelgrane, may wonder if this is a London-based scenario. No, not this time: the action is set in Harlem, NYC. I shan't say more than that; a full promo will be published here when the scenario hits the digital shelves.
Price tag provisionally set at $4 a copy for a 24 page document, which is broadly the same rate charged for The Long Con and Edward Bigsby. This is, I freely admit, a practical decision; the way DriveThru calculates who gets what from each sale means it's much easier to keep track of everything if we're all dealing in round numbers. So where $3.95 would be a sod to calc, $4 is blissfully simple.
Anyway, once it comes out, I hope you enjoy it! If it works, I will publish more via Miskatonic.
When did we last clean the self promotion trumpets?
Anyhoo, if you're one of those crazy people who scan Kickstarter daily looking for new Cthulhu material to back you may have spotted something intriguing in the pile. Stygian Fox Publishing is crowdfunding Fear's Sharp Little Needles, a collection of modern day horror mini scenarios for Call of Cthulhu 7e.
Stygian Fox's last effort along these lines, The Things We Leave Behind, was very well received. Pookie, reviewer of all things Cthulhu and some things that aren't, called it "the first great release for Call of Cthulhu 7e" with nary a dud to be seen in its six scenario collection.
Fear's Sharp Little Needles is going a hell of a lot further than Things We Leave Behind, with a spine-chilling twenty one shot scenarios at time of writing, with more being added as each second passes. That's not including a much longer stretch goal scenario by Jeff Moeller, designer of note and editor of Things We Leave as well as Little Needles.
Who can you expect to see in Little Needles? Well, the likes of Oscar Rios, Brian Courtemanche, Chad Bowser, Adam Gauntlett ... and a hell of a lot of other superb writers, but I'm going to stop right there because if you want to know more there's a Kickstarter Page you really should be looking at right now.
I could launch into a whole bit but I'm not going to do that. What I am going to do is share with you a taste of the one that got away. For lo, I submitted two scenario ideas to begin with, and one did not get through. [I may have submitted a third since then. Sue me. I'm greedy.]
The one that did not get through is:
The Huiquing’s Cargo A 1980s era container ship known to have been captured by pirates
beaches itself offshore with a cargo of human remains in its refrigeration
compartment; one of the dead in the hold was a Daughter of Atlach-Nacha being
smuggled to the Americas, and the would-be spider priestess’ aborted
transcendence transforms the Huiquing
into a Dreamlands nightmare ship. Inspired by the real-life case of the Hai Sin which, in a breaker’s yard in
Guangdong, China, disgorged a cargo of bones and flesh hidden in its
refrigeration unit. You may recall me mentioning the Hai Sin before. Atlach-Nacha is a monstrous entity which weaves its enormous web across a deep chasm underground; legend says that when the web is complete, the world will end. Some of its tunnels lead into the Dreamlands. Its Daughters are human women chosen to be its companions, and marked by a spider bite. This lesser servitor is dragooned into service by the Great Old One's human servants, and after a period of vigorous brainwashing and horrible arcane rituals the woman eventually transforms into a giant spider and travels deep below to join her monstrous parent. The base idea comes from a simple premise: accidents and death happen to everyone, including minions of the Old Ones. The question is, what happens next? In this instance the snakeheads who attempted to smuggle the Daughter into the United States, presumably to kickstart some kind of cult, are forestalled by pirates who capture the Huiquing and murder everyone aboard, including the Daughter. Picture that moment. The surviving crew and smuggled cultists, herded into an airless container. They fight for breath as the oxygen depletes, first trying to claw their way out, then implore, then expire. As the Daughter struggles to breathe her transformation triggers, and the spider within starts to emerge. Too little too late; her husk dies, but in doing so she creates a connection between the Huiquing and the most nightmarish aspects of Dream, in a desperate attempt to reunite with Atlach-Nacha. Imagine what happens next to the pirates, then picture that gutted cargo ship drifting without crew, without direction, finally beaching itself. The Keeper gets to decide exactly where, of course. It might as easily be off North Africa as the coast of Florida. Tell you what. The Little Needles rules specify that a scenario can be no more than 2500 words long. If at least two of you reading this pledge to that Kickstarter, and say so in the Comments thread, I'll write a 2,500 word short scenario based on the pitch The Huiquing’s Cargo and post that scenario here for you to enjoy. Can't say fairer than that, can you?
