Minireview: Walker in the Wastes

Walker in the Wastes is the first big Cthulhu campaign published by Pagan, and it can be quite difficult to find nowadays. I hunted eBay for quite a while before finding my copy, and it wasn’t exactly cheap. I do wish Pagan would do a reprint of this one…

Besides “rare”, what, then, is it? Well, it’s a huge “classic era” (1928 to be exact) campaign for Call of Cthulhu, kicking off with an expedition to the same area where the legendary lost Franklin Expedition vanished in the ice and the wind, 80 years previously. While extensive historical research points to the expedition having perished to a combination of starvation, scurvy, exposure and lead poisoning, this scenario posits that there may have been something more to that list of horrors. What starts off as a fairly mundane scientific expedition slowly becomes more sinister in true Cthulhu fashion. Something dangerous and non-human stalks the icy wastes, and the native “Eskimo” tribes on the ice aren’t talking much and aren’t necessarily all that friendly either.

The first expedition to the ice is intended to kick off a series of escalating events, some of which require the players to go globetrotting in search of clues. Clues to what? Why, a cult that wants to awaken an ancient god, of course! This is Cthulhu, after all, gotta have those cultists! I do have to say that the cult here is quite intelligently portrayed, and is quite far from the stereotypical “bunch of morons in robes” scene. I’d expect the body count on the PC side to rise fast, unless they are very careful.

This campaign will require a lot of GM prep to run. While it’s interesting and contains a lot of stuff (it’s over 200 pages long), the scope of this one is just so huge that those 200 pages are nowhere enough. Don’t expect to just pick this one up and run it… the author (John H. Crowe III) says that about four years of research went into writing this thing, and while you won’t need four years of GM prep in addition to that, you will need to do some amount of work. The campaign says it’s intended for “experienced Keepers and players”, and that’s a fair enough warning. I think this would be a really cool game to run or to play in, though, so I think that prepwork will probably be very much worth it.

After a fairly linear start the campaign becomes extremely freeform. At times I had trouble figuring out why exactly the PCs would go to a given remote corner of the globe – but to the author’s credit, the campaign doesn’t assume all the leads will be uncovered or followed. The end will be less likely to result in a total party kill if most leads are followed – but I can see this one branching in lots of different directions. Most of them deadly to the PCs, of course.

In sum… a huge, complex and demanding campaign, but one which probably rewards effort put into it. This and Beyond the Mountains of Madness are the two big arctic-focused Cthulhu campaigns that exist… and both are justly famous.

Oh, and this one has zeppelins in it. Can’t go wrong with those. […]

Minireview: Final Flight

Will wonders never cease? We now have an actual new adventure module from Pagan Publishing. Between this and the resurrection of Delta Green, things are looking great on that front.

Unlike the previous Cthulhu scenario I read (Murder of Crows) Final Flight is not suitable as the beginning of a campaign – since it’s very doubtful there will be any characters left alive to start said campaign with. For the same reason, plopping this in the middle of a campaign might also not be the brightest of ideas… this thing is lethal. I think it would work best as a one-shot, with maybe a continuation campaign if any characters actually manage to survive.

The story has the PCs setting out to attend an archeological conference in South America, aboard the (prop-driven) Flight 101. This is a “classic era” scenario, so “modern technology” isn’t all that modern. Things go awry, and when I say “awry” I mean “crash in the middle of the jungle”. Hilarity ensues, as characters with skills more suited for academia try to survive hostile sort-of-natives, the hostile environment, other passengers, and other fun stuff. As noted, the probablity of any of them making it back to civilization are on the lowish side. Never underestimate the ingenuity of players, of course….

While I don’t think this is quite up to past Pagan quality, that’s purely because that quality has been so very high. The scenario is quite good, and goes in a “survival horror” direction that isn’t the most usual theme in Cthulhu. I think the biggest problem is that it’s quite sparse; the GM needs to do quite a bit of prepwork for this one and figure out how he/she wants to make the jungle lethal – no rules support is provided here. A somewhat bigger page count, with some additional detail, would have helped. That said, the price point is very low, so you are getting plenty of bang for your buck.

So… not a “must buy”, but not bad at all. If you want some jungle horror in your Cthulhu, take a look. […]

Minireview: Murder of Crows

Chaosium has recently licensed Cthulhu to various rpg companies, and the first fruits of that are now appearing on store shelves. Murder of Crows is a “classic era” Cthulhu scenario from Super Genius Games, set in the fictional town of Bethlehem, New Hampshire. The town has transmuted itself from an up-in-the-mountains lumber town into a fashionable wilderness retreat for city folks – which is now threatened by a plague of crows, in the thousands, in true Hitchcock “Birds” fashion. Who can save the day? Why, an intrepid group of investigators, of course!

This is a “low-level” scenario, well suited for starting off a campaign. The Mythos involvement is fairly minor and no special skills are really required. Some connection to the town via backstory etc would of course make the PC involvement feel a bit more natural. That’s actually one of the minor flaws in this otherwise very good scenario; the beginning is a bit weak and needs some GM work. Another minor flaw is that the “bad guy(s)” are pretty obvious, the PCs are almost saturated with clues pointing in the correct direction. I would personally make things a lot more muddled and add some red herrings here and there. Depends on group, of course.

I liked this. It’s well-written (bar some editing glitches) and engaging, and the town is a well-realized locale. Nice Twin Peaks vibe going on. I gather there are mode adventure modules on the way from these guys, with apparently one being a sequel of sorts to this one. I’m probably byuing them, this was a very good initial effort from a new Cthulhu licensee. […]

Minireview: Toast, by Charles Stross

Toast is a collection of Stross’ older short stories. You can clearly see ideas and influences here that he later expanded and used in his novels. In particular, Lobsters later got expanded into the first chapter of Accelerando. The vision of virtual reality and such as the “next frontier” is one that he has used a lot, too.

The stories vary in quality, but all are at least “ok”. Standouts include the excellent near-future Cthulhu story A Colder War and the clever Antibodies, but there’s a lot of other good stuff here, too. In all fairness his novels are better, but this collection is well worth reading (especially so if you already are a fan of his books).

Some of the stories are already quite dated, as noted by the author in the afterword. That’s the problem when you write about high-tech… it becomes “retro” faster than you can blink.

Pick this one up if you like Stross. Cthulhu fans may also want to read the book just for A Colder War, it’s a fun extrapolation of At the Mountains of Madness. […]

The (cold) land down under

I’ve been reading some Antarctica-related stuff lately, centering around Chaosium’s massive Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign book. I’m about halfway through at the moment, and… wow, it’s quite something. Insane amount of detail, and very inspired expansion on the original short stories “At the Mountains of Madness” (Lovecraft) and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” (Poe). I’m still not sure I’ll be up to running this at any point – it would take a lot of time, and a group of players willing to put up with lots of 1930’s period detail and a fairly slow, deliberate pace; not all that much pulp-style heroics here. It’s something I’ll have to think about some more.

In any case, the sheer amount of background detail in the campaign book is mind-boggling, the appendixes themselves take up about 150 pages. It’s also very well written, and shows a deep love for the subject material. As an adventure, it also feels like it should play well – there are some bits I would tweak and some railroady bits, but on the whole it has a nice flow to it, with lots of plot twists. It’s no wonder that this thing is often nominated when talking about the all-time best roleplaying campaigns; it’s right up there with Warhammer’s “The Enemy Within” and other classics of the genre (with the caveat that I haven’t actually read Enemy Within yet, I’m just told that it’s really really good).

In order to get even more background detail, I’m also reading The Lost Men, the real-life story of Shackleton’s ill-fated Ross Sea supply expedition of 1914-1916. Fascinating stuff, and in parts unbelievable; it seems a miracle, and testament to pure human spirit, that there were any survivors considering all the poor planning and supplies. The whole “we don’t need to prepare, we’re British gentlemen!” thing seems quite alien to my modern mindset, especially since I’ve done a bit of traveling in difficult conditions myself. The thought of going into a virtually unknown, utterly deadly locale with piss-poor planning and sad lack of proper supplies seems suicidal. And was, apparently.

Another sort-of game prep book I’m thinking of getting is Mountains of Madness: A Scientist’s Odyssey in Antarctica, an account of a modern-day paleontologist’s journey to the real-world site of Lovecraft’s story. Might be interesting.

It would be nice to visit Antarctica one day. So many other interesting spots to see also, of course, so hard to say if I’ll ever get around to it – but I’ve always had a fascination for the more barren and hostile areas of the world.

In other news… we had another Exalted session, a bit dungeon-crawly but that was by intention, and was fun for a change of pace and as a chance to get more to grips with the combat system. We still didn’t get it quite right, I forgot about minimum “ping” damage and about natural soak values. Duh. Oh well, next time…

This weekend had me in Turku again, at yet another knife technique seminar. This time time around we spent the weekend practicing the care and feeding of the bali-song (butterfly knife). Apparently the damn things feed on blood, judging by the amount of nicks and cuts we accumulated – at one point we joked that we should have a “sponsored by Hansaplast!” sticker somewhere. Had fun, though. As a weapon the butterfly knife is not that hot; it’s sadly lacking in speed and ease of use compared to modern folding knives, and offers no real benefits of any kind technically. Sure, you can use some of the opening techniques as secondary attacks, but that’s pretty borderline. On the other hand, in more primitive times it was a folding knife that you could (with practice) open with one hand, something that’s quite a feat without modern-day mechanical production skills and tolerances. In the modern day, its main point is “it looks really cool”, and it acts as a fun stress toy and finger nimbleness exercise. One that needs focus to play with, of course, unless you actually like the sight of your own blood.

Considering that I had never played with one before, I’m pretty happy with getting some (very basic) proficiency in ten or so of the basic opening styles over the weekend, and with only getting one cut that required bandages during the process. […]

Beyond the Mountains of... Aieeeeeeee!

This morning, it happened. An ominous silence fell upon the land, and a mysterious van drove up in front of our door. A silent, brooding man stepped out and rang the doorbell. Still unaware of the signs and portents, I opened the door and was handed a heavy package. Being not quite awake yet, I signed the small slip of paper (which I really should have read before signing), and took custody of the package. Only then I realized that…

I now actually own a copy of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, the almost-impossible-to-get and out-of-print-for-aeons megacampaign for CoC. It’s referred to as one of the greats, and I’ve been trying to get my grubby little hands on it for a long, long time. Some weeks back, I got email from Chaosium saying that they’ve found a hardcover printing company that they are happy with, and that a new hardcover version is now available in limited quantities. They also set up a separate ”Antarctic Dementia” section on their website, with some other related goodies.

So now I have the book, the game aid kit, a Starkweather-Moore Antarctic Expedition 1933 t-shirt (yes, really), a sticker, and a collection of short stories including the original “At the Mountains of Madness”. Joy.

Rpg.net recently had a “horror week”, and one guy compiled a list of the Top 10 horror adventures, based on ratings given by rpg.net users. I could quibble with that list a bit (“To Go” isn’t really horror, it’s more in the “occult weirdness” category), but generally… yeah. It’s fun to note that I have almost all of those books in my game collection, and I intend to remove that “almost” word soonish.

About BtMoM… it’s a huge campaign, the book itself is 440 pages… it’s bigger than most game core books. It’s an exhaustively detailed and period-authentic story of a 1933 Antarctic expedition, and apparently a brilliant game if you can find a group that likes that sort of thing – it’s long, sometimes slow-paced, and needs commitment and actual interest in the workings of an expedition like that. In any case, it’s a book I’ve long been wanting to read, if just to see if it’s something I might like to run one day. Anything that’s generally compared to “The Enemy Within” on the quality scale must have a lot going for it. […]

Fear and loathing in Russia, with demons

Well, despite a semi-hectic real life schedule leading me to not get as much prep work done as I would have liked, I’ve managed to run a few non-horrible rpg sessions. After a long while of not running anything, it’s slowly coming back. I guess GM:ing is sort of riding a bike – you can get better at it over time, but once learned you never really forget the skill. Also like the bike, now and then you crash and fall in a spectacular fashion no matter how good you are…

Anyway, last Tuesday we had the first proper session of an Exalted game. The story starts in Nexus, and I had a bunch of plot threads semi-ready and went with what the players decided to do. Mostly things went in expected directions, but there were quite a few surprises to keep me on my toes. Apparently things seemed to progress in a logical fashion, which is nice, considering that behind the scenes I was desperately trying to integrate multiple fast-mutating plot threads together. We’ll see how this goes; at the moment the characters have recovered a few (apparently minor) artifacts and are trying to figure out the meaning of a symbol which gives some of them foreboding flashbacks from the past. Things are made interesting by the fact that the party isn’t exactly in agreement about how best to proceed… White Noise’s stealthy and paranoid approach to things is not quite in synch with Khamyn’s “go forth my followers and fetch me information!” deal. Oh, and they have a First Circle demon in their basement, happily building a nest from various spiky bits. Will the Dragon-Bloods come gunning after the party looking for stolen loot? Will the Wanderer decide to go “fuck this” and revert back to the Immaculate faith? Will Damien the Black Sword decide to pay the brothel another visit (“to gather some more info!”)? Stay tuned.

On Sunday I ran the one-shot scenario Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37 to a bunch of people, with good results. As expected, the scenario worked very well and the pregen characters had just the right amount of built-in friction and mutual paranoia to keep things from being too easy. Most of the game went in a straightforward fashion, with creepy stuff getting discovered bit by bit and the characters going into “oh shit, let’s leave now” mode (smart of them). Things took a sudden and Paranoia-style turn at the end, when the TASS leader decided that the Commissar knew too much and tried to discreetly execute him. The keen-sensed Commissar threw a spanner into the works, however, by partially dodging the bullet (literally) and running for the trucks, trailing blood and shouting “help, he’s gone mad!”. At the same time, the TASS leader was shouting something to the tune of “stop, traitor!” and confusion reigned supreme. Things wound up with the Red Army medic blowing the TASS thug’s head off with a rifle and with the Red Army group doing a “tactical retreat” from the spot. All in all, a grim but fun DeltaGreen-meets-Paranoia game session. I also used the game as an excuse to test Stolze and Detwiller’s Nemesis game system instead of using BRP, and it worked pretty well. Needs some tweaking, the stock skill list isn’t that hot and this one is probably much better – but overall is seems like a solid engine for low-power horror games. Seeing as the same engine is used in the superhero game Wild Talents, it apparently also works for high-power stuff. Oh, and Stolze is working on Reign, which uses the same “ORE” system to drive some sort of political fantasy game. It’s pretty versatile, though of course needs tweaks depending on what sort of game you want to run.

In any case, I think this became my system of choice for Cthulhu-type games, it works and is lightweight enough. The next time I use it I’ll probably give the alternate combat rules a try, they sound like they might work (even) better than the default ones – which aren’t bad by any means.

On Thursday we’ll be doing Exalted again. I’ll have to find some time today to prepare a bit, since tomorrow night I’ll probably be playing VTES at Valter Cafe – Andrea of EC2006 organizing fame is coming to Finland (from Italy) and we’ve promised him gaming company. […]

The high cost of living

Hmph, my decision to minimize spending so I could zero my Visa debt at some point is off to a rocky start. First in the line of “give me money!” events is my dentist – a recent chipped tooth prompted me to finally go to a checkup after lots of procrastination. Result: two new fillings and some cleanup work, and a hefty dental bill. It’s a private clinic, very nice but costly even though Kela does pay a part of that bill back later.

By the way, starting the day with a visit to the dentist isn’t that bad. Usually, the rest of the day seems quite rosy in comparison.

Next up in the cash sink department is my (home) computer. It’s been getting steadily worse, and all signs point to a motherboard error; “something somewhere has broken down”. Now, it’s an old mobo and processor and has been my performance bottleneck for quite a while now. On the other hand, I had hoped to limp along with it for a while yet, that’s why I recently upgraded my graphics card to a modern card with an AGP connector… and now a card with a PCI-e connector would be much easier to fit in. Oh well.

I looked over my options, and with some help from Jari found a set of components that should upgrade my computer to something relatively modern: a nice backward-compatible ASRock microATX mobo, E6400 Core 2 Duo processor, Antec HTPC microATX case, Zalman cpu fan, Seagate 320g SATA drive, and some cabling and replacement 120mm fans for the case. The cost wasn’t bad, 540e for the whole pile, and the result should be a nice, fast computer with a small(ish) form factor and low heat. The new mobo can use my (old) DDR400 memory, so no need to upgrade those. Being able to throw away the broken old mobo, Atlon XP and crappy ATA drives will be nice. Well, maybe not literally “throw away” except for the mobo, but still.

Like the dentist thing, this isn’t really an optional purchase, having a working computer at home is pretty much a must for me and this was the close to the cheapest compromise I could think of. Sure, I could have shaved some more euros here and there, but it didn’t seem worth it. On the plus side, maybe now my graphics card can perform like it’s supposed to, the old processor was a big bottleneck for a lot of stuff. We’ll see. right now the critical thing is getting a computer that works and is stable. Performance is just a nice extra.

I’ll have to struggle along with the old computer for at least a week, still, some of the components will take Verkkokauppa a bit of time to get.

… and of course, just when I decided to cut down on purchases, Amazon and Chaosium both decided to deliver piles of books I had ordered quite some time ago and almost forgotten about. Oh well, they are already paid for, can’t complain. More stuff on the (rpg) reading pile:

• Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37: a Chaosium monograph detailing a Cthulhu scenario set in Stalin’s USSR. Read this over the weekend and liked it, seems like a fun (and grim) oneshot scenario to run for a bunch of comrades. Vodka optional.

• End Time: another monograph, this one about a future where the stars have become (almost) “right” and the Old Ones have done their thing. The last remnants of humanity huddle on Mars, and things are generally not going well. This isn’t a “ready” product, it’s a snapshot of the things that got written for a discontinued Pagan book. Some interesting ideas here, though it’s a jumble and typoes and other mistakes abound. Could be used as the framework for a “Cthulhu on Mars” game.

• The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep: a hardcover reprint of the old classic campaign. Haven’t read this yet, but it’s supposed to be pretty good. Too bad I missed out on the reprint of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, there’s supposed to be another reprint on the way but we’ll see…

• Compass of Celestial Directions I: The Blessed Isle: the only 2nd ed Exalted sourcebook I was missing. So far, all the 2nd ed books have been really good. Overall, the are much better organized and written more clearly than the 1st ed books. The first edition does win out on flavor, sometimes, so I’ve also read most of those just for the “fluff”, even the ones that have been superceded by the new books. Read Aspect Book: Fire over the weekend and it proved to be yet another good read. Some people hate the caste/aspect books because they are “only” tales told from the perspective of 5 different characters, with minimal “crunch”. I like them for precisely that reason, I find they make the world come alive much better than pages of dry explanation text. Then again, I’m one of those people who actually enjoys gaming fiction, so take this with a grain of salt (or two). YMMV.

• Pandora’s Book and Strange Alchemies: the two continuation books for Promethean. The core book made such a positive impression on me that I want to read more. Interesting game, if quite strange in several ways.

So… maybe now I get back to “spend less money”. One can always hope. […]