The Inside Scoop on Gaming

This is so weird. You know how rare it is to find a bad product that Chaosium made?

Well, let me rephrase that: As a scenario, No Man's Land hits every note for an adventure, and hits it fairly well. There's a nice setting (the Ardennes Forest, during World War I), there's the standard roster of Mythos monsters, there's a structure for the investigators to follow, there's some new information and useful tidbits for Keepers...it's a useful book.

But it's like...how to put this: A standard Call of Cthulhu adventure is almost like a standard dungeon crawl in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. While it may satisfy your intiial craving for an adventure, and while it'll work nicely for a single night's adventure, it doesn't even begin to cover the sheer range of material that you can do with Call of Cthulhu. Horror can encompass any event from a quiet rattling across your roof that turns out to be something more than just a raccoon to a full-scale guts-and-brains blowout in a disused slaughterhouse in Tennessee. Hell, even those two options don't begin to get it across. Ligotti versus Landsdale, if you want to get artsy about it.

So, how exactly does No Man's Land fail as a product? Let's go over the good and the bad.

The good part is that this'll work very well for an opening scenario, or an introduction to newbies. It's not very complex, has an A to B to C structure, factors in a historical event that knowledgable players may be familiar with, gives a broad cross-section of Mythos monsters and has a satisfying ending. Nothing spectacular, but it's solid stuff. There's a lot of tips for running it in a tournament setting, with assorted props and a background soundtrack. There's a satisfactory index on how things were during World War I, including rulings for trench fever and hypothermia, and SAN losses and skill gains during the war.

All in all, fairly decent stuff. Nothing ground-breaking, but nothing that sucks, either.

But here's the problems with it, in no particular order.

The Mythos Hoedown Effect:

This is what occurs when you have too many Mythos monsters and not enough explanation for what they're doing there. You typically get this effect whenever the writers of the scenario are trying to ramp up the action without developing on what they've already got. The first incident was in At Your Door, where the sudden tie-up of a lot of loose ends created the first Mythos hoe-down - a literal celebration where Mythos monsters and cultists came together for a massive meeting and summoning in the ruins of a football stadium.

Now, there's nothing wrong with Mythos monsters coming together for a particular purpose. Some of them, like the byakhee and Hastur, go together. You expect to see byakhees when you're fighting the Cult of the Yellow Sign.

In No Man's Land, however, there's ghouls, zombies, Ghatanathoa, animated skeletons, cultists and Lloigor - and only the Lloigor really have a reason to be there. Most of the monsters are simply there so that the players can gun them down. The Lloigor are there as the central bad guys, but there's nothing really there that really makes it necessary for them to be Lloigor. (There's a particular special effect that goes with the Lloigor that occurs during the scenario several times, but you could do it with any other major Mythos monster with a touch of fudging)

There's no reason for the scenario to be this jam-packed. Some of the best Call of Cthulhu scenarios either focus on a particular monster - I.E Landscrapes, Bad Moon Rising, Dead Man Stomp, Still Waters and so forth - or don't have a monster at all, like John Tynes' sublime Hastur Mythos. When you start jam-packing your scenario with cannon fodder, then the mood of horror is ruined. For that matter, the final enemies don't even show up until the end. The players ricochet from encounter to encounter, with no sense of structure and no real sense of purpose.

Even worse, one of the Lloigor has a speech where the phrases "foolish beings", "resistance is useless", "none can stop us", and "this world will be cleansed of your meddling influence forever!". This is bad for a number of reasons. For one thing, it invokes memories of pulp villains and their stock "mu-ha-ha-ing". For another thing, most Mythos monsters are supposed to be vague and unguessable; the only way that you can understand what's really going on is to go permanently insane. That's one of the primary ideas of the game. If the Lloigor simply sucked somebody's brain out of their skull, sliced it up into hundreds of cross-sections and secreted them in various places throughout the adventure, that'd be about par for the course - in short, both baffling and terrifying at the same time.

The Setting, and How it Works Against the Adventure

World War One is one of the periods in time when the human race went through things that makes some of the depradations of Mythos monsters pale in comparison. The charge at Ypres, the Ardenne forest, the bloody trench battles - this actually happened. I won't bore you with the details, but it was a pretty ugly time. (And prone to exaggeration, as well. I was surprised to find a book about World War One that didn't talk about the bloodiest aspects of the conflict. It definitely lent some context to the other horrors.) Throwing in a Mythos adventure just seems like gilding the lily. I remember reading part of adventure in Adventures In Arkham Country that dealt with the horrors of the Civil War by throwing the investigators into it. No Mythos monsters, just the horror of war. And it felt effective. No Man's Land feels ineffective for the same reason.

No Real Sense of Horror

There's the fact that the encounters don't provoke any sense of horror. They have a feeling of "Yikes! Monsters!", followed by a fairly bloody fight scene. In a typical Call of Cthulhu scenario, you spend your time trying to stay the hell away from any kind of situation that could even hint at the possibility of a fight, usually because your opponents are either insane or capable of annhilating you with the flick of a finger. In this scenario, almost all of the monsters can be defeated with gunfire, or the standard tactic of running like hell. Research is minimal. A valuable resource is handed over to the players without any need for research - just show up, or be railroaded there, and avoid a deathtrap in order to get the key to the scenario. In any other scenario, it takes weeks of study to find out a monster's weakness, or even what they hell they're fighting. That's the fun of Call of Cthulhu - it's an investigative game, rather than a shoot-em-up. You wouldn't get that impression from No Man's Land.

The Art

There's the art. The art is huge - and worse, yet, not all that great. A lot of it is sketchy, with misproportioned faces and the like. Some pieces are quite decent, but others are blown to unbelivably large proportions - a single image, a priest waving his arms in panic, covers a full page and a third. Ditto a shot of zombies standing at attention. Ditto a shot of soldiers firing at an unseen menace. And there's no particular detail within the art to really make it worth blowing up to that size - it's blocky and expressionist, as opposed to the lushly detailed art of previous Call of Cthulhu supplements. (Not that it's a bad thing, but it's best seen in a smaller format, so that the eye can take it in all at once.) I feel like I'm buying a product that could have fit comfortably within, say, twelve pages, maybe more, and that Chaosium just went all-out with bulky design elements to justify the price of printing it.

Meanwhile, some of the handouts have problems on their own. A few pieces of art have been done with Photoshop's emboss effect, which looks okay, but it doesn't seem to quite fit with the mood of the adventure - there's even a bit of pixellation if you look close. Other lengthy bits of text are printed in a vaguely handwriting-ish font that's hard to read and looks obviously computer generated.

There's a lot of solid stuff here. The pregenerated characters are solid, and they have a fair number of decent hooks for further adventures. You could do much worse in terms of a Call of Cthulhu adventure.

But you could also do a lot better. If anybody wants to explain how I've misjudged this product, feel free, but I personally don't think that this product is worth the hype that Chaosium has given it.

-Darren MacLennan

P.S Oh, and here's the "...and then World War One started." game. Inspired by Dave Barry and Patrick McManus, it works thusly:

1. Describe the most horrific occurence that you ever heard of during a war, like corpse-eating rats launching a full-scale assault on an orphanage.

2. Tell the story, and then add "...and then World War One started." as soon as you're finished - I.E "Corpse-eating rats launched an assault on the orphanage day and night. Men died for standing up at the wrong time. Shells landed day and night. And then World War One started."

It's worth a chuckle or two.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

No Man's Land
Author: Sam Johnson, with art by Tom Sullivan, John Mirland, and Drashi Krendup Category: game Company/Publisher: Chaosium Line: Call of Cthulhu Cost: $14.95 Page count: 80 ISBN: 1-56882-142-5 SKU: 2385 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 09/29/99. Genre tags: Historical Horror	This is so weird. You know how rare it is to find a bad product that Chaosium made? Well, let me rephrase that: As a scenario, No Man's Land hits every note for an adventure, and hits it fairly well. There's a nice setting (the Ardennes Forest, during World War I), there's the standard roster of Mythos monsters, there's a structure for the investigators to follow, there's some new information and useful tidbits for Keepers...it's a useful book. But it's like...how to put this: A standard Call of Cthulhu adventure is almost like a standard dungeon crawl in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. While it may satisfy your intiial craving for an adventure, and while it'll work nicely for a single night's adventure, it doesn't even begin to cover the sheer range of material that you can do with Call of Cthulhu. Horror can encompass any event from a quiet rattling across your roof that turns out to be something more than just a raccoon to a full-scale guts-and-brains blowout in a disused slaughterhouse in Tennessee. Hell, even those two options don't begin to get it across. Ligotti versus Landsdale, if you want to get artsy about it. So, how exactly does No Man's Land fail as a product? Let's go over the good and the bad. The good part is that this'll work very well for an opening scenario, or an introduction to newbies. It's not very complex, has an A to B to C structure, factors in a historical event that knowledgable players may be familiar with, gives a broad cross-section of Mythos monsters and has a satisfying ending. Nothing spectacular, but it's solid stuff. There's a lot of tips for running it in a tournament setting, with assorted props and a background soundtrack. There's a satisfactory index on how things were during World War I, including rulings for trench fever and hypothermia, and SAN losses and skill gains during the war. All in all, fairly decent stuff. Nothing ground-breaking, but nothing that sucks, either. But here's the problems with it, in no particular order. The Mythos Hoedown Effect: This is what occurs when you have too many Mythos monsters and not enough explanation for what they're doing there. You typically get this effect whenever the writers of the scenario are trying to ramp up the action without developing on what they've already got. The first incident was in At Your Door, where the sudden tie-up of a lot of loose ends created the first Mythos hoe-down - a literal celebration where Mythos monsters and cultists came together for a massive meeting and summoning in the ruins of a football stadium. Now, there's nothing wrong with Mythos monsters coming together for a particular purpose. Some of them, like the byakhee and Hastur, go together. You expect to see byakhees when you're fighting the Cult of the Yellow Sign. In No Man's Land, however, there's ghouls, zombies, Ghatanathoa, animated skeletons, cultists and Lloigor - and only the Lloigor really have a reason to be there. Most of the monsters are simply there so that the players can gun them down. The Lloigor are there as the central bad guys, but there's nothing really there that really makes it necessary for them to be Lloigor. (There's a particular special effect that goes with the Lloigor that occurs during the scenario several times, but you could do it with any other major Mythos monster with a touch of fudging) There's no reason for the scenario to be this jam-packed. Some of the best Call of Cthulhu scenarios either focus on a particular monster - I.E Landscrapes, Bad Moon Rising, Dead Man Stomp, Still Waters and so forth - or don't have a monster at all, like John Tynes' sublime Hastur Mythos. When you start jam-packing your scenario with cannon fodder, then the mood of horror is ruined. For that matter, the final enemies don't even show up until the end. The players ricochet from encounter to encounter, with no sense of structure and no real sense of purpose. Even worse, one of the Lloigor has a speech where the phrases "foolish beings", "resistance is useless", "none can stop us", and "this world will be cleansed of your meddling influence forever!". This is bad for a number of reasons. For one thing, it invokes memories of pulp villains and their stock "mu-ha-ha-ing". For another thing, most Mythos monsters are supposed to be vague and unguessable; the only way that you can understand what's really going on is to go permanently insane. That's one of the primary ideas of the game. If the Lloigor simply sucked somebody's brain out of their skull, sliced it up into hundreds of cross-sections and secreted them in various places throughout the adventure, that'd be about par for the course - in short, both baffling and terrifying at the same time. The Setting, and How it Works Against the Adventure World War One is one of the periods in time when the human race went through things that makes some of the depradations of Mythos monsters pale in comparison. The charge at Ypres, the Ardenne forest, the bloody trench battles - this actually happened. I won't bore you with the details, but it was a pretty ugly time. (And prone to exaggeration, as well. I was surprised to find a book about World War One that didn't talk about the bloodiest aspects of the conflict. It definitely lent some context to the other horrors.) Throwing in a Mythos adventure just seems like gilding the lily. I remember reading part of adventure in Adventures In Arkham Country that dealt with the horrors of the Civil War by throwing the investigators into it. No Mythos monsters, just the horror of war. And it felt effective. No Man's Land feels ineffective for the same reason. No Real Sense of Horror There's the fact that the encounters don't provoke any sense of horror. They have a feeling of "Yikes! Monsters!", followed by a fairly bloody fight scene. In a typical Call of Cthulhu scenario, you spend your time trying to stay the hell away from any kind of situation that could even hint at the possibility of a fight, usually because your opponents are either insane or capable of annhilating you with the flick of a finger. In this scenario, almost all of the monsters can be defeated with gunfire, or the standard tactic of running like hell. Research is minimal. A valuable resource is handed over to the players without any need for research - just show up, or be railroaded there, and avoid a deathtrap in order to get the key to the scenario. In any other scenario, it takes weeks of study to find out a monster's weakness, or even what they hell they're fighting. That's the fun of Call of Cthulhu - it's an investigative game, rather than a shoot-em-up. You wouldn't get that impression from No Man's Land. The Art There's the art. The art is huge - and worse, yet, not all that great. A lot of it is sketchy, with misproportioned faces and the like. Some pieces are quite decent, but others are blown to unbelivably large proportions - a single image, a priest waving his arms in panic, covers a full page and a third. Ditto a shot of zombies standing at attention. Ditto a shot of soldiers firing at an unseen menace. And there's no particular detail within the art to really make it worth blowing up to that size - it's blocky and expressionist, as opposed to the lushly detailed art of previous Call of Cthulhu supplements. (Not that it's a bad thing, but it's best seen in a smaller format, so that the eye can take it in all at once.) I feel like I'm buying a product that could have fit comfortably within, say, twelve pages, maybe more, and that Chaosium just went all-out with bulky design elements to justify the price of printing it. Meanwhile, some of the handouts have problems on their own. A few pieces of art have been done with Photoshop's emboss effect, which looks okay, but it doesn't seem to quite fit with the mood of the adventure - there's even a bit of pixellation if you look close. Other lengthy bits of text are printed in a vaguely handwriting-ish font that's hard to read and looks obviously computer generated. There's a lot of solid stuff here. The pregenerated characters are solid, and they have a fair number of decent hooks for further adventures. You could do much worse in terms of a Call of Cthulhu adventure. But you could also do a lot better. If anybody wants to explain how I've misjudged this product, feel free, but I personally don't think that this product is worth the hype that Chaosium has given it. -Darren MacLennan P.S Oh, and here's the "...and then World War One started." game. Inspired by Dave Barry and Patrick McManus, it works thusly: 1. Describe the most horrific occurence that you ever heard of during a war, like corpse-eating rats launching a full-scale assault on an orphanage. 2. Tell the story, and then add "...and then World War One started." as soon as you're finished - I.E "Corpse-eating rats launched an assault on the orphanage day and night. Men died for standing up at the wrong time. Shells landed day and night. And then World War One started." It's worth a chuckle or two. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 2 (Sparse)