The Inside Scoop on Gaming

You know those nights where you just can't get to sleep, mostly due to a quart's worth of Mountain Dew infusion? I'm currently running through the back end of one of those, and I'm trying desperately to figure out how I'm going to get my sleep patterns back on schedule. So I figured that a decent use of my time would be to do some reviews. Let's see how sleep deprivation affects writing reviews, hmm?

Mortal Coils is a blend of the mediocre and the good - some of the adventures contained within don't take any risks and don't have any big payoff. Others decide to put the pedal to the metal, try something utterly berserk and wind up pulling off a damned interesting scenario, if not an entirely successful one. It's a good book where you can go from an update of an ancient burial ritual to an intricate Hollywood investigation to an archeological dig on top of a mountain in the Andes. It's not such a good book when you hop from one backwater cult to another, differentiated only by the monsters and locations involved.

Oh, and incidentally - I got a little tired of referring to the monsters in previous reviews as "the wink-wink-Gods" and "Nudge-Nudge Old Ones", so I believe that I'll just use the proper names of the Mythos monsters herein and let Keepers and players decide whether they'd like some aspects of the adventures spoiled.

The first two scenarios - well, they aren't identical, but they don't feel all that much different.

The first, Vigilante Justice, is composed of careful detective work - a small girl, possibly the daughter of one of the investigators (if the Keeper feels inclined) has disappeared, and the race is on to find out how she disappeared and who - or what - is responsible. It's a solid adventure, but it doesn't try to do anything new with the boundaries of a Call of Cthulhu scenario. Probably the most interesting part of it is the detective part leading up to the discovery of the villain, and the conclusion of the adventure, which takes place in an entirely different place than the bulk of the adventure.

The more I think about it, though, the more I have trouble remembering the principal villains of the scenario. There's nice use made of the Lloigor and their punishments, but the adventure doesn't really say anything about them. They're lurking villains in the background - and after the major argument involved with No Man's Land, it would be nice to see them fleshed out a bit more than they were in "Return of the Lloigor". Maybe it's just me. Also, in a touch of nitpicking, I'll point out that while the book mentions that the map provides examples of ample cover around a farm in the scenario, the farm itself is rendered from what I'd say is about a thousand feet up - the buildings are just utterly tiny, and they're not going to provide a harried Keeper with a decent idea of the farm's layout in a hurry. It should have been zoomed in to cover the farm and the immediate environs, rather than two open fields, nearby ponds and a tiny cluster of shapes to indicate where the farm is. And the vigilante justice mentioned in the title of the adventure doesn't even occur, or has to be very carefully sculpted to provide the maxiumum effect - and even then, it causes a SAN loss. (Which is okay for a lynching, I suppose, but people don't do these things so that they can feel awful during and after. Like any other communal event, the collective action obliviates the guilt.)

The next, A Murder of Crows, is even more indistinct, involving a hunt for a pair of brothers who have disappeared into a swamp somewhere in Loiusian, where a cult is engaged in the standard cult activities. Bonus points if you can figure out their eventual fate. Yes, very good. It's not that bad of a scenario - I keep wanting to use the word solid, to indicate that it doesn't stray too far away from the standard Call of Cthulhu scenario. There are attempts at stepping beyond the relatively tame scenes in the main rulebook's adventures, like a cultist who enjoys having sex with reanimated corpses - but I must be really jaded from White Wolf or alt.sex.stories, 'cause that didn't even merit a second glance. One thing I liked the idea of - children imitating the cultist rituals that they've seen their parents doing - is something that I also think wasn't pulled off very well, especially since it reminds me too much of the way that abused children will sometimes act out what they've seen their parents and/or abusers doing; a little close to real life for comfort. The other thing, which I won't spoil here, is cool enough to keep investigators aware of their place in history, and is pulled off with the originality that the rest of the scenario just seems to lack.

Nightcap is a minor treasure, but it relies an awful lot on the Dreamlands - which most Call of Cthulhu investigators probably won't be dealing with, since the book is a seperate supplement. Familiarity with Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath would help, as would a passing familiarity with the nature of Moonwine, the Dreaming skill, and the Men From Leng. Otherwise, the investigators will likely be completely at sea. With any of those sources at hand or in mind, or even with some flat-out keeper explanation of Dreamland concepts, the adventure will be a blast. It starts off with the search for the cause of a man's insanity, and winds up with a lengthy search for objects that have been brought over from the Dreamlands, including bottles of dream wine that have been secreted around the valley. One of them's seeped into the water table, resulting in various archetypal images popping up at the appropriate moment; one of them provides a gory NPC death, and an encounter with pea soup that reminded me of Horror on the Orient Express; and one of them is gulped whole by a black bear named Teddy. Teddy provides the Keeper with a great number of rather interesting opportunities, both to exploit the nature of the Dreamlands and to scare the hell out of the investigators.

If I have to nitpick about it, though, I'd point out something that really annoys the hell out of me - the idea that the answers to the scenario can only be found after, say, 2d6 months of studying through an old and musty tome. First off, that's not going to provide any closure to the scenario; six months from now, or even two months from now, the answers that the investigators were looking for are going to be treated as afterthoughts, rather than important facts that end a scenario. It's like dropping one shoe, and then dropping the other one a year later when the original shoe has already been forgotten a long time ago. Plus, the bottles that the moonwine comes in is composed of a single gigantic ruby, carved into a bottle form - and there are several of these things bouncing around, a few of which fall into the hands of the investigators. The scenario doesn't really address the implications of this. It says that the market would break down if the bottle was broken up and turned into smaller rubies - right, but that sure as hell isn't going to stop a former AD&D player from trying. It offers one way to get rid of a ruby bottle, but only if the investigators do something stupid. It would be nice to have an option that takes the bottles out of the hands of the investigators without having them feel as if they're losing an incredible resource - maybe it's not really ruby, or maybe it offers free entry into the Dreamlands if you leave it intact. Or maybe both.

God of the Mountain is the scenario that'll be most likely to be remembered by the players. Centering around a newly discovered city in Peru, it's tense, suspenseful...and likely to leave the players disturbed for a while after the scenario is over. I can't really spoil this one; it has to do more with the overall atmosphere of the scenario, as well as a good number of creepy dreams and mysterious changes. It is spoiled in one minor regard by a parallel with the discovery of a child mummy in the Andes a few real-world years back, but I imagine that it can be made interesting if the Keeper works it into the rest of the scenario. How to put it: Even though I've done the least amount of talking about this scenario, it's the one that stuck in mind longest after I'd read it.

Common Courtesy is just berserk. It features Scythians, a culture native to the Afghanistan region that's some two thousand years old and has some rather - I'd say unorthodox burial customs, but my knowledge of ancient burial customs is fairly limited. In this case, the Scythians have learned that their king has died in America, and with the help of an utterly ancient sorceress, they intend to bury him in full Scythian style. Normally, this wouldn't concern the investigators, except that the burial of a king usually goes along with a massive suicide pact involving dozens of men and horses. And that wouldn't concern the investigators except for the fact that the Scythians intend to kill an innocent woman, whom they mistakenly believe is the wife of their slain king.

This seems the most like a lark of an adventure - as a matter of fact, it's probably the easiest scenario in the whole book to resolve. All that it takes is a correct understanding of Scythian burial rituals, some research and a little politeness to get through - that, or massive amounts of gunfire directed down Scythian way. The scenario "cheats", however, by making the matriarch of the clan a two-thousand year old sorceress with enough magickal firepower to eradicate conventional threats along the lines of a police raid. You can't bring in the cops or the army on this one - but you should be able to. As a matter of fact, it'd be obvious to anybody once they realize the scope of what they're up against and hope to bring in reinforcements.

It just seems kind of goofy. Resurrecting an ancient tribe in the interests of seeing how it reacts is nice, but the selfsame tribe got whacked a long time ago by the march of ages. They're interesting from an archaeological or anthropological standpoint...but having them show up in the twentieth century intent on burying their kin is kind of like having the Egyptians still working for the Pharoahs building new pyramids for the next inbred royal jackass to kick over. They're interesting for the space of a scenario, but I don't think that they'll reappear.

I apologize; I'm being a touch too harsh on this. It takes a big risk, dangles itself out for a kick, and that shouldn't come from me. The scenario takes risks, pulls them off, and I think that's worth commendation.

"We Have Met the Enemy" quotes Pogo for the purpose of trying to get across the idea that the investigators will have to do some things that are usually exclusive to the cultists in the interests of making sure that nobody gets ahold of a particularly nasty spell. The whole idea is to hit the investigators with morally blurry actions - cannibalism and grave robbing, to name two. The problem is that those actions don't seem half as bad as to what investigators normally do, which involves mass murder on more than one occasion. (Justified, but think of John Tynes' Power Kill and Unknown Armies.)

There will be some nasty moments in the scenario, but jaded investigators will probably do it without a whole lot of hesitation. One of the things that always drew me to Call of Cthulhu is the idea - never developed - were dealing with the Mythos in the same way that the cultists were, reading the same books and using the same spells in an effort to gain enough power to stop the other cults from aiding the Great Old Ones. It's a decent scenario, but it doesn't get across some of the nastier aspects of the Mythos. If you want a great example of how you can throw this kind of amibguity into a scenario, check out The Unspeakable Oath #6, where Pagan Publishing suggested the use of ingredients for spells - ranging from the harmless to the illegal to the intensely unethical.

Dream Factory once again proves that John Tynes doesn't mind going a bit far afield for material for a scenario; however, it also proves that you can have too much of a good thing. The investigators are hired to find a missing actress, and wind up embroiled in a remarkably complex series of murder mysteries - not only has the actress disappeared, there's a pair of murderers about who need to be caught and an animator who's got a bit of an insect fetish. The Skoptsi, recently detailed in Delta Green: Countdown, make their appearance and wind up fitting quite well into the scenario. However, the scenario seems overpacked - the introduction warned about its complexity, and I only skimmed over it the first time, trying to understand what was going on and not really understanding. On the second reading, however, everything started to make a lot more sense - it's the identity of the villains that's truly important, and the rest of the scenario can be used or disregarded as a direct result. A description of Hollywood as ".,..the first grinding, bloody cogs of the dream factory" and "the maw of Hollywood is opening, and it will soon devour the American mindscape" sounds fascinating - it certainly brings up some remarkably images - but the plot itself doesn't really reflect that. For a Hollywood scenario, those words could form the basis for a campaign. What if Hollywood wasn't on our side?

Mysteria Matriis Oblitae involves a rather odd Mexican village, where the challenge is to find out exactly where - rather than what - the monster happens to be. It's a good, tight scenario, has a tremendous amount of potential and will provide a great deal of entertainment for the players. It doesn't do a whole lot with the Mythos, but the setting - Mexico in the wake of a massive revolution - and the impact that involving the government would have are nicely done. There's even some excellent game notes that describe potential incidents for the investigators to work with. (I wish that more authors would include play notes; they're just helpful in getting across the nuances that the scenario may not.)

In short, Mortal Coils isn't a bad book, but it feels more like a clearing house of old scenarios with a few really good ones thrown in to keep more progressive Call of Cthulhu Keepers happy. Nightcap is great, God of the Mountain is great, but the others just aren't what I'd hoped they'd be given the parameters of what Pagan Publishing usually does.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Mortal Coils
Author: Michael Cisco, John H. Crowe III, Dennis Detwiller, Jeff Moeller, Rebecca Strong, and John Tynes Category: game Company/Publisher: Pagan Publishing Line: Call of Cthulhu Cost: $20.95 Page count: 204 ISBN: 1-887797-11-4 SKU: PAG 1007 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 01/11/00. Genre tags: Science_fiction Modern_day Historical Horror Espionage Conspiracy Gothic	You know those nights where you just can't get to sleep, mostly due to a quart's worth of Mountain Dew infusion? I'm currently running through the back end of one of those, and I'm trying desperately to figure out how I'm going to get my sleep patterns back on schedule. So I figured that a decent use of my time would be to do some reviews. Let's see how sleep deprivation affects writing reviews, hmm? Mortal Coils is a blend of the mediocre and the good - some of the adventures contained within don't take any risks and don't have any big payoff. Others decide to put the pedal to the metal, try something utterly berserk and wind up pulling off a damned interesting scenario, if not an entirely successful one. It's a good book where you can go from an update of an ancient burial ritual to an intricate Hollywood investigation to an archeological dig on top of a mountain in the Andes. It's not such a good book when you hop from one backwater cult to another, differentiated only by the monsters and locations involved. Oh, and incidentally - I got a little tired of referring to the monsters in previous reviews as "the wink-wink-Gods" and "Nudge-Nudge Old Ones", so I believe that I'll just use the proper names of the Mythos monsters herein and let Keepers and players decide whether they'd like some aspects of the adventures spoiled. The first two scenarios - well, they aren't identical, but they don't feel all that much different. The first, Vigilante Justice, is composed of careful detective work - a small girl, possibly the daughter of one of the investigators (if the Keeper feels inclined) has disappeared, and the race is on to find out how she disappeared and who - or what - is responsible. It's a solid adventure, but it doesn't try to do anything new with the boundaries of a Call of Cthulhu scenario. Probably the most interesting part of it is the detective part leading up to the discovery of the villain, and the conclusion of the adventure, which takes place in an entirely different place than the bulk of the adventure. The more I think about it, though, the more I have trouble remembering the principal villains of the scenario. There's nice use made of the Lloigor and their punishments, but the adventure doesn't really say anything about them. They're lurking villains in the background - and after the major argument involved with No Man's Land, it would be nice to see them fleshed out a bit more than they were in "Return of the Lloigor". Maybe it's just me. Also, in a touch of nitpicking, I'll point out that while the book mentions that the map provides examples of ample cover around a farm in the scenario, the farm itself is rendered from what I'd say is about a thousand feet up - the buildings are just utterly tiny, and they're not going to provide a harried Keeper with a decent idea of the farm's layout in a hurry. It should have been zoomed in to cover the farm and the immediate environs, rather than two open fields, nearby ponds and a tiny cluster of shapes to indicate where the farm is. And the vigilante justice mentioned in the title of the adventure doesn't even occur, or has to be very carefully sculpted to provide the maxiumum effect - and even then, it causes a SAN loss. (Which is okay for a lynching, I suppose, but people don't do these things so that they can feel awful during and after. Like any other communal event, the collective action obliviates the guilt.) The next, A Murder of Crows, is even more indistinct, involving a hunt for a pair of brothers who have disappeared into a swamp somewhere in Loiusian, where a cult is engaged in the standard cult activities. Bonus points if you can figure out their eventual fate. Yes, very good. It's not that bad of a scenario - I keep wanting to use the word solid, to indicate that it doesn't stray too far away from the standard Call of Cthulhu scenario. There are attempts at stepping beyond the relatively tame scenes in the main rulebook's adventures, like a cultist who enjoys having sex with reanimated corpses - but I must be really jaded from White Wolf or alt.sex.stories, 'cause that didn't even merit a second glance. One thing I liked the idea of - children imitating the cultist rituals that they've seen their parents doing - is something that I also think wasn't pulled off very well, especially since it reminds me too much of the way that abused children will sometimes act out what they've seen their parents and/or abusers doing; a little close to real life for comfort. The other thing, which I won't spoil here, is cool enough to keep investigators aware of their place in history, and is pulled off with the originality that the rest of the scenario just seems to lack. Nightcap is a minor treasure, but it relies an awful lot on the Dreamlands - which most Call of Cthulhu investigators probably won't be dealing with, since the book is a seperate supplement. Familiarity with Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath would help, as would a passing familiarity with the nature of Moonwine, the Dreaming skill, and the Men From Leng. Otherwise, the investigators will likely be completely at sea. With any of those sources at hand or in mind, or even with some flat-out keeper explanation of Dreamland concepts, the adventure will be a blast. It starts off with the search for the cause of a man's insanity, and winds up with a lengthy search for objects that have been brought over from the Dreamlands, including bottles of dream wine that have been secreted around the valley. One of them's seeped into the water table, resulting in various archetypal images popping up at the appropriate moment; one of them provides a gory NPC death, and an encounter with pea soup that reminded me of Horror on the Orient Express; and one of them is gulped whole by a black bear named Teddy. Teddy provides the Keeper with a great number of rather interesting opportunities, both to exploit the nature of the Dreamlands and to scare the hell out of the investigators. If I have to nitpick about it, though, I'd point out something that really annoys the hell out of me - the idea that the answers to the scenario can only be found after, say, 2d6 months of studying through an old and musty tome. First off, that's not going to provide any closure to the scenario; six months from now, or even two months from now, the answers that the investigators were looking for are going to be treated as afterthoughts, rather than important facts that end a scenario. It's like dropping one shoe, and then dropping the other one a year later when the original shoe has already been forgotten a long time ago. Plus, the bottles that the moonwine comes in is composed of a single gigantic ruby, carved into a bottle form - and there are several of these things bouncing around, a few of which fall into the hands of the investigators. The scenario doesn't really address the implications of this. It says that the market would break down if the bottle was broken up and turned into smaller rubies - right, but that sure as hell isn't going to stop a former AD&D player from trying. It offers one way to get rid of a ruby bottle, but only if the investigators do something stupid. It would be nice to have an option that takes the bottles out of the hands of the investigators without having them feel as if they're losing an incredible resource - maybe it's not really ruby, or maybe it offers free entry into the Dreamlands if you leave it intact. Or maybe both. God of the Mountain is the scenario that'll be most likely to be remembered by the players. Centering around a newly discovered city in Peru, it's tense, suspenseful...and likely to leave the players disturbed for a while after the scenario is over. I can't really spoil this one; it has to do more with the overall atmosphere of the scenario, as well as a good number of creepy dreams and mysterious changes. It is spoiled in one minor regard by a parallel with the discovery of a child mummy in the Andes a few real-world years back, but I imagine that it can be made interesting if the Keeper works it into the rest of the scenario. How to put it: Even though I've done the least amount of talking about this scenario, it's the one that stuck in mind longest after I'd read it. Common Courtesy is just berserk. It features Scythians, a culture native to the Afghanistan region that's some two thousand years old and has some rather - I'd say unorthodox burial customs, but my knowledge of ancient burial customs is fairly limited. In this case, the Scythians have learned that their king has died in America, and with the help of an utterly ancient sorceress, they intend to bury him in full Scythian style. Normally, this wouldn't concern the investigators, except that the burial of a king usually goes along with a massive suicide pact involving dozens of men and horses. And that wouldn't concern the investigators except for the fact that the Scythians intend to kill an innocent woman, whom they mistakenly believe is the wife of their slain king. This seems the most like a lark of an adventure - as a matter of fact, it's probably the easiest scenario in the whole book to resolve. All that it takes is a correct understanding of Scythian burial rituals, some research and a little politeness to get through - that, or massive amounts of gunfire directed down Scythian way. The scenario "cheats", however, by making the matriarch of the clan a two-thousand year old sorceress with enough magickal firepower to eradicate conventional threats along the lines of a police raid. You can't bring in the cops or the army on this one - but you should be able to. As a matter of fact, it'd be obvious to anybody once they realize the scope of what they're up against and hope to bring in reinforcements. It just seems kind of goofy. Resurrecting an ancient tribe in the interests of seeing how it reacts is nice, but the selfsame tribe got whacked a long time ago by the march of ages. They're interesting from an archaeological or anthropological standpoint...but having them show up in the twentieth century intent on burying their kin is kind of like having the Egyptians still working for the Pharoahs building new pyramids for the next inbred royal jackass to kick over. They're interesting for the space of a scenario, but I don't think that they'll reappear. I apologize; I'm being a touch too harsh on this. It takes a big risk, dangles itself out for a kick, and that shouldn't come from me. The scenario takes risks, pulls them off, and I think that's worth commendation. "We Have Met the Enemy" quotes Pogo for the purpose of trying to get across the idea that the investigators will have to do some things that are usually exclusive to the cultists in the interests of making sure that nobody gets ahold of a particularly nasty spell. The whole idea is to hit the investigators with morally blurry actions - cannibalism and grave robbing, to name two. The problem is that those actions don't seem half as bad as to what investigators normally do, which involves mass murder on more than one occasion. (Justified, but think of John Tynes' Power Kill and Unknown Armies.) There will be some nasty moments in the scenario, but jaded investigators will probably do it without a whole lot of hesitation. One of the things that always drew me to Call of Cthulhu is the idea - never developed - were dealing with the Mythos in the same way that the cultists were, reading the same books and using the same spells in an effort to gain enough power to stop the other cults from aiding the Great Old Ones. It's a decent scenario, but it doesn't get across some of the nastier aspects of the Mythos. If you want a great example of how you can throw this kind of amibguity into a scenario, check out The Unspeakable Oath #6, where Pagan Publishing suggested the use of ingredients for spells - ranging from the harmless to the illegal to the intensely unethical. Dream Factory once again proves that John Tynes doesn't mind going a bit far afield for material for a scenario; however, it also proves that you can have too much of a good thing. The investigators are hired to find a missing actress, and wind up embroiled in a remarkably complex series of murder mysteries - not only has the actress disappeared, there's a pair of murderers about who need to be caught and an animator who's got a bit of an insect fetish. The Skoptsi, recently detailed in Delta Green: Countdown, make their appearance and wind up fitting quite well into the scenario. However, the scenario seems overpacked - the introduction warned about its complexity, and I only skimmed over it the first time, trying to understand what was going on and not really understanding. On the second reading, however, everything started to make a lot more sense - it's the identity of the villains that's truly important, and the rest of the scenario can be used or disregarded as a direct result. A description of Hollywood as ".,..the first grinding, bloody cogs of the dream factory" and "the maw of Hollywood is opening, and it will soon devour the American mindscape" sounds fascinating - it certainly brings up some remarkably images - but the plot itself doesn't really reflect that. For a Hollywood scenario, those words could form the basis for a campaign. What if Hollywood wasn't on our side? Mysteria Matriis Oblitae involves a rather odd Mexican village, where the challenge is to find out exactly where - rather than what - the monster happens to be. It's a good, tight scenario, has a tremendous amount of potential and will provide a great deal of entertainment for the players. It doesn't do a whole lot with the Mythos, but the setting - Mexico in the wake of a massive revolution - and the impact that involving the government would have are nicely done. There's even some excellent game notes that describe potential incidents for the investigators to work with. (I wish that more authors would include play notes; they're just helpful in getting across the nuances that the scenario may not.) In short, Mortal Coils isn't a bad book, but it feels more like a clearing house of old scenarios with a few really good ones thrown in to keep more progressive Call of Cthulhu Keepers happy. Nightcap is great, God of the Mountain is great, but the others just aren't what I'd hoped they'd be given the parameters of what Pagan Publishing usually does. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)