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Ramsey Campbell is one of those authors who's able to write horror at a level entirely removed from a lot of other writers; his stories carry the quality of a thick layer of grime and dirt and human perversity, all set in parts of England that you wouldn't voluntarily enter without wearing a Hazmat suit. Reading the average Campbell story makes you want to take a rusty razor and start shaving off as much skin as it'll take before you're clean agin.
Ramsey Campbell's Goatswood is Chaosium's attempt to replicate the feel of Campbell's stories - or, at least, to describe Britain in Mythos terms. And I have to confess that I consider it the final proof that the talent that used to make Chaosium's scenarios truly innovative has migrated over to Pagan Publishing. There's just nothing here worth buying - surely nothing worth paying $30 for, especially when you could probably get Delta Green: Countdown for $10 more. (As an extra boot in the face, Countdown has a lengthy section dealing with British intelligence, the Insects from Shaggai and the Army of the Third Eye that's far superior to anything that appears in this book.)
Let's go over it step by step.
The book opens with the usual big catalog of Mythos artifacts and books, most of them divorced from their original context so that you can't get what the intent was in the first place - it's like having the One Ring appear without mentioning the ring's history, what it does, what it means and so forth. Chaosium tends to do this a lot, and while it doesn't usually damage a book beyond repair, in this case, it's another nail in the coffin. To boot, most of the descriptions in the beginning of the book are repeated whenever they show up in the scenarios, instead of simply referring the GM to a page number. I can't imagine the SAN loss for a particular book coming up so often that the GM will need to quick-reference it in the scenario, so I imagine that it's put in purely for the purpose of padding the word count.
The details of Britain are, frankly, very disappointing. There's lots of detail on England if you want to visit it as a tourist, or want to learn a bit about the culture, but the problem is that the book doesn't even try to explain what's going on in Britain in the present day. From the few hints that I've gleaned, England has spent the last thirty years slumping into a deep depression. The coal industry was replaced with nuclear power, putting a good number of towns out of business. An influx of Pakistani and Indian immigrants led to a fair amount of resentment, which in turn led to skinhead movements that still exist today - of course, Pakistani cuisine has become remarkably popular in Britain, as evidenced by Lister's love of curries. Soccer hooligans abound. Margaret Thatcher made some rather poor decisions in office, including the idea to eradicate homosexuality as a concept - perhaps poor decision doesn't describe that so much as does pure fucking lunacy, but you get the idea.
Now, to be sure, all of England isn't like this. As a matter of fact, the stories that I've heard are probably representative of only a few areas, much like Detroit isn't representative of the rest of America - but it's worth pointing out that the decay of England is an element that's shown up in English pop culture for a long, long time. At least hinting at the country's recent history would be a step towards giving Goatswood more of a feeling of "Wow, this place is degenerate and depraved", as opposed to "One of England's primary exports is sheep, which provide both meat and wool to those abroad." - John Constantine and Trainspotting as opposed to what you can get at the local travel agency.
It also fails to point out that most British food was created initially as a punishment for runaway orphans, and slowly migrated to become national cuisine in the 20th century.
To be sure, the information provided about how to drive, how firearms are managed and so forth are useful, but that's a failing, rather than a bonus. You can get more about Britain out of the right issue of Hellblazer than you can Goatswood; more about the dark places of England, where the reign breaks down and the brick swallows everything.
There's a point-by-point description of the various locations in Campbell County, which covers a lot of ground - most locations only get a paragraph, along with one or two highlights in areas of particular interest - mostly Mythos encounters, although libraries and police are given a bit more detail. Again, there's the tendency to simply mention a Mythos phenomena and its effects without attempting to put it into a larger context. For example, there's a particular castle described in fairly flat tones; if you happen to yank a particular widget out of place, you can free a Great Old One. That's the kind of event that would normally take a campaign to deal with, but it's mentioned here almost as an afterthought. They've got limited space to describe it, sure, but anybody who's read the story doesn't need another book to translate the stats or the situation - so why include it?
The scenarios.
The first, The Winthrope Legacy, is just an introduction to the setting - the investigators inherit an old house in Campbell Country, which leads into the rest of the adventures within the book. Besides the thumpingly obvious cliche of inheriting a potentially haunted house - and I guarantee that your players are going to reference that tired sitcom cliche over and over again until you put a pencil through one of them as a warning to the rest - there's a couple of maps and NPCs that might come in handy somewhere else.
The next scenario, Gothic - well, to crib a description from my father, it's your punishment for playing Call of Cthulhu.
Let me see if I can summarize: The investigators save a youth from National Front skinheads, only to realize that he's been reported missing in the paper. Said youth turns out to be gay, has run away from home because of his loathsomely homophobic family, and has found happiness and true love in the arms of another guy - who's a vampire, and who turns him into a vampire! And the two of them live in a Goth nightclub, where they only drink a little bit from a lot of people, not killing anybody - but they're threatened by a religious fanatic who wants to kill them both!
Now, go ahead and guess: Is this the plot of:
(A) A bargain-basement Vampire: The Masquerade scenario.
(B) A vampire fanfic written by a thirteen-year old girl.
(C) Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride
The answer is "all of the above", unfortunately. I really don't know when this scenario was written, but it feels like about ten years ago - back before the Goth movement was struck down by Jhonen Vasquez and Goth Talk.
It's also curious in the way that the game treats homophobia in Britain - the homophobia on display seems a hell of a lot closer to American-style intolerance than it does to British-style. Plus, Britain seems more friendly than the States when it comes to homosexuality - witness same-sex boarding schools and their hazing rituals, Winston's Churchill's homosexual experimentation, and the tendency of the average Minister of Parliament to get into sex scandals with astonishing regularity.
("In response to the honorable Minister's complaint about the lack of proper schooling in Woxbury, I'd like to respond with this: Baaaaaaaaa. Baaaa-a-a-a-ah. Baaaaaaaa-a-a-a-h!"
"SHUT YOUR FUCKING PIE HOLE, WENDERS!")
To be sure, that's mostly the upper class; and from what I've seen in The Filth and the Fury, there's a good amount of reactionary sentiment in Britain.
But the "I'll run away to Oz / Gothland and live happily ever after" seems awfully silly when you compare it to the life story of any gay guy over the age of eighteen; it's an adolescent story, and doesn't allow for any growth as a person. Perfect environments never encourage growth, come to think of it.) Plus, it would have been nice if they'd explained how bad homophobia is in Britain, how it got started, whether it's an upper-or-lower class phenomenon, and so forth - what it's like in Britain, instead of America.
The vampires are presented as purely romantic, tragic figures - which would be great, if this were a particularly sentimental session of Vampire. Unfortunately, this is Campbell County; and if there's one thing that I've learned from the works of Ramsey Campbell, it's that no expression of human sexuality is healthy; at least, not in Campbell County. This goes double for heterosexuals, since the presence of Shub-Niggurath creates all manner of unhealthy fertility-based cults. Eihort isn't much better. The tone of this scenario is at odds with every other Call of Cthulhu scenario ever published, insofar as I can tell. The monsters are not the heroes; can't be; they're beyond the concept of heroism or villainy. They just are, ageless and patient, without any malice towards the humans that they kill.
Given a hell of a lot of revision, this scenario could pass. Maybe. The kid is part of a cult of vampires that shift form to resemble gigantic leeches when they're feeding. They hang out in nightclubs, using their perfect forms to seduce anybody of any sex, then drain them dry and throw the resultant bags of bone and empty skin into an alley, where people mistake them for beige plastic trash bags. Have them chased by a pair of frightened upper-class homosexuals who have killed one of them, but who are being tailed by National Front skinheads 'cause they're gay. It's not perfect, but to me, it captures Campbell more than Gothic does.
Silent Scream is your other punishment for liking Call of Cthulhu. Remarkably enough, it has John Carpenter asking the investigators to use their new house to film a remake of an old movie - this is, as far as I can tell, the first ever use of a celebrity in a role-playing scenario. Unfortunately, the scenario isn't that great. The cast of the movie - including, God help us, analogues for both Eminem and Britney Spears - move into the house, then wind up being stalked by a man who's possessed by Y'Golonac himself. The intent of the scenario is to create a situation similar to John Carpenter's The Thing,, where noboody knows who the monster is.
Here's one of the many problems with this scenario: If you find out who the monster is, there's little chance that the investigators are going to be able to do anything about it. Y'Golonac - a freaking Great Old One - is powerful enough to lay waste to any number of investigators without difficulty. Exposing him as the monster just means that you're going to face off against a much more powerful opponent - unlike the Thing, which dies pretty rapidly if you hit it with a flamethrower.
Plus, Y'Golonac is utterly alien to the human experience, or so I'm to assume - it has absolutely nothing to do with the world of humanity. Being able to replicate human behavior should be beyond the reach of any Great Old One. Acting like Michael Myers is completely beyond the comprehension of an entity like that. Walking, for that matter, is probably beyond the comprehension of a Great Old One. Any shape-changing monster would have been fine for this scenario, really, so why they went with a creature whose power is off the scale is beyond me.
(Actually: You'd have a great time if you had Y'Golonac obviously possess somebody, then try to imitate a human being. Nobody can call him on it, since he'd just kill them all, so everybody present has to pretend that Y'Golonac is a normal human being - no matter how alien his behavior becomes. It'd be a great farce to see a party taking pains to assure that possessee that yes, end tables are a human food staple.)
The scenario's also very poorly structured. The suspect is going to be immediately obvious to any investigator, thanks to a rather poorly-planned coincidence, and it's doubtful that they'll take the weak excuse that he provides as the gospel truth. The investigators can do a dozen different things, since they're not locked in by a snowstorm or duty-bound to hang around while Y'Golonac carves them up. There's even detail of what happens when the police are phoned in - although there's a nice stinger involved if the investigators do this, this shouldn't be an option in a locked-house mystery. There's no obligation for investigators to follow what Roger Ebert has dubbed the Idiot Plot - a situation in which everything would be solved if the characters weren't all idiots.
Parts of the scenario are devoted to discovering clues to the identity of the killer in various locations around England, but that defeats the purpose of keeping the action confined to the mansion - if you can leave at any time to do research, what's to prevent the killer from leaving as well? Why is Y'Golonac even bothering to track down and kill those involved with a movie that, as it's described later, increases his ability to corrupt those abroad?
Am I missing the point? Maybe, but this is the first time that I've ever been this confused over a Call of Cthulhu scenario - in terms of motivation, plot, and intended play sequence. This is not a good tiding for a company that's traditionally made some of the tightest scenarios out there.
Cross my Heart, Hope to Die is a better scenario, which comes as a great relief to me. It's actually quite Campbellian, with a pack of evil children wandering around a small English village while Eihort makes plans down in his labyrinth. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than the preceding scenarios; I'll let the unlucky Keepers who bought this product discover this adventure's mysteries. (It's good - not good enough to merit purchase.)
The Watcher out of Time will come as absolutely no surprise to anybody who's seen Groundhog Day - come on, you know where the IMDB is by now, look it up yourself. Essentially, one person keeps provoking a time distortion; unfortunately, the fun parts of the scenario are buried amid huge descriptions of stuff that just absolutely does not matter. For example:
- Burrough's flat is an unremarkable apartment in a fairly nice section of Brichester; there is police tape on the door and a notice that trespassers will be prosecuted. The apartment consists of a living room/study, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a washroom. The kitchen contains a small dining table with two chairs, several cabinets of dishes and food, a refrigerator, a stove, and a sink full of dirty dishes. The bedroom is reasonably neat; there is a double bed, a dresser, a plush chair in one corner, and a closet.
And later:
- There is a couch and coffee table in the middle of the room, and a reclining chair to the right of this; on one wall there is an entertainment center with a television and stereo system. Burrough's collection of jazz music is quite large; there is a Loretta Holiday disc in the player. Behind the couch is a computer
And I'm breaking this off to ask: So WHAT?
None of this shit is even remotely important to the scenario. It's just outgassing; wordy filler to make up for the fact that the scenario doesn't have anything else of interest. There are important clues in the apartment, both pretty obvious, but it's not worth spending this much space blathering on and on about the apartment like some deranged version of the Ikea catalog. An editor and a .45 would have done wonders for cutting this scenario down to a more manageable size. And, just in case we weren't already thinking that this scenario is padded, there's an extensive relisting of material that already occurred earlier in the book, which takes up two half-pages. And, to boot, there's Chaosium's new habit of putting a bracketed pair of artworks on both pages, emulating L5R's sidebars without doing anything useful with them.
There are some rather interesting bits of surrealism involving perception when the investigators get near to the distortions; however, the exact mechanics of how the investigators are supposed to be present at a confrontation between a cult of Yog-Sothoth and one of the central villains of the piece is left to the imagination. A time loop occurs; fortunately, it sends the investigators far enough back that most of the situations that they're familiar with from the first loop won't have occurred yet.
It's not a terrible scenario, but it isn't fantastic, either. I think that it might play better than it reads.
Unpleasant Dreams. Hoo boy.
Okay, it breaks down like this: A young man who's befriended the investigators winds up with a Shan in his head - an alien insect that enjoys sadism. So far, so good.
The young man, who's apparently been hideously abused by his parents for his entire life, is forced to watch as the Insect from Shaggai summons a trio of lawn gnomes - evil lawn gnomes, mind you, Goatswood gnomes - who kill his family. He puts a bullet through his brain, doesn't kill the Shan, and somehow forces the investigators into his nightmares when they sleep. Said nightmares are usually caricatures of his parents, raping and torturing both him and his sister. Meanwhile, if the investigators don't intervene, a female Scotland Yard investigator will get into S&M and go crazy, or something, as a result.
Uhm...
At a certain point, baffled shrieking just runs out of steam as a reaction. Replacing it is looking around in various directions, apparently hoping that additional information will be floating around to clarify this bizarreness, perhaps carried by helpful cherubim.
Okay. Let's go over the problems here:
There was an absolutely hilarious parody on Freakazoid of Disney's Gargoyles, entitled Lawn Gnomes; ("We stole man's fire and tried to hide it in our pockets" "That was painful and dumb.") It makes it very difficult to regard stone gnomes as particularly scary, especially given their current status in pop culture. (I would be remiss in not pointing out these freaky little bastards too.)
Now, to be sure, if there's anybody who can invoke that razor-to-skin feeling upon seeing gnomes, it's Ramsey Campbell; as a matter of fact, I've seen an absolutely hair-raising short story about lawn statuary that still sticks with me today. (If you've ever seen After Hours, you'll know what I'm talking about.) But these Goatswood gnomes are just too adorable to be scared of; at least, judging from their appearance in the scenario's illustrations. They've even got the freaky little bastard hats, for crying out loud.
But that raises another question: Why in the world does the Insect from Shan use a third party to kill the youth's parents? Why not make him do it? It doesn't follow that the Shan would want to avoid getting its host's hands dirty - they're sadistic, and, from my own personal experience, I - er, I mean, sadists - like to use their own hands, to get in there on their own. Maybe the Shan fed off the voyeurism, but it just strikes me as an attempt to remove
Anyways. I'd like to ask the average GM: How much would you enjoy describing this scene? I mean, actually role-playing it out?
- Anyone looking through the window watches Marie being raped and beaten by her father while Andy looks on, as powerless to save his sister as the investigators. Sanity loss for observing this horrible crime is 0/1 SAN.
- After a time, Mr. Cook disappears from view - and suddenly appears behind the investigators, brandishing a butcher knife at them. "We knew you liked to watch," he snarls, "pain is such a powerful aphrodisiac!"
Now, this is a dream, which explains the helplessness and all that. But rape is one of those things that's been generally agreed on as verboten in role-playing games; getting near it in a role-playing context is like touching an exposed nerve with a live wire; like feeling a tapeworm coil itself around the inside of your stomach. It's also worth keeping in mind that this example is Marie and the youth as kids, which makes it even worse.
Plus, the cartoon sadism of the villains in the piece is so over the top that it just feels cheap, and overused - people are abused in real life, but I've never seen situations where their abusers took it so far over the top into this kind of cheap Grand Guignol. The villains come off as parodies of abusers, gleefully molesting their children and celebrating it the whole time - but real-life abusers aren't like this; they aren't that simple. Even as a dream, this doesn't come off as right. Even if they're utterly insane and tainted by the Mythos, this doesn't strike me as right, or particularly insightful; the youth wouldn't remember it the way that it's presented in the dream.
And, just in case the Keeper doesn't know what an S&M club looks like, there's a detailed breakdown of one, room by room, detail by useless detail. The entire point of going to the club is to meet up with a Spawn of Y'Golonac, which gets one of the better illustrations; so why is the club detailed? Why not just make it abstract, and mention that the characters will eventually find the Spawn? Useless detail abounds.
Anyways. Felch gets the same mustache-twirling villainy as the Cook family, and makes a vague reference to the cause of the youth's problems. However, there's also a Scotland Yard inspector who finds herself getting into the S&M scene, which the scenario treats as her seduction into "depravity" - one taste and she turns into a berserker S&M slut. This strikes me as the sort of slippery slope argument that Reefer Madness used. This can happen, but it isn't a seduction into depravity; it's people realizing that yes, other people do that stuff and enjoy it. But it just seems overwrought and silly to have her destroy her entire life chasing what's basically a hobby, albeit a rather unusual one.
And linking the Cthulhu Mythos with S&M turns the Great Old Ones into the Great Dirty Old Men, eternally slobbering on the glass seperating them from humanity's peepshow, occasionally using a cultist to throw another quarter into the slot that keeps the curtain from dropping. I remember Campbell's linking of sexuality to the Great Old Ones - ditto Lovecraft - but it always struck me as humans trying to connect the alien activities of the Great Old Ones with an activity that they could understand, and always failing that what they were doing wasn't even close. T.E.D Klein made something of the same point when he wrote "The Ceremonies". So this scenario has more than a few failings.
Blessed Be. Let's see if I can sum this one up in a hurry:
The investigators go to Goatswood in order to find one of their companions, who's been kidnapped and is going to be sacrificed to Shub-Niggurath. Most of the adventure is devoted to an overview of Goatswood, without the familiar numeric style employed by the Lovecraft County books - it's all dry information that basically states that Goatswood is full of cultists, which captures the mood of Ramsey Campbell's stories about as well as a tourist brochure. At the end of the scenario, the investigators realize that they're the victims of the sacrifice, and have two hundred cultists jump them, as well as the Keeper of the Moon Lens.
The adventure itself claims that it's likely that all of the investigators will be killed in this adventure, but this isn't going to generate fond memories of how they all got killed in an interesting fashion - it's going to feel like a cheat. As a matter of fact, there's almost no way for the investigators to win. Destroying the Moon-Lens after the Keeper comes out is pointless, since it's already out and they've got two hundred cultists to deal with. Destroying the Moon-Lens before the Keeper comes out prevents the Keeper from coming out, but then the investigators still have to deal with a mob of two hundred angry cultists. Unless they brought along heavy firepower, or unless they're able to run faster than hell, they're all going to die - almost by GM fiat.
I don't get it.
Of Dreams and Dark Waters and Third Time's the Charm:
Why does a Great Old One need to use a human telephone network in order to increase the strength of his call? Why do the Shans need to blow up a nuclear reactor in order to breach the ozone layer that keeps them trapped? Why is ozone, of all things, responsible for trapping the Shans on earth? I mean, ozone? O3? This is what stops an incredibly advanced race of alien beings, something that my air purifier can spit out?
If you'll notice me not recounting the details of the adventures, it's because you're not paying me enough to wade through yet another lame adventure to pick it apart piece by piece. One involves Glaaki and his servants, the other nuclear protestors and the Insects of Shan. They don't look great, mostly because of the obsessive focus on NPCs and their homes, their offices, and so forth; architectural wanking, and I'm just too tired by now to go through them in detail.
In short: Ken Hite, in his column Out of the Box, says that Goatswood is a great product, drawing from a bunch of classic British horror tropes - the haunted house, Gothic vampires and so forth - in order to replicate Campbell's Britain. Maybe this is so; in which case, they should have called it Blood Brothers 3, instead of linking its name to Campbell's.
I'm not impressed with this book in the slightest. Maybe you'll get something out of it, but for $10 more, you can get Delta Green: Countdown, which, in two or three chapters, says more about British horror than Goatswood ever will.
Stay the hell away from it.
-Darren MacLennan
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