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It's a real shame that Chaosium hasn't done more to promote the Lovecraft Country series of books. Escape From Innsmouth is, I believe, a second edition, and it was a wise decision to do so, but there's other books - specifically, Return to Dunwich and Kingport: City in the Mists that could easily do with the same treatment that Escape From Innsmouth gets here.
Originally published as part of a series, it's reprinted here in an expanded version - the gigantic adventure in the back has been fleshed out with an extra firefight within a gold refinery, and I assume that various changes were made in order to tighten up things that got missed in the first edition. Unfortunately, the cover art on the original book has been shrunk down to almost a thumbnail - I miss the days when Chaosium would print these huge, full-cover illustrations, putting the author's names in the corner instead of a vague blue pattern surrounding an otherwise excellent illustration.
Obligatory art-related gripes aside, what is the book about? Innsmouth forms one of the key stories in Lovecraft's work; it was a novella about a man visiting a decaying fishing town named Innsmouth on some errand or another and finding out that the residents had made a deal with Cthulhu - in this case, with the fish-frog-human hybrids, the Deep Ones. In keeping with the "fish-men want to mate with our women" meme that somehow got inserted into the human unconscious early in our evolution, the Deep Ones have made a deal with the townsfolk: If the humans interbreed with the Deep Ones, their progeny will live forever; for those who aren't Deep One hybrids, the Deep Ones provided gold and fish, to ensure their livelihoods. The novella itself is a must-read if you like horror of any sort; there's even a section where Lovecraft does his best impression of Gummy Joe as a character describes the lengthy shadow history of Innsmouth.
Innsmouth was also unique in that it's one of the few cases where the government gets directly involved with the Mythos - the novella concludes with a raid on Innsmouth that results in a lot of townsfolk being shipped off to what Lovecraft unapologetically describes as concentration camps and the destruction of Innsmouth.
In any case, Escape from Innsmouth goes all-out to describe both the town - in the year before the raid - and the raid itself, in extraordinary detail. The first part of the book describes the town's inhabitants in the usual Chaosium catalog style, while the second part contains both an adventure designed to kick off the raid, and the raid itself, which is split into six different sections and feels more than a little like Aliens set in a small Massachusetts coastal town. Along with this, there's an explanation of Deep One psychology, society, reproductive cycles and habitat - it's really unfortunate that they didn't build on the brilliant stuff done in "The Sirens of Fantari", in Fatal Passages, which made the Deep Ones truly unique. On the other hand, there's a good explanation for why the Deep Ones breed with humans in the first place.
I haver to confess that the first part of the book seems to be the weakest. Arkham, Dunwich, and Kingsport all have more than their fair share of Mythos activity, but they differ from Innsmouth in that they're all human-occupied.
Innsmouth, by contrast, is a place in which the monsters have moved in and are eating Fiddle-Faddle on their couches while listening to Frank Sinatra; you are intruding on their turf, and they do not like that.
The average Call of Cthulhu adventure gives the players a bad place to investigate, while the rest of the world is relatively safe - they can always retreat to the hotel, or to their homes, or to the upper levels of the museum or what have you. In Escape to Innsmouth, no place is safe. Once they're hunted, they're going to have to get out or die. It's a nasty switchover for players who are used to being able to escape.
However, it sort of limits the amount of poking around that they're going to do within the town. Arkham was a paradise of investigator services, Dunwich is strange, but livable, and Kingsport is ethereal and friendly - you can go form door to door, looking around for interesting stuff. Innsmouth is not conductive to poking around, as well as being largely abandoned; the book's contents have been altered to reflect that. Most of the neighborhoods have only a few entries, and those are for only the most important parts in town - churches, desperate and paranoid untainted humans, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and so forth. In terms of story hooks, I'm a little leery of this section. It manages to avoid the "in case the investigators happen to wander into this building, here's what happens" syndrome; most of the people described have a hook by which inverstigators can meet them. There are points where it feels like there's no real role for the investigators to play - a magical war between a pair of Innsmouth clans, for example - but there's enough creepy stuff in here to keep the players investigating for a long, long time. In the unlikely event that you run out of plot ideas, there's about eight of them in the back, all of which are fleshed out enough to make for three or four game sessions each.
There is a scenario which involves the investigators getting out of Innsmouth, which is interesting, but takes second place almost automatically to one of the best scenarios ever written for Call of Cthulhu - the raid on Innsmouth, played out through six different interweaving mini-adventures and resulting in a few nights that your players are never going to forget.
Using the idea that the investigators have discovered the rotting nature of Innsmouth, the adventure puts the investigators in the Ripley role - they're civilian investigators, each leading a particular team into Innsmouth by various routes. Since the players are split up among different groups, the other players take up the role of the soldiers within the squad, so that everybody's involved throughout. Each of the six scenarios is composed of three parts, and you skip from one to the next - one minute, you're rafting through the smuggler's tunnels underneath Innsmouth, then you're fighting off wave after wave of Deep Ones on the deck of a Naval cutter, then you're aboard the submarine responsible for depth-charging Y'ha-nthlei. In keeping with the swift and brutal nature of the scenario, periods of temporary madness are drastically shortened, indefinite insanity doesn't occur, and NPCs tend to flip out in rather dramatic fashion whenever they see enough Things that Should Not Be.
So, in order, a review of each:
The Esoteric Order of Dagon is a mixed bag. It starts off with the squad moving up a frozen river, a quick firefight - and a moral dilemma amid the usual kill-them-all-and-burn-the-ashes tone of most Call of Cthulhu adventures. There are a lot of firefights with armed hybrids and Deep Ones throughout the entire adventure, but I suspect that it's going to be a lot more like...
...you know what? I'm tired of using Saving Private Ryan as a code word for an adventure or movie which would cost trillions if there was a tax on fake blood. I really am. We need another film in which people run around and occasionally explode into clouds of pink mist, if only to put an end to that comparison.
This particular scenario is mostly about concentrated gunfire directed into threatening Deep Ones, with the occasional "stinger" - a gate into Y'ha-nthlei and the appearance of Dagon at a final firefight. It's definitely the kind of adventure where you're going to want a lot of miniatures to keep track of what's going on. (I'd suggest using paper miniatures, since RAFM doesn't make Call of Cthulhu miniatures anymore and Games Workshop isn't likely to create a Deep One WFB army.)
The Marsh Mansion is another house-sweeping mission, this time to capture the Marsh family. Once again, lots of shootouts - but after the Marsh family has - hopefully - been incapacitated, a particularly powerful Mythos entity decides to have a little fun. The climax of the scenario ends with a very powerful manifestation, in which one of the Marsh family is liquefied and sucked up into its various orifices, much like the mysterious blue liquid that they use to demonstrate the absorbency of paper towels.
As the scenario describes it, this is a Bad Thing - but if the GM isn't careful to make that absolutely clear to the players, then they'll probably help kick the unfortunate Marsh into the maw of the creature. It's like Stalin eating Hitler; as long as you're rid of one of them, it's okay if the other derives some sort of nutrients from the experience. It's not a major deal; just this weird little blurp in an otherwise fine scenario.
The Smuggler's Tunnels is Call of Cthulhu's tribute to Aliens - a fast-paced, gun-heavy firefight in an enclosed tunnel system, including a takeoff of the line "Where's Wierzbowski?" - there's also a subplot involving some team members who have an agenda of their own. This particular scenario also interlaces with other adventures, with loose ends left over from the other adventures culminating here. It's inspiring to realize that you can have the characters show up in any of the other scenarios without having to force it,
On the other hand, there's one part of the adventure that I'm not fond of, and that's the appearance of a good number of shoggoths - not the full-sized kind, but still shoggoths. For those unfamiliar, shoggoths are the Call of Cthulhu equivalent of dragons - astonishingly tough, able to mete out huge amounts of damage and able to lay waste to any adventuring party with relative ease. There are a fair number of explosives included in the weapons manifest of the investigators, so it's possible that they'll be able to kill some of them, but I'm always leery when using them - a lucky series of rolls can wipe out an adventuring party without any recourse, leaving the characters feeling cheated and the GM wondering just what the hell went wrong.
The Devil's Reef is another shoot-'em-up, this one differentiated by its focus on mass combat between sailors aboard a Navy cutter and Deep Ones. Unless I'm misreading, the first part of the scenario may focus entirely on dice-rolling, as sailors fire burst after burst of machine-gun fire into wave after wave of Deep Ones. While combat is fun, there's a lot of dice rolling occurring - there's up to nine guns firing 2d6 shots each, each inflicting anywhere from 2d6 to 10d6 (the main gun) damage, plus the dice rolling involved for hitting the Deep Ones in the first place. Get everybody in on the action or be prepared to get a sore wrist from shaking all of those dice.
While there are some neat bits here, most of them dealing with events around the characters aboard the ship - a half-slain Spawn of Cthulhu bobs to the surface, strange lights under the sea, and particular events which the investigators can deal with on their own - the focus is largely on dice-rolling and combat, to the point where the investigators may get tired of it. Having never play-tested it, I can't say that the scenario's bad, but Keepers should go into this part forewarned.
Y'-ha-nthlei stands as one of the best adventures in the lot, as the investigators hop aboard the submarine sent to torpedo that particular Deep One city. There's a lot of claustrophobic tension here, both from the fact that the investigators are effectively blind - they can hear Deep Ones clawing on the outside of the sub, but they can't see them, can't do anything against them - and the fact that the crew of the submarine isn't exactly used to going up against the Mythos. If you've ever seen Das Boot, you can screw with the investigators for hours and hours before you finally let them out. If you let them out.
Actually, I almost wonder if playing a Das Boot-esque scenario wouldn't add more to this scenario than as currently written. It's not a bad scenario, but it tends to rely on the trope of an unreliable crewmen causing problems when the action gets slow - there's no fewer than three seperate incidents in which sailors or related crewmen snap and go after the investigators or the boat in some way or another. It could be seen as somewhat repetitive after the third incident or so, although each incident has a different cause and a different result if something goes wrong.
On the other hand, reading through the scenario is much different from actually playing through it; what seems like a repetiive series of incidents harping on the same theme becomes a steadily rising chain of events that lead to the destruction of the sub or its salvation - since the entire scenario weaves in and out of itself, the scenarios don't present themselves well when read in a narrative format. I think that played out, this scenario will work much, much better than it reads.
There's also one astonishingly minor nitpicky detail that I didn't like about this particular scenario - there's a part where parts of the submarine succumb to some unspecified Mythos hoo-hah and become transparent, granting the sailors aboard a vision of the Deep One city. It feels pretty forced to have steel plate become transparent - maybe it's just a way to give the characters something scary to look at, but it could knock the suspension of disbelief for a loop if you don't handle it right. Maybe it's just me, though.
The Refinery is a lengthy shootout between the forces of the FBI - led by J. Edgar Hoover - I'll allow for a brief pause so you can get the transvestite jokes out of your system - against the Deep One hybrids who have occupied the Innsmouth gold refinery. The opening shootout goes through some quick combat in the interior of the building, shifts to the pursuit of one of the Marsh family, and ends with a tantrum by everybody's favorite Mythos monster - a gigantic shoggoth that's been used as a power plant for the facility. When it gets mad, the entire refinery starts coming down around everybody's ears, which makes for the usual panicky, screaming retreats so familiar to generations of CoC players.
Besides an epilogue which details the final fates of the people of Innsmouth and potential psychological aftereffects for characters who snapped during the raid, there's also twelve - count 'em, twelve - adventure seeds for Keepers to use in the period before Innsmouth falls. (One of them is actually after the fall, but you get the idea.) I love the adventure seed an idea - it's an idea that isn't quite potent enough to be fleshed out into its own scenario, but it works perfectly as something for the Keeper to work into something unique to him. I wish that Chaosium would do it more often; then again, that's what the sublime Tales of Terror are for.
In any case, Escape From Innsmouth is an excellent, excellent book, worth picking up for the central adventure alone. Everything else in the book - from the description of the town to the adventure seeds to the internal conflicts among the town's residents - is sweet, Deep-One smelling gravy.
-Darren MacLennan
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