The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Welcome to Adobe GoLive 5

I swear to God, sometimes I hate being a reviewer.

Take Unseen Masters, for example. This is a product that's gotten a lot of good press from a lot of a matter of fact - it's even won an award for its portrayal of schizophrenia in one of the adventures. And it's generally regarded as a good book.

And it's not. As a series of adventures for Call of Cthulhu, it's pretty weak, breaking some of the most central tenets of CoC adventures without granting anything in return; they draw more from 70's pop culture than they do from Lovecraft, which is just...not good. They're addicted to red herrings, have dialogue that shades into the ludicrously bad, and have incidents within them that are laughable rather than scary.

And I get to be the one to try to convince you of this. And this is why I sometimes hate being a reviewer.

Anyways. The first scenario, The Wild Hunt is directly based on episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which I have never seen and probably never will.

There's nothing directly wrong with basing a scenario on something that you like. Done correctly, you can take the best aspects of, say, John Carpenter's version of The Thing and create a scenario that draws on its atmosphere and theme, rather than simply imitating some of the surface elements while kicking the traditional themes of CoC in the nuts.

(Warning: Spoilers)

The Wild Hunt is the second kind of adventure. Nominally, it's about a vampire stalking the streets of New York while the authorities struggle madly to stop him before it's too late. That's not a bad idea, although it's a little conventional for a game with the possibility of Call of Cthulhu.

However, the vampire in question isn't really a vampire; he's a hybrid Tindalosian, having been transformed from a human being into a cross between a human and a Hound of Tindalos, thanks to the ingestion of Tindalos ichor. Most of the adventure revolves around investigating New York's underground Goth culture - since the victims are being drained of blood by a supernatural creature, it's the first place to look. Fortunately, the Goth culture in here is very well portrayed - warts and all, which makes it much more human and believable.

But most of the adventure is going to revolve around red herrings - interrogating various members of the subculture and taking lengthy bleach baths afterwards, talking to the victims and eventually doing the research necessary to track down the monster. But most of the research involved in taking the monster down is a red herring; the villain of the scenario isn't a vampire, and so just about every lead involving vampires in one way or another is a dead end. As the book itself states, "[one path of investigation] is the one non-red-herring path of information."

In short, the bulk of the adventure is a red herring. The monster himself gets a fair amount of play, and some of the red herring elements are gradually wound into the primary plot, but ultimately, it's a series of misadventures. Finding the central villain of the scenario - or, at least, his identity - involves getting a report on the blue ichor, finding an old report with the blue ichor in it, investigating the victim of the old report, finding out that the pathologist who did the autopsy was elated to see what the blue ichor was - and then from there divulge the identity of the killer.

I have to confess that I may be missing something in this adventure; some trick of play by which an obscure piece of information becomes instantly highlighted in such a way that it says "Hey! I'm an important piece of information! Investigate me!" So the investigation part of the adventure may be as difficult as its seems.

Let's talk about the dialogue. The dialogue could use some help. For example:

[From a police captain:] "Maybe you can check into the pattern of the killings with some of those new-fangled computers you Feds got."

This is an actual line of dialogue in the book.

For a 70's detective show, this is right on the money, because computers were new then, and their capacities were unknown.

For an adventure supposedly set in the modern day, this statement is so flatly unbelievable that it's funny. You keep expecting a camera pan over to where the computer - a cross between UNIVAC and the Pimpbot - sits, occasionally emitting sparks and smoke whenever it runs. The adventure wants to be a Call of Cthulhu adventure, but it's so busy referencing bad 1970's cop shows that it's difficult to maintain suspension of disbelief.

Or there's this:

"Then I smells this horrible strench, like that outta slaughterhouse - it reeked of death, I tells ya! I began puking. Whens looking through the tears running out of my eyes I see all this mist forming and I notice this man in a dark long trenchcoat and broad-brimmed hat."

This dialogue is remarkably stiff. "I began puking"? How about "I started to puke"? Or "I puked"?

How about not dialogue that doesn't instantly evoke Jay screaming at the Statue of Liberty in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? ("Damn youse! Damn youse all to hell!")

And if you want to see the classic example of somebody who's seen something that he can't possibly deal with, go see Se7en, and watch the other victim of the Lust murder talk about what happened to him. He's screaming, hyperventilating, barely coherent - and you believe every word of it. It's difficult to write out the words of somebody who's just been through hell, but you can make it work if you try hard enough.

But the clincher is this:

"How can you resist me, a master of space and time? Soon the hour shall toll my Lord's arrival and they will feast on humanity. The Wild Hunt is nigh! How? You ask how? I shall tell you how - after all, it will be the last words you ever hear."

NO.

This project is fueled more by earnest fun than it is by the spirit of horror. There's nothing necessarily wrong with using, say, Night Gallery for inspiration, or putting in cliched villain talk because your players are expecting it. But I wasn't expecting it. I was expecting Chaosium to try to top Delta Green - which is to say that they write adventures that actually take place in the modern day, without having them be based on British horror movies, or on 1970's TV shows or whatever other thing catches their attention. It's as if they've decided that Lovecraft is too difficult to write, and that they'd rather do something else with the engine. Which is fine. I just wish that they would make it clear on the book's back cover - something like "Hey! If you like Kolchak and The Omen, you'll love Unseen Masters!"

There's also the in-jokey atmosphere - the game feels light-hearted and fun, like a transcription of the time when you tried to play Call of Cthulhu and wound up with a cross between Kolchak and Police Squad! The guy who wrote it feels like a talented amateur, rather than having been drawn from the stable of talent that produced scenarios like "Bad Moon Rising" and "Landscrapes" and "The Hills Rise Wild" and two dozen other high quality scenarios.

I mean, the guys at Pagan used to send each other severed dog's heads in the mail. That's why just about every scenario they write feels like glimpsing into the darkest place in somebody's head - they're writing horror scenarios, not pop-culture pastiches.

And there's one other thing, although this is more of a peeve than an actual complaint. One of the things that d20 Call of Cthulhu did very well was that it made clear that Lovecraft's Mythos was more of an anti-Mythos - rather than being an arrangement of mythological figures, it was a series of unknowable, unguessable entities whose motives were so alien that humans would have to go insane just to understand the barest fragment.

One of the things that I don't like about The Wild Hunt is that it gives the Hounds of Tindalos - who were doing just fine as an independent race of hideous hound-things - a mythology of their own, with the Lords of Tindalos trying to break through the wall of time in order to subjugate humanity blah blah blah.

But the Hounds of Tindalos were just fine as the supernatural equivalent of tigers - if you wandered into their territory, they'd kill you, but they didn't really have minds that human beings could understand. Mythos races don't need Great Old One supervisors, and creating a Great Old One that rules over the Hounds of Tindalos treads perilously close to turning the Mythos into just another lame pantheon.

And having them want to invade Earth's reality violates what Sandy Petersen wrote about - I believe that it was in the fourth edition of Call of Cthulhu, but the basic point was that it's humans, not the Great Old Ones, who want to hurry the return of the Great Old Ones. The GOO don't care. Fifty years is an eyeblink to them. With an actual motivation to break through, though, they become that much less mysterious.

If you enjoy Kolchak, you'll get a kick out of it. Otherwise, it's not really a Call of Cthulhu scenario so much as an extended homage to a TV show that ended about thirty years ago - and is known today only because of its connection to the X-Files.

And the Truth Shall Set you Free.

"Gee, Ted, maybe you're right - maybe we should take the quote sane people and put them into the asylums and let the psychopaths run the world. No, that would be a bad idea..."

- Elaine, from Airplane! II

That exchange kept running through my head every time I read the promo quote for this scenario, which basically ran something to the effect of "Maybe insane people are privy to secrets that we aren't" - which is kind of the inverse of the central premise of Call of Cthulhu; it's because you know secrets that you're going insane.

Anyways. What this scenario is about is the slow degeneration of one of the investigators into schizophrenic madness, which is triggered by reading a particular book dedicated to Daoloth, the Render of the Veils. As time passes, the investigator goes through the various stages of schizophrenia, convinced that he's the only person able to stop an immensely powerful, evil entity from destroying the world.

Going insane, trying to stop hideous demons that nobody else knows exist - this differs from the average CoC investigator how?

Well, in that the madness described here is very, very detailed - this is probably the best layman's primer on schizophrenia that I've seen so far. I mean, everything fits - the persecution complex, the idea that you're doing something immensely important without anybody else knowing about it, the odd behavior, the special friend that only you can see, the integration of pop culture elements into the delusions - perfect. It won the award for a good reason.

But there are problems in here as well.

For one thing, the average CoC investigator is usually clinging to his sanity after a single adventure as it is - the game has a Sanity stat for a reason. The convictions of a schizophrenic are going to look pretty tame next to a guy who's got 13 SAN points and a 23% score in Cthulhu Mythos.

The schizophrenic will be boiling rainwater because most drinks have subtle poisons in them.

The guy with 13 SAN will be - just for example - seeing blood coming out of everything he touches, hear small chittering things running across his roof at night, be unable to sleep for more than five minutes at a stretch, scream incoherently if anybody touches him, and will most likely be dead within a year from nervous stress if he doesn't cut his throat first. That's if the GM is feeling merciful; if not, he's going to be enforcing the effects of all those little phobias that gradually add up to an inability to walk down the post office without wetting himself in fear.

The central conceit of Call of Cthulhu is that mental health is as important as hit points; so when somebody goes insane, it's more of the same, rather than something that just drops out of thin air. In a game like Adventure!, you could milk the pathos of a hero slowly going insane and then some - he's not actually fighting the Demons of Darkness, he's shooting down innocent National Guardsmen and trying to blow up the armory.

As a matter of fact, that's a little bit similar to the plot of Mazes and Monsters. Fuck.

So, since the degradation into madness isn't unique in Call of Cthulhu, the author decided to throw in another monkeywrench - not only is the investigator becoming schizophrenic, he's actually been marked by Daoloth as his Chosen. As time passes, he even picks up his own cult, which in turn provokes the involvement of two other cults - one of them the remnants of the Knights Templar, the other a Mythos-hunting band of Catholic churchmen who regard the Chosen as a threat. Neither one of them really has a major reason to be in there - they're tossed in so that the scenario has someplace to go after the investigators have figured out what's going on.

Is it a good scenario? Not really. It's got a great description of a mental illness, but it doesn't seem to have any particular direction and the central concept is basically just an extension of Call of Cthulhu's fundemental premise - that PCs can go insane.

Coming of Age

The Omen was a bad, bad movie. I hate to say it, but there it is.

Coming of Age draws - again - from the Seventies pop culture; The Exorcist, The Omen, Omen II, Rosemary's Baby, and a bunch of other "Oh my God, my child is Satanic and also every single piece of clothing that we own looks like somebody projectile vomited over it thanks to what we laughingly refer to as 'Seventies' fashion". It's about an investigator who finds out that his kid is actually the Mythos equivalent of the anti-Messiah, and who will -

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

- and that would be the noise of the investigators discharging shotguns point-blank into this kid the very minute that he displays even the faintest hint of being abnormal.

You know what? I remembered this as being a rule in the Guidelines to Surviving Horror Movies. As a matter of fact, I went and looked it up.

And you know, it's rule number five.

5. If your children speak to you in Latin or any other language which they do not know, or if they speak using a voice other than their own, shoot them at once. It will save you a lot of grief in the long run. Note: it's unlikely they'll die easy, so be prepared.

See? The cliche of demonic children who just happen to be your own is thirty years old; it's so hoary that you can find it at the top of a family tree of cliches. Plus, I challenge any player to remain unsuspicious when he's suddenly informed that his investigator has a kid - previously unmentioned - who was involved in a Mythos incident and whose behavior has become somewhat suspicious -

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

Just went off in my hand, officer. Pore little critter.

Anyways. The scenario kicks off with the cataclysmic destruction of a summer camp -

- well, actually, no. The scenario actually starts off with two full pages describing the history of the Shining Trapazahedron, following it through every single story and/or scenario that it appears in and ending with it being dropped into Narragansett bay. Along with this is a description of the history of Nitocris and New World Incorporated, who appeared in Masks of Nyarlathotep and Day of the Beast. There's a lot of research here, most of it desgined to bridge the gap between those two campaigns and this one.

To me, it just feels like a lot of noodling - I mean, if a scenario needs this much backstory, then it's time to take a step back and assess if you're actually providing useful information or just showing off how much research you've done. The author actually goes ahead and tries to resolve some of the inconsistencies between the different stories - and that's absolutely pointless; there's absolutely no need to enforce continuity between Mythos stories, or to trace every single movement of the Shining Trapazahedron.

Anyways. The scenario opens with the destruction of a summer camp on Narragansett Bay, supposedly the result of a freak storm, actually the result of an appearance of the Haunter of the Dark. One particular kid escapes with the Trapazahedron and tries to escape various Mythos forces who are trying to capture him. In the meantime, David, the investigator's kid, is starting to act funny, including having animals lick his hands, people around him dying -

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

- but enough about him.

And, just to remind me that I've got a good reason to be pissed, there's the usual silliness that should have never seen print. For example, there's the suggestion that David may cast a spell called Guitar of Madness - a variant on Pipes of Madness - and makes his music teacher play it. Or bringing a holograph projector which creates a picture of Mythos horrors at a science fair and then has the exits guarded by Hunting Horrors. Or a digital Hunting Horror which pops out of a computer screen if you happen to download a particular .exe file.

Or this:

"I see you have discovered who I am. I was holping to play with you a little more, but the time for games is over. I have risen out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries! You cannot stop me. Soon in the small hours the cities shall be rent with screams of nightmare. I am the Messenger of Chaos, and the End Times draw near. You and your fathers before you have striven against a design that cannot be altered. I commend your courage, but now it is over. Join me, and you shall revel in pleasures you did not even realize were possible. Resist, and you shall die in agony, in ways you cannot even conceive."

NO.

And, just to throw an extra bundle of salt onto the wound, there's a friendly Egyptian god wandering around who's openly allied with humanity and who may even teach investigators spells. That's about what Lovecraft had envisioned, yeah.

So. Besides trying to stitch elements of the Christian mythos onto the Cthulhu mythos - which manages to blend as well as ketchup and toothpaste - there's an evil corporation included, NWI, which was one of the silliest innovations of the 1980s and 1990s. (I know that it comes from an earlier CoC product, but I've never heard Day of the Beast mentioned on anybody's allt-ime classics list.) (And yeah, Pentex - but look at how silly that shit got.) And there's oodles of research into what eventually resolves into a recap of the events of old stories involving the Shining Trapazahedron, which is pretty much irrelevant to the plot.

I was thinking about the lessons that I learned from Goatswood - not from the product itself, but from the review that I did. For those of you who weren't around for that little roundelay, I wound up making some statements about England that were less than informed. I also managed to directly invoke the wrath of one of Chaosium's employees, who thought that my review was overly harsh and essentially said as such. So, I thought, maybe I'm being too hard on them. Maybe my remembrance of Return to Dunwich and Arkham Unveiled and Terror Austrailis and so forth was positive only because they were old - you know, the same way that you thought that kid's shows were better when you were a kid.

Chaosium's lost its way. They've been sliding for a while, but it's becoming more and more apparent that their products are a mockery of what used to be the best horror line out there. There were scenes in Horror on the Orient Express that gave me nightmares - me, who's probably been exposed to just about every form of horror entertainment there is. (The limb-harvesting operation in the Mosque of Blood, actually.) There were scenes that stuck in my memory for a long time - the wilderness paranoia of The Hills Rise Wild, or the astonishingly audacious concept of Bad Moon Rising, or the careful exploration of T.E.D Klein's themes in Landscrapes, or the potpourri of goodness that was the Blood Brothers series.

They didn't feature mu-ha-ha-ing villains.

They did not feature odd, stilted dialogue.

They did not feature Science Fairs of Doom.

They did not feature extensive research on the background of a Mythos macguffin.

(The Sedefkar simulacrum, fine, but every single point in its history had something to do with the adventure.)

They did not directly contradict the fundemental principles of Lovecraft's universe.

(Unless they replaced it with something better.)

They did not draw from late-night TV.

(Or if they did, they understood the difference between slavish copying and using it as a springboard for something new.)

They did not have friendly gods of any kind wandering around.

They felt scary. They were about people who had bumped the curtain and who were desperately trying to put it back before they could see more of what was on the other side. They were about the end of all human life on earth. They were about stopping the Mythos one last time, even if it only granted humanity another five days of untroubled existence.

They didn't feel goofy. Unseen Masters does, and that's why I think that your money is better spent somewhere else.

-Darren MacLennan