“Of Keys And Gates” is a reprint of three adventures which appeared in the pages of Pagan Publishing’s Call of Cthulhu magazine, The Unspeakable Oath. The cover calls the pieces “resurrected”. Much like the raised dead, they are full of stomach-turning horror, but at the same time they are some problems with a lack of direction - and freshness.
We kick off with "The Travesty", a six-page affair involving a non-mythos beastie who lives under a hill. Although of ancient Amerindian origin, he behaves pretty much like a Cthulhu beastie – he rises up every few years and gets Lovecraftian on people’s asses. The people who used to own the house on the hill he inhabits discovered a ritual to keep him at bay, but they recently all died out to the last man, and a stranger then purchased it. Typically, they neglected to leave clear instructions regarding this important ritual in the deeds to the house – but then I suppose it would hurt sales.
“Gee, it’s gotta a view of the lake honey, but do we really want to drive off evil spirits every ten years?” “Well, maybe we could get a man from the village in to do it, dear…”
Which is, of course, where the PCs come in. Our NPC hook turned the house into a hotel, and his guests seem to be going a tad loopy. He invites the players to come up and check it out. The adventure provides information on research they can do before arriving but it reveals little pertinent and going through it would bog the adventure down pointlessly. Far too many Cthulhu adventures do this, actually, regardless of whether it makes for exciting drama or good play. A smart GM will recognise when to just hand his players what they’ll find out and cut to the chase.
The chase, of course, being the players arrive at the house and spend a few hours of painfully pointless roleplaying with the NPCs staying there. None of whom have any real relevance to the plot apart from being red herrings, but are amusing in their own ways. The adventure also spends too long detailing where they will be at all hours of the day, oblivious to the fact that the first actual event in the adventure takes place at 6pm, and the adventure only lasts one night.
It begins as they sit down to dinner, when the obligatory Snowstorm That Prevents Anyone From Leaving blows in. Then the windows start showing strange, shocking vistas, like being on a boat sinking beneath the waves. Sometime after this, the players will apparently decide to search the place, and thus stumble onto the Diary That Explains Everything in the basement. Players read it and thus learn that to banish the evil spirit they must swing an amulet covered in burning blood. What is burning blood, you ask? Well, it’s blood mixed with kerosene and set alight. The chance of the PCs figuring this out will be examined later, when we have access to a microscope.
At this point, the servants of the beastie attack. These are severed body parts welded together in grotesque shapes. Twisted. Scary too, if done right, and the humour potential carefully avoided. Players have to defeat this brood, walk down to the basement and do the ritual - a series of steps that each requires all sorts of SAN and POW rolls as well as freaky stuff going down. The beastie shows up halfway through, of course, and the players have to fight it and make POW rolls and keep spinning the amulet until finally, the beastie is begone once again.
It’s a bit mechanical, and there’s no advice at all for saving a party that just happens to make a lot of crappy saving throws but doesn’t deserve to die. However, it compensates greatly by some seriously disturbing descriptions of what’s going on behind the rolls. The beastie in question appears as a skinless, deformed human, the basement floor turns into a stone pillar with a descending staircase into darkness down which the players must descend, the players have to get the blood from somebody, the staircase starts repeating itself, over and over, as the players try to descend – it’s all great stuff, dripping with atmosphere, freakishness and the blood of the innocent.
The scary stuff at the windows is also well described and the illusion-play involved provides a clever way to disturb your players. The problem with this scenario is that it’s really just these two scenes, linked by the plot event of the players finding the diary in the basement, which is the same damn plot device used in The Haunting (to name just one). A very inexperienced group might not find it such well trod ground, though, and a group of mad-keen roleplayers could probably fill in time by re-enacting Gosford Park for a while – but that still doesn’t stop the plot being nothing more than “finding a book and doing what it says”.
This is fixable, I’m sure, but the amount of work required compared to the amount of text provided is not a good ratio. Although full of scary ideas, it’s plotless, derivative, full of holes and ultimately, incomplete. Minable for ideas, but I wouldn’t run it.
The second cab off the rank is "The House on Stratford Lane", is more complete, but will also cause any vaguely experienced Cthulhu-hunter to have serious feelings of dejavu. Charles Edwards is a strange physicist who lives in a run-down house and never goes outside. A friend of the players asks them to come and investigate this eccentricity. Charles turns out to be building a dimension hopper in his basement and may end up inviting the Mi-Go round for tea as a result. At which point they put Charles’ brain in a can for sealed-in extra freshness. Stupid Mi-Go.
There is however a side-plot involving a little girl who has been kidnapped. The neighbours all think it was Charles who took her, but it was actually a fellow neighbour Richard Marquand, who is determined to frame Charles for the crime and thus rid the street of his property-value-harming tendency not to cut his grass very often. Players are invited to jump to the wrong conclusion, but also find some footprints leading to the right one. Meanwhile, the Mi-Go turn up and kill them all. Or something like that.
The problem here is once again with there being no actual plot. There is simply a timeline of what Charles and Richard have done and plan to do, and a full description of their respective houses. It’s almost an adventure, it just lacks a thread of player-centred events, scenes and actions to give it direction and thrust. As an adventure framework, however, it’s good stuff and a GM big on improv is not going to have that much trouble filling it out as she goes, or beforehand. But to be a truly worthwhile adventure, they shouldn’t have to.
What’s also disappointing about this adventure is that it hints at two great ideas – then fails to develop them at all. The first is that there is plenty of room for this scenario to explore the kind of psychotic mania which can grip a community fearing for its children, as is evident all-too often in our daily news. There is a mention of lynch-mobs forming up at one point, but that is all. The other missed opportunity is a few hints that Richard Marquand is the kind of man who would make a good Cthulhu PC. If the adventure had made him someone aware of the mythos, and more aware of Charles’ plans, there would be lots of juicy catharsis as the players realise that Richard was only doing what he considered necessary to stop the far greater evil of the Mi-Go arriving – and that they may soon, or may have already faced such questions themselves.
Unfortunately, the morality is as simplistic as the mystery, and instead of exploring these ideas, we are given a lengthy description of what happens if Charles contacts the Mi-Go but survives the encounter (answer: he asks for his mentor’s brain in a jar, and he gets it, too), which is simply background filler, devoted to a fairly unlikely outcome. The fact, however, that I got those two above ideas from the adventure shows that once again, there is a lot in this one worth mining out, or developing. It’s not plug and play, but it’s worth a read to consider the possibilities.
The third and final instalment brings John Tynes up to the plate, and he makes it very clear why he was the MVP in the Cthulhu world for so many years running. "Within You Without You" is a superbly written horror tale, with a fast-paced avalanche of a plot and some of the most twisted ideas ever found outside of an Unknown Armies supplement. The plot concerns a tiny town of Solace in the far north of the US. Not only is it very cold there, but Solace is also built on the ruins of a 17th century town called Saulous, which was sucked into another dimension in a botched spell three hundred years ago. Now, Saulous is coming back in the worst possible way.
In effect, the new townsfolk are being possessed by old townsfolk. At first, this takes effect only on the personalities of the current population, causing the players to be led a merry dance when the seventy-six-year old shop keeper is possessed by a five-year old boy, and Ma Rogers is possessed by a cow. The true horror begins when the possession becomes physical, and two humans are forced into the body of one, causing the horrific, painful and disgustingly malformed death of them both. And then it REALLY gets odd. Buildings flicker from brick into old wood and mud. Women age fifty years in a heart-beat. Children dance around mindlessly, bleeding from their ears. This is Tynes at his freakish, oh-my-god-there-is-something-seriously-wrong-with-this-man best.
And he does it without sacrificing the Lovecraftian feel whatsoever. The original spell was cast by a Puritan sorcerer straight out of Charles Dexter Ward, and the ancient nature of the town and the horrible way it is destroyed are both described with the kind of methodical eloquence Lovecraft did so well. It’s also a masterpiece of subtlety: the research blocks the characters can find read like real reference books for once, mentioning details in passing and obliquely, rather than giving pure exposition; the ear-bleeding children sing a rhyme which vaguely echoes a sentence of ancient language discovered by NPC research, undetectable until it is read out loud a few times. (And should the players miss this easter egg, it harms the adventure none.)
There’s much here that is familiar once again – a friendly NPC hooks the players in, there is a ritual to be prevented – but the quality of this material, and the originality of what surrounds it carries it through. There is also plenty for players to do here, from dealing with the horrors of their own possession (which would be tons of fun for both those affected and those looking on), to rounding up and organising the possessed townsfolk, to finding the NPC hook (who ends up being possessed by the bad guy himself!). Eventually, the players will gather enough understanding from whichever encounters they have to track down the cave where the spell was conducted, whereupon a whole variety of options are available, including three completely different endings, depending on how characters treat the device which provided the magic.
If there’s a flaw to Within You Without You it’s that the constant possessions, the array of monsters and spell-casters and the cataclysmic possibilities of the ending add up to a massive wedge of sanity loss, a high risk of death and a strong likelihood of tearing the universe asunder. Which makes it a great convention scenario, but less useful for an ongoing campaign. If you don’t want everyone to bring their own bodybag, you’ll need to take care to mediate some of the threats, and to make sure the players don’t do anything too stupid.
The other adventures, despite their formulaic elements, would be well suited to drop into any Cthulhu campaign. The inventive ways to scare used in The Travesty would likely be a change of pace, and experienced players might work well enough to stop the plot dragging or falling into too many holes. Meanwhile, if those twists I mentioned above were developed, it could add a whole new spin to a Mi-Go storyline, one that might surprise your players, and make them think. All in all, there is a lot of potential in these pages for three nights of fun, as long as you’re prepared to do the extra slog to make them fly, as well as fitting them to your team.
The Travesty is seriously, almost cripplingly flawed, but is highly plunderable. Stratford Lane needs direction but has done most everything else for you. And Within You Without You may not fit into your campaign, but it is still a great piece of work all round. So this is how you need to think about this book: not as three adventures to keep your campaign going, but three more tools to add to your GM toolbox. The kind of things you might pull out to provide inspiration, or to combine with something else, or to run in an emergency. And as it is a 32-page slim-lined book with a small print run, now assuredly consigned to the bargain bins, you should be able to get it for a price which makes a bag of tools, ideas and stop-gaps a very attractive proposition indeed.
To summarise: Tynes rocks. The rest is useful. It should be cheap. Worth getting if you want a toolbox. And never let a mi-go put your brain in a can.
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