Review of the D20 Call of Cthulhu Gamemaster Pack
The Lost Temple of Yig is a short scenario that was written for Chaosium’s Pulp Cthulhu setting. My first thoughts on reading this scenario were that it is heavily influenced by the Indiana Jones movies, with just a touch of the standard Cthulhu horror thrown in as a spice. In fact as I am writing this I am beginning to see more parallels between this adventure and Indian Jones and the Last Crusade. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of. The adventure comes complete with several contingencies to keep the characters alive if they have a string of bad luck, or if keeper is feeling merciful. This adventure also assumes that you will use the Vanguard Club that is more completely detailed in the next section of the book.
The basic story is the characters travel to the Amazon to explore a temple that appears in our world randomly, and never remains longer than a month before it disappears and moves to another location. While they journey they encounter a rival group that is trying to get any treasure that might be there, a native village, and some serpent men, red herring, and one plot twist that the players could figure out well before it has been sprung on them.
The adventure is dual statted, and I think that it is nicely done in that regard. The format for a check is WIS (DC: 15) {CC: Knowledge}. Though the module only has about 40 or so tests. With in the text the various NPCs are stated in the d20 system, but at the end of the text it gives the classic Cthulhu stats.
The only real error I noticed while reading through this adventure, was that they mixed up the handouts. The text of the adventure refers to the Yig Papers 1 which are actually the Yig Papers 2, and vice versa.
Thoughts on the Vanguard Club:
The Vanguard Club is a sample world spanning organization that the characters can belong to that could be used as a reason for the characters to investigate together. The club sponsors and sometimes funds expeditions to various far flung locales such as the Antarctic, the Amazon, etc. They also have extensive libraries that can be used for research, and some of them even have a very limited amount of Cthulhu Mythos information. The author recommends that no tome should grant more than a 1 rank/% to the Cthulhu Mythos skill and that there is only a 1% chance for such a tome if the branch has less than 100 members or a 2% chance if the branch has more than 100 members or is located in Arkham. We are given a fair discussion of the clubs organization and history followed by a more detailed discussion on the Arkham chapter. Again as with the adventure this seems more suitable to Pulp Cthulhu than to the more traditional fare. However this would be even more easily modified for a traditional role than the adventure. As it stands, the club seems too heroic for a Cthulhu game.
The errata is fairly standard, and when it gives information that was left out of the book for things such as darkvision, it gives a reference to the 3rd D&D book as well as a boxed text that tells you what it is. The erratum also includes stats for Y’golonac, but unfortunately do not contain the stats for the Star Spawn of Cthulhu.
We also get reference sheets for minor characters, characters, and monsters. I like the look of the character sheet better than the one in rulebook, and they all seem well organized.
The screen itself is made of a light weight cardboard, and feels fairly flimsy to me. It has three panels; one has several useful tables, and a nice quick index to look skills, feats or other things up in the rule book. The middle panel is mostly combat related and some of the table names are a bit misleading such as the Spot rules for spellcasting. The last panel is dominated with the Sanity information. Overall it is not too bad.
The package said that you got forms and letterheads with this product, but I did not have any with mine, so I don’t know what they look like, or if they made a change late in production, and did not remove that from the title page. It also came with four topic bookmarks each with page numbers for various items within the bookmark’s topic. The topics for the bookmarks are: Insanity & Magic, Creatures, Cults and Other Horrors, Characters & Equipment and Combat & Other Dangers. These bookmarks, I thought were a really good idea, and potentially very useful for keeping games running smoothly once they have been started.
Overall I liked this product, and I think that there are many items in it that a Keeper will find useful while running an adventure.
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