DUNWICH
Return to the Forgotten Village
Dunwich is both a setting book and an adventure for Call of Cthulhu and Call of Cthulhu D20. It's set in the 1920s (the standard campaign era for Call of Cthulhu) and details the region around Dunwich, where a number of Lovecraft's own stories were set.
It's apparently a reprint of "Return to Dunwich", first published in 1991. Since I don't have "Return to Dunwich", I'll contain myself to discussing what this edition has rather than contrasting it with the older version. Obviously the D20 rules are a new addition, but I don't know how much additional material has been added.
Since it's a dual-system supplement, there are D20 equivalents for just about everything. If an encounter says for the investigators to roll Spot Hidden, it'll say [Spot check, DC 15] in brackets next to it so you know how to handle it in the D20 version as well.
It opens with a nice map of the Massachusetts area, showing the roads from Arkham (the site of Miskatonic University) out to Aylesbury and Dunwich. You can even see where Salem lies in relation to Arkham and where Innsmouth is. The facing page has a small description for every city on the map, generally including their population and how old the city is. It even tells you what Chaosium supplements happen to be situated in those towns, if any. This is a really nice touch.
The next section is The Dunwich Horror itself, the original story by H. P. Lovecraft. It's one of Lovecraft's better efforts, although personally there are several stories I like better. But it's obviously the most appropriate one to reprint here. And I've always loved the bits with the whippoorwills.
After the story, they start into a very detailed discussion of Dunwich and its environs, where the original tale is set. There's a nice timeline of the town's history, starting from its settlement by a small cult that fled persecution in Salem in 1692. In addition to a lot of setting tidbits like the crops that they grow, the difficulty of using automobiles on the dirt roads most of the year, typical reactions to trespassers and such, it even has a two page listing of the inhabitants of the valley. Each house gets a number matching their more detailed entry (found later on) and a very short summary. For example, one of them is "Ames, Allen & Harriet (65); will board guests, son is thief." A quick flip to entry 65 in the detailed section gives us their ages, a description of their home, and stats for their thirteen year old son, who might steal something from the investigators if they spend the night there.
That may not sound like much info, but there are no less than 921 numbered entries, in addition to descriptions of all the major locations (which are named, rather than being numbered). A few of them are just one line descriptions like "This is an abandoned ruin," but most have at least a paragraph of description, often more. While the majority are just a good starting spot for the GM's description there are a heck of a lot of them. This is one setting where I'd actually have to worry about the PCs losing track of all the named NPCs they'll encounter. If you hate modules where the players can go, "Well the villain must be Fred. He's the only named NPC we've seen who hasn't been eaten by the monster yet," then you'll love this one. Players who don't take notes are bound to get confused.
Now these numbered entries aren't lengthy for the most part. And some of them lack particular details you might expect, like a description of someone's spouse or kids. But still, there's a heck of a lot of info for the GM here, regardless. And the atmosphere is great. There are nice country folks... and demented, dysfunctional families that will have your players grimacing as they deal with them. It's not for the particularly squeamish; Dunwich is a decayed, inbred, dying area with extensive poverty. Even the nice folks here often have a few skeletons in their closet (or, more likely, buried out back behind the shed).
One minor problem I did have was with the ordering; the numbered entries are all in order, of course, but they are periodically interrupted by named entries discussing more notable areas or even a subset called M1 through M10 which describe locations around the old mill. It's a bit annoying to see a reference to M3 and then have to search through the book to find that M1 through M10 are located between entries 99 and 101.
There are some typos, but they're mostly minor things. For example, at one point there's a minor discrepancy about how much a local tourist attraction charges visitors. The illustration says a quarter, but the text description says a dime. Perhaps hard times have forced him to give a discounted rate.
I haven't seen any typos that really messed up an entry though; they were all the sort of thing where it was obvious what the correct word was. So the editing, while not perfect, is still pretty good.
Now while there are lots of friendly NPCs (and they probably outnumber the unfriendly ones), the PCs will need a lot of help to complete their mission here. In particular, if they aren't warned about a particular kind of danger that they will probably encounter repeatedly, some or even all of the PCs may die quite ignomiously simply by failing their resistance checks at an inopportune moment. It isn't outright lethal (I'll discuss specifics in the spoilers section below), but it's close enough and it's really prevalent. In addition, there are a lot of potential environmental dangers, like quicksand, rotten floors and hidden pitfalls that can injure or kill investigators who aren't careful enough.
Basically, I could easily see random hazards killing or incapacitating multiple investigators during their mission. I'd seriously suggest having a few NPCs lined up for folks to play, and friendly locals could be used in a pinch. I'd hate to see a PC get sent to the hospital while exploring a rotting farmhouse, long before they actually find anything related to the plot.
There is material here for an entire mini-campaign, really. There are two major Mythos threats to deal with, and several secondary ones, at least one of which can be ignored indefinitely if the PCs desire. There are also a couple of purely human threats to deal with, making a nice change for your players.
The full writeup of Dunwich and her environs (including the plot-specific areas, which are described in much more detail than the rest) takes up more than a hundred pages.
It's followed by two surprisingly short adventures. "Return to Dunwich" has the PCs being recruited by the aged Dr. Henry Armitage (the most important character in The Dunwich Horror) to return to Dunwich on his behalf. A Dunwich man has successfully sued the university of Arkham for the return of Wilbur Whateley's diary and Dr. Armitage has one month to comply. He wants the investigators to find out why Amos Whateley wants the book and whether or not he intends to use its dark secrets to resume Wilbur's work.
The one-month deadline puts some urgency into their mission, but not an unreasonable amount. The module also assumes that events will come to a head long before the month is up, because it doesn't even tell you whether or not Dr. Armitage will actually comply with the court's decision.
The adventure itself is, as I've said, very short. This is because the real meat of the adventure lies in the Dunwich section. Honestly, the adventure isn't much more than an excuse to send the investigators to Dunwich and have them poke around and talk to the locals. There's enough going on in that decaying valley that they are bound to find adventure.
There are a bunch of little hand-outs for this adventure, many of which are supposed to be newspaper clippings relevant to Dunwich, and stats for Dr. Armitage and another antiquarian that they might consult. The last page has a reproduction of an old Rand-McNally map of Massachusetts (and parts of Rhode Island), with Dunwich marked in a much larger font than would have really been used to mark such a backwater. It's a pretty crowded map, since it shows pretty much all of the towns and villages. Hey, there's Woonsocket! I wasn't even sure if that was a real town.
After "Return to Dunwich" is an even shorter little mini-adventure by John Tynes called "Earth, Sky, Soul." As the text says, it's hardly more than an "incident" but it makes a great introduction to the Dunwich area and a good opportunity to lose a little bit of Sanity without serious risk of bodily harm. It may also reveal some important clues that could help them elsewhere.
After these two sections, we have a bunch of appendices. Appendix 1 is a summary of the events of The Dunwich Horror, complete with little portraits of most of the major players and stats for a few of them.
Appendix 2 lists a few dozen one-line "Mysteries, Legends and Secrets" that investigators might uncover while travelling through Dunwich, broken up by the part of the valley that you're in. Really, though, it's almost all secrets, with only a couple of red herrings. That's probably for the best, really. With as many NPCs as there are in Dunwich, listing all of the false rumors to be found would probably require five times as many pages.
Appendix 3 has the D20 stats for all of the notable NPCs and new monsters. There are 35 NPCs here with stats, and all of the ones that I've examined closely look good. I saw one problem with one of the monsters, though; its D20 writeup gives it a new power (assuming human form) which it definitely does not possess. No idea why it's here, but considering that the critter in question is described in the adventure as being trapped in a chamber because it's too big to fit through the exit, it definitely shouldn't have the power to assume human form. This appendix also has spell conversions and a suggested optional rule for D20 play.
Appendix 4 collects all of the player handouts. There are 8 pages of them, and none of them have anything important printed on the back (7 are blank, the 8th has an advert on the other side) so it should be easy to photocopy them for your own use. You could even cut them out of the book itself, but I know I'd never do it. My only qualm is that one of them has the entry numbers of the persons mentioned written in parenthesis. That won't tell the players anything (Ooo, look, Fred Farr is number 303! I wonder what that means?) but it's kind of out of place.
Finally, there's a fold-out map with a crude rendition of the valley. My only qualm is that it has a few "zoom-in" areas that show a picture of an important spot. They don't really count as spoilers per se, since it actually doesn't show all of the important spots, just the ones that investigators would already know about, so I'd probably end up giving it out as a handout anyway. It's a pretty nifty addition to the module.
Summary:
Well, all in all, Dunwich is a very nice supplement. It describes a wide area where there are lots of opportunities for investigators to find adventure, and gives you a horde of named and described NPCs for them to interact with.
One "downside" is that the adventure could easily wipe out an entire party if the GM isn't careful. There's at least one monster, which, if the PCs actually manage to encounter it (if they're smart, they won't, but you never know) will pretty much automatically kill at least one PC without there being anything that the party can do about it. There are several places where the PCs could quite easily get killed by simple bad luck and end up falling down a pit or getting poisoned. Or accidentally degenerating into a hideous monster, but that at least has more "horror" to it than stepping on a loose rock and falling to your death. I would definitely suggest having some NPCs tag along and encouraging the PCs to be very careful. If they try to go it alone, you're bound to end up with a bunch of the PCs dying in an isolated area where it will be very difficult to bring in any replacement PCs.
Still, we are talking about Call of Cthulhu here. It's probably no more lethal than most CoC adventures and clever and cautious investigators can safeguard themselves against most of the dangers just by taking some sensible precautions. Like most CoC adventures, this one has spots that will chew up careless groups quite rapidly.
I'm... uncertain... about the "secret area" that the investigators might uncover. It's interesting, but it's not much of a "climax" to the adventure. In fact, if this module has a weakness, it's probably that it's so non-linear that you could easily miss the plot entirely. Of course, as long as everyone's having fun interacting with the locals, that's not really a big deal.
The art is... well... so-so at best. It's almost all plain line drawings, usually of someone's face. It gets the job done by showing you what folks look like, but it's thoroughly unimpressive otherwise. I definitely wouldn't buy it for the art. In fact, I consider the cover kind of ugly, but perhaps it's meant to be. The interior maps (and there are a bunch) are fairly nice, with most of them being done in a somewhat crude "hand-drawn" style.
I give it a 5 for substance and a 3 for style. If I were running a CoC 1920s campaign, I'd probably discard most of the real "adventure" and just use the Dunwich environs as a springboard for my own. The adventure(s) are so-so, but as a sourcebook for Dunwich this product rocks.
Spoilers Below! Highlight it to see 'em.
Okay, the basic plot is that the Spawn of Yog-Sothoth was not destroyed as Dr. Armitage thought at first, it's instead imprisoned in an underground temple created by ancient Hyperborean settlers. It could stay there indefinitely, but there is an undead cultist in Dunwich who could, at any point, perform the ritual to let it out again. If he blows it, there are some other folks who might do it, too. The investigators need to either stumble into or track down these folks and make sure that they don't do it. Actually facing the Dunwich Horror itself is a really bad idea.
The PCs may also get ahold of the artifact that was used to revive this guy... which could be very useful (if disturbing) since it lets you pretty much ressurrect any corpse you want (but only one at a time), no matter how old, turning them into a magically bound undead slave. Of course, it's not exactly reliable, as the corpse tends to break free of the control if you leave it active too long. The module actually has stats for a couple of dead wizards, in case the PCs actually figure out how to use the thing and revive them.
In addition to the aforementioned Cthulhoid monster, there is another one in Dunwich. A small portion of the shapeless monstrosity Abhoth also lurks in the caverns beneath Dunwich. Abhoth is also the source of the spores that are the source of the degeneration and birth defects in most of the locals. They're treated as a hallucinogenic gas that can't withstand much contact with the open air. PCs who go down into the caverns (almost inevitable, as there are several entrances to be found) are likely to eventually hit an area where the spores are so potent that they can't resist them and all go into hallucinations. Filter masks could prevent this, but if the PCs end up too deep without realizing the danger, they're sure to be driven temporarily nuts and possibly fall off a cliff or down a hole. Worse, the rules actually say that if the spores get into an exposed wound they start growing and rapidly consume the victim, turning them into a fragile and helpless parody of their original self. One spot describes the resistance check for this as CONx5 (typical difficulty), but two others describe it as CONx1 (really hideously difficult to resist). Since a hallucinating PC is quite liable to injure themselves while running madly through the spore-filled caverns, getting dosed with this stuff could easily be a death sentence.
There's also an ancient Mi-Go facility down there, originally dedicated to extracting the spores from Abhoth safely. And a Hyperborean temple dedicated to the worship of said entity. And a Starbucks. Okay, no, there isn't a Starbucks, but the temple does have a lot of ancient machinery that still works and a nearly complete copy of the Book of Eibon, written in the original Hyperborean. Oddly, even though there's a mummified corpse here, the authors don't give you any stats for his resurrected form, or even tell you what happens if you try and use the mystic gizmo to revive him. So I guess it would be up to the GM to decide whether he was a nice guy or a psycho and how powerful his magical abilities would be.
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