 Goto [ Index ] |
Day of the Beast incorporates all the important elements that I believe make a really good Cthulhu campaign. Firstly like a James Bond movie there are lots of exotic locales, from New York, South Dakota, London, Boston, Transylvania, Egypt, Peru, San Francisco and a journey to another planet, in this case the Great Library of Celaneo. Secondly it has great villains, three in fact. One who is a deathless Chinese adapted directly from Lovecraft’s brief description in "The Call of Cthulhu", a Romanian Baron who is only seen at night and lives in a dark castle in Eastern Europe, and a wealth businessman from Chicago. Thirdly, many of the chapters contain some of the most evocative and scary material I’ve ever seen in any horror scenario, particularly "The Thing in the Well", "Castle Dark", "The Halls of Celaeno", "The Sands of Time", and "Mountains of the Moon".
Then there is the cult itself, with a great back history dating to the earliest days of the Egyptian Pharaohs, through to the Middle Ages and the Crusades, and into modern time incorporating the Stock Market crash of 1929. I found the cult lots of fun yet sinister just as a good cult should be, so don’t be surprised if players think they’re going up against an organization on par with the Templar Knights if they really did worship the Great Old Ones. The concluding chapter, while might appear to be fairly mundane on a first reading, should leave players shocked and in fear of their lives and sanity if their plans to defeat their foes fall to pieces.
The revised edition is worth the investment, even if you own the original Fungi from Yuggoth. The plot has been tightened, some scenes expanded such as Celaeno, and the keeper controlled characters have been fleshed out some more.
The three additional scenarios are a bit of a mix bag. "Suffer the Little Children" by Lucya Szachnowski and Gary O’Connell is fairly tame, but it’s meant to be. Their "London Calling" scenario however, is much better. "Black Hills, Black Secrets" by Sam Johnson is not a bad scenario, but doesn't seem to have been written for Day of the Beast, and doesn’t really fit the style of the rest of the campaign.
The layout, artwork and maps are all quiet good, many of which are reprints from the original plus some greyscale reproductions of Nick Smith's pieces which appeared as colour plates when the campaign was reprinted as Curse of Cthulhu back in the early 1990s. I always liked the old art drawn by Chris Marrinan, and the new illustrations by M. Wayne Miller are also evocative of the campaign’s mood. However, there are no thumbnails of the non-player characters, and this is the campaign where I would have liked to have seen them, for the keeper controlled characters are so well done. The front cover picture of two investigators walking into an Egyptian tomb with a shotgun and lamp is one of the best covers Chaosium has ever commissioned, even though there is nothing supernatural or horrible to be seen. You can, however, imagine that whatever lurks inside the tomb won’t be pleasant.
The problem with the new material is that mostly appears at the start of the campaign, building a back story dissipating the original Fungi from Yuggoth's pacy beginnings. I would have much rather have seen scenarios in Chicago, India and a few more encounters against the terrorist organization lurking in the shadows. Reading the campaign you will see why.
There are several aspects of Day of the Beast which I didn’t particularly like. The first is a problem concerning United States locations. The Call of Cthulhu game tends to assume that the rest of us who have only seen the United States on television or visited once or twice know as much about their homeland as their citizens' do. So when I'm reading about South America, Europe or Middle Eastern locales I feel a sense of description, but this tends to be glossed over for the American counterparts. For example, there is no adequate description of the town of Buffalo visited in one of the earlier scenarios, and a big city like San Francisco is barely described at all. Secondly, this criticism is one I could apply to many Call of Cthulhu campaigns, in that there are too many different Great Old Ones, their minions, and independent races working together to achieve the same goal. This kind of turns the whole Lovecraftian themes of nihilism in an uncaring universe into one that does, for all these monsters do care about humanity, working together to bring about their destruction. The main deity worshipped by the cult is an important one, with enough minions to satisfy its needs. However not all monsters are directly related to cult, such as the creatures encountered in "The Dreamer" and "The Thing in the Well", I didn't mind them at all.
Overall Day of the Beast is a great campaign, the likes of which the Call of Cthulhu game needs more of. Because of its extensive history and the global reaches of the cult, I'm surprised Chaosium hasn’t commissioned two sequel campaigns, Dark Ages Day of the Beast and Cthulhu Now Day of the Beast.
This review was originally published on http://www.yog-sothoth.com.
