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The last time that I saw Dark Ages Cthulhu was as a fan-based project online, one that had gotten a lot of word-of-mouth on rpg.net. I wound up downloading the .pdf of an early version of their rules, and I was really impressed with the way that it looked - it was almost an exact stylistic copy of Call of Cthulhu 4th edition, and it looked like a lot of effort had gone into it. I didn't wind up paying too much attention to it, though, mostly because it seemed like it was trying to integrate classical fantasy elements into the Cthulhu Mythos - at least, from what I remember. This was a long time ago.
Four months ago, I see it on the shelf as an actual trade paperback, and thought to myself "What the hell, why not?" I then thought "Exhibit A: Goatswood, Exhibit B: Unseen Masters", and so popped the book out of its plastic covering in order to have a look at it. (Comic Heaven, in Willoughby, Ohio, is not only the best comic book and game store in the state; it's also got a pretty lenient policy in terms of allowing you to pop open the comic bags that protect their games.) The first thing that I saw was a depiction and description of a headless body stretched out and vivisected on a cubical frame designed by the Mi-Go - and I thought "Ooooh, the magic is back."
See, Call of Cthulhu adventures, in my mind, have always lived or died on the strength of their ability to show you something that you couldn't have thought of yourself. Anybody can come up with "There's a Mythos creature at the bottom of the hole/in the church/on the bus" and wrap a scenario around it; but a scenario where your investigators are captured by Deep Ones and experimented on, that's something that you wouldn't necessarily expect. (It's "The Sirens of Fantari", I think, from Fatal Experiments, which I'll review later.) The ability to stretch the borders of the Mythos, to try to do a scenario based around Thomas Ligotti (in the Orient Express box) or T.E.D Klein (Landscrapes, in the otherwise awful _At Your Door_), the ability to come up with a vivid image - that's what makes Call of Cthulhu adventures truly great. And while Dark Ages Cthulhu doesn't quite live up to that, it does do a pretty good job of laying down the groundwork for Keepers to come up with their own unique visions.
One major decision that I don't like comes right off the bat, with the decision to make the game standalone. Basically, if you don't already own Call of Cthulhu, there's something wrong with you. As a matter of fact:
MACLENNAN'S NINTH LAW:
If you don't own a copy of Call of Cthulhu in some format or another, there's something wrong with you.
The game is popular enough, good enough, that ownership shouldn't be a question - and, for that matter, if you're interested in Cthulhu, you probably already own Call of Cthulhu as it is. I suspect that the basic combat rules and so forth were included not so much to provide added value, but to pad the page count out a little more.Then again, a conversion guide would have probably taken up just as much space...
When I first skimmed the book, I was wondering how they were going to handle character creation. Most Dark Age residents were illiterate peasants, with a few learned men scattered here and there - so the usual resort of rolling 3d6 + 3 for the EDU stat, normally capable of producing a man of letters, would create mercenary soldiers or serfs who knew more about the world than anybody around them in a hundred-mile radius. Slickly enough, this problem is balanced by giving each character a hundred points to spent on attributes. If you want to be one of the few men around who knows that the earth revolves around the sun, for example, then you can do so - you're just going to have to short yourself a little on something else. (Perfect opportunity to create a sickly scholar-type, really.)
Of course, there's one problem with this: POW, as a stat, is pretty much disproportionately important to a Call of Cthulhu investigator than any other stat out there. It not only allows you to resist magic of various kinds, it also boosts up your Luck roll so that you don't wind up being the first guy down the oubliette and, most importantly, puts your SAN to a level where you can reliably count on only taking 1d10 SAN loss from seeing a Great Old One rather than a whopping d100. If you can put your POW up to a healthy sixteen at the cost of losing two points in three physical skills - never important anyhow - then you can give yourself a starting SAN of 80, which is pretty damn stable.
I believe that I have a solution to this problem: You roll your POW normally, then subtract the result from the pool of 100 points that you initially get when you start making your character. That way, you don't wind up with a bunch of rock-hard characters to begin with, and there's a little more variety in people's luck and so forth.
The occupations are standard, a mixture of blue-collar jobs - minstrel, beggar, sailor, merchant - and white collar jobs - priest, scholar, warriors of various types, pilgrim. I was initially questioning the reasoning behind having, say, a woodsman as a potential occupation until I realized that the game's focus could be as much along the lines of "unwitting woodsman stumbles into danger with his friends the merchant and the local bandit" as "Father Aelfred and his pilgrims investigate Ye Olde Mythos Hoedowne". It's a nice touch, come to think of it, sort of similar to the High / Low division between parties in Cthuhu By Gaslight. (I know about that split only because The Unspeakable Oath mentioned it; Gaslight has proved rather difficult to lay hands on, at least until they put it out on drivethrurpg.com, hint hint Chaosium.)
The skill listing mostly focuses around the differences between standard Call of Cthulhu and Dark Age Cthulhu. Psychology becomes Insight, History becomes Other Kingdoms, Pharmacy becomes Potions, and a bunch of individual science skills are crushed down into a single skill called science. Languages are again split up into speaking and reading/writing, since the Dark Ages were a pretty bad time for literacy. One problem with the skills is that - okay, for example, say that you're the leading scientific light of the Dark Age. You have Science at 75%. If you go by the prevailing knowledge of the time, 90% of your knowledge is going to be nonsense, while the remaining 10% is going to be of limited value. You probably know more useless alchemy than you do about how the stars move, or why a plant is poisonous. If you go by historical accuracy, a Science skill is going to be pretty poor investment, whereas if you go for utility, you're going to be vaulting over Newton, Brahe and a host of other visionaries about five hundred years before their time. Me, I'd just disallow it as a skill, or use it as a tag skill, and rule that if you want to know how things work, take Natural History, which comes into its own as folklore and common knowledge.
The combat section: Pretty standard stuff. There's a useful section on siege warfare, like how long it takes to chop through a wooden door with an axe, or how many hit points a timber stockade has in the event that you've got a siege crossbow. The game doesn't have the ornate pacing of combat in Elfquest, or (I think) Stormbringer, with DEX ranks and all of that - it's designed to be quick and brutal. I almost wonder if introducing rules from Pendragon might gussy it up a little more, but that's assuming that you have Pendragon in the first place.
Sanity: Here, we come to a problem. Most of Lovecraft's characters live in the 1920's, when sanitariums, at the very least, exist: they may not be the best, but you could at least justify them as a story device to bring insane characters back into play. In the Dark Ages, by contrast, the closest thing you have to a sanitarium is the local church, and that may not be the best resource for getting somebody back to sanity. For example:
BROTHER AELFRED: You say that your friend has become possessed by the Devil?
PIERS PLOUGHMAN: Aye. Behold, as he raves:
ERICK THE FARMER: Phn'glui...the black caves of R'lyeh...the endless void...so dark...so dark...
BROTHER AELFRED: Indeed, 'tis demonic possession. I believe that the standard treatment calls for...yes...yes, we scourge him with fiery brands coated in scorpions, flush him out on both ends with about five gallons of holy water, which will be alternately boiling hot and ice cold, and then crush his hands and genitals with a large flat rock..
ERICK THE FARMER: Cthulhu fht - ho, say what?
BROTHER AELFRED: We're also allowed to give the scorpions holy water enemas in order to ensure that they're extra-stingy.
ERICK THE FARMER: I'M SANE! I'M SANE! DEAR LORD, I AM SANE AGAIN!
BROTHER AELFRED: Aw.
SCORPIONS: Aw.
In other words, it's not likely that somebody in the grips of insanity is going to be able to find competent medical help in the Dark Ages.
There's also a bit of a disjunct in terms of the social mindset. In the 1920's, the general consensus was that there were no monsters (unless you counted Leopold and Loeb, or Sacco and Vanzetti), that the world was essentially a safe place, and that your spiritual soul wasn't in mortal danger if you happened to whistle on the Sabbath. In the Dark Ages, Satan is always out to get you, life is brutal, messy, short and dangerous, and monsters and fairies do exist - and this is all backed up by the priest at the pulpit every Sunday. Psychoanalysis in 1920's Call of Cthulhu involves denying that monsters exist; psychoanalysis in the Dark Ages, such as it were, consists of confirming that every fear that you have is true. The book does mention that local simpletons were regarded as generally benign, but when somebody that you know to be an upstanding member of the community suddenly starts raving and clawing at his own eyes, the first thing that you're going to think is "demonic possession."
So, in a particularly flashy display of hubris, I suggest two alternatives:
(1) In the Dark Ages, there's no real psychoanaylsis available; Freud won't be born for another 800 years. And while the man of the 1920's knows that there's no such thing as monsters or witches, the average Dark Ages resident takes these as certainties. As a result, characters in the Dark Ages are equipped with a paradigm stat - whether pagan or Christian, they expect to live in a demon-haunted universe, and have adapated as a result. Your EDU + POW divided by 4 gives you a starting Paradigm score - Christianity, paganism, the Muslim faith, Coptic monk, rational thought or what have you. (Nothing really modern, like "faith in the self" - it's paganism or one of the Big Three, buddy.) After you take Sanity damage, then you match your Religion score against the amount of Sanity that you've lost. If you're successful, then you don't take any Sanity loss. If you're not, then you take the normal amount. For every ten points of SAN that you lose in-game, your Religion score drops by 2. Something like that, at least - a way for Dark Ages investigators to work against the Mythos while remaining sane enough to function for a little while.
(2) Instead of indefinite insanity, characters who go indefinitely insane become guides for the investigators who come after them - similar to the guides in _Glimmer Rats._ They're insane, but they're also privy to knowledge about the situation that their sane brethren don't. In order to reflect this, the GM gives the player of the insane character three or four "hints" about the situation, like "Something is wrong with the bishop. The other players have to know this, but they cannot confront the bishop directly or they will die," or "The monster is not living in the mill. Make sure that the group barricades the mill and stays there at all times when it's night." Of course, in the above examples, the bishop isn't a villain, but the church in which he lives has a Mythos monster living in the attic, and the mill is just a point that the character happened to find refuge when he first went insane. The hints aren't designed to give the insane investigator a free ride, but his actions can give the players hints as to where to go next.
I think that those two might make for a slightly more interesting experience in dealing with sanity, although the playtesting that I've done with them is absolutely nil.
The history section that follows is pretty good, but not great. While there's a lot of attention paid to the Catholic church and the monks who work within it, there's no overall framework provided for what's going on - the society is described, but not as much history as I'd like. There's enough information to get along, but not so much that the average GM won't feel that he has to hit the history books in order to find out more about the times in which they live. (One of the things that 7th Sea, and White Wolf to a lesser degree, did really well was to come up with a baloney version of a particular period, so you didn't have to worry about including anachronisms in an otherwise straightforward game. I miss that kind of freedom that baloney history grants.) There's also a decent glossary that fleshes out a few precepts of the Dark Ages, like the idea of indulgences, how the feudal system works - nothing in-depth, but enough to get you by.
The magic section deviates only a little bit from the original rulesbook, including both traditional occult and Cthulhu-oriented magic. I believe that the ritual rules are new to CoC, so that the cultists chanting around a fire can actually be doing something other than just praising Cthulhu - or not. The magic here is a little more folksy than your average Cthulhu magic - you can Curse or Bless either attribute or entire skill groups, heal, poison blood and so forth. The spells that don't cost any sanity don't do a whole lot, too. Heal, for example, just increases your healing rate, rather than causing a Cure Light Wounds effect. I think that the lack of a tie-in with the original book hurts this one, to be honest, because there's a lot of spells in the main CoC rulebook that fit quite nicely into this time period.
One argument that I had in regards to sanity loss in this period is actually nerfed by the existence of the Exaltation spell, which is going to be the staple in every Dark Ages adventuring party. Exaltation costs twelve magic points to restore 1d6 Sanity for twenty-four hours, and, if you blow a point of POW, it also relieves the effects of indefinite insanity permanently. It's a little...kludgy in terms of the benefits that it grants, but there's at least some kind of valve allowed to mitigate the effects of temporary and indefinite insanity. (Have an entire church do multiple castings, and you've neatly simulated the "let's get pumped up at church, then go get that monster" feel of medieval adventuring.)
Astral travel is allowed in the game, for the first time to my knowledge; we get rules for travelling and fighting within limbo, along with a description of the ultimate abyss, where Yog-Sothoh lives. Charmingly enough, the details of what happens when you find yourself in the ultimate abyss have the same italicized, purple prose as Lovecraft would use whenever he revealed some awful cosmic truth to the world. It's a nice touch.
The bestiary contains a mixure of fantasy creatures and Mythos entites, but there's a lot of intelligent design going into it. The unicorn, for example, is described in its mythic context, and then instructs the Keeper to use the stats for the white rhinoceros. The Mythos monsters are fairly standard, but they're given some of the best Mythos art that I've seen in a while - the ghoul, especially, is fantastic. We also get the Dark Ones, possessors who animate dead human bodies and dwell within cairns and tombs. Their natural lack of POW means that they can't do magic, but they "seem to be able to forge all kinds of artifacts, which allow them to open Gates without spells, to animate lifeless machines, and to modify living beings in forbidding ways." It doesn't take a lot of effort to imagine investigating a Dark One settlement, carved from the interior of an ancient cairn, with strange, alien artifacts posted along its lightless streets. It's reallty top-notch stuff.
Of course, there are decisions that I disagree with. Doels, vaguely referenced in one of Frank Belknap Long's tales, are described and statted, but the result doesn't so much edify as it annoys. When the doels are mentioned in the story, it's in the context of a man describing his explorations of some sort of occult metaspace, a mixture of physical place and conceptual analogy that he's trying to progress through. The primary focus of Call of Cthulhu is that the Mythos is alien and unknowable; statting out the unknown leads you to the impression that all of the weird references made are simply a catalog of monsters, looked up as easily as any library book.
And, just to make sure that everybody is completely and totally confused, the "Old Ones" - not the Great Old Ones, just Old Ones - are now a seperate Mythos race. The level of confusion that classification is going to cause is going to be Biblical in scale. The Tomb-Herd sound pretty cool, but their description is baffling unless you read it several times. (Their description in the Campbell story has them as white, gelatinous things; whereas Dark Ages has them as immaterials spirits that possess people in order to feed on some weird emanation that comes from corpses.) Bugg-Shash, a Great Old One created by Lumley is included - and really, it's time to stop pretending that Lumley is an honest Mythos writer, 'cause he ain't. We also have Lilith described as a Great Old One, which actually works pretty well within the context. Actually, there's a lot of figures from Christian mythology that are described in Mythos terms - angels, Satan, dragons and so forth. (I love the idea that medieval women would hide their hair so as not to arouse the lust of angels - the book makes a fantastic point of drawing a parallel between that and the weird GOO/human hybrids of Lovecraft's tales.)
The adventure that rounds out the book, "The Tomb" is a weird one. First off, it has two Mythos races working in tandem - a Dark One working with the Mi-Go. The two races don't really go together - the Dark Ones are malevolent, subterranean body possessors, while the Mi-Go are alien scientists who consider humanity as either potential co-exploratrors or guinea pigs. Throwing the two of them together into the same adventure is like throwing Freddy Krueger into the same story as Norman Bates - they're two different styles of horror, even though they occupy the same space, so to speak. It's that kind of mixture that generates Mythos Hoedowns, and I think that the adventure would have been a lot stronger if it had just stuck with one or the other.
Anyways. The adventure focuses around the city of Laa, in the German wilderness; thanks to the cessation of the slave trade in the area, the local Mythos beasties are getting frisky in where they get their bodies from. After investigating a slaughtered village, the investigators proceed to their destination - except that a black stone on one of the bodies is absolutely invaluable to the Dark One. It isn't a really vivid scenario; what it is, though, is solid as a rock. Rather than focusing on Mythos creatures, a lot of the scenario involves dealing with the locals and their factional conflicts. The clues are pretty straightforward, there's some nice spooky scenes throughout, and the climax - the exploration of the Mi-go caverns, along with the aforementioned revelation of what happened to Brother Gudman - is not bad at all. Special points go to the Dark One's pit, where the sloping ground is composed of rotting corpses and mud in equal amounts.
I will note some things wrong with it. Brun, the sixteen-year old daughter of the innkeep, had might as well be equipped with a pretty red shirt from the moment that she's met; making her attractive is going to make experienced investigators think "Oh, yeah, she's a goner." In addition, there's a scene where she, while possessed by the Dark One, attempts to seduce an investigator. Once the seduction gets going, the Dark One inside of her tries to enter in through the investigator's back door, which the book describes in horrified tones. I leave it as an exercise in how well you know your players as to whether the reaction is going to be "Oh my God! It's some kind of alien creature trying to cornhole me!" or "Oh my God! I have _so_ got to marry this chick!"
I think that the scenario would have benefitted from having either one Mythos type or another. I wish that I could remember where, but somebody pointed out that the Mi-Go are _very much_ like medieval descriptions of fairies or fair folk - cruel, alien, able to replace people or whisk them away to strange lands, and baffling in their outlook. I don't believe, to the best of my knowledge, that the book makes the connection - or maybe it does, and I missed it. Either way, it's a fantastic idea, and I wish that I could rememebr where it came from. Enterprising Keepers could probably just trim away the details of the Mi-Go pit from the Dark One's pit and make it a better adventure as a result.
Is it any good? It's decent. It's not everything that it could have been, and there's big gaps that I wish had been filled with something else, but it's got a lot of potential. For example, I'd love to create a Canterbury Tales-style campaign, with each supposed survivor recounting a tale of the Mythos and how he survived - or didn't. If nobody survives, then the person telling the tale is the animated corpse of a participant, or a Mi-Go imposter, or some-such - like an anthology movie. Trimming away the unneeded rules and including another adventure, or more source material, might have made this an all-time classic; as it is, it's worth your money if you're interested in the period.
-Darren MacLennan
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