Goatswood: Oh, We Wanted It
Ramsey Campbell's Goatswood, Chaosium's supplement for Call of Cthulhu based on the Severn Valley Mythos of British horror writer J. Ramsey Campbell was, by many people, eagerly awaited.

That included me. I'd just got back into role-playing games after a six-year hiatus and the discovery that Chaosium were going to bring out a supplement based on Ramsey Campbell's peculiarly British take on the Mythos was really quite exciting. Campbell's stories are regarded by many as being some of the better post-Lovecraft Mythos stories, particularly the likes of Cold Print, The Tugging, The Faces at Pine Dunes and Before the Storm (in a nice touch, the full title of the Chaosium supplement, Ramsey Campbell's Goatswood and less pleasant places, is a reference to Campbell's original Mythos collection The Inhabitant of the Lake, and Less Welcome Tenants).

There had been a buzz for some years: Scott David Aniolowski and friends had been working on it for ten years. Pagan Pbublishing and Chaosium had both been involved in the project. The whole thing was a labour of love on the part of a group of talented and dedicated individuals. Hell, they even got Ramsey Campbell himself to write an introduction, making it the only Cthulhu book with an endorsement from the author of the fiction on which it is based. Can you blame us for expecting something special?

When it came out, it was slammed. really horrendously slammed. It seemed like everybody hated the thing. You'd have thought it was one of the biggest travesties ever turned into a role-playing supplement, the reception it got.

Did it really deserve that?

The Artifact
The book is a 276-page softback, on nice white paper. Its production values are top-notch. In terms of readability and style, the writing is of a high standard, and the editing is just fine. The artwork, by Drashi Khendup and Paul Carrick, is also of a pretty decent standard. Carrick in particular supplies some excellent full-page illos - the ones of The Keeper of the Moon-Lens and Y'Golonac are particularly good, and hit just the right tone. The cover illustration goes for a sort af "sinister in an abstract sort of way" vibe, and doesn't do too badly.

The Start of the Book, or "the Good Parts"
After ten pages of introductions and a very detailed table of contents (there is also a useable index, too, which is another point in the book's favour), Goatswood begins with 47 pages of sourcebook material. The four pages on life in Britain are really just there because they have to be - any keeper worth his salt who's got the book is either going to get hold of other information about everyday life (like the Lonely Planet guide, for example) or they live there already. The two pages on gun laws are a welcome reminder to trigger-happy gamers that in Britain, only terrorists and criminals have handguns (and that if you've got one, the Police are likely to think you're one or the other unless you've got a very, very good excuse).

There's a listing of monsters, mostly - but not entirely - drawn from Ramsey Campbell's stories. The descriptions of the monsters from the core rulebook which are of relevance in the book are reprinted here, as are all the relevant monsters from the Creature Companion. I know that some have attacked this approach on the grounds of wasting space, but I really hate buying a supplement only to find it's unuseable unless you have half a dozen others. Having it all in one place is good, in my opinion.

Some of the monster descriptions are a wee bit unimaginative or literalist (for example, in William Hope Hodgson's story The Hog, it says that the protagonist saw one eye of the monster. That doesn't mean that the beast Saaitii should only have one eye, right? And why is Lrogg, the bat-god of L'gy'hx, suddenly an avatar of Nyarlathotep?) but on the whole it's a perfectly workmanlike list of beasties. The Goatswood Gnomes, by the way, are very stupid indeed, but that is entirely Ramsey Campbell's fault.Likewise, the spells are, well, a set of Mythos spells, which pretty much show why Call of Cthulhu isn't like other games, and why the Keeper never lets the players know what a spell does until they cast it (like the "protective ritual" which requires a permanent stat loss from the caster, only to produce a protective field that doesn't actually keep much out at all).

The section on books incudes a few new books, and more detailed descriptions of a few books from the main rulebook, including a volume-by-volume breakdown of The Revelations of Glaaki, telling you what's in it and detailing individual SAN loss and Mythos bonuses for each volume and every edition. Which is good.

Stats and descriptions of new spells are repeated throughout the book when they're necessary, so that there's a bare minimum of page-flipping. I appreciate the criticism that this is a waste of space, but it's a deliberate format decision, but for me, it scores for ease of use.

The section on Campbell Country is brief, but again, a decent overview for what it is. It's nice to have a map of the region.

The Adventures
The bulk of the book is made up with eight adventures, beginning with an introductory chapter which provides a framing device. Unfortunately, the framing device can be summed up as "one of the investigators inherits an old mansion under which Something Awful Is Sleeping", a device which was old when they started writing the book. Not great, but as I've said in other reviews, in a medium which depends on the derivative as much as role-playing games do, a cliché done well is better than a new idea done badly, and this is, well, all right, in a Dark Shadows sort of way. It depends on how much your players' suspension of disbelief will carry, I suppose.

Most of the adventures are all right, in terms of plot. None of them set the world on fire, if you know what I mean. Certainly nothing as truly marvellous as The Truth Will Set You Free from Unseen Masters, or Artifact Zero from Project Rainbow, anyway.

The best of the adventures are The Watcher Out of Time, a pretty good time-travel head trip, and Cross My Heart, Hope to Die, a creepy little tale involving a group of evil chiuldren and the Spawn of Eihort. Unpleasant Dreams, although flawed in its really rather heavy-handed take on sexual deviance, has some moments of great creepiness, while the obligatory "certain death" adventure, Blessed Be, is pretty much a homage to The Wicker Man as much as it is to Campbell (and yes, I do mean almost certain death. But then, Cthulhu is a game where this sort of thing is practically expected. The trick is to have them enjoy themselves while they're being dragged down to hell screaming their lungs out. Power gamers need not apply). Homage is also present in Silent Scream, which features film director John Carpenter as a minor suppporting character, and which draws its central plot device from Carpenter's The Thing.

Less succesful are Of Dreams and Dark Waters and Third Time's The Charm, although that's more because their plot depends on nuclear power plants, student politics, building projects and employment law not being like they actually are in the UK.

The adventure that works the least is Gothic, where datedness and a foreigner's eye view of Britain work together to make it unplayable. Had this been published back in 1991 when it was supposed to have been, it would probably have been quite highly thought of as an attempt to try something different with a Cthulhu adventure. But the whole thing with sympathetic vampires, took off, took over the role-playing industy and had descended well into the stuff of cliché by the time Goatswood was published. And while Goth was still ali- er, undead when the adventure was written, it's well and truly staked now. Compare the adventure The Evil Stars in the original Cthulhu Now book: at the time quite well received, and now fondly remembered, but so very Eighties. Same problem.

Gothic's real problem lies in its portrayal of British life. It's badly damaged by its supporting cast, which revolves around a family of religious fundamentalists who bear no resemblance whatsoever to Britain's own breed of evangelical Christians and a mad Catholic monk, who, notwithstanding the fact that British evangelicals are mainly anti-Catholic, somehow manages to convince the family that he's got the right idea. Eh?

In fact, the one thing that drags the substance rating of the book right down is just that: it's written by people who know something about what Britain is like, but who don't know the details. The writers have no idea of how the British authorities would deal with an actual nuclear leak (clue: in a really extreme fashion). They supply a list of names for a gang of Camside children, none of which would be seen on any provincial British kid. Renee? Allison with two "l"s? Herbie? The student activists (and student activism is itself a dated concept) on whom two adventures depend are called Students Against Nuclear Energy - it's a good acronym, but the "Students Against..." construction is completely alien to UK English. Meanwhile, the dependence on student organisations on their local branch of the NUS and the nature of student societies would mean that the inclusion of a fourteen-year-old computer whiz and an undercover member of the Real IRA a bit silly. And what about that terrorist guy? Where's his cell? Whay the hell would his cover involve hanging around with a group of student activists (I don't know what they think in the US, but in the UK, "student activist" is pretty much synonymous with "ineffectual layabout"). And what about that bloke who's clearly on the Paedophile Register but who is nonetheless working as a foreman on a building site? No chance. He'd never get the job.

Many of the adventures can be rescued with a little work, but those which depend on dated or inaccurate setting information (namely Gothic, Third Time's the Charm and Dreams and Dark Waters) can't really be saved without major overhauls.

So... You don't like it, then?
This is the part where I wave my hand and hem and haw. I really want to like it. It's clearly a ten-year labour of love on the part of Scott Aniolowski, Gary Sumpter and the others. The amount of efort that has gone into this package shines through again and again. But... the ten-year delay has made some things no longer relevant (Goth is dead, and Inspector Blakes? Leopard skin is so 1992). The inevitably rather dated nature of the sourcebook is, however, more the publishers' fault than the authors', so while I have to take it into account, I can't judge too harshly. I think the book also suffered in comparison to Delta Green: Countdown, which covers on much of the same material, although concentrating more on politics and intelligence, thus avoiding the problem of minutiae.

And minutiae is where the real failure of the book lies. It simply can't convince anyone from Britain that it's authentically British. Which is a bit of a flaw in a product in a role-playing game line which prides itself on its authenticity.