Out of all of the Call of Cthulhu supplements that I’ve read, this is one of the best.

For sheer range of travel, The Great Old Ones can’t be beat – there’s places that the investigators go that’ll drop the jaw of even the most jaded investigator. It has a gutload of imagination, enough for the stronger scenarioes to make up for the weaker ones, but the weaker ones suffer in comparison.

The first scenario, “The Spawn”, has the least descriptive – and least imaginative – name, but it makes up for it with an interesting adventure set in a New Mexican mining town. Not only are you facing off against a particular race of Mythos monsters, you’re also under the stigma of being related to the Wobblies – the International Workers of the World – in a town where labor agitation isn’t exactly willing. To boot, there’s also another Mythos horror hanging around that’s friendly to the local native population. And the local mining concern just happens to be involved with both.

There’s a lot of good detail here. The Wobblies are probably the best example, engaging in the kind of labor agitation that was a part of the 1920s – rather than just being background, it’s something that the investigators may have to directly deal with. Their enemies in this scenario are remarkably powerful, to the point where investigators may be forced to deal with the enemy one at a time, using high explosives. A “magic bullet” would be nice, although I imagine that most investigators will be able to capitalize on the monster’s weakness in order to destroy it. The art is also pretty good, featuring investigators surprised by the sudden appearance of the monster in the scenario. The looks on their faces are going to be familiar to the players, I imagine…

“Still Waters” is a fun scenario, just for atmosphere alone. Focusing around a search for an old book in the Louisiana swamps, it’s fairly short, starting off with a massacre and ending in an exploration of a “haunted” house. There’s some good stuff here, including the souveneirs of a couple closely involved with the Mythos – a Byakhee doll, for example – and a basement which has plenty of creepy details of its own. The final confrontation is supposed to straddle the line between “humor and terror”. That’s easily done, but it could slip into minor silliness if the Keeper doesn’t keep an eye on it. (And having it occur at night, instead of in broad daylight, will help immensely.)

The standout scenario is “Tell Me, Have You Seen The Yellow Sign?” – an adventure that exemplifies everything that Call of Cthulhu can be. Instead of a boogieman with mysterious motives, the villain of this piece has a clear motive for what he’s doing – that makes it that much more horrific. There’s signs of Mythos activity everywhere, but only the investigators will know it. There’s scenes of horror that are simultaneously horrifiying and beautiful, which is one of the things that I love about Call of Cthulhu. There’s plenty of oppurtunities to stop the monster, but he isn’t a pushover. And there’s a scene at the end of the scenario that lets the investigators know just how screwed they are if they haven’t stopped the monster by now. Classic stuff – this could be a primer for how to write a good Call of Cthulhu adventure, or how to structure one.

“One in Darkness” is another great adventure, combining gangsters with the standard Mythos jack-knife – Nyarlathotep, whose thousand forms have been catalogued extensively by Chaosium. Complaints about villain repetition aside, tbis is a cracklingly good scenario. Think of the lowlifes from “Miller’s Crossing” with supernatural aid; except that instead of being in charge, they’re messing with forces that they don’t understand. Net result: Bloodbath for the cops, bloodbath for the gangsters, and the investigators get to be sandwiched in the middle of all of this fun.

Truth be told, I wish that there’d been more attention paid to the gangster aspects of this scenario – the investigation is excellent, featuring a pair of NPC’s that will likely frustrate the characters, and a villain behind the scenes that nobody will expect, but there’s something irresistably…genre about the idea of gangsters backed by demons. Then again, it would

“The Pale God” is one of the less successful attempts referenced to earlier. It opens up with a tremendous bang – a horrifying scene involving the death of a friend, which is rapidly gaining status as the Number One Call of Cthulhu cliché. In this case, though, the death is directly witnessed, horrific, and is supported by excellent line art. Not bad to start with – but the adventure descends into investigation followed by a dungeon crawl where navigation is determined by dice rolls. (Not a bad thing, since there’s no way to map an enormous, supernaturally complex labyrinth.) But the scenario peters out about halfway through – there’s some good information about the Great Old One in the labyrinth, and there’s some interesting material on the ritual that this Old One likes to do, but there’s no definite end to the scenario besides killing the Great Old One and escaping out of the other end of the labyrinth. It’s more of a transition to the next scenario, but the scenario would do better without a fixed conclusion, bringing a seed for a future scenario from this. It could have been better.

The final scenario, “Bad Moon Rising”,  is the best of the lot – it’s the most vivid and the most expansive in scope, moving the investigators from England to…well, that would be spoiling the surprise. Let’s put it this way: It’ll be remembered for the initial shock of the first transition; the rest is going to blow investigators out of their seats entirely. Skillfully constructed, bringing many different aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos under a single umbrella, and featuring some of the most imaginative stuff that I’ve ever seen in an adventure – a visit to an alien-constructed complex inspired by “Forbidden Planet”, a long-reaching plot of the Great Race, alien surgeries – it’s difficult to discuss this adventure without spoling the surprise.

So here’s spoilers; swipe to see them: Not only do the characters wind up travelling through a gate to a ruined complex on the surface of the fucking moon, they wind up exploring a temple of the Great Race which has lain fallow – and then the Great Race wake up, imprison the investigators, and let them out again when the entire fucking human race is extinct. After the characters spend some time exploring the alien environment that they’re in, they’re tossed into a time machine in order to witness the heat death of the fucking universe, after which point they watch it being rebuilt from the ground up and wind up in the exact same position that they were in before they started – unless the Keeper decides that he wants to put a Martian tripod on the horizon, or have people eat with lizard tongues, or have humanity already half-corrupted by the Mythos and thoroughly insane. This is the kind of adventure that everybody will remember for, oh, just about forever.

Tom Sullivan contributes some absolutely amazing artwork to this book, especially the surreal-but-it-feels-like-it-could-happen painting of a Great Old One devouring silent masses of people in an alien cavern. It’s an amazing image, and followed up with some pretty decent line work within.

 Is it worth buying? Initially, when I was first writing this review, I said that yeah, it is worth buying – the showpiece of Call of Cthulhu adventures. On second glance, though, some of the adventures suffer from lackluster endings (One in Darkness has all the setup, but no followthrough; The Pale God is just kinda…blah.) But look: Any book that has Bad Moon Rising and Tell Me, Have you Seen the Yellow Sign? is worth the money that you’ll spend to get it at DriveThruRPG. And with a bunch of other interesting ideas packed in for the ride, it’s eminently worth your time. Go buy it.

-Darren MacLennan