And so to business.

“Toying with Humans” is another in the series of author edited Monographs that Chaosium have put out in the last two years. The format is rather basic, a 120 page softback book bound with tape and printed in black and white. The quality of the cover illustration is rather limited, as is that of the many handouts and maps throughout the book. On the other hand, this book only cost $20 for 120 pages. So far I’ve played three of the scenarios and run three. With an average of 5 players per game, that works out at around $0.666 per game per person. Perhaps more proof that Jack Chick was right to be worried.

The four scenarios in the book were written by the guys who run Shoggoth.net. I had the good fortune to meet them all at Origins and they ran some of the finest Call of Cthulhu I’ve ever played. If they ever got together with the Kult of Keepers from the UK to run something, I’m sure that the overflowing bounty of gaming goodness that would result from such an encounter would melt clean through Heroclix at 90 yards.

The scenarios in this book are on the short side and you would expect to play through them in one four hour session each. That is, if you can stay focussed and don’t jump around the room like asylum inmates, more of which later. So here we go with the reviews.

Where Byakhees Dare by Tyler Hudak.
The title says it all really. A small crack troop of commandos dressed as Wehrmacht officers are parachuted into Switzerland … Switzerland? Didn’t they have 500 years of democracy and invent the Cuckoo Clock. I don’t recall much in the way of evil Nazi tentacles in the land of cheese and chocolate. Never mind, it’s not a biggie.

When they parachute into their objective, our crack troops deal with the usual mix of Cthulhu nasties: cultists, Byakhees (duh!) etc. This is a pretty straight version of the action Cthulhu variant. Various tooled up and competent player characters deal with the mundane job of outwitting Nazis and then encounter something for which they could never really be prepared.

If you want a game of Cthulhu for players more used to the kind of action challenge offered by 3e or Spycraft, of if you just want to sit back and act out silly German and British (or in our case American) accents for a few hours, kick some Nazi butt and get all squided up then you can do much worse than this scenario. It’s a solid start to the collection, but not a risky one.

When I ran this game I changed the end. It was a bit too vanilla for my tastes so I gave the Investigators more of a moral choice to make. I always find that enlivens a game.

I give this B. A solid start.

Reborn to Die by Tony Fragge.
When a professor runs by your frat house and asks you to help chase someone who might be her boyfriend, do you help out? When it happens to be your favourite female professor on whom you’ve got a crush, of course you do.

Later when you have cause to do a spot of entering if not breaking for said foxy professor, will the fact that you’ve got failing grades and could do with a friend on the inside mean that you won’t just call the police instead? Of course it will.

And such background in the character sheets is all that stops this being one of my favourite one-shot Cthulhu adventures.

One of the hardest things for a Cthulhu game is to think of a justification for the characters to come together and deal with the mystery without calling the police. In AD&D the vague promise of a treasure map was usually enough but Cthulhu players demand a little more verisimilitude. In one-shot games this is especially important. The best way of achieving this is to have characters who have decent hooks for getting involved in the game. Sure the players will to a certain extent be expected to adhere to the conventions of the genre, but if they’ve got solid character reasons for doing so then even better. As such, the characters that you get with this adventure are a little disappointing and at some points during this game, both when I played it at Origins and ran it with my group, we had to work rather hard to avoid doing the sensible plot destroying thing. But then, these are quibbles which can easily be overcome by the clued in Keeper. So, onto the scenario itself.

Even minor HPL-ophiles (or -crafties maybe), will probably know in an instant the kind of thing that is going to happen in a scenario whose title contains the word ‘reborn’. You don’t have to be Jeffrey Combs. On the other hand, given that suspense is knowing what’s going to happen, but not when, that kind of insight actually helps with this scenario.

There are perhaps a few minor tweaks needed in the middle game, to make sure the characters encounter the full evil of Tony’s plot, and perhaps some less obvious signposting but these changes are well worth making because what you have here, Lloigors and Ghouls, is a nice bit of reworking of several Lovecraftian ideas into a very satisfying scenario.

I give this A-. Almost the full package.

Funk-a-thulhu by Matt Wiseman.
It’s the 70s man. Dig those crazy shoes, wide lapels, big hair, oh, and the dead prostitute in the alley. This scenario is a bit of an oddity in Cthulhu terms. Sure you’re looking for the perpetrator of a murder in the seedy side of LA but there’s really not a lot to the plot. In fact the whole thing is only 6 pages long.

When we played it at Origins we had a really good 70’s vibe going between the various professions that were represented in the team hired by the LAPD to do the investigation. It’s a shame that these characters are not reproduced in the book because it was that interplay that made the scenario work for us.

With my usual group, we’re a little less focussed, we talk more, cook and eat supper and our approach is mostly less immersive. So when it came to running this game we finished it in about 2½ hours which is a little on the short side for a one-shot. There are suggestions for padding out the game but you can only have so many red herrings before the players start to get antsy. That said, the protagonists are interesting and a departure from the norm and the ending has a definite diabolical flavour.

I give this B+, some good ideas but needs a bit more depth.

Crazy Block by David Noal.
You’re crazy and you need help. Talon Therapy will look after you. They have a special new treatment just for people like you. And they get results.

First you must understand that this game, as played by 6 of us in the Cthulhu final at Origins, was one of the most intense roleplaying experiences I have ever had. We played tabletop for about 10 minutes, and then Pete started walking round with his cane in his hand looking a hamster short of a petshop. And we all thought “whoa, I don’t want him to get piece of me” and backed off. He threw us the ball and we ran with it. From a one GM, six player regular roleplaying experience it became a 6 player, four GM madhouse – all four of the guys who wrote these scenarios.

So my review is obviously tainted by such a massively positive experience.

But then, lets look at the facts. There are 7 pages detailing NPCs. This might sound overwhelming for a player or Keeper, but the information is presented in such a way that makes them easy to use in the game. These are not mere listings of stats and background but information on likely actions during the game.

Each player character is described fairly concisely which gives enough information to allow entry into the game but also lets the player decide on the ultimate direction for their PC.

There are also 12 pages of handouts which range from academic journals to medical notes to occupational therapy activities for the inmates. The former are pretty good value although perhaps give slightly too much information. In particular the handouts on pages 117 and 118 was accidentally left out of our game but it didn’t suffer for it. On the contrary, these give just a bit too much information but as a Keeper you could keep them back, handing them out only if the group is not really progressing. And the therapeutic activities are just a hoot and well worth trying out for real in the game.

The scenario itself is 24 pages long, 9 of which is background, the rest events in the facility. I think that if you are running it you are going to have to take a rather loose approach to the game, the player characters have a large amount of freedom as to how they respond to events and so as a keeper it is probably important to bear this in mind and accept good player solutions to challenges, even if they aren’t the ones in the book. I think that’s the approach that Dave and the Shoggoth gang took when the ran it for us.

I give this scenario A+.

Overall this is a very solid adventure pack with four very different games that each have sufficient links to the established Mythos canon to make them attractive fans of the genre but with enough twists that they can entertain even the most hardened Call of Cthulhu veteran like myself.

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