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I finally got to run a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Ever since I was a player in Masks of Nyarlathotep I have been dying to get behind the screen and control the machinations of an evil cult myself. The steep out-of-print prices for the old classics kept this from happening however. But then a new campaign, Tatters of the King, appeared in Chaosium’s release schedule. So I picked it up and ran it for my group. This is my review of our game. Naturally, a review of an adventure will contain serious spoilers, so if you are intending to play Tatters as a player, you should read no further.
To sum up my opinion of Tatters, it is Cthulhu done right. That is not to say that it is better than the other campaigns or one-offs, or that there is anything wrong about the other adventures. My point is that Tatters takes the basic themes of Cthulhu, cultists, summonings, asylum inmates, inhuman gods – the clichés of the game almost – and brings them to life and makes them fresh. It does them right.
Hopefully the rest of my review will properly explain what I mean by that.
Overview
Tatters focuses on Hastur and related topics, namely the King in Yellow, the play The King in Yellow, the Yellow Sign and the doomed city Carcosa. While it focuses on these, it also takes in certain other Mythos elements, such as the Severn Valley (from the work of Ramsey Campbell), Tcho-Tchos and Chaugnar Faugn, and incorporates these elements very smoothly in my opinion. However, it not only features Hastur, but also plays up themes associated with Hastur, such as madness, uncertainty, unease and influences on artists.
The first half or so of the adventure is based in Britain, and much of that in London. The second half takes place in the Severn Valley and then abroad in Italy, on a cruise liner, in the subcontinent – the Himalayas notably – and then finally on the Plateau of Leng.
Synopsis
The story in Tatters in fact begins with a showing of a version of the play The King in Yellow. This episode is largely peripheral to the story, though it does set the scene for the story as a whole. It does this by introducing certain things that are prominent in Tatters. Namely, the showing of the play evokes madness and hints at tension waiting to be released, as well as a measure of obscurity (one scene in the play is seen differently by different members of the audience, but it is not easy to see what should be made of the different viewed scenes or the differences between them).
The story proper starts after the play. The investigators are asked to investigate into an asylum inmate. Here they learn about a cult that wants to summon Hastur to Earth. The cult succeeds in summoning the city of Carcosa to Earth, though the investigators will probably foil their efforts to bring Hastur to Carcosa (and Earth). Several months pass. The investigators then learn, from an encounter with another cult in the Severn Valley, that a splinter member of the Hastur cult is still pursuing Hastur and has moved to Italy. Investigations in Italy lead the investigators to the Himalayas via India. In the Himalayas the investigators briefly encounter Chaugnar Faugn and then are transported to the Plateau of Leng in the Dreamlands (I presume), meeting the missing cultist. At the end of the long trek through the Himalayas, across the Plateau of Leng and through a temple situated on the plateau, the investigators meet Hastur as the King in Yellow. Hastur wants someone to take him to Earth and the investigators must resist his demands in order to save the Earth from his corrupting influence.
I have of course skipped over much of the details of the adventure, but you can see that it is a very simple and mostly straightforward story. Simplifying it even more the story is this: Investigators learn of cult, foil its efforts, look into its further activities, encounter a Great Old One. This could almost be the template for the prototypical Cthulhu story.
The adventure
In the Cthulhu spectrum, Tatters sits very much at the investigation-orientated end. In fact, it is almost action-averse. The pace is gradual. Not slow necessarily, but measured. This is in keeping with the source material (as I imagine it – I never got around to doing the supplementary reading). The pace of the game certainly contributes to the gloomy, melancholic mood of the adventure.
A tragic, menacing ambience is a critical feature of the adventure. It is accentuated by the NPCs, so many of who are associated with loss, uncertainty and dispiritedness, and the gothic locations, such as St Agnes’ Asylum standing lonely on a hilltop, mist-shrouded Lake Mullardoch and the sorrowful city of Carcosa.
But the atmosphere isn’t just suggested by the locations and NPCs. It is palpable. The adventure takes place at a time when Hastur is unusually close to the Earth. His proximity causes a measure of madness and tension in the people of Earth, particularly the artistic. This manifests in the game by certain investigators having disturbing, cryptic dreams. They also observe the effects on other people who are affected by the proximity of Hastur.
The keeper is helped in evoking this atmosphere by a well-drawn back story and plenty of contextual information.
A good keeper can make great use of this atmosphere and the rich background to the adventure. One of the small triumphs of my game was scaring an artist character by having him discover that the dreamscapes he had been painting were identical to those of another painter, showing that they had both been inspired by the same unearthly visions. And a better keeper than me could have done so much more.
The measured pace of the adventure also acts to build tension and menace. It wasn’t until the fourth episode of our game that the investigators had their first direct encounter with a Mythos creature. Perhaps that isn’t so unusual, but there was certainly an effort made to tone down encounters with the Mythos, not only in having few such encounters, but by having them be more threatening than dangerous. In this first encounter, a byakhee kills an NPC in front of the investigators, but it doesn’t attack the investigators themselves. Most of the other encounters are similar, Mythos creatures are presented as dangerous, not as obstacles to be overcome by the investigators.
I was particularly impressed with the encounters with the Great Old Ones. There are three such encounters in this adventure, but they are handled well. The first encounter with Hastur in Carcosa emphasises the effects on the investigators, Chaugnar Faugn is only presented as a menacing presence (unless the players are unlucky, and one of mine was) and the final encounter with the King in Yellow is suitably momentous. At a risk of trivialising him, The King is presented rather anthropomorphised. However, this is quite effective as it gives the investigators something to relate to, which is critical since the encounter, and the climax of the adventure, is so much more about the investigators’ choices and reactions to the King than their sanity rolls. This last part of the adventure can be very, very powerful.
The other thing that the adventure does well – perhaps its greatest strength – is drawing very believable characters and fitting them together in a nicely crafted back story. Also, as I mentioned above, the personalities and circumstances of the NPCs contribute to the mood. For example, two of the NPCs are ex-partners of cultists, both with their own little tragedies of failure and betrayal.
The most impressive is the character Quarrie, the cultist encountered on the Plateau of Leng. In my game, while the investigators knew that Quarrie was dangerous and suspected he was deluded, there was so much depth in the character that they had as much reason to believe his fallacies about Hastur as they had to kill him for those beliefs. They had a raging debate that culminated with one character trying to kill him, one trying to save him and another vacillating, first helping one and then the other of his companions.
In brief, the mood is ominous, the background is carefully crafted, the Mythos creatures are handled with a degree of subtlety and the cultists come across as real people. All of these points, combined with the simplicity and narrow focus of the story, contribute to the greatest achievement of Tatters: it takes the outlandish story of cultists summoning an evil god to Earth, and makes it almost credible. I guess this is what I mean when I say it is Cthulhu done right.
Criticisms
Several issues came up in our playtest.
As keeper, I found the adventure quite linear. The investigation is essentially a matter of connecting the dots: finding one clue and moving to the next. In some way this is necessary, as events advance in parallel with the investigation. There was also a feeling amongst some of the players that they could investigate all they liked, but that things would only move forward when certain letters were received from NPCs. I’m not sure I entirely agree with that point, but I can see how it can be perceived that way. Quite a bit of important information is revealed in letters from NPCs, but in only one case is action precluded by the investigators (specifically, getting access to the cultist Bacon) until a letter is received (informing the investigators when Bacon will leave his house). The investigation may have been more satisfying if there was more significant information to be gained from research.
Another issue with the adventure is the obscurity of some of the flavour text. Throughout the adventure, selected investigators have dreams or visions. The dreams are very mysterious and do much to build the mood. However, they are quite detailed and appear to have a cryptic meaning. They are also presented in two halves, as if the second half reveals something that the first doesn’t. But in the end the dreams don’t seem to mean anything. The players can try to analyse them as much as they like but they won’t learn anything from them. If the players realise this, the impact of the dreams is lessened.
A very satisfying aspect of the adventure is the fact that the thread of the investigation doesn’t depend so much on the players’ dice rolls, but more on their decisions and ability to follow the clues. However, the thread can get lost at a couple of points and the keeper may have to take care that the investigators get enough information. (Note that the rest of this paragraph may only make sense if you have the adventure.) The first of these points is in finding the location of the ceremony that the cultists will perform to summon Hastur to Carcosa at the end of the first half of the adventure. It is very important that all of the investigators travel together to Lake Mullardoch, where Carcosa has been summoned. However, it wasn’t clear to my players that they had to travel to Mullardoch. Mullardoch came up, but without all the clues there was no real indication that the ceremony would be held there, in fact, Springer Mound, the location of an earlier ceremony, seemed a more likely venue. So I had to hit them with the last definitive clue (in a letter from an NPC, natch). The adventure can also get derailed somewhat at the point where the action moves to Italy. It is not that the adventure doesn’t point to Italy – the clues clearly indicate that the cultist Quarrie has gone to Milan – however, it wasn’t apparent to all of my players that things had been sufficiently resolved in Britain. Specifically, there was still the Severn Valley cult to deal with. A significant point of the adventure is the need to tie up loose ends, namely to find out what happened to Quarrie, so players may assume that the Severn Valley cult is another loose end that must be resolved.
One big decision the keeper has to make is how to handle the long break between the two halves of the adventure. For about six months, Hastur’s influence on the Earth wanes, which forms an extended break in the campaign. After that time passes, the disturbing dreams start to reoccur and it is clear to the investigators that they have more work to do. It really isn’t satisfactory to skim over the passing time, as I ended up doing. When I explained to the players that the investigators were starting to have dreams once more, they got anxious and rushed off to investigate again, which lead to them missing a whole small section of the adventure. In retrospect, I wish I had prepared a low-key, non-Mythos adventure to fill the gap. This would have wound down the tension of the first half of the campaign and put some distance from the early investigations. Ideally, when the investigators begin to experience the dreams again, they should feel like they have to pick up the threads of the investigation, rather then just carry on where they left off.
Summary
Tatters of the King is a very good Call of Cthulhu campaign. It was a great success when I ran it. The ending in particular was quite staggering and impressed us all. It left me a little emotionally stunned really.
So impressed am I with this adventure that I’m tempted to give it a 5. However, I am going to mark it down slightly because of its linearity. I am going to give it a 4 for substance. There are also other ways that it might have been improved. For example, the dreams could relate to the adventure in some way and more could be made of Hastur’s effect on artists, perhaps by having some clues revealed in art.
I will however give a full 5 for style. It is a beautiful book, with wonderfully evocative illustrations, beautiful hand-drawn maps and excellently put together handouts (see artistmonkey.com for downloads of the handouts and NPC portraits).
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