When I first started reading Secrets of San Francisco, I was initially turned on; I was ready to declare that it was the end of Chaosium’s slump, and that it was a great product. After a more careful read, however, I’m going to say that it’s not nearly as impressive as I thought. While it does have some good stuff in it, it suffers from the usual overfocus on non-Mythos elements, fussy overdescription and general malaise that’s plagued Chasoium since the late nineties.

You see, every time that I review one of Chaosium’s products, I have a basic interior monologue, and it tends to proceed along the same lines every time. It goes something like this:

1: Chaosium has pretty much lost its way; this new product that I’ve bought doesn’t bear much relationship to the excellent products of years past, and you can tell that they lost their best talent when they almost went out of business a few years ago. In fact, they seem to have made little effort to secure the same caliber of intellectual quality that they used to have with guys like Keith Herber, Scott David Aniolowski, Mark Morrison, and it’s obvious when you read these books – they miss that uniquely dry, sardonic tone that their old product used to have. It’s not a good product:

2: That’s not being fair; many of the older products that you loved so are lionized in your mind only after the fact, and your nostalgia is coloring their quality. In addition, you’ve played very few of those early scenarios, and while they’re a stone blast to read, you have no idea how they play. On top of that, Lynn Willis was very kind to you when you were young and trying to figure out the whole Call of Cthulhu thing, and Chaosium doesn’t need a boot in its ribs at this point in time. If you looked at the products as what they are, rather than what they’re not, you’d be more kind. Furthermore, you hated Masks of Nyarlthothep until somebody pointed out that it was meant to be an Indiana-Jones style world romp, so your ability to “get” products is somewhat suspect.

1: Even if they are lionized in my mind, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t excellent products. It’s been a while since I’ve read Goatswood, but it’s still a bad product, whereas I know that something like Mansions of Madness still has some neat concepts that raise the adventure above “there’s a monster down a hole.” Chaosium still has a hammerlock on its reputation as having some of the best writing in the business, but there’s only so long that it can coast with mediocre products and keep that reputation. Furthermore, there’s dozens of people on rpg.net alone who have written some truly excellent horror material, and they probably work pretty cheap; why can’t Chaosium hire some of them? I’m not asking them to knock it out of the park; I just don’t want them to get by with the stuff that makes their scenarios so painful to read.

3: I want to look at some titties.

1, 2: Quiet, you.

I’d normally be a little skeptical about these kind of books. I believe that the early Secrets Of – Secrets of Cairo, Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle – didn’t stand tall in terms of offering a lot to the discerning CoC Keeper. I also felt like they were a little more about the occult aspects of those cities than about their Mythos content, which is really unfortunate. (Or so I’ve heard. I have not actually read those books.) I was also worried about the travelogue aspect of the books, where you’re learning more about Cairo’s primary export (angry hobos) than about what kind of Mythos threats the city had (also angry hobos.)

It opens with what I was hoping it would have just ignored: A history of San Francisco, including its weather, its ports, its history, transportation routes in and out of the city – has anybody ever used any of this material in their games? We also get a breakdown of San Francisco’s newspapers, hotels, insane asylums (marginally useful), temples, cemeteries, banks, tourist attractions – does anybody use any of this? I’ve found that it’s better to just let the Keeper make up his own names, so that he knows them as his own creation – he can add onto them without having to continually reference a text.

At the same time, the dry nature of the material is supplemented with story hook after story hook, usually referring to the site being described on the same page. None of them is really grabbing, and some of them simply add atmosphere, but it’s nice to see the dry stuff being tied into the overall purpose of the game. Me, I’d just leave the dry stuff out and just write Mythos stuff.

Chinatown is a place out of Lovecraft’s nightmares – an enclave of foreigners who have set up their own city in the middle of an American city. Even during its time, it was considered to be an alien and threatening place; the book describes the yellow journalists of the time exaggerating various aspects of the town. The book has to walk the line between portraying Chinatown as a seething cauldron of cultists, led by Fu Manchu, or an ordinary place occupied by Chinese immigrants. It’s actually a pretty fair portrayal; there’s cultists and tongs, opium dens and kung-fu villains, but also some heroic types as well. The local sorcerer is an enigmatic figure, but is actually about as friendly as sorcerer as you’ll ever meet in Call of Cthulhu. There’s also discussion of the sad fate of the Chinese women who were brought over and forced to work as prostitutes, as well as a few brave souls who are trying to stop that trade. I have to confess that I’m a little leery on the inclusion of that element – investigators are supposed to fight the forces of the Mythos, not do social or police work. (Plus, that same kind of thing happens today, even in the United States.) There’s nothing forcing the investigators to try to stop it, but the players will want to – but it’ll drag them away from the central focus of the game. I suppose that it’d be up to the Keeper as to whether he wants to include them.

Local universities are described in thorough detail – fortunately, there’s some interesting hooks thrown into the more generic material, like the hunt for Pedro – a long-since vanished dog – at the University of California, or the unfortunate fate of Ishi, a native who wound up mounted for display after his death. An NWI research station reveals one of Chaosium’s signature characters – Mr. Shiny, a shoggoth in human form whose unfortunate appearance in At Your Door did little to really establish him as an interesting character. (At least, to my mind. Check out my review. First one I ever did.) The Carnby Mansion – from a story by Clark Ashton Smith – is described, complete with a typically Smithian monster. It’s two pages, but it contains the seeds of one hell of an interesting scenario. There’s also an enormous collection of Mythos tomes in San Francisco, the Zebulon Pharr collection, if you’re looking for a gold mine to dangle in front of the investigators – or maybe they just inherited it? Finally, the Kn’Yan make a brief appearance, but I found myself wanting to see more of them. They’re a little pulpy for a Call of Cthulhu game, but you have to love a race that rides enormous, gorilla-like degenerate humans as horses.

The chapter on the cults and local societies is okay, but doesn’t really offer anything spectacular – including the Masons seems like a bit of a stretch, just by way of a for example. The Mythos cults are brief, and there’s nothing really impressive – there’s a Deep One cult that you could easily come up with by yourself if you sat down with that idea in mind. We also get the central monster from Fritz Leiber’s Our Dark Lady statted up, and while the stats are decent, there’s no way that you can really use it without having read Leiber’s brilliant, slow build-up in the novel. As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure if the monster makes an appearance in the story except viewed through a telescope, which somehow makes it even creepier than if it were in your face.

There’s a chapter on the local celebrities, but I’ll be honest. I have little patience for historical occultists, mostly because they they put huge amounts

of effort into essentially what amounted to a dry well. They are the equivalent of Dial-A-Psychic phone lines, and they bear about as much use in a Call of Cthulhu scenario. The minute that they run into the Mythos, the elaborately constructed theories that they’ve constructed will collapse like a house of cards, and they’ll be just like any other investigator – worse, since their grasp on reality wasn’t all that great to begin with. So there’s that. The Winchester House is included, which was pretty much inevitable, but nothing’s really done with it. That’s actually okay, mostly because the place has appeared many, many times in other horror and sci-fi works. (Alan Moore had a decent Swamp Thing story about it.) Emperor Norton also makes an appearance, and there’s a neat little Dreamlands hook nearby that could actually make a fun little scenario if the players don’t mind light and weird over dark and heavy.

The chapter on recreation actually has less to do with fun and games around the town and more with the dark side of said activities. A bath house has Mythos entities living underneath it, although the idea of Mythos monsters abducting women and using them for breeding stock has less to do with The Shadow over Innsmouth and more to do with Humanoids from the Deep. Again, we get a look at the gruesome levels of crime in San Francisco in the form of forced prostitution, but Call of Cthulhu has been about law enforcement only in the most peripheral sense.

And then we get to the adventures, which is one of the things that got me interested in the book. They’re genuinely interesting – they have some of the original, out of the box thinking that fueled what I consider to be Chaosium’s Golden Age, which started around Masks of Nyarlathothep and ended around At Your Door.

For instance, The Ferry Ride. While crossing the San Francisco bay, the investigators discover a derelict Chinese junk, its crew killed by Mythos-tainted opium; while they’re exploring, a group of cultists row up with the intention of getting their opium back. And if the investigators lollygag too long – well, the cover illustration gives you a clue as to what happens next. It’s a scenario that feels like the first chapter in a really excellent campaign, like Masks of Nyarlathothep, and you could easily throw in any number of interesting clues and leads into the boat for the investigators to pick up on.

The Westchester House is a reprint from a much earlier Call of Cthulhu product, and deals with an art theft in the ubiquitous house of Sarah Winchester. It’s mostly a red herring scenario, in which all of the threats are purely human. It has some nice art, and you could turn it into a Mythos adventure if you wanted, but I have the impression that it was included mostly for the purpose of completeness.

The Colour of His Eyes isn’t a perfect scenario, but it’s got a perfect example of the out-of-the-box thinking that characterizes some of the best Call of Cthulhu scenarios. I think that it pays homage to The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, but I really don’t care; it’s about a scientist, Dr. Garrick, who uses an arcane telescope of uncertain design and winds up with a Color out of Space lodged in his head, which then feeds on whatever he’s looking at. It always seems like the best Call of Cthulhu scenarios occur not when humans are fighting alien monsters, but when they encounter the spots where the Mythos intersects with the human race – where human motives are warped or exaggerated by the Mythos. The only problem that I would say the scenario has is that it doesn’t really have an ending – Dr. Garrick does the work involved to get the Colour out of his head, and the investigators are only along for the ride. There’s no real way for the investigators to influence the end of the scenario, which is truly unfortunate.

Beyond the Edges is a scenario that’s a little longer than it needs to be. Summarized, it’s about the idea that homeless people aren’t just the victims of schizophrenia, drug and alcohol abuse or social disfunction, but have their minds pulled into an alien dimension – sort of like Changeling, or The Maxx, except that the “added layer” is a weird Mythos hell. After a lengthy investigation – and really, I didn’t even want to read it, much less play through it; it’s ten pages of running from one contact to another just to track down a single guy – the investigators wind up in the same Mythos hell, and there’s some neat effects occuring where the two worlds overlap, like pigeons being killed by running into a building that isn’t even there.

Like, you can take this as a mark of reviewer laziness, and that’s exactly what it is, but I just could not bring myself to read the details of the investigation when the money shot of the scenario is in the other world. It’s like reading about the cultural habits of the tribe that built the trapped cave in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark; you just wanna see the cave trap go off, not people building them. The scenario also assumes that the San Francisco of the 1920’s had a large homeless population, which is the case today; I don’t believe that the city had the same problem back then.

All in all, I would say that it’s a book that’s aggressively okay. It’s got one good scenario, some good plot hooks, and it’ll give you details of San Francisco if you need that information, but I would say that you could make much better use of your money by buying something from Chaosium’s golden age.

-Darren MacLennan