Just over a decade ago (*wince*), I reviewed a Call of Cthulhu supplement titled New Orleans Guidebook. Essentially, I described it as an excellent guide to the city with relatively sparse Mythos ties and an adventure that lacked much local color.

So now I’m reviewing Secrets of New York – a sourcebook that’s at once similar to and more ambitious than its New Orleans predecessor.

As in the New Orleans book, this supplement delves deeply into the city’s history up to the 1920s. A key difference here is the planting of a Mythos seed all the way back to the 1609 Henry Hudson expedition that germinates into a full-blown Nyarlathotep cult.

The book next provides an overview of the city during the Roaring Twenties, including stats for such period figures as Prohibition agents “Izzy” Einstein and Moe Smith and rival gangsters “Lucky” Luciano and Dutch Schultz. The detailed write-ups of the city’s divisions and diversions bring the city to life, complete with descriptions and maps of tenements, a random tenement district encounter table, a sample speakeasy menu, a look at the Harlem Renaissance and its relationship to white high society, and a calendar of social events.

The vast bulk of the supplement details the city’s boroughs, unsurprisingly devoting the most space to Manhattan but offering what seems to be plenty of information on the other parts of the city as well. (Natives of those boroughs might well disagree, of course.) The book stats out potential NPC contacts and allies and seasons the city with some Mythos touches here and there, but the closest the book comes to a major cult is the modern-day manifestation of that Nyarlathotep cult previously mentioned. However, the book earns points for neatly tying this cult to the eugenics movement active during the time period.

The book comes with two adventures. In the first, the investigators must unravel the mystery of a reporter’s disappearance and, in the process, deal with the horrific results of the Nyarlathotep cult’s eugenics experiments. Those GMs who bemoan the “Mythos hoedown” will be glad to hear that only a couple of monsters of the same type await the investigators. For my taste, however, I found the adventure to lack much Mythos flavor until the monster appears. Still, it does include plenty of opportunities to interact with assorted New York NPCs and introduces a new spell-using PC profession: the African-American “conjure man.”

The second adventure has the investigators tracking down a missing professor and/or the source of an enormous drain on the city’s power supply and ends with the discovery of a Mythos version of Stargate. Naturally, the PCs must prevent the gate from being activated, but standing in their way IS…

…a nerd.

No, really. The opposition consists of the geeky scientist who designed the gate and who lacks both any inclination to listen to reason and any means of defending himself – no guns, no spells, no monsters, no nuthin’. So, the adventure amounts to the investigators swimming through the city’s bureaucracy in order to find and beat the crap out of a helpless insane dork. Yeah, I’ll take a pass on this one.