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This review is the review of the recently re-launched Call of Cthulhu magazine – The Unspeakable Oath. For too long, The Unspeakable Oath (hereafter shortened to TUO) has moldered in abandoned game shops that have not put their inventory online or esoteric and dark corners of the Internet such as eBay for extraordinarily high prices causing insanity to whoever happens to peruse its content. Now, thanks to a partnership between Arc Dream and Pagan Publishing, this magazine has been resurrected in both dead tree & PDF. As I do hate PDFs…
TUO represents the distilled imaginations/ranting of a particular group of Call of Cthulhu players/Keepers who took the blueprint of the game and built a city and their design model was hatched in the depths of TUO. This what makes this magazine so great. One gets a real sense of a weird laboratory where hideous experiments are being worked upon and be given some sort of semblance of life.
Now, it is not my intention to critique every single article in each of these issues but to give an overview of the different components letting the reader/Keeper decide how to incorporate these into their own Call of Cthulhu game. Furthermore, I can attest that each of the articles in my humble get either a 9 or 10 for Substance & Style in my personal opinion. Nevertheless, I recognize opinions may vary. What is common to Pagan products and TUO in particular is a darker and more macabre view of the Mythos therefore, if your game is more Pulp oriented – you will be disturbed and even perhaps frightened by the presentation contained within. TUO does not pull any punches, while it is not obscene nor vulgar, the reader does walk away with a profound sense of discomfort seeing the world in a much darker light or finding the need to find refuge in the light – which any good Keeper can adjust for.
First, up is a section on Reviews aka The Eye Of Light & Darkness . If you are reading this…then you know what a review is. In issue 18 being the inaugural issue – the reviews are quite old but nonetheless provide a much needed push to find and buy more stuff. The reviews for the most part are fair and objective in both issues. Highlighting the strengths and weakness along with a mandatory rating system. The Eye Of Light & Darkness is usually the first place that I head to in any magazine unless a by-line has caught my eye.
Next up, we have the Tales of Terror this is akin to an adventure seed. In which, a premise is setup and then three to six possible outcomes provide explanation for the setup. This is excellent device for Keepers who wish either to run one-shots or fill in details between major events in a campaign. By providing multiple options for resolving the premise, it may be reused a number of times by tweaking the setup and even therefore setting seasoned players off the scent, as they try to correct their previous “mistakes”. Each one of these seeds can also be developed and grown into a full fledged adventure as part of the campaign. Typically, each TUO will contain one or two Tales of Terror.
Then has a halfway point between a full-fledged adventure and Tale of Terror lies the Arcane Artifacts section. My particular favourite was the cursed money; for we all know that money may be the root of all evil but little did one suspect the Ancient Evil that went into the production of this money. These can be used as segways into further adventure or just independent action between campaigns. Each of these inspires yet a fiendish hook that players are not likely to forget.
And, what Cthulhu product would be complete without a discussion of Books – hence the Mysterious Manuscripts provides adventure ideas which place blasphemous tomes tucked away as the central character in a plot idea or adventure. I found this section very timely having just picked up Pelgrane Press’ Bookhounds of London which is a campaign model centred on the acquisition of said horrific grimoires.
Then we have a full fledged adventure, listed as feature article usually accompanied with a wealth of background information contained in articles themselves. This level of support is unprecedented in any contemporary RPG that I am aware of. For one of the prime functions of a RPG magazine is to provide an indirect subsidy via advertising revenue/space for their main line. I found the quality of the articles, as noted above to be outstanding – compared to what the TUO was in the past – it certainly has not lost any of edginess or chilling tone. One particular take on the 1930s Dustbowl was especially horrific in how it was described and the Mythos events that may befall one small town which the world forgot about.
Littered throughout either as articles in their own right or within adventures are memorable NPCs that are guaranteed to long haunt the characters afterwards – these could be the players guardian angel or the fiend that damns their characters to spending the rest of lives in an insane asylum blabbering on about the fact that: All Myths Are True… These NPCs are particularly well crafted and do leave their traces upon the imaginary lives and loves of any Player Character.
Lastly, I would like to conclude with the Editorial aka The Dread Page of Azathoth just because most people either skim this or neglect it. Doing so, in TUO, one should be cautioned against this, for it shows the condensation of the entire thought of the editor, not reflecting on the content – those be boring editorials but on the Game itself. These I find are gems and worthy of the great crown – of the dastardly fine bastard of a game – that we call: Call of Cthulhu. These comments along with the concluding comments in issue 18 unite both sides of Cthulhu fandom – the designers and the players. They provide the soil of the twisted weeds of each other imaginations to choke out any idea that this is light & jokey experience.
The main drawback in which countless ink has been spilt is the accessibility of this magazine and Pagan products in general. They have an astronomically huge Shipping & Handling charge, if one lives outside of the continental United States and have a notoriously slow & winding path through the distribution chain of wholesalers before they are gone. These issues of TUO remedy this somewhat by making the PDF available through Drivethroughrpg and hence available everywhere that people have computers. But, for those like me, who like paper we are sorely out of luck – for even the subscription costs are steep compared to the price of getting (when you can) individual issues off of Amazon.com. I know that Shane & co. are working on this issue but it does present a barrier. Lastly, there is also a disconnect between earlier issues (which hopefully will reissued either in print or pdf in the future) and the current incarnation of TUO. So, hopefully, as the reissue moves forward, so will authors stepping forward to connect their imaginations with ones that went before it. For TUO 17, had a fascinating article on the Thugee and India that I would have loved to see expanded upon.
The art is not Blair Reynolds (my all time favourite RPG illustrator, save maybe, Jerome Huguenin) but is damn very good to excellent. Lots of thought went into the execution of the layout – as both art & text nicely complement each other. The style perfectly conveys what Call of Cthulhu ought to be. Scary. Check. Horrific. Most certainly. Borderline grotesque and sometimes grind house. Well… not really, that is something that older editions of TUO were not afraid to do. Hopefully, this excellent art will continue to pour out and come to dominate the Call of Cthulhu game. As I am not entirely disturbed, upset or scared by the latest offerings by Chaosium – and should that not be one of the functions of art? These criticisms aside, there has always been a disconnect between different issues of TUO because of the lack of regularity of delivery from Pagan (more of an art house than publisher) – it is hoped that their partnership with Arc Dream rectifies this and we can once again be sated with the dark nectar of these beautiful minds.
So the top ten articles in these issues (IMHO)
10. Dog Will Hunt…………Issue 18
9. Cheating Madness………..Issue 19
8. The Chinaman’s Screen…………Issue 18
7. The Dollars of Dagon…………Issue 19
6. Henry Darger Second Novel…………Issue 19
5. Cthulhu Dark………..Issue 19
4. The Art Show…………Issue 18
3. Joe Shusterman’s Basement………..Issue 19
2. Black Sunday…………Issue 18
And now, for the best article in these two issues…
1. The Dread Page of Azathoth………..Issue 19
Nevertheless, as I stated earlier they are all excellent. These just happen to be my personal favourites. I look forward to future issues, as Arc Dream has done a great job with these two issues and there is so much more to dread.
So anyone remotely interested in Call of Cthulhu should be buying copies of TUO, if for no other reason to recreate that same creep factor that emerged when you realized that you are not playing Dungeons and Dragons any more…it builds upon what Chaosium and other companies have done and then increased the POW to tenth degree, without any appreciable loss of SANity. Pagan and Arc Dream preserve the darkness, nurture it in the bowels of the earth, before letting it loose to feed upon the world…
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