Blood Brothers. Mmmm. They don't make 'em like this
anymore.
Blood Brothers
was the first non-Mythos product for Call
of Cthulhu that Chaosium came out with, to the best of my knowledge; it's a
collection of no less than thirteen horror scenarios, all of them unrepentently
simulating a different horror movie. With a few exceptions, they all do an
excellent job. It's popcorn-light, occasionally a little balky, but overall is
worth every penny that you might pay for it.
Since putting Call
of Cthulhu's existing Sanity system into a popcorn movie is going to cause some awfully hinky
effects, it gets a little overhaul in Blood Brothers. Temporary and permanent
insanity are replaced with screaming, hair suddenly turning white, and so
forth. There's a lot of room for hamming
it up if the players decide that they want to simulate the agonized scream
of their investigator as he realizes that his host is Dracula, in keeping with
the book's loose and theatrical style.
I'm not even
sure that there should be a Sanity system
in a game this cinematic, to be honest. (The utility of the temporary and
indefinite insanity rules in the original Call
of Cthulhu can be argued - and I
think that I've done so in the past, although I can't remember when - but that's
a topic for the forums, I think.)
Even better,
the book provides for two staples of B-movies. Those interested can do 3-D
effects, where the GM grabs the appropriate object from the table and moves it
back and forth towards the player while making a
"weeeooo-weoooo" noise until the player finishes laughing or
stabs you in the neck with a sharpened pencil.
And, in a coup of imagination not seen since...well,
ever, Abbot and Costello are not
only included in the game, but are statted
out in CoC terms. Lou
Costello, for example, never takes damage from any source. (Why Abbott doesn't get the same
treatment is unknown. Maybe he died in the movies a lot more often.) I don't
know if they got permission from Abbott and Costello's estates - I hope so -
but it's massively cool that they did this. They don't work in all scenarios,
but in the ones they do, it's going to be really cool.
I was going to
argue that these scenarios held a definite possibility of creating a gameplay
style in which the characters become almost totally subservient to the plot -
so that if the players do something that may derail the game, the Keeper may
have to introduce cutscenes in which the story is thrown back on track, in
order to preserve the flow of the movie as intended. As I was reading through
the scenarios, I realized that they were tightly scripted enough to avoid this
dilemma. While there are sequences that are tightly scripted, there's also
periods where the characters have total freedom in how they decide to fight the
menace du jour. It's scenario-writing at its best.
Let's go over
them one by one, an approach suggested by simple utility:
The first scenario,
Uncle Timothy's Will, is designed to simulate movies in which greedy heirs
are killed off one by one by the malevolent benefactor, apparently in the hopes
of saving money on a probate lawyer. The players get to be the greedy scum
grandchildren who want to lay hands on Uncle Timothy's will - a ditzy
secretary, a poet-radical, a "champion bitch", a shyster attorney and
so forth. In order to inherit the money,
they have to spend a weekend in their uncle's house, apparently in deference to
the fact that spending the weekend in a haunted house is the leading cause of
death and dismemberment in greedy scum. (That's why greedy scum can't get life insurance
anymore.) As the weekend goes on, Uncle Tim spends his time butchering the
various claimants to his fortune through a variety of proxies, up to and including a demon that
Uncle Timothy summoned up.
The scenario
itself is actually mighty short Rather than laying the scenario out day by day,
the scenario describes the various steps that Uncle Timothy takes in order to
kill off his potential heirs, ranging from possessing the servants to creating
zombies to summoning a demon from the depths of Hell. The rest of the scenario
describes the house, which has a variety of neat widgets lying around - hidden
gold here, empty coffins there, magic books stashed away, rusty nails for heirs
to step on or be gouged by, and so forth - and the final confrontation with
Uncle Timothy, who's now spiritually occupying his own body's rendered fat in a
vat on his stove. It's excellent scenario design, tight without being binding.
One problem
with the scenario is that the players are going to have to be told to act as if
they are, in fact, greedy and stupid, because there's a substantial difference
in the way that your average CoC investigator handles a situation
(interrogating potential guilty parties, burning down Timothy's shed, laying
traps, researching the shit out of Timothy's library) versus how a greedy
grandchild is going to handle the situation (hop over his brother's cooling
corpse on the way to get a fresh martini, spend the evening trying to think of
bitchy retorts, tennis practice). If the players don't follow the precepts of
the scenario, it's almost like playing Hungry
Hungry Hippoes with the same intensity as you'd play Soul
Calibur II in the arcade. Sure, somebody wins, but the game's practically
broken in half from hitting the little hippo's tabs too hard, and there's no
real skill involved.
I think that
the scenario might work absolutely beautifully if you LARPed it. You're
expecting to play a role, you've got a recognizable place to play, and the
scenario lends itself to troupe-style play. If the focus isn't on you, then you
get to be the butlet, or the chaffeur, and there's no particular direction that
the game has to take save what the GM decides to do.
Another problem
is the time frame of the game. The game is supposed to take place in the space
of two days, but that steps up Uncle Timothy's attacks from eerie occurences
all the way into a full-scale assault. If the GM hasn't gotten in the cool bits
before the time is up, he may wind up having to throw in some kind of lame
extension. ("Okay, for those of you who survived the weekend - you can now
choose to take your inheritance, or stay another two days for a spin on the
Wheel of Inheritance, plus a chance to swap all you've got for What's In the
Box!") Some pre-planning may be mighty useful in making sure that the game
works.
The next scenario, Oath of Blood, involves Romanian immigrants who just happen to be vampires - not only
vampires, but vampire gangsters. (The
book was published before the release of Nocturne, which
features the same idea.) The players take on the role of gangsters with Dutch
Schulz's gang, tasked with the job of taking out their undead rivals before
they can horn in on Schulz's racket. It's actually a mighty cool scenario,
especially if the players manage to get a full-scale war going between Schulz
and Rolanov Teppes. The police simply step out of the way, alllowing for a
full-scale gangster vs. vampire gang war. Neat in the extreme.
The scenario's short, but Lord, if you can't think of
at least a dozen good setpieces involving gangsters versus vampires, then
there's at least that many in any Vampire:
The Masquerade book out there. I do think that the weakness of vampires
against religious symbols should rely on the religiosity of the wielder, rather
than the former religion of the vampire; otherwise, it just seems like some
kind of supernatural bigotry that a cross will work on a vampire, while a Star
of David or copy of the Koran does nothing. (And Scientology
would only work if you first paid $45,000 for a 45-cent piece of plastic.)
Actually, another weakness of the scenario that comes
to mind: All that you really have to know about the scenario is "gangsters
vs. vampires", and your mind will come up with a half dozen ideas that
aren't included in the scenario right off the bat.)
Nemesis
Strikes Back! is the weakest scenario
in the book, not because of the writing, but because the basic premise doesn't
allow the players to do anything more than gamely trot behind the Dr. Phibes-inspired villain and
watch as he dispatches people in various unlikely ways. As it's written,
though, the players have nothing more to do than to watch the cool murders take
place - and if they stop it, then where's the fun? It's more fun to see the
director of the play get impaled by a crescent moon from his own play's
backdrop than it is to save him and say "Wow, that would have really done
some damage" while the director looks shaken. It's kind of like playing a
game in which the object is to prevent Wile E. Coyote from being mutilated by
his own contraptions, rather than sitting back and watching all the fun. A great scenario to read, no fun to play.
The Land
That Time Forgot: A neat pastiche of
Land Before Time movies, minus the Sleestaks and with a healthy dose of winking
postmodernism. The dinosaurs are always described as their special effecs, so
when the party sees an iguanadon, it's described as looking suspiciously like
an iguana with a plastic fin rubber-glued to its back. Most of it is about as
cliche-filled as you'd care to nae. It's a simple scenario, full of glorious
colonial cliches, cavemen, dinosaurs and points related, and players will
probably have a great time even if they're not taking it very seriously.
The Mummy's Bride: Meh. Maybe it's because I'm just not into mummies,
but the scenario left me cold. While on a dig in Egypt blah blah blah mummy blah
blah blah ancient curse blah blah
blah reincarnated princess blah blah
blah Frylock blah blah blah you
must never hug a mummy. As a simulation of a mummy movie, it's pretty good, but
the scenario never really rises above a dry description of the dig site, the
climactic events of the scenario (in which an NPC keeps the mummy from getting
loose) and a description of the interior of the pyramid. It's a little too dry
and straightforward to really draw any attention, and it'll probably take the
intervention of messrs. Abbott and Costello to make it work. Or the Aqua Teens.
Yeah. The Aqua Teens.
The
Dollmaker: This one is a nice one,
drawing in equal parts from killer doll movies, Dr. Who and the Quatermass
experiments. A weird comet - actually made of living stone - falls to earth,
then influences a dollmaker to put a little bit of itself into the dolls that
he makes. The dolls then proceed to murder their owners.
That's pretty
much the scenario in the nutshell. Of course, the obligatory Simpsons reference is Treehouse of Horror III, with
the killer Krusty doll - "Yeah. here's your problem: this doll was set to
evil." That being said, it's actually quite a good scenario, starting with
an escape artist disappearing into a trunk and never returning, continuing with
a ventriloquist's dummy that's a little bossier than its user would like, and concluding
with a battle against a human-sized doll of rather unpleasant demeanor - and
then there's the Thing itself to deal with. It's a great little scenario, and
as long as the players can roll with the inherent sillliness, a good time
should be had by all.
Honeymoon in
Hell is the mad scientist movie of
the lot, involving a houseboat, two
honeymooning couples on a Louisiana
pleasure cruise, complete with useless
cautions about what's up ahead from the locals, mutant alligators, and a mad
scientist whose work with a regeneration serum has generated some rather unusual
effects. Specifically: pleasing taste, some monsterism. The scenario ends with
one of the
professor's creations turning against him, an
alligator siege on the island, the surgical augmentation of at least one of the
player's characters, and a sly nod to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the very
end of the scenario. Nicely done.
Ancient
Midget Nazi Shamans: With a name like
that, it's _got_ to be good, and it is. Drawing from Gremlins,
Ghoulies,
and points
related, the scenario starts with the players taking the roles of American
GI's during the closing days of World War II. When they launch a raid on a
Nazi-occupied farmhouse, they discover that it's actually a cover for a
biological experimentation lab that's been experimenting on what the GI's think
are European children - but whom are actually the midget shamans of the title.
As the firefight winds to a close, one of the Nazis makes a break for it, only
to be brought down by the shaman's magic - weirdly enough, with a Shrivelling
spell, a spell from the Cthulhu Mythos. (I wonder if the scenario was
originally meant to be a Mythos tale? Probably not.) The GIs then proceed to
exercise rather poor judgement in adopting the children and bringing them home
to the States, out of sympathy for what the Nazis did to them.
The second part
of the scenario has the investigators playing children who discover that the
children brought home from Europe are actually
ancient, evil shamans, while the third has the shamans resurrecting their
criminal buddies and wreaking havoc on the town. The first and third sections
are good, but the second is a little hinky. It basically has the PCs taking on
the role of neighborhood children whom Klaus lures into his cave, where the
children see his history revealed through the cave paintings that Klaus has
made. The scenario then jarringly breaks with traditional movies by having the
children killed, either by direct neck-snapping by Klaus or by being stoned to
death while trapped in a pit. There's an unwritten rule that you can't kill
kids off in a horror movie who are younger than thirteen unless it's absolutely
vital to the plot, 'cause nobody but nobody wants to pay to see kids die just
like adults. (Movies in which teenagers are killed are different; that's more
of a rite-of-passage thing, some weird social construct that teenagers love to
death. I could write an essay about it, but I'll leave it until I review Blood Brothers 2.) It's the same kind
of problem that Little
Fears had; the concept is cool, but try keeping a game going after you've
killed off a seven-year old kid. It just doesn't work.
The scenario
also gets a little hinky in terms of the timeframe between when the kids
discover Klaus's history and when the attack of the midget shamans commences. A
full month passes between when the shamans kill off the kids and when they
launch their attack, which means that there's more than enough time for every
adult in the community to tear the place apart in an attempt to find those kids
- and the scenario isn't going to come off right if that happens. The book
mentions that the adults scour the area for the children, but don't find them, but
the town would be devastated for years by that kind of loss; it isn't something
that you can just brush off. If you had the invasion occur the same night, or
even the next day, it would avoid that kind of lag, and make the scenario
better.
Dead On Arrival is one of my favorite scenarios - not so much for its
content, but for the doors that it opens up. It's a direct homage/pastiche of Night
of the Living Dead, right down to the "get bitten, turn into a zombie,
bite others" that's been the hallmark of the Dead films. It isn't quite as
socially visionary as the Night of the
Living Dead, or as witty in its commentary as Dawn of the Dead, or as blunt
in its characters as Day
was, but it's the kind of scenario that Keepers don't need to plan out - just
throw zombies at the players as they overthink their way out of situations that
they overthought their way into in the first place. (The Zombie
Survival Guide is also a must-buy.) Its ending is also nicely Romeroesque, too.
It's All Flesh Must Be Eaten
about ten years before its time, really.
The Swarming is kind of an odd duck. Its most obvious inspiration
comes from The Howling, but The
Howling was a really weird mishmash of sex and lycanthropy; a movie that
begins with its heroine talking to a serial killer while they watch a violent
pornographic film in the back of an adult bookstore, has a middle part
featuring a sex scene between a pair of Crinos-form werewolves, and ends with
its heroine turning into a werewolf on the local news station is definitely one
with some metacommentary on the Swinging Seventies going.
I think.
It could just be about sex scenes between werewolves.
I have no idea, really.
However, The
Swarming is about a plot by werewolves to basically turn the entire town's
population into werewolves. Oddly, the origin of the werewolf curse is
explicitly spiritual - a curse by Satan - but the scenario has the werewolf
curse being passed along by viral means, either by bite or by sexual
intercourse. Basically, the investigators discover the werewolf cult, then wind
up besieged by the werewolves in a small cabin. The siege situation is pretty
cool, but there's some red herrings that seem like leftovers from a longer
version of the scenario. The main villain of the scenario intends to poison the
water supply with LSD, and the investigators can see that he's keeping
craploads of it in an empty coffin in the cemetary - but they'll never be able
to learn of his plans, since there's no opportunity to interrogate him, and the
players may be left with the impression that the werewolves are either really
enamored of LSD, or, worse, are Hippie Werewolves, and are therefore are a
double menace to the people of the community. ("If we don't stop them
here, we'll be knee deep in Grateful Dead albums and wolf shit!" "Oh
my God! We'll be deafened by their constant mournful howling over Jerry
Garcia!")
Actually, if they were Hippie Werewolves, it'd be
easier to fight them; they'd chase you into a dark forest, forget about what
they were doing about half a mile in and spend the rest of the night gulping
down squirrels to quench the munchies.
Spawn of the
Deep. This one is the only scenario
that I really had a problem with. Drawing from the sexist Humanoids
of the Deep, the scenario features fish-men in the Bay City harbor using local female runaways
as breeding pods for their horrible offspring, aided by a local sleazebag who's
doing good trade in gold amulets from the fishmen. This does sound remarkably
like Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth", but the "fish men
want our women" meme has diverged from Lovecraft - look at the Creature
from the Black Lagoon, for example. (Dave Barry once hilariously opined that
the covers of fishing magazines were designed to convince fisherman that,
unless they stabbed a metal hook through a trout's lips, the trout would go to
his home, date their wives and use the riding lawnmower without the fisherman's
permission.) Actually, the scenario itself acknowledges this meme in a
hilarious sidebar:
The most
famous of modern fish people is undeniably The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
It established the basic theme for the fish-men - they want our women! And that's all. Even the Martians of the
fifties sometimes took a break from their interspecies carousing to try to take
over the planet, but not the fish people.
I still have to
wonder if the authors of Black Lagoon ever read Lovecraft, but that's besides
the point.
Anyhow, my major problem with the scenario is
basically that it involves forced impregnation - rape, really - on behalf of
the fishmen, which is a detail squicky enough for most players to pass on the
scenario. You might be inclined to suggest that Lovecraft's Deep Ones did the
same thing, but I disgaree; the folk of Innsmouth made a Faustian bargain with
the Deep Ones, granting their children immortality, rather than having their
womenfolk forcibly manhandled by the Deep One equivalent of Pepe Le Pew. Alien/Aliens
had a similar theme, but the Aliens are pleasantly egalitarian about it. They
don't care whether you're male or female.
The scenario seems to be imitating C.H.U.D
as much as Humanoids
of the Deep; it opens with a massacre in a Halfway House that's as gory as
the Keeper can make it, culminating with the discovery that the girls are gone.
As the scenario's written, though, the Keeper can wind up having the
investigators discover the gillmen within the first five minutes of the game,
after which it boils down to a simple purge and burn mission a la Space Hulk. The GM's going to have to
flesh out the investigative aspect of the scenario through Shark, the fish
men's human contact, before he springs the halfway house massacre, and the
scenario doesn't really provide for that.
Trick or
Treat. This is actually, to my mind,
the least useful scenario in the book - not because it's bad, but just because
it didn't really grab me in any particular way. There's some great
fertility/Halloween symbology in the form of a dream and in the villain itself,
but it's basically an exercise in running around and seeing hideously mutilated
corpses, then finding a way to protect the only person on the villain's list
who hasn't been killd yet. The scenario also features the Villain Who Won't
Stay Dead, which is well in keeping with the false climax / real climax
structure of well-made horror movies. Actually, for four pages, it does the job
pretty well. I'm not sure that I'm aboard with the idea of giving the Wiccan
spells that actually work, but given that the scenario already acknowledges
that druidic magic is real, I suppose that it's in keeping with the tone of the
game.
Horror
Planet: It's a weird scenario, but a
good one. (Awful title, though.) I intitially wanted to screech about how the
scenario's author wouldn't use the word cyberpunk to describe the dark future
that the scenario describes. However, I realized after reading through the
scenario that the future used isn't really cyberpunk; it's just dark.
Technology hasn't advanced in any significant way, cybernetics are ugly,
clunky, and ultra-rare, and society's pretty much collapsed - think of Escape
From New York with higher technology, and you've got it. The players -
including a surgically modified chimpanzee who speaks in sign language -
investigate an old colleague of theirs whose crazy theories may have hit
paydirt. Specifically, his teleportation device has created a link between them
and an alien spacecraft 27 light years from earth - and it's brought something
through that shouldn't have been brought through. The scenario does a great job
in describing the world, including a taxi driver who's not hesitant about
scattering punks with the business end of her taxi to a Vietnam veteran
who just wants the lights in his apartment turned on. When the investigators
meet their friend, he's acting kinda hinky...and the next thing they know,
they're in a ship orbiting Gamma Leporis with an alien crature capable of
hollowing out people's heads and living inside.
The alien
ship's description is excellent - not mind-blowing in a Lovecraftian sense, but
weird in that it's been deliberately desgined to serve an alien organism. The original
owners are dead, and the creature - the
body-possessing aalimorne - that brought them here doesn't have any idea of how to operate the
ship either. To make matters worse, the
engine that they need is down below on the surface of the planet, worshipped as a mystic object
by the aalimorne and its host bodies.
The whipped cream and cherry is another creature on the planet's surface that Nature has equipped with
the tools to bring down and consume a
Mack truck. Fortunately, there's a handy diary that'll clue the players into the nature of the
situation that they face, and the group
has a skill set good enough to surivve if they're careful. The scenario even
ends with a direct nod to the conclusion of Alien.
The book's art
deserves special mention - Earl
Geier, an unsung hero of Call of Cthulhu's supplements, does an excellent
job of portraying all the various menaces that the players might face, along
with a sardonic commentary - a picture of werewolves advancing on a cabin is
entitled "With a huff and a puff, and a gouge and a chew..." while a
picture of a fish man breeding lair reads "Caviar, it isn't...".
Overall, it's
an excellent book. It's hardly perfect, but there's enough stuff within it to
keep players entertained if they're in the mood for something light and fun -
and it's even better if they're horror movie buffs, since they'll be able to
understand some of the subtleties in movies that took place before 1985. I'd
recommend it to anybody who's got Call of Cthulhu.
-Darren
MacLennan
Review Summary