AAA-LARM!!

With Sisters of Sorrow, Adam Gauntlett takes Trail of Cthulhu and Pelgrane Press back to the Great War for a third time. Previously, in Not So Quiet – available in the anthology, Out of Time, the author had us visit a field hospital on the Western Front, whilst he let us take to the air in Flying Coffins to serve with the Royal Flying Corps and face an aerial antagonist the like of which the pilots had never seen. For this third scenario, the author switches to not just another theatre of war, but another side too! The protagonists of Sisters of Sorrow are part of the crew of UC-12, a U-Boot in the service of the Kaiserliche Marine. In other words, the players get to be the Germans! This is not as radical as it sounds, after all, the very first story that H.P. Lovecraft had published was “The Temple,” which related the events that led to the loss of the U-29.

In Sisters of Sorrow, the UC-12 is a mine laying Unterseeboot, an unarmed submarine tasked by the Kaiserliche Marine to cut its way through the nets that protect England’s harbours and lay mines as close as possible to disrupt shipping. This is a dangerous task. Not only is there the possibility of the detection and being sunk by the Royal Navy, but the actual laying of the mines can sink the submarine too! There is supposed to be a delay before a laid mine rises to the surface, but sometimes the delaying mechanism fails and the mine rises under the submarine and detonates! (This is where the title of the scenario comes from, for such mine-laying vessels were known as “Sisters of Sorrow”). For the crew, live aboard is damp, smelly, and unpleasant.

Assigned to penetrate the North Sea defensive zone and lay mines off Tyneside, UC-12 and her crew must contend with more than the routine of avoiding the Royal Navy and other shipping on its way to England. Strange noises seem to reverberate through the hull from the outside – could they really be whale song? This and other strangeness seems to be affecting the crew – have they been cooped up too long in the noxiously narrow atmosphere of UC-12? Or is it that water has been splashed on the batteries and they are giving off chlorine gas?

Structurally, Sisters of Sorrow is a reasonably straightforward, somewhat linear adventure. That though, is due to it being a military based adventure and not a criticism. Within the linear structure though, there is never time for the story to lag and there is always something for the player characters to do. If there is a criticism of the scenario structure it is that the player character roles are primarily reactive, although this is primarily aimed at building atmosphere and tension before there is the opportunity for more proactive play towards the scenario’s climax.

One interesting aspect to Sisters of Sorrow is when it is set. Not just during the Great War, but in the war’s early years. The submarines of the Kaiserliche Marine follow a nineteenth century Prize Code under which her crews must warn those of the ships that they attack so that due time is allowed for them to abandon ship. Although the UC-12 does have a machine gun, it is by no means an attack boat, which together with the terms of the Prize Code mean that the crews’ actions will be limited against the outré threats faced in Sisters of Sorrow. This complication, in combination with the descriptions of life aboard the Unterseeboot, is counter to the romantic, almost chivalrous notions that we have about submarine warfare.

Sisters of Sorrow is a one-shot scenario designed for play with six characters, that should not last more than two sessions. The scenario includes six pre-generated “investigators” – the Executive Officer, Chief Engineer, Radio Operator, Helmsman, Engineer, and Mechanic. As written, the scenario tells the story of their first, and quite possibly their last, mission. No advice is given on how to create characters if the players do not like the pre-generated ones included, as essentially they could take the role of any one of the fourteen man complement of UC-12. That said, the Military Template given in Trail of Cthulhuwill probably be all that a Keeper and player alike will need. It is intimated though, that the role of the Kapitan be not taken by a player, primarily in the short set of play test notes that should help the Keeper further when it comes to running Sisters of Sorrow.

Although there are no notes on whether or not it could be run using a British crew and a British submarine, there is nothing to stop an inventive Keeper from adapting it so. Similarly, an inventive Keeper could easily adjust it to the Second World War if he so chose. One of the issues in changing both sides and period is that the limitations of the design of UC-12 would be lifted. Submarines operated by the Royal Navy in the Great War, and by all sides in World War Two were substantially better armed and this has the potential to curtail certain elements of the scenario.

Physically, Sisters of Sorrow is a twenty-three page, 4.26 Mb PDF. Done in murky grays and greens throughout, it is well written and neatly presented. It is lightly illustrated, but every piece by Phil Reeves is excellent, and even if the cover is perhaps tentacularly misleading, elsewhere he draws more inventively from the text to more disquieting effect.

Like the previous adventures, Not So Quiet and Flying Coffins, this scenario could easily work as a flashback to explain how a character became aware of the Mythos. The character does not even have to have been aboard UC-12. It could be that the character’s brother or father was aboard and that in playing Sisters of Sorrow, what is being played is not a flashback, but the events of the father’s or brother’s journal which was recovered… Sisters of Sorrow is all about the infectiousness of paranoia and desperation in confined spaces. After all, nowhere could be more confined than an Unterseeboot in the middle of a Royal Navy blockade in the North Sea when the danger comes from below.

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Once in No-Man's Land

Call of Cthulhu has visited the Great War before, most notably with the scenario, No-Man’s Land, as has Trail of Cthulhu
 with the recent Flying Coffins and the scenario, "Not So Quiet" from the anthology Out of Time. Yet neither has approached this period in as interactive a fashion as in Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. This is a computer RPG which uses Call of Cthulhu for its mechanics under license from Chaosium, Inc.and is available for several platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows, so can be run on your computer, your smartphone, or your tablet. The latter though, is the game’s natural home. That said, The Wasted Land has taken a while to get to the Android platform and be debugged, which has delayed my getting to write this review.

Anyway, as much as Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land employs the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu, it is not a true RPG. Not in the sense of a pen and paper RPG such as Call of Cthulhu, nor in the sense of a computer RPG. Rather it is a skirmish combat game, one that is Action Point driven and turn-based, much in the same mode as the classic computer games, Laser Squad and X-Com. The game has the player control up to six characters, and on each turn, the player will expend each character’s Action Points to move that character and have him attack his opponents – with an option for taking time to aim at his opponents – as well as to heal and even psychoanalyse his allies!

The setting is the Western Front in 1915. As related in his diaries, a British squad under Captain Hill must defend against a German attack that grows stranger and stranger. Not just ordinary German soldiers, but cult fanatics and zombies too! Fortunately, Professor Brightmeer, a Miskatonic University scholar on attachment to British Military Intelligence is on hand to inform Captain Hill and his men that a German occultist has turned to more outré means to bring about victory for the Kaiser! So begins the desperate search for the means to stop this dastardly villain, which will take the squad out of the trenches and into No-Man’s Land, before going underground over the course of eleven missions. Along the way they will avoid things as ordinary as poison gas and barbed wire, and things as otherworldly as spiders from Leng and giant walking tentacle plants.

Most of the eleven missions involve holding off the Hun, either to defend a location or to get to a location. This has the characters dodging from cover to cover, searching for strongpoints where they can heal, researching documents, and more. For the most part, the missions are very linear, often with one safe path through the mission zone. Even when the characters have to enter patches of poison gas, they can be equipped with gas masks.

In between missions, characters are taken through two upgrade steps. The first sees their stats and skills improved. It is here that the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu are at their most obvious, though in a slimmed down fashion that focuses on those numbers necessary for combat. Skills, rated on a percentile skill, are arms and equipment, along with the First Aid Skill to heal the sick and the Psychoanalysis Skill to heal the mentally disturbed. Stats are rated on a 3 to 18 scale, and are improved to one of two ends. The first is to increase the number of Action Points that a character has in combat, whilst the second is to increase a character’s Sanity and thus his ability to withstand mental shocks.

A Sample Character: Captain Hill

The second upgrade step deals with equipment. Here a character can upgrade from his trusty Lee-Enfield rifle to a Hotchkiss M1914 heavy machine gun or a Winchester Model 1912 pump-action shotgun. There is a small armoury of weapons available, both guns and melee weapons, as well as gasmasks, armour, and even homing pigeons which will deliver requests for artillery support. Medical kits are also available as are books derived from the works of Freud that will help restore a character’s Sanity, whilst it is possible in later missions for characters to learn spells, although casting these greatly deplete the Sanity of the caster.

The mechanics of Call of Cthulhu also show within a mission. First in the use of the skills, though you see no percentile dice being rolled, and second, in the Sanity mechanic. Sanity is lost when attacking and being attacked by forces of the Mythos, and when too much is lost, a character can be paralysed with fear, sent catatonic, or even sent manic! The latter is incredibly taxing on the body, the sufferer usually ending up dead, but whilst manic, a character becomes a force of nature, able to charge the enemy and deal out damage aplenty.

The redoubtable Sid Brown alerts Captain Hill as to the imminent danger!

Whilst game play is simple, it is actually quite challenging in places, the final mission overly so, and it might take a restart or two to really get into the game. It does not help that game play is hampered by slightly clunky controls that sometimes will have you stabbing a stubby finger at the screen of your tablet in frustration. Another often annoying factor is that the missions tend to be very linear in nature – “Go there!”, “Do that!”, “Now exit over there!” – such that there is not a great deal of variety in terms of play. This is exacerbated by the fact that a lot the spells do not become available until last quarter of the game, limiting the option of creating variations upon the gun toting characters that dominate game play.

Inspired by the events of Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, the game’s treatment of the Mythos is more pulp than purist as it mixes a number of Mythos entities together and its game play is all combat. Where The Wasted Land shines is in its detail and its atmosphere. Although a little anachronistic in places (easily portable machine guns in 1915?), all of the characters are well defined, and the battlefields feel suitably ‘gone to hell,’ literally a wasted land. The animation is good too – there is something quite unnerving to see a Dark Young lumbering towards your squad as they attempt to blast it to bits before their sanity is blown too. Overall, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is an engaging electronic treatment of Lovecraftian horror worthy of your time and a sequel.

By the way, perhaps Red Wasp Design and Modiphius Press should get together. A World War II Lovecraftian horror game for your tablet would make a great sequel.

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Not Just the Hun in the Sun...

The year 2012 happens to be the centenary of two major events. The first is the more well-known sinking of the RMS Titanic, the world’s first palatial ocean going and proclaimed unsinkable liner. Pelgrane Press has already celebrated that event by releasing RMS Titanic: The Millionaires’ Special, a scenario for its well-regarded RPG of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Trail of Cthulhu. Now it follows it up with a second scenario, one that unknowingly celebrates the other centenary, the founding of the Royal Flying Corps, the arm of the British Army that would support it from the air throughout the Great War, and at war’s end would become the basis for the Royal Air Force. The scenario in question is Flying Coffins, a one-shot affair which for the first time in any scenario for Calll of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu, lets the investigators take to the air. Of course, there have been several scenarios that have involved flying, but in every case, the investigators have been passengers. In Flying Coffins, the investigators take control of their own flying machines, joystick in hand, rudders at their feet, and fingers curved round the triggers. In addition, both scenarios share the same author, Adam Gauntlett.

The setting for Flying Coffins is the Western Front in late 1918. The pilot protagonists or player characters are members of a Royal Flying Squadron serving a sector of the front to which a new enemy squadron has been assigned – Jagdstaffeln or Jasta 32. A specialised fighting squadron of the “Imperial German Flying Corps," Jasta 32 is commanded by the noted ace, Ernst Becker, and it is known as the Lightning Hussars after his old regiment. Sent out on daunting mission after daunting mission, the pilots must conduct bombing strikes, patrols, raids, and reconnaissance, in the face of not just determined German opposition, but also an otherworldly threat, one that willingly strikes at their fragile aerial steeds in an effort to pull them from the sky. With next big Push rumoured to be about to begin, it is vital that the Allies gain control of the sky.

Although Flying Coffins is more of a Purist than a Pulp scenario, its focus is very much on combat, and the edge that the player characters has over the NPCs in this scenario, does it bring back towards the Pulp. This is understandable, in terms of both the scenario’s military nature and the threat faced by the player characters. Obviously, this is an aerial threat, but it is one that is normally seen as a weaker foe in terms of the Mythos. That said, given the fragility of the aircraft of the time, the scenario’s outré antagonists are more than capable of downing the player characters…

With flying and aerial combat being the focus of Flying Coffins, it is understandable that the scenario goes into some detail about how to handle this in Trail of Cthulhu. As such, aerial combat in Flying Coffins is not that much different to the ordinary Firearms and Scuffling combat of Trail of Cthulhu, but with the aggressor attempting to sneak up on the defender so as to get in a burst of fire that the defender cannot avoid. If the defending pilot survives the attack, he can attack himself or flee, but if he enters the fray, a dogfight ensues. Naturally, this involves both participants attempting to outfly each other – handled by the players bidding points from their Piloting skill, with advantages granted from stunts attempted and from both the manoeuvrability and speed of the aircraft being flown. Additional dangers come in the form of Archie and ground fire. These rules are supported with entertaining period examples.

The scenario itself is tightly wound about its “Spine.” This Spine has an opening scene and a closing scene, but between them the Keeper must slot scenes that alternate between combat and investigation or interaction. For the most part, the Keeper will be deciding the nature of the combat scenes, whilst the players have more choice in terms of the investigative and interactive scenes. In fact, there is only the one set scene that does not involve combat, an interesting and unexpected encounter with a notable personage whose appearance is actually foreshadowed through another NPC.

The scenario allows for some flexibility in how the player characters are set up. There is room here for them to be all pilots serving with another nation, not just British or from the Commonwealth. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the player characters could be German! This will require a little adjusting upon the part of the Keeper, as Flying Coffins is written for use with Allied characters. Nevertheless, the scenario includes stats and short write-ups of some fifteen aeroplanes of the late war period. Also included are six pre-generated investigators. Flying Coffins is designed for play with this number in mind, so will need some adjusting if there are fewer players.

Flying Coffins is not the author’s first foray into writing scenarios for Trail of Cthulhu set during the Great War. His “Not So Quiet,” a scenario from the anthology Out of Time set at a field hospital behind the frontlines could possibly form the basis of a sequel to Flying Coffins if any of its protagonists are injured. As with the author’s previous scenario, RMS Titanic: The Millionaires’ Special, this aerial affair could easily serve as a flashback for an investigator in a later campaign. Flying Coffins though, does betray the author’s age and nationality. Certainly there are references in the scenario’s examples that only an Englishman of a certain age will recognise, and will probably do so with wry amusement.

Flying Coffins comes as a thirty-five page, 17.9 Mb PDF that is pleasingly illustrated by Jérôme Huguenin. It does need another edit and perhaps the pre-generated investigators tend towards the bland. Plus it would have been nice if they had been illustrated as that would have accorded them a little more flavour. Then again, inclusion of details of how the players could create their own aerial investigators would have been a nice touch also. Nevertheless, its contents do a good job of supporting the scenario and a good job of providing period detail aplenty, including a set of period photographs. Clearly, the author’s fascination, if not fondness, for the period, is evident throughout.

Surprisingly, given that Flying Coffins is a one-shot, there is the possibility of sequel, one that would involve a certain NPC mentioned in passing. Should any of the investigators survive this aerial affair, then that NPC should certainly have her revenge in later years… Overall, Flying Coffins is a very different one-shot, one that captures both the uncaring nature of the Mythos and the uncaring nature of early aerial warfare.

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