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More Adventures in Arkham Country

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Details

Publisher: Miskatonic River Press

Product Code: 0007

Publishing Year: 2010

Pages: 182

Cover Price: $29.95

Author(s): Scott David Aniolowski, Brian Courtemanche, Adam Gauntlet, Bret Kramer, Tom Lynch, Oscar Rios

Artist(s): Santiago Caruso, Reuban Dodd, Jason C. Eckhardt, Steff Worthington (maps)

Setting(s): 1920s

Format(s): Softcover and PDF

Contents

There remains, in the state of Massachusetts, a group of communities nestled along the banks of the Miskatonic River. Those who live there soon learn to accept that their region is a place of long shadows, old legends, and deep mystery. Best not to dwell on it, better to focus on the day-to-day struggles of life. Everything is fine, isn't it? However, the truth is that in the historic university city of Arkham, in the misty seaside resort of Kingsport, in the depressed farming community of Foxfield, and in the decrepit squalor of Innsmouth, things are far from fine.

Welcome to More Adventures in Arkham Country. Within you will find a collection of six scenarios for Call of Cthulhu. "Shades of Tomorrow Lost" and "Ghost of Florentina" take investigators to Kingsport where they encounter threats from the past, and possibly the future. We return to Foxfield to look into the mystery of "The Crystal Cavern." On the road the investigators may experience "Engine Trouble." "Spare the Rod" and "The Hopeful" take the investigators to Arkham, and possibly Innsmouth, as they struggle to bring horrific legacies to a close.

Miskatonic River Press is very proud to present one of the authors featured in the original Adventures in Arkham Country, Scott David Aniolowski (Malleus Monstrorum, Ramsey Campbell's Goatswood) with his first published scenario in fifteen years! Welcome back to Arkham Country.

Scenarios: Shades of Tomorrow Lost, Ghosts of Florentina, The Crystal Cavern, Engine Trouble, Spare the Rod, The Hopeful

Additional: Short Fiction, Conversion notes for Trail of Cthulhu, Maps, Player Handouts

Front Cover Text

Six New Scenarios for Classic Call of Cthulhu

Back Cover Text

More Adventures in Arkham Country

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far. Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." -- H.P. Lovecraft

There remains, in the state of Massachusetts, a group of communities nestled along the banks of the Miskatonic River. Those who live there soon learn to accept that their region is a place of long shadows, old legends, and deep mystery. Best not to dwell on it, better to focus on the day-to-day struggles of life. Everything is fine, isn't it? However, the truth is that in the historic university city of Arkham, in the misty seaside resort of Kingsport, in the depressed farming community of Foxfield, and in the decrepit squalor of Innsmouth, things are far from fine.

Welcome to More Adventures in Arkham Country. Within you will find a collection of six scenarios for Call of Cthulhu. "Shades of Tomorrow Lost" and "Ghost of Florentina" take investigators to Kingsport where they encounter threats from the past, and possibly the future. We return to Foxfield to look into the mystery of "The Crystal Cavern." On the road the investigators may experience "Engine Trouble." "Spare the Rod" and "The Hopeful" take the investigators to Arkham, and possibly Innsmouth, as they struggle to bring horrific legacies to a close. It is with great pride that we welcome Scott David Aniolowski back to Lovecraft Country. His work appeared in Adventures in Arkham Country back in 1993, now he returns in More Adventures in Arkham Country.

MRP0008

Comments / Trivia

Dedication: This book is wholly and completely dedicated to the memory of Keith "Doc" Herber. He founded Miskatonic River Press, and passed away long before we were ready. We hope to make him proud with our efforts.

Links

There is a review article about this monograph on the site, but the content is now added to the section below: 'Keeper's Eyes only', slightly edited.

Spoilers - Keepers Eyes Only

Players should not read any further.

Comment here to Keepers about this book. Comments on specific Scenarios and Campaigns go on their respective pages. Keep DISCUSSION on the talk page.

This is a new collection of six scenarios for the Lovecraft Country campaign setting.

The collection has a great, atmospheric cover of Innsmouth by Santiago Caruso, and numerous excellent interior illustrations by Jason Eckhardt. The handouts are really excellent, among the best I've seen for a published scenario. These come courtesy of the HPLHS and are part of the package this time rather than an online supplement, as was the case in New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley (though the HPLHS does host deluxe colour versions of the ones for MAiAC!) The handouts appear both in the text for the GM and in larger formats at the end for copying. The second major improvement is in the quality of maps. Chaosium has allowed Miskatonic River Press to use (reduced) maps of the towns in their sourcebooks (Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth) which is very helpful. Steff Worthington has originated scenario maps and developed the one for Foxfield. The building maps for the first two scenarios are genius and there are helpfully bigger scale versions of the later maps in the handouts section.

There are six scenarios: two set in Kingsport, one taking investigators to Innsmouth, one set entirely in Arkham, one in Foxfield and one set generically in the backroads of Lovecraft country. Apart from Scott David Aniolowski, who contributed to Chaosium's early 1990s Lovecraft Country sourcebooks and collections, the scenario authors are a new generation of CoC authors. All the scenarios are easily read and understood. Worthwhile efforts have been made to copyedit and only the tiniest errors have crept through (e.g. "inflicted" instead of "infected" on page 10).

For Trail of Cthulhu playing groups there are extensive conversion notes for all the scenarios. I'm not in a position to evaluate these, but I can note that, at 21 pages, they take up the space of an entire additional scenario for me the conversion notes' compiler, Christopher Smith Adair, would have been the man to write it. But this is a selfish complaint.

The book's opening and closing with pages offer a fictionalised introduction and conclusion about stalwart investigators battling on despite losing an inspirational colleague. Clearly this is a version of Tom Lynch and Osk Rios keeping the MRP show on the road after the loss of Keith Herber to whom the book is dedicated. With collections of this calibre, they are doing him proud. Most keepers would like to run three or four of these scenarios (which 3 or 4 will vary) and some promise to be highly memorable adventures. The scenarios themselves might not all quite hit the highs of a couple in NTotMV but the quality of the package as a whole is much better.

Shades of Tomorrow Past by Scott David Aniolowski

Drawing on Clark Ashton Smith's Martian Dreamlands tales, the scenario also references real world sleeping sickness epidemics of the period to provide a good hook and a plausible (in game context) link to Kingsport. The threat is Vulthoom's heavy metal pollen and the human villain is the plant expert advising the authorities on the outbreak. The villain and his staff are given convincing psychologies while the opposition muscle is the mysterious (Martian-in-disguise) thug Mr Black. To provide additional aid or hindrance there is the eastern cult of They Who Never Sleep dedicated to opposing Vulthoom's machinations.

There are three Dreamlands episodes in the scenario providing clues and prefiguring (suitably cloaked) the action. If loved ones become affected by the sleeping sickness there is a good hook for the investigators, but the scenario envisions investigators are affected by it and I see this as problematic, dividing the group into those who gain dream clues (but are virtually imprisoned by the authorities as disease carriers) and those who are allowed to act in the real world. This could be pretty frustrating but, helpfully, alternate ways of involving investigators are suggested.

The stakes are high in this scenario and investigators who become known to the authorities may soon burn all their bridges in Arkham Country. Of course, saving the world from Vulthoom ought to come first.

Ghosts of the Florentina by Bret Kramer

Also set in Kingsport, Ghosts of the Florentina is more directly Lovecraftian and much more low key. The investigators are offered lots of red herrings as the ghosts apparently haunt the eponymous Kingsport theatre are a fraud by the crooked developer, stalling for time as he hopes to find money to bail out his scheme. However, underneath the superficial manifestations are the genuine problem of an infestation of well-motivated rat things bound by a long dead sorcerer to defend his former lair. Nothing is black and white here and there are a variety of possible 'solutions', plenty of opportunities for scary underground encounters and surface role-playing. Extremely well supported with handouts and maps this scenario looks a treat.

The Crystal Cavern by Brian Courtemanche

Set in MRP's own (Lovecraft-inspired) Foxfield, investigators are drawn in by another developer (an honest one this time) finding his contractors' efforts to mine the mineral wealth of a cheaply acquired rural property thwarted by a mysterious beast. In fact the fox-like beast is not the real threat but guardian of wards trapping a Lesser Outer God and much the lesser of the two evils. Investigators will come up against variously motivated locals and other interlopers (a big game hunter reminiscent of a character in House of Leaves) providing a number of ways for the climax to be triggered. The (literally) underlying threat reminded me that the Serpent Mound of Ohio (apparently) sits on a geological cryptoexplosion: Foxfield has established itself at the site of an ancient conflict between Hyperboreans and Mi-Go and this may mean it gets wiped off the map, much to the investigators' (SAN) cost. As a pseudo-Dunwich, closer to Arkham, Foxfield can be disposed of with much less expense (in terms of scenarios that cannot be played in campaign continuity), but best to have played Keith Herber's Foxfield scenario from New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley before this one, just in case. Investigators can learn some valuable lessons here, but one of them might be that (in this scenario) they can't win.

Engine Trouble by Tom Lynch

This is both the shortest and the oddest scenario in the collection. It can be easily sprung on any group of investigators travelling through Arkham country at night as they encounter a truck crashed into a bridge, and so far, so good. Then we find out that the truck was carrying an Armageddon device, a massive automata constructed by a disgruntled Niccolo Da Vinci (Leonardo's elder brother!). While this might be intriguing, it doesn't really belong in Arkham country, and would be better as the germ of an Italian-set scenario. No (benign?) American professor is really going to be able to extract such a large artefact from a field in fascist Italy and spirit it to Massachusetts. Furthermore, Armageddon is a bit of a heavy consequence for something introduced casually, without build up, into a campaign.

Really, the scenario is an excuse to attack the investigators with the harrowers, a nasty flying monster, with some redneck supporting cast. Keepers will have to make sure the players win if they want the campaign narrative this is inserted in to carry on. They may also wish to consider one outcome that would be that the investigators now have custody of an Armageddon machine!

This scenario is not for me though elements of it (the-set-up, the backstory, the monsters) might come in handy elsewhere.

Spare the Rod by Adam Gauntlett

This is an Arkham-set scenario which uses its ghouls and witch spirit in residence, Goody Fowler, as counter-investigators, with their own evil agenda searching for the real villain. The 'new' villain is Samuel Seaton, a schoolmaster who was Fowler's dupe and accuser, back from the dead a second time after his warded corpse has been disturbed. Seaton is the monster teacher, an undead fiend whose serial-killing casts ghastly blight on Arkham.

The scenario has an episodic structure providing a number of scenes that are sure to chill.

In some ways the villain is a version of Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Kruger, shorn of his dream powers, in other ways the story is an extension of cautionary tales for children such as the original Struwwel-Peter, but the villain here is dysfunctional and confused and doesn't always target the 'right' children. Some groups will, reasonably, baulk at a game scenario where the horror involves the flaying, dismemberment and murder of schoolchildren.

Plot-wise there seems to be a flaw in that when the undead Seaton was first stopped by a group of parents they seem not to have foreseen his return, despite the temporary nature of their wards, and have provided no information of back-up plan for future generations. The solution the investigators have to discover is instead dependent on Seaton's connections to Fowler and their finding artefacts that belonged to her.

Overall, this is a creepy, even alarming, scenario which may not be to everyone's taste.

The Hopeful by Oscar Rios

This scenario, which leads investigators from Arkham to Innsmouth is probably a better introduction to that fishy place than The Crawford Inheritance, the introductory scenario offered in the Innsmouth sourcebook, Escape from Innsmouth. The Hopeful is on a par with Bless the Beasts and the Children in Adventures in Arkham Country and Freak Show in Tales of the Miskatonic Valley and, like them, tops everything in Chaosium's Before the Fall (though it has similarities with 'Mary', therein). Plausibly involving established mundane investigators (i.e. no specialism in 'the weird' required) it has Esther Marsh as the key villain, making her significance in the raid on Innsmouth slightly more plausible, and introduces a great crew of new supporting baddies. The use of period is excellent and metagaming is nicely circumvented. For me, this is the highlight of the collection.

SUMMARY: Having only read the book, there are three strong scenarios, two that may or may not appeal to keepers depending on the nature of their version of Arkham country, and one that might work if you are stuck for a one-off. All are well presented, illustrated and fully supported with maps and handouts and this an impressive, good value collection.