An Orphic Odyssey

The Persephone Extraction is another campaign for one of the best RPGs—certainly the finest espionage and finest espionage/horror RPG—of 2012, Night’s Black Agents: the Vampire Spy Thriller RPG. Written by Ken Hite and published by Pelgrane Press, the roleplaying game casts the player characters as ex-secret agents who have learned that their former employers are controlled by vampires and decide to take down the vampiric conspiracy before the vampires take them. As much a toolkit as an RPG, it gives everything that the Director needs to design and create his game, allowing him to design the vampire conspiracy and the vampire threat, from psychic alien leeches to the traditional children of Transylvania, and set the tone and style of espionage, from the high octane of the James Bond franchise to the dry and mundane grittiness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Essentially, Night’s Black Agents is your ‘Schweizer Offiziersmesser’ of vampires and espionage.

As with both Night’s Black Agents itself and The Zalozhniy Quartet, the roleplaying game’s first campaign, The Persephone Extraction is a toolkit. It presents another five, high octane scenarios in the vein of The Bourne Identity and its sequels—extending all the way up to the Bond series of films—that can be run more or less in any order. Actually, much like The Zalozhniy Quartet, it is really the middle scenarios which can be run in any order with the beginning scenario run first and the ending scenario run last. Unlike The Zalozhniy Quartet, there is no discussion of the type of vampires that can be used in The Persephone Extraction—supernatural, damned, alien, or mutant in nature—as they are definitely of a supernatural and damned nature. Similarly, it does not give any guidance as to what psychological (and action) Mode—Burn, Dust, Mirror, or (High) Stakes Mode—to run The Persephone Extraction in. The tone of the scenarios though would suggest somewhere between Mirror Mode, the genre’s “wilderness of mirrors” world of shifting allegiances and hidden agendas as exemplified by the best of John Le Carré’s fiction, and the (High) Stakes Mode patriotism of the novels of both Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. From staging the defence of a secret base in Siberia to an aerial drop onto an extremely isolated Greek monastery, The Persephone Extraction certainly involves a lot of high action, but is leavened by interesting moral choices deep into the campaign and plenty of infiltration—both physical and digital—missions, including deep into legend…

Of course, The Persephone Extraction involves a plot about an ancient vampiric conspiracy, one it combines with a modern conspiracy of bioterrorism, but at its heart is a rich vein of Greek mythology, specifically that of Orphic Traditions. These draw from the legends of Orpheus descending into the Underworld where the Souls of the dead lie. And if you are not thinking about the vampiric possibilities of untold numbers of Souls wanting to return to the world of the living, even if that means coming back as one of the blood sucking undead, then perhaps you are running low on sanguinary sustenance yourself? Yet The Persephone Extraction involves not one conspiracy, but multiple conspiracies in a weirdly contemporary parallel to British politics, and in order to unravel it, the agents will find themselves in Paris first and Greece last, but before they get there, they will have travelled to Barcelona, Moscow and points further east, and Istanbul, though not necessarily in that order…

The campaign opens with Emma Marlow’s ‘The Persephone Extraction’ which takes place in Paris. The Agents are drawn to the city when they learn that someone is using their identities and covers, but to what end? It quickly becomes apparent that they are being set up and clues point to a biological research laboratory in the city and one particular researcher. Who is using the Agents and what do they want from the biological research laboratory and the researcher? This sets up the campaign as the Agents are put on the researcher’s trail after an assassination attempt on her life and she goes on the run. The trail will lead into the laboratory where research into Cold War viruses is conducted as well as deep underground—an aspect that will occur again and again throughout the campaign—and into Paris’ famous catacombs. The involvement of the Agents in what looks like some kind of bioterrorism plot also brings down a great deal of Heat upon them and this will hound throughout the campaign. This means that the Agents will need to make some effort to reduce this Heat as they continue their investigative efforts from country to country, lest the authorities catch up with them.

If ‘The Persephone Extraction’ takes the Agents into the underworld, financial clues point to Barcelona and ‘The Pale Agenda’ by Bill White. This is the shortest of the five scenarios in The Persephone Extraction, involving the world of high finance and more hints that there appears to be more than one conspiracy involved in the plot revolving around the research at the laboratory in Paris. This is the first chance for the Agents to really harm one conspiracy or another, but importantly, learn where the Cold War era viruses came from. This is from Soviet Era Russia and in Will Plant’s ‘Sleeping Giants’, the Agents track the source first to Moscow and then up into the Arctic Circle in an underground facility near a closed city. The latter is a holdover from the Soviet Era, but of course, it is a new era and the workers are no longer working at the mercy of the KGB, but instead live and work in a company town and their employer cares about profit rather than ideology. ‘Sleeping Giants’ has some nicely creepy moments, but then, this is a vampiric campaign, and it also has some fun James Bond moments as it turns up the heat by having the Agents direct the defences of the facility against attack. The advice on handling the defence against the assault is nicely done. By now it should be obvious that the vampires are desperate to obtain this virus.

Heather Albano’s ‘Clean-Heeled Achilles’ is where the campaign gets weird. A combination of missing people and possible archaeological malfeasance sends the Agents to Istanbul, where a monastery stands on the coast guarded by private security behind barbed wire. For Agents and players alike, this is where the mythological aspects of the campaign are at their most prominent as the Agents really descend into the Underworld. Getting in is not easy, but getting out is going to be a real challenge as the Agents confront countless restless souls. This is the weirdest, possibly creepiest sequence in the campaign—and quite possibly in Night’s Black Agents—as the Agents find themselves replicating myth in what is essentially an Ancient Greek Orphic heroquest. As part of this the Agents re-enact the heroic figures of Orphic myth and the Director is given advice on assigning these unknowing roles depending upon each Agent’s backstory, Drives, Solaces, and so on. This exacerbates the unworldly nature of the descent and the return, but it would have been good to see these roles foreshadowed much earlier in the campaign.

Lastly, ‘The People of Ash’ by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan brings the campaign to a close in Greece as the conspiracy’s rich and elite gather to bring its plans to fruition. The finale of the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, comes to mind as the Agents conduct an assault on the vampire’s ancient eyrie. The campaign should ideally end with a bang and ultimately, the Agents may succeed in defeating the greater conspiracy, but not the whole conspiracy. Defeating the greater evil will be enough to save the world, but ultimately it may still leave an evil in place. A ‘lesser’ evil, but an evil nonetheless…

As with previous campaigns for Night’s Black Agents, the middle three scenarios are designed to be played in any order, there being clues from one scenario to another, but the smoother path will be in the order as they appear in the book. Similarly all five scenarios are written such that they can be run as standalone adventures, but really this would be to ignore the greater conspiracy and the greater story that would come with them being played in order. This would be particularly obvious in ‘Clean-Heeled Achilles’ because its emulation of myth would lack the context of the previous episodes, and similarly, playing it early in the campaign may mean that the context has not yet developed enough to quite give it the impact it should.

All five scenarios are well organised, with clear explanations of the spine of each episode, the connections between the scenarios, the various NPCs, and quick and dirty briefings on each of the cities where the scenarios are set. Similarly, the set-up for the campaign is decently done with explanations of the campaign’s plots, conspiracies, conspyramid—the diagram of the conspiracy’s overall organisation, and also a Vampyramid. The latter employs mechanics from the supplement Double Tap to track the blowback and fallout of the Agents’ actions as they investigate the conspiracy. This models the conspiracy’s reactions to the Agents and as much as it makes them organic rather than static, it does add one more thing for the Director to keep track of throughout the game. Lastly, there are the vampires of the conspiracy itself, a seeming series of contradictions—arthritic and old, but breathtakingly fast; pale and spindly, but inhumanly strong; and fearful of death, but have long forgotten being alive. Similarly, they are at their weakest when insubstantial, but all but invulnerable and at their strongest when solid, but then at their most vulnerable.

Lastly, The Persephone Extraction comes with six pre-generated Agents, one of which will require some further details that the others have already figured in. They include a range of nationalities and covers, and can be easily personalised by the players. Physically, The Persephone Extraction feels somewhat rushed. The editing is not as tight as it could be and there is text missing in places. The artwork is not always of the highest quality either and in comparison to other Pelgrane Press titles, it does not feel quite as assured.

Ultimately, The Persephone Extraction is not quite the toolkit that The Zalozhniy Quartet is, for it very much feels more like a traditional, linear campaign. This should not be held against it, because The Persephone Extraction is a solid affair which draws from an unexpected source which the authors have developed into an exciting and genuinely surprising campaign.

A Disorderly Foursome

The Zalozhniy Quartet is the first set of scenarios for one of the best RPGs—certainly the finest espionage and finest espionage/horror RPG—of 2012, Night’s Black Agents: the Vampire Spy Thriller RPG. Written by Ken Hite and published by Pelgrane Press, the roleplaying game casts the player characters as ex-secret agents who have learned that their former employers are controlled by vampires and decide to take down the vampiric conspiracy before the vampires take them. As much a toolkit as an RPG, it gives everything that the Director needs to design and create his game, allowing him to design the vampire conspiracy and the vampire threat, from psychic alien leeches to the traditional children of Transylvania, and set the tone and style of the espionage, from the high octane of the James Bond franchise to the dry and mundane grittiness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Essentially, Night’s Black Agents is your ‘Schweizer Offiziersmesser’ of vampires and espionage.

The Zalozhniy Quartet is, much like Night’s Black Agents itself, a toolkit. At its heart are four, high octane scenarios in the vein of The Bourne Identity and its sequels—extending all the way up to the Bond series of films—that can be run in any order and can be adjusted to whatever type of campaign or vampire that the Director is already running. So that is either Burn, Dust, Mirror, or (High) Stakes Mode, with vampires at the heart of the conspiracy either being supernatural, damned, alien, or mutant in nature. That said, the almost alchemical nature of some The Zalozhniy Quartet’s MacGuffins means that some types vampire are better suited than others, in particular, the supernatural or damned types. This enables the four scenarios to be added to the Director’s own campaign with relative ease. Although the tone and drive are all high action and a nod to modern espionage films, the underlying plot is dryer, more measured and restrained, inspired more by the works of authors John Le Carre and Eric Ambler, and this is apparent in some of the scenarios more than others. This combination also reflects the way in which the campaign was written—Gareth Ryder Hanrahan developing and writing from a story design worthy of a Suppressed Transmission by Night’s Black Agents’ author, Kenneth Hite.

The Zalozhniy Quartet starts in quick fashion with an explanation of the conspiracy, its aims, its origins, its participants, and its vampires. The conspiracy is an attempt to take control of one the global levers of economic and thus political power; its origins lie in the post-colonial division of the Middle East and the meddling of an infamous traitor; its participants are the Lisky Bratva, a major Russian mafiya brotherhood; and whatever their exact nature—supernatural, damned, alien, or mutant, as decided by the Director—the vampires have an odd time signature. The latter are the Zalozhniye of the title which actually refers to the number of scenarios in the book, rather than the number of vampires. Rest assured, there are more than just Zalozhniye in The Zalozhniy Quartet. All of this is set up with history, stats for the various NPCs, separate diagrams showing the connections between the NPCs and the arms of the organisation, and so on. 

In addition, The Zalozhniy Quartet includes a sextet of pre-generated player characters. As with other pre-generated player characters in scenarios for the Gumshoe System, these will require some adjustment upon the part of the players—assigning further points, establishing connections and levels of Trust between each other, and so on. Each also comes with a short background, although this is separate from the character sheets. Maps are provided for each of the five main cities that the player characters will visit over the course of the campaign, but not for any of the individual locations that they will visit.

The Zalozhniy Quartet opens in Bourne-style with ‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’. The player characters are employed by independent contractor, Donald Caroll*, to infiltrate a warehouse in Odessa believed to be one more stop on a gun-smuggling operation shifting stolen weapons out of Baghdad and into Europe. This will be their first encounter with both the Lisky Bratva and the Zalozhniye and it will go horribly wrong for both them and their employer. With the Lisky Bratva and the Zalozhniye in hot pursuit, the player characters are forced to go on the run. Their employer will be able to impart the location of his safehouse in Vienna—fortunately considered neutral ground by the espionage world—before he is caught, but getting out of Odessa and across Eastern Europe is challenge in itself even before taking into account the mafiya and the vampires on their tail.

* Man from U.N.C.L.E. fans may just want to change his name to Leo.

There are easy routes out of Odessa, but they are likely to be watched, so the player characters will probably take the scenic route and that means going via some of Eastern Europe’s weirder non-tourist spots. Primarily an extended escape and chase sequence interrupted by border crossings—recognised and unrecognised—‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’ also provides opportunities for the player characters to investigate and disrupt some Lisky Bratva operations along the way before they reach Vienna. These are almost mini-scenarios in themselves, one consisting of a fun attempt to disrupt a sporting event, another uncovering a foul Zalozhniye research site.

Once the player characters reach Vienna, there is a radical shift in tone and adventure type with ‘Out of the House of Ashes’. It is a classic Cold War scenario a la John le Carre, an extraction mission in which the player characters need to get Arkady Shevlenko, a retired KGB general, out of the city before he can give them the information he wants. He also represents the first link into the conspiracy’s origins, and so the Listky Bratva want him as do the CIA, though for different reasons. All the while, the FSB wants to stop them all… This played out against the backdrop of international diplomacy and a economic conference. Where ‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’ is all action, ‘Out of the House of Ashes’ is mostly intrigue and betrayal and counter-betrayal, with the possibility of the player characters needing to make multiple attempts to get Arkady Shevlenko out of the city safely.

The Zalozhniy Quartet again switches to another city, another tone, and another mission type for the third scenario, ‘The Boxmen’. The city is Zurich, the tone a little slicker a la Mission Impossible or Ocean’s 11, and the mission is a classic heist. Of course, it has the capacity to go wrong in the mode of Reservoir Dogs. By now the player characters will have learned that the Lisky Bratva is planning to buy a bank in the city, the same bank that they want to get into themselves to locate one of The Zalozhniy Quartet’s various MacGuffins. So this is very much a matter of casing the joint, gathering intelligence on the bank’s current owners—a family whose members cannot all agree on on the sale, and so on. This is complicated by a rival gang of thieves, the notoriously robust response of the authorities to any threat to its banking industry, and of course, the Lisky Bratva absolutely wanting the sale to go through… This is a much more restrained scenario than either ‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’ or ‘Out of the House of Ashes’, even in its action scenes, but again expect another shift in tone and style for the last part of the campaign.

‘Treason in the Blood’ brings The Zalozhniy Quartet to climax by piling on the action and upping the number of supernatural threats the player characters will face, much in the style of a James Bond movie. Taking them from Baghdad to Beirut to Riyadh, with possible diversion to Cyprus, it includes encounters with the fallout from conspiracy plot’s originators, fearsome monsters—some worse than the Zalozhniye, and of course, the inevitable, one last betrayal…

The Zalozhniy Quartet is thoroughly detailed throughout, such that it is a little overwhelming in places, especially with the number of NPCs that the Director needs to keep track of in some of the scenarios. Any one of the four will take multiple sessions to play through, but the advice and options given are never less than helpful. Whilst the most obvious order in which to play the four scenarios is in the order given—‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’, ‘Out of the House of Ashes’, ‘The Boxmen’, and ‘Treason in the Blood’—they are designed to be played in any order and to that end, links from the other three scenarios are listed at the beginning of each scenario to help the Director run one scenario after another as seamlessly as possible. They also serve as a useful recap.

Although clever, the structure of The Zalozhniy Quartet gives rise to two issues. The first is that, obviously, it does not form a ‘Conspyramid’, the interconnected pyramid structure which the player characters will work their way around and up as they investigate the entwining of vampires, governments, and organisations in order to uncover the bloodsucking conspiracy. This is intended as the classic structure for a Night’s Black Agents campaign, so it is somewhat disappointing not to see it supported in what is really the first set of scenarios released for the horror-espionage roleplaying game. Now that said, the Director can use The Zalozhniy Quartet as is—that is, as a campaign consisting of four, reasonably lengthy and interconnected scenarios, but she can instead take them and slot them into the ‘Conspyramid’ she has created as her own campaign. Then she can forge links of varying strength between these four scenarios and the other nodes in her ‘Conspyramid’. With strong links, The Zalozhniy Quartet becomes an integral part of the Director’s ‘Conspyramid’, but with weaker links, The Zalozhniy Quartet becomes a conspiracy within a ‘Conspyramid’.

The other issue is with the campaign’s climax—or rather with four of them. Each of the four scenarios in The Zalozhniy Quartet has its own climax—or capstone as they are called here—as expected, but depending upon the order in which they are played, the last capstone in the final scenario is upgraded to the campaign’s climax. The problem is that they feel like the finales to scenarios rather than a campaign, and really only the climax to the final scenario, ‘Treason in the Blood’, fully matches the intended scope.

Physically, The Zalozhniy Quartet is well written, fantastically presented and organised, and comes with very helpful staging advice aplenty. It is lightly illustrated, but the black and white artwork is decent. Although there are decent maps of the cities involved in the campaign, what the campaign lacks are maps of individual locations. For the most part, the Director can find or create maps of her own when running The Zalozhniy Quartet, as the descriptions of said locations are sufficiently detailed, but there are locations, such as the bank in ‘The Boxmen’ and the archival storage facilities in ‘Treason in the Blood’ which could have benefited from being supported by their own maps. 

So The Zalozhniy Quartet is not the massive ‘Conspyramid’ campaign that Night’s Black Agents deserves, but that does not mean that it does not present a superbly well realised conspiracy and threat to the future of the world and the means for the player characters to thwart the plot, if not take the conspiracy down. The shifts in tone and adventure type from one scenario to the next are a refreshing change of pace, present opportunities for different player characters to shine, and pleasing encompass a range of espionage styles. Overall, whether as a standalone or a plug-in to the Director’s own campaign, The Zalozhniy Quartet is epic in scope, a gloriously grand affair which showcases how to write and run a horror-espionage campaign.

Mythos Meanderings

Whether it is At the Mountains of Madness or Dagon, Horror on the Orient Express or Beyond the Mountains of Madness, much of both Lovecraftian fiction and Lovecraftian investigative horror has to do with journeys and expeditions. Such journeys and expeditions are either great affairs sponsored by universities sent out in the name of science or museums or desperate dashes by amateurs to save friends or colleagues. Either way, they become gruelling exercises in survival, even terror, fraying the nerves and sanity of the participants and so preparing them for the terrors they will face at their destination. Given the prominence of these great undertakings, of how many scenarios involve expeditions, it seems surprising that in over thirty years of Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying, there has been not been a single sourcebook devoted to this subject. Fortunately, Mythos Expeditions rectifies this omission.

Published by Pelgrane Press, Mythos Expeditions is a supplement for the clue orientated RPG of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Trail of Cthulhu. It provides mechanics for handling the challenges and difficulties faced by an expedition along with ten scenarios that showcase these mechanics. This is a supplement in which the investigators must survive the extremes of the cold and the heat, the wind and the rain, the jungle and the arctic, the swamp and the desert, the open sea and the barren highlands—and all that before they confront whatever mystery or danger it is that drove them to their final destination!

Mythos Expeditions provides a set of rules for handling expeditions under the GUMSHOE System. Whether the classic archaeological expedition, military raid, or research trip, their supplies and equipment are represented by a Survival Pool, whilst the progress of the expedition is broken is down into ‘Travel Increments’. From one ‘Travel increment’ to the next, the members of the expedition will face encounters and potential loss to the Survival Pool, though the investigators’ General Abilities and Investigative Abilities will both be put to the test in alleviate the difficulties of the Survival Tests. The Outdoorsman Ability in particular, figures strongly in these tests as well as increasing the actual Survival Pool itself. Overall, the new rules are clear and simple, as well as supported by the numerous examples in the supplement.

One option presented in Mythos Expeditions is to tie its ten scenarios into the Armitage Inquiry campaign framework as detailed in the Trail of Cthulhu rulebook. This is no surprise given that Miskatonic University has launched numerous expeditions, in particular, the Pabodie Expedition of 1930 to the Antarctic. The aim is not to make the contents of this supplement into an Armitage Inquiry campaign just as the supplement’s aim is not for its contents to be run as a campaign on its own, but rather to use the contents to supplement an existing campaign. Nevertheless, what it talks about are the Occupations and Drives that would send members of the Armitage Inquiry and its associates—that is, the investigators—on these trips. It also covers the skills necessary to such expeditions.

Together the rules and the expansion upon the Armitage Inquiry campaign framework take little more than a tenth of Mythos Expeditions. The remainder consists of ten scenarios, each an expedition to one of the far corners of the world—and sometimes even beyond… The ten scenarios are not designed to be played one after the other, lest the novelty of both the travel and the destination becomes pedestrian. Rather, they are written to be slotted in between other, hopefully different scenarios, of an ongoing campaign, or to be used as one-shots. Either way, none of the ten are particularly long, with most unlikely to last longer than two or three sessions. Lastly, none of the ten are designed specifically for use with Trail of Cthulhu’s Pulp or Purist Modes, but rather leaves this up to the Keeper to decide upon and set in each case. Each scenario follows the same format, first delivering a hook, setting up its spine, and exposing is horrid truth, then presenting its Survival Pool and Expedition Personnel, all before each of giving encounters on the way to the final showdown.

The expeditionary series opens with ‘The Dwellers in the Dunes’ by Steven S. Long. It sees the investigators join Roy Chapman Andrews on a final visit to Mongolia. Having already found amazing dinosaur fossils on previous expeditions, the famed explorer and palaeontologist wants to confirm his hypothesis that humanity evolved in Central Asia. Yet when the expedition is beset by a series of deaths following the uncovering of hominid fossils, is it a mere coincidence or are Chapman Andrews’ theories about to be confirmed? This sends the investigators to the Gobi Desert in the face of banditry and unstable politics, but unlike the scenarios that follow, ‘The Dwellers in the Dunes’ underplays the expeditionary rules and aspects of Trail of Cthulhu. It feels like a more traditional Lovecraftian investigative horror scenario, but it uses the new rules enough so as to ease the Keeper into their application. For the traditional take upon the expeditions of Roy Chapman Andrews in Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying there is mention of the infamous ‘Mongolian Death Worm’, but this is a minor element in what is a solid start to the ten scenarios in Mythos Expeditions.

The designer of the GUMSHOE System, Robin D. Laws, sends the investigators in deepest, dampest Africa. In ‘The Mother of Malaria’, they join Professor H. C. Kelston of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on a mission to North Rhodesia where he wants to examine the mosquitos in order to find a cure for malaria. Following some interesting interaction with various members of the dissolute expat community, the investigators must track deep into the swamps where they will suffer various fetid, fecund encounters. The scenario includes some nicely drawn NPCs and pleasingly combines real history with a natural threat. Adam Gauntlett is on home territory with ‘Lost on a Sea of Dreams’ as the investigators set sail from Kingsport to Bermuda to deliver a bathysphere to naturalist and oceanographer William Beebe, who is conducting a study of undersea life off Bermuda. Unfortunately a terrible storm blows them off course and leaves their ship becalmed below unknown stars. Can the investigators survive long enough to navigate their way out of a ‘sargasso’ off Bermuda? ‘Lost on a Sea of Dreams’ forces the investigators to face more than just the perils of the sea…

The little known Chaco War is the background for ‘An Incident at the Border’, written by Kenneth Hite, the designer of Trail of Cthulhu. This conflict, which drags on for most of the 1930s, is fought between Bolivia and Paraguay over the disputed border territory of Gran Chaco, the highland destination for Professor William Moore of the Miskatonic University—yes, that Professor Moore! There he wants to examine the possible impact site of a Perseid meteor shower and hopefully recover extraterrestrial material. The investigators will be faced with dangers of the barren highlands as well as those of a protracted war before coming upon the sites of the meteor strikes. Here they face a war of a far from mundane nature.

Central America—Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula—is the investigators’ destination in Tristan J. Tarwater’s ‘The Jaguars of El-Thar’. Here, Professor Henry Rutherford Stapleton has been excavating what he calls the Cenote of El-Thar, but with Hurricane Season closing in and the Miskatonic Department of Anthropology concerned for his health, the university sends the investigators down to help. Not only do they have to hack their way through the jungle, they have to contend with odd repatriated Mexicans before discovering the importance of the Cenote of El-Thar. In Bill White’s ‘Tongued With Fire’, the investigators and Miskatonic University are presented with a strange artefact taken from a temple in northwest India, one that might have links to the early history of Christianity and possibly the legend of Prester John. To learn more, an expedition must be mounted to the Punjab of the Subcontinent. Getting there involves some enjoyably colourful encounters, some of them pointing towards a pulpier style than the other scenarios in Mythos Expeditions, and the Keeper is presented with several options as to Mythos connections for the scenario.

‘Served Cold’ by Jeff Tidball begins with the death of two members of the expeditions led by the arctic explorer Robert Peary. What caused their deaths is a mystery, but surely their link cannot be a coincidence—and if not, are the other surviving members also in danger? In order to find out, the investigators will have to retrace Peary’s steps in a long cold traverse over the ice. There is solid investigation to conduct here and much like the journey itself, this is perhaps more interesting than the scenario’s dénouement. Where ‘Served Cold’ takes the investigators onto the ice, Emma Marlow’s ‘Whistle and I’ll Come’ takes them into the jungle. In particular the deep jungles of New Britain (New Guinea), from where the Miskatonic University obtained an oddly carved whistle from the region’s Stone Age tribes. Travelling into the interior of the island has feel of the ‘Heart of Darkness’, but has a more explosive climax.

Lauren Roy takes us to the Irish Republic in ‘A Load of Blarney’ to track down the origins of another artefact—this time an idol salvaged from the wreck of a steamship that went down with almost all its crew in the Irish Sea. A scholar at Dublin’s Trinity College believes that the idol might be connected to Newgrange and other Neolithic tombs and invites members of the Miskatonic University faculty to join her in further investigations. The resulting ‘expedition’ is more of a bucolic meander, the expedition members equipped with flasks of tea and sandwiches rather than quinine and hunting rifles, but is no less arduous. The scenario’s set-up is underwhelming, but it does build towards a dream-like climax.

Lastly, ‘Cerulean Halo’ by Matthew Sanderson sends the investigators off in pursuit of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s patronage. He is planning to return to Clipperton Island in the South Pacific as both a scientific endeavour and an opportunity for some deep sea fishing. Thus he is seeking scientists and naturalists who can join him—and for that he requires a report. This is why the investigators are making a week long survey of the lagoon island. Unlike the previous scenarios, this is more of a sandbox than an expeditionary scenario as the investigators have greater flexibility in what they do on the island. Unfortunately, the scenario could have done with a better map to support that style rather than the expeditionary style used elsewhere, but the change in format shows how the Expedition Rules can be used in less ‘straightforward’ scenarios. The scenario itself feels slightly old fashioned with a pulpier climax.

Physically, Mythos Expeditions is decently presented. The artwork has an eerie quality and the cartography captures some of the feel of maps of the period. A nice touch is that the footers for the book’s pages varies from one expedition/scenario to the next. Each of these different footers nicely encapsulates the expedition from beginning to end, and whilst the players may never see this, it is a pleasing addition that the Keeper can enjoy. Where the supplement does suffer is in the writing and editing, which towards the end of the book is definitely rushed. Elsewhere the book is up to Pelgrane Press’ usual standard of editing and writing.

One of the clichés of pulp adventure movies is the stand-in for long distance travel, a red line stretching from one destination to the next as the heroes travel round the globe. Mythos Expeditions takes that red line and draws it away from the abstract to make it very real—in some cases to make the ‘expedition’ the ‘investigation’ rather than the traditional set-up and process. It is oft said that it is not destination that matters, but the journey, and that is exactly what underpins this supplement. In some places, overly so, but Mythos Expeditions does a fine job of taking a set of new rules and sending them off the map.

Your Templar Primer

The writer Graeme Davis is probably best known as being a co-designer of the seminal British fantasy RPG, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. He has of course worked on other books for other lines for other publishers, most as line editor for Colonial Gothic for Rogue Games. Amongst his other books is a number of sourcebooks for Osprey Publishing of which Knights Templar: A Secret History is one. Part of the publisher’s Osprey Adventures line where fact and fiction coalesce, this short guide is the second in the series that began with Ken Hite’s The Nazi Occult, continuing its exploration of myth, legend, secret histories, and conspiracy theories. Although the matter of its subject, that of the Knights Templar, is older and as presented in Knights Templar: A Secret History, far better intentioned, than that of The Nazi Occult, there is just enough of a connection to cross over between the two. Well, of course there is, the Knights Templar, their history and their legend is just too big a conspiratorial confabulation not to touch upon the Nazis…

This being a book about the Knights Templar means that the book starts with a conspiracy of its own. This is the death of the historian, Doctor Emile Fouchet, who was investigating the foundation and history of the Templars in an attempt to uncover their secrets before died. His notes, compiled by the author, are what form the basis of Knights Templar: A Secret History. The notes begin with the origins of the Templars before their foundation date, and then explore their foundation and rise to power before the French monarchy brought them low with charges of heresy. More importantly, it examines their ties to the Cathars and the Albigensian Heresies that informs their philosophy and creed and their objectives—a united peaceful state free of religious strife, but also the vessel of their teachings—the Holy Grail. This is what drives them again and again, first in the Near East, then in France followed by Scotland, pre-Colonial North America, and back to France for multiple attempts, to manipulate the affairs—ordinary and outré—of governments, secret societies, and more. All the while following or protecting the Grail.

These attempts are where Knights Templar: A Secret History begins to get interesting because what it sets up is a three-way hidden war between the Knights Templar, the Vatican, and the Freemasons. Spread throughout are juicy little details such as their survival in New France, how Benjamin Franklin aided the Templars despite his Freemasonry, what might have really going on in Rennes-le-Château, the Templars' links to the Habsburgs, and all that before coming almost up to date with Dan Brown. After all, one could hardly expect a discussion on the Templars to ignore The Da Vinci Code and pleasingly, Knights Templar: A Secret History does not do that. What it does do is relegate the Prieuré de Sion, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and The Da Vinci Code to nothing more than a sideshow, a smokescreen at best.

Knights Templar: A Secret History covers its subject matter quickly and easily. It is illustrated with a range of solid artwork and is accompanied by both a timeline and a bibliography. The latter is necessary given the brevity of the treatment. This is not to say that the book fails to cover the salient points of its subject matter, but rather that there is relatively little room for depth. It also means that there is no room for the application of its subject matter in gaming terms, so there are no plot seeds given or campaign ideas. Indeed, unlike other entries in the Osprey Adventures line, there are no suggestions as to what games might be applicable for running something based on Knights Templar: A Secret History.

Knights Templar: A Secret History is best used as an introduction to one of the biggest of conspiracies, and then as a source of ideas. A good overview then, but not much more.

Staked Twice, Never Bitten

There are one or two facts that you need to know about Double Tap, the first supplement for one of the best RPGs—certainly the finest espionage and finest espionage/horror RPG—of 2012, Night’s Black Agents: the Vampire Spy Thriller RPG. Written by Ken Hite and published by Pelgrane Press, the player characters are ex-secret agents who have learned that their former employers are controlled by vampires and decide to take down the vampiric conspiracy before the vampires take them. As much a toolkit as an RPG, it gives everything that the Director needs to design and create his game, allowing him to design the vampire conspiracy and the vampire threat, from psychic alien leeches to the traditional children of Transylvania, and set the tone and style of the espionage, from the high octane of the James Bond franchise to the dry and mundane grittiness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Essentially, Night’s Black Agents is your Schweizer Offiziersmesser of vampires and espionage.

The first fact is that as the title might suggest, Double Tap is not a supplement about guns—Double Tap being a shooting manoeuvre intended to ensure that a target is definitely dead by shooting him twice in the head—although there is a section about guns in the book. This of course begs the question, “Why exactly, is this supplement called ‘Double Tap’?”. Which is a perfectly good question to which there is a perfectly good answer in the last paragraph of this review. The second is that Double Tap is not the ‘Agent’s Companion’ for Night’s Black Agents. It is instead the ‘The Night’s Black Agents Expansion Book’, because it contains information for the Director as well as the players and their characters. Indeed, it has sections entitled ‘Agent’s Companion’ and ‘Director’s Companion’. Between them, the players and Director are served up a plethora of clues, benefits, cherries, manoeuvres, rules, gadgets and (yes) guns, and more—all delivered as an easy-to-digest, no-fuss, but some frills, in-country supply drop.

The ‘Agent’s Companion’ dives straight into a re-examination of an agent’s Abilities. Each receives a new overviews and a new focus, the latter less mechanical than a new means of applying it; a ‘Tactical Fact-Finding Benefit’ that showcases how might be used to best effect; sample benefits to be gained from spending the points from an Ability’s pool; and sample clues. For example, the new focus for the Accounting Ability is money laundering. It provides a short, but detailed description of how it is done; its ‘Tactical Fact-Finding Benefit’ describes how Accounting might be used to track down and use an illegal stash of guns to gain an advantage over the opposition; and how it can be spent to gain benefits on other Abilities when they are next used. The accompanying sample clues show how ‘following the money’ can lead somewhere interesting, and like the sample clues for the other Abilities detailed in Double Tap, can either be as is and added in game, or as models to adjusted for the Director’s own game. Other Investigative Abilities also include extra details, associated equipment, and so on, such as the list of British Police Jargon for Cop Talk, the most expensive hotels in Europe for High Society, toxins for Pharmacy, and what you pack in a ‘Bug-Out’ bag under Urban Surveillance.

Then Double Tap does exactly the same thing for an Agent’s General Abilities. Again, each of these is given a new focus, for example, Parkour for Athletics and Plastic Explosives for Explosives; new sample clues, and so on. Instead of ‘Tactical Fact-Finding Benefit’, they have new Cherries, the extra special benefits that come with having high Abilities. In general, these are not quite as interesting as those for Investigative Abilities, but the point of this re-examination is to make each and every Ability interesting, useful, and evocative. It highlights how every Ability can bear upon the game and how the Director should be bringing his player Agents’ Abilities into his campaign.

Double Tap then presents a number of new mechanical options or ‘Tricks of the Trade’, that work in conjunction with a player narration. All a player has to do is narrate the action to gain the benefit of an Ability refresh with these, just as with those in the core rules. In this they work in a similar fashion to the Thriller manoeuvres, like Gear Devil or Technothriller Monologue, found in Night’s Black Agents. They also push the levels of competence, so are suited to more cinematic games. The first is a number of new Thriller manoeuvres, the majority of which these are for non-combat Abilities, such as Grease Monkey for Mechanics and Verbal Trauma Unit for Medic. These are followed by a set of Achievement refreshes—inspired by computer gaming—that push up the cinematic aspects of Night’s Black Agents that little bit more, such as ‘Lifeline’ for climbing out of a window using knotted sheets or fire hose, or ‘Mother Superior’ for impersonating a religious figure! Tricks of the Trade’ continues with ‘Adaptive Tradecraft’, which takes ‘standard’ adaptive espionage or Tradecraft techniques and suggests how they might work when hunting vampires. Rounding this chapter out is a set of standard operating procedures, the Cartagena Rules. These are not for being spies in the field—Night’s Black Agents has the Bucharest Rules for that, backed up by the Moscow Rules in Double Tap—but for playing Night’s Black Agents. Their aim is to keep the game moving and enjoyable, to avoid it stagnating and getting dull, and being a set of rules, they are short and to the point. Good advice for players and Director alike.

‘Materiel’ puts gadgets, gear, and guns under the spotlight. To an extent, this section is in Q Branch territory, especially with its vehicle upgrades like oil slick dispensers and disposable car skins. Guns get the same treatment, but some of the special ammunition may have its uses in any style of game against vampires. Whilst a list of firearms is included, they are not necessarily there for the agents’ use, but rather to arm particular agencies.

The Thriller Chase rules in Night’s Black Agents turned up the action for chases by foot, by vehicle, and so on. ‘Thriller Contests & Manhunts’ does the same for Digital Intrusion, Infiltration, and Surveillance. What this means is that certain non-combat scenes—hacking attempts, stealthy break-ins and break-outs, and monitoring a suspect—can played out dramatically, even thrillingly, by making them intense contests. There are guidelines given to make each of them thrilling and how to use other Abilities during Digital Intrusion, Infiltration, or Surveillance attempts. Not every attempt or scene involving Digital Intrusion, Infiltration, or Surveillance need be run as a Thriller Contest, but when needed, now they can, and they give the player agents involved their moment in the spotlight. In similar fashion, the Manhunt rules up the ante for handling chases, especially where the quarry is trying to do more than just get away. Of course, this is all whilst the player agents are burned and out in the cold, no longer having access to the manpower or infrastructure to carry out a manhunt.

The remaining third of Double Tap is the ‘Director’s Companion’ and for his eyes only. He receives a good set of NPCs, ready to fill out cameo roles, and easy to portray and modify, that can be used as assets or clues. Accompanying these is a set of ‘Establishing Shots’, locations and scenes that the Director can set up a scene and bring it to life. Both sets are evocative and fun, as well as being easy-to-use tools. Double Tap also comes with four new monsters—the chupa, the ekimmu, the homunculus, and the penanggalan—and a complete vampire build in the form of the nosferatu, the latter being familiar to most gamers (and agents). Of course Night’s Black Agents has plenty of options when it comes to the Director creating or selecting a vampiric foe for his game, but these add more, especially given that there are notes included on how to turn these creatures of one legend into another. For the Director, a whole new story aid is provided in the form of the ‘Suspyramid’, which plugs into the ‘Conspyramid’, the structure that underpins the vampire conspiracy in Night’s Black Agents. It helps him run games in which the player agents not only dismantle the conspiracy, but set parts of it against each other. Rounding out the ‘Director’s Companion’ are notes on running Night’s Black Agents in other eras, specifically the Victorian Age, World War II, and the Cold War. These do feel a little underwritten, but they are really no more than notes. Of course, any one of these three periods would be worthy of a supplement in their own right.

Physically, Double Tap is a well-written, easy-to-read, and easily digestible supplement. Its contents are nicely supported by a good index and, for the Director, summary lists of the cherries and vampiric powers—both from Night’s Black Agents and Double Tap.

Companion volumes are not always the most interesting or coherent of reads. This is the danger of covering lots of different subjects under one cover, but Double Tap contains different things that are actually interesting. The new rules its gives are interesting and better than that, they evoke their genre and are fun in the process. If there is a downside to them, it is that they evoke the more cinematic side of Night’s Black Agents, rather than the drier grittier side. Nevertheless, Double Tap provides plenty of manoeuvres and tricks of the trade to ensure that a Director’s Night’s Black Agent is definitely fun.

Nitrates & Nasties

From Dread Albion to the Balkans, the 'Backlot Gothic' stretches across a timeless region of Europe reached only by train, but which can only be crossed on foot or by horse and carriage. It is home to a backwards people, many superstitious, others ignorant, who live under the shadow of the vampire, the werewolf, and the man of visionary, but misguided science. Cousin to the Backlot Gothic is the Backlot Jungle, which stretches from the Amazon to Asia via Africa, and although its creatures change from lion to tiger to jaguar as the continent dictates, the frogs will always sound like those found in Southern California.

For Hollywood is the inspiration for the Backlot Jungle and the Backlot Gothic both, the two being the setting for Shadows Over Filmland, an anthology for Trail of Cthulhu. Penned by Ken Hite and Robin D Laws, the anthology draws from the horror movies of the Desperate Decade. The authors have taken films such as Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, White Zombie, and others, and used them to give the Cthulhu Mythos of stories like ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ and ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, a Silver Nitrate wash. Or indeed, infuse the classic creations of the Universal Monsters films with the sanity debilitating effect that is the Cthulhu Mythos. The result is an otherworldly, gothic conceit that the Keeper will use to draw his investigators into the twelve eerie, sometimes grotesque reels presented on the screen in Shadows Over Filmland.

The supplement is essentially three sections. The first is Hite’s essay exploring the parallels between Lovecraft’s fiction and the horror films of Universal Studios and RKO. Despite Lovecraft’s own dismissal of these films, Hite finds more than enough to support the core conceit behind Shadows Over Filmland, looking in turn at the vampire, the werewolf, the mummy and so on. Thus, both The Mummy and the stories ‘He’, ‘The Terrible Old Man’, ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘The High House in the Mist’,’ ‘Dreams in the Witch-House’, and ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ all make use of the concept of the immortal monster-magus as much as The Mummy and ‘Cool Air’ and ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ all possess a certain fascination with the Oriental and the exotic. Having established the parallels, Hite goes on to explain the differences between the Cthulhu Mythos and the Silver Nitrate Mythos, primarily the emphasis upon sexuality, its obsession with psychology, fascination with corpses and their mutilation, the sublimation of the Desperate Decade’s economic fears into supernatural ones, the mocking of God’s good order, and so on…

The second section explores the more mundane elements that make up the Backlot Gothic. Whether the blackest of forests or catacombs and castles most sinister, hermits or gypsies, butlers or laboratory assistants, these elements emulate the stock characters and locations where the movies of Shadows Over Filmland are shot. Complete with numerous examples and advice on handling both the motifs and the accents to found in the Backlot Gothic, their inclusion highlights both an issue with Shadows Over Filmland and its intent. The issue is that the regular use of this stock footage can easily become a cliché, but the intent is that is Shadows Over Filmland not meant to be used as a campaign. That is, the Backlot Gothic is somewhere to visit on an irregular basis, a fact further supported by the absence of any advice on running the dozen scenarios herein as a campaign. Rounding out this section is a number of story hooks that the Keeper can develop into full scenarios in addition to those in the book’s third section.

Shadows Over Filmland’s third section is its longest and is devoted to the investigators’ individual trips to the Backlot Gothic in the form of a dozen scenarios. Of these twelve, Ken Hite pens five – ‘Death Across the Nile’, ‘Dreams of Dracula’, ‘Lord of the Jungle’, ‘The Black Chateau’, and ‘White Bokor’; Robin D Laws pens six – ‘Dr Grave Dust’, ‘The Green Ape’, ‘The Night I Died’, ‘The Preserve’, ‘The Non-Euclidean Man’, and ‘Under a Werewolf Moon’; and together, they co-author ‘The Final Reel’. The degree to which the Mythos is employed in these dozen varies from one scenario to the next, so that one scenario might be a more Universal Studio feature than a Lovecraftian submission to Weird Tales. That said, those of the scenarios that are more Lovecraftian would work well in a standard Trail of Cthulhu campaign with little or no modification.

The dozen opens in classic fashion not in the Backlot Gothic per se, but Backlot Egypt with ‘Death Across the Nile’ and a tale of possession down the ages. This scenario will be familiar to most gamers, right down to taking place at an archaeological dig, but this does not mean that it is not well done and that it is anything other than engaging. There is a twist or two to the tale, but it is otherwise a straight forward affair. ‘White Bokor’ is written as a sequel to White Zombie, the 1932 film starring Bela Lugosi and is intentionally straight forward, if not linear in nature. In it the investigators find themselves on the Backlot Island, either washed ashore or following up on earlier clues, where the only place to go is a castle on the Mountain of the Dead! The problem is that it is influenced by the films of George Romero and whilst the investigators are faced by a zombie herd, they are the ones being herded and it feels all too heavy handed. Given that its title is ‘Dr Grave Dust’, it is no surprise that the third scenario is inspired by Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’. An epidemic of grave robberies has struck the Backlot Gothic, and the investigators are asked to uncover those responsible. The culprit is quickly highlighted in what is otherwise a surprisingly combat orientated scenario. Again this is another straight forward scenario, but what is interesting is how the culprit’s motive has been taken a step further beyond an interest in reanimating the dead.

The conceit of the Backlot Gothic in ‘Dreams of Dracula’ is that no one has heard of Dracula and Bram Stoker never penned the eponymous novel, which of course flies in the face of player knowledge. Set in Backlot Albion, perhaps London, perhaps Whitby, the investigators are asked by a friend to help him with a queer situation – both his wife and her friend have been struck down by fever and anaemia, brought by nightmares! This is a languorous, atmospheric affair, one that apes the England-set sequences from Bram Stoker’s novel, almost as an act of misdirection. The author’s use of the Cthulhu Mythos, hidden as it is behind the apparent vampire Mythos, nicely and effectively underpins the scenario’s misdirection. As ‘The Green Ape’ opens, the investigators find themselves ready to go ashore and brave the Backlot Jungle on the remote island of Nambu in the South Pacific. This is a trip back into the prehistoric past, much like the movie that inspired it – King Kong, and much like any trek into the unknown, the scenario become something of a test of endurance, although this is balanced by a Pulp sensibility. The next adventure is again set in the Backlot Jungle and is again something of a test of endurance, but more intentionally so. ‘The Lord of the Jungle’, which draws from James Whale’s 1940 film, Green Hell, and Lovecraft’s ‘Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn And His Family’ also continues the previous scenario’s Pulp sensibility, but this slips away as the investigators penetrate further and further into Africa’s dark heart to locate a lost city and uncover its secrets. 

Val Lewton’s films for RKO from the 1940s – leaping a decade ahead than is the norm for Trail of Cthulhu – are the inspiration for ‘The Night I Died’. Once again a friend calls upon the investigators for their help. His fiancée has fallen into melancholia and appears to sleep walk, even going so far as claim that she is a ghost! Set in an Urban Backlot, ‘The Night I Died’ is another atmospheric piece, but one that comes with notes on how to make it more of a Mythos influenced experience than it is. Inspired by Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ as much by The Invisible Man, ‘The Non-Euclidean Man’ brings the investigators to a scientific symposium hosted by the Pneumametric Society and face to death from beyond – though initially not their own. 

‘The Black Chateau’ has the most modern feel of the dozen scenarios in the anthology, at least artistically. It evokes a feeling of stark, nightmarish horror in entrapping the investigators within an imaginatively contemporary version of the haunted house to very pleasing effect. Much like the earlier ‘Dreams of Dracula’, a familiar monster appears in ‘Under a Werewolf Moon’. Its use is not as imaginative as that of Dracula in ‘Dreams of Dracula’, but this is nevertheless far from unplayable. The penultimate conceit in the anthology takes a concept from the Universal Horror films and sets it on the investigators. ‘The Preserve’ unites three of the antagonists from previous entries in Shadows Over Filmland and lets them take revenge on the investigators in what is a Pulp affair suitably located towards both the end of the book and the end of a Backlot Gothic campaign.

The conceit culminates in Backlot Hollywood – or is it the ‘real’ Hollywood? – with the appropriately named ‘The Final Reel’. The investigators are called in by the Hays Office to look into Capitol Pictures’ production of a new horror film entitled Call of Cthulhu! Can they find cause to have this threat to American morals shut down, let alone uncover who exactly is sponsoring the film? Fittingly, this plays louche and loose with the Shadows Over Filmland canon to draw on several of the previous scenarios in the anthology, though such elements are not central to the plot. It is almost as if the investigators have stepped out of the collection’s previous films and into the studio… The scenario comes with several detailed NPCs around which the Keeper involves the investigation, though this is primarily a player-led affair. Should the investigators want to do more than just shut the film down and uncover the cult or cultists behind its production, then the Keeper will have to improvise the details himself. Otherwise, this is an entertaining climax to Shadows Over Filmland.

Physically, Shadows Over Filmland is a beautiful book. The layout is clean and tidy, and Jérôme Huguenin provides some excellent art. It is missing an index, but that is probably less of a problem since the book is unlikely to serve as a reference work. Slightly more problematic is the lack of maps since their inclusion might have aided the Keeper in certain scenarios.

The best of the dozen Shadows Over Filmland work effectively when their combination of the horror of the Cthulhu Mythos and the horror of the Universal Monsters counterbalance each other. Samples of the twelve that achieve this include ‘Dreams of Dracula’, ‘The Black Chateau’, and to an extent, ‘Under a Werewolf Moon’. The least effective scenarios are those that wander away from the Backlot Gothic or the Backlot Albion, primarily because the investigative process plays less of a role and because there is less player agency involved in them. Those in between these two poles are solidly written scenarios, though ‘White Bokor’ is perhaps too linear and too heavily scripted. The tone for most of the twelve is also well handled, for the most part maintaining a steady median between the Pulp and the Purist, sometimes advice being given for the Keeper should he want to adjust to one tone or another. 

As with any anthology, the contents of Shadows Over Filmland can easily be used as a series of one-shots. All are relatively short, offering at most two sessions’ worth of play. There is no particular order to the twelve scenarios, but certainly ‘The Preserve’ and ‘The Final Reel’ should be played after the previous ten. Many of the twelve would also work as additions to an on-going Trail of Cthulhu campaign, though the ‘The Preserve’ and ‘The Final Reel’ might stretch the credulity and tone of certain Keepers’ campaigns. The intended use of the anthology though is as a supplement to an existing campaign, the Backlot Gothic not being somewhere that the investigators should visit regularly. Indeed, there is such a dream-like quality to the scenarios that these twelve would work as a series of visits to a version of the Dreamlands influenced by the cinema of the Desperate Decade. However Shadows Over Filmland is used, it presents a diverting dozen that take the investigators deep into the Arcadian idyll of the Backlot Gothic suffused with the sinister and the malevolent behind which lurks the Cthulhu Mythos.

Nasties & Nazis Primer

Osprey Publishing is best known for its military history books, each diligently researched and meticulously illustrated with period photographs and fully painted colour plates. Over the years, its books have proved useful to historians and gamers alike, primarily wargamers, but on occasion to roleplayers too. It is to the latter that a new series from the publisher is likely to appeal. Where in the past, Osprey Publishing’s books have presented facts and analysis, each entry in the ‘Dark Osprey’ series goes beyond the facts to meld it with fiction. One of the first entries in the series delves into as ‘dark’ subject as you can imagine and the publisher got the right man to write it.

2013 has been a great year if you want Nazis in your games. Both Achtung! Cthulhu: Investigator’s Guide to the Secret War from Modiphius Press and World War Cthulhu: The Darkest Hour from Cubicle Seven Entertainment put the knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos within the grasp of the Nazis, whilst in the recently released Band of Zombies, Eden Studios, Inc. let the Nazis unleash zombies on the Allies, and that is not forgetting Hite’s own GURPS WW2-Weird War Two supplement. Which just goes to show how we love mixing up the weird with our Nazis when it comes to our games and have done so ever since E. Gary Gygax sent his wizards and warriors to fight a German patrol and Indiana Jones uncovered the Nazi’s plans for the Ark of the Covenant in the 1981 movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. What is so fascinating about this frothy mix of the utterly evil and the weird is it has some basis in truth – the Nazis had an interest in the occult and much of what they were grew out of occult interests following the foundation of Germany in 1871. This is the basis for The Nazi Occult, the first in the Dark Osprey series written by Kenneth Hite, the author of two great RPGs in the form of Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents.

Hite does not so much chart the history and origins of the Nazis’ interest in the occult as race through it. Within a few pages, the reader is swept through the völkisch movement and its Aryan ideologies into the volatile politics of post-Great War Germany that saw the rise of the Nazis. Once the Nazis are in power, the founding of the Ahnenerbe is detailed as well as its occult equivalent to the Grand Tour. This takes in Finland, Brazil, Sweden, Bolivia, Iceland, Greece, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but most famously visits Tibet – indeed, a whole chapter is devoted to that expedition and its search for Agartha, the other secret kingdom. Similarly, another chapter devotes itself to the Nazi hunt for the great artefacts – the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Spear of Destiny, while others examines the application of the Nazis’ acquired occult knowledge, primarily in the form of the vril-powered vaguely bell-shaped flying saucers and the post-defeat, last stand, Werwolf program. Of course, with the fall of the Third Reich, the Fourth Reich could be founded, and the last chapter is devoted to its refuge, Point 211, in Antarctica, where it manages to withstand an American response…

Rounding out The Nazi Occult is a short bibliography of books and films as well as an equally short ludography of suitable games. It is followed by a short glossary. Both are necessary, the bibliography if only to aid the reader in expanding upon the book’s contents and confirming fact from fiction; in providing further visual stimulus; and in helping a GM put numbers to the book’s contents. The glossary of course is a handy point of reference for the numerous ‘technical’ terms used throughout The Nazi Occult.

So the question is, how do you use The Nazi Occult? At its most base use, the book is a primer, an introduction to its subject matter, the bibliography providing further pointers as to suggested reading. Its most obvious use is as background to a game of the GM's devising, whether that is in the heyday of the Nazi's occult world tour of the 1930s, during fraught years of World War Two, or in the desperate years following the end of the war. The GM need not use the background wholesale, but instead cherry pick the elements that he wants to use, either as scenario seeds or just simple details. The book is rich in such detail and potential ideas.

What The Nazi Occult is not, is a gaming supplement in the strictest sense. It contains no gaming stats or write-ups – for any gaming system. Such information is for the GM to devise, though certain supplements will no doubt have such information already prepared. What The Nazi Occult is, is an overview and an introduction to the weirder, not to say bonkers, ideology of the Nazis and how they applied it. It also manages to be a history of the Nazi Occult whilst also not being a history of the Nazi Occult. The point being that Hite speculates beyond the actual history, not only filling in the blanks, but going so far as to describe the culmination of the Nazi occultists’ wish fulfilment – the Werwolf program and its actual lycanthropes; the vehicles of Projekt Saucer; and so on. The problem is that whilst such operations and creations are not only fanciful and fictional – and obviously so – it is not so easy to spot the divide between the fact and the fiction elsewhere in the book. 

How much of an issue that will be, will vary from one reader to the next, but it is an issue that needs to be highlighted. Osprey Publishing’s books are history books, and as much history as there is in The Nazi Occult, it diverges from the history and does not say where it does. Still it does at least state in the introduction that in places the act of writing history is by necessity an act of the imagination. Arguably though, a disclaimer of some kind could have been displayed somewhere.

Physically, The Nazi Occult is up to the usual standards of Osprey Books’ layout and presentation. It is superbly illustrated, both the full paintings by Darren Tan and the numerous period book covers and photographs ably supporting the text. The paintings in particular do much to support the more fantastic elements of Hite’s amplified history – the deadly effect of casting spells, the protection of the City of the Birds from the SS by a djinn guardian, a street battle between US Army soldiers and Wolfen resistance, and so on. At just eighty pages, Hite does throw name after name and weirdness after weirdness at the reader at a tumultuous pace, and whilst he does have a lot to cram into those eighty pages, it does leave the reader with a lot to take in…

The Nazi Occult is either a primer on its subject matter or a full roleplaying game background yet to be written up with game stats or a history thick with plot ideas and details ready to be developed and added to an existing roleplaying campaign. It depends upon the reader and the GM of course, but either way, The Nazi Occult is a richly detailed introduction to a fascinating if quite bonkers aspect of history.

The Lion After The Serpent

If you were wondering what had become of The Day After Ragnarok, the 2009 Savage Worlds setting created and written by Ken Hite and published by Atomic Overmind Press, then you are not alone. The award-winning post-WW2, post-apocalypse, post-Ragnarok campaign setting, which has since been adapted for use with Hero Games’ Hero Sixth Edition and more recently for use with Evil Hat Games’ Fate Core, has not received the support that it truly deserves. Ideally, that would be a Plot Point campaign, but in the meantime, the setting has been supported with a half dozen ‘One-Sheet’ adventures and three entries in the Serpent Scales: Fragments From The World After The Serpentfall series. To date, these have visited the rise of the Klan in Serpent Scales #1: The New Konfederacy; examined the STEN Gun in Serpent Scales #2: (Happiness is a) Sten Gun; and even gone ashore in Serpent Scales #3: Return to Monster Island. Now there is a fourth entry in the series, one which comes with a little bit of history of its own.

Available for Savage Worlds and Fate Core, Issue #4 in the Serpent Scales: Fragments From The World After The Serpentfall series is The Lion in Fimbulwinter: Sweden After the Serpentfall. It began life as a Ken Hite authored contribution to the Swedish gaming magazine FENIX for its ‘post-holocaust’ issue, and after all, there is no post-holocaust setting like The Day After Ragnarok. Atomic Overmind Press has taken Hite’s original article and developed it into this fourth entry in the Serpent Scales series. It describes the events in the July 1945 Serpent Fall as they fell upon Sweden, taking them up to the current situation in Sweden in 1948.

Of all the countries of Scandinavia, Sweden is the only one to survive nearly intact. To the west, Denmark and Norway took the brunt of the tsunami that flowed east and west in the wake of Jörmungandr’s atomic-fire induced plummet to earth. Sweden could not avoid the earthquakes or the torrential rain that followed, but despite hundreds of thousands that died, Sweden survived as a nation, although a politically unstable one. Placed east of the Serpent Curtain, Sweden is almost but not quite a client state of Moscow, which cannot be said of its neighbours – Norway and Denmark are both People’s Republics garrisoned by Soviet troops, whilst Stalin incorporated Finland into the USSR directly as the Karelo-Finnish SSR. At home, Sweden remains a monarchy although King Gustav VI Adolf or ‘Comrade G’ was forced to retreat from public life by a Communist government that has since been replaced by a left wing alliance that avoids making radical decisions that might break the government and force external intervention…

Meanwhile, the king’s son, Crown Prince Gustav Adolf, has decamped to the once-German island of Heligoland in the North Sea with much of the Swedish Navy and air force, and declared himself the Royal Governor of Heligoland. It has become a major staging post for ships of the British Royal Navy and for refugees getting out of Soviet occupied Germany – whatever their ‘former’ political allegiances. The British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, supports anti-Communist activities in Sweden, the country serving as the perfect jumping off point to get spies through the Serpent Curtain and back out again. This activity includes research into the oldest runic symbols in Europe; the very ones that the Ahnenerbe scholars are said to have used to summon the Midgard Serpent! Monsters are everywhere, just like the rest of the world, whether that be sinuous serpents newly returned to Sweden’s lakes or the trolls and even more fearsome troll wives that do the bidding of their Frost Giant masters.

Just ten pages long, The Lion in Fimbulwinter is a 2.42 Mb, black and white PDF. It not includes a succinctly written, but nevertheless rich description of a country that is rarely visited in gaming. This presents a fraught nation, desperately trying to rebuild following the Serpentfall whilst staving off the seemingly inevitable Soviet annexation. Although it maintains the high quality in terms of content – content that should spark ideas aplenty for the GM – seen in previous The Day After Ragnarok titles, barring a somewhat silly final scenario seed, what The Lion in Fimbulwinter really lacks is ‘the Top Five’ lists begun in The Day After Ragnarock – such as Top Five Places To Stomp Nazis and Top Five Secret Bases. That said, it is a shorter piece than other titles in the series.

What Serpent Scales #4: The Lion in Fimbulwinter – Sweden presents is the Berlin of the post-Ragnarok world. Which is a little odd given that Hite has already described the city of Tehran, as detailed in his Tehran – Nest of Spies, as being Berlin’s equivalent in The Day After Ragnarok setting, it being the closest non-Soviet capital with an accessible border to the Soviet Union. Perhaps the Berlin of the North of the post-Ragnarok world? If there is a thematic similarity, then the flavour and the tone of The Lion in Fimbulwinter are very different, not as exotic, much dryer, even starker, and colder than Tehran – Nest of Spies. 

Coarse Conjury by K. Hite

Magic in Lovecraftian tales is ineffable, unquantifiable, unworldly, and understandably, a literary device. Magic in games of Lovecraftian investigative horror can be all those things, but to make it so, magic actually has to be the exact opposite. It has to be describable, it has to be quantifiable, and as much it remains a device, it has to have cause and effect, and with those in hand, both a GM and his players can work and describe magics in a roleplaying game as part of its narrative. This is the aim of Rough Magicks, a supplement for Trail of Cthulhu, Pelgrane Press’ RPG of clue orientated Lovecraftian investigative horror, penned by the author of the RPG, Kenneth Hite.

Rough Magicks is a slim volume that expands upon the nature of Lovecraftian magic and the rules for it in Trail of Cthulhu and it begins by addressing a simple question – “What is the nature of magic?” Several solutions are suggested. Is it a hyper-science? Something only known to those who have awoken in the Dreamlands? Is it not magic, but psionics? Is it a genetic holdout from the biological sciences of the Elder Things? One, some, or all of these suggestions are possible answers much in the manner of how the Trail of Cthulhu core rules describe the creatures and entities of the Mythos.

How it expands upon the nature of Lovecraftian magic and the rules for it is done in Rough Magicks all through the simplicity of adding a single new General Ability – Magic. Now in Trail of Cthulhu, it is most obviously the province of the sorcerers and wizards who have had and continue to have dealings with the unknowable and the incomprehensible and so have a grasp of the fundamental workings that underpin the nature of the cosmos. Thus we are dealing with figures such as John Dee, Gaspard du Nord, and Ludwig Prinn, and more latterly, Randolph Carter, and Joseph Curwen. In game, the Ability is being expended to negate in part the loss of Stability, essentially serving as a partial bulwark against the immediate shock that comes with the working of magic and the casting of spells.

The Magic Ability is not wholly the province of the NPC sorcerer or wizard though. If the Keeper allows it, then an investigator can acquire the Magic Ability, but this must be in-game during play rather during character generation. It may be from reading certain Mythos tomes, from encountering or learning it from entities such as Yog-sothoth or Nyarlathotep, from being by an actual sorcerer or wizard, or from being exposed to it at certain places, like Dread Carcosa or the Moon-Pool of Ponape. As much as the Magic Ability partially counters the loss of Stability when casting spells, what it does not, and cannot do, is negate any potential Sanity loss…

In addition to listing the potential Magic Ability gain from studying certain tomes, from Al-Azif to Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Rough Magicks expands upon the rules for ‘Places of Power’, gives numerous examples of casting, and suggests the Magic ratings for a veritable menagerie of Mythos Monsters. Of course, this being a book about magic, there is a whole chapter devoted to spells, pleasingly entitled ‘Cast A Deadly Spell’ which adds new spells whilst also re-examining old ones for dramatic purposes. Trail of Cthulhu being a clue-orientated game means that the casting of spells leaves evidence and just as with Mythos creatures in the Trail of Cthulhu core rules, the investigators can detect evidence of this casting. For example, Bureaucracy could undercover a change of use filed by the Chapel of Contemplation on a certain building or that last night’s midnight mass was no ordinary ceremony with the use of Theology. Not ignored is that signature response to the magics and the entities of the Cthulhu Mythos – the Elder sign, the author discussing what it might look like and there are more suggestions than you think…

Rough Magicks does not restrict itself wholly to Mythos Magic. It also expands upon the rules for ‘Idiosyncratic Magic’ for the ‘Bookhounds of London’ campaign frame in the Trail of Cthulhu core rules – since expanded into a superlative setting book of its very own. More suited to Pulp style games, the purpose of ‘Idiosyncratic Magic’ is to provide boosts to the caster’s General Abilities, and again, these are supported by example effects for each General Ability. Examples are given for each of the various General Abilities, such as wearing pieces of a mirror like monocles until your cheeks bleed to enhance the Disguise Ability or wielding a ‘Dead Man’s Glove’ filled with blood to enhance the Filch skill. All have a certain uneasy, if not out and out gruesome quality, and serve as possible starting suggestions.

Rounding out Rough Magicks is a specific revisiting of magic in Lovecraft’s fiction. This is a more open discussion of the subject, though of course, Hite has been drawing upon and applying his knowledge of Lovecraftian fiction – as evidenced in his Tour de Lovecraft – throughout the pages of Rough Magicks. Here he is more appraising of his sources discussing the various ways in which Lovecraft presents magic in his fiction. This serves as a set of pointers for the Keeper wanting to draw direct from the source for atmosphere as much as it does to highlight Lovecraft’s flexibility when it comes to describing magic in his stories.

Physically, Rough Magicks is another attractive looking book for Trail of Cthulhu, as ever suitably illustrated with a selection of creepy art from Jérôme Huguenin. Unfortunately, the book feels a little rushed in places and could have done with another editorial pass.

Rough Magicks is not a book that the Trail of Cthulhu Keeper necessarily needs, but should he want to expand upon the nature and role of magic in his campaign, then this supplement is more than to the point. Indeed, it would also nicely complement the Bookhounds of London campaign frame and source book with its bibliographic focus and its development of ‘Idiosyncratic Magic’. Perhaps the best aspect of the definition and the quantification at the heart of this book is that it leaves plenty of room for the Keeper to make the magic of his game, ineffable, unquantifiable, and unworldly in play.