19th Level

I'll be making a small adjustment for this actual play. I'll be focusing less on what happened during play - though I will cover that - and more discussing the makeup of the adventure. I think that is probably more of interest to my readers. One of my players commented how she didn't recall any adventures actually involving Cthulhu. With our previous adventure featuring some Thralls of Cthulhu that seemed a great opportunity to make use of the worldwide Cthulhu Cult. Adventure Notes I started with the ending - I had a vision of cultists trying to rise R'lyeh in Boston Harbor. Yes, it's supposed to be in the Pacific Ocean but I decided to adjust that and say R'lyeh is an extradimensional place. It is perhaps easiest to rise from the Pacific, but if the stars are right, it can be risen out of any water. I knew they'd need a tome so I broke the adventure into two parts - the first concerning them acquiring the tome they needed and the second them maki...

One of my favorite supplements for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG is Malleus Monstrorum . Though written for the 6th edition of the game, in my experience it can be converted on the fly to other editions. It is out of print, with physical copies selling in excess of $100.00. It is available digitally from Chaosium and DrivethruRPG . The book is about 300 pages long and is illustrated in black and white, as was typical for pre-7th edition Chaosium books. Regrettably the book is not bookmarked, something that would have been rather useful. The artwork is somewhat unconventional - a combination of black and white photographs, sketches, pictographs, drawings of statues, etc. Malleus Monstorum  is essentially a "Monster Manual" for Call of Cthulhu. It is divided into various classifications, such as servitor races, independent races, gods, animals, etc. It has a lot of creatures from the works of HP Lovecraft, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, H...

Today, January 15, 2019, marks the 100th anniversary of the Great Molasses Flood in Boston. On that day, around noon, a massive tidal wave of molasses flooded the North End neighborhood. Supports for elevated trains were damaged, buildings toppled. Twenty one people died and around 150 were injured. I've written of this before in my review of Stephen Puleo's Dark Tide , the best (and one of the only) source of information for this disaster. I find Boston of the 1910s to be a fascinating period in history and have been running a Call of Cthulhu  campaign set in 1914 - it's about to reach 1915. They might eventually merge with a previous campaign, one that began in France at the end of World War One - but whose second adventure was about the Molasses Flood. What makes the era so fascinating? It was a time of extreme tension. Immigrants were pouring into cities and traditional power bases were being disrupted as the immigrants found their voices. It was also a time of ...

Though based in Boston, the investigators do make occasional forays. When an opportunity to acquire a forbidden tome in Biloxi, Mississippi arises, the Watch and Ward Society sends one of their agents and her allies. Professor Victor Davies was willing to donate the Vishakhapatnam Fragment to Harvard University in return for access to some of Harvard's restricted texts. Not a perfect deal, but the chance to take the Fragment out of circulation could not be ignored. Based on the adventure "Still Waters" by L.N. Isynwill and Doug Lyons from Chaosium's The   Great Old Ones book. Setting: Boston. Tuesday, October 13 - Wednesday, October 14, 1914, Davies Landing, Mississippi. Cast of Characters: Investigators: Colin O'Connor: Civil engineer from Dunmore, Ireland. Employed as a civil engineer by the city of Boston. Lola Diaz Azar: Archaeologist hailing from Puerto Rico, born of a Puerto Rican mother and Middle Eastern father. Agent of the New Englan...

Not all tales of the Mythos involve a world-shattering threat. Some are mysteries as to why people become someone they weren't previously. Sometimes this answer is more than the questioner can handle. Inspired by the adventure capsule "People Change" from Chaosium's Escape from Innsmouth  adventure. Setting: Boston. Friday, August 14, 1914. A drizzly cool day. Cast of Characters: Investigators: Colin O'Connor: Civil engineer from Dunmore, Ireland. Employed as a civil engineer by the city of Boston. Lola Diaz Azar: Archaeologist hailing from Puerto Rico, born of a Puerto Rican mother and Middle Eastern father. Agent of the New England Watch and Ward Society, specializing in occult tomes. Nathaniel Quincy, MD, Captain, US Army (Ret.) Former army doctor, served in Nicaragua and the Philippines. Now working as a medical examiner for Essex County. NPCs: Jonathan Longstreet: Civil engineer. Widower. Working on building the Dorchester Subway. About...

One of the challenges I found in setting a Call of Cthulhu  campaign in Boston was in understanding what the city was really  like around a century ago. Sometimes I find it easier to do things in a fictional city or in one I've never been in than as opposed to one some 25 miles away from me - a city I go to regularly and which is the cultural center of my area. I've found raiding Boston Globe archives to have been an awesome exercise. Check out the following weather forecast from August 14, 1914. So what's interesting to me? First, as someone who is obsessed with details, it's nice to have. To be honest, if an adventure would work better with different weather, I'd happily use the different weather and get it "wrong". A heatwave instead of the modest temperatures in this forecast wouldn't cause a game to self-destruct. But what really got my attention was "The Temperature Yesterday at Thompson's Spa. Going through the archives of 1...

The world doesn't know it yet, but the shots which will trigger the Great War have just been fired. In Boston, the Hub of the Universe, massive construction projects are underway, building the infrastructure which will serve the city for the rest of this century and beyond. However, that construction has unearthed a hidden evil... Setting: Boston. Monday, June 29, 1914 Cast of Characters: Colin O'Connor: Civil engineer from Dunmore, Ireland. Working on the Dorchester Tunnel. Lola Diaz Azar: Archaeologist hailing from Puerto Rico, born of a Puerto Rican mother and Middle Eastern father. Nathaniel Quincy, MD, Captain, US Army (Ret.) Former army doctor, served in Nicaragua and the Philippines. The three investigators had assembled at a home in South Boston on Summer Street. With the Dorchester tunnel extension to the Cambridge Subway being built a number of homes were being moved. Under one of them the house movers had found a hidden chamber of horrors. The thr...

The default era in the Call of Cthulhu RPG is the 1920s. The 1930s, a common era for pulp campaigns, is another well known era. I've kicked off a 1910s campaign. One of the things that I'm working on is making the period stand out differently. This is an incredibly brief, stream of consciousness capsule - any of these paragraphs could be an entire post - or book! This is a fairly US-centric blog post. What are the important differences? Let's start off with the my starting year of 1914. Very quickly, immigration is going to drop off. The Great War helps bring about a drop-off, with European nations occupied with war. However, immigration laws in 1921 and 1924 will do even more of a job in slamming the door on immigration, specifically targeting "undesirable" immigrants such as Italians, Slavs, Poles, and Jews from Eastern Europe. It also reinforced bans on Asian immigration. Politics are a bit different. The German, Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian E...