Supplement Supplemental! (ISIS vs. Delta Green and Mr. Darcy vs. Cthulhu)

Time for another entry in my occasional series of articles giving short thoughts on game supplements which prompted some thoughts for me, but which I didn’t feel inspired to do a full article about. This time it’s a Lovecraftian special, with supplements for Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu which take those games into unexpected settings and eras.

Iconoclasts (Delta Green)

Although the Delta Green Kickstarters have already yielded a healthy crop of core books, supplements, adventures, and campaigns, the stretch goals just keep coming. Iconoclasts, by Adam Scott Glancy, is one of them, and is a truly epic scenario – weighing in at a bit over 200 pages, it’s got the sort of form factor one would expect of full-length campaigns, and it could conceivably take a fair bit of time to play through, though it’s really a single investigation and the thing which has caused the page count to expand to this extent isn’t a large number of encounters or incidents so much as it’s the extensive material Glancy needed to provide to make the concept work.

Ever since the early days of the standalone edition of the game, with scenarios like Kali Ghati, Arc Dream’s been tossing out the occasional Delta Green scenario which departs from the assumed “investigating X-Files cases on US soil” baseline that’s been the norm since the original supplements; Iconoclasts is perhaps the most ambitious one yet, and also goes deeper than ever into the “ripped from the headlines” approach (which means it may risk becoming dated over time).

Set in 2016, the action focuses on Mosul under the brutal rule of ISIS – yes, they’re the titular iconoclasts. Unfortunately, they’ve gone and broken the wrong relic and set something terrible free. Delta Green tasks the PCs with setting up a forward HQ in a friendly airbase in Kurdish northern Iraq, gather what intel they can, and then undertake a mission to get into Mosul and suppress the horrors – by any means necessary.

Supplement Supplemental! (Material Cultures, Filled-In Blanks, and Arthurian Encyclopedia)

Time for another instalment in my occasional series talking about RPG supplements which by themselves don’t inspire me to write an article, but which I still find worthy of comment.

Weapons and Equipment (RuneQuest)

From the title, you might expect this to be a fairly dry piece – perhaps along the lines of …and a 10 Foot Pole for Rolemaster, with lots of expanded equipment lists and the like. There’s an extent to which it is utilitarian in nature – it deliberately includes a chunk of the information from the equipment rules in the RuneQuest core rulebook, for instance, specifically so the book can be of maximal use in actual play. (If you know the information is definitely in there, there’s no need to juggle between this and the core book to find the equipment details you want.)

However, as someone on one of the RuneQuest discussion groups on Facebook pointed out, this supplement’s title undersells it – you could almost call this Material Culture of Dragon Pass, for it doesn’t merely provide you with a price list, but goes into a little detail about what the equipment is, what it tells us from a cultural perspective, and so on. Old World Armoury for 2nd Edition WFRP did something along similar lines to this, though I would say Weapons and Equipment takes the approach even further. Details on availability are here as well as pricing, and there’s also information on the obtaining and maintenance of livestock, mounts, dwellings, and so on. Services as well as goods are covered to an extent, with information on hiring mercenaries and other skilled personnel, or obtaining skill training.

In short, whilst the book gives you the fine item-by-item details it can also, with a quick skim, give you a quick grounding in what the material possessions of RuneQuest characters are like, what that says about them, and how all these things fit into the world – thereby helping evoke the distinctive cultures of Glorantha. This means it’s both extremely useful and extremely flavourful, which is a rare and welcome combination.

Supplement Supplemental! (Redactings, Crawlings, and Harvestings)

Here’s another in my occasional series on game supplements which I read and have some thoughts on, but not enough thoughts for an entire article. This time I’ve got a slightly unfocused expansion for Wrath & Glory, a couple of issues of an old-school D&D zine, and a Call of Cthulhu campaign.

Redacted Records (Wrath & Glory)

This feels like an odd little grab-bag of material for the official Warhammer 40,000 RPG, a bit like the Archives of the Empire volumes offer grab-bags of material for 4th Edition WFRP. The cover and the back cover blurb make it seem like this is a space hulk-themed supplement – a sort of update of material from Ark of Lost Souls for Deathwatch – but this only covers about a third of this supplement’s content (and since the book is only about 100 pages long that’s not a lot). Other material includes more frameworks for your PC party, a brief chapter on unusual servitors, an overview of some cults from two of the worlds of the default setting of Wrath & Glory (the Gilead system), and the start of a greatly expanded Talent list. (Literally: it covers A-I, implying that there will be followup chapters in other books covering J-Z.)

The weird thing about the supplement is that much of this feels like it’s been chopped out of a larger body of work – as well as the J-Z sections of that additional talent list, you’d expect similar cult rundowns of the other worlds of the system to exist somewhere, for instance. Still, as a sort of half-supplement-half-magazine thing it’s not useless – but I feel like it should be presented as being Volume 1 of a series, like the first Archives of the Empire book was, because it’s very apparent that this is merely the first of a series of miscellanea-themed supplements with not much connecting theme.

Call of the Cults

Cults of Cthulhu is an expansive new Call of Cthulhu supplement spanning over 300 pages, penned mostly by Chris Lackey and Mike Mason. A referee-facing book, it’s a deep dive into the titular subject matter, offering an extensive discussion of the role cults play in Call of Cthulhu, how to design sects for your own games, and some extensive worked examples, as well as offering a brace of scenarios making use of some of the groups detailed in the book.

It’s worth emphasising that the title really isn’t kidding: this is a book about cults of Cthulhu – not Yog-Sothoth, not Shub-Niggurath, not Nyarlathotep, not the King In Yellow, but the big blobby squiddyfriend itself. The “cults throughout history” section, giving brief glimpses of sects ranging from Roman or medieval times to the present day and including fictionalised takes of classic “cult true crime” outfits like the People’s Temple, the Branch Davidians, and Scientology, is a series of Cthulhu cults through history. The five cults given extensive deep dive coverage, ranging from the 1890s to the modern era, are all Cthulhu cults – three are new to this book (and are each the subject of one of the three scenarios here), and then there’s also treatments of the Louisiana swamp cult from The Call of Cthulhu and the Esoteric Order of Dagon from The Shadow Over Innsmouth which do a good job of teasing out the horror whilst dialling back the racist implications as much as is possible with Lovecraft’s original material. (The idea that the Cthulhu cult is directed by immortal Fu Manchu-esque manipulators, for example, is explained away by the character of Castro in The Call of Cthulhu having been recruited in China and assuming all the leaders were similar to the leader he met there.) The examples given in the build-your-own-cult chapter are all of Cthulhu cults, and the spells, creatures, items, and generic NPC stats offered in the system toolkit chapter are all for Cthulhu cults.

If you think Cthulhu is absolutely rubbish and overplayed and are only interested in running Call of Cthulhu games focusing on other entities, that may be disappointing, but even in that instance I still think the book is of potential use. In particular, many of the issues raised in the build-your-own-cult chapter are just as applicable to other cults as to Cthulhu sects, and the examples given in the rest of the book of how to make a cult feel appropriately Cthulhu-y point to ways in which you could do the same for other Mythos entities with suitable aesthetic tweaks and distinctive, entity-specific features. The 7th Edition update of the Malleus Monstrorum would be particularly useful in conjunction in this book, because it not only offers ideas on the types of cults that accrue around particular Great Old Ones or Elder Gods, but also presents example “blessings” given to followers by those deities – a concept this book runs with hard for Cthulhu’s purposes. Take the design-a-cult chapter here, cross-reference with the Malleus Monstrorum entry for the deity in question, and you’re in business.

An Unearthing of Ancient Mythos Tomes

The new regime at Chaosium have been justifiably cautious about how they use Kickstarter, given that they got parachuted in originally because the previous incarnation of the company blew itself up through mismanagement of the Kickstarter for 7th edition Call of Cthulhu and Horror On the Orient Express. Nonetheless, they have made use of it here and there, but usually for very deliberate purposes. Brand-new product for current editions of their games don’t get funded by them through Kickstarter; they leave that action to their various third party licensees.

Instead, they have made judicious use of the platform to fund projects to make available spruced-up PDFs and reprints of classic editions of their games, making game materials historically important both to the game lines in question and to the RPG hobby as a whole easily available again. Their first project along these lines was the RuneQuest Classic line, which made RuneQuest 2nd Edition (and, as a lesser priority, 1st Edition) and almost all of its first-party supplements available again. Though successfully delivered, that product ended up taking a while, in part due to the large number of 2nd Edition supplements unlocked via stretch goals.

For their next Kickstarter – for which I’ve recently received the physical goods (delayed by the shipping apocalypse) – they made sure to cap off the stretch goals at a sensible level. Call of Cthulhu Classic is a line rereleasing the 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu core rules, with physical products in two formats – both boxed sets based on the original boxes. For much of the 1980s, Chaosium had a neat inch-deep form factor on their boxed sets (which prevented them having too much in the way of empty space inside, unlike many boxed sets of the early decades of the hobby), and the inch-thick version of the Classic box presents just the 2nd Edition rules (and the 1920s Sourcebook which came with the core rules and various other bits and pieces); the two-inch thick version makes use of the extra inch to incorporate no less than five supplements for the game from 1982 to 1985.

However, is this a treasure trove of forgotten lore, or a Sanity-blasting compilation of horrors better left buried? Let me crack open the box and find out…

Blake’s BRP

Although Doctor Who has had multiple official RPGs, its younger sibling Blake’s 7 never has – but fear not, fans of Terry Nation serials with even thinner budgets than Who, for fandom will often fill a gap that official canon refuses to touch. The Blake’s 7 Roleplaying Game by Kin Ming Looi and Zoé Taylor was published via Horizon, an officially-endorsed fan club for the show, so whilst it’s still in the realm of a fandom product (and certainly looks like a mid-1990s fanzine in terms of production values) it sails about as close to being official as it can without actually being official.

Dated to August 1994, in system terms it’s clearly inspired by Basic Roleplaying-powered RPGs: the attributes do not map precisely to BRP, mind, but they play a similar role much of the time, there’s percentile skills you can improve by succeeding at tasks in a manner exactly like BRP, and in general it’s sufficiently close to BRP in its basic principles that I’m happy to consider it part of the extended family.

Given that Horizon is a UK-based group and I suspect Blake’s 7 fandom is generally healthiest in Britain, this might be due to the prominence that Chaosium’s games enjoyed over here thanks to Games Workshop giving them important early promotion in the mid-1980s through their editions of RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer. If you were a British RPG fan looking to make a homebrew system and you didn’t feel like starting 100% from scratch, and your subject matter clearly wasn’t suitable for adapting to Dungeons & Dragons, it feels likely that you would consider Basic Roleplaying, especially in 1994 – an era that’s before the proliferation of open gaming licences gave you more system options to adapt, before the Internet made widespread research of systems cheaper on a budget, and when Chaosium was still in good health.

Supplement Supplemental! (Chivalric Bestiaries, Arcane Cauldrons, Roman Republics, and OpenQuest Additions)

Time for another entry in my occasional article series covering game supplements which didn’t inspire a full article but did prompt some thoughts. This time around it’s a classic fantasy special, with supplements for various fantasy RPGs with long, distinguished lineages: a Chivalry & Sorcery monster tome, a significant D&D 5E rules expansion, and some material for Basic Roleplaying and OpenQuest.

European Folklore Bestiary (Chivalry & Sorcery)

Like much of the 5th Edition Chivalry & Sorcery lineup, this is the product of a Kickstarter – in this case, a carefully unambitious one, in which stretch goals were sensibly not used to bulk up the book itself but to unlock various 3D printer files for printing miniatures. That’s not something which is necessarily all that interesting if you’re not into using minis for RPG or wargaming purposes, but it’s a nice approach to running a Kickstarter regardless, since it helps steer well clear of the “we added too many stretch goals and now our core product is too ambitious” trap.

Weighing in at a shade over 150 pages, the European Folklore Bestiary is an extensive collection of additional creatures for Chivalry & Sorcery – the schtick here being is that they are derived from medieval bestiaries and folklore, and so represent the creatures as people of the era might have thought of them. It’s a fun concept that’s suitable to the game’s overall focus on historical detail, and I don’t mind owning a hard copy now that it’s out, but at the same time I think it’s a product I would have been happy to just get the PDF for.

The main reason for this is that it’s just a little light for a 150 page supplement. Each creature has a full-page illustration accompanying, and whilst some of these illustrations fill that space nicely, others seem a little under-detailed – like the plan was for them to be smaller initially and used in the corner of a page, rather than blown up to full size.

Pretty much all the creatures here fit onto a single double-page spread, and since each creature has a full-size illustration this means that around half the book is artwork. In the remaining half of the pages, the fairly extensive Chivalry & Sorcery stat blocks often take up half the page, and the written details on the creatures in question are sometimes a little sparse. Not always – some carry more detail – but often enough that this is noticeable.

Of course, this may well be that you’re dealing with some creatures which just aren’t widely mentioned in the bestiaries, just a brief aside here or there, and so there’s not that much authentic detail to provide – but it still makes the book feel a little sparse. There’s a good bibliography at the end, though perhaps it would have been helpful to provide individual citations in the creature entries to better indicate the specific sources of particular beasts. I’m still glad to have the resource, but I think customers coming to this late might be well-advised to consider just getting the PDF.

A Tattered Triptych

Tim Wiseman’s Tatters of the King is a Call of Cthulhu campaign released by Chaosium in 2006. It is notable for being one of the last long-form Call of Cthulhu campaigns released when Lynn Willis was co-running Chaosium alongside Charlie Krank; in 2008, Willis would step down due to ill health, and it would be after that that Chaosium would enter the period of decline under Charlie Krank’s near-sole control until Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen enacted their boardroom coup in order to save the company. The presentation of the material, in terms of layout and art and overall production values, really isn’t that much further developed from material that Chaosium were put out in the mid-to-late 1990s, and whilst at this point in time that wasn’t as incongruous as it would become when they were still using essentially the same approach in the later years of the Krank regime, it can still feel a little rinky-dink at points compared both to the nicer products the market was producing in the mid-2000s and the sort of production values we expect from Chaosium under the new management.

That said, the simplicity of the layout has made it easy for the current powers that be at Chaosium to make the campaign available via print-on-demand. The POD version is a straight reprint of the 2006 release, without updates for the 7th Edition rules (not that many are really needed – multiply all the attributes by 5 and you’re basically there) and without correction of typos, of which there are a few. (Not, admittedly, as many as there were in products from the later years of Krank-era Chsosium – Lynn Willis helped maintain tighter standards as long as he was able – but enough that it’s noticeable.)

What of the content itself? Well, as more or less anyone with a smattering of Mythos knowledge will have guessed from the title, it’s a King In Yellow-themed campaign. Wiseman has good taste in the sort of material he draws on – as well as Chambers himself he looks to Thomas Ligotti and Ramsey Campbell for inspiration – but perhaps the most important touchstone he looks to comes from Chaosium’s licensees at Pagan Publishing.

The Keeper’s Little Instruction Book

Keepers Tips is a small tome put out by Chaosium as part of their celebrations of Call of Cthulhu‘s 40th Anniversary. It’s a short thing – barely over 110 pages, in a small pocketbook size if you get the hard copy – and it’s full of short tips, little suggestions on various subjects relevant to the task of running Call of Cthulhu submitted by a fairly wide spread of Chaosium’s contributors and colleagues.

In essence, it’s like Life’s Little Instruction Book for running Call of Cthulhu; precisely because it consists of a large number of small tips rather than detailed essays on the subjects it covers (fairly broad topics like “Preparation”, “Designing Scenarios” and so on), you aren’t going to get major deep dives into the subject matter at hand. (If you wanted that, the Keeper advice in the main Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition rulebook is a better starting point; if you wanted an entire pocketbook of highly insightful essays on horror gaming, you could dig up Nightmares of Mine by Ken Hite.)

Instead, what you get here is a bunch of suggestions, and a proportion of them will make sense but seem obvious, a proportion will probably be an interesting take worthy of further thought, and a chunk of them will probably bug the living shit out of you (sometimes in a way where you instantly know why you’re rejecting it, sometimes in a way which calls for a certain amount of deeper thought to figure out why you’re getting that reaction). The odds of two Keepers agreeing on which tips go in which categories, though, feel pretty slim, which is where the value of the book comes in – it’s a book to argue with, something to look at to interrogate your refereeing style and to better feel out where your preferences lie.

In the spirit of the book, here’s a tip of my own: why not find suggestions you find especially thought-provoking on this book, put them on flashcards, and use them like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies? You can pull a card when you need a jolt of inspiration when you’re developing material for a game and feel stuck and maybe it’ll help you find a new way to get past the block.

A Gentle Learning Curve For Glorantha

Chaosium’s new RuneQuest Starter Set is very much designed along similar lines to their extremely successful one for Call of Cthulhu. Like that set, it has cover art clearly riffing on the game’s original cover art – as with early editions of the game you get a Bronze Age warrior woman fighting a monster here, but you have a wider party of adventurers with her and it’s more evident that party members are using a mixture of magic and combat prowess. Like that set, it’s intended to provide some semblance of training wheels to help owners of the set go from zero to refereeing their own games by offering a solo adventure to provide an introduction to the rules before providing a rich set of sample adventures to play through as a group. Like that set, the provided rules summary is actually in-depth and useful enough to remain useful for consultation even should you graduate to using the full-fat RuneQuest rules.

At the same time, the RuneQuest Starter Set necessarily deviates from the example set by the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set in some important ways, necessary because of the somewhat different nature of the game. For one thing, Call of Cthulhu is a horror game where player characters start out not knowing much about the true evils of the world, and which is set in the real world and real history. This means that there’s little need for the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set to offer much of anything in the way of setting material, because players and referees alike can draw on their general knowledge of the period and place and use Wikipedia or other sources to cover any particularly severe gaps.