“Midnight Harvest” (OWC4003) is the second of three Call of Cthulhu adventures currently available from Super Genius Games. While “The Doom From Below” suggested ways to tie the other two adventures to it, this adventure does not. In this modern-day adventure designed for four to eight investigators, players are introduced to the town of Five Lanterns, Rhode Island (suggestions for running the adventure in either the 1890s or 1920s strengthen the book’s introduction) as it celebrates its annual Halloween bash. Of course, this is a CoC adventure so expect cultists, mad dreams, and more from the Things Man Is Not Meant To Know.

I like to start out with the book’s artwork and layout. The book’s cover art by Zak Plucinski depicts a group of trick-or-treaters going on their merry way while a dread skeletal figure looms just beyond their reach.

Review by Todd Cash

The PDF opens with fiction to set the mood. While written well, the white text in a scripty font was pretty hard to read on a black background, so I missed a lot of the details. The first section dives right into discussion cross-pantheon politics with commonalities broken out. This is a very useful section for Storytellers because it offers a high-level overview of how the Atzlanti philosophy works versus the Pesedjet that they can use in and out of game. I really like sections like this one in game supplements because it helps water down conflicting ideas and offer ideas for players to work together in a game. Sometimes, finding common ground when your characters come from different pantheons can be a challenge.

As I was currently playing a Wizard in a D&D 4E campaign, I figured that when the opportunity to review The Quintessential Wizard came up it was serendipity. When I created my character I was a little let down at the lack of options and flavor for building my arcanist. The choices available in comparison to the other classes seemed a bit…bland, or maybe un-unique. Same-ol, same-ol. The Quintessential Wizard goes a long way towards rectifying this.

One note: the book was designed by Italian studio Asterion Press, and there are a few instances where the translations show. Nothing major, the work they did was exceptional and I seriously doubt any of us could do better on an Italian published book. When reading, be a bit forgiving of a few awkwardly worded sentences.

Review by Jeff Preston

12 to Midnight’s Skinwalker (TWL-0021) is a modern horror campaign using the fictitious town of Pinebox, Texas as its setting. I reviewed the “Savaged” version of the rules, but a D20 version of the same campaign exists. The PDF, which is sixty-plus pages, comes in a regular and printer-friendly format (I suppose that makes it 120-plus pages). As with most of 12 to Midnight’s products, the attention to detail is the first aspect that pulls in the reader. They love their haunted town so much that fans can visit their website (www.12tomidnight.com) and print out their own map of the city. This attention to detail is why the scenario never puts in the “you can adjust this campaign to fit your own setting” speech. They went ahead a built the town you would need to create for the campaign.

Review by Todd Cash

The first half of the adventure is a straight up series of linear deadly encounters. By linear I mean that while there are a few options given, there is really only one path to succeed. By deadly I do indeed mean DEADLY. A party of 1st Level Adventurers needs to be balanced and smart. They need to be absolutely cautious or face mortality. True Dungeoneers only please! All other should stay on the porch. No real RP at all in the first half. It’s a series of combat encounters and traps only.

The second half of the adventure introduces some roleplaying opportunities. Actually, it’s a big opportunity for characters with social skills to shine because failure at this stage could almost certainly result in TPK as well. Poor rolls and accidentally insulting a faction can result in a massive attack or ambush by vastly overwhelming forces.

Review by Jeff Preston

Goodman Games has a new Age of Cthulhu series, which starts with Death in Luxor. Set in 1924, this adventure centers around a group of investigators as they explore a murder/suicide and the events that could have provided the catalyst for the violence. This adventure comes in at exactly fifty pages (including cover art) and, due to its structure, is a hefty read.

The author, Harley Stroh, also directed the game’s art, which is one of its strongest features. The cover art provided by Eddie Sharam depicts the adventure’s more Sanity-blowing moments and is, quite simply, one of the better cover pieces I’ve seen in ages.

Review by Todd Cash

I was excited to receive my review copy of this corebook. There are genres that I enjoy and there are genres that I love. Preventing Apocalypses falls into the latter category. In fact, I hoped it could provide the mechanics for a two-year old campaign I have been running.

The idea of agencies combating the supernatural, while not original, remains a wide open field. There are several facets of the genre that can be explored, be it comedy, splatterpunk, or Lovecraftian horror. The game’s subtitle–An Action, Horror RPG . . . with a twist of Humor–relates the focus of API. This is a lighter look at the supernatural, something along the lines of Hellboy.

Review by Todd Cash

I was so excited to learn that an RPG treatment of the sanity-blasting horror of H. P. Lovecraft had been made available using the True 20 rules that I went online and bought a copy within days of the discovery. Shadows of Cthulhu, designed by Russell Brown and published by Reality Deviant Publications, is a great way to introduce D&D gamers to a taste of something different without forcing them to learn an entirely new game system. In that vein its important top note that Shadows is not a complete game in itself: a copy of the Green Ronin Publishing’s True 20 Revised Rules will be required in order to play Shadows of Cthulhu.

Annalise offers a new look at a time-honored monster, the vampire. In this game, players take on characters who are somehow influenced or otherwise affected by the story’s vampire,
which is always a concept of the story rather than a player. Annalise takes a pinpoint topic–the relationship between a group (the players) and a vampire or vampires–and attempts to make a playable game out of it.

Review by Todd Cash

Holy hell, what a game.

A couple years ago, the folks at Dark Matter Studios released an RPG called Epic Role-Playing. It was a game I enjoyed, found very well-crafted for a first attempt, and ended up giving a generally positive review to. However, one of the complaints I (and several other reviewers) noted was that Epic was too segmented. The original Epic came in 4 parts—the Rules Manual, Bestiary, Book of the Arcane, and Atlas of Eslin (the default setting for Epic, which also listed many of the guilds/profession available). This compartmentalization was likely a big turn-off to many who otherwise may have given the game a try.

Review by Zach Houghton

The Doom from Below is a stand-alone (ish) Call of Cthulhu scenario from Super Genius Games. It can be, with minimum effort, tied directly to the events in their previous adventure Murder of Crows. The PDF weighs in at 38 pages (35 of these pages are pure meat) and seems quite generous for a one-shot adventure intended for four investigators.

First, a little blurb about the adventure itself. The Doom from Below takes investigators to the depths of a two-hundred foot chasm. The descent itself is semi-treacherous while The Things Not Meant To Be Seen at the bottom are even creepier.

Review by Todd Cash

One of the challenges of any fantasy role-playing game is coming up with new, unpredictable and fearsome foes to tangle with your heroes.

“The Random Esoteric Creature Generator” by Goodman Games is sub-titled “For Classic Fantasy Games and their Modern Simulacra.” Simply put, it’s a monster-maker for d20 and similar fantasy
role-playing games.

The 31-page .PDF document is filled with random roll charts to help you design bizarre and unique creatures, giving you everything from size and body shape to special attacks and defenses.

Review by Michael Erb

Nearly all RPGs have a section devoted to the theory of how RPGs should be played. In fact, this is the part of a corebook I find myself rereading for inspiration. The skill of these chapters range from the banal to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll goodness. If you want how-to theory that feels like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, then John Wick’s Play Dirty is the book for you. Making connections between the two proves simple. Heck, both books have a series of rules to follow. While we won’t talk about the rules of Fight Club, I will share Wick’s two rules:

Rule One: There are no rules.
Rule Two: Cheat anyway.

Review by Todd Cash

The good folks at Precis Intermedia have kept their quality streak alive with the release of Steampunk Musha, a “Victoriental Adventures” setting for Iron Gauntlets. It’s nice to see such an excellent gaming system as IG getting plenty of love and support; despite its relatively small size, PIG is providing as much and more support material for Iron Gauntlets than some companies 3-4 times its size are doing for their lines. Steampunk Musha is a good indicator of the high quality of these releases.

My review copy was a pdf, some 122 pages in length. SM (as we will periodically refer to Steampunk Musha) was created by Rick Hershey, with Brett Bernstein and Alana Abbott, and the overall design of the book is one of clarity and ease of reading.

Review by Zachary Houghton

I recently received a review copy of Races of the Shroud: The Apelord, the initial offering from One Bad Egg, and authored by Fred Hicks and Lee Hammock. This product, weighing in at 12 (electronic pdf) pages, currently retails for $1.99 at RPGNow. This is a 4e GSL (!) product which adds a new race to the D&D rulesets, complete with powers, feats, sample characters, and even a few sample adventure ideas.

First, despite the low price tag, The Apelord is really an aesthetically pleasing product. A clean, professional look, combined with some excellent art by fan favorite Storn Cook, really makes Apelord a pleasure to look over.

Review by Zachary Houghton

When you listen to instrumental music or a movie soundtrack in the background while you’re playing game, it’s very challenging to find music that fits a Cthulhu game. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of droning, repetitious soundtracks that sound the same from song to song. The other side to that, of course, are the soundtracks so recognizable that no matter how softly you play them, every one of your players knows what songs you’re playing. In gaming, music often plays multiple roles to heighten or enhance a mood, to “speak” to the theme of the game and to be playable whether the dice is rolling or not. In a lot of ways, music played for any game has to have a lot of variety because there’s a lot of activity going on in game that will “drown out” the music playing in the background.

This PDF is described by its author as a “World Seed,” a small idea that has no home in ay particular world that you can pick up and drop into the fertile soil of your own game world. You can nurture it and watch it grow in to hours of adventures, exploration and heroism. This is an excellent idea, as most market research has shown that the majority of D&D games that are being played right now are not set in Eberron or The Forgotten Realms but rather in Steve’s World, Jimmy’s Land or some other Random Homebrew Campaign Name Here.

Review by Vincent R. Venturella

Promethean is a ‘new’ property for White Wolf, rather than a rehash of an older proper as their other new World of Darkness titles have been. This, incidentally, means that they have now pretty much caught up, after over a decade, with Nightlife, another RPG that could really do with a reboot in my opinion.

Promethean, basically, covers the idea of ‘constructs’. The inspiration is most clearly from Frankenstein’s Monster but other ideas are mingled in with that inspiration from golems and homunculi to Egyptian myth, all held – loosely – together by a theme of alchemy and a hint of the old anti-technology vibe that the old World of Darkness often displayed, an underlying loathing of ‘the unnatural’.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The Celestial Bureaucracy is the third offering for the Scion companion and a new pantheon – of sorts – delving into Chinese mythology which, to quote the great sage Egg Shen:

“Of course the Chinese mix everything up, look at what we have to work with. There’s Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoist alchemy and sorcery. We take what we want and leave the rest… Just like your salad bar.”

This makes the Celestial Bureaucracy a great hook for Scion, it fits the mould of the game perfectly, kung fu, magic and a huge ‘pantheon’ of sorts with plenty of room for all manner of characters. Indeed, in my opinion, this would have been a far better fit in the original book than the Japanese pantheon would have been.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Our author begins his book by informing us that table-top RPGs are at a crossroads. They are at a point in time where they must make a choice between a new system, something revolutionary and different, and the power of nostalgia, classic systems and tradition on the other. This is an easy assumption to make, casting your eyes about to the RPG market and seeing the 4E update and change in D&D in what seems, especially to outsiders, as very dramatic ways. It is from this premise our author builds his book. I would claim this is his thesis statement; the foundation of the argument for the book. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be more wrong.

Review by Vincent Venturella