Soldiers of Pen and Ink is a Trail of Cthulhu campaign set in the dark heart of the Spanish Civil War

A comrade is lost. Enemies surround you, and your fellow soliders cannot be trusted. Can you rescue your friend while retaining your sanity?

Madrid, 1936. The Investigators have come to Spain to shoot a documentary on the war sympathetic to the Republican cause, but find themselves trapped in the Siege of Madrid. One of their team goes missing, and their literary colleagues say it’s pointless – even dangerous – to ask what happened to him.

In a war of competing ideologies, unorthodoxy can merit the death penalty, even amongst those opposing Fascism, but is this Communist oppression or something more sinister?

Players need have no knowledge of the Spanish Civil War to experience this adventure – their Investigators can be naive idealists, and Keepers can be confident that the text explains historical background.

Dare you negotiate steely-eyed Communist ideologues, blood-thirst fascists and the horrors of an inhuman cult to rescue a friend?

“[I often have] the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world….From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.”

– George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”

Trail of Cthulhu: Soldiers of Pen and Ink is available now at the Flames Rising RPG Shop!

Also available now from Pelgrane Press:

Trail of Cthulhu: Dulce et Decorum Est

“And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such sights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.”
– Siegfried Sassoon

This collection of adventures considers the Great War, 1914-18, from the perspective of Trail of Cthulhu. From the conflict in the air, to the depths of the sea, the home front and the different battle fronts, the Great War affects the lives of countless millions of people. It also brings humanity into conflict with elements of the Mythos, and in particular the Charnel God Mordiggian who, for the first time in centuries, may actually have more to devour than it can stomach.

The forces of the Gods do not take kindly to being disturbed, and nor do they usually play favourites; unless your players are careful, they may find themselves attacked and wiped out in an instant, caught in an otherworldly crossfire they can only hope to survive, not understand.

Trail of Cthulhu: Mythos Expeditions

“Before that there had been wild enough stories — accounts of mysterious trips to Thibet, the African interior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain little-known islands of the South Pacific…”
— H. P. Lovecraft, “The Horror in the Museum”

Bon voyage! You are about to depart on ten journeys into the unknown, following the trail of Cthulhu to isolated Pacific islands, into the icy wastes of the Arctic, through jungles and war zones and even off the Earth itself. In the blank spaces of the map, dark deities flourish and evil festers… but the truth waits to be discovered, secret knowledge that man may not be meant to know but that Miskatonic University covets. Into that mystery your Investigators go, armed with gun and camera and notebook, risking their own survival to keep those blank spaces from swallowing up the world.

Hurry on board — the gangplank is going up!

The Mythos Expeditions are a collection of adventures for Trail of Cthulhu, designed to be run as a stand alone with new rules tailored for expeditions or as part of the Armitage Files campaign setting in the core rules. Take your Investigators on an expedition into the dense jungles of central Africa, trek through the arid wastes of the Gobi desert, and clamber through the lost cities of South America. Your travels will you take you through the skies and across the oceans, into the lava caves of New Zealand and the frozen peaks of Patagonia.

Written by Kenneth Hite and Robin D. Laws, with contributions from an eclectic mix of mythos experts.

Tags | cthulhu, pelgrane press