Hope (Scenario)

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Details

Pages: 24

Author(s): Bob Brinkman

Artist(s): (maps and illustrations uncredited)

Setting: 1920s (1924) Arkham, Halloween

Appears in: Halloween Horror Returns!.

Campaign: (none)

Summary

This adventure is meant as a one shot departure from the normal Call of Cthulhu game, for this time, the players are the cultists: cultists who have become aware of the location of a ritual mask of great Cthulhu, reputed to have great power. Of course, Halloween is a time for both masks and rituals, so the cultists have a rare opportunity, and so do the players.

Links

Link to outside reviews or helpful pages.

  • (Needs a review!)

Spoilers - Keepers Eyes Only

Players should not read any further.

Synopsis

 Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)

The PCs are unstable cultists, plotting against each other while conspiring to steal a ritual mask of Cthulhu from NPC investigators, who in turn have stolen the mask from some Brazilian NPC cultists who are following the mask. With this many plots and conspiracies in place, someone is bound to get hurt....


References

Player Handouts:

Locations:


Creatures:

  • Various Cultists and Investigators
  • Museum Guards and Guard Dogs
  • Police
  • Mind of Cthulhu

Tomes and Artifacts:

  • Mask of Icthultu
  • paper fragment with details about ritual "Joining of the Gods"
  • New Spells:
    • Joining of the Gods (found in MU Library)
    • Dark Sacrifice (known by one of the cultists)
  • Occult Books (apparently not Tomes):
  • mundane items of interest to cultists:
    • strange knives with wooden sheaths carved in the likeness of an octopus (not magical, treat like butcher knives)
    • two mounted Deep One heads
    • Slim Investigator journal (has information about Investigators' allies)
    • Amateur Satanists' candles
    • Hex Signs scrawled on walls to prevent spoiling of milk and eggs

Campaigns / Scenarios: (none)

Comments

Trivia: a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche appears on the scenario's title page: "Hope is the worst evil, for it prolongs the torment of man."

Keeper Comments

Cultists' House, alternate floor plan.
Investigators' House, alternate floor plan.

Comments to Keepers about this scenario; Possibly how to run it successfully. Keep general DISCUSSION on the talk page.

Setting: Generally best suited for the classic 1920s Lovecraft Country setting due to the various classic themes involved, but could be easily modified to work in other eras and locations (though as a one-shot cultist scenario, there's probably no point in changing the setting).

Special Notes: Four pre-gen cultist characters with back-stories are provided. The characters are designed with secret ulterior motives against each other that encourage them to turn on each other at any time. With all the conspiring factions, firepower, MacGuffin-chasing, and doomed evil cultists, this might make a nice Pulp campaign by playing with noir tropes, tossing in a femme fatale] or two, and ramping up the involvement of police and NPC cultists. (Sadly, the title of the scenario, some of the keeper notes included in the scenario, and the Nietzsche quote seem to promise a bit more of an ironic, cynical noir twist than the scenario actually delivers... a keeper who is especially familiar with film noir could probably create some alternative pre-gens or modify the existing ones in ways that make better use of the idea of a doomed, misguided, and corrupt hope driving shades-of-grey cultists to a self-inflicted fate....) Formatting errors in the PDF have mangled one of the hand-outs, requiring some work to put it back together.

Dependence on Halloween: Minimal. One NPC hints that Halloween might be a good night for a ritual, but the PCs don't need to take the hint, and any other holiday could be substituted, or the PCs could be left to perform the ritual on any date they feel like.

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