“Snows of an Early Winter” — Halloween, Horror and…City Politics?
“Snows of an Early Winter” takes your group of Call of Cthulhu investigators on a harrowing adventure set in modern-day New York City. Someone is trying to get into city politics the easy way — if occult research, obscene rituals and human sacrifices are easy, that is. Of course, you can’t go messing around with ancient secret rituals without stirring up a whole pot of slimy weirdness.
At 118 pages, “Snows of an Early Winter” is the longest Call of Cthulhu book Super Genius Games has yet produced. It’s brimming with mysterious characters, bizarre scenarios and slithery horrors. The plot involves a couple of losers who get a hold of an occult book. They use it to perform some rituals, take out some rivals and position one of them to take a position of power in city government. The only thing is, he’s such a loser that he needs a magical charisma boost to win the election, and that page is missing from their book of evil spells. Sounds kind of like a setup for a comedy, and there are definitely moments in the adventure where you can play that up to contrast the horrors, but have no doubt that this adventure is meant to scare you and creep you out. It gets bloody and eventually various nameless things start showing up and no one will be laughing then.
Of course I can’t give away much more of the plot than that, so instead lets talk about the structure of the adventure. It’s very non-linear, broken into a few large sections that the investigators can move through in any manner they choose before progressing to the next section. They start out at a pleasant coffee shop (Marlowe’s Malted Minds) intended as a respite for friendly occult types, but the horror and the action keep increasing as more clues are uncovered. There are lots of NPCs to meet and talk, each with their own specific quotes and bits of information to give. What they tell you will depend on the manner of the interaction — the reactions differ if you strongarm a witness or tell him you like his shoes.
At some points, conflict is unavoidable (particularly if your preferred interaction is the strongarm one), so everyone has a CoC stat line. The focus is really on role-playing and uncovering the mystery, however. The 118 pages aren’t filled up with weapon lists and monster power charts — it’s all clues, conversation trees, if/then branching points and so on. I would suggest that this adventure is probably best suited to gamemasters with a fair amount of skill and experience, as there can be a lot to handle. Not that that should scare anyone off (leave that to the ancient nameless crawling entities), but this is probably not the adventure to use if you’re just learning the Call of Cthulhu system.
I almost forgot to mention that there are some great printable props included, like newspaper articles, business cards and the library card pictured above. That kind of thing always adds to an adventure, especially one with a lot of detective work. It’s nice to have a physical clue in your hand, as opposed to just hearing it described to you.
You can order a print copy of “Snows of an Early Winter” from Studio 2, or download a pdf from DriveThruRPG.
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July 27th, 2010 2:56 AM
My gaming group doesn’t do well with problems they can’t shoot, or stab, or have the eidolon deal with. Effective roleplayers, we are not, but I’m working on it.Shadowrun before Cthullu though. I want to play Cthulhu before I run it, though I wouldn’t object to CthulhuTech. That looks like it would be fun and reasonably balanced between roleplaying and hitting things, though we’re really good at roleplaying hitting things.
Last session our monk was workng in the requirements for the Drunken Master prestige class, one of which is bring chosen by existing drunken masters and “surviving a night of revelry among them without being incarcerated, poisoned, or excessively embarrassed.” Critical miss had him injure his genitalia,so he said his action for the next round was “doubled over in pain” at which point the drunken master shoves an off duty soldier over his back and out the tavern window. He then slaps our monk on the back and yells “Teamwork!” before punching a Lolth cultist in the face. We were a little less than serious for that little side-quest.