Expedition to the Blue Mountain Peaks

It’s only just over a month since we released the previous title in out Convicts & Cthulhu line … but we find ourselves again today quite breathless with excitement, announcing the release of Tickets of Leave #12: Fallen Stars. This PDF is an exciting release for us, since it brings a brand new writer into the C&C production team, long-time historical RPGer Matthew Ruane (who has a long relationship with Colonial-era Lovecraftian RPGs having run many of the convention previews for Sixtystone Press’ excellent-but-sady-still-forthcoming Colonial Lovecraft Country line).

Matthew’s Ticket of Leave weighs in at a respectable 22 pages, and is available for download right now, absolutely free! The format for this supplement is a little more like a traditional convention scenario — which is not surprising, because a version of this scenario will be run at GenCon 2018 in August as our official C&C scenario for the convention. So, if you are already booked into playing on one of the runs of this game in Indy, you may want to hold off reading this Ticket of Leave straight away (or do so with your spoiler-sensitive sunglasses on).

The historical subject matter for Ticket of Leave #12 draws on two related strands important to life in the early penal colony of New South Wales. One of those is the growing need to find new farmland to house and feed the growing settlement, an ambition significantly hampered by the tall slopes of the Blue Mountains bordering the western edge of the colony. Despite several efforts by determined explorers, there is still no known path through this vast natural barrier (at least, Europeans know of no such path — Aboriginal peoples actually had two well-established “highways” to traverse the mountains). The other facet of colonial life explored in this supplement is the inquisitive scientific elite who look upon the strange and vastly unfamiliar flora and fauna of the new continent of Australia and see great new opportunities to expand humanity’s knowledge. And every reader of Lovecraftian fiction knows that expanding the limits of human knowledge *always* works out well …

In this scenario, the Investigators are invited (or obliged) to join an expedition to the remote foothills of the Blue Mountains where, some nights prior, a fiery ball of rock fell from the sky — a “falling star.” Several members of the colonial administration see the opportunity to collect specimens from this scientific oddity as an offer too good to pass up. But, few white men have ever penetrated this far into the hinterland, and the maps of the region are more akin to blank leaves of paper with a few stray scratchings. Thus, the expedition calls for hardy and fearless souls who can survive on their own in the wild bushland … and who knows, somewhere along the way they may even stumble upon the much-sought-after pass through the vertiginous Blue Mountains. Or they may find something (or be *found by* something) far stranger altogether …

Ticket of Leave #12: Fallen Stars by Matthew Ruane (with some minor historical sidebars by Geoff Gillan) is available right now as a free download from the Cthulhu Reborn blog. The version linked here is complete with game statistics for the Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition (under Chaosium’s fan license). As with other recent releases, we have been obliged by Chaosium’s somewhat arbitrary licensing rules to also create a stat-free version of the supplement for release via RPGNow and DrivethruRPG. We would encourage you to share the links to either or both of these versions with your personal network of Lovecraftian RPG enthusiasts. The more free stuff out there in the wild, the better for everyone!

This release also brings us back into our regular bi-monthly schedule of releases (after April’s release being delayed); so from here we’re aiming for another Ticket around GenCon time, one around Halloween, and maybe even a third Convict Christmas-themed supplement.

As a final note, I would really like to express my thanks to Matthew Ruane, our all-new Convicts & Cthulhu writer. In producing this product line we strive for a very high level of historical accuracy — sometimes creating a whole bunch of work for ourselves just to present the Colonial Australian setting in all its grim and gritty (and horrific) detail. Matthew has embraced this obsessive mania for historical verisimilitude and run with it … and the result of his research is a fine, if rather sanity-sapping, adventure which showcases everything we love about Convicts & Cthulhu. So, well done, Matthew … but if all the GenCon groups end up going hideously insane before completing the scenario, we wouldn’t be at all surprised 🙂