A Convicts & Cthulhu Campaign

It’s been several months since we’ve released anything new for our (much-loved) Convicts & Cthulhu RPG. A few people have contacted me asking me if we’d somehow stopped supporting it … fear not, we would never do that. But, even before the current world events had come to disrupt everyone, real-life complications were (temporarily) biting deeply into the free-time of our normal C&C writers. This has slowed down the production of the next Ticket of Leave supplement *and* also preparations for our annual GenCon Convicts & Cthulhu game — the latter of which might depend a lot more on exactly what shape GenCon 2020 takes.

While talking with our small crew the other day, someone suggested that now that there are a LOT of Convicts & Cthulhu scenarios written — scattered through some 400 pages of free/PWYW content that is available to everyone — why don’t we stitch some together to form a campaign? Given the way that downloads of our free scenarios (and especially our free Convicts material) has skyrocketed in recent weeks, having a longer-form Convicts tale that people could just pick up and run seems like an idea whose time has come.

So — between Geoff and myself — we’ve created an eight-chapter “ready(-ish)-to-run” campaign which binds together a selection of scenarios and seeds from the core Convicts & Cthulhu book as well as scenarios from:

• Ticket of Leave #1: Night Terrors (2016)
• Ticket of Leave #3: Criminal Enterprise (2016)
• Ticket of Leave #6: Night of the Convict Dead (2016)
• Ticket of Leave #9: Orphan School Horror (2017)
• Ticket of Leave #11: The Dispensatory of Doctor Macdead (2018), and
• Ticket of Leave #15: The Death Knells (2019).

All up, the campaign has 8 chapters (six core “campaign arc” chapters and 2 optional chapters). We estimate it will take an Investigator group 10-15 sessions to play. It’s an open framework which would also allow a few extra optional chapters to be inserted if you wanted something longer.

You can download the 33-page PDF which contains the campaign outline as a free download from here on the Cthulhu Reborn blog. We will also put the same file up on DriveThruRPG as a Pay-What-You-Want title (in case you would like to chip a small donation our way to help us keep making new Convicts supplements).

We’ve called the campaign notes a “String-A-Line” supplement to distinguish it from our original Convicts & Cthulhu scenario/sourcebook releases (“Tickets of Leave”) and our NPC-specific supplements (“Musters”). The term “stringing a line” comes from the “Flash Talk” slang spoken by convicts in the colony — it refers to the practice of spinning a long and elaborate story to someone to keep them occupied and distracted while one’s accomplice(s) silently robs them of their goods. It seems like a good analogy for running an RPG campaign (except for the stealing bit, obviously :)).

The campaign we’ve created is called “New Dawn Fades (or The Testing of New South Wales)” and concerns itself with a string of peculiar events which begin at the time of the Investigators’ arrival in the colony in early 1803 and extend through the next 2 years. The odd occurrences are linked thanks to the involvement of a shadowy group who are subtly (and not-so-subtly) pulling strings in NSW to fit their own agenda.

What’s In The String-A-Line?

Given that each of the scenarios themselves exist already in published forms (in the C&C core and the different Ticket of Leave supplements, respectively), we haven’t reprinted them but have instead created some “glue” to stitch these individual tales into a larger narrative. The String-A-Line supplement is thus a kind of framework or playbook that allows you to take those pre-existing publications and mash their component parts together into a harmonious whole.Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve described in the String-A-Line:

• Description of the shadowy organization who is at the heart of this campaign
• An option to involve a well-known historical figure in the machinations
• A summary of several ongoing linking elements that bind the stories together. These include NPCs both friendly and adversarial, colonial organizations that recur through the campaign, and some running mysteries
• Six brand-new “campaign handouts” that can be given to players as Investigators begin to unravel pieces of the underlying backstory.
• Eight chapter descriptions (each describing changes/additions to the vanilla published scenarios, how the action ties into the ongoing campaign arc, and the outcomes and loose-ends from each scenario).
• Six ready-to-play Convicts & Cthulhu investigators

Spoilers Hereafter

If you think you might one day be a player in this campaign, perhaps stop reading here. For everyone else, here’s a quick summary of how the New Dawn Fades campaign unfolds through its eight chapters.

Chapter 1: Un-Fresh Off The Boat

The Investigators begin as passengers (and convicts) on a pair of ships which has just arrived in Sydney Harbour from England. A mysterious illness has broken out onboard meaning the ship is refused permission to dock until after it has served a period of quarantine. One person on board simply can’t wait and makes a break overboard, breaking quarantine. The Investigators – as the only uninfected people on board – are asked to give chase. When they track down the missing man, they find that disgusting Mythos creatures were being smuggled into the colony inside his body. But who could have wanted to bring such terrifying monstrosities to New South Wales?

Chapter 2: Night Terrors

As “reward” for their quick-thinking actions in Chapter 1, the Investigators are drafted into the Sydney Night Watch — the motley group who enforces the curfew and patrols the streets at night. This chapter introduces life after dark in Sydney. As the Investigators run their patrols they have a range of  colourful encounters. Many of these are mundane but help to paint a vivid picture of what life on the streets of Sydney is like. However, others relate to the trail of havoc created by an unbound Mythos Creature – following up on these will draw the Investigators towards eliminating the menace it poses to the colony.

Chapter 3: Shyneth as the Gold

As part of their Night Watch duties, the Investigators must pretend to be criminals to meet with an American ship off the NSW coast so they can take possession of smuggled distilling equipment as part of a ‘sting’ operation. A criminal gang was supposed to deliver these items to a remote location near Banks’ Town. In order to find out who receives the illegal items the Investigators must make the rendezvous. When they do, they find a weird group who are happily using distilled essences for some rather unorthodox purposes.

Chapter 4: Night of the Convict Dead

An unusual spate of deaths has been reported on the streets of Sydney Town. In each case a pair of corpses is located adjacent to one another – one looking fresh, the other oddly decayed. Investigating these strange discoveries puts the Investigators on the trail of a dark-hearted man with ambitions to become a necromancer. His designs for the dead in Sydney’s burial grounds needs to be stopped, lest he accidentally trigger a mass zombie resurrection that he has no chance of controlling.

Chapter 5: The Lights of Botany Bay

A strange man in Black Robes has appeared in Sydney calling himself “Solander”. He urgently wants to reach the unsettled shores of Botany Bay and apparently has (somehow) swayed Governor King to arrange a military expedition at short notice. King has ordered the Investigators to “volunteer” to help since they already have experience of the Botany Bay region from their earlier smuggling ‘sting.’

Chapter 6: The Dispensatory of Doctor Macdead

Strange tales have recently been reaching Sydney about bizarre medical conditions reported at the hospital at Parramatta. Looking into these reports of mutations and such, the Investigators quickly establish a common link – all the patients had been treated by a private (highly unqualified) doctor named Macdead. Finding the good doctor, however, proves more complicated than expected. In recent weeks he has been arrested (for passing a forged promissory note) and was sent as punishment to the remote secondary punishment settlement of Coal River. But even in his absence, someone (or something) seems to have ambitions to continue visiting horrible medical alterations upon innocent settlers and convicts of the Parramatta region.

Chapter 7: The Orphan School Horror

The Female Orphan School is one of the few charitable institutions to be created in the harsh colony. Girls at the school have begun to report mysterious and eerie phenomenon in the weeks leading up to Christmas, prompting some to think that the school is haunted.

Chapter 8: The Death Knells

Sydney Town awakes one morning to news of a terrible night of carnage that has left three members of the Night Watch dead and a curious axe left embedded in the Harbour Bell which is used to signal the arrival of new ships. The dead are people who the Investigators knew well from their own service in the Night Watch, so the foul murders strike home in a personal way. But who could have wanted to carry out such an apparently motiveless spree of killings right on the shores of Sydney Harbour?

Getting the Campaign

Convicts & Cthulhu String-A-Line #1: New Dawn Fades is available right now, as a free download using the link below.

33 pages; 8.3MB PDF

In order to run the campaign, you will also need the C&C Core book and the six Ticket of Leave supplements from which the scenarios are drawn. Links to the latter are included at the top of this post. You can get the C&C core either from DriveThru RPG (“Pay What You Want”) or from here on the blog (see the C&C Downloads page). The DTRPG page also offers softcover print copies.

Playing the Campaign

We hope that existing fans of the Convicts & Cthulhu setting will consider using (or adapting) this campaign framework to create hours of amazing entertainment for their gaming group. Equally we hope that some folks who haven’t yet dipped their toes into the gritty world of Convicts might find this lengthy campaign just the ticket to inspire them to transport a group of friends to the penal settlements of early Australia to do battle with shadowy adversaries and save the colonies from an even more brutal fate.

If you and your friends give this campaign a spin we’d love to hear how it went. And if you decide to record and share your online games as “Actual Play” recordings, we’d definitely like to let other C&C fans know so they can check it out!

May the New Dawn never fade on your version of New South Wales!

Kevin Ross, Monstruwacan

I mentioned the other day that we had a big, BIG, announcement that we’ve been keeping under our hats for a week or so. Something very exciting. Here it is:

Kevin Ross — perhaps the most prolific and well-regarded author of Call of Cthulhu material in the history of the game — is writing a sourcebook chapter for the APOCTHULHU core rules!

I have been trying to entice Kevin to write something for Cthulhu Reborn for quite some time, but he is a very busy writer with a long waiting list of people who want to make use of his many and varied talents. But, we have struck lucky on this particular occasion and inveigled ourselves into his schedule … and it was all thanks to William Hope Hodgson.

As we’ve mentioned here on the blog several times, a key goal of APOCTHULHU is to be a reusable and multipurpose engine that can fuel games set in many different versions of the Post-Apocalypse. When asking around for ideas of example literary or film settings we could use as examples of things GMs could try, Kevin casually replied in an email “of course, you’ll have already considered William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land.”

I must confess, dear reader, that I’d only vaguely heard of Hodgson’s sprawling novel The Night Land which takes in a far future when the sun has burned itself out and the remnants of humanity live in a vast pyramid. It sounded kind of intriguing, but as Kevin described more and more about the weirdly horrific world of the novel — complete with vast and alien horrors that lurk in the countryside poised to devour the last humans — the more compelling it sounded.

After Jo and I picked our jaws up off the floor we hastily asked Kevin whether he might be enticed to write up the Night Land setting as a sourcebook chapter for APOCTHULHU. To our collective excitement, he said yes, and in a couple of weeks’ (!) time we had a letter-perfect game rendition of Hodgson’s bizarre and dangerous world. I could try to describe its scope and grandeur and tremendous potential as a RPG setting, but I’m sure I could not top Kevin’s description:

The Night Land is a dark fantasy world, perhaps the darkest such setting ever imagined. The powers of Evil rule this world, from the least living creature to the Great Old One-like Watchers, to the perhaps even more potent residents of The House of Silence and the glowing vaporous pit of The Shine. Here are entities to rival or even surpass the potency of Cthulhu himself, entities so terrible their mere presence causes men to go mad or rush into their monstrously alien grasp.

All of this makes The Night Land a superb setting for roleplaying adventures. With its brooding atmosphere, its harsh environment, and its host of different horrific creatures, the Night Land as written is like somebody’s dark fantasy roleplaying campaign: a cross between Tolkien’s Mordor, Fantasy Flight Games’ Midnight setting for D&D, and the trenches of the first World War. Stocked with hordes of nightmarish Lovecraftian creatures.

It’s worth mentioning that H.P. Lovecraft waxed lyrical about William Hope Hodgson in his seminal 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, and specifically wrote a review of The Night Land which I still think is one of the best summaries of the novel’s strengths (and weaknesses):

Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man’s relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings …

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remote future billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in [WHH’s other tale] Glen Carrig.

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast mental pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort — the prowlers of the black, man forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid — are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author’s touch.

Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years — and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole.

Kevin’s Night Land chapter for APOCTHULHU represents a self-contained sourcebook covering everything about the Night Land setting, from Survivor creation through to a detailed gazetteer of the weird geography of the setting and a statted bestiary of strange horrors. We’re expecting it will stretch to 40-ish pages, maybe a bit more.

William Hope Hodgson fans rejoice! Fans of dark and grim pseudo-fantasy-scifi rejoice! Fans of Kevin Ross rejoice!

Watch this space for future updates about APOCTHULHU and about Kevin’s excellent adaptation of WHH’s epic Night Land setting.

“Thank You For Your Distance”

After a busy month in February, sharing glimpses of sample Apocalypse settings from our forthcoming APOCTHULHU RPG, things have been a bit quiet here in the Cthulhu Reborn blog. This has been largely due to the extraordinary and rapidly-changing global situation around COVID-19. While nobody associated with CR has been personally affected by the pandemic, everyone’s routine has been seriously shaken up. Chances are, you’re in the same boat. We do really hope that all of loyal customers and blog readers take care of themselves and those around them … The Lovecraftian RPG community is small enough that it feels (to me, anyway) a bit like an extended family, and it’s only natural to want to know that all the amazing gamers, writers, illustrators, editors and publishers we’ve worked with are safely out of harm’s way.

Like most other small game publishers, Cthulhu Reborn is very used to remote methods of working — in fact, everything we do is done online through various forms of virtual shopfronts, websites, and collaboration tools. So, the changes created by lockdowns and social-distancing regimes in different countries won’t in themselves slow our ability to create and release cool things. And unlike larger companies which have a payroll of staff to support, we only work through freelancers who get paid immediately on submission of their work. So, our current creative projects are already largely paid for and can move forward regardless of what happens to the gaming industry more generally.

Despite all the recent disruptions, we have still been (slowly) progressing a few different forthcoming releases. Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been up to.

Dean modelling an Apoco-Hoodie

On the APOCTHULHU front, things have been moving along quite nicely on the core book for this standalone RPG. In late February we took stock of everything that has been created for this project and were a little taken aback by the sheer number of words that have now been written. If we put it all into a single volume — rules, sourcebook material, and scenarios, it would probably weigh in at 500-ish pages. That’s an unreasonable size for any RPG title, so we’ve decided to split the material across two releases. The first will be the core APOCTHULHU RPG, which will comprise:

• Rules: the APOCTHULHU d100 system for running Lovecraftian-themed games in any number of different harsh Post-Apocalypse settings. These include rules for: Survivor generation, core mechanics, combat, sanity, activities between adventures.
• Sourcebook: guides and materials to help a Game Moderator build a Lovecraftian Post-Apocalypse setting of his or her choice. This includes resources to assist with: defining a setting, resource scarcity, special equipment rules, making creatures, tomes, rituals.
• Sample Apocalypse Settings: 8 sample short Post-Apocalyse setting write-ups, each about 3 pages long. These were listed in our February 6 blog posting, and the partial text of four of them was shared here also.
• [Exciting Special Sourcebook, details coming in a future update]: see below
• Scenario #1: Kick the Can by Jeff Moeller: a near-future scenario set in a world purged by cleansing fire
• Scenario #2: A Yellow And Unpleasant Land by Jo Kreil: an alternative Gaslight scenario set in a version of England where a very different monarch sits on the throne
• Appendices: notes on converting material from other games, suggested reading and viewing

All this material is 100% written and edited; all-up it comprises about 151,000 words which will make the book *at least* 256 pages, likely more.

As noted above, there is a very special chapter that we’re extremely excited to be able to include in this book, but which is really worthy of an update of its own (watch this space). For now, let me just hint that it is a significant sourcebook written by an extremely well-known and highly-regarded author of Lovecraftian gaming material. It details a strange and evocative setting based on a Post-Apocalyptic world from an epic novel of extreme weirdness.

Even though the layout and illustration of the core book will probably keep us busy for a month or more, we’re already starting to think about how/when we will release APOCTHULHU. We’re mindful of the fact that many people are facing significant real-world hardship and we don’t want to be insensitive in putting out a book of fictional “end of the world” scenarios while that’s happening. On the other hand, many people have expressed a keen interest in checking out this new game, so artificially delaying it until the world is “more sane” might disappoint loyal CR readers. It’s a bit of a quandry — if you have an opinion, leave it in the comments below this post.

 

We have things in the works for both of our other major lines — Convicts & Cthulhu and Dateline: Lovecraft — as well. For the former, Geoff has been putting in some extraordinary hours in historical research for another Ticket of Leave supplement. The topic for this ToL will be theatres in convict NSW, a subject that even seasoned historians seem to disagree upon. Regardless, this will make a great gaming supplement … and who knows, we may end up doing some original historical research as well (is it possible to submit a game PDF as part of a thesis? 🙂 ).

For Dateline: Lovecraft we are sticking to our original commitment to return all profits from sale of the core product to commissioning new scenarios. In January we received a new scenario from Jo Kreil called “Electrical Man” which we will put through our editing process (when time allows!)

For free Convicts and Dateline PDFs we have been seeing a sharp increase in the number of downloads in the past few weeks. I guess that means that more people are running online games and looking for some free content to share with their gaming friends. We’re humbled by the idea that people might be using our PDFs to help bridge the gap caused by social distancing. If you have any tales of amazing Lovecraftian games you’ve run using our free releases, please send them my way (there’s a contact form on the “About Cthulhu Reborn” page).

I will also be trying to write a few suggestions for linking some of our products together to make more extended gaming experiences — mini-campaigns and the like. So, keep an eye out for future blog postings on that subject.

Finally, I wanted to remind everyone that we also have several standalone Call of Cthulhu scenarios available as free downloads over on this page.  These have also been getting a bunch more downloads in recent weeks, with people finding our site as a result of google searches for free CoC scenarios. All of the scenarios we’ve released have been downloaded and played many times by gamers around the world — we’re hoping to share links to some of the Actual Play recordings and blog summaries of how those games worked at the gaming table.

Phew … with all that out of the way, can I just reiterate my original message. We really hope that everyone is well, and is surrounded by friends and family who are likewise. Via online channels we can be further connected to a large network of fellow human-beings with similar interests — those people are kind of like an extended family, and like a family we should all band together to support one another. Be safe, people.