I've run these a few times for a few groups and highly recommend this book. Well written and easy to run for a group.

I've run these a few times for a few groups and highly recommend this book. Well written and easy to run for a group.

Stygian Fox make great stuff, and FSLN is no exception. 26 short scenarios covering a myriad of themes, ready to go at a moment's notice. What's more, the themes tend toward psychological horror and human failings, and this gives the scenarios a distinct quality that sets them apart from the usual fare. This means that they can be used very well as a contrast to longer scenarios or campaigns to change things up a little, but a keeper could also easily string a number of them together to create a mini-campaign, and in fact advice is given to this effect. This is probably my favourite CoC resource.

Alright, I don't play Call of Cthulhu, but I was looking for an awesome modern day paranormal adventure. And I found it here.

The twist of playing the homeless is an interesting one. The investigation feels like it would work well and get the investigators to all the right places.

I feel the abandoned subway station could have been described a little differently to better indicate that the trains still pass through. (I was really imagining it differently than the map shows.) And I feel like the dominated occupents in the apartment building could have been handled differently. It doesn't say when the nightmother dominated them. So it feels like they have been dominated for sometime. Which implies that none of them have went to work for a month and somehow haven't been missed. I think it would make more sense to have the nightmother already affecting them subtlely until she notices that the heroes are coming. Then she takes full control and in the process black flame errupts from their eyes buring them out. Or to have the nightmother to have whispered temptations to people that she met and didn't kill during her time manifested. These people are now considered missing by the police. And they are here in a daze, effectively waiting for the Nightmother to manifest and kill them.

While I feel those two points could have been done a bit differently for clarity, on the whole it feels to me like a solid urban adventure. I recommend people pick it up and give it a read through.

I mostly enjoyed reading this. I would love to see it ran for a group of Japanese players.

I feel like it is important to note that this scenerio comes with recommended characters. The scenerio is written to be related to those specific characters. So if your players are bringing their own, understand that you may have to make some adjustments. These adjustments will be easiest if there is a female character among the investigators.

There were, however, two things that negatively affected my review. The first is that there appears to be an entire page missing. The sentence that starts page 12 is obviously not the end of the sentence that trails off on page 11. There was also a simple grammar error that slipped through and was a bit jarring. I'm actually surprised that Stygian Fox hasn't updated this product to fix the missing page, at least in the digital form. (or either linked to an errata or added an errata to the digital file.)

these maps are excellent. good addition to your Cthulhu library

I agree with another reviewer here that this game needs a bit of Keeper prep rather than feeling entirely complete out of the box. I made a few handouts that I think should have been included.

That said, the material as written contains great atmosphere, interesting problems, sinister characters, and a sense of urgency. My group made a memorable night of it.

The buyer will receive 7 modern-day scenarios with good production values for a price of 19.95. However, I personally cannot recommend this collection and must include it in the "If I had a full preview, I would not have purchased it" category of my library.

The phrase Occam's Razor led me to expect tight, believable no-mythos modern scenarios with just enough grey-area for the keeper to create interesting role-playing situations. Instead, I found almost half of the included scenarios to be some variation of "No mythos, just the most improbable and outlandish theoretically possible antagonist(s) playing the exact same role as the mythos/a mythos creature". The other scenarios, while not bad by any means, were nowhere near strong enough to compensate for their weaker companions. While I appreciate what they were attempting to do in this collection, I could only really imagine myself realistically running 3 or maybe 4 out of the 7 total scenarios without heavily changing them in some way. (Mileage will vary based on player and keeper preferences).

The main reason for this is that, ultimately, given the same amount of contextualization and preparation, I honestly believe that my players would have a harder time buying in to the antagonists presented in this collection than, say, the standard mythos/supernatural beings. For a collection titled Occam's Razor, I find that fact to be more disappointing than anything else.

Favorite Scenario: "The Watchers" For me, this scenario is the best representation of what I felt that the authors were attempting to achieve with this collection. Tragic and horrifying, but also utterly mundane and free of any specific backstory. The entire section is a concise 9 pages and gives the keeper a great deal of freedom to run it however they wish, whether as a misdirection-filled mystery or as a shorter session playing with the idea of narrator reliability. Easily adapted to a classic 1920s or more experimental setting with a bit of rewriting and preparation.

Least Favorite Scenario: "Frozen Footsteps" After reading this scenario, I had to do a double take and make sure I wasn't accidently reading a DnD scenario or a B-movie plot. Prompted an audible "Really?" from this buyer. While the premise can ultimately be tamed with prep work, atmosphere, and good pacing, I do not feel that it should have a place in a collection titled Occam's Razor. Truly the epitome of "the most improbable and outlandish technically possible explaination", made worse by the conclusion presented basically being a choice between killing all of the antagonists or somehow convincing offscreen NPCs to do it.

“The Dark Forest” is a creepy and unnerving modern-day CoC scenario set in Northern Michigan completed in 2-3 sessions. I’ve played this scenario as a private investigator CoC character and am currently running this as a Delta Green scenario for my group (easily modified btw for DG). It does a great job of combining the forests and rural landscapes of Midwest America with the creatures & demons of Finnish folklore. I frequently visit Michigan while on vacation and still find the state’s beauty and local legends fascinating (and obviously so do the writers). Make no mistake…Michigan is the Mid-West version of Lovecraft Country. It is the Great Lakes home to the Sasquatch, Skinwalkers, The Ada Witch, The Red Dwarf and numerous other legends. The writers capture this creepy atmosphere perfectly. (To get in the mood search the internet for videos and stories on Michigan’s ancient forests and legends before running this.)

This story is sort of a combination of “The Blair Witch”, “Stranger Things” and “Twin Peaks”. The horror artwork is top-notch as well. There are some very uncomfortable themes (child abduction and sexual assault by supernatural entities) covered in this scenario. They are necessary to the plot and handled in a mature way with devastating consequences. If your players are new to playing CoC than another introductory scenario would be a better fit. I also feel that creating a character (or friendly NPC) with a background in Finnish folklore is absolutely necessary in your player’s group to fully explain the clues and advance their investigation. Overall, a very well-done supernatural mystery involving lots of detective work and some combat for your players.

As the other review mentions. While this is free (Which is great)...but it has been compressed so heavily that the provided handouts have a lower quality than the same ones from the book. This unfortunately makes this book of handouts fairly useless as the handouts are extremely pixelated.

I hope that the original full resolution images still exist on the company hard drives and this can be re-released in full detail. It could be extremely useful if done right.

I was REALLY impressed with this product, all of the adventures are good or excellent. In most collections of 5 (say) adventures, there are one or two that I'm sure I'll never run, but all of these got me thinking that I could use them (maybe with some changes). The art and quality of the production are gorgous, better than any Chaosium product I've seen. I am seriously thinking of buying more Stygian Fox products; they have impressed me.

Never has there been such a wickedly delightful little set of tiny modern terrors for the discerning Keeper to employ at a moment's notice. Every single one just... gets under my skin. Definitely a recommended title for anyone running any modern day CoC game, who really wants to up the terror factor.

I'm Japanese. I played Nakuko with my Japanese friends. It is a good reproduction of traditional Japanese culture of the 1990s. It is interesting for players to experience the world of Japanese horror. It's fun to have a mixture of horror and funny developments during the scenario.

This scenario is quite good overall, but there's one or two things that bothered me which are going to dampen players' enjoyment a little if any of them know even a little bit of Japanese. Most notably, the Japanese word "nakuko" (泣く子, the type of monster in this scenario) is made up of two extremely common kanji, that would literally be elementary-school-level knowledge to the investigators as well as most people who have taken beginner-level Japanese classes. It means "crying child' and is about as difficult to decipher as those two words are for an English-speaker. Yet they need to go see an eminent folklorist to decipher it! Any player who's taken entry-level Japanese classes has a decent shot at realizing this is ridiculous, probably embarrassing a Keeper with no knowledge of Japanese. This is fairly easily fixed, since the investigators don't just have to decipher the word, they have to find out what kind of creature it is, and the folklorist also helps them with that, so it's only a slight adaptation to make it so that all the invetigators understand the literal meaning of the word just fine with no roll; they still need to find out what it really refers to. I'm not sure why the author didn't write that part of the scenario that way in the first place, since it seems like they must have known it's a perfectly ordinary Japanese word that anyone would know. Of course, this is pretty minor since most players are not expected to have any knowledge of Japanese; then again, if they're interested in a scenario set in Japan, your players might be more likely than average to catch on to this issue!

The scenario itself seems very good otherwise. I don't remember any other egregious mistakes (that I would catch, anyway), the horror elements are quite good with many unnerving suggestions to slowly ratchet up the scares, and the scenario is much more about discovering the very personal story behind the monster to get out alive before it closes in on them, rather than just "defeating" it. All of the NPCs presented have hidden depths along with ways for the investigators to find out about them, giving the Keeper all the tools for some pretty good psychological horror.

Overall, I think this is a decent collection of modern CoC scenarios. I was a little worried when I only really saw most actual play groups playing through the first two scenarios that those would be the only two good scenarios in the book, and unfortunately to some extent that’s true. But I’ll go through them one at a time:

Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home: A little girl is abducted from a big box store under strange circumstances. Moments later, a man walks into the store and commits suicide. The investigators are left to find the girl and piece together why she was taken. This is probably the second best scenario in the book. There’s a lot of layers to the mystery here and a lot of investigating for the players to do. And while there’s a lot of room for the investigators to travel down many different paths, the bloody showdown at the end is all but inevitable. I think there’s maybe a bit too much Christian mythology here (in general, I’m not a big fan of scenarios that mix Christianity with the Cthulhu mythos), the memorable NPCs and setpieces make this a really solid entry.

Forget me not: The investigators wake up inside a crashed van in rural Michigan, and slowly piece together how they got there and what happened to their missing colleague. This is the standout scenario in the book, and is really the most compelling reason to purchase TTWLB. The amnesia trope is used really well here and adds another element of terror to the proceedings. There’s some great body horror and a confrontation with a lesser-used mythos entity. You also get some good old fashioned haunted house exploration, and some compelling clues for your investigators to sift through. There’s a lot of different ways this scenario could go, but no matter what this seems all but guaranteed to be a fun and horrific time at the table.

Roots: A young woman goes missing during a camping trip, and her adoptive parents fear that she has gone off in search of her birth mother. The search for this young woman brings the investigators to an isolated small town surrounded by deep, dark woods. There’s a lot of really interesting ideas here, and I can see what the author was going for with this scenario, but overall it doesn’t really work for me. It’s one of those RPG scenarios that would work much better as a short story. The initial investigation is interesting, but once everyone figures out what’s really going on, I think this one is going to fizzle out a bit.

Hell in Texas: In small-town Texas, a young woman commits suicide inside of a “Hell House” being run by a local church. I had never heard of a Hell House (and strangely, the scenario doesn’t really explain exactly what it is), but from what I gather it’s sort of like a Halloween haunted house attraction but with strict Christian messaging instead of light-hearted scares. The idea of the investigators looking into a haunted house attraction that is actually haunted is fun, but from what’s written on the page it’s almost impossible for the players to actually “solve” this mystery. Instead, this scenario will most likely involve the players witnessing a bunch of horrific events before throwing up their hands and saying “Well, I don’t know what to do here” and just leaving. As written, it’s pretty anticlimactic and if you’re going to run it, it will need a bit of an overhaul to give it a better ending.

The Night Season: In Achorage, Alaska, a young man commits suicide in an unusual manner, and the clues point towards the involvement of a strange, gifted young woman. I really, really don’t like this scenario, for a number of reasons that I won’t get into because it’s impossible to talk about without spoiling the entire thing. Suffice it to say, It mixes the Cthulhu mythos with pop culture in a way that I really dislike. A lot of that is personal preference; some people might actually like the unique premise of this scenario, but I was flat-out repulsed by it. This one might as well not even be in the book because it’s completely unsalvageable as far as I’m concerned.

Intimate Encounters: A serial murderer known as the “liposuction killer” is prowling the internet for victims. Can the investigators stop him before he kills again? I actually really liked this scenario. It has an “X-Files monster of the week” feel to it that I really dug. It’s a bit simple and straightforward, but it’s still good fun. I think some of the clues don’t connect together as neatly as they could, but that would be an easy fix for the keeper.

So, a pretty mixed bag overall. I don’t think TTWLB is quite worth $20, because half the scenarios are not really worth running, but the three that are good are pretty solid, so this collection gets a tentative recommendation from me.

One other thing that bothered me is the way that some of these scenarios use adult themes. I’m all for tons of gore and sex and body horror, but a few of the scenarios throw in some pretty heavy themes for almost no reason (abortion, HIV/AIDs, sexual abuse, etc). I’m all good with using these themes to invoke horror, but here it kind of feels like they are thrown in as an afterthought that has no impact on the story. It sort of feels like the authors felt like they had to include some “mature” stuff just because this book has a “for mature gamers” disclaimer on the cover.