This the first, spoiler-lite section of my review. Find the full review on mjrrpg.com https://mjrrpg.com/dossier-1-the-maw-review-call-of-cthulhu/ Note: Review copy provided by the author.

Dossier No 1 – The Maw, written by Matthis Sperlis and Björn Soentgerath, is the first in the Obscuriat Walser series of German scenarios, and so far, the only translated into English, put out by the appropriately named OBSCURIAT WALSER. Centered around Obscuriat Severin Walser, a sort of occult-focused antiquarian, and his business in the fictional German town of Aken in the 1920s. The Maw tasks the investigators with hunting down a lost, high-value shipment Walser had been waiting for, leading into a beefy two-part, 5-8 hour, very classic-feeling scenario with a balanced mix of investigation and adventure.

The bulk of the scenario is a very classic-feeling (and indeed an unofficial sequel to a Lovecraft story) investigation, moving from location to location largely freeform through Aken, finding clues and talking to people of interest. The slow ratcheting of mystery and tension is done very well, and without giving too much away, the quiet investigative sections are perfectly balanced with eventually excitement and suspense. Aken is also very rooted in its time and place, giving extra texture to the exploration. I don’t have the book myself, but I imagine Berlin: The Wicked City would go alone well with this scenario.

The scenario itself is a hefty 54 pages of text, along with 36 pages of stats, handouts, and pregens. You’ll also get three .pdf versions (a small-size hyperlinked .pdf, a full-sized print-focused .pdf, and a background-less printer-friendly .pdf), a clean text version of the handouts, and two fillable custom character sheets, one full colour, one printer-friendly. Completely ignoring anything else, it is a huge amount of content for its price.

Miskatonic Repository creators, myself very much included, should take note of The Maw’s layout and design. The legibility rivals professional products, with narrative text, text boxes, lists, and images all arrayed in a clean and understandable manner that still looks great. A lot of care can be plainly seen, with custom backgrounds, borders, text box and image frames, and list markers. A combination of stock period pictures and some staged photos (with the writing/editing staff providing actors, I believe) break up the text and add colour to the setting.

The standout feature of the layout are the summary pages at the end of each scene, condensing the scene’s setting and main events, where the investigators may go to next, additional hints and leads that may be found in the scene, as well as additional investigative options that a Keeper may include if they desire or if the investigators want to poke around more. Though a beefy scenario, these summary pages help keep the everything manageable, and after a read through of the full text, Keepers can mostly refer to these summaries as a reminder while preparing or running the scenario. I really hope more scenarios, including officially published scenarios, include sections like this, as they make preparation much, much easier. As far as layout and physical design goes, The Maw is near perfect, with the only addition I could think of being a flowchart, but that’s a personal preference for me (I always draw my own flowcharts before running anyways, but its nice to have one already there).

As with the general layout and design, the bundle of handouts is also detailed and believable. The scenario opens with the investigators receiving a bunch of handouts, and its neat to right away hand ‘control’ of the initial investigation to the players by letting them sort through the various documents and notes before getting into the meat of the game. I particularly like one appendix, a set of NPC bookmarks with pictures and names, and I’ve already stolen that idea for my own future scenarios to both help the Keeper and players keep all the various characters in order. A physical collection of the handouts is also available on OBSCURIAT WALSER’s website – it looks fantastic, though the shipping for me across an ocean would be a bit much, but for those in Europe or with deep pockets, it looks very neat.

There are a few criticisms, though most of them I’ll talk about below as they spoil a few moments, and for the most part impacts Keepers more than players. While very well designed and constructed, there are occasional awkwardly worded phrases. Another editing pass might have helped smooth out the translation, though it is all fully understandable.

Only two pregenerated investigators are included. Unless a scenario is specifically designed for a specific number of investigators or highly encourages players to bring their own, I always prefer at least four pregenerated characters. I don’t feel like the scenario is particularly designed towards only two investigators, as you’ll likely be able to tell from the spoiler-full section. A custom, fillable character sheet is included, and I’m always excited to see custom character sheets, but it still would have been ideal to have two more premade characters as detailed as the ones already included. You can find the two additional investigators I rolled up here if you need two more and don’t want to make them yourself.

One last point that isn’t much of a criticism, is that while the NPCs are colourful and fleshed out with portraits, stats, and detailed backgrounds, it’s easy to miss out on a few of them completely, and many only show up for a single scene. I hope they pop-up as reoccurring characters in future Obscuriat Walser scenarios, otherwise it seems like a lot of effort for one-scene appearances.

Overall, I had a great time not only running The Maw, but just reading it. A unique setting, fun NPCs, great handouts, and a classic investigative feeling with a thrilling conclusion make playing the scenario great fun. As a Keeper and a scenario creator, the layout and design are also top notch, and a reminder that arranging content is as important as writing it. Highly recommended.

You can read the full review, including the spoiler-filled section for Keepers, here: https://mjrrpg.com/dossier-1-the-maw-review-call-of-cthulhu/

This is the first, spoiler-lite, half of my review for Swamp Song. The full review can be found in the link below: https://mjrrpg.com/swamp-song-review-call-of-cthulhu/

Note: Review copy provided by the author.

In-Short: A investigation-heavy single-session scenario that makes full use of its setting and ambience and is well suited to ongoing or one-shot play, though it may benefit from having its teeth sharpened a bit.

Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:

Swamp Song is classic-style scenario set in the 1920s French Quarter of New Orleans during a massive summer storm, and tasks the investigators with hunting down a missing friend. The search should take only a single session without embellishments and takes the form of an almost The Hangover-esque caper as the party retraces their friend’s escapades of the night before. It is very investigation-focused, letting the players work their way freeform style through locations and social interactions.

The scenario makes full use of its setting. Every character and location is seeped in the French Quarter, letting investigators visit places from smoky absinthe clubs to subterranean canals used for prohibition-skirting smuggling, and meet colourful NPCs like an eccentric faux-French occultist bookstore owner or top-of-their-game jazz pianists. There are lots of asides and information boxes that explain the eccentricities of 1920s Near Orleans for added context. Add in the document itself having a thematic production style with plentiful period images, and Keepers shouldn’t have any problem getting into the right groove.

The downloadable file is 44 pages, with the main text taking up 22 pages, 3 pages for stats/tomes/spells, 4 pages of handouts, 11 pages for 5 pregenerated investigators, and the remaining 5 for front/back covers and copyright information. The layout and production is fantastic, courtesy of the Miskatonic Repository’s resident design polymath Alex Guillotte with every page being just a delight to look at and easy to read thanks to clean and varied formatting. Character art for NPCs and pregens by Giacomo Mascellani is stylised and cartoony without being silly, and the accentuated character traits give players easy references to remember (I would have also liked to have a few more character portraits, for instance, of the Count’s daughter, who ended up hanging around for a good portion of my run). The handouts are all functional text documents of some sort containing actionable information, but are still prettied up with aging effects and fancy design to place them in the setting.

(An aside here: having ‘actionable information’ in a handout sounds like it should be obvious, but I emphasise it to differentiate these handouts from ‘ooh pretty’ handouts. Those are still great to have, letting players visualise something in the scenario, but are not the same as a handout that contains a clue or information the players themselves need to parse.)

Plenty of background information, along with more of Mascellani’s portraits, make the pregenerated investigators stand out and give players an easy springboard for roleplaying their characters, and their backgrounds and stats are varied, letting each cover different bases both mechanically and socially. The scenario itself presents plenty of different challenges both skill roll-wise and character-wise, further making sure each investigator has some time to shine.

Without getting into spoilers, the scenario structure is also neatly laid out. With freeform investigations it can be difficult for the Keeper to keep everything in their head with regards to location relationships and where characters and clues are found. Swamp Song helpfully gives each location in the freeform investigation act a ‘Links’ box that points out which clues and locations are found in the location, and the .pdf goes a step further with hyperlinking. This is a slimmer version of what The Maw does with its full page ‘Setting & Key Information” summaries for each location, and the slimmer version works well here in Swamp Song with the lighter page count. I love this trend and highly encourage it in any scenario of this type.

Swamp Song makes great use of its New Orleans setting to tell a classic Call of Cthulhu tale that gives players freedom in their investigations, and thanks to well-considered writing and layout is smooth read and run for Keepers. Well recommended to any players or Keepers looking for a unique 1920s setting or just want a solid investigative scenario.

The full spoiler-filled review can be found here: https://mjrrpg.com/swamp-song-review-call-of-cthulhu/

Review taken from my site, mjrrpg.com

In short: If you as a player make investigators that last longer than a one-shot, or if you as a Keeper make scenarios that emphasise unique NPCs, this is an indispensable resource. Recommended as strongly as possible, seriously, this book is lovely and should be sandwiched between the Keeper Rulebook and the Investigator Handbook in every CoC player and Keeper’s bookcase.

If that’s all the convincing you need, you can find Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation on DriveThruRPG.

In detail:

For players, Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation (henceforth Heinrich’s Guide or the Guide) use is obvious. It makes characters. But as a Keeper, of all the Call of Cthulhu books I have, second only to the Keeper’s Rulebook itself, Heinrich’s Guide is the one I use the most.

Through 156 pages of 140 Tables – and you better like tables because this is ALL tables, short tables, long tables, linked tables, sub tables, sub-sub tables, tables for days, tables for life – the Guide leads a character from birth to adulthood, and through all manner of twists and turns on the way, spitting out a fully formed investigator ready to take on the Mythos, or go insane trying. Over the course of an hour, your investigator will have a detailed family, ancestry, distinguishing features, traits, and beliefs, events from their childhood, adolescence, education, adulthood, and occupation. They’ll likely have an array of acquaintances, each also coloured in with personal features and connections to the investigator, from rivals to lovers.

A few standout acquaintances of my players’ investigators; lover that was both the investigator’s mentor, and their institutionalised patient; A sadistic, wrinkled-faced younger sibling that the investigator none-the-less feels a fraternal need to protect; A down to earth, humble, very short-statured academic that also absolutely hates the investigator and will cause them bodily harm if the opportunity arises; A wizard that saved an investigator’s life.

I believe ‘playing’ through character creation as a group is the ideal way to use the Guide. It’s exciting, and often hilarious, to take turns watching your tablemates roll on the tables and seeing their investigators, your partners, take shape. The handouts are also much more fun to print out and physically pass around (more on handouts later). Also, there are numerous times when further extrapolation can lead to connections between events, or even between investigators, that players and the Keeper can help each other with. Having the Keeper present also helps when events don’t entirely line up with each other, or conflict with the game the Keeper planned.

The Guide does tend to create investigators that already have had fantastic experiences, at times exceeding what your average investigator will experience over the course of an actual CoC scenario (see the video review/guide for my Belgian Dreamlands explorer). Depending on the Keeper, this may break the scenario they had lined up, and so it would be ideal to reroll any particular results as they come up, rather than when the player shows up to the table with a spell-slinging, lightning-gun wielding, sorcerer of an investigator.

This is not at all guaranteed to happen, and most investigators come out somewhere in the middle. Relatively normal, with a couple experiences that could be used as the reasons they become an investigator instead of the normal human that would turn away from the Mythos at the first whiff of it. And some characters will come out the complete opposite, with a fully mundane background, to the point the Keeper might want to let the player reroll some events just to make things more interesting.

For a frequent player, unless you only play one-shots with premade investigators, I would consider Heinrich’s Guide as an equal companion to the Investigator Handbook. And if I had to choose between the two of them… it would be a difficult choice indeed.

As a Keeper, if I need to know something special about creatures and deities I can peek into the Malleus Monstrorum, and if a spell is going to be slung the investigators’ way the Grand Grimoire is on hand. But more than monsters and magic, the most common thing I need references for, beyond the base rules themselves, are NPCs. Whether they be detailed characters central to the story with deep backgrounds and motivations, or briefly met weirdos with a single notable trait to stand out, Heinrich’s Guide can quickly flesh out an NPC.

It’s hard to emphasise how useful it is. With three rolls, an NPC bartender at a speakeasy that would have been described as ‘Uh, um, he’s a… guy named… Bob? And he’s, uh… big?’ becomes Quinn, a morose man with exceptionally smooth skin, who after some conversation is revealed to be exceptionally patriotic. That’s someone the players can latch onto. After a session or two of the players going back to Quinn for local gossip, you might be inclined to flesh him out further, rolling on some background events. Now you know he was indebted to the mob and was coerced to whack someone, got caught but was exonerated, and now he prefers to pay off the debt quietly running a mob speakeasy.

Besides the tables, Heinrich’s Guide also comes with 18 handouts in the form of Player Cards. These cards are earned at various times through various events, and each has some special effect. Some are immediately activated, others you hold on to until a special trigger or you decide to use them, while others can be kept into the actual start of the game. They’re a fantastic idea, and one I’d love to see used more. I do find they work best as physical handouts, as when you simply tell a player they have Handout 15, they tend to forget about it. Harder to forget when you have a black and gold card with a nine-sided star in your hand.

Outside of character creation, the Guide is useful simply as inspiration. Some of the later tables are wild, and even after spending quite some time with the book, I haven’t seen a good number of them (and I refuse to read the book from front to back – that would ruin the surprises!). Reading them can give plenty of ideas for future escapades.

Visually, Heinrich and designer-extraordinaire Alex Guillotte hit this one out of the park. The Guide is a gold standard for Miskatonic Repository titles in layout and design. Well chosen and edited stock art on most pages helps break up the walls of tables, which themselves are laid out cleanly and orderly. You’ll be doing a lot of jumping around between chapters and tables while making a character, and along with the artwork, colour-coded edges of the pages with chapter titles makes it easy to remember where in the book you are. It is a fairly large book though, so it would be worth have a bookmark or two twenty to keep everything marked.

There are two points, maybe three, of not-quite-criticism I have for the Guide, though they’re not really short comings of the book itself, but more my personal preferences that aren’t completely satisfied.

The first is a lack of agency. While many events do give choices to players and placing Characteristic and Skill percentages is often up to the player, and there is nothing stopping players and Keepers from overruling anything the Guide tells you to do, using the Guide as-is generally means rolling and doing what the results tell you. Coming off of the character creation system in Mongoose Traveller 2e, I would have liked opportunities for the players to make more life choices, with rolls deciding if they succeed or fail in those choices. For example, an investigator’s education is decided by a random roll. I would have liked the player to decide what kind of education they’d like to pursue, if any, then make a roll to see if they get into that institution or not, with the following event table being determined based on that success or failure. This can be somewhat averted by the Guide’s suggested method of rolling three times on some or all tables and letting the player choose their preferred result, but this isn’t quite the same.

The second is the reliance on the Quick-Fire Method’s array of Characteristic and Skill percentages. This is the easiest way to do things and makes perfect sense to use, though I would have liked the Guide to give some suggestions on how to use rolled Characteristics or Point Buys (there is a small mention of Point Buy, but not much guidance on how to use it with the rest of the book) and using skill points based off Characteristics depending on occupations. My main group are big fans of full randomisation when making characters, and everyone having the same array of starting numbers is a bit of a put-off. While it wouldn’t be impossible to work more varied numbers in, it would require substantially changing how the Guide works.

One last point, that is not a fault at all and actually more of a mark of quality, is that players and Keepers alike will grow attached to these investigators. Given Call of Cthulhu’s often sudden lethality, it can be a tough pill to swallow when a character you spent an hour crafting and getting to know takes a fatal shotgun blast to the face in their first session. Some groups may decide using some Pulp Cthulhu mechanics are necessary to warrant spending so much time making characters. My group, for example, has adapted the spend all Luck at minimum of 30 rule to save characters from sudden death.

For all the sheer content you get though, these two points barely matter. When Heinrich’s Guide’s unfathomable number of permutations are combined with a player and Keeper’s creativity, we get an infinite amount of investigators and NPCs. If you’re a player heading into a campaign, roll up an investigator (or two or eight, it is a CoC campaign after all), and if you’re a Keeper, give the players some NPCs to get invested in.

This book is worth its weight in dead investigators.

Find more Call of Cthulhu reviews on mjrrpg.com

This is the spoiler-lite section of my full review, which can be found here: https://mjrrpg.com/al-azif-unearthed-the-unraveling-review-call-of-cthulhu/

Note: I received a review copy of this scenario from the author.

In-Short:

An extremely well-produced and fleshed out classic scenario, featuring a fun cast of characters, an action-packed third act, and a wealth of digital extras.

Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:

The Unraveling is the first in an upcoming series written by John Crowdis, focusing on the background of the titular Al-Azif – The Necronomicon. The scenario takes place in 1920s Boston, largely inside a fictional, storied hotel called the Ackerly House Hotel, and centres around investigating an ancient scroll that appeared in a classified ad and will be exhibited during a soiree at the hotel. It’s a very classic-feeling premise reminiscent of The Auction, but with enough tricks up its sleeves to stand out.

It’s an extremely well produced scenario as well, among the best on the Miskatonic Repository, and stands alongside official products in many ways. Ample artwork and varied text formatting make reading very smooth, and chapters are well organised with a very detailed table of contents to help navigate the document. The main scenario document is 76 pages in total, made up of 42 pages of main text, 5 pages of stats, 8 pages of 18 handouts, 6 pregen investigators taking up 12 pages, a 3 page ‘Keeper Quick Reference,’ a Keeper’s note page, and the last 4 pages for the table of contents and credits. All in all a very beefy scenario, and its further expanded with a wealth of extras, including maps and tokens for VTT-use, a Keeper Deck of NPCs (cards with character art on the face and stats on the back), and multiple versions of handouts for printing or online use.

There were a few hiccups with the PDF related to the table of contents when I ran the scenario, but Crowdis is quick with updating and correcting the files.

The scenario is a mix of investigation and action, with players able to look into the past of the hotel, the scroll, and interact with a large cast of colourful NPCs. 18 handouts in the form of newspapers, letters, business cards, etc. give players plenty of goodies to pour over, and the character art by Meg Fanning gives the NPCs a nice dash of personality. I’d love to play this again in-person just so I can handout business cards each time the investigators meet a new character. Latter scenes feature large action set pieces that on the surface may seem difficult to handle, but there is plenty of aids and tips on how to run things smoothly.

Despite the hefty page count, The Unraveling is a fairly compact scenario, likely taking most groups one or two sessions, with my run taking two sessions for a total of about seven hours. We took our time though, and depending on the players and Keeper the scenario could be significantly shortened, and with some sever slashing it could fit a convention-friendly four hours.

Most any investigator could be fit into the scenario, making it very easy to slip it into an ongoing campaign, though there are also six pregenerated investigators included. While they are varied and have some fun details to make them stand out, they are fairly standard as far as premade characters go, with not many direct connections or motivations related to the scenario’s plot. The text helpfully lists ways to include player-made investigators and useful skills, and again most investigator types can work, either by working for the organisation interested in the scroll, or otherwise commissioned to investigate the scroll. I am a big fan of premade investigators though, and I would never complain about some more background for them to give players in one-shots more roleplaying hooks to grab onto. I do very much appreciate one character having their treasured possession being ‘Gobbles the cat.’ MVP right there.

I have very few criticisms, and none related to the actual contents of the scenario, rather more ideas for how to expand on the best parts of it, and as such those are relegated to the spoilers section.

Al-Azif Unearthed: The Unraveling was a blast to run and a pleasure to read. From the perspective of a Miskatonic Repository creator, it should also be used as a standard for how to present community-made work. It’s hard to state how good it looks. Even if you, as a creator, are not interested in running the scenario, it has value just as a source of ideas for layout and design. Highly recommended, and I hope Crowdis continues with the series.

The spoiler section of the review for Keepers can be found here: https://mjrrpg.com/al-azif-unearthed-the-unraveling-review-call-of-cthulhu/

Fantastic resource for the price. Very useful for keepers or players looking for a scenarion in particular setting or language, and also very useful for those wanting some insight into pricing and sales.