A little break from my boardgame design tribulations, as I take a look at tabletop rpgs…
Publishing adventures is a tough business nowadays. While the Open Gaming License meant that there is a wealth of adventures to choose from, it also means that anyone can put out an adventure. While review sites like ENWorld have a huge community that can buy all these adventures and advise us, it still spreads everything out. In the old days, before d20 and the OGL, only one company was making (legal) adventures: and that was TSR. In the early days of D&D especially, everyone knew about Tomb of Horrors and Keep on the Borderlands. It created a shared experience between players and DMs from all over, as they would discuss how a certain monster was beaten or a clever item they used or the weird variant setting the DM set it in. As came afterwards in videogames, they were shared “levels” to which everyone who played it had their own story, or could give advice to other people who were going to take the journey themselves.
My favorite published adventure has this same community feeling, but is also an extremely solid adventure and hits everything an adventure should do.
The adventure I’m speaking of is “The End of Paradise” in the Call of Cthluhu d20 book. Unlike it’s bigger family members in the d20 system, this is an introductory adventure included in the rulebook itself. D&D and d20 Modern have some setting information but no introduction to sink your teeth into: you’re supposed to buy other books for that. But “The End of Paradise” is included in the main book, and offers suggestions on how to drop it into just about any kind of Call of Cthulhu game that you care to run.
(I should note that the CoCd20 book contains a second adventure that I’m not nearly as fond of- it’s more limited in dropping it into a campaign, is not a starting adventure, and reads more like a dungeon crawl than the horror investigation genre. So it’s not simply enough that an adventure be in the rulebook, there are other qualities too.)
As it is designed for first level characters and beginning players, the adventure does not rely on the characters having super psychic powers or being specialized in the Uzi. From what I remember, there’s only one combat, and it’s quite obvious that you can’t fight it. While the whole adventure is on a timeline, the characters have ample time to search and gather clues and can take extra time so as not to blow an all-important roll.
It’s also a great intro to everything that can be done in CoC. There’s searching, investigating, research… and then there’s the horror. With CoC it’s easy to fall back on a “Monster Manual” style approach and just throw a random Lovecraft critter at the players. “You see… a byhakke!” But this adventure features just general creepiness and haunted houseness- ghosts, sex carpets, bizarre ceiling holes… it’s got it. But it also touches on the Lovecraft mythos in the origin of the “big bad” and has an insanity causing book of weirdness for the players to discover. Everything that a CoC game should be about is in there. Insanity checks? You betcha! Plus, because it’s not a huge jump into the obvious supernatural, it allows the characters to slowly be drawn into horror, for greater verisimilitude.
Because it’s so compelling an adventure, and can be used either as the kickoff to a campaign (as I did) or a one-shot/con game. (It is especially good as a con game because of the aforementioned “gives you everything you’d want in a CoC game” and ties nicely into TreasureTables’ ideas about leading with the cool stuff.) Combined, it means that I when I talk to fellow gamers, there’s a decent chance that they’ve played the adventure too. I’ve talked with other GMs on how they ran it, and with players who have played through it, and we all get to swap “How did it end?” stories. How cool is that? I can’t think of any other game I’ve played where I’ve had this sort of experience. And when I talk about the sex carpet, they know what I mean. It’s also interesting to hear what other settings the game took place in: mine ran was the kickoff in a college game, so the characters were students doing classwork, and had no access to weapons. Another GM I talked to ran a party where they had all sorts of military weapons… which ended up being the reason they died!
I can’t recommend the adventure enough. It’s almost perfectly put together, and it brings back the early days of roleplaying when everyone played the same adventures because there were only a few available. It brings me closer to other players and GMs, and let’s me hear how other people tackled the same framework. Thus, it is my favorite published adventure.
My favorite adventure of all time though? That’s a harder question, and one I’d have to split into “Favorite Adventure I’ve Run” and “Favorite Adventure I’ve Played In.” Those will have to be the subjects of future columns… after I’ve sprung them on a few PCs, of course.
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