What do you think?
Rate this book
Call of Cthulhu RPG
The Asylum and Other Tales
Seven Sinister Situations
In every Call of Cthulhu campaign certain situations arise regularly. This book takes seven of those situations and turns them into horrifying adventures. Each story is meant to be used freely by the Keeper (the gamemaster) when he or she needs a quick plot for an impromptu game or as fillers in larger campaigns. Investigators' Information, Keeper's Background, and suggestions for use are provided for each episode. The center four, gray-edged, pages are to be carefully pulled out and handed to the players appropriately as per the scenario.
In every Call of Cthulhu campaign certain situations arise regularly. This book takes seven of those situations and turns them into horrifying adventures. Each story is meant to be used freely by the Keeper (the gamemaster) when he or she needs a quick plot for an impromptu game or as fillers in larger campaigns. Investigators' Information, Keeper's Background, and suggestions for use are provided for each episode. The center four, gray-edged, pages are to be carefully pulled out and handed to the players appropriately as per the scenario.
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
34 people want to read
About the author
Sandy Petersen
105 books70 followersCarl Sanford Joslyn "Sandy" Petersen is an American game designer. He worked at Chaosium, contributing to the development of RuneQuest and creating the acclaimed and influential horror role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. He later joined id Software where he worked on the development of the Doom franchise and Quake. As part of Ensemble Studios, Petersen subsequently contributed to the Age of Empires franchise.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 2, 2022
A collection of adventures for old school Call of Cthulhu. This book is filling a wide variety of niches. The basic idea is that these are adventures that can slot in to longer campaigns. One of your investigators goes insane and has to be retired to an asylum? Turns out there's adventure there! Party stuck on a ship crossing the Atlantic? Here's an adventure to run to pass the trip. There's a variety here in terms of plots and themes and even moods. One adventure features the chaos sewn as a group of Elder Things are chased through time portals by a dinosaur. But there's also an adventure with no supernatural elements at all and I think dropping things like that in to a long-form CoC campaign helps to sell the horror. It's easier to see the weird if it isn't a thing you look at every day.
The structure is also very open for the most part. Some adventures (Like the trip aboard the ship) have pretty tight timelines but almost all of the others utilize a loose structure where you are given a set of dispositions and then the plot develops from there. You may be given a loose timetable for "What happens if the investigators do nothing" but probably not.
The adventures aren't bad though. There's a lot of classics here particularly The Auction and The Asylum which are beloved. And there's some very good yarns to be spun here. As with anything from the early days of TTRPGs, there's some really unfortunate prejudices that worked their way in to the text. A lot of the prepackaged dialog is given in vernacular which can serve to be insulting to the people being depicted. The adventures definitely have something against people who live in backwater parts of the US, that's for sure. That prejudice is part of Lovecraft but maybe it doesn't need to be part of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. And there is one adventure with a number of First Nations characters and it would benefit from sensitivity readers if re-written for CoC 7th Edition.
All that being said, the adventures are pretty good but it's the exception rather than the rule for the book to give you much to help you run them and that's a bit of a shame.
The structure is also very open for the most part. Some adventures (Like the trip aboard the ship) have pretty tight timelines but almost all of the others utilize a loose structure where you are given a set of dispositions and then the plot develops from there. You may be given a loose timetable for "What happens if the investigators do nothing" but probably not.
The adventures aren't bad though. There's a lot of classics here particularly The Auction and The Asylum which are beloved. And there's some very good yarns to be spun here. As with anything from the early days of TTRPGs, there's some really unfortunate prejudices that worked their way in to the text. A lot of the prepackaged dialog is given in vernacular which can serve to be insulting to the people being depicted. The adventures definitely have something against people who live in backwater parts of the US, that's for sure. That prejudice is part of Lovecraft but maybe it doesn't need to be part of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. And there is one adventure with a number of First Nations characters and it would benefit from sensitivity readers if re-written for CoC 7th Edition.
All that being said, the adventures are pretty good but it's the exception rather than the rule for the book to give you much to help you run them and that's a bit of a shame.
Read
February 5, 2025How? Cthulhu collection + "reading my books" project.
What? If "Shadows of Yog-Sothoth" set the structure for what a Call of Cthulhu campaign could be -- world-spanning, deadly -- this, well, isn't that: it's an anthology of adventures, described as seven common events the PCs might get involved with. The framing is almost something like the En Route and other encounter books: you might slot these in when your PCs are between adventures.
In fact, these adventures are actually too meaty to be used that way, but you can see how these adventures started from somewhat common CoC occurrences:
- The Auction takes place at an auction, where some items might be occult.
- The Madman involves a madman who doesn't know he's mad -- or perhaps you can retool this to deal with a mad PC.
- Black Devil Mountain involves the PCs inheriting something and everyone in town being weird about it, which is understandable when you find out that it's essentially a D&D-style dungeon.
- The Asylum features an asylum run by an evil psychologist. (Or maybe psychiatrist?)
- The Mauretania, like the Asylum, says "let's make an adventure of a thing that might not otherwise be adventurous"; in this case, a sea voyage, packed full of cultists, potential allies, a serial killer, etc.
- Gate from the Past involves some not terrible Old Ones trying to escape some Shoggoths and accidentally unleashing a dinosaur on Arkham.
- The Westchester House is a hoax haunting.
Yeah, so? A few notes on the individual adventures:
- The Auction feels almost perfect: a lot of creepy objects, a lot of suspects, a nice murder -- and then there's a little steam lost as the adventure expands (and the cops are called in). Perhaps it's more survival horror than anything else, but my pitch for this would be: you are stuck in an auction house with a monster, and someone of the bidders is in league with it.
- For the Madman, ech, I don't know, in 1983, this was fine, but I wouldn't do it today.
- Black Devil Mountain isn't really suited for Call of Cthulhu, and is also a misfire in terms of this book's framing: inheriting is a common adventure hook, but it's not by itself interesting to explore. And then there's the character of Ol' Tom, which is not very well done.
- The Asylum is, by today's standards, not very interesting, but it does fit the framing: rather than deal with an asylum as downtime, let's make it the adventure.
- The Mauretania -- I've seen the complaint that this adventure is overstuffed with plots and kind of nonsensical because of that. I absolutely see what they mean, and I've said that about some other supplements (like towns where everyone has a Mythos secret), but here's where I disagree with that as a critique: it kinda rips. Like, it absolutely seems silly and top-heavy, but I think that's a fun tone... though maybe not really the Call of Cthulhu tone.
- Gate from the Past absolutely doesn't work as a straight CoC adventure, but as a glimmer of more OSR-style wackiness, I appreciate it. It's also by far the shortest of the book, which is funny considering how strange it might be. (The accompanying art includes a bunch of safari hunters running from a dinosaur.)
- The Westchester House seems fine to me. And I absolutely understand the impulse to provide a rugpull where there is no supernatural stuff going on, but I always wonder how something like this received at the table: as a clever joke or a mean prank?
What? If "Shadows of Yog-Sothoth" set the structure for what a Call of Cthulhu campaign could be -- world-spanning, deadly -- this, well, isn't that: it's an anthology of adventures, described as seven common events the PCs might get involved with. The framing is almost something like the En Route and other encounter books: you might slot these in when your PCs are between adventures.
In fact, these adventures are actually too meaty to be used that way, but you can see how these adventures started from somewhat common CoC occurrences:
- The Auction takes place at an auction, where some items might be occult.
- The Madman involves a madman who doesn't know he's mad -- or perhaps you can retool this to deal with a mad PC.
- Black Devil Mountain involves the PCs inheriting something and everyone in town being weird about it, which is understandable when you find out that it's essentially a D&D-style dungeon.
- The Asylum features an asylum run by an evil psychologist. (Or maybe psychiatrist?)
- The Mauretania, like the Asylum, says "let's make an adventure of a thing that might not otherwise be adventurous"; in this case, a sea voyage, packed full of cultists, potential allies, a serial killer, etc.
- Gate from the Past involves some not terrible Old Ones trying to escape some Shoggoths and accidentally unleashing a dinosaur on Arkham.
- The Westchester House is a hoax haunting.
Yeah, so? A few notes on the individual adventures:
- The Auction feels almost perfect: a lot of creepy objects, a lot of suspects, a nice murder -- and then there's a little steam lost as the adventure expands (and the cops are called in). Perhaps it's more survival horror than anything else, but my pitch for this would be: you are stuck in an auction house with a monster, and someone of the bidders is in league with it.
- For the Madman, ech, I don't know, in 1983, this was fine, but I wouldn't do it today.
- Black Devil Mountain isn't really suited for Call of Cthulhu, and is also a misfire in terms of this book's framing: inheriting is a common adventure hook, but it's not by itself interesting to explore. And then there's the character of Ol' Tom, which is not very well done.
- The Asylum is, by today's standards, not very interesting, but it does fit the framing: rather than deal with an asylum as downtime, let's make it the adventure.
- The Mauretania -- I've seen the complaint that this adventure is overstuffed with plots and kind of nonsensical because of that. I absolutely see what they mean, and I've said that about some other supplements (like towns where everyone has a Mythos secret), but here's where I disagree with that as a critique: it kinda rips. Like, it absolutely seems silly and top-heavy, but I think that's a fun tone... though maybe not really the Call of Cthulhu tone.
- Gate from the Past absolutely doesn't work as a straight CoC adventure, but as a glimmer of more OSR-style wackiness, I appreciate it. It's also by far the shortest of the book, which is funny considering how strange it might be. (The accompanying art includes a bunch of safari hunters running from a dinosaur.)
- The Westchester House seems fine to me. And I absolutely understand the impulse to provide a rugpull where there is no supernatural stuff going on, but I always wonder how something like this received at the table: as a clever joke or a mean prank?
July 3, 2024
A fairly middling collection of scenarios which lack the polish of later CoC releases, but this is unsurprising given its age. There is plenty of decent material and ideas here worth incorporating into other games, but as they stand, I’m not sure I’d run any of these as-is.
January 15, 2023
Can be a bit of a mixed bag, but some good material to mine. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
November 7, 2017
A decent collection of adventures that could be modified with a little work to fit a variety of settings. The shining star of the collection is "The Auction" which I suspect was the inspiration for the Warhammer 40,000 RPG Dark Heresy adventure "The House of Dust and Ash" (which is an excellent adventure and one of the favorites of my Dark Heresy group (https://faith-and-betrayal.obsidianpo...). I actually modified "The Auction" as the introduction adventure for my gaming group's short run at Black Crusade and it went rather well (especially the bidding part of the auction), but my gamers didn't fully get into the mood of playing bad aligned characters.
The rest of the scenarios are hit or miss for interest or utility but all offer some ideas that could be expounded upon if the GM doesn't like the scenario in its described form.
The rest of the scenarios are hit or miss for interest or utility but all offer some ideas that could be expounded upon if the GM doesn't like the scenario in its described form.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews