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Call of Cthulhu RPG
Walker in the Wastes
In 1848 the Franklin Expedition vanished in the ice ...
...searching for the Northwest Passage. Eighty years later, you and your associates travel to Northern Canada to research the disaster -- and find yourselves launched in a globe-spanning race to defeat the terrible god of the icy wastes. Hundreds of hours of research have gone into creating the most realistic 1920s campaign ever. Japanese gangsters, Iraqi archaeological digs, secret airships, and a legend older than humanity serve to challenge even the most experienced of CoC players. Walker in the Wastes is a huge campaign of discovery and horror, and is suggested for experienced Keepers.
...searching for the Northwest Passage. Eighty years later, you and your associates travel to Northern Canada to research the disaster -- and find yourselves launched in a globe-spanning race to defeat the terrible god of the icy wastes. Hundreds of hours of research have gone into creating the most realistic 1920s campaign ever. Japanese gangsters, Iraqi archaeological digs, secret airships, and a legend older than humanity serve to challenge even the most experienced of CoC players. Walker in the Wastes is a huge campaign of discovery and horror, and is suggested for experienced Keepers.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
18 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 21, 2021
Beware Some Spoilers Follow. The Walker in the Wastes is a campaign scenario for the Call of Cthulhu system. Like some of its CoC predecessor campaigns, it presents a grand conspiracy where an Old One cult is attempting to free its god. The player investigators will experience an initial event where they are researchers in the Arctic Circle which will further lead them on a globe-trotting adventure looking for clues and sabotaging the cult’s efforts all the while being dogged by the cult. The opposition is powerful. The stakes are high.
I initially became interested in this campaign because I was looking for inspiration to use Ithaqua (or an Ithaqua-like entity, such as a Wendigo) in an upcoming RPG campaign. I found a few smaller adventure scenarios with this theme, but this was the only published campaign-length adventure that I could find. Being a fan of mystery and supernatural, and having read about (and watched the AMC television mini-series adaptation of the novel The Terror) the Arctic expedition of the H.M.S. Terror and H.M.S. Erebus, I was immediately hooked when I saw that this event was featured from a fictional supernatural perspective. While not essential to the campaign, the inclusion of this mystery, as well as the opportunities for the player investigators to find and explore the ships and read notes from the perished crew were great mood/theme additions.
The campaign starts out with the player investigators part of an Arctic Circle research team which will find themselves engaged with a supernatural horror stalking the winter wasteland. There is deadly cold, isolation and the Native tribes (some could be enemies and some could be allies), all of which need to be navigated successfully to survive. This prologue serves as a jumping off point to a grander conspiracy of an ancient evil and gives the investigators experience to the horrors they will face later.
After this initial adventure, the campaign jumps ahead in time where the investigators are approached because of their past experiences to be part of another Arctic Expedition, this time investigating something supernatural. This is where the investigators’ interaction with the international Ithaqua cult will start and where they will see the cult’s intent to free Ithaqua from his Arctic prison. The cult’s main task is to build several airships to travel to the location of Ithaqua’s prison in the Arctic Circle during the Winter Solstice and set him free. Different airships are being built in different parts of the world and most of the campaign is dedicated to the player investigators locating where these airships are being built and trying to sabotage these efforts or otherwise hinder the cult’s plans.
I have concerns about this particular aspect of the campaign because I feel that it might get pretty repetitive for the players and the Keeper. While the airships are being built in different locations, with different individuals involved at the specific locations and some different circumstances involved, such as a public versus secret location, clues available, and power levels of the areas’ agents, the different scenarios are basically the same- infiltrate/attack the airship location, find the clues, destroy the airship and/or bad guys and escape. There might be some variables (such as joining an airship crew and not sabotaging the project) but for the most part the scenarios are the identical in presentation.
Another concern I have is in regard to the various clues that investigators will need to find to know where to go for the next location that needs to be visited. A lot of these clues are not as obvious and will require investigators to go to certain locations or talk to certain people and then piece together what they have correctly to figure out where they need to go. I do not support hand-feeding clues to players, but I felt that it was not done particularly well in this campaign, unlike Masks of Nyarlathotep, for example, where clues were needed to proceed but they were presented as secret but also more accessible. I feel that the Keeper would have to modify some circumstances to make a lot of these clues accessible, or else suffer some campaign stagnation.
My biggest gripe with the campaign is the Tablets of Destiny. These powerful artifacts can severely hinder the Ithaqua cult’s goal but are not made the focus of the campaign. The scenarios surrounding their location and recovery are presented more as side quests. I feel that these should have been the focus of the campaign with the airship missions being treated more like side missions to disrupt some of the cult’s activities. The clues for the Tablets are hinted at early in the campaign but are not really focused on until the later part where I got the feeling they were placed as a convenient way to have more long-term effects on the cult’s efforts to free Ithaqua and not make the players feel cheated by going through all these efforts (and likely character deaths) just to stop the cult’s yearly prison break.
This all being said, I feel that there was a lot of good stuff in this campaign. I enjoyed the research that the author did on Ithaqua and tying it to other wind gods throughout history and the world. I think that he did a great job of coming up with a cult goal that had a dramatic feeling of something important and terrible for the player investigators to stop (freeing a powerful entity from its remote magical prison that only appears once a year on the Winter Solstice has great thematic effect) and I think that some of the individual scenarios would be great as one-shots or encounters to be placed in an appropriately-themed campaign. The prologue scenario is a good one, as well as some of the Red Herring scenarios. I think the side-trip scenario where the investigators visit the abandoned wrecks of the Terror and Erebus have some great potential.
Overall, this is a great idea for a campaign with some great scenarios, but its really just a loosely connected series of locations which requires work to really make them interesting and fit well together. There is a lot of great material here but personally I would have to make a lot of changes, likely involving making the recovery of the Tablets the focus, to make this campaign work.
I initially became interested in this campaign because I was looking for inspiration to use Ithaqua (or an Ithaqua-like entity, such as a Wendigo) in an upcoming RPG campaign. I found a few smaller adventure scenarios with this theme, but this was the only published campaign-length adventure that I could find. Being a fan of mystery and supernatural, and having read about (and watched the AMC television mini-series adaptation of the novel The Terror) the Arctic expedition of the H.M.S. Terror and H.M.S. Erebus, I was immediately hooked when I saw that this event was featured from a fictional supernatural perspective. While not essential to the campaign, the inclusion of this mystery, as well as the opportunities for the player investigators to find and explore the ships and read notes from the perished crew were great mood/theme additions.
The campaign starts out with the player investigators part of an Arctic Circle research team which will find themselves engaged with a supernatural horror stalking the winter wasteland. There is deadly cold, isolation and the Native tribes (some could be enemies and some could be allies), all of which need to be navigated successfully to survive. This prologue serves as a jumping off point to a grander conspiracy of an ancient evil and gives the investigators experience to the horrors they will face later.
After this initial adventure, the campaign jumps ahead in time where the investigators are approached because of their past experiences to be part of another Arctic Expedition, this time investigating something supernatural. This is where the investigators’ interaction with the international Ithaqua cult will start and where they will see the cult’s intent to free Ithaqua from his Arctic prison. The cult’s main task is to build several airships to travel to the location of Ithaqua’s prison in the Arctic Circle during the Winter Solstice and set him free. Different airships are being built in different parts of the world and most of the campaign is dedicated to the player investigators locating where these airships are being built and trying to sabotage these efforts or otherwise hinder the cult’s plans.
I have concerns about this particular aspect of the campaign because I feel that it might get pretty repetitive for the players and the Keeper. While the airships are being built in different locations, with different individuals involved at the specific locations and some different circumstances involved, such as a public versus secret location, clues available, and power levels of the areas’ agents, the different scenarios are basically the same- infiltrate/attack the airship location, find the clues, destroy the airship and/or bad guys and escape. There might be some variables (such as joining an airship crew and not sabotaging the project) but for the most part the scenarios are the identical in presentation.
Another concern I have is in regard to the various clues that investigators will need to find to know where to go for the next location that needs to be visited. A lot of these clues are not as obvious and will require investigators to go to certain locations or talk to certain people and then piece together what they have correctly to figure out where they need to go. I do not support hand-feeding clues to players, but I felt that it was not done particularly well in this campaign, unlike Masks of Nyarlathotep, for example, where clues were needed to proceed but they were presented as secret but also more accessible. I feel that the Keeper would have to modify some circumstances to make a lot of these clues accessible, or else suffer some campaign stagnation.
My biggest gripe with the campaign is the Tablets of Destiny. These powerful artifacts can severely hinder the Ithaqua cult’s goal but are not made the focus of the campaign. The scenarios surrounding their location and recovery are presented more as side quests. I feel that these should have been the focus of the campaign with the airship missions being treated more like side missions to disrupt some of the cult’s activities. The clues for the Tablets are hinted at early in the campaign but are not really focused on until the later part where I got the feeling they were placed as a convenient way to have more long-term effects on the cult’s efforts to free Ithaqua and not make the players feel cheated by going through all these efforts (and likely character deaths) just to stop the cult’s yearly prison break.
This all being said, I feel that there was a lot of good stuff in this campaign. I enjoyed the research that the author did on Ithaqua and tying it to other wind gods throughout history and the world. I think that he did a great job of coming up with a cult goal that had a dramatic feeling of something important and terrible for the player investigators to stop (freeing a powerful entity from its remote magical prison that only appears once a year on the Winter Solstice has great thematic effect) and I think that some of the individual scenarios would be great as one-shots or encounters to be placed in an appropriately-themed campaign. The prologue scenario is a good one, as well as some of the Red Herring scenarios. I think the side-trip scenario where the investigators visit the abandoned wrecks of the Terror and Erebus have some great potential.
Overall, this is a great idea for a campaign with some great scenarios, but its really just a loosely connected series of locations which requires work to really make them interesting and fit well together. There is a lot of great material here but personally I would have to make a lot of changes, likely involving making the recovery of the Tablets the focus, to make this campaign work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review