NETFLIX AND THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

FILM AND LITERATURE are two very different mediums, and it is pointless to expect a smooth translation from one to the other.  There are reasons why Arwen was at the Ford of Bruinen rather than Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings; reasons why Mat Hooper doesn't hook up with Ellen Brody in the film adaptation of Jaws; and yes, even reasons why Ozymandias's sinister plan in the cinematic Watchmen doesn't include tentacles.  It's pointless to rail against such things.  Very few films are scene-by-scene faithful to the books that inspired them.

There are a few.  Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is essentially just the novel put up on the big screen.  Robert Mulligan didn't stray far from Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird.  And in 1963, legendary director Robert Wise did an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House under the title, The Haunting.  There have been two subsequent film versions, one in 1999 and now a ten-hour television adaptation for Netflix.  Wise's faithful version is widely considered one of the finest haunted house films ever made.  The two subsequent versions missed the entire point.

Now, I did not object to the complete overhauling of the novel's plot; Jackson's legendary novel is far too short and to the point for a ten-hour binge-worthy Netflix adaptation.  Making the protagonists a family, rather than a collection of strangers brought together to investigate a haunted house, was not on the face of it a bad idea.  Nor was it a bad decision to flash backwards and forwards between the characters as children--when they lived in Hill House and it destroyed their mother--and adults still dealing with the echoes and the fallout of that tragedy.  But when fate has handed you one of the scariest pieces of fiction ever written to work with, you might wish to pay attention to the engine that makes it work. That engine is Hill House itself.

What distinguished Jackson's novel is that we are never really certain if Hill House--despite a reputation for being the "Mount Everest of haunted houses"--is really haunted at all.  Are there ghosts in Hill House?  We never see any.  To borrow a line from H. P. Lovecraft, "What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers."  That is the essence of Hill House.  People have terrible accidents there.  People kill themselves there.  But the implication is not that specters walk the halls, it is that the house itself is bad. Stephen King understood this, referencing Hill House directly in his 'salem's Lot.  His own Marsten House--like Hill House--holds evil in its "moldering bones."  King, like Jackson, is asking us to consider the possibility that a house, like a human being, can be wrong.

In the novel, and the superb Wise adaptation, there are poundings on the doors, there is writing on the walls.  But not all of the characters hear the poundings, and we are never really sure if it was a ghostly hand or--far worse--one of the characters wrote the words themselves.  To sum the Jackson novel up in the colloquial, Hill House is fucking with their heads.  People died there, but did they actually leave any ghosts?  Not according to Jackson;

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Hill House, "not sane," stands "by itself."  Whatever walks there, "walks alone."  The problem with the 1999 adaptation, and now Netflix's, is that the house is not alone.  It is filled to the rafters with ghosts.

Don't get me wrong, the Netflix The Haunting of Hill House is a bit more subtle about it than the 1999 version, and is superior to that one in nearly every way.  Right up until the tenth and final episode you can't be certain the ghosts are real or just hallucinations.  But it is in that final installment that the writers and producers demonstrate they either never fully understood the point of the novel or they simply did not care.  Hill House is bad, yes, but the ghosts are real and some of them are "good."  A husband is reunited with his wife there and they two of them live happily ever after as ghosts forever.  The Dudley's die there so they can live eternally with their child.  And in a rewritten line that is essentially a giant middle finger at Shirley Jackson, "whatever walks there, walks together."

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to rewrite books for films.  The film version of Goldfinger, for example, turns Ian Fleming's daft idea of the ultimate bank robbery into a far more chilling act of terrorism.  Yet despite this change, Goldfinger remains fairly true to the core of the novel.  This Hill House doesn't give a damn about Jackson.  It just wants to cash in on the title.

If you like well-written family drama, if you like uplifting tales of familial love overcoming obstacles, this is a good series for you.  It has genuinely scary moments, and the final revelation of the secret of the "Red Room" is brilliantly done.

But if you were looking for The Haunting of Hill House, go rewatch Robert Wise.    

VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE 5TH EDITION: A REVIEW

PAST IS PRELUDE

2000 zero zero party over oops outta time

So tonight I'm gonna party like its 1999 

THE YEAR WAS NINETEEN-NINETY-ONE and the world was coming to an end.  Millennialism hadn't reached a fever pitch yet, but it was there in the air, like the smell of ozone before the storm.  Computer geeks were on about something called Y2K, and it was going to throw us all back into the Dark Ages. The fundamentalists--who were seeing vast Satanic conspiracies and blood-thirsty cults pulling global strings behind every scene--were talking more and more about Rapture and writing books like Left Behind.  The Red Scare was over, but fear of the New World Order was replacing it.  Ruby Ridge and Waco encouraged armed militia groups to multiply.  And AIDS?  AIDS was still making sex as scary as hell, and blood-borne disease was in everyone's mind.  So we knew the world was ending.  Prince knew the world was ending.  Even the vampires knew the world was ending.

Enter Vampire: The Masquerade.

Seldom has a game been such a product of its times.  Introspective bloodsuckers were in, put on the map by Anne Rice in her 1985 The Vampire Lestat and 88's The Queen of the Damned.  In gaming circles, "cyberpunk" was the It Genre, either in pure form or mixed with other flavors like "fantasy-punk" or "steampunk."  In the midst of all this Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire was the perfect storm, tapping into the Millennialism, the vampires, and the punk to create an explosive cocktail.  It entered the scene as a commentary or meditation on the times, but ended up shaping and defining them.  It was the closest to mainstream the hobby had gotten since D&D appeared in Spielberg's E.T.  Hell, even Aaron Spelling wanted a piece of it.

But because zeitgeist was the rocket fuel launching VtM into the stratosphere, no one really expected it to last.  2000 came and went not with a bang but a whimper, Rice had gotten bored writing about her Brat Prince, and D&D 3e was sucking up all the oxygen in the gaming room.  The things that had made VtM hot were now irrelevant, yesterday's pathos.  White Wolf had the good sense to recognize this and so they shut the whole circus down--not just Vampire: The Masquerade, but her sister games as well.  Their setting, "The World of Darkness," had always been about the coming of the end of the world, so in 2004 they let that end arrive in an epic storyline.  The original World of Darkness was dead, and they replaced it with a new one, and with new games rewritten with a lot less zeitgeist dependency.  

So if you had told me awhile back that Vampire: The Masquerade was due for a 2018 comeback (a new edition we'll be calling V5), I would have laughed in your face.  That ship had sailed.  Who the heck did they have who could pull off a VtM Second Coming?

Then I heard it was Ken Hite.

RISEN FROM TORPOR

Cold and black inside this coffin

'Cause you all try to keep me down

How it feels to be forgotten

But you'll never forget me now

   

Though the man has worked on all sorts of games over his storied career, Ken Hite is probably best known for exquisitely crafted modern horror, particularly horror with a conspiracy twist.  He worked on Nephilim and authored both GURPS Horror and GURPS Cabal, he wrote Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade for White Wolf and The Cainite Heresy for Vampire: The Dark Ages.  Later he was responsible for Pelgrane Press's Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents, a game about modern spies hunting vampires.  For NBA he was part of the team that gave us the masterpiece The Dracula Dossier.  If anyone was going to have a chance at pumping fresh new blood into the sleeping remains of Masquerade, this was the guy to do it.  

Leading a team of writers including Martin Ericsson, Matthew Dawkins, Karim Muammar, and Juhanna Pettersson (the writing credits also include Mark Rein-Hagen and Neil Gaiman), Hite redefines VtM by seeming to ask a simple question; what is the zeitgeist of the current decade?  V5 isn't giving us a new World of Darkness, nor is it a successor game like Vampire: The Requiem.  V5 is the same setting, the same vampires, picking up fourteen years after the story left off.  But it recognizes that our world has changed, and by extension, the World of Darkness has changed as well.  VtM knew what scared you in 1991.  V5 is asking; "what is it that keeps you up at night in 2018?" 

Maybe the answer lies in the increasingly divisive politics of out time; we all seem to be at each other's throats.  Maybe, if you are lucky enough to be on the "better off" side of things, you fear the growing threat posed by young and hungry millennials flirting with socialism and change.  On the other hand, if you are one of those millennials, maybe the stranglehold of the "haves" over the "have nots" keeps you awake, the fascist jackboot on your throat.  Or maybe climate change concerns you...the fact that Mother Nature herself seems to be rising against us.  No?  How about the constant threats to your privacy posed by cameras located everywhere, or increased spying online?  If you are in the States, maybe the horror of the opioid crisis, the ravages of addiction, trouble you.  If you live anywhere in the West, it is possible the nearly endless War on Terror, dragging on year after year in the Middle East worries you.  

Hell, maybe all of these things plague you.

Well guess what, dear reader.  In 2018, all these things plague the Kindred too.  Because Hite and his team understand something that Rein-Hagen knew; this game was never about vampires...it was about us.

RUNNING WITH THE DEAD

Driven by the strangle of vein
Showing no mercy I'd do it again

Open up your eyes

You keep on crying

Baby I'll bleed you dry

Let's start at the beginning.

The vampires in V5 call themselves the Kindred.  Many believe they are the children of Caine.  Some 14,000 years ago, as the hunter-gatherer Eden-like age of innocence drew to a close, Caine murdered his brother and was cursed by his god.  Marked to wander for all eternity, repeating his sin of bloodshed, he was eternally damned to struggle with the Beast in his soul.  Some say in the wilderness, the witch Lilith taught him to harness his powers.  Regardless, he learned how to "sire" more of his kind--a process that requires draining a human of blood and then giving the dying mortal your own.  However, any vampire you sire is one generation "down" from you.  The vampires Caine sired where Second Generation, the ones they sired Third Generation, and so on.  Each step down the chain means a decrease in power, as moving away from Caine the blood thins and grows weak.  The highest generation vampires have blood so thin they are practically still human, and are incapable of creating any more of their kind.

Vampires did more than create new vampires.  Caine and his brood were behind the spread of agriculture and the first cities.  These population centers were for the Kindred feeding pens, and the humans in them were their "kine" or "cattle."  In this way the vampires guided and shaped human civilization, reigning over it as ancient god-kings.  The ancient city-state of Enoch was their capital, and from here Caine ruled.  At some point in the ancient past, however, the 13 members of the 3rd Generation rose up against their sires and slaughtered them, stealing their precious blood for themselves.  Caine himself went into hiding.  These 13 usurpers--born before the Flood and therefore called the Antediluvians--sired 13 unique bloodlines in their own images, each with slightly different powers and weaknesses.  In time, the weight of age and constant gnawing hunger drove them into the earth, into a deathless sleep the Kindred call torpor.  

Millennia passed and humanity expanded well beyond vampire control.  The Kindred slowly began to fear the vastly superior numbers of their prey, instituting something called the Masquerade, a formal policy of remaining hidden.  Feeding in secret, protected by the shadows, the centuries ticked by and their hidden society grew ever more labyrinthine and complex.

On the eve of the 21st century--the setting of the original game--two major factions of Kindred, the Camarilla and the Sabbat, held sway.  The Camarilla preferred to remain hidden amongst humanity, ruling over them, while the Sabbat rejected everything human from their natures.  Both lived with the threats posed by the Anarchs, younger Kindred seeking to overthrow ancient power structures, and the looming threat of the Antediluvians themselves.  For it was whispered in Kindred prophecy that these Antediluvians would awake en masse, initiating a vampire apocalypse in which the only thing that would slake their hellish hunger was the blood of their own kind...

2004's Vampire: Gehenna provided four alternate versions of this apocalypse.  V5 gives you a fifth.  It's End of Days is less Revelations and more Ragnarok.  

In this unfolding, the Sabbat--always the enemies of the Antediluvians and their "Jyhad," the manipulative game of chess played with vampires as pawns--have abandoned their cities and hunting grounds to descend upon the ancient strongholds of the Middle East.  Tired of waiting for the Antediluvians, the Sabbat took the Gehenna War to them.

The Antediluvians responded with the Beckoning, a powerful summons that drew the Elders of their bloodlines to them.  Higher generation vampires, rulers of Kindred communities, answered the call and left the younger vampires holding the reigns.    

Thus the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, the so-called "War on Terror," conceals a more terrifying truth; Enoch and its masters have awoken.  

As the Sabbat and the Elders wage this vicious conflict, the Camarilla--deprived of its senior leadership--has been unable to hold back the Anarchs, the rebellious young vampires now rising up in revolution.  The only thing that keeps these two factions from open war is a a greater threat.

The Masquerade has been broken.

While the public doesn't yet know about the existence of vampires, many western intelligence agencies do.  The War on Terror has exposed the Kindred at last.  The FBI, Homeland Security, and the CIA; MI5 and MI6; France's DGSI and Germany's BND, are all among those now coordinating with the Vatican in a sort of "Second Inquisition." Thousands of vampires around the globe have been exterminated in the hunt.

In response, the Camarilla has forbidden any of its members to communicate via the Internet.  NOTHING vampire can be on the Web.  The Masquerade must be tighter than ever.  Even the Anarchs, who reject the rest of the Camarilla's traditions, recognize this.  In a world where everyone has a camera, it is harder (and more important) for vampires to hide than ever.  

WHAT HAVE I BECOME?

Don't be afraid

I didn't mean to scare you

So help me, Jesus

I can promise you

You'll stay as beautiful

With dark hair

And soft skin, forever

Forever   

Entering the world of the Kindred means becoming part of a specific bloodline or Clan.  Each has its own powers (in the form of supernatural abilities called Disciplines) and weakness.  Fans of vampire film and fiction can easily trace the Clans to their sources: the rebellious Brujah are reminiscent of the vampires from Near Dark; the elegant and aloof Toreador recall Miriam and John Blaylock from The Hunger; the hideous Nosferatu echo Count Orlock from...er...Nosferatu.  There are shapeshifting Gangrel, the aristocratic Ventrue, the sorcerous Tremere, the insane Malkavians, and the clanless Caitiffs.  Adding to these are the Thin-Blooded, not really a Clan, but 14th or 15th generation vampires barely vampire at all.  There are six other Clans, but these were not present in the first two editions of VtM and have been excluded (like the Sabbat) from V5.

Aside from reshaping the world the vampires live in, V5 has reshaped the systems governing the vampires as well.  

The core mechanics remain the same.  To attempt an action, players build dice pools of ten-siders.  This is usually a characters core Trait (something like Charisma, Dexterity, or Strength) plus a Skill (perhaps Athletics, Etiquette, or Persuasion).  Such attributes are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, so your dice pool is generally one to ten dice.

In V5, however, the object is to score a 6 or higher on each die.  Those count as successes.  If you roll a natural 10, it counts as two successes.  You are rolling against a difficulty assigned by the Storyteller (GM).  A routine action requires one success, a challenging action requires four.  A nearly impossible action will need seven.  If you score the number of successes you need, you succeed.  Otherwise you fail.  Any additional successes make your success even sweeter.

This is all considerably more streamlined than previous editions of Masquerade, but where V5 really demonstrates innovation is in the new Hunger mechanics.

Vampires drink blood; this is the core of the concept.  Traditionally Masquerade tracked this with the concept of a "Blood Pool."  Like a tank of gas, feeding "filled you up."  Rising each evening, or calling upon your blood to fuel vampiric powers, burned points from your Blood Pool up.  As the Pool got lower you got hungrier, and needed to fill up again.  The system worked fine, but it focused more on the Blood as a resource than on the actual Hunger which drives vampiric existence.

V5 tosses the idea of Blood Pools and replaces it with Hunger, which like all attributes is on a scale of 0 to 5.  At zero you are sated.  At five, the lust for blood is overpowering.  Rising each night, or using your vampiric powers, triggers a "Rouse" check.  This is the roll of a single die; succeed, and your Hunger remains at present levels.  Fail, and your Hunger increases by one.  More powerful vampiric abilities might require multiple Rouse checks.  The lower your vampire's Generation (the closer he is to Caine), the greater your chance of being able to re-roll Rouse checks (compensating for the fact that in previous editions these characters had larger Blood Pools).

Now, to show the overpowering force of the Hunger on vampires, every dice pool you build (with the exception of things like Willpower or Humanity checks) must contain Hunger dice.  These are dice of a different color.  If, for example, you are making a Charisma + Persuasion roll and have a dice pool of six, and your Hunger is currently three, then half of your dice will be Hunger dice.  Hunger dice work normally...unless they come up 1s or 10s.

If they come up tens, they still act as double successes, but the Beast--the monstrous vampire nature all characters wrestle with--emerges and colors the result.  A vampire trying to pick a lock might lose control and just rip it off its hinges.  A vampire trying to intimidate a mortal might suddenly show his fangs and vampiric features.  You still achieve your goal, roughly, but the Beast emerges and taints your victory.  

If you scored any 1s on your Hunger dice, AND failed the roll as well, your character must act out a Compulsion.  There are standard ones--Hunger, Dominance, Harm, and Paranoia--and there are clan specific ones.  The bestial Gangrel are overcome by animalistic behaviors, the rebellious Brujah pick a fight with authority.  Basically a Compulsion is the Beast taking over and driving the character awhile.  The player is still in control, but must act out the character's darker impulses.

Obviously you want to keep your Hunger under control, and that means feeding.  Completely killing and draining a victim will remove all your Hunger dice...but there are happy mediums like taking a pint or two (slaking 2 Hunger dice) or lunching on an animal (removing 1).  The lower your generation, and the more potent your blood, the more difficult these half measures become.  The stronger you are, the more likely you are to need to kill to keep your Hunger under control.

If you have played Masquerade before everything you remember is still here.  You can still call upon your vampiric blood to fuel feats of physical strength and speed, heal damage, etc.  You are still vulnerable to the Blood Bond (drinking too much blood from another vampire can form an emotional attachment that makes you essentially "fang whipped").  Sunlight is still the enemy, and Humanity is something you will struggle with.

In fact, "Humanity" is front and center again.  Rated on a scale of 10 to 0, Humanity measures how strong the "human" half of you is, as opposed to the vampiric Beast.  With Humanity 10 you feel relatively warm to the touch, have an essentially healthy human appearance, and can even eat and drink food (though not live on it).  The lower you drop from this, the more corpse-like and cold you appear, the harder it is to pass as living.  It becomes increasingly harder to interact with living mortals.  At zero, your character is gone, completely consumed by the Beast within.

Humanity is lost by committing acts of brutality or cruelty.  It is lost by giving in to the Beast.  Thus the vampire in V5 is constantly struggling with Hunger and Humanity, trying to find the balance between the two.

Another interesting mechanic is "Memoriam."  Vampires are ageless, and even the younger ones can have decades of life behind them.  However, the mind cannot hold all that memory all of the time.  It would drive you mad.  Vampires tend to exist frozen in the moment then, but can dive into their past when necessary with Memoriam.  This involves stopping the main story and entering a flashback, something that was a common trick back on TV shows like Forever Knight or Angel.  Memoriam can give you bonuses to dice tests ("Wait, I remember, I have done this before..."), answers to problems ("There is an old secret tunnel dating back to Prohibition that will give us access to that building") or even resources ("As I recall I still have a safety deposit box in that bank from my early years, stealing jewels").  It can only be done once a story, but fleshes out the vampire's long unlife in a satisfying and relevant way.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY

On candy stripe legs the Spiderman comes

Softly through the shadow of the evening sun

Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead

Looking for the victim shivering in bed...

...And there is nothing I can do

When I realize with fright

That the Spiderman is having me for dinner tonight

Ah Vampire, how I missed you.

In the summer of 1991 was back from college, running a RuneQuest campaign. We were only about four sessions in when a trip to my local game store changed everything.

On the new arrivals shelf was a strange softcover book with a marbled green cover and a rose on it. The game was called Vampire: The Masquerade. I liked horror games; Call of Cthulhu was an old favorite, and I had been running the new Mayfair version of Chill at university. A game about hunting vampires was intriguing. Reaching out to flip through it, it took a few moments to realize the mistake in my casual assumption. With something akin to mild shock, I realized that in this game, you weren't hunting monsters. You were the monsters.

I bought it immediately.

Understand, there had never been anything like this. I'd been game mastering for over a decade, and games were all pretty much the same; you played heroes, and heroes fought the bad guys. These might be James Bond megalomaniacs or Lovecraftian horrors, they might be orcs, scorpion men, or Stormtroopers...but they were all the villains. Yet here was this weird game, and the damn thing was about being the villain. It was about exploring the nature of evil and essential humanity. I stayed up half the night reading it. It was like discovering role-playing all over again.

The next day I called my players to tell them we had to drop RuneQuest and play this game.  They probably thought I was nuts, but it ended up leading to one of my most memorable campaigns in nearly forty years.  

All good things come to an end, though.  As much as I loved the first and second editions, in the years leading up to the revised edition the game rapidly mutated.  The addition of the Sabbat--originally just a shadowy nemesis--shifted the focus from personal horror to being a sort of amoral, blood-sucking badass.  It was less a game of personal horror and more one of acquiring as many dots as possible.

White Wolf understood this and tried to recapture the initial voice of Vampire when they drove the stake through the heart of Masquerade and let Requiem take its place.  Ken Hite and his team also understand this, and have returned to the original ethos of the game.

V5 is far, far closer to the first edition of Masquerade than any of the subsequent iterations.  This is both a selling point, and to many I suspect, a flaw.  If you came on board with the first edition, V5 will speak to you.  It has the same Clans, the same power levels, the same sharp focus on feeding and clinging to your waning humanity.  On the other hand, if you came to Vampire later in the game, when there were tons of Clans, bloodlines, power levels, and backstory (and a lot less pathos), the stripped down nature of V5 is likely to turn you off.  

Weirdly, a turn-off for me was the production design of the book.  Don't get me wrong, White Wolf has turned out a superior product here, glossy, eye-catching, and worth every penny of the price tag.  But the full-color art, a lot of it quite bright and flashy, often made me feel like I was flipping through a fashion magazine.  This wasn't helped by the fact that much of the art is actual photography, with live models playing the Un-Dead.  I guess I remain nostalgic for Tim Bradstreet, but none of this was to my taste.  It's a minor bitch; the book is a fine piece of publishing.

That covers the good and the bad, now the ugly.  And again, this is a personal bitch.

As a writer, as a college professor, as a HORROR fan, I grow increasingly alarmed with the need for trigger warnings and safe spaces.  This version of Vampire is littered with them.  From the Mature Content Warning on the first page to the Appendix in the back devoted entirely to "considerate play," V5 feels the constant need to remind us to use the "safeword."  It cannot seem to make up its mind if it wants to confront personal horror or turn away from it.  In 1991 I was shaken to my core by a roleplaying game willing to go to the dark places.  That is what horror, at its black heart, was all about.  That is what Vampire was about.  In 2018, we all seem to have gone timid. But in tapping into the zeitgeist of its times, V5 had to embrace this bit as well.  Apparently this is something the newest generation of gamers wants and needs.  So be it.

Neither of my little rants takes away from a game that deserves your attention, gentle reader.  V5 has everything I loved about the original game, and manages to drag Vampire into the 21st century, safe spaces and all.  

It gets a definite four out of five stars...or stakes...or whatever.

            

CTHULHU CHRONICLES: A FIRST LOOK

AH, THE AGE-OLD QUESTION; "what to do in-between sessions, when no Keeper is around but you still want your sanity abused?"  For Call of Cthulhu addicts who just can't get enough this has long been a problem.  Over the years, video games have been the answer, alternate delivery systems for the mind-bending horror provided by the pen-and-paper game.  2005 saw Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, an unholy partnership between Cthulhu publisher Chaosium and Headfirst, Bethesda, 2K, and Ubisoft.  This year sees Cyanide and Chaosium unleashing the very promising Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game.  For those who simply had to take their Cthulhu on the road with them, iOS and Android provided Red Wasp's Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land.  All of these adapted the classic 1981 RPG to various engines and platforms...but were--and let us be honest here--video games.  Not that I dislike video games, mind you.  But they are by definition a visual medium where the horror takes place on the screen.  Call of Cthulhu (the table-top game) is a literary experience; it takes place inside the imagination.  I have never been wholly convinced that even the most gifted graphics team can create Lovecraftian horrors as hideous as the mind can.

Now Chaosium and MetaArcade have joined forces to try something a bit...different.  

Cthulhu Chronicles is perhaps the closest thing to the tabletop Call of Cthulhu experience that gamers can reasonably expect.  Released today for iOS, with Android coming soon, Chronicles essentially takes tried and true Call of Cthulhu scenarios and adapts them to text-based solo-play.  About a week ago, via TestFlight, I had a chance to look at the game for this review.  Here's what you need to know.   

Players choose one of six Investigators to play.  These can be changed between scenarios, or if they survive, continue into the next story.  These characters come with a Bio and some equipment, and are defined by 5 statistics.  Health measures how much physical damage you can endure, Sanity tracks your psychological injury, while Appearance, Athletics, and Knowledge each allow you to face different tests during the game.

Players also select which scenario to pursue.  These are all genuine tabletop Call of Cthulhu scenarios adapted to Chronicles.  We have, for example, the introductory 7th edition scenario Alone Against the Flames, and the 6th edition's Edge of Darkness.  Others from the Chaosium archives are Dead Border, Eyes of the Law, and Paper Chase.  

 

Actual play is fairly straightforward.  Chronicles doesn't have the animated sequences that something like the Steve Jackson's Sorcery! line has, though game play is similar.  A page of text is provided with a picture or illustration, and this will give the player a series of choices to pursue.  It's a time-honored approach going all the way back to those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.  

 

Sometimes these choices lead to a test.  These are the equivalent to rolling dice in the tabletop game.  Tests come in various difficulties, and these modify your chances accordingly.  A wheel appears and spins, resulting in either a pass or a failure.  Consequences depend on the test.  You might simply fail to notice a clue or to persuade an NPC to talk...or you might take damage.

The game is free to play, but as with all games of this sort there are in-app purchases.  These take the form of "tickets."  Basically, players get a number of free trials of a scenario, after which they must purchase the scenario and play it to their heart's content or spend tickets for additional single play-throughs.

Are multiple play-throughs worth it?  Taking different characters through the scenarios changes the text considerably, and I applaud MetaArcade for tailoring the text to each character.  We've all played games like this where it doesn't matter what character you are playing...the text is the same.  This is not the case here.  Also, multiple plays opens up different story paths, either through making alternate choices or passing tests you might have failed before.  On the other hand, just like a pen-and-paper scenario, the second and third time you play it some of the fun derived from surprise and the unknown is dissipated   This isn't a fault of Chronicles, just the nature of the beast.  I suspect players will want to try at least two or three play-throughs at least.

Cthulhu Chronicles is without doubt the closest thing to playing Call of Cthulhu you can get without a Keeper, and this is really the most attractive feature of the game.  The writing is atmospheric, and the music provides suitably creepy immersion playing in your earphones.  The real success or failure of the platform will depend on what scenarios are offered in the future (a massive adaptation of Masks of Nyarlathotep, anyone?).  A steady stream of classic spine-tingling tails will certainly keep drawing players back.  And since the price of admission is free, why on Earth haven't you downloaded it yet?

I give this solid adaptation of Cthulhu three-and-a-half Elder Signs out of five.  Recommended heartily for those who need their Cthulhu fix between sessions and for people who are curious what the whole "Call of Cthulhu" thing is about.  Find it right now in the iOS App store.        

MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP: THE REVIEW

To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night...

...(a)nd it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt.

Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

The Crawling Chaos

IN THE COSMIC IMAGINARIUM of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the gods have a great deal in common with Ebola. Having the misfortune of coming into contact with any of them will very likely result in your unspeakably messy death, but this isn't because of any conscious malevolence on their part. They bear you no more ill will than you bear the demodex brevis breeding right now in your sebaceous glands. You don't even really exist to them. Your hideous demise is not something they notice or take pleasure in.

Except, of course, for him.

He is not like the rest.  When you look at him, he looks back.  He sees you.  He knows you.  He is the only one of them with anything even approaching a personality.  In fact, he has a thousand personalities, each more psychopathic than the last.  Azathoth and Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth will crush you in passing, but he will find out where you live, drive your wife to suicide, and make cannibals of your kids...just so he can hear you scream when you come home to find little Andy and Jenny eating the baby under the hanging corpse of your missus.    

He is the Crawling Chaos, the Messenger and Voice of the Outer Gods.  

His name is Nyarlathotep.

Nearly as dark and twisted as the black god himself, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu campaign, Masks of Nyarlathotep, descended upon the world back in 1984.  It was not the first campaign for this classic RPG--both Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and Fungi from Yuggoth preceded it--but Masks of Nyarlathotep redefined campaign design not just for Cthulhu but gaming in general. Dennis Detwiller (of Delta Green and Godlike fame) calls Masks of Nyarlathotep the "holy grail" of horror.  Ken Hite (Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, The Dracula Dossier, GURPS Horror) says it has "to be in anyone's top five" of greatest RPG adventures.  And long-time Dragon magazine game critic Rick Swan, in his classic Complete Guide to Roleplaying Games, cut to the chase and simply named Masks the best RPG supplement ever.  The list of accolades goes on and on.

One of the thrills of the campaign was the Dark God Himself. Because of the mindless (or at least, so utterly alien as to appear mindless) nature of Lovecraft's deities, Call of Cthulhu usually pit Investigators against rabid cultists, alien races, or mad sorcerers. Masks was the opportunity to literally match wits with a god. If we accept the maxim that a story is only as good as its antagonist, Masks of Nyarlathotep was off to a brilliant start. Original authors Larry DiDtillio and the late (great) Lynn Willis delivered brilliantly on this promise, serving up a complex, multi-faceted campaign stretched across five (at that time) corners of the 1920s world. As Investigators peeled back the hideous conspiracy at the heart of it all, the masks of the various cults fell away to reveal a single malevolence plotting the end of the world.

Over the decades subsequent editions of Masks manifested themselves like further avatars of the god.  There were tweaks and changes to each of these, the eventual edition of the "Australia" chapter, and so on.  The tale generally grew in the telling.  Yet, because Call of Cthulhu was itself so resistant to change, none of these new editions of Masks was terribly necessary.  You could have easily pulled out your first edition of the campaign and played it with any of the current iterations of the core rules (and this reviewer did exactly that three times).  The new bits were nice, but not a must-have.  

All this changes, however, with the newest (fifth) edition.  As part of what can only be described as a renaissance over at Chaosium, the release of the new Masks of Nyarlathotep is a vast improvement over previous editions, and something that you are going to want to risk life, sanity, and hard earned cash to possess.  It replaces the original Masks as the definitive edition. 

Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why...

Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

The New Edition 

THREE THINGS DISTINGUISH the new edition of Masks from its predecessors (aside from much higher production values).  For starters, it is fully compatible with the new, seventh edition, of Call of Cthulhu.  Those who have perused this blasphemous tome will know that the seventh edition is the first major rules upgrade the game has seen since Cthulhu first heaved its cyclopean bulk up from the depths of Sandy Petersen's fevered imagination (I reviewed it here). While even the seventh edition, with all its tweaks, has a high degree of backward compatibility, Masks of Nyarlathotep is a massive campaign with a bewildering array of NPCs, and it is nice to have all the conversion done for you.

Second, the new edition of Masks also makes it compatible with Chaosium's 2016 release, Pulp Cthulhu.  Pulp Cthulhu is a variant play style, more two-fisted action and Indiana Jones intrigue than the purer Lovecraftiana of Call of Cthulhu.  Masks has always had a very pulp element to it, and the new edition contains extensive support to help Keepers increase those elements and run the campaign as cult-busting action.  NPCs and pre-generated characters have both pulp and core stats, and combats have lethality sliders to up the ante for pulp games.  This gives Masks two very different play styles.  You can approach this campaign, via Call of Cthulhu, as the more traditional exercise in Lovecraftian horror, or use Pulp Cthulhu to make it a gangbusting (cultbusting?) crusade against the Dark God.

Third, while the new Masks of Nyarlathotep is bigger than Great Cthulhu and has more moving parts than Yog-Sothoth has congeries of iridescent globes, it manages to be more accessible than any edition before it.  Weighing in at 666 pages (an entirely random number, I feel certain...), the campaign introduces a new location to the Masks mix (Peru, in a prologue set a few years before the rest of the campaign).  Even with this new material swelling its bulk, features like the comprehensive index, detailed appendices of things like Spells, Tomes, and Artifacts all catalogued by location, and innovative "clue diagrams" at the start of each chapter, ensure that Masks has never been easier for a Keeper to navigate.  The clue diagrams function much like old school dungeon maps, carefully and effortlessly detailing which clue leads to which location or NPC.  So don't let the bulk intimidate you, potential Keeper; this Masks handles much more smoothly and should be a joy to drive.

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city--the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes.  My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries...

Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

Behind the Mask

I AM REVIEWING Masks in a PDF package form.  It consists of the 669 page complete campaign PDF, 10 separate pre-generated character sheets, a 96 page PDF of hand-outs (!), an 85-page Keeper reference booklet, and 13 pages of superb NPC portraits.  If you own or have seen the seventh edition, the layout and graphic design is up to those standards.  The pages are full color, clean, and easy to read without being sparse.  The art is glorious (you have been losing sanity looking at it at the head of each section).  I can only imagine how sensational it will look on paper.

The best way to regard Masks is as both a campaign and a worldbook.  The campaign tells a story that I will not be spoiling here.  Those returning to Masks will already know the tale, and it would be serious spoilers for those coming to the Court of the Crawling Chaos for the first time. Essentially it involves the Investigators being asked by a mutual friend to look into the disappearance of the (in)famous Carlyle Expedition.  Founded by a millionaire playboy suddenly and inexplicably turned amateur Egyptologist, the entire expedition vanished on the African continent.  This request leads a to globe-trotting tale of horror, cult activity, and conspiracy as the Investigators realize they are racing against time to stop an alien god from damning the entire world.  Masks brings this world to life, as well as each of the seven hotbeds of cult activity the Investigators might be drawn to.  Each area is extensively detailed, and attention is given both to accurately portraying the historical ethos of each locale and to sidestepping the same; Lovecraft's world was one deeply racist and sexist by our standards, and the text draws attention to these things so that a play group can remain faithful to them or gloss over them as they like.  These seven locations are basically mini-campaign regions, not just with adventures that further the Dark God's insidious plot, but also delicious distractions.  Masks was doing "side quests" long before "side quests" were a thing.  

The marvel of the original, and it is a feature accentuated greatly in this edition, is the "sandbox" nature of it all.  The players go where the clues they discover lead them, and can choose what avenues of inquiry to go down and which to walk past.  You could fight your way though all seven locations, or just two or three.  Keepers can add their own devious tales to each region as well.  Masks is not a railroad...it's a landscape for players to explore (and go horribly mad in).

Probably the only "key" region is the first, set in America.  As mentioned, there has been a prologue added to this game, set in Peru four years earlier than all other events.  The purpose of this episode is to introduce the Investigators to the friend who will later call them together again to chase the lost Carlyle expedition...but it is an entirely optional prologue.  It never existed in previous editions and they all worked just fine.  The second region then, America, provides the clues that can point the players to the other five areas.  From there, the direction of the campaign is really up to the Investigators.  The number of adventures, their scope, is up to the Investigators and Keepers.

Think of Masks as a massive, hideous playground you have an all-access pass to.  Go where you wilt, stay as long as you like.  But be warned; the park will eventually close when darkness falls...

...And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time...the gigantic, tenebrous, ultimate gods--the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

The End is Here

The fifth edition design team of Mike Mason, Lynne Hardy, Paul Fricker, and Scott Dorward has managed to the unexpected; they have released an edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep that actually improves upon the original. This is the same thrilling--and often terrifying--Masks that you know and love, but in every measurable way it surpasses any iteration before it. It looks better, reads better, and with massive amounts of support for the Keeper, runs better. If you play Call of Cthulhu, you need to own it. If you don't play Call of Cthulhu, now is the time to start. Masks of Nyarlathotep once again sets the standard for what a complex, lengthy RPG campaign should look like, and with products like these Chaosium reminds us exactly why it is as storied an institution as it is. Masks is a classic car rebuilt from the ground up with modern parts and the original's soul.


Masks of Nyarlathotep retails at $59.99 US and is worth every single penny.  Get it at Chaosium.com or at DriveThruRPG.