Time is of the essence when running a game demo. I try to keep the demo sessions I run at cons to about two hours. The goal is to get in, show off what makes the game fun and get the players back on the con floor to buy the game from the booth. When I picked up Gateways To Terror from Chaosium I was surprised that the adventures within were built for an even shorter run time. This book collects three adventures that cut to the chase of what makes Call of Cthulhu fun; finding clues, getting spooky and clashing with grotesque monsters. Did they achieve their goal within the hour? Let’s play to find out.
The three adventures here are all structured around the ability to be completed in about an hour. There’s a timed component that gives the Keeper a guide to pacing. The first 10 minutes should allow players to choose characters. The next twenty involve rolling dice and investigating the strange situations the players are in. Things should get spooky around the halfway mark, with the last 20 minutes or so featuring a conflict with a Mythos creature that the players must outwit or defeat. It may seem artificial to some Keepers to have timed events but I like the idea as a way to keep the story moving toward resolution within one hour. (Chaosium does too, as they recently announced a second collection of adventures in the same style coming out this year) There will be time enough for role playing and story building once the players have the full rules and are playing a campaign. These stories are about highlighting what makes the game unique.
There are some discussions surrounding each story about how to use them in different ways. They can be played as continuations of the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set. There’s also discussion about using new characters with each story rather than the included ones. I could see these adventures used as encounters during a longer campaign or also as a short teaser to play on a night when the regular D&D campaign is shut down and the Keeper wants to expand some horizons.
These stories kind of remind me of television cold opens. That’s the part of procedural shows like X-Files or Law And Order where random people encounter the dead body or the monster before the opening credits of the show and then the mystery gets handed off to the main characters. An enterprising Keeper could turn the stories here into a longer adventure with the players playing out the events and then shifting back to their regular characters to finish the story. It seems like a good chance of pace from the classic Lovecraftian opening where an old friend or relative mysteriously died and the players get roped into finding out why.
The rest of the review contains mild spoilers for each case. If you don’t wish to be spoiled, here is my recommendation. Gateways To Terror is a great purchase for someone who wants to test drive Call of Cthulhu beyond the excellent Starter Set. Keepers can also adapt this material though they shouldn’t expect lengthy investigations beyond a scene or two.
“The Necropolis” puts players at the heart of a pulpy romp inside an Egyptian tomb. They are trapped inside with a slowly awakening monster and have to figure out a way out before they get slaughtered. On the one hand, this seems like the best choice for a group that’s been playing D&D because it touches on elements they will already know like exploration, traps and monsters. On the other hand, this one seems to be the most directly fatal for anyone besides the cleverest players. In an ongoing campaign, it works as an example of a doomed expedition the real player characters must follow to get an important clue for their current case.
The players find themselves in an isolated cabin in the woods for “What’s In The Cellar?”. They’re trying to find out the truth about a missing person for someone wrongly accused of murder. The location here, a cramped basement where a demon thing has been bound, didn’t hold a lot of excitement for me. I think it’s the weakest of the three, though it does have two fun implications for longer term play. The law firm that sends the players to the cabin could become the kind of organization that becomes a patron for the investigators that covers expenses, sends them cases and helps them get out of inevitable legal trouble. The monster also ties into a cursed bloodline possessed by two of the pre-generated characters. If a player is on board with being cursed it might be fun to explore that aspect that often shows up in mythos stories.
The players barge in on a dead man in “The Dead Boarder” and see one of their fellow boarders was involved in some sort of ritual that didn’t work. I think this story takes advantage of the timed structure the best with the titular boarder rising from the grave at the halfway point to put a scare into everyone and an ending where they police arrive and blast it to smithereens if the players haven’t already done it by the end of the hour. It also feels like a good way to kick off a campaign where the players dig through the other strange books and artifacts in the dead man’s apartment for further adventure. The one weird thing I noticed about this one is the author’s love of the Appraise skill allowing people to judge whether or not its worth to pocket items of high dollar value.
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