The haunted house remains a staple of horror stories. It offers a location full of haunts for players to explore. It also allows the juxtaposition of the familiar and the supernatural. Call of Cthulhu has some excellent haunted house stories such as the classic The Haunting. They’ve collected a batch of them under the title of Mansions of Madness, Volume One for the seventh edition of the game. Designers Stuart Boon, Shawn DeWolfe, Gavin Inglis, Christopher Lackey, and Mark Morrison assembled five stories that give investigators a chance to creep around spooky locations to discover the machinations of the Mythos. Did these stories hit home? Let’s play to find out.
This is technically the third volume under the same title. The book opens up with a small discussion of the book’s history and what changes were made in between each version. While that was useful for long time fans wondering if they need to buy this book, it does make me wonder why they used the same title even though three out of the five scenarios are new to this edition. Was it so the book comes up in web searches along with Fantasy Flight Games excellent board game of the same name? If that’s the case, even the Old Ones must bow to the power of hashtag branding.
Spoilers for the adventures are discussed below. For those wishing to avoid them, I recommend the collection even if some of the newer titles play fast and loose with the concept behind the collection.
The first scenario, “Mr. Corbitt”, is one I first encountered as a player. It’s a fine kickoff to a campaign with players discovering one of their neighbors is into the mythos when they spy on him transporting human body parts. It’s a fine scenario with a creepy monster and a voyeuristic aspect of being the nosy neighbor. I appreciated the sidebar that explains what happens of the PCs decide to just call the cops, but I was hoping for another that ties in the story to “The Haunting” as the main villain here and the house in that classic scenario share the same name.
I have run “The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse” a few times now as a side quest in a larger campaign and it’s almost always proven to be fatal to at least one investigator. I enjoy the twist in the scenario that the house is the monster here. Or, more specifically, the monster sort of wears the house like a shell in the style of a hermit crab. The poor human brought back the creature from an ill-fated South American expedition. There’s a small chance the players might decide that South America has the answer, so Keepers with a jungle adventure they want to run might want to have that one ready rather than tell players that they can’t get tickets out of Lovecraft Country.
“The Code” leans into two elements of Mythos stories that are my favorite; criminals and science fiction. This story features a pair of con artists who have taken in a professor that’s building a time machine. He locks the criminals out of it before they kill him, so the players get called in as suckers to unlock the device by finding the pass code. This was my favorite of the new scenarios even if it had the least amount of Mythos content. The weird phenomena is more about paradox and timestream convergences than cultists and summoning circles. With a few adjustments this could be a more light hearted palate cleanser between darker episodes of a long Cthulhu chronicle.
One of the classic tropes of these types of stories gets tackled head on by “House of Memphis”. The players get caught up in the rivalry between a pair of stage magicians that have discovered the Real Magic of the Mythos. The scenario is a bit of a slow starter because there’s a lot of information to front load about the world of stage magic. It’s informative but it feels like there’s a big chunk of the first session that might feel like watching a cutscene or two before getting to the spooky house. The designer makes up for it by doing something clever in the house. Each room is accompanied by two sets of details: one for cheap scares tha build atmosphere and tension, the other for when things get real and it’s time to start cooking Sanity points.
The last entry, “The Nineteenth Hole”, pushes the boundaries of the anthology theme to mixed success. The house in this case is located on a golf course. Much like “House of Memphis” there’s a lot of information about the activity central to the mystery here though it came together in a better way. I applaud Chaosium for trying something different here but it never quite came together for me as a case. Instead it felt like the designer wanted to do golf rules and this was the book that had room for them. Fans of the sport might have a different opinion.
Mansions of Madness Volume One collects five investigations for Call of Cthulhu. The majority of them have something to recommend for Keepers of the classic era.
