Achtung! Cthulhu - Reading the opening to Shadows of Atlantis

 

[Very minor spoilers below, but you’d guessed this was about Atlantis, hadn’t you?]

Starting to work my way through the campaign with a focus on running it. The set up is good, but there are aspects that could be improved, especially around the exposition to the GM. For example, the past location of Atlantis isn’t ever called out, despite it being implicit from the final mission. The backstory is a little vague. 

The overall plot arc isn’t really outlined, except in terms of locations. Again, you need to draw what is doing to happen at each location out from the missions themselves. Knowing how the story is supposed to go, and the objectives for each mission really should have been called out at the start as it’s key knowledge for the GM to understand what is going on. Having read this previously, one of my objectives in reviewing this is to pull it together as I go along, along with key clues and interlinks between missions.

There’s nothing that’s bad about the way that this is put together, but it lacks sharpness. This is done much better in The Serpent & The Sands which has a top level bullet point overview of each mission in the campaign preamble. It draws the big picture together at the start.

I may also read the works by Plato that reference Atlantis - Timaeus and Critias - as they’re on Gutenberg and provide part of the deep backstory.

The other thing I noticed was that although the text says only missions 1, 2 and 8 are fixed in time and the others can be run in any order, the campaign as presented does assume that they are run in sequence. Two of the missions felt like they should have been run with other characters when I read the book originally, I’m going to be interested if I still feel the same when I read them again.

It would have been useful to have had a paragraph on travel routes and methods between locations and potential times (especially as the campaign is expected to run from August 1939 to June 1940, before the Phoney War ends). I realise that this may have been avoided because of ‘run in any order’ idea and concept, and is quickly fixed, but again it would have been helpful. I do wonder if that this is a deliberate pulp play-style choice (the camera pulls back as our brave heroes board the vehicle they’re leaving on) but   I was left wanting to have this easily to hand. I suspect there’s enough information in the Gamesmaster’s Guide or one of the many Call of Cthulhu books gathering dust on my shelves if I need to do this myself.

Overall, the campaign looks great. The one concern I have is that the maps may not be useable with the players, as this was published before VTT support versions became common. Hopefully, if that’s the case, they can be edited with Affinity Designer.

Anyway, these were my main take outs from reading the first chapter again. I have a couple of pages of scribbled notes on my reMarkable now.

23 October 2023