Latest Mad Scramble for Shadows of Atlantis

  

I'm about to start Chapter 7, the penultimate scenario for Shadows of Atlantis. Preparing the chapters has become a bit of a chore, only made easier by the fact that I have access to the first edition version of the book that has the useful history extras and lots of extra maps that have been pretty essential for me as a GM. I think they've helped the players visualise this as well. So prep involves opening both sets of documents in Affinity Publisher and extracting images and text as needed to create handouts on Roll 20, the VTT I fell back to after the debacle of Role losing AV. 

Yes, I know that Role has AV back but I wasn't migrating all the material back across after four completed chapters.

I started reading the chapter for tomorrow's game and realised I'd not flow sheeted it (as it was optional so I missed it on the initial run through); that was no bother until I realised that some of the opening act didn' hang together, especially if you used the same team that you'd had in play from the start. Now, the characters in our campaign have been in play since early August 1939, and I was going to pick up the story early 1940 at Section M's headquarters. However, I realised that the loose-goosey way that the campaign (and Achtung! Cthulhu overall is written) means that there will be gaping holes if I just went ahead as things are.

I figured I'd check out the original version to see if I could fix this, which was when I discovered that the scenario was set in Peru originally and had just been translated across to a new country. It explains why there was even less information than previously expected. Oh, and there was a good chance that you could actually be playing the Nachtewolf (German Occultist) operators if you ran it as written. So no real hope there.

The fallback position was that I needed to get some alternative characters in play, which meant taking the ones for the NPCs already available, creating new sheets and getting some nice pictures. As I was rushed, I raided Artflow.ai again and just added the character descriptions into the engine. The results look really nice.

Ms Serena Falconer - Aviatrix & Socialite

Frank Ambrose, Antiquarian

Sgt Bertrand Ross, former French Foreign Legionnaire

Elizabeth Soames, Field Explorer

I'd never touch AI for anything professional, but this was so easy to use for producing character portraits for the game that we're playing. That was fortunate, because I didn't have the time to scan the net for old images that would fit.

Anyway, all the handouts are done and uploaded, the characters built, and we press on. Shadows of Atlantis may be badly organised and hard to use, but the adventure is fun!

I do think that there's a significant chance that the party could be killed on this mission, but then again, this is not the character set we've all been invested in for the last year or so.

25 Nov 2025