This is a short adventure designed to be run in a single session. Set in Scotland, it tells the tale of a pleasure cruise that goes horribly wrong... It will work well with a new party, perhaps even with people who have never played Call of Cthulhu before.

The Keeper's Information explains the background: what exactly is on the island of Bass Rock and what it is doing. It then explains how to get the investigators involved. They don't even need to know each other, they just have to have decided to go on a boat trip, a day trip to Bass Rock just off the coast of Scotland near Berwick (off the east coast to the south of Edinburgh). It's a real place, by the way, so you can supplement the map in the book with real ones if you wish.

The trip is intended to last about four hours, and everything starts off well. Then the weather turns nasty. Sensibly, the boat's captain chooses to cut the trip short, lowering the sail and starting the motor to return to port. Fate - or at least the plot - has other ideas...

The adventure is well-resourced, with an excellent description of the shipwreck combined with clear notes on what the investigators must do to reach the shore. Once ashore on Bass Rock, they will have to survive the night. The resources continue with good details of what is to be found on Bass Rock, player handouts and a useful 'plot map' to ensure nothing is missed.

Although simple in form, the adventure is well-planned and well-paced, with plenty of advice in ramping up the tension and horror as the night progresses. Game mechanical information is provided as needed, e.g. a description of an unstable gantry is accompanied by the DEX rolls required to keep your footing on it, which makes it very straightforward to run. It certainly would make an excellent introduction to Call of Cthulhu, or a neat interlude within a campaign.

(Originally posted at http://secondleft.blogspot.ca/2012/12/review-ballad-of-bass-rock-for-call-of.html)

Over the last couple of years Cubicle 7 has surprised us all by releasing their Cthulhu Britannica line for Call of Cthulhu to great acclaim. Their most recent print publication for the line, Shadows Over Scotland, was very well received (I really need to finish reading that.) If you haven't read any of the line go and grab them, they're all available from DriveThruRPG in PDF format.

The Ballad of Bass Rock is an adventure for Shadows Over Scotland that was originally supposed to be contained in the original publication of Shadows Over Scotland, but was cut when the layout of the book resulted in the page count growing beyond what was planned. Cubicle 7 has now laid out this adventure and made it available for sale.

So what are we getting for our $3.99? First off the adventure is 14 pages. It is professionally laid out and looks like it would if it had been part of the original book. Except the adventure isn't really 14 pages. The first page is taken up by a cover with a nice enough faux oil painting of the island of Bass Rock, and the second page is completely taken up by the credits for the product and license information. So now we're down to 12 pages out of our 14. For $3.99 my feeling of value is already dropping fast here.

The adventure starts in a minorly contrived way, but hey we're Call of Cthulhu players we're used to that now, with the players on board a boat on a pleasure cruise off the coast of Scotland. A storm suddenly arises and smashes the boat on the rocks of Bass Rock. The players, and any surviving NPCs, are then faced with getting help and surviving the day on the rock.

Bass Rock is mainly a bird colony, and the only structures are a lighthouse, the ruins of an old castle and an even older chapel. Unfortunately it's only inhabitants at this point are 150,000+ birds and one huge shoggoth. The shoggoth has been here a couple of weeks, has devoured the lighthouse keeper and the crew sent to find out why they hadn't heard from him. It has also been pulling dolphins and orcas out of the sea and leaving their rotting remains in the castle ruins.

The only real objective of the adventure is to survive and try and contact the mainland to get help.

The bulk of the 0 pages of the adventure are taken up with descriptions of the NPCs involved and descriptions of the locations on the island. The NPCs, two crew members and a newly wed couple, are given sufficient information to be interesting characters in themselves and there is certainly enough information to make them memorable NPCs for the players. Unfortunately there are no illustrations of the NPCs.

Most of the description concerns the lighthouse, and it is fairly thorough. Descriptions of each floor of the lighthouse and what can be found on each floor is very helpful in bringing life to the locations.

All in all the adventure is very basic but could be fun as an introduction to Call of Cthulhu. It will provide a challenge as it is unlikely that the players will find any way to kill the shoggoth, so other solutions need to be considered. I will likely find myself using the adventure at some point.

Finally at the end the last 2 pages consist of reproductions of the handouts already contained in the text, and a plot map table. Considering how short the adventure already is for the money, spending nearly two pages reproducing the handouts again feels like a complete waste. Since this is PDF only we can easily print whatever pages we like and cutout the handouts as needed. I understand this is normal layout process for an RPG adventure, but in this already short product it feels like padding and a reduction in the value for money.

Overall I don't think this is value for money. $3.99 is simply too much for what amounts to a 10 page adventure and this really should have been made available for free on the website for Shadows Over Scotland. So I can't recommend it from a value perspective.

From an adventure perspective it's enjoyable if a bit short. Not exactly the best adventure out there, but adequate for the size. It is however the kind of adventure you'd expect to see in a magazine or as a free download on a website rather than a sold product. If it had been included in Shadows Over Scotland it would have been fine, but here it's a little lacking. Maps of the lighthouse, ruins and chapel would have been appreciated, but aren't necessary.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2012/12/14/tabletop-review-cthulhu-britannica-the-ballad-of-bass-rock-call-of-cthulhu/

…and here I thought Terror From the Skies would be the last Call of Cthulhu release for 2012. Although it’s not Folklore, which has seem more publishing delays than a lot of video games, Cubicle 7 releases something for their Cthulhu Britannica line of products in this calendar year. I’m kind of glad because Call of Cthulhu has had such an incredible year and I was hoping Cubicle 7 would put something out for it, especially we haven’t seen anything from them since Shadows Over Scotland. Unfortunately what we get is a rather bland and generic short little adventure that is overpriced and underwhelming.

Now that’s not to say that the adventure is terrible or poorly written. The layout, writing and everything of that nature is just fine. It’s just the adventure is one that feels like someone just pulled it out of his or her ass and sat it upon their players on the fly instead of actually sitting down and coming up with something less paint by numbers and generic. I realize these comments are probably coming off much harsher than I intend them to, but the fact remains this adventure could literally have been a middle school child’s first attempt at writing an adventure for their gaming group instead of using a store bought adventure. The fact that this costs four dollars for only fourteen pages compared to things like say, Catalyst Game Lab’s Shadowrun Missions line which runs forty or so pages and is in full colour for the same price tag just makes The Ballad of Bass Rock all the more disheartening. Perhaps this was an excised adventure from a previous Cthulhu Britannica book and Cubicle 7 just threw it out there to see who would bite?

Basically the adventure is flawed from beginning to end. The crux of the story is that the Investigators are on a cruise when bad weather and luck alike cause their seafaring vessel to break up against some rocks. The investigators are able to get to a island with the ruins of an ancient castle and a relatively recent lighthouse (also in ruins) that has been ransacked by a very hungry shoggoth. The PCs then have to try and survive the night. If they do they are rescued. The end. See what I mean about how this adventure is not only painfully generic. It feels almost like it was put together via Mad Libs or a dart board.

Again, the technical aspects of the adventure are nicely done. You have some nice hands outs and everything is laid out wonderfully for the Keeper, but formatting is not what people play adventures for. It’s the actual content where things fall apart. Instead of just letting the Investigators get to the island more or less attack, there’s a superfluous series of rolls characters need to make or take large amounts of damage due to the rocky region and bad weather. In some cases this will be enough to kill a PC if they make some bad rolls. Why would anyone design an adventure for Call of Cthulhu where your characters can be killed in the very opening of the adventure leaving a player? I’m sorry, but that’s just stupid. Maybe 1-4 hit points damage max during this whole setup but not up to TWELVE points of damage. That’s enough to kill most characters outright. Call of Cthulhu is not meant to be Keeper Vs. Players. It’s meant to be a well told horror story that engages the entire party playing it. This adventure would be better off in the Dungeon Crawl Classics system in which the whole point of THAT game sometimes seems to be how horribly your character can be killed by the GM. This is just poor adventure design pure and simple. Limit the damage and save PC death until it actually matters. Bumping someone off for no real reason isn’t fun for anyone involved.

Then there’s the rest of the adventure. The Investigators wander around the island, wet and no doubt ready for their impending bout of hypothermia or some other malady brought on by being soaking wet and exhausted when they have to deal with a shoggoth – the most powerful creature in the game not a Outer God or Great Old One. Trapped on a small island with a creature that is faster, bigger, stronger AND knows the landscape of the region better than the players? This isn’t a challenge; it’s a slaughter. Again, there’s no fun in that. Call of Cthulhu is not a Friday the 13th style slasher flick and it’s certainly not meant to be an experience where the Keeper fiendishly picks off the players one by one as the adventure actually suggests you do(!). The adventure lacks any real means or chance for the Investigators to survive save for the remote possibility of a small cave, but the Shoggoth can just send a cephalopod down after the now trapped characters and yank them out one by one. It’s as if the people behind this adventure didn’t actually want to bother with writing a fully fleshed out scenario. They obviously haven’t thought about ways for PCs to get through this. This thing just feels half-assed, rushed and poorly conceived in all ways possible. It’s definitely the worst thing I’ve ever seen Cubicle 7 put out.

Now again, just because this is the worst thing I’ve seen from Cubicle 7 doesn’t mean this is the worst adventure of all time or anything like that. I’ve seen far worse Call of Cthulhu products in my life time. This isn’t a crime against the genre or even the system; it’s just there isn’t much positive to say about this piece. Again, this adventure just feels like a pre-teen wrote it, complete with all the gaps of logic and storytelling one would expect from someone in that age group. The art and layout is fine and the adventure is fleshed out in minor unimportant details – just not in the actually areas that would give The Ballad of Bass Rock the depth and substance the vast majority of gamers are looking for. If this was free or a dollar, I could see giving this thing a pass, but to be this poorly thought out and short and with a price tag higher than most adventure two to three times the page count that Ballad of Bass Rock has? Well, that’s inexcusable and I’m actually ashamed of Cubicle 7 for letting this thing be published. If I was worried about Folklore before, I’m doubly so now. Just remember, this is playable and it’s fine if you’re looking for a paint by numbers one shot adventure to play in two to three hours and everyone is brand spanking new to Call of Cthulhu (including the Keeper) as it could serve as a way to learn what to and not to do with the system, but for anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge about the system of the mood it’s meant to convey, The Ballad of Bass Rock is an overpriced insult.