Trail of Cthulhu: Some favourite scenarios

I promised some time ago to list my favourite Trail of Cthulhu scenarios. Let me start by saying that in general I think almost if not all ToC scenarios are well-written, well-organised, and very concise in presentation. Pelgrane Press standards are pretty high, and Chaosium could probably learn from them a couple of useful things. What I sometimes miss in Trail scenario is the lack of maps and floor plans. It is not that I want tactical combat maps, and in fact, for combat I only use very sketchy doodles to give an idea to the players of what is happening without placing them above the action, but I like to be able to understand the physical space where the action takes place.

I will only discuss scenarios I personally ran (some of them multiple times, one of them more than 20 times), and only scenarios that I were particular standouts, although I have read and run several others I enjoyed.

I tried to avoid any actual spoilers, although there may be some rather minor ones.

Campaign: there are few long campaigns for Trail of Cthulhu, and admittedly, I only ran one of them, but what a campaign.

Eternal Lies - Eternal Lies is one of the best Cthulhu campaigns ever written (if not the best). It is a campaign that takes all the lessons of Masks of Nyarlathotep (MoN) and fine tunes everything. NPCs are credible characters, and, especially in the case of villains, they have nuanced personalities and goals. The locations feel very different from each other, and all of them are very different from MoN’s. Moreover, as a GM you never get that feeling as you get sometimes in MoN that the current cultist ambush feels a lot like a repetition of all the other cultist ambushes. Furthermore the “sandbox” of “sandboxes” structure of Masks is improved upon, resulting in a stellar campaign without skippable locations and a guarantee of a climactic ending. It also feels more grounded somehow, relying less than Masks on monsters and spells to create exciting situations. If you love MoN, I think you are going to at least thoroughly enjoy Eternal Lies. 

Between the two, Eternal Lies is likely to be the better campaign, but MoN still gets the nod for being an ultimate groundbreaking classic (and having a lot of additional support material built over the years by fans).

In any case, when it comes to additional material for Eternal Lies, the Alexandrian surely  has you covered and I advise any Keeper planning on running Eternal Lies to check the Alexandrian Remix from his webpage.

Individual Scenarios: there are many scenarios available for Trail of Cthulhu, and the quality is in general high. I will mention here a couple I particularly like, and I will try to keep the list updated as I run more.

The Black Drop: what if you could have all the thrills of a campaign like Beyond the Mountains of Madness, without all the railroading, and condensed in just one of two tense sessions, where all your decisions truly matter, and that the stakes are both personal and momentous? That is essentially what the Black Drop offers you. Wilderness, impending doom, paranoia, desperation, isolation, difficult alliances, and great sacrifices. The whole thing feels extremely epic. And if you control your timing well, you can make it happen in a convention session. This was the scenario that made me start playing Trail of Cthulhu, and it is still one of the best.

The Dance in the Blood: simply, the best “purist” scenario I have ever run for a Cthulhu game (even if the two first chapters of Curse of the Yellow Sign come pretty close). It is bleak, creepy, and it is easy to move it steadily and at the right pace to its final revelation with that slow increase of discomfort and dread that a great horror story should have. It can be run in a single 4 hour session. And there can be no happy ending on this one.

Invasive Procedures: strictly speaking, this is a Fear Itself scenario, and not a Trail of Cthulhu scenario (although it is labelled as being runnable with both rulesets). It is set in a hospital and the players incarnate the bed-ridden patients. It has some of the most horrifying set pieces of body horror that I have seen in a roleplaying game, so it is definitely not for everybody. The type of horror is not Lovecraftian, no cosmic horror, more like the gnostic horror of Kult or a Clive Barker story. That being said, with something this intense that you can run in just a 4 hour session, I have not a lot of complaints, except the fact that there is no good floorplan of the hospital provided with the scenario. I actually designed my own, which forced me to spend several hours studying architect designs for hospitals, but I was pretty proud of the results (please contact me if you would like to have them). 

Not So Quiet: Another hospital, just this one is a field hospital in WWI. Here the horror is mostly of a human kind. It is about what humans can do to each other, and how to weigh your suffering against the suffering of others. There are lots of gruesome scenes here, many gangrene limbs and amputations, many young men dying in an overcrowded infirmary . The cosmic horror elements, although present, take more the form of an enabler than the centre of the conflict, which is primarily human. My only issue with this scenario is that the climatic end scene is not particularly well-designed. Iit needs to be slightly restructured to give a chance for the investigators to figure out what can be done if the final catastrophe is to be averted, even because it makes the scenario more interesting, and may give a better sense of closure to the whole thing. Runs in a 5 hour session.

Honourable Mention:

The Dying of Saint Margaret: another great purist scenario, with lots of flavour and slowly growing dread. The problem of this one is that it cannot reach its climax if the players don’t take a typical decision of a horror story character that no sane person would take. The author was aware of this, and points out that the Keeper should remind the players that their Drives compel them to do this. I find it a bad design decision, because if the Keeper needs to compel you to take such an important decision through mechanics (and this is the only decision that can bring closure to the scenario), the players will feel that it wasn’t earned, or that they have been negated their will to choose. This problem can be fixed, but it makes me lose some of my appreciation for the scenario as a whole.