The Order of the Stone: A Call of Cthulhu campaign Review

 

The Order of the Stone is a short campaign for Call of Cthulhu published by Chaosium. I wrote this review after reading the book without running the campaign. If I find the time and inclination to run the campaign I will provide an update. As usual, the review starts with a tl;dr section, completely free of spoilers, including positives, negatives and a short summary of my opinion. This will be followed by an in-depth review with spoilers.

TL;DR

Positives:

• easy to run, straightforward plot and structure;

• classic Lovecraftian themes;

• cleanly presented, with plenty of staging advice.

Negatives:

• formulaic and predictable;

• lacks engaging NPCS and iconic villains;

• verbose presentation makes it difficult to use efficiently in the heat of a game session.

Summary:

The Order of the Stone is an accessible, well-organised campaign aimed at new Keepers, offering a straightforward narrative with classic Lovecraftian elements like eerie locations and an impending apocalyptic threat. The modular structure and simplicity make it clear it is designed for beginners. Its predictability and lack of depth may leave some underwhelmed. Overall, it lacks the creativity or distinctiveness that would make it a particularly memorable experience.

Full Review (with spoilers)

Call of Cthulhu needs materials for new Keepers. As a veteran of the game, I often initiate new players into the Dark Arts of Lovecraftian Horror roleplaying. Some want to be Keepers, and a recurrent question I get from these somewhat clueless sorcerer’s apprentices is “Oh, Great Master NyOrlandhotep, what short, easy Call of Cthulhu campaigns would a nube like me be capable of running for my equally clueless friends?”

(Of course, there are other apprentices - much more clueless and much more foolish - who, out of the blue, send me a message on Discord saying “Hi, NyOrl, just decided to run Masks. Lol. Any tips?”)

So, when I read a description of The Order of the Stone, I immediately thought, “This is exactly the sort of thing those crazy kids need”, and I bought it, to be able to help those crazy kids.

And indeed, this is a short campaign (only three scenarios, and each will take one to two sessions tops to run), designed to be simple enough for a new Keeper to manage without being overwhelmed by too much background or a complex structure, while still offering the feeling of a cohesive, long-form narrative.

In that strict sense, The Order of the Stone delivers. The plot is straightforward while touching all the classic CoC vibes, and offering some variety of situations. In the first scenario, the investigators must explore a ship adrift on a stormy sea, a dangerous, isolated location where the corpses pile up and a monster is on the loose. In the second, the investigators must find their way through a small village, inquiring with the townsfolk to track down the hideout of a group of cultists. Finally, in the third, the investigators rush through the wilderness to stop a ritual before the big bad evil is released upon an unprepared world.

All of this is fine. Formulaic, yes, but this is a campaign aimed at new players —people who aren’t jaded cynics who’ve seen this sort of thing countless times and need some clever twist or subversion of the tropes to keep them interested.

There is not a lot of player agency, but the players are likely not to notice this. The first scenario offers the players several different paths, but it’s all a bit of an Illusionist’s Trick: all roads lead to pretty much the same destination. While there’s some variation in the ending, any mistakes or missed clues are easily recoverable in the following scenarios. Destroying the monster in the first scenario will have some impact, but not much. The second scenario revolves going around and talking to lots of NPCs to figure out where to go. Investigators may get involved in the lives of the townsfolk, but none of it connects to the main plot. The third scenario is a straight journey to the “big finale,” where the investigators run

against the clock to stop the summoning ritual.

Now, as you may have guessed, while I don’t have too much of an issue with The Order of the Stone being formulaic and a bit predictable, I am less than enthusiastic about it.

So, what’s the real issue?

Well, this campaign gives me an inescapable feeling of “meh.” To put it simply, there’s nothing exciting about it. And that has nothing to do with being simple or straightforward.

Take for instance the first scenario, set aboard a ghost ship (when the investigators arrive, almost everyone inside is dead, there is a storm, and a monster on the loose). This could be very thrilling—it’s after all the plot of an Alien movie, right? But the ship, as described, is confusing and repetitive, each corridor or room looks pretty much the same as the one before, plus or minus some dead bodies, and all the instructions on how to access each deck and each flight of stairs are just overdone . (I would jettison the blueprint of the boat and the navigation instructions, give a coarse expressionist description of wondering about, and follow-up with a sequence of encounters: dead people, glimpse of the monster, place of the ritual, attack by madman, meeting with mysterious woman, and being chased by the monster).

To make it much worse, the monster, which with slight variations will serve as our big bad evil throughout the entire campaign, is utterly forgettable. Its description is “something-something-ooze-tentacles,” its backstory is “it’s evil and was contained, n0w it wants to get out and kill stuff,” its name is a fitting random string of sylabs, and its powers are essentially "crushing things" and "mind control". In other words, it’s a fantastically generic and personality-free Lovecraftian abomination. 

It’s like a Batman villain who’s a bloke in a black spandex uniform who robs banks and calls himself “The Villain”.

And I must admit the art in the book does an excellent job of capturing its utter lack of Eldritch charm.

The problem is pretty much the same across the all the scenarios.

Take the cultists trying to summon the monster. Their name is, I kid you not, “The Summoners”.

And the descendants of Irish druids who oppose them call themselves the “Order of the Stone.” (which, btw, fyi, is already a thing in Minecraft where it fits much better)

And the Order of the Stone, though they know very little about the supernatural and are essentially a rich kids’ club, will appear in generic dark hooded robes looking all mysterious and then proceed to reveal who their are - which in itself doesn't really matter, as they are perfectly devoid of personalities and just serve the twofold purpose of funneling the investigators towards the finale and providing replacement investigators if needed. In fact, if their leader dies in the first scenario, she is replaced by another cypher with the same agenda and attitude (but a different name) in the follow-up, as no one really cares about any of these NPCs anyway.

As for “The Summoners,” they’re equally bland: a professor and two students, all of them mad—driven crazy by contact with our generic Great Old One. They live to resurrect their master because they believe “they will be rewarded.” And that pretty much sums their personalities, except that one has “second thoughts” -which only came after leaving a huge trail of bodies behind. I remember that when I first read Masks of Nyarlathotep I thought the cultists’ motivation was a bit generic. Compared to this lot, those raving lunatics were practically Shakespearean.

And don’t get me started on the townsfolk you spend the entire second scenario chatting up just to find out where “The Summoners” are hiding. They are blandness incarnate. A good comparison might be the Arizona chapter of The Two-Headed Serpent. There, you’re also wandering around a town, asking questions and piecing together clues to get you to "the place", but that Arizona town is bursting with weirdness, meaningful conflict, and hard-to-read characters, with their own agendas, likes and dislikes. In The Order of the Stone, the NPCs are dreary, with no interesting secrets to reveal, only two (or three?) hastily sketched love triangles that have absolutely nothing to do with the main plot, are neither mysterious nor scary, and which, if the players decide to dwell on them, will turn the game into a second rate soap opera.

The third scenario is a straight journey from A to B, where you’re tasked with stopping the summoning. To add some flavour, the authors drop in a graveyard with some ghosts wandering about, but these ghosts have absolutely no impact on the story—they just hang around being ghostly and stuff. I’ve pointed this out many times before, but ghosts are almost the antithesis of Lovecraftian horror, as they’re fundamentally anthropocentric. There aren’t many things I find more wrong in a Lovecraftian story than ghosts. And since the ghosts have nothing to do with the plot and are just thrown in for "atmosphere", then, honestly, why-oh-why? (Yes, I know Shadows of Yog-Sothoth did it first, but at least the ghost there had a real role to play in the story, and, besides, SoYS is a very old campaign.)

As for the presentation, it’s clean and well-organised, if overly verbose. New Keepers need clear, organised information, but they also need it to be compact enough to be used during play. The Order of the Stone as written will be hard to use in the heat of the moment. I had the same criticism of No Time to Scream. In any case, in this, my sympathy goes to the authors: it is very difficult to strike the right balance, and it is very noticeable that they made a valiant effort.

The art, while it doesn’t feature the ugly character portraits of No Time to Scream, is suitably bland and uninspiring.

How would I prepare this campaign? Well, I’d need to give it the soul it is missing. If I ever run this, I will not change the basic plot, but I will flesh out the NPCs, monsters, and locations, to make them memorable. And that should go a long way into making the whole thing work.

Frankly, I think this is one of the weakest books I’ve read from Chaosium in some time. Which is not something that I say happily because, as sarcastic as I may sometimes sound, I strongly prefer to have good things to say than bad ones, and I am always always rooting for Chaosium to amaze me as they sometimes did in the past.

Cthulhu Fhtagn!