Snows of an Early Winter
In Snows of an Early Winter, the latest Call of Cthulhu scenario from Super Genius Games, the investigators are pulled into a series of mysterious events in modern day New York. While the rest of the city prepares for the Halloween festivities and fetes the visit of the President, someone is slaughtering animals, members of the homeless are being killed, women go missing, and the Art Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art lies beaten to death in his office. In piecing together and following the clues behind each of these incidents, the investigators will find themselves taken from the heights of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to deep underground and into the heart of a cult headquarters via a blood spattered abattoir and a blood soaked sacrifice site. The scenario comes with five pre-generated investigators, a hardy framework, well designed NPCs complete with reactions to the investigators built in, visceral encounters, and a venal villain.
With several deadly encounters – primarily with murderously gun toting cultists, though some of the Mythos critters found are equally as nasty – Snows of an Early Winter is geared towards the Pulp style of play rather than the Purist. As such, it is probably better suited for use with more experienced investigators, but it is flexible enough to run with either Delta Green or Cthulhu by Gaslight. It is designed for non-linear style of play, with the player characters following multiple lines of inquiry, the lines converging until the final encounter with aforementioned villain.
The set up for the scenario has the investigators as frequent customers at Marlowe’s Malted Minds, a coffee house and esoteric supply store. Thus they begin play on the fringes of New York’s occult scene, and are expected to regard the coffee shop as a meeting point or base of operations, with their fellow customers and the staff as a ready circle of family and friends. The five pre-generated investigators provided are all customers and have ties to other customers and the staff at the shop, though not to each other. This being a horror adventure, this family is likely to be targeted by the cultists once they are aware of the investigators’ prying. The coffee and occult shop also serves as a place of safety, a means to pass information to the characters, and essentially as a weathervane, indicating the degree of tension outside the shop’s confines.
Four hooks are provided to get the investigators to the scenario’s first encounters, though the lack of links with each means the Keeper and the players will have to work hard to get their investigators together at the start. The alternative is having the characters follow their own lines of inquiry until they converge later in the scenario, but this will take a little patience upon the part of the players as the focus switches from one character and his investigation to the next.
There is much to explore in the course of playing Snows of an Early Winter. Whether it is the setting of Santeria in New York, the politics of the city, or community housing, the scenario will take the investigators to some interesting places – even some wayward places – that will add freshness to Call of Cthulhu.
Although written for Cthulhu Now – that is, any time from the 1980s up until the present day – Snows of an Early Winter includes extensive notes for setting it during the 1890s of Cthulhu by Gaslight that are relatively easy to use for the classic period of the 1920s as well. In fact, these notes are actually a decent primer for the politics, culture, and mores of New York during the Cthulhu by Gaslight period, useful given the lack of information on early New York for Call of Cthulhu. As written, the scenario takes place at Halloween, but the festivities have almost no bearing upon the events of Snows of an Early Winter and a Keeper could run the scenario at almost any time of the year, as long as there was a suitable conjunction.
Sadly, and given that the scenario is written for use with Cthulhu Now, there are no notes for using the scenario with Delta Green. That said, any Keeper worth his essential saltes should be able to adapt Snows of an Early Winter to Delta Green – my suggestion would be to tie the villain into Stephen Alzis and The Fate, since the scenario takes place in New York.
Considerable thought has gone into the design of Snows of an Early Winter and how the Keeper should be running it, with various tools and structuring used to help the Keeper. The structuring is that of the scenario itself, which has been arranged into five stages: the Spooky, the Tense, the Transitions, the Dangerous, and the Climax stages. Each stage consists of several encounters, the number of encounters decreasing as the stages progress until there is only the one at the Climax. The investigators are expected to move between the encounters at each stage in non-linear fashion, gathering clues – both from the encounters and from the regular newspaper handouts – before moving on to the next stage.
The first type of tool for the Keeper to make use of is that of NPC triggers. The antagonists in Snows of an Early Winter are not content to stay quiescent as the investigators follow the various trails of clues laid out over the course of the scenario. To that end the Keeper is expected to keep a tally of marks on the Trigger Tracker, each mark added or removed according to the actions of the investigators. Accrue enough marks against one of the antagonists, and he will act against the investigators. This is a simple-but-useful device, and it also serves to bring other occult or Mythos forces into play. These forces also take a strong interest in the activities of the antagonists at the heart of the adventure, and will dog the investigators as much as the investigators do the villains.
The second tool is the use of conversational categories to represent the attitudes that the investigators need to take towards the scenario’s detailed NPCs. The four are “Volunteered,” “Friendly,” “Confrontation,” and “Physical,” and for each category certain pieces of information are given. In order to get that information, the investigators need to be friendly towards the NPC, to confront him, and so on.
As clever as these conversational categories are, there is a downside to the use of these guidelines, and that comes in several highly distasteful suggestions for confronting various NPCs. Now it is not unknown for the investigators in Call of Cthulhu to resort to threats of violence, or even slap an NPC in order exhort information (or clues) from him. Snows of an Early Winter though, goes further and actually gives guidelines on how damage needs to be inflicted to extort this information – essentially for inflicting one Hit Point’s worth damage, the investigators get to have one question answered. So far, so bad, but then the author steps over the line and has one of the given victims of this suggested torture be a mentally disturbed woman. It is one thing to portray a misogynist attitude in the scenario’s villains, but to suggest it as a player option – at least in the form of an act of sadistic violence – is in very poor taste.
The inclusion of this guideline raises a further issue, one that came to light after discussing it with the scenario’s author, Louis Agresta. The guidelines are included by intent, first to highlight contemporary attitudes towards the mentally ill in the United States and second to confront the investigators with a moral dilemma – to see how far they would go in order to obtain information that would help prevent a catastrophe. That is, would they be prepared to “smack around” the woman in question? Now as a product of a liberal and progressive upbringing, I know such an act to be nothing short of repugnant, but as a roleplayer I can see myself playing a character who would not hold such modern ideals, although playing such a character would be akin to playing a Black Gangster rapper in Los Angeles in Wyrd is Bond or a devout worshipper of Sárku, Dread One of the Blackest Deeps and Lord of Worms, in Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne. Pretty damned alien both.
The issue though is that of “is the author’s intent apparent?” Now I admit it may be that I am giving the scenario too literal a read, but then I am faced with the problem of a tight deadline and having to read the scenario as a PDF. I am also faced with the problem that I am not American and therefore not aware of the issues with mental health in both New York and the United States in general (it also means that I am not as fully conversant with the structure of New York city politics that underpins the main cultist’s raison d’être, but that is more of an issue of background not being included). So from where I stand, the author’s intent to highlight this issue is not apparent. As to the other issue, earlier in the scenario the author alludes to Hitler’s use of the same occult item in order to fuel his rise to power that the villain of Snows of an Early Winter is using for the same purpose, but beyond this mention, I would suggest that Agresta’s aim to confront the investigators with a moral dilemma also fails. Part of that is due to the fact that this is a Call of Cthulhu scenario and on the most superficial of levels, what is the point of such a work if it is not to stop some great evil. Primarily, though, he fails because the moral dilemma is never made obvious and because even if we were to confront it, we as players know the answer to it.
Physically, Snows of an Early Winter uses the same layout style as the publisher’s other modern set scenario, Midnight Harvest (curiously, that also takes places at Halloween). The layout in Snows of an Early Winter is a little tight in places, though the book is readable and comes with numerous sets of designer’s notes. The book really does need another editorial pass, for example, “Cthulhu” is misspelt throughout the book, while the Mythos tome that is the scenario’s McGuffin is mysteriously shortened almost all the way through. The book is lightly illustrated, but many of the handouts are done in color, which not only has to be a first, it also adds a nice touch.
What Snows of an Early Winter is lacking is the inclusion of maps. While the scenario’s many locations are described, the lack of maps leaves the Keeper with more work to do. He already has to take the book’s descriptions, visualize them, and relay these descriptions to his players, but the lack of maps makes this harder as he has to visualize the layout of each location and be consistent to that imagined layout. This is a constant problem with this publisher’s scenarios, and while including maps means more work for the publisher, it also means less work for his customer.
A scenario this size comes with NPCs aplenty, though not all of them are complete. The same can be said of the pre-generated investigators – five are provided, and not one of them is quite right. In most cases it is a matter of the numbers not being right, but other errors are noticeable: one investigator appears to be very good at speaking to owls, so there is a touch of the Doctor Doolittle about him (though I grant you, this is a spelling error); the investigator studying to be an electrician lacks the Electrical Repair skill; others have impossibly high attributes, while most lack their own language skill (as do many of the book’s NPCs). Overall, the pre-generated tend towards the game’s Pulp Style, each having some fairly high skills, and although Snows of an Early Winter continues the trend to assign one or more of a scenario’s pre-generated investigators with the Cthulhu Mythos skill – an unnecessary trend as far as this reviewer is concerned – the author here at the least keeps the skill to an absolute minimum.
Ultimately, Snows of an Early Winter could have been better with a firmer editorial hand. Most obviously, the author’s intent could have been made stronger and more apparent, but equally in fixing the number of errors that mar the book in small ways, Snows of an Early Winter could have been just that little more polished.
Putting aside the issues already raised, Snows of an Early Winter provides a strong mix of interaction and investigation (perhaps too strong in the case of the former) with quite deadly action. It will work just as well in the 1890s as it will in the modern day or with Delta Green, but whichever the period, the adventure will provide roughly two to three solid sessions of play. Overall, Snows of an Early Winter is a well-structured, strong piece that does not pull any punches.
Want to learn more about Snows of an Early Winter? Author Lou Agresta was interviewed on Atomic Array 037, as was publisher Stan!, who spoke about what Super Genius Games plans are for Call of Cthulhu products in 2010.
January 5th, 2010 at 15:44
Thank you for your thoughtful review.
- Lou