Hunting Horror Call Of Cthulhu
Elia Khensamphanh
Appearance: A hunting horror is roughly 40' of black, ropy, serpentine foulness. They have two (or one!) bat-like wings, which they use to fly. Because of their physical make-up, hunting horrors tend to change shape constantly, and are hard to look at for an extended period.
Designer's Notes: Hunting horrors are creatures of the Cthulhu/Dreamlands Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. This design was based upon the hunting horror presented in the 5th Edition of Call of Cthulhu. Hunting Horrors can range in size from Large to Huge. Game Masters may wish to give hunting horrors additional powers, such as a tail slap (i.e. +4d6 HA), various forms of Life Support (Aging, Pressure, Cold), and spells.
Hunting Horrors are creatures resembling black-winged serpents of immense size. Horrors originally dwelt on only a few worlds, but they have been sighted flying through space in several galaxies. Extremely bright light may destroy a hunting horror, but such a powerful light-source is rarely available to its victims.
The hunting horrors serve Nyarlathotep, who often sends them to deal with those who displease him. An enterprising wizard who is outside at night may summon one of these monsters, providing a sentient being as a sacrifice for it. If none is available, the horror is happy to devour the magician and depart.[1]
The hunting horror expects to have a substantial sacrifice prepared for it, or else it seizes the primary caster as the sacrifice and then departs. If the spell is successful, the hunting horror first consumes the sacrificed creature and then claims any other offered items. A Large or larger creature of at least challenge rating 1 is sufficient, though it is written that larger and more magical beings and other bribes such as magic items make it more likely the hunting horror will act favorably. Upon consuming the sacrifice, the hunting horror is willing to parley with its summoners rather than simply destroying them immediately.
I purchased the adventure as a PDF through DriveThruRPG for $12.95 and received an 110-page document. This document may seem enormous but only about 45 pages of it are devoted to the actual adventure, the rest of it is character sheets, hand-outs, and additional rules. In addition to the main document there are also separate downloads available for the different maps, the extensive hand-outs, the pre-generated character sheets, some images for use with virtual tabletop platforms, and an audio file of people speaking Italian.
An ambitious and innovate adventure that is rightfully heralded as one of the best-written and most fiercely-imagined adventures for Call of Cthulhu. Genuinely unsettling in its Horror and unconventional in its structure, Viral will not be for everyone but everyone with an interest in writing adventures for Call of Cthulhu would benefit from giving it a go.
Textured nonsense aside, the lay-out is decent with a neat two-column page structure that is routinely broken up with coloured box text and bits of art. The art selection is interesting even though the quality is decidedly uneven: Guillotte uses a combination of photography and illustration with the photographs often heavily altered or touched-up to include supernatural elements. While I love the way that this approach creates a somewhat uncanny visual continuum that extends seamlessly from the photo-realistic to the fictionally fantastical, the more heavily-edited images are noticeably weaker. So while this works:
This sort of thing is just a recipe for page-flipping and it would have been so easy to avoid it by including some page numbers. As it is, I would suggest printing off the adventure as well as the separate hand-outs and writing in both page numbers and referenced to lettered hand-out pages as this type of thing is just annoying:
These aesthetic concerns are all somewhat trifling but we live in an age where the look of a module seems to matter almost as much (and sometimes more *cough* Free League *cough*) than the content and so I did want to engage. More concerning is the fact that while Viral may look like yet another third-party Call of Cthulhu adventure, it is actually very different and the text of the adventure is not always great at making these differences clear. In fact, my group struggled with Viral more than any of the adventures I have run since returning to the hobby and while a lot of that is down to mistakes I made and weirdness on the part of my group, this adventure does present some rather unique challenges to prospective keepers and this review is partly about helping prospective GMs to navigate this new terrain.
Viral is a stand-alone one-shot adventure that is designed to be run in a single four-hour session though it could quite easily be stretched to two sessions. The text of the module mentions the possibility of a third but provides no support for that extra session and I suspect that most groups would view it as little more than unnecessary throat-clearing on the way to the fireworks factory.
Unbeknownst to the Krew, the island is home to an original Mythos critter who is basically like a god of disease. The island has been occupied for centuries and many attempts have been made to free the critter and unleash it upon the world but all of these attempts have been foiled by the Italian equivalent of Delta Green who use the Italian Navy to bar access to the island and, if necessary, blow everything to shit before the god of disease is allowed to escape.
Each location has a map, and a number of fixed set-pieces that allow the characters to encounter NPCs, learn something about the island, or catch of glimpse of the evil the island contains. These set-pieces are then augmented by randomly-generated encounters with supernatural forces.
While the list of locations and the instructions of the off-site producer tell the Krew where to go, the Krew are also told what to do at each location by their subscribers who spend the entire adventure yelling at them through the chat; forever demanding that the delve deeper and take greater risks. Risky behaviour is rewarded with cash, risk-averse behaviour is punished with plummeting subscription numbers and angry screams that the entire thing is fake.
This is a scenario that has little room for investigation-based play and aggressively stamps on anything resembling player agency. Viral is a quintessential RPG fairground ride in that the goal of the session is to move the group through a series of escalating set-pieces ending in the emergence of an elder god. The text of the adventure does not recognise the possibility of alternate endings and players are not expected (or really allowed) to do things that might change their or alter the course of the scenario. Even something as simple as allowing the players to choose where their characters go next is problematic as the locations get scarier as you move down the list.
I have written about the culture of play surrounding Call of Cthulhu before and how that culture of play allows for more linear narratives than those found in the culture of play surrounding other RPGs but Viral is considerably more linear and structured than the majority of Call of Cthulhu adventures. In fact, it is considerably more linear and structured than most RPG adventures full stop. This made Viral an almost singularly bad fit for both me and my group but that is not going to be true for everyone.
The first source of fun in this scenario is roleplaying: The adventure provides the group with some very well-conceived characters who all have pre-defined personalities as well as their own private agendas. These agendas bring that characters into some degree of conflict with each other as well as some of the NPCs that the group meets on the island. If you have a group that really enjoy the dramatic aspects of roleplaying then they will love this scenario as the pre-generated characters are a collection of really colourful pieces of shit who are a lot of fun to play as long as you are in the mood for playing that type of character and assuming the responsibilities associated with that role. If you are not interested in doing your best influencer douchebag impression, or rolling around on the floor in terror, or being a sneaky little fucker who loves faking stuff then you will struggle to have fun with this scenario as acting out the roles of the various pre-generated characters is one of the things that this scenario is obviously about.
The third innovation is a set of bespoke, localised Bouts of Madness tables for when players fail a heavy SAN check. These tables have become standard for adventures like The Bloom that were put out in support of the Cairn-derrived Liminal Horror RPG and I am delighted to see someone including them in Call of Cthulhu modules as Call of Cthulhu has never been great at providing guidance for how to handle the moments when PCs temporarily lose their shit and it is really great to see someone who writes horror really well put some serious thought into what going temporarily insane on a cursed Italian island might look like. Seriously, why is this type of thing not standard for all Call of Cthulhu adventures?
I would also put a lot more thought into assigning characters. I allowed the players to select PCs on the basis of what seemed fun to them but it is pretty clear that the character of Marco in particular requires a certain type of player and I got that exactly wrong.
There is a legendary blog post that tries to characterise the different play-styles that have grown up in the various silos that make up RPG culture. One of the play-styles known alternatively as Neotrad, OC, or Modern places a lot of emphasis on characters and on players acting out dramatic arcs that are plotted out prior to play commencing. Much like Viral, the Neotrad playstyle emphasises the joys of performing the role of a particular character and I think that the emphasis this adventure places on performing the characters invites drawing on the collective wisdom of that play-style. In other words, I think that anyone looking to run Viral should think about giving each of the characters as dramatic arc that could then be acted out through the various locations and set-pieces. The more bold and experimental approach would be to discuss that arc in the Session Zero and work with the players to develop arcs which they feel would be a good fit for their vision of the characters.
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