Every October, for the last few years, I’ve been trying to watch 31 horror movies that I haven’t seen before. Some of the most consistently enjoyable horror movies that I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this have been horror anthologies. Creepshow, Trick ‘r Treat, the original V/H/S, and the Mortuary Collection have been some of my favorite things to watch in the last few years.
Why am I reminiscing about horror anthologies at the beginning of an RPG review? Today’s review is looking at No Time to Scream, a collection of Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition adventures, each designed to run about an hour and featuring an adventure with an internal countdown.
Disclaimer
I received my copy of No Time to Scream from Chaosium as a review copy. I have not had the opportunity to run or play any of these scenarios. I have a decent amount of experience with Call of Cthulhu, but mainly as a player.
No Time to Scream
Authors B. W. Holland, Bridgett Jeffries, C. L. Werner, with James Coquillat, and Mike Mason
Editing and Development James Coquillat and Mike Mason
Copy Editing Lawrence Gale and Ken Austin
Art Direction Mike Mason with James Coquillat
Cover Art Nicholas Grey
Interior Art Hannah Elizabeth Baker, Erik Davis-Heim, Heikki Korhonen, Alice Morelli, Alex Ngo, Riley Spalding, and John Sumrow Layout Chandler Kennedy Proofreading Susan O’Brien
Cartography and Handouts Miska Fredman
Call of Cthulhu Creative Director Mike Mason
Clear Credit B. W. Holland wrote “A Lonely Thread” with additional writing by James Coquillat. Bridgett Jeffries wrote “Aurora Blue” with additional writing by Mike Mason. C. L. Werner wrote “Bits and Pieces” with additional writing by Mike Mason and James Coquillat. Editorial by Mike Mason with James Coquillat.
Internal Screaming
This review is based on the PDF version of the product, which includes the following files:
- Investigator’s Pack (121 pages)
- Keeper Map Pack (7 pages)
- NPC Portrait Pack (3 pages)
- Plain Text Pack (4 pages)
- Player Handouts Pack (15 pages)
- PreGens (37 pages)
- No Time to Scream PDF (106 pages)
The No Time to Scream PDF, Player Handouts Pack, the NPC Portrait Pack, and the Keeper Map Pack are what you would expect from their titles. The Plain Text Pack has the same information from the handouts but without the formatting that makes them look like handwritten notebook pages, newspaper articles, or telegrams.
The scenarios have built-in hooks for the pre-generated characters, and the 37-page Pregens PDF has the twelve characters on character sheets. Each character takes up three pages, including a final lined page for notes. The 121-page Investigator’s Pack includes the eight pregens from the first two scenarios, again, but this time with a masculine and feminine presenting portrait for each.
These pregens have broad backgrounds that tie to the adventures but aren’t given specific names or pronouns. The final adventure has four precisely detailed pre-generated characters, which include their names and more detailed histories. In addition to presenting all of the pre-generated characters from the Pregens PDF with portraits included, they also all have a plain white background version of the character sheets versus the weathered tan backgrounds of the other character sheets.
Investigating the Adventures
The adventure PDF is divided into an Introduction, the three adventures, and the appendices. The introduction explains how these adventures are meant to be played. All of the adventures in this product are short adventures designed to run in around an hour, and the investigators in each adventure are under some kind of time crunch. These adventures are also designed to be usable with either the core rules or the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set. All the adventures are assumed to occur in the 1920s-1930s era. There aren’t any conversion notes. Two out of the three scenarios might be able to be adapted to other times with some work; the third scenario is firmly rooted in its Prohibition Era setting.
The Preparation & Running the Game section discusses what the adventures assume, such as the players having some time to familiarize themselves with the details on the pregen investigators and to customize the areas that are left blank. It also touches on the importance of building similar connections that the pregens have if the group decides to use their player characters for these adventures. There is also a section about managing spotlight time and utilizing safety tools to ensure everyone at the table feels comfortable with what is introduced into the scenario.
Because these adventures can be used as adventures that can work with only the Starter Set, a few of the rules of the complete game are quickly summarized in light of how they will work in these adventures. This includes a few paragraphs on the following topics:
- Using Luck
- Skill Rolls
- Bonus & Penalty Dice
- Combat
- Sanity
- Insanity
- “Read Aloud” Text, Obscure, & Obvious Clues
We’ll touch on this in the individual adventures, but the Sanity rules have some tweaks in these adventures to customize the reactions to individual pre-gen characters. The final section talks about how some clues are meant to be found to ensure the PCs can advance the story, while other clues add context and may allow the PCs to be better prepared.
Each of the adventures has the following sections:
- Scenario Structure
- About the Investigators
- Keeper Information
The Scenario Structure breaks down what the Keeper should be doing and when and gives an assumed amount of time for each activity. For example, it might have a section that says, “Investigate X (10 minutes).”
About the Investigators will detail how each investigator is tied to the scenario, which is important for the Keeper to remember and for the player to note. It’s also important to know what should be added to the background of existing or newly created investigators.
Keeper Information will explain background information that only the Keeper should know. It will explain what is happening and present a synopsis of the primary NPCs important to the scenario.
From here on out, we’re going to be touching on some spoilers for the individual scenarios, so if you want to be surprised by the contents of these adventures, or you are likely to be a player in one of these, you may want to skip what’s coming next.
Chapter 1: A Lonely Thread
This scenario assumes that the player characters all know an archaeologist who is a part-time instructor at Miskatonic University. The archaeologist has begun to uncover some information about the Mythos, so all of the contacts are students who have attended his classes, other archaeologists, and/or people who have run across some Mythos strangeness and have been communicating with him about these mysteries.
The professor regularly invites guests to his home; in this case, he’s interested in showing off the strange “otherworldly” thread-like material he has found. The problem is that by the time the PCs arrive at his home, the threads have multiplied into a parasite made of thousands of them, which burrow into the nervous system of a host and puppet them. The thread parasite doesn’t have access to the professor’s memories, so it will be vague and trying to guess how to react to the people invited to the home.
The mystery and the timetable that the Investigators are working against involve the fate of the professor’s housekeeper. The parasite has placed her in a cocoon to mutate her into a more suitable, dangerous host body. If the PCs take too much time, she is fully metamorphosed into a form that is probably way too powerful for the investigators to handle. If they move fast enough, they may be able to save the professor if they can separate him from the parasite attached to his body.
This adventure includes a few ways to advance time in the game’s setting, providing the ticking clock that the investigators are working against. The suggestions include assuming that time is up with about 20 minutes left in the scenario and running the adventure in “real-time,” which in the case of this scenario would be three hours, or keeping track of each major investigative action the investigators take, advancing an hour each time two major investigative actions have been taken.
I thought it was hilarious that there is a sidebar on “what if the PCs just want to burn everything down,” which I find is a very common reaction to almost any stimulus in a Call of Cthulhu scenario. I appreciate that some of this provides guidelines on using Luck to see how well the fire solves the problem. I like that the PCs can potentially save the professor, but I was sad that the housekeeper will always be a casualty of the parasite. It does make me wonder how this would play out if you reversed the scenario, with the professor gestating into the host body and the housekeeper trying to keep the PCs from finding him.
Each pre-generated character has customized sanity effects, including an option for their Involuntary Actions and Bouts of Madness. While I’m not always comfortable with leaning too heavily on deteriorating mental health as a consequence, I’m even less comfortable with individuals with unique backgrounds and personalities randomly developing stress responses, so I like that these are tailored to the characters.
Chapter 2: Bits & Pieces
Remember when we were talking about horror anthology movies? A lot of those movies have one segment that, while still horrific, is almost comically over the top compared to the tone of the other segments. That’s this adventure.
In this case, the investigators find out that their friend, a doctor, has started to obsess over a corpse he was working on. When the investigators show up to check on him, they find out that his obsession led him to follow the corpse to the morgue attached to a local teaching hospital. Because he sounds highly disturbed, and because friends don’t let friends obsess over corpses, the investigators will likely find their friend.
When they arrive at the morgue, they find their friend bleeding out from a scalpel wound, and animated body parts are running free in the morgue. Hands, legs, torso, head, and internal organs have scattered to different parts of the morgue, waiting until daylight to escape. If even one part of the body escapes, it will eventually regenerate into the sorcerer, who sacrificed himself as an offering to Nyarlathotep for more power.
The PCs have a chance to save their doctor friend from the scalpel wound, and he should be able to make things that are somewhat obvious into being very obvious. There is a furnace where the Investigators destroy body parts, but some of the body parts can turn the power to the furnace off. Possibly, my favorite scene that the PCs may stumble across is the dismembered head making a phone call, trying to get the police to arrive so they can open the morgue’s doors to allow the body parts to escape.
I love this scenario very much, just for the over-the-top nature of hunting animated, dismembered body parts through a morgue. That said, the information that the PCs should get that is marked either as obvious or obscure feels more detached from the literal clues that the PCs find. For example, the doctor, even if he’s dying, may say, “Don’t let them get out.” The obvious clue is “the investigators know that they need to hunt the body parts through the morgue and destroy them,” but that obvious clue doesn’t seem to give them all of that information, just that there is something out there that shouldn’t get out.
It feels like explaining that opening the doors to either the morgue or the hospital lacks the clear “this would be a huge mistake” explanation that the investigators may need, other than just asking the players to accept the concession. Unlike the previous scenario with more specific time-tracking material, this has a broader discussion of pacing and when to explain that time has moved forward. There is an example of a typical night of hunting the body parts, which is a lot like how Monster of the Week scenarios lay out what will happen if the Investigators don’t directly stop the monster’s plans. While it’s not explicit, if you’re used to Monster of the Week, the “A Sample Hunt” sidebar will give you a good idea of how to pace this scenario, advance the timeline, and introduce complications.
Chapter 3: Aurora Blue
When I mentioned that horror anthology movies often have an almost comically over-the-top segment, many of those anthologies also have a more serious segment and are concerned with conveying a more resonant message than other stories in the same anthology. This is that scenario.
In this instance, the PCs are all playing Investigators who work for the Bureau of Prohibition in the 1930s. They are closing in on a still producing a new alcohol that’s flooding the market in the States and that still is located in the Alaska wilderness. They aren’t just random law enforcement, however. They are a group of marginalized agents who have pulled together to try to do something important as a last-ditch effort to show why they deserve respect.
This is the scenario that’s the hardest to adapt to newly made or existing investigators because not only are the madness effects tailored to the individual investigators, but there are places in the adventure where each character will have a flashback to an event that has happened to them, that underscores why they need to force their superiors to respect them. There is a sidebar discussing the care that’s necessary when portraying real-world issues around marginalized people. I like that this has that sidebar and refers Keepers to Harlem Unbound for its section on “Racism: Reality and The Game.” Harlem Unbound is a great supplement, and I’m happy whenever it’s mentioned as a resource.
While the adventure mentions the 2019 movie The Colour Out of Space, some of the mutated fruits, insects, and animals remind me of scenes in Annihilation, especially a scene where the investigators run into a mutated moose and her offspring. Keepers should practice using the description of the mutated fruit in this adventure because if you had told me that rotting, misshapen fruit could be that disturbing, I would not have believed you.
Those mutated fruits are being used to make Aurora Blue, a very popular gin, but they are also highly likely to damage the mind and body. Once the agents track down the cabin where the still is located, they will encounter the horror show of dead and mutated family members. There is also a child who has become linked to the Colour Out of Space that has been causing local mutations, who has resisted the mutations and mental damage done to the rest of the family.
Most of the clues in this adventure are Obvious clues, meaning the PCs shouldn’t have to make a check to find them. That makes sense because the raid is relatively straightforward once the investigators find the cabin, and the investigation just gives them a heads-up on some of the dangers of the cabin or the current state of the family’s patriarch. That said, I wish there had been an obvious clue that would let the investigators know that Missy has at least a chance to survive breaking the link with the Colour if they take her far enough away. It’s extremely difficult to do anything that can harm the Colour Out of Space, and I’m not sure most groups will seize upon blowing up the still to harm it with an explosion. It feels like it may be best to just focus on “you shut down the still; you need to run from that thing because you can’t hurt it.”
Obvious Clues They have a lot of utility, whether you just want a night of gaming, a convention scenario, or even something to run to follow up your exploration of the Starter Set before you dive into the complete rules.
This comes from a person who has the bias of playing a lot of Call of Cthulhu at conventions, but I love how focused these scenarios are. While they still maintain the weirdness and danger of Mythos stories, they also avoid the feeling that “investigators are always doomed” that some people have about Call of Cthulhu. There is a nice range of tone and feel in these adventures. The customized sanity effects are a powerful selling point, as are the clearly called out Obvious and Obscure clues.
Obscure Clues
The second and third scenarios don’t have the same clear examples of when advance time is available in the scenarios, which can still be navigated. It feels like it could be difficult to convey exactly why the PCs can’t access the doors leaving the morgue just using the descriptions as written in the second scenario, and some of the Obvious clues feel like they require the Keeper to provide what the Investigators should infer in addition to what the clues they find say. I would have liked the scenario of dealing with the Colour out of Space to be either more obvious or shifted to the alternative presented in the adventure, where the Colour just can’t be harmed. Even if it doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, I wish Missy’s fate could be assessed with a little more surety so the investigators can make an informed decision.
Recommended—If the product fits your broad gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.
This is a solid anthology of adventures. They have a lot of utility, whether you just want a night of gaming, a convention scenario, or even something to run to follow up your exploration of the Starter Set before you dive into the complete rules. The scenarios are evocative enough that I’d even say they are worth looking at even if you play other monster hunting/investigating games and you adapt these scenarios without the mechanical elements.
While they mention being hour-long scenarios, I’d still allow for at least a two-hour slot if you’re using these for convention slots. There are a few places where a Keeper may want to draw some lines a little more directly, and in a few places, you may want to make sure the stakes and the consequences of various decisions are transparent. But I don’t have a problem recommending this to anyone who is a fan of supernatural investigation RPGs.