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Trail of Cthulhu RPG
Eternal Lies
A decade ago, a band of occult investigators battled against the summoning of an ancient and monstrous evil.
They failed.
Now, you must piece together what went wrong. Investigate ancient crypts, abandoned estates, and festering slums. Explore choked jungles and the crushed psyches of your predecessors. Follow in their footprints and make new ones of your own. This time, there won’t be another chance.
The world is yours to save… or lose
A massive new campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball with Jeremy Keller
They failed.
Now, you must piece together what went wrong. Investigate ancient crypts, abandoned estates, and festering slums. Explore choked jungles and the crushed psyches of your predecessors. Follow in their footprints and make new ones of your own. This time, there won’t be another chance.
The world is yours to save… or lose
A massive new campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball with Jeremy Keller
399 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
8 people are currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
Will Hindmarch
57 books19 followersWill is a writer, game designer, graphic designer, producer, and mooncalf aiming to write one of everything. He's got a lot of work to do.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 21, 2025
Absolutamente monumental. Supera en ambición y dimensiones a Las Máscaras de Nyarlathotep. He pasado dos años sumergido en ella y es inimitable.
Para la mejor experiencia, recomiendo añadir el material de The Alexandrian Remix. Querría contar mucho pero no quiero contar nada. Es la mejor campaña de los Mitos que he jugado. Jugarla.
Para la mejor experiencia, recomiendo añadir el material de The Alexandrian Remix. Querría contar mucho pero no quiero contar nada. Es la mejor campaña de los Mitos que he jugado. Jugarla.
September 25, 2024
I bought Eternal Lies soon after its release in 2013 but there were children in our gaming group at the time, and I was aware that the campaign was full of content that wasn't appropriate for them, nor could it be removed without undermining some of the key themes. Almost a decade later, those kids are far too cool to play with us old fogeys, so I was able to get the campaign to the table at last.
We've been playing since June 2020 -- with a couple of gaps -- but I haven't been posting summaries here because, well, the authors ask that no details of the plot are revealed in reviews or other discussion. I intend to respect that, although it will make this review a bit tricky in places. Bear with me.
I'm going to reverse the usual Good, Bad, and Ugly order here because -- spoilers, dear reader -- this campaign has major problems, and I want to end on a positive note. As much as I can, anyway.
The Ugly
The book is massively overwritten. This is obvious from the first page and was part of the reason why I didn't push to get it to the table earlier, as I feared it would be a lot of work to get it to a playable state. I was not wrong. The book has around 400 pages but there are probably about 100 pages of actual content; the rest is faff, nonsense, guff, and vast swathes of pointless repetition. Also, there's quite a lot of repeated information, and furthermore much of the page count is taken up with repeating what you've just read a few pages earlier.
There's also an issue with the tone of the writing, which I admit may be a matter of taste, in that it comes across as smug, arrogant, and hypocritical at times. For example, there are a couple of places were the very concept of dungeon-delving is ridiculed, but then we get at least three actual, honest-to-Gygax dungeons. Maps are considered tools of the imagination-challenged, except when they are not. It's a bit sad and almost embarrassing to read.
The Bad
Oh crikey.
Perhaps the biggest issue with the campaign as a whole is that, aside from a couple of places, there's not much in the way of player choice. The overall structure is somewhat similar to the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep -- which I suspect is deliberate -- in that once things get going, the players can tackle the main campaign locations in any order, but that's where the flexibility ends. Each location is a little railroad, literally in one case, which doesn't even have the decency to be a knowing joke.
(A quickish aside: my understanding is that the entire point of the Gumshoe -- I'm not capitalising it until you tell me why -- philosophy is that the players cannot fail to find essential clues, and so the investigation never stalls. To my mind, this means you can design adventures with a rich and -- if you want -- complex structure, knowing the players will not be blocked from accessing that structure because of a failed skill roll. The authors of Eternal Lies, on the other hand, seem to have taken it to mean that they can force players to experience a sequence of set pieces; it's the sort of structure that we all knew was bad in 1990 so it's a bit baffling to see in 2013, even more so in a game line that I thought was supposed to encourage the opposite. Thus endeth the asideth.)
The grand irony is that despite the rigid design, there are holes in the structure big enough to pilot the Alert through that cause some parts of the campaign to be tricky if not impossible to access. The most egregious is the climax of the entire campaign, which happens for reasons the players have no way of knowing, so the authors crowbar in some quasi-flashbacks to get the players there. One of the major non-player-characters is sort of halfway to working it out, so can nudge the players in the right direction, but -- and look at this for a clusterfudge of bad design -- if the players are sensible there is no reason for them to encounter this NPC at all, so the adventure as written has them beaten unconscious, stripped of their equipment, and dumped literally at the NPC's feet.
(I wasn't going to do that to my players, so in my game, the players arrived at the location and did what they came to do, then decided there was no reason to pursue the NPC, and left.)
This isn't something Gumshoe can fix, because the NPC's name and location are clues the players find whatever happens, but you still need a reason for them to meet the NPC, other than "some thugs knock you out", and the GM shouldn't be doing the work that a £40 book should be doing.
What's worse is that the climax only happens as a result of player action. This is supposed to be a final ironic twist, but because there's no way for the players to realise this, it can come across as arbitrary and random. For the GM, who can see the workings behind the curtain, there is a further disappointing revelation: if the players do nothing, nothing bad happens. The bad guys carry on, but they don't "win", indeed the way they are written -- which is one of the good parts of the campaign; see below -- means that they cannot triumph.
Without going into spoilers, for I have made a promise, this is how the campaign works:
In 1924, a cult attempts to do a Very Specific Thing. It is interrupted and although there are survivors, none of them know what the Very Specific Thing was, or even that the cult was trying to make it happen. This crucial bit of data is lost in 1924.
↓
In 1934 -- or maybe 1937, because the campaign isn't sure when it is set (sigh) -- the players go around tracking down splinters of the original cult and dealing with them.
↓
?????
↓
The players do the Very Specific Thing (oops) and must save the world.
Okay then.
That ????? is a huge narrative and structural gap -- again, a surprise in a campaign which has up to that point forced players along a strict linear path -- and the authors seem to just assume that it will not be an issue. In my game the players decided that yes, they would go and do the Very Specific Thing but they didn't really have any good reason to do so, which strikes me as a problem, and the "twist" that they really shouldn't have done so after all is an even bigger problem, but now I am repeating myself.
(How very appropriate.)
The campaign as a whole is a mess of rigid railroading and massive gaps, which is a worst-of-both-worlds chimera I didn't think was possible.
The Good
There are a couple of terrible non-player-characters in the campaign, but they are not essential and are easily cut. The majority of the NPCs are at least interesting, and the main cast are quite well written, in particular the major antagonists. I am reluctant to call them villains, because while they stand in opposition to the players and represent the traditional Cthulhu cultists, they are far from traditional in their characterisation. Each of the major opposition NPCs is written as complex, with their own goals and motivations, and although the characters are technically on the same side, they have more differences than commonalities.
(The obvious approach is to use these differences to turn the antagonists against each other, but the geographical scope of the campaign does make this difficult and, alas, there is zero support for such an approach in the book. That the potential is there is at least half-good.)
The chief antagonists are layered and interesting enough that they could even be useful to the players under the right circumstances. On the other hand, they are cultists, so even if they are being helpful, the players may not trust them, which of course is fun and interesting. The treatment of these characters is nicely done and by far the strongest aspect of the campaign.
I must also admit that some of the set pieces are effective and fun, so while I can't condone the authors strongarming the players into experiencing them, I can at least understand why they are so keen to show them off. It is ironic and more than a little disappointing that perhaps the chapter with the worst writing is also the one with some of the most fun encounters, and my favourite section of the entire campaign is something of a side trek, optional and not strictly relevant to the main adventure.
I also like the general idea of the big climax, even if it is almost impossible to get there as written.
-----
For the most part I enjoyed running Eternal Lies and I think my players had fun, but my gosh the thing is a janky mess almost from page one, and running it is a lot of work. I don't even mean preparation work of the sort any large campaign needs, but rather a lot of fixing of broken parts and filling in gaps, and even ground-up rewrites in some places. I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect a better, more polished, and more complete product for £40.
I would recommend the campaign only to the GM that enjoys going to such effort, or perhaps as a source of ideas, as there are some good sections that could potentially be pulled out and used in other contexts. Otherwise, there are better, and easier, campaigns to run. You may have heard that Eternal Lies is a classic, on the same level as the venerable Masks of Nyarlathotep, but do not listen to such... lies.
Ha ha.
-----
I ran Eternal Lies over 25 weekly sessions between June 2020 and June 2021, with some interruptions here and there. We played it over Roll20 with a modified version of Call of Cthulhu fifth edition, rather than Trail of Cthulhu; I made good use of the official conversion notes here.
(And how cool is it that Chaosium and Pelgrane allowed those conversion notes to exist?)
Also useful was the Alexandrian Remix; Justin Alexander holds the campaign in much higher regard than I do, and I didn't use much of his actual remix material in my version, but reading it was helpful and it confirmed some of my own misgivings about the source and gave me the confidence to make my own changes. Justin's chapter summaries are far more readable than the ones in the book, so I recommend reading them if you're going to try running the campaign.
We've been playing since June 2020 -- with a couple of gaps -- but I haven't been posting summaries here because, well, the authors ask that no details of the plot are revealed in reviews or other discussion. I intend to respect that, although it will make this review a bit tricky in places. Bear with me.
I'm going to reverse the usual Good, Bad, and Ugly order here because -- spoilers, dear reader -- this campaign has major problems, and I want to end on a positive note. As much as I can, anyway.
The Ugly
The book is massively overwritten. This is obvious from the first page and was part of the reason why I didn't push to get it to the table earlier, as I feared it would be a lot of work to get it to a playable state. I was not wrong. The book has around 400 pages but there are probably about 100 pages of actual content; the rest is faff, nonsense, guff, and vast swathes of pointless repetition. Also, there's quite a lot of repeated information, and furthermore much of the page count is taken up with repeating what you've just read a few pages earlier.
There's also an issue with the tone of the writing, which I admit may be a matter of taste, in that it comes across as smug, arrogant, and hypocritical at times. For example, there are a couple of places were the very concept of dungeon-delving is ridiculed, but then we get at least three actual, honest-to-Gygax dungeons. Maps are considered tools of the imagination-challenged, except when they are not. It's a bit sad and almost embarrassing to read.
The Bad
Oh crikey.
Perhaps the biggest issue with the campaign as a whole is that, aside from a couple of places, there's not much in the way of player choice. The overall structure is somewhat similar to the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep -- which I suspect is deliberate -- in that once things get going, the players can tackle the main campaign locations in any order, but that's where the flexibility ends. Each location is a little railroad, literally in one case, which doesn't even have the decency to be a knowing joke.
(A quickish aside: my understanding is that the entire point of the Gumshoe -- I'm not capitalising it until you tell me why -- philosophy is that the players cannot fail to find essential clues, and so the investigation never stalls. To my mind, this means you can design adventures with a rich and -- if you want -- complex structure, knowing the players will not be blocked from accessing that structure because of a failed skill roll. The authors of Eternal Lies, on the other hand, seem to have taken it to mean that they can force players to experience a sequence of set pieces; it's the sort of structure that we all knew was bad in 1990 so it's a bit baffling to see in 2013, even more so in a game line that I thought was supposed to encourage the opposite. Thus endeth the asideth.)
The grand irony is that despite the rigid design, there are holes in the structure big enough to pilot the Alert through that cause some parts of the campaign to be tricky if not impossible to access. The most egregious is the climax of the entire campaign, which happens for reasons the players have no way of knowing, so the authors crowbar in some quasi-flashbacks to get the players there. One of the major non-player-characters is sort of halfway to working it out, so can nudge the players in the right direction, but -- and look at this for a clusterfudge of bad design -- if the players are sensible there is no reason for them to encounter this NPC at all, so the adventure as written has them beaten unconscious, stripped of their equipment, and dumped literally at the NPC's feet.
(I wasn't going to do that to my players, so in my game, the players arrived at the location and did what they came to do, then decided there was no reason to pursue the NPC, and left.)
This isn't something Gumshoe can fix, because the NPC's name and location are clues the players find whatever happens, but you still need a reason for them to meet the NPC, other than "some thugs knock you out", and the GM shouldn't be doing the work that a £40 book should be doing.
What's worse is that the climax only happens as a result of player action. This is supposed to be a final ironic twist, but because there's no way for the players to realise this, it can come across as arbitrary and random. For the GM, who can see the workings behind the curtain, there is a further disappointing revelation: if the players do nothing, nothing bad happens. The bad guys carry on, but they don't "win", indeed the way they are written -- which is one of the good parts of the campaign; see below -- means that they cannot triumph.
Without going into spoilers, for I have made a promise, this is how the campaign works:
In 1924, a cult attempts to do a Very Specific Thing. It is interrupted and although there are survivors, none of them know what the Very Specific Thing was, or even that the cult was trying to make it happen. This crucial bit of data is lost in 1924.
↓
In 1934 -- or maybe 1937, because the campaign isn't sure when it is set (sigh) -- the players go around tracking down splinters of the original cult and dealing with them.
↓
?????
↓
The players do the Very Specific Thing (oops) and must save the world.
Okay then.
That ????? is a huge narrative and structural gap -- again, a surprise in a campaign which has up to that point forced players along a strict linear path -- and the authors seem to just assume that it will not be an issue. In my game the players decided that yes, they would go and do the Very Specific Thing but they didn't really have any good reason to do so, which strikes me as a problem, and the "twist" that they really shouldn't have done so after all is an even bigger problem, but now I am repeating myself.
(How very appropriate.)
The campaign as a whole is a mess of rigid railroading and massive gaps, which is a worst-of-both-worlds chimera I didn't think was possible.
The Good
There are a couple of terrible non-player-characters in the campaign, but they are not essential and are easily cut. The majority of the NPCs are at least interesting, and the main cast are quite well written, in particular the major antagonists. I am reluctant to call them villains, because while they stand in opposition to the players and represent the traditional Cthulhu cultists, they are far from traditional in their characterisation. Each of the major opposition NPCs is written as complex, with their own goals and motivations, and although the characters are technically on the same side, they have more differences than commonalities.
(The obvious approach is to use these differences to turn the antagonists against each other, but the geographical scope of the campaign does make this difficult and, alas, there is zero support for such an approach in the book. That the potential is there is at least half-good.)
The chief antagonists are layered and interesting enough that they could even be useful to the players under the right circumstances. On the other hand, they are cultists, so even if they are being helpful, the players may not trust them, which of course is fun and interesting. The treatment of these characters is nicely done and by far the strongest aspect of the campaign.
I must also admit that some of the set pieces are effective and fun, so while I can't condone the authors strongarming the players into experiencing them, I can at least understand why they are so keen to show them off. It is ironic and more than a little disappointing that perhaps the chapter with the worst writing is also the one with some of the most fun encounters, and my favourite section of the entire campaign is something of a side trek, optional and not strictly relevant to the main adventure.
I also like the general idea of the big climax, even if it is almost impossible to get there as written.
-----
For the most part I enjoyed running Eternal Lies and I think my players had fun, but my gosh the thing is a janky mess almost from page one, and running it is a lot of work. I don't even mean preparation work of the sort any large campaign needs, but rather a lot of fixing of broken parts and filling in gaps, and even ground-up rewrites in some places. I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect a better, more polished, and more complete product for £40.
I would recommend the campaign only to the GM that enjoys going to such effort, or perhaps as a source of ideas, as there are some good sections that could potentially be pulled out and used in other contexts. Otherwise, there are better, and easier, campaigns to run. You may have heard that Eternal Lies is a classic, on the same level as the venerable Masks of Nyarlathotep, but do not listen to such... lies.
Ha ha.
-----
I ran Eternal Lies over 25 weekly sessions between June 2020 and June 2021, with some interruptions here and there. We played it over Roll20 with a modified version of Call of Cthulhu fifth edition, rather than Trail of Cthulhu; I made good use of the official conversion notes here.
(And how cool is it that Chaosium and Pelgrane allowed those conversion notes to exist?)
Also useful was the Alexandrian Remix; Justin Alexander holds the campaign in much higher regard than I do, and I didn't use much of his actual remix material in my version, but reading it was helpful and it confirmed some of my own misgivings about the source and gave me the confidence to make my own changes. Justin's chapter summaries are far more readable than the ones in the book, so I recommend reading them if you're going to try running the campaign.
November 29, 2015
Little text heavy, but original and massive globe trotting campaign for TOC. Great locations and new monsters and lot of twists. I think this requires lot from GM.
February 20, 2020
Hace mucho tiempo que le tenía ganas a El Rastro de Cthulhu, desde que jugué una crónica de Esoterroristas y descubrí el sistema de juego GUMSHOE. Y como todo lo que tiene que ver con Cthulhu me llama la atención... pues bien. Y la verdad es que Mentiras Eternas me ha parecido un pedazo de aventura que me encantará dirigir en algún momento, y que se equipararía probablemente en grandiosidad a la mítica Las Máscaras de Nyarlathotep de La Llamada de Cthulhu clásico.
Como cualquier cosa a comentar sería spoiler, no voy a contar mucho sobre Mentiras Eternas, más allá de que tiene todo lo que tiene que tener una gran crónica de Cthulhu: Primigenios escondidos, sectas, viajes por medio mundo, giros argumentales... Los aventureros comienzan en Estados Unidos, cuando tienen que comenzar a investigar los extraños sucesos ocurridos en una granja de Los Ángeles diez años atrás... y de pronto se encontrarán envueltos en una siniestra conspiración en la que tendrán que combatir contra una secta que maneja el control mundial de una de las drogas más turbias y siniestras que se ha visto en juego alguno.
Como he dicho antes, un módulo muy interesante, con una gran aventura, y si no le doy la quinta estrella es sólo porque a nivel final me recuerda demasiado a Los Harapos del Rey, que ya en su momento fue un final que no me gustó, y aquí me ha agriado un poco el resultado. ......
Como cualquier cosa a comentar sería spoiler, no voy a contar mucho sobre Mentiras Eternas, más allá de que tiene todo lo que tiene que tener una gran crónica de Cthulhu: Primigenios escondidos, sectas, viajes por medio mundo, giros argumentales... Los aventureros comienzan en Estados Unidos, cuando tienen que comenzar a investigar los extraños sucesos ocurridos en una granja de Los Ángeles diez años atrás... y de pronto se encontrarán envueltos en una siniestra conspiración en la que tendrán que combatir contra una secta que maneja el control mundial de una de las drogas más turbias y siniestras que se ha visto en juego alguno.
Como he dicho antes, un módulo muy interesante, con una gran aventura, y si no le doy la quinta estrella es sólo porque a nivel final me recuerda demasiado a Los Harapos del Rey, que ya en su momento fue un final que no me gustó, y aquí me ha agriado un poco el resultado. ......
August 28, 2019
While I have read plenty of scenarios for CoC and other RPGS I thought I would never play, for years I have hesitated to do that with campaigns. One thing is to ruin a couple of sessions for a few hours of good reading. Depriving yourself of years of entertaining seemed a very different thing. Recently—somewhere before last Christmas—I decided I had way too many campaign books, and books are meant to be read. You can see I have hesitated a lot, since this is the first volume I tackle.
This book is the reason you should get Trail of Cthulhu. There might be other reasons, but I doubt very much they can be called “the.” On the surface, is a very conventional world-spanning campaign, perfectly engaging until the very end, when you see the plot twist. That is for the players, as a GM and reader you get to see it from the very beginning. It is not so much that seemingly unconnected aspects of the story come together, more like “wait, there is more.” I am sure it will frustrate some players. I am also convinced they are ways of ruining this twist. However, as a mere reader, I think it is a fantastic idea.
This is the first RPG book that I have seen with a disclaimer asking readers and players not to spoil it on the internet, so I will stop right here.
This book is the reason you should get Trail of Cthulhu. There might be other reasons, but I doubt very much they can be called “the.” On the surface, is a very conventional world-spanning campaign, perfectly engaging until the very end, when you see the plot twist. That is for the players, as a GM and reader you get to see it from the very beginning. It is not so much that seemingly unconnected aspects of the story come together, more like “wait, there is more.” I am sure it will frustrate some players. I am also convinced they are ways of ruining this twist. However, as a mere reader, I think it is a fantastic idea.
This is the first RPG book that I have seen with a disclaimer asking readers and players not to spoil it on the internet, so I will stop right here.
November 11, 2023
Eternal Lies was a bumpy campaign for my group. The players felt adrift for a while, following leads but not knowing what they were working toward. Also, I like the idea of the scenes at home between chapters, but it didn't work for my group. They slowed play down and divided the group as they spent time thinking about each of their own lives instead of the cohesion of the team. I feel like other groups might gel with that approach, but we didn't.
That said, the back half of the campaign improved quite a bit. I played down the elements that weren't working and the investigators uncovered enough of the mystery to have direction forward. They were satisfied in the end, but my group has played 5 published Cthulhu campaigns over the years and this ranks #4.
HOWEVER! We had two parts of the campaign that were smash hits despite being absent from the book. Number 1: If you're reading this review I strongly recommend checking out: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/...
The author of that website did an extensive rewrite on the campaign. He restructures chapters, replaces scenes, and reworks the mystery. I used less than half his material, but I think he saved my campaign and he definitely provided our #2 highlight. It's not a spoiler to say that the story includes some occult texts. As published, Eternal Lies hand-waves these. My players love occult texts and would have been heart-broken. However, the Alexandrian produced dozens of handouts involving occult lore. My players spent perhaps 12 hours poring over those handouts and piecing together the secrets of the campaign and they loved it. #2 element of the whole thing and it's not in the published book.
The #1 element of my campaign is a SPOILER, but I'll try to be vague. Stop here if you are thinking of playing Eternal Lies instead of running it! There's a big set piece scene where the investigators encounter a deity and attempt to communicate with it. The book offers suggestions about how it might communicate, but no strict instructions. I put a lot of work into that scene. I decided that the deity doesn't understand language, but can reach into the minds of the investigators and pluck out memories. It also didn't understand humans as individuals, so for the duration of the scene their minds became a bit blended and they were all experiencing memories of the others. (Mostly they went back to normal after, but every once in a while they'd discover a memory in their possession which wasn't theirs originally.) So I wrote about 15 memory responses the deity could have to different conversation branches and printed them on slips of paper. Any time it wanted to communicate I would hand one to a player. For example: "Narrate your memory of Being Bored In A Conversation." or "Narrate your memory of Being Startled by a Dog." As a result, the whole scene felt alien, ambiguous, mysterious, unique, but also focused on the investigator's personas and a big opportunity for the players to shine in their roleplaying. They loved it! Highlight of the campaign. (I included a few prompts where the deity edited their memories to turn them into "explicit" instructions, which helped those stand out and also be weird and freaky.)
That said, the back half of the campaign improved quite a bit. I played down the elements that weren't working and the investigators uncovered enough of the mystery to have direction forward. They were satisfied in the end, but my group has played 5 published Cthulhu campaigns over the years and this ranks #4.
HOWEVER! We had two parts of the campaign that were smash hits despite being absent from the book. Number 1: If you're reading this review I strongly recommend checking out: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/...
The author of that website did an extensive rewrite on the campaign. He restructures chapters, replaces scenes, and reworks the mystery. I used less than half his material, but I think he saved my campaign and he definitely provided our #2 highlight. It's not a spoiler to say that the story includes some occult texts. As published, Eternal Lies hand-waves these. My players love occult texts and would have been heart-broken. However, the Alexandrian produced dozens of handouts involving occult lore. My players spent perhaps 12 hours poring over those handouts and piecing together the secrets of the campaign and they loved it. #2 element of the whole thing and it's not in the published book.
The #1 element of my campaign is a SPOILER, but I'll try to be vague. Stop here if you are thinking of playing Eternal Lies instead of running it! There's a big set piece scene where the investigators encounter a deity and attempt to communicate with it. The book offers suggestions about how it might communicate, but no strict instructions. I put a lot of work into that scene. I decided that the deity doesn't understand language, but can reach into the minds of the investigators and pluck out memories. It also didn't understand humans as individuals, so for the duration of the scene their minds became a bit blended and they were all experiencing memories of the others. (Mostly they went back to normal after, but every once in a while they'd discover a memory in their possession which wasn't theirs originally.) So I wrote about 15 memory responses the deity could have to different conversation branches and printed them on slips of paper. Any time it wanted to communicate I would hand one to a player. For example: "Narrate your memory of Being Bored In A Conversation." or "Narrate your memory of Being Startled by a Dog." As a result, the whole scene felt alien, ambiguous, mysterious, unique, but also focused on the investigator's personas and a big opportunity for the players to shine in their roleplaying. They loved it! Highlight of the campaign. (I included a few prompts where the deity edited their memories to turn them into "explicit" instructions, which helped those stand out and also be weird and freaky.)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews