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Shadows over Stillwater
Against the Mythos in the Down Darker Trails Setting
Shadows Over Stillwater is a collection of scenarios and locales for Down Darker Trails—the Wild West setting for Call of Cthulhu and Pulp Cthulhu. Contained within are further insights and challenges for those seeking bold adventure in the American Old West.
Featured is a three-part campaign—The Shadow Over Stillwater—set in the mountains of the New Mexico Territory. A hunt for a fugitive murderer leads the investigators into a mystery involving odd townsfolk, strange lights in the sky, walking corpses, and the machinations of a once-powerful and ancient race seeking to reclaim their lost glory.
The campaign is suitable for groups of any size, as the Keeper can easily scale the opposition to reflect the number of investigators. An apparently simple task, bringing a wanted man to justice, brings the investigators to a town suffering an epidemic of bizarre events, from crazed residents to the dead rising from their graves.
Riders
Contents
Shadows Over Stillwater opens with a three-part campaign called The Shadow Over Stillwater:
Part 1: Lazarus, in Spades, the first scenario in the campaign, sends the investigators to Stillwater, New Mexico. Stillwater’s sheriff has alerted the authorities that a wanted man, Hank Hanratty, has been spotted in the town. The investigators are hired to the outlaw but, on arrival in Stillwater, they are faced with a situation that threatens to plunge them into chaos and death.
Part 2: Trouble on Knife Cut Mesa immediately follows with the investigators heading to the mesa north of Stillwater to seek the source of recent strange events where a band of Mescalero Apache may aid or confuse their investigation. Tracing their quarry into mountains, the investigators come face to face with an ancient evil.
Part 3: Shattered Earth, Poisoned Sky brings the campaign to a potentially explosive finale. Santa Rosita has been wracked with earthquakes—the residents fear that their town will soon be destroyed. The investigators’ efforts to uncover the secret behind the situation may be hampered by the growing paranoia among the townsfolk. The investigators must delve deeply to thwart a plan designed to remake the Earth.
Following the campaign is another adventure, Beneath the Burning Sun, that can be played as a standalone adventure or as a continuation of The Shadow Over Stillwater. The investigators arrive in the town of Shade in Silverhole County, New Mexico where they become embroiled in a desperate bank robbery and join a posse to track down a gang of ferocious outlaws led by a crazed preacher. A bloody trail leads to an abandoned Spanish fort high in the Cebolletas where death awaits.
A new locale for the Down Darker Trails setting follows: Stonegarden expands upon the Down Darker Trails setting. A booming mining town in Arizona, tucked away in the Coyote Mountains, this locale provides a new and fully realized town in which to base adventures. The history of the region, its locations, and people are detailed, as well as its secrets, threats, and Mythos connections. Whether venturing forth to unlock the riddles of Stone Garden Mesa or enjoying the hospitality of the Ralston family, this new campaign setting presents a community with one of the most violent reputations in the entire West. A place of danger, wild adventure, and dark secrets.
Finally, The Devil’s Round-Up provides an extended adventure seed set in a location that may be familiar to long-time Call of Cthulhu fans. A roster of detailed characters, along with their foul agendas are described, ready to darken the day of any investigators who venture into doom-haunted Castronegro.
Poker
That’s plenty of adventure to keep your gaming group immersed in the horrors and terrors of the Old West.
According to your preferred style of play, Shadows Over Stillwater can be played using classic Call of Cthulhu, but can also be enjoyed with the Pulp Cthulhu supplement. This book requires the Call of Cthulhu Keeper’s Rulebook (7th edition) to play. Having access to the Down Darker Trails core setting book is highly recommended.
Down Darker Trails is a trademark of Chaosium Inc.
Shadows Over Stillwater is a collection of scenarios and locales for Down Darker Trails—the Wild West setting for Call of Cthulhu and Pulp Cthulhu. Contained within are further insights and challenges for those seeking bold adventure in the American Old West.
Featured is a three-part campaign—The Shadow Over Stillwater—set in the mountains of the New Mexico Territory. A hunt for a fugitive murderer leads the investigators into a mystery involving odd townsfolk, strange lights in the sky, walking corpses, and the machinations of a once-powerful and ancient race seeking to reclaim their lost glory.
The campaign is suitable for groups of any size, as the Keeper can easily scale the opposition to reflect the number of investigators. An apparently simple task, bringing a wanted man to justice, brings the investigators to a town suffering an epidemic of bizarre events, from crazed residents to the dead rising from their graves.
Riders
Contents
Shadows Over Stillwater opens with a three-part campaign called The Shadow Over Stillwater:
Part 1: Lazarus, in Spades, the first scenario in the campaign, sends the investigators to Stillwater, New Mexico. Stillwater’s sheriff has alerted the authorities that a wanted man, Hank Hanratty, has been spotted in the town. The investigators are hired to the outlaw but, on arrival in Stillwater, they are faced with a situation that threatens to plunge them into chaos and death.
Part 2: Trouble on Knife Cut Mesa immediately follows with the investigators heading to the mesa north of Stillwater to seek the source of recent strange events where a band of Mescalero Apache may aid or confuse their investigation. Tracing their quarry into mountains, the investigators come face to face with an ancient evil.
Part 3: Shattered Earth, Poisoned Sky brings the campaign to a potentially explosive finale. Santa Rosita has been wracked with earthquakes—the residents fear that their town will soon be destroyed. The investigators’ efforts to uncover the secret behind the situation may be hampered by the growing paranoia among the townsfolk. The investigators must delve deeply to thwart a plan designed to remake the Earth.
Following the campaign is another adventure, Beneath the Burning Sun, that can be played as a standalone adventure or as a continuation of The Shadow Over Stillwater. The investigators arrive in the town of Shade in Silverhole County, New Mexico where they become embroiled in a desperate bank robbery and join a posse to track down a gang of ferocious outlaws led by a crazed preacher. A bloody trail leads to an abandoned Spanish fort high in the Cebolletas where death awaits.
A new locale for the Down Darker Trails setting follows: Stonegarden expands upon the Down Darker Trails setting. A booming mining town in Arizona, tucked away in the Coyote Mountains, this locale provides a new and fully realized town in which to base adventures. The history of the region, its locations, and people are detailed, as well as its secrets, threats, and Mythos connections. Whether venturing forth to unlock the riddles of Stone Garden Mesa or enjoying the hospitality of the Ralston family, this new campaign setting presents a community with one of the most violent reputations in the entire West. A place of danger, wild adventure, and dark secrets.
Finally, The Devil’s Round-Up provides an extended adventure seed set in a location that may be familiar to long-time Call of Cthulhu fans. A roster of detailed characters, along with their foul agendas are described, ready to darken the day of any investigators who venture into doom-haunted Castronegro.
Poker
That’s plenty of adventure to keep your gaming group immersed in the horrors and terrors of the Old West.
According to your preferred style of play, Shadows Over Stillwater can be played using classic Call of Cthulhu, but can also be enjoyed with the Pulp Cthulhu supplement. This book requires the Call of Cthulhu Keeper’s Rulebook (7th edition) to play. Having access to the Down Darker Trails core setting book is highly recommended.
Down Darker Trails is a trademark of Chaosium Inc.
- GenresRole Playing Games
176 pages, Hardcover
Published January 22, 2019
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12 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 2, 2023
Solid adventure - and if the scenario itself isn't to your taste, this gives enough details on enough town locations that it can also be used as an instant community to pitch your own adventure concepts in. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
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April 3, 2023How? Part of my continuing read of Call of Cthulhu 7th edition.
What? The standard Call of Cthulhu setting is 1920s, same time period as Lovecraft was writing in/about; they've branched out over the years, with Gaslight, Roman Empire, and modern-day settings getting their own books. "Down Darker Trails" is their recent attempt at a Wild West setting. I've got that book, but decided to read this first. So what is this?
It's a short adventure campaign (three chapters), another adventure, a setting for adventure, and a short adventure seed.
Yeah, so? I'm not crazy about these adventures/locations per se. For one thing, they lean pulp, which is reasonable for our mainstream cultural conception of the Wild West (and/or maybe just our general moment), but it feels like that's a mode that's easy to adopt for "fun." But it's... flattening the subject matter a bit. "I'm the fastest draw in the West" is fun, but how does that work with "the cosmos is indifferent to you"?
So the three-part adventure is about Serpent People (again!) running experiments on the small town of Stillwater, which include a virus to make people dumb and bringing the dead back to life as zombies. The PCs will eventually destroy the Serpent People laboratories, escape a murder charge (which, coming in chapter 3, feels real anticlimactic), and I guess fight zombies.
Chapter four sort of continues the "the villains are trying to do what now?" plotting, with an evil preacher trying to lure a posse into following his gang of outlaws so that he can sacrifice them all to wake up a big monster in a crater lake. I--what? It feels like a plan concocted so that the PCs could have a fun shoot-out in the town and then another at the crater lake.
Chapter five is just a location with a terrible secret: a mining town where some monsters live, but also a bunch of factions. Honestly, if this were an adventure, I might say it's too open-ended or too full of stuff, but as a location, I like it.
Chapter six is an adventure seed that takes place in the town of Castronegro, which is only important because a very old and beloved adventure took place there. So this is like a prequel to that, I guess? It's fan service, but could be a fun scene.
Overall, I may have said this before, but one thing I've noticed in Call of Cthulhu adventures is that they tend to be sandbox investigations, so a description of a town with several threads to follow works really well.
What? The standard Call of Cthulhu setting is 1920s, same time period as Lovecraft was writing in/about; they've branched out over the years, with Gaslight, Roman Empire, and modern-day settings getting their own books. "Down Darker Trails" is their recent attempt at a Wild West setting. I've got that book, but decided to read this first. So what is this?
It's a short adventure campaign (three chapters), another adventure, a setting for adventure, and a short adventure seed.
Yeah, so? I'm not crazy about these adventures/locations per se. For one thing, they lean pulp, which is reasonable for our mainstream cultural conception of the Wild West (and/or maybe just our general moment), but it feels like that's a mode that's easy to adopt for "fun." But it's... flattening the subject matter a bit. "I'm the fastest draw in the West" is fun, but how does that work with "the cosmos is indifferent to you"?
So the three-part adventure is about Serpent People (again!) running experiments on the small town of Stillwater, which include a virus to make people dumb and bringing the dead back to life as zombies. The PCs will eventually destroy the Serpent People laboratories, escape a murder charge (which, coming in chapter 3, feels real anticlimactic), and I guess fight zombies.
Chapter four sort of continues the "the villains are trying to do what now?" plotting, with an evil preacher trying to lure a posse into following his gang of outlaws so that he can sacrifice them all to wake up a big monster in a crater lake. I--what? It feels like a plan concocted so that the PCs could have a fun shoot-out in the town and then another at the crater lake.
Chapter five is just a location with a terrible secret: a mining town where some monsters live, but also a bunch of factions. Honestly, if this were an adventure, I might say it's too open-ended or too full of stuff, but as a location, I like it.
Chapter six is an adventure seed that takes place in the town of Castronegro, which is only important because a very old and beloved adventure took place there. So this is like a prequel to that, I guess? It's fan service, but could be a fun scene.
Overall, I may have said this before, but one thing I've noticed in Call of Cthulhu adventures is that they tend to be sandbox investigations, so a description of a town with several threads to follow works really well.
May 18, 2025
This is lucky number 13 in my journey through the large lot of CoC books a friend of mine sent me.
This book is a collection of modules for the Down Darker Trails setting. Down Darker Trails takes the CoC 7E rules and allows players to use them in the Old West, America's legendary era of gunslinging cowboys, pissed off Indigenous people trying to preserve what little freedom they had left, and black people fighting simply to be acknowledged as people. The first 3 modules involve a story of snake people experimenting on the unsuspecting folk of the titular town of Stillwater. This part isn't as exciting as it sounds, though it gets a lot better as it goes along. It takes a while for the material to become interesting to read and the storyline feels like it fits classic CoC a bit better than Old West. The next chapter is a far more interesting story that fits the setting far better wherein another small town called Stonegarden is under siege by a religiously driven gang that are secretly the puppets of a massive Eldritch horror. This is just a great story that uses the setting well, and I'm also a big fan of the psychotic Mormon preacher that leads the gang. The final chapters lay out another town as another backdrop for adventures, a series of adventure seeds and, as is the case with most books like this, a series of appendices that collect handouts, maps and so forth.
This is a great book that gives players new to the setting a great way to dive into it and a great tool for Keepers that are struggling to find inspiration.
This book is a collection of modules for the Down Darker Trails setting. Down Darker Trails takes the CoC 7E rules and allows players to use them in the Old West, America's legendary era of gunslinging cowboys, pissed off Indigenous people trying to preserve what little freedom they had left, and black people fighting simply to be acknowledged as people. The first 3 modules involve a story of snake people experimenting on the unsuspecting folk of the titular town of Stillwater. This part isn't as exciting as it sounds, though it gets a lot better as it goes along. It takes a while for the material to become interesting to read and the storyline feels like it fits classic CoC a bit better than Old West. The next chapter is a far more interesting story that fits the setting far better wherein another small town called Stonegarden is under siege by a religiously driven gang that are secretly the puppets of a massive Eldritch horror. This is just a great story that uses the setting well, and I'm also a big fan of the psychotic Mormon preacher that leads the gang. The final chapters lay out another town as another backdrop for adventures, a series of adventure seeds and, as is the case with most books like this, a series of appendices that collect handouts, maps and so forth.
This is a great book that gives players new to the setting a great way to dive into it and a great tool for Keepers that are struggling to find inspiration.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews