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Soldiers of pen and ink
Soldiers of Pen and Ink is a Trail of Cthulhu campaign set in the dark heart of the Spanish Civil War
A comrade is lost. Enemies surround you, and your fellow soliders cannot be trusted. Can you rescue your friend while retaining your sanity?
Madrid, 1936. The Investigators have come to Spain to shoot a documentary on the war sympathetic to the Republican cause, but find themselves trapped in the Siege of Madrid. One of their team goes missing, and their literary colleagues say it’s pointless – even dangerous – to ask what happened to him.
In a war of competing ideologies, unorthodoxy can merit the death penalty, even amongst those opposing Fascism, but is this Communist oppression or something more sinister?
Players need have no knowledge of the Spanish Civil War to experience this adventure – their Investigators can be naive idealists, and Keepers can be confident that the text explains historical background.
Dare you negotiate steely-eyed Communist ideologues, blood-thirst fascists and the horrors of an inhuman cult to rescue a friend?
“[I often have] the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world….From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.”
– George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”
A comrade is lost. Enemies surround you, and your fellow soliders cannot be trusted. Can you rescue your friend while retaining your sanity?
Madrid, 1936. The Investigators have come to Spain to shoot a documentary on the war sympathetic to the Republican cause, but find themselves trapped in the Siege of Madrid. One of their team goes missing, and their literary colleagues say it’s pointless – even dangerous – to ask what happened to him.
In a war of competing ideologies, unorthodoxy can merit the death penalty, even amongst those opposing Fascism, but is this Communist oppression or something more sinister?
Players need have no knowledge of the Spanish Civil War to experience this adventure – their Investigators can be naive idealists, and Keepers can be confident that the text explains historical background.
Dare you negotiate steely-eyed Communist ideologues, blood-thirst fascists and the horrors of an inhuman cult to rescue a friend?
“[I often have] the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world….From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.”
– George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”
72 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2014
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May 7, 2026How? I am thinking about using the Yellow King in a scenario and wanted to see how others were using it. Spoilers ahead!
What? It's 1936-9 and Franco is besieging Madrid. But besides surviving Fascist bombs, the PCs also have to survive against Hastur and despair. Because Hastur, in this sort of brilliant version, is a mneme -- not the Dawkins-style self-replicating thought, but the idea of German biologist Richard Semon, wherein memories are encoded, traces left that can be reawoken. (It's sort of a race consciousness thing, but can scope up or down from a human memory to a family memory.)
So in this adventure, Hastur is a trace of a thought that can be awakened -- and that thought is despair, ennui, giving in. So along with the usual game mechanics of a Trail of Cthulhu adventure (with dice pools and sanity), you also have to track your Hope and Despair points. And there are 3 lieutenants of Hastur that are spreading despair -- the Author, the Radio Announcer, and the Kinematographer. Can you stop them in time to keep Madrid from slipping into a Carcosan reality, which might be another memory trace breaking through? (You cannot stop Franco, but Franco + Hastur is worse than Franco alone.)
The adventure itself starts when the PCs -- a foreign group of documentary film-makers -- lose one of their friends. Where did he go? And why are weird things happening in their peripheral vision? (Like when Nationalist/Nazi planes attack the city, they might be accompanied by bhyakee, a Hastur-associated monster.) The PCs can track down the lieutenants and hopefully stop them, inspire hope in the general populace, and try to survive the siege while tracking down their friend. (There's a series of scenes that show the city normally and then, later, show it twisted by Hastur's awakening.)
Also, meet Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
Yeah, so? I just reread Chaosium's Scritch Scratch, and one of the things that makes that so great is that the pregens have these really toothy dramatic hooks with each other and the situation: the nephew who doesn't like the job but feels obligated; the worker who always wanted to be an actor; the former name cinematographer who has fallen on hard times, etc.
Here, these pregens and the inciting incident just seem sort of flat. Which is a shame as the central premise seems really strong for a one-shot: I don't want to track hope v. despair points throughout a campaign, but the idea of Hastur as an idea -- while it's appeared before -- really makes this seem like something innovative as framed against the Spanish Civil War and the fight against fascism. And while "see this place normal and then see it spooky" is a great frame, I found myself sort of skimming what happens because the frame of outsiders inspiring hope made this seem... lighter than it should be. Like, it makes total sense to make your characters into outsiders, just like the players, but imagine how much more dramatic this could be if you were fighting to save your home and not just the NPC you've been assured is your friend.
What? It's 1936-9 and Franco is besieging Madrid. But besides surviving Fascist bombs, the PCs also have to survive against Hastur and despair. Because Hastur, in this sort of brilliant version, is a mneme -- not the Dawkins-style self-replicating thought, but the idea of German biologist Richard Semon, wherein memories are encoded, traces left that can be reawoken. (It's sort of a race consciousness thing, but can scope up or down from a human memory to a family memory.)
So in this adventure, Hastur is a trace of a thought that can be awakened -- and that thought is despair, ennui, giving in. So along with the usual game mechanics of a Trail of Cthulhu adventure (with dice pools and sanity), you also have to track your Hope and Despair points. And there are 3 lieutenants of Hastur that are spreading despair -- the Author, the Radio Announcer, and the Kinematographer. Can you stop them in time to keep Madrid from slipping into a Carcosan reality, which might be another memory trace breaking through? (You cannot stop Franco, but Franco + Hastur is worse than Franco alone.)
The adventure itself starts when the PCs -- a foreign group of documentary film-makers -- lose one of their friends. Where did he go? And why are weird things happening in their peripheral vision? (Like when Nationalist/Nazi planes attack the city, they might be accompanied by bhyakee, a Hastur-associated monster.) The PCs can track down the lieutenants and hopefully stop them, inspire hope in the general populace, and try to survive the siege while tracking down their friend. (There's a series of scenes that show the city normally and then, later, show it twisted by Hastur's awakening.)
Also, meet Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
Yeah, so? I just reread Chaosium's Scritch Scratch, and one of the things that makes that so great is that the pregens have these really toothy dramatic hooks with each other and the situation: the nephew who doesn't like the job but feels obligated; the worker who always wanted to be an actor; the former name cinematographer who has fallen on hard times, etc.
Here, these pregens and the inciting incident just seem sort of flat. Which is a shame as the central premise seems really strong for a one-shot: I don't want to track hope v. despair points throughout a campaign, but the idea of Hastur as an idea -- while it's appeared before -- really makes this seem like something innovative as framed against the Spanish Civil War and the fight against fascism. And while "see this place normal and then see it spooky" is a great frame, I found myself sort of skimming what happens because the frame of outsiders inspiring hope made this seem... lighter than it should be. Like, it makes total sense to make your characters into outsiders, just like the players, but imagine how much more dramatic this could be if you were fighting to save your home and not just the NPC you've been assured is your friend.
December 12, 2018
The core idea of the adventure is solid gold: a Carcosa intrusion in the real world during the Siege of Madrid, that for the players turns into a desperate race to reach a goal while the city is attacked both by mundane fascist forces and by the insidious supernatural agents of the King in Yellow.
Unfortunately the roleplaying adventure itself is a disjointed, unfocused and underdeveloped mess.
The adventure background does a good job of depicting the atmosphere of Madrid during those desperate days, however, and the concept of Madrid progressively merging with the nightmarish Carcosa as despair spreads among its citizens is really good. There's material here from which to craft a good adventure; it's just that the actual adventure included is not very good.
I'm giving it 3 stars because I think some of the background material can be salvaged to craft a different, better story. The adventure itself would be a 2.
Also: the adventure includes several illustrations that mimic propaganda posters from the spanish civil war, but with subtle Mythos twists. They are a really good idea, but unfortunately the spanish text in them is gibberish. Was it so hard to get someone who can read spanish to correct them, instead of blindly trusting google translate?
Unfortunately the roleplaying adventure itself is a disjointed, unfocused and underdeveloped mess.
The adventure background does a good job of depicting the atmosphere of Madrid during those desperate days, however, and the concept of Madrid progressively merging with the nightmarish Carcosa as despair spreads among its citizens is really good. There's material here from which to craft a good adventure; it's just that the actual adventure included is not very good.
I'm giving it 3 stars because I think some of the background material can be salvaged to craft a different, better story. The adventure itself would be a 2.
Also: the adventure includes several illustrations that mimic propaganda posters from the spanish civil war, but with subtle Mythos twists. They are a really good idea, but unfortunately the spanish text in them is gibberish. Was it so hard to get someone who can read spanish to correct them, instead of blindly trusting google translate?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews