What do you think?
Rate this book
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
1 person is currently reading
5 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
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 of 1 review