Shadows of Yog-Sothoth: A Global Campaign to Save Mankind (Call of Cthulhu Horror Roleplaying) by Sandy Petersen

Call of Cthulhu RPG

by Chaosium Inc.

The Silver Twilight is a secretive, international order dedicated to the destruction of the human race. As brave investigators, you must piece together passages from esoteric books, shards of strange artifacts, and puzzling letters to discover the Silver Twilight s loathsome goals. Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is a modestly-sized campaign of seven scenarios. During the course of play the investigators penetrate the outer layers of a secret sinister occult organization led by the lords of the Silver Twilight. Beginning in Boston they investigate an organization in New York, run afoul of a coven in Scotland, roam the desert of the American southwest, vacation off the coast of Maine, and explore the mysteries of the South Pacific. In addition to the campaign, this book includes two bonus scenarios. The People of the Monolith introduces the mysteries of the Cthulhu Mythos, and no harm can come to the investigators except through insanity. As such, is perfect for introducing new players to the wonders of Call of Cthulhu. The other bonus scenario, The Warren, presents an unsettling challenge for even experienced players.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Horror, Gaming, Cthulhu Mythos, Games, Fiction

Paperback

First published December 1, 1982

Reviews

[C.T. Phipps · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE SHADOW OF YOG-SOTHOTH: The first CALL OF CTHULHU mega-adventure and one that is frequently compared to its more popular cousin, THE MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP. Part of this is due to marketing as this isn't an adventure about Yog-Sothoth. If you called it, THE RISE OF CTHULHU, as it's explictly about the request to raise Cthulhu from the depths of R'lyeh then I suspect a lot of people would have a lot more tolerance for it. Certainly, that's the games biggest selling point and I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to slap that on the front cover.

I also would argue that the Shadow of Yog-Sothoth has a few advantages over the Masks of Nyarlathotep. The latter adventures are tighter written and have a lot more exciting Indiana Jones-esque set pieces but I also feel like they're more combat focused. This collection of adventures is a lot more investigation focused with interacting with the Silver Twilight Lodge, checking out a failed movie production in the desert, looking for a mystical R'lyehian artifact in a quaint Scottish village, and so on. There's no enormous bunch of foreigners you have to gun down in order to save the world ala Masks.

Really, the biggest weaknesses of this module is two fold: The first is that the Silver Twilight Lodge is somehow rationale enough to be an Illuminati-esque collection of America's richest people planning to destroy the world but stupid enough that they're planning to destroy the world without any real explanation for what they're going to get from it. It doesn't even have to be a very good explanation but "They believe Cthulhu will raise them as immortal gods" or "Carl Sanford wants to wipe out humanity out of sheer misanthropic spite" would be better. Masks did a very good job of establishing each of the villains' individual motives. Cultists don't have to have deep motives but giving them a basic one would be good.

The game also suffers for the fact it doesn't have a great hook to open it up. The first adventure is the worst of these as it sort of goes, "Yeah, there's this Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn style group opening up in town. Want to join?" Which, most players will not. You need a grizzly murder, beautiful femme fatale, or terrified ex-member seeking them out to start this adventure off proper and getting them to try to figure out what freaky occultism is going on in the basement of this group of pseudo-Masons.

Despite this, there's some very good stuff here that deserves to be praised. The Scottish village is a fully-realized setting and I love the Golden Age of Hollywood so any adventure set there has a lot of appeal for me. Really, though, you don't need to do any of the adventures except the players finding out about the Silver Twilight's plot, them getting the R'lyehian artifact (which they may want to stupidly destroy), and then the Easter Island/R'lyeh adventure. It might improve things considerably to tighten them up in fact.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great time I'm having here. Nothing better on a snowy day than pouring over some old gaming books.

Ahhhhhhhh.

[Taddow · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the early Call of Cthulhu (CoC) RPG campaign books, it offers a series of loosely-linked adventures with investigators attempting to stop the Lords of the Silver Twilight from awakening dread Cthulhu itself! I have not played CoC, but I enjoy Lovecraft's works, and am always on the look-out for adventures I can convert or get inspiration from for RPGs that I do run. This was the main reason why I bought Shadows of Yog-Sothoth years ago, because I read how a GM successfully converted it for the Dark Heresy RPG. The first adventure in this campaign, "The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight" is the best adventure in this book and is great for any RPG where investigation and the infiltration of a mysterious cult is emphasize (see, perfect match for Dark Heresy). The rest of the adventures are good but don't shine to the level of this one. I felt that there could have been some better connections to link their episodes together (which a GM could do of course).

Like most CoC adventures (particularly the early ones), investigator death is a real possibility if the GM runs this campaign as is and there might be some frustration, particularly if PCs are killed off in the "Worm that Walks" during their "relaxing" boat ride, which is just a death trap.

Overall, a decent set of adventures with a couple of really stand-out ones. With a little bit of work by the Keeper (GM) this could be a great campaign arc. Plus, the investigators get to meet Cthulhu at the end (epic- right?).

[Benjamin]

How? Part of my semi-accidental Call of Cthulhu collection and my "I need to read some stuff I already own" project. (Also: my "avert my eyes from calamities I cannot stop" project.)

What? From 1982 and only 72 pages, this might be an important landmark in Call of Cthulhu history: it's the first published campaign with a global scope -- what would become the Cthulhu/Chaosium hallmarks in campaigns like "Horror on the Orient Express" and "Masks of Nyarlathotep."

This being an early exemplar, it's kind of naive and messy -- and misnamed: there's no Yog-Sothoth in here at all.

The campaign is seven adventures long, all taking place in the 1920s -- and I will spoil them all now:

- The PCs investigate a fraternal order that is more than it seems.

- The PCs investigate a group -- gasp, the same group -- which is amassing money by sending someone into the future to return with futuristic trinkets and jewels to sell. (Not stock tips?) There's some highlights here, like a shoggoth used to generate power.

- A worried nephew sends the PCs to the Scottish highlands to find out what his uncle is on about re: an ancient ruin; turns out there's a temple and a witch cult needs an artifact from same.

- A Hollywood financier sends the PCs to investigate a failed historical epic film in the desert -- where invisible monsters ruined the film shoot (and somehow impart their dread to film?).

- A fellow investigator asks the PCs to check out a haunted house -- but actually the investigator has been replaced by a monster who is trying to get the PCs killed in a few ways (madmen at the house, shoggoth on a boat outing, monster in the hospital).

- The PCs go to Easter Island to investigate some disappearances. Cult activity abounds.

- The PCs try to spoil the cult's plan to raise R'lyeh and waken Cthulhu! (No Yog-Sothoth in evidence.)

There's also two other scenarios: one where you encounter a black monolith (explicitly associated with Robert E. Howard's short story); and another where you face rat things in a warren.

Yeah, so? This collection really sets the template for a lot of Cthulhu stuff, but it also, woof, shows its age. That first "adventure" isn't really an adventure: there's no plot hooks about why the PCs investigate, it just says (basically and almost literally) that the PCs should join the organization and start snooping around. Also, the GM is instructed to make sure one of the major villains escapes, which wouldn't exactly qualify today as top-flight design.

That paucity of adventure hook is not present in all of the adventures, but each of them shows that they are early works, when the hobby... published material with more spaces for collaboration. That is, these adventures are a lot more skeletal than a modern-day adventure, with a lot of spaces for the GM to invent.

(Also, some of the language in the second adventure is, ah, awkward about how this group of powerful white people sends an Arab into the future, since the cult has many devout Arab members who have no power. Reminds me of an academic talk I went to that argued that an ethnic enemy at least showed some positive aspects of that enemy, otherwise they wouldn't be a challenge. Here: Arabs are just pawns. Again, something that might be worth revising if you wanted to run for yourself.)

The global scope is interesting, but the monster selection shows the early form we're in: rather than, say, have a coherent story with a focused villain, here we face a grab bag of monsters: serpent people, shoggoth, deep ones, invisible servitors, etc. This doesn't feel like an accident; along with the inclusion of two little adventures, this feels like an attempt to jam everything Cthulhu'ish in.

(I didn't play this, but I checked some reviews from DriveThruRPG and seems like there's some consensus: this a classic, but to play it, you would need to fill in a lot of gaps.)

[Matthew J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are definitely good parts in this, but the overall product is uneven to the point of being...well, not that great. This was the first published Call of Cthulhu RPG campaign way back in the early 80s. It feels of its time in many ways. There's too many different creatures and factions, feeling like the author(s) wanted to make sure they hit a lot of their bases. There's some world-hopping, but without a heck of a lot of reason. There's a very loose thread of a story, but it's so loose early on that when it comes to the big climax it doesn't feel earned.
Where it really lost me was in The Worm that Walks, the fifth of seven chapters in the campaign. It has essentially nothing to do with the overall campaign and is there literally to kill a character or two as a message to the players that the game is deadly. What?! F that. First off, none of the games that use Basic Role-Playing as a base need to remind their players that they're deadly. Combat in any of those games is best avoided if you like your characters. But secondly, it's just bad design, it's mean, and it's not going to foster fun for your players. That's some D&D "save or die" BS and it sucks.
If you were going to use Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, I think you'd have to put in a lot of work. It would likely work best if the various scenarios were peppered into an ongoing 'monster of the week' type campaign (similar to the Alien Conspiracy episodes of The X-Files). The first scenario could be expanded vastly. I could see the first scenario being the basis for the first half of a much longer campaign. You follow the PCs as they grow in power and status within the Silver Twilight, only to finally reveal the truth at what would be the campaign's half-way point. Now that they know what's really going on, the rest of the scenarios come into play.
Anyway, I was reading this one with the thought of maybe running it, but that's not going to happen. There are some things I might lift. I really like the chapter Look to the Future. And one of the two bonus scenarios, People of the Monolith, could make an interesting addition to a campaign, especially if you're thinking about having them eventually travel to the Yucatan or maybe if you want to introduce the Dreamlands.

[C. John Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume is comprised of one multi-scenario campaign and two smaller stand-alone scenarios. The smaller scenarios could be inserted into the main campaign as breathers or a change of pace. Although the campaign is designed to be played as one unit there is no reason it has to be. It could easily be played over a longer period of time, with the investigators having some other adventures in between sessions devoted to the main campaign. As well as some new villains there are some new creatures not found in the original as well. Of course stats are given for all of these so one can use at least the monsters again.
The two smaller scenarios are both based on actual Cthulhu Mythos stories, one by Robert E. Howard and the other by H. P. Lovecraft. I have read both stories so recognized the source material immediately. On a personal note the Lovecraft story is in fact the first one I read by him, in one of the Ballantine paperback collections of his work.
So what is my opinion of this item. Quite good actually. The longer campaign is interesting. I am not sure Lovecraft would have written a story on it but I am sure one of his successors could have handled that. In fact I recall August Derleth actually did write a linked series of stories that formed one continuous story. The two smaller scenarios would be excellent to introduce people to the Call of Cthulhu role playing game.

[Dru · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was the first adventure written for Call of Cthulhu, though this edition was updated for 5th edition. And it is *shocking* that the editors chose to leave all of the terrible parts of the original in place.

The "highlights" of badness:
- Each chapter has lots of clues that are *relevant* to later chapters, but there is absolutely no driver which pushes characters from one chapter to another. By way of example, the characters should *choose* to go to Scotland based on clues in previous chapters. But instead, the characters are hired by some random dude who hires them for some random job that just HAPPENS to be in the Scotland location that the characters should have decided to go to on their own.
- Belphegor. Who is he? Is he thousands of years old? Are there two of them? The module is totally mum on this topic.
- Where is the spell "Raise R'lyeh"? It is referenced repeatedly, but no details given.

I could go on, but you get the picture. This module took *hours and hours* of up front work on my part to correct all the errors and fill in all the blanks. The fact that the editors did NOTHING to fix the fundamental problems from its 1st edition version is really annoying.

No wonder this module never appears on any "best of" lists.

[Arthur B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rough first pass at the "globe-trotting campaign" idea, which shows that this early in the game's life many designers had little idea of what constituted good practice for designing Call of Cthulhu scenarios. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...

[Reece Hunsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently running the campaign but from all the reading looks like a good time

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first Call of Cthulhu campaign I ever ran

[Tamarrion Lash · Rating 2 out of 5]

Очень хорошо, что я не купила эту книгу, а то моя жаба бы меня удавила. Очень видно, насколько лучше сейчас стали делать РПГшные кампании.