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Call of Cthulhu RPG, 7th Edition
The Two-Headed Serpent
The Two-Headed Serpent is an action-packed, globe-spanning, and high-octane campaign set in the 1930s for Pulp Cthulhu. The heroes face the sinister conspiracies of an ancient race of monsters hell-bent on taking back a world that was once theirs.
Working for Caduceus, a medical aid organization, the heroes will loot a lost temple in the forests of Bolivia, go head-to-head with the Mafia in New York City, face a deadly epidemic in the jungles of North Borneo, uncover the workings of a strange cult in dust-bowl-era Oklahoma, infiltrate enemy territory inside an awakening volcano in Iceland, face the horrors of hideous medical experiments in the Congo, race to control an ancient and powerful artifact on the streets of Calcutta, and ultimately travel to a lost continent for a desperate battle to save humanity from enslavement or annihilation!
Packed with nine adrenalin-fuelled adventures, Keeper advice, gorgeous full-color maps and player handouts
Working for Caduceus, a medical aid organization, the heroes will loot a lost temple in the forests of Bolivia, go head-to-head with the Mafia in New York City, face a deadly epidemic in the jungles of North Borneo, uncover the workings of a strange cult in dust-bowl-era Oklahoma, infiltrate enemy territory inside an awakening volcano in Iceland, face the horrors of hideous medical experiments in the Congo, race to control an ancient and powerful artifact on the streets of Calcutta, and ultimately travel to a lost continent for a desperate battle to save humanity from enslavement or annihilation!
Packed with nine adrenalin-fuelled adventures, Keeper advice, gorgeous full-color maps and player handouts
272 pages, ebook
First published June 18, 2017
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46 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 27, 2020
Perhaps the finest campaign ever written for the venerable Call of Cthulhu rules system.
I was greatly disappointed by my purchase of the much heralded and celebrated 'Masks of Nyarthalhotep' campaign about two years ago, so much so that I ended up never actually using it at the table or reviewing it on Goodreads.
But Paul Fricker's 'The Two-Headed Serpent' while it is by no means perfect or complete, because no published campaign ever can be if it is to come inside a page count, is exactly the sort of globe trotting campaign to save the world I had been looking for. While written for the 'Pulp Cthulhu' rules, this by no means should stop Game Masters from seeking it out, as it simply makes official what was probably true about any long running CoC game in the first place. That is, the PC's are ultimately expected to be armed with more than pocket knives, cue sticks, and .25 caliber derringers, and need some sort of framework to operate in that makes sense and keeps the focus on the game fighting the mythos, and not avoiding legal trouble with well meaning local authorities.
Highly recommended.
I was greatly disappointed by my purchase of the much heralded and celebrated 'Masks of Nyarthalhotep' campaign about two years ago, so much so that I ended up never actually using it at the table or reviewing it on Goodreads.
But Paul Fricker's 'The Two-Headed Serpent' while it is by no means perfect or complete, because no published campaign ever can be if it is to come inside a page count, is exactly the sort of globe trotting campaign to save the world I had been looking for. While written for the 'Pulp Cthulhu' rules, this by no means should stop Game Masters from seeking it out, as it simply makes official what was probably true about any long running CoC game in the first place. That is, the PC's are ultimately expected to be armed with more than pocket knives, cue sticks, and .25 caliber derringers, and need some sort of framework to operate in that makes sense and keeps the focus on the game fighting the mythos, and not avoiding legal trouble with well meaning local authorities.
Highly recommended.
January 22, 2020
The campaign book really captures the pulp genre in all aspects: the plot, the settings, the characters, the action, deadly plagues, exotic poisons, weird science, mind-controlled dinosaurs - it's all over the top and very action-oriented. At the same time, there's a lot of truly horrific stuff going on - or, going to be going on if not stopped by the heroes. Just the write-up of the Serpent People's "environmental suits" was one of the creepier things I've read in a while. Hint: They're PEOPLE! The adventures are linked together and have a good bit of "flex" based on game results and the personal preferences of the Keeper and Players. The globe-trotting is epic: jungles, volcanoes, big cities, small towns, lost worlds... you name it - but it all holds together. The hints for the Keeper are excellent as well, made to maximize action and excitement - not so much at the expense of role-playing, but designed to keep the action going. For example, the author suggests that when a player blows an investigation role, that you still let them get the information, but that they are caught by the enemy's goons. The chances of the characters standing around saying "I dunno. What do we do now?" are very low. On the other hand, the odds of them running away screaming "Aaiieee!!! What did we DO?" may be fairly high.
March 26, 2021
Definitivamente empachado de los Mitos, a pesar de que esta campaña podría ser de cualquier cosa porque su vinculación con estos es puntual: pesa más el Pulp que el Cthulhu. No aclaro conmigo mismo si esto ha hecho que me costara tanto terminarla y que, contra mi parecer inicial, no me apetezca dirigirla. Por otra parte, ¡quién tuviera personas comprometidas para ello con las que sincronizar agendas!
De cualquier manera, mejor a mis ojos que Un fuego frío en el abismo: una campaña desafiante para Pulp Cthulhu.
De cualquier manera, mejor a mis ojos que Un fuego frío en el abismo: una campaña desafiante para Pulp Cthulhu.
October 5, 2022
Finally having finished this campaign I can finally review it. This review will be brief and spoiler free. The campaign took my group of 4 players about 5 months (around 90 hours) to complete. The adventures flowed together fairly well, the villains were fleshed out and interesting, and the plot was suitably pulp. There is not extensive information about the numerous world hopping locations,but there is enough for a pulp campaign. The adventures are varied and mostly of intrigue and excitement. There were moments I couldn't wait to get to, and for the most part they were as good as I had hoped. The campaign was overall very satisfying.
There are some negative points, however. There is one adventure that really doesn't seem to fit into the plot at all, and I ended up skipping it,inserting a couple of other small Chaosium adventures in its place. The largest gripe I have is the utter lack of travel times. There is a calendar and at times a timetable,but every single time I had to research 1930 travel times myself. I also had to write my own descriptions for a couple of important npc's. Some of the connections between adventures or connections of adventures to the main plot were difficult to decipher. There are also a lot of times when the PC's can easily ignore huge portions of the story and locations, and it takes some work to keep the PC's on track. The final climatic adventure is unfortunately the most difficult to run, and the most linear and lazily written.
Overall I do highly recommend the campaign as probably the best pulp campaign I have ever run. Just be aware there are a lot of moving parts, sometimes weakly explained, and the Keeper has to do a lot of the heavy lifting at times.
There are some negative points, however. There is one adventure that really doesn't seem to fit into the plot at all, and I ended up skipping it,inserting a couple of other small Chaosium adventures in its place. The largest gripe I have is the utter lack of travel times. There is a calendar and at times a timetable,but every single time I had to research 1930 travel times myself. I also had to write my own descriptions for a couple of important npc's. Some of the connections between adventures or connections of adventures to the main plot were difficult to decipher. There are also a lot of times when the PC's can easily ignore huge portions of the story and locations, and it takes some work to keep the PC's on track. The final climatic adventure is unfortunately the most difficult to run, and the most linear and lazily written.
Overall I do highly recommend the campaign as probably the best pulp campaign I have ever run. Just be aware there are a lot of moving parts, sometimes weakly explained, and the Keeper has to do a lot of the heavy lifting at times.
June 2, 2018
I'm firmly of the opunion that you can never have too many Call of Cthulhu scenarios, especially for the variant settings for that rules-set.
The Two Headed Serpent is a globe-spanning campaign designed for the Pulp Cthulhu rules/setting, and it captures that feel and aesthetic quite well.
The natural comparison for this module is to "Masks of Nyarlathotep": sure, both are globe-spanning quests, but the tone makes them fundamentally different, and that's a good thing! (Though I have a soft spot for Purist CoC, at times I think my players would occasionally prefer something a bit more "heroic".)
That said, with the release of 7E, and some quality new supplements and settings, I think CoC is experiencing an upswing we haven't seen in quite some time!
The Two Headed Serpent is a globe-spanning campaign designed for the Pulp Cthulhu rules/setting, and it captures that feel and aesthetic quite well.
The natural comparison for this module is to "Masks of Nyarlathotep": sure, both are globe-spanning quests, but the tone makes them fundamentally different, and that's a good thing! (Though I have a soft spot for Purist CoC, at times I think my players would occasionally prefer something a bit more "heroic".)
That said, with the release of 7E, and some quality new supplements and settings, I think CoC is experiencing an upswing we haven't seen in quite some time!
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December 8, 2022In RPGs, there is a pretty broad consensus that the best published campaign is Call of Cthulhu's MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP, a world-spanning adventure with a pretty high bodycount and mind-shattering terror. I've not read it, but it's on my shelf, so take that into account when I say:
I really liked this book, maybe even loved it at times, but this feels firmly in the Pulp Cthulhu mode.
Chaosium really set themselves up for success when they published 7th edition by setting out rules for straight/purist Cthulhu (you fight an unwinnable war against a universe that does not care about you) and pulp mode Cthulhu (zip! pow! fire the lightning gun at the monster from out of time!). Lovecraft was writing in the pulps and some of his stuff isn't the sort of heady philosophical nihilism that French philosophers love him for. Some of it is good magician vs. bad magician zip! pow! stuff.
And The Two-Headed Serpent book clearly knows what mode it's in: characters will travel from abandoned temples in South America to dinosaur-guarded alien laboratories in Africa to the lost land of Mu, all in an attempt to stop three snake cults from destroying the world in their own particular fashions. I will say, I bounced off this book the first time I picked it up because it starts with a pretty lengthy backstory about the Serpent Person empire and the crazy research they were doing before they fell, when really, you could sum it up in that one sentence.
But once that's out of the way, this campaign is real smart about the story it's trying to tell: you work for a medical nonprofit called Caduceus, and things are not as they seem. So first you find yourself engaging in missions for Caduceus as they fight off the serpent people, and then, well, let's just say that one of the things about serpent people is that they are good at pretending to be humans. So you get one episode that's about curing a mystical disease that connects Borneo to the Dreamlands, and then you get an episode about a town where a snake-handling preacher seems to know more about the horrid snake god Yig than he should, and then you get an episode where the Mafia in NY thinks you're trying to muscle in on their drug trade, and then you get an episode where you're being treated in a sanitarium by a doctor who may or may not be human and may or may not be sane, etc.
There are a few chapters that feel... maybe less interesting and different than others. I mean, there's a lot of "investigate this ancient Serpent Person laboratory before X happens," but mostly I like them. What really makes this extra fun for me, however, is the care that went into setting this up for the GM, with playtest notes and help and discussions of how to handle which parts of the plot get totally derailed. Like, there are potentially three factions (and lots of double-dealing -- hence, the multiple meanings of "two-headed serpent"), but by the end, maybe only one is left, and the book walks through how that does and doesn't change the climactic battle. (At the end of the day, you still are trying to stop someone from using an ancient Serpent person laboratory before X happens, so it doesn't totally matter which faction is trying to use the lab for which particular doomsday.)
So: a solid and fun adventure that keeps the tone coherent; a helpful play document that helps guide the play without tying either the GM's or the players' hands; and a nice-looking book. I'm pretty happy with this.
I really liked this book, maybe even loved it at times, but this feels firmly in the Pulp Cthulhu mode.
Chaosium really set themselves up for success when they published 7th edition by setting out rules for straight/purist Cthulhu (you fight an unwinnable war against a universe that does not care about you) and pulp mode Cthulhu (zip! pow! fire the lightning gun at the monster from out of time!). Lovecraft was writing in the pulps and some of his stuff isn't the sort of heady philosophical nihilism that French philosophers love him for. Some of it is good magician vs. bad magician zip! pow! stuff.
And The Two-Headed Serpent book clearly knows what mode it's in: characters will travel from abandoned temples in South America to dinosaur-guarded alien laboratories in Africa to the lost land of Mu, all in an attempt to stop three snake cults from destroying the world in their own particular fashions. I will say, I bounced off this book the first time I picked it up because it starts with a pretty lengthy backstory about the Serpent Person empire and the crazy research they were doing before they fell, when really, you could sum it up in that one sentence.
But once that's out of the way, this campaign is real smart about the story it's trying to tell: you work for a medical nonprofit called Caduceus, and things are not as they seem. So first you find yourself engaging in missions for Caduceus as they fight off the serpent people, and then, well, let's just say that one of the things about serpent people is that they are good at pretending to be humans. So you get one episode that's about curing a mystical disease that connects Borneo to the Dreamlands, and then you get an episode about a town where a snake-handling preacher seems to know more about the horrid snake god Yig than he should, and then you get an episode where the Mafia in NY thinks you're trying to muscle in on their drug trade, and then you get an episode where you're being treated in a sanitarium by a doctor who may or may not be human and may or may not be sane, etc.
There are a few chapters that feel... maybe less interesting and different than others. I mean, there's a lot of "investigate this ancient Serpent Person laboratory before X happens," but mostly I like them. What really makes this extra fun for me, however, is the care that went into setting this up for the GM, with playtest notes and help and discussions of how to handle which parts of the plot get totally derailed. Like, there are potentially three factions (and lots of double-dealing -- hence, the multiple meanings of "two-headed serpent"), but by the end, maybe only one is left, and the book walks through how that does and doesn't change the climactic battle. (At the end of the day, you still are trying to stop someone from using an ancient Serpent person laboratory before X happens, so it doesn't totally matter which faction is trying to use the lab for which particular doomsday.)
So: a solid and fun adventure that keeps the tone coherent; a helpful play document that helps guide the play without tying either the GM's or the players' hands; and a nice-looking book. I'm pretty happy with this.
January 25, 2022
Overall, I'd have to say 2HS is not my favorite CoC campaign; quality-wise, it falls in the middle tier of Chaosium's current offerings. This is a testimony to how fantastic the usual Coc scenarios they publish is, not a huge indictment of this one, which is just sort of...fine.
It was the first dedicated Pulp Cthulhu campaign, and compared to so many of the rest of their line, 2HS feels like a product that got rushed out a bit so they could get a Big Pulp Campaign published; some things could be tightened up or detailed more, a lot of handouts that should be there aren't, etc. Some larger and more complex campaigns are ironically easier to run - like Masks of Nyarlahotep (which is also very pulpy, just not a "dedicated" pulp adventure). Handouts of the type that are routinely included in other published scenarios, for example, are mentioned but not included. It's hard to resist the idea that they just didn't have time to create and put them in.
Another month at the editors (the New York section is both confusing and confusingly placed), a few more handouts included, and the like would have slipped it into that top-tier; the basic storyline is good. A++ for letting us give the serpent people nunchaku, too, heh.
It was the first dedicated Pulp Cthulhu campaign, and compared to so many of the rest of their line, 2HS feels like a product that got rushed out a bit so they could get a Big Pulp Campaign published; some things could be tightened up or detailed more, a lot of handouts that should be there aren't, etc. Some larger and more complex campaigns are ironically easier to run - like Masks of Nyarlahotep (which is also very pulpy, just not a "dedicated" pulp adventure). Handouts of the type that are routinely included in other published scenarios, for example, are mentioned but not included. It's hard to resist the idea that they just didn't have time to create and put them in.
Another month at the editors (the New York section is both confusing and confusingly placed), a few more handouts included, and the like would have slipped it into that top-tier; the basic storyline is good. A++ for letting us give the serpent people nunchaku, too, heh.
August 4, 2025
This is the fifteenth book I've read from the lot my friend sent me.
This book is a long campaign specifically geared for Call of Cthulhu's Pulp ruleset. The campaign follows the players as find themselves caught in the middle of an ancient war between three factions of ancient snake-people who each worship a different, equally horrible Great Old One as they try to prevent each of them from taking over the world.
This is just a fun module. It fits the Pulp rules and aesthetic really well (especially in the chapter where one faction of the snake-people ride tyrannosaurs to protect a facility of theirs hidden deep in a jungle), it has a wide variety of locales and the story flows pretty well. It took a hit in my rating because this is, to date, the most poorly edited RPG book I've ever read. In addition to the numerous typos, the same box containing some parenthetical information was printed twice within about two pages of each other, which is something I've never seen before. Great book but it very much needs a cleaned up reprint.
This book is a long campaign specifically geared for Call of Cthulhu's Pulp ruleset. The campaign follows the players as find themselves caught in the middle of an ancient war between three factions of ancient snake-people who each worship a different, equally horrible Great Old One as they try to prevent each of them from taking over the world.
This is just a fun module. It fits the Pulp rules and aesthetic really well (especially in the chapter where one faction of the snake-people ride tyrannosaurs to protect a facility of theirs hidden deep in a jungle), it has a wide variety of locales and the story flows pretty well. It took a hit in my rating because this is, to date, the most poorly edited RPG book I've ever read. In addition to the numerous typos, the same box containing some parenthetical information was printed twice within about two pages of each other, which is something I've never seen before. Great book but it very much needs a cleaned up reprint.
August 12, 2018
Review based on reading the book, have not run it (yet).
The Two-headed serpent is a campaign for the Pulp Cthulhu system, and it shows. It might be possible to run it based on the normal rules, but that will eat up investigators and spit them out. I think quite a few chapters in this book will be hard enough with the pulp rules. Expect to spend a lot of luck.
The story seems to be quite straight forward and is mostly built on action, set pieces and a fast moving play style. Not the normal investigation that we get in most other CoC products. It not as much of a sand box that I would have liked, but I think a good keeper can hide this from the players with a bit of work. But that is what shaves of the fifth star. Other the that its a really good book. Its well written, easy to understand, gives you a lot of ideas on what to do and, as all of Chaosiums CoC products of late, its a beautiful book.
I highly recomend it if you are interested in playing full Indiana Jones CoC. Good stuff.
The Two-headed serpent is a campaign for the Pulp Cthulhu system, and it shows. It might be possible to run it based on the normal rules, but that will eat up investigators and spit them out. I think quite a few chapters in this book will be hard enough with the pulp rules. Expect to spend a lot of luck.
The story seems to be quite straight forward and is mostly built on action, set pieces and a fast moving play style. Not the normal investigation that we get in most other CoC products. It not as much of a sand box that I would have liked, but I think a good keeper can hide this from the players with a bit of work. But that is what shaves of the fifth star. Other the that its a really good book. Its well written, easy to understand, gives you a lot of ideas on what to do and, as all of Chaosiums CoC products of late, its a beautiful book.
I highly recomend it if you are interested in playing full Indiana Jones CoC. Good stuff.
November 9, 2025
I found the story silly, and not very 'Cthulhu'. For a DM there was a lot of work to do - information that was missing or in the wrong place, and it took a lot of work to pull it all together. There was a lot of extraneous material - New York, Mafia and stuff like that, that didn't add to gameplay and made it harder to navigate. Some really crazy balance issues too, where the Keeper really struggles to keep the players from getting mashed. The final chapter was very poor - all kinds of random events in a protean environment that would destroy characters too easily. I skipped it completely.
May 24, 2020
Exciting, fast-paced, easy to run.
Thoroughly recommended!
Thoroughly recommended!
June 19, 2024
A great globetrotting campaign that has several scenarios that feel unique to the setting in which they happen. Much like the feel that the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign had.
March 11, 2025
Probably one of the most crazy TTRPG campaigns. Dinosaurs, portals, mafia AND monkeys within laserguns?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews