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Call of Cthulhu RPG
Curse of Cthulhu: A Campaign of Desperate Struggle Against the Brotherhood
"Two Independent Lead-in Adventures, Six Full-Color Pages, Two Optional Scenes. The World Will Be Ours, Again!
Four thousand years ago a dying priest uttered a vengeful prophecy, and now a renowned psychic has disappeared and a gruesome series of child murders terrify Boston. Hired by a concerned relative of the missing psychic, the investigators travel to scenic San Francisco, the remote country of the Andes, the ruins of ancient Egypt, and to a crumbling castle in Romania. They discover an obscure and shadowy group known only as the Brotherhood, who plot a return to power and glory for an ancient king, and for a forgotten way of life.
Curse of Cthulhu presents a 1920s campaign for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Containing thirteen total chapters, Curse of Cthulhu provides two possible lead-in adventures – each of which can be played independently. A separate concluding tale titled The Haunted House provides the ultimate in haunting adventure!"
Four thousand years ago a dying priest uttered a vengeful prophecy, and now a renowned psychic has disappeared and a gruesome series of child murders terrify Boston. Hired by a concerned relative of the missing psychic, the investigators travel to scenic San Francisco, the remote country of the Andes, the ruins of ancient Egypt, and to a crumbling castle in Romania. They discover an obscure and shadowy group known only as the Brotherhood, who plot a return to power and glory for an ancient king, and for a forgotten way of life.
Curse of Cthulhu presents a 1920s campaign for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Containing thirteen total chapters, Curse of Cthulhu provides two possible lead-in adventures – each of which can be played independently. A separate concluding tale titled The Haunted House provides the ultimate in haunting adventure!"
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 2, 2023
THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH (renamed "Day of The Beast" later) is strangely not a module about the Mi-Go. Chaosium had this weird habit in the old days of naming their modules in such a way as to not spoil it for the players. The problem was this also confused the hell out of keepers. It's more a Nyarlathotep-centric campaign and could be considered something of a predecessor for Masks of Nyarlathotep. In many ways it's superior to that module, though, because it is far more compact and friendlier to non-action or Pulp parties.
The problem is it's not particularly Lovecraftian as the treatment of the Beast is more like Damien Thorne than any kind of Mythos monster. There's an evil cult that wants to take over the world and will do so with the help of Nephren-Ka's reincarnation, who is a white industrialist, and his Dracula-esque henchman. It's pretty good, though, and the second adventure (that has nothing to do with the Beast really) is one of the scariest in the whole of COC.
It's tragic, horrifying, and demented.
The problem is it's not particularly Lovecraftian as the treatment of the Beast is more like Damien Thorne than any kind of Mythos monster. There's an evil cult that wants to take over the world and will do so with the help of Nephren-Ka's reincarnation, who is a white industrialist, and his Dracula-esque henchman. It's pretty good, though, and the second adventure (that has nothing to do with the Beast really) is one of the scariest in the whole of COC.
It's tragic, horrifying, and demented.
Read
March 6, 2025How? My Cthulhu collection demands to be read/flipped through.
What? Maybe Chaosium mis-named their modules to throw off players? Because this is not about the Mi-Go, but about an international corporation (NWI) / cult that's trying to elevate a member (descended from an ancient Egyptian priest) to the presidency and bring chaos to the world to celebrate Nyarlathotep.
That macro-plot is played in a campaign of 8 adventures, with two optional scenes:
- The PCs rescue a famous psychic, who has been abducted and stashed in an asylum by his manager. This is almost completely non-supernatural and unrelated to the campaign -- the only purpose is to get the PCs to have a relationship with this psychic, so that the psychic can point the PCs towards adventures. This is a real naive and obvious gimmick, a real artifact of this being from 1984.
- The PCs go investigate some child murders, and find a monster-child in a well -- a pretty simple setup, but very evocative.
- The PCs go investigate a castle in Roumania.
- The PCs go to Egypt to investigate an ancient ruin, learning about the history of the Egyptian priest.
- The PCs go to Peru to investigate the company NWI mining for a strange mineral. (Features Mi-Go!)
- The PCs go to San Francisco to see how that mineral is being processed and spread around the world at these weird temples. Features Chinese Deep One hybrids, which isn't a thing we often see.
- Also in SF, the PCs can go to an NWI research station and tangle with a mad scientist.
- The PCs go back to Egypt to stop the ritual.
Yeah, so? I enjoyed flipping through this and my first impression was that this was more coherent and less gonzo than Chaosium's earlier campaign, The Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. And I chalked that up to Keith Herber as the writer, since he's got some greats ahead of him.
Yet now, writing out all the adventures, while many of them seem like they could be fun -- which is the point of games, right? -- only the well-monster seems really horrific -- and surely you play CoC for something horrific or Lovecraftian and not just D&D against big tentacles, right? (There's an unknowable amount of sarcasm in that: I really don't know how many people want what out of CoC.)
Someone reviewing this (maybe in Reviews from R'lyeh? maybe here?) offered the opinion that this adventure was a little bit more Indiana Jones than Lovecraft, and I could see this pretty easily in a Pulp vernacular. Even though the ritual is meant to bring about a little apocalypse, there's something funny about the end goal being getting this monster into the presidency. Whereas now we know: you can just get a monster into the presidency.
What? Maybe Chaosium mis-named their modules to throw off players? Because this is not about the Mi-Go, but about an international corporation (NWI) / cult that's trying to elevate a member (descended from an ancient Egyptian priest) to the presidency and bring chaos to the world to celebrate Nyarlathotep.
That macro-plot is played in a campaign of 8 adventures, with two optional scenes:
- The PCs rescue a famous psychic, who has been abducted and stashed in an asylum by his manager. This is almost completely non-supernatural and unrelated to the campaign -- the only purpose is to get the PCs to have a relationship with this psychic, so that the psychic can point the PCs towards adventures. This is a real naive and obvious gimmick, a real artifact of this being from 1984.
- The PCs go investigate some child murders, and find a monster-child in a well -- a pretty simple setup, but very evocative.
- The PCs go investigate a castle in Roumania.
- The PCs go to Egypt to investigate an ancient ruin, learning about the history of the Egyptian priest.
- The PCs go to Peru to investigate the company NWI mining for a strange mineral. (Features Mi-Go!)
- The PCs go to San Francisco to see how that mineral is being processed and spread around the world at these weird temples. Features Chinese Deep One hybrids, which isn't a thing we often see.
- Also in SF, the PCs can go to an NWI research station and tangle with a mad scientist.
- The PCs go back to Egypt to stop the ritual.
Yeah, so? I enjoyed flipping through this and my first impression was that this was more coherent and less gonzo than Chaosium's earlier campaign, The Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. And I chalked that up to Keith Herber as the writer, since he's got some greats ahead of him.
Yet now, writing out all the adventures, while many of them seem like they could be fun -- which is the point of games, right? -- only the well-monster seems really horrific -- and surely you play CoC for something horrific or Lovecraftian and not just D&D against big tentacles, right? (There's an unknowable amount of sarcasm in that: I really don't know how many people want what out of CoC.)
Someone reviewing this (maybe in Reviews from R'lyeh? maybe here?) offered the opinion that this adventure was a little bit more Indiana Jones than Lovecraft, and I could see this pretty easily in a Pulp vernacular. Even though the ritual is meant to bring about a little apocalypse, there's something funny about the end goal being getting this monster into the presidency. Whereas now we know: you can just get a monster into the presidency.
December 23, 2011
New edition of Fungi from Yuggoth campaign ja great The Haunted House -scenario from Trail of Tsathoggua -book.
March 19, 2016
Back when this was new, the cover art alone would have justified the purchase price.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews