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Call of Cthulhu RPG
Dark Designs
The Horned Man Will Live
A gentle breeze wafts across Platform Five of Twyford Station. You wait for the ten o'clock train for Henley-on-Thames, for soon the Henley Royal Regatta begins. Attending the regatta is in high fashion, and patronized by royalty. Not only tremendously entertaining, the regatta is an important meeting-place of contacts, both business and casual.
The train arrives bearing a single first-class car, as usual for runs during the regatta. Everyone files aboard, taking their seats, and the journey begins. Clacking rails pass below. A tunnel approaches, quiet darkness falls, and two men die.
Dark Designs contains three adventures for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. All are set in southern England, and involve occult practises in the 1890s. Two of the adventures can be linked to form a mini-campaign, the third is suitable for new investigators and beginning players. Background information about the 1890s, including a character-generation synopsis and investigator sheet, is included in this book. Enterprising keepers might refer to Chaosium's Cthulhu By Gaslight supplement, containing extensive information about this period. You do not need Cthulhu By Gaslight to fully enjoy Dark Designs.
A gentle breeze wafts across Platform Five of Twyford Station. You wait for the ten o'clock train for Henley-on-Thames, for soon the Henley Royal Regatta begins. Attending the regatta is in high fashion, and patronized by royalty. Not only tremendously entertaining, the regatta is an important meeting-place of contacts, both business and casual.
The train arrives bearing a single first-class car, as usual for runs during the regatta. Everyone files aboard, taking their seats, and the journey begins. Clacking rails pass below. A tunnel approaches, quiet darkness falls, and two men die.
Dark Designs contains three adventures for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. All are set in southern England, and involve occult practises in the 1890s. Two of the adventures can be linked to form a mini-campaign, the third is suitable for new investigators and beginning players. Background information about the 1890s, including a character-generation synopsis and investigator sheet, is included in this book. Enterprising keepers might refer to Chaosium's Cthulhu By Gaslight supplement, containing extensive information about this period. You do not need Cthulhu By Gaslight to fully enjoy Dark Designs.
128 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1991
21 people want to read
About the author
David Hallett
10 booksLibrarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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May 29, 2025How? Part of my Cthulhu collection -- but one that is still in shrinkwrap, so I'm trying to sell it to someone for whom that sort of thing is alluring. I read a pdf.
What? Three adventures in the 1890s/Gaslight London setting. Let's see if I remember them:
- Eyes for the Blind: an ancient sorcerer tries to awake a god of England. That part is fun. He has no eyes, but has a bunch of dead men that he animates by using their eyes. That's suitably gory. The final battle is in a gypsy caravan during a thunderstorm that doesn't depend on the PCs. That's... not great. Honestly, I know this is an older book and I know there's a tradition of gypsy caravans in horror, but it really takes me out.
- Menace from Sumatra: I confess, I had to look up the title. There's some fun scenes in here, like a mad scientist who has taken "pity" on his lab rats and released them into the lab, so the PCs have that to deal with; and a bandaged and mangled man comes and dies at the police station has an invisible man-like illustration, which is fun. But the story line -- guy goes to Sumatra, goes fungus mad, brings back cultists -- doesn't quite work for me. (There's talk in the end about what lawyers would do with this, which seems mundane.)
- The Lord of the Dance: I confess, I was really skimming at this point. This adventure connects to the first again, with cultists trying to wake up that spirit of England, but here in a different form. There's a bunch of fun sites to investigate -- a wax museum, a neolithic site -- but a lot of this is watching or disrupting a ritual, which I guess is something of a core activity for characters in Call of Cthulhu, but still feels a little rote, especially when we had another ritual disrupted in the first adventure with the same people.
Yeah, so? So you can already tell I don't love this, but I think there's something else here that bugs me, and reminds me of Lavie Tidhar's dictum that steampunk is fascism for nice people: what's interesting about Gaslight? This feels like three adventures that slightly glance at imperialism or chauvinism: there's something about ancient British spirits, something about Sumatra being brought back to London.
But... there's not enough there there. So, OK, let's take the first story: we have a villain (ancient sorcerer), we have a scheme (revive spirit of England). What would an English spirit even look like for an ancient? Perhaps there's a cult of British admin toffs who think they know what they're getting, but really the ancient spirit is some Celtic Cernunnos, a cannibal hunter rather than an imperialist bureaucrat. Maybe the spirit has already been summoned and is picking off the impure cultists (ugh, too much Norman blood in that one). It's a True-Born Englishman joke, in the form of a horror story. Heck, throw one of the PCs into the mix because they're an upperclass git who happened to be a first-degree horned god initiate -- purely for social reasons, not for racism.
What? Three adventures in the 1890s/Gaslight London setting. Let's see if I remember them:
- Eyes for the Blind: an ancient sorcerer tries to awake a god of England. That part is fun. He has no eyes, but has a bunch of dead men that he animates by using their eyes. That's suitably gory. The final battle is in a gypsy caravan during a thunderstorm that doesn't depend on the PCs. That's... not great. Honestly, I know this is an older book and I know there's a tradition of gypsy caravans in horror, but it really takes me out.
- Menace from Sumatra: I confess, I had to look up the title. There's some fun scenes in here, like a mad scientist who has taken "pity" on his lab rats and released them into the lab, so the PCs have that to deal with; and a bandaged and mangled man comes and dies at the police station has an invisible man-like illustration, which is fun. But the story line -- guy goes to Sumatra, goes fungus mad, brings back cultists -- doesn't quite work for me. (There's talk in the end about what lawyers would do with this, which seems mundane.)
- The Lord of the Dance: I confess, I was really skimming at this point. This adventure connects to the first again, with cultists trying to wake up that spirit of England, but here in a different form. There's a bunch of fun sites to investigate -- a wax museum, a neolithic site -- but a lot of this is watching or disrupting a ritual, which I guess is something of a core activity for characters in Call of Cthulhu, but still feels a little rote, especially when we had another ritual disrupted in the first adventure with the same people.
Yeah, so? So you can already tell I don't love this, but I think there's something else here that bugs me, and reminds me of Lavie Tidhar's dictum that steampunk is fascism for nice people: what's interesting about Gaslight? This feels like three adventures that slightly glance at imperialism or chauvinism: there's something about ancient British spirits, something about Sumatra being brought back to London.
But... there's not enough there there. So, OK, let's take the first story: we have a villain (ancient sorcerer), we have a scheme (revive spirit of England). What would an English spirit even look like for an ancient? Perhaps there's a cult of British admin toffs who think they know what they're getting, but really the ancient spirit is some Celtic Cernunnos, a cannibal hunter rather than an imperialist bureaucrat. Maybe the spirit has already been summoned and is picking off the impure cultists (ugh, too much Norman blood in that one). It's a True-Born Englishman joke, in the form of a horror story. Heck, throw one of the PCs into the mix because they're an upperclass git who happened to be a first-degree horned god initiate -- purely for social reasons, not for racism.
October 19, 2023
Despite having individual scenes that are a little too on rails, they are three scenarios truly focused on investigation, with a nice margin of freedom and strong interconnections with the setting. Perhaps my favorites among those I know from the Cthulhu by Gaslight line.
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