Review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario Crushed, written by Phil Anderson, and the 7th entry in Type40’s Seeds of Terror series.

Crushed Review – Call of Cthulhu (Seeds of Terror)

Review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario Crushed, written by Phil Anderson, and the 7th entry in Type40’s Seeds of Terror series. Written review available on mjrrpg.com https://mjrrpg.com/crushed-review-call-of-cthulhu-seeds-of-terror/ Crushed can be purchased on DriveThruRPG individually, or as part of the Idol Pursuits bundle with its sibling scenarios A Stone’s Throw from Atlantis (one of my favourites) and Children of Chaac.

In Short:

A deceptively large-scale adventure with fun twists on a classic Lovecraftian creature, a Norse myth, and a particular horror genre.

Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:

Crushed is the seventh Seeds of Terror scenario, and the second written by Phil Anderson. It takes place in the real-world town of Rockport, with the party heading to an archaeological dig site. This gives an opportunity to tie Crushed to Chaosium’s free intro scenario, the Lightless Beacon, where the investigators start out on a ferry to Rockport. While the scenario gives some brief descriptions of Rockport, as well as very nice map, it greatly helps the mood and sense of place if the Keeper googles a few pictures of 1920s Rockport.

As with all the Seeds, Crushed is a very compact scenario, with the main text taking up all of 5 pages, and rounded out by a page of stat blocks and three handouts. The handouts are well produced as always, and one of them links Crushed with the following two scenarios, A Stone’s Throw from Atlantis (one of my favourites of the series), and Children of Chaac, both also written by Phil Anderson, forming a loose trilogy of standalone scenarios.

The five pregenerated investigators are all good fun, with plenty of roleplaying hooks for players to get a hold of thanks to having all their backstory sections filled out and stashes of flavourful, if not particularly useful, gear. I especially enjoy when pregenerated investigators have connections to other investigators or NPCs, and like most Seeds, Crushed provides.

The opening takes the party on a brief drive through the town, then deposits them at the dig site. One thing the Seeds of Terror does well is pacing, with each scenario following a very clear but organic three act structure, and Crushed is no exception. It does give more freedom to players than many of its sibling scenarios, largely unleashing the players on the town after the first act. While there is a very obvious goal for the investigators to achieve, a more freeform playstyle leaning group could rejig the scenario to make it much longer.

Crushed stands out thanks to its inspired blend of Norse mythology and a common Lovecraft creature, and an interested twist on a common horror subgenre. In a series packed with colorful locations and bizarre situations, Crushed is still one of the most memorable. The only issue is that it may be a little too big for its page count, leading to the mid section requiring either extra preparation or a lot of on the spot improvisation from the Keeper to flesh out.

 Crushed can be purchased on DriveThruRPG individually, or as part of the Idol Pursuits bundle with its sibling scenarios A Stone’s Throw from Atlantis (one of my favourites) and Children of Chaac.

Spoilers follow, but before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenarios, Chaosium-released scenarios, Miskatonic Repository scenarios, Japanese scenarios

 

 

 

Spoilers Call of Cthulhu

 

 

 

Like most of the Seeds series, Crushed follows a clear three act structure.

First, the party arrives in Rockport and is driven by an NPC to an archaeological dig site. They are introduced to a couple more NPCs, then are shown the McGuffin – a small idol of half-fish people carved with Viking Runes. After they have some time to poke around, one of them or an NPC reads a journal with translations of the runes. Then things go mad.

Corpses rise from the earth – draugrs – some of them swelling up to unnaturally large sizes and falling atop a local worker at the dig site, crushing him. The draugrs then wander off towards town. After some talking with an NPC, the investigators deduce that the draugrs are going after more Rockport locals, who are said to have the ‘blood of the sea’ in them. Hint hint Deep Ones hint hint.

This starts the bulk of the scenario, and is where that horror sub genre I mentioned comes into play. The investigators need to navigate the town while its being swarmed by zombies. But the zombies don’t bite people, they blow up like balloons and smother people. And the other little twist is the draugrs don’t care about the investigators at all and will at most push them out of the way if an investigator blocks one. Throughout the scenario, the investigators are never really in direct harm.

This leads to the meat of the scenario – navigating Rockport to a rock crusher to destroy the idol, which the investigators likely soon intuited is the source of the draugrs. Depending on the players, this could take very little time at all. The investigators are treated to scenes of townsfolk in peril and can intervene if their consciouses get the better of them. If they don’t, then its just an uncomfortable stroll or drive to the rock crusher amidst the carnage. Likewise, the climax of crushing the idol could be a frantic defense of a few townsfolk while a generator powers up, or the investigators twiddling their thumbs then crushing the rock.

The players in my run did very much try to aid the townsfolk, resulting in their little band dragging along a handful of refugees, and therefore having more and more draugrs stumbling after them. The finale had them desperately trying to fight off the inflated draugrs as the generator started up, and just managing to crush the idol before a draugr toppled on top of a child they’d saved earlier.

Crushed has two points that may need to be considered before running it, though only one could really be considered a weak point.

The first isn’t a criticism, as it relates to one of the more interesting parts of the scenario. You need to know your players. If you think they aren’t the type to care about NPCs, you may need to tweak the scenario to give them some more urgent motivation. I think it could be fun to have one of the investigators originally be from Rockport, but moved away when they were a child, and unknowingly have some Deep One in them. The draugrs would be after that investigator as well, giving a personal incentive to enter Rockport and destroy the idol – and maybe save some of their distant relatives along the way?

The second point is that Crushed does require more work than other Seeds. The town of Rockport is well laid out on the map, but not at all in the text. Keepers either need to go very heavy on improvisation to make the town feel real and give players opportunities to explore it, or they’ll need to prepare town descriptions before hand. Both aren’t really that much of a problem, but the Seeds series is generally all about being quick and easy to run, and Crushed may be the most difficult to run ‘out of the box.’

Overall, Crushed is a memorable romp through a neat setting, with interesting twists on the Mythos, Norse mythology, and a zombie invasion. Well recommended.

Again, Crushed can be purchased on DriveThruRPG individually, or as part of the Idol Pursuits bundle with its sibling scenarios A Stone’s Throw from Atlantis (one of my favourites) and the similarly large-scale Children of Chaac.

Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenarios, Chaosium-released scenarios, Miskatonic Repository scenarios, Japanese scenarios

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