Review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario Do Not Call Up That Which You Cannot Put Down, written by Brian Courtemanche for Stygian Fox’s Fears Sharp Little Needles.
In-Short: A short scenario with a memorable and tense moral-dilemma final scene, but led up to by a largely-choiceless build-up.
Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:
Do Not Call Up That Which You Cannot Put Down is a very short scenario (despite its mouthful of a name), even compared to its peers in Fear’s Sharp Little Needles. It clocks in at only five pages, with one of those devoted to stat blocks.
As the scenario is so short, it’s difficult to give many details without delving straight into spoilers. The set up is simple – the investigators head out on a ship off the coast of Massachusetts during ‘Shark Week,’ and find more than they expected. It plays out how you’d expect, but with enough weirdness to keep players off balance, and has a fantastic final scene. The marine setting is also a nice change of pace for a short one-shot.
That final scene, unfortunately, is preceded by two stage-setting scenes that give the players very little to do. The obviously Jaws-like build up is well done, and the twists and up ticks in tension are easy to deliver, but the lack of input from players is extremely obvious. When I ran the scenario we had a very short session time limit anyways, so I mostly rushed through the early sections to get to the vastly more exciting end. We took about two hours to reach a satisfying end with some player epilogues, as is tradition. Running the scenario straight off the page would likely have taken another hour, but I’d argue without much gain.
Despite all that belly-aching though, the final scene is truly spectacular and well worth the trouble to get to it. I could see the scenario working very well as a one-hour demo scenario by almost entirely axing the first two scenes and starting right at the finale, as by itself the finale has a great structure that can work as its own mini-scenario.
Do Not Call Up That Which You Cannot Put Down can be found in Fear’s Sharp Little Needles, available on DriveThruRPG.
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As written, the scenario is comprised of three scenes. The first two are entirely set up and ‘investigation,’ though the investigation is mostly comprised of rolls that give little tidbits of information that only serve as more set up without any directly actionable information. As far as tone setting and slowly ratcheting up tension, the opening scenes work fine, but they don’t give the players much to actually do. A few tweaks to the investigators’ role in the scenario could relieve this issue though also complicating the run a bit.
The first scene has the investigators meeting with the captain of the little ship they’ll be heading out on and a marine biologist coordinator. The investigators roles can be anything that brings them out to document shark week, so they could be students, scientists, a TV crew, or something similar. As they’re about to head out to sea, an old drunk screams at them incoherently about ‘the eye!’ As the boat heads out they can make some rolls to search about the area on their phones or talk to the captain. If the players don’t do anything on their own, though, the Keeper would have to awkwardly ask if anyone wants to do some research. This could be alleviated by just assuming they’d already done some of this research before hand.
The next scene has them finding a dead shark. Further rolls can determine how it died, but again if the investigators don’t initiate the skill checks, it might turn into the Keeper just asking them to make skill rolls then giving them the information. The captain then receives a distress call on his radio, and they head off to see what the problem is.
This moves into the final scene, and where the players are finally given some freedom to act. The SOS was put out by an old fisherman and his grandson, who managed to catch a real-life sea monster. They put it down with a rifle, but not before it beat up their ship. Unfortunately, the marine biologist turns out to have Deep One blood in her, and she goes into a fit seeing the dying creature, and winds up summoning its parent. The massive creature then demands through spooky telepathy that the investigators must throw the old man and his grandson into the sea, otherwise it will kill them all.
From here players have to decide if they wrestle the sacrifices overboard, try to outrun the creature with their little ship, try to fight the massive beast (good luck with that! It does 18D6 damage), or give up and go down with the ship.
This is a wonderfully tense scene, and while some groups may quickly decide to throw the NPCs overboard having only just met them, making them have to mechanically go through the process of using combat maneuvers on both the grandfather and boy, both fighting back and screaming all the way, can go a long way to make the players feel the weight of their actions. Even more so as the monster takes its time consuming the sacrifices, making sure the investigators witness the whole bloody process.
A boat vs. sea monster combat is also something that doesn’t come up often, and it gave me the opportunity to do a very Call of Cthulhu (the story itself) boat ramming monster roll. In my run, the investigators smashed their ship into the beast, but not enough to kill it, resulting in the creature smashing them into the surf. Luck and swim rolls saved two of them, and one of them managed to grab the kid and drag him onto some flotsam. To twist the knife though, I had the beast still demand the investigator let the kid slip into the water, or it would kill all three survivors. They finally let the kid go, and the beast still treated them to the sights and sounds of its victory. Que a depressing player-led epilogue for the traumatised investigators, and that’s what I call a successful one shot.
While I did my best to blast through first half of the scenario so we could take our time with the final scene, if I had to run it again and in a longer time slot, I think I’d try changing the investigators’ role a touch to give them more control. Instead of the ship captain being an NPC, I’d give that role to one of the players, and maybe start the scenario a little earlier, letting the players plan the expedition with help from the marine biologist NPC who points them towards the Massachusetts coast. This could also give them some more time on shore where they could see more of the drunk, and hear rumours of weird happenings off St. Martin’s Beach – maybe with some heftier red herrings about a massive great white to make them think they really are getting into a Jaws situation. The scenario from there could largely play out as is, but with the players having more agency in deciding when to move on, even if in the end its still largely along the same linear plot points.
While I may have talked at length about the scenario’s first half’s lack of player agency, I probably underemphasized how much I enjoy the final scene. The scenery, threat, and choices make it very memorable, which is what I really want most in a scenario. My group won’t forget an investigator hurling themselves overboard with a harpoon into a monster’s mouth, crashing a ship into said monster, and finally letting a child slip out of their hands into the ocean to be torn apart so they can survive. As long as a scenario sticks with you, I call it a success, and even if I can’t remember the mouthful of a title, Do Not Call Up That Which You Cannot Put Down will stick with us.
Again, Fear’s Sharp Little Needles, can be found on DriveThruRPG.
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
