Review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario Hell Block Five, written by Alex Guillotte and Ian Christiansen, the fifth scenario in the Grindhouse Collection.

In Short: Cool premise and atmosphere, and a couple of very fun tricks to mess with the players, but so far the loosest of the Grindhouse scenarios, making for a lot of work for the Keeper.

Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:

Hell Block Five is the fifth scenario in the Grindhouse Ultimate Collection, set inside a single cell block in a maximum security prison. As with the other Grindhouse scenarios, it’s heavy on the blunt violence and less pouring over books and tomes. Though in comparison to its companions, Hell Block Five is potentially heavier on the investigation than most other scenarios. Emphasis on potentially, as the scenario has the loosest structure of the five Grindhouse entries I’ve run, meaning it will vary hugely from Keeper to Keeper and table to table.

The scenario covers 18 VHS cassette-sized pages, with 12 for the main text and NPC stats, a full page map, two pages for the title and an art piece, and four pages for investigator sheets. As with all its sibling Grindhouse scenarios, the text is laid out non-consecutively, with clearly labelled sections for threats, characters, locations, and story beats separated by occasionally stat blocks. This is a clean way of organizing a scenario that encourages Keepers to make a scenario their own, rather than follow a point by point plot line, but I found it more difficult to work with in Hell Block Five than the other Grindhouse scenarios so far. The pregenerated investigators are among the best in the collection so far, though, with their backgrounds complimenting the Mythos theme of the scenario, and the players found easy hooks to roll with.

Hell Block Five gets straight into the thick of things. After a short bit of narration, the players are dumped into the cell block and need to figure out what to do. Given the setting and loose premise, it shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that it’s basically an escape room scenario. The difficulty of escaping is left largely up to the Keeper, both because the Keeper has a number tools to make things easier or more difficult, and because, again, the scenario is very loose and requires the Keeper to put together the overall structure.

Hell Block Five has a good premise, location, atmosphere, and a handful of cool tricks for the Keeper to play with, but also requires much more preparation than its fellow Grindhouse scenarios. Hell Block Five is part of the Grindhouse Ultimate Collection (or Grindhouse Volume 3), found on DriveThruRPG in pdf or print on demand.

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As I repeated quite a bit, Hell Block Five is the most toolbox-y scenario of the Grindhouse scenarios I’ve played so far. You get a location, events, a truckload of NPCs (a few too many, honestly), monsters, spells, and twists you can spring on the players, but little in the way of guidance on how to put it all together. For some Keepers this will be exactly what your looking for, but I generally prefer a scenario to have a strong foundation that I can then tweak as much or as little as I need. Here, you basically have to put plot the whole thing yourself.

This isn’t all that different than other Grindhouse scenarios. The players are plopped down in a location, the threat is quickly introduced, and then they’re left to their devices, with the Keeper having a few levers they can pull at their leisure to mix things up. Hell Block Five is actually one of the more investigative scenarios of the bunch. There are a few ways to escape the prison, but they all heavily require the Keeper to give hints, which the text doesn’t give all that much guidance on how to give those hints.

The general premise is the players-as-prisoners wake up to find their cell doors open, but most of guards and their fellow prisoners dead, and from there things get progressively weirder and more dangerous. The reality of the situation is the prison is stuck partway into the ‘Nightmare,’ an aspect of the Dreamlands, sucked in there by a prisoner-cultist who miscast a spell trying to escape. To escape the nightmare-prison, the investigators either need to find the cultist’s book and conduct a ritual, destroy magic tattoos on the cultist to end his spell, or offer up the cultist to a Mythos deity hunting for him through the prison.

Finding the book or the cultist requires investigators to have Bouts of Madness, which instead of the usual insanity, send them further into the Nightmare, where they can see the hidden book. The cultist meanwhile is using a spell that hides him from perception, though in a neat way where the investigators can sense his presence, but not directly see him (for example, they might count five people in a room, but when they look at and name each, they can only find four people – cool!). The Mythos deity pops up as often as the Keeper wants, searching around but otherwise not bothering the investigators much.

In my run, the players found the cultist first, but with no idea what was going on. I had the cultist lead the players on, asking them to find the book so he could help them escape. They eventually found the book, and then had a split of opinion over trusting the cultist. Half did and handed over the book, assisting him in casting an escape spell, while the other two stayed behind. To be a bastard, I had the two that ‘escaped’ land further into the twisted Dreamlands, landing in their own personal Nightmares that fed on their deepest fears for eternity, with cultist taunting them before leaving. Meanwhile the two that stayed behind fell in a blaze of glory to the Nightmare creatures.

I enjoyed how it turned out, and most of the players seemed to as well, but this is in no way covered as a potential outcome in the text. I would bet most runs of the scenario will end completely differently – a good thing, really, but it comes about mostly because Keepers will need to heavily improvise or plot out the scenario beforehand.

Again, I generally prefer scenarios that can be run as-is after read through, rather than need to be assembled before hand, especially for small little scenarios like this. It was still a good time and with plenty of cool ideas (I really like the cultist hiding in plane sight and the deity trying to find him), but I would recommended any of the other Grindhouse scenarios first if you haven’t played them yet. All have the same player-first toolbox approach with neat premises and twists, but most are easier to run.

Hell Block Five has a good premise, location, atmosphere, and a handful of cool tricks for the Keeper to play with, but also requires much more preparation than its fellow Grindhouse scenarios. Once again, Hell Block Five is part of the Grindhouse Ultimate Collection (or Grindhouse Volume 3), found on DriveThruRPG in pdf or print on demand.

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