One Less Grave Review – Call of Cthulhu (Seeds of Terror)

This is a review for the Call of Cthulhu Scenario One Less Grave, written by Allan Carey, produced by Type40, the third scenario in the Seeds of Terror series.

One Less Grave Review – Call of Cthulhu (Seeds of Terror)
This is a review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario One Less Grave, by Type 40, the first scenario in their Seeds of Terror series. You can find the written review on mjrrpg.com. You can pick up One Less Grave at DriveThruRPG individually or as part of a 3-set bundle, or through Type 40s Patreon page.

Spoilers-lite for players and Keepers:
One Less Grave is the third entry in Type40’s Seeds of Terror series of concise one-shots, and may be most concise of the lot. After a single read through a Keeper should be ready to run it without any extra prep, and most groups could finish it within two hours if nothing is added. It is simpler than both previous Seeds of Terror scenario’s, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange and Endless Light, though open-ended in its own way. And similar to its predecessors, One Less Grave is also location-restricted and time-sensitive, though to an even more extreme degree.

The cast of investigators is well-rounded, varied despite keeping in theme (most are students, all are young Romantics), and quite funny, giving plenty of ammunition for roleplay. Some of the characters do seem to have received more attention than others though, with more sections in their backstory filled out.

Its hand-outs are beautiful. Besides the detailed and lived-in looking maps, the artist, Simon Lissaman, in particular did a stand-out job on three particular pieces that are the backbone of the whole scenario. They fit the setting and theme just perfectly. As an aside about setting and theme, I appreciate the extra details throughout the text, including hyperlinks to Wikipedia pages explaining specific terms. My favourite scenarios are ones that focus on some place, time, or idea that I don’t know much about, and take some extra page space to explain that theme. If books, movies, and videogames can educate while also being entertaining, so can RPGs.

If your group is looking for an exciting two hour game quite different from the usual Call of Cthulhu scenario, One Less Grave will not do you wrong. Even better, save it for a Halloween game. Find some pictures of spooky churches, set up a speaker with some particular songs (see spoiler section below), and have a spooky good time.

Before you go, though, maybe you would be interested in reading some other scenario reviews?

MJRRG: Branches of Bone – Cthulhu Dark Ages, A Chill in Abashiri – A 1920s Taisho-Era Japan

Seeds of Terror: Series Overview, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, Endless Light, One Less Grave, Hand of Glory, Tickets Please , Fish in a Barrel

Miskatonic Repository: Dossier 1 – The Maw

Chaosium: Amidst the Ancient Trees, Gateways to Terror Overview, The Necropolis, What’s in the Cellar?, The Dead Boarder

Japonism: Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?

Bibliothek 13: A Cup of Horror, Erich!

Spoilers for Keepers:
This scenario greatly benefits with some additional stage-dressing. Beforehand you could write out some extra descriptive sentences for the walk to the church, the walk through the graveyard, inside the church itself, and in the crypt, maybe with some stock pictures of old Catholic churches if you can get some. Background sounds of light rain or wind would also well suit the ramp up. Once the Danse begins, I played loops of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and Franz Liszt’s Totentanz blasting away to really drive home the frantic and bizarre scenes that play out until the end of the scenario. And boy howdy does it get weird.

I always start off one-shots with pregen characters by having the players give a short introduction of the investigators and describing how they are acting in an opening scene. For The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, it was the investigators entertaining themselves waiting in a library, in Endless Light, it was the sailors working a routine ship ride, and in One Less Grave, it was the group of friends sauntering through a small English town at night. I had great players on my run, and they all fell into their characters quickly. While some of the investigators have less background information than others, I think most groups would still be able to find their roleplaying voices with this quirky bunch. The insufferable ‘Wilf’ (the revolver with one bullet was a nice touch) and gentle-giant Jimbo were standouts.

The actual progression and beats of the scenario is extremely simple. Party enters the church and goes to the crypt, look around for a bit, then the Danse Macabre begins, the dead start jiving, and the investigators have to either figure out what the murals are telling them, or get boogied to an early grave. I absolutely love how weird the mental image is of skeletons dancing about and piping away some jaunty tune, trying to nab investigators and dance their bones out. Definitely not the ghouls that some players might expect in a graveyard based Cthulhu scenario, or the regular zombies that would be the non-Lovecraftian twist in other scenarios. Nope, dancing medieval skeletons.

There is only a single solution, with no way to fight their way out – the investigators must bury themselves. And there is, of course, one less grave than there are investigators. While there are plenty of hints to guide the players to the solution, even more so if they know the name of the scenario, if they are stumbling an Idea roll can be used once things are appropriately dire. Maybe once a PC has been turned into a skeleton, or some are suffering bouts of madness, the Idea roll could be suggested, with a success giving the players a blatant hint that folk in the painting that buried themselves did not become spooky skeletons.

The scenario text does not give much guidance on how to progress the siege, or even how many skeletons to throw at the players, leaving the intensity entirely up to the Keeper. This may be a stumbling point if a Keeper does not decide ahead of time what kind of pace they are aiming for. Depending on how much time you have, you could have the skeletons immediately rush the party, using their Sanity blasting horns to disable the group then gang up on individuals. This party is entirely made up of real chunky boys and girls, all having +1 builds, obviously for balance reasons as there will be lots of grappling in the game, but the mental image is still a bit silly once the players realise how big they all are.

If you are aiming for a slower build up, the skeletons can dance about in the graveyard for a longer time, occasionally using their sanity flute-blasts to soften up the party and let them know they can’t diddle-daddle around for too long. I suggest having every investigator at some point have a skeleton go after them, but to keep the combat from dragging on, have skeletons quickly dog-pile investigators if they don’t get free from their initial attacker.

One other potential issue that others might have that came up in our game was an investigator trying to bury themselves. The party in my game scattered, with only two players actually making it to the graves, but at different times. I went with a series of DEX rolls and occasionally a skeleton ‘Spot the Living’ skill roll, ending with a final luck roll to see if they managed to keep silent throughout the night. I could see condescending it to a single Luck roll, or simply not allowing investigators to bury themselves. In the end, only a single investigator survived the night in our game, unearthing themselves in the morning to find the graveyard silent, and searching around to find only a belonging from each of their perished friends. A suitably dire ending, and I won’t deny that my favourite endings are with lone-survivors.

Notably there are no NPCs in this scenario. If you want to lengthen the runtime and have a little bit of social skill use, one idea could be to add a drunk priest or grave digger who passed out in church, forgetting what day it was. They could panic on waking, or with some calming down and sobering up give the players more hints, as well as adding a moral dilemma as there are now two less graves.

As with the first two Seeds of Terror scenarios, One Less Grave was great fun, and I fully plan on running it again in the future. Highly recommended. If you’d like to read my full playthrough of this scenario, you can read my replay here.