Review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario Scream of the Mandrake, written by Allan Carey, and the 10th entry in Type40’s Seeds of Terror series.
In-Short:
One of the only Seeds to focus almost entirely on social investigation, as well as being one of the overall weirdest, and well suited for groups more into talking than clue-hunting or fighting.
Spoilers-lite for Players and Keepers:
Scream of the Mandrake is nearing the end of Seeds of Terror, being the 10th of 12 scenarios, and does a good job of mixing up the formula. While most of its predecessors take a near or total survival horror approach, Scream of the Mandrake is fully investigative, and particular focused on social investigation with a cast of NPCs. In other Seeds the party faces off against Deep Ones, dodges gunfire between cultists and gangsters, or races inflating zombies, but in this one, the party attends a soiree at a pineapple farm. And it’s great.
As always, the scenario is ultra-compact, taking up 6 pages of main text, 1 page of stats, 2 pages of maps, and 5 pregenerated investigators. The pregens are a nice mix of professions, and their ideologies all double nicely as motivations directly tied to the scenario, though the full background details are less filled out than other Seeds, giving fewer roleplay hooks to hang on to. The map handouts are nicely done as always, looking like weathered and realistic floorplans, rather than perfect images.
As mentioned before, the big focus of the scenario is on social investigation, with five NPCs from whom to suss out some clues. Despite the limited word count for each character, each has a short introduction with a few bolded key words, a secret box, and a few quotes that help give them dashes of colour and material for the Keeper to work with. As NPCs do feature prominently, Keepers should be ready to do quite a bit more roleplaying themselves than many Seeds require, and either putting on some voices or adding extra physical and manneristic descriptions would help differentiate characters in the short time the group will have with them.
There is of course also good old fashioned dusty clue hunting, and while not as pressing as other Seeds, there is still a ticking-clock threat. A unique ticking-clock threat indeed, one definitely not in any other Call of Cthulhu scenario you’ll run into. With all this my run of the scenario took a little under three hours. As always, groups could easily find ways to greatly expand the run time, or bull straight through it in an hour.
Scream of the Mandrake is fine scenario on its own for a group itching for some social investigation, and also stands apart from its Seeds of Terror sibling, making it a palate cleanser to slip in between other more action-packing scenarios.
Scream of the Mandrake can be found on DriveThruRPG individually, or as part of the 3-title bundle English Insanities along with One Less Grave and Hand of Glory.
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
The scenario takes place at the Montague pinery, where the family is holding a soiree to celebrate their newest crop which will ‘revolutionise’ the English pineapple. The investigators, who for various reasons are curious about how the Montagues have improved their fruit, attend the soiree along with the four members of the Montague family, their head gardener, and other guests.
The bulk of the scenario covers the soiree, during which the players can interview/interrogate the NPCs and look around the pinery if they can slip away from the reception. The ticking clock is that after the reception the guests are taken inside the main pinery structure and takes part in digging up pineapples for the first harvest. Unfortunately for everyone, the Montague patriarch and the head gardener have been undertaking eldritch rituals to enhance their pineapples, and unwittingly turned them into mandrakes. When the guests pull the fruit-monsters out of the dirt, their screams will turn everyone within the pinery into mush.
If the players do not seem at all interested in investigating during the soiree and instead want to get right to the harvesting, they’ll be walking straight into their doom. To keep the scenario from ending in half an hour without any meaningful roleplaying, you could have the Montague NPCs directly approach an investigator or two to get a hint across something is off about their patriarch and head gardener.
It is fairly obvious something is up though, and the vast majority of players will notice where things are likely heading right away. All the NPCs give some hint that something is wrong with their father or husband, and taking to him directly makes it obvious he is anemic and dazed. Getting a chance to slip away shouldn’t be too difficult, but making the head gardener be obviously suspicious could lead to the players having to come with a distraction, which could lead to some goofy fun.
A shed contains all the clues to discover what is going on. From there the group can figure out a way to kill the pineapple mandrakes or stop the harvest. The most obvious way is to blow up the pinery or poison the pineapples, though creative players could of course come up with more colourful methods. Besides the mandrakes themselves, which likely won’t appear unless things go horribly wrong, the only real threat is the head gardener. If he notices the party is on to him or trying to stop the harvest, he can grab a shotgun and threaten or attack the party. Given none of the investigators are armed, this could be an extremely dangerous threat, though the head gardener isn’t really a murderer or psychopath, and in most cases should be able to be talked down.
Scream of the Mandrake is overall a fairly simple scenario, but with a quirky twist, and different enough structure from the rest of the Seeds to help it stand on its own.
Scream of the Mandrake can be found on DriveThruRPG individually, or as part of the 3-title bundle English Insanities along with One Less Grave and Hand of Glory.
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
