Review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario Servants of the Lake, written by Glynn Owen Barrass, from Chaoisum’s scenario anthology, Doors to Darkness.
In Short: A sleek little investigative/survival horror scenario that could benefit from a bit more fat cutting to bring it to a light 2-ish hour play time, or to give more time for a longer, player-led conclusion.
Spoiler-lite for Players
Servants of the Lake is essentially a single location scenario, and mostly focused on a single building, and with a simple issue to solve. The investigators are tasked with finding a missing person at their last known location, a small motel by a little lake. Cue mystery. What follows is a nice blend of social and physical investigation. The very narrow scope almost approaches a Gateways to Terror-esque scenario, but with more people to talk to and things to look at, and with a bit of the surroundings filled in. Fitting, being in Doors to Darkness, the sort of ‘level up’ book from Gateways.
The scenario covers 20 pages, with three full page art pieces, three pages of stats, two maps, and three handouts. As with all the modern Chaosium-published books, the production quality is all top notch, and the text layout is varied and easily legible with plenty of headings, subheadings, and boxed text. While the quality of the art pieces and maps is as good as the text formatting, there are some odd discrepancies and annoying bits. The title art piece shows a modern-looking two-floor motel, while the motel in the scenario is a little single-story wooden thing on stilts, and the maps are all Keeper-facing with spoilers, rendering them unusable for players (luckily a friendly redditor put up some player-facing edits). There’s also some odd setting issues that I’ll touch on a bit more in the spoiler section, but nothing that would actually get in the way of play.
As Doors to Darkness is aimed at beginner Keepers, the scenario text is thorough and exhaustive, with every room’s contents, every NPC’s motivations and reactions, and as many player-led eventualities explained in detail as possible. An experienced Keeper could probably whittle down the 14 or so pages of actual scenario text into a page or two of notes and be good to go. It could also have the whole beginning bit basically cut out and condensed into a couple sentences of intro explanation during play without losing much, and making it more focused in general.
At its core though, Servants of the Lake is a very solid little scenario that is well suited to the book it is in, giving newer Keepers more things to keep track of and room to flex improvisation when compared to the smaller Gateways to Terror scenarios, as well as giving newer players full agency but in a small location to avoid decision paralysis. The freedom in how to approach the investigation also gives more experienced players some fun options, and they could take the final act in all sorts of ways that could be a nice challenge for the Keeper.
Servants of the Lake is overall a flexible, short scenario that can easily fit into a short convention time limit, a spur of the moment session, or slipped into an ongoing campaign. A little bit of trim could be in order, but it is easy enough to read that it can be largely run off the page without much extra work.
Servants of the Lake can be found in Doors to Darkness, available on the Chaosium store, DriveThruRPG, Amazon, and your friendly local game store if they’re cool enough to stock it ( I’m still waiting for my local stores to become cool).
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 mystery behind the scenario is very straight-forward. The missing person, a banker’s son who eloped for his girlfriend, is last heard from at a motel, which turns out to be run by two older British men. Surprise, surprise, they killed the son. Turns out, ol’ Gla’aki is hanging out in the neighbouring lake (or rather one of his avatars is), and the two old gents are undead servants, kidnapping and turning passerby into more servants, including the missing son. As the investigators are being detectives and poking around, the undead servants are either sleeping in a backroom, or hiding out underneath the motel, ready to pop out at a dramatically entertaining time to try to drag friendly NPCs or the investigators away to the big spikey guy in the water.
The scenario takes an abrupt shift from investigation into survival horror once the servants wake up, so depending on the session time limit and mood of the group, the Keeper can try to stretch out the investigative portion or spring out the servants as they feel appropriate, though the players could trip the chaos switch by stumbling into the wrong room or doing something blatantly aggressive. I think the best way to stretch the investigative portion is to make the old English servants as helpful and friendly as possible. They’re obviously suspicious, but shifting some of that suspicion away from them and onto some of the other motel-dwelling NPCs could give the players some fun paranoia to toy with. In particular, the scenario text has the owners resolutely denying they saw the missing son, but you could instead have them vaguely remember someone of that description staying, but not have any extra details, or think he just passed on the next day.
Once shit does hit the fan, it can turn into a Night of the Living Dead situation, with the half-dozen servants trying to drag away the investigators, which could be especially dangerous if the investigators don’t have access to firearms. One thing to keep in mind is the servants aren’t mindless zombies, but controlled by an alien god, so they don’t need to stumble around and try to swipe at the investigators.They have access to a shotgun, and the others could just wait out the investigators in the woods, or sabotage their vehicle, or if worst comes to worst, try to smoke or burn the investigators out of wherever they’re held up. I also personally find it more fun and creepy to have the servants become completely silent once the facade drops rather than moan and shamble like zombies, not reacting at all to taking injuries, or displaying bizarre bursts of emotion, laughing hysterically or madly weeping, as Gla’aki tries to unnerve the investigators.
As tight as the scenario already is, there are some bits that I excised to fit a shorter session. The opening scene where the banker dad hires the investigators and then they can do some initial detective work before heading to the motel is mostly extraneous. I just opened with the investigators driving to the motel and gave the players a little recap of their conversation with the banker and the son’s girlfriend. There’s also some extra stuff about the lake’s back story and an abandoned settlement on its far shore that has next to nothing to do with the motel and Gla’aki. Once again, I removed most of the extra details, but did keep the settlement there just for the goofy old well trap that an investigator can fall down. It could be a very dumb way to knock an investigator out of the scenario early, but I gave lots of extra rolls to avoid it or prevent falling into it (Spot Hidden to see it – fail – Luck to avoid stepping into it – fail – DEX to grab a branch or root before falling in – Success!). Lastly, there are zombies, failed servants, wandering about the woods that I cut out. They come across as kind of weird, as the servants at the motel seem to be ignorant of them and think they’re still dead. But the servants are controlled by the Gla’aki avatar, and I feel like it shouldn’t be that dumb. I toyed with having the zombies be dumped in the lake instead of awkwardly wandering around the forest, stuck in the muck or trying to worship their god but unable to connect with it.
The setting is also a bit odd. The motel is supposedly located between Arkham and Kingsport, despite the two being only like ten or twenty miles or so away from each other on the Chaosium-released maps. Not exactly a long distance trip that necessitates overnighting at a motel. The scenario is also supposed to take place in January, but there’s no wintery description , and the art pieces don’t make it look particularly cold. Maybe the son stopped at the motel because of poor weather? Having the investigators get snowed in with ice creeping over the lake could be a cool twist on the imagery. In the end it doesn’t matter much, you can describe the weather however you like, the motel (were motels all that common in the early 20s?) could be placed anywhere really, and if the players don’t mind or don’t know, Kingsport can be as far away from Arkham as need be.
Servants of the Lake is a nice sort of ‘second-step’ scenario for beginner Keepers, being a bit longer and more complicated than the Gateways to Terror scenarios, offering Keepers more chances to test their improvisation and chaos-management skills, and letting players have a bit more freedom and opportunities to try out social investigation, while still limiting the play area and session length to something manageable without extra preparation. And it does very well in that position, beating out most of, if not all, its sibling Doors to Darkness scenarios.
Again, servants of the Lake can be found in Doors to Darkness, available on the Chaosium store, DriveThruRPG, Amazon, and your friendly local game store.
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
