Review of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu scenario, The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse, written by Mark Morrison, from the updated 7th edition Mansions of Madness Volume 1.
In Short: Top-notch spooky house scenario, perfect for groups of any experience level, being simple enough for new players, but with enough meat and surprises to keep experienced gamers on their toes.
Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:
While quite simple once stripped down, The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse has a fairly beefy page count for a one shot scenario, covering 28 pages including plentiful illustrations, handouts, maps, and stats. Chaosium’s official 7e releases are almost always beautifully produced, and this is not exception. The text layout is varied from paragraph to paragraph to avoid any massive text blocks, and generously sprinkled with illustrations, character portraits, maps, and handouts to further break up text. All-in-all, as a physical object, its pleasant to read.
The scenario is likely best suited to a 3-5 player group, but there’s nothing stopping it from working for smaller or larger groups without needing to alter much, though a solo investigator could use an NPC or two to help them along. Mansions of Madness unfortunately does not come with any pregenerated investigators to use, but most characters with a nice balance of skills between them should fit in well enough and don’t require any specific ties to the scenario’s setting.
Like the ever popular The Haunting, The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse is an ‘explore the spooky house’ type scenario. And also like the Haunting, it’s very well suited to new players and Keepers, though with quite a bit more meat than The Haunting, allowing it appeal to more experienced players as well. Featuring a larger house (a Manse!) than The Haunting does generally lead to it being a longer session, but if a group can swing it, I think it would make a better introduction scenario than The Haunting. It offers more NPC interaction, both easier and more detailed initial investigation, and more flexibility for players to think up their own solutions, while also having a tighter structure for new Keepers.
Being bigger does mean completely new Keepers may find it more difficult to work with than The Haunting or any of the bite-sized titles in Gateways to Terror, but if they’ve GM’d other games before it shouldn’t be that much of an issue. With a comfortable Keeper and a group of newbies willing to jump in feet first, or especially for experienced gamers new to Call of Cthulhu, I think the The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse may be the best beefy yet small-sized and contained scenario to introduce Call of Cthulhu 7e.
Mansions of Madness Volume I can be bought from Chaosium, DriveThruRPG, Amazon, or your local game store.
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The structure of the scenario is simple and straight forward, though what actually haunts the manse, and how to deal with it, is a twist.
The investigators are tasked with looking into the disappearance of a wealthy explorer-philanthropist in a small rural town by the disappeared man’s lawyers, who want to take possession of his large estate. The investigators can poke around town before heading to the estate, and there are number of fun NPCs to interact with and learn about both the missing man and his mansion’s storied past.
It’s a good idea to encourage the party to look around the town instead of heading straight to the manse, which would cut out NPC introductions that could be made use of later and also subverting the fun misdirect about the mansion’s supposed haunting or curse. The easiest way to do so, beyond outright telling them to explore, is to have the party arrive in the town at night when the law office is already closed, giving them an excuse to stay at the local boarding house. There they can gossip with the owners, getting leads and suggestions for who to talk with in the morning.
If the players still seem like they’re just going to go straight to the lawyers’ then the mansion in the morning, you could have the boarding house owners spread word around town. This gives an excuse to have the three main NPCs, the sheriff, journalist, and librarian, intercept the party to ask some questions or favours, and conveniently dropping some clues the party would otherwise miss.
One small clue that I believe definitely needs to be given the players, and not hidden behind a roll of some sort, is the missing man’s paid for but undelivered truck-load of salt. Without it the players have less options, as well as miss out on some initial confusion.
Walking around the manse itself is again very simple and quite fun to run as a Keeper. The text gives detailed descriptions of every location in the manor, as well as lots of advice on how to amp up the creepy factor right until the reveal. The investigators, and hopefully players, will believe the mansion is haunted or cursed. The truth, of course, is that a giant slime monster lives in the basement.
Directly fighting the creature is almost impossible without salt or fire, and even with those the creature can probably take an investigator or two down with it. Rather than a fighting the beast, the finale is more likely to be a desperate escape from the manse as the slime wriggles and bubbles up through the house. Ideally the investigators will all be on the second floor when it’s finally time to bring out the monster, forcing them to clamber out the windows.
In my run, three investigators hurled themselves one by one out the second-floor windows, two knocking themselves unconscious. The last investigator got stuck in a closet, but as the walls are rotted away by the slime creature’s… slime, I allowed them to smash through a wall and make their way up into the attic. A couple fantastic rolls helped him down, and the two conscious investigators dragged their fellows into the car and sped away just as couple pseudopods swept past them.
Overall, despite The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse’s page length, it is a very easy to run scenario. Its simplicity also makes it very easy to slot into ongoing campaigns or serve as a completely separate one shot, and it can serve both completely new players or seasoned vets looking for a classic spooky house investigation. An easily recommended scenario in an easily recommended book.
Again, you can find The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse in Mansions of Madness Volume 1, available from Chaosium, DriveThruRPG, Amazon, or your 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
