(Kind of) Review of the ur-classic Call of Cthulhu scenario, The Haunting, originally written by Sandy Peterson. The review bit is short, because everyone and their dog and their dog’s dog has already written reviews for it. This is more a collection of additions I made to the spooky house.

In-Short: The classic beginner scenario for a reason. An investigation and spooky house exploration that can set the tone for a future CoC career, but missing out on some of the personal connections and roleplay hooks that newer beginner scenarios place more emphasis on.

Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:

There is not a whole lot to say about The Haunting that hasn’t been said a hundred times elsewhere. It’s the go-to starter scenario thanks to its simplicity and ubiquitous structure. Once you’ve played The Haunting, you should have a good grasp on the basic foundation of most future Call of Cthulhu scenarios: Investigation, Exploration, Confrontation. This does mean that playing other scenarios first before coming back to The Haunting can leave it feeling a bit anemic, as scenarios have had 40 years to build off it.

You probably already know the premise of the scenario, and just glancing at any of the covers should give you the jist. The investigators are tasked with exploring a spooky house. And that’s basically it. If you’ve played a horror game or even seen a horror movie, you know where this is going, but with a Call of Cthulhu spin.

Players completely new to Call of Cthulhu will get the chance to learn the orthodox process of pilfering libraries and newspapers for spooky information, going to the spooky place, and doing the spooky thing. A fine process they can repeat hundreds of times afterwards. As I said before, if they’ve already done this a few times before hand, The Haunting might fall a bit flat. But if this is a group’s first foray into an orthodox ‘full-sized’ scenario (as in, not a bite-sized Gateways to Terror or Seeds of Terror scenario), it’s hard to go wrong with the Haunting.

The Haunting is available for free in the Call of Cthulhu 7^th Edition Quick-Start Rules, found in many places. Google it!

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

Again, you can find a hundred reviews, game journals, and actual plays for The Haunting. In a very small nutshell: Investigators are tasked with investigating a spooky house. They first optionally poke around for information, discovering the house is indeed spooky. They go into the spooky house and get accosted by furniture. Finally, after dealing with a spooky knife and spooky rats, they find the biggest spooky, an old undead wizard, bricked up in a wall, and the fight is on. Or they run away. It’s good fun and something of a right of passage for Keepers to maim or kill a newbie investigator with a flying bed.

The rest of this ‘review’ will be almost entirely just additions I made to make the spooky house spookier, mostly ideas nabbed from various comment sections and forums. I do have one suggestion though: if playing with beginners, make the initial investigation section as short and simple as possible.

The investigators have the opportunity to visit four different locations, chat with multiple NPCs, and gather nine handouts. But in the end, they only really get one piece of pertinent, actionable information, and one big red herring in the form of the Chapel of Contemplation. The red herring can be used for a follow-up game, but otherwise the chapel only acts to suck up time and attention, while only further communicating that some spookiness be going on. Meanwhile, across the other six handouts, the only useful information is that Mr. Corbitt, the spooky dead wizard, is potentially buried in the basement. Giving out handouts is great fun and all, but for a scenario this small and beginner-focused, it’s a lot of time spent on very little. I’d suggest either condensing the first six handouts into a single newspaper or library location, or even having a friendly NPC straight up hand over all the information at whatever starting scene the Keeper makes up.

Once inside the spooky house, here’s a handful of ideas I picked up on to spice things up a bit.

• Spooky rats. Have one or two of Corbitt’s rats sit in a dark corner, watching the party with faintly glowing yellow eyes. It doesn’t react at all to the investigators, even if they stomp it to death, it just stairs silently as it dies.
• Spooky reflections. Almost all mirrors in the house are missing or scratched up, but in whatever reflective surfaces remain, like maybe a dirty stainless-steel pot, the investigators catch brief glimpses of a dark silhouette behind them.
• Spooky radio. A radio suddenly turns on blaring a song. After unplugging or turning it off, it starts up again after a few seconds, playing slightly slower. Smashing it doesn’t stop it, only distorts the song more.
• Spooky crib. In one of the upstairs bedrooms there is a crib with a dirty blanket, and something wriggling and softly crying under it. Taking off the blanket reveals a roiling blackness in the shape of a child for a instant before it breaks apart into a dozen scrambling rats.
• Spooky bathtub. The tub in the upstairs bathroom is full of fetid water, but a close by investigator hears something in the water. When they get close, they see a dark reflection. Opposed POW roll against Corbitt, and on a fail the investigator is pulled into the filthy water. To anyone watching, it looks like the investigator shoved their own head into the water. Other investigators can pull them out with an opposed STR roll against the drowning investigator.

And of course, sprinkle SAN rolls as needed throughout.

Everything else in the spooky house is pretty straight forward. Make sure to use (or not use, if you want to be easy on your investigators) Corbitt’s dominate spell. Any investigator that brought a firearm becomes a massive liability, and it’s always fun giving a new player the memory of gunning down one of their teammates in their first game.

While other spooky house scenarios, such as The Crack’d and Crook’d Manse, have a bit more shine while still fulfilling the same beginner investigation role, the Haunting is still perfectly serviceable, and it’s worth it just to let players join in on the death-by-bed experience.

Again, The Haunting is in the free Quick-Play Rules.

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