“Shadows of Leningrad” – my first foray into creating a “Call of Cthulhu” adventure for publication – was a challenge to write.
It also was a hell of a lot of fun.
As I’ve noted before on this blog, “Call of Cthulhu” ranks as one of my favorite games of all time. When the Age of Cthulhu line was announced by Goodman Games, I immediately contacted the good folks there, and let them know that I’d be very interested in writing an adventure for the line. One thing led to another from there, and … wham. From there, the ball started rolling on “Shadows”.
Writing “Shadows” proved to be much more difficult than any other adventure I’d previously written. One of the main reasons for this was because I wanted to make this a non-linear adventure. For the most part, the traditional fantasy adventures I’ve previously written for publication were very linear – players (and their characters) were expected to go from point A to point B to point C during the adventure, in that specific order, without much room for deviation. In a fantasy adventure, that’s simple enough to do – especially when you make the environment of the adventure a castle, or a series of underground caverns, where you can better control all of the chokepoints in the adventure, and where and when encounters occur. That works fine for fantasy … but in a city-based Call of Cthulhu adventure, not so much. There may be unspeakable horrors lurking in every shadow of a CoC adventure, but the game’s firmly grounded in reality. And reality involves choices. Forcing players down a linear railroad just wasn’t something I wanted to do with “Shadows”.
(“No, you can’t go to the sanitarium yet, you need to go to the library, even though based on how you’ve read the clues, it makes perfect sense that you'd want to go the sanitarium.")
So I structured “Shadows” in such a manner that you could start the adventure from a few different scenes, not just one. Clues in each scene would potentially lead to several other scenes, in a way that the order wasn’t terribly important, and in a way that usually meant there were choices. In "Shadows", you don’t have to go from Scene 1 to Scene 2 to Scene 3, in that order. Instead, you can potentially start in Scene 2, then go to Scene 1, then go to Scene 5, then to Scene 4, for example … it took a bit of planning in the early writing stages, but it’s possible.
The scenes all eventually lead to the same place, but I felt it important that players in the adventure have options, and be able to make legitimate choices, not ones forced upon them. (In one of the playtests, the investigators skipped over an entire scene, believing it not to be important, and it ultimately didn’t affect the outcome of the adventure.) This looser, investigative structure mirrors much more closely how I tend to run my own home games (whether Call of Cthulhu, D&D, or Warhammer), so I’m pleased that I was able to work a similar structure into “Shadows”, despite the extra planning that it required.
The other difficulty came from trying to make the adventure historically accurate. I’ve always been fascinated with Russian culture and history, so the original thought – “let’s set an adventure in Leningrad” – seemed an easy choice. However, if you want to make an adventure set in an actual place believable, it means making the details accurate.
In a fantasy adventure, it’s very easy to say “the orc has a sword” without getting into specifics of what type of sword. The made-up town that the heroes need to travel to – how long does it take them to get there after leaving the dungeon? Since I just made the dungeon and the town up in the first place, it’s easy for me to say as the author “oh, three days”, and not worry about checking for things like accuracy. In cases like that, I'm not checking facts, I'm making them up, and it works.
For Call of Cthulhu, though, when you say “the Soviet secret policeman has a gun” … well, what kind of gun? (The answer is “typically a Nagant M1895 Revolver, in 1927.”) When you say “they take the characters to the sanitarium” … was there actually a sanitarium in Leningrad in the 1920s? (“Yes.”) Was the city even called Leningrad in 1927? (“Yes. The city was originally named St. Petersburg, then renamed Petrograd in 1914, then renamed Leningrad in 1924 after Lenin died, and then finally restored back to St. Peterburg in 1991.”) What was the U.S./Soviet monetary exchange rate in 1927? And so on. A lot of it doesn't necessarily relate to the actual adventure itself, but it does all tie into making the world in which the adventure takes a believable one.
In adventures like this, you can’t just make assumptions about how things work. As an author, you need to take the time to research all the details properly. And there’s a lot of details, many of which only get a casual mention in the adventure … but it’s important to get all them right, if you can. The process added up to way, way more research and work than I would typically need for writing a fantasy adventure.
Ultimately, though, the process was enjoyable, and I think the adventure’s all the better for the additional work, so I can’t complain.
(And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the editorial crew on “Shadows” – Chad Bowser, Ken Hart, and Matthew “Pookie” Pook, who took the time to review what I’d written. I'll just say that if the historical facts are right in “Shadows”, thank them for verifying what I’d originally written, or for correcting my mistakes; if you find something that’s wrong, blame me.)
As I said, the adventure was a challenge. But I enjoyed writing “Shadows” immensely, so it was all worth it … and then some. “Shadows” stands at the moment as one of the adventures I’m most proud of writing so far in my freelancing career. I’m glad I had the opportunity to contribute something to the world of “Age of Cthulhu”.
And I hope you enjoy it as well. Please let me know if you do.
And if you do like it … well, here’s something to look forward to, to be released on Free RPG Day – Saturday, June 19, 2010.
