A Shrieking Violet by Jacob Parker is a role playing game supplement published by Chaosium Inc. through the Miskatonic Repository Community Content Programme for use with Call of Cthulhu, the horror role playing game based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
The supplement is available as a 19 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover and one the Introduction and Thanks.
Background explains this the Chicago Police Department has turned to a Catholic church for aid against the Capone crime syndicate. Synopsis them summarises the adventure.
Area Central is the building out of which the investigators, police detectives, work. They are sent out to a crime scene by their lieutenant.
Polk Street is the crime scene, where someone has died from falling from a window, though they are quite a mess. As detectives, the characters can canvass the scene; the dead man was a member of the mafia.
Following Up considers the investigations that the characters can do next, with several different locations to visit and sources for research, as well as potentially being ambushed by the mob, should they have annoyed them in some way.
Closing In hopefully sees the investigators working out what is going on and how to deal with it. Several different ways the adventure could turn out are covered, but it’s acknowledged the characters could come up with something else.
Conclusion wraps up the adventure and the Sanity consequences and has stats for potential foes.
Handouts has three different things the investigators could discover.
The final eight pages are four double-sided character sheets.
A Shrieking Violet in Review
The PDF is supposedly bookmarked, but the bookmarks have somehow become garbled, and at best only point to bits of the character sheets. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are several stock images related to the locations. Presentation is okay.
Though this adventure could be used as part of a campaign, it perhaps works better as a standalone game. In a campaign, characters would become too tied to the police department and lose a lot of freedom; additionally, the pre-generated characters are all detectives, giving little variation of skills. Perhaps it could be used as a campaign starter for a couple of characters, who could then meet more investigators, but this might require some work. As a standalone adventure, it is a decent little one. A Shrieking Violet can be found by clicking here.
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