Shadow From the Past by ChubbyBabu 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 28 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear covers and one and a third pages are the front matter and Table of Contents.
The Introduction explains that the adventure is intended to be for four or more players. It gives a summary of the story, which involves a group of retired explorers are called to meet with an old friend and fellow explorer at his manor near York, where he has returned after his latest expedition. There is some advice for the Keeper on running the adventure.
Scn #0: Prologue has the characters receiving a letter from their friend.
Scn #1: In the Carriage has the characters travelling to the manor. In, bizarrely as this is the 1920s, a carriage not a car.
Scn #2: Davenport Manor is the first long scene with sub-scenes and has the characters being shown around and meeting their host.
Scn #3: Dinner has dinner and what the characters do afterwards.
Scn #4: The Night has the characters exploring the manor during the night when things have deteriorated.
Scn #5: In the Basement has the final confrontation.
Sn #6: Epilogue – It’s All Over wraps things up.
Following this are two sheets of handouts and 12 pages of character sheets for the four pre-generated characters.
There are also a number of supplementary PDFs. There are four, three-page, PDFs, one for each pre-generated investigator, a single page handout sheet and a two-page handout sheet, said to be printer friendly but it isn’t and has different handouts to the first and both are in Spanish.
Shadow From the Past in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that these would have been useful. The Table of Contents covers the major sections. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a two-column format and a number of errors were noticed where the supplement hadn’t been translated into English, as well as in the Scn titles. There are a variety of colour illustrations, although the illustration choice is unusual. This is a 1920s adventure, yet the illustrations look like those from a computer game. Perhaps this is intended to resemble computer mystery games of a few decades ago? Presentation is okay.
This is a one-shot adventure that probably works best with the pre-generated characters, though with some tweaking it could be used in an existing campaign. It’s a fairly straightforward scenario in a single location that follows a series of events; there isn’t much done to see what happens should the players do something that might derail things, as players are wont to do. Shadow From the Past can be found by clicking here.
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