The Stars Are Right! by Richard Watts, Andre Bishop, Steve Hatherley, Kevin A. Ross, John Tynes, Fred Behrendt, Gary Sumpter, Steve C. Rasmussen and D. H. Frew is a role playing game supplement published by Chaosium Inc. for use with their Call of Cthulhu horror game based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft. This book is a collection of seven scenarios, and one essay, in the modern setting of Cthulhu Now, rather than the standard 1920s era of the majority of the supplements. “Modern” in this case means the 1990s, which was when the book was published.
The supplement is available as 128 page perfect bound softcover book, although it isn’t available new in either printed or PDF form. Copies of the original book can still be purchased on sites such as Amazon. The original printed version is therefore what is being reviewed. Two pages of the book are the front matter and one page is the Contents and the Introduction. The Introduction gives an overview of the seven scenarios as well as having a small box outlining the differences between certain skills in the 5th Edition of the game and previous versions.
Love’s Lonely Children sees the players investigating the murder of a teenage prostitute and finally going up against a Great Old One.
Nemo Solus Sapit sees them investigating a renowned psychiatrist in California whose methods have gone off the rails more than a little.
This Fire Shall Kill has a group of fire cultists in San Francisco attempting to summon their god whilst killing people along the way.
The Professionals involves alien manipulation of the political process in a Senatorial election.
Fractal Gods makes use of home computers to open gateways to other worlds.
The Gates of Delirium has the players investigating another crazed psychiatrist whose methods don’t exactly benefit his patients.
The Music of the Spheres is set at a radio telescope array in Nebraska and the potential problems caused when it discovers a planet which isn’t a planet.
When The Stars Came Right Again is the final part of the book and not an actual adventure but an in-character essay on astrology and the stars being right, complete with charts.
The Stars Are Right! in Review
The Contents lists the pages of each of the seven scenarios, and the final essay, but doesn’t go any deeper than that. This is common for supplements of the time, and could be a lot better and more thorough. There are a number of player handouts throughout the book, but these are not separated into their own section as is the case in many supplements.
The covers of the book are in full colour and the interior illustrations are in black and white. These range from the common for the time portraits of various non-player characters to illustrations relevant to the nearby text ranging from about a sixth of a page to full page in size. There are also a number of black and white maps, which have a hand drawn appearance, as well as a number of page fillers, usually at the end of the chapter, which have little relevance to anything and some astrology charts in the final essay. Even with the occasional full page illustration, the book is still text-heavy – there is a lot of writing in this.
The book has the occasional new minor Mythos work and some new monsters, including extremely powerful ones, which is a common occurrence in Call of Cthulhu supplements, but rather unusually there do not seem to be any new spells.
Although the book was originally published in the 1990s, and based in that era, still be used as a modern setting in the 21st century, with some minor tweaks where technology has changed. In many cases these are quite minor; even the advance and improvement in mobile gadgets will not make that much of a difference. There are no real instances when a smartphone is going to make s significant difference. Only Fractal Gods is heavily based on computers and this can be tweaked quite easily. References to floppy discs and VHS tapes can be substituted by such as CDs and DVDs, or even flash drives.
The final essay seems a little out of place, compared to the rest of the book. However, it is not uncommon in some Call of Cthulhu supplements to include an essay with a selection of adventures, although it would seem to make more sense to actually collect these essays together and publish in more appropriate works such as the Keeper’s Compendium.
One thing that is common in several of the adventures, unfortunately so, is player railroading. This includes such things as killing off a character as the prelude to the adventure, burning down a character’s house, or the depressingly common matter of introducing friends from the past who have never cropped up before. These all put a bit of a strain on things, damaging believability and, in some cases, fun. Call of Cthulhu is not exactly a survivable game, but killing off a player’s character off-camera without any input from them is a bit much.
All of the adventures are set in the United States, sometimes in quite specific areas, but they could be adapted to other countries and places, with varying degrees of work. Some of the adventures definitely need some tweaking, or perhaps some foreshadowing, so that they don’t railroad the characters as much as they do the way that they are currently set up. Railroading is one of the less popular techniques for running adventures, outside such as tournament play. Things such as non-player characters who are supposedly friends, but have never been seen before, could be introduced in passing in earlier adventures. Contacts can be developed in advance of when they are actually needed. This does all increase the burden on the Keeper though. All told, The Stars Are Right! is not a bad collection of modern adventures, but they could have done with a bit of redesign to make them more player-friendly before being published.
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