A Review of the Roleplaying Game Supplement Gothic Campaign Compendium

The Gothic Campaign Compendium written by a variety of authors and published by Legendary Games is a roleplaying game supplement for Paizo Publishing‘s Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. It is specifically for use with Paizo’s Carrion Crown Adventure Path, although the contents can be used for running any horror themed game within the Pathfinder framework, and was compiled from seventeen different supplements. The supplement is published under the Open Game License and as such some of it is considered to be Open Game Content.

The supplement is available as a watermarked PDF from RPGNow, which has a regular price of $29.99 but was bought at the discounted price of $20.69, and as a printed version from Legendary Games’ own site as well as from sites such as Amazon. The PDF version is the one reviewed, and has 256 pages. Of these, 2 pages are the full colour front and back covers, 1 page is the front matter and Open Game License, 1 page about Legendary Games, Adventure Path Plug-Ins and the electronic version, 1 page the Table of Contents, 1 page the Dedication, including a list of Kickstarter backers, there are 5 pages of 5 Forewords, each by a different person involved in the product and a 1 page Introduction. The Introduction has an overview of the different chapters of the book and the Appendices.

Chapter One, Character Options has new feats and archetypes and alternate class abilities for classes from the Core Rulebook and the Advanced Player’s Guide. Not every class has new abilities or archetypes; the new material is intended to be suitable for a horror game.

The second chapter, Spells, has new spells for various different classes, both core classes and those from the Advanced Player’s Guide. There are spell lists, in alphabetical order by class, followed by the spells themselves, which are also in alphabetical order. The spells are darker and on the more brutal side, in order to emphasise the horror nature.

Grimoires, Chapter Three, has a selection of “books” – many are not actually in book form – that provide useful, and often potentially dangerous, skills and knowledge.

Monsters, the next chapter, has new horror monsters. A substantial proportion of these are new constructs. There are also four new creature templates.

Chapter Four, Magic Items, has a selection of new magic items, including a couple of artefacts. As with the spells, these new magic items have a tendency towards the bloody.

Running a Gothic Campaign has some tips for running horror, and also has some new rules. There are notes on running cults and cultic character options, how to have horror from space and mad science, in particular constructs. Magic and the mythos, sanity, madness and horror and several insanities and the mythos descriptor from Tomes of Arcane Knowledge all are related to how to make a fantasy game more horrifying. There is also a section on chirurgery and new procedures for it.

Adventures has three mini-adventures that are intended to be slotted within the Carrion Crown Adventure Path, but can be adapted to other settings.

The final chapter, Pregenerated Characters, has eight pre-generated characters that can be used by players in the campaign. Each character has a sketch, background, roleplaying and scaling tips and stats. The characters have ties to the campaign and sometimes to each other as well.

The Appendices have five full page illustrations of monsters, repeated from earlier in the book but on a larger scale, six pages of maps and player handout maps, based on maps from earlier in the book and one page of black and white t-frame paper miniatures depicting the pregenerated characters from Chapter Eight.

Gothic Campaign Compendium in Review

The PDF is decently hyperlinked, with the various chapters internally linked from the Table of Contents and some other internal links within the text, as well as external links to relevant pages in the Pathfinder Reference Document, or if unavailable there, to the d20PFSRD. However, it lacks any bookmarks and the Table of Contents only lists the various chapters and the appendices. It lacks an index as well, something that would have been very useful, given the large number of different new creations, items, spells and options in the book. Navigation is, therefore, not as good as it could be.

There are many full colour illustrations, from part of a page up to a full page and sort of beyond, as those at the beginning of each chapter go partly onto a second page, just as is commonly seen in Paizo’s own publications, resulting in the start of each chapter taking up two pages on an illustration and a sidebar. The new items and monsters are specifically illustrated.

The authors include writers who have founded their own third party companies and freelancers who have written for Paizo itself, including authors who actually worked on the Carrion Crown Adventure Path itself

On the whole, the supplement is very professionally done, and the illustrations are definitely great. There are a number of errors, usually grammatical, in the book, as well as sentence fragments. One of the biggest sources of grammatical errors is in the Spells section; there seem to be more here than anywhere else. For formatting, in the Magic Items chapter there is a place where the font has been changed to a bold version of the one normally used, which certainly would appear to be a mistake. The reference to Tomes of Arcane Knowledge in Running a Gothic Campaign may actually be a typo, with it actually being Tomes of Ancient Knowledge that should be referenced.

The books in Grimoires, which are not all books in the strict sense, are described in loving detail and all come with illustrations of them. It appears an attempt has been made to capture some of the mystique of the tomes of knowledge found in Cthulhu Mythos based games, and a decent job has been done of it as well. Rarely are books described in such comprehensive detail as this, but it should be remembered that each of the books described was originally sold as a separate supplement.

The Pathfinder game has, on the whole, had a certain level of influence from the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and the Carrion Crown Adventure Path is one of the areas that have had a greater level of influence in this manner. Having tips on how to use sanity adds a degree of horror. These have been adapted to a fantasy game where characters are more resistant than would be seen in, say, a Call of Cthulhu game, but could still be affected.

The three adventures are The Murmuring Fountain, Feasting at Lanterngeist and The Fiddler’s Lament. The second of these, Feasting at Lanterngeist, is marked as being specifically for during Adventure Path #46, Wake of the Watcher, but the others are less explicit. The first, The Murmuring Fountain, mentions the Professor’s funeral and the third, The Fiddler’s Lament, is stated as taking place near the haunted prison, both probably in or near Ravengro from #43, The Haunting of Harrowstone (and the third adventure mentions the town of Raven). These locations will be more familiar to owners of the Adventure Path but the adventures can, of course, be adapted to other locations.

For a GameMaster planning to run Carrion Crown, this book provides a useful source of additional details and items that can be used to flesh out the campaign in greater detail, and the pregenerated characters can also be useful if time is limited for character creation or other reasons. The Gothic Campaign Compendium is a nice collection of horror related resources for Carrion Crown.