The setting is the Canadian Arctic in 1958, where something odd had happened to the crew of a remote radar station...
Fans of 'The Thing from Another World' will love it |
Bill makes no secret that the inspiration for this was Howard Hawkes' 1951 classic 'The Thing from Another World'. For me, that is recommendation in itself.
OK, to steal a format from the incomparable Reviews from R'lyeh...
Name: Without Warning
Publisher: Chaosium Inc (Miskatonic Repository). Availble to download.
Author: William Adcock
Setting: 1950s Arctic outpost (military)
Product: Scenario
What You Get: 27 page, 18.74 MB illustrated PDF
Elevator Pitch: The Arctic is deadly, but sometimes it's worse than that...
Plot Hook: November, 1957. An isolated DEW-line radar station in the Canadian Arctic has radioed in a medical emergency. A relief flight carrying a medic is dispatched, but as a winter storm closes in, the crew of the Hula Honey discovers something far worse than seals and seabirds roaming the Arctic ice.
Plot Support: Plot set-up, one plan/map, one handout, stat-block for adversaries, six pre-generated Investigators.
Production Values: Clean and readable, well-laid out (by Danial Carroll), atmospheric illustrations (by Jonathan Myers), PDF background layer can be turned off for easy printing.
Pros
- One-night, one-shot set-up
- Potential convention scenario
- Set firmly in the period
- Could be set in other periods (back to a Franklin Expedition-like mystery, forward to a contempory setting, or even transfered to an outpost on another planet)
- Could be included in a Cold-War conspiracy campaign
- Pre-generated investigators tie in well with scenario
- 'Time running out' scenario set in a bottle location
- Captures the feeling of 1959's 'creature features'
- Evocotive and menacing adversary
- Optional additional encounter raises the stakes significantly.
- One-night, one-shot set-up
- Set firmly in the period
- 'Time running out' scenario set in a bottle location
- All pre-gens are male. Even within the restraints of the setting, a female character could be introduced as a civilan medic or scientist.
- Very little oportunity for player agency or character development
- Linear plot
- Not much will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with 'The Thing from Another World'
- Mythos-light
- Could degenerate into a 'creature feature' if the Investigators don't follow the clues to the second location
Conclusion
I enjoyed taking part in the play-test and reading the final text (finding out what we'd missed in-game!) and would recommend it for an afternoon or evening's play.
It's bottle adventure suitable for one-shots or convention play, which is a draw-back, though of course there no reason why this might not just be the beginning for any surviving Investigators...
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