Death in Dunwich
Theatre of the Mind, 1983. Enterprises, L. F., Lawrence Flournoy, Elaine Shatto, Elizabeth Liss. First. Softcover. Good. Item #58
A good player's copy of TOME's 1983 adventure Death in Dunwich. Content's are complete. The included envelope is detached but present. Handouts are present and uncut. Pages have highlighting and pencil marks. A nice copy of an early Call of Cthulhu adventure authorized by Chaosium, Inc.
Review from RPG.net: "Death in Dunwich came out in 1983, and was put out by a company called "Theatre Of the Mind, Enterprises, Inc.", or TOME. (TOTMEI seems more accurate, or TOTME, or even TOTM, but they had to pick the clever one.). It's 32 pages, and apparently sold for $8 originally (according to an old Chaosium catalog), though a sticker on it says DM 36.00. My guess is that was german money, before they got sucked up into the EU (That's about the only thing Cyberpunk the RPG got right...). It also apparently came with a letter for the "Keeper", the CoC name for the GM, as well as a cardstock centerpiece meant to be a screen.
As the title strongly implies, this module is set in the fictional town of Dunwich, at least partially, though it's mostly a non-mythos adventure. Mostly. The basic premise is on the obvious use for the Resurrection spell by an art dealer. Really quite clever, actually.
The background for the module is actually fascinating. It seems there are two different secret, esoteric brotherhoods, fighting with each other. This modules details one such struggle, albeit a pretty minor one.
It starts off with the players being summoned by a mysterious stranger, and are asked to investigate the mysterious death of a French art dealer. This is a weak point, I think, but the starting adventure hooks in CoC modules are generally pretty lame, often involving relatives or friends the player never knew his character had.
The adventure is mostly investigative. The players start off with a couple leads, then go and talk to people, starting in Boston, then on to Dunwich, with maybe a trip to New York. There are a lot of people to talk to. For the most part, each NPC is given a fairly distinct personality/writeup, and a list of 6-7 key items that the players should find out to help move the mystery onwards. There is one fairly obvious clue that the players really need to figure out to move the plot along, involving keys. It's pretty obvious to get, but you never know if your players will. That could be a stumbling block. But eventually they should be led to a showdown with the villain of the adventure.
It's actually a pretty short adventure, because about half of the 32 page booklet is made up of player handouts and background info. It's also somewhat dry, with regards to the adventure itself, and the layout is a bit odd, so this is probably not well suited for novice GMs (ie, there's no boxes to read to the players like you find in some RPG modules, and no real keyed location to explore room by room. Or a flowchart It almost reminds me of the old Star Fleet Battles rules layout) .
It's also not an adventure where if the PCs fail, the world will be destroyed. Or really anything bad happens. Just some tampering with the art market, and a murder or two of people who get too nosey. So that's a plus.
So, to sum up, it's an adventure with a very original plot, lots of roleplaying opportunities (mostly in interviewing people), fairly well detailed and with an interesting background. On the down side, it's a bit hard to use, it's somewhat short, and some of the names are a bit goofy. Still, I'm glad I bought it, and I plan on tracking down the rest of the modules from this company when I can afford to."
Price: $20.00