I bought the Call of Cthulhu adventure collection Mansions of Madness, Volume 1: Behind Closed Doors, and this is my review of the second scenario, called The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse. I also reviewed the first scenario, Mister Corbitt. I'm avoiding spoilers beyond what you'd read in the introduction to the adventure in the book, but if you're thinking of playing any of these scenarios then even that might be too much. This review is intended for game masters.
The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse is an actively investigative adventure. The player characters are hired by a law firm to investigate the disappearance of one of their clients. It seems that Arthur Cornthwaite returned from an expedition into South America recently, and then was never heard from again. The law firm needs to establish Arthur's status so that they know what to do with his estate. Their best and only lead right now is his mansion, which were his last known whereabouts.
The scenario assumes, and rather insists, that the investigators stay in Arthur Cornthwaite's mansion, sort of as guests of a host that's missing in action. That strikes me as a profoundly strange prompt. What private investigator moves into a missing person's house during their investigation? That just seems too strange to me. I know I could come up with reasons, like it's better to be around in case Arthur just turns up suddenly, or maybe whomever (or whatever?) abducted him will return to the scene of the crime. But these investigators are meant to be real people living in the real world. They're meant to have lives outside of work. I find it too odd to imagine them leaving their own apartments, or even just a hotel, to stay in the house of the missing person they're investigating.
The problem is, the scenario is meant to be, essentially, a dungeon crawl. There are lots of clues pointing back to South America, but the adventure has a big sidebar cautioning you to steer your players away from leaving the country, much less the mansion. The scenario intends for the players to be in the mansion.
To solve the apparent problem of location, I set the mansion far away from the investigators' home city. They had to travel a full day to reach it, and the law firm put them up in a local boarding house. I couldn't bring myself, even in the guise of a fictional estate lawyer, to propose that they stay in the house being investigated. Just couldn't make myself do it.
But anyway, getting the investigators into Gamwell, the nearest town to the mansion, was good because it meant they had to interact with NPCs, all of whom had opinions on what might have happened to Arthur Cornthwaite. That's a key component to the scenario, too. The house has a reputation for having been cursed for its history of tragic ends for every former owner. You can play into local superstition a lot, but it works better when the NPCs are around to mention it. The scenario just has random people wander by the mansion, which I guess happens in a small town, but it felt a little forced to me.
Long story short, I had the lawyers strongly imply that they believed Arthur was dead or incapacitated in his house, and that investigating it was what the investigators were being hired for. If they couldn't find him, then they were to find evidence of where he might have gone, at which point the lawyers would contact authorities at that location to continue their own investigation. The investigators boarded in town, and went to the mansion for work each day. That worked out fine, and for whatever reason felt more realistic to me.
Running the crack'd and crook'd manse itself felt a little like running a haunted house. There's lots of evidence in the house about what happened to Arthur Cornthwaite, and a few interesting threats. It's a pretty big place, so there's a fair amount of stuff to investigate and try to piece together.
It isn't actually a haunted house, though, and that does make it a little difficult to keep it interesting. A room by room search starts to get tedious, and so I found myself having random people show up at the house just to break the monotony. Eventually, the investigators got impatient enough to start breaking things, and that did move the plot along.
The weakness of this scenario, for me, is that a lot hinges on a single big reveal, but that reveal is highly likely to trigger the final act of the scenario. There's a huge emphasis on the mansion, and even though there are some strange events in town posing as potential clues, ultimately the answer lies within the mansion, which you have to broadcast to the players from the start because you don't want them flying off to South America or lingering too long in town. It's like revealing the identity of the killer at the start of a movie, and then spending the whole movie pretending like nobody knows who the killer is, and then revealing the killer at the end. There's no real twist here. Go to the mansion to solve the mystery, and then solve the mystery.
Of course, from the player's perspective, they don't know what happened to Arthur, so the reveal at the end does at least put to rest all their wild theories. The problem still remains that they're being forced to investigate exactly this mansion, so there are only so many possible answers. The one they eventually find is probably not going to surprise any experience Call of Cthulhu player, but then again even within that setting there are many different ways a person can go missing, so there is at least resolution.
This scenario isn't amazing, but it's fine. Were I to run it again, I'd probably try to put less emphasis on the mansion, and let players get to it when they get to it. If they want to run off to South America, I'd let them.
As a short adventure, this might be ideal, too. As a one-shot, this is adventure is probably not bad, in the way many dungeon crawls are ideal for that. You've got a place to investigate, so you go through it room by room until you find the MacGuffin. I'm not sure the mansion is interesting enough for that kind of game play, but have some NPCs go along with the investigators (and then disappear one by one) and I think you'd have a proper haunted house adventure.
Table and coffee photo by Freddy Castro and licensed under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth Kenlon, with a book cover featuring artwork copyright by Chaosium.