I've been reading through the Call of Cthulhu adventure collection Mansions of Madness, Volume 1: Behind Closed Doors, and this is my review of the fourth scenario, called House of Memphis. I've reviewed Mister Corbitt, The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse, and The Code from this book. This review contains some spoilers, so this review is intended for game masters only.
The adventures in this book just keep getting better and better. I enjoyed The Code more than the previous ones, but I am aware for the potential of it to spiral out of control. House of Memphis is more contained than The Code, but just as satisfying in pacing and mystery.
The plot of the adventure begins with the investigation of a grotesque multiple murder. It seems that 3 burglars broke into the home of "Memphis the Great", a prominent stage magician. The magician is on tour, so he wasn't at home at the time. Instead of robbing the home as burglars usually do, this trio seems to have killed each other (butchered is a more accurate term.) People don't usually break into someone's mansion together just to kill one another, so the local police, and the magician's lawyers, and some influential members of the criminal underground, are eager to know what happened. That's where the investigators are invited to join the adventure.
As with many Call of Cthulhu adventures, and I guess real life too, there is potential for the investigators to get way off track. If they start to suspect that Memphis is up to no good, then they might try to fly half way around the world to find him. However, the adventure's author does a good job of acknowledging the obvious points of distraction and provides ways around them. There are plenty of characters in the adventure, each with conflicting interests, who the game master (Keeper) can enlist to gently guide the investigators in a story-approved direction.
It's the characters, and a few key locations where they're each found, that helps pace this adventure so nicely. I won't spoil anything about what's really going on, but suffice it to say that the multiple-homicide burglary mystery isn't the actual mystery of the scenario. It's a clue, but there are lots more clues to uncover, both inside the mansion and in the surrounding city (a little place called Boston.)
As with many stories, the climactic ending here does rely on a big monstrous threat that you kind of can't reveal, as the game master, until it's time to start the final act. That's the weakest part of the plot, because it does force you to insist that the investigators show up at the right place at the right time (or at least, the time you're going to make right because once it happens the adventure must end.) Then again, it's also a strangely liberating. Once the investigators have gathered enough clues to draw some conclusion, you're free to reveal the big threat. That may influence their final accusation of who's to blame, but by that time they'll have collected so many adjunct crimes and suspicions that they'll have likely got some things right and other things wrong, but it'll all come out in the wash.
The atmosphere of the adventure is what I love most, and I think it's actually the big star of this one. Stage magic in the early 1900s was really coming into its own, sometimes as an art form and other times as a grift. These were the years when many of the classic stage illusions we still see today were invented. This was the heyday of theatrical magicians, and this adventure revels in it.
Investigators are likely to end up going to a magic show, a magic shop, and a meeting of professional magicians. They'll hear about magicians who take the art too seriously, or not seriously enough, about people who get duped into the mysticism of it all, and of course there are murmurings of the mythos. The boundary between "actual" eldritch magic and performative stage magic gets especially thin at some points during this adventure, and I think it would be such a perfect introduction for someone new to the Cthulhu Mythos. Can you imagine sitting down to play a game about detectives who go in to solve an ordinary crime, only to discover half way through the game that some magic is real and dangerous and comes from an alien entity beyond comprehension? What a way to stumble into the existence of elder gods.
A book titled Mansions of Madness ought to have a good mansion in it. Well, this adventure is about a mansion belonging to a magician, so don't worry, this is a good mansion. Once again, the author of this adventure knows exactly what to provide you throughout the exploration of Memphis's home. In nearly every room there are suggestions for Cheap Scare, designed to spook the investigators with minor or imagined "haunted house" effects. In some rooms, there are bigger effects that trigger under specific circumstances, and these do real harm (usually to Sanity.)
The mansion's big, with 20 rooms, and there's a fair few clues to find. Unlike Crack'd and Crook'd Manse and The Code, it's not expected that the whole adventure takes place inside the mansion. Investigators can come and go, and a few different characters have connections to the mansion and can draw the investigators back to it (or away from it) as needed.
Several characters have rich backstories, and I often wonder how much of those histories different gaming groups discover. This is an investigative adventure, so most of what has happened when the scenario starts is in the past. Non-player characters have been places, they've done things, the burglars broke in and now they're dead. Very little of the story happens after the player characters arrive, meaning that everything from the start of the scenario on are reactions or fallout of past events. Not all events are known or understood by all parties equally.
Piecing it all together is the mystery to solve.
You can get to the end without understanding how it all began, and I have to assume that some gaming groups do just that. I think that's a characteristic of a really flexible Call of Cthulhu adventure. If a player wants to ignore the Cthulhu Mythos and treat the story as a gumshoe mystery, it's largely possible to do that. You could solve the crime without solving the mystery. Or you could solve the mystery and let the criminals walk free. I don't think every Call of Cthulhu story needs to be that limber, but it's fun that this one is.
Both The Code and House of Memphis have been very much the adventures I was hoping for from Mansions of Madness volume 1. For me, the theme of magicians at the turn-of-the-century is a winning formula, and a lot less campaign-breaking than The Code could be, so I think House of Memphis is probably the top adventure of the book.
So far.
There's one more to go, and that's The Nineteenth Hole.
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.