There wasn’t a fifth entry I could squeeze out of Horror on the Orient Express (and let’s be honest, the screen on Wednesday was a bit of a reach) so I turned to Fearful Passages to continue the travel theme.

Contained herein are nine short adventures, each tied to a mode of transportation – planes, trains, automobiles, blimps, canal boats, elephants, diving suits, armored cars and snow sleds. The scenarios are a bit of a mixed bag, some great (the blimp and canal boat adventures), many pedestrian and all plagued by a sense of “how do I work these into my campaign?” Several seem to be intended as short occurrences to be inserted between longer chapters of a game like Masks of Nyarlathotep, but doing that runs the risk of making the dangers of the mythos seem too common (a danger in any Call of Cthulhu game), which would drain them of their horror. The armored car scenario in particular would be better suited for a game like Pulp Cthulhu.

Mostly, I love this book for its cover. Nick Smith doesn’t usually do it for me – something about his paintings tends to be too shiny or metallic for my taste – but this one, depicting the Alert escaping from Cthulhu, as described in Lovecraft’s masterpiece “The Call of Cthulhu,” is probably my favorite depiction of ol’ tentacle face in the context of gaming and solidly top 10 in a broader competition.