This surprisingly hard to come by book represents one of only two books of scenarios Chaosium issued for Cthulhu by Gaslight (I covered the other, Dark Designs, yesterday), which tells you that something wasn’t really clicking for both designers and players.

The scenarios are a bit uneven compared to Dark Designs. Two are straight up clunkers – a rather dull ancestral curse thingy and a bizarre seagoing riff on Alien involving a prehistoric scorpion/crab thing.

The good scenarios offer a variety of horrors. “Eyes of a Stranger” goes all out on the period flavor, featuring Freemasons, spiritualists, a Jack the Ripper red herring and more. The title scenario is a nasty bit of sacrilegious fun involving priests and serial murders. The longest scenario in the book, “Signs Writ in Scarlet,” is another riff on serial murder that benefits from a baffling mystery, perhaps a smidge too much danger and some sticky moral quandaries, all of which make up for the fact that it uses one of the Mythos creatures that features prominently in Dark Designs.

My favorite scenario, though, is the gothic “Masterwork of Nicholas Formby,” because there isn’t a cultist or formless monster in sight. It might very well be my favorite Gaslight scenario full stop because it fully embraces the feel of the period horror without hobbling itself to make things more Lovecraftian.

Oh, and, is it just me, or is this cover terribly boring? We went from proboscis sharks to this?