Here’s a rarity: an RPG book I have run recently. This is Doors to Darkness (2016). The subtitle is “Scenarios for Beginning Keepers.” The intention here was to provide Keepers fresh to Call of Cthulhu thanks to the lovely new 7th edition rules  five scenarios to run with extra training wheels. Even if you’ve been at this a while, I highly recommend this book. Primo stuff here.

All of the scenarios are straight forward enough on the Keeper side of things. Potential for high death tolls is kept mostly down, at least in three of the scenarios. All of them save one are interesting and feel fresh (the cover scenario, which involves a serpent man’s underground sanctuary, feels very D&D and trades in some “degenerate human” tropes I don’t personally find appealing). Standouts for me are Servants of the Lake, about a motel with ambiance worse than Psycho, and Genius Loci, about a dark influence haunting Danvers Mental Hospital. I ran both and they went over well, particularly the hotel.

As for being for beginning Keepers, sure. There is lots of advice sprinkled around and none of these have piles of NPCs to manage or labyrinthine subplots. What you see is what you get.

However, I’m not a beginning Keeper and I had a bit of trouble running the scenarios right out of the book. As much as I like reading prose adventures, the older I get, the more I wish folks would dispense with sentences and paragraphs and adopt bulleted lists, flow charts or other easier to manage ways to convey information. As much as I adore this book, I really hate having to generate notes to properly run something without pausing to fish something out of a dense paragraph. Putting all the information in standard prose makes all the information seem equally important when it is not. This isn’t a big deal in the scheme of things, but as a book geared toward beginners, I fear it might still be overwhelming.