Hahaha oh my god. This is Death in Dunwich (1983) and wow.

OK, so, let’s get the good out of the way. I like the cover, another great example of the naive folk art of early RPGs. I should be clear though that, whilst the organization and editing of the book prevents me from being 100% certain about, well, anything really, I am fairly confident no grim reaper appears within. There is a zombie with a scythe, though, which I feel is a bit of false advertising. And there is also an unadvertised pet attack gorilla, which is also the last of the good things in the book.

So, there is this rich old guy. And he wants to own more paintings by the old masters. He makes friends with a sorcerer who is part of an evil brotherhood of sorcerers who are locked in an age-old struggle against a brotherhood of good sorcerers. This struggle is detailed at length, and has absolutely no bearing on anything else in the story. This sorcerer digs up the corpses of old masters, resurrects them a la The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and makes them crank out new work which he sells to the rich old guy. And, you know, I was against this as absolutely preposterous while I was reading it, but now summarizing it, I feel like a pretty good commentary on being a creative person in late-stage capitalism is coalescing.

Anyway, the rich old guy lives in Dunwich for some reason. A lot of space is devoted to describing Dunwich (in fact, this is the first time Dunwich is described in game terms, ever!) but there is no further connection between the plot and the setting. Well, other than the fact that after a certain point, everything is dependent on finding one single, easily missed clue, so wandering around Dunwich gives the players something to do until they find it. Weirdly, no one in town wants to talk about that time an invisible monster killed a whole bunch of people.

Oh, and the bad guy can only be killed with diamond bullets? Is that a thing? And, if the players kill him early on, all the resurrected artists turn to dust off screen, so it is extremely possible the scenario could wrap up with the players not knowing anything about what was really going on. Which is not the way mysteries are supposed to work.