As if Horror on the Orient Express didn’t have enough material stuffed inside its ample box, Reign of Terror expands that gargantuan campaign.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, the second edition of Orient Express offers keepers the chance to play through side scenarios that reflect the events of historical handouts the main characters discover during the course of their investigation. The events in the box happen to coincide with time periods for which Chaosium has established sourcebooks – the Dark Ages, Rome, the Victorian era and the modern day. Yet much of the mystery in Orient express centers on events that occur during the French Revolution. Enter Reign of Terror.

A portion of the book is given over to historical details and adventure seeds you’d expect from a sourcebook, but the real meat is the two-part scenario that plugs into Orient Express. It amounts to a mini-campaign of its own.

I won’t get into the details, of course, since the book only recently came out. I’ll leave it at this: it is Very Good. So good, in fact, that if this is an indication of the level of quality modern Chaosium is putting into its titles, I’d say we’re on the edge of another Golden Age for the company (so long as the business end keeps it together).

It has a key difference from the historical scenarios in the Orient Express box. Those delve into events that have predetermined endings, reflecting the fact that these are dramatic re-enactments of events the characters in 1923 are reading about in order to discover clues for their decidedly not predetermined mystery on the train. It’s very meta, I know. The downside is that these side scenarios run the risk of feeling railroaded.

Not so with Reign of Terror. The second part of RoT depicts a part of history that is unrecorded in the context of Horror on the Orient Express, meaning the outcome – and the consequences – for both the 18th century and 1923 investigators are entirely up in the air. Plot twist!