Blurb from the publisher: 'Man dies three times in one night!
A puzzling headline begins a front-page article found in the Times of London. Three men, all identical in identification, were found dead in the same room of the Chelsea Arms Hotel. All were dispatched in a similar manner—stabbed through the heart. Then the home of a valued friend burns to the ground, severely injuring him in the process. An odd summons, a surreptitious meeting, and a thousand-mile journey begins on the legendary rail service carrying the investigators to Constantinople, the Gateway of the Orient.
Horror On The Orient Express contains a massive and legendary campaign, of up to nineteen adventures, for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Beginning in 1920s London, the investigators journey to Paris and thence to the ancient city of Constantinople. With luck, they also return home.
Optional episodes are set in ancient times or special places (Roman-era, Dark Ages, Gaslight-era, the Dreamlands), so that the players can experience the founding, creation, and discovery of crucial elements of this campaign. Also included is a modern-day coda to the storyline, an alternate ending for those wishing a shorter campaign, and a built-in survival guide to aid beleaguered investigators.
Horror on the Orient Express is back in print with a reformatted two-volume set, making it more digestible than ever! This is a black and white reprint of the 2014 boxed set, reformatted into two hardcover books.'
What you get: Your USD 89,99 or equivalent will buy you the 2021 iteration of Horror On The Orient Express, a 768-page Call of Cthulhu mega campaign in both its two-volume hardcover and its pdf edition. The game is statted for the game's 7th edition, with advice on how to use previous editions without much hassle. Both books have a royal red cloth bookmark attached. A map of Europe depicting the route of the Orient Express is also included.
As the blurb states, this is a reformatted two-volume, black and white reprint of the almost 4-kilo boxed set that came out in 2014, following a kickstarter that almost bankrupted the old Chaosium and lead to its eventual takeover by the current all-star team. Reformatted means exactly that; this is not a faithful, 100% identical reprint of the 2014 edition. Texts have changed size, some boxed texts are presented differently, some images have been eliminated, others have been shuffled around and are overall presented in a higher resolution, dozens of typos have been eliminated, and so on and so forth.
That product has been reformatted and put to the market again, since, in the words of Rick Meints, Chaosium's president, "there is a lot of demand from fans who'd like to own a physical copy and not pay collector prices". He is, of course, correct. The accessory-rich 2014 boxed set which included things like a European Route Map, three era-inspired luggage stickers, two era-inspired postcards, a matchbox, the Scroll of the Head, four U.S. passports, a bumper sticker, and many more, has been out of print for quite some time and is sold on the secondary market at prohibitive prices. The present reformatting aims towards those who want to experience the iconic campaign without breaking their budget. Certain physical items that were included in the boxed set are not included in the physical two-volume edition, like The Traveler's Companion (still included in the pdf), the stickers (idem), the passports (idem), the puzzle-cut simulacrum (which can be purchased separately), the former Book VI-Handouts for the Investigators (which can be downloaded free of charge) etc.
The electronic version can be obtained separately for USD 39,99 and includes 18 pdfs: the campaign's itself, both in two different pdfs as per the current iteration's format as well as in six different pdfs, as per the previous iteration's format, a 1923 Calendar, a US Passport, Train Car Plans, a Traveler's Companion, a large Orient Express map, a player map pack, a Keeper map pack, a map of air routes, the scroll of the head, as well as a a pack of images from the 2014 edition's stickers and postcards. Another 13 files are also included in epub (4), mobi (5), and prc (4) formats, for those who use non-pdf readers.
The product is also supported by the Horror On The Orient Express Keeper Screen, as well as the Horror On The Orient Express Dice Set (black-purple). The former can now be downloaded free of charge from Chaosium's website. The latter is always available from Q Workshop.
For the purposes of the present review I playtested selected parts of the campaign with the new hardcovers and pdf. You might remember that in my initial review of the 2014 boxed set I had not perused the pdf, and had used only the boxed set during the playtests.
Taking into account the similarities between the present product and its immediate parent, the two reviews also share obvious similarities when it comes to the content of the campaign. To facilitate those who have already been exposed to the the boxed set, I will start the strong and the weak points with what makes this edition different, before continuing with the observations that remain constant for both iterations.
Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the plot, parts of the campaign will be revealed while discussing its strong and less strong points. If you intend to play it, stop reading now.
Contents: Horror On The Orient Express (or HotOE) is a campaign comprised of 19 adventures. Eleven of them are linear and follow the progress of the investigators towards their main goal. The other eight are optional. Five of those do not take place on the timeline of the main adventure but on different CoC eras. Namely, in Cthulhu Invictus/Ancient Rome, the Dark Ages, Gaslight, Dreamlands (if it can be considered an era) and the modern times, a scenario that closes off the campaign.
Volume 1 includes the contents from the previous edition's Book I (Campaign Book), Book II (Through the Alps), and Book V (Strangers On The Train). Campaign information is the first thing a Keeper needs to read in order to make sense of the campaign. It includes information on the history of the Orient Express, its function and appeal. It also presents the synopsis of the 19 adventures, and how they link to each other. It sets up the background of the campaign by the events that have transpired up to now. The first 7 (out of the 19 adventures) are included in this volume. So are the dozen pre-generated characters and the around 30 innocent, or not so innocent, NPCs that are not necessarily crucial in each scenario yet which can spice up the game. The volume ends with a 6-page index.
Volume 2 contains the contents of Book II (Italy and Beyond) and Book III (Constantinople and Consequences) of the earlier boxed set, namely the remaining 12 adventures. Even though the core adventures are presented in chronological order, the optional ones are not; they are presented in the order clues are revealed and their insertion becomes appropriate. As an example, the gaslight adventure is the third adventure to be encountered, while the ancient Roman one is the 13th. The volume ends with a 5-page index.
The Traveler's Companion is included as a pdf, but not as a physical product the way it initially did in the 2014 boxed set. It is a travellogue that every passenger of the Orient Express would receive, with information about the cities and check points the train passes from.
The strong points: The comparative aspects to the boxed set first, as I had promised.
There is merit in having many books, and then again, there is merit in having all that info in two books only. The layout is partially changed, while still retaining the two-column format. The fonts are smaller and much clearer, with more information per page than before. I found the presentation to be much crisper, including the use of boxed texts which usually present tangential information. The printing is obviously done in a higher resolution than before. Multiplication of materials like maps and handouts has been reigned in, at least partially; no need to have handouts in a printed version that nobody is going to cut out. All this mean less fuss for the Keeper, less notes, less places that he needs to look at, less books behind his screen. The page total dropped from the boxed set's 944 pages to the current volumes' 768 for the same material, and that pretty much sums it up. Playing adventures from Volume 1 works like a spell, seeing how it includes all the campaign's additional NPCs and the pre-gens in case an immediate replacement is required.
I am happy with the electronic edition, both about the pdfs that correspond directly to this iteration as well as those which correspond to the previous boxed set, and indeed, one does get them all. That's already a major selling point in order to buy the pdf alone, in case you didn't own it already along with your 2014 boxed set. Images are extractable, while bookmarks go three levels down. Boxed texts are not bookmarked, yet that is not a deal-breaker. The index and the table of contents are live-linked in the two pdfs that correspond to the two present volumes and in some of the pdfs that correspond to the boxed set's books, but not in all. As an example, the pdfs of Book I and Book V (from the old boxed set) do not provide that facilitation, while the pdfs of Books II, III and IV (always from the old boxed set) do. Thankfully, this is not very disruptive, seeing how the better supported pdfs are the ones that contain the adventures. All in all, running these adventures with these pdfs available has made my life much easier.
If you are wondering how it felt to run some of these adventures a few years down the road, the answer is... good! The main observations do not change, be them positive or negative; keep on reading about those. Now however, I am free from the overwhelming desire to see the reactions of my players while the campaign's events come to life. I was happy to improvise with some of these adventures by visiting them on a totally autonomous basis. The non-linear adventures taking place outside of the 1920s timeline are a good fit. I won't go as far as to say that all these adventures can be played autonomously without work, yet this makes me think of HotOE even more fondly than before.
Physically speaking the two books are gorgeous. In contrast to most big books of the 7th edition they were published once again in black and white, yet this does not diminish their value. The integrated bookmarks are a great help, and I am wondering whether, for this size of books, Chaosium should consider adding an extra one or three.
If these strong points did not help you because this is the first time your read about HotOE (or you don't wish to read my review of the 2014 iteration), here's why it is a solid product.
First, it is a 19-scenario campaign. You read that right: nineteen. In many ways the campaign is what Cthulhu is about. It is dangerous and unforgiving, yet on the other hand it is low key. This isn't about cultists bringing down a mass apocalypse that the whole humanity feels � la Assault On The Mountains Of Madness, or at least not in the beginning; this is about a single item that can give extreme powers, and potentially eternal life, to its user. Its horror is claustrophobic, shrouded in layers of paranoia. Can you only be the bright-eyed one that understands the danger of it all, while everybody else blithely sips their tea? It's all personal, and it becomes so from the very first stories. The Investigators will not have it easy. The book itself advertises a fatality rate (death and insanity combined) of 70%, and I can immediately confirm this. This, however, is part of the trope, and when the trope is well-made, you will care about every single loss. Alien, a movie otherwise unrelated to the campaign at hand, proves this perfectly with a death rate above 85%. Quality and emotion is what it all is about. Idem for what can be perceived as, ahem, rail-roading. Indeed, it is rather convenient that aspects of the campaign will be dealt in the recurring stops of the Orient Express. Isn't this however also a classical horror trope? Linear plots are what they are for a reason, and in this case linearity works. Some times the heroes will save the day; others, they will be able to do nothing but watch. The balance and the narrative is what matters, and both are crafted to a very high standard.
The adventures are many and varied. This is probably the most cosmopolitan campaign in existence. Shadows Of Atlantis might take you to more places, it is in many ways however more abstract, and sort of more forced, with its military aspects and orders coming from here and there. HotOE has this quaint quality of not simply being about Cthulhu and all it entails, it is Cthulhu. Orientalism and exotic personalities are a very strong part of the Mythos' core, and they come to this campaign in spades. There are so many influences from different eras and places it wouldn't even make sense for me to recount them here. Idem for the stories' feel and pacing. There are the investigations, and there are the fights, there are the introspective scenarios in other worlds, and there are the horrors that have to be stopped right here right now. If all these sound different enough, they mesh in an excellent way. If there is a recurring theme in the core scenarios, that would be the urgency to see the affair resolved. Time is of essence; in many circumstances the players will have nothing but seconds to decide what to do, and I am not talking about fights or action scenes. The Keeper should definitely have contingencies in place if he doesn't wish the campaign to get derailed (bad pun #2). Idea rolls in many situations, or an approach � la Trail of Cthulhu where clues are found but cannot be as easily interpreted would work wonders.
Like many Cthulhu adventures, this one doesn't pull any stops when it comes to the scenes it uses to instil you with dread. There are some deeply psychological scenes, starting from a half-burnt friend urging you to take the case, and then there is the magic incantation in which you are moving human remains on a self-made train track, literally holding hearts and offal with your bare hands, hoping this will work for you not to be eaten by zombies. The depravity of such a scene, and there are many more like it, is all-encompassing when seen from a distance. How frantic, however, how desperate and horrifyingly sober, is the experience when one gets into the role and fully understands what exactly it is that he is doing in order to escape alive?
I had not perused the 1991 edition of the campaign (and I have quite the sad personal story of remembering the box in my city's game store but not the money to purchase it), the 2014 boxed however added a significant amount of new material and quite a few extended rewrites for what could be perceived as a director's cut. Here, the new information is reproduced in full, while the format is much, much friendlier to the Keeper.
Many of the optional adventures, and especially the ones taking place in different time periods, can be used outside the ambit of the present campaign. Are you into Cthulhu Invictus yet you are running out of ideas? Take Sanguis Omnia Vincet, and you are good to go. For more suggestions on how to use these adventures with the core campaign, keep reading.
The campaign was published for the 7th edition even before the rulebook of that edition itself. That explains why new Chaosium did not revisit its whole premise like it did with the outright excellent Masks of Nyarlathotep, where it added colour, improved texts and what have you. I actually like the fact that in this case Chaosium opted for an incremental improvement instead of a full do-over; the latter would have felt underhanded, seeing how the game is still on its 7th edition. Incidentally, if one wishes to run the game in a previous edition, he will need no more than a 5-minute chore in order to rethink some of the stats.
The weak points: Once again, I will start from comparing the present product to the 2014 boxed set.
The page margins are as big as they were in the boxed set; I wish they were smaller. The two books could have lost another 10% in size easily, making them even easier to use behind the screen, not to mention a click cheaper. Surely I am not the only one not taking notes on my RPG books? The presentation of the NPCs could have been further optimized in order to save space, but I won't make a big deal out of it. That is reserved for the total lack of constructive headers and footers, an issue that the boxed set also faced. Honestly, there are 19 adventures here. How is it helpful to state 'Book 1' and 'Through the Alps' almost throughout Volume 1? Name the adventure, make my life easier when I use the book during the session.
Some might miss the props that the boxed set offered, but then again, most of them were done in a rather haphazard manner in the boxed set. Some were good, while others were terrible. I don't feel one is losing anything by having this version instead of the boxed set. The boxed set's simulacrum was simply amazing and we don't get one here, or do we? Lo and behold, a fully authorized simulacrum can be purchased in at least two different web shops; just go to Chaosium's page for details. This is a prop you might wish to invest in.
Had enough of a comparison? Let's go to the actual product itself.
When it comes to the campaign proper, and as is usual with campaigns of this magnitude, not all adventures are born equal. Some scenarios are better, some are worse, it's as obvious as that. The campaign starts after a request from a friend of the Investigators, but frankly, taking into account how dangerous it all is, it doesn't feel potent enough for me even though he urges you while he practically passes out in front of you. Real life can solve the issue, of course; after the first one or two fatalities, the players can always introduce a fully new group of Investigators with a real, potent, undeniable reason to stay on the track of the campaign's plot device, while the previous Investigators, probably scared shitless by now, retire.
Most of the suggestions about how to include the optional adventures in the narrative are rather sub-par. Actual suggestion: ask your players whether they want to stop the main narrative for a session or two and run a side-adventure with different Investigators at another timeline. WTF? Any Keeper with an understanding of gravitas and theme-building will easily see how HotOE can be run more effectively: have your players run almost all the optional, out-of-timeframe scenarios in advance of the HotOE campaign by actively lying to them. Some excuse about trying out different investigators in different eras and different adventures will do the trick. If you have the time and resources, add these adventures to a couple of other ones in that era. In other words, don't play only the HotOE Ancient Roman one, play another one or two Ancient Roman Mythos adventures. Idem for the outright fantastic contemporary edition of Dark Ages and gaslight adventures. Once you are done with that, and we are talking about months of gaming time, start HotOE proper. It will be substantially more rewarding when your players realise, at many points in the HotOE campaign, that some of the things they are doing now are directly influenced by things they did in the past as different people in different places. It will blow out of the water any feeling of being railroaded; in fact, they will be rediscovering things they had directly invested in.
Of course this implies serious preparation and access to material beyond the present product. The latter might not be possible, if however one thinks that he can run this campaign without committed, extensive note-taking and multiple readings of the two books, he is in for a very hard landing. No matter the misgivings of the present material, the Keeper has to treat it with respect.
At times within each adventure you will find that as a Keeper you have no choice but to alter the narrative. I will not go into every single adventure, let's take the beginning of the campaign however as an example. The main bad guy, Mehmet Makryat, part of a super secret cult, consistently acts as if he wishes to to be found. According to the background, he turns three of his followers into roughly his own image. No explanation is given for this. Were I to speculate, and I am thinking aloud here, I can potentially see the advantage if they all go to different parts of the globe and try to harvest a network of possible resources that would be loyal only to the man himself and no one else. It might be exaggerated, but it makes sense. However the book states that they travel together. What a fantastic way of drawing attention and creating a scandal by having four identical men traveling together in different parts of the world! Even worse, he kills his three lookalikes in the same hotel just before the adventure starts. I repeat that: In. The. Same. Hotel. Leaving evidence around as to who they are, namely forged travel documents with his name on them times three. Seriously? The guy doesn't do any better in the following adventures, leaving a trail of death and destruction, drawing attention pointlessly scene after scene. What is that now? Some of this stuff is not rational even for a deranged cultist. I recommend rethinking most of these thematically problematic exaggerations.
If that is major, there are also other issues, that relate to each adventure per se. Again, a single example from the beginning of the campaign: in The Doom Train, the characters might succeed into boarding a ghost train that disappeared some thirty years ago. If and when they manage to escape, they will be in the middle of the English countryside wearing clothes from that era (as soon as one boards the train his clothes alter), muddy, bloodied, full of gore and what have you. We are talking about characters that have already roused quite the suspicion in London due to the incredible murders they are involved in as Investigators, and whom the police might not be looking at favourably already. The book totally handwaves this, by stating that they can stay in a nearby inn while the train line gets fixed. Just like that. Hmmm, yeah, ok, the Keeper has to think this through.
Again, these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many instances that as a Keeper you will have to intervene in order to make the background more rational and the repercussions of what's going on felt in the proper magnitude. Is this likely to make a deadly campaign even more complicated? Yes, it is. At the end of the day however, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to increase the churn from 70% to 75% or even 80% in order to make a campaign more memorable, or plain logical. That having been said, you have work to do.
Conclusion: Horror on the Orient Express is a must-own campaign which shines through no matter some of its easily avoidable flaws. It is intrinsically Cthulhian, and offers a high entertainment value once the Keeper puts in the required work. The way this two-volume set presents information and eliminates the rampant typos of the 2014 boxed set make it a perceptible improvement over its predecessor, even though the inflexibility of RPG.net's grading system does not allow me to hand out the 4,5/4 that I would have wanted to. I am extremely happy that it is once again available, and even more so because it was transposed to 7th edition already. It is meant to be affordable, to be read, and played, and read, and played again. If a completist wants to search collector's sets on ebay and pay the requested prices, more power to him, yet the rest of us should not suffer. If this reformatting teaches us anything, it's how Chaosium easily scores a 5/5 as a company once again.
For more info on Horror On The Orient Express, visit Chaosium's website at http://www.chaosium.com.
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