Wake of the Watcher
Part 4 of 6 of Carrion Crown. In addition to the adventure, there are only three additional articles this time, albeit longer than usual. As this is the "Lovecraftian Horror" episode of the series, you get a a writeup of Cults of the Dark Tapestry and a much larger Bestiary full of Eldritch horrors, along with the continuation of the Laurel Cylphra story. If you're looking to cross your Pathfinder game with Call of Cthulhu, the cults article (which includes info on several of the Great Old Ones and Elder Gods that the cults worship) and the Bestiary will certainly help, with several critters straight from the pages of Lovecraft's work (The Colour Out of Space, Mi-gos, Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, Elder Things, etc.). I found it particularly interesting that they aren't just transplanting the stories to Golarion, but referencing them in such a way to include Earth. Cthulhu, for example still slumbers in R'lyeh on a "distant planet," not Golarion, but his "Star-Spawn" have reached here, and even one of them is CR20, so that's really all you need. Again, a preview of the next part is included as are four blurbs inside the cover on random adventure hooks. (I like these, but I'm starting to wish they were single-spaced and twice as long.)
At the end of
Broken Moon, the PCs were chasing the Whispering Way to the town of Thrushmoor. In a brief one-encounter stay there, they find that the riders have gone on to Illmarsh, which is nearly exactly Lovecraft's Innsmouth. (The writers acknowledge this in the preface, so I decided to fill that hole in my Lovecraft knowledge and read the original before proceeding. Doing so was an interesting experience, as I could spot all the homages instantly.) In Illmarsh, they find that one rider went off to Caliphas with most of the Carrion Crown components, while one stayed here to trade the idol from Part 2 for a magic mace, which is the real component they want. The mace is held by a group of skum (fish/frog-people) who take the role of the Deep Ones here. (I have no idea if skum were originally meant to be D&D's Deep Ones or not, but I will just say that I prefer their term for themselves presented here (ulat-kini) and the Illmarsh natives' name for them (the Neighbors down bay) to the rather silly sounding "skum".) Anyway, the Illmarshers have an agreement with the Neighbors that they will give them their 2nd and 3rd baby daughters for "fostering" (i.e. breeding stock) in return for protection and good fish harvests. Like in the original story, the skum worship the demon lord Dagon and have passed on this practice to the humans in Illmarsh. The module, however, ups the stakes from the story's status quo by having some of the skum fall under the sway of a group of Mi-Go (alien fungus bugs with advanced tech), who wipe out most of the skum. Remnants of the skum fight back by calling on a "moit of Shub-Niggurath", which is a slug that infests humanoid brains, protecting them from Mi-Go mind probes for a while, but then explodes out of them, creating a tentacle-headed "spawning canker", which births more slugs. This was the fate of the local Whispering Way contact, but the Mi-Go go one further with the WW rider who came here, infecting him with a slug and then manipulating it to grow into a full "dark young of Shub-Niggurath", which will get the attention of Shub-Nigguath itself to manifest here. Got all that?
So, enter the PCs, who get to Illmarsh, find that people have been abducted by the Mi-Go, and follow clues to the local temple of Dagon where they fight the priests there. More clues lead to a mansion built by the founder of the town, where the High Priest is hiding, where they learn the truth about the Neighbors and enter the skum tunnels beneath the mansion in search of the Whispering Way rider. He's not there, but a Colour out of Space summoned by the Mi-Go is. After dealing with that, they have to head underwater (possibly with the help of a local inventor and his submarine) to the deeper skum tunnels and Mi-Go laboratory. There they face the dark young, and destroy it, which causes everything to mostly go back to "normal" in Illmarsh.
I did not love this adventure. I'm not sure I even liked it. I found it to be overstuffed, with the skum, the Mi-Go, the slugspawn, the color out of space, the dark young.... I get that they wanted this to be the big Lovecraft homage, but the Lovecraft stories I've read usually focus on just one, maybe two, of his weird creatures, not five or six of them. After a while, it was exhausting, and hard to keep track of motivations (which are already murky because they are all alien and eldritch and whatnot..). And of course, this being a pathfinder module, the way to stop all these horrible creatures is pretty much to hack and slash your way through them. The "investigative" parts of the adventure are pretty railroaded: "Smash your way through these bad guys, find one clue. Follow that clue to more bad guys, repeat." Aside from the crackpot inventor, there aren't even any great NPCs to speak of. On top of that, the actual horror aspect of the story is REALLY horrifying, and not in a good way. The daughters sent for "fostering" are raised in underground tunnels until they are old enough to breed with the skum (OK, let's call it what it is: to be raped by the skum). Then they give birth to either skum, or humans that are sacrificed to Dagon, or sent back to Illmarsh, and then serve as wet-nurses to the next batch of baby girls that come in. I know some groups don't shy away from the truly depraved stuff like that, but I don't think I could run it in good conscience. It's too disturbing, and coming from a horror aficionado like me, that's saying something.
But the true sin here is how incredibly skip-able it is. There's nothing that connects to the Whispering Way plot here except a botched trade of MacGuffin for MacGuffin. There's a blurb on how, if you want even more Lovecraft, you can stick in
Carrion Hill on the way here. But honestly, I think I'd rather run it
instead. I'd just put the mace in the hands of the cultists there instead of Illmarsh's skum. But if you wanted to skip even that, you could probably just have the idol
be the item needed, instead of the mace. (I haven't read the last 2 parts yet. Maybe there's some reason that wouldn't work.)
If I were to use it in Ravenloft... well, I probably wouldn't. But of course we have our own Innsmouth homage with the Shay-lot in Tidemore (and Meerdorf in our Nocturnal Sea Gazeteer, as well). I just don't know that I'd want to introduce all the other Lovecraftian horrors too.
Overall, maybe I've been too hard on this. If you want to have a big Lovecraft-fest, here it is. But I would have cut a lot of the various horrors out and simplified it, playing up the investigation and playing down the fighting, giving some other way to stop the random apocalypse that the PCs stumble into. (And integrate that more with the plot in the first place.) I know it's Pathfinder/D&D and not Call of Cthulhu. That doesn't always have to mean hack and slash dungeon crawls. 2/5 blood drops.
"We're realistic heroes. We're not here to save the world, just nudge the world into a better place."