Last Rites is actually four separate scenarios for the Call Of Cthulhu RPG, set in the modern day. This review contains spoilers, so if you plan to play in these scenarios you should read no further lest the blasphemous truths contained herein rend your feeble mind to tatters!
Last Rites is also the name of the first scenario. Henry Ennis was never a good father or husband, resulting in his wife Nicole's suicide. This left Lucinda, his eldest daughter, bitter and angry towards her father. Her sister, Sophia, disappeared years ago, a mystery that was unsolved until recently. Lucinda met a mysterious fellow named Jason, who opened her mind by sharing a book titled Flagitious Fragments.
Flagitious Fragments unlocks psychic talents in the reader, a rather campaign-altering event given that an investigator reading the book has a chance of acquiring psychic powers equal to his POW rolled against D100. These psychic powers include telepathy, mind control, and the ability to send nightmares to a target. All these powers are rather unbalancing in the hands of an investigator trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. It almost seems as if this scenario was written to introduce psychic powers to investigators, but it does so in the most boring fashion possible - I'd much rather have a PC receive his psychic powers through a traumatic event, a brush with the Mythos, or Mi-Go surgery. Not because he happened to read a book and then "meditate and perform mental tests to learn if he or she is a suitable candidate." Flagitious Fragments makes acquiring psychic powers sound like passing your driver's test.
After offing her father (we never find out how), Lucinda plans revenge on those who killed her sister. You see, there are no less than four cultists lurking in the town of Runville. Runville is an extremely small town nestled on the edge of a cliff and numbers "perhaps a hundred souls." Nobody said they were smart cultists.
Lucinda's convoluted plan involves animating her father's corpse as her instrument of revenge, which basically turns him into a zombie slasher. Controlled by Lucinda, Henry then offs the cultists one by one. It's up to the investigators to stop him.
There are so many disparate elements here that it's easy to lose the thread of the plot. Who are the cultists that killed Sophie? Who is the shambling corpse killing them? Who is controlling the corpse? Where did Lucinda get her psychic powers from? Who is this Jason fellow, anyway?
When I ran this scenario, I stole liberally from Friday the 13th, Part VII - The New Blood, which also involves a psychic girl, her dead father, and a reanimated killer. I changed the first cultist, Dr. Alan Ettringer, to a psychiatrist from Arkham trying to push Lucinda's psychic powers to their limits. I also made it a point of having the investigators discover Sophie's body in another town, so it's a bit more plausible that the cultists relocated to Runville. I made it clear that Ettringer knew this too, and brought Lucy to the town to provoke her and thereby reveal her psychic talents. The rest of the scenario turned into a supervillain battle, with Lucinda using telekinesis (a power not granted by the book) to try to stop her father. Ultimately, father and daughter both sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.
As scenarios go, this one gets a two out of five. Not particularly inventive, a boring town, and the cultists aren't even Mythos cultists.
The second scenario, Lethal Legacy, is much more interesting. A cultist named Douglas Drebber decides to summon a dimensional shambler to off his ex-wife who has since married Randy Kalms, a tough Vietnam vet turned author. But after he summons the shambler, Drebber changes his mind, only to die in his haste to undo the damage. Now it's up to the investigators to get to the Kalms before the shambler does.
This is a great race against time. Drebber's tale of domestic violence tinged with the Cthulhu Mythos really makes the character come alive (even after he's dead). The Kalms family is suitably hilarious and dangerous. Convincing a gun-toting family that something is about to kill them is like Aliens meets Home Alone.
This was one of the first scenarios I game mastered for my players and they loved it. I played Randy as a Jack Nicholson type. And of course, the shambler went after the Kalms' youngest child. It was a bloody fight to the finish.
This scenario gets five out of five stars. I didn't have to change much to make it exciting and the players loved it.
The House on McKinley Boulevard is a haunted house story that involves gremlin-like homunculi. Cedric Hedge, a disciple of Tsathoggua, sacrificed regularly to his dark god until he finally escalated to killing children. This resulted in the creation of an animated idol in Tsathoggua's likeness, but something went wrong: Hedge lost control of it and, in his attempts to stop it, smashed it to pieces before expiring himself. Thus little mini-Tsaothoggaus have been waiting for an eternity to be freed.
The Victorian-style mansion that was once Hedge's grand home is now a modern hovel. Squatters and drug addicts reside there. At the start of the scenario, one of the squatters has already killed himself. It's up to the investigators to get to the bottom of the mystery.
I ripped off the plot from movies again: The Gate. This kept the tension going, gave me ample opportunities to introduce the creepy little monsters, and provided an outline for what victims to go after and when. I used the rule from the Gate that the little monsters have to sacrifice two people to bring their dark lord back to his former glory. The subsequent battle with the swarming homunculi was great, and the spell to deactivate the animated statue of Tsathoggua was suitably climactic. This differed significantly from the original scenario, which sets up the drug addict (the obvious "bad guy") as a killer possessed by the homunculi.
The House on McKinley Boulevard gets four out of five stars. The ideas are great but the characters aren't really structured to provide narrative tension other than the crazy drug-addict guy, and there are far too many of those in horror scenarios.
The last scenario is one I haven't played yet but plan to. It's a little far out there, as it involves time travel, a high priestess of Pazzuzu, and a magic mace. It reminds me a bit of the plot from House (the movie, not the television show). Could be a lot of fun.
There's not a lot of structure to this scenario either, but the time travel and battle against the priestess -- who has a suitably climactic "monster form" -- could be interesting. I give it four out of five stars.
That puts Last Rites at four stars overall. Despite the first clunker of a scenario, the other scenarios are all suitably interesting and different enough to make for a memorable, quick game that will keep modern day investigators on their toes.
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