Today we’re going to look at a scenario where the player characters are working for a government agency investigating clandestine Cthulhu Mythos activity. The scenario isn’t set during the modern era, giving a glimpse into the world in a different era. Wait, no, come back, I didn’t accidentally post the same review two days in a row. It just happened to finish up two adventures that have similar themes.

Today’s review is for Brinkmanship, a scenario for Green Ronin’s AGE system RPG Cthulhu Awakens. This is a scenario set in 1963, in that magical period of time when the CIA and the KGB were trying to one up each other trying to figure out if they could control people’s minds or set up a program of psychics to give them advantage in the Cold War.

Disclaimer

While I have received review copies from Green Ronin in the past, I am not working from a review copy. I was a crowdfunding backer for Cthulhu Awakens, and this adventure is one of the goals. I have not had the opportunity to run or play this adventure. I don’t have a lot of AGE system experience as a GM, but I’ve been a player before.

Cthulhu Awakens: Brinkmanship

Design: Alexander Thomas with Malcolm Sheppard
Development: Malcolm Sheppard
Editing: Michael Matheson
Graphic Design: Hal Mangold & Kara Hamilton
Art Direction: Hal Mangold
Interior Art: Danil Luzon
Cartography: Zach Moeller
Publisher: Chris Pramas
Team Ronin: Kara Hamilton, Troy Hewitt, Steven Jones, Steve Kenson, Ian Lemke, Nicole Lindroos, Hal Mangold, Chris Pramas, Evan Sass, Malcolm Sheppard, Dylan Templar, and Alexander Thomas

Digital Doom

This review is based on the PDF of the adventure. The PDF is 26 pages long. The PDF is in two-column layout and follows the trade dress for the Cthulhu Awakens line, with a parchment like page background, green headers and section dividers, and black “slate” sidebars. In addition to artwork that serves as a snapshot of what is going on in the adventure, there are portraits of all of the main NPCs. There are also several maps of the adventure location.

The pages are broken out as follows:

• Front Cover, Back Cover, and Credits: 3 pages
• Entities and Individuals: 5 pages
• Main Adventure Text: 18 pages

The Era

As mentioned above, this adventure is set in 1963. The dabbling with psychic phenomenon that was part of real-world history, in the Weird Century setting of Cthulhu Awakens, reaches into the powers of the mythos.

The organizations at play in this adventure are the CIA, which you may have heard of, and the ICG, the Implicit Cartography Group. The Soviet organization at play is the GRU, although they aren’t quite the villain of the piece, but they do contribute to what shaped one of the antagonists.

The adventure mentions the issues surrounding the marginalization of people regarding gender, sexual orientation, and race. There is the standard (and good) disclaimer that you don’t want to include content that makes your table uncomfortable. Because of the remote location where the majority of this adventure takes place, the primary prejudice that the PCs will encounter is the systemic sexism surrounding the CIA, mainly regarding the degree to which the adventure location is not set up to make female agents comfortable in an effort to let them know that they don’t belong in the field.

Outpost 323 is located in Northern Türkiye, a location secured by the CIA with their support of far-right paramilitaries and funding counter-insurgency groups. This outpost is near the USSR and is conducting some research on top of housing members of the ICG, which includes individuals involved in remote seeing (clairvoyant) activities.

Visiting the 60s

The opening of the adventure includes suggestions for how the adventure can be used, beyond a one shot in a 60s era campaign. These include the following suggestions:

• The events of the adventure establish facts that are revisited in the modern portion of the campaign
• The PCs may be displaced in time by interacting with existing supernatural effects
• The modern PCs may be older, and playing themselves as young agents in their 20s and 30s, and flashing back to an earlier mission
• Characters in the modern era start reading files that they have found, and they play through this adventure to see what is detailed in the logs

What is Going on Here

If you might be a player in this adventure, or if you want to be surprised while reading the adventure for yourself, you should probably perform a ritual that removes you from the current fragment of reality

The PCs will be contacted by the CIA, sent to Outpost 323 in northern Türkiye, to investigate strange events surrounding the outpost. Why the PCs? Because one of the members of the ICG left instructions to recruit them, because that agent has been on some mind and time period swapping adventures due to the Yithians he’s been in contact with, and he knows the PCs are important to resolve the situation, but not why.

The CIA contact recruiting them trusts the ICG agent that left the instructions, so she wants to follow through. She can’t ask him any further questions, because he’s disappeared. As written, many of the government agents that deal with strange topics like remote viewing may understand there are some inexplicable psychic things that happen but aren’t clued into the much wider reality of the cosmic horrors that might threaten the planet. But she understands that all of this is likely related to some kind of psychic phenomenon.

Because they may be dealing with double agents, the PCs are going to be set up with false clearances to show why they are being assigned to the outpost. The default ID sets up the PCs as airplane mechanics, and they’ll be given a quick training session to let them bluff their way through any questions about their jobs, which is represented as a temporary bonus on checks related to airplane maintenance. If the PCs have some other specialty that might qualify them for a different security clearance, they can ask about it, but the point is to not stand out.

The PCs will be given inoculations, which they are told are related to the location to which they are traveling. The truth is, one of the inoculations they receive is an experimental compound that blocks telepathic intrusion.

Investigating the Site

Much of the bulk of the adventure is about the PCs exploring the outpost, justifying why they may be in the section of the outpost that they are currently investigating, and being scrutinized by Betty Fuller, a radio engineer at the site who has been assigned the job of coordinator for the ICG projects on base.

One interesting element of this scenario is that depending on who finds out that the PCs are here under cover identities, this is a CIA operation, and multiple layers of subterfuge are almost expected. That said, having their cover blown is going to draw eyes on them and make investigation much harder.

There is a strange, ongoing effect where an area near the base is constantly raining ash, and that ash burns through the material it settles on. Neither Fuller, nor the PCs, have clearance to enter the special hanger that is part of the P-VERTICAL project.

There are a number of secrets the PCs can uncover through investigation. If they follow Fuller, they find out that the pilot that flew them into the Outpost doesn’t trust her, and they find out that she’s suspicious of the PCs. The PCs may find out the P-VERTICAL hanger contains an experimental aircraft.

Eventually, the PCs may find a group of agents who know something is wrong with Fuller and have been sequestering themselves until they can secure more of the psionic inoculation that the PCs were given before they were sent here.

What is REALLY Going on Here

The experimental aircraft has been using technology that touches on reality warping powers. In creating the power source for the aircraft, the engineers effectively began an Eldritch Working that was never completed. This damages the prison of an entity that has been trapped below the site’s location since pre-historic times. The burning ash that keeps falling is a side effect of where the plane’s technology damaged reality.

Melvin Bird, the agent that sent the cryptic recommendation to recruit the PCs, has swapped minds with a Yithian, incredibly old aliens that explore other times by inhabiting the bodies of others. The Yithians imprisoned the skotomorphs in ancient times, sometimes in vaults, and others sealed away in underground cities. Melvin knows some of what is going on, and that the Yithians are afraid that the Skotomorphs will escape their prison.

Betty Fuller is actually a Russian double agent, who was also recruited due to her psychic abilities. The skotomorph whose prison was damaged has convinced her that she needs to free it. Fuller, who has trained to use multiple cover identities, is now convinced that she is a double agent, but for who, and why changes in her mind constantly. She just knows she needs to free the skotomorph. She’s also got control of many of the personnel, since none of them knew to use the inoculation to protect against mental intrusion. Fuller is planning on completing the destruction of the skotomorph’s prison.

Because of the outpost’s remote location, once everything comes to a head, the PCs will need to determine how they are going to get back to inhabited settlements. They can travel through the wilderness, which will take a while, as well as requiring food and water. They can attempt to fix the experimental airplane, which can be potentially dangerous, since they need to complete the ritual used to power the aircraft in order to use it. Or, in my favorite bit of irony in this scenario, they can repair the Cessna that is used to fly personnel into and out of the facility.

Endings

The skotomorph escaping its prison is bad, but it’s not “the world is ending immediately” bad. It could still get there, because the skotomorph will be working to break down the barriers to all of the other prisons around the Earth, and then secure control of the planet.

Betty Fuller is a wildcard. Depending on how the PCs approach their final confrontation, she may escape and get picked up by her Russian handlers, or she may surrender and wait for a good time to attempt an escape or find a way to wheedle into someone’s trust.

Defusing the Situation

I’ve said this before, but I like investigative adventures that give the players wide latitude to investigate what they want, how they want. I like how the base is laid out for investigation, and how the different NPCs that the PCs can find or interact with might recontextualize everything they think they know, without invalidating that information that they have gathered. I’m going touch on this below, but when I was thinking of what kind of pop culture “vibes” I get from this adventure, this almost feels like an X-Files or Fringe style scenario. I mentioned it above, but I love the irony of needing to fix a plane after showing up with false credentials as airplane mechanics.

Accidental Dimensional Membrane Damage

I mentioned this above, and it’s not really a negative, but if you are coming into a Cthulhu Awakens scenario expecting a more horror-oriented vibe, this one leans more “weird” science in execution. There is a recurring line used in the adventure about how the PCs can only trick the guards because their minds are clouded, and they could never use silly tricks like you see in action movies on them otherwise. We’re playing an RPG. Some of us don’t want to think about what tactical training would or wouldn’t make guards likely to be on guard about. That’s why you set a difficulty and let dice roll. There is a lot of backstory in this adventure. Much of it may not even be revealed to the PCs, even if they manage to stop Fuller’s plans.

Speaking of things that the players aren’t likely to know in the adventure backstory, there is an element of Fuller’s story that I think is unintentionally sounding a wrong note. At most, the PCs will probably learn that Fuller is a deep cover agent with multiple identities. However, her history includes her hiding her Jewish heritage due to Russian antisemitism. That’s a compelling backstory for this era. But then the character that hid their Jewish identity ends up being part of a potential conspiracy free former rulers of the planet, and she’s using her abilities to secretly control almost everyone on the base. It’s not intentional. It’s not a critical plot. It’s just one of those things that may be interpreted in an unfavorable light.

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

This is a solid investigative adventure, and it plays well with the more structured Mythos history established in the Cthulhu Awakens core rulebook. It establishes that the game is about using the Mythos as a story element, and not just retreading traditional Cthulhu Mythos tropes. That said, I know there will be some people that expect this to be a little more horror heavy.

There is also just a lot going on in the backstory, and if I were running this, I would have to sit down to map places where the backstory could bleed through, if I wanted to make it more meaningful. In some places, there are areas where it can be naturally communicated, but those areas of the adventure aren’t clearly called out or highlighted, making those fine points a little trickier to remember.

https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/10/01/what-do-i-know-about-reviews-cthulhu-awakens-brinkmanship/

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