Tales of the Sleepless City is a collection of investigations for Call of Cthulhu. The download weighs in at 162-pages from Miskatonic River Press.
There are seven different authors involved. Dan Harms for To Awaken What Never Sleeps, Brian Sammons for The Terror from the Museum, C. Michael Hurst for The Fishers of Men, Oscar Rios for The Tenement, Mikael Hedberg for A Night at the Opera, Tom Lynch and Scott David Aniolowski for The Child and Weeping Mother.
It seems like a good time to be running a scenario called The Fishers of Men. It said that Saint Peter, the first Pope, was supposed to become a Fisher of Men.
As this is a review of a series of adventures you should make the decision now whether you want to read any further. There will be no spoilers but savvy players will be able to wriggle out ideas and informed guesses from even the slightest clue.
Please also note this is not a playtest review. Tales of the Sleepless City only hit the electronic shelves in March 2013. However, this is a review from a Keeper looking to supplement his notes with an “investigation pack” ready to scoop up players who stray from the expected hooks and clues in a larger Call of Cthulhu sandbox campaign I have been preparing.
Tales of the Sleepless City needs experience. It needs an experienced Keeper and it needs experienced players. More importantly, perhaps, it needs investigators with some experience and in some cases with mythos lore.
I am glad I took the time to thoroughly read through Tales of the Sleepless City rather than just print it out and tuck it into my Keeper folder. This is a collection of investigations that a Keeper needs to know well and have thought about in advance. Miskatonic River Press have a logical presentation and share information in a timely way but as is common in Cthulhu investigations you need to know about background, upcoming events, motivations of NPCs and the importance of locations.
I had wanted to use Tales of the Sleepless City as a backup, as a method to drag in straying investigators into a plot, and I can still do that with this offering but it was not the “I’ve not prepared anything” failsafe it might have been. Tales requires preparation.
The city in question is New York. The adventures are set in the 1920s and this is an interesting time for America. This is a time of segregation. There is religious intolerance and homosexuality was considered a mental disease. It feels like an appropriate backdrop for a game of sinister madness and evil.
Miskatonic River Press do a number of things right for the busy Keeper. It’s an experienced crew and it does feel like you’re buying this experience when you purchase the scenarios.
The layout is clear and easy to read. Information comes at the right pace. However, I’m normally happy to keep PDFs electronic and work either off a laptop or even my Nexus 7. That wasn’t the case for Tales of the Sleepless City. I had my (albeit flaky) Adobe Reader beeping me about errors on the first page of the PDF and the sidebar indexing isn’t everything it could be.
The download is generous with handouts. That’s exactly what I needed it to be. As you read through the Keeper’s notes and stats you’ll see handouts in the layout. You’ll also get access to them all at the end of the PDF again, in the right orientation and easy to print.
The adventures in Tales of the Sleepless City are nice and diverse too. I love the idea of “megapolisomancy” as a form of city magic, it feels very suited to a living, breathing New York of 1920. Miskatonic River Press draw in mythos from beyond the pen of Lovecraft too; for example taking some of Robert Bloch’s creations as inspiration.
The page count is a little misleading. There are a lot of pages for other Miskatonic River Press products in the download. That said; none of the adventures feel like they’ve had pages cut from them in order to save space. Now that I’ve printed them off I’ll be keeping all of the handouts handy and three of the adventures in the back of the folder and the rest hidden away for another rainy day.
In conclusion Tales of the Sleepless City will sell itself. If you’re a Keeper with a fairly experienced group and you’re looking for all that you need to run some investigations, but not a step-by-step dungeon crawl, then this is a product aimed at you. It’ll satisfy your needs too.
Tales of the Sleepless City is available from Drivethru RPG.
