Cinq Supplices

As announced a year and a half ago, we have completed our Cinq Supplices campaign for Call of Cthulhu. Contrary to what had been announced, however, I did not publish an intermediate review: the campaign turning out to be shorter than expected, a long post-mortem seemed more relevant. Since my post-mortem of Masks of Nyarlathotep exceeded 3,000 words, it seems more logical to split this one into several articles, each dealing with a separate aspect of our epic campaign: the statistics for the curious, the summaries and step-by-step commentary, then a proper conclusion with my review.

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We start with the game statistics. This is certainly the least interesting part for many readers, but you may be intrigued to learn how this campaign played out at our table. You will more easily gauge the time needed to finish it, as well as understand the challenges the players faced. And besides, a good shot of graphs never hurt anyone, right?

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Play time & team

In its review, SciFi-Universe mentions that the Cinq Supplices campaign is very long. The exact definition of "very long" will depend on your free time, but the campaign's author counts on roughly a good hundred hours of play at most, which represents twenty-five sessions of decent length. At a rate of one session every two weeks, you will therefore complete the campaign in less than a year: in my eyes, this is a medium-sized campaign.

In practice, our campaign did not last that long. Twenty-three sessions were enough to finish our adventure, for a total of about seventy-five hours around the table. As the GM, plan on double that including preparation. That remains totally affordable for busy GMs - yes, you mature adults with many responsibilities such as your children or your depressing job - and since the in-game calendar is quite restrictive, you will hardly get the opportunity to flesh out this adventure with your own inventions, or even those of your players. This option is anyway hardly viable from a scenario standpoint, since it should be clear to any PC leaving Paris on Sayk Fong Lee's trail that time is working against them. To dawdle is to die.

More concretely, our short sessions (three hours on average) generally ran below the minimum envisioned by the author until the arrival of the Yellow Snake. Difficult to explain this difference: generally, I consider myself a fairly descriptive GM, who likes to dwell on details. Yet even so, the plane trip from Paris to Dairen took us less than half of the time estimated in the book. If you embark on this campaign, expect a similar gap. On the other hand, once the action became more prevalent, the pace of our sessions matched the forecasts.

Alongside this, only one player left the ship along the way, replaced four sessions later by a new member. The rest of the team stayed together for the whole campaign: over two years, that is quite good (of my last four campaigns, only the Pavillon Noir one can boast an even better score). The players' attendance rate proved relatively high throughout our adventure, compared to the hecatomb that the Cinq Soleils campaign of Pavillon Noir or Tian Xia for Qin represented.

Madness and Death

After the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, I almost dreaded another pile of corpses in my next stint as Call of Cthulhu GM. The fact is, I was wrong: between the more forgiving system of the 7th edition and a campaign with many open doors for escaping, death ultimately struck only once, on a bold action by a PC. Meng "the beloved" Zhude was swept away by the blast of his own grenade while he heroically wanted to settle the fate of the Tcho Tchos of the Ranksacaan cave, letting his comrades flee. The poor man was knocked out after pulling the pin on his engine of death, which took him to the other world along with his attackers.

The author therefore did not lie about the low mortality of his campaign, even if a sadistic GM will certainly manage to send their flock ad patres on multiple occasions. Fights are not lacking, and the military equipment that is ubiquitous from the start of the Japanese invasion is enough to fell many a human being in one blow (including your PCs). What is more, the relatively limited time window in which the story takes place offers few opportunities to recover effectively from one's wounds: as you can see in the "PC attendance and injuries" chart, three members of the group spent nearly half the campaign recovering from one (or several) bad blows. This aspect amply compensates for the absence of deaths in a group: tension is everywhere, and the players still feel vulnerable. Similarly, madness is not really a deal-breaker in this adventure, since none of our valiant investigators was institutionalized following the collapse of their sanity. Two characters finished with a score close to 10 - so it was a close call - but the explanation is to be found in their poor rolls at character creation.

To put it simply, if you are looking for a campaign where your players will suffer and create new characters at every session, you should move on. In Manchuria, people are kind.

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Next step of our dissection of the campaign: the summary of our adventure, garnished with some commentary at each stop.

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