The Terror Beneath by Scott Malthouse

After reading the Great God Pan recently for the Grognard Files book club, I picked up this role playing game inspired by the works of Arthur Machen. It’s an investigative game, based on the Gumshoe system, in which players will always find the clues they need to progress without needing a specific roll but they will face other challenges or possibly get more information by using the right skills at the right time. An adventuring party should have most, if not all, of the available skills between them so there is no point where the game will be halted by a failed investigation roll.

Combat is also dealt with in an interesting way too - each character involved gets one roll which they can add to by spending points from their resource pool and the number of successes against their opponents is totalled up to find the outcome with a range of possible results depending on what they were trying to do. Were they attempting to drive off the monster so they could escape, or subdue a cultist so they could capture them? Characters can also suffer a range of injuries or afflictions which are tracked using cards (helpfully provided as a print and cut out download). Needless to say that direct combat against some of the powerful entities in this setting is not advisable! 

There is a good amount of detail in the chapters about the setting, with sections on the London Metropolis and the Welsh Wilderness, and the various entities that the characters might face from mad scientists to corrupted soldiers to the Great God Pan itself. There are plenty of plot hooks and scenario ideas based on the stories given too. The advice on writing and running investigative scenarios, and building a sense of creeping terror as the tension mounts, is very useful too and applicable to other games like Vaesen and Cthulhu Hack.

One last thing to mention is that as well as printed and pdf versions, this book is available in indexed and resizable EPUB format which is perfect for e-readers like Kindle and accessible for my poor eyesight. I wish more publishers would offer this! Recommended!

Osprey Games - The Terror Beneath