Unfortunately, not up to the standard of The Things We Leave Behind or Fear's Sharp Little Needles. These scenarios read like rejects from FSLN or dated Chaosium adventures given a coat of modern paint. The authors tend to rely heavily on lore ripped straight from the CoC core rulebook (Chaugnar Faugn, Pnakotic Manuscripts, Deep Ones, etc.) and applied it uncreatively. The cults and evil forces present in each scenario suffer from unclear motivations and inexplicable levels of power and influence. As a result, the final scenarios are blandly familiar mythos-tinged romps tied to a mildly interesting concept, such as the world of skeezy underground comix, dead malls, malicious urban planning or shipbreaking yards in the global south. Most of these fail to spark the imagination on paper and seem like they would fail to provide a satisfying climax or resolution in-game. The theme-driven scenarios that made TTWLB special are absent.
Best: Granny's Tales - A hack indie comic book author floats around the fringes of the already fringe underground comic scene, penning a demoralizing set of 12 issues relating the Earth's Atlantean past. I could see this being well used in a adventure focusing on urban intellectual counterculture, comic collecting or anything with a punk vibe. In my opinion, tying the books to the Pnakotic manuscripts was a misstep. R. Crumb (the obvious inspiration for this piece) lived a life of nomadic poverty and wrote deliberately shocking and pornographic works. If Crumb was any more unhinged and occult-inclined, his work would have likely gone to places much stranger than garden-variety pseudohistory. And where would a scummy no-talent wannabe artist come across a magical tome older than the human race anyhow??
Worst: Urban Pentimento - A thoroughly boring resume of a seaside Japanese town with a dark secret. The latest in a long line of efforts to create a Japanese CoC setting, relying more on thirdhand pop-culture cliches than actual experience with the language and the country.
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