Minireview: Blood Brothers (Call of Cthulhu)

Blood Brothers is a somewhat unusual scenario collection from Chaosium. First of all, it’s not exactly a Call of Cthulhu collection such even though it’s labeled as part of the game line; while it uses the BRP ruleset, the scenarios are all non-mythos. Secondly, it’s firmly tongue-in-cheek, since the scenarios take their inspiration from late, late night horror B-movies. The book opens with various tweaks (replacing CoC sanity rules with stuff like “his hair turns white instantly”), ja providing optional 3-D rules (“the GM grabs the appropriate object from the table and moves it back and forth towards the player while making a ‘weeeooo-weoooo’ noise until the player finishes laughing or stabs him in the neck with a sharpened pencil”).

With those starting points the quality could be anything under the sun, but I’m happy to report that on the whole this is a good and very fun collection. Most (all?) are best suited for one-shots, since incorporating most of these in a “normal” campaign might be difficult. The quality varies, of course. Some are nice stylistic experiments but not necessarily great game tools (“Nemesis Strikes Back!” for example, there the PCs are mostly in the roles of spectators to events), and some just didn’t really grab me. On the other hand, many of these sound like a lot of fun given players who agree to the theme and play up the “B-Movie” vibe. Hey, a scenario titled “Ancient Midget Nazi Shamans” can’t be all bad, can it? Actually, it’s one of the better scenarios here, taking cues from the movie Gremlins and other sources. “Dead on Arrival” is a nice zombie homage, “Honeymoon in Hell” is a good “Island of Dr. Moreau” -style romp, and “The Dollmaker” gives us creepy dolls and an interesting scenario built around them. The book ends with a (B-Movie) sci-fi scenario, “Horror Planet”, which is both pretty good and has a suitably crappy title (all old late-night scifi/horror movies seem to have really bad titles, for some reason).

So. A bit of a mixed bag, but an amusing read and should provide good low-prep fun for GMs who need a one-shot to run some evening. Best served to players expecting a serious Cthulhu scenario, of course; the GM can get much amusement from watching the players try to figure out what mythos horror is behind the events (when it’s actually nothing of the sort).

There’s also a follow-up book available (titled “Blood Brothers 2”, unsurprisingly), and it’s supposed to be even better.

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