News & Reviews

Open Design LLC recently released The Red Eye of Azatoth a 108-paged adventure anthology for Call of Cthulhu available through the KQ Store or DriveThruRPG. Its story spans nothing less than a whole millennium. Each adventure takes place in a different place and time from England in 887 AD to the American West in 1887. The name of the adventure anthology refers to the Harbinger Star, a comet that appears in the sky on the 87th year of every century. This comet is what binds the different adventures together.

There are five adventures set into the years 887, 1287, 1487, 1587 and 1887 respectively. The backcover blurb should give you a good overview of what The Red Eye of Azatoth has to offer:

Fear the Red Eye of Azathoth!

Kings die, nations crumble, and madness trails in the fiery wake of a comet called The Red Eye of Azathoth. Do you have what it takes to battle across history against the Mythos horrors that surface under its lurid glow?

• 887 AD, Holy Island, English Northumbria – As blood rain falls and the dead rise, Viking invaders and English monks must join forces or perish in a Lovecraftian nightmare.
• 1287 AD, Iwaizumi, Japan – Snowbound Samurai must unearth what lies behind the village where babies cannot cry and an abomination hangs lanterns that shriek with a thousand voices.
• 1487 AD, Valencia, Spain – Heretics must escape torture, prison, and the clutches of angels to expose the Spanish Inquisition’s true purpose.
• 1587 AD, Roanoke Colony, The New World – Colonists face flayed horrors that hammer on stretched-skin drums to reveal whose knife dug CROATOAN into the Lost Colony’s tree.
• 1887 AD, Desperation, Arizona Territory – In the series’ explosive magic-and-gunpowder climax, condemned gunfighters unravel the last skeins of the millennium-spanning mystery and stand alone against the full Mythos horror of The Red Eye of Azathoth!

Ia! Ia! Take your players to the mad reaches of our past with 108 pages of epic horror, complete with player handouts, new adversaries, and pregenerated Investigators for each time period.

Physically the adventure looks great (even in PDF form). There’s a nice page background that give the pages a slightly old feel without being distracting. The interior artwork and the maps are mostly in black & white but of great quality. That’s how I want my historical Call of Cthulhu adventures to look like.

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