Review: The Big Hoodoo

I finally played Trail of Cthulhu!

Looking around for an initial adventure, the premise of the self-described “film noir” adventure, The Big Hoodoo, by Bill White, seemed like it would be a good start. I was sadly disappointed.

The adventure fails largely in facilitating a quick and easy understanding of its structure and critical clues connecting the scenes together. I’d have expected better particularly as this is highlighted as a good adventure for convention play. I’d feel so sorry for the GM who had to do a low prep, or no prep session for convention players. The writing and inconsistent formatting throughout is really what makes it extremely difficult to get through. In some places, NPC names are bolded, while other names within the same sentence are not, and the reasons why are difficult to discern. Other difficulties stem from lack of clear distinction of read aloud text. Some body text is clearly written to be read aloud as descriptive text for players, but often the format does not differ significantly from clues. Clues are inconsistent as well, with some featuring the skill and point spends denoted in bold and at the beginning of paragraphs, which others are buried in body text. 

Neither connections between scenes nor a flowchart of this information is provided in a standard manner, such as putting a scene that leads from a clue in parentheses or signaling some other way to the GM. In my case, it was difficult to figure out that an invitation to a named address corresponded to another scene, since there was no information in the next scene referring back to the context of the clue. The address was the only link, and that information was buried deeper in the scene description. The lack of robust and multiple connections threatened to cause exactly the roadblocks that Trail of Cthulhu attempts to avoid, particularly with new players unused to matching their clue abilities to a given situation.

While I do enjoy the themes of alternative history, and the tie into classic science fiction, I was also let than impressed at some of the execution. Some clues seemed more red herrings or distractions than anything. The impression was more of a pastiche of various occult or ancient religious bits, then loosely, but not explicitly, tied to the Cthulhu Mythos. The puzzles that did exist were such that my characters would not have been able to solve them.

After more than a couple read throughs, I did have the opportunity to run the adventure. Despite the issues, I managed to muddle through most of it (the linkage to the climax is totally lacking, and the climax is its own mess). At the least I accomplished my initial goal of exposing some of my players to a very different system than they normally try. I would not recommend The Big Hoodoo as an adventure to much people though.