Strength of the Wendigo

The remit for Three Faces of the Wendigo – write an adventure with the Wendigo at the heart of it. In the hands of three writers you get three chilling takes on the same theme with a very different perspective.

Each writer – Richard August, John Almack and myself – came at the tale independently. John kicked off and completed his investigation, “Lovely, Dark and Deep“, first – a story set in the Jazz Age, but far, far away from the bright lights and the music. If there’s commonality in these adventure, it comes from exposure to the distant wilds, the rugged settlements and territories far from the beaten track.

John noted: “What I really like about this anthology is that the relative strength of the Wendigo depicted in each scenario perfectly matches the era in which it is set.” Indeed, the entity at the heart of “Wolves in the Mountain” sets a high watermark in malevolence – but each adventure will have the investigators questioning their slim possibility of survival in the face in the inhuman horrors.

“Wolves” and “Tainted Meat” lie at least a century apart, but both tell a story about communities pushed to extremes and challenged with survival. There’s nothing stopping a GM running each of these investigations with the same group – they’re perfect for filling a trio of sessions with Lovecraftian horrors.

They’ve all been tested in “convention conditions”, so they might equally serve well as one-shot fillers or as games to take to a convention yourself and run in a 3 – 4 hour slot. One adventure comes with pre-generated characters, but the simple character generation of The Cthulhu Hack means that you can get up and running without preparation or use existing investigators.

On top of that, the simplicity of the system means that there’s nothing stopping you from using these adventures with other systems and substituting systems on-the-fly, if you wish. Whatever flavour of Mythos game system you prefer, they scale up or down in either direction – it’s why The Cthulhu Hack exists, not as a replacement but as an alternative. TCH shines when you just want to get your game on at a moments notice, but absolutely works for longer term games if you wish. Other systems angle toward the campaign first and, therefore, guide you through a more structured and thorough character generation.

However you choose to use it, Three Faces of the Wendigo – available now from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG, and soon through All Rolled Up – provides three different adventures, each with their own influences, whether Blackwood, Ithaqua or the rich folklore of the Algonquin tribes. I enjoyed bringing it all together – and I hope you get a thrill out of playing or running these investigations.