Sir Wulf

Since I already have the earlier edition, I don't particularly need the new one anytime soon. On the other hand, if some sort of discount were available for a limited time, I might pick the new version up right away so I could enjoy the added and revised material. Chaosium has many other fine products that attract my attention, so they won't be deprived of my business in any case.

Would it be practical to give a slight discount for those of us who purchased the original?

Count me in!

The Bolton described by Lovecraft in "Herbert West - Reanimator" has little resemblance to the actual town. In the 1920s, Bolton, Massachusetts, was an agricultural hamlet of about 700 souls, about 25 miles from Boston. The Central Massachusetts Line of the Boston and Maine Railroad provided easy transportation into the city for those who wished to visit. In Herbert West – Reanmator, Lovecraft described a very different sort of town. The text mentions immigrants living in the town from Italy, Ireland, and Poland (At the time, immigrants from other Baltic states were often misidentified as Poles, so the description could have been loosely applied). The Bolton Worsted Mills are repeatedly mentioned: “... A factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter’s field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district.” “In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing—with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported." “Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town...” Lovecraft's Bolton seems to have instead been inspired by one of the boroughs of Manchester, in England. England's Bolton was a center (or should that be “centre”?) of textile manufacture, a mill town almost exactly matching Lovecraft's description.

I was framing out a scenario set in and near the mill town of Bolton, Massachussetts. There was some mention of the town in the scenario Freak Show (from Tales of the Miskatonic Valley), but I don't recall any other sources detailing the place. Has Bolton come up in any other scenarios or sourcebooks? (My initial take on Bolton was based on Lowell, Massachussetts, a former mill town along the Merrimack River. When I was last there, way back in 1986, it was a forlorn place, with most of its mills shut down and high unemployment. In its heyday, Lowell was a bustling center of industry, with dozens of cloth mills and shoe manufacturers.)

When I run a scenario, I don't want my players to immediately guess what they're dealing with. Ideally, they should be mystified, worried, and maybe confused. I do want them to figure out what's going on somewhere in the middle of the action, and I definitely don't want the scenario to gratuituously swap one monster into the natural niche of another without foreshadowing that the players' metagame preconceptions may be wrong. As an example, suppose that the investigators are looking into strange disturbances at an old cemetary. The players (not necessarily the investigators) may very well expect ghouls to be involved. If it turns out that the issues were caused by a pod of cthonians burrowing around underneath the place, I expect some clues will give the players a hint of what they're truly facing, even if the clues don't give away the whole show. I also like to see enough "Scooby Doo" shenanigans to keep them honest: They might go in expcting ghouls, and instead discover that thieves are trying to tunnel into a bank vault next to the cemetary. A scenaro like that should have some other twists: Perhaps the thieves are trying to get into something less cliched than a bank vault, and perhaps they want a payoff that isn't as simple as the bank's contents... If something is the first thing you think of, it's better to put something else into your scenario.. Not every cult is Cthulhoid, and not every town has a cult. Not everyone who suspects the truth is a cultist, and not every cultist is a fanatic.