Does Love Forgive? Review

Review of a Call of Cthulhu module

Does Love Forgive? is a unique pair of modules for Call of Cthulhu. Intended for a single player and a Keeper, they focus on love and romance. I was really excited about getting to play these modules—my girlfriend and I are always looking for more Call of Cthulhu oneshots to play and are tragically limited by other people’s willingness to play them, and we tend to run our games as Cultist Dating Simulators even when they weren’t intended.

Unfortunately, I thought that the first module, Love You To Death, was fairly low-quality, and the second, Mask of Desire, needs some serious rewriting to be playable.

[The following contains spoilers and should not be read by people intending to be a player in a game from Does Love Forgive?]

Love You To Death

Justin Alexander has written about how some adventure modules aren’t really intended to be played—they’re intended to be read by people imagining how fun it would be to play it. If you actually try to play it, you discover serious structural problems.

Love You To Death is one of those modules.

The premise is that the investigator was friends with two girls—Hattie and Ellen—at the orphanage. Ellen was in love with you and believed that Hattie and the investigator are in love, which caused your friendship to fall apart. Years later, when you’re all adults, Ellen learns a spell that allows her to transfer her mind into Hattie’s body. She hopes to impersonate Hattie so you’ll love her.

Ellen is a great villain; we have a lot of really fun backstory for her. Unfortunately, there’s no possible way for the investigator to learn half of it, and it exists only for the enjoyment of the module reader. She doesn’t appear on screen until the very final scene. That could work, if you’re learning about her from other sources, gaining a deep sense of her personality so the player is vibrating with anticipation by the time she actually appears— but the mystery is who kidnapped Hattie, so we learn nothing about Ellen until almost the end. The only real presence she has in the story is a love letter she inexplicably sends you where she essentially confesses that she’s going to transfer her mind into Hattie’s body. For the player, Ellen herself is a cipher.

Because she spends the entire module kidnapped, Hattie only shows up in one scene and has very little characterization. This is a serious problem, because the investigator’s relationship with Hattie is supposedly the driving force of the entire game.

Love You To Death sacrifices Hattie’s and Ellen’s character development for the mystery like a cultist to summon a dark god, but the mystery is so dull that it’s like instead of Cthulhu the ritual summoned Joe who has an octopus tattoo. Ellen is obviously the villain, because you introduced her at the beginning of the story, she sent you a creepy letter, and there’s no other role for her to play. The player winds up playacting solving a mystery they already know the answer to.

Furthermore, the structure of the mystery is that the protagonist talks to an NPC, who provides exposition and a pointer to the next NPC. None of the NPCs have their own motivations or any reason to conceal information from the protagonist; none of them are mistaken about what’s going on. I’d say they’re Clue Delivery Mechanisms, but that would be giving Love You To Death too much credit. They present the entire plot wrapped up in a bow. The player’s only role is saying “oh?” while the NPC tells you what’s going on.

Even in the climax, there are very few mysteries to solve. The game wants to make absolutely 100% sure that the player character does not possibly have any room to believe false things about whether the person they’re talking to is Ellen or Hattie, from the creepy letter at the beginning to the fact that Hattie’s pet dog senses that it’s really Ellen. What could be an incredibly suspenseful moment, a genuine dilemma for the player, feels railroaded in play. (Part of the problem, of course, is that we don’t get to meet Ellen or Hattie, so the player has no basis on which to try to figure out who is who.)

The player might object to not having any mysteries to solve in their investigation game. Fortunately, Love You To Death lets you solve riddles! Unfortunately, the riddles are the sort one might put in a book aimed at eight-year-olds, and there’s literally no good characterization reason for Hattie to be communicating in riddles. Why is she so worried about Ellen that she’s leaving secret notes in riddle code, but not worried enough to take any precautions? Why does she think that Ellen isn’t going to be able to solve riddles, especially ones an elementary schooler could work out?

The fundamental issue is that Love You To Death doesn’t have the courage of its premise. It’s a game focused around love, romance, and characterization. But they don’t want to actually commit to making the player do romance at the table. Lots of people find it uncomfortable, it can lead to sexual harassment, and it explores deep issues many players are uncomfortable with.

I would like to suggest that people who have these preferences, while very valid, should simply not try to play Does Love Forgive?, a pair of Call of Cthulhu modules focused on love and romance. I don’t like crunchy combat, so I don’t try to play GURPS Vehicle Explosions: We Researched Every Kind Of Car And Now You Can Spend Two Hours Rolling Dice To See Exactly Where The Hubcap Goes When The Car Goes Boom. If people don’t want to play cultist dating sims, they can play a different fucking game. Love You To Death splits the difference between being an ordinary Call of Cthulhu module and being one focused on feelings and kissing, and does a good job of neither.

A final criticism: Love You To Death takes place the day after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and Hattie’s husband died in it. You might notice that the plot summary I gave above has absolutely nothing to do with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The only role it plays in the plot is as a reason for Hattie to be separated from the investigator, a situation which presumably occurs every night, because they live in different places. There isn’t even any thematic resonance or narrative foils happening. It feels like they were like “this is the 1920s! We should make something that happened in the 1920s happen! Ooh! It’s on Valentine’s Day, which is clever, because our game is about kissing!” Which is fine, but you have to come up with a reason for it to matter.

Mask of Desire

Mask of Desire is a significantly stronger game than Love You To Death, but still presents some serious issues.

The premise of Mask of Desire is that there’s a mask which grants the wearer their heart’s desire as long as they wear it… at a cost to their sanity. The investigator’s best friend Anna has a very important audition tomorrow, but she has crippling stage fright which might derail her career before it starts. Her friend Lucas, who is pining after her, has obtained the mask to help her, but is tempted by the possibility of wearing it himself and becoming someone that she loves. Meanwhile, a spy for the Imperial Japanese is attempting to collect the mask himself.

The premise here is neat. The Mask of Desire is spooky in the best Call of Cthulhu way and offers an opportunity for rich character development and psychologically based play.

There are two initial scenes (the party and the delivery of the mask) that occur in a pretty linear way, and the climax will probably be at the audition¹, but in between the player has a lot of freedom. There are a manageable number of different factions for a oneshot and each have their own clear motivations, which allows the Keeper to respond fluidly to unexpected behavior from the investigator. The locations the player might reasonably visit are clearly described, with vivid details that bring them to life.

I have two major criticisms and one minor criticism.

First, it seems to me that the most interesting play will come if the investigator themself has some reason to want to put on the Mask—they have some sort of heart’s desire that hasn’t been fulfilled. Otherwise, the investigator isn’t involved in the primary internal conflict of the story. If I were writing this, I would specifically highlight that Keepers should encourage their players to have some sort of unmet (and possibly unmeetable) heart’s desire which could be provided by the mask.

Second, one of the primary conflicts is Lucas’s decision to either put on the mask himself or give it to Anna (or throw the damn thing away because it’s bad news). As written, there is no obvious way for the protagonist to wind up influencing this conflict, because Lucas is resistant to all of the investigator’s attempts to talk to him about it. At the end, we’re told to have the player roll the dice for Anna’s audition so they feel involved in the climax. But surely it would be much more satisfying if the investigator were actively involved in the Anna/Lucas arc! I’d suggest that Lucas should open up to the investigator about his internal conflict, giving the investigator a chance to influence him one way or the other—and to be tempted to wear the mask themself.

My minor criticism is that it seems to me the Imperial Japanese would not be very responsible users of an evil cult mask that gives you your heart’s desire. I would have appreciated a flashforward if the Imperial Japanese agent gets the mask that shows the horrifying uses to which it was put. This is a pretty minor criticism, but I think it would have really put the horror in this horror game.

These are all fairly fixable problems on the Keeper’s part, and I recommend Mask of Desire to any person who finds the premise interesting.

1. Although the time I played it with my girlfriend it wasn’t.