Cthulhu Britannica: Avalon: The Somerset Sourcebook Paperback – September 7, 2010

Pristine, brand new and hard to find. Great resource book

works great for both gaslight and 20's and 30's even, the atmosphere is creepy and there is a lot of soggy bulbous eyed goodness to be had.

I bought Avalon because I needed a few short adventures to fill some gaps in a British CoC campaign. As such I was disappointed. Avalon includes only three complete adventures - not four, as stated in the product blurb. Instead of a fourth adventure there's a chapter made up of half a dozen adventure seeds, i.e. incomplete adventures. And of the three complete adventures only one met my needs, although I'll try not to let that get in the way of this review.Since I bought this product for the adventures I'll start there. The three adventures are Blood and Water, Strange Little Girl and St Swithun's Hole. Blood and Water is a conspiracy thriller featuring the British royal family and the Holy Grail. It's tied to the death of Queen Victoria's daughter Helena, and so takes place in 1923. The author explains that the date could be changed if Helena were replaced with another member of the royal family, but I suspect this is easier said than done. While I expect campaign-length adventures to be tied into historical events I desire flexibility in short adventures.Strange Little Girl concerns an archaeologist trying to escape the wrath of an angry deity whose avenging avatar appears as a little girl. It takes place at midsummer but the year isn't important.In St Swithun's Hole the investigators explore a cave system of archaeological interest that's home to a tribe of monsters. This adventure is the most flexible and can take place whenever the GM likes. It works as a stand-alone adventure or as part of an on-going campaign. By adjusting the number and power of the monsters the GM can adjust the difficulty of the adventure to suit his needs. It also contains a useful set of rules for randomly generating cave complexes.While St Swithun's Hole is the only adventure that meets my current needs I could see myself running any or all of these in the right campaign.Of course Avalon isn't just an adventure pack, it's a sourcebook for running CoC adventures in the county of Somerset during the 1920s, and so the first half of the book is filled with the sort historical, geographical and legendary information about the county that GMs should find useful.Overall I was fairly impressed but thought the product overpriced. It may be 130 pages long but the text and spacing are quite large, so it doesn't contain as much information as the page length suggests. Excluding postage I paid about £13 for it. I think £10 would be more reasonable and if I'd paid £10 I'd probably give it four stars.

La magia primordiale, che permea la Contea del Somerset fin da epoca preromana, fornisce spunti notevoli all'appassionato di giochi di ruolo di ambientazione lovecraftiana (Artù è sepolto sulla perduta isola di Avalon...) ed offre orizzonti narrativi imprevisti, che permettono variazioni interessanti rispetto agli svolgimenti abituali. In lingua inglese.