Florida. Indisputably weird place. Lovecraft himself sent his recurrent protagonist Randolph Carter down there on an unsettling adventure. Snake Oil Salesman is a Classic-era Call of Cthulhu scenario that brings the investigation to a floundering sanatorium tucked in the remote Florida swampland outside Tampa. It’s the first Miskatonic Repository outing by Chris Tatum and the content pairs perfectly with reliably awesome layout and design work by Alex Guillotte.
Drawing inspiration from the Road to Wellville, Tatum intentionally crafted this wonderfully encapsulated investigative scenario for the Second Annual Cthulhu Masters Tournament hosted by Lurking Fears at the 2024 Origins Game Fair. Eight tables overseen by a collection of talented Keepers, including Jon Hook and XP Lovecat, ran this adventure concurrently. At the end, each table’s success was measured by a well-balanced mixture of objective and subjective criteria. I also had the honor of participating as a Keeper along with the privilege to game with a creative and wild group of players who succeeded in capturing a perfect score and winning the tournament.
Playing this scenario was an undeniable 2024 Gaming Highlight for me. I had the pleasure of running it twice, once as a home group playtest and again during the tourney. Both versions played incredibly different, but equally entertaining. I highly recommend this scenario for its versatility, simplicity, and quality. Chris is a talented writer and Keeper, and I look forward to his future work. This review will first reflect on the strengths of the scenario while minimizing spoilers before transitioning to a spoiler-laden discussion of my personal experience and Keeper notes.
The investigation hits the ground running with a tight opening hook. The investigators gather in the office of their quest-giving patron, Ishwar. He’s a young, suave, and wealthy Indian importer. He reveals his financial relationship with Dr. Laramore, the owner of the Harris Corner’s Sanatorium. Laramore has fallen far behind on his loan payments despite grand promises of a tuberculosis miracle cure. Ishwar, a victim of institutional racism, needs clandestine allies to visit the sanatorium and gather information to support his position that the doctor is, at the very least, running a sham operation.
The six pre-generated characters are expertly crafted for this scenario. There are three pairs of investigators, including a private detective and his downtrodden sidekick, Ishwar’s accountant and his nurse/lover, and a patient’s academic husband and journalist sister. Each pair has an individual goal to investigate with varied motives. At the table, it works great for roleplaying and it facilitates scoring in tournament play. If running for a smaller group, the pre-generated characters can be effectively distributed based on numbers. If running for three or less, I would select from each pair’s “primary” investigator (PI, accountant, professor). If running for four, I would select two pairs, ideally including the husband/sister. Similarly, with five, use two pairs and a primary. Of course, this is easily modified for groups preferring to run with their own investigators by adding a pre-gen or two as accompanying NPCs.
With hook baited, the adventure moves briskly from the opening scene to a series of montage-type investigative options in Tampa proper. Here each investigator completes a single skill check of their choice to pursue preliminary clues. This keeps the pace rolling while allowing player agency in their selections. With information in hand, they follow a clear, direct path forward on board a bus to the sanatorium.
Once at the sanatorium, they meet the key characters, including Laramore and his current prized patient, Vera, wife/sister to an investigative pair. The rural sanatorium and its grounds offers a great setting for contained exploration without risk of player jumping out of bounds. There is a small cast of interesting NPCs and some tantalizing clues. Overall, it’s a well-crafted mini-sandbox.
The scenario provides a useful timeline for pacing with several discrete events to be added based on discoveries and player preferences. The insertion of events allows for considerable flexibility during play permitting narrative acceleration without breaking the plot. Helpful troubleshooting tips are provided. For example, NPCs are thoughtfully promoted as tools to enforce boundaries and elevate tension. The location-based scenario structure is laid out nicely in the text along with sets of reference floor plans for both Keeper and players.
The climax and conclusion are geared to hit hard. There are several dramatic levers that can be pulled to maximize the effect. Most importantly, there is no clearly defined track to the climax and conclusion. There are simply tipping points. From my experience and discussions with the author and tournament Keepers, this adventure never ends the same way, but it is always memorable.
Spoilers and Keeper Reflections
Without question, I am a fan of this scenario. All of my players were big fans of this scenario. My homegroup demanded a full-report from tournament and celebrated the insane choices made by the other group. In order to maintain consistency for the purposes of tournament play, I ran Snake Oil Salesman extremely close to the published content. I did make a few minor aesthetic choices and had some backstory thoughts.
To no one’s surprise, this scenario involves the Serpent People. Dr. Laramore discovered their artifacts in the swamps in the midst of prolonged grieving after his young daughter succumbed to tuberculosis. His sanity took an initial and substantial hit when he encountered an actual Serpent Person near the site of his discovery. Laramore goes on to obsess over the crystal mask artifact as a potential cure for tuberculosis. The majority of this information is Keeper facing and mostly irrelevant to scenario play. That said, it prompted some questions for consideration:
- What was it about the mask artifact that made Laramore believe it had healing properties?
- Was the Serpent Person using it in someway to revive, regenerate or transform an injured, hibernating or dead Serpent Person?
- Was the mask an artifact used by the Serpent People to subjugate, torture, or transform humans?
- How did Laramore learn that the other crystal device could be used as a weapon?
Answers to these questions may be useful for Keepers with inquisitive investigators. They could flesh out his older journal entries that depict his descent into madness. Another added clue to consider is mundane patient files stored on the ground floor in Laramore’s office or the staff area. Investigators inevitably seeks this information out, and these charts document the administration of sham treatments, track symptoms, and notably lack the records for Virgil and Vera.
With his crystal mask artifact, Laramore experiments on the unsuspecting patients at his sanatorium. The results lend some fantastic body horror elements to this scenario. Keepers should lean hard into both the snake motif and body horror. Players will immediately suspect the Serpent People angle and the shocks should come in the horrifying discoveries. The sanatorium’s third floor houses a wealth of potential, including Laramore’s serpentarium. Hundreds of pet snakes writhe in enclosures and terrariums. There is a giant, underfed python centrally located…emphasizing the apparent hunger of this creature gives investigators all sorts of ideas. In an adjacent room, the doctor has conducted an autopsy on a transformed patient. It hits harder when the body belongs to Virgil, the missing patient pursued by the private detective.
Tatum weaves in a creative red herring by drawing on Hindu religious iconography. The inclusion is respectful and well-conceived as it stems from Laramore’s obsession with serpents, rather than insinuating a religion-Mythos intersection. What’s more, it facilitates Ishwar’s involvement as a sympathetic patron and lends cultural depth to the snake motif.
In preparing the scenario, it is help to prep names of additional NPCs, including staff and patients. Assign each of these individuals with fact, clue, or red herring to provide to the investigators. It’s easy to assemble these tidbits using the scenario text. In my experience, investigators will want to pump the patients for information and view all staff as shady. It’s great to make all of these poor souls as innocent, hopeful, and naive as possible.
In most cases, the climax launches when someone activates one of the Serpent Person artifacts. As a result, the lurking Serpent People finally launch their attempt to recover their ancient devices. When this happened in my games, I had the initial attacks occur off camera as the Serpent People slaughtered the patients and staff. Amidst screams and slithers, they turned the sanatorium into an abattoir. First, the investigators discovered the gore, saw traces of snakes, and feared for their own lives then glimpsed the monsters and took their Sanity hit. Each time, Laramore got a special spotlight encounter with the Serpent People as the result of his own actions. He’s a great way to demonstrate, violently, that they have come to recover their artifacts, not eat people.
This scenario benefits mightily from a split party; in fact, it entices players to split the party by including paired investigators with discrete goals. At the tournament, one of my players expressed reticence to split up stating “it makes it harder for you [the Keeper].” I dismissed this concern and encouraged them to blaze their own trails. We ended up with a three-way party split that ran for nearly two hours across all three floors of the sanatorium. It created an amazing sense of player tension across the table, promoted clever teamwork, and allowed them to accomplish many goals while mitigating risk. The fixed locations, moving parts, and timeline events make this a great scenario to practice split party management.
I want to conclude with some of my personal highlights from this scenario. If anyone else has run or played Snake Oil Salesman, it would be delightful to hear yours. And if you haven’t played this one yet, you really should. I’ll be adding it to my regular convention rotation.
Highlights:
- Investigator throwing himself down stairs to realistically feign a medical emergency so companions could raid offices
- All four investigators signing up for a restorative massage with three of them ending up drugged, restrained, and taken upstairs for experimentation
- The fourth investigator discovering that all three of his friends had disappeared during his restorative massage
- One of the restrained investigators waking up in Laramore’s “treatment room” and stealthily choking an orderly to death with an electrical cord.
- Single investigator opening every single door in the Experimental Hall of Horrors…and tanking his Sanity rolls.
- Two investigators knocking an orderly unconscious and feeding him to the hungry python
- Second orderly dragging the python containing his consumed colleague into the autopsy room in an attempt to set him free
- Consumed orderly waking inside python only to be shot to death
- Investigators communicating with each other between first and second floor by banging a broom against the ceiling – “Damn spiders around here!”
- All investigators jumping out a third floor window and hoping to land in the adjacent pond with the old professor surviving only because his tuberculosis-ridden wife breaks his fall.