Soldiers of pen and ink

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Soldiers of Pen and Ink is a Trail of Cthulhu campaign set in the dark heart of the Spanish Civil War

A comrade is lost. Enemies surround you, and your fellow soliders cannot be trusted. Can you rescue your friend while retaining your sanity?

Madrid, 1936. The Investigators have come to Spain to shoot a documentary on the war sympathetic to the Republican cause, but find themselves trapped in the Siege of Madrid. One of their team goes missing, and their literary colleagues say it’s pointless – even dangerous – to ask what happened to him.

In a war of competing ideologies, unorthodoxy can merit the death penalty, even amongst those opposing Fascism, but is this Communist oppression or something more sinister?

Players need have no knowledge of the Spanish Civil War to experience this adventure – their Investigators can be naive idealists, and Keepers can be confident that the text explains historical background.

Dare you negotiate steely-eyed Communist ideologues, blood-thirst fascists and the horrors of an inhuman cult to rescue a friend?

“[I often have] the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world….From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.”

– George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”