An Interview with Christopher Smith Adair about A Cold Fire Within

A Cold Fire Within is Chaosium’s latest addition to the Pulp Cthulhu line. I had the opportunity and pleasure to interview its writer, Christopher Smith Adair, and get their thoughts on the campaign, its inspirations, Pulp Cthulhu in general, and escaping out the butts of Dholes:

Can you tell us about your background with Call of Cthulhu?

 I’d been running the game for about fifteen years when Brian Sammons posted an open call for Strange Aeons II on Chaosium’s mailing list in 2002. It had never really occurred to me that I could or should write for an RPG before that. But I kicked around ideas for a couple of days until I made a pitch. 

That pitch was accepted, and I found it an interesting and rewarding challenge to write the actual scenario. While that project slowly moved through publishing, I wrote another couple of things that ended up in Worlds of Cthulhu magazine. 

In 2005, Strange Aeons II showed no signs of coming out, and a D20 book I was going to be a main writer on evaporated with the company that had solicited it. So, I quit writing for RPGs to focus the limited time I could allot to creativity and networking on writing songs and performing with a friend.

 Then, in 2008, Keith Herber, one of my favorite writers and editors, came back to the game when he started Miskatonic River Press. That got my attention, and I wrote “Wasted Youth” for New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. 

I also wrote the official conversions of the book for Trail of Cthulhu. I converted most of their subsequent game books, as well, and I copyedited all of them. I’ve remained a freelancer ever since, working with Chaosium and a number of their licensees, as well as Pelgrane Press.

 What started off the creation of A Cold Fire Within?

 After Mike Mason conducted a panel on the upcoming Pulp Cthulhu at Gen Con, the ideas behind A Cold Fire Within began to form. I had thought about including K’n-yan in a campaign for a couple of years, and the psychic powers and weird science options in Pulp Cthulhu seemed perfect. During the ENnie Awards, 

I asked Mike if there were plans to support the new game and gave him a soft pitch for the campaign. I followed that up with a refined formal pitch and expanded outline. Once we’d settled on the scope and concepts, I dived into the research.

 Without giving anything away, were there any particular movies or books that inspired A Cold Fire Within?

 While I’m sure there are some films that provided inspiration, even if subconsciously, I can’t think of anything specific. I know I didn’t watch anything with this project in mind. Prose, both fiction and nonfiction, absolutely did, though. 

I looked closely at a number of stories that Lovecraft had a hand in: “The Mound,” “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” “Polaris,” and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” chiefly. I examined the annotations that S. T. Joshi and Leslie S. Klinger made for those stories. I also made use of the variorum edition of Lovecraft’s collected fiction that Hippocampus Press published. Seeing what previous drafts had in them brings up some interesting threads occasionally.

 It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s satire of fascistic populism, provided one of the factions the heroes’ encounter. Then there’s all the nonfiction I researched. The one I want to especially mention is Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs from Inside the Earth by Walter Kafton-Minkel. Not only did it provide an excellent survey, it was imminently readable. The author clearly loves this material but provides engaging and humorous analysis of it. It’s unfortunately out of print and the only book written by the author.

 For A Cold Fire Within, you essentially created a comprehensive overview of K’n-yan culture. This looks like a vast undertaking. What did that process look like?

 So, there were several sources of inspiration. Of course, “The Mound” was my primary source. I broke that novella down, taking extensive notes so that I could analyze what was detailed about the culture. In the story, practically all the details of K’n-yan come from a conquistador’s account. The K’n-yan shown there has been in decadent decline for millennia. 

So, my task was to be true to what had been established while imagining what K’n-yan would be like in the 1930s. What are they like centuries after having had their world disrupted by the appearance of a surface dweller? What if they encounter more of them and have their worldview tested? What happens to a nation of psychics when the alien god that they no longer believe in briefly awakens and invades their minds?

 Also, I had a lot of opportunity to expand on the information. The novella provides an exhausting amount of detail, but there’s still a lot that is glossed over or ignored. And the area of K’n-yan we visit in the campaign is not that of the novella.

 Basically, I needed to do more than just provide game mechanics for what’s in “The Mound.” The heroes spend too much time in K’n-yan, and it’s too important to the campaign, for that. I wanted to provide an environment that was open and varied enough that heroes could be free to explore it and blaze their own trails. I also wanted to provide enough detail that Keepers could use it as a springboard for further adventures.

 I also drew inspiration from legends and hollow-earth theories. Considering the role that Theosophical beliefs play in the campaign, I paid extra attention to those that dealt with the underworld. While Theosophy gets no mention in “The Mound,” there are definitely connections to be made. When looking at other hollow-earth inspiration, I privileged what theories existed up to the 1930s. I didn’t stick to that too strictly, but I wanted the campaign to feel like something that could have been written during that time.

 Lastly, journeying to the center of the earth is a staple of pulp and adventure fiction. I wanted to play with some of the tropes we find in those stories. That influenced the schism between the two main factions I outline in K’n-yanian culture and led me to provide a variety of environments to potentially explore, from gleaming super-science cities to bizarre jungles.

 A couple questions about your opinions on Pulp Cthulhu in general: How would you describe the key differences between “stock” Call of Cthulhu and Pulp Cthulhu?

 I’d say my opinions on how it differs mirror the standard ones. Pulp Cthulhu allows you to play in a more adventurous and action-packed fashion. Heroes as player characters are hardier than investigators. Luck is more integral and more versatile than in the standard game. Talents make heroes still more capable and varied.

 What perhaps doesn’t get as much attention is the pulp genre’s variety and how that can make Pulp Cthulhu a great change of pace. It’s not just the PCs that are different; it’s the themes and even the world. Frankly, I doubt I would have written this campaign for regular Call of Cthulhu, and certainly not in the same way. 

Pulp Cthulhu is more than hard-boiled detectives and rugged archaeologists charging in. I can take a pulp hero and place them in environments I might not in CoC. Not only is that character more durable, but thematically and tonally they can exist in and interact with that strange environment rather than just experience it for a moment. That’s what interests me about Pulp Cthulhu.

 I’ll also point out that the structure of a pulp adventure is somewhat different from the average scenario. While not all CoC scenarios are full-fledged investigations, solving mysteries is definitely something investigators do. You can absolutely have mysteries in Pulp Cthulhu, too, but I don’t think it should be the focus. That’s one reason why I don’t think that heroes with psychic powers are a big deal in pulp games. If a Pulp Cthulhu scenario is made pointless by a clairvoyant, then it’s probably emphasizing the wrong things.

 As of now, Chaosium has only put out campaign-length scenarios for Pulp Cthulhu, A Cold Fire Within and the Two-Headed Serpent. Do you think Pulp Cthulhu lends itself better to campaign-length games, or is this just coincidence?

It’s probably coincidence. I pitched my campaign before Two-Headed Serpent was announced, though I suspect it was already in the works. The rulebook itself has four scenarios. I think Pulp Cthulhu works fine with any length. That said, the durability of heroes makes campaign play attractive. But durability isn’t immunity. I ran three play tests of A Cold Fire Within, and one group needed two replacement characters, and another needed one, and it could easily have gone worse a few times. 

Finally, did giving investigators the opportunity to crawl out of a Dhole’s butt happen organically, or had you been itching to get that put in somewhere, anywhere, the entire campaign?

I had an appearance by a dhole in mind long before I wrote that dubious escape route into it. Dholes or something like them were originally going to show up at the climax, powering immense machinery. I radically changed my initial ideas for the climax at some point. It was probably later that I thought about using a dhole elsewhere. 

Once I had the setup in mind and developed it, I started thinking of how the heroes were going to get out of the situation. There’s a way to do it that is in the heroes best interests in the long run, and that’s what I worked out first. But as with a number of other points in the campaign, my design goal was to provide options. 

As it turns out, none of my own players tried this particular method.

Find out more about Christopher Smith Adair’s at their website.