If you’ve made it to this website, you may well have heard of Dungeons and Dragons in a Castle, where rich nerds pay sackloads of gold pieces (about $5,000 per head) to enjoy an RPG-filled UK holiday in a historical setting with famous DMs. But now Call of Cthulhu is getting in on the action, with a one shot that takes place in the high security wing of a disused prison.
The game is taking place in Australia, at Pentridge Prison in Melbourne. Players will take on the cosmic beings, sinister cultists, and disorganized libraries that populate this horror RPG. They’ll be playing for three hours inside a cell in the prison’s high security H Division, apparently known as ‘hell division’ to inmates.
Once the largest prison complex in Victoria, Pentridge Prison was created in 1851 (though the H Division wasn’t built until a century later) and closed down in 1997. It’s now open for tours led by the Australian National Trust, the heritage organization that’s running this event in partnership with Masters of Alchemy, a Melbourne based group of professional DMs.
Obviously, this is a much smaller scale affair than the grand semi-LARP promised by DnD in a Castle. It lasts only three hours and doesn’t have the celebrity DMs who seem to be a large part of the appeal of that event. Fortunately, it’s not charging DnD in a Castle prices. The one shot, which takes place on November 19, costs $89 AUD/ $60 USD per person.
The website description makes pretty bold claims “In this never before seen event [you] will not only bear witness to the creation of haunting worlds of adventure, you will be transported to them,” but doesn’t offer up many clues as to what the game will be like. Obviously, it would make a lot of sense if the one shot was based around the history of the prison, or at least set in a prison, but not much can be gleaned.
Given that the image on the Pentridge Prison event page shows a game that clearly isn’t Call of Cthulhu, I have some suspicions that whoever created it may not be super au fait with tabletop RPGs.
However, Masters of Alchemy’s Instagram page calls the game Shadows Inside Pentridge, so it looks like the adventure will be making good use of its historical setting.
We’ve had Pathfinder in a palace and now Call of Cthulhu in the clink. We should keep this series going. Who wouldn’t be up for playing Morkborg in a morgue, the Alien RPG in an Arctic base, or Blades in the Dark at a bus stop? Admittedly, that last one might be pretty hard to market.
Source: Wargamer
