Trail of the Brotherhood (2011)

Trail of the Brotherhood is an adventure game with a deductive element set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s as the Investigative player teams work as a group to discover the Old One the Sorcerer players is working to summon. In a race against time the Investigators will span the globe seeking to uncover clues, attacking cults that have joined The Brotherhood, and working to obtain the keystone magical item required for the final ceremony. Will they succeed in this desperate quest, or will the Sorcerer player prevail, joining cults together to create the ritual’s power while wielding the required magic item to open the gate and wake the Old One they worship from slumber?

Trail of the Brotherhood is a game for 2 – 5 players designed by Richard Launius and published by EOS.

[Previous coverage of game from 2008]

The Trail of the Brotherhood has been on the back burner for some 15 years now and has never been published. RPGMP3.com and Yog-sothoth.com have obtained a play test copy and they would like to tell you all about it.

The game is a mixture of card play and board gaming. It is a game for 2 to 4 players. In each case one of the players takes the role of the Evil Cult Leader, attempting to summon some unnameable Lovecraftian entity to take over the world. He does this by gathering cults under his sway to allow him to build enough power to manage the summoning. He must also possess the necessary Summon Item to call the creature.

The other players take on the roles of teams of Investigators who are trying to foil his evil scheme. They do this either by destroying all the cults on the board (not an easy task) or by finding and destroying the artifact required for the summoning. The price for destroying the wrong item is expulsion from the game, so the players must deduce which item is the right one in a Clue (Cluedo) kind of fashion.

At present the game consists of:

80 Cards
3 six-sided Dice
World Map
Investigative Group Sheets
Rulebook
4 Player Tokens
Cult Location Tokens

An audio review of this game can be found at http://www.rpgmp3.com