This is part of my campaign report for Horror on the Orient Express.

As recommended on Reddit, this is the perfect prelude for the campaign. Running this after or in the middle of the London chapter as the book suggests is a waste. Running it as a prequel offers many benefits:

  1. It establishes Professor Smith as a trustworthy and helpful character, making the later attack on him more impactful
  2. It introduces the Makryats and the Brothers of the Skin as villains (and as enemies of Smith) for a satisfying payoff later
  3. You can establish more interesting back story for the characters of the main campaign: one of our 1920s characters was the child of two of our 1890s characters
  4. You can establish connections to Constantinople: one of our 1890s characters remained in Constantinople and became an elderly NPC who the 1920s characters could consult

I ran the opening as Smith’s New Year’s party, also as recommended on Reddit.

This chapter is good practice for all of the “train chapters” in the campaign where the investigators are pretty much stuck on a train the whole time. All of the flavor of these kinds of chapters come from the NPCs and the timeline. Map out the timeline ahead of time and plan out what interesting developments will happen on each day and which NPCs will be involved. Print out NPC portraits so your players can keep track of the large cast.

I also highly recommend leaning into a couple key NPC potrayals:

  • Show off Menkaph front and center as a gloating, flashy villain. Have him openly terrorize Ellie Myers and sneer at the investigators’ meddling. Your players will hate him, making his ultimate demise all the better.
  • Have Henri show up in the nick of time, every time. Don’t worry about him being too helpful: throw him into combat and have him support whatever zany schemes your players come up with (while maintaing his cool professionalism). My players fell in love with him and desperately longed for his return throughout the next few chapters, making his eventual reappearance all the more sweet.

I otherwise ran this mostly as-written over two sessions. This was partly due to lack of time: we had some guest players who weren’t committed to the rest of the campaign. This works great for this scenario since realistically most of the surviving characters will be too old to participate in the rest of the campaign anyway. I plan on continuing this in later side scenarios: inviting new players to join in to get a taste of HotOE.

Because of lack of time, I ended up cutting out the entire climax. My investigators managed to subdue Menkaph on the train with the help of Ilsa von Hofler, who brought sedatives on board. I then got rid of the note from Nisra, and substituted a new climax: bringing Menkaph and the other fez-wearers to Demir to break the spell. Demir giving the investigators the Destroy the Fez spell works fine as a climax because there is still the chance of the wearers’ heads exploding.

Next: Ch 0: The Doom Train.