From publisher blurb:
It is September, 1914, and the young nation of Australia – an independent country formed by the federation of colonies in 1901 – finds itself at war. Political machinations half a world away in Europe have led to Britain declaring war on Germany, and as part of the globe-spanning British Empire, Australia is eager to do its part to defend the realm. The effort is well underway to recruit tens of thousands of soldiers to fight overseas as part of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs).
But closer to home, the German colonies in the Pacific Ocean — and in particular the German wireless communication stations in New Guinea, a few hundred miles to the north of Australia — are a more immediate concern. In order to neutralise these colonies, a second (much more hastily assembled) group has been recruited from volunteers — the Australian Naval & Military Expeditionary Force (ANMEF). Less than a month after their creation, this force had taken part in some of the earliest fighting of World War 1 and successfully forced a German surrender which brought New Guinea under Australian occupation.
But while the ANMEF forces control the islands, the German fleet — the remnants of the East Asia Squadron — still lurk in the waters, threatening the defence of the new territory. Australian forces need to patrol the waters to keep them at bay. One of the vessels that has been given this important task is the Australian E-class submarine HMAS AE-3, whose crew of 34 includes the Protagonists. Buoyed by recent successes, the AE-3 cruises through the Bismarck Sea ever-watchful for German vessels ... but as the crew of this small ship are about to discover, there are places in the remote and empty oceans where the threat of enemy detection is the least of their worries.
"Red in Tooth & Claw" is a gritty Lovecraftian survival-horror sandbox scenario which places the crew of an Australian World War 1 submarine in a perilous "lost world" environment brimming with danger. Nature and its predations threaten to snuff out the lives of these young men, bereft of supplies and resources ... but those mundane concerns are but a backdrop to a much weirder and pernicious form of peril that wants to ensnare them.
The scenario can be played with access to just the open-source Cthulhu Eternal World War I SRD, which (for your convenience) we've bundled with the scenario. The adventure also comes with isolated digital versions of all props and maps, to make it easier to run on a VTT of your preference.
This is the third in our "Australian Aeons" line of self-contained scenarios set in different eras of Australian history, each infused with Lovecraftian hints of cosmic horror.
A NOTE ON PROTAGONIST GENDER & PRONOUNS: The set-up for this scenario presumes that the Protagonists are all members of a World War 1 era submarine crew. As such there is a default assumption Protagonists are male, based on the historical composition of such crews. Pronouns in the text reflect this assumption; similarly, the pre-generated Protagonists supplied with the adventure are all Australian men in their 20s or 30s. This is not to say that the scenario could not readily be run with Protagonists from a more diverse range of backgrounds, however this would require a (probably very small) amount of effort on the part of the GM to create an appropriate circumstance for other character types to be included on-board a war submarine in 1914. We thoroughly encourage and endorse such adaptations, however!