The "Blood Ties" map, complete with starting setup cards.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Mansions of Madness by Fantasy Flight Games is about an ancient conflict, between incomprehensible things and a few ignorant people willing to peer into the unknown, and in the process push back the darkness for a few minutes more or lose their sanity. It takes place in the thick of Lovecraft’s (and his inheritors’) fiction, in a vast universe hostile, or perhaps worse, indifferent, to man.

I sat down on Halloween night with my wife, my sister Emilie, and two friends to play through one of the game’s scenarios, “Blood Ties.” This is the story of what befell four investigators as they struggled to uncover the mystery of a blood relative, and the legacy he may have passed on…

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