--- title: "Review of Mister Corbitt from Mansions of Madness Volume 1" subtitle: "Call of Cthulhu" author: "Seth Kenlon" publish_date: 2026-09-10 00:01 date: date: 2026-09-10 00:01 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: book-cthulhu-mansions-of-madness-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: gaming tag: [ gaming, modules, gm, settings ] --- I enjoy **Call of Cthulhu** and I enjoy the **Mansions of Madness** board game, so I finally bought the **Call of Cthulhu** adventure collection called **Mansions of Madness, Volume 1: Behind Closed Doors**. I've run all of these adventures at least once, and this is my review of the first scenario, called **Mister Corbitt**. I'm avoiding spoilers beyond what you'd read in the introduction to the adventure in the book, but if you're thinking of playing any of these scenarios then even that might be too much. This review is intended for game masters. First of all, **Mister Corbitt** is not really a self-contained scenario. I guess it could be, if you forced it, but it's smoother to incorporate it as a component of a larger adventure. The scenario knows this, and is written with the assumption that it will emerge as a mystery only incidentally as player characters slowly notice the strange behaviour of their neighbour, Mr. Corbitt. That makes it an odd choice for the first adventure of this book, and frankly it confused me when I first ran it. I set out to run exactly **Mister Corbitt** but ended up running 2 different scenarios, one as the active investigation and **Mister Corbitt** as the scenario nested inside that one. If you go and pick up **Mansions of Madness, Volume 1: Behind Closed Doors**, consider **Mister Corbitt** as an appendix or side quest, because it gets really awkward if you try to run it as the main adventure. The reason for this is because, at least as written, nobody has a problem with Mr. Corbitt. He's an NPC even among NPCs. He's part of the town's background. Nobody comes to the player characters and asks them to start surveillance on Mr. Corbitt, no one has a problem with him. Ideally, the player characters themselves are meant to start noticing his not-necessarily-normal behaviour after several casual observances of his daily routine. This trick works really well, too. My players never conflated Mr. Corbitt's behaviour with what they thought the main adventure was, and somehow understood that it was an additional mystery to solve. The game sessions were set to end after a month or so, and I think my players appreciated that they were getting to solve 2 mysteries for the price of one. It also does wonders for bringing the RPG town to life. This wasn't a dungeon delve, where there's exactly one location with maybe a few forked paths. This was an actual town, with suspicious NPCs all over the place. My players had surveillance going on Corbitt even as they were investigating the mystery they'd been hired for. It was exciting, and it gave them lots of chances to interact with other NPCs as they asked around about both of their cases. ## The mansion A book called **Mansions of Madness** had better have a mansion in each adventure, and better yet one I can recreate using my **Mansions of Madness** tiles. This adventure ticks that box. Corbitt's house has about 19 rooms in it, and my players ended up exploring probably half of it. We were playing remotely, so I didn't actually use my **Mansions of Madness** tiles, but I was comforted to see that I can do that, should I ever run the adventure with an in-person play group. The mansion is creepy rather than threatening, broadly speaking. My players were there on a dinner invitation, so there was pressure for one investigator at a time to sneak around the house without their host noticing their absence. Of course it's a **Call of Cthulhu** game, so there's something going on in the mansion, which I won't spoil here. Piecing it all together is fun, and it really did feel like a proper investigative adventure. My players felt like detectives, and they felt like they solved a mystery when they finally reached the end [of the scenario, not their lives.] ## Good add-on adventure Despite being the very first adventure in the colleciton, **Mister Corbitt** isn't a stand-alone adventure unless you force your investigators to pay attention to him. I think that misses the point, though, and would make the adventure such a straight shot that it would hardly feel like an adventure, much less an investigation. Once investigators descend on Mr. Corbitt, a resolution is inevitable, and it can only go a few different ways. His mansion is not a dungeon crawl, and his life isn't that mysterious. The mystery and uncertainty is whether or not to even bother investigating Mr. Corbitt. If you broadcast his abnormal behaviour, then you're bypassing most of the tension the scenario has going for it. As a side quest, **Mister Corbitt** is good. It's got a nice build-up to whatever breaking point finally convinces players to investigate, and it's kind of fun for the game master to find what that breaking point is. Depending on your players, you might have to escalate Mr. Corbitt's activities to comical proportions, or your players might follow the lead after the first clue that something's going on. You never really know until you start mentioning clues as you casually describe the neighbourhood. Is Mr. Corbitt just quirky local colour? Does the game master keep mentioning this guy because he's the one guy the game master bothered developing for this adventure? Or is this significant? Those are the questions you want your players to be asking, at first of themselves, and then to each other, and finally, eventually, to Mr. Corbitt himself.

Table and coffee photo by Freddy Castro and licensed under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth Kenlon, with a book cover featuring artwork copyright by Chaosium.