--- title: "Rising Tide" subtitle: "Mansions of Madness scenario review" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-03-20 08:00 date: 2025-03-20 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: haunted-house-1600x800.jpg show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, modules ] --- The second scenario in order of difficulty rating is **Rising Tide**, one of the adventures included in the main game. My short spoiler-free review is that **Rising Tide** is one of my favourite scenarios, full of investigation, mystery, and spooky atmosphere. For the rest of this review, there are minor plot spoilers, so don't read on if you want everything to be a surprise. ## The bad parts As with any **Mansions of Madness** 2nd edition scenario, this one is largely dependent on an automated game master and a fully scripted storyline. That means you don't get to invent surprise questions when you're interviewing a suspect, and must choose from a dialogue tree. Worse still, the app (as usual) does a dismal job of broadcasting to you what constitutes an Action. Is every question and answer pair an Action, or is the full conversation an Action? Can you not converse with someone through an open door? Do you really have to use an Action to step into a room just to chat with someone? In other words, there's a little bit of awkwardness in a **Mansions of Madness** scenario with so many dialogue trees. But that's the format of the game, and it's not entirely different from a **Lone Wolf** or **Fighting Fantasy** book. As long as you relax into it and don't overthink it, this adventure works very well. The final puzzle gets a little repetitive. As I recall, you literally have to solve the same app-based puzzle 3 times (1 for each ritual you're disrupting), which was very strange. The good news is that by the final encounter, you're so pleased with the scenario's design and story that you don't care about the final quirk. ## The good parts If you came to **Mansions of Madness** because the main players are Investigators, and you like investigation, then _this_ is the scenario for you. You're not forced into combat in this scenario at all, and it's all pretty much all detective work. You are tasked with covertly interviewing 6 suspects and finding the cultists among them. That's the adventure, and it is super intriguing. In terms of mechanics, this means one thing you end up doing is clearing the board frequently. Unlike most **Mansions of Madness** scenarios, this doesn't take place in just a single location. You start in a hotel, but you end up exploring lots of other areas around the city. There are lots of NPCs besides the prime suspects, and seemingly innumerable threads of the story. Even when you're entirely on the wrong track, you're discovering something interesting. The whole story has a great atmosphere, somewhere between the unease of **Shadow over Innsmouth** and the, well, lurking fear of **The Lurking Fear**. I played this scenario with a friend, so we each controlled 2 Investigators, and it took us 6 hours to complete (successfully, I might add) the scenario, and between sessions we were constantly reviewing our evolving suspicions. I intend to play the scenario twice more, once with another friend who I think would enjoy the detective work, and once by myself so I can follow false leads just for the fun of it. Probably one of the best **Mansions of Madness** scenarios, especially if you don't want to mess around with combat and prefer mental exercises to physical threats. ## Actual rating * **Combat**: Low (very little combat) * **Investigation**: High (detective work required) * **Horror**: Low (spooky townsfolk, suspicious family lineages, obligatory occult rituals) * **Difficulty**: Medium (while you can fail to infer one culprit correctly and still beat the scenario, there are obstacles that could mislead you so drastically that you miss the endgame event)

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