This is a combined review of both the "Investigators Guide to the Secret War" and the "Keepers Guide to the Secret War".  Despite being hardbound books, together they take up space on the shelf roughly equal to a normal CoC book, including Delta Green.  Despite that they are no less full of amazing detail and inspirational tidbits.  It does, however, make them a bit on the pricy side.

What you get for the money is a highly detailed campaign resource that can be used to run ANY game set in the late thirties and early forties, focusing on The War, and of course the Things Man Was Not Meant to Know hiding in the shadows.  The rules that exist are meant for either Call of Cthulu or Savage Worlds, and are a rather small portion of the work.  

The text is presented as a compiled dossier, with margin borders that resemble sheaves of paper stacked, artwork is presented as attached photos or sketches, and editorial notes complete the illusion.  This is an unobtrusive way to ground the text 'in game', more an artistic flourish than anything else but a nice touch for all that.

The Investigator's guide starts off with fifty pages of historical research, including a timeline going back to 1918, tidbits about Ms Sew-n-Sew dolls and why they existed, examples of pop culture of the day, such as common radio programs, movies and so forth that are grouped according to year.  I've never seen a book so quickly and throughly cover so much ground in this amount of detail, so much so that I am almost compelled to run it for my group one day just so I can finally immerse my players in the world!

There quickly follows a short series of random tables to help you generate a character concept, completely devoid of mechanics, meaning the tables can be used or dropped without influencing game play. Don't know what country your character is from? There's a table right there!

From there you are introduced to the Occupations, which are open enough to allow a pre-war campaign to evolve into a military campaign. Continuing the earlier trend, useful bits of historical lore are embedded in side bars here and there, such as annual wages, conversion rates for common currencies and so forth.  The focus is on Europe and America (a Pacific Theater book is planned, according to a single line of text in the book), with military and intelligence operations being predominant.   There are rules for being drafted and an entire chapter of the highly specialized military skills that normally don't figure into typical CoC campaigns.

Then Savage Worlds gets it's chapters on character creation, including new talents and hindrances. It's a bit thinner, possibly due to its largely repetitious nature. No doubt if the order of the chapters was reversed, the CoC section would seem slimmer and less interesting.

Chapter 8 introduces us to military equipment, putting the fluff first, then side by side tables for the two systems. One interesting note is the elimination of explosives damage, replaced by a sidebar essentially handing the effectiveness of explosives to GM Fiat, which is fine by me.  They rather correctly explain that even on a crap roll, 8 oz. of PE* will ruin anyone's day, and if you're chucking grenades at Cthulu Himself, well... they've got a book planned for that!

Chapter 9 is a two/three page resource for 'quick character creation' and chapter 10 is really an appendix listing resources and inspirational materials.

So we move on to the Keeper's Guide:

The Interesting Note here is that the IG is more or less a straight WWII resource, with only fluffy references here and there to Mythos anything.  The two books run largely in parallel, with the KG repeating the IG by having a timeline of Mythos/Supernatural events rather than historical events. It also deviates (and I feel compelled to point out that it is the thicker book by half), in that it puts the emphasis on Nazi Germany, including a long and thoughtful essay by Kenneth Hite on the basic humanity of Wehrmacht Soldiers that wouldn't be out of place in a college history class.**

Not surprisingly, a good chunk of the early chapters is taken up with generic NPC writeups for forces from various militaries.

There is a ten page chapter on the various intelligence agencies of the day, necessarily in brief, but in no way shallow.

On page 60, however, we get to the real meat of the setting, the Secret War. Specifically we are given any number of coexisting conspiracies, secret societies, operating at the time... broken down by nation of origin. For the most part the allied conspiracies are heroic and good and the Axis conspiracies are depraved lunatics out to destroy the world, for example the Cult of the Black Sun are Yog-Sothoth Worshippers attempting to bring the very manifestation of Space/Time into reality itself.  Naturally they get enough pages to make up a normal chapter unto themselves, as befitting a major antagonist.  Ditto their 'frenemies' the Nachtwolf, who are users of experimental 'atlantean' technology and unwitting pawns of another outer god.

Then its back to more mundane but fascinating topics, such as travel means and times, which sensibly leads to stats for German armored vehicles and their weapons... which then leads back to the Black Sun and Nachtwolfe forces and THEIR weapons.   Strangely, I found no downsides for heroic (non-insane types) using these eldritch materials, no insanity or rolls to prevent Daoloth from taking over their minds*** . I do have a minor beef here, as the names for these new eldritch materials are pretty generic.

There follows a couple of chapters, one for each game system, covering military actions involving tanks and planes... you know, for dogfights and tank duels. Its a nice resource, but I'll refrain from judging the quality of the rules.

Then its on to Magic Items.... um... I mean Artifacts and Tomes.  There is an interesting collection here, but I would suggest that the design team was more influenced by Savage Worlds than CoC, as many of them seem more useful than dangerous.  Typically there is some side effect like a temporary draining of hit points, but no real madness or corruption.  The Tomes section is a bit different, as only a tiny handful of new books are offered, most of the section is essentially translating CoC rules to SW rules.

The next chapter is essentially a translation as well, this time of Call of Cthulu spells to Savage Worlds, with a brief addendum at the end for some new CoC spells for use by Black Sun. As with the rules for dogfights, I'm not well positioned to judge the rules themselves on the merits, but they seem

Continuing their yoeman's work of translating CoC to SW, the critters chapter is more of the same, though I will note that the single most complete list of 'Gods' I've ever seen in a CoC resource is the lead for this chapter. Again, a smaller section of new things are added at the end.

The book ends with NPCs, starting with a list of Who's Who of WWII, and followed by a gallery of more generic NPCs, such as Postmistresses and Bobbies and Private investigators, along with a few other general GMing... I mean Keeper aides, such as brief adventure seeds and the sort.



This leads me to the All in All, the conclusion.  The books are beautiful, and jam packed with game resources. They are indespensible for running Cthulu flavored games in Savage Worlds****, and if you don't mind a bit more action and heroics in your Call of Cthulu games then its a dandy source there too.  On the other hand, if you believe that Beyond the Supernatural characters are too tough and capable to take on mythos critters, this may not be the book for you.  I can guess that grognards of the CoC flavor might object to the action-movie vibe the Nazi's provide, but I'm not sure how that could be avoided without being horribly depressing.  Yes, you will be fighting nazi zombies with your bazooka.   What impresses me most, as I've noted before, is its sheer utility as a resource for any WWII setting.  True, half the Keeper's Guide is dead weight if you don't want Nazi sorcerers and zombies and supersoldiers running around summoning elder things, but that still leaves the entire Investigators Guide and a good chunk of the Keeper's Guide as well.  

* No, I don't know what PE stands for. I can make an educated guess, or I could look it up, but let's just take it from context that PE is a military grade explosive used to power grenades or bombs, and leave it at that.  

** Really, any mainstream discussion of history and literature outside of gaming exclusive products, but I'm at a loss how best to describe that briefly in the bulk of the text. Besides, I need every excuse I can get for footnotes.

*** In reality, the Black Steel weapons forged in the Dreamlands from ores mined on the Plateau of Leng are apparently perfectly useable. The Blue Crystal (sigh...) materials of the Nachtwolfe do have a weight limit before checks are made, but its easy to miss that when looking at the equipment itself.

**** I didn't say irreplacable, since I'm not familiar with the SW line enough to know if anyone else has done all this before.