Dawning Horror has a subtitle that parses strangely. It is in fact adventures for one: a supplement to the solitaire pen-and-paper horror adventure game Four against the Great Old Ones.

The slim book includes five discrete scenarios. Each of these is a smaller-scale challenge intended to serve as a prologue to the main game in the original Four Against the Great Old Ones book. I have only played two of these so far. "The Horror of the Mine" is focused on trying to free a kidnapping victim being held by cultists in an abandoned mine. "The Howl of the Mutated" takes place in a corrupted wilderness that reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's Area X. Each adventure took me a little under an hour to play, and my investigator characters were defeated and killed in both. There is no small difficulty in these adventures.

While the original game calls for the player to manage a team of four principal investigators and their various possible helpers, the scenarios of Dawning Horror each involve a single principal investigator with three assistants. The book also includes two new investigator classes, which can be started in the prologue scenarios or just dropped into the original game. These are the Archaeologist and the Redeemed Cultist. I have tried the latter of these, and I thought it worked well in play. It does however show a little softening of the game's former rigorous Lovecraftianism to include one of the common tropes of neo-Yog-Sothothery.

Like the core game, which features travel all over the United States, each of the Dawning Horror scenarios is organized around a map. But these maps are at a far smaller scale, and typically feature exploration in ways that make it a little odd that the investigator would have access to the map's information to start with. Maybe some of the scenarios I haven't yet played supply rationales for their maps. In any case, there is plenty unknown and much randomly generated during play, and the adventures are hard enough that I expect them to be still challenging when I return to them with new investigators and a certain measure of foreknowledge.