Pyramid: Pyramid Review: H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham (for Call of Cthulhu & Call of Cthulhu d20)

Pyramid Review

H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham (for Call of Cthulhu & Call of Cthulhu d20)

Published by Chaosium

Written by Keith Herber, Mark Morrison, Richard Watts, & Mervyn Boyd

Illustrated by Louis Cortes Real

Cover by Lee Gibbons

248-page b&w softcover; $28.95

It's easy to think of Chaosium as stuck in an "old-school" publishing regimen and its latest release, H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham, at first appears to be only more evidence. In form, it's an anachronism, sporting the kind of low-level, detail-happy setting material that hasn't been seen in a major RPG supplement in years, plus four ready-to-run "scenarios" (as they were called back in the old days). On one hand, the outdated appearance isn't a surprise; a vast majority of the book's text could be found in Arkham Unveiled, published in 1990. What is surprising, then, is that this material can serve a GM today as well as it did 13 years ago, something that certainly can't be said of many RPG supplements from those days before vampires started masquerading and a d20 was a piece of plastic, not a marketing phenomenon.

Chaosium hasn't been totally unaffected by the zeitgeist. It has littered H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham with d20 System conversions for every rules passage and NPC statistic listing. But the cursory (though adequate) nature of these conversions -- not to mention the puzzlingly out-of-place collection of d20 System character "backgrounds," including the modern-day "Hacker" and "Crime Scene Investigator" . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.

Article publication date: September 26, 2003

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