Pyramid: Pyramid Review: Malleus Monstrorum: Creatures, Gods and Forbidden Knowledge (for Call of Cthulhu)

Pyramid Review

Malleus Monstrorum: Creatures, Gods and Forbidden Knowledge (for Call of Cthulhu)

Written by Scott David Aniolowski, with Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis

Published by Chaosium Inc.

296-page b&w softcover; $34.95

One of the best purchases I ever made for my Call of Cthulhu game was Ye Booke of Monstres. It was a delightful two-volume set of "new nightmares" for the game: creatures and Gods culled from the festering mass of Mythos fiction and previous Chaosium works, complete with wonderful illustrations of the oogy-boogies. Since many of my players were veterans, and had at least leafed through the main book, mere sight of "Ye Booke" was fair warning they were about to get pasted by something they knew nothing about. So I could ensure fear just by having one or both volumes on the table, even if it they weren't going to be used that session.

A few years later, Chaosium printed The Creature Companion, which was a combining and expansion of the two volumes of Ye Booke of Monstres with additional creatures, full-color reproductions of four Nick Smith Mythos paintings, and journal entries from a fictional Mythos investigator thrown in for good measure. After a good read-through I groused that, having kept up with Chaosium's products over the years, there wasn't enough new and good material in it to truly justify my purchase. But there were a few new and worthy inspirations to be found, and it was handy having all the info in one . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.

Article publication date: March 2, 2007

Copyright © 2007 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.