Arkham Sourcebook: A Review

 

This is a spoiler free review.

TLDR:

Positive

• nicely edited
• beautiful, inspiring illustrations
• lots of information
• several exciting and inspiring entries about Mythos-related secrets of the city

Negative

• lots and lots of information, not all of it interesting or necessary
• hard to read through
• even with all the effort they put in it, still difficult to consult during play
• Arkham is overcrowded with Mythos stuff.

Overall

• enjoy, but consume with moderation
• not sure it is a better value proposition than the old Arkham Unveiled, there we had great scenarios, here we get great art instead.
• it has tons of usable information, but will you be able to find it when you need it?

Detailed review:

With over 30 years of experience with Call of Cthulhu, I have never run a campaign centred in Arkham. My first campaign did start in Arkham—with our first scenario being “Edge of Darkness”—but subsequent adventures took the characters all over the United States, and then to Scotland, Egypt, and England.

I did run other Arkham-centric scenarios, like “The Condemned” but, overall, my Mythos sessions mostly took the characters elsewhere. I think this is because, given the historical setting of the game, I always found it more exciting to explore the real issues of those days, in the places where those issues came to the forefront. For instance, one of my favourite recent Cthulhu settings was “Berlin: The Wicked City” — a real city, the capital of one of the most powerful countries in Europe, during a period of dramatic sociocultural changes and high political instability.

Comparatively, Lovecraft’s Arkham is almost pure escapism, like a ghost train or a haunted house ride in a Lovecraft-themed amusement park. And horror is more horrific the closer it gets to reality.

Nonetheless, I did buy and read Arkham Unveiled, an earlier version of the current book. It includes the terrific scenarios “The Condemned” and “The Hills Rise High.” Moreover, playing in Lovecraft country is an immersive experience. After all, once in a while, riding the ghost train is fun.

So, what has changed from Arkham Unveiled?

One big change is that we do not get any scenarios. This is a curious choice. Not only the scenarios in “Arkham Unveiled” were certified classics, but all other setting books I’ve read until now included scenarios.

Moreover, Wizards of the Coast, the biggest player in the market, sells all their settings as part of a campaign these days. And while there may be a lot I don’t like about Wizards and D&D, this actually makes sense: offering materials with a clear and direct way to use them at the table.

At this point, I feel like Arkham has tossed away the best Arkham Unveiled had to offer.

So, what do we actually get?

First and foremost, we get a lot of good-looking, inspiring art and a very nice layout. Eye candy—lots of it.

Then we get some mildly interesting historical information about Arkham. We also get a description of a group of Arkhamites who can serve as major opposition in a campaign. Additionally, there’s a detailed guide, district by district, of many locations, including private homes, businesses, services, information about their inhabitants, owners, and workers, and the (Mythos) secrets of some of these people and places.

Some of the entries are great, interesting to read and guaranteed to provide plot ideas; others are just okay, and several feel more like filler.

Given the massive number of entries and the lack of any narrative to glue them together, this book is a bit difficult to enjoy reading. I would advise most people to read just a couple of pages a day, at most.

Now, according to Mike Mason, the idea of this book is to enable a sandbox campaign in Arkham.

Looking at the book and the amount of ideas and information in it, I wondered if I would find it particularly useful. I’ve run sandbox campaigns in large cities, both fictional (like Eversink from Swords of the Serpentine) and real (like Paris for a long Vampire campaign, or a string of European cities for my Night's Black Agents campaign), and I never needed this amount of detail.

In the case of Eversink, I would just improvise NPCs and locations as we went along. The challenges in this improvised worldbuilding were avoiding repetition, maintaining coherence, and keeping track of all the things we invented, as they would become permanent features in the game world.

In Night's Black Agents, I would prepare key locations of the plot, and I would have Google Maps open and just check what kind of locations, businesses, and services existed in the parts of the city visited by the player characters. The advantage of this over sheer improvisation is that the locations felt more realistic (at least to me) and more coherent. The city feels more lived in and not limited to what I can come up with.

Now, Arkham seems to want to offer the sort of geographic and urban consistency that I like from having a Google map of the city, with a lot of interesting information about NPCs that we can use to trigger events in the campaign.

I must confess I was mostly inspired by the artwork and one or two entries. There’s a lot of eye candy, but the content (given the lack of scenarios) seemed to me to be just more detail on what we already had in Arkham Unveiled, and more detail is not necessarily better.

One thing is certain: there was not a lot of pleasure in simply reading through this book. So I decided to test it by actually running a sandbox campaign in Arkham. Furthermore, I decided it would be completely improvised, in the sense that I only defined the starting situation of the investigators (with the help of the players), an agenda of a couple of major factions, starting mysterious circumstances to entice the players, and little else.

At the table

The results, after several months of playing, are thus: yes, we could create something very exciting with an improvised sandbox structure using this book, and we are having a lot of fun and many memorable moments.

There are, however, a few caveats to mention. First, the ghost train ride syndrome is really a thing. The investigators are looking around for any supernatural phenomenon as it may be linked to the conspiracy… but the problem is that Arkham is filled to the brim with supernatural (or better said, Mythos-related) stuff. It stretches credibility that the good people of Arkham could be so surrounded by these things and never noticed them. Since we started the investigators saw: ghouls, portals, reanimated people, resurrected people, deep one hybrids, Dark Youngs, rat things, dimensional shamblers, a terrible old man, several sorcerers and witches, amongst others. In one small town. A bit too much, I would say.

Another issue is that the book’s format is often inadequate to power this free exploration because it takes time to find the relevant entries (well-organised as they are), and several of them are too verbose to be used during a session. Moreover, in an improvised campaign, it’s not as if the GM can prepare locations in advance of the session, as often I have no idea where the characters are going.

What I would like to have is something like a Google map of Arkham, where I can just hover over locations and get a quick information popup of what is going on there, maybe an image, and a link to extra text with elaboration. Too many times our sessions got stuck with me searching through the book, finding the right entry, and reading it while the players waited. Using the PDF didn’t make it much faster. To the point that I just started improvising more and more without reading the entries, which renders the book a lot less useful.

Curiously, a more useful tool in this campaign was ChatGPT. Call of Cthulhu thrives on great handouts, but when you are improvising, it is pretty difficult to generate them on time. With ChatGPT, you can sometimes generate terrific handouts with just one short sentence. 

For example, one of the characters became interested in the experiments of Herbert West and searched for his diary in the archives of the Miskatonic library. As he found it, I felt it would be very exciting to give him some entries from the diary. So I went to ChatGPT and asked it to create two or three entries of Herbert West’s diary. I have to admit the results were excellent. So excellent, in fact, that I asked ChatGPT to create a more specific entry, which described how a local (named) Arkham man had paid West to reanimate his wife and son, who had died in a train accident. The entry was really good and led the investigators to track this man and analyze the two reanimated corpses with whom he lived (yes, ultra-creepy).

This is just one example. I also used ChatGPT to help me create a rune-based magic system on the fly, to be used by one of the occult factions.

And when the characters decided to go on a day trip to Kingsport, it allowed me to generate nice descriptions for the most important locations in the town.

I am pretty sure the entries ChatGPT generated for the Herbert West diary and Kingsport were very much lifted almost directly from Lovecraft’s books, but not only could it adapt them to my needs (like a description of a specific case of reanimation that I wanted to use in our game), it took a lot less time than searching through Lovecraft’s stories for the descriptions, which would not do in an improvised campaign.

All in all, the Arkham sourcebook has excellent production value and some interesting ideas you can use, but the book and the entries are too large to be easily consulted fast enough for improvised play.

My experience with it suggests that this kind of play aid would be more interesting if provided in a different form. An Arkham-specialised LLM AI, for instance, would be great, especially if combined with a Google Maps-style map of Arkham that would give direct map access to the entries.

As for the book in its current form, it will be more useful if you plan a more guided plot (i.e., not as improvised), selecting beforehand the entries that you are going to need and preparing them before the session.

I will write some subsequent posts about my Arkham campaign to highlight how an improvised narrative can evolve and how to use tools (books and digital assistants) to help you shape it.

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