S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors is a repackaging of two earlier books – Petersen’s Guide to Cthulhu Monsters (which I covered in July of last year) and Creatures of the Dreamlands (which I will get to eventually).
I am of two minds about guides like this. On the one hand, I love books about monsters, and this one delivers that in spades. On the other hand, for Lovecraftian horror in particular, to see the thing is to diminish its impact. These are supposed to be mind-blowing horrors when your investigators see them, but cool as they might be, paintings on a page are always less than the images in your mind.
That said, the artists here do a fantastic job of taking long-established in-game creature designs and giving them a fresh look. There’s a kind of comfort in the old illustrations from the previous Call of Cthulhu rulebooks – seeing these depictions is strange and a little unsettling. In a few cases, the creatures get close to the absolutely alien quality of their fictional descriptions.
As with the earlier, discreet volumes, the Dreamlands creatures are a little bit more huggable, which is a function of their setting, but I dunno, that Gug is still pretty terrifying.
Anyway, this is one of my favorite recent releases from Chaosium and gives me great hope for the Call of Cthulhu line going forward.
