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H.P. Lovecraft's Dunwich

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit"

That's a line from Aliens. In many ways, that applies to Dunwich.

H.P. Lovecraft's Dunwich is an updated and expanded version of Chaosium's previous "Return to Dunwich". The main changes are the addition of Call of Cthulhu d20 stats, and some stuff that apparently was previously omitted in the original version, but appeared in Pagan Publishing's "Unspeakable Oath", issue #4 (which is available on the web ). It was the first of the HPL Country line, the second being Arkham (which I reviewed a couple of weeks agp), and the third being Kingsport (which was recently release, and which I'll have to buy when I can afford it)

It starts off with H.P. Lovecraft's (HPL) short story, "The Dunwich Horror". This is one of his better stories, I think, and it does a great job of setting the mood. The cover also apparently depicts the star of The Dunwich Horror, Wilbur Whately (I think), as he would appear in a Sergio Leone western (extreme close up). (As an aside, it is remarkable how much Dean Stockwell either looks like Mr. Whately, or has influenced people's images of him, because the cover does look somewhat like him.)

The meat of the book, about 120 pages, describes Dunwich itself.

It follows a pretty standard format of having a keyed map (there are ten different maps, 1 for the town, 9 being smaller sub-maps of the outlying area), with descriptions of various locations and the people related to that location.

For the most part, it does a good job of capturing the Lovecraft feel. As the title quote says, it's a very nasty, icky place. It's full of people with dark, twisted secrets, ranging from the rather simple polygamy to things like incest, to crazed relatives in the closet, to cannibals to Barbra Streisand fans. There are some normal people, but they are in the minority.

There's a lot of weird stuff. Besides the ickiness of the inhabitants, there are various ancient ruins and such - it seems the area was the location of a Hyperborean colony, Druid Hippies fleeing the Roman "Man", and more recently, a pseudo-Wiccan coven escaping persecution from the Salem witch trials.

The specifics of that pseudo-Wiccan coven seem to go against HPL's spirit, and the entire spirit of the Cthluhu mythos. It somehow features a "non-malignant" form of Nyarlthotep. That just about made me sputter when I read it. Nyarlthotep's motives are unscrutable, so even if he seems friendly, you should never be able to say he's non-malignant.

The other thing that annoyed me, is that there is a concrete, and possibly solvable, reasons as to why Dunwich is such a decayed and run down place. Though to do that, you'd have to do a D&D style dungeon crawl to get to the main baddie and kill it (hopefully).

While I realize that HPL's stuff did help inspire D&D, and it's not uncommon in his stories to explore ancient and often icky places and caves, I always thought that never suited Call of Cthulhu's style. (Though conversely, it might be good for a D&D game. Dunwich could be set in a D&D setting quite easily, it being fairly low-tech). It's also a fairly well done dungeon/cave crawl, if a bit icky (a good thing for horror games), but no player in their right mind would go down there.

I also think it goes against HPL's spirit that there is a root cause of the ickiness of Dunwich, as opposed to just general decay. Decay is more or less the nature state of the world - entropy. Places like Dunwich get run down not because of some Cthulhu super-fungus, but because it takes more effort to keep up the place than the inhabitants can or want to spend. If you're ever been to Arkansas, you know what I mean.

I really really didn't like the included scenario, "Return to Dunwich", which is set just after the story "The Dunwich Horror". It's basically a sequel to the Dunwich horror, and it's one of those sequels that says "Woops, the semi-happy ending of the first was in fact completely wrong". (Not unlike what Alien 3 did to Aliens, though not as bad). It also seems to contradict some of the stuff mentioned in "The Dunwich Horror".

It's mentioned in the story that "The thing has gone forever.", "It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again."

But the scenario basically says "Woops, HPL wasn't right, I know better than he did, so just ignore what he wrote."

More importantly, it doesn't work very well as a scenario. The set up hook is implausible - they are sent back to Dunwich by Dr. Armitage. But why would he trust them? If he knew them, and trusted them, why wouldn't have have asked their help in "The Dunwich Horror"?

Lastly, comes the d20 conversion. It starts off with a statement saying Dunwich is best for 1st to 3rd level characters. Personally, I think this shows some ignorance of the d20 system, as well as settings in general. A town, even a small one like Dunwich, should vary a bit in levels. As it's not an adventure in of itself, it doesn't matter what levels the NPCs are, they should be what is appropriate, not scaled to the players. So, not surprisingly, most of the NPCs of Dunwich are indeed from 1st to 3rd level, even when they probably shouldn't be.

As an added bonus to make the conversion even worse, the author used a variant rule (the defense bonus rule). One curious note is that it mentions that one spell first appeared in "Delta Green d20", which as far as I know, isn't out.

The art is generally excellent. While not everyone gets an illustration, there are portraits of a lot of the inhabitants, and while some are overly folksy looking (complete with straw in their mouth), they look good. I really like the map of the Dunwich. It's hand drawn, much nicer than the usual computer generated overland maps you see today.

On a few occasions (first & last pages of a chapter), the background art of the page is very dark, and makes it very hard to read the text on it.

So, the Dunwich source material gets a B-, the scenario "Return to Dunwich" gets an F, the d20 conversion gets a D. Overall, call it a C+. The core of the product (the description of Dunwich & its inhabitants) is okay, but the rest, while pretty awful (IMHO), is more or less superfluous.

It's worth buying if you are a Call of Cthulhu d20 fan, but don't expect it to be nearly as good a book as Arkham is. If you already have the previous incarnation, and don't like CoC d20, then it's probably not worth buying.

(For those who care, which is probably only me, Chaosium's Dunwich also doesn't really fit the Dunwich depicted in "Death In Dunwich" from TOME, though it's not too hard to mesh the two, as the Chaosium Dunwich allows a lot of room for additional people).

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