S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters: A Field Observer's Handbook of Preternatural Entities

Call of Cthulhu RPG

by Sandy Petersen, Lynn Willis (Editor), Tom Sullivan (Illustrator)

Weird shapes in the park? Odd rumbling noises in the basement? When you need to know what you're encountering, you need to know it fast - don't leave home without the Field Guide!

Paintings and Descriptions From the Cthulhu Mythos As Created by H.P. Lovecraft, With Augmentations for Today

Accurate and Complete
Over Two Dozen Often-Met Creatures
Quick-Reference Monster ID Key
27 Evocative Full-Page Paintings
50+ Illustrations and Silhouettes
Uniform Presentation of Data
Special Size Comparison Charts
Habitat, Distribution, and Life Cycle Notes
How to Distinguish Similar-Seeming Entities
Latest Hyper-Geometric Scholarship
Specialized Observer Warnings as Needed
Full Bibliography
Faithful to Lovecraft

Genres: Role Playing Games, Horror, Lovecraftian, Science Fiction, Gaming, Art, Cthulhu Mythos

64 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1988

About the author

Carl Sanford Joslyn "Sandy" Petersen is an American game designer. He worked at Chaosium, contributing to the development of RuneQuest and creating the acclaimed and influential horror role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. He later joined id Software where he worked on the development of the Doom franchise and Quake. As part of Ensemble Studios, Petersen subsequently contributed to the Age of Empires franchise.

Reviews

[K.T. Katzmann]

I found two important books at the age of thirteen. Helen Hoke's "Terrors, Terrors, Terrors" introduced me to Lovecraft. Short months later, this lavishly illustrated tome indelibly stamped its images into my mind. It takes an act of will to consciously picture the creatures of the Mythos differently than they appear in this book. It certainly codified Ithaqua as my wife's favorite Mythos entity.

Aside from the big pictures, the little fiddly bits are great. The side illustrations are charming, from the dimensional shamblers hand usage to the Innsmouth look. Teaching science this year, I realized that this was my first introduction to using a dichotomous key chart to classify organisms; I'm trying to figure out how to use this book in class. I love the Sherlock Holmes reference in the already entertaining bibliography; look for it!

There's a new edition coming out, and I smile when I imagine the joy on precocious, weird children's faces when the next generation discovers it on moldering bookshelves. Until then, give them this!

Final Rating: Loss of 1d6/2d10 SAN points.

[Matthew J.]

The art in this book is gorgeous. That's really the selling point. There's a brief description, written almost like an informal nature journal, about each of the 27 creatures and then the picture. That's really it. I suppose it could work as a sort of 'in game' item that player characters could get their hands on, but it's written from the perspective of the time it was published, so would only work in more modern-set games. Physically, the book is terrible. It's a weird size, has an extremely stiff soft-cover, and a glue binding that has felt like it was going to give way ever since I got it back in the 90s. I'm careful with my books, yet this thing looks like it's been through the wringer, just from sitting on a bookshelf. I would absolutely LOVE to see the art from this reprinted in a totally different format (hardcover?!).

[RunningRed NightBringer]

I don't play any of the Cthulhu RPGs, I picked this up a while back out of curiosity.
It's an okay book, each page depicts a different Lovecraftian type monster, with a drawing and some details about it. It's not a Monster Manual, there's no "stats" for the creatures.

It's not a casual reading book, but something for reference. If you're running a game and want to give the players some info about the monster they're facing. Or if you're a deep Lovecraftian fan.

[Kvakosavrus]

Просто картинки.
Но это было охуительно.

[Andrew]

Ok another one to add to my guilty pleasure list here. This really is the same comments I put down for the Field guide to The Dreamlands - since they were really written in the same manner and for the same purpose, so repeated below is the Dreamland comments but they stand equally as true for this book as for the other:


Years ago as I started to read H P Lovecrafts books I started to wonder what some of those monsters and nightmares would look like. The descriptions were creative and amazing and really brought the atmosphere and feel of the story to life. Then I started to wonder more about that - what they looked like, what they did, after all the authors had gone to great lengths to bring them to life - after all many of the stories are more about the creatures than they are of the people who encounter them.
Then I discovered that in the tradition of Dungeons And Dragons there was a paper based role playing game based on the world of Call of Cthulhu and I was hooked.
Now years later (too many if you ask me) and I am older and maybe not much wiser but I still have fond memories of those days. And yes the game maybe passed but the material that was written to support it still stand since it relates to the original stories too.
These two field guides are perfect examples of that wonderful work. And even now I love to read and remember the worlds they invited you to.

[Robin]

A quaint sort of bestiary.