Pyramid Pick
Beyond the Mountains of Madness (for Call of Cthulhu)
By Charles and Janyce Engan, et al.
Published by Chaosium, Inc.
438 pages, $39.95
It's very difficult not to be intimidated by most Call of Cthulhu adventures. Even the least ambitious among them demand a level of erudition unmatched by other roleplaying games. To my mind, this is a good thing and one of the reasons Call of Cthulhu remains one of my favorite RPGs. The game rarely talks down to its players. More often than not, it gives them a remarkable benefit of the doubt, both in terms of their sophistication and stamina, the latter being especially important when one considers some of the mammoth scenarios Chaosium has produced over the years.
Yet all previous adventures pale in comparison to Beyond the Mountains of Madness (BtMoM), the single largest roleplaying game product I've ever seen (beating out the similarly massive -- and similarly good -- Delta Green: Countdown from the fine folks at Pagan Publishing). Weighing in at a stupendous 438 pages, BtMoM is described as "an epic Antarctic campaign and sourcebook," but that description is somewhat misleading. Unlike some of Chaosium's previous efforts, like the excellent Masks of Nyarlathotep or Horror on the Orient Express, BtMoM isn't so much a campaign book as a single adventure, divided into seventeen chapters. Together, they chronicle the story of the Starweather-Moore Antarctic expedition, as it attempts to determine the final fate of the doomed Miskatonic . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: August 4, 2000
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