Pyramid Review
Spawn of Azathoth: Herald of the End of Time (for Call of Cthulhu)
Published by Chaosium, Inc.
Written by Keith Herber with Sandy Petersen, Lynn Willis, David Conyers, Don Coatar, Jeff Carey, & Steve Hatherley
Cover by Tom Sullivan
Illustrated by Paul Carrick, Andy Hopp, Mislet Michel, & Kevin Ramos
Cartography by David Conyers & Carolyn Schulz
200-page perfect bound black and white book; $23.95
Spawn of Azathoth: Herald of the End of Time is two decades old and is one of Call of Cthulhu's forgotten campaigns. Originally published in 1986 in the same boxed set format as Masks of Nyarlathotep, it has never been republished until now. Another world-spanning campaign, it is on a far less grander scale, taking the investigators from New England to Asia and the top of the world with a detour through the Dreamlands along the way.
Like the earlier Shadows of Yog-Sothoth this is not a straight reprint. Similarly, unlike the second edition of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, this second edition of Spawn of Azathoth is not a lame and barely executed attempt to fix the perceived problems of a regarded classic. Indeed, no real attempt has been made to fix this campaign's problems, of which there are relatively few. Rather, this is the original campaign with extra support material, some new, some culled from other Call of Cthulhu supplements. Then again, Spawn of Azathoth was never regarded as a classic.
As the title suggests, the threat faced in Spawn of Azathoth: Herald of the End of Time is . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 1, 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.