Trail of Cthulhu: Cthulhu City

Enter a place born from all of Lovecraft’s creations, and governed by servitors of the Old Ones.­­

Great Arkham – the Cthulhu City.

There is – by certain unreliable and maddening accounts, and now by your own dreadful experience – a city on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in northern Massachusetts. You do not recall seeing it on maps when you were growing up, and no-one of your acquaintance ever admitted coming from that place until you found yourself living within its eerie confines. It is a city of windowless cyclopean skyscrapers, of crumbling baroque buildings and ruins that must, impossibly, predate human habitation in this part of the world. At times, you can see remnants of familiar small towns which have grown together into this monstrous conurbation – Dunwich in the west, beyond Sentinel Hill; quaint Kingsport, by the sea; industrial Innsmouth, the engine of trade and commerce; and the city’s heart, Old Arkham.

You know that this city is monstrous.

You know that the city government are in the thrall of – or in league with – alien horrors.

You know better than to go out at night, when the clouds roll in from the sea and shapes move in the sky. You know there are occasional, unpredictable streets that come and go according to some unearthly schedule, that strange black ships dock at Innsmouth to trade with the squat, ugly denizens of that neighbourhood. You know, too, that not all of your neighbours are sane – or human.

But you’re trapped. There’s no way to escape the city.

Because the city is the world.

Cthulhu City is a setting for Trail of Cthulhu, usable for a full campaign in its own right or as a nightmarish intrusion into an existing game. The Investigators find themselves in a strange, corrupted Arkham, a ghastly metropolis. People – humans – live in the city, and seem bizarrely normal on first encounter – their concerns are the same mundane, day-to-day passions and trials of anyone in the modern world – but scratch the surface, and the Mythos spills forth. Motorcars drive down streets lined with sullen-eyed basalt cyclopean buildings raised by no human hand; at night, loathsome and titanic shapes move behind the clouds. It’s a city where priests masked with yellow silk proclaim the majesty of God from the churches; a city occupied by alien powers. The old-money families have names like Marsh and Whately and Curwen, and the worst crime imaginable is defying the will of the living gods.

Humans shouldn’t survive here, but they do, blindly adapting to the horror all around them. Are the Investigators dreaming? Insane? Have they travelled in time? Is this an alternate reality? An illusion? Or have they somehow had their minds swapped with denizens of the city?

Or has it always been this way, and they can no longer deny the truth?

The Great, the Old, the Terrible City of Unnumbered Crimes

In this surreal nightmare supplement for Trail of Cthulhu, discover…

• The heart of Lovecraft’s urban fiction. Arkham, Dunwich and Kingsport, but also R’lyeh, the Nameless City, and the City of the Elder Things…
• The vertiginous terror of inverted order! Worshippers of the Great Old Ones rule from City Hall, while investigators are wanted criminals! After the infamous Miskatonic Raid which put an end to the “anarchist plots” of the Armitage Inquiry, who dares challenge the authorities?
• Intrigue and action in the twisted streets! In a campaign of urban horror, evade the watchful eyes of the authorities with the new Suspicion rules! Smash the cults – or conspire to pit one faction against the others!
• The hidden ways of the city. Use District Knowledges to find help, but beware – any of the dozens of NPCs could be a stalwart ally, a doomed victim, or a sinister servant of the Mythos…

Includes The Whispering Light, a full-length noir-flavoured adventure set in Great Arkham that takes investigators on a tour of the mysterious city… and into the beyond! 

Cthulhu City – an inescapable new setting for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG