Arkham Horror RPG will introduce new investigators to a world of miskatonic mysteries this summer
Adventures in Rokugan studio translates the popular LCG into dice pool-driven roleplay.
Load your guns and grab your occult literature because there’s a new way to combat the cosmic terrors of the Arkham Horror Files universe. Arkham Horror The Roleplaying Game will trade living card game mechanics for more traditional collaborative storytelling with a Starter Set launching in August.
Many of you are probably yelling, “Wait, but there’s already Call of Cthulhu!” at your screens. Yes, Chaosium’s RPG of 1920s gumshoe and cosmic horrors is already a massively popular hit, but publisher Edge Studios and Asmodee seem keen on leveraging their version of a haunted Northeast US coastline to players more familiar with character sheets than decks of cards.
Arkham Horror The Roleplaying Game will support two to six players, plus a Game Master, and use what Edge Studios (which most recently adapted Legend of the Five Rings to 5E rules in Adventures in Rokugan) calls a Dynamic Pool System (DPS). A press release described it as “easy-to-learn but strategically deep system based only on 6-sided dice for maximum accessibility,” but it just sounds like the dice pools that plenty of other tabletop RPGs already deploy. That’s not a bad thing - dice pools are rad, but slapping a flashy name on it doesn’t automatically make it revolutionary.
Regardless, Arkham Horror TRPG is keeping its eye on RPG newcomers who have no prior experience with any of the previous Arkham Horror Files games, the cosmic horror subgenre or even tabletop RPGs. The starter box will contain everything a group needs to immediately dive into the included adventure, Hungering Abyss. The cover art shows a party of spooked and cautious regular-degular people foregrounded against a graveyard and cultists with both horns and tentacles. Yep, this is pure Arkham Horror vibes.
Hungering Abyss has been designed to digest in 10 discrete scenes that should take a little over an hour, each. Alongside the 48-page adventure book are 5 character portfolios, three double-sided maps, 16 character profile cards, 21 item cards, and a mess of handouts and tokens. There’s also 24 six-sided dice included, so nobody will be forced to raid their Monopoly boxes if it’s their first time playing an RPG.
Edge Studios plans to unveil Arkham Horror The Roleplaying Game’s starter box and intro adventure at Gen Con 2024, where they’ll be running open demos. The full game will launch in retail during the same weekend, hitting hobby store shelves and online stores on August 2nd in the USA, Canada, UK, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Distribution to other European countries not mentioned in the press release will reportedly go through the ADC Black Fire network.
