Arkham Horror RPG: Hungering Abyss Review

By Edge Studio (written by Leah Hawthorne & Sam Gregor-Stewart)

I love the Arkham Files games. One of my first co-operative board games was Arkham Horror Second Edition. This was a board game which vastly outstayed its welcome and was gloriously improved by future games. Eldritch Horror (slightly shorter and world-spanning), Arkham Horror Third Edition and the Arkham Horror Living Card Game. At the moment I’m playing Arkham Horror every fortnight with a group at Brighton’s Dice Saloon, a group so obsessed that a professional token-maker made a specific Dice Saloon token for Arkham Nights a few years ago.

The Arkham Files universe is a pulpier version of Lovecraftian horror, with a brilliantly diverse roster of characters that would make old HP spin in his grave. It’s set in the 1920’s and normally takes place in Arkham, Massachusetts. That said, this is a game about cosmic horrors, so they’ve benched things like racism, sexism and ableism from this story as it’s not relevant to the game. There are novels, adventure books, Dark Horse has a comic out at the moment for it, so a roleplaying game felt like an inevitable item in the Arkham Files portfolio.

But should it be? Lovecraftian horror’s seen several different roleplaying games over the years. Call of Cthulhu’s the classic choice for folks and in the current edition has blown some dust off its venerable bones. There’s even a pulp version out there for it. Similarly, Pelgrane Press released Trail of Cthulhu, which does more to play with the investigative side, also with ‘pulp’ and ‘purist’ modes. Outside of those, there’s tremulus, Lovecraftesque, Squamous, Cthulhu Dark, Mythos World and more. So what makes this game unique and can it stand up to the other games out there? 

I bought the starter set, “Hungering Abyss” and arranged to play through it with some of my Arkham group. I’d run Cthulhu Dark for some of them, and they all had mixed experience with RPGs.

What’s In The Box?

Edge have made a gorgeous boxed set, utilising a number of existing FFG paintings for Arkham and some new art which has a washed out night sky, rendered pale by the light of a full moon, and a cover with a cast of investigators, allies and monsters in the mist. Compared to the old Star Wars and L5R boxed sets which were sparse and easily damaged, this is a fancy product.

There’s one book, which contains the rules and the adventure, based on the Night of the Zealot campaign from the Arkham Horror Living Card Game’s core set. The campaign is ten scenes, each assumed to take about an hour and split between three scenarios. I’ll get into how it works and my findings below.

There are five character sheets which are nicely laid out. They have pregenerated characters with their stats, abilities, items and slots to put tokens on. There’s a rule summary on one side and the back cover of the characters has some evidence which led them to the campaign’s adventure.

There’s a GM board, rather than a screen. It has a summary of the rules, tables for trauma and injuries, as well as space along the bottom to place ally & enemy cards. It’s a bit big, especially with those cards in place.

There are oversized cards for each enemy and ally, with groups of enemies coming two to a card. I learnt pretty quickly to stack them so that their dice slots were all that was visible, and added little post-it notes for any injuries they took or effects from the players.

There are cards to represent items and spells. These and the creatures are where most of the pre-existing art from the other games is used and it’s got to a point where some are nicely familiar these days. I get the choice, and I’m fine with it. There are no replicated items, so my group did have to share, and one which was funny, but didn’t see use.

Evidence! There are pieces of paper with autopsy notes, ciphers and some CCG-sized cards representing a police jotter.

There are puzzle pieces and a double-sided frame to put them in. These are sliding block puzzles which would be familiar to people who have played the Arkham Files’ Mansions of Madness.

There are six maps which are large and nicely made, although RPGs and maps with grids are not something I generally use these days.

Two boxes contain 12 black and green six-sided dice each. This is nowhere near enough, but it’s a good start. They’re pretty, but you will need more.

Finally there are a ton of tokens. There are some to represent characters and monsters (we had miniatures provided by my friend Steve and one of the players, Sam, respectively). There are double-sided health/sanity tokens which we only ran out of in the last combat, and really tiny inventory tokens which are about the size of a punched out bit of paper from a hole punch.

The System

Play in the Arkham Horror RPG is split into two types of scene. There are the looser Narrative Scenes, and tighter Structured Scenes. These both use the same system, but change things up a bit.

Either way, each player has six d6 placed onto spots on their character sheet. To perform any complex action (e.g. fighting, researching, distracting a security guard) you can spend any amount of these dice, rolling them and comparing them against a stat. If any are equal to or above your rating (e.g. Melee Combat 4+) then you succeed. Sometimes the amount of successes might make things better. Structured Scenes are generally combats and while you spend dice for complex actions, you also spend them for movement, switching up inventory or hold them back in order to defend against enemy attacks.

It’s a nice system and gives some tricky choices of going all in on one action or splitting things out. Being better at hitting or being cautious and keeping a couple of dice back. Abilities and items help modify these actions, too. 

Narrative scenes change things up a little, removing a turn structure and costs for simple actions like moving. Complex actions still use up dice, and now if you’re all out of them or want to refresh them, time advances. This means enemies scheme, the ritual gets closer or the group simply need to bail from a location. I like the limit on what people can do and the momentum it forces. It also lets reflects things like the passage of time in the LCG and how that can make things more tense.

Rolls can be modified by a few things. First up there’s Advantage and Disadvantage, which cause rerolls of failures/successes (this was from a FAQ, compared to amending a stat down or up, respectively). A metacurrency called Insight can grant extra successes. It can also be used to add narrative elements or protect you from some side effects.

If players are hurt, they take damage which covers dice spots on their sheet, reducing your pool. You can clear them, but that means ‘straining’ and taking an injury. If you run out or take a lot of successes on a hit with a weapon, you also take an injury. These go from a sprain to losing a sense of being put into a coma. If you take horror, then you replace dice in your pool with ‘Horror Dice’. If any of these result in a 1, then you take a trauma. Again, there’s a lot to like in these ideas.

All of these rules are spread throughout the adventure and while there are a summary of actions to take, I still needed to make my own version of the gameplay loop on a bit of paper to square it all in my head. An appendix or a one-page infographic could have helped here.

How does it play?

I have so many thoughts about this. There will be some spoilers for the adventure (and in a way, the LCG’s Night of the Zealot) here.

My group were:

• Jeremie – Playing Daisy Walker, The Librarian

• Matt – Playing Joe Diamond, The Detective

• Rob – Playing Carolyn Fern, The Psychologist

• Sam – Playing William Yorick, The Gravedigger

The Howl of the Hounds

These scenes took one play session of four hours, including teaching the rules.

Scene One: Let’s Get Our Story Straight

Each player starts with their own pieces of evidence (and Daisy also had the evidence of Rita, the pregen we didn’t have). They meet up at Joe Diamond’s house and go through the evidence together, coming up with leads. This started a little awkwardly, with two of the players going through a cipher puzzle and no one really getting into character. They shared some information and gathered leads. Not that they would get to follow them yet. One of the players who wasn’t handling the cipher looked for some booze in his basement stash, another thought they saw something outside of a window. I watched their dice spends and when enough of them had spent dice, I moved us on.

Scene Two: We’re Not Alone

The windows and doors in the house vanished and ghouls dug their way up from the cellar. We started a simultaneous fight and attempt to dispel the magic which blocked the exits. The fight meant quite a bit of looking at the rules and making notes of things to chase up.

The ghouls had a bit of a conga line, pushing past a table and when I got bored, smashing up through the floor as well to mix things up. Daisy discovered that spells were really useful, but also could cause a bit of horror. Carolyn had the problem of being a bit of a support character, but mainly being there to use the sliding tile puzzle to try and get out. I lost a piece, so I quickly drew a replacement, but that wasn’t really the problem. The limited actions in a Structured Scene and the fact that Carolyn’s player wasn’t as much of a puzzle person as the folks who handled the cipher and were in the middle of the fight. 

The group did some good work using a table as a barricade, grabbing kitchen implements as weapons and once they gave up on solving the puzzle, finding an alternate way out. Here’s where I fudged things a little. There’s a second wave of ghouls who arrive from above, but unlike the ones who were burrowing, there was no mention of where they came from. I remembered a chimney in one of the location cards from The Gathering, so I mentioned that. The problem was that there wasn’t a chimney on the map. A player asked about that and I explained that there was one, the map wasn’t 100% literal. Luckily the group went with it, the ghouls came through the chimney and once the group were past them, they used blankets to help get up and out of the building.

Finally there was an encounter with a Ghoul Priest fighting Lita Chantler, an anti-cult zealot, outside. The combat didn’t last long, as I’d not realised the difference between minor and major NPCs, so as soon as he took one full batch of wounds, he was downed. That was a bit quick.

Scene Three: Friend of Foe? 

Scene Two took most of the night and things were wrapping up at the Dice Saloon, luckily this is just a bit of gathering up details in a diner, working out where to go next.

Cultists Among Us

This was the longest act in the game, with some downtime and the first two scenes played in a single session. Similar to Midnight Masks in the LCG, this is where the world opens up. The group needed to find details out about a cult and that means they can tackle things in any order.

The group also went to the docks to get some equipment, walking out with a Molotov cocktail.

Scene Four: St Mary’s Hospital

Next up it was off to the Miskatonic University. Sneaking around campus security and kids out late, the group found the house of the author of the cult’s cipher. This was mostly a Narrative Scene with them poking around, Joe keeping an eye out and Daisy paranoid about being caught burgling somewhere in her place of work.

Yorick found a puzzle box and the group groaned at another sliding puzzle. These really didn’t go well with them. At the same time, Joe saw Professor Warren and some robed buddies heading towards the house.

There was a tense conversation which was interrupted by the group letting Lita unleash her rage on them and Yorick throwing his Molotov cocktail out of the window. The group managed to capture the Professor in the chaos and got him to open the puzzle box, so they had his clue and could move on before campus security showed up.

Scene Six: The Professor’s House

A nurse friend of Carolyn’s was nervous about noises from the morgue, so the group went here, talked her into taking a nap after so many sleepless nights and started to investigate. One of the group went into the mortician’s office, finding the key evidence and a named ghoul hiding under the desk! The ghoul, Bob, startled the other ghouls who were resting in morgue drawers. The group cleverly barricaded two of the drawers up and Carolyn ran around using the Aid action to give advantage to people while slipping between them so she wouldn’t get attacked by ghouls. 

Scene Five: The Graveyard

We started the next session with the group tracking a corrupt policeman to a graveyard. Yorick didn’t take kindly to people commenting about how it was a bit of a mess on the map. Officer Billy Cooper was observing ghouls feasting on corpses and Yorick’s player spent an Insight to declare that they both knew each other. He tried to talk Cooper into giving up details about the cult and dealing him in. Unfortunately it didn’t last as the hungry ghouls and Carolyn smashing Cooper’s car window raised a bit of suspicion. The group took down the ghouls, interrogated Cooper and left him in an open grave after casting a mindwipe spell on him.

Scene Seven was optional and we never really had the opportunity to pursue it.

Hunger from Below

Scene Eight: So, What’s The Plan?

This was another gathering and planning scene. As we’d started the session with the graveyard, we just moved on to the Arkham Woods, where the finale would take place. I emphasised the time pressure on it all and they went along with that.

Scene Nine: Before the Finale

The group entered the woods and I used the ‘Paint the Scene’ technique from The Gauntlet to ask them how the woods had changed. They each provided suitably creepy responses, helping to build atmosphere until they saw Lita sneaking up on some ghouls. They managed to distract them and sneak down a massive hole and a staircase which went ludicrously far beneath the earth.

Scene Ten: The Ritual

The group had made it to the cult’s site, they knew what the ritual was for and the weaknesses of the ghouls. Now they had a bunch of cultists and their boss, The Charnel Lord, to stop. There were also three captives to rescue. The majority of the evening was a protracted fight with them and this is where the difference between major and minor NPCs came in. The cultists and their leader were regular NPCs instead of minor ones, so when they took injuries they rolled on the table instead of simply being downed. This caused some bloody injuries on both sides. The cult leader was blinded, deafened, had a messed up leg, was slowed down and beaten into a coma a couple of times (the first time he was brought back by a friend). It was entertainingly gruesome but it was pretty slow.

Eventually, the group had fought cultists and tentacles. With the leader down, everything started collapsing and it was time to flee.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to love about Arkham Horror. I enjoyed the dice system and the components were gorgeous. At the same time, I generally run theatre of the mind and I wouldn’t give puzzles like the sliding tile ones out to players. It’d be interesting to see if elements like the grid and puzzle use are optional in the core rulebook when that comes out. I’m also hoping there’s a lot of clarification about the rules as we had several instances of trying to figure out a rule and coming up with a ruling at the table. I had a list of questions in my notes at the end of each session and thankfully found an FAQ from the Edge site which was 100% necessary in resolving some of them.

There are a number of actions each player can do in a round, but they felt like they very much settled on one thing and kept doing that in a fight. 

Personally, I’m more of a ‘purist’ fan of eldritch horror than a ‘pulp’ fan, so this was going to struggle a bit with me. I’ve still yet to run Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, but so far each of the other Lovecraftian horror games I’ve mentioned before: Cthulhu Dark, Lovecraftesque, Trail of Cthulhu, Squamous and tremulus rank higher than it in my opinion. 

The intended audience for this game feels like newer roleplayers, specifically ones who have enjoyed any of the other Arkham games. I’m not sure how well this will go down with them, given the need for a FAQ and a lot more d6’s. The lack of a need for complex maths when rolling and the dice system is good, but it felt tricky having to weed out the system from the adventure.

Hopefully the core rulebook will change my opinion and tidy things up, but at the moment, I can only really recommend this for die hard fans of the Arkham Files.