If the release of the Call of Cthulhu fourth edition rules ushered in a mini-golden age of Call of Cthulhu material (and it did, there is a massive concentration of goodness from 1989 to 1993, including Horror on the Orient Express, the Lovecraft Country sourcebooks and more), Adventures in Arkham Country signals the end.

Not that Adventures is bad! It isn’t! Nor are the many books that came out between 1993 to 2014, when the Seventh Edition of the rules ushered in a new golden period we’re still enjoying. But…something evaporates in the 90s. The graphic design gets shabby, the illustrations aren’t quite as high quality, the whole things loses focus for a while. Things never get truly bad, but they do get a little less than inspired.

For instance, this edition of Adventures in Arkham Country (1993) was rather hard to find. The reprint is easier to come by, but it has this weird thing where the art piece is shrunk to about 1/6 the size of the cover, with the rest taken up by a weird, vaguely tentacle pattern. This was adapted for several other books in the mid-90s and dear god why? Why make the big painting you paid for to sell the book so small??

Anyway, this one is the primo version. I love Stephen King painting (not that Stephen King, poor guy) and I feel like the whole Arkham Horror aesthetic springs directly from it. Interiors are all John T. Snyder and holy wow is his work tight and controlled and detailed and moody here.

The adventures are solid, though there is a little bit too much Dreamlands for a book called Arkham Country. The best adventure features an archaeological dig in Dunwich that unearths a machine that controls a semi-invisible entity. The centerpiece of the book is a three-parter the involves putting the players on trial for murder, which is novel but also seems like a recipe for disaster. At least for my players. That one also features a thinly veiled Randal Flagg, which is weird.