Call of Cthulhu is not a game that needs a monster manual. Monster manuals are for games of an entirely different temperament, where random encounters happen frequently and strength of arms wins victories and piles of monsters are needed to make for ever more bellicose triumphs. If you were to put the same amount of monsters in a Call of Cthulhu session that you do a Dungeons & Dragons session, you’d kill all the players off in short order.

However, just because monster books aren’t particularly useful for Call of Cthulhu doesn’t mean they aren’t desirable. This is the Creature Companion (1998), which largely reprints two previous books with less interesting covers, Ye Booke of Monsters volume one and two. It basically collects every monster used in Call of Cthulhu games to that point, plus a good number of beasties collected from various notable Mythos stories (like TED Klein’s Shugoran). They’re presented in Monster Manual format – description, stats and illustration by Earl Geier, who does a fantastic job (but I couldn’t reproduce his illustrations well enough to do them justice, alas).

The upside of a book like this is monsters. I love monsters. The downside of a book like this is seeing the patterns at play in the narrative. Everything has an improbable name. Everything is some variation of a tentacle monster. Viewed en mass, these things aren’t scary any more, they just become sets of tropes endlessly rearranged. It is hard to tell many of them apart. I am surprised it didn’t drive Geier to quit. Which isn’t to say its bad – its not! But it is a bit overwhelming.