Fragments of Fear (1985) is the second Call of Cthulhu companion book. Chaosium released these for most of the games in their line and they generally consists of a little bit of everything – stats for new monsters, essays, rules supplements, scenarios and the occasional bit of weirdness like poems or jokes (in Fragments of Fear’s case, the weirdest thing is a selection of quotes of historical ritual curses compiled by Sandy Petersen).

This one has a lot of new spells, a page of rules clarifications, a map of Innsmouth, an essay on Cthulhu, two rather straight forward scenarios and some new stats for monsters and animals. Most of this stuff, and stuff in the first companion, would fill out the page count of the core rules when they transitioned from box sets to books.

The best part of Fragments of Fear is the fold out size comparison chart, which displays the relative sizes of most of the monsters and gods in the game. It is silly and arguable the height of early Call of Cthulhu’s (accidental?) effort to catalog and D&D-ify the unknowable mythos, but I love it anyway.

Oh, and Tom Sullivan’s illustrations are, as usual, on point. The summoning of the dark young is one of my all time favorites. I dig the cover, too, even though I’ve never decided what the heck is going on in it. Are those ghouls? Zombies? Servants of Glaaki?