What do you think?
Rate this book
Call of Cthulhu RPG
Return to Dunwich
Dunwich is a small village located along the Miskatonic, upriver from Arkham. Until 1806, Dunwich was a thriving community, boasting many mills and the powerful Whateley family.
Those among the Whateleys came to know dark secrets about the world, and they fell into the worship of unwholesome creatures from other times and places. Retreating to the hills and forests surrounding the town, they betrayed their uncorrupted kin.
Prosperity fled, and a dark despair seized the people. What remains is a skeleton town, mills closed, its citizens without hope or future. However, secrets of the Mythos survive, to be discovered by brave and enterprising investigators.
Return to Dunwich contains extensive background information about a town originally created and described by H.P. Lovecraft in his terrifying tales of horror. Pertinent buildings, useful people, and important locations are described in depth. A 17x22" map of Dunwich Country depicts the area for miles around. Two new scenarios are included: one introductory and the other suitable for many evenings of play. Various links and leads to Arkham are included; possession of Arkham Unveiled is useful but not necessary.
Those among the Whateleys came to know dark secrets about the world, and they fell into the worship of unwholesome creatures from other times and places. Retreating to the hills and forests surrounding the town, they betrayed their uncorrupted kin.
Prosperity fled, and a dark despair seized the people. What remains is a skeleton town, mills closed, its citizens without hope or future. However, secrets of the Mythos survive, to be discovered by brave and enterprising investigators.
Return to Dunwich contains extensive background information about a town originally created and described by H.P. Lovecraft in his terrifying tales of horror. Pertinent buildings, useful people, and important locations are described in depth. A 17x22" map of Dunwich Country depicts the area for miles around. Two new scenarios are included: one introductory and the other suitable for many evenings of play. Various links and leads to Arkham are included; possession of Arkham Unveiled is useful but not necessary.
132 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
2 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 26, 2019
Para incursionar por primera vez con Lovecraft, no fue un buen relato. No me gustó la historia ni la forma en que está contada, así que esta vez paso de este autor.
May 4, 2025
Chaosium was clearing its warehouses at the end of July -- some bargains seem to be available still! -- and I decided to spend some royalty money on H.P. Lovecraft's Dunwich for Call of Cthulhu. I'm not sure why I picked that one out of everything available, but I'm glad I did. Allow me to tell you why.
The Good
The format is a lovely surprise. I was expecting a sourcebook on Dunwich, with some related adventures, a bit like Chaosium's books on real-life locations like Cairo and London, and that is sort of what you get. Ish. It turns out the book is more of a sandbox, akin to an old school D&D adventure. You get a -- long! -- list of locations, the people associated with them, and any events -- eldritch or otherwise -- tied to them, but there is no plot as such. That said, there are some ongoing agendas and schemes, but nothing like the sort of strong plotting one expects from a CoC adventure. Not only is it refreshing, the gazetteer-like approach makes the content easy to read and, probably, prepare. Which is good, because there is a lot of content. Speaking of which...
So... much... stuff! Every house, building, or other point of interest is listed and numbered. There are almost a thousand locations, although some are empty. I haven't got this to the table -- and I am unlikely to do so since one of my regular players has read the whole lot -- but I imagine you could get weeks if not months of play out of Dunwich and the surrounding area.
The content is pretty good too. There is a lot of interesting stuff to investigate and poke around in, some of which is waiting for the players to discover, some of which is carrying on without them. It all seems very playable and it feels like a real, living location. There are plenty of non-Mythos interactions too, which is good, but I'll have more to say about that in a bit.
The Bad
The d20 Call of Cthulhu rules. Ha. No, I joke. I'm all in favour of 7th-level Librarians.
The Ugly
There is some... "old-fashioned" terminology used to describe the mental and physical condition of some of the Dunwich residents. This is a 2002 revision of a 1991 book, but even so I was surprised. On the plus side, there are only a handful of occurrences, but beware and be prepared to ignore the Old Ways.
There are a couple of sections that are a bit dungeony and feel out of place in Call of Cthulhu. These were perhaps less jarring in 1991.
I think there's too much Cthulhu Mythos content. This seems like an odd complaint for a game about the Mythos, but bear with me. Without going into spoilers, there are at least three major Mythos, er, vectors, only one of which has anything to do with the Dunwich Horror. It feels a bit greedy and over the top and moreover, the intellectual, physical, and social decay running through Dunwich is given a Mythos origin, which I feel undermines the Deliverance-like horror of the setting; I prefer to think that the Dunwich Horror happened because the village was already corrupted by human failings, rather than those failings being caused by an alien influence.
(What's worse is that the book is inconsistent on how pervasive this influence is and jumps through unconvincing hoops to explain why some villagers are unaffected.)
I would remove at least one of these Mythos elements, maybe even two, and make the village a bit less of a Cthulhu "zoo". Cthulzoo?
I am not a huge fan of the cover, as seen above. It's a fine picture and better than anything I can do, but as a cover it tells us nothing about the book, except that there is a wrinkly old man in it. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that there are quite a few wrinkly old men in the Dunwich area.
The cover for 1991's Return to Dunwich is more overt -- perhaps obvious -- as a piece of horror art -- and to be fair, seems to illustrate one minor possible event out of almost a thousand, so I can see why it was changed for the reprint -- but it's also more striking as a visual. I would rent that dodgy VHS in a heartbeat.
------
That looks like more bullet points for Ugly than Good, but worry not! That first Good point is such a... good point that it more than makes up for the flaws, and most of the issues with the book can be fixed with ease, or ignored without making the adventures more difficult to play.
(I would go into specifics on said fixes, but, you know, spoilers.)
I remember seeing the original Return to Dunwich book in the collection of my old Call of Cthulhu GM Keeper Dave and that cover jumped out at me even back then. For whatever reason we never went to Dunwich in Dave's campaign, but I hope I'll get a chance to run it one day, as it seems like great, degenerate, backwoods, fun.
The Good
The format is a lovely surprise. I was expecting a sourcebook on Dunwich, with some related adventures, a bit like Chaosium's books on real-life locations like Cairo and London, and that is sort of what you get. Ish. It turns out the book is more of a sandbox, akin to an old school D&D adventure. You get a -- long! -- list of locations, the people associated with them, and any events -- eldritch or otherwise -- tied to them, but there is no plot as such. That said, there are some ongoing agendas and schemes, but nothing like the sort of strong plotting one expects from a CoC adventure. Not only is it refreshing, the gazetteer-like approach makes the content easy to read and, probably, prepare. Which is good, because there is a lot of content. Speaking of which...
So... much... stuff! Every house, building, or other point of interest is listed and numbered. There are almost a thousand locations, although some are empty. I haven't got this to the table -- and I am unlikely to do so since one of my regular players has read the whole lot -- but I imagine you could get weeks if not months of play out of Dunwich and the surrounding area.
The content is pretty good too. There is a lot of interesting stuff to investigate and poke around in, some of which is waiting for the players to discover, some of which is carrying on without them. It all seems very playable and it feels like a real, living location. There are plenty of non-Mythos interactions too, which is good, but I'll have more to say about that in a bit.
The Bad
The d20 Call of Cthulhu rules. Ha. No, I joke. I'm all in favour of 7th-level Librarians.
The Ugly
There is some... "old-fashioned" terminology used to describe the mental and physical condition of some of the Dunwich residents. This is a 2002 revision of a 1991 book, but even so I was surprised. On the plus side, there are only a handful of occurrences, but beware and be prepared to ignore the Old Ways.
There are a couple of sections that are a bit dungeony and feel out of place in Call of Cthulhu. These were perhaps less jarring in 1991.
I think there's too much Cthulhu Mythos content. This seems like an odd complaint for a game about the Mythos, but bear with me. Without going into spoilers, there are at least three major Mythos, er, vectors, only one of which has anything to do with the Dunwich Horror. It feels a bit greedy and over the top and moreover, the intellectual, physical, and social decay running through Dunwich is given a Mythos origin, which I feel undermines the Deliverance-like horror of the setting; I prefer to think that the Dunwich Horror happened because the village was already corrupted by human failings, rather than those failings being caused by an alien influence.
(What's worse is that the book is inconsistent on how pervasive this influence is and jumps through unconvincing hoops to explain why some villagers are unaffected.)
I would remove at least one of these Mythos elements, maybe even two, and make the village a bit less of a Cthulhu "zoo". Cthulzoo?
I am not a huge fan of the cover, as seen above. It's a fine picture and better than anything I can do, but as a cover it tells us nothing about the book, except that there is a wrinkly old man in it. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that there are quite a few wrinkly old men in the Dunwich area.
The cover for 1991's Return to Dunwich is more overt -- perhaps obvious -- as a piece of horror art -- and to be fair, seems to illustrate one minor possible event out of almost a thousand, so I can see why it was changed for the reprint -- but it's also more striking as a visual. I would rent that dodgy VHS in a heartbeat.
------
That looks like more bullet points for Ugly than Good, but worry not! That first Good point is such a... good point that it more than makes up for the flaws, and most of the issues with the book can be fixed with ease, or ignored without making the adventures more difficult to play.
(I would go into specifics on said fixes, but, you know, spoilers.)
I remember seeing the original Return to Dunwich book in the collection of my old Call of Cthulhu GM Keeper Dave and that cover jumped out at me even back then. For whatever reason we never went to Dunwich in Dave's campaign, but I hope I'll get a chance to run it one day, as it seems like great, degenerate, backwoods, fun.
Read
May 1, 2025How? My Cthulhu pile.
What? The second book in a mini-product line on Lovecraft Country (the first was H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham: Unveiling the Legend-Haunted City). This book covers Dunwich and environs, and boy, does it cover them. Unlike Arkham Unveiled, which is half sourcebook, half adventures, this book has a little adventure-like intro, and the rest of the book is pure sourcebook.
In some ways, that makes this book more interesting to me to flip through, because you can flip through and stop and read a location (a farmhouse, an abandoned farmhouse, a strange hill) and let yourself go.
Yeah, so? Putting this on my keep pile -- though all these Lovecraft Country books have had other versions, so I don't know what I'll do about those in my collection.
What? The second book in a mini-product line on Lovecraft Country (the first was H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham: Unveiling the Legend-Haunted City). This book covers Dunwich and environs, and boy, does it cover them. Unlike Arkham Unveiled, which is half sourcebook, half adventures, this book has a little adventure-like intro, and the rest of the book is pure sourcebook.
In some ways, that makes this book more interesting to me to flip through, because you can flip through and stop and read a location (a farmhouse, an abandoned farmhouse, a strange hill) and let yourself go.
Yeah, so? Putting this on my keep pile -- though all these Lovecraft Country books have had other versions, so I don't know what I'll do about those in my collection.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews