# Arkham tags: #game/rpg/arkham ![[Arkham (Call of Cthulhu) (cover).jpg|600]] **Arkham** is the town that horror gaming is named after. This is the exhaustive 7th edition sourcebook for the Miskatonic University city at the beating heart of **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** — the place investigators keep coming home to, or keep dragging themselves out of. It's a gazetteer thick enough to run a whole campaign inside one set of municipal limits: every street, institution, and unsettling local accounted for, from the university's august halls to the wrong sort of boarding house down by the river. ## Setting If **Call of Cthulhu** has a home, it's this town. **Arkham** lays out the whole place the way the classic sourcebooks always have: the **Miskatonic University** campus and its satellite institutions (its schools and colleges, the Orne Library and its too-valuable tomes, the *Miskatonic University Crier* newspaper, athletics grounds), the town's neighborhoods and districts, and the waterfront's grimmer corners that only tourists mistake for scenic. It peoples Arkham too — the faculty and the curious old families, the Pickerings, the bohemian circles that swirl around people like Asenath Waite, and the ordinary citizens trying not to notice what their neighbours get up to at night. The 1925 history is woven in as well: the Armitage-and-Whateley business in Dunwich, the expeditions Miskatonic keeps outfitting that come back wrong (that 1930 Antarctic one), and the long municipal memory of things better left buried. The point of the book is that Arkham is a *place* — lived-in, mapped, and dense enough that a Keeper never has to fake a street name. It comes with full cartography, a timeline so the town's history lands in order, and enough detail that every investigation can start with a real address. ## Mechanics **Arkham** is a setting and NPC resource, not a new rulebook — it feeds the **Call of Cthulhu** 7th edition core rather than adding systems to it. What it does add is material: - **A gazetteer of locations** — the university, the Orne Library, the town's streets, shops, dives, and institutions all given proper entries. - **Cast of characters** — the faculty, families, and mythos-adjacent locals an investigator would actually meet, statted for the game. - **Campaign material** — a framework for running investigations across town, and tie-ins to the classic mythos canon (Miskatonic University itself, the Dunwich affair's legacy). - **The Arkham Advertiser** — a period newspaper "prop" so the Keeper can hand players real Arkham local news. ## Editions - **Original Arkham sourcebook (1990)** — **Keith Herber**'s classic treatment of the town; the foundational Arkham book. - **2003 edition** — the expanded revision credited to Herber, Mark Morrison, Richard Watts, Mervyn Boyd, Lynn Willis, and John B. Monroe. - **4th Edition (2023)** — the 7th-edition **Arkham**, by **Mike Mason, Keith Herber, and Bret Kramer** (editorial by Mason & Kramer, cartography by Matt Ryan, with the support of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society). *In the library.* ## References - [Arkham (2023) — Chaosium](https://www.chaosium.com/arkham/) - [Arkham — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/454202/Arkham)