Daniel (@dungeondive) sets up Cthulhu: Death May Die to learn, and in the process voices a complaint he has with nearly every Mythos board game he owns: none of them treat the game as a launching pad into the literature that inspired it. No reading lists. No author credits. No little lore snippets connecting the characters on the box to their original stories. In his view, that is a genuine disservice to Lovecraft, Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Brian Lumley, and the dozens of other writers who built the Mythos.
His touchstone is the famous Appendix N from Dungeons & Dragons — a reading list that, in the early 1980s, sent him hunting Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and the rest through second-hand bookstores. That appendix didn’t just recommend books; it handed players a treasure map. A game like Death May Die picking Yog-Sothoth and Wilbur Whateley should, he argues, at minimum point players toward the Dunwich Horror, Robert M. Price’s Dunwich Cycle, and the public-domain Lovecraft stories that established the relationship between them.
He reads a passage from Price’s “Wilbur Whateley Waiting” to illustrate how dramatically a short story can deepen a game session. Most of this fiction is public domain — there is no rights barrier, only a missing will.
Should Mythos board games owe more explicit literary credit to the authors they riff on, or is atmosphere enough?