Daniel (@dungeondive) traces the lineage: Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG begat Arkham Horror 1e and 2e at Fantasy Flight, and now Edge Studios has passed the torch back to an RPG. The Hungering Abyss is the new starter set, provided as a review copy. Up front, he’s honest: this isn’t a solo or co-op game, and if solo horror is what you want, there are better options (a dedicated guide is coming).
The positives: for £35, you get a remarkable amount of physical content—five pregenerated investigators, tangible evidence handouts, pamphlets, ciphers to solve, three double-sided battle maps, tokens, dice, a GM screen, and two sliding puzzles reminiscent of Mansions of Madness 2e. The core Dynamic Pool System is genuinely cool: six D6 that double as health and actions, with Horror Dice added when you accumulate mental injuries. Ones on Horror Dice trigger trauma rolls. Daniel is a longtime advocate of D6 pool systems and appreciates the transparency—dice pools are always public, even for enemies.
The negatives: rules scattered across scenario text with no index, no character creation in the starter set, no random tables for the GM, player-focused puzzles he’s philosophically opposed to, and a trauma-table printing error on the GM screen. He flags missed opportunity: this could have been the first genuinely co-op investigative RPG.
Should the full Arkham Horror RPG embrace co-op play, or is Edge right to keep it traditional?