Edge Studio has been quiet for much of its current existence. While Edge had an original incarnation making RPGs like End of the World, in its current version it’s the RPG arm of Asmodee, built up in part from the original Edge Studio but primarily from the roleplaying team of Fantasy Flight Games. Immediately after Edge Studio was formed they did little besides finish existing Fantasy Flight obligations, mostly in the form of Legend of the Five Rings supplements. While Edge was also responsible for releasing the Twilight Imperium supplement for Genesys and a few 5e-based games, there has not been an Edge-developed RPG system. Until now. Finally in broad distribution at the end of November, Arkham Horror is both a new swing at an old license but also a completely new set of RPG mechanics, the Dynamic Pool System. While the Dynamic Pool System certainly drinks from the same well as Genesys, for Arkham Horror it presents much simpler mechanics; there are no custom dice, only d6s, and while the game provides the comfortable framework of character classes there are really only two mechanical levers players need to worry about pulling, skills and knacks. All in all, it’s a simpler ruleset designed to be an easier way to play Call of Cthulhu. The question, of course, is if that’s something that we want.

The Dynamic Pool System

There are two vectors of conversation about the Arkham Horror RPG; one where we discuss how the game is designed, and one where we discuss what the game is trying to be (as much as the surface-level answer is blindingly obvious). Let’s start with the mechanics, because this is kind of interesting. The Arkham Horror RPG uses a set of mechanics that Edge Studio calls the ‘Dynamic Pool System’, or DPS for short (using a gaming acronym is SEO suicide but I digress). The first reason I find DPS interesting is because it is a new system for Edge. Edge Studio and their Fantasy Flight predecessor put a lot of manpower into Narrative Dice and Genesys. Now, significant investment in an existing system doesn’t mean that investment into a new system is a bad idea (that’s the sunk cost fallacy), but choosing not to leverage an existing system which has an existing fanbase and is already written says a lot more than the studio may mean about how they think that existing system fits into their lineup. In this case, I think the message is more about how the Arkham Horror RPG is being positioned than the viability (or not) of Genesys, though if Edge wanted Genesys to be more viable they could simply stop product managing it so poorly. Anyways.

The Dynamic Pool System builds characters without stats, instead using ten skills and a series of ‘Knacks’ to define characters. ‘Knacks’ represent the bread and butter of Edge Studio/Fantasy Flight game design, long lists of things that make your character unique. I find it tiresome but will also concede that if you want to make a game both simple and still have strong niche protection, picking limited ‘cool things’ off a list is a decent way to do it. To drive the niche protection point home, character creation is centrally built off of picking from a list of eight classes archetypes which are built up around pulp narrative tropes. These archetypes give you specific sublists of Knacks that only your archetype can purchase, and you can even multiclass into a second archetype (yes, they use the term multiclass) at a number of XP roughly equivalent to 30 sessions of play (their numbers, not mine). In addition to specific lists of Knacks, each archetype has different limits on how far you can advance each of the ten skills, yet further emphasizing that the archetype mechanics are built for niche protection as a primary role.

Why is niche protection so important? Because this is a game with little to no mechanical character differentiation. Other than the Knacks and skill limits, each character can do roughly the same things and uses roughly the same mechanics to do them. The core mechanic of the game is that every character has a dice pool that they will steadily exhaust throughout the course of either a scene or turn. Once all characters have exhausted their dice pools, the scene or turn ends. When looking at this from a structured time perspective (i.e. combat, though the game has light structured time social rules as well), it makes a lot of sense (and borrows from the same predecessor as Genesys, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay): spend your AP on what you want to do this turn, then it’s the next turn. In more freeform scenes, I think it’s going to take some practice. The way dice work in this system is that your skill ranking determines how well you have to roll to succeed at a task, and then the number of dice you roll is determined primarily by how many dice you want to roll. Skill rankings range from 6+ (bad) to 2+ (very, very good), and are literally the dice result you need to succeed. 1 is always a failure, and 6 is always a success, so having the worst possible ranking in a skill basically means you only succeed when the dice grace you with a circumstance so good you’ll succeed anyway. For most rolls the default roll is one die, though you can add as many dice as you’d like from your pool in hopes of generating a success. This is where the balancing act comes in. All player characters have a maximum dice pool of six, so that means that over the course of a scene you can attempt somewhere between one and six actions (you could roll more dice than that, Knacks and other circumstances may give you free dice that don’t come from your pool). If you were to, say, put all six dice into one action, it means that you’re spending the entire scene working on this one thing, and you don’t get to participate in the rest of the scene save for interstitial dialogue and maybe a free action or two. If a task is particularly difficult or important, that might be exactly the decision you want to make. At the same time, if your group ends up wrapping up scenes and you as a player keep on ending up with dice left over, it sends you a message that you can be more liberal with your spending.

Overall I’d say I’m fairly bullish on Dynamic Pool, making fun of its name aside. Edge has identified that if you want to make character creation and overall procedures of play relatively simple, you have to make sure you’re still giving players interesting decisions. Making every scene an opportunity to invest dice to get the outcomes you want is interesting, and it makes you think about those relatively straightforward Knacks and skill ratings in every scene. Having the game laid out like this shows that you don’t need ‘ivory tower game design’ trap options to make character creation decisions interesting, and also posits a way to give character dice pools to spend that doesn’t feel bad. I’m not necessarily as convinced when it comes to using these mechanisms for combat; damage in combat is expressed by shrinking your dice pool, and that is absolutely a death spiral mechanic statistically speaking. That said, this is a Call of Cthulhu game. Let’s say that again, in case you somehow missed it: Arkham Horror the RPG is meant to be a direct competitor, and possibly even replacement for, Call of Cthulhu.

Design Intent

While Edge Studio would love for the Arkham Horror RPG to replace Call of Cthulhu, it won’t; no matter what you think about BRP and d100s, the game is entrenched in the RPG hobby both due to its history and present fandom the world over. Still, it would take a particularly wild blind eye to not see that Arkham Horror is the same basic game as Call of Cthulhu. Hell, Arkham Horror the board game was built, by Chaosium no less, on the archetypal story of investigators facing down one of the Great Old Ones in the middle of Lovecraft’s playground, fictional Massachusetts.

I’m not going to spend too much time on the setting here; Arkham, Innsmouth, Dunwich, these were creations of HP Lovecraft and we already know FFG/Edge/Asmodee/whoever the hell actually is in the credits to these games has done a perfectly serviceable job resummarizing the setting. That’s how I’d describe the setting materials here as well: perfectly serviceable. There is a bit of leaning into the specifically 1920s pulp of speakeasies and bootlegging, but that both fits the setting and fits the milieu of the game, which is a pulpier, more over the top Call of Cthulhu.

Seeing Arkham Horror as a pulpier Call of Cthulhu aligns with the choice to bring in the Dynamic Pool System as part of the game’s overarching design goal: Make a more accessible entree into Mythos role-playing than currently exists. Call of Cthulhu is built on a 40+ year old system which favors mechanical depth over accessibility and, to be frank, was never really built for the kind of game that Call of Cthulhu wants to be. Arkham Horror is, in contrast, designed to be an appealing RPG to existing fans of the board game, and in the process come full circle on the original Call of Cthulhu concepts that inspired that board game in the first place. Dynamic Pool does a few things right when it comes to being beginner friendly: It only uses d6s, it reduces math by having the skill ratings directly equivalent to the dice results the player needs to succeed, and it boils down most advancement decisions to either improving a skill rating or taking another Knack, which is a small and understandable nugget of mechanical capability. Beyond that, the mechanics for using character dice pools during unstructured scenes are a boon for beginners, because it enables the GM to easily and concretely tell players if they can still do things during a scene, a small contributor to defeating the large scourge of choice paralysis.

The rules being easier and more streamlined makes the game more appealing for beginners, but so does a ratcheting down of the game’s lethality, which is a decision I’m less enthusiastic about. Arkham Horror borrows its rough injury and “sanity” (here called Horror) mechanics from the same mechanic as Genesys, though grounds them in the dice pool math. As a character takes damage their dice pool is reduced, until it hits zero and the character is incapacitated. At the same time, weapons also have injury ratings (crit ratings in Genesys, essentially), and if an attack roll generates more successes than the injury rating of the attack, then the character being attacked gets an injury. The injury roll is a 1d6, with each existing injury adding +1 to the roll. As the result ‘dead’ is an 11, you need to get hit hard and a lot to actually be at risk of dying. The Horror mechanic ends up in a similar place (instead of injuries you get Traumas, but once again you need an 11 on a 1d6 for the character to be ‘lost forever’), though it’s a bit easier to gain more severe traumas. The underlying mechanic for Horror is pretty neat: when a character suffers Horror, an equal number of dice in their dice pool become Horror dice. Whenever a Horror die rolls a 1, the character gains a trauma, and the more 1s they roll the more they add to the severity of the trauma. This does mean that characters are more likely to “go insane” than die, and there is clearly some escalation as more and more of a character’s dice get replaced with horror dice. Still, healing Horror can happen inside of a single scene, making the mechanic much more fleeting than the equivalent from Call of Cthulhu.

As I implied above, I’m not personally enthused about a softball cosmic horror game; it just doesn’t jive with how I personally want to approach the genre. That doesn’t mean that making one was the wrong decision when it comes to the Arkham Horror RPG. Arkham Horror as a board game is already intended to be more over the top than Call of Cthulhu; a good playthrough ends with you fighting a great old one, which is a ludicrous premise in Call of Cthulhu, not to mention any of Lovecraft’s actual works. It was even a ludicrous premise in the original Chaosium-developed Arkham horror board game; fighting the great old one at the end was added to the game by Fantasy Flight in the game’s 2005 second edition. To say the least, Edge is following the path of their corporate cousin when it comes to adjusting the approach to the Mythos in the Arkham Horror RPG.

The Arkham Horror RPG follows in the footsteps of Fantasy Flight’s adaptation of the original board game. This version of the Mythos involves more empowered characters, less onerous lose conditions, and a generally easier and more welcoming ruleset. I think if it weren’t obviously intended to emulate Call of Cthulhu, I’d have an easier time leaving it at the assessment of the mechanics. As I said above, Arkham Horror isn’t the kind of Mythos game I think I’d want to play. The dread and powerlessness that Call of Cthulhu baked into its rules is something that I see as a cornerstone of the cosmic horror genre, and this game is going for ‘spooky’ as opposed to ‘horror’ in that respect. To be blunt I blame HP Lovecraft for this; his works have become so overexposed in pop culture that it can be hard to get at the root of what he was going for in his original writing, or what others like Robert Chambers were going for. It’s why I read the section in Arkham Horror on safety tools and 1920s attitudes with some degree of irony. I don’t think we should worry about 1920s attitudes on race and gender in a game, but at the same time Lovecraft’s oeuvre was rooted in xenophobia. The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which is cited in Arkham Horror’s setting section, is literally about miscegenation and would never have been written without Lovecraft’s intense xenophobia and racism. As much as I agree with Edge that our intent isn’t to alienate our gaming groups, Lovecraft’s writing is not a playground for spooky set dressing and monsters to uncover. At a certain level I think most RPGs using the Mythos are neutering it in the same way (honestly, really out there ones like Fate of Cthulhu and Cohors Cthulhu might be worse), but seeing advice in a book to just take out all the objectionable parts of Lovecraft so you can play around in his stories seems, well, rather galling. I guess that’s the inevitable end state of turning the works of a paranoid racist into games and toys, and if it were my decision I’d take cosmic horror elsewhere. No one’s made an official RPG for John Dies At the End that I’m aware of.

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After stepping off my genre soapbox, my reception of Arkham Horror is fairly positive. The recipe of toning down the grimness of Call of Cthulhu should look familiar because that’s exactly what Fantasy Flight did with the original Arkham Horror board game, and it is going to make the game more accessible to a new generation of gamers who may be put off of Call of Cthulhu by its age or relative brutality. And as much as Arkham Horror will do perfectly well for Edge as a tie-in game, I’m interested to see where the Dynamic Pool System goes. The version in Arkham Horror is meant to be straightforward, with ten skills, no stats, and few other mechanics besides Knacks. At the same time, the basic principle of having a character dice pool for pacing and structuring scenes could, much like Free League’s Year Zero Engine, see a lot of potential permutations. I’d love to see future games with just a bit more complexity and richness built into the DPS scaffold, and I think Arkham Horror is a good enough first outing that we may be able to get just that.

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