Is the Second Time a Charm? Lovecraftesque Second Edition Reviewed

Title: Lovecraftesque Second Edition

Publisher: Black Armada

Authors: Joshua Fox and Becky Annison

Artists: Vincent Sammy and Paul Tomes

Year: 2024

Genre: Second edition of the collaborative Lovecraftian horror storytelling game

Pages: 146 pages

MSRP: £50.00 for the hardcover or $20.00 in PDF at DriveThruRPG

Lovecraftesque is a game of communal storytelling, aided by cards and a clearly explained set of rules. Players work together, rotating among roles, to tell a story of intrigue, horror, and doom. For those with experience playing these kinds of narrative games, especially The Zone, it’s a gentle learning curve, but even true newbies will pick up quickly.

Lovecraftesque is a game for people who love storytelling. It’s not about rolling dice, but about picking up narrative threads. It’s about crafting a compelling tale, even as your tablemates cover their eyes. It keeps things moving by keeping them interesting and ensures that no one is ever left to sit and passively listen while the chattier members of a table drive the plot.

Its design is pretty solid and its conceit is fairly strong.

It’s in trying to tackle Lovecraft’s unsavory elements where the game stumbles.

To be clear: Lovecraftesque’s heart is in the right place. Lovecraft’s racism was abominable and in an era of spotty media literacy, labeling it as such is never a bad call. Much of the broad message of the game’s advice on addressing these issues boils down to ‘remember that you are telling the story of a human being, not a stereotype’ —which, again, is always sound— and to discuss with your table what themes, elements, and tropes everyone is comfortable with and interested in exploring and which are better left off the table.

The suggestion to omit any references to racism entirely, however, poses a bit more of a challenge. Chris Spivey’s Harlem Unbound and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom are both distinctly black takes on Lovecraft from talented black storytellers, set in the era of the original stories and complete with the racism of the period. In their hands, the presence and insidious evil of this racism inspires empathy for the characters, and allows players and readers who may have never experienced racial injustice in their own lives to gain a deeper, more personal understanding of what it might be like to live and labor under that burden— and to hopefully carry that understanding with them into the real world.

Likewise, while Lovecraftesque is right to call out Lovecraft’s odious views on things like intermarriage, the game forgets that the plot elements those views inspired (e.g., the Innsmouth taint) can be used to tell compelling and deeply humane stories, as Chris Spivey demonstrated in one of the most affecting adventures in Harlem Unbound.

Racism as casual set dressing in a game is bad; re-enacting its abuses solely in the name of “historical accuracy” or “fidelity of tone” is even worse. However, there are constructive and meaningful ways to engage with the topic, ones that directly challenge what Lovecraft wrote and believed — and shutting that out shuts out those possibilities.

The conversation around mental illness is another important one to have. Lovecraftesque is correct in labeling that many games dealing with cosmic horrors have a tendency to mechanize mental illness into a flat debuff, reducing complex lived experiences into a challenge to overcome when gaming. There’s a broader conversation to be had in confronting that pattern, but the omission of a sanity mechanic here feels natural, as the game is ultimately driven by player storytelling rather than rolls.

Again, however, in trying to correct a cultural wrong, Lovecraftesque oversteps a bit in the suggestion to ban secondary characters treating the protagonist as a ‘raving madman.’ People who live with mental illness can struggle to access vital resources or find their lived experience dismissed and this, too, can be an element that inspires empathy and challenges preconceived notions.

The suggestion, however, to think through what it might be like to engage with one of these horrors and to ensure it is carried through in realistic and thoughtful ways, especially with secondary characters, is a great one.

Ironically, in “showing, not telling,” Lovecraftesque is able to make far better headway in its goals. The scenarios developed for the second edition feature women and characters of color in prominent, heroic roles and root stories in real world questions of power and oppression. They are well-designed and rife with possibility. In addition to simply being compelling on their own, they are wonderful examples of how to tell stories free of Lovecraft’s worst impulses while remaining true to the spirit of cosmic horror.

Lovecraftesque has real promise and means well. It’s a game which allows a table to come together to have open and honest conversations through the medium of narrative — and also maybe to take some pride in who can come up with the creepiest twist. The game wants to encourage players to engage thoughtfully with the source material and to challenge many of the standing genre tropes, but in being overly prescriptive, it cuts off opportunities for tackling thornier topics, even when its overall message is packed with sound advice.