Call of Cthulhu - Malleus Monstrorum

Necron 99 · Post June 13th, 2020, 9:14 am

Saw this post from Chaosium a bit ago, looks good. Guessing they will be rather expensive in print.

Weighing in at 480 pages, the new Malleus Monstrorum will be coming out as a two volume hardcover slipcase set!

Volume I Monsters of the Mythos - 216 pages
Volume II Deities of the Mythos - 264 pages

You'll be sure to find this two-volume collection packed with ideas, concepts, and insights to immerse your scenarios and campaigns deep in the heart of the Cthulhu Mythos. With lore and statistics updated and revised for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, and all brought to startling life by the illustrations of expert artist Loïc Muzy.

The Malleus Monstrorum will be available in PDF very soon from Chaosium.com and DriveThruRPG.

The print edition will be available in October. If you buy the PDF direct from Chaosium.com, you get the full price of the PDF off the cost of the slipcase set when it is released.

grodog · Post June 17th, 2020, 10:29 pm

Hmmm.

The previous edition fit in a single volume fine, wonder why it’s so much larger—does 7e CoC have 3.x-D&D-sized stat blocks??

Allan.

Necron 99 · Post June 18th, 2020, 7:54 pm

I don't know that I've seen the previous book, but this is a sample of one entry from Volume 1, the monsters of the mythos:

Necron 99 · Post June 18th, 2020, 7:56 pm

Here are the Table of Contents from Vol 1 and 2:

Necron 99 · Post June 18th, 2020, 8:01 pm

Volume 2, covering the deities, seems to go into much greater detail, even having paragraphs dedicated to the cults of each Old One.

grodog · Post June 21st, 2020, 11:09 pm

I’ll pull my copy to compare!

Allan.

Captain_Blood · Post July 3rd, 2020, 2:09 pm

I might have to get the PDF of this one just for flavor text. It looks like it could be quite useful inside and outside CoC.

grodog · Post August 11th, 2020, 11:59 pm

I pulled out my older 5e/6e copy from 2006, and it just appears to be a tighter layout, with less-wide margins. Even so, it was still only a 300 page book, so perhaps they've expanded upon it, some? Here's the TOC breakdown, assuming I've done my math properly:

Front matter - 13 pages worth
Creatures of the Mythos - 107 pages worth
Deities of the Mythos - 131 pages worth
Creatures of Legends & Folklore - 9 pages worth
Animals - 13 pages worth
Appendicies and Index - 22 pages worth

The back cover blurb mentions over 380 different monsters. The new versions include over 150 Mythos monsters and over 110 Mythos deities = 260 creatures, so it sounds like some got dropped, perhaps? This 31 July 2020 review by Shannon Appelcline includes a nice overview of the CoC monster manuals from over the years, to provide some context (but mostly focuses on artwork and layout vs. the monster contents in detail): https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/18/18744.phtml

Allan.

Necron 99 · Post August 13th, 2020, 9:04 pm

Solid review and comparison of the new version vs. older, thanks for the link. Weird that the older material seems to cover more entities, now I feel like digging out a copy of the 5/6th edition and doing a hard analysis to see where the real differences are.

grodog · Post August 13th, 2020, 10:25 pm

Necron 99 wrote: ↑August 13th, 2020, 9:04 pm Solid review and comparison of the new version vs. older, thanks for the link. Weird that the older material seems to cover more entities, now I feel like digging out a copy of the 5/6th edition and doing a hard analysis to see where the real differences are.

If you end up picking up the new one, we can compare TOCs

Allan.