"Do no Harm..."

English; Daniel Harms, 1998; 1d6/2d6 Sanity Loss; Cthulhu Mythos +9%; Occult +1%; 7 weeks to read and comprehend.

Spells: None. Carrying it openly results in a -5% penalty to most Communications skills, but it makes an excellent short-term lighting source (burns for 1-6 rounds) and emergency weapon (attack roll 20%, 1-2 damage, 3 HP).

*****

I’m sorry to have made light of the Hippocratic Oath as the title of this essay, and it would seem to be an injunction against the person of whom I’m about to speak. To be frank I just took advantage of an obvious joke and hopefully, it will not cause offence. If it does, mea culpa; my bad; I apologise.

I want to talk about The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms (ah, you see where the feeble joke comes in now!). My copy is the second edition, published by Chaosium in 1998. As you can see from the image, it’s a well-thumbed copy with the lacquer of the front wrapper detaching itself slowly with every perusal. This authoritative volume commands my attention every time I start forth on yet another sojourn amongst entities Lovecraftian; it’s always my first port of call. I urgently encourage anyone gaming with the Cthulhu Mythos to acquire a copy of this book and to utilise it as a mainstay of their tale-telling.

That being said, I now offer a few caveats.

From having read this volume many times, I’m aware that the author tries very hard to not let any cats out of any bags. This is only fair. If the Encyclopedia baldly stated the crucial elements of every Mythos tales it dissects, then there would be no reason for fans to search out and explore the writings of the many authors which the tome encompasses. It is, and I have found it to be so, a great encouragement to seek out the original stories of the writers which it talks about and so I have used it, to great effect. Having done so, however, I begin to see the shortcomings of the Encyclopedia itself.

Not only does Harms promote the ‘Devil’s Reef’ fallacy, he misses the point on several other issues and, after a while, it starts to look as though Harms was only skimming the source material and missing some salient points in the hurry to meet a deadline. Time pressure affects us all, but this is the second edition of this work and you would reasonably expect that any glaring errors from the first release would have been addressed.

Take one entry as an example. I was working on gathering together all of the entries regarding strange Mythos stones and other carvings when I stumbled across the ‘Sixtystone’ or ‘Ixaxar’. This led me to a reference about Pomponius Mela and his geographical work “De Situ Orbis”. Having tracked this volume down and studying the publishing history concerning it, I discovered that it had nothing to do with any Mythos concepts. The title appears in a piece by Arthur Machen entitled “The Black Seal”; in that work, the information surrounding the ‘Sixtystone’ emerges from another text that is bound together into an edition of Mela’s work:

“Now, however, in desperation, I began to re-examine the musty sheepskin and calf bindings, and found, much to my delight, a fine old quarto printed by the Stephani, containing the three books of Pomponius Mela, De Situ Orbis, and other of the ancient geographers. I knew enough of Latin to steer my way through an ordinary sentence, and I soon became absorbed in the odd mixture of fact and fancy - light shining on a little of the space of the world, and beyond, mist and shadow and awful forms. Glancing over the clear-printed pages, my attention was caught by the heading of a chapter in Solinus, and I read the words:

‘MIRA DE INTIMIS GENTIBUS LIBYAE. DE LAPIDE HEXECONTALITHO,’

'The wonders of the people that inhabit the inner parts of Libya, and of the stone called Sixtystone...'”

-Arthur Machen, “The Novel of the Black Seal”

So, it is an entry on Solinus which is required, not one on Mela. The author could have saved himself a painful night’s cross-referencing if he had only surmised this fact.

I guess the automatic response to a situation like this is to say, “get off your high horse; it’s only a roleplaying game.” Yes; that’s right – it is just a roleplaying game. But it also stems from a body of work from which people are making money and gaining tertiary educational qualifications. As I’ve said before, if something’s worth doing, then it’s worth getting it right. The quality of the work released is what gains the author kudos and respect; a work that’s flawed only opens the instigator up to ridicule.

So, how about a third edition of The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana? Surely it’s about time that a new re-working hit the market? As I’ve already stated, this is an invaluable resource and it should be updated to keep pace with everything that the market produces. And after all, a lot of ichor has flowed under the bridge since 1998...