This is the original H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands box set (1986), a sort of expansion of Call of Cthulhu. It can be used as a unique campaign setting in its own right, or can be bolted on to any existing Call of Cthulhu campaign since, as the name applies, it can be accessed by sleeping.

The world of Earth’s Dreamlands is based on a suite of Lovecraft’s early, pre-Cthulhu stories, inspired largely by Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana. There are quite a few of them, but the most important for our purposes is “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” which serves as a sort of gazetteer upon which the game world is based. It is a weird, semi-medieval place that effecitvely mixes the dreamy with the horrific (You get to ride zebras! You could get sold into slavery and fed to giant spiders!). The place is often pastoral, but there are plenty of awful monsters, like gugs (those hairy critters with the vertical mouths and four arms). You can also go to the moon.  Oh, and every world has cats. You don’t want to meet the cats from Saturn though.

Everything is described with just enough detail to seem familiar and, well, dreamy. The late Kevin Ramos’ art does a lot to sell it for me. That gug, man.

The rules have been issued several times over the year, but not a lot of Dreamlands specific scenarios aside of the (very good) Dreaming Stone campaign, though many regular CoC scenarios incorporate aspects of the the Dreamlands. As much as I love this box – and I do, I firmly believe it is the best of the non-1920s Call of Cthulhu setting supplements by a large margin – I think there is a ton of untapped potential here. Still, it does an excellent job of converting a strange and melancholy literary world into an interesting and accessible roleplaying world.