“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” – H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
The Arkham Horror Files
This series, mostly created and distributed by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) and their partners is a great example of Lovecraftian horror and archaeology colliding in interesting ways. At this point, there are multiple board games, a living card game, a TTRPG, a video game, various books and novellas, and other pieces of media that are all connected and intertwined. As an example, one character card has enough text to fully analyze the idea of museums & repatriation, and there are less than 200 words to use. The various pieces of media are discussed in some detail at the links below:
Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game is a new TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) that was released by Edge Studios in 2024, one of the FFG partner companies. The game is fairly simple to get into, and like most of the other pieces in the franchise, it is set in the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. The game focuses on a set of investigators, the players, who take on the characters who seek to solve the mysteries surrounding the town.
This is a living card game that is going on nearly 9 years as of 2025. The result is a mountain of content to sort through, and while the lore is scattered around a lot of different cards and the various game pieces, much can be said about archaeology here. Kymani Jones, is a good example of this.
Because each piece of media is interconnected, the characters are a good way to talk about the rest of the world as well. Many original characters are in the series of games at this point, with many who represent a lot of the tropes discussed before. And, of course, the character of Monterey Jack who seems to favor a bullwhip quite a lot.