In May 2023 we presented the Arc Dream Mythos Bundle featuring Cthulhu Mythos supplements and magazines from Arc Dream Publishing. Best known for its Delta Green RPG line, Arc Dream has long honored and enhanced the legacy of Pagan Publishing, the much-honored publisher of many 1990s third-party Call of Cthulhu scenarios.
In 1990 19-year-old John Scott Tynes founded Pagan to publish The Unspeakable Oath magazine, a spectacularly fine digest of arcane lore supporting Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu. Each issue of the Oath presented Arcane Artifacts, Mysterious Manuscripts, Tales of Terror, Messages in a Bottle, Unconventional Firearms, and full-length scenarios that added new terrors to any Cthulhu Mythos game. In issue 7 of the Oath (1992) – nine months before the premiere of The X-Files – Tynes and designer Dennis Detwiller introduced the secret government conspiracy Delta Green.
As Pagan started producing full-length CoC supplements like Coming Full Circle (1995), The Golden Dawn (1996), and the widely acclaimed original version of Delta Green (1997), The Unspeakable Oath issues grew correspondingly less frequent. Originally a quarterly, it became more-or-less annual (1994-97). After a four-year hiatus, Pagan disgorged a final double issue (#16/17) in 2001, and since then has gone mostly dormant, sleeping like Cthulhu in sunken R’lyeh.
In 2010 Arc Dream licensed publishing rights to The Unspeakable Oath and published eight more issues through 2018. At first supporting only Call of Cthulhu, the Oath expanded its remit to cover other Mythos RPGs: Trail, Dark, Delta Green, and even Fiasco (the playset Unaussprechlichen Klutzen). Contributors included some of the best and most knowledgeable Lovecraftian gaming writers outside Chaosium itself: Greg Stolze, Adam Scott Glancy, Adam Gauntlett, and many more.
This offer showcased all eight Arc Dream issues of the Oath, along with Dennis Detwiller’s extraordinary Dreamlands campaign The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man (2013). All these titles were previously presented in our Bundle of Tentacles 2 (Oct 2014), Tentacles 5 (Oct 2018), or Delta Green Operations (Oct 2019) offers. There were six titles in our Unspeakable Collection (retail value $64) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the 294-page Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands campaign The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man; the Old Ones Rising compilation that gathers The Unspeakable Oath issues #18-21; and the four most recent issues of the Oath: The Unspeakable Oath issue #22, issue #23, issue #24, and issue #25.
