Fhtagn! – Tales of the Creeping Madness (v2.1.1a)

Arkham becomes the stage for a gleefully bleak bid to end the world, with four would-be cultists trying to summon an ancient terror before ordinary people realize what is happening. Fhtagn! – Tales of the Creeping Madness is a choice-driven text adventure that treats Lovecraftian doom with a sharp, mischievous sense of humor rather than straight-faced cosmic despair. Its town is full of investigators, criminals, crooked authorities, and things far worse lurking beneath the surface, all of whom can complicate a cult’s carefully planned apocalypse. The tone lands somewhere between a dark comedy and a branching tabletop campaign, where terrible decisions are often the most entertaining ones.

Each run centers on preparing for the final ritual through visits to locations around Arkham and decisions made during dozens of supernatural and criminal encounters. Players choose one of four cultists, steer their approach to problems, and decide when to bargain, deceive, fight, or lean into increasingly reckless occult schemes. Conflicts can involve investigators, gangs, police, and Deep One-style horrors, but the real challenge is managing the consequences of choices as events branch toward success, disaster, or an unexpectedly absurd outcome. With more than a hundred scenarios and hundreds of possible narrative results, progression comes from seeing how different roles and decisions reshape the route to the end of days.

What stands out is the scale of its reactive writing: the adventure contains roughly 93,000 words, 24 potential character roles, dedicated feedback stories for those roles, and 142 endings. Rather than offering one definitive Lovecraft story, it lets players build a personal catastrophe from opportunism, bad luck, cult politics, and supernatural interference. The text-first presentation makes it best suited to readers who enjoy interactive fiction and replaying branching stories over action-heavy spectacle. Fans of Choice of Games-style adventures, tabletop role-playing chaos, or comic spins on Cthulhu mythos should find plenty of reasons to revisit Arkham and ruin it differently each time.