Intro Adventure Cover: Call of Cthulhu 1E

  Going up the D&D tree of life has made me curious about some of the other major systems. Call of Cthulhu isn't a lineage I've ever delved into deeply, but it's popular and pervasive enough that I definitely have a fixed image in my mind: Fedora-wearing investigators smoking heavily, aiming machine guns by gaslight at tentacles of some nameless horror framed just offscreen. That's what pop culture has fed me, but what did Chaosium opt for when they were publishing their very first adventure? In the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth we have an ambitious adventure against a world-encompassing threat. I know nothing about the details of the adventure itself, but given CoC is on its seventh edition...I think it did okay.
  Rather than our city stereotype, this cover takes place in a strange and alien land, greenish and misty. The adventure talks about Yog-Sothoth, but the city emerging out of the water? That's pure Call of Cthulhu (the short story). Although nothing depicted is strictly non-Euclidean, the architecture is strange, inhuman. It's certainly cyclopean in its scale, mountainous in the way even skyscrapers aren't. This looks like a location you're definitely going to have to make a few sanity checks to tackle.
  It actually took me a little while to notice the humans in this cover image. Reduced to the size of insignificant ants before the gaping maw of the structure's entryway, the slightly different colors they're wearing get washed out in comparison. Although there's no direct monster, there is something monstrous...the slightly phallic/slightly durpy stone octopus statue to the left. It's alien and weird at least, and completely indifferent to the rest of the scene.
  In fact in general I think the whole cover is about colossal indifference. Nothing in the strange, sickly landscape cares the slightest about the human party investigating it. The party is in danger, not because anything is particularly threatening them with malice, but because they're just exploring a place inimical to their lives entirely. It's a chilling effect, and has done more to make me want to play Call of Cthulhu than hundreds of mobsters shooting tentacles with Uzis. Well done.

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