The Book of Ants

From the City of Lights to the Palaces of Dreams

Evocative, enigmatic, and haunted by airborne polyps, The Book of Ants, a.k.a Le Livre des Fourmis, gives Trail of Cthulhu Keepers and players an essential window into Paris of the 20s and 30s, and into the Dreamlands beyond.

From November 1918 to September 1929, the young poet Henri Salem fell in with the Paris surrealists. Swept up by the charisma of group leader André Breton, he soon shared café tables with key figures of the movement. According to his diary, he traded quips with Marcel Duchamp. He feared the madness of Antonin Artaud. He also served as the model for the famous ants-from-the-hand image in Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

If his tale can be fully believed, he stepped with them from waking Paris to an ancient yet surprisingly malleable realm of dream. (Save for Breton, who could never make the leap.) There he walked alongside such Mythos figures as Randolph Carter, King Kuranes and the ghoul once known as Richard Pickman.

As such, his diary serves as an indispensable guide for exploring the dangerous demimonde of the Parisian art scene in Dreamhounds of Paris. There, people often settle aesthetic disputes with knife wounds and broken bones. Beyond that, it offers a rare look at the ever-shifting shores of the Dreamlands. Its fantastical air gives way to horrific reflections of a world spinning into chaos and death.