I was just watching a popular board game video review about 'Mansion of Madness' that described it as taking place in the world of 'Arkham Horror' .

My first reaction was, I know Arkhah Horror is a popular franchise, but surely the credit should go to Lovecraft. Then my thoughts turned to Chaosium, who's 'Call of Cthulhu' trade mark is acknowledged on the box of Arkham Horror. However, there is no such credit at all on the Mansions of Madness box of manual.

I know HPL's works are in the public domain, and Arkham Horror is the reworking of an old Chaosium game (therefor has a licenced IP) . But surely MoM borrows many elements from CoC (investigator, keeper, Harvey Walters, even Mansions of Madness). I suspect that FFG's Cthulhu Mythos based product would be significantly outselling Chaosium's nowadays. Arkham Horror has certainly been a huge selle, and appeared to really launch the success in high component quality, theme rich board games that we all enjoy today.

I find it interesting that MoM does not appear to owe any licence to Chaosium. Is FFG biting the hand that fed them?

I would say the bigger reason for Arkham Horror Reference over Call of the Cthulhu is because the lack of Elder Ones involvement and the recognizable investigators from Arkham Horror. Especially since there are not even Cthulhu's regular spawn in this game. Good game, Great Lovecraftian theme, but no Cthuthlhu presence... yet.

Afaik not every HPL story features an Elder God, so "there are no Elder Gods, therefore it ain't Cthulhu" seems rather blunt, at least to me.

The way I see it, there HAD to be a mark on Arkham Horror's box because of licence issues, while Mansions of Madness (the board game) never was trademarked by Chaosium, therefore no licence was necessary.
- You already said that Lovecraft is public licence and
- I guess the copyright of all artwork done by FFG for Arkham Horror was left at FFG, which means they can reuse it for other games (-> MoM) without any licence necessary.

Adding a contract when none is necessary might really hurt the development process of any game, so I can totally understand WHY they didn't want Chaosium to have any influence whatsoever in MoM.

Of course, since FFG didn't add Chaosium to the people responsible for the game, they are not allowed to add the Call of Cthulhu logo (which is trademarked) on MoM's box. In order to add the logo on the box, they'd have to set up a contract with Chaosium, which would a) cost a bunch of money, since lawyers aren't cheap, b) slow down the dev. process because Chaosium would have influence on the game, perhaps prohibiting certain stories, adding characters, changing other aspects, etc.

tl;dr: No logo on box because it's a FFGame and had nothing to do with Chaosium

V0RTEX said:

It is a bit perplexing, especially since it is listed as an "Arkham Horror Files" game (whatever that is).

Perhaps since FFG have the license to produce Arkham Horror and MoM is far enough away from Arkham Horror that they can resue some names of characters that appear in AH that FFG are not required to further pay licensing on derivitive works using the AH IP.

I am no IP attorney, so my opinion is just that. But it does appear that the matter would be complicated.

I really doubt though that FFG are biting the hand that feeds them with this. In fact, I think Chaosium likely would have been out of business by now if it wasnt for the licensing income provided by Arkham Horror and Call of Cthulhu Card game. Chaosium have not been known to be the most business savvy enterprise historically. Just ask anyone who used to write for their CoC products that still havent been paid after decades.