Arkham Horror RPG

What’s in Welcome to Promise?

2026 / 07 / 13

Bonjour, investigators! It’s Keith Ryan Kappel here, one of the freelance game writers for Edge Studio. Now I’ve already talked a bit about the Welcome to Promise Starter Set for Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game, but I bet you’re curious as a cat in a French Market fish stall about just what’s inside this new starter set.

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Welcome to Promise is packed full of a ton of new content to help you run this boxed experience and has tools you can use in your other Arkham RPG adventures, too! To start, you’ll find the basics needed to run the game, including the 64-page Welcome to Promise adventure booklet, a 16-page rules appendix (which can be used as a reference for your other Arkham RPG sessions, too), 18 six-sided dice (12 black and 6 green dice), and five investigator portfolios (more on these later). With these items alone, a game master could run the game for up to five friends.

But wait, there’s more! Welcome to Promise also includes three double-sided poster maps that bring the bayou and the blue lights of Promise to life as well as three sheets of double-sided punchboard tokens so everyone can keep sight of their fellow investigators and track their dice pools, horror, insight, and more. The adventure also includes several handouts that are useful at different points in the story and help immerse players in the experience. 

There are, of course, NPC profile cards (20) as with our previous boxed experiences—but this time around we also include a new tool to track enemy dice pools. The new small, square tokens can be placed on the square section of the dice tracker cards, each numbered to correspond with a circular complementary version for the battle maps. This way, several NPC’s dice pools can be easily tracked on one sheet. With the dice tracker cards, a GM can quickly identify that an investigator shot Corpse Gator 1 and properly adjust that enemy’s dice pool without having to remember which gator is which! With the dice trackers, GMs will only need one copy of the enemy’s profile card, which leaves room for more characters in the box!

We include both the Injury Table and Trauma Table as a hand-out, too, helpful for quickly referencing when needing to make injury and trauma rolls in combat. Similarly, there are 32 item and injury reminder cards to help players keep track of their investigator’s current inventory and status. While we couldn’t include as many copies as we wanted of the injury and trauma reminder cards, we think that these will prove useful tools in all of your investigations. 

We also introduce Pool Die Tokens as new punchboard additions. These tokens are used to show an available die in your pool if your group doesn’t have enough dice available for everyone.

The Investigator Folios

A starter set is meant to help ease new players into the action-packed, pulpy, Lovecraftian world of Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game. To this end, we’ve included five pre-generated investigator folios, featuring iconic, established investigators from the world of Arkham Horror. 

Each folio has 4 pages: a cover, an investigator profile followed by a quick-reference rules page and a back cover that appropriately features that investigator’s backstory. The investigator profile and quick reference make the player-friendly Dynamic Pool System thatArkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game runs on easy to learn and even includes a section on leveling each investigator over the course of the adventure. While you can use characters from other starter boxes or ones you’ve made yourself for Welcome to Promise, the investigators included in the box have some special tie-ins for the beginning of the adventure, though these ties aren’t necessary to play the box. 

The roster of investigators for this adventure are: Minh Thi Phan, a former secretary with a specialty in relics; the wealthy and haunted Preston Fairmont; the drifter who dreams of horrors, “Ashcan” Pete Washburne and his loyal hound Duke; the trumpet-player for the dead Jim Culver; and the famous singer with the Smoky Velvet voice, Marie Lambeau. 

That’s all I have for you this time, investigators! Now that you have a sense of what comes with the Welcome to Promise Starter Set for Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game, keep watch for future articles giving more information about this pending release. Until then, Laissez les bons temps rouler, or, as the tourists might translate, let the good times roll—Keith Ryan Kappel. 

Arkham Horror RPG – Welcome to Promise – Starter Set will be released on July 31!

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