Posts Tagged Chaosium

This is the third in a series of posts looking at ten (or so) roleplaying games, of the traditional pen-and-paper variety, that I’d highly recommend you play. Last time I talked about Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes; in this post we’re going for something a bit more spine-tingling….

7) Call of Cthulhu

It seems to me, at least in recent years, that Call of Cthulhu has finally taken a place alongside Dungeons & Dragons as one of the pillars of roleplaying. While it’s always been a great game – and unlike D&D, has never needed to radically reinvent itself – I think sheer longevity, perhaps coupled with the fact that it matures exceedingly well, has given it a near legendary status. It’s well deserved.

I should be clear from the off that I’m no Cthulhu scholar. I’ve played it fairly infrequently in my 20-odd years of gaming, and generally I’ve enjoyed it, although I never wanted to run a game myself. I’ve always been aware of it though, as right from the start Cthulhu had something about it; a sense of being ‘grown up’ for lack of a better term.

If you’ve never encountered it, then as the covers say, Call of Cthulhu is a roleplaying game set in the worlds of HP Lovecraft, an early 20th century novelist who was probably a few hammers short of a toolbox. Created by Sandy Petersen for Chaosium in 1981, and then later revised and expanded upon by Lynn Willis, the game won multiple awards from its inception.

Players take the role of investigators into the occult and the supernatural, with what may start off as ‘conventional’ ghouls and ghosts ultimately giving way to much more powerful and mysterious eldritch horrors – the Great Old Ones, Lovecraft’s ultimate evil from beyond the stars. These ‘gibbering horrors’ have been so influential over the years that Lovecraft probably deserves to be put on a plinth next to Bram Stoker, but when CoC first debuted, the idea of fighting monsters who were so terrifying that mortal man could not even look on them without going mad was still pretty revolutionary.

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