Product Review

The crickets sing their song of nightly loneliness. The subtitle reads: “Twenty years ago today…” No, this is not the beginning of “Maniac Mansion”. But you must expect mansions and maniacs ahead, because we have them aplenty. As I was saying, twenty years ago, a bizarre RPG was first published.

The title? “Call of Cthulhu”. Call of what? As Robert Bloch once put it: “Who or what was Cthulhu and how in hell did you pronounce it? And who cared, anyway?” But gamers knew. Or they would learn soon enough. Chaosium had given birth to the most memorable RPG of all time. This was the first horror RPG ever published, and it remained close to its ideal for twenty long years.

The game was edited many times. It is currently in what Chaosium calls (in a very software style) 5.6 Edition. It was based on the writings of one man, and his crew of followers. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and the group that has been called “The Cthulhu Circle”. Robert Bloch was one of them. These authors wrote about a forgotten pantheon of alien mad gods, that rule the universe and created man almost by accident. Monstrous beings that just don’t care about humans. Just as a careless human crushes an ant under his shoe without even noticing, so do these creatures destroy and kill, with reckless abandon. Cthulhu is one of this behemoths, a giant that lies dormant in the sunken city of R’lyeh, waiting to rise again, and take those giant footsteps… For now, he is content to send his dreams of feverish and alien messages to those so mad to receive those demented broadcasts.

This RPG is about people. The people that fight these gods and their insane minions. The people that learn the forbidden arts in vain hopes of using them against the enemy. The people that let their sanity melt down like a candle, just to save their fellow humans. Regular people that face the horrors of a world to which most of humanity is oblivious. This is sounding like Hunter: the Reckoning. But CoC has some interesting differences. It is not set in the World of Darkness, but on our own. The “Investigators” do not wield uncanny powers to fight evil, and when they learn some arcane spell, it is very likely to backfire on them. The evils they fight are not out of Gothic horror tales, but out of Lovecraft’s weird nightmares.

One that has never played CoC will notice some odd things on this game and its system. Many of the dice checks are made with percentile dice (two D10 rolled, one as the ‘tens’ and the other as the ‘ones’), and there is no “experience reward” in the game. You only get to increase the skills you used, and then, only if you used them remarkably well. The only “real” reward are some arcane forbidden tomes that further erode your sanity. Then, you have that — the sanity. This game has that unique trait most games have not; a counter for your character’s mental health. Of course, every encounter you have with any being that suggests that the world of “scientific proof” we have built for ourselves is not entirely accurate hits hard on your reason and pushes you one rung down on the ladder to insanity. Some encounters make you fall directly to the ground. So, this is time for the true valor. Any barbarian can hack his way through skeleton wasteland. But can you, a regular human being, take an encounter face to face with the macabre monster that haunts that old mansion? Will you come out of there alive?

There are three main eras in which CoC Scenarios are set. The 1890s, the Present, and my favourite and the original one: the 1920s. Most of Lovecraft’s tales are set in the roaring 20s and the 1930s, and the period has an aura of mystery that is worth trying. Gangsters roam the streets, filling the speakeasies with illegal liquors, secret societies flourish and dabble with things that were not meant to be known, and people are just thrilled to be alive because they have survived the Great War. But fear exists not only on the trench…

COC RPG gives you the opportunity to explore the world as H.P. Lovecraft perceived it, and to play a different kind of character. One that does not have the “Kill Everything in My Path” skill at a 150%, but that has high “Spot Hidden” (detect stuff that is not plain to see) and “Library Use” (find ‘that’ particular tome you are looking for among thousands of books). One that does not carry home thousands of coins of looted gold, but a pack of rare books with rarer titles yet, such as “Necronomicon”, “De Vermiis Mysteriis”, “Unaussprechlichen Kulten” or “The Book of Dzyan”. One that is not a heartless thug that kills by the hundreds, but a quiet college professor that will cry, faint or run when confronted to a monster… or turn into a babbling, catatonic human statue.

That is the essence of Call of Cthulhu. That is, in my humble opinion, the essence of true horror. To be faced with something you’re not prepared for. Not more, not less. After twenty years and more than five major editions, Chaosium has published dozens of sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu, some of them have even earned them prizes, but the heart of the game has remained the same. And it’s one of those RPGs that don’t require you to buy all the sourcebooks to start to play them. It’s a great buy, and you will love it for ever… just like me… just like hundreds or thousands of other fans…

"That is not dead which can eternally lie, and with strange æons, even death may die", Abdul Alhazred, a.k.a. Abd Al-Azrad, the mad arab that wrote the Kitab Al-Azif, a.k.a Necronomicon.

Reviewed by Matías Timm