Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Call of Cthulhu arrived in 1981 with a premise that broke every rule tabletop gaming had established. The characters were doomed. Survival was unlikely. Sanity was a resource you spent until it ran out. In a hobby built on power fantasies, Sandy Petersen had designed a game about powerlessness.

  Chaosium published it first as a boxed set, alongside a 16-page Basic Role-Playing booklet. Within a year it had won the Origins Award for Best Role Playing Game. Within fifteen years, readers of the British magazine Arcane had voted it the single most popular roleplaying game of all time. By 2021, it ranked as the second-most-played game on the virtual tabletop platform Roll20, behind only Dungeons and Dragons. In Japan, it reportedly overtook D&D entirely.

  How did a game built around inevitable failure become one of the most enduring games ever made? And what does it say about us that millions of players keep returning to a world where, as Petersen and H. P. Lovecraft both insisted, humanity is irrelevant to the forces that actually run the cosmos?

• 2. The Lovecraft Foundation

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  H. P. Lovecraft gave Call of Cthulhu its spine in a single sentence from his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature": "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Petersen built the game's entire emotional architecture around that claim.

  The default setting is the 1920s, the era of most of Lovecraft's own fiction. Players take on ordinary people: detectives, scholars, artists, war veterans, criminals. They begin investigations that appear manageable, until layer after layer of hidden reality peels back to reveal something worse beneath. The gamemaster is not called a dungeon master or a referee. In Call of Cthulhu, the role is the Keeper of Arcane Lore. The players are Investigators of the Unknown.

  The game extends Lovecraft's geography and cosmology far beyond the default 1920s frame. Settings range from 1000 AD in Cthulhu: Dark Ages to the 23rd century in Cthulhu Rising. Players can also enter the Dreamlands, accessible through sleep or through physical connections to earth, as well as other planets and the voids of space. The Cthulhu by Gaslight supplement transplants the horror into 1890s England, mixing the occult with the atmosphere of Holmesian mystery.

  The Lovecraftian setting is not mandatory. The rules explicitly support folk horror, the settings of other authors, horror films, or entirely custom worlds designed by the gamemaster and players.

• 3. Sanity Points and Percentile Dice

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  Call of Cthulhu does not use levels. A character does not become harder to kill as the campaign progresses. Skills improve only through use, and only while the character remains functionally healthy and sane. The game's central innovation is the Sanity system, abbreviated SAN, which tracks how damaged a character's grip on reality has become.

  Encountering the game's monsters typically triggers a loss of Sanity Points. To acquire the mystic knowledge sometimes needed to confront those monsters, characters must also sacrifice sanity. The result is a slow grinding attrition. Gaining power costs the very resource you need to remain functional. The game has a well-established reputation for characters dying in gruesome circumstances or ending up in mental institutions. Triumph is not guaranteed.

  The underlying mathematics use percentile dice, with results from 1 to 100. An artist with a 75 in the Art skill succeeds by rolling under 75. Rolling within the bottom portion of that range, specifically 1-15 in the example, produces a special success for combat skills known as an "impale," yielding an extra bonus determined by the Keeper. Every statistic is designed to represent a genuine probability of success for a specific type of action.

  In his 1990 book The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games, critic Rick Swan gave the game a top rating of 4 out of 4, calling it "a masterpiece, easily the best horror RPG ever published and possibly the best RPG, period."

• 4. Sandy Petersen and the Onion Skin

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  Sandy Petersen did not originally set out to write Call of Cthulhu. He contacted Chaosium about writing a supplement for RuneQuest, their existing fantasy game, set within Lovecraft's Dreamlands. Chaosium redirected him to take over a shelved project called Dark Worlds, a game they had commissioned but never published. The result became something entirely new.

  Petersen introduced a design philosophy he called the Onion Skin: interlocking layers of information and nested clues that carry investigators from a seemingly minor missing person case into a mind-numbing global conspiracy. Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, which rewarded combat and dungeon crawling, Petersen's game rewarded research, real-life settings, and thinking around trouble rather than through it. Running away was frequently the correct strategic choice.

  The first adventure book released for the game was Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. In it, player characters uncover a secret society's plot to destroy humanity, beginning close to home before expanding into a series of exotic locations. That template, clues leading to linked scenarios that investigators must assemble like detectives, became the standard format for every campaign-length Call of Cthulhu publication that followed.

  Petersen oversaw the first four editions of the game, from 1981 through 1989, with only minor changes to the system each time.

• 5. Beloved Campaigns and Physical Props

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  Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express became the most celebrated campaigns Chaosium produced, and for a specific reason: the physical objects packed inside the boxes. Players could find matchbooks and business cards that appeared to have been scrawled on by non-player characters, newspaper cuttings, and, in the case of Orient Express, period passports to which players could attach their own photographs.

  Those props set a standard that third-party publishers spent years trying to match. Some offered separately-priced deluxe clue packages for their own campaigns, attempting to replicate the sense of immersion the original boxed sets generated.

  The Asylum and Other Tales, a collection of standalone scenarios released in 1983, rated an overall 9 out of 10 in Issue 47 of White Dwarf magazine. In Issue 138 of Dragon, published in October 1988, reviewer Ken Rolston placed Call of Cthulhu ahead of its competitors specifically because of the authentic-looking player handouts. Rolston called Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and Masks of Nyarlathotep "among the greatest pinnacles of the fantasy role-playing game design."

  The Lovecraft Country line of supplements, overseen by Keith Herber and launched in 1990, gave investigators a recurring home base in Lovecraft's fictional towns of Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth, and Dunwich, each with clearly drawn characters and distinct local histories.

• 6. Chaosium's Near Collapse and Comeback

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  The failure of Mythos, Chaosium's collectible card game based on the Cthulhu setting, ended the game's production in 1997 and pushed the company toward near bankruptcy. For years afterward, the release of Call of Cthulhu books became sporadic, with gaps of up to a year between new products.

  The turnaround began with 2005 as Chaosium's busiest year in a long time, with ten releases for the game. The company introduced "monographs," short books by individual writers with editing and layout handled externally, sold directly to consumers. The approach let Chaosium test market interest before committing to larger print runs. New milieux followed: Cthulhu Dark Ages by Stephane Gesbert for 11th century Europe, Secrets of Japan by Michael Dziesinski, and Secrets of Kenya by David Conyers for the interwar period in Africa.

  On the 28th of May 2013, a Kickstarter campaign for the 7th edition launched with a goal of $40,000. By the 29th of June 2013 it had collected $561,836. The 7th edition, developed by Mike Mason and Paul Fricker, represented the most significant rules revisions in the game's history, splitting the core rules into a Player's Guide and a Keeper's Guide for the first time.

  Fulfillment problems led Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen, both of whom had left Chaosium in 1998, to return to active roles at the company in June 2015. The print edition of the 7th edition became available in September 2016.

• 7. A Genre That Spread Outward

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  Call of Cthulhu licensed its setting and brand to a wide range of other publishers, and several of those licensed projects grew into independent institutions. Delta Green, originally published by Pagan Publishing as a 1990s-era conspiracy setting, was released as a fully standalone game by Arc Dream Publishing in 2016. Arkham Horror, produced by Fantasy Flight Games, moved so far from the original game that it essentially became its own line.

  In February 2008, Pelgrane Press published Trail of Cthulhu, a standalone game by Kenneth Hite using the GUMSHOE system developed by Robin Laws, specifically designed for investigative play. Wizards of the Coast released a d20 adaptation in 2001 to bring Lovecraftian gaming to the Dungeons and Dragons player base, though that version is no longer supported.

  Video games extended the property further. Infogrames released Shadow of the Comet in 1993 and Prisoner of Ice in 1995, the latter ported to the Sega Saturn and PlayStation in Japan in 1997. Headfirst Productions released Dark Corners of the Earth through Bethesda Softworks in 2005-2006. In 2018, Metarcade produced Cthulhu Chronicles for iOS, a campaign of nine interactive fiction stories set in 1920s England, with the first five stories releasing on the 10th of July 2018.

  Harlem Unbound, a supplement set in the Harlem Renaissance, received three Gold ENNIE Awards after Chaosium published its second edition in 2020, demonstrating the range of historical and cultural territory the game's framework could support.

• 8. Forty-Plus Years of Dread

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  In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath identified what separates Call of Cthulhu from everything that came before it: "Horror, as a genre, is generally concerned with powerlessness... In a complete inversion of other RPGs, characters in Call of Cthulhu are doomed." Every other game in the hobby's history, Horvath argued, was in some form a power fantasy. Call of Cthulhu was the first to bet against that assumption and win.

  The game has collected awards across four decades. It won Best Role Playing Game at the Origins Awards in 1982, entered the Origins Hall of Fame in 1995, and took the UK Games Expo Award for Best Roleplaying Game in 2016. In 2018, Tabletop Gaming Magazine readers ranked it third in their poll of the 150 greatest games of all time. As recently as 2024, the ENNIE Awards gave Call of Cthulhu: Alone Against the Static the Gold for Best Writing.

  Horvath's verdict in 2023 was direct: "I find Call of Cthulhu unabashedly fun, despite the scares and the despair." He noted that the appetite for all things Cthulhu showed no sign of exhausting itself. The 7th edition's Kickstarter collected more than fourteen times its original funding target. The game that told players they would probably lose has not yet lost.