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Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game) | HearLore
Common questions
When was the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game first released?
Call of Cthulhu was first released in 1981. The game was originally conceived as Dark Worlds before Sandy Petersen transformed it into the final system.
Who created the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game?
Sandy Petersen created the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. He took over the writing of a project originally called Dark Worlds and oversaw the first four editions of the game.
What is the Basic Role-Playing system used in Call of Cthulhu?
The Basic Role-Playing system used in Call of Cthulhu relies on percentile dice to determine success or failure. This system does not use levels or hit points and instead focuses on the erosion of a character's sanity through Sanity Points or SAN.
What are the roles of the Keeper of Arcane Lore and Investigators of the Unknown?
The Keeper of Arcane Lore is the title for the gamemaster in Call of Cthulhu. Investigators of the Unknown are the player characters who are ordinary people such as detectives, scholars, or war veterans drawn into the mysterious.
Which supplement was the first published addition to the Call of Cthulhu boxed first edition?
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was the first published addition to the boxed first edition of Call of Cthulhu. This work established a template for subsequent campaigns involving linked scenarios and actual clues for players to follow.
What awards has the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game won?
Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game)
The first horror role-playing game ever created was not about slaying dragons or saving kingdoms, but about the terrifying realization that humanity is insignificant and that sanity is a fragile illusion. When Call of Cthulhu launched in 1981, it shattered the established conventions of the tabletop gaming industry, which had been dominated by Dungeons and Dragons since the early 1970s. Instead of empowering players to become heroes, the game was designed to make them feel powerless, often ending with their characters dying in gruesome circumstances or being committed to mental institutions. This radical shift in tone was the brainchild of Sandy Petersen, who took over the writing of a project originally conceived as Dark Worlds and transformed it into a system where the only safe way to deal with the vast majority of threats was to run away. The game introduced the concept of the Onion Skin, a narrative structure where interlocking layers of information and nested clues lead players from seemingly minor investigations into missing persons to discovering mind-numbingly awful global conspiracies. Unlike its predecessors, Call of Cthulhu assumed that most investigators would not survive, alive or sane, creating a sense of foreboding and inevitable doom that became the game's defining characteristic.
The Mechanics Of Madness
At the heart of the game lies a unique mechanical system that prioritizes the erosion of the human mind over the accumulation of physical power. Call of Cthulhu utilizes the Basic Role-Playing system, which relies on percentile dice to determine success or failure, meaning every player statistic is intended to be compatible with the notion that there is a probability of success for a particular action given what the player is capable of doing. For example, an artist may have a 75% chance of being able to draw something, represented by having 75 in Art skill, and thus rolling a number under 75 would yield a success. However, the game does not use levels or hit points, and characters do not become significantly harder to kill as they progress. Instead, the game includes a mechanism for determining how damaged a character's sanity is at any given point, with sanity represented by Sanity Points or SAN. Encountering the horrific beings usually triggers a loss of SAN points, and to gain the tools they need to defeat the horrors, such as mystic knowledge and magic, the characters may end up losing some of their sanity. This mechanic ensures that the game has a reputation as one in which it is quite common for a player character to die in gruesome circumstances or end up in a mental institution, as eventual triumph of the players is not guaranteed.
Call of Cthulhu has won the 1982 Origins Award for Best Role Playing Game and the 1995 Origins Award for Hall of Fame. The game also received the 2016 UK Games Expo Award for Best Roleplaying Game.
The roles within the game are carefully crafted to reflect the power dynamics of the Lovecraftian universe, where the gamemaster is called the Keeper of Arcane Lore and the player characters are called Investigators of the Unknown. The players take the roles of ordinary people drawn into the realm of the mysterious, such as detectives, criminals, scholars, artists, and war veterans. Often, happenings begin innocently enough, until more and more of the workings behind the scenes are revealed. As the characters learn more of the true horrors of the world and the irrelevance of humanity, their sanity inevitably withers away. The game is set in a darker version of our world based on H. P. Lovecraft's observation that the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. While predominantly focused on Lovecraftian fiction and horror, playing in the Cthulhu Mythos is not required, and the system also includes ideas for non-Lovecraft games, such as using folk horror or the settings of other authors and horror movies. The protagonists may also travel to places that are not of this earth, such as the Dreamlands, which can be accessed through dreams as well as being physically connected to the earth, other planets, or the voids of space.
The Evolution Of The Mythos
The history of the game's development is a testament to the resilience of its creators and the enduring appeal of its source material. The original conception of Call of Cthulhu was Dark Worlds, a game commissioned by the publisher Chaosium but never published. Sandy Petersen contacted them regarding writing a supplement for their popular fantasy game RuneQuest set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and he took over the writing of Call of Cthulhu, which was released in 1981. Petersen oversaw the first four editions with only minor changes to the system. Once he left, development was continued by Lynn Willis, who was credited as co-author in the fifth and sixth editions. After the death of Willis, Mike Mason became Call of Cthulhu line editor in 2013, continuing its development with Paul Fricker. Together they made the most significant rules alterations, more so than in any previous edition, culminating in the release of the 7th edition in 2014. The game has seen numerous expansions, including Cthulhu by Gaslight, which blends the occult and Holmesian mystery and is mostly set in England during the 1890s, and Cthulhu Now and Delta Green, which are set in a modern/1980s era and deal with conspiracies. Recent settings include 1000 AD, the 23rd century, and Ancient Rome, demonstrating the game's ability to adapt to different time periods and settings.
The Golden Age Of Supplements
The early releases of the game set a new standard for tabletop gaming, with the first book of Call of Cthulhu adventures being Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. In this work, the characters come upon a secret society's foul plot to destroy mankind, and pursue it first near to home and then in a series of exotic locations. This template was to be followed in many subsequent campaigns, including Fungi from Yuggoth, Spawn of Azathoth, and possibly the most highly acclaimed, Masks of Nyarlathotep. Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is important not only because it represents the first published addition to the boxed first edition of Call of Cthulhu, but because its format defined a new way of approaching a campaign of linked RPG scenarios involving actual clues for the would-be detectives amongst the players to follow and link in order to uncover the dastardly plots afoot. The standard of the included 'clue' material varies from scenario to scenario, but reached its zenith in the original boxed versions of the Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express campaigns. Inside these one could find matchbooks and business cards apparently defaced by non-player characters, newspaper cuttings and period passports to which players could attach their photographs, increasing the sense of immersion. Indeed, during the period that these supplements were produced, third party campaign publishers strove to emulate the quality of the additional materials, often offering separately-priced 'deluxe' clue packages for their campaigns.
The Expansion Into Other Media
The success of the tabletop game led to a wide array of licensed products, including video games, card games, and miniatures. Shadow of the Comet, developed and released by Infogrames in 1993, is an adventure game based on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and uses many elements from Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. A follow-up game, Prisoner of Ice, is not a direct sequel but is based on H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. Dark Corners of the Earth, a licensed first-person shooter adventure game by Headfirst Productions, was released by Bethesda Softworks in 2005/2006 for the PC and Xbox. The game has also spawned collectible card games, with Mythos being a collectible card game that Chaosium produced and marketed during the mid-1990s, and Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game being a second collectible card game produced by Fantasy Flight Games. The first licensed Call of Cthulhu gaming miniatures were sculpted by Andrew Chernack and released by Grenadier Models in 1983, and as of 2011, RAFM still produce licensed Call of Cthulhu models sculpted by Bob Murch. In 2020 Chaosium announced a license agreement with Ardacious for Call of Cthulhu virtual miniatures to be released on their augmented reality app Ardent Roleplay.
The Critical Acclaim And Legacy
The game has received widespread critical acclaim, with multiple reviews appearing in magazines such as Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer, White Dwarf, and Dragon. In the March 1982 edition, William A. Barton noted that there were some shortcomings resulting from an assumption by the designers that players would have access to rules from RuneQuest that were not in Call of Cthulhu, but otherwise Barton called the game 'an excellent piece of work.' In the August 1982 edition, Ian Bailey admired much about the first edition of the game, giving the game an above average rating of 9 out of 10, saying, 'Call of Cthulhu is an excellent game and a welcome addition to the world of role-playing.' In his 1990 book The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games, game 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.' In a reader poll conducted by UK magazine Arcane in 1996 to determine the 50 most popular roleplaying games of all time, Call of Cthulhu was ranked 1st. Scott Taylor for Black Gate in 2013 rated Call of Cthulhu as #4 in the top ten role-playing games of all time, and in 2021, it was reported to be the second-most popular game played on the virtual table top platform Roll20, having overtaken D&D in Japan.
The Enduring Appeal Of Doom
In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath noted that roleplaying games are united in one way: in some fashion, they are all power fantasies. Characters go someplace, kill some things, find some loot, and maybe gain enough experience points to unlock their hidden personal potential in the form of new spells or a new power. Horvath then pointed out that this game, as the first horror RPG, had an essential difference: 'Horror, as a genre, is generally concerned with powerlessness... In a complete inversion of other RPGs, characters in Call of Cthulhu are doomed.' About the game itself, Horvath commented, 'I find Call of Cthulhu unabashedly fun, despite the scares and the despair.' The slumbering god is certainly one of the strangest of pop culture canonizations, but there seems to be an endless appetite and deep wallets for all things Cthulhu. So long as that remains true, the Great Old One will continue to loom large over RPGs. The game has won multiple awards, including the 1982 Origins Awards for Best Role Playing Game, the 1995 Origins Award for Hall of Fame, and the 2016 UK Games Expo Awards for Best Roleplaying Game. The game's legacy is secure, with its various supplements over the years maintaining an exceptional level of quality, and several, including Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and Masks of Nyarlathotep, deserving consideration among the greatest pinnacles of the fantasy role-playing game design.