For everyone who's only ever played D&D, the next game I want them to play is Call of Cthulhu.
Call of Cthulhu is a horror RPG published by Chaosium (who we've seen before, and will see again, in this series!) from 1981 that's been in print continuously since then. It's the biggest and most successful game that's not related to Dungeons & Dragons. Players are investigators into weird eldritch horrors. This was one of the first non-D&D games that I got, too, and I remember feeling almost dazed by it: you can do that in a RPG? I remember seeing an article once about how these days it's easy to forget that at the time, Call of Cthulhu was an extremely 'indie' game - based on an at-the-time obscure writer, this is one of the first games with rules for personality simulation (the sanity mechanic) in which combat is almost always a terrible idea and characters are inevitably doomed to either perish or go mad, rather than gain power and wealth. In addition, Call of Cthulhu is supported by some very, very excellent material, like the famous world-spanning adventure The Masks of Nyarlathotep.
The core of the game is very simple. Characters have a number of skills, all expressed as a percentage. To successfully use that skill, they have to roll under the skill. With 7th Edition, there are now degrees of success, where rolling under 1/2 the skill or 1/5 the skill can achieve a higher level of success. Failed checks can be modified with Luck points (but at the cost of having less Luck available later on) or by Pushing the check - this lets you reroll, but with increased consequences for failure. These combine to make investigators extremely good at what they do. At the same time, they're only human: characters have extremely limited hit points and weapons or monsters can do a lot of damage. Even worse, character have to make Sanity checks when something awful happens, which can result in the players temporarily losing control of their characters to terror or even going insane. It's a nice simple system that's pretty intuitive and gets out of the way when you're playing the game.
I think modern design has evolved a lot from when Call of Cthulhu was created. At the same time, I have been involved with Chaosium's Cults of Chaos programme demoing Call of Cthulhu. Sometimes this was for people who'd only played Dungeons & Dragons before, and sometimes for people who hadn't played any TTRPG, or who had no idea what a TTRPG was. Everyone found it really quick and easy to take part, they found the rules simple and intuitive, the setting thematic and enjoyable, and generally had a blast. I've had a blast with every session that I've run too. This is a really, really good game.
Character Creation: Even though I hold Call of Cthulhu in very high esteem, I don't actually own the 7th Edition rulebook. I do find the few changes to the rules in 7th Edition to be a big improvement over earlier editions though! I've created this character using the Quickstart Rules, which you can find for free online or in the excellent Starter Set, which are a bit streamlined.
I'm a librarian in real life, and I think that a librarian would be an excellent protagonist for a Lovecraftian game, so I've created Ms. Jean Lafitte, a librarian from New Orleans who currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island. I started by allocating scores to my eight Characteristics. (These are rolled in the full game.) I gave her an excellent Willpower (you see things as a public librarian!) and good Intelligence and Education as well, as well as an above-average Strength for lugging all those books around. Her Size is her lowest characteristic, many librarians are fairly petite. These characteristics then determine the starting value for various secondary characteristics, like hit points and sanity.
Every character has an Occupation, with a number of associated skills. (It's also easy to make your own occupation - just pick the skills!) In the Quickstart, these are also allocated; in the full game, these are usually calculated based on the Investigator's Education characteristic. I made Jean excellent at Library Use, gave her a good Charm and Intimidate (Shhh!) and made her well-read in Anthropology and the Occult; she is, after all, going to be investigating Squamous Horrors down the line. Finally, you get some additional skill points to distribute, which are your investigator's personal interests. I like this differentiation of 'occupation' and 'personal interest' skills, because it's a simple way to think about what's going on inside a character's head. I gave Jean some personal interest points in Cooking, Listen, Natural World and Psychology.
And that's it! Very easy.
Final Thoughts: Can you tell that I like Call of Cthulhu? I think it might have come across. It's a classic for a reason. I'm not actually a huge fan of Lovecraftian horror, which is the only reason I haven't played more of it. Great game, always fun, highly recommended if you haven't tried it.
No comments:
Post a Comment