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Cthulhu Dark Ages

Call of Cthulhu is arguably the premier horror role-playing game, and has been around for over 20 years, with minimal changes to setting or game system. Some (at least me) feel that it's perhaps gotten a bit stale, and has lost it's edge or scariness, what with plush dolls of all the major nasties of the game and silly songs and comic strips and what not.

To a certain extent, Chaosium has taken steps to alter this (possibly unintended), branching out Cthulhu to the d20 System, and to other settings. There was supposed to be a "pulp" setting for Cthulhu, which seems to have vanished like Amelia Earhart (wrong era?), and some other company is coming out with Mecha-Cthulhu, but that also seems delayed. But we do get this, Cthulhu Dark Ages, basically Call of Cthulhu set in A.D. 1000.

It's a stand alone game (the original German version was simply a sourcebook), and uses Chaosium's "Basic Role Playing System" (BRP), which is a fairly old and simple system. Essentially it takes all the statistics from D&D (Strength, Constitution, etc, plus a couple), and adds (or uses) a percentile (d100) skill system. Basically, to skills are rated from 0 to 100, and to see if you succeed at using a skill, you have to roll under the skill rating on a d100.

There is no d20 conversion, sadly (which would have made the various historical d20 sourcebooks more readily usable, particularly dual statted Ars Magica books). From what I've read, the d20 System may be on the way out over at Chaosium (not surprising, but sad).

BRP is a decent system, but is geared towards "gritty" play, and I have found it somewhat unrewarding for long campaigns, as there is limited character growth (in terms of abilities). But that generally isn't a probably in Cthulhu games, as characters tend to die, go crazy, or retire frequently. The most innovative thing about the BRP system used in CoC is the Sanity score, which tracks the stableness of your investigator. As it gets lower, your characters gets nuttier and nuttier. Just like Michael Jackson!

The rules for BRP take up about 50 pages (or 1/3 or so) of the book.

There are some tweaks that seem to make it more appropriate for the setting. For instance, a chart that correlates hit points of damage (as a percentage of a person's overall total) taken to the effects of the blow or wound. For instance, if you take 10% of your damage, it's a bruise or a flesh wound. But 50% is a major wound or fracture and the victim has to make a roll to say conscious. And 250% is a fairly gory death.

Unlike the randomly rolling for attributes found in many earlier versions of BRP Call of Cthulhu (all the ones I have, which are 2nd, 4th, 5.1, and 5.6), in this, you allocate 100 points combined to all 8 stats (that is, when you add up all 8 stats, they total 100). While this certainly works, and probably generates characters better than rolled randomly (since the average of this is 12.5, vs 10.5 for rolling 3d6, though not as good as the 13 average for 2d6+6), chances are good that there will be a lot of ugly characters, as players will be tempted to put points in attributes that are more readily useful than Appearance.

I'm also not convinced "Education" makes all that much sense, in how it relates to skills (basically, you get skill points equal to your education times 20, with each skill percentage costing a point). People then were poorly educated, but had a wide variety of skills.

As mentioned, the number of skill points you get is determined by your Education score, and the skills you can spend them on are determined by your class, er, "Occupation". There are 20 different Occupations, and each occupation has a list of 8 or so skills you can spend your points on. Characters then get more points, based on 10x their Intelligence, that they can spend on any skill they want. For the most part, this works, except it's difficult to create someone that is competent with more than one weapon, as all warrior or guard types only have 1 weapon skill in their occupation list.

One odd note, characters start at age 15. For every 10 years (or fraction thereof) older, they lose a point of any physical characteristic. While I know life was hard back then, surely 25 or 30 year olds are not that much out of shape, compared to a 15 year old? Even without THG, I think humans reach their physical peak at 28 or so.

Frankly, the layout in this chapter is somewhat confusing. The main information on how to create a character is in a tiny box on page 17, it's easy to ignore (usually things in boxes tend to be sidebars), but then the information on assigning skill points is a couple pages later, buried in the section on "Occupations".

Not being a fan of the BRP system, I'll probably end up converting to d20 (shouldn't be that hard).

Only about 20 pages is devoted to the Dark Ages era itself. This is probably the book's weakness. It does a good job of portraying everyday life, and giving a general overview, but lacks a lot of detail.

Maybe it's just part of the audience changing - maybe those in Mainland Europe (where this is originally from) are more familiar from their history, and so more detail wasn't necessary. In the US, our history really goes back only 400 years (obviously, further, but American Indians didn't keep much in the way of records, at least in North America. And you don't want to know what the Mayans did to each other. Youch!), but everyone pretty much has a good feel of what it was like, in the 1600s, 1700s, the 1800s, 1900s, etc. But 1000s? There's a big disconnect.

The Cthulhu Mythos gets about 30 pages. This is the best part of the book. Basically, the Cthulhu Mythos were the invention of a writer named H.P. Lovecraft around the 1920s-1940s (he died at a relatively young age due to cancer). Their main was the alieness of the horror, and the insignificance of mankind.

I think this part was fairly well done, it tries to depict the Cthulhu Mythos as someone from A.D. 1000 would see it. Many of the traditional Mythos monsters are given different names, or put under a more traditional folk-lore name (one used by people in the Dark Ages).

There are also lesser known Lovecraftian monsters, like Lilith (which is also based on Jewish folklore, but HPL used her in a story. Which I never really thought meshed in with his other stuff, but eh) and some I had never heard of (despite my having 5 different versions of Call of Cthulhu, plus both Ye Books of Monsters).

That said, it's not perfect. I think they should have keep the more traditional Cthulhu monsters out of it, or at least the names. For instance, the Mi-Go, are very science-fictiony. Having them in the book sort of breaks the mood. Or Dimensional Shamblers. No one in A.D. 1000 would ever use that term. And then there is serpent people, who I really think fit in better elsewhere (American Indian legends, mostly). At the very least, they should have been renamed, like the other monsters. (I think this may have been Chaosium's doing, adding those critters but not renaming them)

Some notable mythos creatures are not included (like the Big C. himself), but I think this was a good move, as most of the excluded ones had little business being in this setting - Cthulhu is in the Pacific Ocean, which as far as those in Dark Ages Europe, doesn't even exist.

The magic system still works the same way (they are case using spell points and sometimes sanity), but again, the spells are often renamed, or are a bit different, to suit the setting. Again, there are a few quirks here, but this apparently cropped up during Chaosium's editing and expansion from a sourcebook to stand alone game.

The last 40 pages or so are devoted to a scenario (about 30 pages for the scenario itself, about 10 for handouts). While this scenario isn't bad, I'm not sure it was the best thing to included in this book as an introductory scenario.

For one, the setting is almost certainly unfamiliar to those who have this game. It's set in the "Eastern March of the Germanic Empire". Yes, for the original book, which was published in Germany, this was probably a familiar setting. But for an English speaking person, I think it's unfamiliar. And you can't really suggest any films or TV shows that might set the mood. And if you have silly players, there's a large variety of jokes.

As the book mentions, people in the Dark Ages had a radically different view of the world. Basically, they were pretty ignorant, not knowing basic things like laws of physics, things that are hard to forget, even to pretend to forget. Add to that a setting almost no one is familiar with, and it's a daunting thing to role-play properly. I can probably fake it for Dark Ages England or France, having read dozens of historical mysteries set in that region and era. But eastern Germany? I'm out of my depth.

For another, the length is perhaps a bit daunting. I think it would have been best to include several short scenarios, instead of one great big long one.

The end part of it is also something of a dungeon crawl. Basically, the PCs have to explore an ancient burial mound (an awfully big one) with about a dozen different keyed locations. This isn't exactly uncommon in CoC scenarios, and even some of the fiction, but I've always disliked them in CoC.

Actually, the end game is quite combat intensive, and this is actually one of those scenarios where combat skills and stats matter. (Which contradicts the claim in the introduction of the book that "Read Latin" is often better than being good with a weapon). It's also pretty tough, I am shocked most character would survive even half-way through the end dungeon crawl, I'm not sure it was the best introductory scenario.

Lastly, though it's got some gruesome twists to it, the Mythos critters in it are probably the most over used opponents, ones that I am sick to death of. Something more obscure, or a radical interpretation of them would have been nice. But no, it's fairly standard, tweaked a bit, but still our tired old friends. The other Mythos critter/villain is lesser known, but seems to be somewhat inspired in the final showdown.

Hmmm. Upon first reading the scenario, I didn't think it was bad, but looking at what I've written, I think it could have been a lot better. It would make a pretty good scenario for the Conan RPG.

The book itself looks great. Lavishly illustrated, fancy looking layout, fancy looking top margin graphics (that change from chapter to chapter). By far the best looking book from Chaosium I have seen.

All in all, it's a pretty good product. Some might complain that they already have the basic Call of Cthulhu rules, so some of the material is duplicated, but the price is probably about the same ($25 for a 170 page book is pretty nice, these days, if they lost the 50 pages for the BRP rules, it would be 120 for $25, which is still a bargain compared to some books (AEG's)), and this allows new players to start the game with a minimum investment. Chaosium also apparently has plans to support Dark Age with more supplements (they apparently already have a 'monograph' available), so it's not just a one shot, it's got a future.

If you haven't tried Call of Cthulhu, this would be a good way to start. For veterans, it's somewhat less appealing, but still well worth the money. B-

(Also, the author has a website devoted to this, http://ad1000.cjb.net/, including fixing some of the problems that crept into it by Chaosium's editing, but please note that it happens to set off my virus-checker. And what's really spooky, is I didn't even know I had a virus program running... still, I've had computer problems of late, including this review going missing until I ran scandisk, so it could be a false warning. But worth mentioning.)

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