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I think anyone interested in Lovecraftian roleplaying would do well to get Trail of Cthulhu, despite some potential problems and shortcomings. Hite's writing skill is very impressive, as is his grasp of the Mythos and his determination to make a better game of them. In particular, the section on the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods is genius. Instead of learning that Hastur has 150 HP and 30 points of armor, we're told that:
"Hastur is a sentient (or at least self-willed) meme, or rather a viral complex of memes centered on alienation, ennui and despair. If, say, an artist depicts futile conversations on the edge of reality, she inculcates Hastur into the belief systems of her susceptible viewers. "Seeing the Yellow Sign" is a kind of perceptual stigmata that occurs as the brain begins to become convinced of Hastur's centrality."
But that's just one of 11 interpretations of the nature of Hastur that Hite gives us. Hastur could also be a great octopoid Great Old One similar to Cthulhu. It's up the GM to decide which one, or which ones, apply. The only stats given are for the hit a character's mental health will take from the encounter: you don't fight a meme or a god, at least not with weapons.
The things that give me pause about the game include some of the mechanics, particularly for sanity and spells. The introductory scenario is a bit of a disappointment (more about this later). The art, by Jerome Huguenin, is passable, but it's all printed in an unpleasant and murky brown-green duotone.
Mechanics
So how does the investigative game work? Basically, the player characters (known in both ToC and CoC as Investigators) are loaded up with "investigative abilities" like Evidence Collection and Oral History, and the idea is that merely by showing up at a scene, they gain the scene's core clue, which points to further scenes. The PCs can spend points from the ability pools to gain further information, which may give them an advantage or just make that PC look good and smart. But the core clue should be enough to propel the story. There's never a roll to to see if you gain a clue.
This sounds sort of lame and unchallenging at first, but importantly, the game is intended to leave analysis and synthesis of the clues to the players. You get the clue, but you should still have to sort of figure out what it means, and where to go next. Hite and Laws have spent quite some time heading off accusations that the automatic clues amount to railroading of the players, or at any rate, fighting the accusation that railroading is necessarily a bad thing. Laying out a "bread crumb trail," where one clue leads to the next, is pretty much the only way to construct an investigative scenario before play, so I don't have much of a problem with this. A scenario that's built on a bread crumb trail but doesn't give automatic clues is no less railroading.
Also, to be clear, it's only investigative abilities that are automatic successes. If the investigators want to do something about the knowledge they gain, they'll probably have to use abilities that can fail, like Firearms, Explosives and Fleeing (a good and useful ability). The core resolution mechanic that applies is this: roll a six-sided die, and add as many points from the associated ability pool as you like. If you meet the difficulty number set by the Keeper or the rules, you succeed.
There's another aspect of the game that's more likely to draw justified complaints about railroading. Players have to chose Drives for their characters, reasons they get into trouble, like Curiosity or a sense of Duty. The Keeper can tell a player that a particular situation triggers her particular Drive. A Curious Investigator might have a strong urge to explore what lies in that dark tunnel, for instance. A character who ignores that Drive is penalized. This takes away some of a player's free will but also ensures that characters will take risks that are appropriate to the horror genre. In any case, my guess is that a Keeper who is overly fond of this rule is going to face player rebellion.
Pulp and Purist
The rules provide for two "idioms" or modes. Pulp mode is close to the feel of CoC, which has always been more like the sword-in-fist Mythos stories of Robert E. Howard than Lovecraft's writings. The characters are tough and can shake off some supernatural insights with a shrug and a swig of whisky. The Mythos horrors can be thwarted, and packing heat (especially shotguns) is a good idea. And why stop at one gun? Use one in each hand, so you can fire twice as fast.
While building on the older game, ToC also cuts through the dense flora of CoC material that's built up over the decades, and goes back to Lovecraft to get the inspiration for the Purist idiom. In this mode, the characters are fragile mentally and physically. A "good" ending to a scenario might be that a character or two survive to tell the tale, much like in Lovecraft's stories. In this mode, the Keeper doesn't reveal the difficulty number for skill use until after the roll, making it much harder to judge how many pool points to assign. Very appropriately, Purist characters do have one mental defense mechanism Pulp characters lack: they can Faint to avoid a terrible sight, and thereby save some Sanity.
Sanity
Speaking of mental health, this mechanic is based on an interesting idea: splitting CoC's SAN into two ratings, Stability and Sanity. The former tracks the PC's short-term mental health. It regenerates between episodes. It can be severely affected by purely mundane shocks, like finding a dead body, but Mythos encounters generate the largest Stability losses. The Sanity rating, on the other hand, is a long-term measure of how much the Mythos have broken the character's mind. It usually doesn't regenerate, so it represents a one-way path to utter madness.
The system conveniently reflects how you can have immortal sorcerers who move in the best of circles and aren't shocked by much: they have 0 Sanity but high Stability ratings. Conversely, you can have conventional crazies who have little Stability but average Sanity.
Overall, characters appear to be much tougher mentally in ToC than in CoC, in part because Stability refreshes, but also because the "Temporary Insanity" mechanic is missing. We're used to having the possibility of someone run away screaming at their first encounter with a Deep One, but that isn't going to happen in ToC. It would take 4 or 5 encounters with a Deep One to send a ToC character over the edge, for instance.
Even an encounter with Great Cthulhu isn't going to mentally incapacitate a fresh ToC adventurer (though it would cause a loss of Sanity that's permanent in Purist mode). If I'm remembering correctly and doing the math somewhat right, about a third of CoC investigators would go Indefinitely Insane from such an encounter and another third would go Temporarily Insane, leaving just a third to take action.
It takes a succession of terrors to wear ToC characters down to the point of insanity. I'm guessing this is intentional, and that the game wants to preserve the party for the Stability-blasting finale of the adventure. Keepers beware: Short adventures with minor Mythos creatures may not be a mental challenge at all.
The game mechanics contain several hooks for making the horror personal to the characters. In the Pulp game, the characters' Stability scores are tied to things that calm them: family, friends, money, home and personal items. Similarly, in both idioms, Sanity is supported by certain Pillars that depend on how the character views and understands the world: science, religion, philosophy. Naturally, both Pillars of Sanity and Sources of Stability are prime targets for the creative Keeper.
The potentially most interesting, but also challenging, part of the Sanity rules is that madness effects aren't acted out by the affected player, but by the other players! If your character is paranoid, you won't know it, but the other players will be sniggering at you, passing notes, making meaningful glances, etc. Hite dutifully notes that some playtesters hated this communal approach to madness, and offers the more conventional alternative of having the crazy character's player act out the craziness.
Magic
The magic system doesn't feel quite right to me. The tests to see if you manage to cast spells are conducted mainly with Stability, which raises questions. Why make mentally stable people better spell casters? I don't see why backwoods crazies and professors teetering on the edge of madness should be penalized as magic users. It's fine that there's a cost to Stability for casting a spell, but it's weird that the test to cast is basically a SAN check.
Wizards with Sanity 0 get bit of a break - their Stability cost is halved. But I don't see why their mental health would decline from spell casting - they should be inured to this stuff.
Also, monsters have no Stability rating. That means that the opposed Stability tests required by some spells won't work, so the rules imply that the monster always win those tests, but that isn't quite spelled out.
My inclination would be to reinstate CoC's Magic Points or something similar. Wizards and monsters should probably have a Magic ability. Maybe it's something PCs can acquire too.
Setting
The default setting for the game is the 1930s, and the background material makes it clear what a grim and ominous decade that was. There's a great essay on how to treat the rise of totalitarianism in the game.
There's also a lovely section on "Campaign Frames," which give the group of investigators an overarching reason to tackle mysteries together. One of the supplied frames is centered on the scholars at Miskatonic University, another is a 1930s version of Delta Green's quasi-governmental evil-fighters, and a third describes the "Bookhounds of London." That last one is my favorite, going beyond CoC to draw influences from Unknown Armies and Tim Powers, with expanded access to magic for the characters.
Scenario
So why was I disappointed by the introductory scenario? It has some great period detail from 1930s Cleveland and interesting scenes, but it's neither Lovecraftian nor Pulp in its feel. It's a gruesome noir piece about the hunt for a serial killer, and it's modern in its outlook, including sexual references that are alien to the fiction the game is based on. The scenario makes no reference to some of the cooler things in the mechanics, like Drives, Sources of Stability and Pillars of Sanity. It's not a bad adventure, but a curious way to showcase the game, and it's one reason this is not a playtest review. I would have liked a way to test the more personal horror mechanics in the game, even if that required a scenario with pregenerated characters.
It shouldn't be hard to adapt CoC adventures to ToC on a mechanical basis, and ToC gives some guidelines for this. However, most CoC adventures don't have the right structure. Many of them don't have, or don't make a big deal of, the "bread-crumb trail" of clues that ToC is designed for. Because CoC Investigators are fallible, many CoC scenarios are designed with redundant, short paths to the showdown. Rather than a long trail, they're like a funnel. Other scenarios aren't really investigative at all, but are more about exploration, action, or survival horror. A campaign that might hold up for conversion is Masks of Nyarlathotep.
The book is rounded out by a very nice rundown on what to read by Lovecraft and the writers he inspired. It gave me quite a few tips.
The Tail of Cthulhu
In all, great work by Hite, but I do have quite a few questions about how the game will work in practice. I'm giving the game 4 out of 5 for Substance because of these uncertainties. I'm not completely convinced that it's worth migrating from the popular but dated CoC rules because some investigations stall. I think the proof in the shoggoth pudding is going to be the emergence of some great scenarios that take advantage of the new system and Hite's insights.
I'm going to be harsh and give ToC a 3 out of 5 for Style because of the murky pictures. Layout and proofreading are otherwise good for a small-press book.
