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The Good: Monsters, spells, adventures with 20 years of playtesting, excellent GMing advice, enjoyable fiction, and easily understood mechanics come together to create a truly marvelous game. The game is very complete and needs no supplements to provide many, many hours of fun.
The Bad: Some skills and character archetypes have notably more power in the setting, such as Library Use or a Professor, but the goal of the system is create real people exploring the wonders at the edge of human experience.
The Physical Thing
This 320 page softcover packs in an enormous amount of material and proves to be a bargain at $34.95. The artwork is very atmospheric and appropriate to the book. The ToC and Index make navigation easy, the book is easy to read, and a large number of examples help to clarify game concepts.Under the Cover
SettingThe setting is the Mythos based on the collective works of H.P. Lovecraft and later writers. With 1890, 1920, and the modern day in mind, the book presents a universe far more alien than the human mind can comprehend. Lovecraft imagined that the laws of science we have unlocked apply only locally, and we only partially understand them, such that the greater universe is a place of chaos. The beings that so frequently appear in Lovecraft’s works are often alien entities that have arrived on Earth, often in the distant past. Some of the beings even dwell on distant stars and are summoned to Earth through magic, which often involves geometric principles completely alien to the human mind.
Common themes bind the setting together. The extreme alienness of the entities that dwell behind human perception, the smallness of humanity in the face of such things, and the mind’s tendency towards madness when trying to deal with uncovering a universe we’re not meant to understand are all present throughout Lovecraft’s works and are clearly communicated through Call of Cthulhu. The setting is only briefly discussed explicitly, but in the many entries concerning Mythos entities, spells, NPCs, and adventures the reader quickly gains a feel for the lurking horror involved in Call of Cthulhu games.
System
A simple percentile system is used to resolve most actions here, with players trying to roll d100 under some target number (often a Skill number). Let’s build a character so I can tell you about it as we go!
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Example: By default Call of Cthulhu asks players to randomly roll Characteristics straight down the line, but various alternatives are included. Going with the straight method I roll 3d6 for my core Characteristics and get a Strength of 13, a Constitution of 12, a Power (mental/social strength) of 12, a Dexterity of 8, and an Appearance of 10 – those are amazing stats! I roll 2d6+6 for Size and Intelligence, generating a Size of 16 and an Intelligence of 12. My character’s starting Education, 3d6+3, is 16 and his Sanity is 60.
Based on this I’d say this person is very fit and at least a college graduate. I decide this is Eric Moore, a recent college graduate who made it through his Literature degree thanks to a football scholarship (linebacker). He’s currently trying to make it as a writer, but he tends to spend time doing freelance scouting and personal training to help pay the bills. Eric’s other derived Characteristics include an Idea of 60%, a Luck of 60%, a Know of 80%, a damage bonus of +1d4 to physical attacks, and 14 Hit Points. Eric is pretty badass – strong, tough, but still smart enough to figure out mysteries. Hopefully he’ll rely more on his wits than his brawn if he hopes to survive what’s coming! |
Characteristic rolls become simple percentile rolls when the characteristic is multiplied by 5, and this is the basis for rolls like Luck (based on the Power characteristic). A Keeper (Game Moderator) may call for a Luck roll to determine which PC the cultists snare or whether a PC brought along a secondary flashlight. Other core Characteristics, such as Strength, are more intuitive. Arguably, the most useful Characteristic in the game is Education since it provides the basis for Skill Points.
Skills in Call of Cthulhu have a certain baseline from which players may add points based on their Education. Skills that require learned expertise, such as Biology, start out at 1% while Skills that most people pick up handily, such as Driving, start much higher (20% in the case of Driving). Skills tend to be specific, but unlike many games they’re very clearly useful in this setting.
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Example: With an Education of 16 I have 320 Skill points to spend. I spend them on: Library Use 45, Occult 15, English 5, Latin 60, Credit Rating 35, Jump 15, History 25, Swim 5, Throw 15, Dodge 20 (from football), Fast Talk 20, Listen 15, Law 10, Persuade 15, Accounting 10, Biology 10.
This gives Eric a lot of breadth and depth, definitely setting him up as a research focused character. His final percentiles for the above Skills are: Library Use 70, Occult 20, English 85, Latin 61, Credit Rating 50, Jump 40, History 45, Swim 30, Throw 40, Dodge 36, Fast Talk 25, Listen 40, Law 15, Persuade 30, Accounting 20, and Biology 11%. I could have made Eric even better at a few Skills, such as History or Persuade, instead of building such a broad character. The broad Skill set feels more realistic to be as a player, but there’s no reason Eric couldn’t be even more focused in a specific direction. |
With a simple percentile system for resolving most character actions, how does Call of Cthulhu handle combat? In similarly easy to use but abstract fashion. Characters act in order of their Dexterity, with firearms attacks tending to occur before hand to hand attacks. Firearms deal straight damage (usually around 2d6 or so) while hand to hand attacks also factor in a character’s physique to determine damage. Firearms have a definite advantage in terms of damage and frequency of attack. The good news for players is that most characters can survive even a gunshot and make it to safety, though they can’t survive much more than that. I think the mechanics do a fine job of balancing realism with simplicity and playability, especially considering that gunfights will (hopefully) not be the focus of the investigators’ lives.
Rules and example rules modifications are included for a broad range of situations, and a the book endeavors to provide helpful support and examples for everything a Keeper might encounter while hosting a Call of Cthulhu game.
Before we move on to Support I’d like to tell you about one other important mechanic: Sanity. Sanity is a number ranging from 1 to 100 that has its maximum value limited by the character’s Cthulhu Mythos score. As a character learns more about the true nature of reality the mind starts having difficulty coping with what it encounters. Just seeing gruesome things or strange creatures can result in a call for a Sanity check to prevent losing Sanity points, and as a character becomes more unstable it becomes easier for them to fail (thus a downward spiral towards madness). Becoming permanently insane is as much or more of a threat in this game than death, and in many ways roleplaying a character coping with bizarre horrors is the primary roleplaying challenge of Call of Cthulhu
Related to Sanity are Spells. Some characters will learn little bits of ritual magic during their time investigating the dark places of Earth. These spells tend to be very narrow, fairly powerful, and usually maddening to cast. If being an investigator is hard on the mind, becoming a sorcerer is downright suicidal at times. Academically inclined characters who decide to learn a few spells will have to balance their Sanity against the usefulness and power offered to them by magic.
Support
The setting introduction and mechanics only make up only a small portion of the book. This is, without a doubt, one of the most complete RPGs I’ve ever encountered. First off, there are clear mechanics examples that really assist in understanding the game. The setting also receives plenty of attention, in terms of writing for clarity, so that the reader really gets what’s going on.
Thirty pages of spells are provided, many of which could easily be the focus of an entire adventure. They’re flavorful, unique, well integrated with the setting, and drawn from a variety of different past products. A similarly enormous amount of space is dedicated to Mythos entities, each of which can easily serve as the focus of an adventure (or series of adventures). The entries are nicely illustrated, the creatures are bizarre and interesting, and the mechanics are clearly laid out.
Four adventures are included, each of which could easily fill up one or two nights of gaming. Some of them have seen over 20 years of play, and I consider them to be well written and easy to follow. I would have no difficulty running any of these adventures, and that they come complete with photocopyable handouts is just icing on the cake.
It’s hard to convey just how much support material is really here. Example NPCs? Check. A list of the past events, by year, from the past 100 years? Yep. How about equipment costs for objects in the 1890s and 1920s, for game set in those time periods? Of course! There’s plenty of material to serve a large number of games with little need for outside reference, and it’s all well written.
