I actually had the privilege to meet Kenneth Hite at Origins, in 2003(?); we had an interesting conversation about a number of things, including philosophies of writing reviews, the nature of conspiracy theories and their inevitable descent into anti-Semitism, his patient explanation to me of crystal skulls - I'd always thought that they were
carved, whereas apparently they're
poured or something - and, most interestingly,
Call of Cthulhu. (I think that I held my end of the conversation up, although talking to Hite is intimidating; the man knows his
shit like few people I've ever met.)
Hite made the point that Call of Cthulhu was perhaps the only role-playing game that wasn't, up until that point, an adolescent power fantasy; Call of Cthulhu is about taking on the responsibilities of an adult with the faculties of an adult, rather than with the limitless potential of childhood. I noted that Call of Cthulhu is a game that openly acknowledges player mortality - you know that you're going to die, so what do you with the time that you have left?
So, skip ahead some five years and Hite has written, with the aid of Robin D. Laws' GUMSHOE system, Trail of Cthulhu, his own take on a game that's been in print since 1982 and has won dozens of awards. For anybody else, this'd be an act of arrogant presumption; for Hite, it's a five-finger exercise.
Trail of Cthulhu isn't really a complete overhaul of Call of Cthulhu. It's more of a stripdown - think of it as an ultralight glider as opposed to a 747. In fact, during a playtest, one of my players observed that it might have worked better if it had decided to dump dice altogether and go purely narrativist.
The central dilemma that the GUMSHOE system - and Trail of Cthulhu - tries to solve is the problem with investigative games in general: If the characters miss an important clue, then the investigation grinds to a halt. Miss the next lead because you boofed a Library Use roll and don't know where the tomb of the monster is? The game grinds to a halt. Miss the scroll hidden under the desk because you failed a Spot Hidden check? There's no way for the players to defeat the monster, and therefore no way to win.
Except - and this is from my own experience, not from an objective measure - I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. I'm sure that if you're playing a purely investigative game the way that Hite does, and if you design the scenario around a central chokepoint that requires a pass/fail skill roll, then yes, you're going to have that problem.
But I have to confess that I've never run Call of Cthulhu as a purely investigative game, with characters following clues to prevent something terrible from happening at the end. I picked up Call of Cthulhu when I was about twelve years old, spent the next three years pestering my younger brother to play it with me without realizing that the Cyclopean vistas and cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft's work aren't going to necessarily going to appeal to somebody whose primary interests at the time lay primarily in Transformers.
After spending most of my teenage years reading every Stephen King book and Call of Cthulhu supplement I could lay hands on, I figured that the characters wouldn't necessarily need to investigate the monster or its leavings; if they left it alone, the monster would come find them, and not necessarily in a game-ending way. If you couldn't get the players interested in investigating the old tomb out by the new quarry, have the ghouls assault their house the next night. If they don't find the scroll that they need to dismiss the monster, wire the quarry with dynamite and collapse it on whatever appendage the monster's using for a head that day. In other words, don't make a chokepoint and there won't be problems with chokepoints.
Plus, one thing that I've noticed about Library Use and Spot Hidden rolls, both of which are "clue dispensers": even if one person fails the roll, it's usually a sure bet that somebody else in the party will. Experienced players know that Spot Hidden and Library Use are both important skills to have, and Library Use and Spot Hidden already start with a healthy 25% base chance that you don't have to pay our of your starting pool of points. One person may fail the roll; three or four probably won't.
As I've had time to think about it, though, I see the basic problem - when you're writing an adventure that's very heavily investigative, it's hard to provide multiple opportunities for the investigators to pick up on the necessary clues for the next scene. The one time that you must have the players pick up on a vital clue, you'll get a string of failed Spot Hidden rolls and an adventure that needs emergency rewriting on the fly in order. Thus, the GUMSHOE system.
The basic premise of the GUMSHOE system is that characters will always find the the core clues necessary to advance the plot of the scenario - all that they have to do is to declare that you're using an investigative skill in the right place, and the Keeper will deliver the appropriate clue. If there's an slip of paper with the address where the Jade Monkey is being held, then all it takes it a declaration that you're using the Evidence Collection skill in order to find it. If you need to identify the fossil as being in the wrong stratum for its age, all you have to do is declare that you're using Geology on the rock. Clues that aren't immediately apparent are discovered by whoever has the highest relevant skill in the party, so players don't need to mechanically
Characters can also, if they choose, spend points out of their skill pools - split neatly into Investigative and General abilities - in order to acquire additional clues if they so choose. A two-point Geology spend on a rock reveals that it's not a geode, but a cocoon spun out of extruded fibers of melted granite. A one-point Forensics spend on an axe reveals that even though it was washed, flies are still feeding on the microscopic bits of blood left behind on the blade.
In the event of a contest, or a combat, you roll a six-sided dice and choose whether or not you're going to spend points in order to beat a target number between two and eight. Points that are spent are gone until the end of the adventure, so players have to be careful in how they manage their resources until the scenario ends.
Here's some concerns that we encountered during the initial playtest of Trail of Cthulhu. We had one Call of Cthulhu grognard (he actually owns a copy of Glozel est Authentique, if you can believe that shit), one self-admitted power gamer, and a guy who had extensive experience with a wide variety of role-playing games. The general comparison that they made for Trail of Cthulhu is that it was very rules-light, almost like a LARP, and heavily narrativist - but that they liked BRP's system better.
One problem that we ran into during the playtest was character generation; vital pieces of information about character generation are scattered throughout the book - for instance, a subrule about your second-highest skill having to be at least half of your highest skill, or the automatic points that you get in Health, Sanity and Stability. Thanks to my lack of preparation in making a helpful list of skill spends that the investigators were going to make, the characters created tended to lack in both Gather Evidence and Forensics skills, both of which were important skills for the scenario to come, but which they didn't have.
Furthermore, one of the players pointed out that there's a lot of redundant skills that seem to do the same thing. Instead of a generic Persuade or Personal Interaction skill, for instance, there's Intimidation, Interrogation, Assess Honesty and Flattery - admittedly slightly different things, but all usable for the same general purpose. (I'm reminded of the crushing of Debate and Oratory into Persuade in the BRP version.) Some skills act as more specialized versions of other skills, like Art History and Oral History, but it's arguable that anybody who has points in History could just use his History skill for both of those applications.
In keeping with the book's advice, we started off with a play-combat between the main characters and some Haitian cultists who had cornered the characters in an abandoned shack. It worked out pretty well, giving the players some time to get accustomed to the way that Trail of Cthulhu functioned and the way that point spends worked. The game itself went very smoothly, with characters eventually deducing the central mystery of the scenario and going from scene to scene with little difficulty. However, I neglected to include the addresses of two major NPCs in the scenario thanks to poor forward planning, which led the players to miss several major clues. Before I had the chance to reintroduce them, the players came up with a clever plan and ended the scenario without any major confrontation, a problem that I intend to remedy when I write it up as a formal scenario.
The general input from the playtest group was that the system was interesting, but not something that they wanted to use long-term. One of the major problems was with the game's central mechanic of spending points in order to get extra bonuses. The point made was that once all of the points in a particular skill had been exhausted, the skill was essentially useless - but it didn't make sense to one of the players that an investigative skill could be exhausted after you found a certain number of clues. Skills are still useful after they've been expended - you can use them to gather core clues - but the exhaustion mechanism for investigative skills didn't make sense to them.
Another problem came with combat. The power gamer of the group decided to go with a character who had been in the Army Corps of Engineers, heavily focused on explosives and with eight points in Firearms. (For those of who you who have played Call of Cthulhu before, you can stop giggling now.) The initial firefight had him burning through all eight points in order to guarantee hits on the cultists - you have to roll 3+ on a six-sided dice in order to hit one of them, and since his weapon only did 1d6+1 damage on targets with seven hit points, he had to burn at least two shots to kill one human. After his points were gone, he was no better at shooting than any other character despite having a huge Firearms skill. In the BRP system, he'd be pegging cultists at an 85% hit chance until the inevitable moment when he figures out that firearms don't work well in Call of Cthulhu.
His solution for this was actually pretty interesting - he found the breakdown of combat into separate rounds to be jarring, and suggested instead that it might be better to run the entire combat as a single round; that way, characters with high combat skills would still be useful over a longer period, and would be able to contribute in the same way that investigative characters did. I thought that it was an interesting insight; I don't know how it would work, exactly, but I thought that it was interesting.
In any case. Trail of Cthulhu adds an elegant solution to a problem that's been dogging the game since its inception - really, it's the classic question of any horror game, which is what keeps an investigator investigating the Cthulhu Mythos after the first encounter? The traditional assumption is that the investigators realize that they're the only bulwark between humanity and the Mythos, but there's only a few of Lovecraft's characters who really fit into that model, and it doesn't really allow for characters who are investigating the Mythos for any other reason than defeating it. Instead, Trail of Cthulhu offers Drives to its player characters - some emotional (Duty, Ennui, Revenge, Arrogance), some intellectual (Thirst for Knowledge, Antiquarianism, Scholarship), some of them inherited (Bad Luck, Artistic Sensitivity, Sudden Shock.)
They work in game as a sort of carrot/stick for Keepers to drive the plot forwards; if the players are acting skittish about investigating that crypt without the accompaniment of the 32nd Heavy Armor Division, then the Keeper can charge them Stability for going against the central reason as to why they're investigating in the first place - or reward them with extra Stability if they go along with the self-destructive impulse to delve deeper into things that would probably be left alone.
I'm sort of two minds on the subject of drivers. On the one hand, it's a brilliant way to keep characters moving towards the heart of the mystery, and gives the player a good, solid reason to proceed forward. You're not just investigating an occult mystery for some nebulous reason, you're doing it because you're hunting for occult knowledge that you, and only you, should have - or you're doing it because one of those things killed your partner and they're not getting away with it. But in the hands of an inexperienced Keeper, it'll potentially act as a way to get the investigators to act like they're in a slasher film, doing stuff that isn't just risky, but flat-out dumb. The fact that you can be charged Stability for not doing what the Keeper thinks that your character should do is a tool that lends itself to railroading, and through it, crappy games.
Speaking of Stability and Sanity, the game splits it into two halves; your Stability represents your general ability to take shocks and freaky shit, while your Sanity gets damaged when your Stability is knocked below zero by a Mythos shock. I didn't really have a chance to test it in practice, which I kind of regret. Essentially, any time that you come into contact with a shock, you roll a single dice and try to beat a four (five if it's a Mythos shock); fail, and you lose Stability. You can spend from your Stability pool if you want to increase your roll, but if you fail it anyways, you're out both the Stability loss and the amount that you spent to try to avoid that Stability loss. It does seem a little counterintuitive, but it makes more sense when you realize that you can avoid a four-point loss with a one-point expenditure.
Getting shocked into negative Stability numbers results in madness. There's actually some clever methods here for representing madness that basically allows the entire group to collaborate in screwing with the insane player's head - for instance, assigning control of the investigator to another player to represent multiple personality disorder, or having the players refer to something that the investigator did that never happened in order to represent selective amnesia. It's kind of an innovative way to handle madness in a game. However, I would suggest knowing your players before you try it, mostly because I once ran a game of Insylum - where you play inmates in an asylum - without realizing that one of my players had actually been institutionalized at one point, and who had some interesting ideas about how his character should behave.
One thing that I do wish is that there was some system in place for rewarding characters according to their Drives, and not just with Stability; both Call and Trail of Cthulhu operate on the idea that the characters are on a permanent death spiral from the word go, but I remember seeing an illustration in - I think that it was one of Pagan Publishing's Mysteries of Mesoamerica, where they had portraits of investigators who had died during the playtest of that particular adventure. One of the portraits was of an professor proudly holding up some Mythos artifact that he'd discovered, with a caption noting his scientific pride in having made the discovery - and I thought yeah, that's basically a treasure for an academically-focused investigator, but nothing will ever come of it because it's not supported by the system. I suppose that's in keeping with the nihilistic viewpoint of the Cthulhu Mythos, but allowing investigators to, say, bring evidence of the lost civilization of Mu to the attention of the academic world versus having to suppress it for the betterment of all mankind.
One of the really innovative parts of Trail of Cthulhu is the writeup of the Great Old Ones. Rather than going with a single vision for each, Hite offers about a half-dozen suggestions as to what the Great Old One could be; the first canonical with Call of Cthulhu, subsequent entries exploring the Great Old Ones through different lenses, ranging from the scientific to the outre. For instance, here's a description of Nyarlathothep as a literal lens through which humanity views the Mythos:
"Nyarlathothep" is the technical term for the interphase state between human perception and the Mythos, like a film of soap on water. As human perceptions push through the boundaries of conventional reality, it deforms to match them, to seem human - but as they adjust to the scope of cosmic reality, Nyarlathothep, the interface, widens out cosmically as well."
But if you don't like that, you can go with another explanation designed to explain why Nyarlathothep has a thosuand forms:
Nyarlathothep's thousand forms reflect the many varieties of fear and apocalypse. Every form of the Crawling Chaos is tuned to a specific alignment - of cosmic energies, the stars, of its perceiver, of the weak points of the society or cult (or species) that summons or encounters it.
Or you can go with the Language as a Virus explanation:
Nyarlathothep began as a specific telepathic "language", capable of expressing ultimate para-scientific truths between species of vastly varying sensoria, brain structure, chemical composition, etc. It eventually became artifically intelligent, as more beings put more and more information and meaning into it. As its heuristics and decision-making routines warped, Nyarlathothep became malicious and capricious, asserting its growing independence. (Eclipse Phase fans, take note!)
There's dozens of different explanations for the various forms of the Great Old Ones; Hite goes so far as to integrate Derleth's ideas of the Great Old Ones as representing the different elements, or Tynes' ideas about Hastur as a sort of societal decay mechanism. To be honest, one of the reasons why I bought Trail of Cthulhu was to read Hite's ideas on the different Great Old Ones, and the section of the book doesn't disappoint in the slightest. That's not to say that all of them are winners - linking Dagon, the giant Deep One with Dagan, the Assyrian corn god is a bit of a stretch even by Mythos standards - but there's information here for miles.
The monsters chapter doesn't stray far from the old standards that you'll find in the Call of Cthulhu corebook; just about all of the standards are here, ranging from the ubiquitous Deep Ones and ghouls to outliers like the barely-human K'N-Yan and the mummified Musqat.
I'll have to backtrack a moment in order to explain what makes the chapter so useful, though: Way back in the Cthulhu Casebook, there was an article called Death Reports that described the human remains left behind by a monster kill - so a dhole's victim would be crushed flat and covered with slime, a ghoul would leave its victim with a throat torn out by sharp teeth that were contaminated with bacteria normally found on corpses and so forth. It was really, really good, and so Hite brings it back for each monster description in the book. Rather than just focusing on death scenes, Hite includes sample information that might be gleaned about a monster by skill:
Geology: I can't tell what it is that sheared off those rocks; it wasn't heat or cold, or impact, or chemicals. They seem to split along a kind of crystal pattern, though, even the igneous rocks. This sample here almost looks like it was splintered from the inside. The water is not contaminated - if anything, it's got less bacteria or algae in it than normal pond water - it just looks strange in this light. If it's a mineral, it's too trace to register.
Architecture: The dimensions of the walls and the attic don't add up. Which is to say, it almost seems like the attic is larger than the house, but that's impossible. There's probably some sort of large crawlspace behind one of the interior walls.
Oral History: Pore ol' Elspeth. Got knocked up on Roodmas an' los' the chile on Midsummers, and still pretends to go 'feed her babe' down in Devil Glen when she thinks no-one's a-watchin'. Runs in th' family, I expect; her mammy used to put out calf's brains for whippoorwills, of all things.
But, since this is Cthulhu, there's also listings for the aftermath of a monster attack:
Forensics: The body was lacerated and nearly flayed in strips, with trauma consistent with a bullwhip or knout injuries. Nine ribs, the sternum, both collarbones, and all the bones in both forearms were broken, and several vertebrae dislocated or smashed together. The welts and lacerations were bloody and filled with a clear greenish liquid, probably vegetation of some sort.
Forensics: The torso and one leg were smashed flat by the rapid descent of a roughly barrel-shaped mass. (If this were India, not Oregon, I'd say it was an elephant track.) The black, ropy tar on the body sublimed away into a whitish gummy residue. There was surprisingly little blood or bruising. The large, circular black mark on the upper back proved, on further inspection, to be composed of dozens of small, suppurating punctures.
Along with a pretty decent rundown of major Mythos cults and tomes, there's a discussion of what life was like in the Thirties - grim and war-filled, complete with famines in China and Russia and a series of wars that'll eventually blossom into World War II, with the Great Depression as the cherry on the whole thing. There's fascinating sidebars on the rise of totalitarianism as a political force throughout the 1930's, and another on the issue of race and how it relates to Trail of Cthulhu games. There's an excellent chapter on how to arrange a Trail of Cthulhu adventure, with a lot of tips on how to use the GUMSHOE system appropriately. Even if you're just using it for Call of Cthulhu, it's still worth it for Hite's advice on how to run a horror game. ("One of the huge mistakes characters make in a horror movie is to split up in the face of danger. As a Keeper, you should always be encouraging players to make it.")
The book ends with a short adventure - The Kingsbury Horror - which ties into the Torso Murders that actually occurred in Cleveland during that period. It's a very, very clue-heavy adventure, and players are going to have to work hard and use their brains in order to track down the villain of the scenario and stop him. In fact, I have to confess that I have a hard time figuring out how the players are supposed to navigate their way through the labyrinth of clues that the scenario presents - there's a lot of leads going in a lot of places. (I feel like an inattentive reader, but I keep thinking that a flow chart would have been remarkably useful.) That being said, it's got an excellent "whammy" - John Tynes' term - when the investigators start slipping through time thanks to the influence of a Mythos entity, seeing 747 contrails in the sky and meeting someone who's come unstuck in time.
Would I recommend Trail of Cthulhu?
I guess it depends on how dedicated you are to Call of Cthulhu's basic system. I, myself, am not going to make the changeover from Call to Trail; Trail just has too many mechanical quirks for me to lose the simplicity and versatility that Call of Cthulhu uses. On the other hand, Trail of Cthulhu taught me how to write an investigative adventure, has a ton of useful resources for Call of Cthulhu - and if you're not married to Call of Cthulhu already, like I am, it's entirely possible that it'll work better for you.
-Darren MacLennan
Review Summary