For some time now I have been drawn into the depths of the RPG sea where sunken cities and alien gods lie slumbering...I hear the call of great Cthulhu reaching out in the corners of my consciousness as I reach for my new 7th edition game tomes. Planning and scheming, my brain feverishly plots an elaborate path leading to an ancient tomb in Mexico where lies buried secrets long lost to the eyes of man...secrets that may unlock ancient horror and madness. Only play will tell.
Yeah, this post is about my on-again-off-again obsession with Sandy Petersen's classic RPG Call of Cthulhu. As I have mentioned before, I returned from Gencon in 1981 with a copy of Call of Cthulhu, a game which changed how I approach role-playing; a change which likely has helped keep me excited about this hobby for over 40 years. CoC forced me to take role-playing a character seriously and elevated adventure games to a new level of challenge and a much broader scope of possibilities beyond the excitement of being a momentary "hero" in the game. CoC showed me how role-playing can have all the depth of a novel complete with unfolding story, plot twists, character development...a novel my friends and I write together as we play. It helped me explore the concept of "hero" beyond "he who defeats the monster". Heroics can be having the courage to look behind the door, fighting through the insanity to save humanity, even at the cost of personal defeat. Things got a lot more complex and this no doubt extended my interest in the hobby which became yet another tool to explore what it means to be human.
I have always enjoyed the d100 mechanics of CoC, even more so than those found in RuneQuest which originated the d100 Basic Role-Play system Chaosium has used to power CoC and other games. Sandy Petersen seems to have hit the sweet spot in d100 with CoC. Chaosium's current 7th edition makes all the right additions for me and improves an already great game. The change in characteristic values to dice roll multiplied by 5 allows one to talk about the half roll (hard success) and the fifth roll (critical success) and therefore changes a success/fail model into one with degree of success in simple user friendly terms. Borrowing the advantage die from other games, 7th edition allows the use of two tens dice to be thrown as part of the d100 mechanic - use the higher for advantage, the lower for disadvantage.
The classic CoC early twentieth century setting is perhaps the most accessible setting for a role-play adventure game ever because it is both familiar enough for us all to feel at home, yet isolated by the lack of hand-held technology, no police on call and no atomic age weaponry. Man has not yet been to the moon and we can pretend planet Mars might be inhabited. Weird science seems possible, in a campy, entertaining way, and we can make in-game assumptions about things like electricity and generally be correct. It was the idea that CoC could be played in different eras of man's history that really awakened my sense of possibilities however. Official supplements have set the game in Victorian Europe, the Roman Empire, Dark Ages Britain and Constantinople and the French Revolution. One's imagination soars with the story possibilities and because you are dealing with the weird and supernatural, it doesn't all have to strictly make sense.
Pulp Cthulhu is an official 7th edition supplement from Chaosium which I added to my collection last year, but have not played. Pulp takes the game into the 1930's which arguably isn't that much different from the 1920's, but Pulp also changes the tone of play and introduces more fast-paced action and harder to kill PCs. Want to ask fewer questions and just go in swinging...that's kinda what Pulp seems to be about. There is also an available adventure book for Pulp involving snake men. R.E. Howard would approve, I think.
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