Myths about the Mythos

 I recently watched a video by Seth Skorkowsky where he discussed Call of Cthulhu. In it, he mentioned three internet rumors that initially kept him away from Call of Cthulhu:

1. There is no combat in CoC
2. Every CoC session must end with everyone dead or insane
3. CoC must be Lovecraftian

Now, I got into Call of Cthulhu before the internet was a thing. I’m not sure Neuromancer had even been written. So my reactions were:

1.  Wha?!
2. Well, I see where you’re coming from…
3. What does that even mean?

Okay. Let’s get a little more detailed:

There’s no combat in CoC? Have they looked at the rules? There are combat rules in the core rules! Yes, Mythos creatures and other monsters have _distinct_ advantages over squishy investigators but why would they get hit points of you could take those hit points away with guns, knives and explosives? 

Yes, there is a Mythos game (Cthulhu Dark) that explicitly doesn’t have combat rules but I literally have no idea how anyone with any exposure to CoC could have that idea about CoC.

Everyone is dead and/or insane at the end of every session. Yeah, that’s an older joke the head of Vecna. And if you are playing a one-shot, I think that’s worth going for. 

But campaign play is baked into the game. Heck, Chaosium has been selling campaigns pretty much from the start. And campaign play works for every flavor of CoC. If you are are playing a purist game of cosmic horror and despair, you want to take time to grind down your characters’ souls.

Call of Cthulhu has to be Lovecraftian. I’m not quite sure what this means? If you mean everything has to be centered around the Mythos, that doesn’t even work for Lovecraft’s own writing! That sentence is simultaneously vague and limiting (and possibly condescending) all at the same time.

I have run and played a few different Call of Cthulhu campaigns and it’s safe to say that none of them followed any of those memes.

Sandy Peterson and the reading list of doom

It’s October! One of the twelve best months to talk about the Cthulhu Mythos!

During a recent conversation about how the Cthulhu Mythos has become mainstream, I commented on how much Call of the Cthulhu (the RPG, not the short story or the telephone joke) and Sandy Peterson had to do with that. One of the other folks in that conversation proceeded to send me a link to Sandy Peterson talking about just that.

I am just barely old enough to appreciate how obscure Lovecraft and his influence was before Sandy Peterson began to share his love of Lovecraft and the Mythos. I work with kids who have always had plush Cthulhu’s in the world but there was a time when Lovecraft was basically a footnote in fantastic literature. Yes, August Derleth kept his name and work alive but Arkham House was a niche publisher at best.

These days, scholars write about Lovecraft. There’s a whole genre of cosmic honor named after him that includes literature, movies, video games and music. He is held up as second only to Edgar Allen Poe. But there was like half a century when obscure and thought  of as a hack if he was thought of at all.

And, while Call of the Cthulhu and Sandy Peterson didn’t single-handedly change that, they were one of the first dominos to fall.

According to Sandy Peterson, he had been a big fan of Lovecradt way before it was cool. And Chaosium picked him to design the game because he wouldn’t view it as a joke and he would be able to make a serious game.

Looking back, I realized that Sandy Peterson did one thing that was crucial to introducing audiences to the wider world of the Mythos. (Plenty of authors were influenced by Lovecraft, even when readers weren’t) He didn’t just include a list of source materials like Gygwx did with Appendix N.

No, for every entry in the bestiary, he included a quotation from a work that introduced or used that particular horror. And he cited the name and author of that work. Peterson integrated the reading list into the rules. And he didn’t just use Lovecraft’s own works. He also quoted August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and that’s not the end of the list. Sandy Peterson gave me a reading list that I’m still not done with, literally decades after I first read  book.

And I’m going to argue that that is why Call of Cthulhu didn’t just have an impact on RPGs but on literature in general. It didn’t just introduce us to Cthulhu or H. P. Lovecraft or the idea of Cosmic Horror burning away sanity like cobwebs under a flame thrower. It showed us a broader picture of the literature of Cosmic Horror. 

Sandy Peterson didn’t single handedly make it possible for me to buy Cthulhu t-shirts. (The fact that Lovevaft is now public domain has a lot to with that too) But he had a lot to do with making the Mythos part of mainstream culture.

Call of Cthulhu as a reading list

I don’t know about for anyone else but the Call of Cthulhu RPG rulebook served as a reading list for me back in the 80s. 

At the time, there was no internet. At least, not that I had access to. The local library and book stores had limited selections of Lovecraft (Thanks, Del Rey for the affordable reprints) But finding stuff by other authors, that was really hard.

And if it wasn’t for the fact that most of the descriptions of the foul beasties that make up the wonderful world of the Call of Cthulhu included descriptions from the stories with citations, I wouldn’t have even known that there were stories out there for me to look for.

At the time, this was a revelation for me. I had no idea that there was this wealth of cosmic horror out there. Stuff I would have had no other way of finding out about if it wasn’t for the role playing game.

Boy, do we live in a different world now. And boy, is it fun to live in the future!

Mind you, it took me a long time to eventually find some of those works. I didn’t find and read Ramsey Cambell’s Lovecraftian stories until I was in my thirties. Which is a shame because they turned out to be really good. His Severn Valley stories create their own internal mythology of cosmic nastiness.

Amusingly, it went around the other way too. When I finally read Notebook Found in a Deserted House by Robert Bloch, which I understood to be the origin of the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, I found out they were actually shoggoths (which Lovecraft created) Chaosium made them as the brand new dark young to bulk up t heir bestiary :D And, in turn, authors have used the dark young in stories.

(Notebook et al is a really good story regardless and I’m glad I read it for its own sake)

Seriously, The Call of Cthulhu RPG wasn’t just a game. It was a Wikipedia of Eldritch Horror. And that was just super cool.

(Incidentally, by the time I got around to reading Gary Gygax’s Appendix N, it was more of a checklist of stuff I’d already read :D)

How Call of Cthulhu helped shape my life... okay, my tastes and gaming

I am a big fan of both H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos in general. I've read most of Lovecraft's original works and a lot of work inspired by him. I've played a number of board games inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos and there are a lot of role playing games inspired by the Mythos as well.

Okay, it really helps that the original works are public domain now :D

But no game based on the works of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos have had a bigger impact on me and my gaming life than Call of Cthulhu. To be fair, Call of Cthulhu has had a huge impact on Mythos games, horror games and even role playing games in general.

Everyone knows the old joke about how every character in Call of Cthulhu ends up dead, insane or both. Which, to be fair, if you play like it was D&D set in the 1920s, is pretty much how things will end. If you try to hack and slash your way through, you'll go through a lot of characters.

Call of Cthulhu came out way back in 1981, which makes it one of an old, hoary game. At the time, it broke a lot of paradigms about role-playing. It was set in the 1920s, not really a prime time for adventures. Most of the monsters were vastly more powerful than the characters, meaning any direct confrontation would end in >squish<

And, of course, Call of Cthulhu introduced sanity as a stat. You didn't just have to worry about getting squished. You have to worry about going insane, complete with phobias and difficult recuperation. It both brings home the inherent theme and gives you one more way to feel fragile.

Mind you, I don't think anyone who's going to be reading this blog isn't going to be familiar with Call of Cthulhu and its influence. If you are interested in role-playing games and have heard anything outside of Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire, you're going to know about Call of Cthulhu.

So let me ruminate about how the game has affected me on a personal level.

First of all, it got me interested in Lovecraft. I doubt I am the first person who was interested in the game first and then got into the literature. To be honest, I have spent a lot more time and certainly more years reading various Mythos stories than I have spent playing Call of Cthulhu.

Oh, I am sure that I would have ended up reading Lovecraft even if I hadn't discovered Call of Cthulhu. But it definitely got me reading his works years earlier than I would have. Not a year goes by without me rereading some of his stories and looking for more mythos work to read.

Second, Call of Cthulhu pretty huge part in teaching me to role-play a character as opposed to having a character be a mobile Orc slaying machine. Seriously, when even the lesser Mythos monsters can pretty much take out a character without a problem (and even fighting cultists can be tough work), spending time with character development (and, of course, looking for clues) just became a good idea.

Call of Cthulhu wasn't the only game that taught me to do that. Heck, Dungeons and Dragons did that too. But it became the best choice in Call of Cthulhu  After all, in any game of Call of Cthulhu, you always had to ask yourself why your character is even staying involved. You have to actually explore why someone would go through with this kind of adventure.

Third, I spent a couple years in college playing in a regular campaign. We had a lot of fun and I've hold that it is one of my great role-playing experiences. I got a lot of lasting friendships from that campaign and it is still one of my touchtone experiences in role-playing in general.

I will admit, that if I was going to be in a traditional, investigation based Mythos game, I'd go for Trail of Cthulhu. I have been in games where bad rolls have lost clues and thrown the story completely out of wack. The Gumshoe system helps keep the story moving. Mind you, Call of Cthulhu came out more than twenty-five years before Trail of Cthulhu. There's a lot of time and development to reach Trail. And I'd cheerfully use Call of Cthulhu for a Delta Green game.

Call of Cthulhu keeps on casting a long, unspeakable, shambling shadow.

My old school roots in RPGs

While I know that it probably sounds like I am only interested in avant-garde role-playing games, the truth is that my basic grounding was very traditional games. The three games that really helped me get into role playing games were second edition Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and the original Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game.

Of course, I had played role playing games before then, like first edition Dungeons and Dragons. However, those three games were the first really serious campaigns I was in and really made role playing games a serious hobby for me. Of course, the groups I played with get the real credit but the systems still help.

Dungeons and Dragons is the bedrock of role playing games. It's the game that got the industry started and I don't think role playing games would have inevitably, spontaneously come to life. They needed a spark and it turns out that a dragon is a pretty good spark.

I do know some gamers who actively dislike D&D. I think it's because D&D is the Man of role playing games and it's hip to hate the Man. And, as litigious as TSR would be, sometimes they really did act like the Man.

However, decades of development and changes and ideas has given Dungeons and Dragons one of the richest and most genuinely diverse contents out there. It has so much to offer. For a game that isn't designed to be a generic system that you can apply any theme to, it has a wealth of sandboxes to play in.

If I could only play one game for the rest of my life, it would be a tussle between Dungeons and Dragons and Go. Mind you, I'd argue I could play every edition and make a monk who plays Go and insist on playing Go, just in character.

I have to admit that reading the second edition of Call of Cthulhu's rules in middle school was my introduction to H. P. Lovecraft and I have been reading his works and the works he inspired. It's been a lifelong enjoyment and not a year goes by without me rereading some of his stories.

If you somehow don't know what Call of Cthulhu is about, it is a horror game inspired by the guy who helped define cosmic horror. You play relatively ordinary people trying to make it to the end without dying horribly or going insane.

Call of Cthulhu, particularly when it first came out, was really the role player.s role playing game. An investigator with a Bowie knife, a tommy guns and some dynamite will probably take out some deep ones. But against anything real monsters, let alone Great Old Ones, you will just die horribly. So you have to focus on playing the character, not fighting.

Back in the day, I was a little sheepish about playing Marvel Super Heroes, since it was such a simple system where one chart did most of the work. But I have had years of fun with it and even occasionally play it now.

And with such a simple system, it was easy to hack the system and play with the mechanics. (My primary GM didn't use the Marvel setting, just the rules, so we populated it with all of our own heroes and villains) I didn't really do that seriously until the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons but Marvel Super Heroes gave me a good start.

And, frankly, it was all such comic book silly fun :)

I've played and researched a lot of indie games in the last few years. But I really owe my grounding in the hobby and my love of the hobby to these old school games. 

Monophobia: You are all alone in the dark... with the shogoths

Monophobia is a collection of three Call of Cthulhu adventures that are specifically designed for just one player. After I already wrote about two player games and Lovecraftian ones in particular, I knew I had to read it. 

Since these are adventures, I'm going to try not to give too many spoilers away. After all, there may be folks out there who want to play these adventures.

There are three things I judge RPG adventures these days: Did I enjoy reading it? Do I think it would be fun to run or play? Can they be mined for ideas for homebrew adventures?

Vengeance from Beyond is an adventure about the investigator being  haunted by an angry ghost who will drive them to insanity if not stopped. Frankly, it is my least favorite of the three adventures and I think it's the weakest.

That's because it really has the narrowest range of options for the player. There's only one way to deal with the ghost. If the player doesn't figure that one way out, that's it for the investigator. It's a bit like a railroad where you have to find the track.

Frankly, that can be a real problem with Call of Cthulhu adventures in general. Sometimes, they read more like a script than an adventure and this is far from the worst case I've read.

Of Grave Concern has the investigator dealing with a zombie wizard who keeps swapping bodies with them with the long term goal of taking over their body forever. 

This is my favorite adventure of the lot. The player has a lot of avenues to explore and ways to go about their investigation. It has much more of a sandbox feel. And, while there's only one way to put the zombie down, it's a lot more reasonable than Vengeance from Beyond.

Robinson Gruesome has the investigator become a castaway on a desert island where they have to resonantly Mythos cultists and the horror they worship. It's actually a very simple adventure with a fairly tight timeline for what all the evil types are doing. However, the investigator has a lot of leeway in what they can do.

But what I really like about this adventure is that it can be mined for more ideas for adventures. While the Cthulhu genre is no stranger to Robinsonades (Dagon by Lovecraft for instance), I haven't seen a lot of adventures that use it. You could build a whole campaign around being a stranded island.

All through out all three adventures, there's advice how to handle only having one player and how to make sure that bad dice rolls don't kill them. After all, poor planning and bad decisions on the part of the player can take care of that just that fine.good advice goes a long way towards making this a good supplement.

Monophobia isn't perfect but it does a good job tackling the idea of running one-on-one Call of Cthulhu in three different ways. It's pretty much a must read for anyone interested in that.

http://www.unboundbook.org/?p=82

RPGs designed for two players

Role playing games that are designed for two people has always seemed like an odd design space for me. Since my earliest experiences with games like Dungeons and Dragons, role playing has always been a group activity. Even mechanics light, narrative driven games likes Fiasco or Microscope benefit from having more voices and imaginations thrown in.

But the idea of two player games have been around for a while. One of the earliest examples that I remember running across was Paper Chase, an adventure for Call of Cthulhu who specifically designed for one keeper and one player. Heck, that one was in the third edition basic rule book.

I have heard it argued, quite convincingly, that horror games are best played with only one player. After all, everything is scarier when you are all alone. There is an entire Lovecraftian system called Macabre Tales designed for two-players and a noted collection of Call of Cthulhu adventures called  Monophoboa.

And, over the last few years, I have found some interesting two player systems. Beast Hunters, Martian Colony, and Murderous Ghosts to name three very strong examples. Incidentally, all three of them have fairly tight structures for play.

Beast Hunters has the players swap the role of GM back and forth with a budget for threats. Murderous Ghosts actually uses a paired set of Choose Your Own Adventure style books for the mechanics, although you fill in all of the narrative details with your own imagination. Martian Colony's mechanical structure resembles a resource management, push your luck board game!

While there are some obvious benefits to only having two people involved in a game (like only having two schedules to worry about), there's a lot of issues as well. For instance, a lot of systems are designed to have a variety of abilities to tackle problems. (I cast magic missile/swing my sword/backstab the kobold! You kill it! And the other eight kobolds swarm you.)

Also, and this can definitely be the case in a Call of Cthulhu adventure, is that having only one brain working on a problem means the lone player can miss clues or other plot points. (Monophobia actually recommends using idea rolls to let the keeper flat out give clues player)

Two-player games also can have a stronger level of intimacy than group games. I've read more than a few which are actually about romance, with Emily Care Boss's Breaking the Ice being the one I'm the most interested in reading and researching. Whether or not this is a good or a bad thing depends on whose playing, I guess.

Two player games don't interest me as much as GM-free systems do. However, there's no denying there's a wide variety of them out there, both from a mechanical angle and thematic angle. It's a sub-genre of role playing games with some interesting ideas.