OSSR: Call of Cthulhu (5.6)

[Laertes]

It's this image, but I can't find a card. All I can find is someone's character sheet for a duellist called Kakita Hayate which uses the image.



Edit: I never played Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, but I recognise that piece of art from that card very clearly. Is it possible that these are fake cards made with RPG art and we're being trolled?

[Akiosama]

My bad - it's Kakita Hideo, Celestial Edition - his Non-unique form.

1F/3C. 0FH/4G/3PH. Crane Clan/Samurai/Duelist.

Apparently, he goes off the deep end at some point later in the game, given the card Kakita Hideo - the Fallen Keeper, in his Exp. 2 version.

Fun times - not that the Crane usually need any help being good.

My 2 yen,

Akiosama

[Shatner]

Some of the derivative works are weirder than others. If you want us to explain how this image is related to Lovecraft in general and this section in particular, we will do that.

Okay, I'll bite. How does this relate?

[Ancient History]

Action Girls - Soldiers of the Dead Part 1 - and if there was ever a "movie" that needed the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment - the green vial of stuff that renanimates the dead comes from Reanimator.



I will not link to Re-Penetrator I will not link to Re-Penetrator I will not link to Re-Penetrator

[erik]

Strangely I found no link to Re-Penetrator.

[Longes]

But they got better!

Is it bad that one of the cool things about that picture is that she's not only playing CoC but also playing the L5R CCG, apparently? (Look at the cards. There's another game there whose cards seem familiar, but what game that is is escaping me right now.)

World of Warcraft CCG too, apparently.

My 2 yen,

Akiosama

You can also see Carcassonne tiles lying around.

[Username17]

Strangely I found no link to Re-Penetrator.

There are multiple pornographic features that are inspired by the movie version of Dr. Herbert West Reanimator-Reanimator. We happened to choose the Czech softcore eurotrash porn rather than the more famous Re-penetrator. Re-penetrator is really pretty over the top in its use of fake blood and corpse fucking, while Action Girls: Soldiers of the Dead Part 1 is mostly just scantily clad Czech women running around with guns in crumbling Soviet era ruins.

-Username17

[Count Arioch the 28th]

The second one sounds more appealing.

[Ancient History]

Scenarios
The Haunting


What do you want? It's a remake.

Music: Yuggothian Slayers.

FrankT:

The Scenarios chapter contains four pre-made adventures for Call of Cthulhu and runs for 26 pages. It's considerably shorter than the previous two “chapters,” which I should remind you were 73 pages for the “rules” and 124 pages for the “reference” sections. These are all much better organized than the rest of the book. The first scenario is called “The Haunting” or perhaps is called “The Haunted House” and runs for five pages.

The reason that there is some confusion over the name is that this adventure made its appearance in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu under the name “The Haunted House,” but in this book is listed as “The Haunting.” The book explains that they renamed it because there is another published adventure called “The Haunted House” (despite that having been the name of the introductory adventure in the fucking core book), and also because it's been significantly overhauled because people found the original writeup “baffling.” Considering the standards of coherency displayed by the rest of the book, the fact that the original mission was considered to have gone too far is rather amazing to me.

AncientH:

I think I've talked about this before, but the standards for Call of Cthulhu scenarios is rather generously low - which is in part why the epic campaigns like Horror on the Orient Express and Shadows of Yog-Sothoth get such high praise. The general problem with "The Haunting"/"The Haunted House" is...well, pretty much what you expect when you read the title. You're expecting a group of paranormal investigators called in to explore a haunted house, and (surprise!) you find a Mythos horror lurking about. This is such an obvious plot just given the game and the title, that little things like hooks, motivation, and resolution tend to be forgotten in the mad rush.

FrankT:

The core story is that there's a house you're supposed to investigate, there's a monster in the basement, and when you kill that monster you win all the internets. This is not complicated or difficult at all, but the game expects that you will spend your time investigating various other stuff. If you follow an incredibly convoluted trail of extremely tenuous leads, you will eventually be led to realize that the executor of the will of the guy who has turned himself into something vampiresque was part of a nebulously evil cult that was shut down by the cops years ago in a huge fire fight, but which there are probably still members of running around. But none of that shit matters, because what you actually get or learn from successfully tracking down the backup copy of a will and checking the police records of the organization that the will executor left behind (assuming for some reason you actually thought that was a reasonable thing to do and never failed any of the skill checks along the way to make the trail go cold) is... nothing. You still just have to go to the house you're told to investigate at the beginning of the story, find the secret room with the undead wizard in it, and stab him in the face. That's seriously the whole thing.


The mystery is not very deep.

Essentially, I think we're looking at an adventure which is intentionally scalable in time. Since every single piece of evidence goes absolutely nowhere and is just a red herring, the adventure suggests simply adding or subtracting stuff as required to fill the evening. But ultimately, I think this pretty much sent a lot of Call of Cthulhu players in a direction that the authors obviously didn't want them to go: brutal hack and slash. While the game repeatedly tells you that you are supposed to find clues and track down leads, the way you actually solve this adventure is by searching for secret doors and stabbing a zombie in the face. In short, while it's supposed to break you out of your D&D habits, it actually reinforces them by trolling you with useless crap until you go back to the old standbys of poking things with a ten foot pole and shooting monsters with your crossbow.


This wasn't the message they were trying to send... but it's the message they did send.

AncientH:

There's some other stuff that bears mentioning. For one, one of the placed tomes is the Liber Ivonis (a Latin translation of the Book of Eibon), which is a fairly decent tome (even in the crappy version presented here with no spells), and it's not the only sanity-sapping book in here either, which is kind of weird for an introductory adventure. Two, the roll to flirt with the librarian is (APP x 3 or Credit Rating roll), which makes me wonder what she does on the side.

Third and finally, "The Haunted House"/"The Haunting" ties in to a not-inconsiderable amount of fan material, usually tying it into different campaigns or sidequests or sequels. Because that's a thing Call of Cthulhu players do.



Edge of Darkness


There are actually a lot of things called “Edge of Darkness.”

FrankT:

This is an 8 page story, made that long because there are really a lot of handouts and journal entries for players to read. The basic structure is pretty much the same as that of the previous one: there's a house with a monster in it and you're supposed to get rid of the monster. Very much unlike the previous adventure, the various investigations you can do can result in the investigators getting rid of the monster through a very long and railroady ritual. And you might want to do that, because the monster in the attic is immune to physical weapons and is generally a lot more dangerous than the undead wizard from the previous scenario. Also it is backed up by some zombie mooks once shit gets real.


This is explicitly a reference to this adventure.

However, if you search the house you find a magic item that forces the monster into corporeal form and then you can kill it with guns and swords. So the D&D treatment totally works here too. And honestly, I'm not sure what lessons you're supposed to learn if you try the D&D approach and it doesn't work. It really seems like if they wanted this whole “investigation” thing to be a thing, that they should begin by not telling you exactly where the boss monster is. If the investigators already know magic, they can seriously just skip to the end and have a big fight in the dungeon farmhouse. Also they should probably have any of the NPCs you can interrogate know anything useful – that would probably help as well.

AncientH:

One of the go-to hooks for this adventure is that you're a relative of <X>, where <X> is seriously any recently dead or soon-to-be-deceased blood relation. It can get absolutely ridiculous how many uncles and great uncles in the family tree die during any given CoC campaign, especially considering the amount of Mythos shit said relatives get up to and leave to you to sort the fuck out. You get to the point where you think you're either cursed, a descendant of a line of really incompetent wizards, or they all secretly hate you.


Don't worry son, when you die you'll inherit the house and everything in it...including this corpse, it's ghost, and the slug-monster in the basement.

This adventure introduces the Brotherhood of the Dark Pharaoh, aka the Dark Brotherhood. This is a quasi-Egyptian style cult devoted to Nyarlathetop in his guise as the Black Pharaoh. It's one of the interesting little additions to the Mythos that Chaosium has made over the years, since most of the cults in Mythos stories go unnamed or are vanquished PDQ by the end: the BotDF are one of the cults with staying power that crop up again and again in CoC scenarios.

More or less this, with more murder and less sodomy.

FrankT:

A vast conspiracy?

The scenario suggests ways to tie it into the previous scenario, and ways to tie it into future adventures. There are a bunch of loose ends, which the keeper could potentially pick up and run with. Or not, you know, whatever.

For an introductory adventure, this sort of thing is actually really useful: there are definitely ways to expand this adventure into a campaign if that's what you want to do. But there isn't really any clear indication of where such a campaign might go. There are forty year old murders in New Orleans that are unsolved and um... yeah. I can't tell if this is the authors attempting to inspire keepers to write their own plots or simple laziness.

AncientH:

Bit of both, I suspect. This scenario also ties into Lovecraft (surprise!) by including the Miskatonic University library and Dr. Armitage from The Dunwich Horror.


Our hero.

The Madman


Unfortunately not this.

FrankT:

This is a 3 page micro-adventure. There are Mi-Go on top of a mountain trying to summon Ithaqua the Great Old One, and a modestly hard core drunkard that the Mi-Go have conned into helping them do it. This is basically another D&D style adventure. Indeed, it's even more so, because not only is there absolutely nothing to learn by following any leads, but every night you don't charge up the mountain and blow up the Mi-Go at the top with extreme face stabbing they have a 20% chance of successfully summoning a kaiju that promptly murders everyone in the valley including the investigators. So not only does fucking around looking for “clues” and performing an “investigation” not have any payoff at all, doing anything other than playing it as a dungeon crawl is playing russian roulette.

Ithaqua getting called is... bad.

AncientH:

There's not a lot to this adventure, but it does tend to highlight a) how bug-shit insane the Mi-Go are in every appearance, and b) how often Lovecraftian tropes like "grizzled, half-made town drunk" get recycled.



Dead Man Stomp


This character was partially inspired by this adventure, and is probably the best thing to come out of this book.

FrankT:

The final scenario is 9 pages long, which is longer than any of the others. It is also the only scenario in this book that cannot be solved by the simple D&Desque expedient of going to the dungeon introduced at the beginning and killing all the monsters until they are dead. On the most superficial level, Dead Man Stomp is about jazz and zombies.


Not really, no.

On a deeper level, the magic elements are pretty much incidental to this story, and Dead Man Stomp is more of a brooding mood piece about racism and jazz culture in the 1920s. There are some descriptive and interesting set pieces, but I honestly think this would have made a better short fiction piece than an RPG scenario. It's extremely linear, and there aren't really a lot of places for the investigators to make decisions or impact the proceedings. People die and rise from the dead at predetermined times no matter what the players do, the gangsters automagically escape until the final setpiece battle, and the players are required by law to be in certain places in a certain order so they can watch the cut scenes.

Ultimately, I'm not sure that having a discussion about racism and 1920s Negro culture is something that people are prepared to do with only 9 pages of material to work with.

AncientH:

Still, this is more than it actually gets discussed anywhere else in this book. We haven't even gotten to the "How to roleplay the 1920s" bit yet. Considering that Call of Cthulhu generally approaches "Wow, people were surprisingly more racist and misogynist and generally bigoted back then." with "Okay, well...yeah, you might not want to roleplay that." it's actually somewhat interesting to have a bit in the book to show that you can totally address those topics.


Alan Moore also addressed this in Neonomicon. He gets some shit for this comic, and not just because of the gratuitous Deep One penis. To be fair, he did it mostly to pay off a massive tax debt.

FrankT:

I bring up the “impale” rules a lot because they come up a lot. This adventure describes the impale rules again, and this is the only time there's really an example of how exactly it works. I'm not sure this is what the other rules meant by “two damage rolls for that attack are made,” but according to the example in this adventure you roll twice as many dice and double the base damage. The rules text is quite ambiguous, and there is no way to know that the explanation (if such it is) should be found 210 pages later in a throwaway comment in a sample adventure, but that's how this game rolls.

AncientH:

The other major hook of this scenario is that it gives your investigator an excuse to call up Louis Armstrong. No, really.


Satchmo.

I've been pretty quiet about these adventures because, well, they all highlight the general problem with CoC adventures. In Scooby Doo, you figure out the mystery as the ghoulies chase Shaggy and Scooby around during blunt-breaks and then when they're conveniently tied up, you unmask them and have a good chuckle as the police take them away to be ass-raped in some hick country jail. In Call of Cthulhu...okay, you've figured out there's a shoggoth in the basement. Now what?



But it's not the "and then" part that gets most CoC scenario writers - it's the lead up. Clues either tend to fall out in front of players or be so obscure that you could seriously spend half the game macking on the librarian before you get to the "real" lead buried in the pile of stuff. The "correct" actions are often bizarre and idiosyncratic, and keep in mind that you have no idea at the outset if anybody in the group has the right skills - seriously, how many starting characters have Latin or Middle Egyptian? - and none of them really have a solid hook to get involved in the scenarios. It's taken as given that they're a group of independent investigators looking into...something...because...some reason. The whole logistics of "What do we get out of it?" or the existential "Why are we even here?" are almost never addressed outside of a fairly abrupt "Dying relative has called you to their bedside."

Well, fuck your wrinkled ass, why didn't you tell me about the immortal sorcerer in the basement years ago? It's like radon, if you ignore it isn't just going to go away! Now where did you leave the dynamite?

[Laertes]

I've played through Dead Man Stomp. It's fun as a period piece and worked well enough because the GM was good at her job, but it's extremely railroady and treats the PCs as spectators much of the time.

[Red_Rob]

Clues either tend to fall out in front of players or be so obscure that you could seriously spend half the game macking on the librarian before you get to the "real" lead buried in the pile of stuff.

This seems like an easy trap to fall into when creating a "mystery" scenario. Either you telegraph the clues and the game turns into a breadcrumb trail where the players just go from place to place following the obvious leads, or you make it more obscure and risk the players missing a vital link. Are there any scenarios you think have walked this line well?

[mlangsdorf]

The best advice I've seen was in GURPS Mysteries:

Have a long breadcrumb trail of obvious clues, and provide shortcuts that skip multiple scenes if the players figure out the obscure stuff. There's always a next place to go, but an obscure link lets you get to the eventual pay-off faster/better prepared.

[name_here]

The advice I've heard is to have three clues for each step of uncovering the mystery; odds are good the players will find at least one of them.

[Username17]

I think the best advice you can get from the sample adventures here is: have some alternate pathways available. Probably the best structured in here is Edge of Darkness, which gives a bunch of journal entries to read that pretty much spell everything out. It's really a very simple mystery and it gives you more than enough clues to solve it all if you go the route of translating the Middle Egyptian text before venturing into the farmhouse. And if you go into the farmhouse without having done that, it still throws you a magic item that turns the monster corporeal so you can solve it the old fashioned way with guns.

However, the big pitfall of course is that translating the hieroglyphics takes a lot of time, and things become pretty time dependent once you open the front door of house. So if you decide to go check out the old farmhouse and then you either don't find or don't successfully identify the Powder of Ibd-Gazi before you decide to force your way into the attic - everyone fucking dies with no save. That's a pretty major adventure failure if the investigators decide to do a first pass on the house before reading the journals and then go through the house from top to bottom instead of bottom to top.

And that, I think, is the adventure with the fewest failure points. The Madman can bad end in the night of day one with the investigators having canvassed the town (learning nothing) and then having the Fungi from Yuggoth succeed at their Call Great Old One check. That's fucked.



You can't plan for everything, obviously. But a mystery scenario necessitates a bit of free action on the part of the player characters. And that means that your adventure should at least cover the most plausible flowchart directions of character actions. Neither "checking the house" nor "checking the diary" should go directly to "bad end." That's stupid.

-Username17

[Longes]

Hah. There's a Call of Cthulhu (RPG) joke in Nyarko-san.

-I thought you'd be like other monsters - with tentacles, or nauseous vapors.
-I can be, if you want to. But your sanity points might suffer.

[Ancient History]

There's a lot of them.

[GâtFromKI]

I played CoC at several point in the past. As far as I remember, the game plays as such:

1/ The Keeper tells you to roll a bunch of attribute for some reason.

2/ The Keeper tells you to forget what you've rolled, because attribute are useless anyway. The second or third time you play CoC, you skip steps 1 and 2.

3/ The Keeper gives you a sheet with 50+ skills and tells you you have to distribute 320 points. You stare at him to see if he's serious, and what's the point of this bullshit if your character die during the intro scene as the ad says.

4/ Now that everyone is done. Something strange happens; the investigators investigate.

5/ Since they fail at every roll, they don't find anything: no clue, no info from a NPC, no info in books, nothing.

6/ When they don't have anything else to investigate, they say "screw you guys, I'm going home".

7/ Several day latter, they read in the newspaper that something horrible happened. It may or may not be related to the strange thing at the beginning.

8/ The end.


Once, I played a very good one-shot labeled "CoC". At the end of the game, the MC explained he didn't use any of the rules (be it skill, sanity, or anything else), because the rules are a pile of shit and would have prevented him to make a good game. So whatever.


I think CoC is the worse game I ever played. I have never understand the enthusiasm around it.

[TheFlatline]

Clues either tend to fall out in front of players or be so obscure that you could seriously spend half the game macking on the librarian before you get to the "real" lead buried in the pile of stuff.

This seems like an easy trap to fall into when creating a "mystery" scenario. Either you telegraph the clues and the game turns into a breadcrumb trail where the players just go from place to place following the obvious leads, or you make it more obscure and risk the players missing a vital link. Are there any scenarios you think have walked this line well?

I'll repost my mini-essay on conspiracy/investigation adventures, written from a 2 year or so Dark Heresy campaign that was probably 75% investigation.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=387323#387323

My best addendum is that if you need a clue to reach the players to continue never make it contingent on a roll.

I'd almost refrain from figuring out where the clues lie and let players come up with their best ideas. If they come up with a lead to follow and you think it's appropriate to drop a clue in there, do it. If not, and it was a good idea, leave a big fat arrow pointing to another lead that will have the clue.

The more players get told "yes" or are rewarded in an investigation, the more creative they'll get.

Also be ready for them to figure out your big mystery on like 2 clues. Seriously. Players are often brilliant when you expect them to be ignorant.

[Harshax]

I'll repost my mini-essay on conspiracy/investigation adventures, written from a 2 year or so Dark Heresy campaign that was probably 75% investigation.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=387323#387323

I think this might have been how I stumbled on to this forum. Can't remember, been lurking for a while.

[Ancient History]

Utilities
A Guide to Lovecraft Country

We've been gone for a while, so it's time for the Reanimator Dance Mix.


Sure Feels Like It

FrankT:

The “Utilities” chapter is different from the “References” chapter in that it comes later in the book. Fuck, one of the subsections in the Utilities chapter is actually named “References.” It's forty pages long and made of the kind of random collections of essays, charts, and additional rules that every other chapter (except the scenarios) is made of. There are a total of nine subsections, but the book claims there are ten because the typesetter erroneously believes that the book's Index is part of this chapter. I don't know how you can be on the third revision of a fifth edition of a book without someone at some point explaining the difference between an index and a text body, but here we are.



The first subsection is just four pages long and is a cramped set of obsessive fan notes about when and where various Lovecraft stories set in the fictional city of Arkham occurred. There's a map and a timeline, and neither quite line up with other fan maps or timelines. I don't know which one is most accurate and honestly I don't much care. None of these are “official” and none ever can be. As obsessive fan rants go, this one is probably more useful than most. I have no problem with its inclusion, but of course I am totally at a loss to explain why it is where it is in the book rather than somewhere else.

These days, Arkham tends to look like this.

AncientH:

Lovecraft did actually sketch out a street plan of Arkham once, for lulz, and this one is a bit more...twisty? Seriously though, the general assumption of Call of Cthulhu is that you're playing in Lovecraft Country, in the same region of Arkham and Dunwich and Innsmouth (which are the most that most bodies can name, because they forget about Kingsport and Dean's Corners and whatnot). It's very much a licensed RPG feel to it, and to Chaosium's credit they did later on do well to expand on these settings, with books on Miskatonic University and Dunwich and whatnot, until you get the impression of a region steeped in strange goings-on, where nobody will blink at the rampant inbreeding and no gentlemanly person will mention madam's webbed fingers and the suggestion of gills, because those are real pearls on that necklace.

...which is another way to say, this isn't an effort to build a real working setting any more than D&D does in its main book. This is just a starting point to help gamemasters flesh out their own stories set in Lovecraft Country.

Optional Rules: Vehicle Chases

Start your engines. Yes, I'm aware that is a rowboat. Start them anyway.

FrankT:

The table of contents and the page headers both call this four page subsection “Traveling: Land, Sea, and Air,” but there's no section heading for that. Most of this is taken up by chase rules. You may recall that the rules section didn't really have rules for movement or chases, and instead merely gave some high concept advice on how such a ruleset might look once it was completed. These chase rules are kindof based on that advice. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use these vehicle chase rules, and going through them now it's easy to see why. It's a circus.




The first thing you note is that the “relative speed” discussed in these rules are not remotely the same as the speed values discussed elsewhere in the book. I thought they might just be the regular movements divided by 10 and rounded off, but no. They are totally arbitrary values and only assigned to a small number of things – a smattering of vehicles from various decades and some of the monsters. Extremely notably: I don't think “human on foot” is on the list at all. Even for those things that are listed, I don't really know what they are talking about in most instances. There's an entry for “Harley D Motorcycle” but I haven't the slightest idea which motorcycle is supposed to be in the list. Very notably, Harley Davidson did exist in the 1920s, so maybe they are talking about the old models? But there's also an 18-wheeler on the list (which to my knowledge did not exist before 1934) and a Taurus (which was introduced in 1986), so maybe they are referencing the “modern” versions. But which modern versions would they be talking about? When this book came out, “Cthulhu Now” was already thirteen years old. They could plausibly be talking about “modern” motorcycles from the early eighties or late nineties. No way to tell.

So this little chase mini-game doesn't play nice with the rest of the game and is so limited in its offerings that it's hard to imagine a circumstance where you could use it as-is to represent anything happening in a game. But it could still have been useful, I suppose, had it been tight enough and explicable enough that people could write their own material. But... that wasn't happening either. What little space there is is given over to bizarrely specific maneuvers and completely asspulled modifiers. So “Bootlegger Reverse” forces you to make a drive skill at -25 percentiles, while shooting from “2 car lengths” away forces you to halve your firearms skill.

AncientH:

Modifiers to percentiles seems like such an obvious part of the Call of Cthulhu rules, some fiddly change to represent the proportional ease or difficulty of a given action, that you might be surprised to remember that they're actually not part of the fundamental ruleset. They are, in fact, part of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay ruleset which also used percentile skills to a degree, but in CoC there's nothing in general about percentile modifiers at all - it's always something specific buried in some subparagraph somewhere.

FrankT:

And of course if you actually had to make driving rolls during a chase you were extremely likely to fail. If you failed, you were extremely likely to have one of your horses die (don't ask). And of course, you were also extremely likely to have your car blow up.


These chase rules are unusable and almost always end up with everything on fire.

Just for fun, I rolled up rolling a Taurus, and it seriously called for 20 rolls on a chart that gave out six separate 10% chances of the gas tank exploding, which it did.

Anyway, the final page of this section has a chart that tells you how many nautical miles it is from the Panama Canal to various places. I have no words.

Costs, Equipment, and Services by Time Period



You have your services, I have mine.

AncientH:

They really should have just issued everyone a copy of the 1920 Sears & Roebuck catalog.

FrankT:

This seven page equipment and services list is just a list with prices. I genuinely have no idea what year they are using for “modern” because of the aforementioned problem where this book came out more than a decade after the “modern day” sourcebook came out.

Like the equipment list in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, they are just lists, with no further information. So if you aren't entirely sure what's being described by a “coil spring animal trap” I guess you can just go fuck yourself. Honestly, I think this all ends up being rather less than worthless.

AncientH:

Which, t'be fair, was fairly typical for RPGs...back in the '80s. The massive equipment bloat, and the desire for actual information as to what equipment does and looks like, is part of the reason that Shadowrun turned into a Shopper's Guide to the 2050s and the longest part of character generation was spending your money on gold chain cyberware. Shadowrun did, in fact, not invent the book full of new crap for your character to buy, but they may well have perfected it. Chaosium never quite got that far; but at least they could always argue that you could just look up what the price really was back in 1927 and use that.

References for Keepers and Players

Someday someone will create a web site with thousands of annotated titles contributed by hundreds of people, but these will have to do for now. For more references, see the Resources pages near the front of this book

They might have mentioned the “References” chapter, which was nominally 124 pages of exactly this sort of information. But whatever.

FrankT:

This is a two page bibliography written in opaque and tiny scrawl. Some of their suggestions are fairly odd, such as pointing you towards Jane's Fighting Aircraft. Not that it's a bad book or anything, but what the fuck? How is any of the material in that book going to be at all useful in a Call of Cthulhu game? Seriously, it's a book about the combat aircraft used by various national airforces. AncientHistory is a much better judge than I am of whether the various Necronomicon Press books of Lovecraft lore are good or bad, so I guess I'll let him take it from here.

AncientH:

The list is rubbish. It's a wishlist for books that even the authors cannot afford, and would not buy if they could. Even if you could afford the Jane's guide series, you're not going to sit down and read it, and you're sure as hell not going to try and use any of that shit in the game. Most of these are encylopedias, almanacks, and writer's guides. The Necronomicon Press stuff is useful, to literati, but even when this book came out I'm fairly certain they were out of print and hard to find, and today they go for up to US$100 for a fifty-page index to a set of books that cost you at least US$500. It's rather like if the Player's Handbook recommended that you bone up on strange cults by picking up the original works of Aleister Crowley, the Pearl of Great Price, and the twelve-volume version of Frazer's The Golden Bough (which, at the very least, will give you a bonus to your occult skill after five weeks of study.)



Cthulhu Supplements

Call of Cthulhu has a lot books.

FrankT:

This is just a one-page ad for other books. It's not a complete listing of Call of Cthulhu products, but it very nearly fills the page, so I guess that is why they stopped when they did. I basically find it to be in bad taste to put ads in the body of the text of an RPG. That shit pretty much flies in magazines, because the format is already expected to be an intermingling of articles, advertisements, and possibly pornography (depending on the type of magazine). But in a reference book like an RPG, that is over the fucking line. This particular advertisement suggests that you check out Wizard's Attic. Under no circumstances would that be a good idea.

AncientH:

I've bitched about Wizard's Attic. I will not do so again. I will, however, plug my Mythos comic book collection:

Which is about as useful, and tells all the geek girls what a massive penis I must have.

Timelines

I don't know either.

FrankT:

Coming in at 9 pages, the Timelines section is the longest section in this chapter and among the longest sections in the book. It is pretty much just line after line of small font text, so it may well have the most words of any section. It's... a context-free list of events that happened in the last hundred years and change. It's split into three sections: a timeline of various disasters that happened, a timeline of various weird shit, and a different timeline of various weird shit.

I guess the idea is that you can use this to generate plot seeds for whatever year you're playing in. Or something. It goes from 1890 to 1999, and obviously is in way too little detail to be much use for that. I mean, these aren't even wikifacts, they are often literally things like “Artificial diamonds.” Seriously, that's one of the five entries for 1957 in its entirety in the second timeline.

AncientH:

You get this in some CoC supplements. I don't know why. Well, that's a lie, I do know why: it's page bloat, and it presents Fortean events that can be referenced in a game, but it's really just an abbreviated slice of history that could have come out of a third-rate textbook. It has no place in the game, it isn't really relevant to any of the Mythos shenanigans in the book...it's just the kind of filler crap which, sadly, many CoC books tend to specialize in.

FrankT:

Obviously, if you actually wanted to play in any of these eras, you'd want and need to do more research than looking at this list. This list is more like listening to We Didn't Start The Fire or It's The End of the World As We Know It than it is like an actual historical aid. About the only thing that you might really do with this is go through the lists until you see something that intrigues you enough to decide you want to read more about occultism in 1910 because blood fell from the sky in South America and the Boy Scouts of America were founded.



But that's really kind of a stretch. Mostly I think we could have spent nine pages discussing any actual part of the setting or providing rules for something. Fucking hell.

AncientH:

Okay, there's not much left in this book - some cartoons, character sheets, tables, and the index - but I think we're going to do a wrap-up post. Stay tuned.

[Ancient History]

Utilities

Musically, we're going to end with the opening to Haiyore! Nyaruko-San

Comic


Something like this would have been better. Also, extremely common.

FrankT:

The “comic” is two pages of self-congratulatory horse shit claiming that Call of Cthulhu is totally deadly and totally different from other RPGs. This comic probably did more for Call of Cthulhu's reputation than anything actually written in the book, because as we've already established: almost none of the fans actually read this fucking thing and it wouldn't have done them much good if they had.

The basic structure is that the first panel claims “Call of Cthulhu is the only game where...” and then it lists off a bunch of attributes. Most of these attributes are things that can be found in other games, and almost none of the attributes are ones that Call of Cthulhu actually has. For example, it claims that the most experienced characters have the highest movement rates – something which is actually true for many RPGs (either because movement rates level up or because movement rates are very important for succeeding as a character for whatever reason) – but of course Call of Cthulhu doesn't have variable movement rates for player characters. Hell, Call of Cthulhu doesn't have movement rules, full fucking stop. It also claims that characters don't get combat skills in Call of Cthulhu, which is just fucking bullshit. Crap like that.

Basically, this comic was thrown around a lot as a way to “introduce players” to the game, which in turn caused a whole shit tonne of people to think that Call of Cthulhu was a much different game from what is actually written in. Despite, or perhaps because of it coming very late in the book, this comic got a lot more eyeballs than any of the actual rules, and to this day you'll see a lot of Call of Cthulhu fans who apparently claim to play this game regularly yet simultaneously claim to believe descriptions about how the game works from this comic that are demonstrably false. Since so much of a cooperative storytelling game is simply sculpted gobs of mind caulk, false advertising often makes itself true in practice. Like how people came by to tell us that Scion was a great game despite the fact that Scion isn't actually a finished product and literally cannot be played.

AncientH:

There's a lot to bitch about as we come to the end of the book, but I'll go with: why this? I mean, we already established about a dozen pages back that Chaosium had put out over a dozen supplements and adventures. Couldn't they rip off...well, something else? Something more useful? Probably.

All I can think of is that Chaosium has been so dedicated to maintaining essentially the same ruleset for so long, they didn't want to "fuck up" and accidentally introduce anything in the core book that invalidated one of the products from yesteryear that they were still fucking selling people...and admittedly, they weren't entirely alone on that point. Shadowrun 2nd edition made very minimal changes to the Street Samurai Catalog and the Grimoire supplements to update them to the new ruleset; the books are otherwise identical - you could have covered the changes with an errata sheet. But Chaosium has always taken that to another place entirely, steadfastly remaining mired in a dinosaur of a ruleset for decades despite the glaring flaws in it, and despite the manifold errors and omissions in the setting material. It really is the fish that absolutely refused to evolve, even as its living space shrunk because it couldn't compete.

Ready to Play Investigators


Also ready to die.

FrankT:

So far, the game has angrily refused to actually tell you what any skill level is supposed to mean or what skill levels you're expected to have. It's the preparation of the kind of denial-in-depth that defenders of the system tend to engage in – since the game never comes clean about what any of the numbers mean, you're not allowed to criticize the numbers for being terribly terribly stupid. It's a bullshit argument, but I've had it a bunch of times.

Anyway, the sample characters are really the game's last chance to tell you what a character is supposed to look like and how all this shit is supposed to work. Despite being on page 274, it's also one of the book's first chances, because one of the few page citations in the entire book is near the beginning of the character creation section telling you to look here. It's actually not very helpful. The character sheets aren't complete (both in the sense that they haven't spent all their skill points and in the sense that the basic character sheet fills a page and these are only half a page because they leave off stuff), and in some cases I'm not even sure what their in-game profession was supposed to be. The very first character has a 95% in her core skill (credit rating), and her combat skill of choice is at 60% before spending special interest skill points – so anything and everything you hear about min/maxing being not-encouraged in this game is a fucking lie from the start.

They provide 2 characters from the 1890s, 4 characters from the 1920s, and 2 characters from the 1990s. This all takes only four pages because as mentioned earlier these characters aren't complete in any way. They don't even have the sort of minimalist in media res backstories found on the back of an Arkham Horror character sheet.

Something like this would have been so much better.

AncientH:

The only thing you have to compare these to is the NPCs from a couple chapters back, and half of those included joke skills. I'm a big fan of examples in RPGs, because they give players and gamemasters an idea of the possible - ways to think outside the box but within the ruleset, so to speak. I could easily see a sort of PACKS thing working for Chaosium, based on profession and social background, which might actually be useful. These...aren't.

FrankT:

It's difficult to really get across how horrible these things are. Even these deliberately incomplete partial character sheets have over two hundred numbers on them. That's not a joke or an exaggeration for effect. The most important part of the character sheet is the skills, and the 1890s investigators have 46 of them plus blank spaces for skills not everyone has (like the all-important “read ancient language” and special combat skills). You can't make a Call of Cthulhu character sheet with a pencil and some lined paper. You can't even remember all the skills. Geology, Archaeology, History, and Anthropology are all separate skills, but Botany is part of Biology while Medicine is not. Good fucking luck with that. [AH Note: I've also seen Botany listed as a separate skill.]

For a game like this, you'd really want to have some sort of “make your own science discipline” system not unlike Shadowrun 4's Background Skills. But they didn't do that. There's a fixed list of skills, but they only tell you about enough of them that it's far too long a list for you to reasonably remember what they all are, let alone what they can do. It really does sit in the valley of minimum usability.

AncientH:

It's a fixed list of skills when anybody remembers that. As I think we've established, Call of Cthulhu is very much a game of the mind, and the game that the players play and the designers design and the scenarists...er...scenariate...aren't all the same fucking game. There's no guidelines for making an NPC, so Keepers and adventure writers are free to give them whatever stats and skills that they want. You can't even intuit limits with that kind of thing. If you have the brass cojones to write that your character has a bag of German potato-mashers they brought back from the war...well, who is to say they don't have that? There's nothing in the rules about that sort of shit at all. You've got some starting cash and a laundry list of undefined equipment, but money is handled so obliquely, the only reason that's in there is because of gaming instincts left over from D&D and RuneQuest.

This reminds me, if nothing else, of those people that write scenarios and character generation rules specifically for convention play. It's all fast and loose, until you get to the part where the guy or gal running the game gets to a part where they remembered (or wrote) the rules, and then they mechanic you to death with them. Restrictions on characters are made to suit the Keeper's vision of the game, not what the players want to play. It's not a good system, and it doesn't breed good playing habits.

Monster Master


I'd like to say that the stuff in the book is less gay porn than this, but it's honestly hard to tell.

FrankT:

This six page section is supposedly called “Charts & Forms” according to the table of contents, but it doesn't actually have a heading labeled that per se. The first form is called the “Monster Master” and combined with the book's lack of labeling the section anything else, that's what you'd assume the section was called if you were just reading it straight.

I'm not actually sure what the Monster Master form is for. It's like an abbreviated character sheet for monsters, with three more character sheets for “Minions” that are even more abbreviated. This is the kind of thing that like 4th edition D&D did, where monsters had simple character sheets and minions had even simpler ones. But um... this game isn't 4th edition D&D. In fact, I have no idea what the abbreviated monster or minion rules might be, because I am fucking positive that they weren't written up anywhere in this book.

Then you have “full” character sheets for each of the three eras. The 1920s character sheet has over fifty skills listed on it in addition to blank spaces for writing new ones. That's considerably more than are listed on the earlier incomplete sample characters from that era, but I'll be fucked if I'm going to do a line item comparison to figure out what's missing.

And for no particular reason, the section ends with a half page sample telegraph form from World Wide Telegraph. I don't think that's a real thing, which seems odd because it doesn't seem like it would have been that hard to dredge up a form for the American Telegraph Company or something.

AncientH:

I don't know. If someone told me this was filler from the days when people laid out these books by hand, I would believe them.

Play Aids


In case you need aids.

FrankT:

Page 284 and 285 are a set of quick look-up rules, like you might see on the back of a DM screen for that other game. Their choices of what rules you might have to look up in a hurry are somewhat... opaque. First off, despite not being about dungeon crawls and stuff, almost the whole thing is taken up with special damage situations. Poison, acids, falling, that sort of thing. The stuff that isn't basically look-up tables for trap damage is mostly filled up with those incredibly shitty random insanity effects tables we were complaining about earlier and which even this book's reference section seems to believe you will not want to use.


Imagine something like this, but smaller and less helpful.

The remaining little bits include some doodles of some of the mystic symbols in the setting and also an announcement of which skills fit into which “skill categories.” Having just finished reading this entire book, I don't actually recall there being any skill categories. And I'm almost positive that if it was ever mentioned, they don't make any difference. So I think like a sixth of one of the sides of the quick reference sheet is taken up by a reference to a relic rule from a different edition or a proto-rule they never even bothered fleshing out.

AncientH:

If I'm getting a little short here, it's because the headache meds are kicking in and I'm getting drowsy. The long story short on the back of the book is that all the charts and tables and stuff are back here because that's how people remember it was done back in D&D and RuneQuest, but they don't remember why it was done. It's tradition all the way...and that could pretty much sum up the approach to this entire book. It's a rote exercise, not a creative one; there is no try, only do what has only been done before.

FrankT:

And that's the book. What follows is the Index, which as previously noted is something that the book seems to believe is part of this chapter, but obviously isn't because that's not how books work.



Wrapup

AncientH:

OKay, at this point we've been bashing this book for...weeks...and by comparison the entire game and company and fans. But I don't think the fans themselves are entirely to blame. There is a lot of fun to be had playing the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and the RPG has been in its own way hugely influential in introducing Lovecraft and the Mythos to pop culture. There's nothing inherently wrong with people liking the game, and writing new material for it, or revisiting the old classic campaigns.

But at the same time, you do have to look at the game for what it is, and it's not pretty. It's a product of its time, and it has aged very badly - like comparing comics from the 1950s to the comics of the 2010s, you're going to recognize it's the same medium and even some of the same characters, but the whole tone and feel and quality are incomparable. Even by the 1980s standards, Call of Cthulhu was a poorly designed game - it got by on the appeal of the licensed universe, and in a very real way it's been coasting on that ever since. The fundamental disconnect between the game people play and the actual rules is very strongly apparent after only a short time, simply because nobody plays this game as written - even the game itself isn't internally consistent on many points.

FrankT:

I am honestly amazed at how bad this book is. Back when I played this game, I kind of assumed that we were playing something with more substance. I didn't really know all the rules, but I thought that the other people I was playing with did. Obviously, this was not the case because the rules I didn't know just plain fucking didn't exist. We were basically playing magical teaparty and to the extent play was in any way structured it was held together with mind caulk and the personal charisma of our keeper. This is exactly as disappointing as rewatching a horror movie that scared me as a child – only now it's a lack of rules and organization rather than cheesy special effects and bad acting.

Call of Cthulhu isn't even a game. It's a pile of essays and design specs requesting that a game be made. In the meantime, people are basically just supposed to tell each other scary stories and ad hoc a game-like structure while doing so.

I'm not surprised or even offended that this is what Call of Cthulhu looked like in the early eighties, but the fact that it was still coming out with editions that were were still like that years after I outgrew the “game” is beyond comprehension.

AncientH:

I can't say the game is still like this, because the 7th edition - while not released released yet, was sent out to the kickstarter backers a couple weeks ago, and I know that they brought some new people on board to fiddle with the dice mechanics, which set many an old fan's teeth on edge. I don't have high hopes for it, but I have some small hopes for it, because in looking at v5.3 vs v6 - well, the rules and content might not have changed, but someone at least dumped it into a PDF file and updated the layout. That was a big shift, at least in terms of CoC, and there have been some actual playable games based on CoC that have been released in the last few years so maybe...just maybe...7th edition will be where CoC should have been about fifteen years ago. I don't have high hopes, though.

FrankT:

The Mythos genuinely has legs. The basic concept of horror that is completely divorced from religious themes tied into an occult that honestly doesn't care about you at all is truly compelling. But Call of Cthulhu is a genuinely bad game. It didn't stand out as especially bad in the eighties, but only because the competition was just generally worse. In the nineties and especially in this century it's just ridiculous. Now, many people have been enticed by the call of Call of Cthulhu and decided that what they needed to do was to make their own game based on it. And that's where we get stuff like Cthulhutech and Unknown Armies – but the fact is that these games are also terrible. Call of Cthulhu is simply a bad foundation upon which to try to build a game. There was a time when RPGs were young and nobody knew any better that this wasn't terribly apparent, but decades have passed and no one has any fucking excuse anymore.

A game like Call of Cthulhu, or rather a game like what Call of Cthulhu wants to be is certainly something that people want. That's probably why Call of Cthulhu keeps not going away despite being objectively terrible in almost every way it is possible for an RPG to be objectively terrible. But really people just need to nuke this from orbit and start over from scratch. Arkham Horror, which I remind you is a board game, is a much better RPG. You could really just start with Arkham Horror and add narrative elements to it until it was as open ended as Dungeons & Dragons and you'd end up with an RPG that was not only better than the Call of Cthulhu we have, but better than the Call of Cthulhu that we are ever going to get from people attempting to incrementally evolve this unfinished piece of crap.

People want to do horror stories in the early twentieth century. People want to do modern horror stories. People want to fight horror monsters in the science fiction future. These don't necessarily have to be the same game, but if they are ever going to be good they have to start from other systems that work instead of this failtastic BRP garbage.

AncientH:

We do these OSSRs in part because...well, this is a forum about game design. It might have started with us being snarktastic and making fun of old products, but I think it's developed somewhat to the point where we can give some actual insight and analysis to the product. Call of Cthulhu is a big game to do. Not a shelfbuster by any means, but the conceptual space it occupies in RPG is significant - one of those games that White Wolf never really tried to mimic or devour, one that nobody really made a competitive product for, because anything close to CoC was probably just a side-project or altsetting for the game, and even those like CthulhuTech tended to turn out terribad in the end. We do these OSSRs at least in part to look critically at games and see how we would not make the same mistakes, which is an aspect of game design that seems to be sadly lacking in many game designers...including those at Chaosium.

So, I hope that was worth it, and Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

[Red_Rob]

So in the end the game did end up blasting your sanity, just not in the way you'd hoped.

Cthulhu gets by I think because the people that play it aren't really interested in anything more than narrating a creepy tale and occasionally looking at their sheet and seeing a number they need to roll to make something happen. But really it should either go whole-hog rules-lite and cut a load of the cruft, or do a D&D 3e and consolidate all it's various bits into a workable core mechanic and extrapolate the system from there. Currently it's in this no-mans-land where making a character takes ages and involves figuring characteristics and assigning hundreds of points but in play there is almost nothing beyond "roll under your skill".

[virgil]

I got to listen to a guy rant about how Call of Cthulhu had the best, most realistic XP system out of any RPG. It was so hard to bite my tongue.

[Longes]

I got to listen to a guy rant about how Call of Cthulhu had the best, most realistic XP system out of any RPG. It was so hard to bite my tongue.

Please, do retell.

[virgil]

I got to listen to a guy rant about how Call of Cthulhu had the best, most realistic XP system out of any RPG. It was so hard to bite my tongue.

Please, do retell.

Except for a one or two sentence explanation about how getting better at something you're good at should be harder, that's the entirety of his line. I'm sure it could've become more had I interjected, but I couldn't rationally see a positive outcome from such an act.