Call of Cthulhu: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game

Hello!

ILX has many threads on Dungeons & Dragons, and a few on RPGs in general, but none on Call of Cthulhu, which is often called the 2nd most popular RPG in the world (on hand, I have no statistics to back this up). It's currently in its 7th edition though little has changed from the original rule set. Obviously(?) it's a game of "Lovecraftian horror" (whatever that means) and it's set in the 1920s (generally) .

Finally learning how to play and run this game has become one of my quarantine hobbies. Admittedly, I am not great at it, but I'm getting better. The style of game is investigative and the focus is rarely on combat, so it plays quite differently than D&D; I think the game system is also really excellent for this. The combat system, when used, is brutal and efficient, as makes sense when ordinary humans are faced with aliens and unintelligible cosmic entities.

Do we have any other players or fans on ILX? We have played a half-dozen or so independent scenarios since last year, but soon we will embark on our first longterm campaign - Horror On The Orient Express.

I've been trying to talk some friends with a history of RPGing into trying this post-pandemic but "there is no heroism or winning, you just lose your mind" isn't selling them yet.

I think the bit about "you just die or go insane" is a bit overstated. If they're looking for a game in which fighting saves the day, this is not that. If your players aren't into investigation I an understand it being a bit of a hard-sell. That said -- characters die because they do stupid things or make bad decisions -- they are mortal after all! - but in our year of gaming we've had only one character death (a few close calls) and no one has gone permanently insane. And there are definitely moments of victory as well. Not every scenario will have a happy ending, but some will see your players mitigating terror, defeating cultists and/or saving the world.

Love CoC, especially because it has a vibe unique to rpgs. Only Paranoia is kind of similar.

You don't *just* die or go insane - it's all about the slow burn until you die or go insane. Also, CoC is one of the best games for one-shots. It can be liberating knowing you probably won't make it.

My favorite CoC adventure ended with one player, trapped in a secret, closet-like room, blowing his head off with a shotgun as a blob-like entity poured into around his ankles. The other player attempted to ram the house with a dump truck, which plunged into the basement where the blob-like entity resided.

It’s no WFRP.

I remember really enjoying reading Horror on the Orient Express in my mid teens, but I don't think I ever got round to actually GMing it...

Very much my college years RPG, but haven’t played since.

Last week we started the "Horror On The Orient Express" campaign. I think it will be a fun time, though I expect it will take us a LONG time to get through, without even running any of the optional scenarios. We have five players, currently -- a stage magician, a Trinidadian jazz musician, a socialite widow, an antique dealer, and a French-Algerian photographer. I'm not sure who we have stepping in as backups if/when these characters die or go insane.

Any one of you folks played it back in the (gasp) 1990s?

Somehow missed this thread! I became interested in RPGs around 1997, when I was in junior high. That was the same time I started reading Lovecraft, so likely found out about CoC from InQuest magazine (anyone remember that?). I’ve never played it, though—I could never recruit anyone else, and once I got into high school and found other folks into RPGs, D&D 3e swept them all up. Despite that, I had dozens of sourcebooks and made a whole town/campaign setting.

Here’s a trip down memory lane: Chaosium’s website circa 1998, courtesy of archive site The Old Net.

During the pandemic, I had an itch to revisit my youthful dalliances and explored some of the solo Cthulhu supplements. Not quite the same, but entertaining enough.

I played it in the early 80s. Starting up a game with the 7th edition(!) next month.

7th Edition is pretty similar to previous editions with a few adjustment (optional!) to make things easier on the players (spending luck points being the main one.) I hope you enjoy it! It's been great fun for me.

Blatherskite -- I had a subscription to InQuest and read it cover to cover every month. It was sort of torture being a kid with a tiny budget etc when most RPG books were, gosh, i dunnno, $20-25? They're like double that now, but at the time that was a lot of money for 14 year old me. I also had a bunch of games I wanted to play, but pretty much any non-D&D RPG was the off the table. As I mentioned upthread, I just started playing CoC last year and I really love it.

I always wanted to play some of the less-goth World Of Darkness games, like Mage: The Ascension (and it's historical little brother) and Changeling. Never did, though.

Last year, I bought about a run of issues from 1997 and 1998—I couldn’t believe how many of the articles and ads I remembered. It was also amusing to see the card game bubble in full swing. It seemed like everything had a CCG: Babylon 5, Dune, CoC, X-Files...

I also wanted to play Vampire and Mage, had a dozen books at least. I suppose I could easily do so now, with Zoom and all, but the idea of sitting around a table with dice and snacks is so ingrained that I feel like anything less wouldn’t live up to my imagination. I’ll sometimes watch YouTube playthroughs of things like Masks of Nyarlathotep, it’s dorky but endearing to see how all-out some folks go.

blatherskite, I've been running rpgs through discord for several months. While its not as good as sitting around a table, it works amazingly well, especially for something like CoC that isn't rules and combat oriented.

In case y’all want to road trip down memory lane, Chaosium is reprinting (Kickstarter fulfilled) the Call of Cthulhu 2nd edition box set. Two different physical products - one with reprints of old modules and supplements, and another with just what came in the OG box.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chaosium/call-of-cthulhu-classic?ref=checkout_rewards_page

Still playing Horror On The Orient Express -- the team is on their way out of Lausanne and towards Milan and the rising tide of fascism, body horror and madness.

A documentary, then.

I'm not sure I ever actually got round to running that campaign, but I certainly enjoyed reading it.

sleeve to thread?

I always wanted to play this and never got a chance. IIRC, Chaosium put it out originally around the same time they put out Stormbringer. Foolishly, I opted for the latter.

There is a group on YouTube run by a young woman who is an outstanding GM. I can't think of her name off the top of my head.

This starts kinda rocky, but ended up being better than I thought it would...

Cthulhu Standup

Found her, it's

Becca Scott

I was very impressed by this system! The idea of "hard" or "extreme" success, the neat hack of letting you spend luck points to adjust rolls, sanity checks, all pretty cool.

(I played in a game of ian's last night, was the first to die, head crushed by a mummy of some type)