Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game

Format: Full Color Cover, color Interior, hardcover Page Count: 317 pages Genre: sourcebook Campaign Setting: Call of Cthulhu game setting Developer: Chaosium Inc Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Authors: Monte Cook, John Tynes (from the work by Lynn Willis and Sandy Petersen)  Product Code: 886440000

Overall rating:  4.5/5.

Maybe it's because I have an appreciation for classic horror.  Maybe it's my love of ancient civilizations like Sumer.  Or maybe I'm just developing a thing for tentacled monsters.

Call of Cthulhu is a roleplaying game that throws adventurers'...excuse me..."investigators" square into the slimy pit of chaos with those things that just should not be.  Expanding upon the dark, rich world created by H.P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu provides an adventure where the goal isn't to escape the monster's lair with its treasure, but to escape it with your own sanity in tack.

Instead of character classes, players start off by choosing a profession.  Are you a government agent sent to investigate the strange disappearances in a small town?  An archeologist searching for an ancient artifact in the tombs of Cairo?  A reporter tracking down a story for her newspaper?  A priest trying to save the soul of a not-so-innocent parishioner?  There are 17 choices in all, and each profession has its own set of abilities and key skills.

Most skills will be familiar to d20 players.  The three skills with the most impact in the game are Cthulhu Mythos, Psychic Focus, and Psychoanalysis.  Cthulhu Mythos provides you with information and insight into the strange forces at work in the game.  Unfortunately, you can't buy it with skill points.  You earn ranks by reading tomes or interacting with monsters.  You pay for each rank with the loss of one permanently point from your maximum sanity rating, the ability that prevents you from becoming a pool of blabbering nonsense at the local insane asylum.  Psychic Focus allows you to see things others cannot, as well as take advantage of psychic feats.  Every party needs at least one character with a high psychoanalysis rank, since this is the only skill that can help a character regain loss sanity.

The root of Lovecraftian horror is based in the psychological, how the human mind reacts when confronted with that which should not be.  The game mimics this aspect with Sanity Points.  Sanity points represent how ?stable? a character is and how much control he can maintain over himself.  Encounters with the supernatural, using magical artifacts, and even non-mythos related shocks such as airplane crashes or the death of a loved one eat away at a character?s sanity.  The loss of too many sanity points results in either temporary or permanent insanity effects, from paranoia to becoming catatonic.

Yes, there are spells available.  Over 100 sanity-draining spells are available to those foolish enough to delve so deeply into the mythos.  Even supposedly benevolent spells such as Healing Touch or old stand-bys like True Strike can drive you nuts using them.  But the point of Call of Cthulhu isn't about learning how to cast a fireball to level your enemies, it's about figuring out what the enemy actually is.

And gamemasters will have plenty of other ways to drain away sanity and hit points.  With over two dozen monsters pulled straight out of Lovecraftian literature, templates for cultists, ghosts, and mummies, and even the down-and-dirty stat on everyone's favorite tentacled terror: Cthulhu (the elder god all mind flayers want to grow up to be).

The book is expertly done with easy to follow charts, clear explanations, detailed illustrations, and plenty of quotes from Lovecraft's works.  It is also surprisingly well edited (and we all know the editing in most roleplaying books can be brutal).  Fans of Lovecraft will appreciate the efforts the game developers made to stay true to the mythos.  And jaded gamers burnt out on dragon-hunting and lair looting may find themselves happily unprepared for a new twist on roleplaying.

Just watch out for that first tentacle.

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Reviewed by Julie Ann Dawson

Originally reviewed for Gaming Frontiers Magazine