In addition, Call of Cthulhu added some of its own unique bits to BRP, such as a Sanity rating. By the way, it hits 100% of the time.” This is not D&D where characters are eventually romping their way through the 9 planes of Hell on the way to beat down Sata… sorry, Asmodeus. Some of the other stats for Great Old One profiles didn’t even bother with this shit and just said “If it hits you, you die horribly. If you ever got pinkie-flicked by Mighty Cthulhu, he did something like 22d6 damage, where the maximum human hit point potential was 18. It doesn’t matter how long your character has been adventuring, if some farmer finds you trespassing and levels Ol’ Bessie in your direction, you’d best put your damn hands up and start explaining yourself. A shotgun blast at close range does 4d6 damage, which averages out to about 14 hit points gone. The average character in Call of Cthulhu will have about 12 hit points. No disabling, no ‘on the verge’ or ‘bleeding out’. Also, although BRP does have ‘Hit Points’, they will never increase, and if they drop to zero, your character dies. Your basic attributes (Strength, Dexterity, etc.) will almost never change in the course of play, except perhaps in a negative sense. Even then, there’s a chance you might not increase the skill, especially if you’re already very good at it. All advancement is skill-based, and tied to usage of those particular skills during the game. Anyhow, the point is that I really believe a large part of why Call of Cthulhu remains so popular, with a ruleset largely unchanged from 1981, is because BRP is a very bleak system at its core. The subject of tweaking a generic base to mold a genre is something that could be a blog of its own, and in fact I have a relatively obscure game in mind that could serve as a good demonstration… but that’s for later. Oh, sure, like with any of these setups, there were tweaks for each meant to flavor the generic base… but 30 years later Call of Cthulhu is still active, while I think you’d be hard pressed to find a Superworld campaign. The publisher of the game, Chaosium, designed their Basic Role-Playing (BRP) rules for use with all of the RPGs under their banner, from Superheroes, to Fantasy, to Science Fiction. The ironic thing is that the system Call of Cthulhu runs on is, at its base, the same concept as GURPS or D20. Oh, did I mention mankind in the Cthulhu Mythos is confirmed as doomed, to be eventually replaced by intelligent roaches? Who in their right minds would try to make a role-playing game out of this? Well, unless we cast off the burdens of humanity and sanity and join them in the horror of Understanding. In fact, science itself is suspect, as the “magic” displayed by the Great Old Ones and their minions is said to be nothing more than a form of geometry and engineering we humans cannot hope to understand, any more than a Neanderthal could comprehend a jet engine. Lovecraft’s stories usually centered on cerebral, studious types living in the modern world of 1920s and 1930s America (modern for HPL, since this was when he was writing) that are drawn into a horrifying web of discovery as they realize witches, mutants and monsters really do exist just beneath the veneer of our skeptical, scientific civilization. Often cited as a birthplace (if not the birthplace) of post-gothic horror, the Cthulhu Mythos removed any sense of God from the equation, unless you consider “God” as indistinguishable from a towering, tentacular alien horror that exists in so many dimensions beyond your comprehension that your mind will bleed out your ears just looking at It. Lovecraft (and other authors who expanded on his fiction) concerning the Cthulhu Mythos, a dark concept of a cosmos at best indifferent to mankind, and at worst malevolently dedicated to our enslavement or extinction. Call of Cthulhu (original BRP system)Ĭall of Cthulhu debuted just a handful of years after D&D first started the whole notion of pen and paper tabletop roleplay, but oh what a different beast it was to the hack and slash dungeon crawls preceding it.Ĭall of Cthulhu is based on the works of H.P. So, today I’m going to limit myself to talking of just one of the Role-Playing Game systems that, in my own damned opinion, does a great job of enhancing the experience of its source material. Actually, let me go check on exactly what I promised to do last week. Due to a crippling combination of laziness and WordPress deciding to eat my first draft (choke on it, you buggy bastard!), I am scaling back my ambitions.
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