The players take the roles of ordinary people drawn into the realm of the mysterious: detectives, criminals, scholars, artists, war veterans, etc. Often, happenings begin innocently enough, until more and more of the workings behind the scenes are revealed.
As the characters learn more of the true horrors of the world and the irrelevance of humanity, their sanity represented by 'Sanity Points', abbreviated SAN inevitably withers away.
The game includes a mechanism for determining how damaged a character's sanity is at any given point; encountering the horrific beings usually triggers a loss of SAN points. To gain the tools they need to defeat the horrors — mystic knowledge and magic — the characters may end up losing some of their sanity, though other means such as pure firepower or simply outsmarting one's opponents also exist.
CoC has a reputation as a game in which it is quite common for a player character to die in gruesome circumstances or end up in a mental institution. Eventual triumph of the players is not assumed. The original conception of Call of Cthulhu was Dark Worlds , a game commissioned by the publisher Chaosium but never published.
Sandy Petersen contacted them regarding writing a supplement for their popular fantasy game RuneQuest set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands. He took over the writing of Call of Cthulhu , and the game was released in Since Petersen's departure from Chaosium, continuing development of Call of Cthulhu passed to Lynn Willis, credited as co-author in the fifth and sixth editions, and more recently to Paul Fricker and Mike Mason.
The game system underwent only minor rules changes in its first six editions between and ; the current seventh edition, released , includes more significant rules alterations than in any previous release. For those grounded in the RPG tradition, the very first release of Call of Cthulhu created a brand new framework for table-top gaming. Unlike its predecessor games, CoC assumed that most investigators would not survive, alive or sane, and that the only safe way to deal with the vast majority of nasty things described in the rule books was to run away.
A well-run CoC campaign should engender a sense of foreboding and inevitable doom in its players. The style and setting of the game, in a relatively modern time period, created an emphasis on real-life settings, character research, and thinking one's way around trouble. In this work, the characters come upon a secret society's foul plot to destroy mankind, and pursue it first near to home and then in a series of exotic locations.
This template was to be followed in many subsequent campaigns, including Fungi from Yuggoth later known as Curse of Cthulhu and Day of the Beast , Spawn of Azathoth , and possibly the most highly acclaimed, Masks of Nyarlathotep.
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is important not only because it represents the first published addition to the boxed first edition of Call of Cthulhu , but because its format defined a new way of approaching a campaign of linked RPG scenarios involving actual clues for the would-be detectives amongst the players to follow and link in order to uncover the dastardly plots afoot. Its format has been used by every other campaign-length Call of Cthulhu publication.
The standard of CoC scenarios was well received by independent reviewers. The standard of the included 'clue' material varies from scenario to scenario, but reached its zenith in the original boxed versions of the Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express campaigns. Inside these one could find matchbooks and business cards apparently defaced by non-player characters, newspaper cuttings and in the case of Orient Express period passports to which players could attach their photographs, increasing the sense of immersion.
Indeed, during the period that these supplements were produced, third party campaign publishers strove to emulate the quality of the additional materials, often offering separately-priced 'deluxe' clue packages for their campaigns. Additional milieux were provided by Chaosium with the release of Dreamlands , a boxed supplement containing additional rules needed for playing within the Lovecraft Dreamlands, a large map and a scenario booklet, and Cthulhu By Gaslight , another boxed set which moved the action from the s to the s.
In , Chaosium issued the supplement titled Cthulhu Now , a collection of rules, supplemental source materials and scenarios for playing Call of Cthulhu in the present day.
This proved to be a very popular alternative milieu, so much so that much of the supplemental material is now included in the core rule book. Pagan Publishing released Delta Green , a series of supplements originally set in the s, although later supplements add support for playing closer to the present day.
In these, player characters are agents of a secret agency known as Delta Green, which fights against creatures from the Mythos and conspiracies related to them.
Arc Dream Publishing released a new version of Delta Green in as a standalone game, partially using the mechanics from Call of Cthulhu. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
It is the tale of a horrifying underwater monster coming to life and threatening mankind. The story is narrated by Francis Wayland Thurston who recounts to the reader his discovery of various notes that were left behind by his great uncle.
The notes tell, among other things, of a strange cult who worship the Great Old Ones who lived long before there were any men and who were found chanting the phrase - 'In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. Lovecraft didn't think much of the story, describing it as 'rather middling - not as bad as the worst', and it was initially rejected. However, the story became H.
Lovecraft's most famous and most widely popular tale, spawning an entire mythology.
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