Monday, July 27, 2009

Call of Cthulhu

People always think that the Chaosium game Call of Cthulhu is unsuited for campaign play, because the deathcount is too high.

I don't see why this needs to be. I've been involved in a BRP CoC game for several months now, and only two characters have had to be replaced.

Sadly, they've both been mine. One of them, I took the stats as rolled even though our GM specifically told us we could arrange them to suit. His Wisdom was very low, which meant that his starting Sanity was also very low. A chance meeting with Nyarlathotep, disguised as a human that we knew of, caused me to fail a sanity check and become psychosomatically blind. Well, he wasn't useable anymore. Oh, well. So much for my idea of porting Bertie Wooster into Lovecraft.

My second character was actually killed on a night when I wasn't there, so I don't count it as any failing of mine. He's actually the only character who's died. My third character has taken neither hit point nor sanity damage... so far.

A lot of people say that even "normal" encounters with thugs and cultists are lethal in this game, but I'm not finding that to necessarily be true. Rather, it's not unlike playing fairly low level D&D... in fact, low level d20 games might if anything be more lethal than Cthulhu, which stands the notion that it's this highly lethal game completely on its head.


The image is a cool one I found at an artist blog, of a Deep One rising from the sea. Since we've got Deep Ones and their fishy fellows in our game, I thought it seemed appropriate. Plus; holy cow, cool image.

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