Hail!

There is a video in swedish of a short roleplaying session on our stream on-demand library. Check it out! It's called "Fredagsrollspel med Hate"
http://www.livestream.com/svartblodgaming

Ave Victoria!
/Hate

Death to the world - Cthulhu's come!

Hail!

I have returned. I have made a decission to start writing on the blog on a weekly basis, again. So there's that. There has been difficulties with finding time to write here, but I'll make time.

So, what's the deal with the song and the title? Well, we played Call of Cthulhu last week and I felt like writing about it.

Call of Cthulhu is a horror investigation game first published back in 1981, based on the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft. The philosophy of the game can be captured in a quote from his essay Supernatural Horror in Litterature: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.". Unlike many other role-playing game there is little to no focus on combat situations, but instead investigation. My father is one of the role-playing pioneers here in Sweden, and he told me that what he heard from his friends playing this back in round '82 was "Well, you won't have to bother keeping track of your hitpoints. Your character will likely go insane and end his misery with a bullet to the brain before any of the horrors harm you".

I won't go in depth on who/what Cthulhu is, that would require the entire post to describe. So if you don't know, go look it up on wikipedia.
I will instead focus on the system itself and my first experience of it.

The system uses the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system. Which, in my opinion, is indeed a basic system making character generation simple and playing the game as simple. You start up with rolling up some characteristics, like STR and DEX, then you pick an occupation, like antiquarian or journalist. Last of all you divide skill points in different occupation and interest skills. Then you are done. The first character TC and I rolled up pretty much only took 20 minutes.

Skills are, well, skills. They range from how much you know about archaeology or law to how good you are at fast talking or fighting with a broken chair's leg. Every skill goes from 0-100%, but only the Cthulhu Mythos skill starts out at 0%, a skill that measures your knowledge of the mythos. You divide your skill points to the skills, every point raising the skill by 1%, adding it to the starting modifier. So if you wish to be the master of the art of fighting with chair legs, you can add 75% to your Fighting (chair leg) skill, putting it to 95% (base 20%). Giving you a 95% chance of success whenever you check the skill. Very easy, really.

The Cthulhu Mythos skill on the other hand cannot be raised by regular means, and you always start out at 0%. This measures what you know about the mythos, it's monsters and magic. You gain points in this skill by reading books of the mythos and encounter all of its different horrors. Speaking of horrors, that brings me to what makes CoC so very special - Sanity and Insanity.

Your current level of sanity is measured by your SAN, ranging from 0-99. 0 being permanently insane, and essentially unplayable and 100 being the happiest person in the world without a single trouble on his mind. Your starting SAN is probably somewhere between 40-70, higher and lower points possible. When you encounter horrible things, your SAN will drop. This can be caused by something natural, like seing a corpse or watching your friend being beaten to death. But also the supernatural, "the unknown", things such as monsters or magic. You can never have more sanity points than 99 subtracted with your Cthulhu Mythos skill. Knowing the actual truth about the universe makes it harder to keep your sanity.
 
I really liked that part of the game. Sanity and insanity is something I find deeply intriguing. The game plays really well, there were no times we had to stop to check the rules, which is great.  It is very easy to learn and understand. Lovecraftian horror also makes for great roleplaying, I noticed.
As much as I, and I hope my players liked it, it's not be a game for everyone. It is very slow paced and atmospheric, to me that's good. Some may play RPGs for fast paced action, then this is not the game for them. Making an ex-military guy who kept all his weapon may be good that one time you assault a cult. But when you explore an ancient temple consisting of to our minds impossible geometries, the weapons will only serve as ways to kill oneself when insanity gets the better of you. Or maybe even the entire party if the guy decided to bring a bazooka (8d6 damage, your average hp is 8-12) into the temple. So before trying out this game, make sure you have the right players for it.

That pretty much summarizes the game system, and my thoughts about it. It's very easy for players to get into, but a bit harder for the Keeper (read:DM). The keeper needs to read up on the magic and monsters of the mythos, but also thing such as mental disorders. I found it interesting, but it's just not something you can pick up without any preparation. The keeper needs a well thought out mystery for the players to solve, otherwise the game loses all meaning.
... Unless you play an ex-military guy with a bazooka. Then you can blow things up, and that's always something..

I ran the scenario "The Haunting", which apparently is a real classic that has been in every edition. I liked it, it turned out great. I might write about the session next week, unless TC wishes to write about it from his perspective. We shall see.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn...

Ave Victoria!
/Hate