Call of Cthulhu Help

[Nohwl]

I am going to be playing a one shot adventure of Call of Cthulhu soon (its going to be next Thursday). It is going to be my first time with Call of Cthulhu, so what kind of game is it? Does anyone have any general advice, anything i should know before playing? What are Cthulhu adventures generally like?

I know Cthulhu is a mind flayer and thats about it. Anything would be appreciated.

[MeklorIlavator]

Cthulhu is a mindflayer as a shock lizard is a blue dragon. Looking upon Cthulhu's form generally causes insanity in the most grounded of men. I've never played a game, but I've heard stories of the game and I know the background. The bes I can say is that you're characters are extremely fragile and will likely die without extreme amounts of planing and inventiveness.

[Nebo_]

Don't read any books, don't touch anything, don't look at anything for too long, don't ask any questions, make sure you have an escape route at all times... in fact, try not to think about anything either.

Play a blind man with a dog. When there's evil about, the dog will bark. That's your cue to leave and never come back.

[Solo]

I am going to be playing a one shot adventure of Call of Cthulhu soon (its going to be next Thursday). It is going to be my first time with Call of Cthulhu, so what kind of game is it? Does anyone have any general advice, anything i should know before playing? What are Cthulhu adventures generally like?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

[Venerable]

From my scant experience (two sessions into a new campaign), it's less action-oriented, and has more stuff to puzzle out. There are no character classes, but you can skew your skill points to favor a particular role. Don't expect to encounter the BBEG in the first session. Avoid combat if possible; characters are normal people, who can and will die when shot or stabbed. Expect to eventually go insane.

And pray you never encounter Cthulhu. You will not destroy it, nor will you survive.

[SilverClawShift]

Call of Cthulhu is (usually) a 1920s-1960s "Private Detective" kind of thing. You're a normal person, your friends (party members) are normal people, and you live in a normal world.

Except in this normal world, Something Is Lurking Just Behind The Scenes, something supernatural, evil, and not grounded in the same rules of reality the rest of you have to follow.
It's generally a thinkers roleplaying experience, not necessarily puzzles, but don't expect to be stabbing everything that comes up. In fact, stabbing the wrong things will probably just get you Gakked, or at least crack your mind like a china plate.

The gist of it is this. Your character has to learn more to keep up what they're doing (wether that's just surviving, exploring, fighting, whatever), but the more you learn, the more likely your brain will simply unhinge and you'll wind up in a padded room from learning that everything you thought was real is a lie and oh god no one understands why aren't they listening to you for the love of god if they could only see the shadows behind time the coppery taste is me chewing off my own tongue.

Ect.

Also, cultists.

*EDIT*

Oh yeah, and cthulhu isn't a mindflayer. Mindflayers were loosely based on Cthulhu. Cthulhu is just a name. A name for the END OF DAYS. With tentacles.

[TehJhu]

1- Why does everyone think Cthulhu is the absolute worst thing in the Mythos world? He's the Old One's BITCH!

2- You're all going to die. Don't get attached to your characters. if you want to win, say you stay home and read when they ask you to investiage something fishy.

[SilverClawShift]

1- Why does everyone think Cthulhu is the absolute worst thing in the Mythos world? He's the Old One's BITCH!

That's the point. Cthulhu is nothing but a herald (if you want to call him that) BUT YOU STILL DON'T STAND A GHOST OF A CHANCE AGAINST CTHULHU, and he's not the worst thing out there.

So go insane. It's easier than your mind trying to understand the unrealities behind the scenes.

[Nohwl]

So if its a normal world, that means no elfs and no spellcasters?

How do you win if you are going to go insane? Do you have to kill someone, or figure something out, or what?

[comicshorse]

Fundamentally in Cthulhu our reality is a fragile soap bubble that the unimaginable forces that lurk just out of sight will one day crush. The earth and the human race is DOOMED !
BUT the Stars are not yet Right, the gods still slumber or wait to return. Madmen and cults seek to advance that time, they can be stopped by brave investigators who strive to hold back the outer horrors.
They will eventually lose but mankind can be preserved from day to day, from year to year IF you can halt the plans of the creatures and mad-men who would hurl our world into blind oblivion

[Venerable]

No elfs, no spellcasters, no classes, no feats. Humans only, people you could meet. Only skills humans can actually do (research, use guns, chemistry, tumble, etc -- no bullet time stuff).

How do you win? Well, you don't. Not in the long run. But you might be able to postpone armageddon for a while. Isn't saving the world for at least a few years enough?

[allonym]

Sometimes, just surviving is enough. There's a reason Call of Cthulhu characters are called 'investigators', as that's generally what you do, but the best one-shots I've run are those where the characters are thrust into a terrifying horror situation and have to desperately work to survive.

Don't go all gooey-eyed at guns; while putting a hole in a cultist or even a gibbering ghoul might be all well and good, the big nasties aren't there for you to battle epically; either you run away, you work out or use some means of combatting or banishing the beast that the plot calls for, or you die, because you're facing it because you screwed up.

Adequate research and a methodical approach to problems are often the best tools you have, but when the chips are down, you do NOT want to be blasting away. If (and it's very unlikely) you encounter any of the hundreds of Gods or unique and horrifying entities, or indeed any of the tougher and more gruesome enemies, you pray that your SAN roll is good, that you don't faint or go nuts from the sight of it, and that you can run away fast enough. Cthulhu alone could easily take down an army; he is prophesised to be the end of human civilisation. The only reason stats are given in the book are to give a relative idea of flavour and strengths compared to other great and powerful entities, not to enable the players to battle them.

Being blind with a guide dog won't help; you lose sanity from 'experiencing' monsters, not just from seeing them, though there are examples of blind characters having reduced sanity loss.

You playing D20 Cthulhu or BRP?

[Bleen]

1) Don't look at anything
2) Don't listen to anything
3) Run away as soon as the opportunity provides itself.

[Cuddly]

If you want to deal damage, explosives, chemistry, and throwing are typically the way to go (and rolling crit fails with those are spectacular!). Guns usually won't do enough damage, attract the wrong sort of attention, and can be hard to take places. You can make a molotov cocktail out of just about anything, anywhere.

Getting in hand-to-hand combat with anything besides cultists is pretty much a guaranteed way to die. Spec yourself for survival as much as possible, unless you know someone you can trust, in which case, have the two of you make characters that complement each other (one drives good, the other throws bombs, one can pick locks, the other can fast talk, etc).

Don't use magic. You will die. Running away is usually the better thing to do. This is the sort of game where cowering under a table is the best way to make it through combat. Try not to ever split up. Don't go check out what that noise was all by yourself. Don't stop to turn around and look.

Basically, you're in a B-horror movie. Don't be dumb, and you won't die. Just accept that you can't win, and figure out the best way to escape. Make sure you know a good psychiatrist.

[Nohwl]

I don't know what version it is. I was just told that it was a game sorta like Dungeons and Dragons, and asked if I wanted to play.

[Bleen]

It's dungeons and dragons if the system had ten times the mortality rate, lovecraftian horrors, and everyone slowly going insane. And less gridmaps, I think.

[Nohwl]

Are most things immune to fire and burning to death?

[Cuddly]

Are most things immune to fire and burning to death?

Resistant, but not totally immune. Depends on what you're fighting, really. But in my experience, throwing bottles of flaming liquid is usually ftw.

[Nohwl]

I was thinking large amounts of napalm because gasoline was cheap back then and because styrofoam shouldn't be too hard to find.

[Venerable]

Depends on when the game's set. Styrofoam wasn't invented until 1941 (sayeth Wikipedia and Dow Chemical). Molotov cocktails should do, though.

[Cuddly]

Fire is typically the classic way to combat monsters. However, there is lots of precedent for the fire... backfiring. Be careful where you use it.

[comicshorse]

Fire is also good for obscuring evidence. Very few police take 'Officer he was trying to summon a Great Old One to eat the city' as a good reason for you wastinmg Old Man Jones and his creepy friends

[Mewtarthio]

Cthulhu is a mindflayer as a shock lizard is a blue dragon.

Methinks you have that backwards.

---

I once saw an article on powergaming in Call of Cthulhu. It concluded that the best possible munchkin build for the game is a really strong guy with lots of nasty weapons and explosives but horribly low sanity scores. Once you show everyone else your character, the rest of the party will chip in to sequester you away in a decent hotel before you inevitably snap and kill them all. It's still not a guaranteed victory, as the world could simply end, but it's the closest you can get.

[Jerthanis]

Here's my advice: Get Weapon Focus: Steamboat. You're just going to have to trust me on this.

[Liliedhe]

It can be incredibly atmospheric and a lot of fun. (If you like pain) Don't play hero. Don't try to save anyone or anything, because it always gets you hurt. Don't play with unknown objects... It helps if you don't have a sense of justice, a wish to better your fellow man's lot oder a conscience.

Yes, it was fun . But I made the mistake of playing a police woman and in the end she lost a leg and almost drowned, while the innocents got sacrificed, her friends stayed at home and did nothing, the villains got away with murder and she was swept out into the sea. Yeah, playing hero is suicidal, definitely.

[new1965]

I played D100 Chuthulu. Boths 1920's and 1990's and while there are differences in the newer D20 system, its the same flavor at its core.
here are the QuickStart rules..
http://www.chaosium.com/forms/coc_quick_start_bw.pdf

There are character classes: They are called occupations and your choice makes it easier to go up in that profession's primary skills.

There is spell casting but you wont be using it as it will make you character go insane. The cultist however WILL occasionally because the are already insane to one level or another.

Cuddly pretty much has it right, Remember that your characters are not "supermen" and you cant just wade into combat. This may have changed in the D20 rules but, you cant really meta game your character but YOU can go into combat if you go in as a group and do it tactically. By the end of the campaign (we played our core group of characters until retirement), we were working together like a SWAT team . I had 5 characters and only one died in combat (if getting crushed by a giant tentacle while you are insanely firing a machine gun and refusing to run away is considered combat). ... running away IS a good tactic sometimes

IF your DM will allow it, have 2 characters in play at the same time. Concentrate on one character's researching skills and the others combat skills.
This will let you be successfully involved in all aspects of the investigation and split the sanity loss

With a good DM, it can be huge amounts of fun and your character can visit other worlds and planes of reality. DONT GET TOO ATTACHED TO YOUR CHARACTER THOUGH. Sooner or later, you WILL miss a sanity check at the wrong time from just seeing something and then things can go bad to worse FAST.

[Iku Rex]

[Xuincherguixe]

Call of Cthulhu from what I understand is a very different experience from Dungeons and Dragons. My understanding is that it's one of the first roleplaying games that came after D&D, and this was back in the days of very high death tolls.

If the person running the game is fairly new, expect to get in a lot of encounters you really aren't prepared for, and die a lot. But if they're reasonably good, death will be less guaranteed. You might be able to cause a building to collapse on that thing that you can't possible win against. Or you'll have an orphan no one cares about that it can eat while you run. Fun stuff like that.

You might even get really lucky, and end up with someone who'll provide ways of defeating some of the things horrible beyond description. Like a sonic cannon left by an ancient alien race. Or a beaker full of some glowing goo that defies science, which you can throw in somethings face which then makes it grow a bunch of mouths on it's skin, which spread, and consume itself.

Oh, and expect lots of things even more disturbing than what I just suggested there. If you don't, you should probably complain ^_^.

[Danzaver]

My best advice for anyone wanting to understand the Cthulhu mythos is to go straight to the source and read some of the works of the grandfather of horror, H.P. Lovecraft.

As it happens, you can read every one of his short stories online here:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600031h.html#14

I recommend "The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Rats in the Walls", "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and maybe "Pickman's Model" and "The Call of Cthulhu" for some ideas of what the genre is all about.

If it excites you like I did, and you have finished them all and still hunger for more, I recommend you move on to one of the many other artists who have followed in his footsteps. Clive Barker's "Books of Blood" are a wonderful source, as is Ramsay Campbell's "Cold Print", though I cannot recommend Brian Lumley's "The House of Cthulhu", unless you enjoy the fantasy world-building element of Lovecraft's work without the same imaginative impact of the horror. For the true Lovecraftian scholar, Chris Jarocha-Ernst's "A Cthulhu Mythos: Bibliography and Concordance" will instantly link you to every piece the mythos ever printed and Michel Houllebecq's "H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" will paint a no-punches-pulled picture of the man behind it all.

Because don't get me wrong, the Cthulhu horror is not just a mythos, it is a genre of its own - a departure from the horror tale being used to teach lessons and impart morals, like the age-old ghost stories. It is a step sideways into revelation and the imprehensible. It speaks to age-old forgotten fears, and gives not monsters but mere shadows while the imagination speaks volumes of our terror. Is that not why the artists and the insane are always the first to be affected by his dread call?

Sorry, this is quite a bit more than you asked for. I encourage, no, impel you to try to read some of his stories at the least. Give ample time to digest each one, and then make your own mind up. Like I said, the only way to learn what to expect from the Lovecraftian style is to immerse yourself in it.

[Tsotha-lanti]

As a game, original Call of Cthulhu (BRP, not d20) it's a simple system (which doesn't handle complexity very well, either; that's why it's best to keep games rules-light). The default periods are 1890, 1920, and 1990. It's an alternate reality, the change being that beyond what science and men know, the world is a horrible, fundamentally incomprehensible place, and magic is real. PCs are called investigators, because the basic adventure is investigating some odd event or crime and finding out that it is incomprehensibly terrible.


All the "don't do X" advice leads to nothing but an amazingly boring game.

Explore. Examine. Make sure to remember to disbelieve anything extraordinary, unnatural, or supernatural. Display intellectual curiosity, a healthy arrogance and confidence in the superiority of Man and Science.

Then RP the hell out of all of that getting shattered. That's the fun.

Think twice, act once. Research everything - in any proper CoC scenario, there's a ton of background waiting to be dug up, and most of it is significant. Don't be afraid to make tough choices and big sacrifices, because the shadow of success isn't easy to catch.

Also, depending on whether your Ref prefers continuity or not, you may want to create a stack of ready-to-run characters for when you get horribly killed. (As a GM, I do prefer story and continuity, so I don't arbitrarily kill PCs off with awful monsters. Kinda ruins all the work you've put into making sure they care about their characteres enough to be actually worried about jumping into the unknown.)


I also recommend reading something (I'd say The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, as the single best and most RPG-adventure-like Lovecraft story) to get an idea about the mood and style. Pickman's Model and Rats in the Walls are also good. Shadow Over Innsmouth is probably the most powerful, with the amazing chase scene.

Be warned, Lovecraft was an awful writer, and all of his early works were bad Poe knock-offs, with literally only two different endings: "HE/IT WAS INCREDIBLY OLD!" and "IT USED TO BE A HUMAN, MAYBE!" There is a good example of the latter: The Lurking Fear. Even Shadow Over Innsmouth is packed with awful, awful over-revealing and the like, and most of his lampshading is enough to block out the sun - it's hamfisted and over-heavy.

And yet, somehow, some of his stuff is among the most powerful horror in the world. (Even if it's real signifigance was influencing writers in literally half a dozen generations.)