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Call of Cthulhu is a horror fiction role-playing game based on H. P. Lovecraft'sstory of the same name and the associated Cthulhu Mythos.[1] The game, often abbreviated as CoC, is published by Chaosium. The game was first released in 1981,and seven editions have been published to date.

Contents

1 Gameplay 2 History 2.1 Editions 2.2 Early releases 2.3 Supplement campaigns 2.4 Cthulhu Now 2.5 Delta Green 2.6 Lovecraft Country 2.7 Recent history 3 Licenses 3.1 D20 Call of Cthulhu 3.2 Dark Corners of the Earth

3.3 Trail of Cthulhu 3.4 Shadows of Cthulhu 3.5 Realms of Cthulhu 3.6 The Laundry 3.7 The Wasted Land 3.8 Card games 3.9 Miniatures 4 Reception 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Gameplay

The setting of Call of Cthulhu is a darker version of our world, based on H. P.Lovecraft's observation (from his essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature) that"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the strongest kind offear is fear of the unknown." The original game, first published in 1981, usesmechanics from Basic Role-Playing, and is set in the 1920s, the setting of manyof Lovecraft's stories. Additional settings were developed in the 1890s Cthulhuby Gaslight supplement, a blend of occult and Holmesian mystery and mostly set in England, and modern/1980s conspiracy with Cthulhu Now. More recent additions include 1000 AD (Cthulhu: Dark Ages), 23rd century (Cthulhu Rising) and Ancient Roman times (Cthulhu Invictus). The protagonists may also travel to places that are not of this earth, represented in the Dreamlands (which can be accessed throu

gh dreams as well as being physically connected to the earth), to other planets,or into the voids of space.

Call of Cthulhu uses the Basic Role-Playing system used by other Chaosium games(first seen in RuneQuest). For as long as they stay functionally healthy and sane, characters grow and develop. Call of Cthulhu does not use levels, but is completely skill-based, with player characters getting better with their skills by succeeding at them. They do not, however, gain "hit points" and do not become significantly harder to kill.

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 sce

nes are revealed. As the characters learn more of the true horrors of the worldand the irrelevance of humanity, their sanity (represented by "Sanity Points", abbreviated SAN) inevitably withers away. The game includes a mechanism for deter

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mining how damaged a character's sanity is at any given point; encountering thehorrific 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. Call of Cthulhu 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. Unlike most[citation needed] other role

-playing games, eventual triumph of the players is not assumed.History

The original conception of Call of Cthulhu was Dark Worlds, a game commissionedby the publisher Chaosium but never published. Sandy Petersen, now best known for his work on the Doom computer game, 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 1981, using a version of the Basic Role-Playing system used in RuneQuest.[2]