Styles of Play in Call of Cthulhu

We’re back and we’re looking at all the different ways in which people use Call of Cthulhu at the gaming table. Conveniently enough, we have Call of Cthulhu line developer Mike Mason on hand to help us with this. Between the four of us, we probably have over 100 years of Call of Cthulhu experience, so we’ve seen a fair few styles of play first-hand.

Not to mention the rise and fall of civilisations, the fading of ancient days, and the passing into folly of all human endeavour.

For a game about such a niche sub-genre as Lovecraftian horror, Call of Cthulhu has proved uncannily flexible, much like a shoggoth in a gimp suit. We’ve seen it used for mysteries, survival horror, dark comedies, emotional dramas and many games that bear no relation at all to Lovecraft. In our discussion, we spend a bit of time trying to work out whether this anything inherent to the game, or simply because it was the first major horror RPG.

Admittedly, I’m now more interested in working out how to get a shoggoth into a gimp suit.

The latter part of the discussion includes a potted history of the Kult of Keepers, who pretty much defined Call of Cthulhu convention gaming in the UK for the early part of this century. It’s fair to say that without the Kult of Keepers, there would be no Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, Cthulhu Britannica or even the Good Friends of Jackson Elias. With that in mind, we hope you’ll excuse our little diversion.

Don’t they all look young? Well, maybe not if this is the first time you’ve seen them, but I certainly did a couple of double-takes.

We’re a little light on shout-outs this episode, not for a lack of backers, but simply because Paul’s Internet connection has failed him. This stopped us doing our usual trick of recording a bunch of segments the week before release and editing them in at the last minute. We promise to thank everyone outstanding in the next episode! In the meantime, we hope the copy of the first issue of The Blasphemous Tome that should be appearing on backers’ doorsteps around now will go some way toward making up for this.