A video of this review is available here.

GRUMPY
Greetings from Hobb’s End Bar in the city of Arkham. This week we are reviewing…

LOVECRAFT
Pardon me.

GRUMPY
Agent Coleson! There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all those bottles of Kree Beer in my suitcase..…

LOVECRAFT
Excuse me, but I am not this Agent Coleson.

GRUMPY
Well, who are you?

LOVECRAFT
Hello, I am Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

GRUMPY
I thought you were dead.

LOVECRAFT
I got better.

GRUMPY
Really?

LOVECRAFT
It involved a Canadian librarian.

GRUMPY
Ah, right. Well, can I do something for you today?

LOVECRAFT
Well yes, thank you. I have been out of the loop, to employ the modern vernacular, for several decades. It has come to my attention that there is something called an RPG based upon my humble literary efforts. My hosts recommended I speak to you.

GRUMPY
So you are familiar with neither the concept of role-playing games nor the game based upon your works?

LOVECRAFT
No I am not.

GRUMPY
Right. Where to begin.
Contemporary RPGs – an acronym for role-playing games – derive from the war gaming hobby that arouse in Europe in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. H.G. Wells himself was not only a fan but helped to define the war gaming hobby and a scene of young boys playing these games appears in that heartwarming classic, Beau Geste. Later, in the early 1970s, when you were still dead, several Americans from the Midwest took existing the then existing rules for war gaming and changed them and use them in settings and situations inspired by stories of  writers such as yourself, Robert E. Howard and Lord Dunsany, rather than the battlefields of 19th century Europe.

LOVECRAFT
You had my curiosity but now you have my attention.

GRUMPY
This moved war-gaming from large-scale battlefield tactics to small group tactics and added the possibilities of magic and monsters. In the late 1970s, other enthusiasts of the hobby took it in yet another direction, developing a version of the game that usually avoided physical combat but did stress investigation and futile efforts at grappling with hopeless inhuman mysteries – the Call of Cthulhu RPG is a game specifically designed to evoke your stories.
Mr. Lovecraft you created or at least took into a new direction many aspects of horror and dark fantasy now taken as old hat and even cliché.

The quality of your writing varied – no offense sir – however, behind the writings dwelled a force of energy and despairing imagination that can wickedly get a hold of a reader. In your fiction… generally speaking, everything people know is wrong. The sciences are wrong – physics, biology, zoology, etc. The religions are wrong – at least all but the worst and maddest of them. Even conventional sanity is possibly the wrong approach to living in the universe populated with many terrible… things.

The 100,000 years home sapiens have been a distinct species is nothing to those alien horrors that lurk in the mythos and the 5,000 years or so of civilized history are even less. Those incomprehensible alien things did much to create the world and their current apparent absence is but a passing phase – they will be back. Our most advanced sciences amount to little more than an ape poking at an anthill with a stick and the difference between pious prayers and meaningless mutterings are insignificant. Eventually they will return… and according to one of the more disturbing passages you wrote, sir, they will then teach men to be free. In the mean time, here and there in the dark corners of the world the unlucky encounter horrid feral creatures or profane wizards.

The game carries some elements of Raymond Chandler as well, as the characters are usually some kind of investigator dealing with mysteries that are more than they appear. After the characters encounter something odd or a curiosity, their further investigations lead them to encounter some restlessly sleeping elder horror or legacy of an elder horror, such an alien mind-stealing thing.

The game employs a variation of the Basic Role Playing system publisher Chaosium Incorporated uses for its games. Assuming a player character remains physically healthy and sane – more on sanity in a moment – they grow and develop in terms of skills, rather than levels.

Characters possess seven attributes; strength, constitution, dexterity, size, intelligence, power, appearance and education. These are determined by rolling 3d6. The characters size determines their hit points and their education attribute is arguably the most important as it governs many skill rolls and the game heavily relies on skill rolls. The Call of Cthuhlu mechanics employs a simple percentile system to resolve most actions in the game, as players try to roll under a target number – usually determined by a skill rating – between 1 and 100. However, difficulties can vary greatly depending on the situation and circumstances, such as how many undead squids are trying to eat your characters face when they are trying to do something.

The sanity score, though listed as a secondary trait in the game, is one of the things that thematically and mechanically setting Call of Cthuhlu apart from other RPG. The characters you depicted were mentally delicate flowers, prone to psychologically wilting into insanity when confronting some elder horror.

LOVECRAFT
hrmph

GRUMPY
In any event, in the same way characters may be physically broken, they can – and usually are – mentally broken. Mending a broken mind is markedly more difficult than mending a broken body. Decaying sanity can lead to legitimate in-character party conflict, among other things.

As an object, the 6th edition book for Call of Cthulhu is almost perfect RPG product, featuring excellent writing, layout and design. The art presented in the book is good at conveying the mood it is supposed to convey. Some of the layout and composition tricks are problematic, including white text on a black background and odd column sizes, making the text difficult to read though this is not severe issue.

Further, the book provides everything a group will need, including rules, setting information, monster information and information to adapt the game from the 1890s to the 1920s to the modern era. The only thing it does not provide is scratch paper, dice and pencil. In any case, the stand-alone quality of the work is good in a time when many RPG products are designed to making buying additional books a necessity. Kudos to the good people at Chaosium. It is such a pity at the next GenCon they will succumbs to giant extra-dimensional cuttlefish dispatched by Narly-Ho-tep.

LOVECRAFT
What was that?

GRUMPY
Nothing.

This is a review show and to wrap things up I give 6th Edition Call of Cthulhu the RPG a 20 on a d20 roll. It would be difficult for a game to more effectively pursue its goal and accomplish its specific objectives. Honestly to dislike this game you would have to be some kind of bastard with no concept of an indoor voice to think this game sucks.

Your thoughts, sir?

LOVECRAFT
Well I believe I am flattered if somewhat confused. What is the appeal of playing these characters that are just devoured by a shoggoth or star vampire?

GRUMPY
Well not all the characters succumb to a devouring – some find themselves rendered hopelessly insane. In any event, if the stories themselves posses an appeal then consider the attraction of a game based upon the stories, where it is dynamic interactive experience rather than the relatively static experience of reading. To game in a setting where human existence is like a candle accidently lit, alone in a darkness filled with unknowable monsters while the wind starts to pick up, where neither suffering nor accomplishment have meaning…

LOVECRAFT
Right.

GRUMPY
Yes.

LOVECRAFT
Indeed.

GRUMPY
How about some upbeat music?

LOVECRAFT
That would be nice.

-GRUMPY starts playing the My Little Pony theme song. GRUMPY and LOVECRAFT dance awkwardly in place.-