Games of the decade: Call of Cthulhu

Best advice if this ever happens to you: RUN!!!

This game is a bit different than the other games of the decade i have posted about. First of all this game is a good old analog roleplaying game. Secondly the was actually published sometime in 1981. I will justify my post here though by saying that the game is now in its 6th edition, and the 6th edition was published in 2004.

My claim is that Chaosiums Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game is one of the best roleplaying games ever made. Back when it was originally published you had very few choices when you wanted to pick up a roleplaying game. The selection usually ended up being between Dungeons and Dragons or some obscure game you hadn’t heard about anyway. Those games where more or less always variations on the Dungeons and Dragons theme. Go get XP, and treasure in X setting. Call of Cthulhu changed that.

In Call of Cthulhu your character will eventually die. The only question is how soon. You play a human investigator who, somehow, finds out about the Cthulhu Mythos. This forever changes your life, as it slowly moves you into insanity. This alone made the game original, since it becomes a question of telling a cool story about your characters decline, instead of figuring out ways to optimize the best damage output for him. The game focused on investigation plots, and by cleverly designing investigation scenes, it became the job of the game master to spread a sense of dread in the players.

I’ve run several of these campaigns, but the one that stands the clearest and most scarily in my mind was one i can’t claim to have created myself. The campaign was the first campaign i bought for any roleplaying game (usually i make my own); The Complete Masks of Nyarlathothep. In it the players traverse the world to try and stop the plot of Nyarlathothep the messenger for the outer gods. We played the campaign every week, sometimes twice per week, for a little more than a year. At some points the game became so scary that even me, the keeper with all the knowledge about the campaign, became slightly frightened. It was incredible, and no game i have ever tried since has managed to elicit such an emotional response from me.

The combination of uniqueness and the ability to make for a generally scary experience makes this game one of my favorites. So even though it didn’t actually get published for the first time this decade, i still put it on my list as one of the most memorable games i have played in any decade.