How We Play Call of Cthulhu And Its Heirs
Some pieces of the following text will appear in the upcoming Lurking Fear GMās Guide, but have been heavily modified for this post.
There are broadly three kinds of horror RPGs: ones where people play investigators, ones where people play monsters, and ones where people play victims. Games like World of Darkness and its many descendants put players into the shoes of the monsters. They often emphasize action horror, personal horror, or ethical dilemma. Games like Slasher Flick, Final Girl, and Ten Candles focus on the victim experience, and often on the tropes of horror storytelling. Every one of these āvictimā games Iāve ever seen has been either extremely fun, thoughtful, or both, but theyāre a couple decades newer than the others and a more niche part of the hobby. Thereās plenty of overlap in these categories, such as when people make characters who are investigators within a victim or a monster game. The category Iāve run and played most puts the players in the shoes of investigators ā a genre Iām going to call investigative horror.
Call of Cthulhu is one of the oldest and by far the most popular investigative horror RPG. Other excellent games that play similarly include Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu, Eclipse Phase, Mothership, Delta Green, Kult, Unknown Armies, and to some degree Monster of the Week and Liminal Horror.
Investigative horror stories focus on mostly mundane player characters who encounter things beyond the context of the world they know ā supernatural beings, cryptids, extraterrestrials, and unknown scientific phenomena. Most adventures focus on that encounter with something weird and attempts by the PCs understand and survive that weird thing. Within the genre of investigative horror, there are a few common tones for games to take: Purist, Pulp, and Procedural. Pulp and Purist are common jargon amongst CoC players; procedural is my own appropriation.
Purist, Pulp, and Procedural
Purist games genuinely try to invoke the emotion of fear in the players at the table. They often use the tools of cosmic horror, psychodrama, and body horror. Player characters in a Purist one-shot can hope to survive at best, and often face fates worse than death. The same goes for player characters in a Purist campaign, but even those who survive should be worn down in mind and body by their repeated encounters with horror. Players in a Purist campaign are playing to find out, not to win ā they want entertaining stories of how their characters met terrible fates, or of the moment they realized they were in over their heads. When running a Purist game, GMs work to maintain an atmosphere of fear.
Pulp games incorporate elements of adventure fiction, urban fantasy, and action horror. Player characters in a Pulp game are heroes who use violence and cunning to fight against horror. The odds may be stacked against them, but at least they have a fighting chance, and they look good in the fight. Players in a Pulp game may want to mix a little hope into their horror, to play characters like their favorite tough-as-nails supernatural investigators, or to engage with the power fantasy of standing up to impossible odds. When running a Pulp game, GMs work to make the player characters feel like competent heroes and to keep the supernatural a threatening danger for those competent heroes.
Procedural games borrow from the cozy mystery and police procedural. Player characters still encounter something weird, but are usually able to identify and understand it with a little work. Weird problems are likely to follow the rules set out in folklore or magic texts, and can be resolved without too much tension. These games may lean on the human element for drama. Monsters from folklore are often drawn or made hostile by the misdeeds of humans, and can be banished by setting those deeds to right. Players in a Procedural game are generally looking for a relaxed time and a chance to geek out over real-world folklore. Some may want to engage in the power fantasy of being skilled professionals who can solve a complicated problem with their expertise and education. When running a Procedural game, GMs rarely put PCs in serious danger.
Adventures, Not Mechanics
Iāve compared some of my previous work, like The Lurking Fear, to āOSR with CoC instead of D&Dā. This is a good comparison because, as with OSR games, the goal of the CoC rules is to provide adequate resolution mechanics and then fade into the background. They donāt inherently create situations of horror or push players to a specifically genre-appropriate way of play. The responsibility for that lies with the GM and the adventures they choose to run. According to the most complete list I could find ā the Yog-sothoth.com wiki - there have been 1,323 adventures for Call of Cthulhu professionally published since the game was first released in 1981, across a wide array of publishers. They follow Sturgeonās Law like anything else, but there are still countless adventures that can provide a group with as weird and compelling an experience as anything else in RPGs. A couple of my personal favorites for CoC include "Fade to Grey", "Red Letter Day", "The Night Floors", "Convergence", "Bad Moon Rising", "Sunspots", "Devilās Children", and the wonderful vignettes of Fearās Sharp Little Needles. And thatās just CoC. Some of the adventures that have come out for Fear Itself, Delta Green, and Mothership are incredible!
The Folk Tradition of Mystery Stories
One interesting thing about CoC and its heirs being trad games about investigators is that CoC itself has almost no rules about investigation. It calls the PCs āInvestigatorsā, and thatās it. Somehow, that act of investigation has grown in published adventures to take up much more time and space than the horror. When I say investigation, Iām not talking about the revelation and discovery inherent in horror, but putting on the deerstalker and going out to solve mysteries. I would wager a majority of CoC adventures involve either a missing person or a murder mystery, and many will involve just as much time spent playing detective and looking for clues as they do running away screaming from the horrors. Iāve personally played in campaigns that took multiple sessions of detective work before they got to anything that would be considered horror.
Thatās not a bad thing by itself. When CoC first came out, there were few RPGs about playing detective stories. CoC is a game about ordinary people, often ones competent in many skills, and pays little attention to the necessities of surviving day to day. It certainly works as a detective game. It works so well that some groups prefer to use it only to run mundane mysteries, or mundane historical dramas.
Still, if someone stripped down the rules of CoC into an SRD and handed them to a outsider, it would be very clear that the game was about horror, and there would be no clue that it was intended to be a detective game. This core part of playing CoC is not found codified in its rules, but in the culture of people who play it ā a folk tradition of playing detective that is ingrained in most CoC GMs and players from their first game onwards, and replicated by published adventures that invariably follow its model.
Many of the heirs of CoC go ahead and do have explicit rules to support investigation ā Trail of Cthulhu and Monster of the Week are particularly notable ā and their published adventures follow suit in featuring mysteries.
Taking the Other Road
I love a good mystery story, at least as much as the next person, but I have been wondering what would have happened if RPGs hadnāt taken that road. It can be a little frustrating sometimes to sit down for horror and do three hours of mystery to get 30 minutes of monsters and mayhem, and I want to open the space up for more kinds of horror. As I work on my latest take on horror games, Fear and Panic, Iām going to do my best to package it with adventures that devote more play time to the horror. If nothing else, the only major d100 systems I know of going that direction is Mothership, and itās firmly tied to the setting of a spacefaring future. Fear and Panic, at least right now, doesnāt have any more mechanics pushing GMs to run a āvictimsā game than CoC has mechanics pushing groups to run an āinvestigatorsā game. But Fear and Panic does call the PCs āvictimsā, and just naming the PCs was enough for CoC.