Unveiling the Eldritch Lore: The Impact and Evolution of Call of Cthulhu

Step into the shadows of the unknown with us as we unearth the fascinating history behind the Call of Cthulhu RPG, a game that turned tabletop horror on its head.  We'll trail the game's evolution, from Sandy Peterson's early work to the atmospheric depths of the 1920s setting, and delve into the ingenious Sanity Score.  Prepare to celebrate the game's unique approach to horror as we guide you through its legacy, a journey not just for seasoned investigators but for anyone drawn to the call of the cosmic unknown.

Our exploration doesn't stop at the game's inception; rather, it expands into the realms of Call of Cthulhu's thrilling expansions and the 7th edition's Kickstarter odyssey. Discover how this RPG has transcended time with globe-trotting campaigns like "Horror on the Orient Express," and how it has traversed different eras through supplements like "Cthulhu by Gaslight." We'll dig into the logistical labyrinth the creators navigated, revealing how a simple miscalculation in shipping costs almost sunk the company, and how the original masterminds saved the day. Embrace the refined mechanics of the 7th edition, and get a glimpse of the extensive catalogue of supplements that continue to bolster the mystique of Call of Cthulhu, ensuring its place at the pinnacle of horror role-playing games. Join us for an episode dealing with the birth and growth of a game that has captured the imaginations of players for decades.

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
TWITTER: @savepodcast
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
VOICEOVER LADY: Keeley Wilson
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page). 

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page). 

Transcript

Keeley 0:00

Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast. Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu Expansions and Evolution

Shipping Costs and Call of Cthulhu

Iain 0:22

Hello and welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast. We've abandoned the monthly moniker as that turned out to be a massive lie. Hey, editing podcasts is time consuming and difficult, okay? Anyway, this episode we look at Call of Cthulhu, the granddaddy of all horror RPGs. Released in the early 80s, Call of Cthulhu is 43 years old and still going strong, which as anyone over 40 will tell you, the phrase going strong is really something that you end up feeling as you transition into the twilight of your life. Call of Cthulhu has a fascinating history as it managed to tread into some genuinely unique territory. Whereas most RPGs prior to it had been power fantasies centred around being the hero, Call of Cthulhu was much more an exercise in cautious investigation where combat was something to be avoided and where the most exciting magical artefact you'd find was some mouldy old book that would drive you insane when you read it. Yeah, no plus four Vorpal Blades of Slaying to be found here. Anyway, sit back and relax as we take you through the history of the world's first, and to my mind best, horror RPG. Back at the beginning of 1988, I bought a copy of White Dwarf magazine. Nowadays, White Dwarf is nothing more than a glorified catalogue encouraging you to buy more Warhammer 40,000 miniatures. Like I need any more encouragement to do that. But back in 1988, it was a different beast. For those of us involved in the role-playing hobby, White Dwarf was a treasure trove of inspirations, being packed with articles covering all manner of RPG goodies you could drop into your games, from encounters to artifacts to creatures, all the way to fully-fledged adventures that you could send your friends on. Provided, of course, they hadn't bought the same copy as you had. I was an avid Warhammer Fantasy roleplay GM back then, so my main reason for picking up this issue was the promise of more material for my favourite game as well as a scenario for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. However, the article that really intrigued me was a piece called Trilogy of Terror that touted itself as three cases for Call of Cthulhu. Now, I had no idea what this game was, in fact I couldn't even pronounce that weird word in its title, I thought it was Cthulhu for ages, but But being a massive horror fan, much to my mother's disappointment, these three adventure seeds and the possibility of an investigative horror game really captured my imagination. It turned out I was actually rather late to the whole Call of Cthulhu party because when I finally got my hands on a copy of it later on that year, it was on its third edition. The first edition was published all the way back in 1981, but its roots went even further back than that. A young games designer called Sandy Peterson was given a job back in 1980 by Chaosium, the company that would go on to publish Call of Cthulhu, to create a book of monsters for their flagship fantasy RPG RuneQuest. Peterson did so, and as a longtime Lovecraft fan, he included a whole chapter of Lovecraftian monstrosities. This was well-received, so he proposed a RuneQuest expansion based on adventures in Lovecraft's Dreamlands worlds, and we'll get to those later. To his surprise, KSEM revealed to him that they were already hard at work on an RPG based on Lovecraft's stories. Eventually, Peterson was given the job to develop this, and Call of Cthulhu was born. Only, it wasn't originally going to be called Call of Cthulhu. KSEM's initial working title was Now, to the modern geek, this sounds like an awful miss. After all, Cthulhu is such a recognisable horror brand, you can even buy a cuddly Cthulhu plushie at Target. Even folks who aren't of horror aficionados know who Lovecraft's Tentacled Creation is, so why wouldn't you use that name in the game's title? Well, one of the reasons for Lovecraft's resurgence in popularity was because of the RPG. Prior to this, he was an obscure literary figure, a pulp hack who wasn't highly regarded during his heyday, and who had a vanishingly small following of literary geeks that would probably have been lucky if they numbered in the hundreds worldwide. With this in mind, why would you choose to name the world's first horror RPG after a largely forgotten story a story that its own author described as rather middling not as bad as the worst but full of cheap and cumbrous touches. Thankfully the name had little effect on sales and after the first edition was published in 1981 on Friday the 13th during a thunderstorm of legend is to be believed it sold like hotcakes. In a market saturated with fantasy and sci-fi RPGs Call of Cthulhu was something new and RPG fans lapped this up and the first edition sold very well. Like most RPGs of the time, it came packaged as a box set, including a rule book, an adventure book, and a source book for the 1920s. It was this last book that probably helped cement the game's lasting appeal. Originally, Call of Cthulhu was going to be set in the modern day, but after much discussion, it was decided to set it in the heyday of Lovecraft's writing. The 1920s was close enough culturally and temporally that prospective players wouldn't have much trouble wrapping their heads around it. around the setting but different enough to make things interesting to play in. There's also a certain glamour to the 1920s which gave the setting an almost fantasy-like element. The sourcebook for the 20s gave the keeper, that's Carl of Cthulhu's term for games master, sufficient information to bring the setting to life for their players without requiring them to hit the history books. One consideration for KSE when designing the game was the source material and particularly the fact that Lovecraft's protagonists spent a lot of time shrieking, fainting, screaming, running away and generally going mad when exposed to the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. This is fine in a literary form, but knowing that roleplayers come from a tradition of confronting evil and terror head on with a sword and a shield, how could they invoke that sort of atmosphere in a game? Thankfully, the designers came up with an ingenious mechanic in the form of the sanity score. This was a value on a scale of 0 to 100. When an investigator, as Call of Cthulhu's PCs were termed, encountered something scary, they rolled a percentage number against the sanity score and, based on the result, they could end up losing sanity points. Lose too much in one go and they would momentarily lose agency as their character would freak out in some way. Lose a lot over a short space of time and their character would temporarily go insane and would require some kind of medical intervention. Lose all their sanity and their character would go permanently insane and they would lose them. With the rules for insanity, the San stat became so much more than simple mental hit points. Instead when players knew the consequences of confronting terrible beings and events the system behind sanity actually informed their behaviour leading to much more cautious sensible play on their part and, usually, driving them away from the tropes that would guarantee success in other RPGs. Whilst D&D characters would run towards that blood-cuddling screen with swords drawn and spells at the ready, Call of Cthulhu investigators were much more likely to back slowly towards the door unless they were really sure of what they were dealing with. After all, sanity was a sliding scale. The more that was lost, the harder it became to pass subsequent tests, and that they Therefore, the higher the likelihood of an investigator had of going insane with repeated shocks, yet it really was a death spiral. The rest of the system used by Call of Cthulhu would have been familiar to players of RuneQuest, being a modification of what was used in Chaos Aims fantasy game. Called Basic Role-Playing, or BRP for short, it was a mix of traditional statistics like strength, dexterity and constitution, and percentage-based skills. The stats governed other mechanical aspects of your character, for example, strength would determine how much damage you could do in hunter-and-combat, and constitution would be a factor in determining how many hit points you had. whilst the skills were used whenever you wanted to attempt various tasks. There were a whole swathe of them, covering everything from combat, to languages, to physical endeavours like climbing and sneaking, to ones most suited to investigating things man was not meant to know, like library use and occult. Yeah, a common trope of Call of Cthulhu games was that the player characters spent a lot of their time in libraries, looking up dusty old books of arcane lore to help combat the otherworldly menace by the creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos and their human pawns. This introduced another wonderful aspect of Call of Cthulhus that has remained firmly embedded in the design of every edition since the first, and that's the accumulation of forbidden knowledge. You see, most of the creatures of the Mythos were simply too vast and terrible for the investigators to tackle head-on. Even the lowliest beings that might rear their ugly heads were generally stronger and tougher than humans, and usually had some kind of resistance to conventional weapons. weaponry. Seriously, a surprising amount of them are either immune to or have some kind of ability to shrug off attacks from firearms. Therefore, as the investigators put together the clues and a picture begins to form of what they're up against, generally all roads lead to them finding some kind of piece of esoteric knowledge that will allow them to either banish or overcome the foe they're facing. This is good precedent Lovecraft's work, the Dunwich Horror, which sees a reprint in the most recent edition of the Investigator's Handbook in is a perfect example of this. The beauty of this knowledge is that, whilst powerful, it has consequences. Lovecraft's called it secrets man was not meant to know for good reason. Reading these horrible old books that contain the hidden truths of the universe slowly erodes an investigator's sanity as they begin to realise how small and meaningless mankind actually is. Casting the spells costs sanity as an investigator begins to realise that reality is not what they first thought. Seeing the creatures brought forth or banished by the spells batters an investigator's sanity too. In short, even as you tried to overcome the horrors facing your character, you slowly drove them closer and closer to that point where you'd lose control of them, maybe forever. In addition, simply gaining knowledge of the mythos, as represented by the aptly named Cthulhu Mythos skill, ate into an investigator's ability to hold it all together. An investigator's maximum sanity could be no higher than 99 minus the levels in the skill. Yes, as characters embrace the knowledge needed to overcome their foes, they actually lessen their chances of being able to remain calm and composed when confronting them. This, coupled with the lethality of combat, gives Call of Cthulhu a justified reputation for being a game with an astonishingly high mortality rate. Whilst not quite in paranoia's league of AND EVERYONE DIES, a lot of published scenarios assume a 70% fatality rate amongst player characters. Why then would anyone want to play this game? Simply put, Call of Cthulhu is enormous fun and, back in 1981, it was completely different to what was available at the time. One of the original adventures that came bundled with it, and which has seen a reprint with every core book, bar the latest, was The Haunting. It featured only a single antagonist, and the majority of the scenario dealt with the characters trying to piece together the mystery of what was happening at the supposedly haunted house. Compare this to most fantasy adventures of the time that were simply bristling with a menagerie of weird and wonderful beasts lining up for the adventurers to carve their way through, and where a lot of the brain work required simply amounted to how do I get past this trap. Call of Cthulhu sold very well, and was swiftly followed by a swathe of supplements. I won't endeavour to go through them all. Without counting third party supplements, KSAM released well over 70 of their own and continue to do so to this day. However, one notable feature of their releases was their ability to conjure up truly epic campaigns. In fact, the very first supplement for Call of Cthulhu was Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, a globe-trotting campaign to save the world from a dark cult intent on summoning its Eldritch Master from the deeps. Globe-trotting became a theme for Call of Cthulhu scenarios and resulted in some truly wonderful campaigns like The Fungi from Yoggoth, Horror on the Orient Express and Shadows of Nyarlathotep, all of which took the investigators to exotic, far-flung locations as they attempted to thwart the minions of the mythos. The last two became famous for their production values. They came as part of box sets and were packed with all sorts of goodies like physical clues for the players to handle and other props like passports from the 20s, luggage tags and travel posters for the locations the investigators would be visiting. In this day and age of easy printable PDFs this seems like overkill. However, back in the earlier days of the hobby, when even photocopying was expensive, these sort of props really added value to a game and turned it into a truly memorable experience. Not every supplement was an epic campaign, however. KSM also saw the value in publishing compilations of single-use adventures, much like other companies published adventure modules. Indeed, the first supplement released after Shadows of Yogg-Sothoth was The Asylum and Other Tales. seven short scenarios that received very positive reviews. Indeed, these shorter scenarios could often be said to be much closer to Lovecraft's actual fiction, with the larger, more expansive campaigns being much more in the pulp, Indiana Jones-esque genre than the bleak, sanity-crumbling nihilism of the original source material. As well as adventures, supplements were released covering different parts of the world, both countries and cities, new monsters and new settings. The latter were very well received by fans, and the most famous of these were Cthulhu by Gaslight, which covered Victorian times, Cthulhu Now, which covered modern times, or at least back in the day, the late 1980s when they were considered modern, and H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, which introduced the fantasy setting of The Lands Beyond the Walls of Sleep, which Lovecraft wrote about in several of his stories, most famously in his novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. The Dreamlands was probably the most interesting of these expansions, not because the others were badly written or dull, but because it offered players and keepers alike the chance to explore a radically different setting and style of play. The Dreamlands setting is much more high fantasy, and in keeping with the source material, adventures set there are much more about questing than investigation. However, this wasn't just a D&D-esque setting bolted onto Call of Cthulhu. While the Dreamlands was different and fantastical, it still had horror at the core. There were plenty of nightmarish creatures to be found in the dreamlands, and the various deities of the Cthulhu Mythos were powerful enough to transcend our earthly reality and were able to claw their way into the dreamlands too. While there were only ever a handful of adventures released that were specifically for this setting, some of the most clever ones were those that crossed over investigations in the waking world with sous-genres into the dreamlands and these were perfect for firing the imagination of keepers everywhere. Between 1981 and 1992 Call of Cthulhu proved to be so popular that it received five different editions. Unlike a lot of games that saw radical overhauling of the system and mechanics between editions these new versions of Call of Cthulhu saw the underlying system remaining largely the same with the odd tweak here and there but adding a lot more in terms of content Each edition saw Kia Seam add in new monsters, spells and background information from previous editions to expand what was available to keepers planning their campaigns. As an example of this, and as I mentioned earlier, I started with 3rd edition. In fact, not only was it the 3rd edition, it was that weird UK specific 3rd edition released by Games Workshop. Unlike its American cousin that came in a box, this edition was a hardback book. However, in terms of being a new expansion, As well as slight tweaks to the system, it included content that had previously shown up in the Cthulhu Companion and Fragments of Fear, supplements that had been produced for previous editions. As another example of this, when I obtained 5th edition, the overall system remained largely the same as before, but there was a lot more content included, such as details on spells, additional monsters, an overview of the Dreamlands, and information to allow running games in the modern and Gaslight eras. 5th edition is curious because as well as the main version, KSEAM also released a 5.5, 5.6 and 5.61. Overall these versions didn't add much in terms of core rule changes but in the tradition of previous edition updates they included a lot of additional material and some layout changes as well as 5.6 coming as a hardback rather than as a softback. Actually they did include rules for chases but I don't think I've ever used rules like that in any game I've ever played so that's probably why why it didn't stand out. In 1996, the collectible card game craze was reaching fever pitch with everyone and their dog wanting to emulate the success of Magic the Gathering. KSEM decided it was their turn to throw their hat in the ring and they did so with Mythos, a CCG based on, surprise surprise, the Cthulhu Mythos. Why am I mentioning this in the context of the Call of Well, even though Mythos won great critical acclaim, and having played a lot of it myself, I can confirm it's an excellent game, it sold really poorly, and KSEM made the decision to discontinue it in 1997. Unfortunately, this foray into the world of CCGs did a ton of financial damage to the company, and caused it to limp along in ill health well into the 2010s. This financial ill health wasn't helped by their decision to publish it, published in the early 2000s, Monographs. Now, this was similar to what a lot of other companies started doing, essentially allowing fans to submit their own scenarios and supplements, which would be available for other fans to purchase. However, unlike similar schemes like Wizards of the Coast's DMs Guild, where the submissions are available either as print on demand or as PDF downloads, KSAM chose to print and stock these monographs in their warehouses like traditional products, A process that led to customers being presented with the choice to pay full price for products whose quality and presentation varied wildly. I'm not exactly aware of the numbers involved in this process, but I doubt that KSCM could have chosen a more financially ruinous way to fund this particular venture. Anyway, come 2012 and some bright sparks at KSCM seemed to have found a solution to their financial woes in the form of the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Lots of game publishers regularly make use of crowdfunding. And to test the waters, KSEAM launched the Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter in the August of 2012 and quickly blew past their target of $20,000 to raise well over $200,000. Believe it or not, saying blew past is really tricky. It took me three attempts to do so, but I saved you that by editing it out and putting this nonsense in instead. Anyway, not bad, but also not surprising. The original Horror on the Orient Express was a beloved expansion and a new deluxe version was bound to generate interest and in the case certainly got the attention of the 1,374 backers that contributed to the Kickstarter. The delivery date was given as August 2013. Stoked, again, pun very much intended, by the success of the Horror on the Orient Express campaign, KCM also launched the Kickstarter for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition in the May of 2013 Touted as the first really radical overhaul of the system, this campaign raised over $561,000, considerably more than its modest goal of $40,000. The delivery estimate? November 2013. I'm not going to speculate on how wildly off the mark the delivery dates were, I don't know enough about the inner workings of KSEM to do anything other than speculate, but around the rest of the campaign, boy, mistakes were made. I am always wary of any Kickstarter that goes overboard with stretch goals and pledge limits, and especially campaigns that start off focused on books and then branch out into physical rewards like dice mugs, t-shirts, miniatures and other assorted tat that the original buyers were never interested in. Horror on the Orient Express was fairly modest in terms of pledge levels, having only five that dealt with the main product. But although they included some nice things like extra scenarios in the stretch goals, they also promised a whole cavalcade of nonsense, including a medallion of Ithaca, four sheets of letterhead paper, four envelopes, an Orient Express notepad, a telegram notepad, Orient Express pencils, luggage stickers, postcards, just cards, poker chips, a custom playing card deck, a wooden box to keep the chips and cards in, dice. they always add in dice that roleplayers do not need any more dice. A coffee mug, an embossed certificate bearing the signatures of the authors, editors and others who worked on the project, a book of fiction about the Orient Express, a dining car kit featuring coasters, napkins, placemats, seat assignment cards and menus and, for some reason, a bumper sticker. This probably seems excessive, and it is, but this hall of assorted tat pales into insignificance next to the egregious bloatfest that was on show for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition. There were 20 pledge levels and over 60 rewards which ended up leading to KSEM actually producing a little grid so confused backers could see what they got at the various different levels. However, even though this was a lot, it wasn't the sheer volume of rewards that started to destabilise this campaign. Now, the thing that really caused it to crash and burn was the utter insanity that was KSEM's completely unhinged approach to postage. As an example of this, the tier with the highest postage cost included six hardback copies of The Investigator's Handbook, six hardback copies of The Keeper's Rulebook, as well as leatherette editions of both. It also included a print copy of the book Nameless Horrors, The Guide to the Dreamlands, The Guide to Cthulhu Monsters, a slipcase for the books, and a copy of Pulp Cthulhu. Aside from the other 33 rewards being shipped, that's 19 books. 19 big books. The cost given to ship these domestically within the United States? $19, a dollar per book. Just taking a quick look at the US Postage Service website, the cost to send a large parcel, not weighing more than a couple of pounds, is around $31. What's more, KCM added the option for additional items to be added to your pledge. It didn't matter if this was something small like dice or if it was a book, the additional cost of the shipping per item, $1. Now, I'm giving you an extreme example of a reward tier that includes 19 books, but the most popular tier backed by people, called the Slobbering Shoggoth tier, which is fun to say, included 43 items, amongst which were 5 books. Now, in fairness, not all the rewards were physical, there were PDFs and amongst those listed, but the price to ship this little lot came in at $5 for domestic postage. $5 Why am I making such a big deal about this? Well, according to Google, the D&D player's handbook weighs around two and a half pounds and that serves as a fair approximate for RPG books everywhere. Doing some back of the napkin maths, that means that according to the US Postal Service, the shipping cost for five books alone should come in around $57, which means that for the roughly 2,000 people who back this tier alone and ignoring the other 1,600 or so backers of other tiers, the budget for that shipping should be around $115,000. And remember, that's just for the books. When you consider that KSEAM were originally asking for $40,000 to bring this project to life, you can immediately tell that someone hasn't done their sums correctly. Or, to put it another way, their shipping costs were off by about 1,200%. Now, I get that shipping partners will offer a discounted rate, but nonetheless, it would still be a by a significant margin. How likely do you think they were of meeting their overly optimistic delivery date? Yep, what was a faltering start very quickly became a nosedive which rapidly escalated into a death spiral. They ended up seeing Sandy Peterson and Greg Stafford, the two original minds behind Call of Cthulhu who had left KSEM decades ago, coming back to assume control of the faltering project. Now there were personnel changes at KSEM, a load of bat was cut from the Kickstarter and all rewards for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition were finally delivered around November of 2016, a full three years behind schedule. Horror Memory Express delivered in October 2015 a mere two years late. The whole process was painful and humbling for KSEM and almost ended the company for good. In an update in October 2016 they wrote to their Kickstarter backers and said KSEM has learned the difficult and painful lesson of straying from its core strengths. We are a game company and need to focus on the games we make, not producing t-shirts, jewellery, mugs and other similar items. Which is all fair, but I'm pretty sure a better understanding of how postage works would help in the future. Anyway, 7th edition eventually arrived after its bloody and tumultuous birth pangs. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Apart from the fact that the book is a work of art, it's the first really big, significant change to the system in decades. And rather than tinkering for the sake of it, these changes streamline play and make the game more engaging and exciting to play. One change that I particularly like is around character creation. In previous editions, a character's available points for skills was purely down to their education score. It didn't matter if you were a university professor, a soldier, a PI or a hobo, if you a good education, you are simply better than the other characters. Seventh Edition instead looks at the various professions and chooses an appropriate attribute to calculate your skill points. While a doctor might solely use their education to calculate their available skill points, a soldier's strength or dexterity is just as important to them. Another nice quality of life change is how credit rating has happened. In previous editions, all investigators earned a salary and could also take points in a skill called credit rating that represented their social clout based on wealth and status. This was always fairly clumsy and led to a lot of bookkeeping around money. 7th edition directly links prospective credit rating to your occupation and uses this to shorthand how much cash you may reasonably spend during a session before you have to dig into your savings. It's simple and elegant and removes another thing to keep track of. All in all, 7th edition is, to my mind anyway, the best version of Call of Cthulhu to date. Although, undoubtedly, there will be people hearing me say this and yelling something like, how dare you, 2nd edition is the best. Don't worry, one of the beautiful aspects of Call of Cthulhu is that it's largely timeless and you can play whatever edition you like and the feel of the game and what makes it fun will remain the same. And that's it, a brief history of the world's first ever horror RPG and I've not even touched on the sheer volume of third party material available to support the game. In fact I I guess that's going to have to be its own podcast. And that was our Call of Cthulhu history episode. We hope you enjoyed it. We're a semi-regular podcast on the history of role-playing games, with over 60 episodes in our back catalogue. Here, you can find more history shows like this one, along with round tables, interviews with authors, and actual plays. If you want to get in touch with us, you can find us on Twitter. I refuse to call it X. At Save Podcast. Or you can email us at Although the latter seems largely to be used by people contacting us to say how wonderful my voice is, which I think means I'm clearly the most important part of this whole endeavour. The episodes are just a vehicle to put me in front of my adoring public. Thanks again for listening. See you on the next episode.