![]() It was a scary game, and a blackly humorous game. You didn't boast about your character's heroic exploits.you bragged about the horrific way in which she met her untimely end. You didn't create a first level character and watch him ascend to greatness.you created a capable professional and watched him slowly descend into madness. It's charm was in inverting most other RPG tropes. It is a brutal, uncaring universe where men struggle mainly to prevent the more powerful alien occupants from wiping out the human race too soon. There are no beneficent deities, humanity wasn't created in anyone's image, and there are no universal standards of good and evil. Based on the writings of celebrated American author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), Cthulhu depicts a incomprehensibly vast cosmos occupied by utterly alien, often god-like beings, in which mankind and its concerns are insignificant. Almost every campaign is the tale of characters growing in power and dominance over a place.First published in 1981, Call of Cthulhu was the first explicitly "horror" roleplaying game. In the same way, other role-playing games can become repetitive. Tolstoy’s words about family come to mind: All happy families are alike each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This extended interaction with such a painful subject does turn some players off, yet over the decades it seems to have produced loyalty in its fanbase. Like gallows humor, the jokes domesticate death. While the game has its moments of fear and high drama, you’ll also see players laughing and cracking jokes. Playing Cthulhu is a prolonged engagement with death and suffering. The characters in Call of Cthulhu face death and an implacable universe The players at the table face the same, but at a safe remove. ![]() Only by dooming oneself to tragedy can you preserve the illusion - again, per Lovecraft, that’s all we have - of safety and goodness for those innocent others. Hite wrote, arouses, in Aristotle’s words, “pity and terror”… The heroic Investigators’ tragic choice is to choose to face the universe squarely, to learn about its truth - the Mythos - and by so doing, go mad. The universe’s flaw is that it is inhabited by malignant forces beyond the comprehension of humanity. Hite compares the game to a Greek tragedy, but one where the universe- not the characters- possesses a fatal flaw. It is because we’ve been telling ourselves stories of loss, woe, and self-sacrifice since the first shaman rattled some dead hero’s bones over the campfire. The nigh inevitable fate of most investigators. The question then follows, if the game is about confronting terrors, and inevitably losing to them, why would anyone ever want to play this game? Hite said, Call of Cthulhu is the only RPG that has to be, when played by the rules, about something besides an adolescent power fantasy… Your character deliberately, and gradually, commits slow, horrible suicide by insanity in order to save innocent people (a few, a thousand, or a billion) from that very fate. Having written a Cthulhu game of his own, he knows a thing or two about diving into madness. Writer and game-design master Ken Hite is the originator of this argument. ![]() It is a game where in all the ways that matter, your character gets worse over time, until her skin is sloughed off by some nickering abomination. ![]() And if you engage in straight up combat with the game’s monstrosities, the coroner will be lucky to find enough teeth to identify your ragged remains.
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