Retrospective: Call of Cthulhu

"Didn't James already do a Retrospective on Call of Cthulhu?" After four hundred posts in this series – this one is, in fact, the four hundredth – you would understandably think that, but it's not true. As I've discovered in the process of choosing the contents of my Grognardia anthologies, I didn't start writing Retrospective posts until September 17, 2008 and, even then, those posts didn't become consistent, weekly features of the blog for a while longer. 

Now, I did write a post – my first one on the subject – about Call of Cthulhu on October 31, 2008 that definitely has something of a Retrospective vibe about it. Indeed, I regularly link to that post as a kind of substitute for the fact that, even after all these years, I'd still never written a Retrospective on CoC, despite my immense affection for the game, which I consider among the greatest and most influential games and game designs in the history of the hobby.

Since I'm now nearly halfway through my The Shadow over August series honoring the memory of H.P. Lovecraft, I thought now might be the perfect time to rectify this very old oversight on my part. However, since my original post from 2008, "A Game for Grown-Ups," already covers much of the ground I'd usually cover in a Retrospective post, I've decided that this one will instead focus on a different aspect of Call of Cthulhu, namely, its place in the history of the hobby.

When the game first appeared in 1981, it was unlike anything that had come before it. Published by Chaosium and designed by Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, it was the first fully realized horror role-playing game. There had, of course, been fantasy games with horrific elements before it. Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, had more than its share of shambling undead and sanity-blasting monsters, but Call of Cthulhu was the first to make horror not merely an atmospheric seasoning but the whole meal. In doing so, it did more than simply introduce a new genre to the RPG marketplace; it reframed what a role-playing game could be.

The significance of being first is hard to overstate. By 1981, science fiction, post-apocalypse, superheroes, and espionage each had their own dedicated RPGs, often more than one. Horror, however, remained conspicuously absent, perhaps because many assumed its central emotion, fear, couldn’t be easily conjured at the table. Petersen’s ingenious solution was not to frighten the players directly, but to have them role-play fear. Dread emerged from the slow unravelling of an investigator’s mind, the accumulation of forbidden knowledge, and the grim realization that the forces at work could never be overcome in the usual, heroic way.

This approach has since become the template for almost all horror games, even when they are self-consciously attempting to distance themselves from it. Just Alfred North Whitehead famously called Western philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato, the same can be said of Call of Cthulhu's place in the realm of horror RPGs. The sanity mechanic, the emphasis on investigation over combat, and the focus on player knowledge versus character fragility all flowed from Petersen’s design choices in Call of Cthulhu. Nearly every horror RPG since has grappled with or responded to this foundation.

For Chaosium, Call of Cthulhu was similarly transformative. Before 1981, the company was best known for RuneQuest and its Glorantha setting, along with Basic Role-Playing, the streamlined system that powered it. These were critical successes but niche compared to the behemoth that was TSR. Call of Cthulhu changed the equation, thanks to its much wider appeal. By the mid-1980s, Call of Cthulhu was outselling everything else Chaosium produced and it became the company’s flagship line for decades. In many respects, Call of Cthulhu was Chaosium in the public mind and arguably is still the game most closely associated with the company.

It’s telling that Chaosium survived rough patches in its history largely because Call of Cthulhu never went out of print. Where other RPGs waxed and waned in popularity, CoC had a steady, international audience. Indeed, its scenarios and campaigns became not just supplements but cultural touchstones in RPG history. Many are considered landmarks whose influence extends far beyond their original audience, much like Call of Cthulhu itself. Looking back, the game’s influence is visible everywhere. Here are just a few that occur to me:

Dungeons & Dragons modules before 1981 were largely site-based adventures. By contrast, CoC’s scenarios pioneered investigation-driven play, where clues, interviews, and research were central. This structure seeped back into other genres, shaping how adventures were written.

Though frequently imitated, few mechanics have been as thematically perfect as CoC’s sanity rules, which track not just the erosion of mental stability but the cost of knowing too much. It’s become almost impossible to design a horror RPG without addressing the question: what’s your version of this mechanic?

Translations of CoC played a huge role in spreading RPGs worldwide, especially in countries where Lovecraft’s stories already had a foothold. In France, Japan, and elsewhere, it rather than, say, Dungeons & Dragons was often the gateway RPG.

More than four decades later, Call of Cthulhu is not merely Chaosium’s flagship; it is "the Dungeons & Dragons of horror gaming." It has become the lingua franca of the genre, the common framework through which players, Keepers, and designers alike approach tales of the uncanny and the unknown. It remains the benchmark for how to adapt a literary source faithfully without becoming a prisoner to it, preserving the essence of Lovecraft’s cosmic dread while evolving into a style of play all its own.

Like D&D, it has been endlessly imitated, parodied, expanded upon, and reimagined, yet the original endures – still recognizably itself and still drawing new players into its orbit. For many, it is not simply a horror RPG; it is the horror RPG, the game against which all others are measured. As long as players gather to face ancient secrets and watch their fragile investigators descend into madness, Call of Cthulhu will remain the universal tongue of tabletop terror.

Retrospective: The Book of Wondrous Inventions

I have a complicated relationship with humor in roleplaying games. I unreservedly celebrate games like Paranoia and Toon that are explicitly humorous in tone and content, having had a lot of fun with them in the past. Likewise, I know very well that even the most "serious" RPG campaigns are likely to include moments of unexpected levity and goofiness and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, even Shakespeare included moments of comic relief in his most harrowing tragedies.

At the same time, I wince at most puns and have a particular dislike of forced attempts humor in roleplaying games. Over the years, I've seen enough well-meaning but ultimately disastrous attempts to "lighten the mood" that my natural inclination is to be suspicious of humor in RPGs. That's not to say I hate it unreservedly, only that I recognize how easy it is for this sort of thing to go badly wrong.

With all that in mind, I hope I can be forgiven for having very mixed feelings about The Book of Wondrous Inventions. Compiled by Bruce Heard from nearly fifty contributions by a wide variety of authors (more on that in a bit) and published in 1987, The Book of Wondrous Inventions is clearly intended to be a companion volume to The Book of Marvelous Magic, right down to its title. But whereas the content of The Book of Marvelous Magic was largely serious in tone – or at least no less serious than the standard lists of (A)D&D magic items – this new book was intentionally written with humor in mind. In his introduction, Bruce Heard writes the following:

These inventions should be viewed with humor. They provide fun and an uncommon change of pace whenever they appear in the game.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, especially if one is sparing in their use within a given campaign. Almost since its inception, D&D has included its fair share of magic items that could well be viewed as silly. The apparatus of Kwalish, anyone? The difference here, I think, is that previous goofy magic items were spice, those included here are the main course – or, at least, they give the impression of being so, because there are so many of them under a single cover. That's not really their fault, but I can't deny that it bugged me a bit in the past and still bugs me a bit even today.

The magic items detailed in this book are all unique and highly idiosyncratic, the products of singular individuals intent on creating something truly unusual. There's Aldryk's Fire Quencher (a magical water sprinkler), Brandon's Bard-in-a-Box (a portable music system), Kruze's Magnificent Missile (self-explanatory), Volospin's Dragonfly of Doom (a magical attack helicopter for hunting dragons), and so on. As you can see, nearly all of the items described reproduce the effects of a post-medieval – and likely modern-day or futuristic – technological device within the idiom of vanilla fantasy. There's not much cleverness on display here. Instead, the entries are all "What would a magical vacuum cleaner be like?" or "Wouldn't a magical pinball machine be funny?" 

The combination of the fundamentally technological framing of these items and their banality results in a very sub-par book, even given Heard's stated intention that they "provide fun" and a "change of pace." It's particularly baffling, because many of the entries are written by talented and imaginative people, like Ed Greenwood, Jeff Grubb, and even Sandy Petersen. I can only assume that they were all specifically instructed to come up with stuff that would feel appropriate in Wile E. Coyote's Acme Catalog – or perhaps from the minds of Dragonlance's tinker gnomes. The end result is not, in my opinion, either useful as a source of ideas for an ongoing D&D campaign or even of mirth. It's dull, predictable, and, above all, forced, which is a great shame, because I admire many of the book's contributors.

Sadly, the book is done no favors by its accompanying illustrations. Much as I adore the work of Jim Holloway, one of the few artists who really understood the humor inherent in typical RPG situations, his artwork here is simply so goofy that it makes it impossible to imagine using any of its inventions with a straight face. Maybe that's the point. Maybe you're not supposed to be able to do so. Maybe I'm just a killjoy lacking in a funny bone. Ultimately, that's not for me to judge. I can only say that, when I bought this back in 1987, I instantly regretted and have never used it, except as a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to inject "humor" into a campaign rather than allowing it to arise organically through play. 

Oh, the pain ... the pain!

Retrospective: Ghostbusters

Roleplaying games based on officially licensed properties started appearing quite early in the history of the hobby. FGU's Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo is the first that I can recall, unless you wish to count TSR's Warriors of Mars, which is, in my opinion, something of an edge case – and it wasn't officially licensed at any rate). Others soon followed, like Heritage's Star Trek (and FASA's too!), SPI's Dallas, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, ICE's Middle-earth Role Playing, and many, many more. 

I mention all of this because I think it's sometimes easy to forget, especially on the old school side of the hobby, that gamers have long been quite keen on playing around in fictional worlds originally created for mass media. Much as I valorize the inventive and often idiosyncratic settings unique to RPGs, I'm also a big fan of a couple of games that make use of licensed settings and think the hobby would be diminished without them. If nothing else, licensed roleplaying games can serve as a useful entrée to newcomers.

Though I suspect that Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, released by West End Games in 1987, is the most well-known (and successful?) licensed RPG ever, at least some of its success depends on another West End RPG, released the year before: Ghostbusters. Subtitled, "A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game," Ghostbusters is an unexpectedly good game, boasting not just a good sense of humor, as you'd expect, but also a solid and easy to use set of rules. Looking at its designers – Sandy Petersen, Greg Stafford, and Lynn Willis – this should come as little surprise. What still surprises me, though, even after all these years, is that it was Ghostbusters that gave the world not just the core of the system later used to excellent effect in the aforementioned Star Wars RPG, but also gave it the now-ubiquitous dice pool method of resolving in-game actions.

Characters in Ghostbusters have four ability scores, called traits – Brains, Muscle, Moves, and Cool – that are each given a numerical rating representing the number of six-sided dice rolled when making use of that trait. Players can associate a talent with each trait. Talents are more or less skills, like brawl, convince, or parapsychology. When a character makes use of a talent, he gets an additional three dice to add to those already provided by his trait. Other things, like equipment, can add to the pool of dice a player rolls as well. The sum of any roll is then compared to a target number assigned by the referee (called the Ghostmaster), based on its difficulty, success equated with meeting or exceeding the assigned target number.

If you understood the foregoing description of Ghostbusters' game mechanics without any trouble, that's because they're now well-established and commonplace, but that wasn't the case in 1986, when the idea of dice pool was somewhat exotic, at least in the circles in which I moved. As I already mentioned, Star Wars borrowed and further developed this system, which is no surprise, given that the two games were both West End products. What's more remarkable, I think, is that games like Ars Magica, Vampire: The Masquerade (and its sequels), and Shadowrun all evince the direct or indirect influence of Ghostbusters, making its mechanics, along with those of Dungeons & Dragons and Basic Role-Playing, among the most enduring in the history of the hobby.

Ghostbusters included or popularized several other mechanical innovations, such as the use of "brownie points" with which a player could influence the result of dice rolls, potentially blunting some of their negative consequences. "Hero points" of this sort were nothing new by this point. However, Ghostbusters enabled a player to gain more brownie points for his character through good roleplaying and achieving his character's stated goals. I can't say for certain that nothing like this had ever been done before – I'm pretty sure it had been – but, at the time, I found it revelatory. At the opposite end of the scale, the game included the "ghost die," a special six-sider where the 6 was replaced with the Ghostbusters logo. The ghost die is used in every roll and any roll showing the logo indicates a negative consequence of some sort, even if the roll is otherwise successful. Again, it's old hat now; in 1986, though, this was genuinely innovative.

Another aspect of Ghostbusters that I think deserves special praise is its basic premise. Unlike some licensed RPGs, which assume the players will take on the roles of existing characters within the media property, Ghostbusters assumes the players will create their own Ghostbusters, who are franchisees of the original, New York-based Ghostbusters of the 1984 movie. The idea is that the player characters are the local Ghostbusters of their hometown and their adventures should reflect that fact. I think it's a great set-up and, even at the time, I felt that it was a good basis for making more Ghostbusters movies, with each one taking place in a new city with a new cast of characters. 

I really enjoyed playing Ghostbusters when it was first released and still look back fondly on it. Sadly, I no longer have my copy and trying to replace it is prohibitively expensive. It's a very underrated RPG for one that is so well designed, influential, and fun. I wish it were more widely known and appreciated today.

The Wages of Naturalism

I think it's fair to say that my post on Gygaxian Naturalism way back in the first year of this blog is one of, if not the, most influential posts I've ever written. I regularly come across people using the terminology, often with no knowledge of its origins, on blogs, forums, and elsewhere. I think that's terrific. I imagine most writers dream of creating something that becomes sufficiently widespread that their own role in creating is forgotten or, perhaps more charitably, subsumed by the creation itself. In any case, I take no small pleasure in having put a name to and explicated a concept that retains some degree of currency in unrelated discussions almost a decade and a half later.

Ironically, my own feelings about the consequences of Gygaxian Naturalism are in flux and with each passing day becoming more negative. To be clear: I'm still very much a proponent of consistent worldbuilding, which is what I think Gygaxian Naturalism is at its root. However, I increasingly feel as if many designers have mistaken consistency, which is generally an unalloyed good, for realism, by which I mean (in this case) operating according to rational – or even scientific – principles. In general, I don't think fantasy is very well served by most expressions of realism, as they will ultimately undermine the fantasy.

Maintaining consistency and coherence without toppling over into monomanical realism is not easy, so I try not to come down too harshly on lapses. Take, for example, this illustration (by Lisa A. Free) that appeared in the 1982 RuneQuest release, Trollpak, which is widely considered a masterclass in how to present a nonhuman species for use in a roleplaying game.

Taken in itself, this anatomical diagram of a troll is a wonderful piece of work that helps ground one of Glorantha's most fearsomely antagonistic species in an almost palpable reality – and that's part of my problem with it. As a setting, Glorantha has a (fairly) consistent tone, one grounded in myth. That's a huge part of its appeal to me. Illustrations like the one above, though, they detract from that mythic feel. Seeing one of the Uz laid out like, dissected and tagged like a cadaver from a Renaissance sketchbook, doesn't, in my opinion, add to the consistent worldbuilding of Glorantha, even if it does shed light on how trolls are able to eat anything. Instead, it actively detracts from any conception of trolls as weird or wondrous inhabitants of the Underworld.

Consider, too, this illustration from issue #72 (April 1983) of Dragon:

Almost anyone who was a reader of Dragon at the time should remember this piece of art, which accompanied "The Ecology of the Piercer" by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards. At the time it first appeared, I absolutely adored this article and, judging from the fact that it inspired a regular feature in the magazine for many years to come, I suspect I was not alone in my feelings. Like the troll diagram, that of the piercer attempts to present a interpretation of a well-known monster that works pretty well on a rational, scientific level but that, in so doing, also undermines its weirdness and wonder.

Obviously, everyone draws the line of what constitutes "undermining" fantasy in a different place. But I nevertheless can't help but feel that the tendency toward describing fantastical beings by recourse to rationalistic, scientific categories is an error – an error not just in applying the principle of coherent worldbuilding that undergirds Gygaxian Naturalism but also in understanding fantasy itself. Once upon a time, science fiction was considered a species of the wider genre of a fantasy. SF took place in an imaginary world, as all fantasies do, but one whose imaginary elements were theoretically explicable by recourse to scientific axioms. The anatomical drawings above seem to be tentative examples of applying science fictional principles to fantasy.

I'm not yet convinced that the approach pioneered by Trollpak or "The Ecology of the Piercer" is the inevitable endpoint of Gygaxian Naturalism. At the same time, I could cite plenty of other examples down through the years that suggest that, for many people, consistency and coherence can only be understood in terms of rationalism and science, even when discussing a purely fantastical world and its inhabitants. I struggle with this myself, so I appreciate the difficulties, even as I regret the outcome. 

Retrospective: RuneQuest Companion

About a year after the publication of original Dungeons & Dragons, its first supplement appeared. Subtitled Greyhawk, Supplement I offered up a grab bag of "new characters, new abilities, more spells to use, a horde of new monsters, heaps of new magical treasure, and various additions to the suggestions and rules for adventuring above and below the ground," most of which were drawn from Gary Gygax's D&D campaign of the same name. Two more supplements of a similar sort followed (Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry), thereby establishing a pattern for the way rules additions and suggestions were published in the hobby.

Chaosium was particularly prolific in producing supplements of this sort, though, rather than calling them "supplements," they called them "companions." Companions were published to support most of their RPGs, from Call of Cthulhu to Stormbringer to Ringworld, among others. Each of these companions presented a selection of rules and setting additions, expansions, options, and corrections. I've always appreciated this approach, since it both obviates the need for a new edition and gave the referee the choice of whether or not to include any of the new material printed in its pages.

The RuneQuest Companion, first published in 1983, is a good example of what I mean. Over the course of 72 pages, the Companion presents nineteen articles by a wide variety of authors, each of which offers new insight into some aspect of RQ and its setting, Glorantha. As explained by Charlie Krank in his introduction to the book, the Companion was published in the wake of the cancelation of Wyrms Footnotesm the semi-regular 'zine that had previously provided RQ fans with more information about Glorantha and its history, cultures, and denizens. (It's interesting to note that Krank's explanation for the demise of Wyrms Footnotes is quite simple: "it costs too much money." As the publisher of a fanzine myself, I am deeply sympathetic with Krank's perspective.) The Companion, then, was intended to fill this particular gap, with the promise – unfulfilled, as it turned out, but then that's nothing new in the history of RuneQuest – of a new volume of the Companion "whenever we have accumulated 64–96 pages of top-notch articles."

The articles are quite varied. There's Sherman Kahn's "An Index to RuneQuest Cults," Alan LaVergne's solo adventure, "The Maze of Shaxry Oborok," and Greg Stafford's "Holy Country" (complete with a remarkable map). Meanwhile, Sandy Petersen presents his "Species Spotlight: Unicorns," which gives a unique Gloranthan spin on the legendary beasts and "More on Trolls," expanding on the information in Trollpak. There's also a fair bit of fiction (and poetry) set in Glorantha and few rules additions. What makes the Companion remarkable, though, is its diversity. Its pages aren't devoted to a single theme or topic. Instead, we're provided with articles and essays on many aspects of the game and its setting, with a particular emphasis on the latter. Indeed, looking back on it now, what really strikes me about the RuneQuest Companion is how few of its pages are devoted to new rules. Chaosium clearly understood the main draw of RQ was its setting of Glorantha. That's probably why I look on this book so favorably even now.

Different Worlds: Issue #19

Issue #19 of Different Worlds (February 1982) is filled with tentacles, starting with its cover by Roland Brown. Inside, many of its articles are devoted to Chaosium's then-new horror roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu, which of course pleases me, as it's one of my all-time favorite RPGs. 

The issue kicks off with two excellent side-by-side articles by Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, in which each of them discuss the process of creating Call of Cthulhu from their perspective. These are both excellent articles and I wish I could do them justice with a brief summary. In general, Petersen focuses on the design of the game's rules and setting, while Willis talks about the "nuts and bolts" of making the game as a physical product, though each touches on other aspects as well. I already knew some of what was presented in these pieces, such as the origins of the game, but there was much more I'd never heard before. Good stuff!

"Guns Against Cthulhu" by Dick Wagenet presents variant rules for handling firearms in Call of Cthulhu and other modern Basic Role-Playing games. "Underground Menace" meanwhile is a Call of Cthulhu scenario by Sandy Petersen, set in and around Lake Superior in northern Michigan. Following it is a single page of errata and "second thoughts" on the rules of Call of Cthulhu. Not specifically related to Call of Cthulhu but relating to the 1920s time period is "The Gang Leaders" by Glenn Rahman. It's a collection of biographies and game statistics for famous criminals like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd for use with FGU's Gangster! I enjoyed reading it, even though I've never played Gangster!, helped no doubt by the terrific contemporary photographs of the gangsters themselves.

"Safe Storage for Figures" by John T. Sapienza reviews several cases and storage containers intended to hold and protect miniature figures, complete with photos. "Thieves of Sparta" by B. Dennis Sustare presents guidelines for adapting Task Force's Heroes of Olympus to the setting of Thieves' World. The article is notable for the fact that Sustare is himself the designer of Heroes of Olympus. This month's reviews include Call of Cthulhu (very favorable), Adventure Class Ships, Volume 1 (for Traveller, also favorable), and Palace of the Silver Princess. The latter review is interesting in that the reviewer, Anders Swenson, comments on its conflation of "player" and "player character," a pet peeve of mine, which Swenson calls "the perennial FRP identity crisis." That said, his overview opinion of the module is positive.

There are also reviews of the notorious roleplaying game, Spawn of Fashan, other reviews of which I recall from my youth. Amusingly, the reviewer, Charles Dale Martin, spends the entirety of his review criticizing various aspects of the game, but still concludes "it may be still worth buying" on the strength of its referee's section. No similar charity is extended to Patrick Amory's review of Deities & Demigods. Amory lambastes it for its overall approach, saying it "contains monsters not religions." While I largely agree with that particular point, he is much harsher than I, concluding that it "is not of the slightest interest to anyone in the FRP market and should be avoided like leprosy." Ouch!

The issue ends with Gigi D'Arn's column. Most of this issue's gossip is filled with ephemera but a few rumors stand out. Among these are Richard Snider's hiring by Avalon Hill, Lawrence Schick's hiring by Coleco, the upcoming D&D video game for Intellivision, and GDW's cease-and-desist order filed against Edu-Ware for computer games illegally derived from Traveller. There's also talk of an upcoming RuneQuest supplement by Ken Kaufer called Dorastor. A product with a similar title would eventually appear, featuring some of Kaufer's work (along with many others), but it would not appear until more than a decade later during the brief RuneQuest Renaissance of the early 1990s masterminded by Ken Rolston.

Being a fan of Call of Cthulhu as I am, I enjoyed this issue a great deal. I hope I'll be similarly impressed with issue #20.

Different Worlds: Issue #17

Issue #18 of Different Worlds (December 1981) begins with an interesting editorial by Tadashi Ehara. He discusses the need for "careful consideration" in choosing a roleplaying game system if one intends for it to become "a lifetime hobby." Ehara seems to be suggesting that a person might – or even must – choose a single system and then devote oneself fully to it. For that reason, he advocates choosing a system that is "lasting and worthwhile," providing "learning experiences that we can use constructively in our daily lives." I don't disagree in general, though I do find it odd that he doesn't consider the possibility of long-term devotion to multiple systems rather than a single "ultimate set of rules." 

The first article is a RuneQuest solo scenario by Sandy Petersen entitled "Ware Hall." Set in Glorantha, it's presented as a series of short boxed texts found at the bottom of most pages of the issue. The scenario itself is nothing special but I was impressed with its presentation, which is quite clever. Ronald Mark Pehr's "Speed in Melee" is a set of variant rules for Dungeons & Dragons focused on an alternative approach to initiative. I find it difficult to judge articles like this, as I've never cared much about these matters, preferring simpler, if "unrealistic," systems rather than more complex ones.

Paul Montgomery Crabaugh's "For Sale" provides three new fighter craft designs for use with GDW's Traveller. Greg Wilson's "Enuk Manamee" is a gateway cult for RuneQuest describing "the fire god of the tundra nomads." Ronald Mark Pehr appears again, this time offering "The Horseclans Player" for use with The Fantasy Trip. It's a short overview of how to set TFT in the universe of Robert Adams's Horseclans novels. As a fan of the source material, I was glad to see this article, even if it's much too brief. "The Log of the Lively Lady" by Gerald Seypura is an adventure for FGU's Skull & Crossbones – a RPG for which I've rarely ever seen articles published anywhere. 

"Questworld" is a lengthy article by Lynn Willis, Sandy Petersen, and Greg Stafford discussing the creation of a non-Gloranthan setting for use with RuneQuest. Ultimately, this setting would be published in the boxed set of the same name. I've long been intrigued by Questworld, which has long seemed to me to have been a path not taken for RQ. Most interesting to me is the article's mentioning of the fact that continents on Questworld had been set aside for Games Workshop and Judges Guild to use in producing their own adventures and support material. So far as I know, neither publisher ever did anything with Questworld, but then neither did Chaosium beyond the initial boxed set.

Robin Wood's "Conversions in Lead" is another lengthy article, this time discussing how to create non-standard miniatures by modifying existing ones. Like most topics pertaining to miniatures figures, I have a great interest in this one but absolutely no experience with it. Also notable is the article's inclusion of an Ahoggyá figure from the world of Tékumel, which is something you don't see very often. "Devious Magic" by Robert Plamondon is another D&D variant. Plamondon offers a number of new ways to use old spells and magic items in order to breathe new life in them. While I can't say I was blown away by any of his suggestions, I certainly approve of his intentions. 

John T. Sapienza also presents a D&D variant, entitled "Non-human Level Limits," which seeks an alternative approach to slowing the level advancement of demihuman characters. Sapienza's approach isn't what suggests – which is fine – but that he repeatedly notes that "the D&D rules are designed for human characters" and "humanity dominates among the intelligent races." It's a perspective that isn't much held nowadays, but I'm always pleased when I find further evidence that it was commonplace in the hobby prior to the 21st century. Issue #13 also reviews Champions, Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, and Cults of Terror. 

Gigi D'Arn's column begins by noting that the sales of many RPG companies were poor in 1981 and that many would likely not survive long into 1982. There's no specific support for these claims, however, so I can't speak to their truth. Then there's this story:

Lou Zocchi's ventriloquist dummy, Woody Knotts, was once quite well known in the hobby, so I found this tidbit fascinating. Gigi likewise mentions rumors of a gaming magazine from FGU, Rona Jaffe's upcoming novel, Steve Jackson writing a supplement for Dragonquest, and the first two volumes of the Armies of Tékumel series. 

My exploration of Different Worlds continues. It's an odd magazine, as I've said: when it's good, it's very, very good, but much of the time it's fairly mediocre, or at least of much less interest to me than any random issue of Dragon or White Dwarf. That might say more about me and my tastes than it does about Different Worlds, of course, but there it is.

Retrospective: The Gateway Bestiary

To my mind, RuneQuest is inextricably linked to Glorantha, Greg Stafford's incomparable mythic Bronze Age setting. For me, playing RQ means playing a fantasy roleplaying campaign in that setting, a perspective seemingly shared by Chaosium, since the current iteration of the game is literally subtitled "Roleplaying in Glorantha." 

However, this wasn't always the case. In the early days of the game, there was the concept of "Gateway RuneQuest." Gateway RQ was RQ played in a setting other than Glorantha. In 1982, Chaosium took a stab at supporting this concept with a boxed set, entitled QuestWorld, which presented a non-Gloranthan setting for use with the game. For whatever reason, QuestWorld received no follow-up support and Gateway RuneQuest more or less faded away. 

Two years prior to the release of QuestWorld, Chaosium published an entire book of monsters intended, at least in part, to support non-Gloranthan RuneQuest. Appropriately called The Gateway Bestiary, it's also Sandy Petersen's earliest credit for Chaosium. The 40-page book is a fascinating collection of beasts, illustrated by Rick Becker, whose work appeared in numerous RQ products in the late 1970s and early '80s. Each creature is given a description, game statistics, and a hit location table for use with the combat system. 

The Gateway Bestiary consists of seven chapters, each one devoted to a different type of creature. The first chapter describes giant anthropods [sic], which is to say, insects and insect-like creatures, such as crabs and spiders. The chapter also includes rules for hive minds. The second chapter treats "legendary beings" of the sort found in Greek mythology, such as fauns and gorgons. The subjects of the third chapter are "Celtic horrors" of the sort found in Gaelic folklore (e.g. kelpies, redcaps, voughs, etc.). 

The fourth chapter is perhaps the most interesting one in the whole book, since it details "H.P. Lovecraft Creations." Call of Cthulhu, also by Petersen, would appear a year later and give this subject a fuller treatment, so this chapter serves as a kind of "sneak peek" of what was to come. Perhaps the most notable thing about the chapter is that there are not yet any sanity rules associated with these entities. The fifth chapter provides a large number of "natural animals" like lions, tigers, and bears, while the sixth offers up a plethora of dinosaurs. Concluding the book are "miscellaneous types" that don't easily fit anywhere else, such as jabberwocks, mummies, and shark-men.

As monster books go, The Gateway Bestiary is a fairly good one. While it lacks the length of, say, the AD&D Monster Manual, it more than makes up for it by the quality of its entries. Many detail truly unusual and unexpected creatures one doesn't normally see elsewhere. Their impact would likely have been even more significant in 1980, when monster books of any kind were still relatively rare. For me, though, the real power of The Gateway Bestiary is its invocation of a time before RuneQuest was so firmly entrenched in Glorantha that the two had become synonymous, a path not taken by Chaosium that might have contributed to a very different history for the game. 

Different Worlds: Issue #7

Issue #7 of Different Worlds (April/May 1980) features a cover by Cora L. Healy, an artist known for her work on science fiction periodicals throughout the 1970s and early '80s. The issue proper begins with an installment of the "Beginner's Brew" column that lists "all the more popular role-playing games (RPGs) and magazines available." The games and magazines are divided up by publisher, sixteen for RPGs and fourteen for magazines. There are also fifteen miniatures manufacturers listed. The list are interesting, most especially for the "forthcoming" games mentioned, such as Chaosium's Dark Worlds and Elric RuneQuest and Heritage USA's Heroes of Middle Earth. 

"Ten Days in the Arena of Khazan" by Ken St. Andre is a seven-page outline of a campaign for use with Tunnels & Trolls. More than that, though, it's an overview of a portion of the game's setting of Trollworld, with lots of interesting tidbits about its history and peoples. I really enjoyed this article, because it gave me some insight into what it's like to play in St. Andre's home campaign, a topic that never ceases to interest me. 

I find it hard to disagree with Richard L. Snider's effusive review of Cults of Prax, one of the truly great RPG supplements of all time. He rightly deems it "the best extant cosmology designed for use with any FRP" – which was probably true in 1980 and, even today, it stands head and shoulders above most other treatments of similar topics. "Gloranthan Birthday Tables" by Morgan O. Woodward III is a series of random tables to determine when a Gloranthan character is born, with special attention given to those during Sacred Time (and the special abilities that might come from such an auspicious birth). 

Part two of the "Vardy Combat System" by John T. Sapienza appears in this issue. A variant combat system for use with Dungeons & Dragons, this article provides expanded rules and tables for handling parries, shields, hit points, and more. What I appreciate about the system is that it strives to be genuinely compatible with D&D's existing combat system rather than simply replacing it. The article even offers a further option that uses D20 rolls rather than percentile ones, for even further compatibility. As I said previously, I have not tested this system and have no idea how well it works in practice, but, from reading it, I think it might be worthy testing out in play.

"Foundchild Cult" by Sandy Petersen is a cult for use with RuneQuest and its setting of Glorantha. Meanwhile. Steve Perrin reviews In the Labyrinth by Steve Jackson. Perrin thinks very highly of the game, his main complaint being that, like Tunnels & Trolls before it, allows characteristics to increase as a character gains experience, something that he thinks inevitably leads to an "incredibly strong, lightning fast, cosmically intelligent character who seems to have stepped directly from the pages of Marvel or DC Comics." I think that's a fair criticism and one of the reasons I prefer the more grounded approach taken by many older RPGs. 

James M. Ward offers "Power Groups and Player Characters in RPGs," in which he talks specifically about the importance of factions in a campaign. He then provides examples from his home Metamorphosis Alpha campaign, showing how the characters became involved with them and how this involvement affected the development of the campaign. It's a solid, though short, article, covering a topic that is increasingly near and dear to my heart. "Two from Grenadier" by John T. Sapienza is a lengthy, five-page article that reviews in detail two AD&D boxed sets from Grenadier Models, Woodland Adventurers and Tomb of Spells. His review is quite positive overall and a nice bit of nostalgia for me, since I once owned both of the boxed sets in question.

"System Snobbery" by Larry DiTillio is an early entry in the now well-worn genre of "there are no bad RPGs, just bad GMs" articles. It's fine for what it is; its main interest to me was DiTillio's recounting of his experience with various GMs over the years. Gigi D'Arn's gossip column this month mentions the departure of Tim Kask from the editorship of Dragon and eludes to "dubious circumstances." There's further mention of a D&D movie, as well as a reference to something called the "AD&D Companion," a collection of variants for use with D&D and AD&D. I suspect this is either simply untrue or a garbled rumor of something like the Best of Dragon anthology, the first of which did appear in 1980. Concluding the issue is "Oriental Weapons for RuneQuest" by Sean Summers, with additional material by Steve Perrin. It's pretty much what you'd expect for this type of article, a staple of the '70s and '80s, when all things Asian were the rage in RPG circles.

Interview: Sandy Petersen

Sandy Petersen scarcely needs an introduction. One of his first RPG designs, Call of Cthulhu, remains one of the most successful and widely known roleplaying games of all time, played by several generations of gamers. It's probably done more to introduce the works of H.P. Lovecraft into pop culture than anything. Since writing Call of Cthulhu, Mr Petersen has gone from strength to strength, producing not just RPG materials but also video games and, most recently, boardgames. He very kindly agreed to answer my questions about his early experiences in the hobby, his career, and his current activities.

1. How did you first become involved in the hobby of roleplaying?

In 1974, a friend of mine brought the original D&D to the table. He'd borrowed it from a teacher at our university. I was doubtful and it sounded loony, but when we played it we had fun. So I started roleplaying in the year it was published. 

2. Did you start playing RuneQuest as soon as it was published in 1978? What attracted you to the game? 

I did start in 1978. Just happened across it in the tiny Utah Valley game store and noticed it was set in the same world as my White Bear and Red Moon game. I got it because WBRM was such a weird universe and I liked it. Then, when we started playing it, of all things we got hooked by the game system which was vastly superior to D&D. No character classes. Bows were actually useful. Giant monsters were super-scary. No less than two magic systems, each of which made sense. By the end of the year we weren't playing D&D any more. 

3. Could you elaborate a bit on what it was you liked about Glorantha? What were the features that you found so compelling?

I was fascinated that the world seemed more mythic rather than mere sword & sorcery. I loved the fact that religion played such a core role. It wasn't rare in D&D for a cleric to join the party and if you asked him what his deity was, he'd answer, "I don't know, but he's Lawful Good." Also people besides clerics had religion in RuneQuest. A lot of it was simply that the world seemed huge, well fleshed out, and unique. D&D gave you no setting whatsoever except for a generic medieval place (this last has been fixed since then with plenty of good settings). One of my friends, who really, really liked fantasy, finally gave up on D&D because it was a mishmash. As he explained to me. "D&D has centaurs, demons, stirges, and trolls all in the same world. Those are totally different mythologies. I can't take it." I can see what he meant, though it didn't bother me as much. But I could still see the attraction of a world, like Glorantha, that was created to make sense. 

4. Your first published RPG credit is the Gateway Bestiary for RuneQuest. Among the exotic creatures it introduces for use with RQ are some derived from the works of H.P. Lovecraft. How did you first become aware of Lovecaft's work?

At the age of 8, I found a book in my dad's storage boxes, The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories. It was an Armed Services edition, published in 1942 (never could figure out why reading HPL would make our men fight harder, but I'm glad they had access to it). I was one of those annoying precocious kids who read a lot, and had already read Poe. So I read this book and was blown away. I couldn't find any other sources of his works though - he was pretty much totally out of print. I didn't find more sources of his works for years! Probably the search for Lovecraft got me hooked as a super fan.

5. I recall reading an article in Different Worlds that your original plan for a Lovecraftian RPG was to base it on the Dreamlands stories. Why did you initially take this approach? What did you see in the Dreamlands stories that made you think they'd make a good basis for a roleplaying game?

I simply had failure of imagination. My idea was not to write a whole new RPG – that sounded like a huge project. I just wanted to do something about Lovecraft. The RuneQuest game was medieval/ancient myth & magic, I thought the Dreamlands would be a good match, so I could do a Dreamlands sourcebook for RuneQuest players. Chaosium had the real vision: a whole game, set in the modern era about Lovecraftian horrors. I mean, I had previously designed my own little modern-era horror RPG but not for publication, just for me and my friends. I never dreamed Chaosium would give me the reins to a full-on RPG of my own.

6. It's my understanding that, at the time you proposed your Dreamlands game, Chaosium had already approved another horror RPG called Dark Worlds, written by Kurt Lortz. If that's correct, how did it happen that Call of Cthulhu eventually became Chaosium's horror game instead? 

I don't recall who the original writer on Dark Worlds was. I know he was in Texas. What Chaosium told me is that he had sent them just a few pages of stuff, including a 1d100 table to roll up Spooky Noises with. I just asked if I could read over the project and make suggestions, when they dropped the whole thing on me. They said they'd send me the stuff from the original author to look at but they never did. I didn't get to see the Spooky Noises table till like three years later. My understanding is that it was going to be a Lovecraft game from the very start, but I was not privy to how they decided to do HPL instead of some other author. 

7. Call of Cthulhu is probably most notable for its introduction of a Sanity mechanic. Obviously, the idea for it came from Lovecraft's stories themselves but did you have any other inspirations for it, particularly on the game mechanical side?

The real origin was an article in Sorcerer's Apprentice magazine in which the authors posited a sort of mental stability stat for Tunnels & Trolls. If you fumbled your stability roll, it would drop by a point. The concept of a stat that could be lowered hit me like a thunderclap, and I ran with it, creating the entire Sanity system in a day or two, and then honing it. 

But at first I just thought of Sanity as another tool for the monsters to use to blight the investigators, plus a means to simulate folks going crazy – a common event in Lovecraft's tales. I changed my mind on the very first test we did using Sanity. The players were in the "Haunted House" scenario (still in every copy of CoC) and had found a creepy old book which had a spell – "Summon Malign Entity From Beyond." Somehow they got it into their heads that this Malign Entity was the cause of the haunting, so they decided to summon it. They went into the basement, set up a pentacle and did the summoning (it was actually a Dimensional Shambler spell). I told them that they heard weird sounds, like something clawing its way through the dimensions, and then a portal opened and something … awful … pulled its body forward. This is when I got a shock. One player said, "I'm covering my eyes." Another, "I'm running away upstairs." A third "I'm huddling in the corner, face turned to the wall." 

You'd never see D&D players averting their gaze from a possible threat! But in Call of Cthulhu, their investigators acted as though they were afraid, because of the Sanity rules. I understood at that moment how powerful the Sanity rules would be in making a game terrifying. It was a rule mechanic which drove players to behave in a way that suited the world.    

8. By the time you'd written Call of Cthulhu, you already had several RuneQuest products under your belt. Were you still a freelancer at the time you wrote Call of Cthulhu or were an employee by that point?

I was still freelancing. I was going to school in Utah, finishing my Bachelor's degree. I became a part-time employee of Chaosium shortly after Call of Cthulhu's publication. 

9. TrollPak is widely considered one of the best RQ supplements of all time, as well as being one of the best depictions of an imaginary species and culture in a roleplaying game. Which parts of that boxed set were you responsible for? Were you given a lot of freedom or did Greg Stafford provide you with strong direction?

I did the scenarios and the "science" part, like troll evolution and anatomy. Greg did the weird psychology/mythic material. We worked super-well together and as a result of Trollpak we basically became indispensable to one another for all things RuneQuest. I still worked alone for Call of Cthulhu, as he did for Pendragon. 

10. Your credits while working at Chaosium are many, spanning RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Superworld, and more. Looking back on them all, do you have a favorite, one that you're most proud of?

I guess my four top picks are first, Call of Cthulhu, which is still the game that gets me bought drinks when I'm at convention. Second, the Ghostbusters game (for West End), because it won an award and the game system then got used (usually without credit) in a bunch of other RPGs, so its legacy lives on. Third, the Borderlands adventure pack for Runequest because it was the first-ever boxed campaign set. And fourth, my developmental work on the original Arkham Horror board game for which I was not given credit, though I feel I was key in turning Richard Launius's great design into a polished version.  

11. After you left Chaosium, you entered the world of computer games, working first for MicroProse and then, more famously, for id Software. Was the transition between pen and paper and digital games difficult or did you find that the skills you'd developed at Chaosium served you well outside the world of tabletop gaming?

I was able to fit right into computer games. One thing that helped me is that my friends and mentor at MicroProse also came from the world of tabletop games, so we were all adapting tabletop means of development to the new world of digital games. It turns out that game design is game design, no matter what the medium. The hard part of adapting was that you couldn't do it all yourself. You had to work with programmers and project leads, and artists were far more core to the design than in a tabletop game where they mostly just functioned as illustrators, hired after the game was mostly finished. 

The process went full circle in 2012, when I returned to tabletop gaming, and brought my digital ethos with me. One thing I had learned is to treat artists as a team member, not an "illustrator" and to have them involved from the start of the process. This is one of the aspects that made Cthulhu Wars and Planet Apocalypse memorable – that art involvement. I also learned to playtest super-early and super-often. 

12. In 2015, it was announced that you had returned to Chaosium, specifically to do work on the Call of Cthulhu game line. Which projects have commanded your attention in the past few years?

I returned to active control of Chaosium along with Greg Stafford, but not in order to work on Call of Cthulhu, and I don't think that was ever stated. [Thanks for correcting my memory -- JM] Instead, we returned to ensure the planned release of Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, which had stalled tragically and to get Chaosium out of the hole it had dug itself into. Greg and I never planned to stay. He was in retirement, and writing fiction, while I had a whole other company to run. In fact, within a month Greg and I sold a controlling interest in Chaosium to Moon Publications and basically turned it over to them. About a year later, Chaosium bought out my remaining shares except for 1%. 

I worked with the new Chaosium to produce Petersen's Abominations, a book of scenarios I'd compiled over the years. I have more such scenarios and Chaosium said they were interested but have not come back to it. They also wanted a bunch of my Glorantha scenarios and I worked with an editor to get that started, but since then I guess they've been too busy to move it along. 

13. Outside of roleplaying games, you've also been busy with your own company, Petersen Games, designing and producing extremely high quality boardgames. What prompted your interest in boardgames? Were you always a fan of this type of game?

In grammar school, I used to stay inside during recess to play Clue, so boardgames have always held interest. I started playing Avalon Hill wargames when I was about 12, and that has remained the case my whole life. As in I still play them. I was originally interested in D&D because it was a game, and we were playing lots of games all the time. Chess, chess variants, wargames, and so forth. The realm of games was not as wide as it is now – trading games, Euro games, unique card games, and worker placement had yet to be invented but we did our best. 

As the years went by I still played these games, and so did my co-workers everywhere I went. I played Up Front and Titan and Britannia at Chaosium, among others. At Ensemble Studios, we'd play Vinci, Settlers of Nurnberg, Shadows Over Camelot, Descent, and Twilight Imperium, among others. The board games never ceased. At home I'd play a tabletop wargame with a friend on a weeknight or sometimes Saturday. 

The main change when I started to publish my own games was that when I get together with my friends mostly I force them to playtest one of my upcoming works. I'd say 75-80% of our game sessions double for me as a playtest. We do occasionally pull out another game for fun. And I play games with my grandson on Sunday. He likes Rattlebones, for instance. So yeah, always steeped in games.  

14. Do you still get the chance to play RPGs? If so, what games are you currently playing?

I have a game session almost every saturday night. It's pretty much always Call of Cthulhu or RuneQuest, with occasional forays into something else when one of my pals wants to GM (usually Risus, then). Of late we've been playing the Hyperspace RPG a not-yet-published creation of my own set in the same universe as my not-yet-released Hyperspace strategy game.

Retrospective: H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands

Though H.P. Lovecraft is remembered today for the tales of cosmic horror to which the name "the Cthulhu Mythos" (or simply "the Mythos") has become attached, he began his literary career under the influence of the Anglo-Irish writer Edward Plunkett, better known to the world by his title, Lord Dunsany. In the first two decades of the 20th century, Dunsany wrote a large number of fantasy short stories, most of which were collected into larger volumes. These stories are often described as having a "dream-like" quality, evoking strange foreign lands inhabited by bizarre beings and ruled over by a pantheon of exotic deities. Both Dunsany's invented world and the style with which he presented it were highly regarded and not just by Lovecraft, who once heard him speak in Boston in 1919.

From 1918 till 1922, Lovecraft himself penned nearly three dozen short stories where the influence of Dunsany is clearly in evidence. These "Dream Cycle" stories are not generally held to be HPL's best works, but there's no question that, despite their flaws, many possess a certain vibrancy and immediacy that makes them attractive. After 1922, Lovecraft largely abandoned his Dunsanian tales, believing himself not temperamentally well-suited to its idiom. Nevertheless, he did occasionally return to some of the characters, locations, and themes of his Dream Cycle in later stories, starting with The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in 1926. For this reason, the Dream Cycle is sometimes considered a sub-set of his Cthulhu Mythos tales, even though the connections between them are tenuous at best.

Of course, tenuous connections are the stuff of which pastiche is made and so it is with H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, a 1986 boxed supplement to Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, written by Sandy Petersen, Kerie L. Robson, Keith Herber, and others. Subtitled, "Roleplaying Beyond the Wall of Sleep," Dreamlands is intended to open up a new realm for Call of Cthulhu adventures, one reached by leaving one's physical body behind and allowing one's consciousness to travel elsewhere. It's an intriguing basis for a fantasy roleplaying campaign, I can't deny, which is why I readily snapped up the supplement when it was first released. It's worth noting, too, that, though presented as an adjunct to Call of Cthulhu, its origins are in fact far older than that venerable game, having been conceived by Sandy Petersen before he wrote Call of Cthulhu (or so I believe -- someone with more certain knowledge can correct my misapprehension if indeed that's what it is).

Unfortunately, Dreamlands suffers a bit from the same problem that nearly every Mythos-related project suffers from: the need to codify. Now, as someone who is regularly guilty of the same vice, I say this not to point fingers at Sandy Petersen and friends. I mention it because I think the great difficulty in producing a roleplaying game (or supplement) that takes place in the land of dreams is that dreams are regularly whimsical to the point of incoherency. By their nature, they defy codification, even when there's a seeming connection between them. I often have dreams that take place in the "same" locale and yet, each time, details -- sometimes very large ones -- change or are omitted entirely and my dream self rarely takes notice.

So, while there's clearly a basis for a single dream realm in Lovecraft's stories, I'm not sure that realm is consistent enough to serve as the basis for, say, a canonical map. But that's exactly what Dreamlands does. It gives readers a map and a gazetteer of the Dreamlands, along with stats for many of its inhabitants, including its deities and other supernatural beings. It's all very well-done in a literal-minded way, but it certainly doesn't feel very much Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories, even the worst of which possesses that queer, malleable feeling that so many of my dreams do. Furthermore, the connection between the Dream Cycle and the Cthulhu Mythos feels very forced at times. Simply because, for example, ghouls appear in both doesn't mean that Lovecraft saw his stories as all taking place within the same "universe," at least no more than the fact that I dreamed about "M.A.R. Barker" means that he and I actually met.

If that all sounds nitpicky and pedantic, that's probably because it is. H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands is a supplement I enjoy and I regularly think about finding some way to incorporate it into my Call of Cthulhu campaigns, but I've never done so successfully. Every time I've tried to do so, it's felt a bit silly and cheap, more akin to revealing that Hastur is Cthulhu's half-brother than something mystical and phantasmagoric. Maybe the failing is in me rather than in Dreamlands itself, but I'm not yet fully convinced of that.

American Gothic

Reader Ronald Copley pointed me toward an old post over at Yog-Sothoth, where you can download a PDF copy of the original manuscript pages of the RPG, American Gothic, typed up by Steve Marsh. American Gothic is of interest, because it is, in the words of Sandy Petersen, "the alpha version" of Call of Cthulhu, one of the classics of our hobby.

According to Sandy Petersen:

Steve is an old friend of mine, and he did in fact help germinate the American Gothic idea (the name was his idea, for instance). Another pal of mine, Marc Hutchison, was involved from the start. Steve wrote up a treatment basing it largely on D&D...

The PDF document, which you can download here, is short but fascinating, particularly since it was written in May 1977 and uses OD&D/Chainmail terminology in places (such as the fighting capability of the "Mycenean Thought Crafters" class). Reading through it, you can see a number of things that call to mind the lost version of psionics that Steve Marsh created that was later reworked for inclusion into Eldritch Wizardry. It's well worth taking a look at this if you have any interest in the development of the games and ideas of the hobby.

Sandy Petersen Reviews Call of Cthulhu

A number of people emailed me today, asking that I take a look at this "review" of Call of Cthulhu by its creator, Sandy Petersen. It's quite a read, especially if you're interested in the genesis of this classic of the hobby. There are a lot of fascinating tidbits in it, some of which I already knew from other sources, but I think the most interesting to me concerned why the game was set in the 1920s:

To me, Lovecraft was never about the era. His characters used cutting-edge technology, such as submarines, airplanes, and recording devices, and interacted with cutting-edge events, such as the discovery of Pluto, and 20th-century population conflicts and pressures. So the way I saw it, if HPL had lived in 1980, he’d have written about Jimmy Carter (my dream is a 1980 HPL story where we find out it wasn’t a giant swimming *rabbit* after all).

However, the good folks at Chaosium did not respect Lovecraft. Greg’s exact words were "HPL is a terrible writer." That was mild, compared to some other Chaosium opinions. They were okay with having a fan like me design the game, because that way my love for Lovecraft would be in the rules. But on the other hand, the Chaosium folks wanted to enjoy playing the game I was going to design, and they wanted a "hook" to hang their fun onto. They chose the 1920s. In their games, they loved driving old cars, talking about zeppelins, flappers, the Weimar Republic and all that stuff. My own games usually didn’t reference the era at all, except peripherally. Yeah they were in the 1920s too, but they could just as easily have been set anywhere in the 20th century. A haunted house is a haunted house as far as I was concerned.

So Call of Cthulhu to this day is officially set in the 1920s, and has the big 1920s guidebook, with which I had little to do, except providing some monster stats (like for mummies and wolves and so forth). But that was the Chaosium thing.

And there you have it.

Retrospective: Trollpak

Even though I never played much RuneQuest during its heyday in the 80s, there were two things I knew for certain about its setting, Glorantha. First, the setting included anthropomorphic ducks as a playable race, a "sin" that I am ashamed to admit prevented me from taking the game seriously for a long time. Older and wiser -- and with a better sense of humor -- I actually rather like the ducks and can't imagine Glorantha without them. Second, Glorantha's trolls were nothing like the trolls I knew from D&D and fantasy literature; they were weird. Of course, most of the nonhuman races of Glorantha are "weird" and that's part of their charm, but, callow youth that I was, I saw this as yet more evidence that Glorantha was not worth my time.

Truth be told, it probably wasn't, at least not at that stage of my initiation into the hobby. Nowadays, though, I find myself feeling a strange kind of nostalgia for RuneQuest and Glorantha -- the nostalgia for something I never directly experienced in my personal past. There must be a term for this odd feeling, probably a German one, but, regardless, I've been feeling it a lot lately and never more strongly than when I recently reread 1982's Trollpak, written by Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen. As its title implies and its subtitle -- "Troll facts, secrets, and adventures for RuneQuest" -- makes explicit, Trollpak was a boxed set detailing the race commonly called trolls but who call themselves the Uz.

Trollpak contained of four books, a map, and many handouts, all presented with the kind of care and attention that was typical of Chaosium boxed sets in the early to mid-1980s. The first book, "Uz Lore," presents an overview of the history, mythology, and anatomy of trolls. The second book, "Book of Uz," included all the rules and information needed to create and play troll characters, whether as PCs or NPCs. It includes details on family life, religion, insects (which play a big role in troll culture), and a glossary of troll words and terms. The third book, "Into Uzdom," is a book of scenarios that take advantage of the new information presented in the first two books. Some scenarios are written with troll PCs in mind, while others present the trolls as antagonists with whom PCs of other races must interact. Also included are rules for playing trollball, an ancient -- and violent -- sport among the Uz that uses cursed trollkin as the "ball." The fourth and final book, "Munchrooms," is also an adventure, but a unique one in that it is designed to be played two ways, one with the PCs as trolls and another with the PCs as non-trolls.

Normally, I'm rather averse to delving too deeply into an "evil" fantasy race, as it almost always presages the sudden discovery that the race in question is not in fact evil but merely misunderstood. Call me racist and imperialistic but I like being able to kill orcs with impunity, knowing that they're the spawn of Chaos, bubbling up from black pools beneath the earth and having no purpose other than to kill men and bring down civilization. Fortunately, Trollpak does not turn the trolls into nice guys. They're still creatures tied to the rune of Darkness and enemies of men and elves alike, whose cults are decidedly unsavory. What Trollpak does do is present the trolls as more than one-dimensional beings whose behavior and motives make no sense. They're presented as, for all intents and purposes, aliens. That they are nevertheless intelligible and usable is a testament to just how remarkable this product is.

Rereading Trollpak has, as I said, only increased my sense that I missed out horribly by not having been more into RuneQuest in my younger days. It's also reminded me that, at the time, this boxed set was often described as being "overwhelming" in its detail and it's true that it is lengthy compared to previous treatments of almost any fantasy race in a RPG. However, compared to the products based on such topics we've seen in the years since, Trollpak is comparatively spartan in its detail and still leaves many aspects of troll life and society undescribed (or only cursorily so). That is, it doesn't feel constraining at all but acts as a spur to my own ideas about trolls and how to use them in a Glorantha campaign.

It's still probably more detailed than I personally need -- the extensive histories, for example, seem particularly unnecessary -- but Trollpak doesn't leave me with a sense of either self-indulgence on the part of its writers or pointless padding to meet a page count quota, flaws inherent in a lot of RPG products that have been written since 1982. Instead, Trollpak evinces the enthusiasm of its writers for the mythic world of Glorantha and its fantastical inhabitants. There's a palpable sense of joy here, the joy of "discovering" an alien race and sharing it with others. Given that, I'm willing to cut it a great deal of slack and note that, if more gaming products were as obviously joyous, I'd probably be willing to extend the same courtesy to them as well.

Lights in the Darkness

August Derleth catches a lot of flak among Lovecraftian purists and, I think, understandably so. It was largely Derleth, after all, who took HPL's disparate extra-terrene entities and welded them together into what we today call the Cthulhu Mythos (despite Derleth's own stated preference for the "Mythology of Hastur"), a creation that was every bit as alien to Lovecraft's own conception of them as they were to life on Earth. It was Derleth too who layered onto the Mythos a Manichean worldview that pitted the "good" Elder Gods against the "evil" Great Old Ones (as well as a Christian-derived notion of the Old Ones having "fallen" in their primordial rebellion against the Elder Gods). Consequently, Derleth's name is muttered as a curse by those who prefer their cosmic horror undiluted with pedestrian notions like hope or faith in the future.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First, because, while preparing to review Lovecraftian Tales from the Table, I re-watched video interviews with both Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen, in which both game designers reflected on the creation of Call of Cthulhu. Stafford noted that one of the very few changes made to Petersen's original manuscript was the addition of a way to regain Sanity after having lost it in order to prevent them game from becoming too depressing to play. Meanwhile, Petersen, when asked why Call of Cthulhu has remained so popular after all these years replied that it's because of the game's "optimism."

Now, "optimism" is not a word one normally associates with a game like Call of Cthulhu, where most characters are likely to end up dead or insane. However, Petersen explains himself by noting that Call of Cthulhu allows us to play ordinary people who, through their actions, manage to hold off Armageddon for just one more day. I definitely think there's something to this perspective, as it's one I largely share. On the face of it, Call of Cthulhu ought to be a bleak, nihilistic game and it could easily have been so. But, in my experience, Call of Cthulhu is in fact one of the most unambiguously heroic RPGs ever written -- a game where people little different than you or I risk loss of life and sanity to give mankind another small chance at survival.

Second, I bring this up because I was recently reading a collection of Robert E. Howard's "Mythos fiction" last week. The particular volume I own was edited and introduced by Robert M. Price. I often don't think much of Price's interpretations of Lovecraft (or indeed of many things), but I was intrigued by something he wrote in his introduction to the story "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth."

Howard's tales of heroic adventure, whether Sword-and-Sorcery or Lost Race stories, sometimes make reference to the Cthulhu Mythos, even though they are not really "about" the Mythos. This is because Howard's fiction proceeded from the dark inner cosmos of his own mind and the fictive universe in which he set his tales are an externalization of that inner Sheol. His heroes, even when victorious, as they almost always are, are not merely bottling up the anomalous inkspill of evil which has momentarily put a crimp in a pleasant picnic-world of reality. No, Conan's victories, or Solomon Kane's, are like that of the most pessimistic Lovecraftian anti-hero in that they are but temporary reprieves from the ineluctable fall of universal darkness. Contrary to the anti-Derlethian stereotype, a good-versus-evil plot is by no means incompatible with Lovecraftian nihilistic cosmicism. [italics mine]

Leaving aside Price's comments about Howard, it's his last sentence that really struck me square in the face. Thinking about it, I believe Price is correct; there is nothing inherently incompatible about a "happy ending" of sorts in a Lovecraftian-inspired tale. Looking even to HPL's own stories, you'll find that some, such as "The Dunwich Horror" and even "The Call of Cthulhu," conclude on comparatively positive notes, the "inkspill of evil," to borrow Price's evocative phrase, being blotted for the time being. That perspective is at the root of the optimism Sandy Petersen sees as key to Call of Cthulhu's lasting success -- its ability to present confrontations with a dark and uncaring cosmos that paradoxically confirms the enduring value of human heroism and self-sacrifice.

There's little question that Derleth was heavy-handed in his lightening of Lovecraft's cosmic horror, often to the point of parody. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to say that, without the framework provided by Derleth's approach, a RPG treatment of Lovecraft's work probably would have been the depressing affair Greg Stafford mentioned in his interview and certainly not the mainstay of the hobby it became. I think the same is true of RPGs based on other genres. I've never been a big fan of "dark" stories unleavened by even a glimmer of hope. Bleakness for its own sake holds no appeal and I instinctively shy away from media, including RPGs, that seem to revel in it. In fact, it's an instinct that, ironically, only seems to grow stronger as I get older.

The rediscovery of the pulp fantasy roots of Dungeons & Dragons -- and therefore the hobby -- has increased interest in sword-and-sorcery fiction, which many people, mistakenly in my view, see as necessarily bleak. As with cosmic horror, though, there's no necessity for it. From my perspective, S&S is distinguished more by its personal focus than any putative bleakness, which is to say, the struggles of individuals in a world of magic and monsters rather than the epic contests of nations, peoples, or worlds. Indeed, much sword-and-sorcery fiction is surprisingly optimistic, even upbeat, rather than bleak. There is often an attention to realism (or at least verisimilitude) in S&S fiction, but that hardly entails bleakness unless one already views reality in unrelentingly negative terms. Conan's gigantic melancholies were, after all, counterbalanced by his gigantic mirth and so too can sword-and-sorcery fiction -- or roleplaying games that looks to them for inspiration.