CALL OF CTHULHU

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Call of Cthulhu is unequivocally the greatest role-playing game ever written. Okay, maybe that’s just my opinion, but I have some people who can back me up on this.

The game, created in 1981 by Sandy Petersen, is based on the works of seminal horror author HP Lovecraft. In the game, player characters discover that our universe is malignant, inimical to human existence, and filled with slobbering horrors. The darkness may be beaten back by investigators willing to sacrifice their minds and their lives to the fight, but inevitably, the stars will roll right, and humanity will be snuffed out by forces older than time and beyond our comprehension. One could consider it horror for atheists, for whom the old tropes of ghosts, demons, and witches have lost their sting.

So why is this game better than any other.

It’s because of what the game teaches us about life.

Every game system is written to promote a style of play. And that style of play, whether consciously or unconsciously, is written with ideas about life in mind.

Dungeons & Dragons, for example, is a game of heroic self-improvement. Characters gain experience, becoming stronger, smarter, more handsome, richer, and acquire magic and special abilities. A character that persists over time, and her improvement, is one of the defining characteristics of a role-playing game.

However, it is also exactly the reverse of what we experience in life.

We do not get stronger, better, and more handsome as we age. Rather, we get flabby and sick, then die. D&D functions as an escape from that reality, and as such is wildly po[CENSORED]r.

Call of Cthulhu functions contrariwise.

In Cthulhu, spellbooks drive you insane. Practicing magic results in horrors. 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. 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.

That, my friends, is life.

Writer and game-design master Ken Hite is the originator o

Call of this argument. Having written a Cthulhu game of his own, he knows a thing or two about diving into madness. 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.