- Image via Wikipedia
Call it the Game that Wouldn’t die.
Like most young geeks I was playing D&D at a relatively young age. We had a blast getting about six or seven of us together and throwing us up against huge monsters for even huge hoards.
But even then I was left wanting more. We played the typical “Monty Haul” type games. Our characters were the most powerful people in the world, but it was a narrow, unfulfilling world. We soon drifted to other games in which we were able to create richer experiences such as Gamma World, and eventually Call Of Cthulhu
Call of Cthulhu was unique at the time: An Rpg that didn’t really cater to adolescent wish fulfillment. Based on the pulp-horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, CoC was kown as the game where “Characrters die and go insane.” Basd in a cold uncaring universe, “Heroes” in CoC often would sacrifice themselves to stop hideous plots that they barely understood. The villians were either insane cultists, or incomprehensible aliens who were not evil: they just didn’t realize we were in their way.
And I learned a lot about writing from Call of Cthulhu:
- Atmosphere and setting are important-It’s hard to be scared in the middle of the day. CoC needs to be played at night, preferable on a wintry fall weekend, with spooky music playing in the background.
- Characters don’t always do what you want-Because CoC took place in a version of the “Real” world, characters would often come up with “real” solutions that weren’t scripted. There always needed to be some way to� disable the car, stop them from bringing along dynamite, calling the cops, etc. When their lives are on the line, characters can be resourceful.
- Plots aren’t random- Much humor has been written about D&D’s ecology- How wizards seem to keep offices in dank dungeons, how come blobs never seem to eat the kobolds in the next room. But CoC required careful pacing and plotting. Clues to Mysteries not only ad to be laid out in a logical order, they needed to build to an appropriate climax.
- The point is to have fun- Call of Cthulhu had a subtext- that the universe is really big and doesn’t care all that much about us.� But the point of the game wasn’t to preach. it was to get a group of friends together to have some fun, and keep the darkness at bay.� Isn’t that the point of all writing?
