Reference
Keeper's Lore
When in doubt, slap some boobs on it.
Musical Offering: In the Depths of R'lyeh - Catacombs
FrankT:
Having finished with the more miscellaneous essays, we now get into a 14 page section of more rules called the Keeper's lore section. It's much denser with rules, opinions, and wallbangers than the rest of the book, so we'll be going over it in more detail than similarly sized chunks of text. This is like the DMG for the game, which at only 14 pages means that most of the suggestions can be summarized as “do whatever the f*ck you want, you're the keeper.” One of the interesting things is that this book not only says that players don't need to read the whole book, but that keepers don't need to either. That's some seriously zen sh*t right there.
So if Call of Cthulhu fans seem rather vague as to what the rules actually say, that is why. The way you're supposed to run the game is by playing it, and then reading it afterward if it seems necessary. Seriously. It says that.
Keeper's Lore wrote:The present chapter is background – play first, then thumb through here as convenient.
What the book does want you to read are actual books by HP Lovecraft to use as source material and inspiration. The actual rules you can take or leave. Mostly leave, I suppose, what with the book not expecting you to read them in the first place. Players are even encouraged to simply not bring their rulebook to games. On account of Call of Cthulhu being “a simple game to play.” I assume the game is even simpler to play when you haven't read the rules and don't have access to the book.
AncientH:
Titles with asterisks are longish, up to novelette in length.
All of the stories they cite can be found in one book now. Or in the ebook format of your choice. Hell, most of 'em are on the web now that Lovecraft's (mostly) in the public domain.
Amazingly, most of the advice in this section is incredibly low-level and practical, to the point of being trivial or like they were trying to write a GMing article for Better Homes & Gardens. My favorite bit:
Expect players to bring their own investigators, copies of the rules if they want them, their own dice, and any miniature figures they want to play with in the game. People who bring all of that usually bring their own writing materials as well. Pencil erasers sometimes wear to nubs in half an hour--a large, fresh gum eraser can be very helpful.
Ye f*cking gods of R'lyeh, I always counted myself lucky if players showed up with a pulse and pants.
Most keepers like to look over investigator sheets before play begins. The idea behind this inspection is not to allow the keeper to construct the hardest possible situations, but to see if any of the crucial situations in the play to come will be unduly hard or easy for the group to overcome. If no problem jumps out at the keeper, the player should be not much concerned. Having said this, though, it can be useful to photocopy the sheets so that a roll can be made in secret now and then, or so that the shreds of somebody's sanity can be considered.
See? Secret rolls. I told you about that sh*t. Not mentioned anywhere previously in the book.
FrankT:
I've harped on Medusa's Coil a few times because it's probably the most amazingly offensive of the stories from a racism standpoint. The fact that a sexy lady is part African is literally the horrible reveal at the end. Holy f*cking sh*t. But that story is not on the list of recommended reading. Which is probably fine. I think that story is actually well written other than the fact that it's offensive on the level of Nazi propaganda or child p*rnography – but it certainly makes sense to quietly pretend it doesn't exist. But here's the thing: it does exist. And really, a lot of other racist passages exist as well. If you're going to tell people to go out and read Lovecraftian horror, you should really take them aside a bit and ease them into the whole part where it's jaw-droppingly offensive by modern standards. Really. You should do that.
Because otherwise it's going to go over like telling someone how much you like Exalted and having them pick up and read The Lunars.
AncientH:
I hate to burst Frank's bubble, but I think the only reason it's not on the list is that none of Lovecraft's collaborations are.
This is seriously an image from the story.
I know we've harped on Lovecraft's racism a couple times, but as long as we're on the general topic of "terrible sh*t to bring to games," let's talk about female characters.
Whether it was a symptom of the time he lived in, or a personal choice, Lovecraft rarely included positive female characters in his stories. Asenath Waite, from “The Thing on the Doorstep” was actually an evil old man wearing a girl’s body like a suit, and his other major female character, Lavinia Whateley from “The Dunwich Horror” was merely a servant of a greater evil. Lovecraft usually limited his women to a mention that the main character had a wife, one who faded from the story a sentence or two later. To be fair, Lovecraft didn’t just limit female sexuality—none of his characters are romantic or sexual either. He simply left it out. We don’t want to only expand the role of the female in the mythos, we also want to include a spectrum of gender and sexuality models, to better reflect today’s society. (“WNW talks with Carrie Cuinn, the woman behind the Cthulhurotica anthology”)
This isn't quite accurate, but it's a very common view of Lovecraft: that in addition to being prejudiced against race, he was prejudiced about women as well. The reality is more complicated - he had a number of female revision clients and friends, and a fair number of female characters - but it is generally true to say that Lovecraft had few female protagonists, didn't tend to focus on romantic relationships, and eschewed many of the female stereotypes of his day. So where does this leave female Call of Cthulhu players, or players that want female Call of Cthulhu characters?
Originally, Chaosium...didn't do well at catering to this market.
But they got better!
Honestly though, the game mainly...doesn't address female characters, leaving the choice of sex entirely up to the players and not emphasizing the much more sexist nature of the 1920s. That said, it has gotten a little better at depicting female players in the art and text.
FrankT:
Keeper's Choice wrote: “Oh, no,” you think, “I wanted rules!”
This is from Call of Cthulhu's formulation of Rule Zero called “Keeper's Choice.” It not only tells you that the keeper can change any rule as he likes, but that these decisions have “no ramifications.” I don't really know what they mean by that, because obviously the keeper making choices about how to handle life or death scenarios for the investigators has ramifications. I think what they are trying to get across is that a keeper in Call of Cthulhu isn't even supposed to keep their arbitrary rulings consistent. You know, just whatever, man.
But the thing that really sets this apart from like 2nd edition AD&D is that in addition to constantly reminding you that the MC can ignore or change any rule at any time for any reason or no reason at all, is that it literally makes fun of you for wanting a functional ruleset. Heck, it makes fun of you for wanting there to be rules in the rulebook.
AncientH:
Most of the advice and examples in this section are how to create adventures, and by linking adventures together, campaigns. The rest of it is about running games and f*cking over players. I wish I was kidding about that. There's seriously a whole section called "Relying on Possessions" which says players should bleed for every new piece of equipment or spell or whatever that they get/want.
What you really get in this section is the impression of someone trying to impose a certain style of play, sort of in a proto-World of Darkness manner. We usually expect games like D&D to be at least nominally balanced in the numbers, but CoC is so hilariously unbalanced that approaching it from the standpoint of "I have enough X to do Y" is seen as disturbingly against the character of the game.
These are exactly what they appear to be.
FrankT:
This being the equivalent of a really abridged DMG, there are of course discussions of how to structure a story and an example plot. The metaphor of choice is that of an onion. That the story should unfold as the peeling of an onion: each layer revealed being more horrible and overtly supernatural. Not bad advice, in abstract. Certainly, you can do supernatural horror that way.
...and I'm all out of bubblegum.
The author sort of loses me when he attempts to explain this idea with the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. It's not really set up like that, to be honest. And the way the book describes it fits into the attempted paradigm even less well. For starters, he talks about two different onions (one for the adventures of Charles and one for the adventures of Dr. Willett). But really, it's not really onionesque. So I'm not sure what the point of that example is supposed to be. Considering that The Call of Cthulhu is actually in three parts of increasing tempo and batsh*ttery, and used as the opening fiction and the title of the book, that probably would have been a better choice as an example of onion-style storytelling. But maybe the author is just bad at literary critique.
There is then a piece on “building a scenario,” which describes a typical adventure as a five paragraph essay of: setup, hook, clues, confrontation, resolution (but obviously with a lot more rambling text). Also not a bad format for an adventure (especially for short adventures), but then the book claims this is an example of an onion-style storytelling, when it very obviously f*cking isn't. So who the f*ck knows what these guys are babbling about?
AncientH:
One thing you will notice a general lack of in Lovecraft's fiction is the idea of a "party." Usually you have one, maybe two people that investigate any given mystery; "The Dunwich Horror" is the exception, and even that is mainly Armitage until the very end. So pretty much by definition, your average game of Call of Cthulhu is not going to play through like a Lovecraft story come to life...and this is usually where the trouble starts: trying to figure out why all the players characters are gathered together in the first place. This section really doesn't address that very well, and while other games like Bookhounds of London or Delta Green have presented a bit of pretext, there's no sort of generic scheme or conceit set up where you've come together as a team of paranormal investigators or anything.
FrankT:
Die rolls add drama!
I'm not sure if they do or not, but I am sure that if all you're rolling dice for is to create a sense of confusion in the players, there are probably more surreal ways to achieve that goal. And definitely more fair ways to use dice. The overt contempt this game has for actually playing it as a game is alternately puzzling and infuriating.
Much should be said about the “A Great Reluctance” speech. It's a special rant about how keepers should not let players have access to big guns or powerful spells because you're just going to kill their characters anyway and when you have a really big hammer everything looks like a nail.
This is, honestly, really f*cked up. When you repeatedly murder peoples' characters, of course they are going to try to fight back against that with proverbial (or actual) bigger guns. And when you kill their characters again, they are going to want bigger guns, and so on. The only way this cycle ever breaks is if you either let the players win, or the players wise up and figure out that you're a whack MC who is just trolling them.
AncientH:
Details can be added to spells, to considerable effect, since the rulesbook little describes the spells and usually leaves the evidence of their casting up to the keeper.
I'm not sure why this is here. It''s sort of weird, isn't it? You would expect that perhaps this would be back by the spells or the magic rules. You might even expect that the person who wrote it would read it twice, and then maybe go add some more details to spells, or possibly an example, but that doesn't happen.
Are you sure this is how you summon Cthulhu?
FrankT:
Longer than the other mini-essays is the rant about how you should use florid language and eschew using terminology consistently so as to avoid inadvertently telling your players what something actually is or does. Spells and monsters and sh*t have names in the game that are taken directly from books in the setting, but you're not supposed to use those names as a keeper, because the players read these books too and possiprobably know what a shantak is. There is certainly a case to be made for this sort of behavior, but I think this section clearly takes it too far. It goes out and says that when you can't think of something, you should just say a word and let that hang ominously in the air while you attempt to overcome your writer's block. Hopefully you'll think of something scary to say before the players get bored and start cracking jokes.
AncientH:
Sort of tailing on the whole "why doesn't somebody mass-produce the Necronomicon?" is "why doesn't somebody photograph the Mythos?" This is usually mindcaulked away in games, but in Lovecraft's fiction there is evidence - if you have eyes to look for it and put the pieces together - but usually the inescapable evidence decays shortly after the monster dies, or is covered up by cults or civic authorities. This section sortof addresses that in a tangential manner by talking about how to handle alien entities, especially when they die.
A Keeper's Toolkit
FrankT:
We're still in the Keeper's Lore section, but page 124 is called out as being its own thing in the table of contents, so we'll go with it. Basically, this is a set of secret rules that are for the Keeper to know and you to not know. Or more accurately, for the Keeper to possibly know, and you to not know – since after all the Keeper is expected to merely skim this section to reduce the chance of sanity loss. These aren't mostly obscure things that probably won't come up, there are seriously basic die mechanics in here. They are not the same as the die mechanics listed elsewhere.
Let's jump right into the deep end: Criticals and Fumbles. The rest of the book tells you that a natural 00 is a fumble. Well, some of it doesn't mention fumbles and merely tells us that a natural 00 is a failure, but where it mentions fumbles, it does so for the natural roll of 00. These secret rules expand that to 96, 97, 98, and 99. So if you read the player section and the keeper reads the keeper section, you can roll a result that you think is a normal failure and the keeper thinks is a fumble. And in the example of play, players were reporting only success or failure on a lot of their die rolls, so I have no f*cking idea how that is supposed to work. Note also that while fumbles may start at 96, skills go up to 99%. So it's entirely possibly for a roll to be both a fumble and a success, and I have no idea how that's supposed to work either.
Then there's critical success. As I've harped on before, the book describes a special case state called “Impale” which is a kind of critical success which occurs when you roll under 1/5th of what you need to roll to succeed in the first place (yay for doing division in the middle of task resolution), and alternately tells you that this only applies during combat with attacks using thrusting weapons and that the keeper should apply it to other die rolls that roll comparably well. Well, just to make it so that there are more than two possible answers, page 124 (and only page 124, not any of the earlier or later pages) has a completely different set of criteria for critical success on a roll, which is any roll of 01-05. Remember again that the example of play just had players reporting things like “I succeed” after having rolled dice, so I have no idea how secret critical success thresholds are supposed to be implemented. Note that even on the next page, we are told again that the marvels of extraordinary success should be handed out for rolling less than 1/5th the literal skill, which is called a “special” result. So this whole 1 in 20 chance of scoring a critical seems to be like a minority report or legacy artifact from a different system or edition.
No idea.
There is then some rumination on implementing partial success by having people roll one set of dice and comparing the results to multiple skills. Note that partial success in this manner is only possible if your literal result lands between the two skill values, and it tells you to choose skills that are “relatively equal in percentiles,” which seems to undermine the whole operation. If two skills differ by only 5%, then obviously you only have a 5% chance of getting a partial success.
Special note should be made of the mini-essay “Control of the Game,” which suggests that sometimes Call of Cthulhu games can fall apart (as all RPGs, and indeed all social gatherings can), and suggests that the likely reason for this is the keeper paying too much attention to the rules. This breaks my f*cking mind. After spending virtually the entire book so far explaining that in nearly twenty years they hadn't really bothered
finishing the rule set, and you should probably just wing it for pretty much everything, they think a key problem remaining in the game might be that there are too many rules? What the hell? How could that even be on the map of things that might be worth discussing?
AncientH:
Homerules and generating your own material for games (what a novel concept!) are sort-of addressed in a section on "Creating a Skill" - which is about adding a new skill (or an old skill that might have been abolished in a previous edition like, I dunno, f*cking Alchemy or something) you can totally do that, just get the players and keeper to sign off on it so everybody knows what the f*ck is going on.
The specific example of this given is the Hypnosis skill, which is marked as optional. Hypnosis is one of those quasi-real, quasi-pulp skills that people like to cram into games so they can play The Shadow or whatever.
I've been waiting to use this.
I'm not against it...but it's about as "realistic" as having an Animal Ken skill that let's you go Crocodile Dundee beastmaster on roving cattle and sh*t.
FrankT:
The game floats the idea that you might want to use different character generation rules than those given earlier in the books. That's pretty much it, there's no real discussion of what that would actually mean or what the connotations might be. There is also a discussion of how you might want to add new skills – or to use skills that appeared in earlier editions of the game and no longer exist in this edition. Because you know, whatever.
It's actually Lynn Willis' United States of Whatever.
What's really missing here is the idea that if you add skills you are diluting the amount of skill points that players have. This in turn means that they have less capabilities and have to choose to be able to do less things or to be able to do the things they can do less well. The fact that the great proliferation of combat skills leads directly to the actual players of the game turning into low-rent superheroes with signature weapons that they carry with them everywhere they go seems to be a very great indictment of the skill proliferation concept. But the author doesn't seem to have noticed that this is going on. Possibly because every time someone presented evidence of this fact to him, he simply stamped his foot and said they were playing the game wrong.
Because when the sanity rules emergently caused players to avert their eyes from horrible monsters, that's proof that the game is working. But when the skill rules emergently cause players to put backup swords in their cars, their homes, and every suit of clothing and to never ever go anywhere without access to several backup swords – that's a failure of the players. Or something.
AncientH:
At about the time you get to the bit on "Spell Multipliers," you realize that this is the Grandma's Attic of the game, where a bunch of stuff that was deliberately thrown out of previous editions is presented here just to please the grognards that don't think this edition is a True Scotsman Call of Cthulhu game.
Not to be confused with Wizard's Attic. For a time in the 90s Wizard's Attic was a spin-off that served as the online retailer for Chaosium, and famously started to just not ship out orders even though it cashed people's checks. Terrible details here.
Anyway, the idea with a spell multiplier is that when you read a Mythos tome, you had INT x (Spell Multiplier) chance of learning a given spell in there. Typically multipliers were usually around 3.
FrankT:
The section on “Surviving or Dying” is actually about appropriate challenges for teams of investigators. This book seems to think you should provide some, even going so far as to read through adventures you are considering running to make sure it's an appropriate challenge for the team you have. This game has no challenge ratings or power levels, and none of the mechanics are set in stone. I have no idea how the author thinks this is to be accomplished.
This section also expounds on how characters can get serious injuries that lower their stats or skills. But that all seems to be MTP. Apparently the keeper can just announce that you got a facial scar and now permanently have a lower credit rating. That sounds like me making fun of this book, but it's literally the example.
AncientH:
Nearly half of Cthulhu players are not U. S. citizens and may never visit or live in the United States.
This is amazingly true. While CoC has never even really been in the top three RPGs in the US, it is insanely popular overseas, for reasons I have never quite understood, and it basically single-handedly spurred interested in Lovecraft and the Mythos in Japan. The Japanese even pioneered a unique kind of RPG book called a replay, which is sort of a script of a group playing through a module or campaign. The closest we've really come to that in English is Knights of the Dinner Table and various gaming webcomics.
FrankT:
The Civil Authority subsection is mostly about how the cops can go full Ferguson on your ass for any reason or no reason at all because it's the 1920s and what does Due Process mean? It's also a section about how if investigators talk about the sh*t they are doing with their outside voices, they can get committed to an Insane Asylum. You don't get response times or historical police manpower numbers or anything that might be useful, it really is just a list of reasons the cops might arrest you. But since it starts with the fact that the cops can arrest you for “looking suspicious,” the rest of it doesn't even matter.
Move along, citizen.
AncientH:
We already had a sanity loss guide table, back when we discussed sanity rules, but here we have it...again...in sort of greater depth...by which I mean, using more flavors of dice, and presenting some accompanying descriptors.
FrankT:
The final bit is a rant about tournament games. I... can't even pretend to care. This game is basically Calvinball, I have no idea what a “tournament” would mean or prove.
So that's the DMG portion of the game. Next up, we get into the monster manual. Honestly, if you had shown me this section and the “rules” section separately, I would have bet real money that they were written for entirely different editions of the game. The fact that basic die mechanics are treated differently would have been the big give-away on that score. That it isn't so just causes me san loss.
AncientH:
Honestly, I don't care about tournaments either, but last investigator standing does mean a few things. As I mentioned earlier, going permanently or indefinitely insane doesn't mean your character dies, but it does take them out of play for a while, so we get a too-brief look at some of the niceties surrounding asylums...which is all too brief, really, considering how much of this game is played in and around asylums.
Where did you think this place came from?
Anyway, next up: Creatures!
Last edited by Ancient History on Tue Aug 19, 2014 9:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
