Off the Shelf: Call of Cthulhu

I had this game stored and never thought I would return to it. However, my recent interest in Runequest led me to dig it out, and there is a reason this is the second most-played game behind D&D.

Horror games are fantastic.

5E absolutely cannot do horror.

The Alien RPG by Free League is my other horror game, but nothing beats the Lovecraftian classics. Nothing will come close to this game, except maybe Vaesen by Free League. But these are world-ending horrors, Cthulhu himself and other society-eating, world-crushing, madness-incusing things from beyond the veil of reality.

This does modern-era gaming and the 1920s, just like its superset sister game, Basic Roleplaying. CoC has the madness rules, ancient lore, the artifacts, and all the spooky horrors that turn a seemingly ordinary small town in the middle of nowhere into a frightening experience of sheer terror.

The beauty of this game is that any situation can be played entirely normal, and then when the world turns upside-down, what was once safe and familiar becomes a no-man's land of strange cosmic horror.

I once had a scenario in a small Nebraska town where the investigators investigated a series of mysterious cattle deaths. They had a packed town hall meeting in the local church, which dragged on into the night. A small group got tired of the pointless meeting and said there was no threat. It was wild dogs, and they left to go to their cars.

When the meeting ended, the first out discovered the group that had left, sans heads, lying in the street.  They never made it to their cars. The clouds in the sky were strangely moving like snakes.

And all the guns were in the general store three blocks away.

And the only one with the keys to the gun safe was lying in the street. Oh yeah, you are screwed, and those guns will not likely do you any good.

That was a long night.

Until they realized what was under the church.

No X-card is saving you. You saw the sign-up sheet's "what can happen" reverse safety tool and agreed. I am an old-school "eff-er" DM. I will happily bore you, twist the situation on its head, make you fear for your lives, and then unfairly pull the rug out from under you. I will replace a party member with a doppelganger and never tell the player until their character bursts open into gory tentacles.

If I pull things back or say, "I'm sorry," I am not doing my job. People who play with me come to enjoy a specific type of no-limits experience. This is like popping John Carpenter's The Thing into the Blu-Ray player.

You are in a horror game.

This is what you paid admission to see.