Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The Call of Cthulhu: Problems Posed By Tomes In The Game

Disclaimer: Ever since Sandy Petersen left Chaosium, the rules for the Call of Cthulhu have been undergoing a shift towards a "more realistic" way to present the game. I have many observations, reservations and - let's be honest - plain old fashioned whinges and whines about that. This post is certainly coloured by my feelings and I make no attempt to be neutral in my tone. I care about this stuff. All comments refer to the Basic Role Playing (BRP) rulesset unless otherwise indicated.


One of the puzzling things about the attempt to reface Call of Cthulhu with a more "realisitic" stucco over the years has been the matter of the Mythos Tome in the game.

A lot has changed since the Petersen days. The books now take unfeasibly long times to read - I seriously doubt that any Keeper1 uses the suggested times as written in the latest version of the rules2, where a copy of Al Azif - aka The Necronomicon - can take sixty-summat weeks to digest. It simply isn't feasible for players to become conversant with such volumes within a campaign structure, where they always have better things to do with their time.

Which raises problems when success hinges on the learning and deployment of a spell from such a book (which it often does in published scenarios). The hapless Keeper is faced with having to come up with a jury-rigged kluge just to make the game "work". This is unsatisfying to me. Of all the things that need fixing in the game, decent, workable rules for how to put these books to use in the game need to be worked out.

Part of the problem is an overly slavish dedication to the Lovecraft canon, or rather, certain select pieces from it. I don't know for a fact that this is the case, but I have surmised over more than three decades experience with the game the following: The game structure is largely drawn whole from the novella "The Call of Cthulhu", The campaign template from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and the rules for reading tomes from "The Dunwich Horror". The problem as I see it is that "The Dunwich Horror" concerns a wizard searching for the means to craft a spell, a very specific spell, from hints inside the book. He already has a debased copy of the book itself and spends a lot of time correcting it from the copy in the Miskatonic University Library. From this one rather specialised case, which is in fact more a classic example of D&D style Magical Research than an attempt to read and understand the book per se, the general rules for reading tomes seem to be drawn, and drawn so as to make the books an unattainable resource in fact, if not in spirit.

The arguments for why this should be so include the abtrusness of the material, the insanity of the author and the ancient idioms in which they are couched - all good points. But they make the tomes unplayable. If the point is that players should not have first-hand knowledge of these things but should rely on NPC intermediaries to supply tome-contained information, then why include them as player-attainable assets in the game at all3?

It is telling that no sooner does one read and absorb the Tome Times (my term) than there is a sidebar in the rulebook desperately suggesting ways to override them in specific cases. Rules that have to be overridden to become playable should never have seen the typesetting machine in the first place in my opinion.

In this search for "realism" one aspect of the whole business has remained, puzzlingly, rather abstract and unrealistic, and that is the Sanity Loss mechanic with respect to Tome reading. You read the book, taking a year or so to do so with no adverse effects or incremental benefits, and then, when it's all over, you take a sudden kick in the SAN nodes and receive a Cthulhu Mythos skill powerup. You'd think that if the editorial staff at Chaosium were going to tackle the issue of "realism" in The Call Of Cthulhu, this would be one of the places to start, but no. For some reason, this odd little mechanism has been left unchanged since the first edition.

Now it has to be said that none of my players have ever worried about this, and truth to say neither did I until I read the Tome reading rules in the D20 version of the rules, in which there is an attempt to at least represent the months-long research as an incremental process. Indeed, the BRP Keeper is well advised to take a long, hard look at the D20 rules even if he/she/it is never intending to run a game under that system, just for the fresh ideas that the authors bring to the business of presenting the game to the players.

How to "fix" all this, if indeed it really needs fixing at all, is something for another time after a lot of careful thought.

Probably the reason that players (and I) have not worried about the issue before is that reading a Tome is akin to attempting to use a one-off experience-boosting magic item in D&D, something you do for the obvious benefit and then get on with the real business at hand - whatever the campaign is calling for you to do. The rules seem to suggest that Tome Reading should be an adventure in and of itself, which isn't a bad idea per se, but the BRP rules have never suggested guidelines for doing that. In fact, they only talk of the ways that reading a Tome can be fitted into other in-game activities, which seems to be conveying the message that Tome reading is not all that important other than as background scenery.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this, or even if I'm going to do anything. I ran from first edition rules and everyone had a blast without sweating these sorts of details. It's true that the perception of how the game should be played has changed. It used to be an action/adventure game with Lovecraftian overtones. The emphasis was on the search for truth, and the almost inevitable trip into madness usually marked the end of a PCs career. Now the emphasis is on the deep immersion playing of insane characters fighting a doomed battle against unbeatable forces. The madness is seen to be the point now.

But I think I need to think it out again.

  1. Call of Cthulhu speak for "DM"
  2. 6th edition
  3. Not an idle question. The D20 rules for Call of Cthulhu state outright that the Great Old Ones should never be met by players.