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.↑

Unfeasible Deck Size

Another game I have that suffers from this "Oversize Deck" problem is Munchkin.

I don't mix'n'match Munchkin games. I have the original and the Cthulhu variant, and never the twain shall meet. I do, however, have six expansions added to the basic Munchkin game, making for a Door Deck climbing towards 5 inches tall. This poses two major problems:

Firstly, the largest deck, the Door Deck (Munchkin calls for two decks, the so-called "Door" and "Treasure" decks), threatens to collapse all over the playing area as the players get more animated.

Secondly, the decks are impossible to shuffle in one go. They have to be broken down into four or five smaller packages in order to shuffle them.

Short of investing in a motorized card shuffler (and don't think I haven't thought about it) the shuffling problem is par for the course. But I think I can do something about keeping the decks propped up.

Two Ideas suggest themselves. The first is a simple box in which the cards are dropped in an upright manner so that they sit on one of their short edges and lean back against the back of the box. This has the problem that the deck is thicker than a card is tall, so I'll either have to break the deck in pieces and only stack one piece at a time in a smaller box or put up with the cards slumping into a larger box once enough have been removed during play. Not optimal.

The second idea involves having the cards in a spring-fed shoe, rather like the ones seen in the Sean Connery "Bond" movies. The design could be different. A box open on one of the short sides with a spring-tensioned base and a slotted lid would do the same job.

But then there's the problem of the discard pile. It has to be looked after too since some cards allow players to root though it looking for particular cards.

Back to the drawing board.

Arkham Horror Space Woes

The New "Innsmouth Horror" expansion set has finally been distributed.

Like each of the <Blahblah>Horror expansions for this game, it is packaged in a box of about the same dimensions as the original game, and contains several additional cards for the existing decks as well as a fan of entirely new decks of cards to add to the game along with a board expansion of around 1/3rd the size of the base game board.

Put four people round a table to play this game and the problem becomes one of finding enough space for the player cards, status display sheets, various tokens that indicate money, sanity and health and I don't know what-all else, The card display for the big monster, the board, the extra board and the two dozen card decks now required to play the blasted game.

I've said elsewhere that FFG could have gone the "Formula One" route with the player displays and made them gust-of-air proof either using dials or pegs to keep track of the various customizable settings each character has. That would, of course, have driven up the cost but would also have made for one component that could be stood upright to save space. Ditto the main monster display.

But the board aside, the biggest consumers of table real estate are the card decks.

The cards vary in size. Some are the size of Pinochle cards, some about half that.

If only some way could be found to stack them in such a way that they use less space while still being easy to reach and draw cards from.

I'm working on this, but the old brain is not co-operating (as usual). I'm thinking that some sort of stand in which decks of cards can be stood on end at an angle would work. I originally thought of a slotted wooden stand, but the slots would have to be very wide to accomodate some of the decks, and there are no two decks of the same thickness, leading to more wasted space. Not only that, these bolt-on expansions always add a few inches to the overall deck thickness. Whatever it ends up looking like, the stand must be able to cater for this factor.

It's a puzzler and no mistake.

Project "Scroll"

I had this idea.

I was looking at my collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios and campaigns, and mulling over something someone said about how White Box D&D was more about what the players could do than the characters when it came to solving mysteries, and I had a vision.

What if I could come up with a campaign-length set of linked Call of Cthulhu scenarios in which characters would obtain a huge scroll covered in glyphic writing, then go on to translate pieces of it by means of other artifacts obtained in each component adventure?

If the translations were of chunks of glyphic text, and were found on "Rosetta Stone" type artifacts such as tablets, fragmentary books and so forth, the players could add annotations to the scroll and gradually translate the entire thing, thereby uncovering some ghastly secret plot that would need thwarting as per usual for Call of Cthulhu.

There could also be some nice moments of darmatic tension when portions of already translated text were found with an alternate translation, sort of like the hieroglyphic writing correction in Star Gate (the movie).

This would be the sort of game in which relying on skill rolls would not help. The game would only progress by players actually doing the pattern matching (for that is what it is) for themselves in the real world.

Nor would the glyphic language need to be either Orthoganal to English or a true language in its own right. I'm not talking about an alphabet here. This will not be some sort of glorified cypher, but a true code.

Taking a leaf from actual glyphic written languages there won't have to be a grammar the players can learn either. It stands to reason that beings too outré to understand would use a written language that defied rational translation.

I've bandied the idea about. Some people object to my idea that players write on the scroll, claiming (quite reasonably) that no archeologist would so damage a real artifact of that type. My current view is that by allowing the players to write on the scroll they will have a nice record of where they are for those times when the game is put on lengthy hiatus or a player has an enforced absence from a few sessions, and get a very tangible sense of progress simply by looking at it.

As of now I'm firmly wedded to the idea and believe that the players won't have a problem. The issue really comes down to my wanting the players to be easily able to read what they are translating, which they won't if they first have to break up the scroll so it will fit in notebooks or sheets of scrap paper (which will then get lost). There is no requirement that the scroll the players use be regarded as the original document anyway. Indeed, it will probably be given to them with some work already done and explained away as a copy made from an original in the British Museum.

The artifacts that will be used to provide the translation will be more than the usual paper documents. I plan on having clay tablets, fragments of manuscripts, wooden plaques, pieces of vase and so on, and I'm going to need a laundry list of evocative names for these things.

So this is the challenge that I'll throw open to the floor. Suggest some nicely HPL-esque names I might use for something. You don't get to choose what it is to be used on. Your idea of a perfect name for an ancient scroll might be my idea of a great name for a cave painting. But I would welcome any suggestions you might have.

My first thought along these lines is "The Pottergate Shard" (most cities have a district called pottergate or something similar, the one I'm thinking of is in Norwich, England).

I'll repost any and all suggestions in the next blog posting on this thread, to be made I don't know when.

On The Percieved Difficulty of Game Rules, and the Resulting Real Difficulty of Scaring Up Players

Used to be I could scare up a game with a six-page rulebook of densely packed type with no problem. Avalon Hill and SPI, the two manufacturers of complex simpulation-oriented games in my collection, wrote rules that worked for the most part, with much fewer "grey areas" requiring in-game on-the-fly fixing than today's games offer, and they did so in a way that enabled the players of those games to get down to the nitty gritty without worrying about knowing the rules by heart, by using a format called "The Case System" (more on that in another post).

Today, however, there is a perception that any non-RPG with a text-only rulebook of more than two pages is "too hard", and getting players for such games is next-to impossible.

I think this attitude springs from the preponderance of RPGs with their by-necessity laxer rulesets that are open to wide interpretation, and the rise of the computer gaming industry, which offers the singular advantage that you don't need to learn any rules, just pick them up as you play by intuition. Gamers also seem to feel that the game should bend to player expectations rather than the player should learn to play the game. There is something to be said for that approach, but consider what would be lost if we brought the same viewpoint to chess. The whole point of the game would be lost.

The manufacturers of games have gone the TV route on this one too, "dumbing-down" their games for the percieved audience (which apparently has the attention span of a speed-addled gnat with ADD), resulting in games where the challenge is relatively low and the complexity of play is all-but non-existant. That isn't really important in and of itself because I can always just not buy or play those games, but it also makes todays gamer less inclined to stretch themselves.

Games I once had no trouble at all getting people to play now are all-but impossible to fill out. Circus Maximus, Civilization, Dune, Conquistador, Kingmaker were all AH games I had to schedule multiple sessions of just to accomodate the people who wanted to play. Now, I can't get enough players to make the games work properly.

I joined a web-based community that exists for the sole purpose of getting people together for games. In recent weeks I have polled the membership as to their interest in the following:

Game Title	Game Type	Comment	Response
Civilization	Avalon Hill Boardgame	Plays itself for the most part	No Takers
Zombies!!!	Board Game	Trivially Easy (< 1 page of rules)	Two takers, was looking for 5 to 11
Red Dwarf	RPG	SF played for laughs	Cricket Noise
Empire of the Petal Throne	RPG	Emphasis on Role Playing in an alien culture	No Takers
Traveller	RPG	Space Opera	No Interest whatsoever
Call of Cthulhu	RPG	Gothic Horror	No Interest, but already have one game in rotation

If I can't scare up a game of Civilization, a game that really does play the fiddly bits on automatic pilot leaving the big picture decisions to the players, what earthly chance do I have of ever playing another game of Star Soldier or Azhanti High Lightning, games of considerable complexity and high levels of simulation?

What is doubly irritating is that people are willing enough to talk about how they want to play this or that game, then become evasive when actually asked to sit down at the board/table/whatever. People argue bitterly on the 'net about various facets of this game or that, sometimes becoming very heated on the subject, but actually suggest playing the game in question and the conversation dries up.

I'm going back to an earlier method people used before the internet became a fact of life: cards pinned to the corckboard in the game store. You don't get responses to them either but at least no-one fights with you.

Yet Another Game Blog?

Well, the fact is that I have been a keen player of serious board games, wargames and RPGs since the mid 70s and I have a lot to say about them (sometimes). I'm clogging a couple of boards up with my dribble on this subject and the tiome has come for a change of direction.

Will anyone else be interested in what I say? I don't know and I don't care very much. This is really for my own satisfaction. Over the next few weeks I'll be talking, when the mood takes me, about games I'm playing, have played or want to play.

Sometimes I may talk about the people who play them too, but that won't be the primary focus as it usually leads to ranting and there're plenty of other places to do that more constructively.

Sometimes I'll talk about actual games I've played, either to constructively analyse the flow of the play and the ease of the rules, sometimes just to vent about the other people sitting around the table .