From hero to victim - the history of Call of Cthulhu

Picture a player in 1981, used to Dungeons & Dragons. On the character sheet sit numbers he knows. Hit points, levels, gold pieces. All of them numbers that want to go the right way, upward.

Then he starts a new game. He is not playing a warrior or a wizard, but a professor of ancient languages. And on his sheet sits a number he does not know yet: Sanity.

The first time it matters, it does not go up. It goes down. He has opened a book he would have done better to leave shut, and the knowledge inside it has cost him something. In this game, knowing does not make you stronger. It breaks you.

That was new. And it changed what a role-playing game could be.

The man behind the mythos

It starts with a writer almost no one knew while he lived. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, born in 1890 in Providence, died there in 1937 of intestinal cancer, forty-six years old and nearly without fame. His stories appeared in cheap pulp magazines. He barely made a living from them.

What he wrote was a new kind of horror. Not the haunted houses and vampires of his day, but something colder. The greatest terror, Lovecraft believed, was not the supernatural but the universe itself: vast, indifferent, and utterly uninterested in us. Set against ancient beings like Cthulhu, a human is an ant. Those who see too much are not rewarded. They go mad.

Lovecraft encouraged writer friends to borrow each other's inventions: the same forbidden books, the same gods, the same places like Arkham and Miskatonic University. Out of that grew a shared world, later called the Cthulhu Mythos, that belonged to no one alone.

After his death, he nearly vanished anyway. That he did not, we owe to friends. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the publisher Arkham House in 1939 for the sole purpose of keeping Lovecraft's work in print. Without them, there probably would never have been a game.

The game that abolished the hero

In 1981, the publisher Chaosium released Call of Cthulhu. Chaosium was known for RuneQuest and for a smooth system called Basic Role-Playing, using percentile dice instead of the many kinds of dice we watched arrive in the previous chapter. Designer Sandy Petersen took that system and built horror on top of it.

In Call of Cthulhu the players are not called heroes but investigators. Ordinary people: doctors, journalists, professors, antiquarians. And the game master goes by a different name than in D&D. Where that role has been called the dungeon master since 1975, here it is the Keeper, in full the Keeper of Arcane Lore, the keeper of forbidden knowledge.

The inversion lives in that one number. In D&D everything on your sheet wants to grow. In Call of Cthulhu there is Sanity, and mostly it can only fall. The cruelty is in the trap beneath it. The knowledge and magic with which you might defeat the creatures are exactly the things that erode your mind. The more you understand, the less you remain yourself.

The emphasis shifted from fighting to investigating. Not winning, but delaying the end. And that fit precisely the want that runs through this whole series: a character becomes real through what it desires. An investigator usually wants only one thing, and it is a tragic thing. To know the truth, even when it destroys him.

Honest about the messy parts

An honest word belongs here, as in the earlier chapters.

Lovecraft was a racist. Not as rumor, nor as a child of his time we should weigh gently, but openly, in his letters and in his stories. His fear of the foreign, which gives his horror so much of its force, came partly from a very ugly source. The hobby still wrestles with this. In 2015, the World Fantasy Award decided to retire the bust of Lovecraft that winners had received since 1975; in 2017 a new design appeared. Whether you can separate the work from the man has no easy answer, and that is as it should be.

Messy too is how the mythos grew. August Derleth coined the term Cthulhu Mythos and, after Lovecraft's death, wrote stories from his fragments, published as though the two had written them together. Fans still argue over whether he rescued Lovecraft or distorted him. Probably both.

And there is a bitter echo with the previous chapter. In the 1980s, people panicked over role-playing games full of devils, witchcraft and forbidden books. Call of Cthulhu embraced all of those images, not out of malice, but because fear is the engine of good horror. The game did, on purpose, exactly what the worried parents feared most.

Why it stayed

You might think a game you cannot win would not last long. The opposite turned out to be true.

Call of Cthulhu is one of the longest-running role-playing games in the world, in print for more than forty years and now in its seventh edition. It made horror a branch of the hobby in its own right, beside the heroic fantasy from which everything began. In chapter one, the role-playing game wanted to produce heroes. With Call of Cthulhu, it discovered it also wanted to be afraid.

And that brings us back to that player in 1981, with his falling Sanity. What kept him at the table was not the hope of winning. It was the tension of what he might lose. You open the book, you know it will cost you something, and you read on anyway.

In that, the investigator is like all of us at the table. We know the story ends badly for the character. We want to know how all the same.