Its a big day for those of us here at Cthulhu Reborn … our first-ever commercial PDF product (Mutable Deceptions, Volume 1 – Jazz Age Newspapers) has just been released. It’s available for sale at both the RPGNow and DrivethruRPG online stores.

I’ve already written a bit of a blurb about this product back when it was announced on 9 January … so feel free to jump back to that previous posting if you want the basic info on what it’s all about.

Essentially, though, the idea is that for a modest investment (US$5.95) you get a collection of fourteen double-sided templates for 1920s/1930s news articles. Each is formatted with fonts and layout which give them the right look & feel for the era (and come pre-populated with weird and wonderful real-world articles from the period). Surrounding the main article there’s clips from other news items, period advertisements and other newspaper junk from the era. The same is true for the reverse-side of each article template which features loads of additional period-colour.

You can use these templates to make as many different newspaper props as you’d like … and you can save your modified templates for later use.

So How Would I Use This?

How might someone use such a thing? Well I guess that’s largely up to the initiative and creativity of the gaming public (and there is a LOT of both), but I can easily imagine these templates being handy in these situations:

• You have written a new homebrew scenario that you’d like some nice handouts for;
• You have a published scenario but don’t like the look of its props;
• You’ve modified a published scenario and now need some of the facts modified in its handouts;
• You are an evil referee who likes making things difficult for your players by adding “red herring” clues to vex them;
• During play the characters do something noteworthy (aka blow up something) that is newsworthy …

It’s worth mentioning that there really isn’t anything about the newspaper templates that limits them to only being useful for Lovecraftian roleplaying (which, to be fair, uses a LOT of newspaper clues). If you play other games set in the 1920s or 1930s — maybe gangster or pulp games or weird alternative reality games — these would also be useful for such a game. And if you run a modern game which includes old newspaper articles as props or clues (e.g., the recently-discovered contents of Al Capone’s newspaper clipping archive), then they might be useful for that too!

Supporting Material

Generally, Mutable Deceptions Vol 1 is a self-contained package that includes everything you need to get going (well, except for the Adobe Reader software, but you can get that free from Adobe for most modern OS-es). But I have also put together a “product support” page which has extra stuff that might be helpful to prop-makers or other folks curious about Mutable Deceptions generally.

At the moment this includes a download link for all the (free) fonts which were used to make these highly-authentic newspaper articles … and a higher-res version of the full 12-page instruction booklet that comes with the package. If you want to know what you can (and can’t) do with the product, downloading the latter might help you decide if it’s for you.

Make Amusing Headlines!

Finally, I’ll leave you with some humour from one of the testers who we asked to put the newspaper templates through their paces before publication. Reanimator, indeed!

Here at Cthulhu Reborn we are most delighted to welcome Dan Harms. While some folks may claim that they “wrote the book on the Cthulhu Mythos,” Dan is probably one of only a handful of people for who that is literally true. His Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia (which has gone by several titles under the hands of different publishers, see below) is universally referred to as the only comprehensive summary of the decades of creative collaboration that has led to today’s melange we call the “Cthulhu Mythos.”

Both because of his all-encompassing 90+ Cthulhu Mythos skill and also because he has been a contributor to the pages of Lovecraftian RPG magazines for over 17 years we are incredibly excited that Dan has agreed to come along and share his views about the past, present and future of Lovecraftian gaming.

Introduction

Dan Harms, noted expert on the Cthulhu Mythos and in particular the dread Necronomicon, has one unique characteristic possessed by no other authority interviewed to date on this blog: he is dead. Well, at least if that most esteemed academic source known as UseNet is to be believed. For, in a most grave and solemn press release issued on 18 August 2001 beneath the byline “NECRONOMICON EXPERT BRUTALLY SLAIN, SCHOLAR WOUNDED” a most heinous happening was recounted. It would appear that during a panel session at the NecronomiCON convention of that fateful year an unknown gunman predated upon panel members shortly after a shock announcement that one panelist had finally unearthed an extant copy of the TRUE Necronomicon. By my reckoning, that makes Dan well over a decade in the grave. The fact that this has not lessened but actually accelerated his mission to spread information far and wide about the Cthulhu Mythos speaks volumes about the true aims of the forces that wait BEYOND.

Of course we may be wrong about some of that.

In a less spectral sense, however, there is no doubt about the fact that Dan has been a leading authority on the Cthulhu Mythos since the first release of the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Chaosium in 1994. This exhaustive volume, much referred to as the canonical source of information about the Mythos, has been through a couple of subsequent editions and is now titled The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia: A Guide to H.P. Lovecraft’s Universe (Elder Sign Press). It was recently re-released (with surprisingly little fanfare) for the first time as an e-book. Dan also co-wrote a scholarly volume in 1998 entitled The Necronomicon Files which gathers together a wealth of real-world historical information to deliver what has been called “the Necronomicon debunker’s bible,” soundly proving once-and-for-all that Lovecraft’s fictional creation is just that.

In additional to publishing scholarly treatises, Dan has also been an active writer and collaborator in both the analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction and in extrapolating his ideas into new and interesting material for Lovecraftian roleplaying games. The former resulted in the somewhat extensive series of discussion threads “The Shadow Over UseNet” in which most Lovecraft tales came under the knife. Dan’s gaming writing has graced the pages of several key periodicals many of which he has also edited. These include The Unspeakable Oath (old and new incarnations), The Black Seal and Worlds of Cthulhu. The last of these featured a series of articles describing Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne as a detailed and imaginative setting for Dark Ages Cthulhu.

Dan also has gaming material written and awaiting release with multiple Call of Cthulhu publishers. These include contributions to the soon-to-be-released Tales of the Sleepless City (Miskatonic River Press) and the much-awaited line of Colonial Lovecraft books by Sixtystone Press. Dan also has two books primarily written by him awaiting publication by Sixtystone (Ghouls: Eaters of the Dead and Fury of Yig). A preview scenario from the former of these is available for FREE over on DrivethruRPG.

In real-life, Dan Harms is a writer and librarian.

As with all of the interviews in the “State of the Tentacle” series, all opinions expressed here are Dan’s and are not necessarily shared by any of the companies he has worked for (Chaosium, Miskatonic River Press, Sixtystone Press, and the Unspeakable Oath).

CthulhuReborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Dan: Milestones: The creation of Call of Cthulhu itself, the Lovecraft Country line of books, Delta Green, Cthulhu Live, and Trail of Cthulhu.

Mis-steps: Globe spanning campaigns in the line of Indiana Jones for a system that doesn’t support Jones-style play, the monograph line. Even those, however, still have resulted in some great offerings.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Dan: There’s certainly a great deal of material out there for Cthulhu gaming – more than I can keep track of – so that’s much in its favour.

I think that our biggest challenge is to stop confusing the creation of new settings, or mashing up Lovecraft with another genre, with innovation. Much of what I’m seeing seems to spring from someone saying, “Boy, wouldn’t it be fun to play a game/scenario set on a remote geographical location, or in an alternate future, or with mechs!” Those games can be fun, but they don’t try anything different, and I’m not sure how much interest they inspire after the novelty factor has worn off.

That’s not to say that such settings can’t be innovative. Both Dark Ages and the Averoigne setting in Worlds [of Cthulhu] (which I was a part of) tried to achieve that, with limited success. Delta Green does a good job, but I’m not sure how much people really pick up on that. Bookhounds of London is an excellent example – it’s not just set in London in the Thirties, it carries with it a new perspective from which the characters operate.

That is not to say that innovation is necessary for fun, of course, or that it’s common in any genre. Nevertheless, I’d like to see more projects that take Lovecraft’s vision and transform it in interesting ways.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Dan: The growth of attention to Lovecraft and his creations in the horror, science fiction, and mainstream communities (this is good and bad, especially when it comes to Mythos humour). The acknowledgment that Lovecraft is in the public domain. The continued desire to create new games, and the widespread availability of the tools for one individual to take an RPG to start from conception through distribution.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Dan: The large number of people writing for the game, as opposed to the small number of people publishing it. Most of the publishers I know are pretty much one-man operations, and that can often lead to bottlenecks of production, cash flow problems, burnout, etc. Combine this with an RPG reading public that wants something that is an accurate historical work, an art book, a solid piece of technical writing, and suitable for an evening’s entertainment – oh, and some of them are going to download a torrented copy “just to see if they want to buy it” – and you’ve got a tremendous amount of work for very little return.

I’m also concerned about accessibility. For example, let’s take Call of Cthulhu. Let’s assume that the new player has read Lovecraft, and is familiar with the relatively simple system. It’s set in the Twenties, so that becomes another aspect of understanding. It’s often not clear as to why your characters want to investigate this horrific Thing, or why they’d want to come back and do it again. If you think of it in terms of other media, your characters are too fragile for the game to be comparable to a TV show, but hardy enough that it’s not like a horror movie, either. And if you’re running the game, it’s even more complex, in terms of how to manage all of these.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Dan: All of the stuff coming out from the publishers with whom I’m working, for starters. After that, it might be nice to see more support for either campaign play, or one-shot adventures set up like horror movies. I enjoy playing in different eras, but I agree with Sandy Petersen that the best setting is modern.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Dan: Not much, I’m afraid. Even the best material I’ve read hasn’t done much to change the overall trajectory of the genre, and I doubt it will. At least there’ll be more fun stuff to read and enjoy.

CR: Are you happy to field an additional question or two on the topic of Lovecraftian gaming?

Dan: OK

When we kicked off the “State of the Tentacle” series, one of the goals was to cast a net further than just Call of Cthulhu and to try to get some opionions from folks in the broader “Lovecraftian RPG” field. With this fourth installment we have certainly succeeded in this endeavour … for trapped in the bottom of our net (trying desperately to swim back to the nearest Deep One metropolis) we find Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan.

Lovecraftian gamers will certainly know Gareth from his recent work as the “Laundry Guy” and for Trail of Cthulhu. But for gamers who are a little longer in the tooth (or is that tentacle?) his name will certainly be also recognizable as the “Paranoia reboot” guy and the “new Traveller edition” guy and many other epithets besides. All this experience — both inside and outside our little corner of the gaming universe — makes him an interesting person to quiz about the future of Lovecraftian games, so we are really happy that our net held true and we were able to compel some interesting answers from Gareth in exchange for his liberty.

Introduction

Gareth is a writer and game designer based in Ireland. While innocently starting out writing Cthulhu scenarios (irishgaming.com) for conventions, he wandered into a career in gaming by accident. These days, he is a line manager at Cubicle 7 (for The Laundry and other properties) and a freelancer for other companies, notably Pelgrane Press.

Gareth has worked on all the Laundry Files books -- that’s The Laundry Files Core Rulebook, the excellent Laundry scenario compendium Black Bag Jobs, The Laundry Agent’s Handbook, License to Summon, Mythos Dossiers, GOD GAME BLACK and the yet-to-be-released Cultists Under The Bed for those keeping score. He’s also written Arkham Detective Tales and has taken over responsibilities in writing the latter chapters of the much-loved Cthulhu Apocalypse campaign for Pelgrane Press. Gareth also contributed to the Maelstrom anthology of Mythos fiction and to the marginalia for Graham Walmsley’s insanely useful Stealing Cthulhu guide to building Lovecraftian tales by … well, er, stealing.

And all this in the last couple of years. Clearly Gareth is either a man who believes sleep is for the weak, some form of military AI experiment, or a Beowulf cluster of Mi-go brain cylinders. Even after interviewing him, we’re not really sure which.

Outside the Mythos, Gareth is also famous for having written new editions of Traveller and Paranoia for Mongoose Publishing (and is proud of the fact that he added the “Servants of Cthulhu” as a secret society in Paranoia: Internal Security), He has also contributed to many, many more game lines than we could possibly mention here, written a licensed novel (Paranoia: Reality Optional) and is currently working on a FATE-powered game of lurid Georgian-era occult horror called Rakehell as well as many, many other things.

Gareth blog (infrequently) at www.milkyfish.com, but can be found more regularly on twitter and other forums, where he usually goes by the name “mytholder”.

CthulhuReborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Gareth: Lovecraft bestrides the gaming world like some shambling colossus. There are few genres or types of game that don’t have at least a nod in the direction of ancient tentacled horrors. Not just roleplaying games – I’ve got shelves full of Lovecraftian board games, card games, computer games… plush toys, even. Lovecraft’s a geek shibboleth.

(Of course, calling most of these ‘Lovecraftian’ is arguable a misnomer. If you say ‘Mythos’ roleplaying, you’re on safer ground. A lot of games don’t capture Lovecraft’s artful dread, but have the tropes of tentacled monsters, musty books and madmen down pat.)

The key milestones have to include the publication of Call of Cthulhu, of course, but I think the Deities and Demigods printing of the Mythos gods was also very important, as it seeded the idea that Lovecraft could be added to any game, instead of just being restricted to a single setting. Did that primordial miscegenation open up Lovecraftian horror to strange new vistas of gaming?

Given the huge success of Lovecraftian roleplaying, pointing out missteps feels like nitpicking. “Lovecraftian roleplaying has been a pillar of gaming for decades, hugely well-respected with a sturdy ruleset that’s hardly dated, a host of fans and a reputation for immensely rewarding play – where did it all go wrong?”

If I must answer – the game never really embraced one-shots as much as it should have, the character generation rules are… quaint, but notoriously time-consuming given how quickly investigators can perish, and there’s been a paucity of good advice for Keepers on how to keep a campaign going.

I worry about some of what I’ve heard about the 7th edition rules. Updating a classic ruleset like that is a very, very tricky job – look at the current debates over the direction of Dungeons and Dragons, for example. I worked on a new edition of Traveller a few years ago, and that was a harrowing experience. I feel you have to see yourself as a custodian of the game, not an architect – make tweaks rather than large-scale changes unless you can clearly identify sections that need improvement. It’s doubly hard with CoC, as the basic engine is so transparent and simple. “Here’s your skill, roll under it” is hard to improve upon.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Gareth: The glib answer is “it’s doing well by surviving” in this grim times. The various publishers all seem to be ploughing their own fields quite nicely. Even if you restrict it to BRP-compatible material, everyone’s got their Unique Selling Point – hard-edged modern-day black-helicopter stuff in Delta Green, Lovecraft-country at Miskatonic River Press, 1920s England at Cthulhu Britanica and so on.

We do need more innovation. More player-facing books, for example. Robin Laws’ Armitage Files suggests a fantastic way of presenting investigative adventures, and I’d love to see something like that applied to classic Cthulhu. The big challenges in roleplaying writing are structuring information so it can be referenced quickly in play while still being clear and entertaining, and harnessing the creativity and enthusiasm of the players while still preserving a meaningful investigation.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Gareth: There’s the X + Cthulhu approach, adding the Mythos to different settings or genres. Cthulhu plus space, Cthulhu plus mecha, Cthulhu plus spies, Cthulhu plus WWII, Cthulhu plus Regency England. The right combination can, I think, spark something wonderful – if you can find unexpected and fruitful resonances between the Mythos and your chosen X, it makes for great gaming. It’s also possible to come up with new and interesting perspectives on the Mythos – look at John Snead’s Eldritch Skies, which recasts the Mythos races as aliens to be encountered and explored, as opposed to fundamentally incomprehensible horrors.

The downside is that it can be all too easy to rely on Mythos tropes to provide the bad guys for your setting, which can result in retelling The Shadow Over Innsmouth over and over, only the bad guys have different hats. Any worthwhile combination should bring something new to the Mythos. (I was very pleased when reviews of the Black Bag Jobs anthology for the Laundry observed that it would be hard to adapt those adventures for a regular Cthulhu campaign, as they were so tied to the Laundry setting while still using classic Mythos concepts like Deep Ones or cultists.)

There’s also Kickstarter, which may have a big influence on the direction of games, but I’ll get to that later on.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Gareth: I note the distinction between ‘prosperity’ and ‘growth’. I’ll also draw a distinction between ‘hobby’ and ‘industry’.

The industry’s gotten very good at surviving and even prospering on small margins. The average book sells far fewer copies than a comparable release a decade ago, but there are more books, and they’re more efficiently produced. The industry will continue to prosper, within its own little niche, possibly becoming every more indistinguishable from ‘hobby’. I think the games and adventures coming out these days are richer and better-designed than any before, and there’s more analysis, discussion and refinement going on than ever before, thanks to the Internet.

Growth, though, is harder to achieve. One of the biggest obstacles for roleplaying games is time. I may get a deeper and more interesting experience out of a D&D campaign with six friends than I do out of popping Skyrim into my Xbox – but the latter takes only ten seconds, as opposed to the hours of wrangling, scheduling, postponement and logistical issues needed to get seven busy people into the same room for four hours. Gaming requires a huge investment of time, and that’s a big obstacle for new players.

Call of Cthulhu and its ilk actually do moderately well on this score. The Cthulhu character generation rules are rather slow, but the rules can be explained in a few seconds. There’s a wealth of scenarios available for busy Keepers, and Cthulhu lends itself very well to the one-shot game or a campaign where you can drop in pre-written scenarios.

I’d love to see something with the visuals and props of, say, Arkham Horror but with the structure and interactivity of a roleplaying game…but we’re crossing over into opportunities here. So, one of the obstacles is the lack of an appealing entry-level game, and one of the opportunities is the production of an appealing entry-level game!

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Gareth: Well, one corner of our quaint, witch-haunted town is under my tyrannical reign – I’m line manager for the Laundry Files, the game based on the novels of Charles Stross. While the novels determine the overall trajectory of the line (towards CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN [the Laundryverse name for the imminent catastrophe "when the stars come right" --CR]), we get to explore other aspects of the setting, and that normally involves adding a little more Mythos. This year, we’re working on a guide to the military and political aspects of the Laundryverse, another adventure anthology, and a guide to cults called Cultists Under The Bed, which uses a similar format to the Mythos Dossiers with lots of player handouts.

Other lines I wouldn’t want to dictate, save perhaps to hurry them along (Eternal Lies, for example, is something I’d really like to run at some point). There are lots of very strong designers working in the shadow of Lovecraft.

I’d love to see something that’s really quick to pick up and play, while still keeping all the strengths of a roleplaying game. Cthulhu Dark or Tremulus might come close.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Gareth: There’ll be more integration of electronic media and support. The balance of the industry is shifting towards PDFs. These days, if I buy a new game to read, I’ll buy it in PDF, and only get a print version if I want to actually play it. You still can’t beat print for ease of use at a gaming table (at least, not yet — playing “the five year future of consumer electronics, especially tablets” is a whole other blog post). There’ll also be more use of character trackers, virtual handouts, and so on, especially for games set in the modern era.

Right now, Kickstarter’s exerting a huge gravitational pull over the industry. Bigger companies like WotC have enough financial mass to ignore it, but it’s virtually irresistible for smaller companies and hobbyist publishers. The lure of a enthused, connected, invested fanbase PLUS money up front PLUS a financing system that rewards clever ideas and gaming the system… that’s very attractive.

There are three ways this can go.

Firstly, the kickstarter bubble might just burst. If a number of high-profile projects don’t deliver, then people may decide that investing money in a game that might never materialise just isn’t worth the risk. A badly managed successful Kickstarter can be much worse than a failed project.

In this scenario, the landscape looks much as it does now. Some product lines will have closed down, others opened up, but I wouldn’t expect any large-scale changes.

Secondly, Kickstart might just tick along, in which case it effectively becomes a pre-order/market testing system. Someone has an idea for a book, up it goes on Kickstarter, and if it funds, it gets published. It gives companies cash flow and lets them avoid sinking thousands into a book that no-one wants. Everyone wins, especially publishers with good track records.

Scenario three is that we keep getting these huge spikes of funding for high-profile projects with thousands of backers. That would open the door to a scenario where there are fewer but much bigger and more impressive products instead of a steady stream of books.

The Kickstarter phenomenon is especially relevant to Mythos gaming, because… well, Cthulhu’s popular and instantly recognisable. We’re a meme.

CR: A meme indeed … Thanks for your time, Gareth!

Those who have been following Chaosium’s website press-releases or the Yog-Sothoth forums will know that a few days ago, Chaosium released a book called Atomic Age Cthulhu which brings Call of Cthulhu roleplaying into a brand new era … the 1950s. I’ve had a quick chance to skim through the PDF version of the book … and I’d have to say that it looks brimming with potential (I can’t wait to get my hands on a print version to read through properly).

People that have been following the State of the Tentacle interview series here on Cthulhu Reborn will probably remember that Atomic Age Cthulhu is one of several projects shepherded into this world by the necromantic hand of Brian Sammons. You can read our interview with Brian, where he talks about this book and many others, over on this blog post.

Long-time readers of Cthulhu Reborn may remember that waaaay back in June 2011, we released a design for a 1950s “Atomic Age” character sheet for Call of Cthulhu. While I was hoping that this sheet may have made it into the Chaosium book, it seems to have missed out on inclusion …. I’m guessing for space reasons (since it’s already a pretty hefty book, weighting in at 228 pages).

Anyway, far be it from me to deny the world the chance to use this character sheet design … so below there’s a link to an updated version of the original PDF that includes a couple of new skills found in some of the Atomic Age Cthulhu book. I’ve even updated it to be a fillable PDF sheet. Download it. Use it in your games. Share it with your friends. Print out a double-sided copy and staple it into the back of your copy of Atomic Age Cthulhu. Go crazy, Daddy-O.

Pictures of the Sheet

Just so you know what you’ll be getting if you download the 1950s PDF character sheet … here are pictures of both the front and back (click for larger versions of the images).

Download Links

There are two versions, one which includes a small amount of autocalculation of fields (Idea, Luck, Know, 99-Cthulhu) and another which has no autocalculation:

• two-sided Chaosium Atomic Age (1950s) character sheet with autocalc, for Letter
• two-sided Chaosium Atomic Age (1950s) character sheet no autocalc, for Letter

Both files are 6.7MB in size, and have been granted the right holy Adobe incantations to allow you to fill them in and save the form complete with input (kinda useful for a char sheet).

These files are copyright to Cthulhu Reborn but released for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons License. That means, you can do pretty much whatever you like with them … except make money.

Duck and Cover

I hope folks get some use out of these (semi-official) sheets for Chaosium’s “Atomic Age” setting for Call of Cthulhu. If you use them for anything truly epic … feel free to let us know and we’ll share your magnificence with the world

Cthulhu Reborn is pleased to welcome Graham Walmsley as our fifth interviewee in the “State of the Tentacle” series. Graham kindly agreed to drop by our dimly-lit half-forgotten headquarters high on a Wooded Hill overgrown with trees unnaturally thick. And if it sounds like that is a description lifted from Graham’s own book Stealing Cthulhu — well, that’s just a coincidence.

When we were formulating a dream list of people to interview, Graham was one of the first entries … Although he has only been writing for Lovecraftian RPGs for a few years, he has already left quite an impression in terms of creating a manifestly different type of roleplaying experience which is distinctly more “Lovecrafty” than almost anything that has gone before. Protagonists in his scenarios are just that more certainly doomed than in most scenarios — and the horrors they face are just that bit more elusive and “unknowable” in the same way that many of the finer details of the supernatural manifestations in Lovecraft’s tales were never properly explained. This is really what the Trail of Cthulhu creators were thinking when they coined the term “purist.”

We figured that with such a fresh and innovative take on translating Mythos to the gaming table, Graham was sure to have some interesting things to say about the future of Lovecraftian gaming. As you’ll see below … we were right.

Introduction

By way of introductions … Graham is the author of the much-acclaimed (and insanely useful) Stealing Cthulhu, a guide to Lovecraftian storytelling in games. He is also the creator of the free, rules-light system Cthulhu Dark which has been garnering significant attention among gamers intrigued by its simplicity and deadliness. He has written many products for Pelgrane Press’ Trail of Cthulhu and has also written for Cubicle 7′s The Laundry.

Graham is passionate about self-publishing: as well as Stealing Cthulhu and Cthulhu Dark, he wrote and published the storytelling guide Play Unsafe and the murder mystery game A Taste For Murder.

Graham’s work is regularly nominated for awards and, last year, won a Gold Ennie award.

CthulhuReborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Graham: First, there was Call of Cthulhu, the game I grew up with, which scared me. And then, honestly, I lost touch for a few years. All I remember was this scary, scary game.

When I got back into gaming, I was most interested in smaller games. So I liked Malcolm Craig’s Cold City, which doesn’t explicitly reference Lovecraft, but has soldiers fighting tentacled monsters in Berlin. And I liked Jared Sorensen’s Unspeakable, a Lovecraftian investigation game, in which you make up the horror as you go along. And other horror games like Dread and Dead of Night.

Five years ago, there was Trail of Cthulhu. That did two things: it gave Ken Hite’s take on the Mythos, which was utterly beautiful, making the creatures unknowable and twisted; and it specified a “Purist” style of play. I think that was important. It gave the idea that Cthulhu games needn’t be about shooting cultists: they could be about incomphrensible, insoluble horror.

Since then, there’s been a mini-explosion in Cthulhu games: CthulhuTech, Realms of Cthulhu, my own Cthulhu Dark. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. On the negative side, it’s become a bandwagon. On the positive side, there are lots of games, each offering their own take on Lovecraftian gaming.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Graham: Man. I hate talking about the industry. When we talk about the industry, we tend to focus on the bigger companies and the products they’re releasing. But, for me, that’s not where the interesting stuff is coming from.

For me, the interesting stuff comes from smaller publishers. For example, James Raggi’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess has some great Mythos stuff in it.

Even more interesting is the stuff that comes from Keepers and players. For example, I’m excited about Scott Dorward’s scenarios, which he runs at conventions in the UK. And I’m excited about the stuff Terry Romero is doing with Cthulhu games in the States.

So, to answer your question: what’s the industry doing well? It’s doing well at a grassroots level. Keepers are producing great stuff, small publishers are producing great stuff. What could the industry do better? Engage with that grassroots stuff.

Let me give you an example. One of my favourite publications, at the moment, is Arc Dream’s The Unspeakable Oath. It’s a magazine that contains adventure seeds, scenarios and other things related to Lovecraftian games. What makes it so good? Everything is written by writers who genuinely care about what they’re writing. (Here’s what doesn’t happen: The Oath invents a theme; writers pitch scenario based on that theme; the Oath pays writers to write those scenarios. Instead, writers are writing what they want to write, which is what makes it so good.)

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now? What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Graham: It’s easier to publish that it’s ever been. That means: it’s easier to publish Cthulhu stuff than it has ever been. And services like Kickstarter make it even easier. This is all good.

What I see, at the moment, is a groundswell of people publishing their own stuff. Often, it’s as good as the products produced by bigger companies. Often, it’s better: because they love what they’re publishing, people playtest it more, research it more, polish it more.

For me, that’s where we’re going. It’s a world of little, innovative home-produced products. I’m excited.

So where does that leave the bigger companies? In some ways, they’re getting more innovative. Pelgrane Press are working with individual writers to produce a range of strange and creative scenarios (Jason Morningstar’s The Black Drop, Bill White’s The Big Hoodoo, Robin Laws’ The Repairer of Reputations). Cubicle 7 are building product lines around British folktales and World War II. And we’ll see what happens with Call of Cthulhu Seventh Edition, but I’m excited that two long-standing British Keepers are writing it.

In some ways, however, the things published today aren’t innovative. They resemble the things published twenty or thirty years ago. I’d like more innovation.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Graham: Let’s see. I’m tempted to reply in generalisations, but that’s dull. It’s more fun if I tell you exactly what I think the major product lines should do. Let’s do that.

• Call of Cthulhu: I’d like an explosion of new monographs, in which up-and-coming writers cover new historical eras and aspects of the occult. In particular, I’d like monographs that don’t take a British or American perspective. For example, I’d love an Indian monograph written from the point of view of Indian people, rather than Westerners.

• Trail of Cthulhu: I’d like to see a new edition, which shakes up the GUMSHOE system, keeping the best bits and tweaking the rest to make it even better. Meanwhile, I’d like them to keep working with writers and publishing exciting stuff.

• Delta Green: I’m looking forward to the new edition. For me, the most exciting thing about Delta Green is that it’s a military setting. I’d like them to use more military history, with stories from soldiers and support staff we haven’t heard before.

• Cthulhu Dark: I’m planning to publish a Cthulhu Dark rulebook. In addition, I’d like people to use Cthulhu Dark to publish their own scenarios and sourcebooks. As above, I’m especially interested in non-Western perspectives. Or at least stories and settings we haven’t heard before.

CR: What do you mean, non-Western perspectives?

Graham: Most Cthulhu material has focussed on Brits and Americans. Even when a product focusses on a foreign country, it takes a British or American perspective. (It’s usually British for Gaslight material, American for later material).

This is both a problem and an opportunity. It’s a problem, because we only hear a Western perspective. It’s like nobody else exists. It’s also a problem because it tends to romanticise history. There were some deeply problematic things happening in the 1890s and 1920s (which I won’t spell out for you). We don’t hear about them.

So, I’d like to hear the stories we don’t normally hear. More widely, I’d like to hear stories about people we don’t usually hear. We hear a lot about Victorian gentlemen, but not about Victorian market traders, Victorian mistresses or Victorian mudlarks, even though their stories are probably more interesting.

And it’s an opportunity, because there are so many more stories to tell. I want to hear stories we haven’t heard before, from people we don’t usually hear from.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Graham: There’ll be more small publishers, more exciting new scenarios and more focus on horror that’s close to Lovecraft but not Lovecraft. Poe? M R James? Stephen King? Thomas Ligotti? I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

CR:Us too! Thanks for your time, Graham! I’m sure that there’s a whole range of things you’ve mentioned that readers might want to quiz you further on. Are you willing to come back to answer a couple more questions?

Graham: OK.

A few weeks back we interviewed Stuart Boon, line director of Cubicle 7′s Cthulhu Britannica line and award-winning writer of Shadows Over Scotland. Lots of folks seem to have enjoyed reading Stuart’s comments, so we thought we would invite him back to answer a couple more questions . . .

CR: One of the most praised aspects of Shadows Over Scotland is the way it tackles presenting source material in a informative, exhaustive but also more entertaining way than many of the Cthulhu location books from recent history. Did you have any particular approach or methodology you applied to writing those sections of the book? Were there any particular sources of inspiration that helped in creating an innovative presentation of sourcebook material?

Stuart: My intention with writing Shadows Over Scotland was always to write the book ‘for Keepers’ — that is, to write for an audience that is looking to acquire and make use of detailed, informative, and evocative source material, but who also want to be entertained in the process. These days it is easy enough to dial up information on people, places, events, etc. in Wikipedia or the like, so I personally don’t think it is enough for sourcebooks to be mere repositories of information. That said, a lot of sourcebooks I own and have read are written solely to disseminate information and care little for engaging readers. When the opportunity to write Shadows came up, I planned from the beginning to write a book that had the material (e.g. histories, events, local knowledge, etc.), but that would situate it within a larger story (that of a Mythos-infused Scotland in the 1920s) and emphasise atmosphere and drama over sheer quantity of information. So, from the get-go, I was very conscious of writing a book that would be entertaining, and hopefully inspirational, for Keepers.

CR: Why do you think there is such a vast difference between the production standards applied to recent European Cthulhu editions (French, German, Spanish) and those produced for the English Language? Do those publishers just have bigger art budgets, or a buying public that will pay at a higher price point for quality products, or are they just more creative at applying their art budget to produce more beautiful results?

Stuart: Hmm, that’s a hard question to answer from a desk in Scotland. It would be fascinating to get an answer from the French, Spanish, and German designers themselves. For one, however, I suspect there is a very different approach to production design in those European editions. I think the European design houses have tapped into the fact that the relatively small, but very loyal Call of Cthulhu fan base is willing, and has the disposable income, to purchase prestige products.

So, to answer your question, I think they are designed differently from English publications at the outset. They may well have different approaches to the use of art, but I think what drives them is their ability to produce attractive, specialised products for a targeted audience. They may well be selling lower numbers, but making a modest profit and the final products that we’ve seen so far have been truly spectacular. I can see little reason why such an approach could not be adopted by an English language publisher, but no one as yet has made the effort.

CR: Thanks for allowing yourself to be dragged back by Cthulhu’s tentacles for a second round. Best of luck on the First Aid and Psychoanalysis rolls

For our sixth interview in the State of the Tentacle series, we are very excited to be speaking with one of Call of Cthulhu‘s hardest-working and prolific writers of recent years, Oscar Rios. Heck, in terms of the total volume of superb scenario material he has produced, he is likely one of the game’s most prolific writers of all time. Couple that with the fact that unlike most writers, Oscar hasn’t been content to concentrate his writing on just one favourite game setting … instead he has written material for just about every setting that has ever been published. His work appears in an impressive array of different scenario collections. He also represents the major success-story of Chaosium’s (sometime’s maligned) Monograph series, having contributed to many of the most popular titles in that line.

With all that wealth of diverse experience, Oscar was someone we were very eager to quiz about the future of Lovecraftian gaming. Fortunately for us, we caught him just as his gladiatorial chariot hit a pot-hole in the Via Appia, and in a stunned daze he was unable to escape our clutches. What transpired appears below.

Introduction

Oscar Rios is an author of horror fiction and role playing scenarios for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Since 2002 he has written sixty three (and counting) Call of Cthulhu scenarios, and has written for nearly every historical era possible. He’s written five monographs for Chaosium, including Ripples from Carcosa and The Ravenar Saga. His scenarios appear in various Chaosium monograph collections, including every Halloween themed one produced to date. Oscar has a scenario in Chaosium’s latest publication, Atomic Age Cthulhu. His work has appeared in The Unspeakable Oath, Worlds of Cthulhu and Independent Roleplaying Magazine (IRM).

Oscar began working for Miskatonic River Press, as a staff writer and editor. His scenarios appear in MRP’s offerings More Adventures in Arkham Country, New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, Lux in Tenebras and the upcoming Tales of the Sleepless City. He is the author of The Legacy of Arrius Lurco, a Miskatonic River Press campaign for Cthulhu Invictus that in some ways put the Roman era on the map as a seriously supported setting for Call of Cthulhu .

In addition to his gaming work, Oscar has branched out into the realm of Lovecraftian fiction, with short stories in Cthulhu’s Dark Cults, Horror for the Holidays, and the upcoming collections Undead and Unbound and Cthulhu’s Dark Cults II. He has also further branched out into the world of Fantasy RPG’s, writing A Faceless Enemy for Chapter 13 Press, as part of Tales From the Fallen Empire: Post-Apocalyptic Sword and Sorcery Setting for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG (coming soon).

On the strength of his unassailable reputation as a writer of excellent Invictus-era adventures for Call of Cthulhu, he was recently invited to become the first “new face” to join the team writing additional material for Chaosium’s 2nd edition of the classic campaign, Horror on the Orient Express. Impressed with the awesomeness of his Roman prequel chapter (Sanguis Omnia Vincet), the Orient Express folks invited him back to write another (non-Roman) chapter for the campaign, entitled Bread or Stone.

At his core Oscar remains an avid gamer, running and playing Call of Cthulhu whenever possible.

Cthulhu Reborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Oscar: Strangely enough some of the milestones and mis-steps are one and the same. Every time something went “wrong” it opened up new opportunities. Some of those opportunities carried Lovecraftian Roleplaying in new directions. These sped up the evolution of Cosmic Horror RPG’s.

Chaosium’s monograph program offered new authors a chance to get their work out there. Those products allowed the voices of new authors to be heard. Some of those books weren’t well received by fans for various reasons. Those instances likely caused a lot of harm to the new authors’ careers in particular and Mythos gaming in general. Other books were warmly received by the fans and established a solid foundation for several new authors to build upon.

Another milestone would have to be the publication of the epic campaigns, such as Horror on the Orient Express and the Beyond the Mountains of Madness. These were audacious project that became legendary among the fans. The publication of the setting books, such as Kingsport and Arkham, helped the average Keeper turn his occasional horror game into real campaigns. Expanding Mythos Gaming into other historical eras, like modern times, the 1890’s, the Dark Ages and the time of the Roman Empire gave greater depth to the genre.

Key missteps… I think too many people consider Cosmic Horror RPG’s as a throw away art form. Not enough care is taken with regards to historical accuracy, editing and proof reading, play testing, layout and product development. Books also come out far too infrequently, with some sitting in limbo for years or even decades. Then, when a product is released, there’s this huge expectation that it’ll be wonderful, because so much time has gone by since the last book came out. If it turns out the book isn’t wonderful, whoa boy… I love CoC fans, I am a HUGE CoC fan myself, but we can be brutal with our opinions at times.

And you know… The collectable card game fiasco. I won’t go there, that horse won’t get any deader if I join my colleagues in beating on it.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Oscar: There isn’t one type of Call of Cthulhu fan, there are many. There are the X-File investigators, the two-fisted pulp investigators, the survival horror guys and the grim old school purists who like short lives, shattered minds and spectacular deaths. Most fans shift between several of these types, depending on their mood. I think most of the new publishers have realized this and are putting out products directed at a target fan type. Since the fans shift between types, they’ll purchase products from this company AND that one, depending on what the Keeper wants to run and the sort of players they have. There is enough room in Cosmic Horror RPG’s for everyone to do well.

What could all these companies do better? Well, they could put out more products. When a fan hears about a great book, sees an amazing cover, and gets all excited that the product will be out in four months everything is cool. When a year or two goes by and that book still isn’t out that fan is no longer excited. They might not even be interested anymore. Hell, it’s possible they don’t even remember the project or if they do their angry about it. Some of these have become almost Urban Legends within the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Want to start a heated discussion among a group of CoC players, just say “Hey, Pulp Cthulhu [A Chaosium project "delayed" by over a decade - CR], what’s up with that?” and watch the sparks fly. Bad things happen; it’s not a perfect universe, I get that. I’ve been on both sides of this, as a publisher and a fan. I’ve been a victim of it and I’ve been guilty of doing it. When you tell people a book should be out on X-day… and then X-day +2 years later that book isn’t out… well, that sucks. It happens.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Oscar: The Cthulhu Mythos has always been a shared universe, since the early days of the Lovecraft Circle. Now, Lovecraftian RPG’s are becoming the same way. You can get players on three different continents investigating a scenario over Skype, recording it and putting it on a podcast.

You can get authors, artists and publishers from all over the world brainstorming together to produce truly amazing things. Authors who produced some of the golden age classic scenarios and campaigns are back writing new material. Newer authors are working on projects with them. New publishers are adding their voices and visions to the genre.

There’s a new energy and a lot of new material is being produced. Some of it is going to be great; some of it is going to be crap; and everyone will disagree on which is which. And that’s FINE! What’s shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPG’s? Everyone is! What is that direction? A 365 degree outward expansion. It’s a great time to be a fan of Lovecraftian RPG.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Oscar: If I had to pick three words, they would be Courtesy, Professionalism and Postage. I’ll get to the last one in a minute. When a bad product comes out the fans take it as a personal slight. They spent money on this and take their disappointment to the Internet, spitting venom and frustration in their statuses and on message boards. Is that fair? Who should we feel for? The company that put out a less-than-perfect product or the disgruntled fan lashing out? I will say that both sides are in the wrong.

We, as an industry and a fan base, can do better than this. More care needs to be given to these projects by various publishers. Fans need to understand that it is impossible to please everyone and their disappointment doesn’t give them a “licence to kill” on the Internet. The same goes for those working together on projects within the industry as well. We can all treat one another with a little more respect. Again, I am not perfect nor innocent of any of the things I’ve just mentioned. However, I am trying to do better. I want fans to be happy, but I know no matter what anyone does you can’t please everyone. I am trying to be a better colleague to my industry brothers and sisters as well.

And so we come to my last obstacle, Postage. If a great book comes out in one country of course fans in other countries will want it. The fans are very connected because the Internet makes the entire planet feel like a small village. But these fans live in many different countries, some of which are separated by oceans and rest on far off continents.

So, these fans try to order the book and what happens? Suddenly they realize they’ll have to pay MORE to get the book shipped to them than the book actually costs. That sucks. If that book is damaged while being shipped of course they’ll want a new one mailed out to them. They’ll expect the publisher to send them one and eat the shipping costs. So that cost the publisher, many of whom are now small independent licensees, an entire new book plus the wildly expensive shipping. This soon becomes such a spiralling pit of financial loss that international fans and small publishers simply can’t afford to support one another. I wish I had a solution but I don’t.

Yes, I know about PDF’s… but physical books… call me old school but I hate running a scenario off my laptop. No I don’t want to print 100+ pages off my printer.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Oscar: I would like to see all the companies, both parent and licensee, communicate and coordinate in the support of all the established eras. This way every year or two there would be at least one book out for each of the major settings; a new Dark Ages book, an new Invictus Book, a new Gaslight book, A new Modern Era book, maybe even support for Old West, Far Future and Colonial Eras. All of these setting are wonderful and deserve support. No matter how much fans love them and play them, if they aren’t supported they’ll die. The industry has planted an amazing orchard of Cosmic Horror Gaming settings; we need to start watering all those trees with scenario collections, campaigns and settings.

CR:Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Oscar: I’ve often been criticized for being a Mythos writer who has hope for mankind. When I look into the future I see what I want to see, much like someone failing a Sanity Roll AND the following INT check. So here it goes -

I see Del Toro getting a green light for At The Mountains of Madness because of the success of Pacific Rim. At The Mountains of Madness does for Mythos Horror what The Lord of the Rings did for Fantasy. The way everyone knows what Hobbits are now, people will know what a Shoggoth, Mi-Go and The Great Race of Yith are. They start picking out just which of their friends have the Innsmouth Look. Mythos Horror explodes in popularity and people like us all grumble saying “We loved H.P. Lovecraft before it was cool”.

What will that mean for the hobby? It will be more popular than ever, crossing over into high budget video games, motion pictures, MMRPG’s and cable TV mini-series. Yeah, maybe even some mock reality shows like the Real Housewives of Arkham or Innsmouth Shore… hehehehehehe

(He is suddenly tackled by men in white coats and dragged off screaming)

No wait, it’ll happen! Really! Just wait! I’m not insane, I’m Not INSANE!

CR: Thanks Oscar! Are you willing to stick around to answer a few more questions?

Oscar: OK

Of all the interviews we have run so far in the “State of the Tenacle” series, probably the one we have received the most feedback about is our chat with Dan Harms, renowned expert on all things Cthulhu Mythos. Spurred on by that interest, we were very eager to get Dan back in the interview seat for a couple more questions. We were lucky enough to grab a little bit of his time the other day … but there were so many questions we wanted to ask that we couldn’t pick just two. He is, after all, an interesting guy to quiz . . .

CR: You mention the Chaosium Monograph line as a “mis-step”, at least in its current form. Could you elaborate a little on what you think does and doesn’t work about this line … and can you see any way the monograph publishing system could work better?

Dan: When I say the monograph line is a “mis-step,” mind you, I’m basing it on what monographs I have read,  the reactions I’ve heard to the others, and my creative philosophy.  Maybe they make a good amount of money, and if so they’re a success from a business perspective.

In my experience, you should believe in what you’re creating, if you’re an author, an illustrator, a publisher, or a programmer.  That’s not to say it’s not possible to get by without it, especially if you’re talented, but bringing that perspective to a project always leads to its improvement.  When you’re just putting a product on paper and shipping it out, without really getting behind it, people will start becoming skeptical about that line as a whole.

To me, the place for a monograph series is between what you believe in and what can be marketed.  For example, someone could write a wonderful Gaslight sourcebook for Buffalo, New York.  No matter how great it is, it’ll always be a product appealing to a very small niche, which makes it suitable as a small-scale Print On Demand book rather than a general release.  If the sales reveal some interest, then the book can be expanded and published on a broader scale.

I do think there are products in the monograph line that meet my criteria – off the top of my head, Machine Tractor Station Kharkov 37, The Abbey, and The Parapsychologist’s Handbook.  It also includes those that simply don’t.

CR: You make the distinction between true innovation and simply “applying window-dressing” to the familiar genre conventions. Do you have any thoughts on ways that a designer might approach the development of a genuinely innocative product line? Do you need to completely throw out or challenge entrenched gaming stereotypes? Go back to literary sources to mine for other narrative voices?

Dan: I think to work with Lovecraft, you have to get back to his writing and accept its viewpoint as a baseline.  That means getting beyond the trappings and asking what the story says about the universe itself.  For example, Pathfinder includes Mythos creatures among its monsters.  Fighting them is probably fun, but their presence doesn’t equate to a Lovecraftian game.

Now, that doesn’t mean accepting an indifferent cosmos, necessarily; after all, Lovecraft’s tales of Randolph Carter are certainly not about that.  Yet if you’re not letting Lovecraft set the vision on a fundamental level, you either have a bunch of ideas thrown together because they’re neat, or you let the other elements set the tone, at which point you’re back to using the Mythos as a monster manual.

Does that mean we’re committed to rehashing Lovecraft again and again?  Certainly not.  The next question is how the genre, or the characters within it, act within that setting.  Both Delta Green and Bookhounds [of London] do that well, with Delta Green working to answer why the characters fight the Mythos, and Bookhounds asking whether it isn’t so bad every so often to make a pound or two off those terrors.  Some answers are easier than others – it’d be much easier to write Lovecraftian noir than Lovecraftian pulp or four-color superheroics – but that’s not to say it couldn’t be done.

I’d also encourage authors to think of this from a campaign perspective – how does that tone come through when the initial novelty of the setting wears off?

CR: One thing that featured heavily in early Call of Cthulhu products, but which has largely disappeared is gaming material themed around travelling to otherworldly or “Mythos” locations. Why do you think that exotic locales for Cthulhuoid adventuring have gradually been replaced by scenarios set in more mundane places, and is there a case for revisiting some of those outre places?

Dan: Why we don’t see more alien settings in Cthulhu games? They’re really hard to write about.  I wrote a chapter for Fury of Yig that used a classic HPL location as the setting.  Going in, I realized that I had to knock that chapter out of the park, or that I had to let it go.  It has to be genuinely unnerving and alien and significant to the plot, and that can be quite tough.  If other writers feel the same way, I’m not surprised they’ve decided to take their writing elsewhere.

CR: You have a significant professional background in one of the themes that turn up frequently in Lovecraft’s fiction: old books.  How well do you think existing Lovecraftian RPGs embrace the way “eldritch tomes” are used in Mythos fiction? Have you ever tried anything different in your own gaming to better capture the Lovecraftian fascination with research?

Dan: Tomes are used very differently in Mythos stories than in the games.  In the works of Lovecraft and other authors, these books are treated as sources of information.  In Call of Cthulhu, they are rewards, insofar as they provide the Cthulhu Mythos skill and spells after the events of the session are over.   In addition, the adventures and campaigns have not been built to take them into account.  Even in a gripping long-term campaign like Masks [of Nyarlathotep], reading the tomes you find doesn’t tell you anything directly useful to your investigations.

A clear sign that this is a problem are the changes in the rules to get past it.  Back in the day, people would write scenarios with notes like, “Oh, most books take long periods of time to read, but this one only takes 24 hours.”  Later we got rules about skimming and reducing tome reading times, all of which are attempts to mitigate how those rules work.

My quick survey of the other Lovecraftian RPGs on my shelf (and it’s not a complete collection, I should add) is that everyone else treats them the same way, if not in terms of time, then in terms of benefits.  I think this is a major detriment, as it really makes tomes optional to the course of play.  You lose the element of characters saying, “The knowledge in these books is dangerous – but knowing it could be crucial to our struggles!”

Then, of course, you have Keepers who want to keep tomes and spells away from characters because it might make them too powerful.  I suppose you could do that.  In terms of genre emulation, it’s like deciding that soldier characters in a modern battlefield game shouldn’t have grenades and machine guns because they might derail the plot.

If you want to get a good idea of how I think tomes should be treated in games, I’d suggest picking up The Unspeakable Oath 21 and looking at Bret Kramer’s article on “Saucer Attack 1928!”  The tome is Bret’s inspiration, but the format comes from our discussions about how books should be used in the game.  Fury of Yig, when it appears, should give some examples of how they can be placed into a game.

I don’t know if the rules for handling tomes need to be more complex, necessarily, but it would be better if they or the scenarios were geared to encourage a player to behave like a character in a Lovecraft story.

CR: Dan … thanks so much for coming back and offering another great set of answers! Our tentacles are in your debt …

When we kicked off the “State of the Tentacle” interviews, we deliberately cast a fairly wide net in relation to the types of Lovecraftian roleplaying games that were up for discussion. We didn’t just want it to be a discussion about where things are at with Call of Cthulhu — Lovecraftian gaming moved beyond the confines of just a single game some time back (when most of us weren’t looking!). There are now a whole variety of ideas out there about how the elusive yet enticing prose of Lovecraft can be translated to the gaming table, and ideally we would like these interviews to take in ALL of those different perspectives.

Introduction

Today’s guest interviewee, Cynthia Celeste Miller, is the creative force behind one of the more established of the “new crop” of Lovecraftian RPGs, Macabre Tales. Cynthia is the president of Spectrum Games, a company known specifically for faithfully emulating various genres with their game rules.

For folks who have not dipped their toes to test the Macabre Tales water (and you really should) … it represents quite a different take on Lovecraftian gaming than either of the two major games, Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu. For starters it prides itself not on being a “Cthulhu Mythos game”, but a “Lovecraft game” : that means that a lot of the weird and wonderful (and sometimes slightly dubious) additions to the Lovecraft universe made by later authors such as August Derleth and Brian Lumley are simply not part of the game. In style it is a narrative-driven game (rather than a simulation-driven one) and it is specifically tailored to being run by a Keeper for a solo Investigator. Indeed, the default rules for the game assume there is only one player … the rationale being that almost all of Lovecraft’s stories feature a central narrator or character (who foolishly investigates things that man was not meant to know). But if you want to run Macabre Tales for more than one player, there are also some optional rules for doing that too.

One of the aspects of the game which is oft-talked about is its unusual central game mechanic which uses dominoes rather than dice as the mechanism by which the outcome of a challenge is determined. [And in case there's any confusion whatsoever, we're talking here about dominos the game pieces ... not anything to do with pizza, although I guess you could eat pizza while playing too ]

Each adventure specifically has a classic three-act structure and the game mechanics function slightly differently in each of the acts (to simulate the rising danger as the horror unfolds). When things get truly pulse-pounding the game’s “tension scene” mechanic kicks in delivering a short and suspenseful piece of action during which things can get more deadly again.

You can read a much more detailed description of the intriguing mechanics of Macabre Tales, as well as the features of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction which inspired them, in this essay penned by Cynthia herself.

In addition to their genre emulation of Lovecraft’s universe, Cynthia’s company also produces other games which aim to faithfully recreate other fictional genres: Superheroes, 1980s Action Cartoons, Slasher Movies, and (coming this year) 1970s Sci-Fi. You can find out more at Spectrum Games’ website or Facebook page.

Cthulhu Reborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Cynthia: The publication of Call of Cthulhu has to be considered the most important milestone, at least in my mind. That is the point where roleplaying and Lovecraft truly and fully melded into one tentacle-laden abomination. While other games may have contained some Lovecraftian entities and monsters, it wasn’t until CoC that an entire game focused on bringing H.P. Lovecraft’s lore to life. So, to me, that was the milestone.

Aside from that, there have certainly been milestones of note, though mostly in terms of devising new ways to translate HPL’s work to tabletop gaming (e.g., Trail of Cthulhu’s ingenious use of clues and Tremulus’ story-driven approach, etc.). For so long, the RPG industry was content with mostly allowing CoC to be the final word in Lovecraftian roleplaying. In recent years, designers/companies have taken it upon themselves to add their own voices to the mix by releasing new Lovecraftian RPGs and I think that’s fantastic!

As for missteps, well, that’s a tough call. At the risk of seeming non-committal, I don’t feel that there have been any missteps of note. The way I see it, every designer has his or her own vision of what Lovecraftian roleplaying should be all about – whether it’s simply staying within context of HPL’s tales or adding major twists to the whole shebang (mechs, for example). There’s no right or wrong in this, so I can’t really say any of these things could be classified as a misstep.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Cynthia: The fact that such a tiny niche within a niche is still thriving and growing exponentially proves, as far as I’m concerned, that the mini-industry is doing a lot of things right. For starters, a ton of Lovecraftian RPG material can easily be found, which is a huge plus. Another plus is that new material is being churned out every month. This persistence can only serve to keep Lovecraftian gaming alive.

What could be done better? I would like to see more non-CoC Lovecraftian RPGs on store shelves. Many gamers (especially the more casual gamers who don’t haunt RPG websites) think that CoC is the only RPG of this nature and that, to me, is a shame. Not that CoC is a bad game or anything; it’s just that people should be aware that it’s only one of many options available for those wanting to channel HPL into their gaming activities.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Cynthia: It’s an exciting time right now, because more Lovecraftian games are hitting the market than ever before. Much of this stems from the fact that HPL’s work is becoming increasingly well known in popular media, creating more of a demand for such products.

I feel that designers are really asking themselves how to best translate Lovecraft’s style into game mechanics. This is certainly something I’ve noticed and I can’t stress enough how happy that makes me. It’s this line of thinking that leads to innovation.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Cynthia: The relatively recent surge of Lovecraft-based RPG products has a dark side. Many of these products are well thought out, laboriously researched and worthwhile products. However, as with anything, there has been a regrettable portion of less-than-stellar material being released. This is the nature of the beast, given that nearly anyone can publish products, due to crowdfunding, print-on-demand and PDF technology. The challenge publishers and designers face is to make their work stand out and thus rise to the top of the heap.

Image: Phil Slattery’s Art of Horror (wordpress)

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Cynthia: I would like to see a stronger emphasis on one-shot adventures rather than campaigns. I’m of the opinion that campaigns go directly against Lovecraft’s philosophy that humans are insignificant in the grand scheme of the cosmos. In his tales, the protagonists just weren’t that important. We weren’t meant to empathize with them and, in truth, they were little more than plot devices used so that the reader could experience these horrific concepts and entities. In a campaign situation, the spotlight is, by necessity, on the protagonists. It’s a chronicle of their continued exploits and I don’t think it conveys the Lovecraftian themes as well as one-shots do.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Cynthia: With time becoming more and more of a precious commodity these days, I can see a move toward games that require little preparation – fast character creation, modular plot seeds, fast resolution, etc. In fact, this trend has already started to take hold. If pen-and-paper RPGs are to thoroughly prosper in the future, I believe this is the route that needs to be taken. In a day and age where someone can just sit down at a computer and immerse themselves in an MMORPG with zero prep time, we need to be able to follow suit, at least to some degree.

Am I saying that MMORPGs are going to spell doom for tabletop roleplaying? Not at all. They are still two very different experiences. It’s like saying that hotdogs and hamburgers can’t co-exist. What I am saying is that we as an industry/hobby have to continue to evolve… and I think we are. If we stagnate and lose touch with the times, things could go very sour. Fortunately, I don’t see that happening.

CR: Thanks Cynthia for coming along to chat about the future of Lovecraftian gaming!

When we interviewed Graham Walmsley (of Trail of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Dark and Stealing Cthulhu fame) a couple of weeks back, he had lots of intriguing and thought-provoking things to say about Lovecraftian gaming. He also had a wealth of well-considered things to say about publishing, and in particular small-press or self-publication of gaming material. We thought it would be great to get Graham back to answer another couple of questions about the intersection of these two topics … publishing Lovecraftian stuff.

Here’s what happened.

CR: Knowing Lovecraftian gamers, I would imagine that many readers would have, at one time or another, given thought to self-publication of their own-written material. As someone who has been more successful than most in establishing their own small press, what do you think are the key challenges to making a self-published book a success? Is it different for PDF publishing vs print publishing?

There are the practical things: playtesting, layout, art, printing. But those are fairly simple. (And, if people are looking to get started, I’m always happy to talk people through the process. I’d love to see more self-publishing.)

But the difficult part is finding an audience. What you must do, here, is engage with people: go to conventions, run your scenarios for people, get them excited about your stuff. Until you’ve got that excitement, you’re sunk.

Too many people write something on their own, then hope they can find an audience for it. That’s all wrong. You need to be engaging with people from the start.

CR: In talking about publishers engaging better with what’s happening with their games at the grassroots level, do you have any thoughts about ways in which companies can better tap into this (largely underutilized) source of product inspiration?

It’s funny. I rarely see publishers playing games at conventions. I genuinely don’t understand it. How can you find out what’s going on if you don’t play? So that’s the first thing: I think they should play more.

I’d also like to see projects originating from writers. When I’ve worked for larger companies, what has often happened is: they give me a brief and a word limit. I then write whatever they ask me to write. I’d like to see writers proposing projects.

And, to be fair, I’ve seen that happen, but I’d like to see more of it. There are such talented writers out there, with such amazing ideas. I’d love them to have more of a free rein.

CR: Well thanks for that, Graham … I guess we had better send the shoggoth off to catch some other poor unfortunate! You are free to go (but watch the Hound of Tindalos on your way out).

Four the eighth installment of the “State of the Tentacle” interview series we have the rare privilege of welcoming to our non-Euclidean temple one of the most accomplished writer/game designer in the tabletop roleplaying industry, Kenneth Hite. While it is true that he fought desperately to escape from our musty gothic belfry before darkness fell upon our Shining Trapezohedron® his efforts were ultimately thwarted by the simple expediency of us having tied his shoelaces together while he was unconscious … or some other blatantly implausable plot device from the pulps

Introduction

Kenneth has written and designed an insanely large number of game books for an insanely diverse array of roleplaying games. Only some of those books have themselves been insane … but insane in a very, very good way. I am not even going to attempt to summarize his 20 years of game writing in the space we have here, but if you are interested in reading more you can check out the database of Kenneth’s design credits over on RPG Geek (but be warned, it is split over *11 pages* of entries).

In the worlds of Cthulhu gaming, Kenneth is no slouch either. By metrics that man-was-not-meant-to-understand, he is credited as the author of:

• the best introductory primer (Cthulhu 101),
• the second-best roleplaying game (Trail of Cthulhu),
• the fourth-best book of criticism (Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales),
• the best alternate comics history (Adventures Into Darkness),
• the third-best Tarot treatment (Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana),
• the sixth-best RPG supplement (Bookhounds of London), and
• the three best children’s books (Where the Deep Ones Are, The Antarctic Express, and Cliffourd the Big Red God)

about the Cthulhu Mythos.

For many years he wrote a much-loved column called “Suppressed Transmissions” for Pyramid magazine in which he brought his formidable knowledge of history, folklore and weird-science to bear on the tasks facing Gamemasters in producing new and interesting environments for their games. Although not specifically written with Lovecraftian games in mind, these articles frequently were peppered (and sometimes more than peppered) with a veritable goldmine of crunchy and usable ideas which an imaginative Cthulhu Keeper could use to spawn a whole series of games. Fortunately for those of us who don’t subscribe to Pyramid Magazine, Steve Jackson Games published two collections of the best articles from this long-running column — Suppressed Transmissions: the First Broadcast and Suppressed Transmissions: the Second Broadcast.

Besides all that, he also currently writes the “Lost in Lovecraft” column in Weird Tales magazine, and has also written 70 or so books and games that barely touch on Cthulhu at all. He blogs at http://princeofcairo.livejournal.com.

In November, 2012 Pelgrane announced that they had successfully wooed Kenneth to take up a full time position heading up the Trail of Cthulhu line and also writing more support material for his vampire spy thriller game Night’s Black Agents.

In the real world Kenneth lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and one non-Lovecraftian wife.

Cthulhu Reborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Kenneth: The greatest milestone remains the first: Sandy Petersen’s seminal, path-breaking, elegant, incisive design of Call of Cthulhu. Without Sandy’s design, Lovecraftian roleplaying would have been stillborn – can you imagine a Lovecraftian game descended from the Deities & Demigods write-ups? After that, comes the general slow revolution and pioneering of scenario design work, from the “deadly sandbox” of Larry DiTillio and Lynn Willis’ Masks of Nyarlathotep to the still-underutilized “troupe of meatshields” model of Keith Herber and Kevin Ross’ Escape From Innsmouth to the recent “Purist-style” existential suicides of Graham Walmsley’s Lake District cycle. The other seminal milestone along the path was John Tynes, Scott Glancy, and Dennis Detwiller’s Delta Green, which demonstrated how much other modern horror (conspiracies and body horror specifically) could be super-charged with the Mythos in gaming, and showed how to do it masterfully. Nobody’s had the balls to really do that outright for another horror genre, although Eclipse Phase gets close in places and there are a number of more or less adequate “space Lovecraft” games now. Tynes, Glancy, and Detwiller also potentially revolutionized setting description (not just for the Mythos but for all RPGs) in their half of the d20 Call of Cthulhu project.

In straight game-design terms, I think I tried to do justice to Robin Laws’ brilliant reconceptualization of the investigation and mystery genres in my Trail of Cthulhu for Robin’s GUMSHOE engine. Maybe my splitting of Sanity from Stability is worth noting, too. Robert MacLoughlin’s Cthulhu Live is apparently an underrated design; I’m not a LARPer, but my friends who are praise it. Although I differed with many of Monte Cook’s specific decisions, his d20 Call of Cthulhu rules did about as well as anything could to bolt level-and-XP gaming onto the Mythos, and opened up a lot of possibilities in quasi-Mythos settings like Freeport and the Scarred Lands. Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa is another approach to that blend, which shows great promise. I have similar hopes for Sean Preston’s tremulus, which should complete our riffing Cthulhu gaming off the 1970s at last while pointing the way to more design options for the future.

Mis-steps – like I said up above, we avoided the biggest one when Chaosium, not TSR, did the first Lovecraft RPG. We all wish Chaosium hadn’t nearly drowned itself in debt, and could have kept as close an eye on their premiere product line as it deserved, but that’s not really a mis-step on the evolutionary path of Lovecraftian roleplaying. I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been an A-list designer in the new generation try a Lovecraftian story game from the ground up: I’m talking Luke Crane, Vincent Baker, Paul Czege, Emily Care Boss or someone of their calibre and vintage. (Ron Edwards did a terrific “Northwest Smith” RPG in S/Lay w/Me, but that doesn’t quite count as Lovecraftian; Michael Oracz’ De Profundis was terrific but seems to have sunk without a trace.) But again, a step not (yet?) taken isn’t a mis-step either. Sharks haven’t evolved much for 90 million years, but they’ll still chomp your arm off.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Kenneth: The single biggest thing that this mini-industry is doing well is yet another thing Chaosium is doing well: by relaxing the terms for their license, they allow a hundred game-design flowers to bloom. However, just like the first bloom of the d20 license, the gardeners seem fairly timid. Right now, the vast majority of these products seem to be mostly in the “what we always wanted Chaosium to do” realm – Cthulhu in WW2, licensing other Mythos writers like Charlie Stross, Cthulhu with giant robots, etc. – or the “Chaosium’s game now in another rules set” realm rather than trying to think about what will make Lovecraftian roleplaying compelling going forward into the new millennium.

I should emphasize that my work on Trail of Cthulhu partakes of both those conservative flavors: I’m developing books I always wanted Chaosium to do (Bibliophile Cthulhu! Thirties Cthulhu!), using Robin’s GUMSHOE rules set. To the extent that “the mini-industry” is holding back, so am I. And I hope that example indicates that, like Lovecraft, I don’t see anything wrong with conservatism in design! Jason Durall and Gareth Hanrahan’s Laundry RPG, for example, is excellent, and has some of the best adventures ever written for Lovecraftian RPGs, but it’s nobody’s idea of cutting edge.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Kenneth: In addition to Chaosium’s generous (and apparently wise) licensing decision I mention above, the other main factor shaping Lovecraftian RPGs – like it shapes the rest of the RPG design space – is Kickstarter, and crowdfunding in general. This, I think, tends to reinforce those two conservative trends I mentioned before: it’s always easier to get people’s money for the loved and familiar.

I’d like to say that the indie half of the current Golden Age of RPG design was influencing the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs, but tremulus and Graham Walmsley’s interestingly minimalist Cthulhu Dark aside, it really doesn’t seem to be doing so (although Cynthia Celeste Miller’s Dread-influenced Macabre Tales is another example). Right now, it’s new design ideas from “trad” designers (especially Robin Laws, but I suspect Monte’s d20 Call of Cthulhu rules are more influential than people think) that seem to be moving the needle, to the extent it’s moving.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Kenneth: The main challenge to Lovecraftian RPGs is the same as the challenge to RPGs (and perhaps all publishing and broadcasting) in general: how to continue the transition from a mass entertainment model (albeit a smaller one, in our case) to a craft entertainment model. As retail continues to deform under Internet competition, and as the old ways of distribution continue to collapse, the economic assumptions of publishers, designers, and gamers all come under real strain. At some point, the architecture will exist to allow point-to-point sale by creators of creative goods to anyone in the world, but whether that architecture will support a “game line” or even an RPG in the fashion we grew up on is another question. Tabletop RPGs, of course, also face increased niche competition (for free time even more than for dollars) from electronic games of all sorts, although virtual “tabletop” platforms mitigate this to some extent.

This, of course, is aside from the generational lag that’s (to one or another level) hobbling all the advanced economies in the world. If we can get folks in India and Africa reading Lovecraft (not an easy sale, I admit), or get RPGs into retirement communities, maybe we can dodge that bullet for another decade or two.

The other potential big obstacle in the road would be someone with deeper pockets closing off Cthulhu at the tap. While H.P. Lovecraft’s work is public domain, there’s enough shadows and fog there that a Disney or Time Warner (or even a farcical “Lovecraft estate”) could make it impossible to publish Cthulhu mythos work. Trademark abuse could strangle us – the core tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard are both clearly in the public domain, but just try to market something with the word “Tarzan” or “Conan” in the title and see how far you get. Right now, someone is suing the Conan Doyle estate over their claim of exclusive rights to a character invented in 1886! Multinational IP law reform is clearly needed, and is just as clearly not happening any time soon.

Finally, just as Chaosium’s two good decisions have created and fertilized the Lovecraftian RPG scene, a bad Chaosium decision that forks or breaks the audience of Call of Cthulhu could hurt it. The mooted 7th edition of the rules will mark the biggest change to Sandy’s original design ever; even if the new design is a good one, faulty marketing or licensing decisions around it could badly damage our tentacled little market segment. You only have to look at the slipshod way Wizards handled the 3.5e to 4e D&D transition to see what’s at stake, and Chaosium has less running room (and starts with fewer advantages) than Wizards did.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Kenneth: To some extent, it is up to me, in that I’ll be writing (and possibly commissioning) more books for Trail of Cthulhu and co-writing the upcoming Delta Green RPG. So apparently, what I’d like to see is more historically informed setting and adventure material that inspires and terrifies gamers while being accessible to them, and a Delta Green that feels like part of the 21st century’s politics, economics, and horror.

Aside from that, I’d really like to see more top-flight indie designers take on Lovecraft’s original fiction and mythology from the ground up. It’s understandable to feel like you’ll always be in Sandy Petersen’s shadow, but people kept writing plays after Shakespeare.

CR:Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Kenneth: I think the most likely future in almost any context is “more of the same.” Real change isn’t very common, and we’re still in the middle of our era’s real change, the Web-shifted economy. The changes to the RPG hobby and industry because of that macro-change will swamp any artistic turns unless a real bolt-of-lightning game like Fiasco reshapes the design field. For example, if a next-generation (modular-encounter, idiot-proof) virtual tabletop gaming platform really takes off and dominates the hobby, its Cthulhoid skin is likely to be more influential than any dead-tree product. If I’m lucky, they’ll hire me to work on it.

I imagine in five years there will be at least five more really great Lovecraftian RPG books, if none quite on a par with Masks of Nyarlathotep. I can confidently predict that the new Delta Green RPG will be one of them. Hopefully another of them will be by me. One or two A-list indie designers might create Lovecraftian story games – I’m surprised, as I say, that this hasn’t already happened. There will be a lot of forgettable, conventional-minded dross, most of which (thanks mainly to legacy structure from Lynn Willis and Keith Herber) will nonetheless have playable adventures. Kickstarter will be as normal as PDF sales are now; just a way most people do business.

Here’s my wild prediction: At least one new-generation horror writer will try to increase mind-share and brand awareness by offering an open license (for tabletop, anyhow) to her portion of the Cthulhu mythos; the success of that scheme will depend on how good a writer she is and on how good her tabletop partners are.

CR: Thanks Kenneth … Are you willing to come back and answer some follow-up questions later on?

Kenneth: OK.

[ If you would like to contribute any follow-up questions for Kenneth, leave a comment or below or PM them to user "dce" on either Yog-Sothoth.com or rpg.net ]

While the Cthulhu Reborn blog has been dominated over recent weeks with the “State of the Tentacle” interviews, that doesn’t mean that things haven’t been chugging away with several other projects which will ultimately be released via this perfidious source. There are at least two more scenarios currently, both written by big names in the Call of Cthulhu world, that are being worked on as future Cthulhu Reborn released as well as a whole bunch of other weirdness.

Just to convince everyone that there’s more to Cthulhu Reborn than wonderful interviews … here’s another entry in the rather sporadic series of real-world newspaper articles that read like they *could* have been Call of Cthulhu scenarios (and indeed can be, if you want them to be). The article below was originally published in several newspapers around March 25, 1926 … you’ll need to click on the article to read it (unless your eyesight is really, really good).

Click the image below to view a larger (aka actually readable) version of the article

Note that this is actually a recreation of the original news article, created using Cthulhu Reborn’s very own (commercially-released) PDF toolkit for make-your-own Jazz-Age newspaper props, available via RPGNow and DrivethruRPG for a smallish sum. Of course you can go straight to the source and nab the original scan of the newspaper if you want to see what it *really* looked like: here’s a link to the version published by the Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator … great name for a newspaper. While you’re there you can also read the story about the drunken LA bank robber or the visit to town by the self-proclaimed “director of Hobo College, Chicago”

A month back we were fortunate enough to interview Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan (chief Laundrarian and writer of some nifty Trail of Cthulhu material also). Since then he has become father to a pair of twins … Now you’d think that this would be enough to keep any sane person have pretty much occupied for every waking moment. But not Gareth: not only has he just signed on to write a bunch of stuff for a cool-sounding (recently-finished) Kickstarter, but he has kindly agreed to come back for a quick follow-up interview. The man is unstoppable!

CR: Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu are fairly atypical game lines in that unlike most their published support material is extremely heavily weighted towards “ready-to-run” scenarios/campaigns rather than rules expansions or source material. Do you think that bias is driven by what followers of those games will buy? Or are publishers missing out on opportunities to sell different types of books in addition to scenarion anthologies?

Gareth: To a degree, that’s an artefact of the structure of the game. The player characters are ordinary people; the setting is the real world, more or less, and it’s hard to provide information about the Mythos without bludgeoning the mystery to death with concrete facts. You might get away with a book on, say, Ghouls or Deep Ones or Arkham or Antarctica, but not The Complete Guide to Elder Things or a Rlyeh setting book. Lovecraftian gaming is about singular moments of revelation, not a deep exploration of setting. Fear comes from wondering what’s behind that shadowed door, so you’ve got to leave shadows.

CR: You mention the Call of Cthulhu character creation rules as being slow, and perhaps a barrier to entry for players who just want a “quick fix”. Do you have any thoughts on ways in which they might be streamlined? Alternative optional chargen rules for “instant gratification” gamers?

Gareth: Pregenerated or partially pregenerated characters are an easy solution. Have a set of Lovecraftian investigator archetypes – the Antiquarian, the Private Detective, the Dilettante and so on – with most of their stats and skills precalculated. Let the player spend a few points on skills to customise the character, maybe have a bunch of background hooks and character quirks to pick from, and off you go.

CR: Regarding the inexorable move toward PDF-only electronic publishing, how receptive do you think the current gamer community is to the thought of entirely abandoning “dead-tree” versions of their products? Looking at current Kickstarters, it seems that the majority of the backers still want to buy printed books … but how practical do you think that is that in a world where international shipping is getting expensive? Are people just going to have to get used to the idea of electronic-only releases?

Gareth: The rise of Print-on-Demand means that there’ll always be physical books for those who want them, and while they’ll certainly be expensive, especially with the rising cost of shipping, I still think roleplaying works out as a moderately cheap hobby if you’re actually playing with the books. Say a new prestige-format rulebook costs me $100 – if I run a 10-session campaign with that book, and each session is four hour’s long, then that’s a reasonable $2.50 an hour for my entertainment.

CR: Thank you so much for making the time to come back! Now … go get some sleep, man!

Hot on the heels of our recent brush with Mr Kenneth Hite (and his twitter-loving cult of followers ), we are pleased to be able to present yet ANOTHER big name for the “State of the Tentacle” interviews. Today, Scott David Aniolowski has fallen into the clutches of one of the Lesser Servitor Races that we always keep around Cthulhu Reborn central just to keep the tentacle grass down. You would have thought that Scott — the man who wrote the very book on Call of Cthulhu monsters (Malleus Monstrorum) — might have spotted the tell-tale signs: stench of rotting flesh, dripping ichor, putrescent liquifying fleshy tendrils. Maybe he mistook the beast for a Hollywood starlet after one too many cosmetic procedures? Who knows … but we consider ourselves very fortunate that we were able to snag Scott and extract this most excellent confession .. er .. interview before he was able to break free of his chains!

Introduction

Scott David Aniolowski is one of the Grand Old Gents of Call of Cthulhu (or allegedly one of “The Great Old Ones” according to some young upstarts!), having first been published by Chaosium in 1986. That makes him the longest-published CoC designer still (occasionally) writing for the game. He has written dozens of scenarios, articles and books for CoC and is probably best known as the author of Chaosium’s acclaimed book of Cthulhu Mythos monsters The Malleus Monstrorum. Over the many years of his game designing, Scott has produced work for Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, Miskatonic River Press (MRP) and Triad Entertainments (and possibly a few other brand new publishers who have queried him about working for their imprint). He has had the pleasure of working with iconic CoC designers and editors Sandy Petersen, Keith Herber, Lynn Willis, Kevin Ross and John Tynes, and has assembled and edited books of his own for various publishers.

Scott has also been active in fiction, his short stories and poems having been published by Chaosium, MRP, Barnes & Noble, PS Publishing and various magazines and other publishers. He has edited several fiction anthologies, including Made in Goatswood, Singers of Strange Songs, Horror for the Holidays and others.

Scott is an Executive Chef by vocation, an Anglophile, “Ripperologist”, fan of all things Victorian, insatiable bibliophile, horror/weird/dark fiction enthusiast and author/poet, diehard new wave and punk fan, lifelong bigfoot geek, and student of Chinese cuisine, culture and language. Scott is a collector of jack o’lanterns and bigfoot movies, and works extensively to restore his old Colonial home (“The House of Secrets”) to its former original period splendour. Scott’s blog, “Whispers from the House of Secrets,” where he blathers on about writing, rails against the mundane world, waxes nostalgic and otherwise makes noise can be found at: http://scottdavidaniolowski.blogspot.com/

CthulhuReborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Scott: Well, certainly milestones would be the releases of such classic and literally game-changing products as Pagan’s Delta Green and Chaosium’s fan favourites, the BIG campaigns such as Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express. Personally, I’m not a fan of any of that stuff but the buying public sure are, and at the end of the day that’s pretty much all that counts from a business point of view. Campaigns – even shorter ones – fly against the intrinsic theme of Lovecraft’s work that mankind is but a speck in an uncaring universe, powerless to affect any real changes on the true Powers that froth and caper just out of our sight. Grand adventures to save mankind – and I’ve been a part of some campaign designing, so I’m not throwing stones here – bring to mind more the pulp adventures of the 1940’s than Lovecraft’s nihilistic worldview. If you look at Lovecraft’s bigger “adventures” – “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” etc. – the protagonists may have saved themselves (usually at the cost of their own sanity), but they didn’t really save mankind because in the end those blasphemous secrets are still out there just waiting patiently to rise up again. But from a purely gaming point of view, big campaigns can be great fun and offer the chance to explore Indiana Jones-style in far-off and exotic locations, so I totally understand their appeal. Who doesn’t love that sort of stuff?

As for the Delta Green milieu, I can’t say much about it as I haven’t been involved in any of that as either a game designer or a player, but what I’ve seen and read of the material is quite good and offers a completely different style of play for CoC fans. Interestingly, I know that John (Tynes) and gang had the idea and the start of their Delta Green universe before X-Files came on the scene, so for those who always assumed X-Files inspired Delta Green let me set the record straight [indeed "Convergence", the scenario which introduced the idea of Delta Green was published in The Unspeakable Oath Issue 7, a full year before X-Files premiered - CR]. Something I really like about Delta Green is that it provides a modern world for investigators to adventure in; Chaosium’s Cthulhu Now didn’t really have a distinct voice of its own and never created that world – it was pretty much just standard 1920’s Call of Cthulhu with some modern technology and themes thrown in to make it “modern” (but is now mostly very dated because it lacked its own unique voice).

Now, missteps are another whole matter. I don’t know as you can point to any particular Lovecraftian product and call it a misstep as that’s all a matter of personal taste. There are products which I loathe and think are just terrible, but to call them missteps would be unfair as that’s just my own personal opinion. The true missteps have been in the business handling of particular companies, and to get into specifics of that is to open up a rather large can of worms. Let me just say that certain companies have a longstanding reputation for having very poor business practices and have sadly driven away some very talented authors and artists.

The only specific project I will refer to when speaking of missteps is a proposed new [7th Edition] version of Call of Cthulhu. I was part of a hand-picked cabal of CoC designers chosen by Chaosium and the authors to read and review the manuscript, and we pretty much all came away very unhappy with the bulk of what was being proposed. I see it as too radical a departure from the basic, well-honed and well-loved BRP CoC rules, and foresee it creating a split in CoC fans – those who will endorse and play the new rules and those who will loyally stay with the existing ruleset. Such a division is not what a small sub-genre of an already shrinking hobby needs. The proposed changes over-complicate much of the rules, which has always been CoC’s charm, in that the game system fades quietly into the background without a lot of dice rolling, number crunching and rule referencing. In fairness to the authors, however, it was obvious to us all that they spent a great deal of time and put a lot of thought into their material. After the cabal’s comments the authors were going to take another look at their manuscript and make adjustments. I do not know where it stands presently as we have not been updated at this point.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Scott: I can’t really comment on much of anything outside of the Call of Cthulhu game, as I don’t follow the other systems, but I think Chaosium’s recent licensing deals with various and sundry new upstart publishers is a good thing as it brings in lots of new blood with fresh ideas and perspectives. I haven’t liked all of what these new guys have done, but some of them have produced some exceptional products. I think the late Keith Herber’s Miskatonic River Press rises to the top of the crowd and has produced unquestionably the best licensed CoC material in the past several years. RPG output there has slowed nearly to a stop, however, and it looks like the company is moving more into fiction production, so we’ll see what the future holds for CoC at MRP. But there are new Lovecraft/Cthulhu gaming publishing houses cropping up all the time and I anticipate, knowing many of the people involved, good things.

I think one thing that could be done better is supporting new lines and CoC setting books. Historically, new setting books come out and then are either never supported with another product, or the support comes a very long time later. I think the best way to do something like that is to release your new setting book and immediately follow it up with a book of scenarios. If that proves successful follow it with a campaign and perhaps a companion to gather and add new rules, occupations, monsters, villains, etc. to the particular setting. Chaosium, for example, has never really done much to support either the Dreamlands setting (although ironically, that book has been reprinted a number of times and had several updated editions) or their Gaslight era book (or Invictus or Dark Ages….). Fellow-dinosaur and Elder Statesman of CoC, Kevin Ross wrote, assembled and edited a series of Colonial America CoC setting books (and a Western CoC line, incidentally) for a licensee which includes the core setting sourcebook, a book of scenarios, and a campaign. That’s how it should be done… although when or if that material will ever actually be published is another question long waiting to be answered.

One recentish development that I really dislike is Chaosium’s line of monographs. These books are produced wholly by the author and Chaosium only publishes the material as they receive it, with no editing, layout or other professional assistance provided. This has resulted in a hodge-podge of material varying from horrible and amateurish to darn-near professional and everything in between. I’m sure it’s a thrill for new authors and nascent game designers to produce (or sometimes cobble together) their own books and see them in print, unfortunately it’s rather analogous to the self-publishing craze which has been glutting the market with sub-par, near-illiterate dribble. If Chaosium or any other professional company is going to publish something and put their name on it then they should take the time to ensure the material gets a look from editorial and layout people so that the product is worthy of what their customers have come to expect from them. Producing and selling sub-par books looks bad for any company, even if it is understood that it is basically a do-it-yourself self-publishing deal.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Scott: Undoubtedly it’s the newfound popularity and recognisability of Cthulhu. The big guy has reached the celebrity status of some unscrupulous and smarmy reality tv “star.” Twenty-odd years ago when I was a fledgling CoC designer I would have never thought that I would see the day when Cthulhu and Lovecraft were pop culture icons, appearing on everything from the once-scandalous South Park to the angsty Supernatural and all manner of shows in between. Where in the 1970’s and 1980’s finding Lovecraftian/Mythos material was like a glorious and elusive treasure hunt, today one just has to browse through the local comic or book shop to find numerous mentions of HPL and his cosmic sprattlings. And the explosive bloom of Mythos anthologies, collections and novels is mind-numbing; I clearly remember a time not so very long ago when most book and magazine submission guidelines specifically said “NO LOVECRAFT/CTHULHU STORIES.” The day was when you would mention “Lovecraft” or “Cthulhu” and people would look at you oddly and you would grin knowingly, but now you can’t swing a cat without hitting some self-proclaimed Lovecraft fan (or worse, “Lovecraft scholar”) or Mythos aficionado. It’s crazy! And not in the good, drooling from mind-blasted insanity way! Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon unhappy that his special little private club has opened its doors to the public? It just seems that the wider the popularity spreads the more watered down and inane the whole thing gets.

So, with the newfound popularity of all things Lovecraft comes a melding of modern ideas and technology into the Mythos, and we’re seeing Cthulhutechy things and Cthulhu anime and other new sub-genres inspired by modern culture. Cthulhu, in his own little way, has become a pop culture icon. Some think it’s great and have made a name for themselves with it, which I certainly don’t begrudge. Others are less enthusiastic, like my old pal Kevin Ross who likes to say “don’t y’all think this Lovecraft shit has done got out of hand?” Pushed to take a side, I think I’d have to agree with Kevin.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Scott: Well, the hobby itself is in danger of extinction just because games in general have moved from the table top and into the computer. In an impatient video generation imagination and personal interaction has taken a back seat to instant gratification on screen either alone or with an unseen stranger on the other side of the globe. The monsters and gore are all displayed in glorious on-screen colour and details so that the player doesn’t have to think for himself and imagine what it all must be like. It makes me sad: nothing any computer graphics designer creates can match what I see in my mind’s eye. But then I pre-date the computer age by several centuries (see “curmudgeon,” above!), so my tastes tend to be for things of a bygone age.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Scott: As I mentioned elsewhere, I think product lines should be developed and supported. I would love to see more Gaslight era material, both scenarios or campaigns and more source material. I think the British Empire needs to be addressed in a Victorian setting. Although not a big fan of the Dreamlands, it would be fun to see more Dreamland adventuring. This I always saw as Chaosium’s chance to take a little bite out of the Sword and Sorcery/AD&D market with Cthulhu. I can see Dreamlands making a name for itself as heroic fantasy adventuring in the right hands and taken in the right direction. Of course, I’m very impatiently waiting to see the Colonial era CoC material see print, and I think that will be an exciting new stage for players who love history and Mythos investigation.

Something I would also love to see (and to be a part of) would be CoC source material for other author’s worlds. Clark Ashton Smith is the most obvious one, as he had several fantastic realms and worlds in which he wrote: Hyperborea, Mars, Averoigne, Zothique, etc. A two-fisted pulpy Robert E. Howard book could supply more action-oriented CoC gaming. Of course, I did a Ramsey Campbell book several years ago, and have always wanted to return to Ramsey’s creations. There has long been talk of me doing a more Lovecraft Countrified book set in Campbell Country in the default CoC 1920’s era. That is what I had originally pitched and what ultimately became Ramsey Campbell’s Goatswood and Less Pleasant Places, a modern campaign. I’ve never been really happy with that one and would love to go back to Ramsey’s haunted Severn Valley and do what I had originally set out to do.

Also, I’d love to see some of the original books produced by the foreign licensees translated into English. The Germans, particularly, have an awful lot of original material that non-German speaking gamers are missing out on. And although it’s a matter of debate and personal preferences, I think the foreign editions tend to look a lot nicer than the American ones. I’m not a fan of the wholesale replacement of existing artwork with photographs, but I do think adding period photos into the mix (while retaining the original art) is a really nice touch.

Beyond that, I think just producing quality material is the way to go to ensure a future for CoC and Lovecraftian games.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Scott: The hobby itself I expect to have shrunken in five years. It’s a sad truth that as technology advances table top RPGs just aren’t as popular as computer and video games. Dead tree publishing in general is not in the best of health: “print is dead” and all of that twaddle. As for CoC, unless someone does something monumentally stupid or there’s some cataclysmic shake-up, I don’t see as it will be much different than it is today. The game has survived pretty much unchanged since 1981, so barring a tragically radical new edition, I don’t foresee any great changes.

CR: Thanks, Scott! Are you willing to stick around and answer a few follow-up questions?

Scott: OK

For the tenth installment of the “State of the Tentacle” interview series we are very pleased to be able to go aaaaaall the way back to the very source of Lovecraftian roleplaying by talking with the man who is responsible for it all, Sandy Petersen. While Sandy left the pen-and-paper gaming industry many years ago to become an incredibly successful video game designer, he still plays Call of Cthulhu regularly. Both because of his inside knowledge of the hobby’s genesis, and also because of his current interests in bringing Cthulhu back to the gaming table (albeit in a slightly different form), we were very eager to have Sandy along to chew the tentacle for a bit. Thankfully he agreed (even before we applied the mind control sorcery ).

Introduction

Sandy Petersen is someone whose work should really be very well known to every reader of this blog. But just in case you’ve accidentally stumbled upon this page while searching for knitting patterns or something, here’s a capsule summary of what Sandy has contributed to Lovecraftian gaming. In 1981 he was the original author of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, adapting mechanics from Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying System to deliver a frightening and erudite world in which gamers could roleplay investigators of arcane Lovecraftian horrors. This was at a time when mainstream RPGs were little more than hack-and-slash dungeon crawls, so for a game to propose characters that were physically (and often mentally) frail fighting against odds that were likely to eventually overwhelm them … that was pretty radical. Some would say that it still is.

Sandy remained at Chaosium for the next seven years, acting as both a key writer for Call of Cthulhu and editor of the line. During that period many of the titles that are still regarded as unrivalled classics of the game were published — including the Masks of Nyarlathotep and Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaigns and the alternate Modern-day, Gaslight and Dreamlands settings. In fact, pretty much every Lovecraftian product released by Chaosium between 1981 and 1989 has Sandy’s fingerprints all over it in some form or other.

Sandy left the world of pen-and-paper gaming, lured to the world of computer games (which was, in some ways, still in its infancy). His first job in this heady industry was with Microprose where he worked on Darklands, Hyperspeed, and even Civilization. He then moved on to a small company called id Software that was just about to launch a first-person shooter called “Doom” that was kind of a horror-story set in space. Sandy brought quite a significant amount of Cthulhu-oid madness to the monsters and levels of Doom, and later applied that to the worlds of Quake. The rest, as they say, is history. But these are but a handful of the highlights of Sandy’s extraordinary gaming credits. He also worked for Ensemble Studios and was a key designer on such genre-defining titles as the Age of Empires series, and Halo Wars.

On the success of this career, Sandy also spent two years teaching game design to graduate students at Southern Methodist University.

At present, Sandy is again back in the world of hands-on game design. He is a partner in a small startup firm preparing a Lovecraftian-themed boardgame for Kickstarter funding. If the Kickstarter campaign isn’t already active by the time you read this … it will be soon! The game is titled Cthulhu Wars, and it has received rave reviews from playtesters … some folks saying that it is the best thing Sandy has done since Call of Cthulhu. And it’s easy to see why, judging from the initial photos that have been released of the game board and the monstrous miniatures (montaged below … but click on the link above to see more).

As they say … Watch the Skies!

Cthulhu Reborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Sandy: It might sound self-serving, but the obvious key milestone was the publication of Call of Cthulhu – there really wasn’t any horror gaming before then, and not only was this horror-based, but it was honest-to-goodness Lovecraft, at least as I misunderstood it at the time (I was only 26!).

I think the next big milestone was the development of video graphics and sound to the point that a digital game could be made that was genuinely frightening. This was a gradual process, but certainly by 1993, there were games that creeped people out.

The third important development was the creation of tabletop card & boardgames that successfully channelled Lovecraft. The most obvious success is the Arkham Horror game, but there are others.

Another important step has been the spread of the Lovecraft influence into other genres. There are lots of games nowadays which, while not explicitly Cthulhu Mythos-based, obviously are under the shadow of the Man from Providence.

And one of the biggest upcoming improvements I believe to be the continued expansion of Lovecraft LARPs [Live-Action Role Playing games]. While I have played in, and written, several of these, my trip to the Italian Lucca game convention last year was a real eye-opener. Those Italians are hard-core – EVERYONE in the LARP was in full 1930s costume (including Italian police in what looked to me like fascist uniforms, women with fake mink stoles, you name it). They had even hired a live band to play dance music! The culmination of the evening was a guy wearing a complete Mi-Go “costume” coming out of the night to annihilate the other gamers – he had to walk on stilts for his hands & legs, and even had a voice-box changer to make weird insect-like noises. Must have cost a fortune. The guy who invited me to this told me that in an earlier LARP he ran, his job was to lay sprawled out, a bullet-wound in his head, throughout the four hours of the game. Shades of SAW. Those Italians left me in awe.

Sandy delivering a Masterclass at the Lucca Comics & Games Convention

I think the biggest mistake in Lovecraft gaming is the tendency for many designers to try to transform the players into some sort of “special agent” or super-skilled person with access to tools and techniques far beyond the grasp of we mere mortals. Horror, by its nature, needs to be seen to affect normal humans. In retrospect, looking back at my 26-year old self, I salute him for seeing the need to have the investigators be Jes’ Folks – not government spooks, or privately-funded mercenaries, but doctors, private eyes, and the like.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Sandy: I think the more variety that is offered players in game systems, miniature figures, toys, and fun stuff, the better it is for the entire hobby. I am constantly thrilled when I see something new in this field.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Sandy: You got me, pal. For roleplaying Lovecraft, I pretty much just play Call of Cthulhu. After all, it is, in effect, my own “house rules”. And learning a new roleplaying system hasn’t been attractive to me since my college days.

<in the voice of the Frankenstein Monster> “Change bad!”

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Sandy: The tendency for humor to start taking over Lovecraftian themes. Look – the Mythos is obviously easy to make fun of (as is all horror). And that is not a bad thing. But I think it would be sad if Cthulhu becomes more of a comedy figure than a terrifying one.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Sandy: I want to see Halloween costumes. Get with it, guys.

trendhunter.com

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Sandy: I think that the game will spread to far more use of Skype-like resources, with people playing over distances. Cthulhu fans tend to be more mature than typical RPGers, and so we are frequently married, with careers and lives, rather than college kids living in a dorm. As a result, we are scattered far and wide, and it is physically harder for us to get together for our Lovecraft gaming fix. Technology is just now able to solve this problem, and I’m happy about it. Now old friends who live hundreds, even thousands of miles away, will be able to get together to play games.

Maybe there will even be a MMORPG [Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game] based on Call of Cthulhu one day. That is a holy grail worth waiting for.

CR: Thanks for your time, Sandy! Are you willing to come back and answer a few follow-up questions?

Sandy: You bet!

[ If there's something you would like us to quiz Sandy about when we catch up with him again for a follow-up interview, either leave them as comments to this post, PM them user "dce" on either YSDC or rpg.net or email them to questions AT cthulhureborn.com ]

Some readers of Cthulhu Reborn may know Hal Eccles’ (aka AirborneXO on YSDC) for his excellent video production work and his fan-produced add-on to Arkham Horror. What you may not know is that Hal has recently self-published Arkham Investigator, a mystery-investigation boardgame in the style of Sleuth Publications’ “Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective” game from the 1980s.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Sherlock Holmes game … the essence of the gameplay involves a group of players trying to solve a mystery by taking turns visiting one of hundreds of possible locations on a large city map. The game can be played either co-operatively (which is how I always played it) or competitively. Players are guided in their choices by a starting description of the mystery they must solve (which contains names and places worthy of investigation), a collection of “standard go-to resources” they can always ask for help, and a city directory which gives location addresses for a huge variety of people and companies. The players also have access to a newspaper for the day of the case, which usually contains one or more clues embedded somewhere in amongst all the day-to-day news and advertisements. When players visit a location they get to open up the “case book” for that particular mystery to the designated entry — a bit like flipping through a choose-your-own-adventure book — and read out the encounter that proceeds when the investigator calls upon the witness or suspect. This description usually opens up more possible locations / people to investigate. And so on, and so on until the players think they have solved the mystery.

Hal’s re-imagining of this gameplay seems pretty true to the original, but transplants it from Gaslight London to 1920s Arkham. He has put together a beautiful colour map of Arkham and some nicely designed booklets for the rules, directory and first case book. The case also includes a large two-page issue of the Arkham Advertiser which also looks very attractive.

But the BEST thing about Hal’s game … is that he is releasing the core rules and first case ENTIRELY free. Because we here at Cthulhu Reborn like freebies we asked Hal if we could re-host his nifty game. So here are some links to the version hosted here:

• The Core Rules for game are free, and consist of a Rulebook, Large Map of Arkham and an Arkham Directory. You can download all these files (or a ZIP containing them all) from this Google Drive page.

• The First Case for Arkham Investigator, A Grain of Evil, is also free. This consists of an Investigation Book (the clues) in either a printer-friendly or screen-friendly format plus a two-sided full-page newspaper prop (which has further clues buried in it). You can get these files (or a ZIP containing them all) from this Google Drive page.

If you do decide to play this game … and you definitely SHOULD … can I urge you to jump across to its entry on boardgame geek and consider rating it or reviewing it. Independently produced games like rely on your word of mouth to flourish … and this one deserves to

As I’ve mentioned here on the blog before, over the past couple of years I have been invited by several different game publishers to produce designs for handouts/props for future releases. Most of these books have yet to see the light of day … but yesterday one of them crawled free from its musty tomb and went on sale to the Cthulhu-loving public.

I’m talking about Sixtystone Press’ book “Lost in the Lights” (by Jeff Moeller). It’s for sale now as a PDF over on DrivethruRPG — a printed book will be released in the second-half of this year.

This is a pretty cool book, and something quite different from your run-of-the-mill Call of Cthulhu investigative romp through New England. While it still retains all the best elements of the classic Cthulhuoid investigation, it transplants them to modern-day Las Vegas … or more correctly the literary/movie version of modern-day Las Vegas. So, there’s lots of glitz, glamour, Elvis impersonators, and opportunities for insanely-convoluted heists. But behind the gaudy facade there lies some really repulsive horrors … so, even if it is in lurid Technicolor, you know it’s still good-ol Call of Cthulhu.

My own role on this book was to design most of the handouts … which was actually no mean feat (indeed it was one of the most challenging projects I’ve undertaken). Jeff had some neat ideas about using modern electronic means of delivering clues — so there’s text messages, web pages, wikipedia entries … and video clips. The last of these alone took forever to create — after all you can’t just go out and find stock images of a Hazmat team romping through Las Vegas’s Greyhound bus depot; these things need to be built up as a Photoshop montage of found elements. In the end I also added in some original photographs of my own (by lurking around my local bus depot with a camera, doubtlessly looking very suspicious).

I can’t show all the handouts here — you’ll need to go buy the book to get those. Or even better, buy the interactive PDF version of the handouts which lets you tweak some aspects of the dates/times/TV logos on the handouts to help customize them to your game. Below, above, I have put together a montage of SOME of the handout images that I contributed to Lost in the Lights (click for a larger version). I hope those that buy this great book enjoy my small contribution … and that players everywhere will enjoy the realism that I’ve tried to bring to the handouts, even if they do get creeped out when they recognize their local bus depot

For this installment of the State of the Tentacle series, we are going abroad … leaving behind the confines of the comfortable world of English-language Call of Cthulhu publishing to talk with Dr Christian Lehmann, a man with an uncommonly keen knowledge of the past, present (and perhaps future) of CoC in France.

squadlala the 13th, deviantart

When I first conceived of the idea of this interview series, one of my goals was to be as inclusive as possible … trying to bring out the views of ALL of the different creative folk who are driving the development of Lovecraftian roleplaying. Those of us in the English-speaking world tend to sort of ignore what is going on in the realms of non-English publications for the game … or at least we *used to* until we started seeing the jaw-dropping production values which European publishers are now bringing to their game books.

So I am quite pleased to be able to break down these invisible barriers a little by talking with Christian, who has had a long-running relationship with French-language CoC pretty much since its beginning in the 1980s. I am hoping to follow this up with some further interviews with current European publishers … just so those of us who never spent points to develop an Other Language skill for ourselves can get a sense of how the endlessly creative minds behind those beautiful rulebooks and supplements view the future of Lovecraftian gaming.

Introduction

Christian Lehmann would already be known to many from his active presence on Lovecraftian gaming forums. In real life he is a trained medical doctor … who CLAIMS to only use his skilled detailed knowledge of the human form in service to his local community (near Paris) as a GP. Any suggestions of strange chitterings coming from his basement laboratory are always soundly refuted, although one wonders exactly how many Jacob’s Ladders one man needs for decoration

In addition to his day job, Christian is also an accomplished novelist, with over twenty books published in French. At least one of these has been made into a film.

In the 1980s Christian published a well regarded French-language RPG magazine called Chroniques d’Outre-Monde whose mission was to broach more adult themes in RPGs. During the several years the magazine was published, Christian befriended many of the “Great Old Ones” at and around Chaosium in the 80’s (Greg Stafford, Lynn Willis, Keith Herber, Mark Morrisson, etc…), also arranging for numerous English-language Call of Cthulhu scenarios to be translated and published in French. During this time he was also part of the team which incubated the classic Horror on the Orient Express campaign. In recent years Christian has scanned and published many of the letters and faxes that shot around the world during the creation of this monumental box set (this log of correspondence being a fascinating read for anyone who wants to know how such things really come together behind-the-scenes; highly recommended).

And with the rebirth of Horror on the Orient Express as a massively expanded Kickstarter 2nd Edition, Christian has been roped in once again … this time in a more substantial writing role. While us mere mortals are waiting to see the fruits of his labours (and those of many other talented folk) in print, Christian has this keen advice about what to expect from the new edition: “from what I’ve seen, it will kick shoggoth ass.” Enough said.

Cthulhu Reborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Christian: Role-playing trickled down into France slowly at the end of the seventies. In effect, RPGs meant D&D. Until Chaosium put out Call of Cthulhu and changed things completely.

France has a strange relationship with fantasy, and an even stranger relationship with Lovecraft. Even though Maupassant and other writers have written about the supernatural, «fantasy» in France had a bad press in the second half of the twentieth century and was considered as a sub-genre. Who could seriously give a hoot about elves and orcs and rings of power in the land of existentialism? Dunsany, Howard, Tolkien et al were frowned upon, and their works were not easily attainable.

Lovecraft was another matter: his peculiar brand of pessimism, his depiction of an uncaring universe struck a chord with the French intellectuals and he was always highly thought of, the subject of many a pamphlet or discourse. When Chaosium published CoC, the game became a long-time hit in France, and its rapid translation in French by Jeux Descartes, who was then a publisher and a series of brick and mortar shops all over France, was instrumental in its success. Not only did «Descartes» as they were called (and it’s funny to think that THE French RPG company in those days had the name of a French rational thinker from long ago) import the English-language supplements, but they translated the Chaosium scenarios, as well as scenarios from less-known publishers, like TOME. Arkham Evil and Pursuit to Kadath are thus better known in France than in their native USA .

There were very few original French scenarios published outside of Casus Belli, the Jeux Descartes monthly magazine, so Keepers and players were totally dependent on the original Chaosium output and there was a long period of drought when Chaosium seemed on the brink of collapse at the end of the eighties.

By that time, I had put out a professional rpg magazine «Chroniques d’Outre-Monde», and for the fourteen issues that it lasted, I used my friendly connections with English-speaking authors to publish Carl Ford, Mark Morrisson and Keith Herber in French.

I don’t think the Cthulhu collecting-card game had much following in France, and it certainly didn’t help the hobby as rpgs were for a time pushed back to make way for wave after wave of collectible card-games. Cthulhu d20 was not a success either, and there were long intervals when no new scenario appeared, and Descartes, never managing to reach a sufficient audience to become profitable enough, started to close down shops, and stopped translating new Chaosium material.

So in France, only the advent of the internet and the possibility of getting in touch with brick and mortar stores outside the country, and to keep in touch with the CoC community worldwide, helped to maintain the game alive. To my mind, the arrival of such communities as «TOC, Trouver Object Caché» (french translation for Spot Hidden Object) and yog-sothoth.com is a very important factor for the game. I can now keep in touch with what is happening worldwide, know very quickly when a new supplement or comic or novel or film is in the works. That’s incredibly cool. I mean… I can’t imagine a world without yog-sothoth.com, it’d be a huge disappointment if we one day failed to maintain that sense of community.

Lately, of course, the big big change in France is the arrival on the scene three years ago of a new publisher, Sans Detour, who started to publish translations of Chaosium scenarios in lavish hardback productions, and then new French creations, books for Keepers as well as new scenarios ( from Tristan Lhomme, long-time writer of shorter scenarios for Casus Belli, who took the opportunity given him of writing longer stuff). Sans Detour has prospered, its long term bet of producing beautiful well laid-out supplements proving a great success. I don’t know how they do it, I don’t know what they’ve sacrificed to become such a success while churning out beautiful well-produced books at reasonable prices, but they seem to thrive. At the same time, Trail of Cthulhu and its supplements came out, and continue to come out, practically in synch with the English language line.

Among the missteps, I can’t fail to mention the monograph line, which to my mind is a failure. Publishing is not just making material available, it’s a real work of editing and rewriting and laying-out worthwile material. Chaosium’s decision to do a «quick and dirty» has produced some gems (Oscar Rios’s haunting Ripples From Carcosa springs to mind) but some duds and has, I think, not helped the trademark at all.

Quite problematic too, I find, is the fact that many authors have complained about their dealings with Chaosium, over the years. And I think that Lynn Willis’s passing must be mourned not only because he was a great human being but also because he WAS the Call of Cthulhu editor supreme, and he has not been replaced.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Christian: The industry has survived, and surviving is a success in itself. Chaosium’s decision to open up the licence to other companies has helped the game tremendously, but it has had another effect which I’m not sure they foresaw: everybody’s standards have gone up. When you open up one of the books from Miskatonic River Press or Cubicle 7, you start to expect from all the players, and specially THE major player, excellent quality of writing and layout… Why ask gifted illustrators to paint fantastic drawings if they print out like a grey smudge on a coal-bed?

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Christian: I find that each line reflects in a way the world-view of its seminal authors. Herber and Di Tillio and Ross and Willis crafted the Chaosium line of scenarios: whether they are globe spanning adventures or backwards Lovecraft Country one-shots, they have a certain feel, in which the humanity of the PCs and NPCs, the care for the fate of individuals, are paramount. The Pagan Publishing boys were a different matter entirely, their scenarios were more ruthless, the uncaring universe was back in force, people would be trampled down in the course of things without much wringing of hands. ( Though John H. Crowe’s Coming Full Circle is more Chaosium than Pagan in its care for a very small family of «banal» people around whom the whole campaign will revolve). Trail of Cthulhu has put the Purist back in Lovecraft, The Laundry mingles some of the DG hi-tech cloak and dagger stuff with a very peculiar British humour about bureaucracy and civil servants… Even though they all hail from Lovecraft, they are all products of very diffe-rent writers, and I find them as diverse as books from different novelists working in the same genre.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

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Christian: In the eighties, we briefly thought, and fervently hoped, rpgs would become mainstream. They didn’t. Videogames happened along the way, and they kidnapped Lovecraft, Tolkien etc..; and took them in another dimension. Videogames are fun, videogames are easy to play, video-games don’t need hours of preparation, etc… and their industry thrives on rehashing concepts that have already worked. So… RPGs, and Lovecraftian RPGs, are a niche. Well, that’s good, actually. Because in a niche you don’t have to pander to the needs and diktats of producers and moneymakers. You can write what you want to write, and expect a small but reasonable financial return on your intellectual investment. What I mean is that people in the RPG field don’t get rich, but they can create without barriers. As long as publishers do their job well… The big problem is that the end of many brick and mortar shops make many of us dependent on postage prices and we have seen recently how much this can become a problem. Kickstarter makes it easier for the community to help projects get done, but what happens when a great part of the profit is swallowed up by postage? PDFs are somehow not the same as deadtree editions, I find, and I hope that print-on-demand options will in the near future become more readily available worldwide. That would help the hobby enormously, I think.

I was thrilled when Greg Stoltze and Dennis Detwiller started tu use a Pledge system to get new work in print, and now Kickstarter seems like a very promising venture for the future, but I’m a bit wary of becoming too complacent about KS and having authors and companies compete for donors only to take ages to deliver the final product. I think it is very important to give pledgers a reasonable timing for «when will that f$$$****ing book/game come out?» and I find it is not always the case. KS is a contract, of sorts, and it’s very important not to mess with pledger’s expectations.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Christian: I think what is missing at the moment is an incentive to draw more new players into the game. Obviously a Del Toro “Mountains of Madness” movie would have that kind of effect. So would novels based on the existing scenarios. I found Nick Marsh’s Horror on the Orient-Express novel [titled The Express Diaries] a great read and it’s a beautiful book, but I’m afraid it’s not well-known enough outside of the circle of players. I would love to write a novel based on my Beyond The Mountains Of Madness campaign, and have talked with Chaz Engan about it from time to time but find it tricky to embark on such a monu-mental task at present.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Christian: I hope to see more new companies, I hope to see work from fantastic authors like Oscar Rios ans David Conyers and Kevin Ross and others actually getting into print. I mean, I’m not going to live eternally, and I won’t find much use if my heirs slip a copy of Kevin Ross’s Colonial era supplements in my coffin ( maybe the ghouls will…). I hope that as we grow older, I can still play with my friends, even if we drift apart geographically, by using the Internet. My current group has four players around a table near Paris, and a friend who has moved near Brussels and plays through Skype. I tend to forget he’s not there physically. And I guess this is a great way to connect Keepers and players as new programs help us to transfer the rpg experience through the Internet.

CR: Thanks for your time, Christian!

One of the ‘hot topics’ in the Call of Cthulhu world right now is the proposed 7th Edition of the game. It has been debated ad-infinitum on online forums and referenced several times in earlier interviews in this series. Because of this level of interest, we here at Cthulhu Reborn were keen to speak with the creators of this next step in the evolution of the most venerable Lovecraftian RPG … not to quiz them about what the new rules might be (you can read information about that lots of other places), but to get a bit of an insight into their creative vision of Cthulhoid gaming and where it might be going longer-term.

We are very pleased today to be interviewing Mike Mason, one half of the core design team for Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition … but also an experienced writer and publisher with a long association with Lovecraftian roleplaying and the broader RPG industry.

Introduction

Mike Mason is the co-writer of Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Rulebook and co-writer of the (also upcoming) Call of Cthulhu Investigator’s Handbook. Previously, Mike was the developer, editor and co-author of Black Industries (now FFG) 40K RPG DarK Heresy. His stint at Black Industries included working on and publishing The Inquisitor’s Handbook, Disciples of the Dark Gods, GM Screen & Pack, and Purge the Unclean. Mike also published the small press zine The Whisperer, which focused on Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian things, bringing out Gaslight and Dreamlands specials in the zine’s run. Previous work for Chaosium included editing on the Ramsey Campbell’s Goatswood scenario book.

Mike has also worked for Games Workshop, managing the annual Games Day & Golden Demon show, running numerous 40K and Warhammer tournaments, as well as setting up a UK gaming community programme to support gaming clubs in schools, colleges and libraries. In his spare time he also set up and ran the UK’s Kult of Keepers; a cadre of writers and keepers who organised and ran numerous Call of Cthulhu games across UK and German RPG conventions.

Cthulhu Reborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Mike: It’s all very subjective as something liked by one person can easily be disliked by another. For me, highlights would be sitting down to play Masks of Nyarlathotep for the first time and my character finding himself on the (very) wrong end of an Outer God. Another highlight is Sandy’s Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, which is often (wrongly in my opinion) seen as a poorer cousin to Masks. I’m looking forward to the revamped Horror on the Orient Express – having run it all the way through twice for two very different groups I’m keen to see it back in print. I think a key milestone was Chaosium’s opening-up of their licensee arrangements, which has resulted in some cool companies doing some cool products.

obsidianportal.com

I’m not sure the MULAs were a misstep as they have provided an accessible entry point for new writers – which is important and should be applauded. However, it would be nice if MULAs could receive some editing and development work prior to print. I would advise all potential MULA authors to visit the forums and see if they can’t find someone willing to read and edit their work before sending it to Chaosium.

Obviously Sandy’s work on the Call of Cthulhu rules are a key milestone. Both myself and Paul (Fricker) took them very seriously when working on the 7th edition. It’s kinda surprising to see how the rules have actually grown between the 1st and 6th editions. Numerous additions have been bolted on, some as core content, others as Spot Rules, and so on. In my experience and in conversation with numerous players, much of this added content was either forgotten or ignored in the heat of playing the game. 7th edition has been about trying to restructure the rulebook so that all the rules are in one place in a logical order. Allowing players to choose the optionality they like has also been important – everyone plays Call of Cthulhu in ‘their own way’ – so ensuring the rulebook worked for as near as 100% of people as possible was a major task. Having a world-wide play test was always something I wanted to do, and I’m pleased that so many gaming groups answered the call and joined in the play test – my thanks to them. Everyone’s feedback was useful and provided good food for thought.

Early on, when we had prepared the first draft of the rulebook, the ideas were pretty radical and the reaction by some quarters of the Cthulhu community was certainly vocal! That’s a good thing as it allowed us to test the water and then redraft. Working on anything 30 years old with such a huge community of fans was always going to be like walking a tight-rope. Some want real change, whilst others would be happy by simply changing the book’s cover and keeping all the content the same. For redraft, we’ve kept the core rules as simple and straight forward as possible, whilst also providing keepers with additional, optional material that can be used if it suits their style of play and gaming group – a toolkit in other words.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Mike: I think expanding the concept of how scenarios are written and run is a good thing. All too often many scenarios follow the same pattern and I like to see new takes on how scenarios are run and put together. Whilst I love big campaigns, I think Cthulhu is often at its best with the one-shot approach, allowing a writer to do something different and put the players in unfamiliar or unconventional situations that differ from investigating the haunted house and so on. I think smaller publishers may have an advantage in being able to be quite radical in the material they could published, whereas there are certain expectations for a Chaosium publication.

Shoggoth depicted by eclectixx @ deviantart

Within 7th edition, we’ve been at pains to advise keepers that what is important in scenario design is their story and not necessarily Lovecraft’s or Chaosium’s story. Whilst the rules provide the standard template for what a shoggoth is, etc., it doesn’t mean that ‘your’ shoggoth has to be the same. If you have a cool idea that is left-field of the standard, then why not go with it? Especially if it’s going to perplex and scare your players. HPL didn’t worry about standardising the Mythos, so don’t feel like you have to sweat it either.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Probably not the 7th Ed Cover

Mike: Well I guess 7th edition when it finally arrives will give some shape to that question. At the moment, a few people seem overly worried, but really there’s nothing to worry about. It’s totally backwards compatible with previous Call of Cthulhu material (just some minor maths on stat blocks which can be done in the head whilst playing). Also, as I said earlier, we have dialled back the more radical stuff from the first draft. The rule for spending Luck points on altering dice rolls is now a totally optional rule – some groups love this, others prefer to play without it – either way is fine. The pushing rule can really ratchet up the tension in a game, whilst also proving some really memorable experiences.

I think it’s going to be interesting to see how the new Delta Green RPG shapes up, especially as it will no longer be the Call of Cthulhu ruleset.

With all the many different publishers each doing their own settings, its a great time.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Mike: Well every convention I go to there seems to be a seminar or panel of experts talking about the death of the RPG hobby. Its been the same for well over ten years now and to be honest, nothing has changed in this regard. Computer games haven’t killed the hobby, neither has iPhones, Kindles or motorbikes (etc…)

The key challenge has always been ensuring games are accessible to new players. Some people have the ‘RPG gene’, some don’t. Just like some have the ‘bird watching gene’ and some don’t. We have to ensure that those with the gaming gene have the opportunity to play a game and discover for themselves that they like it. Making sure RPGs are available and accessible is important. That’s often why gaming clubs are important as they provide a way-in for new and returning gamers. The Internet is obviously a big help too – as are podcasts like YSDC and MU Podcast.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Mike: One of the things I was pleased to write was the chapter on investigator organisation in the 7th edition Investigator’s Handbook. We have a limited number of these existing, Delta Green being the most famous. In the chapter I wanted to open up the possibilities for every group to feel that it was ok for them to create their own organisation, or at least give them a range of ideas that they could build on. Thus, in the chapter, we have all manner of organisations that the investigators could be a part of, including a travelling circus, the R&D wing of a multi-national business, an esoteric order, a collection of ex-military comrades, and many others. I think this opens out the possibilities and I’d love to see what different gaming groups do with these ideas. In time, I could envision some cool campaigns to stem from these ideas, and I’d love to see more published materials along these lines.

I’d like to see a complete revamp of the Dreamlands setting. The stuff Dennis Detwiller has been doing looks great. Like some of your other interviewees, Clark Ashton Smith is a big favourite of mine and I would love to be involved in bringing CAS to life in a Cthulhu setting or supplement. It’s such a rich potential that’s just waiting to be explored. The kick-starter for Achtung! Cthulhu signals another setting that’s been crying out for treatment and I look forward to seeing WWII material. Having said that, there’s plenty that could also be done for WWI of course. I’m also a fan of Gaslight so would love to see more exploration of that setting.

Obviously 7th edition is an opportunity and I hope everyone, whether they are a steadfast player or new to the hobby, finds something they like in there and inspires them to ‘cthulhu’.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Mike: In five years time I imagine all the initial fuss over 7th edition will be long forgotten and people will just be continuing to play Call of Cthulhu. An explosion of cool settings, new scenarios and a couple of new big campaigns will be good. An investigator generator should hopefully be available for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone and Android by then too (well, at least I hope so!).

CR: Thanks Mike!

Hot on the heels of our interview earlier this week with Mike Mason, one half of the design team for the draft 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu, we are extremely pleased to welcome the other half of that team, Paul Fricker. Paul has done a significant amount of remarkable writing for the game even prior to taking on the challenge of revising its rules. His contribution to Chaosium’s monograph line is consistently named as one of the highlights of that range and his mind-bending scenario writing has received much praise, not least for his self-published Dockside Dogs PDF which has already raised over £1000 for charity.

With all that experience writing, playing and Keeping Call of Cthulhu … not to mention continually challenging the limits of the game … we were very interested to hear about how Paul thinks sees the past, present and future of Lovecraftian gaming in general.

Introduction

Paul Fricker has spent the last few years working on the 7th edition of Call of Cthulhu. Prior to that he was part of the UK group, The Kult of Keepers, writing and running scenarios at numerous games conventions in England and Germany. Some of those scenarios were published, the first of which was Gatsby and the Great Race (a Chaosium MULA). Gatsby’s unique selling point is that it blends multiple games for up to 24 players at once. ‘My Little Sister Wants You to Suffer’, a science-fiction scenario, was published in Cthulhu Britannica by Cubicle 7. Last year Paul published Dockside Dogs, a modern-day gangster scenario, in aid of Cancer Research. You can buy a copy from DrivethruRPG — all the money raised goes to Cancer Research.

Cthulhu Reborn: With over three decades of history to Lovecraftian Roleplaying, what do you see as the key milestones and mis-steps that have been made during its evolution?

Paul: First and foremost, all credit to Sandy Petersen for creating the game. Since then, if there has been evolution, its been in scenario design. Thankfully some writers have moved away from the rigid scenario structure that was so prevalent in the 80s, in which players are moved as if on a conveyor belt from one location to the next; pick up the clue–move from location A to location B, pick up the next clue – move from B to C, and so on. Of course there have always been good scenarios with a more open plan structure, just take a look at The Haunting [one of the scenarios in the Call of Cthulhu rulebook, called "The Haunted House" in early editions]. When you begin play you’re told about that house, and as soon as you set foot it in you’re screwed!

For me, the key milestone in Lovecraftian Roleplaying is the work of Pagan Publishing. Those early days of The Unspeakable Oath were exciting times. I recall discovering an issue in the Virgin store in Meadowhall, Sheffield, if memory serves me right. I ran ‘Convergence’ (the scenario that spawned Delta Green) in the early 90s, it really was a breath of fresh air. There is a lot of bad mythos fiction out there, but I love the Delta Green fiction, which for my money is better than the game books they produced. I’m just finishing Detwiller’s latest novel, Through A Glass, Darkly, and the quality has not diminished.

CR: Given the many and varied publishers and product lines that exist in 2013 to support the hobby, what things do you think this “mini-industry” is doing well and what could be done better?

Paul: Even back in the pre-internet-1980s there was a circulation of photocopied fanzines and the like, but nowadays people have the means of production and distribution literally at their fingertips. This is a mixed blessing; hopefully the good stuff rises to the top of the pile. The outcome is that there can be a game to satisfy every niche, and I think that is a good thing. I see many of the new small press games more akin to a Call of Cthulhu Scenario in terms of the investment in preparation and playing time. This makes them easy to pick up, play a few sessions then move on to something else, just as we would with a traditional scenario.

CR: What do you see as the main factors shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs right now?

Paul: The main factor that is shaping the direction of Lovecraftian RPGs is all the previously published material and our preconceptions about how to play. We’re all immersed in what has gone before and see that as the way that things should be done. There are good things in the Call of Cthulhu back catalogue, but I’m sure there are many innovations for us to look forward to. I do not mean change for the sake of change, but genuinely new and exciting ideas. The game I’m most excited about right now is Monsterhearts. I’ve sat down and played it a few times at conventions and in the space of 4-hours we’ve created characters and a story from scratch. The game mechanics and the fiction just flow seamlessly together, supporting one another effortlessly. It’s a great example of innovative game design.

CR: What do you see as the main challenges currently facing the continued prosperity/growth of the hobby?

Paul: Seems there’s a flip-side to every challenge. One might argue that computer gaming has drawn people away from pen-and-paper rpgs, but on the other hand, computers have also been a great boon in enabling roleplayers to get in touch with one another.

One of the sad things I see is the self-imposed divisions among roleplayers. For goodness sake folks, we’re a niche hobby. When I hear people complaining about ‘indie-gamers’ or ‘trad-gamers’ doing it ‘wrong’, I’m reminded of the Judean People’s Front in [Monty Python's] Life of Brian. Splitters.

CR: If it was up to you, where would you like to see the product lines of Lovecraftian RPGs (whether it’s the games themselves or their support products) go next?

Paul: Much as I love Call of Cthulhu, I think the size of the book is enough to put off some people nowadays. When I began with second edition, it was a slim volume that I read cover to cover. Seems to me that people have more things to do with their free time now than they ever have, so you have to grab them quick or they move on. So I think there’s an opportunity for slim, grabby products. The irony does not escape me; 7th edition Call of Cthulhu will be a big book. I would also like to see a slimmed down version, something a bit more than the quickstart rules, more akin to the second edition that I started with.

CR: Hypothetically, if you were to gaze into a crystal ball and look five years into the future of the hobby, what do you expect you’d see had changed in that time?

Paul: One thing I see now is an increased use of Skype and Google Plus hangouts for gaming. I figure not many people are willing to drive 100 miles to a stranger’s house for a game, but would be happy to join the same people for an online game. That said, I think there will always be a place for face-to-face gaming. There is no replacement for sharing leisure time with friends.

CR: Thanks Paul!