19th Level

Cthulhu Dark is without a doubt the briefest game in this list. The rules take up two pages and that includes examples. I'm going to do something a little weird and reproduce the essentials of the first page of the rules. You can see a the full rules of the first incarnation of the rules at  http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu%20Dark.pdf . You can purchase the newest version at RPGNow which includes lots of campaign settings, interpretations of the rules, adventures, etc. Your Investigator Choose a name and occupation. Describe your Investigator. Take a green Insight Die. All dice, including your Insight die, are six-sided. Insight Your Insight shows how far you can see into the horror behind the universe. It starts at 1. When you see something disturbing, roll your Insight Die. If you get higher than your Insight, add 1 to your Insight and roleplay your fear. (This is called an “Insight roll”.) Is your Insight real? Can you really see a deeper truth? Or is it...

With a brief break from our Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea game taking place due to some travel going on in our group, we recently had the opportunity to try out Cthulhu Dark . It was just three of us, myself and two players, which in my experience can work pretty well for horror games. Cthulhu Dark  is designed for Lovecraftian horror. It is about as stripped down a set of rules as I could imagine. Your investigator has a name, a description, and an occupation. He or she has one stat, Insight, which begins at 1. If it reaches 6, your investigator is pretty much insane. Game over, man. How do you resolve tasks? It's pretty straightforward. If your task is something a human could do you doll a d6. If it is related to your occupation, you roll another d6. Finally, if you are willing to risk your mind to succeed you can roll an Insight Die. You pretty much always "succeed" unless Failure Dice are bing rolled. Your overall roll is the highest of a...

We'll take this for a spin again in 2017, though I imagine my posts will be a little briefer than last year's given my grad program has shifted its schedule and I'm in the middle of a class this August... Given I've just kicked off an Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea  game that's in one sense my answer - I'm not so flighty as to immediately wishing I was doing something else. I've probably clocked a ton of AD&D in my life so I'm looking forward to playing a game with a setting inspired by my favorite authors (Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, HP Lovecraft, etc.) with some rules based on AD&D. However, let's assume the answer is something I am not not currently playing. I've begun receiving material from the Cthulhu Dark  Kickstarter that I'm really itching to try. To be honest, if I ever have a game with just two players I think I'd whip it out for a one-shot, something Cthulhu Dark seems very well suited...

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu  is probably my favorite RPG. It has a system very well matched for its genre and it realizes its genre fantastically well. It's definitely an old-school game - in many ways it is a living fossil - you could take an adventure for its 1st edition from the 1980s and very easily use it with the most recent 7th edition, converting things on the fly. If you come from a D&D background, the rules are pretty easy to pick up (I'd argue that Call of Cthulhu is easier to pick up than D&D). But there are other ways to play a game of Lovecraftian horror, and reasons you'd want to go in that direction, depending on what you are looking for in a game. Call of Cthulhu  is very traditional, giving players minimal narrative control. Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu  injects a laser focus on investigation, insuring that no game comes to a halt because of a failed skill roll. One can see that Trail had an influence on the 7th edition of Call o...