Call of Cthulhu - Sanity Roll, please

When I was a freshman in high school, I had the chance to play a horror role playing game. The name of the game was Call of Cthulhu, and it was incredible fun.

Call of Cthulhu is a game that is based on the writings of the 1920s horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. His stories were spooky, scary, and often involved the devolution of a person’s sanity. He created a whole mythos of old gods who are going to return to earth and destroy humanity, including the great old one himself Cthulhu. These old gods work through human and monster agents. They also write evil books like the Necronomicon.

Coming off of a ‘hack-n-slash’ game like Dungeons and Dragons, CoC was a bit of a surprise. The game is much more cerebral and detective work, followed by moments of intense panic, fear, fighting, and eventually insanity.

CoC has a statistic called ‘sanity.’ Essentially, the idea behind it is that as people get scared, their sanity gets hit, and they may freak out. If a person loses 10% of their sanity in less than an hour, they will go temporarily insane, and maybe develop a phobia.

Warren Carothers ran the game of Call of Cthulhu for us. He worked through the Chaosium game company’s books. By now, you’ll see recurring people in who were playing these games.

Call of Cthulhu takes place in the roaring 1920s. You could choose any occupation, anything from hobo to dilettante, policeman to mobster, doctor to journalist to anarchist.

Brad Gottschalk had a character named Dr. John Scott. He was a researcher, always questing for more knowledge. However, as the game went on, he gained I think it was 80% or 90% Cthulhu mythos knowledge. This stat reduced his potential maximum sanity to 10 points. Any little thing would make the character freak out.

Tom Hood, Ingrid Lind, Warren Brewer and I all had characters as well. I wish I could remember more of the details, but Tom’s character has disappeared in my memory. All I know is that his character threw John Scott into the basement of the first house that they investigated, not knowing that’s where the zombie was. That was John Scott’s first moment of insanity. I’m pretty sure he developed claustrophobia at that point…

I know Ingrid's character's first name was Julie, and she was a writer or something along that line.

Warren Brewer, using his random name creator (rolling dice), came up with Yemek Uglowski or something like that. He was a Polish immigrant who had come over after WWI. He had been a sniper in the Polish army.

My own character was Patrick MacDuff, a Scottish-born man raised in St. Louis. He intended to be a reporter, and followed a lead that brought him into contact with the rest of the group. He wore a trenchcoat, carried a German luger and a portable typewriter in a cast-iron case. He used both of those as weapons throughout the time. He also had a crush on Julie the writer, and when she developed amnesia when she failed a sanity roll, he took care of her while trying not to die in the Grand Canyon.

I know there were more of us playing, but I'm drawing a blank as to who else was there. While the players were all friends, the characters were not, and there was definitely some in-fighting going on, as evidenced by Tom throwing Dr. Scott down into the cellar. Made for some very interesting role playing.

Warren ran us through one of the supplements ‘The Shadows of Yog-Sothoth.’ Our characters travelled around the world, following clues. It started in Arkham, MA and New York City, but soon we were in Scotland, the Grand Canyon, and other exotic locations.

That game of Call of Cthulhu was immense fun.