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Hey guys, I'm a big fan of Lovecraftian horror and I recently dug up a bunch of stuff for Call of Cthulhu, a roleplaying game set in the Cthulhu Mythos. If you're not familiar with the Mythos, it's a series of perhaps hundreds of interconnected short stories begun by H.P. Lovecraft, a writer of "weird fiction" (a predecessor of modern sci-fi) in the 1910s-20s and continued to the present by various other authors. Most of them deal with the "Old Ones", a race of gods, demigods, and extradimensional beings. Essentially the Old Ones had (or will have, or still have) dominion over the universe, and a hapless poet, artist, anthropologist or man of science tends to stumble upon the secret of their existence. They usually try to stop the return of that particular god or his minions, and generally succeeds only in delaying the coming darkness, or fails completely, and almost always go insane in the process.

Despite this, it does make for a pretty entertaining campaign. You take control of an investigator similar to a D&D character, except the stats focus more on intellectual and deductive abilities and include the all-important Sanity statistic. Your character loses sanity points by seeing/hearing/learning/fornicating with things too terrible for humanity to comprehend, but can be developed and improved as long as he/she still has some shred of lucidity. It's probably the only RPG where suicide or institutionalization is a key part of the game mechanics. Chaosium has published a lot of stuff for it, and it's in its 6th edition with dozens of supplements set in various locations/eras/planes of existence.

So, anyone play? I'd like to get started with a fairly simple campaign and go from there. Not sure what I'm using for miniatures yet but Worldworks has great products for survival/horror type games. Any information would be very much appreciated.

I used to play it back in the day. Great times.

There are plenty of CoC worthy figures on the market. Here are a few pointers:

http://www.hasslefreeminiatures.co.uk/range.php?range_id=27&subcat_id=63

http://www.hasslefreeminiatures.co.uk/pack.php?pack=1971

Heaps of good stuff in the Copplestone range.

http://www.copplestonecastings.co.uk/

Check out anything Pulp or Steampunk from any manufacturer.

Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Cthulhu_(role-playing_game)
Wikipedia's CoC page

Good stuff! If you'll excuse me my paypal has a date with Mr. Coppelstone.

I've played both the core 1920s CoC and Cthulhu Now! 90s version.

Scarily, the modern one was sooo much creepier. Technological progress made no difference to beings older than time itself.

That is, until Cthulhu got nuked back into slumber. I think a knock out punch on a god is a score 1 for us puny mortals.