As we head into spooky season, role playing gamers look to bring the chill of Halloween to their gaming sessions. Many of the most popular options include the Cthulhu Mythos which features cosmic horror inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. There are plenty of excellent games that use Cthulhu to send chills up and down our spines: Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green and Pelgrane Press’s Trail of Cthulhu line.
Thanks to a Humble Bundle running through September 28th, a massive chunk of this groundbreaking game is on sale for a great price. The bundle includes the core book, settings, adventures and even a soundtrack to help set the mood for game night. Let’s take a look at why, if you’re a fan of horror gaming, you should pick up the bundle for your table.
Gumshoe Core Book
Trail of Cthulhu uses the Gumshoe game system to power its investigations. The system has since gone on to power award winning games like the spies versus vampires of Night’s Black Agents and the rowdy urban fantasy of Swords of the Serpentine. It all started here with Trail of Cthulhu, with two game sytems working for the same purpose.
The first half of Gunshoe featured a simple roll over mehcanic with players spending points out of skills to represent effort and luck. Having a high enough rating in an active skill often give the character a benefit such as making them harder to hit in combat. Players have some control over guaranteeing success early on at the risk of being at the mercy of the dice in the final act when the monsters arise and are hungry.
The investigative system gives players a chance to grab the spotlight and the narrative with spends. Any player with the right skill can find the clues on the scene needed to advance the plot but spends can give the players an advantage in the rest of the story. A character with Archaeology, for example, would recognize the message scrawled in blood on the wall as being written in Sanskrit with a spend giving them access to the original text or perhaps a colleague they can bring into assist.
Trail of Cthulhu Settings
The core book discusses two types of games using the rules. Purist games make surviving investigations intact harder for investigators for those tables who want to play the kind of Lovecraftian protagonist that doesn’t survive their first brush with the Great Old Ones. Pulp games embrace the spirit of the magazines where these stories were published with more flexible rules the encourage globetrotting adventure in between the cosmis horror.
The bundle includes a few settings that land on various ends of this spectrum. Bookhounds of London puts players in the role of shady librarians and book sellers tracking down the cursed tomes that lay at the heart of many Mythos stories. Eternal Lies follows in the grand tradition of around the world adventures where the investigators must put right what once went wrong because of a previous group of heroes failing their mission.
Trail of Cthulhu Adventures
The bundle also comes with several adventure collections scattered across different times and places. Out of Time and Out of Space sends players everywhere from the skies above World War I to the deck of the Titanic moments before its fateful plunge into the deep. Shadows Over Filmland pays homage to the classic Hollywood movie monsters in an anthology that can be played as stand alone adventures or as a one fill tale that takes a left turn into unspeakable horror.
Trail of Cthulhu changed how I approached invetsigations in gaming. I think its a great game and a great read for anyone who enjoys supernatural mysteries.
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