Everyone knows that I love “rules-lite” games. I’m far more interested in characters and story than crunchy bits. Everyone knows that I love Call of Cthulhu as a concept, and think the game system was the bomb in the 1980s, but find the rules clunky by modern standards. When Halloween rolls around, I run a one-shot horror game and would actually dig running a longer Mythos-based campaign. Coc is a bit heavy for a one-shot, though, especially when your players haven’t used that rules set before.
Enter Cthulhu Dark. So called because nothing about the Mythos can ever be called “lite”. It’s four pages, one of which is a cover. It’s so lite there isn’t even a character sheet. Come up with a name, an occupation, and a character description. Done. The only number you need to keep track of is your insanity. If it’s something human beings can do, roll 1d6. If it’s within your character’s occupation, roll 2d6. If you’re willing to risk your sanity to achieve it, roll 3d6 (and take a point of insanity). You never fail; the die total is how well you did, subject to interpretation. This is to add story potential; if you’re sneaking around trying not to be seen, 1 means you’re not seen but were heard and left track, 6 could mean it will take Them (whoever They are) a while to find you, and so on.
A lot of GM caveat comes into play here. Among other rules, if you get into a fight with a Mythos creature you automatically lose. Don’t even roll. Die rolls are for running away. Kind of like playing Munchkin. If you want to cast a spell, you don’t get the die for stuff humans do or occupation; you just roll your insanity die and go a little more mad. Bwahahahah.
If another player decides if would be more interesting if you failed, though, they describe what they want to happen and you roll off; high roll wins and describes what happens.
When you get 6 points of insanity, you crack and go mad. Roleplay it. It’s not stated in the rules, but I’d use colored stones or similar markers and hand them out. The player would have this visible little pile in front of them to remind everyone that they’re losing their mind. At the end of the session I, as gamemaster, would note how many insanity points each player had. That gives the players absolutely nothing to keep track of between sessions. I even made my own tracking sheet to do it.
When I printed the game out, I skipped printing the cover because it’s got heavy, solid blacks and would suck up all my ink. It’s a nice cover, but not remotely printer-friendly. The other three pages are narrow single columns centered on the page. I set it up to print two pages per page, so I’ve got pages 2 and 3 on the front looking like two columns (see the image above), and page 4 on the back. One sheet of paper. My players can handle this for a one-shot.
Easy to learn, fast to play (presumably; I’ll find out in the near future, I hope) and doing all of the major things the full Call of Cthulhu rules do without all of the crunchy bits. I can run any CoC adventure in print using this, with minimal prep time. Layout aside, this is definitely a keeper.
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