Realms of Cthulhu Corebook(1).pdf

Realms of

Cthulhu

Sean PReSton

additional MateRialS: Shane henSley, SiMon luCaS, ed WetteRMan,

& StaCy young

lead editoR: lyn haRM

aSSiStant editoR: ed WetteRMan

aRt diReCtion: SiMon luCaS & Sean PReSton

CaRtogRaPhy: Keith CuRtiS

CoveR aRt: daniel RudniCKi

glyPhS: oMega Font laBS

gRaPhiC deSign: SiMon luCaS & Sean PReSton

inveStigatoR’S doSSieR: Cheyenne WRight

tyPeSetting: SiMon luCaS

inteRioR aRt: aaRon aCevedo, Raul gonzalez, andy hoPP, igoR KieRyluK,

diego giSBeRt lloRenS, ChRiS MalidoRe, luiS nuñez de CaStRo,

aaRon PanagoS, daniel RudniCKi, ChaRlene Sun, ChRiStoPhe SWal,

tRiSha WilliaMS, Cheyenne WRight, and daReK zaBRoCKi

daRK MinionS: eRiC avediSSian, eRiCa BalSley, BoB BRetz, MaRK FRanCiS,

deB goRdon, BaRRy gReen, noRM henSley, Joel KinStle, PiotR KoRyS,

“evil MiKe” MCneal, “WeiRd dave” olSon, Randall oRndoRFF, Joe Sallitt,

JeFF SCiFeRt, MiChael SiMS, and toM WiSnieWSKi

SPeCial thanKS to ChaRlie KRanK and duStin WRight oF ChaoSiuM inC. and

Shane henSley oF PinnaCle enteRtainMent gRouP Without WhoM thiS

BooK Wouldn’t Be PoSSiBle.

this work is dedicated to my dear daughter, China Preston,

my supportive parents, Charles and Ruby Preston, the newest

little lucas (coming Soon), and the memory of Charlene Sun.

The title font is Policy Gothic available from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society at CthulhuLives.org.

The interior is typeset in Public Works, Garamond, and Segoe Print.

associated trademarks and logos are the property of Reality Blurs, LLC. This material is protected under the Copyright

Act of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is

prohibited without the express written consent of Reality Blurs, LLC.

The names, descriptions, and depictions applied to this supplement are derived from works copyrighted by and include

trademarks owned by Chaosium Inc., and may not be used or reused without its permission.

This game references the Savage Worlds game system, available from Pinnacle Entertainment Group at www.peginc.com.

Savage Worlds and all associated logos and trademarks are copyrights of Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Used with permis-

sion. Pinnacle makes no representation or warranty as to the quality, viability, or suitability for purpose of this product.

FOREWORD

Our adventures were many and varied through the

years, but always a blast. Often literally. As with the

haunted house adventure, when we couldn’t solve

the puzzle, dynamite proved a satisfactory riposte

to the Elder God’s manipulations.

Which brings me to my second secret. Through

all the adventures, as my friends dropped like lies

or went stark, raving mad, Lacy survived. Charles

bragged frequently that he had killed us all many

times over—but he was wrong. Up until our last

adventure when he destroyed the entire world, my

character was perfectly sane and alive.

Character death is a hotly-debated topic within

gamer circles. But Call of Cthulhu Game Masters

and players alike positively revel in it. In dungeon

crawls one brags about the magic sword recovered

from the red dragon’s treasure trove, defeating the

neromancer’s army, or saving the princess from

some dastardly warlord’s clutches. In Cthulhu, a

player brags about his character’s messy end, or even

better, what he did in the moments his broken mind

inally snapped. The truly fortunate might combine

the two. Did the unfortunate soul gun down the

rest of the party? Did he dance merrily into the

iery depths of a volcano? Or perhaps he slowly

ground himself up in an industrial meat grinder.

Good times.

Realms of Cthulhu will prove a fascinating change

of tempo since it uses the Savage Worlds rules. Our

game system encourages offense and action. Heroes

will likely be tougher and more competent than

similar characters in the traditional system. Person-

ally, I ind this exciting. It means battles against the

conspiratorial townspeople of Innsmouth, inmates

from Arkham, or rabid cultists will be fast-paced

and exciting—like a good pulp movie. But blazing

Tommy Guns won’t help much against the more

terrible creatures of the Mythos. As usual, your hero

will have to rely on the information he’s found to

escape the clutches of such villains as Nyarlathotep

or Yog-Sothoth.

Practically, that means less of you will be stabbed

to death by a cultist, and more of you will survive

to have your face melted off by the Lurker at

the Threshold. And isn’t that what Cthulhu is all

about?

I have two secrets to share. The irst is that I’ve

never read the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

That may seem strange coming from someone so

heavily involved with roleplaying games for the last

two decades, but hear me out. The reason I haven’t

read CoC isn’t due to any lack of appreciation for

Chaosium’s lagship product line. On the contrary.

I haven’t read Cthulhu because I want the Mythos

to remain mysterious.

I’ve read plenty of H.P. Lovecraft’s work—I’m

a pulp enthusiast to the core—but I don’t want to

see the stats for the Colour out of Space , or the details

for the ritual cast in The Strange Case of Charles Dexter

Ward . I don’t want a spell list from The Necronomicon ,

or know the exact percentage chance a Ghoul has

of causing my hero infection.

I want my Game Master to have these facts—

and that’s what you’ll ind in Reality Blurs’ excellent

version of the game—but we players need to be

in the dark. Perhaps we won’t be as perplexed

as our characters when they confront some

angular-yet-amorphous horror from beyond our

comprehension, but neither should we know the

exact hit points (or Toughness, in Savage Worlds ) for

a Fungi from Yuggoth.

Call of Cthulhu is all about mystery. I remem-

ber the irst game I ever played. It was a haunted

house adventure that I think was included in some

edition of the core rulebook. The adventure was

pure chaos. The party I was with—which included

Deadlands alumni John Goff and John Hopler—

couldn’t for the life of us igure out what was going

on. It seemed a completely random collection of

strangeness, ghosts, and horrors. To the best of my

admittedly-limited knowledge, I think the villain of

our tale was a druid who used the history of the

house to conjure spirits and images to torment and

drive us out. We didn’t have a clue about any of

that, but we had an incredibly good time playing.

Oh, and when we couldn’t solve the mystery, we

burned the house down.

Years later, Charles Ryan, author of Millenium’s

End and later Brand Manager for Dungeons &

Dragons ® ran a series of unrelated adventures. I

played Lacy O’Malley, forerunner of the character

who would become our featured Kolchak-inspired

reporter for the Tombstone Epitaph in Deadlands ® .

Shane Hensley

January 21, 2009

FROM THE AUTHOR

ries were of our characters’ exploits and how we

went mad or died in some fantastic fashion. Call of

Cthulhu taught us several lessons. The irst one was

not to get too attached to our characters and the

second one was the ine art of roleplaying. In this

unforgiving and merciless world where dark gods

lie sleeping, your neighbor may be a cultist, guns are

lethal, magic is dangerous, and the more you learn,

the less you really feel you need to know, this is the

dark gift we were given.

In 2004, I received another present, the gift of an

innovative game system that struck a chord within

me, a system that catalyzed me to actually pursue a

longtime dream, a dream of writing in the gaming

industry, and for that I owe much thanks to Shane

Hensley and his Savage Worlds system.

Now fortune has afforded me the opportunity to

delve into the darkness of the Cthulhu Mythos and

do so with one of the most lexible game systems

I’ve ever encountered. If you already play Savage

Worlds , I’m preaching to the choir; for those who

are reading this because of the mention of Cthulhu,

I tell you, you’re in for a real treat! Because now it’s

time for me to put away my dreams and get down

to the nightmares that dwell just below the surface.

If you don’t think Savage Worlds can handle horror

and grit and send rash characters to the morgue or

the asylum, I assure you, you are mistaken.

When one hears the name Lovecraft, one’s mind

wanders to dread things, alien things, things that are

dead, and things that are not, and things that are

beyond the ken of humanity. In other words, one’s

mind goes to that venerable creation of a New Eng-

lander many years past when society was dealing

with the strangeness of science and the potentiality

of a world without religion. Lovecraft introduced

the possiblity that there were indeed gods, ancient

gods, alien gods, to whom all the glories and

wonders of our civilizations and the vainglorious

illusion of our cerebral superiority were as nothing.

In short, we were nothing. So frail were we that even

a glimpse at one of these dark denizens showed us

how fragile we are. The Mythos revealed the atavis-

tic nature of our humanity and the potentiality that

this world was all there was and the powers beyond

ourselves, the ones we sought solace in and turned

to in our hours of need were the grandest joke of

all, for these very creatures viewed us as little more

than playthings if they viewed us as anything at all.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house

full of pulp; old, dog eared books were laden upon

our bookshelves intermingled amongst the likes

of Edgar Allen Poe, Lord Dunsany, Sir Arthur

Conan Doyle, and the classics of Twain and his ilk.

As much as I enjoyed a spectrum of iction in my

youth, I was always fascinated by the strange focus

of Lovecraft and his obsession with the bizarre.

To me, it seemed, Lovecraft did not so much write

strange and weird tales, but reported them. His

stories ring with a disturbing resonance that lasts

beyond the written page.

Returning to my young adulthood, I also

had the rare opportunity to grow up in a hobby

shop. Not the quaint world of trains and

models, but one of fanciful knights, fearsome

dragons, and chests of gold. In more simple

terms, D&D. I loved the game and the books of

dark fancy soon were disregarded as I bathed in

the works of fantasy authors. However, when I

got to the hobby store from school one day and

began unloading inventory, what did I discover? My

brothers had ordered a new game from a l edgling

company calling itself Chaosium, a game called Call

of Cthulhu . Soon we dove back into our passion for

scaring each other senseless, one well served by

the game, and some of my fondest game memo-

Sean Preston

August 2008

P.S.

I am happy to report that I have emerged from

the other side of the design and developmental

process relatively unscathed. It was a pleasure revis-

iting some of my old favorite haunts—Arkham,

Innsmouth, and certain unnamed swamps in

Louisiana—over the course of the past year and

developing brand new ones, such as Bayhaven and

Drake Manor. While writing is a solitary process,

playtesting is not. We had enormous fun stress test-

ing the mechanics and, after the requisite number

of investigators died, we felt we had things properly

sorted.

Enjoy!

July 2009

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