OSSR Call of Cthulhu d20

[ColorBlindNinja61]

OSSR: Call of Cthulhu d20

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Introduction
In 2001, Wizards of the Coast released a d20 hack of Call of Cthulhu. In addition to creating d20 rules for the Cthulhu Mythos, CoC d20 was also made to a be compatible with D&D 3rd edition.

The game faded into obscurity and as far as I can tell, very little content was made for it. I did find some third-party content for system, including Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that either. No, they're not very good, why do you ask?

CoC d20 was largely rejected by the Call of Cthulhu community, most likely because d20 is associated with the high fantasy world of D&D and thus was deemed inappropriate for a horror game.

When I initially looked into the system, I was honestly expecting something on the level of Monte Cook’s World of Darkness or Big Eyes Small Mouth d20. While CoC d20 is definitely flawed, I don’t think it’s as irredeemably bad as those two games.

And since at the end of the day, d20 is a functional system, I think it’s superior to Chaosium’s take of the Cthulhu Mythos. Not much of an accomplishment, really, but I really do believe it’s an improvement.

The book opens with a (mercifully brief) “What is a roleplaying game” segment before jumping straight into character creation.



Character Creation
We get an explanation of what ability scores and what they mean, pretty basic stuff to anyone with a passing knowledge of d20. Though I am amused the book illustrates ability score values with Cthulhu Mythos monsters. I don’t think it’s terribly meaningful to the reader that a Shoggoth has a CON score of 30-31.

We’re expected to roll 4d6 and drop the lowest to generate our ability scores. Bleh. I’m not a fan of rolling for stats, but sadly, I don’t see any options for point buy here.

Strength is about as useless here as you’d expect in a modern/semi modern horror setting with firearms, while Dexterity is much more important since it adds to your to hit with all ranged weapons.

Wisdom is extremely important in CoC d20, since you multiply your WIS score by 5 to determine your sanity points. We’ll cover the sanity system when we get to that chapter of the book, but I hope your expectations are low.

It’s worth noting that the errata for this book tells us that you don’t get languages based on your INT mod in this game, you’re expected to invest individual ranks in “Speak Language.” Fuck that noise. Intelligence is also your key stat for casting magic in this game, not that you’ll want to cast magic in the first place.

In addition to seducing NPCs powering social skills, Charisma also is a key stat for the Psychic Feats that CoC d20 has. We’ll look into those in more detail when we get to the feat chapter.

This game only has a single class, called Investigator. In D&D terms, they’re something of a mashup between a Commoner and an Expert. D6 hitdice and 8 skill points per level. The Investigator is more customizable to make up for the fact it’s the only class in the entire game.

You can choose a defensive option with two good saving throws of your choice and poor BAB, or an offensive option with a single good save and medium BAB. You will take the defensive option, because taking the offensive one is a ticket to a quick death.

Much like Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, you have list of professions to choose from that determine which skills you can start with more points in. They’re the sort of careers you’d expect for CoC, Archeologist, Professor, Doctor, Psychologist, and so forth.

Most of these aren’t horrible or anything, but I’d prefer to just let players pick whatever skills they want for their characters. For some bizarre reason, Dilettante is the only profession that has Drive as a class skill. And priest is listed as a career choice. I’m not sure what a priest is supposed to do in a CoC game, but it’s there if you want it.

Say what you will about how shitty d20 Modern’s classes are, it at least had a couple to pick from. CoC d20 doesn’t even afford you that luxury. Nor are there any prestige classes in this game. This means that a lot of the characters in a party are going to feel the same. Because they have no class features to speak of, unless you count the fact that everyone can cast magic.

The last bits of this chapter are devoted to fleshing out your character’s personality/background, education (which has no mechanical effects, near as I can tell) and money.

What you’re supposed to do is roll a d6, modified by your profession, then compare it to a table based on what era you’re playing in. Lastly, you multiply your die result by the amount indicated by the era table.

For example, let’s say I’m a Doctor. My modifier to my income is +2. So, I roll a d6 and add +2, for an average result of around 5.5. I’m playing in the 1901-1920 era, and looking at the table, I see that means my starting money in savings is $1000 and my yearly income is $500. I multiply those numbers by 5.5 and get $5500 in savings and a yearly income of $2750.

This sounds like far more bookkeeping than necessary and I honestly think they should have taken a more abstract approach to equipment, perhaps something like the 2017 Delta Green RPG does.

Making CoC d20 characters is extremely similar to making characters in any other d20 game. For a system that’s supposed to be as lethal as Call of Cthulhu is, that’s not a good thing. It takes a decent chunk of time to make characters in d20, having PCs drop left and right is going to bog the game down when their players need to replace them. Unless you insist that everyone has 2-3 backup characters. Which is what I did when I ran a one shot using this system.

[deaddmwalking]

Yeah, I'm really confused why anyone would think that a 3/4 BAB would be worthwhile. The BAB is exactly the same at 1st, 2nd, and within a single point at 3-6th. It isn't until 7th level that BAB is a difference of 2. Picking up a +1 bonus is pretty easy; at 6th level having Base Saves of +5/+5/+2 versus +5/+2/+2 seems like a pretty significant deal. If you're dealing with challenges that aren't just 'you're outclassed, everyone fails their saves', the difference is actually meaningful - especially since you can usually keep attacking but you usually can't make a new save.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Skills
Skills are also old hat to anyone who’s played a d20 game before. The skill list could certainly use some consolidation. Demolitions, Disable Device and Open Lock are all separate skills. We have Read Lips which really should have been folded into Spot and Innuendo which should have been part of Bluff. And we also have Handle Animal and Animal Empathy.

Perhaps the biggest offense the skill system commits is having Speak Other Language as a skill instead of just handling languages the way D&D 3rd edition did. You have to invest ranks in Speak Other Language separately for each language you want to learn.

They did remove Decipher Script, but I feel like that would have been a better way to handle this idea rather than forcing players to set copious amount of skill points on fire so they can speak Latin, Russian and French.

Other new skills worth noting are Research (aka Library Use), Psychoanalysis (for treating crazy party members) and Psychic Focus (which interacts with the Psychic Feats.)

There are some skills I can’t imagine most PCs taking at character creation, like Spellcraft and Concentration, since they’re focused around casting spells. And your character can’t start with spells in this game.

I feel like the Drive skill is worth talking about. Thankfully, someone on the design team realized that having the players roll every time they wanted to take a trip to the grocery store was pant on heads stupid, so you only make Drive checks when you’re being shot at or the like.

Cars make shockingly good weapons in CoC d20, dealing 1d6 damage for every 10 MPH you were traveling over 10 MPH. So, traveling at 20 MPH does 1d6, 30 does 2d6 and so on.

The downside is that you take half damage from a car crash or full damage if you hit something really big (and whatever you hit takes half damage). Still, taking out a rampaging monster might be worth the death of a single PC.

The Cthulhu Mythos skill works much in the same way it does in standard CoC. You can’t put ranks in it with your skill points, you gain them from reading tomes or going nuts from running into a byakhee.

The skill system feels like every other d20 skill system, except no attempt was made at all to fix any of its problems.



Feats
Since your characters are all human in CoC, you get two feats at level 1. But, the same problem that haunted D&D 3.5 plagues Call of Cthulhu d20, you just don’t get enough feats.

Most of the core D&D 3rd edition feats are here, minus stuff like metamagic and Stunning Fist. There are a glut of “+2 to one skill and another skill” feats.

And then feats that were copy pasted from D&D that are utterly useless, like Power Attack. As if you’d want to risk melee combat with horrible abominations from beyond space and time when you don’t even have full BAB and could just shoot them from a distance.

With that said, there are some feats you might not ever consider taking in D&D that might be worth having in CoC d20, particularly at low levels. The +3 hitpoints you get from Toughness just might save your ass in a gunfight and getting a +2 to save at level 1 is actually a pretty hefty bonus.

Perhaps the biggest kick in the nuts is that you aren’t considered proficient with most weapons by default (except your fists). So, if you don’t want to suffer a -4 penalty to attack rolls, you need to spend feats to become proficient with melee weapons, thrown weapons, pistols, rifles, shotguns and submachine guns. This is basically going to encourage the same shit you see in standard CoC where players pick one weapon and never use anything else.

There are also a lot of feats to improve fighting with ranged weapons. Mostly to reduce penalties you take from firing guns more than once a round (independent of extra attacks from high BAB). You can also take a feat that lets you make an extra attack with firearms at a penalty.

Finally, let’s talk about the Psychic Feats. They’re a huge investment, since you need the Sensitive feat as a perquisite for the rest of them and Sensitive requires a 15 in CHA. While some of these feats boil down to Magical Tea Party (like the Sensitive feat’s actual benefits) others are actually pretty helpful.

Psychokinesis, Mind Reading, Psychometry (object reading) and Remote Viewing. But you won’t have enough feats to take all of them.

You use the Psychic Focus skill to activate these powers, with 15 being a typical DC. They also sap your sanity to use. Unfortunate, but not unexpected, but they’re still more usable than most spells. And you can take them at level 1.

[Ancient History]

Ha ha, fuck this brings back memories. While not the worst or even of the cheapest of the "Different RPG to d20" conversions of the 00s, this one holds a special place in my heart. At a time when the ubiquity of the open-source d20 system seemed like a great way for older games to piggyback their way back into relevance, or new games to make their bones with less work, it was hard to conceive of a game less suited to this than Call of Cthulhu...and it was almost immediately quashed by WotC's own d20 Modern.

It basically was the worst of both systems put together. Lazy, unintuitive, boring, unfamiliar to just about everybody...

The thing about the whole d20 concept is that it was worse than GURPS when it came to trying to be a "universal" system. d20 could just about handle levels 1-6 to a handful of different fantasy settings where combat was the focus and you either minmaxed skills to death or tried to avoid rolling them entirely, and where settings were either pretty consistently segregated or nerfed so that they were all running on the same basic preconceptions...and even then, Kingdoms of Kalamar, Conan the Roleplaying Game, Ghostwalk, and Call of Cthulhu weren't really using the same ruleset, they were all using variations of the same ruleset. Nobody was set-up to do cross-genre, cross-setting adventures with d20. You could do it, but damn few people did because it was such a bloody mess.

Which, y'know, could have been fun if anybody had really run with the concept. There's nothing wrong with different settings having different inherent power levels and some feats just being better than others, as long as everybody goes into the game with the basic understanding that some player characters are going to be "better" than others and it's about how you play them, not any pretense at even progression of level-appropriate challenges. But most games aren't set up for that, at least not explicitly.

[Libertad]

The best use of CoC D20 was converting Lovecraftian monsters to 3rd Edition D&D. I can't recall ever playing in this crazy-ass ruleset, and if I did I blocked out all memories of it long ago.

I do recall that by bean counting individual dollars for personal wealth instead of a percentage Credit Rating like in original CoC was perhaps one of the dumbest decisions in this. You ended up spending almost all of your wealth on a car and living expenses, or carpool with other PCs and have more money than you know what to do with. And unlike D20 Modern it didn't have a bunch of cool-ass gear to spend things on.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Kingdoms of Kalamar

That's another one that's ripe for an OSSR. I remember reading the d20 one and angrily shaking my fist the entire time.

The best use of CoC D20 was converting Lovecraftian monsters to 3rd Edition D&D.

Agreed.

I do recall that by bean counting individual dollars for personal wealth instead of a percentage Credit Rating like in original CoC was perhaps one of the dumbest decisions in this. You ended up spending almost all of your wealth on a car and living expenses, or carpool with other PCs and have more money than you know what to do with. And unlike D20 Modern it didn't have a bunch of cool-ass gear to spend things on.

That's pretty much exactly what I thought when reading through those rules.




Sanity
Note: The SRD’s Sanity rules are practically identical to CoC d20’s. Here’s a link, if you’re interested: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/sanity.htm

Oh boy. Call of Cthulhu’s rules for sanity have always been utterly, abominably awful. And basically, nothing was done to change them here except the bare minimum necessary to make it compatible with d20.

Mechanically, you make sanity checks the same way you do in classic CoC, you roll percentile dice and succeed if you roll equal to or under your current sanity score. You still lose sanity for seeing things, even though the entire damn game is centered around investigation and thus seeing things is inevitable.

Let be known that I am a programmer, not a doctor, so I will not be going into detail about how medically wrong the sanity rules are. But even with my limited knowledge I know that seeing a mangled corpse won’t cause you to spontaneously develop multiple personalities.

As I said back in the character creation chapter, your Wisdom score x 5 determines your sanity. It’s worth noting that your WIS going up or down does not change your current sanity. As usual, your maximum possible sanity is 99 minus your Cthulhu Mythos skill.

You make sanity checks for seeing shocking or disturbing stuff as well as rolling when you see supernatural shit. If you lose more than half of your WIS score in sanity during a single roll, you temporarily go insane and roll on a chart. The chart’s effects are really random, but for the most part isn’t brain-meltingly awful. That honor is reserved for the other charts.

Worth mentioning that you can snap someone out of temporary insanity with the Psychoanalysis or Heal skills (DC 15).

If you lose 20% or more sanity in one in-game hour, you go indefinitely insane. A misnomer, since it actually lasts 1d6 months. This is where you get stupid shit like your PC developing nymphomania or starts hallucinating. The only real saving grace is that for phobias and whatnot, you’re expected to work with your GM to come with the exact nature of your newfound disorder, not roll on a bullshit chart.

Of course, having a PC wind up an asylum for 3.5 months is pretty disruptive for the group. The expectation seems to be you play a backup or something. And just like in the original CoC, it’s possible that your character could end up wandering around homeless with a 5% per month to just fucking drop dead.

The rest of the chapter is one long list of various disorders. To CoC d20’s credit, they at least try to include mechanics for phobias and dissociative disorders. The bare minimum, I know.

Even still, I think it’s safe to say the sanity rules are the worst part of the system. Kind of a problem, considering it’s the most iconic part of Call of Cthulhu. It’s disappointing beyond measure that they didn’t even try to fix these rules.


Combat
Another section that will be familiar to d20 veterans. This might be a good time to mention that aside from a healing spell you’re not guaranteed to have access to, your main source of healing in this game is bedrest and heal checks. Which will likely mean long stays at the hospital after every combat encounter.

One of the biggest changes CoC d20 made to the rules is how massive damage works. In D&D 3.5, massive damage is an often-forgotten rule where if your character takes 50 or more damage from a single attack, they must make a DC 15 FORT save or die instantly.

In CoC d20, this save is triggered when you take 10 damage or more. This is Wizard of the Coast’s solution to HP bloat that higher level investigators will doubtlessly suffer from. It’s a clunky way to solve this problem, but I am glad that at least tried to solve it.

The other major combat rule that’s worth covering is how firearms work. Guns are grouped in three categories: standard, multifire and autofire.

You can make an extra attack with a standard firearm, but you take a -6 to hit with your attacks. Multifire weapons also let you make two attacks, but with a -4 penalty. Finally, autofire guns let you make two extra attacks, but you take a -6 to hit.

As much as I hate to say it, I think d20 Modern handled this sort of thing better by adding extra damage dice instead of having the player make extra attacks. The fact you need feats to do so was fucking asinine, but that’s d20 Modern for you.

As you might expect from a d20 hack, there are lot of rules for melee specific maneuvers that you’ll never use in a modern setting. You’re just flat out never going to grapple someone in Call of Cthulhu when you could just shoot them instead.

The combat rules are solid enough for what they are and are pretty comprehensive. Just nothing terribly innovative.

[Sigil]

Nobody was set-up to do cross-genre, cross-setting adventures with d20. You could do it, but damn few people did because it was such a bloody mess.

Which, y'know, could have been fun if anybody had really run with the concept. There's nothing wrong with different settings having different inherent power levels and some feats just being better than others, as long as everybody goes into the game with the basic understanding that some player characters are going to be "better" than others and it's about how you play them, not any pretense at even progression of level-appropriate challenges. But most games aren't set up for that, at least not explicitly.

I've uh, been working on and off on a thing, C.O.R.E.F.A.I.L.U.R.E., as a joke. The concept being that you play with only the core rules, but it's the core rules from every stand alone 3.X based d20 product other than the actual core rules of D&D or Pathfinder. I even made a self calculating character sheet for it. It's not done, because there's more systems to integrate, but it's 'playable' as-is with the current systems integrated.

Beware, this quote from the start of the main document is very relevant:

Code: Select all

"Have you ever spent time creating something and then realized it’s the worst thing a human being has ever done?"
        -Niel Cicierega

[Libertad]

Kingdoms of Kalamar

That's another one that's ripe for an OSSR. I remember reading the d20 one and angrily shaking my fist the entire time.

You should review either Svimohzia the Ancient Isle, which was the setting's attempt at a Fantasy Africa, rr the adventure If I Were a Rich Man which revolves around the PCs managing a farm and growing crops cuz Realistic Medieval Fantasy.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

You should review either Svimohzia the Ancient Isle, which was the setting's attempt at a Fantasy Africa, rr the adventure If I Were a Rich Man which revolves around the PCs managing a farm and growing crops cuz Realistic Medieval Fantasy.

I have never understood the fascination some systems have with players that are basically shit covered farmers, but I think Kingdoms of Kalamar is the first game I've heard of that literally has you be shit covered farmers.




Equipment
This is the first chapter that’s truly different from its standard d20 counterpart, mostly thanks to the large lists of firearms.

One thing I do like about this chapter is that they give prices for the 1920s and for 2000. I guess it saves you a Google search or two.

We get quite a few stats for melee weapons that you’ll probably never use and some rules for armor. Armor is for modern times only (2000) and the good armor is fuck off expensive. It grants some fairly sexy AC bonuses in exchange for some nasty armor check penalties, which apply to attack rolls in addition to skill checks. A trade off of having better protection VS having to deal with armor check penalties.

There are simple and detailed rules for firearms, the latter having a hefty list of the various guns you can get your grubby mitts on. There are too many pistols that deal 1d10 damage for my liking, I prefer that firearms deal more damage than a heavy crossbow.

Rifles tend to output 2d8-2d10 damage, with a Barret .50 sniper rifle dealing 2d12. Unlike in d20 Modern, there’s actually a reason to use a shotgun in CoC d20.

Shotguns deal normal damage if you’re within their 1st range increment (50 feet seems to be standard) and the damage drops by a die every range increment afterwards.

A 12-gauge shotgun (buckshot) deals 3d6 damage and a 10-gauge one (also buckshot) outputs 3d8. A far cry from the 2d8 damage the ones in d20 Modern tend to have. I could see shotguns being an investigators’ go to weapon for combat.

There’s also a handy table for the damage of guns by the caliber of the round or its size in millimeters. That said, I do have to scratch my head at some of the numbers. A .22 short/long pistol round only deals 1d4 damage? Wat?

With firearms, comes accessories for them. Bayonets, bipods, suppressors, laser sights, and telescopic sights. All of which have rules and PCs are going to stick laser sights on their guns if at all possible, since it’s a free +1 to hit if you’re 30 feet or closer to your target.

We also get detailed entries about each individual gun which while interesting, is hardly necessary. Similarly, we get treated to a lengthy discussion about various firearm laws passed in the US. I’m guessing this is for modern era games since the banning of automatic weapons didn’t occur in America until 1934 and the standard era for CoC is the 1920s.

We also get rules for explosives. C-4, grenades, dynamite, pipe bombs, that sort of thing. Much in the vein of D&D 3.5, we get a long ass list about general equipment. Hiking gear, surveillance equipment, prices for clothes, communication, lodging, dining, medical equipment and more.

I am happy to see that they provide actual mechanics for this stuff, but they don’t go into a ton of detail for the individual items. They give prices and sometimes the weight of these objects, other times, just price. If you want to know how much a Giger counter weighs, you’re SOL.

I’d have appreciated stats for vehicle weapons, tanks, helicopters, battleships, etc., but we don’t get those. Kind of a problem if you want to run something like Escape from Innsmouth, which prominently features a ship with a cannon.

Other than that, the equipment chapter is basically what you’d expect from a modern/semi-modern game.

[Libertad]

We get quite a few stats for melee weapons that you’ll probably never use and some rules for armor. Armor is for modern times only (2000) and the good armor is fuck off expensive. It grants some fairly sexy AC bonuses in exchange for some nasty armor check penalties, which apply to attack rolls in addition to skill checks. A trade off of having better protection VS having to deal with armor check penalties.

This is the dumbest thing I've read so far for an already wholly-inappropriate D20 conversion.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

We get quite a few stats for melee weapons that you’ll probably never use and some rules for armor. Armor is for modern times only (2000) and the good armor is fuck off expensive. It grants some fairly sexy AC bonuses in exchange for some nasty armor check penalties, which apply to attack rolls in addition to skill checks. A trade off of having better protection VS having to deal with armor check penalties.

This is the dumbest thing I've read so far for an already wholly-inappropriate D20 conversion.

I suspect it's intended to be a balancing measure.

[Foxwarrior]

Cars make shockingly good weapons in CoC d20, dealing 1d6 damage for every 10 MPH you were traveling over 10 MPH. So, traveling at 20 MPH does 1d6, 30 does 2d6 and so on.

Do bigger vehicles do more damage, or does ramming a boat into Cthulhu do just 2d6?

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Cars make shockingly good weapons in CoC d20, dealing 1d6 damage for every 10 MPH you were traveling over 10 MPH. So, traveling at 20 MPH does 1d6, 30 does 2d6 and so on.

Do bigger vehicles do more damage, or does ramming a boat into Cthulhu do just 2d6?

These rules refer specifically to cars, so it's not clear they'd apply to other vehicles or not. It's certainly not unreasonable to assume they would.

The only way that the size of the vehicle matters is in relation to what it's hitting. If it's crashing into something bigger, that object takes half damage and the car takes full damage. The reverse is true if the car is bigger than the object.

[angelfromanotherpin]

It grants some fairly sexy AC bonuses in exchange for some nasty armor check penalties, which apply to attack rolls in addition to skill checks. A trade off of having better protection VS having to deal with armor check penalties.

This is the dumbest thing I've read so far for an already wholly-inappropriate D20 conversion.

Why? It's completely standard d20 rules that ACP applies to attack rolls if you aren't proficient with the armor, and Investigators aren't proficient with any armor.

[Libertad]

It grants some fairly sexy AC bonuses in exchange for some nasty armor check penalties, which apply to attack rolls in addition to skill checks. A trade off of having better protection VS having to deal with armor check penalties.

This is the dumbest thing I've read so far for an already wholly-inappropriate D20 conversion.

Why? It's completely standard d20 rules that ACP applies to attack rolls if you aren't proficient with the armor, and Investigators aren't proficient with any armor.

Unless I'm missing some detail, I thought that the attack rolls applied regardless of proficiency just like skill checks do.

[angelfromanotherpin]

It's written that way, but as there's apparently no way to get armor proficiency in CoC20, the distinction is moot.

[amethal]

I did find some third-party content for system, including Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

I have the d20 version of Fantasy Flight's Nocturnum. Some parts of it are great, but most of it isn't (and it pretty much makes up its own mythos rather than building upon the classic elements, which annoys some people).

You’re just flat out never going to grapple someone in Call of Cthulhu when you could just shoot them instead.

Last time I played CoC (the normal version, not d20) someone was spying on the party. Rather than gun him down in the street in broad daylight, I grabbed him instead. At which point ... he shot me.

One thing I do like about this chapter is that they give prices for the 1920s and for 2000. I guess it saves you a Google search or two.

In the current climate I'm a bit reluctant to google things like "how much does dynamite cost".

[Username17]

CoC d20 was largely rejected by the Call of Cthulhu community, most likely because d20 is associated with the high fantasy world of D&D and thus was deemed inappropriate for a horror game.

The most infuriating thing about this attitude among Call of Cthulhu fans is that on the most basic level they are wrong about this. Leaving aside for the moment the technical fact that the Mythos is low fantasy by definition because it has Earth in it, the thing people actually mean by 'high fantasy' are not and have never been incompatible with the Mythos. The Mythos is so completely compatible with sword and sorcery that Conan the fucking Barbarian literally has Mythos crossovers in the original literary source material. Tsathoggua is from the Hyperborean Tales by Smith. Unaussprechlichen Kulten is from RE Howard and Lovecraft used it with permission. Sword and Sorcery elements and Mythos elements cross pollinate just fine, and always have - since before either of those genres even had names.

Now I would agree that Dungeons & Dragons is a terrible fit for the game that Call of Cthulhu players want to be playing, but that is because they want to be playing modern age mystery stories, not because they want to do Horror with Mythos elements. It is entirely possible to write about the sword and sorcery adventures of a daring thief named Satampra Zeiros while he fights monsters and steals from an ancient evil god in an abandoned temple and have that be in the Mythos. Because that is literally and actually the literary roots of Tsathoggua - a completely bog standard D&D style dungeon crawl.

Where D&D falls flat is not in handling Mythos inspired magic and monsters - it handles those things just fine. The difficulty is handling cars and guns. Call of Cthulhu d20 was definitely going to be bad for he same reason d20 Modern was always going to be bad - the core engine doesn't support 20th century inventions well at all.

The really infuriating part of course is that Call of Cthulhu is already a D&D hack through Runequest. And it is precisely the parts of modern world gaming that D&D doesn't handle well that are the most obviously garbage portions of Call of Cthulhu - and for precisely the same reason. Having a Strength and Constitution attribute when people own and drive trucks is a gods damned insult - and that's baked into the pie as far as old CoC hands are concerned.

You could have a system that handles gun fights OK and use that for your game set in the 20th century. They exist. You could take one of those rulesets and make that your core Call of Cthulhu engine and then you'd be able to do 20th century combats without that being embarrassing.

But the people writing CoC20 and the CoC fans who criticized it at the time both badly missed the point. You can't cross D&D with Call of Cthulhu, because Call of Cthulhu is already a set of Dungeons & Dragons house rules using a setting that was one of the primary inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons since the very beginning. The reason to look back at Dungeons & Dragons is to recompile the game from its source code. To ask more fundamental questions like whether we should be having a Constitution score and whether we should be using hit points (spoiler alert: No). The end result from an honest and productive redesign of Call of Cthulhu with a D&D reference wouldn't look all that much like Call of Cthulhu (any edition) because it would be made with the benefit of hindsight and the internet. But most importantly it would look less like Dungeons & Dragons than Call of Cthulhu currently does. Because fucking obviously.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

A 12-gauge shotgun (buckshot) deals 3d6 damage and a 10-gauge one (also buckshot) outputs 3d8. A far cry from the 2d8 damage the ones in d20 Modern tend to have. I could see shotguns being an investigators’ go to weapon for combat.

There’s also a handy table for the damage of guns by the caliber of the round or its size in millimeters. That said, I do have to scratch my head at some of the numbers. A .22 short/long pistol round only deals 1d4 damage? Wat?

Eh, if you're saying 12-gauge buckshot (of some sort) is 3d6, 1d4 for .22 doesn't seem that bad. A 3rd ed dagger does 1d4 (I think), so seems reasonable.

Anyhoo, is this about Lovecraftian monsters, or Lovecraftian horror? Cause big tentacled monsters and people who are people but kill on sight because they are the wrong kind of people is hardly incompatible with D&D, but wandering round thinking nothing weird is going on until you are writing your diary while being eated is a different matter.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Anyhoo, is this about Lovecraftian monsters, or Lovecraftian horror? Cause big tentacled monsters and people who are people but kill on sight because they are the wrong kind of people is hardly incompatible with D&D, but wandering round thinking nothing weird is going on until you are writing your diary while being eated is a different matter.

Call of Cthulhu d20 is meant to be Lovecraftian horror. You can also yoink the monster stats for your D&D game and that's by design.




Magic
The magic chapter is a bit misleading for a title, since this section includes tomes and magic items as well. While Call of Cthulhu’s magic system is flavorful, it falls flat in vital number of areas. Despite the obvious desire of players to play as mages who battle against the Mythos, CoC seems reluctant to grant this wish (3rd party splats not withstanding).

A lot of these same problems plague Coc d20, spells take too long to learn, the cost of casting said spells is exorbitant, you can’t have spells out of character creation, and whether you even get a spell at all is entirely left to the GM’s discretion.

When you find a tome, you need to spend several weeks examining it before you can decipher its contents. Mechanically, this is handled with a study check (d20 + your character level + your INT mod). For each previous check you fail, you get a +1 to the roll. Every time you fail a check, you get to roll on the strange events table, which is mostly just random spooky shit that usually causes you to lose sanity.

You have to study the tome without taking a break longer than a week, otherwise you have to make a DC 15 INT check or start the entire process over. You naturally lose sanity once you’re done examining the book. If you want to actually learn a spell, you have to spend 1d3 additional weeks to do that.

FFS, you’ll never have the time to learn magic in this game! Even if you did, you’d probably lose way too much sanity for it to be worth it! And not all of the tomes even have spells in them! Just like in vanilla CoC, your GM is encouraged to troll you by making up different names for spells, so have fun with that.

We get a list of the various tomes you can find in CoC d20 and while it doesn’t have all of them, it covers most of the more notable ones.

Then, the chapter starts talking about magic items. Unlike D&D, you aren’t assumed to be walking around with a collection of magic swag in CoC and the approach to the design of magic items is very different.

Quite of few of these artifacts are unlikely to see use. For instance, the Carafe of Space Mead allows you to breath in the vacuum of space. What are the odds that the party is actually going to outer space? Not high. Most of these items exist more as storytelling devices than anything the players might actually use.

I do have a certain fondness for the Lightning Gun (probably because of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth) but its mechanics are… weird. It holds 32 charges and deals 1d6 damage per charge, but using multiple charges increases the odds it burns out and breaks.

We get some Mi-Go gear, Brain Cylinders, Mist Projectors (2d6, DC 19 REF for half), Living Armor and a Mi-Go Electric Weapon. It only does 1d10 damage, but you have to make a FORT save VS instant death, then another FORT save or be paralyzed for 1d4 rounds. Stay away from the Mi-Go.

We get the standard d20 rules for how magic works, then alphabetized list of all the spells in the game.

I know they didn’t adapt all of the spells from Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu (no Call/Attract Fish), but there are a fair number here.

A couple of them were clearly copy pasted mechanics from D&D, like Augury, Magic Weapon and Detect Magic. While others like Cause Fear and Invisibility Purge were just ripped straight from D&D and plopped into CoC d20 with no changes beyond ability score damage/drain and SAN loss.

One thing I do appreciate is that all the Call and Contact spells are consolidated into a single spell each with various clauses explaining how calling/contacting each individual differs. This saves a ton of space.

Given that Monte Cook made this game, you might expect the spells to be really overpowered. Shockingly, this isn’t the case. You can’t restore sanity with magic and I only recall a handful of spells that could truly break a campaign and the cost for casting them makes them practically unusable.

This would be a good time to talk about how spells work in CoC d20. You not only lose sanity for casting them, you also take ability score damage or even drain. Yeah. I think these spells are even less usable than the ones in vanilla CoC because of that. Even if a spell doesn’t cost sanity, it will deal at least a point or two of ability score damage.

Much like with the artifacts, several spells here exist purely as plot devices. The players are usually trying to stop Azathoth from being summoned, not the other way around.

Probably the most broken spell in the game is Create Time Gate, for obvious reason. Casting it causes STR drain. Because spells are completely Mother May I, you’ll never see it unless your GM has a time travel plot (Run away!).

There are a couple buff spells, perhaps most notably is Deflect Harm, which completely negates a number of physical attacks equal to your level. The downside is you take two points of INT damage for each attack that’s negated.

The Elder Sign spell drains a point of CON, making it even more unlikely that you’d ever use it. Healing Touch is probably the spell I would see players using the most. It deals 2 points of WIS damage and costs a point of sanity to use, but it basically acts like Cure Light Wounds.

Much like with the sanity chapter, no real effort was made to fix the problems that CoC’s magic system has, it was just converted to d20 with a few D&D spells tossed in, and that was the extent of the effort put forth.


Creatures
This is usually my favorite part of d20 books, I just really like monsters. We get a breakdown of the various types and subtypes that monsters have before their descriptions. I also would like to draw attention to what the book says about challenge rating:

In Call of Cthulhu, a creature’s Challenge Rating (or CR) gives a rough measure of its toughness on a scale of 1 to 20. CR stats are listed here as a guideline to help the GM measure the relative difficulty of various encounters in a campaign.

In DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, CR has a slightly different meaning. A creature’s Challenge Rating is the average level of a party of adventurers for which one creature would make an encounter of moderate difficulty. However, for several reasons the average CofC investigator isn’t as tough as the average D&D character. Keep in mind that a “moderate” encounter in a high-fantasy game may become “extreme” in a modern horror setting.

Investigators can fight creatures with any CR, regardless of the average level of the group.

Which means that a group of level 1 CoC investigators aren’t necessarily going to be fighting ECL 1 encounters. There’s no such thing as a level appropriate encounter in this game. Or an inappropriate one.

I mention this because one of the primary complaints I hear leveled against CoC d20 is that the players will easily slaughter all of the monsters in the game, because d20 = high powered/fantasy.

That’s just not the case. Ironically, it’s Chaosium’s Coc where this is more likely to be a problem, thanks to its automatic weapon rules being batshit insane. Compared to CoC d20 where you just get 2-3 extra attacks at a penalty.

I’m not going to cover every monster here, but there are a couple notable critters missing. Interestingly, they added in Shantak in a web supplement, but they never got around to doing the same with Star Spawn.

We’ve got most of the classic CoC monsters here, Byakee, Colors Out of Space, Cthonian, Dark Young, Elder Things, Shoggoth and (possibly my favorite) Flying Polyps.

All but the weakest monsters in the game will effortlessly slaughter a party of hapless investigators. And since we’re using d20 instead of BRP, they won’t miss all the damn time.

Take a Byakee for instance. It’s CR 3 and has a +7 to hit, an AC of 15 and 18 HP. Could a party of level 1 investigators kill it? If they act first and get lucky, absolutely.

The same is true of the CR 2 Deep Ones (assuming they’re not underwater). But the Mi-Go may be CR 2, but they have DR 10/+2 and the nasty weapons we talked about in the magic chapter.

A CR 4 Elder Thing has DR 15/+1. A Nightgaunt (also CR 4) has DR 15/+2. To say nothing of the CR 9 Dark Young that has DR 20/+2, 60 HP and has 4 tentacle attacks that each deal 1d6+10 damage.

Then there are the monsters that are incorporeal, like Colors Out of Space, Lloigor, and Flying Polyps, which are just giant raised middle fingers to the PCs.

Speaking of giant fuck yous, I suspect whoever converted the monsters to d20 didn’t understand the difference between Chaosium CoC’s regeneration and d20’s.

In standard CoC, regeneration is more akin to d20 fast healing. In d20, regeneration means a monster takes nonlethal damage from all types of damage save for one or two. Trolls, for instance, cannot be killed unless you use fire or acid.

Whoever wrote the stats for these monsters neglected to tell us what damage types cause lethal damage to creatures with regeneration. CoC d20’s regeneration works the exact same way as D&D’s, the description it gives makes this crystal clear.

So, strictly RAW, you can never actually kill a Shoggoth or a Hound of Tindalos, you can only knock them out for a while. If you’re porting these monsters into your D&D game, you can kill them with save or dies or with the Greymantle spell (which suppresses regeneration). But in CoC d20? You’re just SOL.

If the design goal with the monsters was to make the players wet themselves in terror and flee rather than fight, mission accomplished. If the monster is faster than the party… Well, remember the old saying, you don’t have to outrun Hunting Horror, you just need to run faster than the guy behind you.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention is that the book has stats for level 10 cultists, which I absolutely do not approve of. CoC is not a setting where you should see level 10 humans.

[angelfromanotherpin]

One thing I forgot to mention is that the book has stats for level 10 cultists, which I absolutely do not approve of. CoC is not a setting where you should see level 10 humans.

Yeah, but they're all some sad NPC-grade class that counts as half CR if it's lucky.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

The Cthulhu Mythos
This chapter basically establishes tone and the basics of the Cosmic Horror genre. The idea that knowledge is inherently dangerous, the corrupting nature of the mythos, that humans are mere fleas before Cthulhu’s might, standard CoC stuff.

The first chunk of the chapter is dedicated to talking about the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones. A few of the more obscure entities are left out but there are more than enough for a campaign.

For some reason they tell us that Cthulhu isn’t actually a god despite him being labeled as such in the appendix. I think the editor failed their sanity check before they finished their job. Furthermore, Nodens is listed among the “false gods” despite the fact that he’s more traditionally labeled as an Elder God.

A few of the major independent races get named here, in spite of the fact that the creatures chapter already covered them. We also get an explanation as to how magic works in the mythos, again, even though we already had a magic chapter. I can’t help but feel this chapter should have been placed earlier in the book.

We get some advice for designing your own cults, tomes, spells, gods and monsters. As well as suggestions for making “mysterious secrets”, “sinister clues”, “horrible families” and “strange places.”

The advice is pretty good, but I find it odd this section of the book has so much GM advice in it. We’re told cults should have a purpose and a leader. However, I don’t care for the advice to detail their history or foundation since that’s rarely important to TRPGs, but I guess it is in-genre.

They do basically tell the GM that there are already a ton of them, and they probably shouldn’t bother to make their own. They might have a point about gods, but monsters? There are a fair amount of them, but I find this advice odd when CoC modules tend to make up new monsters wholesale all the damn time.

Likewise, the advice for making your own secrets, clues, horrible families and strange places is solid. The latter two are especially prominent in the Cthulhu Mythos. We get the Town With a Dark Secret as an example of a strange place, naturally, as well as outer space and different worlds.

The last part of this chapter really hammers home the nihilistic tone of the Cosmic Horror genre. Cthulhu will eat us all in the end and there’s nothing we can do about it.

They do try to drive home the fact that investigators can still make a difference in the here and now, even if in the long term their actions won’t stop us all from winding up as a cosmic buffet.

This chapter does it job competently, it explains to the reader the setting and its tone. I really think this chapter should have been placed sooner in the book, but it wasn’t. What are you gonna do?

[Koumei]

The most infuriating thing about this attitude among Call of Cthulhu fans is that on the most basic level they are wrong about this. Leaving aside for the moment the technical fact that the Mythos is low fantasy by definition because it has Earth in it, the thing people actually mean by 'high fantasy' are not and have never been incompatible with the Mythos. The Mythos is so completely compatible with sword and sorcery that Conan the fucking Barbarian literally has Mythos crossovers in the original literary source material. Tsathoggua is from the Hyperborean Tales by Smith. Unaussprechlichen Kulten is from RE Howard and Lovecraft used it with permission. Sword and Sorcery elements and Mythos elements cross pollinate just fine, and always have - since before either of those genres even had names.

At the end of the day, most people who like Call of Cthulhu, and who say/think they want a Lovecraftian game, aren't considering any of that. What they're pretty sure they want is basically a re-telling of any of the relatively short stories you get in a Lovecraft compendium where the hapless investigators all die or go insane. As fuckawful as actually playing such a thing would be, their mental vision really is that a shotgun won't even inconvenience a Shoggoth or Deep One (and also you won't have a shotgun you filthy powergamer), and that even reading the wrong book will send you completely insane, retire your character immediately.

Sadly, I could not find a screencap of Eternal Darkness with "Should ___ read the tome of eternal darkness?" to insert here.

A playable game is going to be something more like Conan or Eldritch/Arkham Horror or Scooby Do. But what they set their heart on is not that and you're wrong for wanting anything else.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

At the end of the day, most people who like Call of Cthulhu, and who say/think they want a Lovecraftian game, aren't considering any of that. What they're pretty sure they want is basically a re-telling of any of the relatively short stories you get in a Lovecraft compendium where the hapless investigators all die or go insane. As fuckawful as actually playing such a thing would be, their mental vision really is that a shotgun won't even inconvenience a Shoggoth or Deep One (and also you won't have a shotgun you filthy powergamer), and that even reading the wrong book will send you completely insane, retire your character immediately.

I find this attitude amongst the fanbase utterly baffling. Even if you're just looking at the stories Lovecraft wrote, the monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos aren't all unstoppable juggernauts that humans are helpless against.

The most obvious example of this is the Shadow Over Innsmouth, in which the government raids the titular town.

In the Escape From Innsmouth adventure scenario (which Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is based on) you can kill Dagon's ass with a 3-inch cannon.

This is the event that lead directly to Delta Green being founded. And while Delta Green suffers from its own flavor of grimderp, the main premise is that you can still make a difference in the short term.

EDIT:

Sadly, I could not find a screencap of Eternal Darkness with "Should ___ read the tome of eternal darkness?" to insert here.

+1 for referencing Eternal Darkness. That game is awesome.




The Gamemaster
This chapter is mostly about giving the GM advice about setting the right tone. This section primarily covers storytelling, setting the mood and scaring your players.

I firmly believe that TRPGs are an inherently difficult medium to actually frighten people with. Tabletop games tend to be cooperative by nature and they don’t have the same visual and audio components so essential to atmosphere in horror movies and video games.

We get some advice about pacing, which basically boils down to, “Dedicate more time to the stuff your group likes.” The advice for setting scenes is, “Give a basic description and have the players ask questions to find out details.” The intent is to avoid bogging everything down with details. But to me, this is a bit too close to the Gygaxian approach of “You didn’t think to check if the ceiling is a monster, ergo, it eats you.”

There’s also advice about keeping the story moving as to keep the pacing intact. This seems fair, since horror lives or dies on its pacing.

Next, the book tells us about atmosphere. Isolation is the first point that’s touched upon, a classic, and then helplessness. To the book’s credit, it does tell you the players shouldn’t be doomed to failure from the start, but that having the occasional NPC the party isn’t able to save can drive home the horror.

Violence is another suggestion for atmosphere, and honestly, I’m of the opinion that western horror is too fixated on gore. I also feel like a paragraph about making sure your players are okay with blood and gore would have been prudent.

The last theme that’s mentioned for establishing atmosphere is Self-Destruction, which seems to boil down to ironic grimdark:

For some players this is part and parcel of the horror of Call of Cthulhu. A “good cop” PC who finds himself brutally torturing a cultist to find out where the ritual takes place; a peace activist who dynamites a tenement to kill the thing in the basement; a CIA agent who reveals secrets to the Russians to get access to the Kremlin copy of the Necronomicon; a Catholic priest who must chant spells from a heretical and blasphemous tome to save a small village - in each case the “hero’s” self-image has eroded, along with their sanity.

Can I get a hearty “Fuck no!”? This just sounds like dickery in name of grimdark. Having players make hard decisions every once and a while? Fine. Teaming up with morally reprehensible people to stop a worse threat? As long as it’s not done to death. Deliberately forcing your players to take actions completely contrary to their character? Grimdark bullshit of the highest order.

We also get a paragraph establishing atmosphere in whatever physical location you’re playing your game in. This feels a tad dated, since I can’t speak for you guys, but 95% of my own TRPG games are online.
We get more ideas for building tension or just invoking fear, a sense of wrongness in an otherwise normal scene, a sense of being watched and miscellaneous spooky shit like time slips and spooky voices.

The last bit boils down to “Suddenly, cultists!” Which I guess is a good way to get your party’s attention. We do get more emphasis on the fact that monsters = dead PCs more often than not.

More ideas for building horror are suggested, like creating fear of the anticipation of some unknown horror. We get the usual horror clichés, like darkness, scary locations (cemetery, asylum, spooky mansions, ect.), grisly corpses, animals behaving in an ominous fashion. Finally, we get “Jump scares!” which seems comparatively weak to the rest of the advice given here. Also really hard to pull off in a TRPG format.

The next section talks about the supernatural and how to handle it. Advice includes trace evidence (a smear of hydrocarbon paste in the lungs of a heart attack victim), malfunctioning technology and tell tale “sign” of the supernatural. Which mostly amounts to more random spooky shit.

They talk about cultist and how even the batshit crazy ones can still appear normal at times to fool the authorities. Also, that they shouldn’t do completely stupid things just because “LOL! Crazy!”

We get a similar couple paragraphs about magic, emphasizing how unnatural and unpredictable it should be. Also, random spooky shit.

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to actually running the game. We get a recommendation to make some rolls in secret and a few paragraphs amounting to “Make sure you understand how the game works, making a few maps wouldn’t hurt either.”

Oddly out of place are the rules about NPC attitudes, but I guess they had to go somewhere.

We also get some information about advancement. CoC d20 doesn’t have an XP chart, instead the players are supposed to gain XP or level up from accomplishing story goals or finishing adventures. This is also where the game tells us that players get sanity back each time they level up.

Finally, the book recommends being more generous with XP for a more pulp style game and stingier if you want to drill down even harder on the grimdark.

Grimdark bullshit aside, most of the advice here is solid, albeit with a lot of random spooky shit. But the part where we’re told how to make campaigns isn’t until the next chapter.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

We also get a paragraph establishing atmosphere in whatever physical location you’re playing your game in. This feels a tad dated, since I can’t speak for you guys, but 95% of my own TRPG games are online.

Well... they are still called tabletop games for a reason. My online experiences have gone poorly compared to getting some friends together around a too-small table.