OSSR Call of Cthulhu d20

[Thaluikhain]

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.

Which humans? Humans in general can keep lights going to keep Nyarlathotep at bay, but the humans that Lovecraft writes about are the ones that are helpless. You mention Shadow over Innsmouth, the government attack and fire torpedoes downwards into the water (because Lovecraft didn't know about depth charges, I guess), but that doesn't help the main character.

You can fight Lovecraftian monsters, but it's not Lovecraftian horror if you win.

[Username17]

You can fight Lovecraftian monsters, but it's not Lovecraftian horror if you win.

Does that make The Dunwich Horror and The Call of Cthulhu not Lovecraftian because the protagonist does in fact win?

-Username17

[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.

Which humans? Humans in general can keep lights going to keep Nyarlathotep at bay, but the humans that Lovecraft writes about are the ones that are helpless. You mention Shadow over Innsmouth, the government attack and fire torpedoes downwards into the water (because Lovecraft didn't know about depth charges, I guess), but that doesn't help the main character.

The main protagonist of The Shadow Over Innsmouth turns into an immortal fish person and joins his relatives under the sea.

A far cry from dying in a grisly fashion or winding up in a padded cell for the rest of his life. Hell, depending on your outlook, you could say this a happy ending.

EDIT: It's also worth remembering that this outcome would have occurred even if he'd never gone to Innsmouth and instead became an encyclopedia salesman.

You can fight Lovecraftian monsters, but it's not Lovecraftian horror if you win.

Frank already pointed out that this isn't the case, at all, but more crucially, this idea isn't conducive to playing a TRPG. Games have to have stakes and if losing is a foregone conclusion, then why bother playing?

Victory might be difficult, it might be Pyrrhic and some of the PCs might die along the way, but it needs to be a possibility.

Otherwise...

[Chamomile]

I haven't actually gone back and counted, but my impression from actually reading a bunch of Lovecraft stories is that the two most common outcomes for the protagonist are to be condemned as insane because of a perfectly accurate recollection of an alien encounter, or else for someone else to go insane and/or die horribly, leaving the protagonist behind shaken but unharmed to recount the story. And this is for the shorter stories. In the longer ones, the protagonist usually just wins. Which also happens in some of the short stories. Like, in From Beyond, the protagonist wins completely and unreservedly.

The only stories I can think of that end with the protagonist themselves actually insane or dead is Dagon and the Temple, and the latter is arguably not even a Mythos story.

[Foxwarrior]

But surely HP Lovecraft intended for the protagonist to die or go insane every time, and just wasn't able to because third person omniscient narrators hadn't been invented yet.

[Thaluikhain]

Does that make The Dunwich Horror and The Call of Cthulhu not Lovecraftian because the protagonist does in fact win?

Ok, you have me there.

The main protagonist of The Shadow Over Innsmouth turns into an immortal fish person and joins his relatives under the sea.

A far cry from dying in a grisly fashion or winding up in a padded cell for the rest of his life. Hell, depending on your outlook, you could say this a happy ending.

Ah, but from Lovecraft's wildly xenophobic outlook, it was not.

this idea isn't conducive to playing a TRPG. Games have to have stakes and if losing is a foregone conclusion, then why bother playing?

Victory might be difficult, it might be Pyrrhic and some of the PCs might die along the way, but it needs to be a possibility.

Sure, which is why Lovecraftian Horror doesn't seem to work very well as the basis for a game (as opposed to the Mythos).

Based on the idea that the protagonists always lose, that is, which in retrospect might not be as certain as I thought it was.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

The main protagonist of The Shadow Over Innsmouth turns into an immortal fish person and joins his relatives under the sea.

A far cry from dying in a grisly fashion or winding up in a padded cell for the rest of his life. Hell, depending on your outlook, you could say this a happy ending.

Ah, but from Lovecraft's wildly xenophobic outlook, it was not.

And why I should care about Lovecraft's xenophobic viewpoint? Simply because he's the author?

EDIT: A lot of authors mean to paint something as good or bad only to have their readers disagree with them.

[OgreBattle]

And why I should care about Lovecraft's xenophobic viewpoint? Simply because he's the author?

I don't think that's a good rebuttal, as that's the response that leads you to a "GOTCHA".

A better response would be...

- Lovecraft isn't owned by disney so doublewoke pieces target him easier


Like... when Hayao Miyazaki says Spielberg's Indiana Jones is a racist pile of shit, the narrative isn't "yeah this nonwhite beloved creator challenges Hollywood racial supremacist norms" but "how DARE he attack what's already been canonized as Beyond Criticism in White Society"

https://comicbook.com/anime/2019/03/21/ ... hollywood/

[Username17]

Lovecraft's xenophobia does have to be addressed if you're going to write Lovecraftian fiction. Call of Cthulhu does a particularly bad job of this, to be honest. They don't honestly grapple with the implications of racism on the setting and also too the rules attempt to enforce behaviors that are derived in the source material directly from racism. Often not even subtextually, but literally as text.

Consider the ending of Medusa's Coil. The narrator has their horrible revelation upon seeing Marceline's true form... and that horrible revelation is that she is a mulattress. For reals. The core sanity mechanic of Call of Cthulhu is literally an attempt to codify the racist revulsion and terror of contemplating the attractiveness of half-castes. That sounds like something you would say as an elaborate insult just prior to throwing down or accepting a thrown glove, but in this case that's just actually what it is. Quite aside from the fact that Call of Cthulhu's sanity rules do not work very well or encourage productive play patterns - the rules are attempting to model something that you shouldn't want to model. Or at the very least, that you should definitely not portray as universal.

Portraying the idea that seeing Deep Ones or Tcho-Tcho invokes sanity eroding revulsion in normal people is to enshrine racist revulsion and segregationist impulses as normal. That's just factually what you're doing. Quite aside from the many mechanical problems with Call of Cthulhu's sanity system, the very proposition of creating such a system is morally wrong.

There are Lovecraftian protagonists that have responded to having their horizons expanded with revulsion and despair, but there have also been Lovecraftian protagonists who have responded with simple caution or even with fascination and curiosity. The simple strangeness of the unknown has not always been presented as something to fear even in the original source material. The Call of Cthulhu sanity meter is a bad mechanic, but what it's trying to model is the worst and most offensive parts of the original literature. Parts even the primary author was at time able to identify as a personal flaw.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Is there any room for playing a character who's some xenophobic 1920's asshole and loses his mind when he sees fish-people because he's a pussy with a weird complex, or should that be totally ejected even if your investigator has the [Crippling Xenophobia] tag?

[ColorBlindNinja61]

And why I should care about Lovecraft's xenophobic viewpoint? Simply because he's the author?

I don't think that's a good rebuttal, as that's the response that leads you to a "GOTCHA".

A better response would be...

- Lovecraft isn't owned by disney so doublewoke pieces target him easier

I was coming at this more from a "Just because the guy who wrote it thinks it's a bad ending doesn't mean I have to." angle.

Plenty of people think Lord of the Rings is an analogy for World War II, despite Tolkien saying it's not.

Lovecraft's xenophobia does have to be addressed if you're going to write Lovecraftian fiction.

I don't disagree with you, Lovecraft's racism needs to be addressed. What I was trying to say is that I don't feel compelled to share Lovecraft's xenophobic conclusions about turning into a fishman merely because he wrote The Shadow Over Innsmouth.





Stories
Now for the campaign advice. We’re told a campaign offers a story, a puzzle and a threat. We get a discussion of linear VS nonlinear adventures and then various ideas you might center your game around. A mystery, a rescue, exploration, combat, etc.

The book informs us that we should lead with an opening hook, something to entice your players to get involved and that you need to provide them with proper motivation to continue.

Perhaps most interestingly, there’s a paragraph here talking about how to get the PCs involved in the plot. We actually get an acknowledgment that the “Your distant relative needs your help!” hook gets old fast and that you should cater the adventure’s hook to your group in mind.

Once the players bite down on the opening hook, emphasis is placed on making sure that they feel like they’re making progress. Also, to include some danger to keep things from getting boring.

Finally, the climax should provide an answer to the mystery at hand but in an unpleasant/frightening fashion. We also get advice about major discoveries, NPC interactions, combat and horror.

The game’s designers also seemed to realize that CoC parties can be rather eclectic and gives some advice how to get the group together. They also realize that CoC characters are ordinary people with jobs and emphasis that the GM should offer credible reasons for the PCs to get involved with the plot.

And that you should try to think of ways to keep the group together if they are a motley crew. The main suggestion for accomplishing this is to leave some loose end the investigators can pursue.

We also get a segment that explains how the party start out as normal people who don’t believe in the supernatural and have an encounter with something that forces them to accept its existence. We get some illustrations drawn from other works of fiction, like the X-Files, but also Terminator.

We get yet another reference to Terminator when they talk about new players joining a group that already knows about the mythos. These comparisons work well enough, but I just find it a bit odd that they used Terminator as an example not once, but twice.

The book starts to lose the goodwill it’s garnered from this mostly good advice by talking about “consequences”, read, “The cops should hound the PCs if they get into a gunfight with cultists.” Realistic, yes, but I can’t help but feel like that’d break up the tempo of the campaign.

The next segment gives us various campaign goals, like “Stop the baddies from doing something bad before the time runs out!”, “Explore the Unknown!”, “Recover the McGuffin!”, and “Save the World!” Cliché, but they work.

We get a section talking about campaign elements like villains, monsters, locations, objects, and the everyman. The game tells us that the everyman is basically ignorant and useless, while hammering into our heads once again that monsters are dangerous. We’re also told to use them sparingly, less they lose their impact.

Oddly enough, CoC d20 breaks from the typical narrative that the fanbase promotes and tells us that you shouldn’t be losing entire parties of PCs every other session. The book tells us you should have a couple investigators who last throughout the entire campaign. Interesting.

The last part of this chapter is all about the climax. We’re told some games just putter out and die, but this undesirable. Some games always seem to have dangling plot hooks, which can get exhausting if it happens too often. The coveted “happily ever after” is apparently the rarest of endings, while the last one is “All hell breaks loose.”, which is presented as a game over condition.

Most of this advice is solid and surprisingly, attempts to address some of the well-known problems with Call of Cthulhu campaigns. I feel like these attempts could have been better but I’m happy the problems were acknowledged at all.

I find it rather interesting that CoC d20 seems to grasp the conceptual problems that the genre has but not the mechanical problems it’s inherited from standard CoC.


Setting
This chapter opens talking about when and where you set your game. We get a token mention of running CoC just prior to the start World War 1, during and the years immediately after WW1, the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s to modern day. Most of the material written here was created with modern day or the 1920s in mind. This section is little more than a brief summary of each decade that could be substituted with a few hours of research on Wikipedia.

We turn to the physical side of the equation, which naturally discusses Lovecraft Country. We also are told we could just set the session in your hometown. Which is… strange to me. It’d probably work reasonably well but might be a tad surreal.

We also get suggestions for how to involve the PCs in the plot, which is nice. The suggestions include, the players are PIs, hired to look into peoples’ problems, they work a Miskatonic University, that they work for Delta Green, they’re into the occult, or they work for Swollen Eyeball.

We are treated to a lengthy list of campaign ideas for each era of play and each of the aforementioned plot hooks, a good deal of them inspired by various works of fiction.

Some highlights include, an evil carnival (Something Wicked This Way Comes), literally having fucking Dracula as the BBEG, Nazis steal a mythos artifact (Indiana Jones), the plot of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dr. Strangelove, The Blair Witch Project, and of course, The Thing. Not to mention about two dozen Lovecraft stories to steal take inspiration from.

This section is easily the best part of the chapter, it’s a great resource for a GM and just reading it makes you want to run a Call of Cthulhu adventure. The hooks for involving the players in the plot are also great.


EDIT:

Is there any room for playing a character who's some xenophobic 1920's asshole and loses his mind when he sees fish-people because he's a pussy with a weird complex, or should that be totally ejected even if your investigator has the [Crippling Xenophobia] tag?

Since we're talking about fishmen specifically, I don't think that'd be an issue. As soon as you start dealing with the actual bigoted views of the 1920s is when things get uncomfortable.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

We get yet another reference to Terminator when they talk about new players joining a group that already knows about the mythos. These comparisons work well enough, but I just find it a bit odd that they used Terminator as an example not once, but twice.

Great, now I have to ask if you could plausibly run a Terminator game in CoC. I'd probably lose sanity if I saw a guy get his head "blown off", only to reveal he's a terrifying metal skeleton that wants to kill me.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

The End of Paradise
Standards for Call of Cthulhu adventures are generously low. Most of the ones I’ve read tend to be mediocre at best and horrid at worst.

Rather than adapting The Haunting or Edge of Darkness, CoC d20 gives us two original adventures. The first of these is The End of Paradise. Unlike a lot of CoC scenarios, both of the adventures in this book take place in modern times (well, modern for when this book was released).

The End of Paradise is a 1st level adventure that centers around a movie theater called Paradise where spooky shit is going down and a crazy rich guy who wants to perform a dark ritual there. It’s a solid setup, let’s see what they do with it.

The main hook to entice the players to their doom into the plot, is that one of the workers at the theater was injured in accident (her name is Mary). We get a list of publicly known information about the theater, when it was originally built and by who, who owns it now and that fact it’s being renovated for a grand reopening. We’re also told spooky shit has happened here before.

We get some more specific hooks based on the ideas in the previous chapter. If the PCs work at Miskatonic university, it’s suggested you set this adventure in Arkham and that Mary (the injured employee) be a student at MU or a friend. Another hook is that the players work at the theater or if they’re private investigators, someone may have hired them to investigate.

For a Delta Green campaign, it’s suggested that a cultist in custody was babbling about “Paradise” and thus the players are sent to the theater to check it out. The last suggestion is that the current owners of the theater are mystics and the PCs are paranormal investigators. These are all solid hooks and I appreciate that they’re trying to concoct ways for the players to be involved in the plot.

The module paints us a picture of what the opening scene should look like and we get a floor plan of the theater. The party is introduced to the lady in charge of the renovation effort (Sara) but she quickly leaves them to their own devices so they can go exploring.

At this point, random spooky shit starts happening. It’s inventive spooky shit, though, and the GM is encouraged to only have a single player witness each spook. We get spooky music, they see an old movie playing behind a loading dock door, strange patterns in the carpet and a screaming face in the furnace.

The primary purpose of these “whammies” as the book terms them, is to inform the PCs that something is wrong with the theater and it merits further investigation. Not a bad way to go about it but you risk them wising up and getting the fuck out of dodge.

There’s also a running gag where the other employees at the Paradise theater make references to a guy named Robert, who the party never meet. They blame the creepy music on Robert, for instance.

After the GM has indulged in some spooky shit, the party bumps into Sara (the woman in charge) again. She invites them along for a visit to the hospital and Mary the injured employee.

Once in the hospital, the players witness an old man die of a coronary. In a bit of clever writing, the PCs can look up the man’s name and find that he used to work at the theater before he suffered a heart attack.

While this is happening, Mary tells the party that she didn’t “fall down” she “fell up” but they need to make a DC 15 Listen check to hear her.

Then all the electronics in the room freak out and the players are treated to an indistinct figure caressing Mary’s face. Finally, the TV explodes (DC 10 REF to avoid 1 point of damage) and Mary repeats her “falling up” statement. Which makes me wonder what the point of the Listen check earlier was for.

We get an extension of the Robert gag in which one of the employees states that they’ll need Robert to fix the TV. If the players ask, they are told this is a different Robert, who they also never meet.

At this point Sara escorts the PCs out of the room, not that it matters since Mary gives them the silent treatment anyway. If the party tries to visit Mary again, they find she’s been moved to a different hospital out of town.

With the basic scenario put in place, the players are taken off the rails and can proceed in whichever way they wish. They can conduct research into the theater and the people associated with it, interview the volunteers working on the renovation process, or head back to the theater for a closer look.

If the players decide to examine the section of the theater where Mary fell, they’re treated to more spooks and some foreshadowing. The ceiling features disturbing carvings and they can hear a humming sound. If someone examines the ceiling closely, they find a hinge and a switch. The book informs us this will not happen while NPCs are around and only a single player can climb up to the scaffolding around the ceiling at a time.

Upon pressing the switch and opening the hinge, the lone PC sees a scene of the theater, as if they were looking down at from above. The player hears the spooky music as audience of helpless film goers fall into a vortex along with the rest of the theater. Cue SAN loss.

Worse still, the opening in the ceiling tries to suck the hapless player inside. DC 20 STR check motherfucker or take 1d6 fall damage and get drenched in Cthulhu jizz. The panel mysteriously vanishes afterwards.

The players may also want to check out the basement, because, horror genre. They find a plastered over door and a hidden room with a film projector. The projector plays a movie that depicts a crowd of strange men wearing masks, doing nothing but standing in place. The party also finds a mural depicting the stars, which is a hint to when the BBEG is planning to unleash his terrible ritual. It’s the same day the theater opens. DUN! DUN! DUN!

The investigators can discover that the floor is stained with blood, as well as find skulls and a mythos tome. While it does contain spells, the entire adventure is on a time limit consisting of a few days. I guess it’s intended to be used for the next adventure?

At one point, the projector turns off, but the image it’s projecting remains just long enough for the men in the video to lower their masks before it stops playing (naturally before the PCs can see their faces). Spooky.

Most of the Research and Gather Information DCs are pretty low 10 and 12, for the most part, but a 15 pops up every now and then. The people the party can interview aren’t all that helpful. But one of the volunteers tells them that the only person to see Mary fall was the mysterious Robert.

The players can also interview a crazy old man who belonged to the “Club of Light and Sound”. While this encounter is fun, it doesn’t tell them much.

During the players’ research, the name “Richard Jacobs” will come up several times.

Meeting with him is a DC 15 Gather Information check. He’s the BBEG, but they won’t learn he’s not being honest with them unless they ask him if he was part of the Club of Light and Sound and make a DC 18 Sense Motive check.

Ummm… Good luck? Even if you’ve got a PC who maxed Sense Motive and has an 18 in WIS, you’ve got about a 55% chance to make that check. Likely the odds are even worse.

Fast forward to the opening night of the theater. This is the big climax of the adventure and I was pleasantly surprised the module covered a variety of ways the investigators could stop Richard Jacobs and foil his evil plot.

They acknowledge that the PCs might just beat the guy up and toss him in the trunk of their car. But Sara (the lady who’s in charge of the renovations) is useless, so she won’t help them. But the module points out that the players could fake a fire (or start a real one) to get everyone out of the theater.

If the investigators fail, the vision they saw earlier comes to pass. The theater gets sucked into a vortex by a servitor of Yog-Sothoth with Jacob riding on its film tentacles. Assuming the PCs don’t die, they lose a shit ton of sanity (1d10/1d20). However, they can potentially salvage things by killing Jacob before shit goes completely sideways, which is appreciated.

Even if the party manages to prevent the ritual, unless they deal with the BBEG in a permanent fashion, he’ll just try again.

Interestingly, the investigators actually regain more sanity from stopping the ritual once it starts (1d6) than if they prevented it in the first place (1d4). Neat.

Like I said at the beginning of this chapter, standards for CoC adventures are really low. But I honestly think this is one of the better ones I’ve seen.

If the players take 10, they should make most of the skill checks this module calls for. Even if they utterly fail to figure out who the BBEG is, once the ritual starts, it’s painfully obvious and they can still put a stop it. The only major problem I see is that they might not think to attend to the opening night of the theater if they missed some vital clues.

It’s not impossible or highly improbable for the players to win and there are multiple ways for them solve the scenario. It also doesn’t reinforce the hack n’ slash mindset the way The Haunting or Edge of Darkness do. Save, perhaps, for the fact that if the BBEG survives he’ll keep trying to implement his evil plan.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Little Slices of Death
This level 1 adventure is named after an Edgar Allen Poe quote and is centered around a sleep clinic. This scenario takes heavy inspiration from the Lovecraft story From Beyond. Why is it that whenever sleep clinics pop up in fiction land, bad shit is always going down?

Like the last adventure, Little Slices of Death is meant to be run in modern times, but it does have a sidebar for adapting it to different time periods.

The primary hook to get the players involved is that one of the PCs is suffering from nightmares/sleepwalking. This scenario seems to have been intended to be a follow up to a previous adventure. Not nearly as much care or effort was made to involve the players in the plot as in End of Paradise. Sleep disorders is the only hook we get.

We get some wiki facts about the different stages of sleep and a layout of the sleep clinic. We also get the cast of NPCs and a timeline of events.

The adventure revolves around a doctor at the clinic who created a machine that summons eldritch horrors from another dimension. These creatures are responsible for night terrors and if the experiments don’t stop, mass death will ensue.

The other NPCs are basically just horror extras, meant to die hideously, or act as potential suspects. We’ve got a belligerent researcher whose patient killed his wife during a sleepwalking episode. A lady who will console the PC who’s suffering from nightmares. We’ve also got a few orderlies, a couple patients and a guard who doesn’t get along with the belligerent researcher.

Not much happens on the first night, beyond a patient sleep walking, but this is the first time our mad scientist sees a creature from the beyond. On night 2, a PC starts sleepwalking and the mad scientists sees another night terror monster and screams in fear.

One of the NPCs complains about a purchase that was made (the device that summons the terrors) which the players can look into. Another NPC complains about finding Cthulhu jizz (from the night terrors) and the same NPC as night 1 sleepwalks again.

Day four is officially when shit goes down. An NPC goes missing, having been devoured by the night terrors and the PCs can find bitemarks on a countertop in the clinic. That night, the sleepwalking NPC acts up again and the night terrors begin attacking. They devour at least one NPC and will run amok unless the players turn the machine that’s summoning them off.

The module has a paragraph talking about how the players can spy on the mad scientist and they might spot one of the terrors, especially if they view the footage from the clinic’s security cameras.

Turning the machine off without breaking is a DC 15 Disable Device or DC 20 Repair check. The book does admit it’s easier to just smash the damn thing (it’s got hardness 5 and 10 HP). But if the players try to get out of dodge, the night terrors will just follow them.

The terrors themselves have 13 HP and DR 5/+1. It’s possible the players could gun them down, with some luck and some heavy firepower, but it’s not the best way to approach this adventure.

This scenario is solid, albeit with less potential hooks to involve the PCs than End of Paradise. I do like that the party can solve this adventure without resorting to brutal hack n’ slash, so that’s a definite plus.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Appendix
This is the last chapter in the book and it’s almost entirely dedicated to incorporating the Cthulhu Mythos into your D&D game. I suspect for a lot of people, this is the primary draw to CoC d20. We’re also provided with some information about the reverse; adding D&D monsters into your CoC campaign. That’s an idea with potential, since it bolsters the otherwise somewhat small CoC bestiary and a lot of D&D monsters are Lovecraftian to begin with.

The first segment for Lovecraftian D&D games involves embracing the nihilistic tone of cosmic horror wholesale. Clerics are all insane cultists who worship their mad gods and the world is a dark, bleak place where the forces of darkness are barely held at bay.

I will confess, this is a novel approach that I don’t think I’ve seen before. But I don’t think it’d be all that popular since players come to D&D with a very specific set of expectations and cosmic horror isn’t among them.

The alternative suggestion is to just add the Cthulhu Mythos into D&D and they’re just more monsters for you to kill and take their stuff. I suspect this will be more appealing to most groups than the former idea.

We get some information to convert CoC monsters and spells into D&D. I seriously doubt most D&D players will be interested in these spells, with perhaps the exception of Create Time Gate. It’s a 9th level Sor/Wiz spell that costs 10,000 XP to cast! Holy shit!

We also get some info on incorporating the sanity system into D&D (you don’t want to do this) and we get a list of how much sanity loss various D&D monsters incur. I feel like the sanity system in the SRD will cover these needs just fine.

Next, we get stats for some of the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. Normally, you’d wonder why they bother, but the book explicitly states these statblocks are for use in D&D:

The deities described in the Cthulhu Mythos are beyond mortal kin in the Call of Cthulhu game. They usually need no statistics, for they are beyond such things.

However, in DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, where player characters can cast wish spells and struggle against the powerful dragons, they can make formidable foes, whether as evil gods worshiped by insane clerics or extraordinarily powerful enemies that high-level characters do battle with (or both).

While I disagree with the idea that you shouldn’t bother giving these critters stats, I’m glad they recognize that a party of D&D adventurers might want to beat up Cthulhu and take his stuff.

I also want to point out that CoC d20 statting up the Great Old Ones/Outer Gods is something I see people bitch about a lot, but they never seem to realize that this was done for use in D&D and not CoC.

By the way, if you do use these statblocks for CoC d20, you’re not going to kill them. Ever. Even if you bring in shit from d20 Future, it’s not happening. All of these guys are epic level encounters, with Azathoth being the strongest at CR 50. So, the bitching about how the players in CoC d20 will just kill Cthulhu instead of losing d3 investigators a round are also entirely unfounded.

All of the entities here are also gods, which is odd to me since dudes like Cthulhu and Dagon aren’t supposed to be divine. All of these monsters use the rules from Deities and Demigods, which are pretty goddamn awful. A prime illustration of this is that Cthulhu is a demigod. Under the Deities and Demigods rules, a demigod is a full fledged god, albeit a weak one. Quasi-gods are the ones with “not quite a god but has a spark of divinity.” Fucking, fuckity, fuck!

Let’s go over a couple of these statblocks, shall we?


Cthulhu

Cthulhu is a CR 34 abomination with 882 HP, an AC of 47 and really pathetic melee attacks. If he grapples you, he can drain your ability scores or levels (DC 39 FORT save to negate) and he can cast any spell from the Evil, Death, Destruction and Water domains at will. His best strategy is to act like a high-level Wizard and cast Gate. Once he calls an 80 HD monster, he can sit back eating popcorn with his face tentacles while it beats your ass into the ground.


Hastur

Hastar is CR 37, but he actually has less HP than Cthulhu (600) and worse AC (43). No one could accuse the CR system of making sense. His melee attacks are a lot better, though, d100 + 13 damage. Hastur gets spells from the Chaos, Destruction, Evil and Madness domains. He can also drain d100 sanity points with a touch attack. Hastur also gets all Sorcerer spells and Alter Reality, so good luck fighting him.


Nyarlothotep

Nyarlothotep is CR 45 and has 650 HP and an AC of 32. If I’m not mistaken, he’s got the highest INT score of any D&D or CoC monster, a whopping 75. His melee damage also sucks. Nyarlothotep gets spells from the Chaos, Destruction, Madness, Magic and Trickery domains. You can only kill him for good if you’re actually a god of a higher divine rank. Not that you’ll ever kill him. Because Nyarlothotep can cast any spell as a free action! What the fucking hell?! Reading this strictly RAW means he can cast as many spells in one round as he wants. You die if your DM has the faintest clue what they’re doing.


Cthugha

The Lord of Flame is CR 21, has 513 HP and an AC of 36. The only domain Cthugha gets spells from is Fire. Makes sense, but kind leaves him with limited options. Cthugha also can cast “any spell pertaining to summoning and binding with entities of flame” once per day. I’m sure with enough dumpster diving, you could come up with something badass but of the gods we’ve looked at so far, I think Cthugha is the most takeable.


Amusingly, despite mentioning Y’ Golonac in this chapter, they forget to provide a statblock for him and had to put one in the errata.

The last section of the book is about converting CoC investigators and monsters to d20. I’ve gotten some mileage out of the monster conversion rules, but they leave a lot of blanks that the GM has to fill in. What feats they get, for example, is completely up to the GM.

We get a recommended reading list and that’s the book.


Final Thoughts
Call of Cthulhu d20 is definitely worse than I remember it being. That’s probably because when I first read this book, I had rock bottom expectations whereas this time I was purposely looking for problems.

I do still like the system, despite its flaws, but rereading it did make me realize just how many houserule I used during the one shot I ran.

In the interest of positive criticism, I do have some suggestions for fixing CoC d20 (without rewriting the entire thing from scratch). It’s not all that hard, since you can just steal stuff from other d20 games.

Swap Speak Other Language for Decipher Script and handle languages the same way D&D 3.5 does. Consolidate the skill list. Implement E6 across the board. Maybe steal some content from d20 Modern (the Menace Manual has some interesting monsters).

I know some of you will ask why you would want to even bother fixing CoC d20 and that leads me neatly into my final point.

As flawed as Call of Cthulhu d20 is, I don’t think it’s as bad as the BRP Call of Cthulhu games. People want to play cosmic horror adventures in the early 20th century. But the games that do that are ass.

Of the CoC games that exist, are any of them actually better options than CoC d20? Trail of Cthulhu is the only one I can think of and I know Gumshoe basically boils down to a walking simulator with heavy Magical Tea Party.

I’m painfully aware the best approach would be to use an entirely different system and adapt it for Call of Cthulhu. Or to make your own system from scratch.

But of the actual CoC games we have, is Call of Cthulhu d20 the best we’ve got? I’m honestly curious and if it is, that’s… really sad.

[Username17]

The attitude of Call of Cthulhu fans towards Cthulhu is nothing short of cultic. Like, Cthulhu gets banished when struck in the face with boat. He's real tough, but he's like ordinary kaiju tough. If you can fight dragons, you can probably fight Cthulhu.

There are actual planet sized enemies in the Mythos that you can't meaningfully fight. Azathoth and Ghroth don't need or benefit from having D&D stats because they are literally thousands of miles across and don't meaningfully interact with the d20 simulation. But Cthulhu isn't like that at all. You could just hit him with a big weapon and knock him out. That's the actual story.

It's weird because at this point the Mythos fandom is almost completely operating from fan rantings. It would be like if the Harry Potter fanfiction community had so thoroughly taken over that official works were generally dismissed and sneered at for not having Harry/Ron pairings.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

It's weird because at this point the Mythos fandom is almost completely operating from fan rantings. It would be like if the Harry Potter fanfiction community had so thoroughly taken over that official works were generally dismissed and sneered at for not having Harry/Ron pairings.

It's a mythos not an IP (thanks copyright law for making it pretty much the most modern one in the world) so it's more like if everyone decided that harpies were half woman, half bird creatures (I refuse to forgive Herodotus).

[OgreBattle]

It's weird because at this point the Mythos fandom is almost completely operating from fan rantings. It would be like if the Harry Potter fanfiction community had so thoroughly taken over that official works were generally dismissed and sneered at for not having Harry/Ron pairings.

It's a mythos not an IP (thanks copyright law for making it pretty much the most modern one in the world) so it's more like if everyone decided that harpies were half woman, half bird creatures (I refuse to forgive Herodotus).

Perhaps the same could be said of all religions

[ColorBlindNinja61]

The attitude of Call of Cthulhu fans towards Cthulhu is nothing short of cultic. Like, Cthulhu gets banished when struck in the face with boat. He's real tough, but he's like ordinary kaiju tough. If you can fight dragons, you can probably fight Cthulhu.

Which I find especially odd because (unless I'm very much mistaken) you can just grab a minigun or two and shred Cthulhu's flabby ass in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu.

I guess this is yet another case of them not paying attention to the rules and substituting magical tea party instead.

That absolutely won't work in CoC d20, there Cthulhu really is a horrible DM penis extension that you can't beat. But the Call of Cthulhu fans don't seem to realize that.

[Foxwarrior]

It's weird because at this point the Mythos fandom is almost completely operating from fan rantings. It would be like if the Harry Potter fanfiction community had so thoroughly taken over that official works were generally dismissed and sneered at for not having Harry/Ron pairings.

It's a mythos not an IP (thanks copyright law for making it pretty much the most modern one in the world) so it's more like if everyone decided that harpies were half woman, half bird creatures (I refuse to forgive Herodotus).

Perhaps the same could be said of all religions

Oh, yeah, maybe yachts get the same damage bonus vs divine creatures that iron chariots do.

[Username17]

It's a mythos not an IP (thanks copyright law for making it pretty much the most modern one in the world) so it's more like if everyone decided that harpies were half woman, half bird creatures (I refuse to forgive Herodotus).

Perhaps the same could be said of all religions

Oh, yeah, maybe yachts get the same damage bonus vs divine creatures that iron chariots do.

It's plausible. You might have to call a judge. Maybe nineteen.

-Username17

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Next, I'm thinking of doing an OSSR of either d20's Kingdoms of Kalamar or 3.0's Deities of Demigods. If anyone would be interested in either of those.

[deaddmwalking]

Next, I'm thinking of doing an OSSR of either d20's Kingdoms of Kalamar or 3.0's Deities of Demigods. If anyone would be interested in either of those.

Kingdoms of Kalamar.

I like Knights of the Dinner Table, and I know Kenzer was proud of having an 'official' setting back in the day. My initial impression was it was exactly what every single DMs homebrew looked like.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Next, I'm thinking of doing an OSSR of either d20's Kingdoms of Kalamar or 3.0's Deities of Demigods. If anyone would be interested in either of those.

Kingdoms of Kalamar.

I like Knights of the Dinner Table, and I know Kenzer was proud of having an 'official' setting back in the day. My initial impression was it was exactly what every single DMs homebrew looked like.

If every single DM's homebrew is a low magic setting with an obsession with realism, then that sounds 100% accurate.

EDIT: Hell, I could probably do an entire series on Kingdoms of Kalamar, they made quite a few d20 books for the setting.