What is CoC?

Call of Cthulhu is a horror role-playing game wherein you, the Investigators, must do battle with/survive horrific entities ripped from the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his fellow authors.

CoC games take place within historical periods, usually the 1890's, the 1920's, or modern day, and can range in atmosphere from survival-horror to pulpy P.I. stories akin to Chinatown or the Maltese Falcon.

Your characters are remarkable in that they are NOT remarkable-they are ordinary folks caught up in alien plots and pitted against foes who typically surpass them in every possible way: sometimes the mere presence of your enemy is enough to send your character reeling into madness.

Emphasis is put on role-playing, puzzle solving, and atmosphere rather than combat in CoC-fights are uncommon, usually, and easily fatal. Monsters, instead, should be considered puzzles to solve or obstacles to circumvent, rather than things which must be shot to death-sometimes its more challenging figuring out HOW to kill something than the actual slaying.

Loftcraftian horror tends to shy away from the traditional tools of horror like haunted castles or vampires and werewolves. Instead it focuses more on a sense of helplessness, isolation, and alien nature. Humans occupy a speck of dust within a cosmos too titanic for us to even comprehend, threatened by creatures who defy our trite concepts of physics, biology, and sanity. We aren't even the first, last, or greastest rulers of this tiny planet.

Lovecraftian characters rarely if ever fully understand what is happening to them, and often go insane if they try. Characters in many of Lovecraft's stories are unable to mentally cope with the extraordinary and almost unreasonable truths they witness or hear. The strain of trying to cope, is too impossible to bear and insanity takes hold.

Although Lovecraftian heroes may occasionally deal a "setback" to malignant forces, their victories are temporary, and they usually pay a price for it. Otherwise, subjects often find themselves completely unable to simply run away, instead driven by some other force to their desperate end.

Other themes include threats from impossibly ancient times, genetic decadence and decay, and a tendency towards alien physiologies and textures (for example, slime and tentacles) rather than more traditional staples of bone, blood, and corpses.