Absolut faszinierend - vor zwei Tagen hat CoC-Erfinder Sandy Peterson auf der Webseite "RPG Geek" eine Eigenrezension zu CoC
geschrieben. Enthält viele tolle Einblicke. Im Rest des OP zitiere ich die vollständige Rezension. Bin gespannt auf Kommentare der CoC-Spieler hier!
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Howdy all! This is Sandy Petersen, author of the
Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. I wasn’t really sure whether to post this here or in the “first edition” section, but eventually decided that more players seem to haunt this area.
I’m not going to try to explain the rules of the game.
Call of Cthulhu is over 30 years old, and has sunk into the collective subconscious of RPGs. Even people who don’t play it know enough to make jokes about it and, frankly, that’s about the biggest praise I can think of. Instead in this article, I am going to discuss the history, design decisions, and position of this strange little game. In other words, like Cotton-Eyed-Joe, where did it come from? Where did it go?
HISTORYI got into
D&D almost immediately after it came out, way back in 1974. Soon my friends and I were hardcore roleplayers. We tried other RPGs too, such as the almost-unplayable
Empire of the Petal Throne, the absolutely-unplayable horrors of FGU (
Chivalry & Sorcery and
Villains & Vigilantes), First edition
Traveller, etc.. In 1978 we encountered first-edition
Runequest and it took our group by storm. Today we would call it the first second-generation RPG. It had pretensions to combat realism, a complete mythic world, and a real magic system! We loved it. At first we played both
D&D and
Runequest, but after about a year D&D play dropped off to nothing, and we were solid Runequesters.
I was such a fan of
Runequest that I wrote to Greg Stafford, the president of Chaosium. Instead of putting me on the FBI stalker list, he encouraged me, and I published some articles and one book of monsters with him. Ultimately I proposed an expansion to
Runequest in which the players could adventure in H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Greg wasn’t interested, because he already had a guy designing a Lovecraft game set in the real world. Ack! This was like the holy grail to me, because I had been a Lovecraft fan since the age of 8, literally. (You can draw your own conclusions about my childhood.) I begged to be allowed in on the project, and then Greg dropped another bombshell - the other guy was dragging his heels, so Greg wanted to drop the whole project in my lap. Excelsior! Greg never even sent me the other person’s notes and writings, so I had to do the whole thing from scratch.
I had previously worked on a game I called American Gothic, which was basically horror set in the modern world. It had not gotten too far along, and used its very own RPG system which was, admittedly, much inferior to Basic Role Playing, which is what Greg demanded. He also demanded that I set the game in the 1920s, which is when Lovecraft wrote the stories.
WHY THE 1920s?To me, Lovecraft was never about the era. His characters used cutting-edge technology, such as submarines, airplanes, and recording devices, and interacted with cutting-edge events, such as the discovery of Pluto, and 20th-century population conflicts and pressures. So the way I saw it, if HPL had lived in 1980, he’d have written about Jimmy Carter (my dream is a 1980 HPL story where we find out it wasn’t a giant swimming *rabbit* after all).
However, the good folks at Chaosium did not respect Lovecraft. Greg’s exact words were "HPL is a terrible writer." That was mild, compared to some other Chaosium opinions. They were okay with having a fan like me design the game, because that way my love for Lovecraft would be in the rules. But on the other hand, the Chaosium folks wanted to enjoy playing the game I was going to design, and they wanted a "hook" to hang their fun onto. They chose the 1920s. In their games, they loved driving old cars, talking about zeppelins, flappers, the Weimar Republic and all that stuff. My own games usually didn’t reference the era at all, except peripherally. Yeah they were in the 1920s too, but they could just as easily have been set anywhere in the 20th century. A haunted house is a haunted house as far as I was concerned.
So
Call of Cthulhu to this day is officially set in the 1920s, and has the big 1920s guidebook, with which I had little to do, except providing some monster stats (like for mummies and wolves and so forth). But that was the Chaosium thing.
SANITY The central driving mechanic of
Call of Cthulhu is Sanity. This stat starts pretty high, then deteriorates over time. Though there are methods of raising it, usually you can tell how long you’ve been playing a particular investigator by how low it’s dropped. Lots of folks have told me how ingenious and revolutionary this concept was, and I’ve seen it adapted to many other games under many different names.
As such I’d like to take full credit for inventing it. But I can’t, alas. The original concept was published in an article for the Sorcerer’s Apprentice magazine, where the authors (whose names are published in other interviews of mine) suggested that the player be given a Willpower stat or some such thing, and if he saw something too scary, he could take a Willpower check, and a bad enough failure could reduce it permanently. Reduce it permanently?! This was what I hung my hat on. I took the fundamental idea, called it Sanity, made it the focus of the game, and instead of, on rare occasions, lowering this stat, I had almost every encounter and event reduce one’s Sanity, till player-characters could become gibbering wrecks, or even turn into GM-controlled monsters.
It worked like a charm. In the very first game I ever ran of
Call of Cthulhu (long before the rules were finished), my players found a book which enabled them to summon up a Foul Thing From Otherwhere (a dimensional shambler) and decided to do so. At the moment they completed the spell, the players suddenly chimed in with comments like "I’m covering my eyes." "Turning my back." "Shielding my view so I don’t see the monster." I had never seen this kind of activity in an RPG before - trying NOT to see the monster? What a concept. You may not credit it, but I had actually not realized that the Sanity stat, as I had written it, would lead to such behavior. To me it was serendipitous; emergent play. But I loved it. The players were actually acting like Lovecraft heroes instead of the mighty-thewed barbarian lunks of
D&D. I knew I was on to something and kept refining the Sanity mechanic, in conjunction with the people at Chaosium, until it reached its current state. One big change was that I had concluded that Sanity should only diminish, and never increase, and the folks at Chaosium thought that was too negative even for a game about Cthulhu. They were right, I feel. And after all, Sanity still trends downwards, so I got my way in the end. If anything it’s more agonizing for the players this way, because they are fooled into thinking they can work their Sanity back up. Ha ha.
THE MONSTERSEarly reviews of the game took issue with my portrayal of the monsters and gods of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Well, at least T.E.D. Klein’s review did.) They wanted mysterious undescribed horrors, but I just wasn’t raised that way. Not after 7 years of
D&D, anyhoo. So I wanted concrete stats and I got them. The biggest problem was that, of course, Lovecraft didn’t specify hardly any of his monsters. They had descriptors instead of names. "Hunting Horrors", "Formless Spawn", that sort of things. My response, pedestrian as it may sound, was to take those descriptors and turn them INTO names, plus adding a few extra monsters for good cheer. (Yes, the Dark Young are totally my invention. Now it can be told.) Turning the gods, like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, into monsters went a little against the grain, but on the other hand, the wholly-materialistic Lovecraft kind of treated them LIKE big monsters. Cthulhu, for instance, isn’t really a god - he’s just a huge alien horror; high priest and ruler of his loathsome race. (And what is he a high priest OF? That’s never said.)
HOW TO PLAY LOVECRAFT Lovecraft is famously unfilmable. If you take the stories literally, he’s almost unplayable too. The Great Race went extinct 70 million years ago - how can you interact with them? Shoggoths are so awful, people go insane just seeing them in dreams. Lovecraft wrote a story about a guy who had sex with a gorilla. WTF!? One of the tasks I was assigned by Chaosium was to write an essay about “How to Play
Call of Cthulhu”, and I put a lot of thought into it. In the end I based it on Lovecraft’s own stories – not the plots, but the way the tales played out. Instead of crashing through the front door of the cultist temple and opening fire, I recommended trying to investigate – the main thrust of the game was actually a mental struggle instead of a physical one. The players are trying to understand what is going on. Knowledge is power. Once they realize what is happening, they can (usually) solve the riddle and save the world, though it usually requires a big boss confrontation at the least.
Really, it’s a very cinematic game. This is in part because I grew up informed by horror films. (I’m a huge horror buff - ask me anything.) Naturally, I picture my game sequences in the form of film scenes, rather than literary ones. So I wrote a game which is, in fact, built around show-stopper images. The dark library looming up in the darkness. The desolate hills. The hideous chanting from underground. It’s all visual and auditory - like a movie.
STRENGTH OUT OF WEAKNESS: WHY WAS CALL OF CTHULHU A SUCCESS?This question can be broken into two parts. First, how did this game, so peculiar and quirky, survive to this day? Second, why did other, often better-produced and more mass-market, horror games, such as
Chill, vanish into the netherworld of forgotten games? (White Wolf is still doing fine, though.) Cthulhu is a bigger meme than Frankenstein today. He sure wasn’t back in 1981, and I credit a lot of his popularity to this game.
Other roleplaying games were about living your dreams. You got to pilot a starship, cast mighty spells, fight dragons. In
Call of Cthulhu, you played a puny pedantic neurotic, plagued by nightmares and horrors beyond human comprehension – it was a nightmare, rather than a dream. Rarely has a game been more out-of-synch with its contemporaries. But oddly enough I think this is the secret of
Call of Cthulhu’s success. It’s contrarian. If you don’t like the heroic subtext of other RPGs, you can be as inferior as you like in CoC. And of course, since you are just a helpless mortal, any success you have is magnified. No one’s impressed when a D&D party kills a werewolf, but when you face off against such a fearsome beast in CoC and survive, it’s a tale worth retelling.
So both people who didn't like the testosterone heroics of other games, and people who just wanted a break, to use their brains instead of their brawn, both gravitated to
Call of Cthulhu. In doing so, another benefit soon became clear - girls liked scary stories, but were not always interested in Conanesque antics, so you could get your girlfriend to play when Cthulhu was running. There were even all-female campaigns here and there around the country. In an era when only male nerds played RPGs, this was not insignificant.
Of course there was a sort of backlash against
Call of Cthulhu. Other horror-based RPGs appeared, trying to "fix" CoC’s perceived flaw by making the heroes mighty again. The problem was, there are lots of venues for you to be mighty, already.
Traveller,
Champions,
D&D, all place you above the common ruck of humanity. When a game like
Chill does so too, who cares?
What about
Vampire the Masquerade, you ask? Well, it plays off on the conventional RPG hero motif. But it also, unlike other horror RPGs, gave you a complete and interesting world, in which much of the game’s emphasis is actually about politics and diplomacy as much as adventuring. So it complements
Call of Cthulhu, rather than being a rival. It’s certainly easy enough to imagine CoC investigators trying to hunt down and destroy the obsessed, fey bloodsuckers of the Masquerade. A crossover game might be interesting, at least as a LARP.
Thema: Sandy Peterson rezensiert sein 'Call of Cthulhu' (Gelesen 1365 mal)
