00:00Part 1. What is Call of Cthulhu?
00:04Based on a series of creepypastas by fellow 90s kid H.P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu is the world's second
00:11most popular tabletop RPG.
00:14When people first get into tabletop roleplaying, they always start with Dungeons & Dragons,
00:19and it has to be explained in terms of how it differs from Skyrim,
00:24the closest thing you can be sure someone's already played when they discover D&D.
00:28Likewise, Call of Cthulhu has to be described in terms of how it differs from D&D,
00:35the closest thing you can be sure someone's already played by the time they find out Call of Cthulhu exists.
00:41Part 2. Where does it fit in the wider world of tabletop roleplaying?
00:47Get used to hearing D&D comparisons,
00:49because if you're watching a review of Call of Cthulhu,
00:53then it stands to reason that you too got started with D&D, are starting to get tired of it,
01:00and are looking for a second game to broaden your horizons.
01:04Either that, or you're here for the humor.
01:06In which case, you would be humbly advised to look at this video's view count.
01:13When someone new to the hobby says they want to play D&D, it can mean one of two things.
01:19Either they want to play D&D specifically,
01:23or they want to play a tabletop roleplaying game,
01:27and they're using D&D as a generic label because they don't have the vocabulary to ask for what they
01:34actually want specifically.
01:36But what is D&D specifically?
01:41High magic, high fantasy, high combat, low difficulty,
01:45medieval European but not too medieval European, dungeon crawling adventures.
01:51And the biggest problem in the hobby is that when people go looking for their second game,
01:56they're always met with a deluge of games that change less than half of these attributes,
02:01and even then not by that much.
02:04Games that read more like rules hacks of D&D than entirely new products.
02:10Do we really need another rulebook for
02:14Low magic, high fantasy, high combat, high difficulty,
02:18more medieval European but still not too medieval European dungeon crawling adventures?
02:23Or
02:24High magic, high fantasy, high combat, medium difficulty,
02:28medieval European but maybe not medieval European enough dungeon crawling adventures?
02:34Or
02:35Low magic, high fantasy, high combat, low difficulty,
02:39medieval European but maybe a bit too medieval European
02:43but in a way that's played for laughs dungeon crawling adventures?
02:48Well, technically, no tabletop RPG is truly necessary,
02:53as you can just live completely without entertainment.
02:59Unless you work in the entertainment industry.
03:02In which case, I guess you do really need these to all be separate books.
03:07Because publishing a book brings in money,
03:10while posting a rules hack to your blog doesn't.
03:14But who cares about whether or not you get to eat?
03:19It is a serious problem when newbies get tricked into thinking that high fantasy,
03:26high combat, medieval European dungeon crawling is all we have to offer
03:30and that new games do nothing more than adjusting these parameters.
03:37Now, if you're on your second game, you have come to the right place.
03:42As Call of Cthulhu is
03:44low magic, low fantasy, low combat, high difficulty,
03:50early 20th century, but hopefully not too early 20th century,
03:55cosmic horror detective noir.
03:57It still has the basic structure of a tabletop RPG,
04:01with one game master who calls all the shots
04:04and several players who each control one character,
04:07and it is also about a ragtag crew of heroes who have to save the world.
04:13But this time, the heroes are investigators instead of dedicated warriors.
04:18The danger that the world needs to be saved from
04:20is an inscrutable, all-powerful cosmic force
04:24that doesn't care for human ideas of good and evil,
04:27and, perhaps most importantly,
04:30the world that you're saving is Earth.
04:35Part 3, Product Appraisal.
04:39One of the few commonalities between games is price tag,
04:43with the rule set being split between multiple books
04:46that each cost about 50 US dollars apiece.
04:49Although, these books are better made,
04:52with stitched bindings and built-in fabric bookmarks.
04:55The great production value carries over into the game's various scenarios.
04:59Nearly every adventure published by Chaosium
05:03has in-universe handouts that really get you immersed in the game's world.
05:09Part 4, What are the main mechanics?
05:13Like with Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay of Call of Cthulhu
05:17is more about building a character than actually playing the character.
05:21Although, this game isn't quite as bad of an offender.
05:24You start by assigning your characteristics, which are basically your stats,
05:29then you pick a profession.
05:31Not to be confused with classes,
05:33professions only determine what skills you start with,
05:36but you can put points into skills outside of your profession.
05:40And, most of the professions are not combat-oriented.
05:46Playing a cop or a soldier will help you survive a little longer,
05:49at least until you run into the first bulletproof monster,
05:53or mugger who gets a lucky shot.
05:56Combat in this game is not a power trip,
05:59as most guns do enough damage to kill an investigator in a single hit.
06:04But if your characters have too much life expectancy,
06:08you can increase your character turnover rate by playing a spellcaster,
06:13with the keeper's permission.
06:16Spells have a very high cost in power points,
06:19so if you're gonna cast more than one spell a day,
06:22you'll probably have to spend hit points to cast them,
06:25and every spell is mind-affecting,
06:27having a cost in sanity points as well,
06:30so spending hit points to cast spells will be the least of your problems.
06:35There is a system for character improvement,
06:38but the only things that improve are skills,
06:41and even then, only skills that you've actually used.
06:45And, improving a skill gets harder,
06:48the higher that skill rank is.
06:51Now, I've complained that D&D has one character arc,
06:54of amateur stabby-grabby kid
06:57to immortal god of all things stab and grab,
07:00and Call of Cthulhu also has only one character arc,
07:03but it's a very different arc.
07:05Boy meets goal, boy loses sanity, boy versus cosmos.
07:11And, as much as Call of Cthulhu is harder to play,
07:15it's also harder to run.
07:17The low magic setting, combined with the fact
07:20that magic is pretty much reserved for the bad guys,
07:23means that you can't just fix all your plot holes
07:26by just saying a wizard did it.
07:29Also, the historical setting gives you more chances
07:33to get your historical facts wrong,
07:35and fewer outs if you do.
07:38Though, I wouldn't say it throws you into the deep end,
07:41as the starter set does a great job of easing you in.
07:45It contains three scenarios,
07:48the first of which is a solo adventure,
07:51which is basically a choose-your-own-adventure book
07:54with dice and a character sheet,
07:55then a duet adventure, which is just one GM and one player character,
08:02and then a scenario for two to four investigators.
08:09Like D&D, Call of Cthulhu boasts a wide variety of settings and play styles,
08:15but unlike D&D it actually makes good on that promise.
08:20Settings range from pre-medieval to post-apocalyptic,
08:24and if you ever get tired of the bleak, oppressive atmosphere
08:27that you signed up for when selecting a horror game,
08:31Pulp Cthulhu lets you play larger-than-life investigators
08:35that border on low-power superheroes.
08:39While I prefer Call of Cthulhu over D&D,
08:42I would get tired of it if it took up the mantle of being
08:46the one tabletop RPG that everyone plays,
08:49regardless of genre or scenario,
08:52though it would be better suited to the job.
08:55Part 5. The problem with H.P. Lovecraft
09:00Before I can continue with the review,
09:02I've gotta talk about the book's problematic terminology.
09:08Call of Cthulhu spells out that H.P. stands for
09:12hit points on the character sheet and Howard Phillips
09:15in reference to the author.
09:18This was supposed to be a really easy review to make.
09:21I was planning to just coast by on pretending to conflate
09:25hit points Howard Phillips, Horsepower, Harry Potter, and Hewlett Packard.
09:31But no! Chowseum had to go spell it all out,
09:35and I had to put a non-zero amount of effort into my jokes.
09:40For making me do actual work,
09:43Call of Cthulhu is officially the worst tabletop RPG ever.
09:47Call of Cthulhu? More like...
09:51Balls of...
09:52Cunt...
09:53Poo...
09:56Loo...
10:05All joking aside,
10:07I do need to discuss the unforgivable evil that Lovecraft committed.
10:15Howard Phillips Lovecraft
10:19wrote a self-insert OC.
10:24And also he said the N-word several million times.
10:29Part 6, or are we still on part 5?
10:31Lovecraft Bad, Lovecraft Bad, Lovecraft Bad.
10:36A lot of people have said a lot of things about the topic of Lovecraft's racism.
10:42In fact, pretty much every time I've heard the name Lovecraft invoked since 2012,
10:47it's always been followed with a tangent on just how terrible of a person Lovecraft was.
10:53Well, every time except for this book released in 2015.
10:58It doesn't let him off the hook as a product of his time, but...
11:04It doesn't explicitly say just how bad he was even for his own time, either.
11:10Fate of Cthulhu was at least able to devote most of one page to Lovecraft bashing.
11:15Then again, Lovecraft's racism could be the topic of an hour-long video essay unto itself,
11:21and it already is the topic of several such essays,
11:25so there's nothing left for me to contribute to this topic,
11:29besides mining material for a few more trite jokes.
11:35It turns out, the color out of space wasn't the only color Lovecraft feared.
11:47Lovecraft's creatures are famous for having literally unspeakable names.
11:52And Cthulhu is a little hard to pronounce, too.
12:00Lovecraft certainly knew a lot about living on a placid island of ignorance.
12:09And, okay, this joke is a little off-topic, but...
12:13My favorite feature of this game is that the GM is called the Keeper of Arcane Lore,
12:18or Keeper for short.
12:20So if you run Call of Cthulhu,
12:23you can say in your dating profile that you are objectively a keeper.
12:30Oh, brother, this guy stinks!
12:33Hey, at least I didn't make a joke about the name Paul Fricker.
12:37Or start off this video with a fake-out review of the original short story,
12:43where I pretend not to know the difference between
12:45Call of Cthulhu and THE Call of Cthulhu.
12:50Part 6, or maybe this is Part 7.
12:53Let's make a character!
12:54Now, in the spirit of horror protagonists always choosing the worst possible course of action,
13:01I'm going to show you how to make a pessimized character build for Call of Cthulhu.
13:07Today, we'll be making a nerdy Demoman.
13:11Another speedrun strat is to make a spellcaster,
13:14but it's much harder to ask your keeper for a spell than to just ask for a rare skill.
13:21We'll be using the point-buy system, putting 90 points in intelligence,
13:2590 points in education, and 15 in power.
13:29In this game, intelligence isn't useless like it is in D&D,
13:33it's downright counterproductive.
13:37Every time you see a monster, you have to make a sanity check.
13:40Starting sanity is based on your POW, and
13:44if you lose more than 5 sanity, you have to make an intelligence check.
13:48If you fail the intelligence check, you're fine,
13:51but if you succeed, you go temporarily insane.
13:55With this set of stats, if you see a monster that causes more than 5 sanity loss,
14:00you have an over 75% chance of going insane.
14:07Now for the skills.
14:08For our profession, we're going to choose to be a professor.
14:12It gives you 360 skill points, and lets you put them in pretty much any 4 skills of your choice.
14:20First, max out spot hidden, so you don't miss out on a single cognitohazard.
14:25Then, max out science, chemistry, demolition, and credit,
14:31so your professor always has access to explosives, or at least a way to make them.
14:36Now, if your keeper rolls a 3 on the Bout of Madness table,
14:42your investigator explodes an esprit of violence in the most literal sense.
14:48I should probably disclose right now that I've never gotten a chance to do this at a real table.
14:55My keeper doesn't let me make my own characters for some reason.
15:00Part 7 or 8.
15:03Call of Cthulhu is a great game to get started with,
15:06and the perfect second game to add to your library when you start to get tired of D&D.
15:11It does enough differently to justify being an entire separate system,
15:16but it has enough familiar tropes and anchor points that newbies aren't going to get scared off.
15:22At least not scared off by the rules themselves.
15:24At least not scared off by the rules, but it wasn't easy for us to become a humor,
15:24and in the content-y shell.
15:24at least not scared off by the rules, but mostuta is changed the informationquirfcere.
15:25What do you send to find McDonald's as promised risai synchronizes,
15:25and leave a certain human being?
15:25And not, because they want them to eat,
15:25We're gonna slip.
15:25At least?
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