Tomes of Cthulhu

Bear with me on this one…

Recently I have looked at the Fria Ligan games. I like their mechanics and it satisfies my desire for a rules lite but flavour rich game. In these games there has been one mechanic I didn’t like, momentum in Conan and Darkness points in Coriolis but…

I was walking our dogs earlier and I started day dreaming about a game, for want of a better title, called Terror:Year Zero. It would be the standard Mutant engine but replace these momentum/darkness points with Insanity points and you have yourself a pretty little rules lite Cthulhu game.

The reason I am thinking about Cthulhu is twofold. Over on my own blog we are talking about how to run a Cthulhu game using Rolemaster as a core system. It would be fairly easy to do as the rules are skills based just like the original Chaosium game. What was D100 roll under becomes  d100 + skill. Spacemaster has all the rules for guns and the rules sell as PDFs for just $5 each now.

The second reason is that a friend, who creates RPG supplements sent me a copy of the PDF in the title, Tomes of Cthulhu.

Tomes of Cthulhu

This book details 40 tomes, books or journals for use in a Cthonian(?) game. They come complete with their history and the circumstances of their creation of known, details of the authors, where the book was lost or found and so on. As there are Cthulhu games set in a great many time periods the pdf details not only the origins of the books but the time period between writing and discovery, a hand written journal in 1928 could just be mouldering sheets by 1982. The book also deals with whether books have been copied, the nature of the copies and their locations.

Magic is also covered as some books contain arcane knowledge, the types of spells that could be discovered and the the implications, including madness/insanity.

A sample page is below so you can get a real feel for that this supplement offers.

If you like your Cthulhu gaming then this supplement is definitely worth taking a look at.