This weekend a bunch of my childhood friends were getting together back in Jersey in order to play a marathon day/night session of Call of Cthulhu, what is without a doubt the best roleplaying game ever crafted. Based on the short stories and novels of H. P. Lovecraft, CoC casts the players in the role of Lovecraftian protagonists, the hapless investigators who peel back layer after layer of cosmic horror, only to be rewarded with eventual death or insanity (and sometimes both). To its credit, the CoC system doesn't try to even the odds for the "good guys", making it an anomaly in the world of roleplaying games which play to the heroic aspirations of the participants. Combat is deadly and almost always a bad idea, and the most valuable commodities in the game are one's skill rating in the Cthulhu Mythos - which is increased by reading forbidden books - and one's sanity - which is decreased by reading those same accursed texts! In Call of Cthulhu you're just happy to be along for the ride, which is never dull, and therefore you're actually overjoyed when your investigator survives the night without requiring multiple amputations and a mandatory stay in the local mental ward!
Good times. Wish I'd been able to make it down there for the game. I wonder what the body count was?
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