When Dice Were Made of Flint #17

It was early 1983 when I discovered the game that would change everything – not just for me, but for the whole tabletop roleplaying industry. That game was Call of Cthulhu.

At the time, I knew little to nothing about the Cthulhu Mythos. I had heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but only in the context of his correspondence with Robert E. Howard, whom I regarded at the time as the only true fantasy. I owned a first printing of Deities & Demigods for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which included an unauthorized section on the Cthulhu Mythos with art by Erol Otus, but that was it. I and my college group were more than happy to keep on bashing dungeons.

When I first saw the flat, white box containing the first edition of Call of Cthulhu, I already had the beginnings of a fairly good RPG collection. Most of them were second-hand, acquired through the small ads in White Dwarf, and I had bought them for reading rather than to play. Call of Cthulhu was the first non-D&D title I bought new, at full price.

And what a price it was! Printed in the United States and imported, it cost about £25 if memory serves, and I barely spent that much on student living in a week. Under normal circumstances the cost would have been prohibitive, but I was already selling AD&D material to White Dwarf and I justified my growing collection to myself as material for future articles. Looked at that way, a new game was an investment rather than an expense.

I had a long-standing interest in horror, having been weaned on Universal and Hammer reruns on television, and here was a horror game. I bought it, I studied it, and I started to write a series of articles on using this game with “proper” horror instead of all these unpronounceable names. Then I started to run it, and everything changed.

At first, my players loved the idea of having access to Tommy guns and dynamite, but they quickly realized that most Mythos entities laughed at such things. Murder hobos didn’t last long in Lovecraft’s world, but the game and its published adventures offered a depth of investigation and NPC interaction that was rare to unknown in D&D, and my long-dormant theatrical inclinations were stirred by the possibilities.

I collected all the early supplements as they came out, and I delved into an extensive set of Lovecraft books published by Ballantine and Del Rey at about that time, with disturbingly gorgeous covers by Michael Whelan. I won’t say I became a huge fan of the Mythos, but I did come to understand it and appreciate its possibilities. One, since my group and I were British college students, was to set our campaign in the age of Jeeves and Wooster, anticipating Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s pastiche “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?” in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by almost 25 years.

That led me to write a few Call of Cthulhu articles for White Dwarf, which led to an invitation to contribute to Games Workshop’s slim 1920s-Britain supplement Green and Pleasant Land in late 1985, which led in turn to a job offer to help develop Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

Against this background, it’s easy to see how the first edition WFRP became the hybrid of AD&D and Call of Cthulhu that it was.