What is clear is that there is an enduring fan-base who enjoy playing the game and will support it despite some of these drawbacks. I have personally been surprised at the consistent number of downloads of my free Call of Cthulhu scenario Sundown set in the Old West (it has been downloaded around 600 times via DriveThruRPG over the last 2 years – not bad considering Sundown is also available for free on the Chaosium website).
2013 has seen a number of interesting developments. Firstly, the
licensed Call of Cthulhu products have continued in leaps and bounds – with
products like “Tales of the Sleepless City” from Miskatonic River Press,
“Island of Ignorance” from Golden Goblin press and the previously mentioned
World War Cthulhu: The Darkest Hour and Achtung! Cthulhu having maintained a high standard of quality.In addition, Chaosium have been pretty active, with a number of new Call of Cthulhu releases including scenario collection “House of R’yleh”, stand-alone scenario “Canis Mysterium” and new setting and scenario collection “Atomic Age Cthulhu”.
The excellent analysis via Yog-Sothoth provided by Dean (from Adelaide) shows that the number of scenarios for Call of Cthulhu published in books has jumped markedly in 2013, reaching a point near the high-water mark of the 1990’s.
More kickstarters have been hinted at, refreshing other old campaigns, Pulp Cthulhu might allow a more heroic style of play, drawing in those turned-off by the purist character path (a downward spiral into insanity), and the new edition should make the game more accessible to players.
It will be interesting to see
if these new products actually result in a spread of Call of Cthulhu,
introducing new players to the game, or if they actually reflect publishers
finding more effective methods of tapping into the existing
fan-base, and leveraging an aging gaming community who now have more disposable
income which they are willing to spend on direct sales. When I look at my local gaming community, there is not a single Call of Cthulhu scenario currently offered in the major local gaming convention in January, nor was there a Call of Cthulhu offering at the Horror Convention in October. Perhaps this will change over time, and perhaps more gamers will be inspired to pull a Call of Cthulhu scenario off the shelf in 2014, and give it a try… or perhaps contemporary gamers expect more than a mere makeover of such a traditional game to fire their imagination and Call of Cthulhu is still dreaming in the dark?
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The big name RPGs tend to have a disproportionately smaller representation across the board in local Cons. D&D, Pathfinder, WoD, CoC, W40K, and even some mid tier games like Savage World are pretty rare.
ReplyDeleteI assume some of this is because they see lots of play time outside of the Con scene and are not exceptionally well suited to the limited time format.
On saying that, CoC probably fares better than comparable big name RPGs on the Con circuit.
Yes, you're right and I think that's an interesting phenomenon. My own hypothesis is that many GMs feel too constrained by the big systems, or have anxiety about being rules-lawyered in public - I know that I would only take a system that I was fully across to a 'con for this reason.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I have played CoC at Kapcon fairly regularly over the years - but I suppose that were it not for EPOCH, I and perhaps Liam might be offering it this year...
Interesting thought. I don't feel that anxiety myself and I have never encountered any issue when running these types of game in a Con or similar format. But I may be an outlier :)
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