Achtung! Cthulhu brings you a two-fisted wartime CALL OF CTHULHU roleplaying game setting packed full of fiendish Nazis, terrifying ancient mysteries, legendary war machines, and enough writhing tentacles to fill ten Reichstags!

Three Kings is the first in a series of standalone adventure supplements in the globe-spanning Zero Point campaign for Achtung! Cthulhu written by Sarah Newton. Join a band of heroic soldiers, agents, and partisans behind enemy lines on the eve of World War Two, as they discover the unspeakable horrors of Castle Karlstein in occupied Czechoslovakia!

When I first got this assignment, I was underwhelmed. Why on Earth would I care about guns from a century ago? I’m not the manliest guy in my gaming group. I zone out when people start talking weapons and cars. Tell me you’re shooting at the red convertible with your rifle and I’m good. I know for the Purists out there that is a lot more to it than that, but that’s your game, not mine. I’ll research a little out of love for my gamers, but I’ll be researching the occult side of the horror game quite a bit more.

I mention all of this because this book seemed to be akin to the ultra-horrible World of Darkness: Combat book or some lame D&D PDF for an arrowhead. As much as my ego forbids me to say this, I will: I was wrong about this book.

It is the Age of Cthulhu, and the cold tentacles of primeval madness reach across the globe!

Age of Cthulhu 6: A Dream of Japan is now in stores and at RPGNow.com. A search for a missing socialite leads to the Aokigahara forest at the base of Mount Fuji. Eerily quiet, strangely lifeless, and infinitely desolate, this mysterious forest hosts more suicides than any other location in the world — and, as the investigators will discover, is home to an alien intelligence far beyond our comprehension!

Look for AOC6: A Dream of Japan in your local game store or download at RPGNow.com!

Masks of Nyarlathotep is a masterful campaign by Larry De Tillo with Lynn Willis created for the Call of Cthulhu tabletop role-playing game. In it, the investigators are drawn into a plot to throw open the gates keeping the Great Old Ones at bay, causing the earth to become a nightmare landscape of death, destruction, and mind-shattering horror. Spanning five continents, Masks is an epic adventure of mayhem and supernatural evil that will consume many game-nights of play, and is suitable even for a larger group of investigators. Available again in a revised 4th Edition, it once more rears it’s terrifying, blood-red tentacle to drive us all over the brink.

At last the stars are almost right!

Soon Nyarlathotep’s plans will come to fruition. Then the world will be changed irrevocably — but not quite yet. Pesky human investigators have learned much. Now they must survive long enough to make sense of what they know, and take resolute action.

Masks of Nyarlathotep is a Lovecraftian exercise in horror and mystery. This Call of Cthulhu roleplaying classic is a series of linked adventures forming one long and unforgettable campaign. Horrifying deeds and dangerous sorcery dog those who dare attempt to unravel the fate of the Carlyle Expedition.

Investigator Weapons for Call of Cthulhu in the Classic era is a comprehensive collection of weapons available to stalwart investigators of the Cthulhu Mythos and their crazed cultist opponents.

Investigator Weapons covers handguns, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, melee weapons, explosives, and special ammunition; and gathers together all the spot rules for injury, environmental conditions, and firearms combat in one place, as well as introducing many optional rules for enhanced play.

Investigator Weapons – the essential weapons book for Keepers and players of all editions of Call of Cthulhu.

Investigator Weapons is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

An agreement between Call of Cthulhu impresarios, Chaosium and new development studio Red Wasp Design will see the award winning role-playing game (RPG), Call of Cthulhu, coming to a mobile platform near you. The first title, ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’ is set in the midst of World War One and pits a team of investigators and soldiers against an ancient enemy, older than humanity itself. This eldritch enemy is using the carnage of the great war to build an undead army amidst the battlefields of Europe. The game will be a 3D turn-based strategy/role playing game and will initially launch on iPhone and Android with more platforms to follow. As the game is still in development, release dates and price points are to be announced after the summer. See here for the game’s summary page.

There are many ways to put together a Call of Cthulhu adventure, although so many of them have the same trappings. Our Ladies of Sorrow truly comes from a different place that is part Greco-Roman myth, part psychology (some of the game involves a common psychological condition), and, of course, part Lovecraftian Mythos. It feels so much more like older Cthulhu adventures mainly because it is so ingrained with investigation work. As the author suggests, a small party (3-5) is ideal for this adventure. The story centers around three sisters, be they the Fates, avatars of Nyarlathotep (for keeping with traditional Mythos flavor), or several other well conceived possibilities. This large adventure (154 pages/7 pages are ads) consists of a brief foreward and introduction before jumping into the first of four chapters.

Throughout Cthulhu Week we’ve discussed Mythos tomes in comic books, fiction, movies and more. We’ve even offered up a Campaign Frame for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG and vivisected elements of the Call of Cthulhu RPG as well.

Yet there is another Mythos RPG and game designer Sean Preston is here to tell us about his dark work on the game called Realms of Cthulhu…

Deconstructing Realms of Cthulhu

Hello there. I’m Sean Preston, and I’m a game designer, writer, editor, publisher, and an avid gamer as well. I like to talk and write about games (when not playing them) as much as most of us in this industry, but before we get going let’s have a compact. Since we’ll be talking about Lovecraft, it’s only natural that blood enters the scene, so let’s make it a blood compact. Shall we? My digital blood is being spilled before you, pixel by pixel. I trust you’ll smear some about at some point or other, so the compact is made. What I’ll be talking about is the philosophy of writing Lovecraftian horror for games. I shall not deviate. If I do, I pray the Hounds of Tindalos find a lovely angle from which to spring upon me in the dead of night. As for you, if you enjoy the article, share it about. Fair enough? Good. Now, let’s get started in earnest. The clock is ticking.

Continuing the adventures of Cthulhu Week we have a series of reflections on some of the Call of Cthulhu RPG supplements by reviewer Bill Bodden.

Pay close attention, however, as Bill does sneak in a note about his favorite Trail of Cthulhu adventure as well…

I’ve been a devotee of the Call of Cthulhu RPG for more than 25 years. Along the way there have been some excellent adventures created, and in celebration of Cthulhu Week, I’d like to share a few of my favorites. Hopefully, they’ll intrigue you as they did me, and you’ll consider adding them to your own campaign, or running them as one-off adventures for your gaming group. Be warned that a few small spoilers may be found in what follows…

Kenneth Hite, author of Cthulhu 101 and other Mythos tomes of dark intent brings us a tale of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game from Chaosium.

Enjoy this contribution to Cthulhu Week, but don’t read too deep…we can’t be held responsible for what horrors are left behind…

In Call of Cthulhu, your character explicitly starts no better than any other. There is no leveling up, no percentile strength, no special class skills or feats separating your character from any other citizen of Arkham. Yes, your character may well gain magical powers and travel to exotic destinations, as in other roleplaying games. But such “improvements” come at a cost, at the cost of lowering your irreplaceable Sanity. In Call of Cthulhu, the player knows at the outset that his character, if played long enough, will go insane and die. That’s a very different proposition from hoping that your character will become the vampiric Prince of Pittsburgh or get a Helm of Command at 18th level. Of course if that was all it was, Call of Cthulhu would simply be nihilistic, an exercise in masochistic masturbation. At best, its characters would resemble the decadent aesthetes of Lovecraft’s short story “The Hound,” seeking ever more outré pleasures, or perhaps the shortsighted Tillinghast in “From Beyond,” accepting insanity as the necessary visa for interdimensional tourism. And in many of Lovecraft’s stories, this is the case — Lovecraft was, after all, a nihilist (albeit a gentlemanly nihilist) himself, who considered morality “mere Victorian fiction.” The object of terror, for Lovecraft, is terror.

This book is the second in the series that began with Act I: Digging for a Dead God. The front cover artwork is exactly the same, title aside, being of a large Yellow Sign on a dark, blood spattered background. Instead there is a longer piece of introductory copy on the back cover that delivers the mood to you straight off the bat. “At the turn of the century,” it begins, “In an abandoned hotel / In the dead darkness of winter / Six sit to read a cursed play.” Any Call of Cthulhu pro will, at this stage, be nodding sagely at this point, correctly indentifying the play The King in Yellow, the horrific drama around which many (recent) Call of Cthulhu adventures that focus on Hastur cultists have tapped into. However, in much the same way as the previous Act, the lines between player and character are deliberately blurred.

As the Introduction states, this is a distillation of the core of Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system, the mechanic that has powered many of the company’s best-known games such as Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest. While the full system fills many pages, it is simple enough for the core to be presented fully-playable here, as an introduction or for use with a setting other than the main game lines.

The Introduction continues with an explanation of what role-playing games are all about, particularly useful if you’re using this work as an introduction to this type of game as well as to the BRP system. In describing what role-playing consists of, mention is made of the range of genres and settings you can play in…

I wasn’t overly familiar with the works of John Wick before I picked up the first two Acts of this Curse of the Yellow Sign series (presumably a trilogy), but on the strength of what I’ve read I’m encouraged to seek out more. That’s always a good sign (pun not intended). Since then I’ve noticed that his name has been linked to some other reputable games, such as Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea and, more recently, Houses of the Blooded.

To a certain extent there is much to compare the Curse of the Yellow Sign series with the trilogy of scenarios within the Chaosium monograph Ripples of Carcosa – three scenarios that explore the ‘Hastur Mythos’ over different eras.