Cthuhlu Dark RPG Review

The Cthuhlu mythos and H.P. Lovecraft's work has managed to stay fairly popular, spawning many different products including board games, films and of course role playing games. Most people are familiar with the Call of Cthuhlu RPG but today I am looking at a different take on role playing in a Lovecraftian world, in the form of Cthulhu Dark.

Cthulhu Dark is a rules-light RPG system designed to be used in a lovecraftian universe where the players seek to unravel the mysteries around them and try to discover the location of Ry'leh. It is written by Graham Walmsley and is available for free from his website.  

The downloadable PDF is clearly laid out and makes good use of examples to clarify the rules, not that they need much clarification. It seems this game was designed to be fast paced with a heavy focus on role play and it looks like that is achieved. Everything is determined by a small pool of D6s that the players role and the highest number they roll determines the degree of their success.

Of course, this wouldn't be a Lovecraft game without an insanity score. In Cthulhu Dark your insanity ranges from one to six. One being sane and six being bat-shit crazy. You have to make insanity checks whenever you experience anything potentially too much for you to handle, but you are given the chance to reduce your insanity score by suppressing your memories.

The only problem I have with the game is the failure system. As the rules are, you will always succeed at everything but to a different degree depending on how well you roll, so a low roll will give significantly less information as a high roll when searching for something. But if another player decides that it would be more interesting for you to fail, they can roll an opposing check to make you mess up what you're attempting.

This makes sense in an extremely meta sort of way, but I have a difficult time imagining why anyone would want to do this. Since everyone is working together, anyone failing would hinder the entire group, it may mean the story is more interesting to the player, but surely this breaks the illusion and immersion that role playing creates, by causing a player to come completely out of character in order to cause his team mate to fail. I think that this power should be put in the keepers (GM) hands.

Overall this is a simple and elegant system that should allow for fast-paced games with a lot of role playing - perfect for a Lovecraft game. The simple rules allow for a lot of versatility so you could play this with prewritten scenarios or improvise the entire thing. It could even be played without a GM with the decisions being made in game. If you're looking for a simple and quick game you should definitely check this out.