Basic Roleplaying: Creatures is out now. It’s a dangerous tome which adds 170 pages of monsters, animals and NPCs to Basic Roleplaying, and therefore to every other Chaosium game built on its fine bones. Our most popular game happens to have a lot to do with bones, mostly digging them up and then trying to put them back down again: we’re talking about Call of Cthulhu.
Call of Cthulhu has no shortage of Mythos monstrosities. Chapter 14 of the Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook is chock full of tentacled monsters and deities, and the Malleus Monstorum is a hefty two-volume set which guarantees that no investigator will ever sleep again. (As an added bonus, at the time of writing this blog post, it’s on sale). So, the literary creations of the Lovecraft Circle and later writers are already well covered in the game, with many pages of monsters created by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E Howard, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and more, not to mention the many original Mythos horrors created over the years by Call of Cthulhu scenario writers.
In the Traditional Horrors section of the Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook, Mike Mason & Paul Fricker write “Games of Call of Cthulhu can be used to tell any kind of horror story—don’t feel restricted to using authentically Lovecraftian adversaries.” There are three pages of classic monsters in the Keeper Rulebook, plus a scary 12-page section of “Monsters from Folklore” in the Malleus Monstorum. But there’s always room for a few more monsters in the attic, or under the bed.
It’s huge fun to occasionally throw in a non-Mythos threat at your investigators; in fact, it’s also possible to run a whole Call of Cthulhu campaign with no Cthulhu at all. I fell in love with the game because as a kid in the 1970s I had the wits scared out of me by the monster-of-the-week TV show Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in which stubborn and irascible newspaperman Carl Kolchak (a fantastic performance by Darren McGavin) would ignore his increasingly apoplectic editor and always look deeper into what really happened with the latest horrible murder in Chicago. It was always a monster, he’d always manage to kill it, but he never got to publish the story. Little Mark had nightmares, but older Mark reckons there’s a fantastic campaign in that.
- The original Creature: science fiction and horror would not be the same without Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein, with the new filmed version from master director and HPL fan Guillermo del Toro out now. If you’d like to turn a similar creature loose in your Call of Cthulhu game, pull up the stats for Flesh Golem and yell “It’s alive!”
- Aliens: if you’d like to run a campaign with suave 1990s FBI investigators in sharp suits, then you might want some extraterrestrials. BRP Creatures has a range of aliens, from UFO-flying Green Aliens to terrifying Alien Xenomorphs.
- Undead: Malleus Monstorum has all your classics, including Ghosts, Mummies, Skeletons, Vampires, and Zombies. They make for bone chilling foes, but your standard movie-watching player already knows how to kill ‘em (“Aim for the head!”). Mix things up with some BRP creatures. Horror and haunt the joint with a Wight or a Wraith. Sometimes cultists are long dead: try statting up your head priest as a Lich. My favourite is the one that will not die: come at the investigators again and again with a Revenant.
- Demons: they may be anathema to Lovecraft, the ultimate atheist, but Demons are compelling foes. It might be better suited to an entirely separate urban fantasy campaign, but letting Hell have its due will make your investigators fear for more than their mortal bodies. BRP Creatures has Greater Demons, Lesser Demons and Imps. And, if you want to bring on the full war between Heaven and Hell, you can find Angels too.
- Make it Mythos: you can of course fold any of these creatures back into the Cthulhu Mythos. Demons could essentially be "other-dimensional beings" - indeed, back in the Dark Ages, anything supernatural was most likely to be called a “demon”. Lovecraft’s story “The Unnamable” features a creature with horns. Are your investigators ready for a Xenomorph of Tindalos?
