By Mark Morrison
You were living your life, and one day everything changed.
Maybe it started with a ripple in the South Pacific. Perhaps a wave broke as strange statuary surfaced on an uncharted island. Before you could stop it, a nightmare of wings and tentacles and doom rose from the depths.In other words, you first became aware of Cthulhu. And now, you can’t unknow him.*
Think back to those innocent before times, and ask yourself: how did this happen? Did you call Cthulhu, or did Cthulhu call you?
H.P. Lovecraft crept into my life with a shovel and a canvas sack when I read “Herbert West Reanimator” in the Michael Parry anthology The Rivals of Frankenstein, a collection of stories about monsters and the people that made them. There’s something delightfully gruesome in West’s single-minded pursuit of life beyond death, although the godawful racism in Part 3 of the story (Howard, no) makes it hard to re-read 45 years later; Brian Yuzna’s delightfully unhinged 1985 film Re-Animator is the superior version.**
That paperback anthology might have been both the beginning and end of my Cthulhu call but he just keeps looming at ya, kid. The Cthulhu Mythos lurched in the first edition of Deities & Demigods for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a game I enjoyed tremendously until I discovered RuneQuest and found all the things that were missing. Truth is, I’d barely clocked the Cthulhu Mythos anyway, my AD&D players were too busy choosing Finnish and Norse deities for their rangers and fighters for us to pay any attention to the weird squid-headed god on p.43. Cthulhu wept.
Once I was on the Chaosium wavelength though, the Great Old One finally got me. I loved RuneQuest, and saw that they also published a horror game with the same BRP system. The adventures were like nothing else, with foreboding artwork and unpronounceable titles; in my mind’s eye I can still see the cover of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth on the shelf at Mind Games, with Tom Sullivan’s singular cyclopean city in blues and greens; we weren’t in Hommlet any more, Toto.
The Call of Cthulhu box had an evocative scene of a gambrel-roofed house in a lightning storm, as one investigator with a lantern prepared to go in while the other two tried to talk him out of it. (Tag yourself, I’m “Let’s just take a quick look, it’ll be fine” guy).
I talked myself into needing to own the game.*** I wanted to support my friend’s new game store at the far end of a train line, so I took a long ride along the Melbourne coastline to get it. I still have that same copy of Call of Cthulhu today; I like to think that the Deep Ones watched me travel to and fro from their vantage point in Port Philip Bay, saying “Looks like we got another one, Obed”. (You too can get the classic Call of Cthulhu 1” box set albeit in reprint form, and without the seaside train trip.)
Got it home, read it, caught my breath, read it again, ran it. That’s a story for another time, but running this game has been a major part of my life for over 40 years now and will probably remain so until I finally end up in a morgue, percentile dice still clutched in my cold dead hand, and hopefully without a latter day Herbert West in the vicinity to disturb my eternal slumber. Then again, that’s one way to finally find the time to run Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
The thing is, there’s no escape: I’d called Cthulhu, and as Lovecraft warns in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, do not call up that which you cannot put down. It was too late for me. This was the mid-1980s when Lovecraft was not in print, and a non-zero amount of readers thought that maybe the Necronomicon was actually real. This was forgotten and forbidden stuff. Searchers after horror haunt strange far places and in our case it was second-hand bookshops. Each battered HPL paperback we found a triumphant score, Library Use in real life, bringing new insights into the strange monsters in the rulebook.****
Paperbacks and pulp stories, that’s my origin story; you might have surmised by now that I’m of a certain age. I like to think of myself as a Mediocre Old One. The Cthulhu I called was the one of HP Lovecraft, with all his faults and warts, but calling Cthulhu is a different thing nowadays in astonishingly better ways (e.g. the HBO series Lovecraft Country) and astonishingly, well, different ways: I’m sorry, I just can’t do plushies, there it is. Make them stop. He lives in the ocean, people, the felt is gonna spoil.
Your own personal Cthulhu call might have got you via a meme, or via your so-called friend slash cultist, or a computer game, or wherever else the algorithms of the Mythos found you and plated him up. Once upon a time I scoured for old books; but now I can read “The Lurking Fear” from anywhere on the planet provided I have phone signal. Cthulhu is everywhere and we’ll never be rid of him.
That makes me think why. Why has this curious tale of an improbable entity lodged so deep in our collective imaginings? Mostly because he has a weird name and by the time you’ve replied “Cth- what?” he’s already got you. Maybe because he looks gnarly on a T-shirt. Maybe because your cool friend (slash cultist) asked you to play this strange game with odd-shaped dice and you were hooked. And maybe, and probably, in this day and age it’s nice to imagine worse things than the actual problems we have to contend with in the actual world. I never thought of Cthulhu as cozy, but here we are. A night spent playing games with friends is a way to forget your problems, just as your investigator’s problems are beginning. (Tag yourself, you’re “Um there’s something behind that tombstone”.)
Cthulhu called. He left a message. It cannot be erased. Who’s up for a game?
* I gotta say, it’s weird using he/him pronouns for Cthulhu, who I think exists in dimensions beyond gender. Unlike, say, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young who has serious childcare obligations, or Yog-Sothoth because Wilbur Whately sure resembles him, and of course that undersea power couple Mother Hydra and Father Dagon (#livelaughspawn).
** I laughed myself stupid in Re-Animator when West kills a fellow scholar with a shovel, hissing “Plagiarist!” as he cuts through the neck. I’d love to take that same shovel to Chat GPT.
*** 40 years later I’m still more than capable of doing that when new games catch my eye (it’s not the best superpower I admit but great responsibility yada yada...)
**** To my shame, sorry not sorry, I actually stole my first Lovecraft anthology The Lurking Fear from the Melbourne University D&D Club library. Steal is a big word, let’s just say I never got around to returning it. I seem to have lived with the guilt, as “The Lurking Fear” remains one of my favourite stories, as it’s less racist unless you happen to be from the Netherlands, and has outstanding gore: “and on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face”.
You were living your life, and one day everything changed.
Maybe it started with a ripple in the South Pacific. Perhaps a wave broke as strange statuary surfaced on an uncharted island. Before you could stop it, a nightmare of wings and tentacles and doom rose from the depths.In other words, you first became aware of Cthulhu. And now, you can’t unknow him.*
Think back to those innocent before times, and ask yourself: how did this happen? Did you call Cthulhu, or did Cthulhu call you?
H.P. Lovecraft crept into my life with a shovel and a canvas sack when I read “Herbert West Reanimator” in the Michael Parry anthology The Rivals of Frankenstein, a collection of stories about monsters and the people that made them. There’s something delightfully gruesome in West’s single-minded pursuit of life beyond death, although the godawful racism in Part 3 of the story (Howard, no) makes it hard to re-read 45 years later; Brian Yuzna’s delightfully unhinged 1985 film Re-Animator is the superior version.**
That paperback anthology might have been both the beginning and end of my Cthulhu call but he just keeps looming at ya, kid. The Cthulhu Mythos lurched in the first edition of Deities & Demigods for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a game I enjoyed tremendously until I discovered RuneQuest and found all the things that were missing. Truth is, I’d barely clocked the Cthulhu Mythos anyway, my AD&D players were too busy choosing Finnish and Norse deities for their rangers and fighters for us to pay any attention to the weird squid-headed god on p.43. Cthulhu wept.
Once I was on the Chaosium wavelength though, the Great Old One finally got me. I loved RuneQuest, and saw that they also published a horror game with the same BRP system. The adventures were like nothing else, with foreboding artwork and unpronounceable titles; in my mind’s eye I can still see the cover of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth on the shelf at Mind Games, with Tom Sullivan’s singular cyclopean city in blues and greens; we weren’t in Hommlet any more, Toto.
The Call of Cthulhu box had an evocative scene of a gambrel-roofed house in a lightning storm, as one investigator with a lantern prepared to go in while the other two tried to talk him out of it. (Tag yourself, I’m “Let’s just take a quick look, it’ll be fine” guy).
I talked myself into needing to own the game.*** I wanted to support my friend’s new game store at the far end of a train line, so I took a long ride along the Melbourne coastline to get it. I still have that same copy of Call of Cthulhu today; I like to think that the Deep Ones watched me travel to and fro from their vantage point in Port Philip Bay, saying “Looks like we got another one, Obed”. (You too can get the classic Call of Cthulhu 1” box set albeit in reprint form, and without the seaside train trip.)
Got it home, read it, caught my breath, read it again, ran it. That’s a story for another time, but running this game has been a major part of my life for over 40 years now and will probably remain so until I finally end up in a morgue, percentile dice still clutched in my cold dead hand, and hopefully without a latter day Herbert West in the vicinity to disturb my eternal slumber. Then again, that’s one way to finally find the time to run Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
The thing is, there’s no escape: I’d called Cthulhu, and as Lovecraft warns in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, do not call up that which you cannot put down. It was too late for me. This was the mid-1980s when Lovecraft was not in print, and a non-zero amount of readers thought that maybe the Necronomicon was actually real. This was forgotten and forbidden stuff. Searchers after horror haunt strange far places and in our case it was second-hand bookshops. Each battered HPL paperback we found a triumphant score, Library Use in real life, bringing new insights into the strange monsters in the rulebook.****
Paperbacks and pulp stories, that’s my origin story; you might have surmised by now that I’m of a certain age. I like to think of myself as a Mediocre Old One. The Cthulhu I called was the one of HP Lovecraft, with all his faults and warts, but calling Cthulhu is a different thing nowadays in astonishingly better ways (e.g. the HBO series Lovecraft Country) and astonishingly, well, different ways: I’m sorry, I just can’t do plushies, there it is. Make them stop. He lives in the ocean, people, the felt is gonna spoil.
Your own personal Cthulhu call might have got you via a meme, or via your so-called friend slash cultist, or a computer game, or wherever else the algorithms of the Mythos found you and plated him up. Once upon a time I scoured for old books; but now I can read “The Lurking Fear” from anywhere on the planet provided I have phone signal. Cthulhu is everywhere and we’ll never be rid of him.
That makes me think why. Why has this curious tale of an improbable entity lodged so deep in our collective imaginings? Mostly because he has a weird name and by the time you’ve replied “Cth- what?” he’s already got you. Maybe because he looks gnarly on a T-shirt. Maybe because your cool friend (slash cultist) asked you to play this strange game with odd-shaped dice and you were hooked. And maybe, and probably, in this day and age it’s nice to imagine worse things than the actual problems we have to contend with in the actual world. I never thought of Cthulhu as cozy, but here we are. A night spent playing games with friends is a way to forget your problems, just as your investigator’s problems are beginning. (Tag yourself, you’re “Um there’s something behind that tombstone”.)
Cthulhu called. He left a message. It cannot be erased. Who’s up for a game?
* I gotta say, it’s weird using he/him pronouns for Cthulhu, who I think exists in dimensions beyond gender. Unlike, say, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young who has serious childcare obligations, or Yog-Sothoth because Wilbur Whately sure resembles him, and of course that undersea power couple Mother Hydra and Father Dagon (#livelaughspawn).
** I laughed myself stupid in Re-Animator when West kills a fellow scholar with a shovel, hissing “Plagiarist!” as he cuts through the neck. I’d love to take that same shovel to Chat GPT.
*** 40 years later I’m still more than capable of doing that when new games catch my eye (it’s not the best superpower I admit but great responsibility yada yada...)
**** To my shame, sorry not sorry, I actually stole my first Lovecraft anthology The Lurking Fear from the Melbourne University D&D Club library. Steal is a big word, let’s just say I never got around to returning it. I seem to have lived with the guilt, as “The Lurking Fear” remains one of my favourite stories, as it’s less racist unless you happen to be from the Netherlands, and has outstanding gore: “and on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face”.
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