Playing Cthulhu with Fudge Rules

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Introduction

One of the things that I've never liked about Cthulhu was its sanity system; or rather, not the system, but its implementation. For a system that focused much on creating the proper atmosphere for a horror game, the sanity rules were abstract, and focused on number-crunching.

So, after some experimentation, I've come up with an implementation the Sanity rules for Fudge that did exactly the opposite: focus on the descriptive aspects, but give the players and the GM the freedom to interpret the results.

The rules are modelled mostly after the damage system, using the following table:

On any occasion where a PC encounters something that might shake him up (such as pretty much anything out of the Mythos, but sometimes also normal occurrences), roll a Will check against an appropriate Difficulty Level. Normal occurrences would range from Mediocre to Good, the horror projected of creatures of the Mythos can easily go up to Legendary and beyond.

If you make the check, then all is well and good. If you fail it, find out by how much you failed. Look up the Degree by which you failed in the first row, and mark off a box below. If the box is already marked, take the next box to the right until you find one.

Example: Hugo is unfortunate enough to encounter Great Cthulhu himself, who is horrifying beyond belief; a Legendary Will roll is required. Poor Hugo has only Fair Willpower, and rolls a -1, resulting in a mediocre result. This misses the desired result by 5, resulting in a panicked Hugo. The player decides that Hugo has figured out what the better part of valor is, and runs away screaming.

Unfortunately, that arouses Cthulhu's interest, and he snatches Hugo, preparing to swallow him whole. Poor Hugo must make another Legendary Will check, this time with a -2 penalty for already being panicked, and rolls a 0, giving him a Poor result. Having missed the necessary result by a total of six, Hugo's player marks off the Temporarily Insane box, and decides that Hugo's brain has mercifully shut down, having him only babbling incoherently and thankfully unaware of his fate.

General Rules

• A sanity check requires a roll on your Willpower attribute (or whatever you have to denote mental endurance). Missing the required Difficulty Level results in damage to your sanity.
• Mundane events can at most result in a panicked result. Only supernatural events have the potential of evoking insanity (temporary or permanent).
• Results of being Shaken or Scared disappear once the current situation is over.
• Panicked results drop to a Shaken, which disappears after a good night's rest, or something else that gives you the opportunity to recover your sanity. Until then, they take up on of the Shaken boxes. If you run out of them, the box for being Scared goes away, meaning that you still suffer seriously from the long-term effects.
• Temporary Insanity has the same results, except that you have to make another Sanity check. If that one fails, the box is lost permanently, and you acquire an appropriate fault (which should be negotiated with the GM).
• Permanent Insanity remains until cured by appropriate psychological counseling, and even then has automatically the same long-term effects as Temporary Insanity.

The idea is to have a more gradual process than the standard Call of Cthulhu rules. While PCs will go insane over time, as the low-level boxes go away, the entire process tends to be more controlled, and unlikely to provoke extreme results in average situations.

The descriptions for the various effects should not be taken too literally, and it should probably be left mostly to the player to decide what the proper way to roleplay them is. They are more an advisory than a prescriptive mechanic. A panicked PC could just as well stand rooted in place, barely able to do anything, but he could also ineffectually wave a kitchen knife around or try to find a place to hide. Whatever he does, due to being so frightened, he's at -2 to all actions that require some amount of conscious effort.

Sample Characters

Below you will find six sample characters for an 1890 Call of Cthulhu game to be played with Fudge rules.

• Adrienne de la Tour
• Frederick Rowland, MD
• Lady Georgina Wyndham
• Giles Weatherby
• James Morrison
• Lord Philip Wyndham

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