BoLS Prime: ‘Shadows Of Yog-Sothoth’– the Campaign That Invented The Handout
.In the early days of RPGs, one campaign laid the foundation for adventures as we know them today: Call of Cthulhu‘s Shadows of Yog-Sothoth.
Call of Cthulhu turns 40 this year, and we’re taking a look back at some of the biggest impacts the game has had in the world of RPGs. The game’s uniquely fleshy and vulnerable characters deliver the opposite of the power fantasy. And the horror fueled adventures continue to inspire others to this day. Call of Cthulhu has certainly left its mark on gaming.
Part of its legacy springs from the game’s general attitude towards adventurers. No matter how skilled or tough you are, Cthulhu can still show up and it’s going to be bad. And the other part of it is the sheer amount of work to cultivate the atmosphere of horror that the early modules for the game put in.
Take Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, one of the foundations of RPG adventures. Even if you’ve never played this adventure through, you’ve been influenced by it. It all comes down to the the principle of immersion. Take a look.
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was the very first CoC supplement ever published. It did two things extraordinarily well. Both seem fairly straightforward when you hear about it, but again, this is the first system to really pull it off the way that other games wished they could’ve.
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth‘s Roleplay Aids
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth took the idea of Roleplay Aids and ran with it. It refined player handouts to the point that pretty much every game/adventure has them now. You don’t get to be a major player in the industry and not have player handouts.
While D&D might have done it first, Cthulhu did it best. One of the first modules to introduce handouts was S1: The Tomb of Horrors. It had a book of pictures that the DM could show to players.
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, on the other hand, had an eight-page centerfold spread full of information meant to be revealed to the players as they discovered it.
A D&D illustration might contain a description of the statue that players needed to investigate. But Call of Cthulhu wanted to just hand you an actual clue that you could puzzle out.
And recall, this is the first time anyone’s doing anything like this in the industry. Call of Cthulhu set the bar high for player supplements.
Immersive props and the like that folks like Beadle and Grimm develop owe their existence to this one campaign module that struck a chord that resonates to this day. and they keep on running with it.
A few years back there was a Kickstarter for one of the greatest RPG adventures of all time, Masks of Nyarlathotep, and not to reprint it or anything like that, but rather to recreate a “gamer prop set” of all 109 different handouts and props.
Because there’s a huge difference between being told “you find a letter buried in the professor’s desk” and being given the actual letter. And that letter contains information to help you stop the cultists before the full moon in just a few days.
Going back to Yog-Sothoth, the campaign even includes a section where players must trace their route on an island across a blank map. The GM then compares with a master copy that shows what hazards they might encounter across the way.
Players might puzzle out information and then they have to apply it. It appeals not just to characters, but to what the actual players put into the game as they pursue cultists across the globe.
Yog-Sothoth is a Layered Story
That brings us to the other big concept that Shadows of Yog-Sothoth laid the groundwork for.
Cthulhu stories sprawl in unexpected ways across unlikely paths. A package delivered to a small town might lead to a forgotten ruin in a jungle halfway across the world.
Or a mundane disappearance or a murder sparks the investigators to tumble well out of their depth. Suddenly they find themselves in a world that holds nothing but monsters and darkness and death.
This style of revelation is called the “onion skin” system. It’s is meant to convey the investigator’s descent into the world of the mythos. Every layer of reality they know is peeled away. Clues lead not onward, but inward:
The first campaign for Call of Cthulhu, it paved the way for many classics to come and it introduced the concept of the onionskin campaign. This has the investigators stripping away layers of information like the skin of an onion as the players progress through the campaign, revealing more of the evil cult’s plans and coming closer to the heart of the adventure.
In Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, that cult is the Masters of the Silver Twilight, an international organization dedicated to a single aim. Dread Cthulhu sleeps still in the sunken city of R’lyeh yet stirs as the stars converge. Even though the stars are not quite right, the cult believes it can force the premature rise of the city and release the Great old One. The campaign against the cult is broken into seven parts, taking the investigators from Boston to New York, then Scotland, California, Maine, and finally Easter Island and the South Pacific.
Campaigns in Call of Cthulhu followed this model. They refined the ideas included in this campaign, and developed more globe-trotting, secret-laden campaigns.
It kept players feeling like they were chasing down a dark secret. Culminating in Masks of Nyarlathotep, which is worth a read whatever edition of Cthulhu you’re playing.
But whatever the case, modern gaming wouldn’t be remotely close to what it is without Petersen and Call of Cthulhu. It was the game that finally got RPGs to leave behind their Wargame roots. It ushered RPGs into a new genre of game.
You can find some of the best gamemaster and player advice out there in its books. Just be careful. If I’ve learned one thing in my time playing Call of Cthulhu, it’s that reading books gets you killed.
Call of Cthulhu continues to leave its mark on gaming. Have you given it a try?
