Call Of Cthulhu... in SPAAAACE!

Well, not exactly.

After perusing some of Chaosium's free downloads on their website www.chaosium.com, I realised that a science fiction version of their flagship horror roleplaying would be amazing. If you took the basic Call of Cthulhu system, kept the sanity rules, and added a few skills to represent the sci-fi then you'd be on to a winner. You don't even need to include stats or rules for starships, really, as you could just use all that as window dressing, like an ocean liner or aeroplane in CoC. Like in Cthulhu: Dark Ages you could keep the rules to a basic minimum and flesh out the atmosphere with the rest of the book, making it self contained so that you can use it with the mythos or use your own creations. I was thinking of running a Dark Ages game minus the Cthulhu mythos, and use creatures from the Runequest games. Dark Ages is a wonderfuly simple fantasy roleplaying game, if you want to use it like that.

Anyway, I digress. So, you could keep the Cthulhu mythos if you wanted (that would be proper cool - imagine searching long-abandoned asteroid bases overrun by Mi-Go, or travelling to the other side of the galaxy and finding a Great Old One's ancient, deserted city) but you could also use it for other sci-fi horror/mystery games and do your version of Alien, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Outland.

It's something to consider, for sure. I know we've got Cthulhutech, but in my book Lovecraft, mechs and anime don't mix. Take me back to the dark sci-fi of the late 1970s.