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Call of Cthulhu
There was a time when I thought that Cthulhu was the greatest RPG ever. The idea of a horror game set in the mythos of Lovecraft is great. But really, CoC does not supply this, and I have fallen into disillusonment in recent years. Much of the rulebook makes the game into AD&D with mythos creatures in place of dragons, firearms in place of magic weapons, and summon/bind spells in place of fireballs. What can be done to remedy this situation? Here are a few points in no particular order.

Not all scenarios need contain supernatural horror: I should say that the best CoC games I've ever run were in a campaign which I wrote called Bob What's Detective Agency. Sadly I only ran two scenarios before circumstances forced us apart, but they were crackers. The curious thing about them was that absolutely nothing supernatural happened in them at all. I'd decided to run a campaign in which the player characters would be members of a private detective agency in Boston in the 1920s. I thought that the players should have a chance to get into their characters and establish inter-character relationships before I threw any mythos horrors at them. It's hard to roleplay people who have established working relationships with each other when in fact you've never played them together before. It's hard to roleplay people reacting to confronting sanity-blasting horrors for the first time, especially if you haven't established the character's personality through previous play. It's doubly hard to do both these things at once.

So I wrote a couple of scenarios which were just straight investigations which PIs would do. In the first, which if memory serves me correctly I titled Psycho Nymphomaniac Deranged Serial Killer Bitch Queen (the clue's in the title) they had to find a rich man's missing niece; they failed, but it was still fun. In the second, The Colombian Connection, the client wanted the PIs to find out if his wife was having an affair. They happily reported back to him, 'No Sir, your wife isn't having an affair, but we have exposed the bootlegging business she was involved in, so she'll be spending the next few years in prison.' The next scenario which I planned to run, but which never happened as the group split up about then, would have had some mythos content. After that I planned to run the campaign with a mix of mythos and non-mythos scenarios. I could see no reason why every job that a detective agency takes should involve the supernatural.

Not all horrors need be from the Cthulhu Mythos: I’ve hardly run a scenario involving mythos creatures from the CoC book in years. When I want horrors for my games, I usually make them up myself. A while ago I ran a 'zombie town' scenario in which the PCs were police detectives in a town beseiged by flesh-eating zombies. These zombies were created by a Being. I could have justified this, in terms of the CoC interpretation of Lovecraft, as a minor Great Old One, but I saw no need to do so.

Having to save mankind every week is so boring: I generally don't like players having to save mankind in scenarios. Instead I prefer a smaller, local horror. Saving the inhabitants of one small town is much more personal. It also comes down to a matter of probability. If there are so many threats to humanity that people are always having to defeat them, you'd expect at least one of them not to be defeated. To have humanity constantly on the brink of being wiped out, constantly being saved by bands of heroic investigators, yet with the great mass of humanity oblivious to all this going on, is silly. I much prefer the idea that although alien intelligences are common in the universe at large, they're rare on earth, and rarely trouble mankind.

The supernatural need not be alien horror: Now many people will denounce my next point as heresy, but I don't necessarily see that the supernatural things in CoC scenarios should be either horrible or mind-destroyingly alien. In my scenario House of the Fathers which was published in People of Innsmouth, the supernatural threat was caused by human spirits which had stayed around on this earthly plane after death due some wierd magic. The local people had built a religion around this. They could go and speak to their departed ancestors, so to them ressurection to eternal life was a tangibly proven reality, not a promise which must be taken on faith. Now these dead people were not evil, were not alien, and were not repulsive. They looked like slightly transparent humans and their motivations were the motivations of normal people. They did have a conflict of interest with outsiders who came to their isolated town, as they needed human sacrifices to fuel their magic and prolong their lifespan indefinitely, but I wouldn't really call them evil, just doing what was practically necessary.

PROBLEMS WITH COC AS IT'S WRITTEN TODAY

I find that the Call of Cthulhu rulebooks, supplements and published scenarios encourage a kind of gaming which I don't like. Here's a list of my objections.

Heroic Investigators and their Rollicking Adventures: The players are encouraged to play people who will investigate the occult when they see it, often in quite a gung-ho way. This is really against the spirit of Lovecraft's work. There are a few such intrepid occult investigators (like Randolph Carter or the narrator of The Lurking Fear), but most of the time people get drawn into something because of some personal involvement (like ancestry in Shadow over Innsmouth and Rats in the Walls or friendship in Pickman's Model and Thing on the Doorstep), or they simply happen to stumble on something, or they dabble with the occult without realising the danger. Then when they glimpse just the slightest fraction of the horror, they run away screaming in terror, or just go mad there and then. But the game encourages people to play characters who go into the breach regardless of the danger to their life or sanity, like brash young officers going over the top in World War 1. I find this extremely unsatisfying to play. I'd rather play people who have a normal person's response to supernatural terror, which would be fear and flight probably.

Another one bites the dust: The game is written on the assumption that there will be a high rate of character loss, through death or insanity. This leads to players not crying when their characters die or go mad, but rather thinking it's a jolly good laugh. Characters are then created as disposable things with little thought put into them, lightly created and lightly lost. They cease to be characters played by the player, and become game-pawns controlled by the player.

Dungeons & Deep Ones: Distressingly often, CoC turns into a game about fighting monsters. Typically, a perfunctory investigation will lead the characters to a ‘dungeon’, where they encounter monsters, kill them, and take their treasure in the form of spell books and magic items.

Player characters with magic: I suspect that when CoC was first conceived, magic was intended purely for cultists, and rules for magic were written giving the spells the effects which they would have in the hands of cultists. But since then there's been a drift toward PCs having magic. This is a big mistake. Spells like Summon/Bind were created to let cultists gain supernatural aid from the beings they worship, but they have been allowed to enter the hands of PCs without any re-thinking of what the spell means.

This is what a Summon/Bind spell means to me: a bunch of cultists of Shub-Niggurath need the services of a dark Young, so they perform the ritual which calls out to Shub. She recognises this as the particular magical call which she has taught to her followers, meaning 'send us some help.' She sends a Dark Young to help them, with instructions to help the cultists. The Dark Young appears, the cultists tell it what they want done, and it does it. Then it goes back where it came from.

Now I would say from this that the Dark Young is not actually bound in the strict sense of the term, but instead that it chooses its own course of action according to its own motivation, which is to serve the cause of its mother Shub-Niggurath. The Young will only obey the summoners if if believes that this helps the Dark Mother. Thus 'binding' means that the summoner persuades the Young that he is a faithful follower of Shub and that the action that he wants done serves Her purpose. Now the Young may assume that anyone who knows the magical call must be a cultist, and lacking knowledge of human society it may be unable to judge for itself what is good or bad for the cause. Thus an investigator could try to deceive a Dark Young into believing that he is a genuine cultist. But such an attempt should carry a risk of failure, and the consequence of failure are the wrath of the Young and of the Mother Herself. For instance, ordering a Dark Young to go and destroy a bunch of Shub-Niggurath worshippers will immediately arouse its suspicion.

In contrast, the CoC rules go in completely the opposite direction. Here’s what they say (CoC 5th Edn p143): Bound, the thing must obey one order by the caster, even to attacking its own kind, after which it is freed and returns whence it came. This means that, once summoned and bound, a Dark Young could be ordered by its summoner destroy another Dark Young, which was faithfully furthering the plans of the Mother, and it would have to obey. This is plainly nothing short of ludicrous. These rules really need changing, and so does the attitude of GMs and writers to the whole idea of PC magic. It should be virtually impossible for anyone who isn't a cultist to learn a Summon/Bind spell, and using it should always involve a risk of the subterfuge being detected, with horrible consequences.

Giving PCs access to a magical arsenal like the spells Shrivelling, Dread Curse of Azathoth, Resurection and Wither Limb is simply madness. Basically these turn the game into a magical firefight, with PCs throwing spells about all over the place. These spells should only be for cultists, to make them a dangerous and frightening enemy.