The hard times of old England
CTHULHU DARK AGES
Designer: Chaosium
Gamers from across the globe can testify that facing down Call of Cthulhu’s eldritch abominations with little more than an old service revolver and a wind-up torch can shake you to your soul. Now imagine doing the same thing, except with an iron dagger in place of a gun and the torch switched out for the flickering light of a burning taper.
This is the world of Cthulhu Dark Ages, which aims to capture all the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s conveniently copyrightfree creations and translate them to the wild woods and dirty streets of 10th century England. The result is something fascinating and eminently readable, though it’s a little tricky to picture the table that will take full advantage of the writers’ obvious love for the real-world history.
In fairness, though, there is rather a lot of this love on display. Huge sections of the rulebook are dedicated to giving both GMs and players a crash-course in living and dying like an Anglo-Saxon, ranging from details about literacy through to a rather lengthy list of period-appropriate popes (and occasional antipopes).
As you might expect, the absence of anything spookier than the threat of excommunication can make the raw history a little dry in places. However, it says a lot about the quality of the writing that even those of us without a burning passion for the period can leaf through the book and almost accidently absorb a smattering of details.
It helps that Lovecraftian horror translates rather well to the dark ages. The idea of ever-present corruption and rot meshes quite neatly into a world so concerned with plagues and crop failures. On top of this, there really is something rather special about taking on tentacled monsters with so few of the meagre advantages held by more modern investigators. There are no convenient university libraries to consult, no rich uncles waiting at the end of a telegraph line and no last-resort sticks of dynamite sitting somewhere in the heroes’ backpacks. Instead you get burning torches, iron blades and whatever knowledge might be sitting in the local monastery.
While it might seem like this would make every game of Cthulhu Dark Ages an exercise in futility and early death, the rules are more-or-less balanced to keep investigations highly dangerous but not suicidal. While you could certainly choose to turn things into a gritty slog where the entire team is laid low by infections every other session, there’s no obligation to run things this way.
As far as the rest of the rules go, it probably says rather a lot that we’ve gotten so far through the review without mentioning them.
The game bases the core of its ruleset around the latest edition of Call of Cthulhu, which has been merrily plodding along with the same framework of simple percentage-based skills for a few decades now. This feeds into a system that’s simple to grasp – roll under the score, and you succeed – but not terribly exciting or particularly tied into the game’s themes.
Of course, few people flock to Lovecraftian horror for the complex or highly honed game systems, but rather for the mysteries, the unsettling air of dread and the setting itself. Here, we run into another potential sticking point with Cthulhu Dark Ages – the possibility that players might struggle to spot the instant appeal of a small village in the Midlands.
This is especially true when it’s so directly contrasted with the opportunities to explore the cocktail parties and jazz clubs so popular in Call of Cthulhu’s default timeframe of the roaring 20s.
Getting the most out of the game still requires a group that genuinely enjoys the historical details of the book, and that can be a rather tricky thing to find.
Tricky, though, isn’t quite the same as impossible. If you can find a group that bonds over their ability to correctly pronounce Æthelflæd you’re onto a real winner. Heck, even if you can’t entire your friends into a multi-year campaign, Cthulhu Dark Ages is still a great book to read through and a wonderful tool for spicing up your more conventional Lovecraftian games.
RICHARD JANSEN-PARKES
WE SAY
Come for the chance to stab abominations with pointy sticks, stay for the loving guide to dark ages England
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… CALL OF CTHULHU
It’s a shade obvious, but outside of history nuts the ideal audience for Cthulhu Dark Ages is the experienced investigator looking for a new twist on all the old Lovecraftian tropes