- 🔀 For the August Derleth series of stories, see The Trail of Cthulhu.
Trail of Cthulhu is an investigative tabletop role-playing game designed by Kenneth Hite using the GUMSHOE system designed by Robin D. Laws. It was published by Pelgrane Press in March 2008.
The Trail of Cthulhu roleplaying game uses a rules-light approach where points are spent to obtain clues to the adventure's resolution and for combat. Similarly points are spent to use other skills.
Perhaps its most noteworthy feature is that this game does not provide dogmatic descriptions of Mythos creatures. Instead, it provides a summary of the various versions and interpretations that have been written over the many years since each entity was first created. Rather than using syncretism to try and reconcile the hundreds of iterations of a Mythos creature the different versions are just offered as options that a referee running a game can choose from. This also serves to disarm players with encyclopaedic knowledge of the "settled" versions of the Mythos creatures. This is a radical point of difference from the "monster manual" approach taken by Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG.
Expansions[]
Since its inception, a wealth of supplements for Trail of Cthulhu have been released. These include:
- The Dead White World (2011)
- The Apocalypse Machine (2011)
- Cthulhu Apocalypse (2015)
- Mythos Expeditions (2018)
External links[]
- Review of Trail of Cthulhu at RPG.net