Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa Part One

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Regarding tabletop RPG fantasy, we think of Dungeons & Dragons. For players in the know, Traveller covers all the bases for science fiction. The third big genre, horror, is typically associated with Call of Cthulhu. CoC is based, of course, on the cosmic horror writing of H.P. Lovecraft. and was first published in 1981. Since then, it has undergone several iterations and is currently in its 7th edition. The game uses the Basic Roleplaying system. Characters have skills that are ranked via percentages. When you attempt to do something risky, you identify the appropriate skill and roll a d100, trying to roll the same as or under that score to succeed. There are slight variations and more complicated combat rules, but for the most part, you can play BRP games with just the skills and have a fun time.

I have never played Call of Cthulhu, mainly because it intimidated me. If you look at a character sheet, a lot is going on. Compared to the simplistic, almost flowchart nature of a Powered by the Apocalypse playbook, CoC seems overwhelming. Yet, I had heard that two solo-friendly supplements were worth looking at – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation and Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa. This was my first time creating a CoC character, and the Guide to Character Creation did an alright job. It assumes you know some things about the system already, and I had to do a lot of Googling to calculate a few things.

Beyond the numbers, Guide to Character Creation is an incredible means to create intensely unique characters whose lives, until they enter the game, are enough to fill a whole novel. The book has you go through four phases of your life – Origins, Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood. The default assumption is that your character is in their 20s; if you want to be older, you roll for more Adult life events. With Origins, you roll to determine your place & circumstances of birth. Childhood is focused on your family structure & upbringing. Adolescence is where your character can have their first meaningful religious experience. Adulthood is where your formal education culminates & your occupation begins. It sounds deceptively simple.

Rolling on these base tables often sends you flipping through all 150 pages to reach other tables linked to events that happen. Perhaps you were born while your mother was with a cult or in another dimension entirely. As a child, you might have participated in a crime that labels you as a juvenile offender, sending your life down one route. Maybe a war breaks out during this time, and you are faced with the peril of life & death up close. Your teenage years could see your character physically developing early, attracting unwanted attention from adults, or a stranger bumps into you leaving behind a trinket that introduces you to a shadow of our world, or your parents get divorced. As an adult, you could follow in a family member’s footsteps for work, get an advanced degree, or end up homeless and drifting from town to town.

Again, with all these tables, you roll things that will affect your skills and potential occupations and send you to other tables to detail strange events. I can’t imagine any two characters made in this book would be anywhere close to similar. Even without playing a second of Call of Cthulhu, you can have a fun time just creating characters and then making yourself sit down and figure out how these wild events connect to make a single person’s life. I made two characters as of this writing. Below, I’ll share the biography I came up with from my roles, and in our next session, we’ll talk more about the Guide to Carcosa and how that roguelite-style adventure plays out.

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One of Charlie’s earliest memories was of the hand-carved wooden chess set his Aunt Madelyn had put in his bedroom. The apartment was located in a working-class neighborhood of Bangkok. Nothing exceptionally rundown, but neither was it like the glamorous high rises that reached for the heavens. Aunt Madelyn would gently engage little Charlie in simple games with the chess board, focusing on one piece for weeks at a time. The pawns move one or two. The rooks zoom from side to side. The queen can do everything. By the time he was six, she’d signed Charlie up for a local competition. He came in just a few spots from last place, but Aunt Madelyn emphasized that the experience would count. One day, Charlie would never lose again.

(Sports: You become proficient in a sport, though whether you enjoy playing it is up to you.     

Game Playing – chess.)

Unlike the other children he played against, Charlie didn’t attend school. His aunt taught him from home, and when he reached adulthood, he could reflect on how harmful this had been to him. At the time, he couldn’t understand the areas where she had gross deficits of knowledge and how her lack of humility kept her from abdicating a place of authority in the boy’s life. Madelyn would simply make up “facts” to ensure that Charlie always listened to her and no one else. 

He was also unlike all the other children in his neighborhood. He was not Thai; Madelyn told him they were British, from a little town named Portlow, an insignificant fishing village. This was accepted as truth, like so many other lies. As Charlie grew, something in his head kept telling him it was all wrong; these were all lies. Madelyn kept him busy with an increasing number of tournaments, and the boy improved. He didn’t improve enough, though.

Charlie’s only companion most days was Daisy, a labrador retriever. Madelyn would disappear for days, always stocking up on Charlie’s specific meals. He was a plump boy, just his body type, but his aunt was insistent that he was unhealthy. He needed to eat these meals, which she claimed would “reshape” him over time. They were often bland and lacking in color. Even Daisy turned her nose up at them. While Charlie promised Madelyn he wouldn’t leave the apartment while she was gone, a few hours after she left, you could find him briefly sneaking out to buy snacks at the shop below their apartment. He’d rush back to ensure everything was in the same place, hoping Madelyn wouldn’t notice. She never did.

(Family Life – Family pet: You get a pet. Choose or refer to “81-85: A Pet” on Table 15B: Mundane Items to find out what kind of pet – Dog)

Madelyn instructed Charlie in the ways of God’s light, making him pray several times a day. She never told him how to pray; she simply told him he must. So Charlie started speaking in his head to nothing, and then one day, something spoke back. It was a voice like thick fog sliding across the ground, enveloping him. It wasn’t booming or powerful, but something confident and centered. Madelyn insisted that the chess board was not just a game but a kamea – a number grid on which rituals were performed. The players manifested God’s patterns as they played, weaving life further through time. Over time, the voice felt like tiny needles prodding at Charlie, irritating something under his skin; it would eventually grow to enrage him.

(Religion – major world religion, though a minority in your country of birth – Zoroastrianism

Fervor: zealot)

When Charlie was thirteen, he played against Boon-Nam Saetang, a local boy ranked in the top ten nationally. Madelyn had been priming Charlie for this, getting him to focus harder than ever. Then Saetang made a move that sent his opponent spiraling. Charlie’s eyes darted over the board, playing out each scenario in his mind and how Saetang might counter it. The slight noise from the otherwise hushed crowd. The ticking of the chess clock. The infuriating chatter of his own mind. Charlie lunged over the table and attempted to strangle Saetang. That is what Madelyn told him when he came to in the taxi. 

They moved. This time, it was further away from the city, into the rural areas of Thailand. The cracks were already there, and over the following years, Charlie started to scrutinize Aunt Madelyn more than he ever had before. He would think back on exchanges that never sat right with him. He would question and push back when she tried telling him more of her invented stories about the world. He didn’t play in any more tournaments, but chess still dominated his life. Madelyn forced him to play four or more games a day against her. She was good, but Charlie was getting better. The one thing he never knew was why she was so good and why it was so important that her nephew be better.

His angry spells kept happening. Towards a merchant, they were haggling with that Charlie was convinced was trying to rip them off. Charlie thought that another customer at the market was following them. There was the night when he found himself strangling Madelyn on the floor of their rundown house, glass shattered and furniture destroyed. It would have been easy for her to toss her nephew onto the street, but she said she forgave him. She didn’t forget, which is when Charlie discovered she was padlocking him in his bedroom. She lined his window with barbed wire. Charlie was a prisoner. But hadn’t he always been?

Around his sixteenth birthday, Charlie escaped. He forced his anger down into his belly, a roiling hell. It was enough to regain some of Madelyn’s trust and for her to take him to the market. He didn’t bolt right away, looking for the moment. She was distracted in conversation with a farmer. Charlie noticed a straight path open to him through the crowd. He bolted. He went into the jungle and didn’t emerge until the next day, unable to comprehend how he made it through the night unharmed. 

He’d been swiping Bhat from Madelyn’s purse over the last year. Just a few bills at a time. It wouldn’t last him long, but it was enough to get food and a room for a night in the first city he came across. Charlie stowed away on a boat, lightly sleeping in the cargo hold while gripping the handle of a knife he picked up. He was never found. Something in him understood that a force had opened up that path for him in the market, keeping him hidden from the eyes of the ship’s crew. He had no name for this entity but could feel it watching, protecting, guiding him somewhere.

That path eventually led to a tenement in Guangzhou in Southern China. He’d been told by an acquaintance at a seedy alley bar about a “soul seer,” a woman who would look into a person and know their story, even the parts they had no idea of. This was what Charlie needed. He had to know who Madleyn was to him, where his parents were, and why his life was this way. The apartment door opened, and a girl close to Charlie’s age answered. In his broken Mandarin, he asked for the services of the seer who lived there. Without responding, the girl turned around and walked into the dark recesses of the apartment, leaving the door wide open behind her. Charlie followed, closing the door, and found her sitting beside an old blind woman on the floor. 

The girl pulled a sack from a nearby cabinet drawer and handed it to Charlie, who he assumed was her grandmother, at least, likely great-grandmother. The old woman opened the sack and pulled out dozens of wooden stalks. She shuffled them in her hands, stopped, removed one, and placed it to the side. The rest were sorted into two piles, then hands fluttered back and forth. Charlie could barely keep up. He was stunned that someone who appeared so frail could be so agile with their hands. The old woman’s lips moved, but Charlie could barely hear the sound coming from her. The granddaughter was leaning in and began to speak for the seer.

“You grew up a stranger in a place you were not from. A hand that was not your own guided you.”

Charlie nodded.

“Taken from warm arms. In the night. The north. Far north. Lost to them forever.”

“What?” Charlie asked. “Taken? I was taken? You’re talking about my parents?”

(Birthplace: native Russian

Birth events: Stolen from parents shortly after being born. 

Parents: One or more persons not biologically related to you were responsible for your upbringing – a stranger who abducted you at birth (perhaps to raise you as their own; perhaps to utilize you in scientific experiments or occult rituals) – Well-dressed stranger)

The girl looked at Charlie with annoyance and put a finger to her lips. The old woman continued to mutter.

“Sharpened your mind. But also dulled it. Saw you as nothing but a tool.”

Madelyn. They were talking about his aunt. Charlie felt the heat flush in his face.

“Marked. Fated. Death.” Charlie could tell from the tenor of the girl’s voice and how she glanced at him quickly, only to look away as soon as they made eye contact, that something in her grandmother’s message was troubling.

“What does that mean?” he asked. The girl signaled for Charlie to be quiet again. “You know when I will die? How? When?” She looked at him with fury in her eyes. “Goddammit! Tell me!” 

Charlie’s fist came down on the table hard. The sticks scattered into the air, across the table, onto the floor. The old woman let out a pained wail. The girl started shouting at Charlie to get out, get out, get out. He ran from the apartment. It was a downpour outside. He vanished into the rainy haze.

(The Magician: You encounter an individual who calls themselves a Magician. Roll on Table 32K: The Wizard to learn what happens.

Offense: You offend the Wizard in some way and they become an enemy to you. Take Player Handout 9: The Cursed.)

Years spilled by, slipping through his hands. Like whiplash from the restrictive diet Madelyn had him under, Charlie began to gorge himself on sweets & junk. It caused his head to buzz and his body to numb. He’d eat so much he’d pass out. Charlie’s weight had ballooned by the time he was living unregistered in The Hague. He was out of shape and kept to himself. 

Charlie was washing dishes in the back of a seedy restaurant near the city’s edge. He was unregistered; Madleyn had never gotten him a passport. Charlie credited listening to that voice for why he had never been caught in all these years. The voice led him here, where he worked for little pay, but the boss let him sleep in a cot in a supply closet. The rage was tempered most of the time, but an argument with one of the waitresses exploded one night, getting him sacked. 

Charlie had no place to sleep and wandered to Den Haag HS, one of the stations in the city. He sat in the public bathroom, speaking to the voice, which was silent when he needed it the most. 

(Occupational Event – Unemployed – fired for misconduct)

Stepping out, Charlie made his way to the platform that advertised a train to Amsterdam arriving soon. The lights had gone out, Charlie attributed to the windy rain storm blowing through the city. No one else is on the platform except for a figure on a bench wearing a long, tattered trench coat. Charlie leans against a nearby pillar. The figure speaks up in a gravelly voice, “Do we know each other? You look familiar?” They take a drag off a smoldering cigarette; it goes out as a strong wind blows through the station. 

[Choose to be silent]

Charlie feels the lighter in his pocket but doesn’t take it out. A beat. “Well, no matter,” the stranger continues. “I have a message for you.” Charlie feels chills across his skin but remains silent. “Oh well,” says the stranger.

The lights come back on. The stranger is gone. Something else is there, thin with a face covered in nylon. It stands, its body moving unnaturally, contorting just slightly. Its head snaps to Charlie. He notices the serrated knives in each of its hands as it moves toward him.

[Loss of 1 Sanity, choosing to Run]

[Fail Dodge roll, take 2 HP damage]

[Combat roll, Hard success]

Charlie lets the rage return to him and swings a fist at the thing. Does it connect with…flesh? Ribbons? He can’t tell, but the thing dances backward down the train platform, moving down the stairs. Charlie turns back to the public bathroom when it impossibly emerges from around a corner. Charlie swings again. It stumbles back, arms flailing in the air. 

A train pulls up the platform. The door opens, but no one gets off. Charlie leaps on, slamming the “doors close” button. He can’t see the thing as the train begins to move. He finds a seat, an easy task as all of them are empty. The screen on the wall listing destinations shows only one, “Carcosa.” Charlie doesn’t know if that’s a neighborhood outside of Amsterdam, but it will be away from here. He sleeps but doesn’t dream.

Next up: Charlie explores Carcosa