I bet you thought I was going to do the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition rules today. Nah. Going to save that for another week, as it warrants multiple posts. Instead, I give you a 7th edition ruleset derivative: Pulp Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is a game about fragile characters. The investigators are meant to solve cases, but they are never supposed to win – eventually, the horrors they face will consume them in mind or body. This is very much rooted in the aesthetics of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction.

One of the things that made Lovecraft’s work so enduring was the fact that he allowed other authors to play with his mythology. In this way, the Cthulhu Mythos grew larger than Lovecraft. There’s all sorts of different Cthulhu Mythos stories because of this, and Pulp Cthulhu is a move to translate some of that variety to roleplaying games.

Pulp Cthulhu is about two-fisted adventurers standing against darkness, inspired by the more action-oriented pulps, particularly those of the 1930s. This was the era of the proto-superhero, of larger than life serial characters like Doc Samson and The Shadow. That’s the sort of characters you play in Pulp Cthulhu.

It is probably a change that makes players of D&D more comfortable. You can punch stuff. You can build machines with weird science. You stand a chance of not getting squished by the first monster you meet. The stakes are still high, but the flavor changes.

In a lot of ways, this is a place Call of Cthulhu has been trying to go for a long time. Masks of Nyarlathotep, the classic CoC campaign, has a lot more in common with Indiana Jones and the The Maltese Falcon than it does with mind-bending eldritch horrors. In this way, Pulp Cthulhu is a game about narrowly thwarting doom at great price, rather than being consumed by it – a theme that has become prevalent in nearly all of our blockbuster pop culture, if you think about.