The Cthulhu Hack Rulebook

At heart, The Cthulhu Hack provides a simple framework of mechanics to support investigative storytelling. A lot of other games have done similar, including the venerable Call of Cthulhu (from Chaosium) and Trail of Cthulhu (from Pelgrane Press), but Cthulhu Hack boils the mechanical crunch right down to two basic mechanics – Saves and Resources.

• When a Threat sets to hamper or hurt your character, you roll to Save yourself
• When you apply yourself to just about anything, you get the result you want but check the measure of your Resources to see if you’ve pushed too far

Both involve throwing one or other of a standard die from a set of polyhedral dice – you’ll need everything from a four-sided through to a twenty-sided. And the players get pretty much all the dice rolling fun – so they’re the instruments of their own doom.

Everything you do in the game that involves a dice roll involves either Threat or Resource, and The Cthulhu Hack uses these in interesting ways.