The many-tentacled Call of Cthulhu, one of Japan’s most popular RPGs

Ask someone if they’ve ever played a tabletop role-playing game, and their likely answer will be something along the lines of “Oh, like Dungeons & Dragons, right?” But in certain corners of the world, a many-tentacled beast has its tendrils deep in the hearts of tabletop RPGs: Chaosium’s Cthulhu Call.

Call of Cthulhu A role-playing games based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, who is widely credited for the popularization of “cosmic” horror. In Lovecraft’s most memorable works, like The Mountains of Madness And Shadow Over InnsmouthHe suggests that humans are a small part of a vast universe controlled by unknowable entities and gods.

It’s that eerie premise which some players and creators say accounts for its global popularity.

“Cthulhu Call is about these giant, scary cosmic gods and monsters against our puny human beings, but that’s not the whole story, because those puny human beings are actively resisting and fighting, although we all know that they’re doomed anyway,” said Sungil Kim of Dayspring Games.

“But they still stand and when they die, other investigators take over and the fight continues, and I find it very heroic, more so than any space captains or fantasy warriors. That moves me and I think it speaks to a lot of other people too.”

Kim and Narim Park worked together on the licensing process. Cthulhu Call South Korea: Chaosium 2016, 2016. Speaking with Polygon, Kim said that the tabletop role-playing market in Korea isn’t large to begin with, but the Lovecraft-inspired game has quickly dominated it.

“I think almost everyone has played with it at least once,” he told Polygon.

“Our usual sales channel is bookstores, rather than gaming shops, because there aren’t any game shops per se in Korea. These are the [main]Rulebook was once the top-selling book in Korea. It was one of the 100 bestselling books, total, in Korea.”

The data also shows these sales. Cthulhu Call’s Over the past decade, popularity has grown. The second edition of Orr Report was published in 2014. It provides statistics on the tabletop gambling industry, as well as user survey results from Roll20 (a website that supports tabletop gamers) and other support tools. It placed Cthulhu Call in a distant 16th place of its most-played games, well behind the top 10 list that included Dungeons & Dragons, ShadowrunAnd, the most important, Pathfinder.

However, over time, Cthulhu Call slowly crept up the list, breaking into the top 10 2016, then continuing to creep upward before, as the report for early 2018 noted, shooting “up from the eighth most-played game on Roll20 to the fourth.” Cthulhu Call then rocketed into second place, behind the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons in Q2 of 2019, and has subsequently seen big user jumps, like in the report in Q2 of 2021. The same report noted that the horror RPG is gaining popularity worldwide, with huge growth in East Asia in places like Japan and South Korea.

Image: Agatha Suisho

Polygon told Roll20 that 20% Cthulhu CallUsers can play in languages other than English. That’s double the rate of other systems. Cthulhu users play Korean in particular. This is a significant difference from the 1% who use other systems. This popularity can also be seen on DriveThruRPG’s Miskatonic Repository. It hosts community-created content. Cthulhu Call RPG. The majority of popular scenarios on the site are available in other languages, including the three top-ranked scenarios (as of January 25, 2023), which were all in Korean.

That fan creation community is a vital part of the RPG’s success overseas. In Korea, those communities are known as “keomyus.”

“It’s short for community or communication,” Kim says. “It’s about creating characters and playing without any real rules. People who once played that game were called “the people who play it.” Cthulhu CallAnd they continued with the activities that they were doing in the keomyus. It was this precedent that led to the creation of the keomyu Interest in the arts is a common theme among people. Cthulhu CallIt has many aspects Cthulhu Call’s popularity in Japan.”

Japanese translator for tabletop RPGs, who notifies Cthulhu Call’s market supremacy in Japan is Andy Kitkowski, who tweeted a photo in 2019 of store shelvesYou are overwhelmed by Cthulhu CallThe sourcebooks are fan-material. The tweet was even quote-tweeted by Chaosium, a curiosity that Kitkowski couldn’t help but laugh at years later.

“I was like: are you clear that you understand that only 1/30th of that was the official Chaosium stuff?” Kitkowski said in a direct message with Polygon.

“You go to any game store that carries RPGs and there’s the Cthulhu CallBook, consistently in the top 5 weekly and monthly sales. No matter how many years have passed, it’s always there. And you turn to the right and there are three shelves of Cthulhu supplements written by people where not a single penny goes to them or Chaosium.”

He says that in Japan, love of the Cthulhu mythos was primarily spread through a robust fan community sharing “replays” — literally, logs of gaming sessions published as short fiction, often with manga artwork to go with it. Sometimes, the replays become animated, and can even be made into anime, as in “Replays”. Lodoss War Record.

A participant and one such creator of video replays is shown below. Cthulhu CallAgata is the name of the gaming community. She says that “replays” — a word here which stands in for a Japanese term with no literal translation — quickly spread the popularity of Cthulhu CallThe rules are easy to learn and follow. Basic Roleplaying allows the game to be used with any type of content.

“This may sound strange, but non- (or almost non-) horror scenarios seem to be extremely popular now,” Suisho told Polygon via email. “I believe the number of horror-centric Cthulhu Call lovers has increased, too.”

This, in turn, feeds back into the game’s popularity among women in Japan. Because the role-playing rules can be applied to any kind of scenario, it’s often a social or even romantic activity in Japan, with one-on-one sessions between a “keeper” (the person running the game) and a player.

“When I look for players on social media, the male-female ratio is about 1:1,” Suisho said. “I would have no trouble in gathering players for a female-only game, at least when it’s online. I’m not sure about the current offline situation, as I haven’t been to such events for two or three years.”

Kim claims that nearly half of South Korea’s players are women. In fact, attendance to a Dayspring Games convention in 2019 saw over 70% females. Kim attributes some of that gender slant due to a misogynistic attack on Dayspring’s initial crowdfunding campaign to license the Cthulhu Call game. Taking a strong stance against that attack, Kim says, earned the company and the game some respect among Korea’s female gamers.

Japan Cthulhu Call This license was obtained from Chaosium by Kadokawa. It announced in July that it will launch a player support application for the game and disclosed that its cumulative sales of licensed books and scenarios has risen to over 1.1million. That’s a major jump over its previous sales stat from 2019 of 200,000 copies sold, although that figure only covered the main rulebook.

A Japanese translator Cthulhu Callscenario, who goes by the pseudonym Ashinoha, says the game gained popularity in Japan for several reasons. These include an easy-to-learn system, user-created tools and accessories and Kadokawa’s translation and publication efforts. Cthulhu CallThe accumulation and distribution of online scenarios.

“Various RPGs had their videos published on YouTube, but Cthulhu Call’s popularity outstripped the others,” Ashinoha wrote in an email to Polygon.

“Video creators created their own scenarios for their videos and published them online. Neue Cthulhu Call players could immediately play scenarios they had watched and found interesting.”

Alex Guillotte

Ashinoha is a translator The Mummy at Pemberley GrangeAnd There is endless lightThese are two most popular Japanese-language titles in the Miskatonic Repository. Alex Guillotte is the fan-made creator of one of the most beloved Fan-Made Titles. Cthulhu Call scenario about the Miskatonic Repository Viral:, says that Chaosium’s team has been helpful and clear in how people can legally create content and distribute it on their platform.

Guillotte says creators should not copy material from other sources.

“That was sort of what Lovecraft had in mind,” said Guillotte. “He wanted people to not just use what he wrote, but to take his ideas and then expand on them. It is a good idea to have more creativity, particularly if you are trying to take on veterans. Cthulhu Call.”

Viral:It was so popular, Guillotte got emails from people who loved the scenario in Poland and Italy. Another person even wanted to translate the game to Korean.

Hokyung Park claims that he’s translated many English-language texts. Cthulhu Call He has translated the Korean scenarios and is now working on his own pulp-style design, which he created in the 1930s Korea.

“Koreans seem to love the horror genre very much,” Park said in a direct message on Twitter. “As for Cthulhu CallAccording to me, the Korean genre can be divided into two main categories. One is the fan-scenario field, which was greatly influenced by the Japanese scenarios…The other category is based on Chaosium’s official-style scenarios, and it’s what I tend to prefer.”

Dayspring Games

In terms of fan-created content, Dayspring’s Sungil Kim is all for it. He says that because fan creations rely on the base game, it all feeds back into his company’s sales of the core rulebook. He believes that companies should work with fans.

“Collectively, they can provide much more product than we ever could,” said Kim. “If you go to Chaosium’s Miskatonic Repository, there are so many scenarios, and half of them are in Korean. That’s a lot. This level of production is beyond our ability to attain. Fans’ creations are a good thing, I think […] because those fan creations feed back into our core rulebook sales.”

Strong keomyus and communities with video replays, fan scenarios, and strong keomyus have helped to boost the popularity of Cthulhu Call, especially in East Asia — and with certain other RPGs learning the hard way how fans will react negatively to overreach on their communities and creations — Lovecraft’s spawn seems to be here to stay.

Download the A quick start guideFor Cthulhu Call for free on Chaosium’s website.