- 🔀 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. The core rulebook 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 simply 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.
Supplements[]
Since its inception, a wealth of supplements for Trail of Cthulhu have been released. These include:
- The Murderer of Thomas Fell (2008)
- Rough Magicks (2009)
- Shadows Over Filmland (2009)
- Arkham Detective Tales (2009, 2010)
- The Armitage Files (2010)
- The Black Drop (2010)
- Bookhounds of London (2010)
- Castle Bravo (2010)
- Not so Quiet (2010)
- The Big Hoodoo (2011)
- The Book of the Smoke (2011)
- The Dead White World (2011)
- The Apocalypse Machine (2011)
- Many Fires (2011)
- The Repairer of Reputations (2011)
- Flying Coffins (2012)
- Hell Fire (2012)
- Out of Time (2012)
- RMS Titanic: The Millionaire's Special (2012)
- Eternal Lies (2013)
- The Book of Ants (2014)
- Dulce et Decorum Est (2014)
- The Final Revelation (2014)
- Cthulhu Apocalypse (2015)
- Dreamhounds of Paris (2015)
- Cthulhu City (2017)
- Out of the Woods (2017)
- Mythos Expeditions (2018)
External links[]
- Review of Trail of Cthulhu at RPG.net