"Call of Cthulhu¿" is a fun fantasy role playing game, set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft. It is distributed by Chaosium, Inc. Like most FRP games, in order to play you need to generate the characters that are used by the players. Normally, this is a complicated and time consuming process that involves selecting a number of skills based on randomly determined attributes. To make matters worse, sometimes the game has a fairly high "mortality" rate, which can make it necessary to generate new characters quite often. Well, now, the Macintosh can aid the "Keeper of Arcane Lore" (the Game Master) in generating and printing characters for Call of Cthulhu. It is assumed that anyone using this program has the game manuals for the Call of Cthulhu game.
CREATING A CHARACTER
When the program is launched, a new character is automatically generated, and given a randomly determined name and residence. He (as of now, only male characters are supported) is defaulted to be an Author by profession, and based on his education, his degree is chosen. If the character has a sufficiently high degree, then a school is also randomly chosen. All of these attributes, as well as the character's choice of weapons and additional languages, can be changed through the selections in the Options menu. The character's attributes are all shown in the "Attributes" window.
PROFESSIONS
Each character can choose a profession. Although originally the program generates each character as an Author, different professions can be chosen by selecting items from the Profession menu.
SKILLS
Based on how smart and well-educated the character is, points are given to distribute among many possible skills. "General Use Points" are given to the character to add ability to skills of the player's choice. "Special Use Points" are given to the character to add ability to skills that are a reflection of the player's chosen profession. You can toggle between Special Use Points and General Use Points with the Points menu. Depending on what profession the character is, certain skills will not be modifiable when working with Special Use Points.
To add points to a given skill, activate the "Skills" window by either clicking on it or using the Windows menu. Clicking on a radio button selects that particular skill for modification. Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the "Skills" window to modify the point total for that particular skill. The title of the radio button, the text near the scroll bar, and the total remaining points are modified to reflect the changes.
First start with Special Use Points and distribute them among the skills that are a function of the character's profession. All characters have a few skills that go with whatever profession they are. The radio buttons that correspond to those skills are framed with a rectangle. Certain types of characters are allowed to choose between several optional skills. The number of optional skills that can be chosen is shown by the small number in the lower left hand corner of the "Skills" window. After the allotted amount of Special Use Points are used up, then select "General Use Points" from the Points menu. All of the possible skills are hilited. Distribute the "General Use Points" as desired.
PRINTING AND SAVING
When the character has been generated, then it can be printed using the Print command in the File menu. The character can be saved to disk in two formats. First, the character can be saved in the native format of the character generator using the Save or Save As╔ commands in the File menu. The Export Text command in the File menu can be used to export an ASCII text version of the character to disk for modification in a text editor or word processor.
OTHER NOTES
Since Call of Cthulhu is meant to be a flexible, open ended game, this character generation program does not do extensive checking for things that aren't quite kosher. This allows the Keeper to generate non-standard characters and non-player characters. Here are a few hints:
1) By exhausting the Special Use Points on a skill, then switching to General Use Points, the Keeper can then reduce that skill, providing more General Use Points. By doing this, you can have good flexibility in skewing a character's skills in a variety of ways.
2) Another way to 'cheat' the program is to switch professions while allocating the points.
3) The Dilletante profession does not have any restrictions on skills that can be chosen, so it can be used as a means to generate non-standard professions.
4) Even though the number of optional skills is shown in the corner of the Skills window, it is up to the Keeper to make sure that this number is enforced.
FUTURE PLANS
Enhancements planned for the future include support for Female characters, choices of whether player characters or non-player characters are generated (PC's are generally more educated so right now the Education attribute is generated by 3d6+3). In the future, the skill choices will reflect the 4th Edition of the Call of Cthulhu handbook (they are based on the 1st Edition right now).
This program is freeware, although it is copyrighted. It can be distributed through a variety of means, as long as this documentation file goes with it. Call of Cthulhu¿ is a registered trademark of Chaosium, Inc., who have granted permission to use the name. It has been tested on a Mac Plus and a Mac II running System 6.0.2. It has been tested under Finder and MultiFinder, and requires a 128K memory allocation. It has not been tested with Switcher. There are no features, aside from MultiFinder compatibility that lie outside the realm of Inside Macintosh Volumes I-III, so it should run on earlier versions of both the hardware and the system software, but I have not tested it. Let me know if there are any problems.
Copyright ⌐ 1989
Send bug reports, suggestions, comments and beer to:
