Everybody loves Lovecraftian Horror. I also like playing around with various systems. So I just had to give the The Eldritch Hack a going over. And, yes, I’m Dungeoncraft Fan and Patron.

Just like the cover says, it’s a rules lite horror game. But it’s rules light in the most sensible way. It’s very easy to convert adventures into it. Heck, an experienced gamer could do it on the fly. The core system is something most folks are familiar with. Roll a d20 and roll high.

Character generation is super quick. There’s only four stats to roll: Skill, Hit Points, Sanity, and Lore. Yep that’s it. Let’s go over these a bit. There’s no long list of skills instead just choose a profession and when the character does something related to it then add your Skill. Skill ranges from 1 to 6. OK, sure there’s not set of stats like most games and in the scale of things the human range is pretty insignificant. So no need to worry about that. Hit Points? Well, I’m assuming you know what those are and they’ll average about 10 or so for beginning characters. You got to have Sanity if you’re doing Lovecraftian Horror. Since the system uses d20 rolls, Sanity ranges from 4 to 9 for starting characters. And yes they can lose it. (In more ways than one.) And Lore begins at 0. This is that crazy Forbidden Knowledge.

Like I said, converting on the fly shouldn’t be too much a problem. Hit Points and Damage from Weapons match up roughly to the same scale as you’d find in CofC. That gives a whole plethora of adventures that a GM could use for inspiration. Task resolution mechanics using that d20 are going to be more familiar to more players.

So what am I thinking of doing with it? If you’ve followed the blog for a while then you’d know that I’ve been messing around with something along the lines of an Old West Cthulhu Campaign inspired by Down Darker Trails. I’ve also been thinking about the crazy idea of Pirates Vs Cthulhu. While Eldritch Hack is designed for adventures that take place during the first half of the 20th Century, it would take little to no effort to hack into those historical periods. Since it’s d20 based, I could easily keep many of the core concepts and crunch it up just a little bit with something like ICRPG. Who knows? I may just keep it in the family and hack with Deathbringer.

You can grab up Eldritch Hack on DrivethruRPG. And with that. Roll Dice. And unpleasant dreams!