Trophy? No, Cthulhu!

My friend Liz from Underground Adventures just introduced me to Cthulhu Dark and, in doing so, kinda blew my mind. I've been raving about Trophy Gold, or Trophy in general, for a couple of months (see my shared review on Bones of Contention with Alex and Ram—that we only just published because we're a bit behind). It turns out that Trophy Dark, the original rulebook in the series, was based off of a rules-light Lovecraftian horror game called Cthulhu Dark.

Even better is that Cthulhu Dark seems easier to grasp than Trophy! If you've played Trophy, you know that there are two main kinds of rolls you can make: risk rolls for when your character is... risking their safety or sanity, and hunt rolls for when your character is delving deeper into a mystery. Both start with 1 light die plus another light die if your character is skilled at the task; only for risk rolls, however, do you roll a "dark die" representing the potential risk of your character's action.

Cthulhu Dark, however, just has one kind of roll. One or two light dice, plus a dark die if you risk your character's sanity (NB: in a later edition, apparently, "insanity" is renamed to "insight", which is an interesting and fruitful change). That's all there is to it. There is a quirk in that you roll your insanity die twice: once during task resolution, and then a second time to confirm if your insanity goes down. However, Liz told me, a common house rule is just to treat it like Trophy does.

The hunt token system, which really is Trophy's bread and butter, is also missing from Cthulhu Dark. All you need to do, though, is add it as an outcome to the normal (consolidated) roll on a result of 4+! I see no issue with throwing even more tokens into the mix, especially for how well they abstract the process of investigating a mystery (if you're totally stuck and can't think of what to do next). Tokens feel like monkey enrichment juice and all I want is more.

Some closing thoughts: I've been thinking for a while how fun it would be to play a Cthulhu game, so seeing the relation between Cthulhu Dark and Trophy feels encouraging in that it's like I've been playing Cthulhu all this time! No wonder it was a perfect fit for Nova's adventures focused on horror and social intrigue (check her latest report!). Gus L. introduced me to a term, "masquerade", that encapsulates a lot of this play style as opposed to the location-based "dungeon" play style. To that I say: bring on the masks and let's ball!