Chaosium Call of Cthulhu: Cthulhu Dark Ages RPG

Where the Dark Has Teeth

Before the printing press. Before the scientific method. Before even the comfort of knowing the shape of the world. In the year 950 CE, the darkness beyond the firelight is not merely the absence of light — it is a living, breathing threat. Cthulhu Dark Ages takes Chaosium's legendary investigative horror system and plunges it into the medieval period, where peasants huddle in wattle-and-daub villages, Viking longships haunt the coasts, and the incomprehensible terrors of the Cthulhu Mythos wear the faces of the monsters people already fear. The result is one of the most atmospheric settings in Call of Cthulhu's long history — a world where your investigators are already terrified before the first tentacle appears.

A World Lit Only by Fire

This supplement transplants the core mechanics of Call of Cthulhu — the Basic Role-Playing system, sanity, investigation, and the ever-present sense of human fragility — into the early medieval period. Characters are not gun-toting 1920s antiquarians. They are farmers, monks, warriors, and wandering scholars armed with iron blades, superstition, and faith. The threats they face are equally grounded in the age: Viking raiders pressing inland, outlaws haunting the forest roads, witches working at the edges of villages, and the unquiet dead rising from unconsecrated ground. And beneath all of it, ancient horrors older than Christendom itself, stirring in barrow mounds and drowned places, completely indifferent to the prayers of any god mankind has named.

The supplement adapts occupations, skills, equipment, and the sanity system to the period — a medieval herbalist and a Dark Ages huscarl face the Mythos very differently than a Roaring Twenties professor. The horror here is intimate and communal. There is no university library to retreat to. There is no telegraph. There is only the village, the church, the dark, and whatever is moving in it.

Who This Book Is For

Cthulhu Dark Ages is a supplement — you will need the Call of Cthulhu Core Rulebook to run it. It is written for Keepers (the Call of Cthulhu term for the Game Master) who want to shift their campaigns away from the classic 1920s setting and into something rawer and more primal. Experienced Call of Cthulhu groups looking for a change of era will find an extraordinarily rich sandbox here. If you have ever wanted to run a session where the horror of the Mythos is indistinguishable from the genuine terrors of the medieval world — because to the people living it, there is no difference — this is the book that makes that possible.