Tuesday, November 20, 2018

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.324: Black Books - Tomes of the Outer Dark


Black Books: Tomes of the Outer Dark takes the basic frameworkmof the Call f Cthulhu rpg subjects it to an Old School Renaissance reimplementation using classic D&D rules.

Whilst I actually rather like Black Books, there is something oddly hauntological about the game: the OSR has been largely concerned with producing nostalgia-driven retroclone iterations of original D&D - a process driven by the assumption that the older and the simpler the better (at least as far as rpg rules are concerned).

Given that the original Call of Cthulhu rpg rules are only a few years older than D&D, and are pretty much the definition of simple, elegent design, an artefact like Black Books feels like something of a strange, retrofuturistic imagining of what Call of Cthulhu might have been if produced by TSR: the future past of gaming as it never happened.

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