What is it about Call of Cthulhu that appeals to you as a player and as a designer?
Ross: I was a fan of horror and Lovecraft back in grade school, and I got into RPGs in college. That was about the time Call of Cthulhu came out, and I jumped on it right away. It was very different from the D&D we had been playing, but since nobody else was as much of a horror fan, I didn’t get to play much. I still collected the game material, though, and after a couple of years, I started writing it myself. Eventually I sent some of the stuff I’d written to Chaosium and started corresponding with Sandy Petersen. I met Sandy and the gang at GenCon a few times before I finally got published. Call of Cthulhu really was a different animal among RPGs, and it still is. In most other games, the PCs/investigators are more powerful than normal people, but in Call of Cthulhu, they’re just normal Joes up against these incredible alien forces whose mere presence can destroy a man’s mind. That’s what horror is all about, and that’s why Call of Cthulhu is such a good game. It captures the whole “
