Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation, by Heinrich Moore.

In short: If you as a player make investigators that last longer than a one-shot, or if you as a Keeper make scenarios that emphasise unique NPCs, this is an indispensable resource. Recommended as strongly as possible, seriously, this book is lovely and should be sandwiched between the Keeper Rulebook and the Investigator Handbook in every CoC player and Keeper’s bookcase.

If that’s all the convincing you need, you can find Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation on DriveThruRPG.

In detail:

For players, Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation (henceforth Heinrich’s Guide or the Guide) use is obvious. It makes characters. But as a Keeper, of all the Call of Cthulhu books I have, second only to the Keeper’s Rulebook itself, Heinrich’s Guide is the one I use the most.

Through 156 pages of 140 Tables – and you better like tables because this is ALL tables, short tables, long tables, linked tables, sub tables, sub-sub tables, tables for days, tables for life – the Guide leads a character from birth to adulthood, and through all manner of twists and turns on the way, spitting out a fully formed investigator ready to take on the Mythos, or go insane trying. Over the course of an hour, your investigator will have a detailed family, ancestry, distinguishing features, traits, and beliefs, events from their childhood, adolescence, education, adulthood, and occupation. They’ll likely have an array of acquaintances, each also coloured in with personal features and connections to the investigator, from rivals to lovers.

A few standout acquaintances of my players’ investigators; lover that was both the investigator’s mentor, and their institutionalised patient; A sadistic, wrinkled-faced younger sibling that the investigator none-the-less feels a fraternal need to protect; A down to earth, humble, very short-statured academic that also absolutely hates the investigator and will cause them bodily harm if the opportunity arises; A wizard that saved an investigator’s life.

I believe ‘playing’ through character creation as a group is the ideal way to use the Guide. It’s exciting, and often hilarious, to take turns watching your tablemates roll on the tables and seeing their investigators, your partners, take shape. The handouts are also much more fun to print out and physically pass around (more on handouts later). Also, there are numerous times when further extrapolation can lead to connections between events, or even between investigators, that players and the Keeper can help each other with. Having the Keeper present also helps when events don’t entirely line up with each other, or conflict with the game the Keeper planned.

The Guide does tend to create investigators that already have had fantastic experiences, at times exceeding what your average investigator will experience over the course of an actual CoC scenario (see the video review/guide for my Belgian Dreamlands explorer). Depending on the Keeper, this may break the scenario they had lined up, and so it would be ideal to reroll any particular results as they come up, rather than when the player shows up to the table with a spell-slinging, lightning-gun wielding, sorcerer of an investigator.

This is not at all guaranteed to happen, and most investigators come out somewhere in the middle. Relatively normal, with a couple experiences that could be used as the reasons they become an investigator instead of the normal human that would turn away from the Mythos at the first whiff of it. And some characters will come out the complete opposite, with a fully mundane background, to the point the Keeper might want to let the player reroll some events just to make things more interesting.

For a frequent player, unless you only play one-shots with premade investigators, I would consider Heinrich’s Guide as an equal companion to the Investigator Handbook. And if I had to choose between the two of them… it would be a difficult choice indeed.

As a Keeper, if I need to know something special about creatures and deities I can peek into the Malleus Monstrorum, and if a spell is going to be slung the investigators’ way the Grand Grimoire is on hand. But more than monsters and magic, the most common thing I need references for, beyond the base rules themselves, are NPCs. Whether they be detailed characters central to the story with deep backgrounds and motivations, or briefly met weirdos with a single notable trait to stand out, Heinrich’s Guide can quickly flesh out an NPC.

It’s hard to emphasise how useful it is. With three rolls, an NPC bartender at a speakeasy that would have been described as ‘Uh, um, he’s a… guy named… Bob? And he’s, uh… big?’ becomes Quinn, a morose man with exceptionally smooth skin, who after some conversation is revealed to be exceptionally patriotic. That’s someone the players can latch onto. After a session or two of the players going back to Quinn for local gossip, you might be inclined to flesh him out further, rolling on some background events. Now you know he was indebted to the mob and was coerced to whack someone, got caught but was exonerated, and now he prefers to pay off the debt quietly running a mob speakeasy.

Besides the tables, Heinrich’s Guide also comes with 18 handouts in the form of Player Cards. These cards are earned at various times through various events, and each has some special effect. Some are immediately activated, others you hold on to until a special trigger or you decide to use them, while others can be kept into the actual start of the game. They’re a fantastic idea, and one I’d love to see used more. I do find they work best as physical handouts, as when you simply tell a player they have Handout 15, they tend to forget about it. Harder to forget when you have a black and gold card with a nine-sided star in your hand.

Outside of character creation, the Guide is useful simply as inspiration. Some of the later tables are wild, and even after spending quite some time with the book, I haven’t seen a good number of them (and I refuse to read the book from front to back – that would ruin the surprises!). Reading them can give plenty of ideas for future escapades.

Visually, Heinrich and designer-extraordinaire Alex Guillotte hit this one out of the park. The Guide is a gold standard for Miskatonic Repository titles in layout and design. Well chosen and edited stock art on most pages helps break up the walls of tables, which themselves are laid out cleanly and orderly. You’ll be doing a lot of jumping around between chapters and tables while making a character, and along with the artwork, colour-coded edges of the pages with chapter titles makes it easy to remember where in the book you are. It is a fairly large book though, so it would be worth have a bookmark or two twenty to keep everything marked.

There are two points, maybe three, of not-quite-criticism I have for the Guide, though they’re not really short comings of the book itself, but more my personal preferences that aren’t completely satisfied.

The first is a lack of agency. While many events do give choices to players and placing Characteristic and Skill percentages is often up to the player, and there is nothing stopping players and Keepers from overruling anything the Guide tells you to do, using the Guide as-is generally means rolling and doing what the results tell you. Coming off of the character creation system in Mongoose Traveller 2e, I would have liked opportunities for the players to make more life choices, with rolls deciding if they succeed or fail in those choices. For example, an investigator’s education is decided by a random roll. I would have liked the player to decide what kind of education they’d like to pursue, if any, then make a roll to see if they get into that institution or not, with the following event table being determined based on that success or failure. This can be somewhat averted by the Guide’s suggested method of rolling three times on some or all tables and letting the player choose their preferred result, but this isn’t quite the same.

The second is the reliance on the Quick-Fire Method’s array of Characteristic and Skill percentages. This is the easiest way to do things and makes perfect sense to use, though I would have liked the Guide to give some suggestions on how to use rolled Characteristics or Point Buys (there is a small mention of Point Buy, but not much guidance on how to use it with the rest of the book) and using skill points based off Characteristics depending on occupations. My main group are big fans of full randomisation when making characters, and everyone having the same array of starting numbers is a bit of a put-off. While it wouldn’t be impossible to work more varied numbers in, it would require substantially changing how the Guide works.

One last point, that is not a fault at all and actually more of a mark of quality, is that players and Keepers alike will grow attached to these investigators. Given Call of Cthulhu’s often sudden lethality, it can be a tough pill to swallow when a character you spent an hour crafting and getting to know takes a fatal shotgun blast to the face in their first session. Some groups may decide using some Pulp Cthulhu mechanics are necessary to warrant spending so much time making characters. My group, for example, has adapted the spend all Luck at minimum of 30 rule to save characters from sudden death.

For all the sheer content you get though, these two points barely matter. When Heinrich’s Guide’s unfathomable number of permutations are combined with a player and Keeper’s creativity, we get an infinite amount of investigators and NPCs. If you’re a player heading into a campaign, roll up an investigator (or two or eight, it is a CoC campaign after all), and if you’re a Keeper, give the players some NPCs to get invested in.

This book is worth its weight in dead investigators.

Once again, you can buy Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation from DriveThruRPG in PDF or Print on Demand. I personally suggest getting a physical copy for ease of use, and because running your finger along the tables to find your result is always a joy.

Before you go, though, maybe you would be interested in reading some other scenario reviews? 

MJRRG: Branches of Bone – Cthulhu Dark Ages, A Chill in Abashiri – A 1920s Taisho-Era Japan

Seeds of Terror: Series Overview, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, Endless Light, One Less Grave, Hand of Glory, Tickets Please , Fish in a Barrel

Miskatonic Repository: Dossier 1 – The Maw

Chaosium: Amidst the Ancient Trees, Gateways to Terror Overview, The Necropolis, What’s in the Cellar?, The Dead Boarder

Japonism: Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?

Bibliothek 13: A Cup of Horror, Erich!