ABOUT THE GAME

Trail of Cthulhu is an award-winning tabletop roleplaying game of horror and mystery, powered by the story-forward GUMSHOE system. The revolutionary GUMSHOE rules system, by award-winning designer Robin D. Laws, speeds and streamlines play, ensuring that, as your characters plunge into Stygian subways, infiltrate forbidden libraries, and explore frigid Antarctic labyrinths, they always get the clues they need to move ever onward. Onward … toward their fated confrontation with ancient truths too appalling for the mind to assimilate!

Full-color Trail of Cthulhu corebook contains all the lore and guidance players and gamemasters need to create dauntless Investigators, build forbidding mysteries, and play stories of wonder and terror. Acclaimed game designer and Lovecraft scholar Kenneth Hite remixes the Cthulhu Mythos, providing players with eldritch tomes to sift for blasphemous lore and spells, and with a horde of unnatural monstrosities to battle with such knowledge. Award-winning RPG adventure creator and best-selling fantasy novelist Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan adds a wealth of advice and tools for building your own mysteries and for exciting improvised play.

Eerie art and period book design throughout immerse you in the sepia-tinted world of Lovecraft’s Thirties—a time when the cosmic malignity of the Great Old Ones intermingles with the lowering threats of global totalitarianism.

The Next Titanic Step in Lovecraftian Roleplaying

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of Earth. The time would be easy to know, for the Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves …

First launched in 2008, Trail of Cthulhu pits the investigative GUMSHOE rules against the unknowable and horrific mysteries of the Cthulhu Mythos. The Second Edition is wholly compatible with the original edition and its wealth of award-winning supplements: The Armitage Files, Bookhounds of London, Eternal Lies, Dreamhounds of Paris and many more.

Whether you’re running through a classic adventure or building a new world of terror together, you can play in your choice of styles, each supported by specific rules and tailored advice. The Purist style drives you toward stories of philosophical horror and cosmic dread in Lovecraft’s starkest style, while the Pulp style offers the lurid, desperate action feel of Robert E. Howard and Indiana Jones.

Trail of Cthulhu Second Edition also features:

• Over a dozen compelling Drives help you explain why your character is going into that crypt at night.

• Twenty Occupations provide a wide variety of player character options from FBI agents to hoboes to scientists, which lets your group approach mysteries from many different angles

• Three exciting campaign frames: Delve into the dark corners of the Earth as Miskatonic University academics in the Armitage Inquiry! Play small-town folk suddenly become neighbors with the uncanny Beneath Unknown Skies! Pit your tommy-guns against the Mythos amidst the Shadows Under Chicago!

• Best practices, helpful notes, and guidelines for GUMSHOE gamemasters and players taken from the last two decades of GUMSHOE system releases and actual play experience.

• New angles on the gods and titans of the Cthulhu Mythos help keep your games properly mysterious, and your revelations unexpected!

• Full support, advice, and special rules options for improvised play.

• Scenario seeds and story hooks for Lovecraftian horror and occult adventure all around the world of the 1930s.

• Examples of adventure structure, a guide to mystery construction from clues to pacing, and a vast collection of modular story elements—reliable building blocks from which you can create endless Mythos tales and scenarios.

• Two complete introductory adventures: Stop the Nazis from reaching a primordial artifact in “The Hammer of the Gods” and sift through the ashes of a disastrous seance in “Afterlight”.

A TOP-TIER GAME FROM AWARD-WINNING CREATORS

The first edition of Trail of Cthulhu has been hailed as “masterful” (Megan Robertson, rpg.now) and “a glorious space for interesting roleplaying” (Cynthia Hornbeck, Shut Up & Sit Down), and described as “a lean, beginner-friendly ruleset” (Matt Jarvis, Dicebreaker) and “simply a great RPG” (M.J. Harnish, Wired.com). It received two ENWorld Awards in 2008, for Best Rules and Best Writing, and the Lucca Games Festival in 2010 awarded it Best Roleplaying Game and gave it the Best of Show Award.

Kenneth Hite

A roleplaying game designer and writer, Kenneth has written over a hundred RPG books and wrote the Lovecraft column for the Hugo Award-winning incarnation of Weird Tales magazine. Games to which he has contributed have won 17 gold and 15 silver ENWorld awards, two Golden Geek Awards, and six Origins Awards, including the double-Origins-winning Fifth Edition of Vampire: the Masquerade, for which he was lead designer.

Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan

Gareth’s an author and game designer who’s collaborated with Ken on celebrated campaigns including the Dracula Dossier and the Borellus Connection. He wrote Cthulhu City for the 1st Edition of Trail, co-wrote the 2nd editions of The Esoterrorists, Fear Itself, and Mutant City Blues, as well as a host of other books including Moria for the One Ring, Eyes of the Stone Thief for 13th Age, and the Black Iron Legacy and Lands of the Firstborn novel series.