# Day 22: Cthulhu Unleashed - Christian DeLuca, Ritual Detective tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2026 #game/rpg/cthulhu-unleashed > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2026]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice I'm not thrilled about this, actually. I know I should be. I am a Cthulhu Mythos fan from way back. *[[Call of Cthulhu]]* was the first RPG I ever ran. Horror was my field of expertise for a very long time. Yet, I'm just not excited for today. In fact, I just want to get it out of the way. I had forgotten that this title was tucked into the pile about this point, and possibly for good reason, but I'm as good as my word. ![[Cthulhu Unleashed (cover).jpg|400]] Next up on the chopping block: *[[Cthulhu Unleashed]]*. Now, I know what you're thinking. **"Why is Lex reluctant to do character generation for this game?"** My reason is actually really quite boring, but important. Man, I really hate BRP. Basic Roleplaying is one of my least favorite systems on Earth, right next to classic D&D. Percentile systems are the devil, as I've said more than once before, relatively recently. Yet, BRP is absolutely all about percentile-based systems. I'm looking at the character generation system, and despite the fact that it technically only spans a couple of pages, I know what I'm in for. I've looked at the character sheet. I know where this is going. On top of that, there's something else about *Cthulhu Unleashed* that I find personally irritating, and that's how hard it tries to be cool and trendy. It very much concentrates on **"this is our modern world."** Really, they might as well just say the postmodern world, because they're focused on the digital landscape, on technology as a double-edged sword. As some of the first characters they introduce, there are digital natives, influencers, and streamers. Look, guys, I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but as one of the first inhabitants of the digital world, I've got to say that digital natives, influencers, and streamers aren't going to be the people who are important to potentially revealing the influence of the Cthulhu Mythos and secret societies on the world. Hell, they're probably the last people who would notice. That's just part and parcel of the attitude. It's a bit off-putting for me. While the list of occupations isn't solely focused on that sort of thing, let's be honest, when Content Creator is up there with Urban Explorer, I'm not sure I can take it seriously. Nevertheless, we will continue with all the resolve we can muster. Let's get stuck in. ## Acts of Creation All right, I'm going to need everyone to get out their accounting textbooks because you know we're going to have a bunch of multiplication, addition, and point allocation coming up. Just secure everything and get ready because that's what we're doing now. ### Concept and Background We start off in the classic old school way by conceptualizing our character, considering their occupation, personal history, and what drives them to explore the mysteries of the modern world. In a point allocation system like this, frankly, this is on the wrong end, particularly because in the next step, we generate attributes, which are pretty widely variant and may have absolutely no relevance to what we want to do. If you're going to stick me with random allocation later, don't let me make decisions at this point which could fly in the face of it. Regardless. We might as well sketch in the basics. - **Name:** Christian deLuca - **Occupation:** Police Officer - **Personal History / Motivation:** Beat cop in an urban area who stumbled into a crime scene left by a cult and slowly got sucked into being a detective with a specialization. I think this is broad enough to work with. I looked ahead to the next page to see the list of occupations and picked something that I thought would be interesting. There are more occupations listed in Appendix 1 of the book, not that it actually refers you specifically to the page number. We'll deal with that in a minute. (Not going to lie, it was kind of tempting to take Cultist as an occupation just to keep to the theme that we've been going with on a regular basis, but I'm going to let it slide this time.) ### Attributes We meet again, my old nemesis, attributes and BRP. We're instructed to assign attributes, but in truth, we roll a bunch of dice and do a bunch of math. I will try not to make this tedious for you, because God knows one of us should escape freed. | Attribute | Value | | ------------ | ----: | | STRength | 40 | | CONstitution | 70 | | SIZe | 70 | | DEXterity | 50 | | APPearance | 70 | | INTelligence | 70 | | POWer | 40 | | EDUcation | 50 | That was a lot more annoying for me than it was for you, because as an example, intelligence is calculated by `(2d6 + 6) * 5`. Pretty much everything on the table is multiplied by five, which always comes out as a multiple of five, obviously enough. This makes you immediately wonder why they bothered going with a percentile-based system rather than a d20-based system and making it simple for everyone involved. After all, one of the literal entries on the character sheet is for one-fifth of whatever the percentile value is, and that would be what you would need to roll on a d20. Because human beings, that's why. Ironically, looking at our actual stats, we're at least relatively healthy, a little bit burly, and both surprisingly good looking and smart for a cop. This could be worse. I'm surprised it wasn't. ### Occupation Next up, we choose an occupation and relevant skills. We're instructed not to hesitate to reflavor. We've already grabbed one off the list, so now it's just a matter of looking at what that entails. Oh boy. ![[22 - Cthulhu Unleashed - Police Officer (table).webp]] You know you're in for a good time when your credit rating is a percentile and has an inbuilt cap. God forbid I wanted to be a dirty cop on the take. There'd be little point with this kind of money stuck back. You guys know how much I love filling out fiddly skill systems? Well, here we go again. First, we better figure out what our occupation skill point allocation is. - **Occupation Skill Points:** 280 Oh boy, 280 points to allocate. Or if we stick to the five-point increments, that means effectively 56 increments of skill points to allocate. Of course, some of these skills have starting values, which we don't have to pay for. I'll tell you what, I'm going to go off and deal with this tediousness, flipping back and forth through the skill sheets and figuring this out. But while I do that, I would like to point out that this is actually the cut-down, simplified version of BRP, not the full version that you would find in *Call of Cthulhu*. Oh, a side note as I do this: there is no list of skills actually in the text of the book itself, nor are the starting values or descriptions of the skills listed there. The only place you'll find them is on the character sheet, you know, just to make it easier when you're creating your character.[^1] Also notable is that despite literally being called out in the text of the book as one of the skills with a starting value, Persuade isn't even found on the character sheet. Judging from the subtle misalignment of the pilot skill, I suspect it was actually in that column at one point and somehow got removed, not noticed, and a blank slot put in at the bottom. Here is the Markdown version of the skills table from your spreadsheet: | Skill | Starting Value | Ranks | Value | | ---------- | -------------: | -----: | ------: | | Law | 5 | 5 | 30 | | Firearms | 0 | 7 | 35 | | Search | 25 | 8 | 65 | | Persuade | 0 | 7 | 35 | | Psychology | 10 | 5 | 35 | | First Aid | 30 | 7 | 65 | | Drive Auto | 20 | 8 | 60 | | Intimidate | 15 | 9 | 60 | | **Total** | **105** | **56** | **280** | I think it's worth pointing out that this could have been a lot more annoying than it turned out to be purely because of the Gemini AI integration into Google Sheets. I created a bare table with just the starting values in it and cut and pasted it into the chat with a sheet, told it to make a table to insert into the sheet, set up the calculations, which are pretty much second nature to anyone who's ever worked with spreadsheets before. When I was done, I told it to convert it back into a markdown table. The actual computations I simply did by juggling ranks rather than trying to keep up with odd numbers of skill point values. Again, I point out that all of this stuff could have simply been divided by five and resolved on a d20. Percentiles here serve no actual useful purpose. As for good old Christian here, he's quite the intimidating son of a bitch, and he knows how to toss a house pretty well. I traded out a little bit of expertise in law, but sometimes when you're a maverick cop, you don't give a shit about the law. Okay, pretty much all the time. ### Sanity and Hit Points It wouldn't be a Cthulhu game without Sanity Points. They start off equal to our Power attribute, which I guess makes sense. Doesn't do us much good though. Hit Points, however, are calculated as a combination of Size and Constitution `(CON + SIZ) / 10`. - **Sanity:** 40 - **HP:** 14 We've probably seen too much shit to be as sane as most people, but at least we're a big boy and we can take it. ### Personal Description, Story, and Tethers It's interesting that they cram these three things together in the same chunk because neither personal description nor story has any game mechanical impact, but tethers absolutely do. Rationally, tethers should have been split out into a separate step to be figured out after you've got your description and what you've been up to, but here we are. We go to war with the system we have and not the system we want. - **Personal Description & Story:** 6'3", 260 pounds, and generally sporting the aura of a bad attitude, Christian DeLuca grew up in downtown Detroit and hated it enough to want to clean it up. Then he hated it enough to want to get out. Luckily or unluckily for him, he ran into the Cult of the Wintry Crimson and the remains of the six people they killed in a failed ritual to bind a shoggoth called up from the Detroit underground. A few run-ins like that, along with finding out how deeply entrenched they were in the Chicago political machine, and DeLuca got his wish, with a transfer to Charleston, South Carolina, and a seething distrust of both politicians and cults.[^2] - **Tethers:** - Julie Escandoza, 9yo girl DeLuca managed to save from a Wintry Crimson ritual. The only one. - Seeing Chicago O'Hare fall away underneath the plane as he took off for the last time. - His badge The tether system might be the best and most interesting part of *Cthulhu Unleashed*. Each tether starts off with a value of 30. Anytime you take sanity loss, you can essentially use one of your tethers as armor to absorb that sanity damage, reducing the value of the tether accordingly, as long as you can invoke how it supports you in that moment. I'll leave it up to your imagination what happens when a tether is completely consumed. I'll pretty much have to because it's not in the book. ### Equipment and Belongings This is where our credit rating kicks in. We take our credit rating, divide it by 10, round it up, and that's the amount in items we can choose from the equipment list. That's right, it's a crunchy equipment list shopping experience. Rather than an abstract "you have the things that you need." It's like accounting for individual skill points, right? - **Credit Rating:** 30 - **Equipment Allotment:** 3 Now, despite that and the fact that it actually refers you to the wrong page for actually looking at the gear list, when we turn to page 20 and look at the list of things that you can have, it does tell us cheerfully enough that all player characters begin the game with a smartphone. Thanks, Obama! We have three bits of gear that we can have. Three-quarters of the things listed that you can have as items/equipment are included in a smartphone, so I'm not sure why you would be taking them as separate bits of gear. - **Gear** - Emergency First-Aid Kit - Pepper Spray - Compact Handgun The author takes a moment to lecture us when discussing weapons, and I quote: > "It's important to point out that most people are not accustomed to violence, let alone murder. Carrying a weapon is, for most people, very unusual unless you decide to play a police officer or a military recruit." This motherfucker has never been to the South a day in his life, and it shows. There are people who wake up, and the first thing they grab after their underwear is their .38 (or more likely their 9 mil, because revolvers are still déclassé). While most people are not accustomed to murder, most people also don't particularly want to be murdered, and if they come from a culture where being armed is fairly normal, then they will be. This is a reminder that as a games designer or as a player of games, you need to actually open up the front door and walk out into the world once in a while, just so you know what it looks like, so you can use it in your games. ## Exunt There we go. We're out the door and down the road, ready to go face off against the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos and all that it implies. ![[22 - Cthulhu Unleashed - Christian DeLuca, Ritual Detective.webp]] Speaking of implication, we are outright told that there is a secret cell-structured society called Aegis, which has declared itself to be opposed to the descent of humanity into Mythos horror and is keeping a watch on the player characters. It's depicted simultaneously as everywhere, knowing everything, disorganized, ad hoc, and perpetually on the back foot because the Cthulhu Mythos is beyond human comprehension. All of these are at the same time. It's as if it can't decide if the PCs are going to join up or fight against it, and I think the setting suffers as a result. In fact, a single unified anti-Mythos organization just doesn't seem to fit the way the world works. Regardless, here we are. We've made it to the end. We're dancing in the streets, and we're ahead of the curve. Tomorrow, I promise, no Mythos horror, probably no necromancy. We're just going to be filthy. [^1]: "He says, sarcastically." [^2]: See, I'll bet you're surprised—and even shocked—that I didn't create a necromancer. Chokes on you. Sometimes I subvert the idea.