Quick and Dirty Fudge Rules for the Cthulhu Mythos

I've been a long-time fan of the Cthulhu Mythos (though for gamers, that's hardly unique - indeed it's almost a cliche at this point), and my wife is a huge fan of Eldritch Horror. I want to run a one-on-one occult investigation game, but we have a newborn and that makes gaming time (and space) difficult to come by. So, I wanted something light - like, rules fit on one page and characters fit on a 3x5 index card light. Dice should be minimal. Rules should play fast and loose, with no significant record-keeping. Minimal skill list.

And I figured, why not Fudge? I've always been intrigued by the game, as well as one of its successors, Fate. But Fate has never really hit the right chord for me. I don't like the "authorial" stance into which Fate pushes me; plus, given our circumstances, I don't want to have to worry about writing stuff onto index cards or sticky notes. Plus - and this is a goofy reason, I know - I just plain like rolling Fudge dice. So that says Fudge.

I mean, there are plenty of alternatives. I already own two editions (5.6 and 7) of Call of Cthulhu, as well as Trail of Cthulhu and Nemesis, plus other games that could easily be reskinned to the Mythos - Unknown Armies orUnisystem (Angel or All Flesh Must be Eaten), perhaps. Cthulhu Confidential looks pretty great for one-on-one play, but at 300+ pages, it's way too heavy for what I'm doing, and I don't want to have to learn a whole new game system. Other rules-light systems like Cthulhu Risus would also be an option, of course. But I'm sticking with Fudge because I've never had a chance to run it and I think it'll work well.

And so, while it's a work in progress, I figured I'd share what I've got so far.

I. Character Creation

Step One: Traits, not Skills. I'm ditching skills entirely. Instead, I'm taking the skills from Eldritch Horror, making 'em into Traits, and adding in Agility to fill a gap. So a character's Traits are now:

• Lore
• Observation
• Influence
• Will
• Agility
• Strength

Fudge runs on a scale from -3 to +3, and all these traits start at 0. Apply six points (on a one-to-one basis) to the Traits. Only one Trait can start at +3. (This might seem a bit lean but even at 0, a character has around a 60% chance of succeeding at normal difficulty tasks so a +1 or +2 is pretty good!)

For a more involved campaign I might add Skills back in (probably "broad" skill groups appropriate to the genre) and maybe a Wealth Trait or Credit Rating Skill. (In keeping with the Eldritch Horror roots of this hack, Influence could stand in in some circumstances.) But then again, for a more involved campaign I'd probably just run Call of Cthulhu anyway.

Step Two: Pick a Profession. Pick three situations where the character would get a +1 bonus when rolling against a certain Trait. (Why three? I dunno.) The bonuses should be significant but situational.  For example: I'm a P.I., so I get +1 to Agility when shooting a firearm. I'm a Journalist so I get +1 to Lore when doing non-occult research. I'm rich so I get a +1 Influence where money makes a difference. I'm a former cult member so I get +1 to Will when resisting Terror.

For sure, not all bonuses are created equal, but that's fine. We don't have to worry about party balance.

Step Three: Pick Belongings. There's no limit on this, but they should be appropriate to the character.

Step Four: Pick a Complication. This is something that makes the character's life more complicated. In game terms, the GM has explicit permission to use the Complication to make the character's life miserable (e.g. to turn a rolled success into a failure, to make a given task impossible, to take away an important possession or NPC). But when the Complication is used in this way, the character earns a Fudge Point and an Experience Point - like a combination of Compels in Fate, and Flaws in 7th Sea 1st Ed. This might be too, well, complicated or meta for a true quick-and-dirty system, but we'll see how it plays.

Step Five: Record 5 Fudge Points on the character's sheet. They operate much as set out in the Fudge rules.

And that's it! Because I'm not using Skills, and therefore there are fewer things to spend experience points on, I'm thinking I'll require a fair number of EPs to raise a Trait. But really, that's almost certainly moot. I doubt we'll play enough for Traits to significantly increase anyway. (Hey, having almost no mechanical character devlopment worked in the original Traveller.)

 II. Combat and Sanity

I've taken the most basic approach to Sanity suggested from various takes on the topic: I just created a separate track for mental damage. I've just termed the two tracks, collectively, Trauma, and followed Fudge rules for Physical Trauma - Scratched, Hurt, Very Hurt, Incapacitated, and Near Death. I set up similar categories for Mental Trauma - Unsettled, Shaken, Traumatized, Incapacitated, and Insane. I've expanded the second category (Hurt and Shaken) in each to two boxes rather than one. (I might also expand the first category to four, from three. We'll see.)

Physical combat is as per regular Fudge rules. Sanity is a bit different. Every spell and unnatural event and creature has a Terror (or Unnatural, or Wibble - whatever) score. Roll Will vs. that score or lose Sanity. Failing a Lore test when casting a spell also costs you Sanity. If you're reduced to Traumatized or lower on the mental track, you probably have a phobia, PTSD, or other ongoing mental condition that will require treatment. If you're Insane, you won't recover without professional help (just like you'll die without help if you're reduced to Near Death). Otherwise Mental trauma accumulates just the same as Physical trauma.

Eyeballing it, and taking into account the guidelines in Fudge for physical damage (e.g. a .45 would have a damage of 2 or 3) I'm thinking that seeing a dead body would be a -1 or 0 Will test. A Deep One would be 0. A zombie would be +1. A Dark Young or Shoggoth would be +3. Cthulhu would be +4 or up.

This does mean that, unlike in Call of Cthulhu, there probably won't be the ongoing slow decline of Sanity. It'll play more like Sanity in Eldritch Horror. That's fine for my purposes.

III. Credit where credit's due
 
Files that were useful in putting this together:

Fudge 1995 Edition from Grey Ghost Press.
Solo Game with Fudge and Horror from Stargazer's World.
Fudge Sanity (three different takes on Sanity rules) by R. Behrends, M. Lucas, and M. Harvey.
Going Slightly Mad by Fred Hicks (by way of the Wayback Machine) - more Sanity rules.
Call of Fudge by Tim Hall.