Japanese Call of Cthulhu Sourcebooks

For my recent trip to Tokyo, I knew I wanted to pick up some Japanese Call of Cthulhu Sourcebooks, however, once I had made a trip to the games store, I saw that it was not quite as simple as picking a book off the shelf, and saying, 'Look, now I have a book in Japanese!'  I knew I wanted the book to have some functionality, which left me with the problem of not knowing what the options were, short of using Google Lens to translate each book on the shelf one by one.
A quick google search on my phone back at the hotel (yes I should have done my research before I left, but, you know, life) left me very little the wiser, The books by enterbrain, the publisher of Japanese Call of Cthulhu, seems to fall into 2 main categories, reprints of Chaosium books, but in Japanese, and books made for the Japanese market. 

That was about as much info as I could get, as it's clear their main site is not available in English, or at least doesn't come up on my English google searches. Even now, sitting on my laptop, with time to spare, I'm not having much more luck, but that is something I want to rectify and explore through this series of blog posts.

The recent realisation among the Call of Cthulhu community on the west, that CoC is big in Japan has come together with an interest in what they seem to do differently. I want to start to explore this, firstly by looking in depth at the 2 books I picked up, then by casting the net a little wider to see what else is out there, and in doing so, let's try to lift the lid on what the differences and similarities are, and hopefully get access to new and different gaming experiences.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Necronomicon Dissection: Part 6, Purchases

Image
Ok, so there were many reasons for going to a Con like this, but one of them is surely to pick up on products that you can't get elsewhere, or without spending too much on postage. With this in mind, I think I was actually quite restrained in my purchases. First off, I had a list of books to buy at the Chaosium stand (although I did spend my Cult of Chaos credit, and won one of these through the Extra Life Charity event prize draw). I was able to get the following: Pulp Cthulhu Two Headed Serpent Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic Doors To Darkness Dead Light Another tip to the vendors hall led me to find a couple of second hand book stores, who had all the kinds of books you'd want to find at a Con like this, including: H P Lovecraft : The Shadow over Innsmouth and other Stories of Horror, as well as a copy of August Derleth's: The Reminiscences of Solar Pons. The Necronomicon Press stand was there, where I hooked up with a copy of TED Klein's: The ...
Read more

RPG a Day: Day 7

Image
Question 7: What was your most impactful RPG session? Hmm, from which side of the GM screen? I guess I'll answer from both points of view. As a player : There was once a Buffy game played in Edinburgh called The Watch House  (it was only a matter of time before that game came up, no?). There are two sessions that stick in my memory. The first is the one where my character was possessed by his evil ancestor. The second was the breaking of the 4th wall episode, where some of us played our characters, the actors who played our characters in a TV show, and finally, played our versions of the actual players for another character at the table. It sounds confusing, but it was a hell of a lot of fun, and fun is the reason we're at the table. These sessions stuck with me, as they opened doors to my understanding of what you can do at the table, when the other people at the table are in it for the same reasons as you. As a GM/Keeper : Scaring the Players. A Call of Cthulhu ...
Read more