Cosmic Horror SRD: Introduction

While I love Dungeons & Dragons and have been playing it for as long as I can remember, the game which truly captures my imagination is Call of Cthulhu. It's probably because I'm a bigger H.P. Lovecraft fan than I am a Tolkien/Moorcock/Donaldson/Weis & Hickman/Leiber/other fantasy author fan.  So when Wizards of the Coast struck up a licensing agreement with Chaosium and published Call of Cthulhu for d20, I was positively tickled.

Of course the license had a time limit and when it expired, Call of Cthulhu d20 seemed to all but completely disappear.  However, it remains one of my favorite d20 system implementations... if not my actual favorite.  Because Wizards of the Coast owns the d20 system and its trademarks, and because Call of Cthulhu d20 was a licensed property, the game wasn't actually released under the Open Game License even though at least 90% of the mechanics had already been released under that license elsewhere. Additional mechanics and monsters have been released under the Open Game License since Call of Cthulhu d20 went out-of-print.

So I've decided to create a "retro-clone" (more like a "modern-clone") of Call of Cthulhu d20 using the vast amount of open gaming content available today.  I'm calling it The Cosmic Horror SRD, and will have it all freely available online not only when I'm done but as I work through the development process.  My hope is that through The Cosmic Horror SRD people will remember that BRP is not the only system under which one can play a cosmic horror RPG and that the d20 system is as good of a contender as is any other system.

I'm starting off using both the d20 modern SRD and the d20 3.5 SRD as my main sources, although I know I'm going to have to reach into other SRDs and products for the sanity mechanics, monsters, and magic.  I'll be contributing my own Mythos constructs to the SRD as well, so watch out.

I'll keep this blog updated as I develop The Cosmic Horror SRD.