Getting Started
Take a look at our Getting Started with Online Gaming!
Roleplaying games, are essentially collaborative, improvised storytelling created by the players, with rules to guide situations where success or failure makes a difference. Using dialogue and description, the participants describe and explore a world and the beings that inhabit it. They create stories together, guided by game rules to ensure fairness and some degree of order and consistency.
In Chaosium games, you and your friends are characters and one of you is the gamemaster. In Call of Cthulhu the character are Investigators; in RuneQuest they are Adventurers; in 7th Sea, Heroes; and in Pendragon, Knights. They are described in terms of their abilities: numbers and terms that indicate how strong, smart, charismatic, or fast they are, and how skilled they are at what they do.
The gamemaster is a combination of referee and director, interpreting the setting and the creatures and people that inhabit it and representing it to the players. The players act in the world through their characters, and the gamemaster adapts the story to their actions—successes and failures—as the collaborative story being told in the game unfolds. When there's a chance that an action the characters or the gamemaster attempts might fail, you roll dice to determine whether luck smiles on you or whether you'll have to keep trying!
more about playing our games
Board Games and Fiction
If you are new to the Chaosium games, and even new to role-playing completely, this is a great place to start. We would like to think that roleplaying is the perfect blend of board game randomness and replay-ability with the depth of fiction. To get you started, you can check out the board games we have for most of our major lines, or read a great assortment of fiction.
Roleplaying is an interactive storytelling experience that allows participants to take on the roles of mythic, fantastic, larger-than-life, or simply ordinary characters in a variety of worlds and settings. Chaosium believes it is important to ensure that all players, at all times, are 100% comfortable with the story, themes, and scenes being played out and explored at their gaming table.
Chaosium understands that players of our games come from all walks of life. Therefore, it’s important for everyone to remember that just because an aspect of a story or scene is perfectly comfortable for you, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be comfortable for everyone else.
It is the responsibility of the Game Master/Keeper, to inform all players of potentially sensitive content being explored in any of their games. Prior to beginning a new campaign having open and judgement-free conversations, perhaps one-on-one, is an excellent way to get a feel for what each player is or isn’t comfortable with.
To assist with this, many tabletop gamers have found the X Card system to be helpful, especially for convention, game store, and online games. You can read about the X Card system here.
Please remember, a person’s well being and safety comes before any game! Please don’t hesitate to use available safety protocols and tools, and communicate with your event organiser or game facilitator if you need help.
The Cult of Chaos is Chaosium's officially sanctioned Gamemaster program for Game Masters and Keepers running demos and events. More importantly it is is a way to support gamers playing the games we all love. Keepers, investigators, adventurers, and games masters all can benefit from the community, and even find a gaming group if you are looking for one.
Click here to learn more about our Organized Play program. We would love to see you at a convention or game store!