BESM2 Call of Cthulhu

Rescuing some more BESM fan rules from obscurity. In this case it's William H Timmins' rules for playing Call of Cthulhu with the BESM 2 rules (which could easily be tweaked to work with the free Tri-Stat rules).

They are the one's formerly linked to on Blackbird's (of BESM EX supplement fame) BESM links page. They're too long to post here, but just follow the link to find an archived copy of them. I'm pretty sure they were written before the Revised Edition was published and it's surprising how similar the Sanity rules are to the Psyche rules in 2RE. Something else I really like are the Occupation rules.

Designing an occupation is simply a matter of collecting a series of skills so that the skill cost, per level, is divisible by 10. The cost in Character Points is the skill cost divided by 10.

I like the way games like Call of Cthulhu and Mekton Z handle occupations by treating each profession as a group of 5-6 specific skills, so it's nice to see something similar implemented in BESM. Here's the example he gives.

Example, in standard genre:

Antiquarian – Art, Bargain, History, Law, Library Use, Other Language, Spot Hidden, + any one skill as a personal specialty

Visual Arts (any) 3/level

Persuasion (Bargain) 3/level

* I added this, it is not in normal BESM2. Other specializations: fast talk, persuade

Cultural Arts (History) 4/level

Research (any) 4/level

* I added this, too. Specializations: library use, lab work, internet use, statistical analysis

Linguistics (any) 3/level

Standard package costs 2 CP, gets one level of Visual Arts (any), Persuasion (bargain), Cultural Arts (History), Research (any), and two levels of Linguistics (any).

And since skills are optional in 2E you could always just use Occupations as a rough outline of what kinds of things a character would be proficient at.

In any case, there's lots of good advice here for running CoC using BESM rules, or (if you want to make Lovecraft roll in his grave) playing a Demonbane campaign.