In Japan, the #callofcthulhu #rpg is immensely popular - so much so that whereas 'roleplaying game' is synonymous with Dungeons and Dragons in many other countries, in Japan roleplaying = Call of Cthulhu - Chaosium JTo see this content please enable targeting cookies. To put into perspective, the CoC shelves at biggest RPG store in Japan are about the size of all the other RPGs together.” (Dicebreaker attempted to contact Kitkowski for further comment, but was unable to reach him in time for publication.) “It's the most common point of entry to the hobby. “The single top non- RPG in Japan is Call of Cthulhu, by leagues,” Kitkowski reiterated on Twitter in June 2019. That change happened the last eight years.” It is Call of Cthulhu and then everything else. “The scale is so grand that it is basically like D&D versus all the other non-D&D games in the US or other countries. “For women, it is at a peak in their 20s, suggesting that many women have started playing TTRPGs in the past decade.”Ĭall of Cthulhu has previously been claimed to be more popular in Japan than Dungeons & Dragons, with tabletop localisation specialist Andy Kitkowski stating in an early 2018 YouTube video that Call of Cthulhu has been “the single top-selling RPG - period - for the last seven or eight years”. “It appears that the male player base reached its peak in the 40s and 20s, where it could be said these are those who started during the boom around 1990 and those who started after CoC became known,” Sakamoto said. Players who identified as non-binary or “other” comprised less than 1% of the audience. The majority of D&D players - more than three-fifths - identified as male, with 39% identifying as female. By way of comparison, Wizards of the Coast revealed last year that most Dungeons & Dragons players are under 30, with 40% aged 24 or younger and around a fifth aged between 30 and 34. Chaosium added that the release of the seventh edition led to a “surge” of sales in 2020.Ĭall of Cthulhu sells more copies in Japanese than all of the game's other languages combined - English included.Īccording to the game's production studio Arclight, most Call of Cthulhu players in Japan are women aged between 17 and 35.

The seventh edition of Call of Cthulhu was released in Japanese at the end of 2019, and is estimated to have sold over 60,000 copies since.Ī representative for Call of Cthulhu studio Chaosium told Dicebreaker that the Japanese-language release of the RPG doesn’t just outsell any other language, it sells more copies than all of the game's other languages combined - English included. Roleplaying game writer and editor Masayuki Sakamoto, who has worked on Call of Cthulhu since its original release in Japan, told Dicebreaker that the sixth and seventh editions have sold more than 300,000 copies combined, including 60,000 copies of the latest edition. The latest seventh edition of the game was released in December 2019, featuring a complete overhaul of the rulebook. By September 2019, all versions of the RPG had sold over 200,000 copies in Japan, according to Kadokawa.

Following a break in development during the 1990s due to a slump in the local market, its sixth edition was released by current publisher Kadokawa in 2004, and has seen a number of reprints since. Horror roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu has overtaken Dungeons & Dragons’ popularity in Japan, with its success driven by an explosion in interest among younger fans and a growing audience of female players over the last decade.Ĭall of Cthulhu was first translated into Japanese by publisher Hobby Japan, which localised the game’s third edition in 1986. Using Call of Cthulhu Material in a D&D Game.

260 Adventu r e 2: Little Slices of Death. 8 Example of Generating and Assigning Ability Scores. 5 What ls a Roleplaying Game? C h a pter 1: C h aracter Creatio n.

Call of cthulhu rulebook