The Dhole’s House is a free site for Call of Cthulhu RPG fans, players and Keepers alike.
Chaosium, the publisher of the game, has bought the site. In an announcement today, Chaosium vice president Michael O’Brien said;
The fact that Chaosium nows owns The Dhole’s House will make no noticeable difference for existing users of the site. With Lee, we plan to keep improving the features and functionality of the resource for the benefit of Call of Cthulhu gamers,”
Financial details were not disclosed, but The Dhole’s House creator Lee Carnell has joined Chaosium as an in-house software developer.
The site means players and Keepers can crate 7e characters quickly and easily, maintaining a library of character sheets.
118 occupation templates are supported by the site, including some from modern era stories (such as Hacker and cult Deprogrammer). Other supported eras include Pulp Cthulhu and Gaslight.
A generator also allows Keepers to make handouts for in-game artefacts such as telegrams, business cards, newspaper clipping and calendars. Precisely the sort of clues that brave investigators might discover while foolishly digging into the dark mysteries of the game.
The online dice roller is free to use, and registered members of the free site can have results emailed to them. Unlike other dice rollers, this solution requires players to enter the reason for the roll and details for it. There’s an archive, a log of these events, maintained by the site.
In a novel move, The Dhole’s House even once had a Twitterbot (called BotCharacters) which helped provide random characters by sharing those whisked up by the system. It’s not seen life in recent years but like ancient and forgotten lore it remains there for researchers to discover a new and investigate.
Dholes are canines native to parts of Asia, but in Lovecraft lore are huge worm monsters. In Through the Gates of the Silver Key, it was written;
Below him the ground was festering with gigantic Dholes, and even as he looked, one reared up several hundred feet and leveled a bleached, viscous end at him.
The value fans got from The Dhole’s House is perhaps made apparent from the Ko-fi support page where over 200 people have bought Lee a coffee in thanks.
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