THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF PROTÉGÉS & LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS

Oct 6, 2026

Optional rules for Call of Cthulhu (7th edition) help resolve the tension between running deadly sanity-crushing scenarios and maintaining investigators across sessions. The rules expand on protégés and last wills to preserve earned Cthulhu Mythos skills after an investigator’s death or permanent insanity. A protégé training downtime activity grants automatic Mythos skill point bonuses based on training duration, limits, and available downtime, enabling campaign knowledge to persist while keeping lethality on the table.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages4

Reading Time6 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Protégés

Training a Protégé

Creating an Investigator from a Protégé

THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF PROTÉGÉS & LAST WILLSAND TESTAMENTS Miskatonic Repository Resource for Call of Cthulhu PROTÉGÉS & LAST WILLSAND TESTAMENTS written by Grant Dowell art by Marco Monte Call of Cthulhu is a Trademark of Chaosium Inc. and is used with their permission via the OBS Community Content program. For more information please visit Chaosium’[s website:](s website: www.chaosium.com)[ ](s website: www.chaosium.com)[www.chaosium.com](s website: www.chaosium.com) The Miskatonic Repository Logo is used under license. Protégés & Last Wills and Testaments ©2019 Grant Dowell INTRODUCTION Players of Call of Cthulhu (7th edition) are often pulled in two different directions. They feel a tension between, on the one hand, wanting to play deadly sanity crushing scenarios, but on the other hand, wanting to develop an investigator that survives across multiple play sessions. An investigator may struggle hard to gain a few Cthulhu Mythos skill points during a first session of play only to face, in the second session, a complete mental breakdown that leaves the investigator unplayable. The simple optional rules presented here are an attempt to have your cake and to eat it too. These rules allow you to keep the threat of death and debilitating insanity very much on the table, but at the same time, allow players to have investigators that can become Cthulhu Mythos savvy. The nice thing about these optional rules is that a keeper can retain a high level of lethality, and all the while, players can have investigators with significant Cthulhu Mythos knowledge and possess powerful tomes and artifacts discovered throughout the course of a campaign. On page 156 of the Investigator Handbook both protégésand wills are briefly introduced. The handbook suggests ways that they might be used in the game, and the discussion there leaves plenty of room for further development. Here you will find an expansion of those ideas, and a few more details and suggestions for how protégés and wills can be used to address the issue of accruing and growing Mythos knowledge when doing so is necessarily a dangerous and often deadly undertaking. PROTÉGÉS As a downtime activity that can be undertaken between sessions, an investigator may decide to train a protégé . The protégé can be a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or just about anyone. Given the lethal danger that investigators often find themselves facing, the intended purpose of this activity is to pass along certain hard to attain skills to a protégé so that upon the death of the investigator, the protégé can be used as anew investigator thus preserving some of the hard earned skills of the recently deceased or permanently insane. TRAINING A PROTÉGÉ An investigator spending three months time training a protégé grants the protégé a bonus of up to 10 Cthulhu Mythos skill points to be automatically added to the protégé’s investigator sheet when they are eventually created. The number of bonus Cthulhu Mythos skill points that the protégé receives (per three month training period) is limited to 10 or the number of Cthulhu Mythos skill points that the investigator has, whichever is lower. The three months of training need not occur consecutively, but no bonus skill points are received until three months of training has occurred. The investigator who is training the protégé may not be involved in any other downtime activity during the training time such as recovering from an injury, receiving mental health therapy, studying a tome, or learning a spell. There is no limit to the number of three month training periods that a single protégé can receive. For example, an investigator with 25 Cthulhu Mythos skill points might spend six months training a protégé that will receive 20 Cthulhu Mythos skill points upon creation. For example, Tamra has been playing her investigator Trevor Gibbs for several sessions. Through studying tomes discovered over the course of the

FAQs

What problem do these optional rules address in Call of Cthulhu?

They address the conflict between wanting lethal, sanity-crushing play and also wanting investigators to survive and grow across multiple sessions.

How does training a protégé work as a downtime activity?

An investigator trains a protégé between sessions for up to three months at a time, granting Cthulhu Mythos skill point bonuses when the protégé is later created as an investigator.

When are bonus Mythos skill points from protégé training applied?

Bonus Cthulhu Mythos skill points are not received until three months of training has occurred, and the total bonus from a three-month period is applied automatically when the protégé is eventually created.

Oct 6, 2026

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