For 2025, I’m participating in the 2025 Character Creation Challenge. The idea is to create one RPG character per day for each day in January, for a total of 31 characters. You can find new characters as they're created here.
Character 4: Call of Cthlulhu
Today character is in honor of my most-read-post here at Retreat Forward. It’s a character for one of the world’s most enduring tabletop RPGs: Call of Cthulhu.
My Most Popular Post
My blog gets very little traffic. I’m absolutely fine with that. The purpose of this site is to give me somewhere to publish some of my small RPG musings. In many ways, it’s like a public notebook of finished and half-finished ideas that I might want to reference in the future.
That said, the posting that has the most views on this entire site is this one, in which I complain about the price of the Call of Chtulhu PDFs. It’s kind of embarrassing because, re-reading that post, I don’t know that I still agree with it. For one thing, $27.95 feels more reasonable in 2025 than it did in 2011. Plus, if you buy the physical book, you get the PDF for free. It probably helps that I have worked a convention booth across from the Chaosium folks a couple of times since I wrote that. It’s hard to be grumpy at some nice guys you’ve met vs. some faceless company.
So, I take it all back, friendly Call of Cthulhu publishers! Now I think your PDF is only modestly overpriced (lol).
Process
For Milton, I rolled stats exactly as described in the 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu Rulebook. I also made use of a spreadsheet to help spend skill points, as well as and excellent auto-calculating character sheet from Chaosium.
The Character: Dr. Milton T. Blair
Born to a prominent journalist and author, Dr. Milton Blair’s family moved to England when he was 10 years old. Blair excelled in school, eventually receiving degrees from the Wilhelm University in Berlin, Chappon University in England, and Harvard University in the United States. He currently works as a Professor of Anthropology at a small private university in Chicago.
A prominent academic writer in his own right, Blair enjoys a certain level of economic freedom beyond what his university position might might otherwise provide. He uses this freedom to pursue his personal passion for history and anthropology, particularly as it relates to pre-colonial settlements in the United States. He spends time each year traveling around the Midwest researching these interests. He’s also a fairly accomplished amateur archaeologist.
Dr. Blair is an unwavering skeptic, well-read in many
subjects, and he puts little stock in anything supernatural. However, he doesn’t
particularly like conflict, and would will often back down to a more assertive
person in order to avoid an argument.
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Notes
The character picture is courtesy of a useful little archive of 1920s yearbook photographs put together by Rolling Boxcars. It's of a man named Theodus LaFayette Gunn who, in 1936, was the Librarian and Assistant Professor of Bibliography at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC. What a great name!
Also, proper credit to biographical information on the lives of Alain LeRoy Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois, who both inspired my (very brief) write-up of this character's educational background.
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