Archetype: The Detective - LunarNeil/Call-of-Cthulhu-Campaign GitHub Wiki

The Archetypal Detective is a rational individualist, seeking to order society by challenging it along rational lines. They are social without being sociable, often intelligent, and nearly always quite observant. Detectives are students of human nature, often as equally aware of their own faults as they are the faults of others. When a mystery forces the detective to accept an irrational thing as fact, they can find themselves drawn ever further into a quest to discover what the truth really is, no matter how strange that truth may seem.

The defining characteristic of a Detective Archetype is their adherence to rationality and pragmatism. Many will have a code of conduct that drives them to pursue a mystery even once it becomes personally dangerous, but in nearly every case this code aligns with some pragmatic view of human interaction.

Their Archetypal struggle characterizes the battle of the mind against its own fears and deceptions. Detectives often appear uncouth or unlikable, but reveal the respectable people around them to be undeniably worse. Politeness is often a form of deceit for the detective to undo. Detectives are often compelled into action by forces outside their control, so their own negative characteristics can be seen as the price of a necessary evil.

Detectives are great Archetypes for players that want to emphasize the horror of the chaotic unknown. They are a classic characters particularly well suited to investigating mysteries, but unequipped to accept the insanity that lies just below the surface of the world. This leads to interesting roleplay problems, and exciting possibilities character development.