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Investigators will pick up a lot of Clues as they advance through the adventure. Clues, which are talked about above in their own section, are small plot threads that the characters can scribble down and try to investigate later. Some clues can also be picked up and taken with them, like a photograph of a strange creature or a postcard from Arkham talking about the stars aligning. When the Keeper sees the Investigator picking up on a Clue they can either announce it openly or they can hand the Investigator a handout of some variety.

Secrets and Lores are what happens when you follow up on a Clue. Playing the game to track down leads or spending Sanity Points to simulate hard-thought inspiration will allow your Investigator to earn a special insights that the other Investigators don't automatically share. These insights give them an advantage, sometimes just a simple thing like being able to give the password to a Cultist lair, sometimes a bit of crucial information that you could use to manipulate a the leader of the Cultists into killing himself. If you choose to share the Secret you may, but if the secret could endanger yourself you may want to keep it as a secret. In game terms this can be interperted as "acting funny," something that Lovecraft characters do quite often when they find something terrible in an eldritch tome... or something fishy in their family tree.

####-Collecting Lore and Mythos Artifacts Part of the fun of Call of Cthulhu is making a collection of all the dark artifacts you come across, researching them, and discovering new dark secrets that allow further adventures into the dark corners of the Earth.

Lore is easy to accumulate entirely by accident, often as the result of risking Madness to understand a horrifying creature well enough to defend yourself from it. Lore can also be gleaned from your experiences by spending Sanity Points to "make sense" of the insensible madness of reality. Many times the Keeper will indicate the revelations you have made by giving you a "Lore Card," such as an index card with the Secret of your Lore written on it. This should be kept with your Journal like all Secrets.

Mythos Artifacts are physical representations of Mythos power, commonly statuettes or tomes of ancient dark magic. As a physical entity, these Artifacts don't need to be kept with the Journal and are able to be freely passed from Investigator to Investigator. Keepers will often use a real object or some variety of handout as a prop to help the players interact with these rare treasures. The most common use for an Artifact is as a subject for research, but they are also often sources of magical power, should an Investigator wish to go down that dark path.

Tomes of magic are the most common resources for this, and the easiest for the Keeper to provide, as they can be represented by a few sheets of paper with scrawled gibberish writing and a number of foul symbols.

Unlike the Madness Meter, once a target has been shot or stabbed they have no chance to "save" against it, and will be dealt as much damage as the attacker's Margin of Success and the target's Armor allow for. Most weapons (even improvised ones like a shovel or a tire-iron) inflict a flat Damage amount with one bonus point of damage for every Margin of Success rolled on the attack. This means that any attack made with a weapon has the capacity to seriously injure a human being.

There are no special rules for attacking without a weapon, punches and kicks are treated like a weapon as well, but even the most skilled Boxing Club members will recognize the added value that crude length of iron makes in a fight against someone with just a bare pair of knuckles.

There are no forms of body armor capable of protecting one from a turn-of-the-century rifle, but Investigators are just as likely to encounter angry townspeople with farming implements or mindless thumping horrors made out of animate acidic jelly as they are to face down enemies equipped and practiced with a military-grade weapon. Body armor in the early turn of the century era is surprisingly diverse, from absurd metal plate armor designed to deflect machinegun fire at long range to cotton and silk coats capable of stopping small caliber handgun bullets from nearly point blank range.

If the attack could have no meaningful effect on the target (like firing handguns at the Shoggoth) no wounds will be assessed.

For specific information on how much damage is assessed

####-Conducting Combat Combat is deadly serious and combats rarely last long. All forms of combat use the standard Conflict Resolution mechanics discussed earlier in this book, with no major exceptions or extensions on the rules. Keepers and Players are encouraged to use their own ingenuity during combat, and to interact with their environment to achieve an advantage. The grim banality of combat means that every moment you spend exchanging gunfire with the enemy is another moment where you risk your life on the whims of fate.

The biggest reason to avoid combat is the surprisingly lethality of just about every weapon known to man. From as ancient as a flint-tipped arrowhead fired from a tribal cultist's bow, to a fully automatic Maxim Machinegun used for sweeping infantry squads, there is little in man's armory that is not capable of causing grievous harm when wielded with malice against a member of our species. Wounds in Call of Cthulhu are crippling and difficult to recover from, and an Investigator cannot withstand much abuse before succumbing to an attack. With the help of friends and medical intervention their life can be saved, but combat ability disappears nearly the instant a bullet crashes through a lung or leg or shoulder. Be extremely careful when upping the stakes in a hostile encounter from Madness to murder! The ones you're choosing to fight with may have... unnatural advantages.

Given that Call of Cthulhu is a horror game with a strong bent towards the intellectual horror and not the slasher horror, combat where the whole group is together would actually less likely to end in an abrupt death than splitting up to explore an old haunted house. The former is a lethal situation, but the latter practically demands a grisly sacrifice for dramatic effect. Investigators that want to be combat-themed or at least "well prepared" for combat should create an Investigator with a fighting background and treat it only as a last resort. Such a character could probably attest to the terrors of combat, and would not seek to risk their lives unnecessarily.

####-Being Outnumbered and the Ordering a Round of Combat

-Understanding Investigator Attributes

Investigators have attributes that define them, though they share little in common with the attributes of other roleplaying games. In our Call of Cthulhu campaign, each Investigator is defined by three categories of Attributes. These are Skills, Traits, and Obsessions, and they are detailed blow:

Investigator Skills These define the things you can do either through natural talent, hard work, or knowledge. Skills are most notable for the beneficial modifiers they provide in Conflict Resolution. Every Investigator is going to have several skills associated to their occupation, interests, hobbies and experiences. Skills are relatively easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Investigator Traits These are unusual physical or mental characteristics that can assist or hinder you. Traits are hard to pick up, you either have them or you don't, and the most common way to gain a Trait is by losing something else. Having an eye or an arm torn away by an abomination, developing a permanent psychosis, or taking on a strange fishlike appearance are all the kinds of Traits that Investigators generally prefer to avoid gaining. Traits come into play primarily in the special roleplaying opportunities they offer, but they do at times carry a special effect, such as water-breathing through your new neck gills.
Investigator Obsessions These are personality traits that drive you, nearly to the point of irrationality. Obsessions don't need to be a sign of madness, but they tend to grow stronger as one's mental health erodes and their willpower grows weaker. Though generally a hindrance, obsessions are advantageous in one major way: they give the Investigator something more powerful than their fear, something inside them that drives them on. In just the right circumstances this weakness can be a tremendous strength.

The Archetype you choose will give you a direction, but the choice of how you roleplay your Investigator and how you choose to advance them as time goes on is entirely up to you. If you really want something specific a Keeper is always able to modify the Archetypes if they choose.

-Character Sheets as Investigator Journals

Character Sheets in our Call of Cthulhu campaign are more than just cheat-sheets for the player, they're the journal the Investigator keeps as they investigate the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. Your journal not only contains all those important character details you refer back to, but all the clues, theories, and traumatic memories that your Investigator has written down.

Writing things down in your journal not only helps you remember the things the Keeper has told you, but if you die or succumb to Madness, your journal will be the last words of advice you give to your fellow Investigators. Investigators who know their mind is going, or are running out of time, may want to use what time they have left to write as much as they can as a final message, or a clue, or to point them to someone they think that can help them.

-Sanity Points and Replacement Investigators

One of the most common reasons for creating an Investigator is because of the untimely demise or decent into madness of a previous Investigator. When this happens, the player may consider their new Investigator weak or useless without a large amount of extra Sanity Points so they can massively upgrade their starting characters and "keep up" with the rest of the group.

This sounds reasonable, but makes the assumption that the rest of the group will not only keep gaining power, but survive long enough for the group to surpass the usefulness of a rookie Investigator. In the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, that is unlikely to happen. Keepers should resist the urge to upgrade every new Investigator to the level of the most senior in the group, for this pattern would keep the entire group on an inevitable upwards climb.