Cthulhu Lives is a live-action roleplaying game created in 1984, based on the gothic horror fiction of seminal American pulp writer H. P. Lovecraft. It is a blend of the notions of free-form make-believe and the carefully planned excitement of traditional roleplaying games, in which players experience a frightening mystery investigation. Cthulhu Lives is the embodiment of the word play in all its senses. It is structured, complex, layered, mind-bending, and fun. At its best it is a mental, emotional, and physical challenge. It has evolved over the years, growing from a lighthearted adaptation of a commercial game into something quite new and independent; something which is not easily categorized as a hobby, or as entertainment, or as a form of art. It is without question an extremely potent medium for intellectual and psychological exploration, in which its players constantly find new sources of terror, and joy, and wonder.

In the fifteen years since Cthulhu Lives was first created, its players have produced over sixty original live-action adventures, involving a total well over 300 people as active participants. The games have been as small as a one-evening dinner party, and as large as a three-part epic lasting for eight months that involved, among other things, a mummified corpse in a hidden basement, 35 live rats, rooting around a mountaintop cemetery, and the midnight banishment of a very powerful deity. Some games have been simple and straightforward, others have involved elaborate special effects, sets, props and costumes, and even (in one notable case) a herd of horses. Games have been played in diverse locations: ghost towns of the Colorado Rockies, the Great Sand Dunes, Death Valley, the Pacific Ocean, a Gothic Mansion in Iowa, the British Museum in London, the Seismology Lab at CalTech, and on the campus of Cambridge University. Investigators have witnessed the full-scale manifestations of monsters and deities of many kinds. They've met figures from history: Aliester Crowley, Dr. John Dee, Rasputin, Harry Houdini, John Wilkes Booth, and an entire village of Native Americans. Investigators have travelled to Egypt, the Gobi Desert, Russia, England, and medieval France, and the halls of Miskatonic University and Dreamlands of Lovecraft's fiction. They've jumped off roofs, plummeted through dimensional gateways, escaped from asylums, exhumed corpses, crawled down mine shafts, explored tunnels, waded into seaside caves, climbed cathedral towers, dredged lakes, broken into secret vaults, scaled mountains, sailed in ghostly boats, flown in helicopters, battled some congregations of cultists, and run like hell from others. And although it was all a game, it was all for real.

This website will chronicle Cthulhu Lives adventures and serve as a hub for future games and a resource for Players and Keepers alike. The site is updated as often as possible with new archive entries and other fun stuff: please return and see the changes.

The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society is the primary organization devoted to Cthulhu Lives. The HPLHS motto is "Ludo Fore Putavimus": a Latin phrase meaning "We thought it would be fun." And, by-the-way, we pronounce it "cuh-thoo-loo".