Chaosium Finds the Terror in Folklore With New RPG

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Chaosium is best known for pitting players against the sanity-shattering cosmic horrors of Call of Cthulhu, but its next roleplaying game is turning its attention to something a little closer to home: the folk stories and fairy tales we all grew up with. Recently announced at this year’s Chaosium Con EU in Gdańsk, Poland, Folklorists is an cupoming tabletop RPG from Ennie Award-winning designer Pedro Ziviani that sends players back to the 1860s to uncover the dark truths hiding behind local myths and legends.

Folklorists also technically isn’t even a new game. In fact, it’s been in development at Chaosium for more than a decade, and has been quietly playtested and demoed at a number of conventions in recent years. Now, players will be able to officially get their hands on it, with a general release planned for mid-2027.

Below, we gather round the fire and scare up all the details on everything we know so far.

What is the Folklorists RPG about?

As the name suggests, players take on the roles of folklorists: scholars who study the stories, customs and beliefs passed down through generations. The game takes place in the 1860s, a time in which folklore was emerging as a field of study in its own right, with The Brothers Grimm publishing their famous collection of fairy tales a few decades earlier. In Folklorists, however, those old stories turn out to be more terrifyingly true.

Mechanically, Folklorists ditches Chaosium’s well-worn Basic Roleplaying Engine (the percentile dice system which powers Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest and Age of Vikings). Instead, the game uses a standard deck of playing cards (although it’s not entirely clear just yet how the rules work). The gameplay loop, however, involves the following:

• Investigate: The folklorists work through a sequence of scenes, uncovering clues and deciding how they’re going to deal with the myth they’re facing, all while a card-based countdown ticks away in the background.
• Confront the myth: At the end of the investigation, the folklorists come face-to-face with the myth and put their theories to the test. If they’ve figured it out correctly, the myth is defeated or neutralized. If they haven’t, they’ll suffer the consequences.
• Retell the tale: Once it’s all over, the players write a new version of the folk story, which becomes a cautionary tale for future generations.

Notably, the game doesn’t appear to be meant for long term play, with each standalone session taking roughly two hours to play and requiring no GM prep. Thematically, the game sounds like it shares some of the same concepts as Free League’s Vaesen RPG, while mechanically it seems to lean into a similar short, standalone, low-prep play experience like Paizo’s upcoming 13 Omens.

Who is the creative team behind Folklorists?

Folklorists is written by Brazilian-Icelandic game designer Pedro Ziviani, an Ennie Award-winning designer who’s no stranger to Chaosium, having co-written the Cthulhu Through the Ages sourcebook and overseeing the recently published Age of Vikings Companion.

Fittingly, the game grew out of Ziviani’s own academic studies into folklore. In a blog post on the Chaosium website, he explains that he once ran an improvised game for his fellow students, where players built stories out of fairy tale motifs using cards drawn from a deck. it inspired him to create an RPG that could teach players about authentic folklore from around the world while still leaving room for creative retellings. He had a first draft done just a few weeks later.

The book will also include original illustrations from Polish artist Martyna Starczewska, who has worked on a number of other Chaosium products over the past few years including Age of Vikings and Call of Cthulhu.

Final thoughts

Folklorists continues Chaosium’s recent trend of publishing new standalone games, following Rivers of London in 2022, Age of Vikings in 2025 and the post-apocalyptic steampunk RPG Time Without Tide, which was announced earlier this year. And while there’s still a lot we don’t know about the game, the premise and mechanics sound like it has a ton of potential.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story in the days ahead. In the meantime, you can read the full announcement about Folklorists on the Chaosium blog and sign up for updates ahead of release in mid-2027.