Sandy Petersen
The designer who brought cosmic horror to the tabletop — and made terror something you could roll dice against.
Lynn Sandy Petersen (born 1955) is the creator of Call of Cthulhu, one of the most influential and enduring role-playing games ever published. Adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos into a tabletop game in 1981, Petersen gave players something almost no RPG had offered before: a game you were probably going to lose.
Where D&D rewarded power accumulation, Call of Cthulhu rewarded investigation and atmosphere. Characters aged, went mad, and died — permanently. The game introduced the Sanity mechanic, a psychological survival resource that became one of the most copied ideas in game design history.
Petersen later joined id Software, contributing to Doom and Quake before returning to tabletop design. His career spans half a century of influential work across multiple media.
1981 — Chaosium
The game that proved horror was a viable RPG genre. Investigators research the unknowable, accumulate Sanity damage, and face enemies that cannot be defeated — only survived or escaped. Still in print over 40 years later.
2015 — Petersen Games
A strategic board game casting players as Great Old Ones competing for dominance over Earth. One of the most successful Kickstarter tabletop projects of its era, praised for asymmetric faction design.
1978–1982 — Chaosium
Petersen contributed extensively to Chaosium’s RuneQuest line before creating Call of Cthulhu, helping define the Basic Role-Playing system that underpins both games.
“Petersen’s great insight was that helplessness is dramatic. The scariest games aren’t the ones where you might fail — they’re the ones where failure is almost certain, and you play anyway.”