The game’s main goal is survival, hiding in Shelters and waiting for the best windows of opportunity to go on supply runs. Food, medicine, weapons, and gear are the essential tools to resist the dooming future ahead, filled with regular folk possessed by pure desperation and madness, scheming cultists, shadowy priests, and the most dangerous Enemies of all: the perverse spawns of Cthulhu and other Great Old Ones, powerful enough to shatter someone’s mind just with their presence.

There are three ways to play The Legacy of Cthulhu:

Solo Player: create one or more survivors and interact with them in the premade scenario through dice rolls on the pre-defined tables, slowly unfolding the characters’ story.

Group of Players: on the second way of playing, you and one or more friends will use the tools for generating and conducting the game without the need for a Storyteller to tell you what will happen. Thus, events and characters will appear according to random rolls and pre-defined tables. At the same time, your group will react to the events the way your characters would find most common and, when necessary, by rolling the dice to check if your actions were successful.

Mediator: finally, the third way to play is by one of the group playing the role of Mediator, similar to the Game Master/Storyteller. The Mediator will answer the questions through the role of the Oracle, ask for the dice rolls to carry out the basic actions, roll the game events and mediate the players’ actions, giving the freedom to insert different elements through the story.

The book is a great toolbox that can make your story unfold in multiple, dynamic ways before you with the help of the following features and mechanics:

• Detailed backstory explaining more of the world's setting.

• Suggestions and examples on how to run your adventures.

• Complete set of rules, character creation, skills and stats, advantage and disadvantage, hunger and insanity, leveling, and much more.

• Full set of instructions on how to build, manage and upgrade your shelter.

• Oracle system that helps you answer simple questions like Yes/No, Left/Right, Open/Close.

• 22 Items, 46 spells, 32 artifacts of power, and other elements to customize your adventure and characters like item upgrades.

• Auxiliary tables to expand the events, including weapons, vehicles, upgrades, violent encounters, horde attacks, plot twists like environmental challenges, enemy ambushes, and character introductions and reveals.

• 9 pre-built cities based on classic Lovecraftian settings and real-life places to inspire you to start your adventures until you feel confident to create your own: Arkham (featuring the Miskatonic Six), Dunwich, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Las Vegas, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, and London. 

• 19 types of common enemies and 17 major enemies (Great Old Ones and their minions), which include Cthulhu, Yig, and Hastur -- plus the Outer God Nyarlathotep.