introduction: I love gaming in a Cthulhuesque universe, but something one quickly learns about such a setting is that the lifespan of a typical character is quite short, and sooner or later they'll wind up either drooling-at-the-mouth insane, gorily sacrificed by a cultist, or ingested by some nameless tentacled horror. It is hard to spend an hour creating a character knowing the great likelihood of their eventual fate, and even harder to justify spending another hour on a new character after your previous one has just been rent limb-from-limb by a shoggoth while on his first adventure. Hence, here is my proposed solution: use Risus as the gaming engine! It is hard to find a setting better suited for 30 second character creation than the Cthulhu Mythos. Even if your character just got eaten, sacrificed, or pulled into an alternate dimension, a new character is just a few seconds away. The advantages of this should be clear.