CthulhuTech - a fresh take on Mythos Gaming
Blame the guys at Yog-Sothoth.com. If they hadn’t done a sterling review of CthulhuTech, I wouldn’t own it now. Ergo, my bank account is now a little lighter and my ideas for Cthulhu Mythos gaming are broader. The interview with the creators they did was quite nice, and I learned a lot about the motivations of producing a non-BRP implementation of a Mythos-inspired setting.
However, it was Neil’s description of the history and placement of the current “setting” within its own fatally doomed milieu that drew me to make the purchase. It’s the end of the world, folks! And it’s not going to be a pleasant slide into the heat-death of the planet, a jaunty collision with an asteroid the size of Montana, nor even a soothing bout of hyper-infectious viroid packing enough toxic DNA under its hood to wipe out all carbon-based life down to the geothermal vents of the Mariana Trench…
This apocalyptic vision has Mythos entities fighting over the corpse of the Earth like starved dogs tearing each other apart over a bucket of Original Recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken! We’d be lucky if there was enough rubble remaining to leave behind an asteroid-belt in the third orbit of our pale yellow sun.
And you get to play the characters who get to fight them off!
From the standpoint of production values, my copy of CthulhuTech stands out among many of my other gaming books. Brilliant color, striking visual designs, and the details of a setting which makes my skin crawl. Altogether, it’s a pretty intruiging read with lots of beautiful art to help smooth understanding over some of the inevitable rough spots.
It is not a Basic Roleplaying system game, but instead presents it’s own gamescience called Framewerk. I am, as anyone who knows me will tell you, quite a rabid BRP/Chaosium fan. My intent with the game was to play a session or three using their native system (to get the feel of the game), then to decide which bits I liked, which bits I wanted to pinch, and which bits to leave on the cutting room floor. This world would be rendered in Basic Roleplaying eventually, if only in my homebrew mutant.
However, the Framewerk system as presented appears to have some utility to it. I look forward to trying it out.
Being a completeist, I had to pre-order Dark Passions from Mongoose, the publisher of the line. I blog about this game because it arrived today, and I have begun digging into this latest peek into the setting.
The first book could have been a fluke; subsequent installments in the series might fail to capture the spark I caught from the first. Dark Passions would appear to deliver. Hard.
Looking for a “new” way to send your players cacklingly mad? I might suggest CthulhuTech. It’s deeper than you think.
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