Let's read: CthulhuTech

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Baeraad

Delicate Snowflake
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What the hell. I have previously done a let's-read of Eldritch Skies, which annoyed me by being too bland and aggressively inoffensive. I've also run a a campaign of it, and concluded that it doesn't run very well (which is, in fairness, mostly because the port to Savage Worlds didn't work very well - the setting is at least salvagable). Let's try the polar opposite, and check out CthulhuTech. Is it really as bad as everyone says? Let's find out.

Chapter one: Welcome
We start out with a long piece of fiction. First, there's a scene of an Engel (a bio-mech that's cooler than regular all-machine mecha, think Neon Genesis Evangelion) pilot scrambling to survive in a city that the Migou are stomping heavily on, except that turns out to be a nightmare she has later, and she wakes up and is sent on a mission with a bunch of other mech pilot, and they meet another mech pilot, and every pilot has a name and a call sign and a mech type and at least one of the mecha has a name of its own, and it's all very confusing and incoherent. The fact that the narration tries to be hardboiled and curt doesn't help, either.

I mean, to give you an idea:

A phantom shape flew neatly through the trees. Landing, it shimmered as the Rapier's stealth system powered down. Sam hated the way stealth mecha just seemed to step out of thin air.

CC stepped up. The Rapier spoke. "You Feint?"

"That's me," replied CC.

Timana dropped the stealth on his Eclipse. He stood an arm's length behind the Rapier, with those acid-dripping claws waiting for trouble. The callsign Scalpel was stenciled on its shoulder. "Are you our man?" the Eclipse "whispered" into the mech's ear. "Uh... yeah."

I think, having written it out and gone back to double-check a few things, I can kind of understand what's going on, but this is some really amateurish writing. This is not a good way to convey information, especially not when you're introducing a whole setting full of details (and whatever CthulhuTech's failings, it's certainly detailed).

Anyway, the mechas find a Migou "Dragonfly" mech sitting around for no apparent reason, and they blow it up. Then they get debriefed. And that's about it for them.

The story then switches to a pack of Tagers (good shapeshifters who fight weaker, more numerous and evil shapeshifters called Dhohanoids who work for the Chrysalis Corporation which in turn is run by Nyarlathotep; they're basically Garou from Werewolf: the Apocalypse, only slimy instead of furry) running around that city from the beginning and gathering up civilians, except the civilians turn out to be Dhohanoids and there's another confusing fight scene. It doesn't really help that there's very little difference in theme between Tagers and Dhohanoids, they're all your basic creepy-crawley eldritch abomination things, it's just that Tagers are slightly bigger and more powerful. What you end up with is a big tangle of tentacles and teeth and claws and it's hard to keep track of who's who, is what I'm saying.

The Tagers end up fleeing the city, there's more Dhohanoids, they get cornered in a building but another Tager (I... think?) turn up to save them and they all use their Cool Move That Wins Fights and they live to fight another day.

So we have human and alien mecha fighting each other across a burning city while humans who can turn into horrors and horrors who can turn into humans have desperate battles to the death in the shadows. How did they manage to make that boring? :argh:

We then have an account by a soldier who's been stationed at the front of the various wars that are being fought and been injured and gone slightly batty and war is hell and woe is me. No, wait, scratch that. To be specific:

They say war is hell. I've seen hell. This is worse.

Er, what does that mean, exactly? You've seen hell? When? In the war? But if the war is the hell, how is the war worse than hell? Aaargggghh.

We then finally get to the proper introduction.

CthulhuTech is a hybrid genre, fusing together two separate paradigms. On one hand, it is an anime world of mecha – giant piloted robot war-machines. It’s a world of high adventure, plucky resourcefulness, and the hope that a brighter day is on the horizon. On the other, it’s a world of eldritch horrors, where unknowable things dwell outside the world of man. A place where the gods are horrible creatures with malevolent agendas, unsympathetic to lesser beings such as man – a dark world of shattering revelations and insanity.

Okay, that's cool, that's cool, but... are you, at some point, going to explain how to reconcile those two "paradigms," or are you just going to sort of mush them together and act like it makes perfect sense? I mean, you can do cosmic-horror anime, sure. NGE is pretty much exactly that. But NGE is also a very carefully balanced story where you constantly feel like the shiny machinery and slapstick humour is a thin coat of paint over something deep and dark and stomach-turning. Are you capable of that sort of precision, CthulhuTech? I have my doubts, but I guess we'll see...

We also have the famously snotty rant against digital piracy. I plead the fifth on how I came by this PDF, by the way. :tongue: I will, however, state for the record that Eclipse Phase is available as PDF free of charge, and for that one I bought the hardback, whereas I do not foresee a day when CthulhuTech will be gracing my bookshelf with its presence. But, hey, I may be wrong and I may start to like it after reading it properly!

We then get a dictionary, explaining the various terms that get thrown around.

The Aeon War is something the human (united under the New Earth Government) and the Nazzadi (space-Drow created through Migou science; they were meant to go fight the humans, but they decided they liked the humans better than the Migou) are fighting against the Migou and the Old Ones. It's not going so good.

Arcanotech is technology derived from "non-Euclidian geometry" and can generate infinite power. It's developed exclusively by the Ashcroft Foundation. You can also use it to build mecha, for some reason. The best sort of mecha are Engels, half-biological mecha that kicks especially much ass.

There's cults about. The main ones are the Rapine Storm and the Death Shadows, who both serve Hastur. The Rapine Storm is a huge army of lunatics and monsters that is currently stomping all over Asia. The Death Shadows, meanwhile, infiltrate the NEG in secret and sabotage it. Under the sea you get the Deep Ones of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, who wants to bring Cthulhu back, in which case we're all fucked.

There's also the Children of Chaos, who are led by Nyarlathotep, and who have taken over the Chrysalis Corporation and wreak havoc through monstrous shapeshifters called Dhohanoids. They're resisted by the Eldritch Society, who have much better monstrous shapeshifters called Tagers. Is it bad that so far, the best argument I can think of for playing CthulhuTech is that you'd get to say "Dhohanoid" a lot? What? It's a fun word! It sounds all squishy, like a rubber ball! :grin:

Also, magic is a thing that exists. Whether it costs you SAN points to use has yet to be revealed.

There follows a list of inspirations. They're about what you'd expect. All things Lovecraft, obviously. Also Neon Genesis Evangelion (for Engels) and The Guyver (for Tagers and Dhohanoids. Dhooooohanoioioioioids. Yeah, still fun. :grin: ). And something called Robotech, which I have never seen any of, but I assume the Nazzadi come from there because it seems like they don't exist for any reason other than to provide a playable version of something from somewhere.

And that was the first chapter. This might be a tough one, folks. It's just all so... dull. And I don't even understand why, because all the parts it's made of are big and colourful and exciting, but somehow, the way they're put together just makes me want to snooze.
 
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NGE is horrible.
Horrible.

At least the original series. Never bothered to check out all the movies which came afterward, maybe one day...

Robotech is a very famous USA mashup of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavarly Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. These were three original and completely unrelated japanese anime series. Harmony Gold bought the rights for the US distribution, and while dubbing them they completely changed the original stories and unified the 3 series in a single one called Robotech.
This went on to have a huge success and spawned its own sequels, although not in terms of animation but mostly comics and novels. There's an infamously shaky relationship between Harmony Gold and Tatsunoko Production (the Japanese original producers) which has been going on for decades and involving several lawsuits. Among other things, this has meant the western market has never seen a (legal) distribution of the original Macross series which has become a huge hit in Japan and has given rise to... I think a dozen follow-up series, at this point.
You'd think this would mean the end of the relationship when the terms expired... but Harmony Gold just recently (last year, IIRC) announced having negotiated an extension of the IP rights with Tatsunoko.
 
NGE is horrible.
Horrible.

At least the original series. Never bothered to check out all the movies which came afterward, maybe one day...

Awww, I kinda liked it... though I admit that there were a lot of things that made no sense. And I don't even mean the ending, I mean things like, "why do the Angels keep attacking the exact tiny spot of ground that the Evas can cover with their stupid extension cords?" :tongue: (yes, I know that there was an explanation of sorts, but honestly it just raised further questions...)

Robotech is a very famous USA mashup of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavarly Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. These were three original and completely unrelated japanese anime series. Harmony Gold bought the rights for the US distribution, and while dubbing them they completely changed the original stories and unified the 3 series in a single one called Robotech.
This went on to have a huge success and spawned its own sequels, although not in terms of animation but mostly comics and novels. There's an infamously shaky relationship between Harmony Gold and Tatsunoko Production (the Japanese original producers) which has been going on for decades and involving several lawsuits. Among other things, this has meant the western market has never seen a (legal) distribution of the original Macross series which has become a huge hit in Japan and has given rise to... I think a dozen follow-up series, at this point.
You'd think this would mean the end of the relationship when the terms expired... but Harmony Gold just recently (last year, IIRC) announced having negotiated an extension of the IP rights with Tatsunoko.

Oh dear. That sounds complicated. Are there any Nazzadi look-alikes involved?

Chapter two: That was then and this is now (part one)
The second chapter starts with a timeline, never my favourite thing in a book. But okay.

Some dude found an old stone tablet explaining how to build, effectively, an infinite energy source! Then he disappears under Mysterious Circumstances (TM) and his notes ended up in care of Miskatonic University. Then they stayed there for a while with no one paying attention to them, so I'm not sure why we had to start with that.

Meanwhile, the world united (more or less) under the New United Nations, so yay international harmony, I guess? They started colonising the solar system and stuff.

Then some chick named Theresa Ashcroft found the infinite-energy-source transcription and went crazy. Then some dude named Simon Yi looked into her studies and went crazy. Then some other dude named Golvash Czeny looked into his research and amazingly enough kept from going crazy. Instead, he started the Ashcroft Foundation to develop Cthulhu-powered perpetual motion machines. Some of his researchers went crazy, though. Riveting stuff. :tongue:

The Ashcroft Foundation presented the D-Engine to the world. The scientific community clutched their pearls and went "buh-buh-buh-buh-buuuuuuut!!!!" but eventually had to admit that the Ashcrofters were much smartier than them. Sorry, do I sound too sarcastic? It's because the tone of oily smugness here is getting to me, and it's not going away anytime soon. It's reminding me unpleasantly of every amateur Suefic in existence - the way that there are always a bunch of vaguely defined impotetent naysayers who are awed by the main character. CthulhuTech has a number of different main characters, so I guess there's that, but there is always this gloating undertone of "and then Ashcroft Foundation/The Eldritch Society/the NEG/whomever is taken the spotlight right now did something SUPER-COOL and everyone looked on in awe!!!!" Blegh.

CthulhuTech has a reputation for having modules where the PCs just get to watch the NPCs do stuff, and this thing, this freaking thing here, is the reason why. The writers just don't seem to understand the concept of there being space in between a fumble and a slam dunk. Anything that gets done, has to be done in a way that completely outclasses the competition.

Mutter mutter mutter... where was I? Oh yeah, the Ashcroft Foundation and their new safe, clean, cheap power source that somehow has no drawbacks despite being fuelled by sorcery. They invent mecha and hover cars and stuff. "Oil-producing nations" leave the NUN because they're sore losers. The Chinese side with them, because they hate democracy and freedom and apple pie.

(2051) First mecha war machines deployed – The first combat mecha are unveiled to the public. They range from 20 to 40 feet tall and perform in a startling array of trial scenarios. They capture the imagination of the public, though political representatives of the Middle East-China Coalition are visibly nervous.

AMURRRRRKKKKAAAAAA - FUCK YEAH!!!! Someone gag me with a spoon.

In fact, not only are those heathen foreigners intimidated by American know-how, over on Pluto the Migou are shitting themselves because they never figured out arcanotech, so now those puny earthlings are threatening to become better than them. They promptly nick the plans for the D-Engine and set about developing their own version. They also genetically engineer the Nazzadi, a race of black-skinned, red-eyed, fanged humans. They choose that form because they assume it will be scary. I'm not entirely sure if that is meant to imply that the Migou really just don't get humans beyond the very most basic, but...

Meanwhile, the Chrysalis Corporation discovers its own ancient tablet full of naughtiness, and in the best tradition of evil corporations, they promptly set about creating monsters with it. The result are the Dhohanoids, shapeshifters who can switch between a seemingly human form and their true, creepy-crawley one. The Chrysalis Corporation is then promptly taken over by Nyarlathotep and his Children of Chaos cult.

The Nazzadi invade and blow shit up! This will be known as the First Archaotech War. The NUN is reformed into the NEG in response, and China and the Middle East return to the fold. However, eventually the Nazzadi leadership starts to question why they are taking orders from a bunch of crustacean fungi from Pluto when they frankly have a lot more in common with the humans than with them, and most of them defect. The loyalists are defeated in short order.

In the chaos of the First Archaotech War, the Chrysalis Corporation sets about grabbing as many Blasphemous Tomes of Eldritch Lore (TM) as possible with the plan of eventually bringing the Old Ones back. One of the bits and bobs they get hold of is the Ta'ge Fragment, which contains an improved version of the ritual to create Dhohanoids. However, some researchers decide that helping the Old Ones return is maybe not the best idea no matter how good it is for the next fiscal year's bottom line, so they defect and take the Ta'ge Fragment with them, forming the Eldritch Society. They use it to create Tagers, humans bonded with otherworldly beings (as opposed to taken over by them, like the Dhohanoids).

The Migou take the matter into their own claws and invade Earth themselves. The Second Archanotech War starts. Despite the resistance of the Eldritch Society and their Tagers, the Children of Chaos manage to bring Hastur into the world on the Plateau of Leng, and he gathers followers into an army called the Rapine Storm. In the ocean, the Esoteric Order of Dagon decides to join in the fun and starts attacking coastal regions. Both the NEG and the Migou realise that this is a problem, and while they don't stop fighting each other, they both start fighting the Rapine Storm and the Esoteric Order as well. The Second Archanotech War becomes the Aeon War, human against alien against eldritch abomination.

The Ashcroft Foundation invent Engels to fight the war. Engels need to be linked to a particular pilot in order to be controllable - if someone else tries to "drive" one it just goes berserk and starts smashing shit.

That concludes the timeline. Next is a rundown of all the various factions.
 
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Oh dear. That sounds complicated. Are there any Nazzadi look-alikes involved?
The Zentraedi, I guess? They start off as giants, but can be miniaturized to human size, to interact with (and spy on) humans. Their appearance is pretty human, but they have pointed ears, and occasionally non-human skin and hair colors. Over time it's shown that they can interbreed with humans.
 
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As a contrast, I think Cthulhutech is pretty cool RPG. It’s definitely the designers first, but it’s a great effort compared to most of similar pedigree. The writing does ramble somewhat, the setting is a little too derivative of its source material (Robotech and Robotech), and it is presented like a World of Darkness game in the years that that was going out of fashion (including way too many skills and pages of full fiction).

However, none of that is too damning and it was generally well thought of until RPGnet got its teeth into it with a handful of issues in the text. From that point on, there arose one of the more relentless and continual dog piling from TBP that I have seen outside of a couple of RPGs with far more glaring issues. So much so that the designers were effectively blocked from interacting with their fan base and eventually the industry. I personally see that as a great shame as new talent like theirs should have been welcomed.

If you want to know what the issues are, from memory:
  • The book refers to the solar system as galaxy at one point.
  • The deep ones use rape camps in China to further their cross-breeding efforts.
  • Nazzadi have black faces.
  • There is a mind control device in one of the supplements that is involved is some despicable sexual acts.
 
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Are there any Nazzadi look-alikes involved?
Somewhere here I've got issues of an old manga that name-drops Lovecraft entities and has something like alien cat-girls in power armor. Cat girls come to Earth as enemies but soon become friends...
Something like that. A bit like Outlanders, with more Cthulhu.
It seems to be a common trope, alien invaders leaving their team to befriend humans.
 
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The Zentraedi, I guess? They start off as giants, but can be miniaturized to human size, to interact with (and spy on) humans. Their appearance is pretty human, but they have pointed ears, and occasionally non-human skin and hair colors. Over time it's shown that they can interbreed with humans.
The Nazzadi are a riff off of the Zentradi. Different in appearance but serving the same role in the setting.

Okay, so... what role they serve in the setting? Because they just seem so superflous...

As a contrast, I think Cthulhutech is pretty cool RPG. It’s definitely the designers first, but it’s a great effort compared to most of similar pedigree. The writing does ramble somewhat, the setting is a little too derivative of its source material (Robotech and Robotech), and it is presented like a World of Darkness game in the years that that was going out of fashion (including way too many skills and pages of full fiction).

However, none of that is too damning and it was generally well thought of until RPGnet got its teeth into it with a handful of issues in the text. From that point on, there arose one of the more relentless and continual dog piling from TBP that I have seen outside of a couple of RPGs with far more glaring issues. So much so that the designers were effectively blocked from interacting with their fan base and eventually the industry. I personally see that as a great shame as new talent like theirs should have been welcomed.

If you want to know what the issues are, from memory:
  • The book refers to the solar system as galaxy at one point.
  • The deep ones use rape camps in China to further their cross-breeding efforts.
  • Nazzadi have black faces.
  • There is a mind control device in one of the supplements that is involved is some despicable sexual acts.

Heh. Well, for what it's worth, I do think the game gets more hate than it deserves. It's got a cool premise... well, it's got like two and a half cool premises crammed together, and that's part of the problem, but still. And I do very strongly feel that people need to calm down about tasteless worldbuilding. Horrible fucked-up over-the-top badness can be fun as long as you're ready for it. Sometimes tasteless is just the taste you're looking for! :shade:

That said, though, I have skimmed enough of the book to know that my two complaints from the last two parts persist. It's all weirdly boring, and it's all too damn smug. There's this weird tonedeafness over it all - none of it fits together and none of it is in proportion.

Chapter two: That was then and this is now (part two)
The people of Earth have become free of prejudice and bigotry, the economy is booming, everyone is optimistic, and all is joy, joy, happy joy, happy happy joy... well, other than the alien invasions and genicidal cults, I guess. Remember those? Because the book seems to have momentarily forgotten them. See what I mean about tonedeaf?

The NEG rules the whole world (well, what's left of it, anyway), and is divided into states. The old USA and Canada are one state, and so is all of Europe. I would complain about the book so cavalierly glossing over the differences between different European countries and assuming that we're basically all the same and could easily be smushed together into a single nation, but... well, at least it seems to be aware that that we are not currently a single nation, which puts it head and shoulders past Eldritch Skies. :tongue:

Hum, hum, uninteresting bits about politics and defense... Apparently the NEG no longer controls New England (because all the Innsmouth-style towns there turned out to be full of Deep Ones, natch) and has lost parts of Europe and Asia (and Russia, I think) to the Rapine Storm. They're worried about holding England and the Mediterranean, and they're losing their grip of Africa, India and China due to cult activity.

NEG military is based around mecha, with troops in power armour serving at a smaller scale. They have a combat doctrine that stresses rapid deployment and flexibility, since they don't know where the enemy will strike next. The navy now has ships that can switch freely between being ocean-going and hovering in the air, which is kind of nifty. The NEG also maintains a Global Intelligence Agency for all your spy thriller needs.

There was an experiment with a super-weapon in the Nevada Desert. It didn't go so well. By which I mean, the Nevada Desert now has a 160-mile-wide area where the laws of reality have stopped applying and... things keep shambling out from it. It's called The Zone. There are troops stationed around it to make sure nothing gets in or out. Okay, that's sort of cool and creepy.

Oh, by the way, the NEG is losing. All that joy, joy, happy joy is something the government tries to keep going so that people don't start panicking. Okay, so we're back at the grimdark Lovecraftian side of things now, then.

The Ashcroft Foundation! They invented arcanotech, which rendered large swaths of industry obsolete. "Fortunately, faith in the new field was so high that economies didn’t collapse under the strain. The companies that survived were those who could adapt as quickly as possible. The car manufacturers who had stubbornly refused to design good vehicles powered by alternate fuels were buried by their more ready competition." Yes, fortunately the worldshaking changes didn't actually harm anyone except the sticks in the mud who totally deserved it anyway. That's very fortunate, yes. :tongue:

"The New Earth Government and the Ashcroft Foundation are in bed together the way no government and corporation has ever been." Er... that's kind of bad. Do you get that that's kind of bad? I mean, apparently some people do, because "Many protest that a private organization has no business advising on matters of state or economy," but are we supposed to agree with that or are we supposed to think that they're the stupid pootieheads who just don't understand that the noble Ashcroft Foundation has everyone's best interests at heart? Because the way the chapter then goes on at some length about how well the Foundation treats its employees and how loyal and devoted they are and how they are all the best and the brightest and probably stunningly attractive too... makes me kind of suspect it's the latter. :tongue:

I wonder if the writers actually understood that SEELE (from NGE) weren't supposed to be wholly sympathetic? Because it seems a lot like they've copied the basic setup of a secretive private organisation with a monopoly on essential technology and made them full of sweetness and light.

Oh, and Ashcroft researchers go crazy a lot, as we've already seen. But they get excellent company-funded mental health care and "The Foundation however has never fired an employee for mental health reasons." Eh. Okay, as someone whose mental health has always been shaky, I appreciate that in principle, but... :tongue:

The Engel Project! It's a joint venture between the NEG and the Ashcroft Foundation. They artificially grow giant creatures cloned from "the DNA of humans and god knows what else." Then they slap on a ton of cybernetic enhancements, including a control capsule where the pilot is submerged when driving the thing. The pilot needs to have a special chip implanted in his brain that's paired with one implanted in the Engel's brain, allowing him to control it. Without that interface, the Engel just goes berserk the moment it feels threatened. The same if the pilot is knocked out during combat - then the Engel just starts killing everything within sight. Each Engel can only have one pilot at the time, and vice versa.

Engels are better than regular mecha, but they take time to build. Only one mech of six in the NEG army is an Engel. The Project would need to churn out Engels at four times its current rate for them to actually turn the tide of the war the way the government tells the public that they already have.

There are ideas for creating Engels that can be trained and thus need no pilots to control them. I have a good feeling about that plan and it will definitely not go horribly wrong, no sirree. :tongue: Seriously, there is some potential for a story there - the PCs being sent to track down a rampaging monster that turns out to be a "free" Engel that escaped. Naturally it would all be so classified that they were barely allowed to keep their eyes open during the mission, for that nicely skeevy feeling.

Next we get to the Eldritch Society, and then we'll move on to the baddies.
 
Okay, so... what role they serve in the setting? Because they just seem so superflous...

One of the big reveals in Robotech is that the alien enemy is actually not much different from us. This is something common in anime and the Japanese view of war being something that makes both sides suffer, even where there is a victor. In Cthulhutech, the Nazzadi are effectively discovered to be engineered from human DNA despite being seen initially as monsters. This puts into question what does being human mean, which can lead in to some trans-humanist questions as well IME.

From a more practical level, it opens up a new character option that seems pretty popular and a bunch of narratives about being a minority which I have seen used for good effect.
 
Okay, so... what role they serve in the setting? Because they just seem so superflous...
The Zentraedi were a proxy warrior race created by another alien species that initially fight humanity, but after the war is over learn to work with (and occasionally fuck) them, so that seems to track with the role the Nazzadi seem to play in CT.

Also, depending on the age and nationality of the game's creators, Robotech may have just been listed as an influence because, for many U.S. nerds of a certain age, it was our introduction to both anime and the mecha genre. Even if it's pretty tame and basic compared to some of the anime that would come later, it's kind of hard to overstate just how different it felt from American cartoon when it showed up here in the mid 80's, back when Saturday morning cartoons were completely toothless, and the syndicated stuff that we watched in the afternoon only slightly less so. Pre-teen me was completely floored when one of the main characters died during the first season. "Can they do that in a cartoon???"
 
As a contrast, I think Cthulhutech is pretty cool RPG. It’s definitely the designers first, but it’s a great effort compared to most of similar pedigree. The writing does ramble somewhat, the setting is a little too derivative of its source material (Robotech and Robotech), and it is presented like a World of Darkness game in the years that that was going out of fashion (including way too many skills and pages of full fiction).

However, none of that is too damning and it was generally well thought of until RPGnet got its teeth into it with a handful of issues in the text. From that point on, there arose one of the more relentless and continual dog piling from TBP that I have seen outside of a couple of RPGs with far more glaring issues. So much so that the designers were effectively blocked from interacting with their fan base and eventually the industry. I personally see that as a great shame as new talent like theirs should have been welcomed.

If you want to know what the issues are, from memory:
  • The book refers to the solar system as galaxy at one point.
  • The deep ones use rape camps in China to further their cross-breeding efforts.
  • Nazzadi have black faces.
  • There is a mind control device in one of the supplements that is involved is some despicable sexual acts.

I agree with this as far as the setting, though to be honest the system was always mediocre at best and that is being generous. I think that the issues with the setting stuff were vastly overblown by TBP, and I say that as someone who would probably butt heads with a lot of people on the Pub if we got started talking about political stuff in RPGs. It isn't the best setting in the world, but it has potential and some fun ideas. Even the blatant ripoff stuff like Nazzadi basically being the Zentraidi from Robotech had potential to be interesting.

Also, I'm pretty sure the various "types" like the engels and tagers and what not are not really intended to be played in the same campaign. I think you are just supposed to pick a specific focus for a game and play that. But it was never really explicitly said.
 
I have almost all the books for this game since I like the setting and the art. I do remember that a notorious 2 faced troll trying to trash on TBP and SA.

I have played once using the system but since I was a player I have no memory of the quality of the system.

I would honestly use the Rifts rules to play this game since it took the MDC rules from it.
 
One of the big reveals in Robotech is that the alien enemy is actually not much different from us. This is something common in anime and the Japanese view of war being something that makes both sides suffer, even where there is a victor. In Cthulhutech, the Nazzadi are effectively discovered to be engineered from human DNA despite being seen initially as monsters. This puts into question what does being human mean, which can lead in to some trans-humanist questions as well IME.

From a more practical level, it opens up a new character option that seems pretty popular and a bunch of narratives about being a minority which I have seen used for good effect.
The Zentraedi were a proxy warrior race created by another alien species that initially fight humanity, but after the war is over learn to work with (and occasionally fuck) them, so that seems to track with the role the Nazzadi seem to play in CT.

Also, depending on the age and nationality of the game's creators, Robotech may have just been listed as an influence because, for many U.S. nerds of a certain age, it was our introduction to both anime and the mecha genre. Even if it's pretty tame and basic compared to some of the anime that would come later, it's kind of hard to overstate just how different it felt from American cartoon when it showed up here in the mid 80's, back when Saturday morning cartoons were completely toothless, and the syndicated stuff that we watched in the afternoon only slightly less so. Pre-teen me was completely floored when one of the main characters died during the first season. "Can they do that in a cartoon???"

Fair enough.

Chapter two: That was then and this is now (part three)
I tell a lie, the Chrysalis Corporation comes before the Eldritch Society. And... look, they're Pentex. They're just freaking Pentex, all right? They are an evil multinational corporation with their fingers in absolutely everything, they want to spread spiritual corruption in the world, they're run by the Devil (well... one of them), they have an army of monsters at their command, GIVE ME A P, GIVE ME AN E, GIVE ME AN N, GIVE ME A T... I mean, in fairness, Pentex is not a strikingly original concept in the first place, and if asked the writers would probably say it's more inspired by the villains from The Guyver, but given how much of the structure and style they have lifted from the WoD, I'm calling it. It's Pentex, only even more obviously evil. I mean "the Chrysalis Corporation"? Why not just call yourself "the We Are A Creepy Alien Entity Just Biding Our Time Before We Unleash Our Full Horror Corporation" and be done with it? :tongue:

Anyway, to be specific, the Chrysalis Corporation is based on South Africa (because it's EVIL, see?) and sometime in the mid-twenty-first century they got heavily into the occult and learned to turn people into Dhohanoids. The Children of Chaos claims they led Chrysalis to the discovery, but that might just be them being quick to claim credit. Either way, the Children infiltrated the Corporation and took over shortly after, and now the whole thing is run by Nyarlathotep. Like, literally. He's taken human form and acts as the CEO. That's... okay, not gonna lie, that's at least a little bit awesome.

Dhohanoids are divided into subspecies called manifestations. "Very few unique Dhohanoids are created, and they may just be the first of new breeds," for some reason (this is just one example of the game being oddly rigid about its stat blocks - you're not allowed to pimp out your Engel either, everything has to be a cookie-cutter identical incarnation of one of a number of pre-defined models, for some reason). They can breed normally with each other or with humans to create more Dhohanoids. They are inherently inhuman and can be identified by a simple blood test, but the Chrysalis Corporation have enough strings to pull that it can make its Dhohanoids excempt from routine NEG screening.

They work in cells, usually with cover identities that have some sort of corporate high flier. The Corporation takes care to send cleaners to cover their tracks, "not that anyone would likely believe their connection to the Corporation anyway." Er, why not, if they are officially employed by it? If enough of your VIPs are seen transforming into giant alien frogs and going on a rampage, I'd say the authorities will start giving you some suspicious looks, just saying...

Most people working for the Chrysalis Corporation don't know that they are serving an Endless One, they just think they have an unusually shitty and soul-destroying job. The top execs are all either sorcerers, para-psychics or Dhohanoids, though. Getting promoted past a certain point means either getting initiated into some blasphemous ritual magic or getting an alien squid shoved down your throat. There is an explicit comparison to organised crime - the company takes care of its own, but disloyalty is punished severely.

Nyarlathotep wants to bring the Old Ones back, though it doesn't say why, since he's not actually an Old One. The Chrysalis Corporation was responsible for the return of Hastur (who is also not an Old One. Look, I know it says in the early chapter that the book does not follow the Lovecraftian canon slavishly, but can you at least make sense of the changes you make? Why create these overly neat subcategories if you're just going to treat the lot of them like one big happy family anyway?) and get along quite well with the Rapine Storm and the Death Shadows. They have diplomatic relations with the Esoteric Order, but don't cooperate with them beyond sharing information.

The Eldritch Society, then. It started when some Chrysalis goons found the Ta'ge Fragment in some ruined city in the Arctic. They brought home a transcription and a bunch of researchers managed to translate it. It contained stories of "the Forgotten Ones" (which is one of the group of elder gods the game uses, along with the Old Ones and the Endless Ones - I'm not entirely clear on what their deal is yet) and led the researchers to believe that, hey, maybe handing over the world to a bunch of tentacled abominations wasn't such a bright idea after all! They absconded with the Fragment, which also involved a helpful description on how to perform a ritual to make a person "more divine."

There were twelve of them to start with, and only three got away alive, but they made it to Chicago and went underground, gathering a secret society around them. There they developed the Rite of Sacred Union, which merges a mortal and a "higher being" together. This is in contrast to the Dhohanoids Rite of Transfiguration, where another being completely takes over the mortal's body. It's tricky, though - there's a long regimen of ritual purification beforehand, and even then most people who try it are "judged unworthy" and dies.

Okay, here's another point where the way things are presented are just weird. I think that the idea is supposed to be that Tagers manage to merge with some horrific alien thing and still keep their humanity, thus allowing them to fight fire with fire. But there is so much gushing over how they are "divine" and "holy warriors" that I'm not sure whether that's meant to be ironic or not. I mean, in a pure Lovecraftian setting, anything being called "divine" should set off warning bells, because it's always code for "horrible insane squid-like monstrosity that will drive you crazy just by existing at you." Here, I am genuinely unsure whether the Ta'ge symbionts are meant to be actually a form of benevolent angelic beings that just happen to have more tentacles than angelic beings normally have.

Anyway, the point is that the Eldritch Society can't just mass-produce Tagers, they need to find candidates with an iron will and pure dedication for them to have a chance to survive the process. There's a lot more Dhohanoids than Tagers, and it'll stay that way "until Chrysalis Corporation breeding programs and Genesis Pits can be crippled or destroyed." Hmm, interesting.

Ultimately, [the Founders] had to decide on their role in the world. How would they fight their war? Would they come forward to their own government? Themselves Dhohanoids, the Founders of the Eldritch Society knew the corruption and paranoia that permeated the New Earth Government.

First off, WHAT? The Founders were Dhohanoids? I thought Dhohanoids were irredeemably evil! If they are still human enough to decide to maybe not feed humanity to the Old Ones, then that will make it a lot less fun to massacre them wholesale, I'm just saying... :tongue: I mean, it does say later that the Founders killed themselves before their Dhohanoid nature got the better of them, but wasn't the whole point that the Rite of Transfiguration erased everything human in the host? And there's just no reason why they'd even need to be Dhohanoids. They were scientists, after all, not shock troops. Bah. Stupid.

Secondly, the NEG is permeated by corruption and paranoia now? That's the first I've heard of it, so far they've been presented as the square-jawed all-American heroes of the setting. Damn it, CthulhuTech, you can't just go grimdark when you feel like it and spend the rest of the time gushing about how awesome everything is! A consistent tone, is it too much to ask? :argh:

Bah... well, the upshot is that the Founders decided to keep the Eldritch Society hidden and fight Shadow War against the Chrysalis Corporation. So basically, like I said, they're the Garou from Werewolf: the Apocalypse (they're even organised into "packs," though the Tagers themselves prefer to call them "murders"), the Chrysalis Corporation is Pentex, the Dhohanoids are fomori... But that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, my big problem with WtA has always been that I hate the Garou with a fiery passion, while thinking that the general setup is pretty badass. I could see the appeal of a game where you get to do the "shapeshifters fighting a secret war against an evil corporation with mutant armies" thing without having to play a furry Luddite. :grin:

Next: more cults.
 
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I understand that the Tager lore is heavily based on the anime Guyver.

As to Tagers being divine, that does accord with the Lovecraftian concept of the divine. Like Lovecraft, that doesn’t make them inherently good or bad, just inherently beyond human comprehension.

In that sense, they are an occult based transhuman or posthuman device that can run the kinds of narratives you see in Ghost in the Shell or other anime that explore such themes.
 
In the opening credits, the authors explicitly named the Guyver as the inspiration for the Tagers and co.
 
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Chapter two: That was then and this is now (part four)
The Disciples of the Unnamable are the foul minions of Hastur, the Dead God. They're centered on the plateau of Leng, where Hastur resides in his dark evil citadel in the form of his avatar, the Ruined King. They are divided into the Rapine Storm, who's a huge rampaging army of monsters and lunatics, and the Death Shadows, who are scheming infiltrators trying to bring down the NEG from within.

The Rapine Storm is mad, bad and crazy. As the book puts it:

They don’t occupy – they strip bare. They don’t conquer – they raze. They don’t murder – they exterminate.

Okay, see, those first two were effective in making the point, but in the third case, murder and exterminate mean the same thing. The difference is just in what sort of moral weight you assign to the action. :tongue: But that aside, well, you get the idea. Basically, the average Rapine Storm soldier is a howling madman who gets grouchy if he has to go more than fifteen minutes without getting to kill something. They don't bother with tactics, instead relying on the simple fact that if you bring enough brute force, you don't need them.

The Rapine Storm doesn't have an overarching command structure but is divided into small war bands led by the biggest, baddest mofo of the bunch. Hastur sends them divine commandments in their dreams to make sure that they are all at least approximately moving in the same direction at the same time.

The Death Shadows, on the other hand, are smart cookies. They try to destroy the moral fabric of society by catering to everyone's basest urges. Enough sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, they figure, and people will be too venal and self-indulgent to resist Hastur. Okay... but let's remember that for later, because I think at some point the game is going to start bragging about how how wise and enlightened the NEG is for not having any of those puritan hangups anymore. Anyway, they also collect blackmail material on everyone who's anyone so as to get more control and clout.

One small piece of possible good news: Hastur does not lead his armies in the field, nor does he even leave his castle in Leng. There are theories that maybe something was off about his summoning and he actually can't leave.

The Esoteric Order! Okay, brace yourselves. This is the, ahem, controversial part. :tongue:

The Deep Ones of the Esoteric Order of Dagon has been bringing fishing communities under its sway for centuries by first taking away the fish and then giving back the fish when the townsfolk start making the right sort of hideous sacrifices. Their ultimate goal is to start breeding with them so as to increase their numbers.

The fertile females of the village offer themselves up to these “holy” beings. In the streets, on the beach, in the church, these unholy unions couple in a grotesque mockery of sexual intercourse. The mothers carry their children with pride, honored to have been chosen to bear the scions of their beloved god.

Okay. A bit gross. Also contrary to Lovecraftian canon, where there were also human male/Deep One female pairings (and they screwed in the privacy of their own homes, because just because you're an evil alien fish-thing it doesn't mean you don't have some standards). But, in fairness, Lovecraft never did mention precisely why the Deep Ones wanted to mate with humans (the monsters in his stories rarely seemed to have any motivation beyond just being scary and alien for the sake of it), "increasing their numbers" is an obvious reason, and that reason would require human women more so than human men. And also, it's actually more consensual than in the canon, where it wasn't clear how willing the Innsmouthers were to "keep guests" but it was pretty obvious that the Deep Ones weren't going to take no for an answer.

No, the part that makes some people see red comes a few paragraphs later:

Now, the Esoteric Order has come out into the world. They take towns by force and set up rape camps to increase their numbers. They brainwash new-agers, forcing them to become spies for the cult. And they search the world to find the lost sunken city of R’lyeh and for ways to awaken the sleeping god within.

Emphasis mine. See what I mean about tonedeaf? They even put it in the middle of a paragraph of other things the Esoteric Order is doing, like it's just one item on their to-do list. Like... one of those things is not like the others, guys! :tongue:

Okay, look. I'm not opposed to the use of sensitive topics in roleplaying games. Any kind of entertainment tries to evoke emotions, sometimes the emotions it tries to evoke are ones of horror and disgust, and if you don't want to be horrified an disgusted, I think you shouldn't play games that are shock full of tentacles and war crimes in the first place. In fact, in my let's-read of Eldritch Skies, I complained about the description of Deep Ones because it sanitised them and took out all the references to heavily implied rape - which is only one of the ways that ES bends over backwards to never, ever make anyone even the tiniest bit uncomfortable, and ends up dull as dishwater because of it.

But, yeah. Tonedeaf. It's not that the writers put in rape camps in their game. It's that they don't seem to understand just how much of a punch that would pack. It's just sort of mushed in there with everything else in a giant, gooey, unappetising mess. There's such a thing as artfulness. There's such a thing as style. There's such a thing as tone. There is, in fact, all sorts of things and the writers of CthulhuTech appear to have none of them.

All right. That's my take on the game's main claim to infamy. Moving on!

The Esoteric Order rules the oceans, and anything that needs to be transported across them needs a military guard or they'll take it. They occupy a variety of islands and coast lines all over the world. Their human cultists infiltrate the NEG and have produced acquatic mecha and Deep One power armour. Not sure that I buy them managing to get hold of enough infrastructure to be competetive in the arms race if they started out with a bunch of fishing villages, but okay... They are also joined by Spawn, squiddy things from deep beneath the ocean with immense power. Only Dagon, the leader of the Deep Ones, can match the power of a Spawn, and they function as a sort of priesthood. They strike under cover of night, use sorcery to assist them, and then withdraw back to their coastal and island strongholds. Their ultimate goal is to wake up Cthulhu and let him cleanse the surface world for them, so they are looking for old pieces of lore that might lead them to the location of R'lyeh.

The Migou! They come from Pluto and are butthurt because the humans came up with arcanotech before they did. They responded to that insult by creating a clone army, brainwashing the soldiers into remembering being from an interstellar empire bent on conquest, and sent them at Earth to start the First Arcanotech War. But then, one of the Nazzadi brass, who knew the real score, told the rest about it.

The Nazzadi were furious and ashamed. They were a race that never existed, who were destroying a people that weren’t even their enemies. They surrendered to the New Earth Government and ended the war.

Okay, I seriously doubt that would have happened. You tell people that not only is their whole life a lie, but their entire history and culture is a lie too? I think they'd go into denial like you wouldn't believe. Especially if it was in the middle of a war, for God's sakes - you try telling a bunch of people who absolutely can not afford to second-guess themselves that everything they think they know is wrong, they're not going to believe you. Not even if you offered proof. It would feel suicidal for them to even consider the possibility that you might be right, so they'd clamp their hands over their ears, go, "LALALALALA ENEMY SUBVERSION TACTIC LALALALA!!!" and get back to shooting at the people who were shooting at them.

This is what keeps bugging me about CT's worldbuilding. There's no structure to it, things just sort of magically happen when the plot needs them to. It snaps my suspension of disbelief every time. Things in the real world don't happen in big, dramatic strokes, they happen piecemeal and because a ton of different things align to make them possible. This is a child's idea of how the world works, that you can just wave a magic wand and make everything right all in one go.

Hrmpf.

Anyway, since the Nazzadi were such a wash, the Migou built a big Hive Ship and came to Earth themselves and started kicking the NEG's ass. Then the Rapine Storm and the Esoteric Order joined in, and the Migou found themselves fighting a war on two fronts, which slowed them down a bit. They're still winning, though, it's just not happening as fast anymore. When they take a city, they execute all the Nazzadi and drag all the humans away to be brainwashed into "Blanks," who are used as slaves or to infiltrate the NEG. The NEG can identify Blanks through brain scans, so they can't get into government buildings, though.

The Migou are masters of sorcery, para-psychic powers, robotics, genetics and psychiatry (I'm a little dubious about that last one, since their best idea for creating a terrifying-looking race was to make it black and red with spiky bits. Come on, guys, that's your best effort at psychological warfare?). They didn't invent arcanotech, but once they got to take a look at it they figured it out pretty thoroughly. They use "null rays" that disintegrate enemies in battle and their communication resembles telepathy and so can't be intercepted or jammed. Basically, they have all the coolest toys and actually know what they're doing at least some of the time, which gives them an edge against the other factions.

The Migou are responsible for all the alien abduction stories you've heard. The whole "little grey men" thing was a cover they created through brainwashing. I'm not sure why they saw the need to cover up their alien abductions by pretending they were a different sort of alien abductions, but okay... They have had free reign of Earth throughout humankind's entire history and aren't about to let us get uppity.

The Migou live on Pluto in "great crystalline and metallic cities." They like it cold, so their base of operation on Earth is Antarctica. They're also in the process of helping themselves to Alaska, which would put them on the doorstep of the NEG's heartland.
 
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Chapter two: That was then and this is now (part five)
The, sigh, Nazzadi. Again, they were cloned by the Migou and implanted with fake memories of being soldiers of an ancient empire with a manifest destiny of conquering the entire universe. They had the upper hand in the First Archanotech War, but then some of the generals had a chance of heart and broadcasted the truth all over the fleet, three quarters of which promptly went, "oooops, guess we should switch sides then." This is still dumb, by the way. It's like... Left Behind levels of dumb.

Anyway, the humans and the rogue Nazzadi won the war, and the Nazzadi started moping around because, well, their entire individual and collective identity had been shattered and all. They were given Cuba and established their own nation of Nazza-Duhni there. Okay, again, this is not a thing that would happen, at least not without some massive objections from, y'know, the Cubans.

Humans were intolerant of the Nazzadi, what with having almost been genicided by them and all, but then the Migou Hive Ship got spotted, and... "Faced with another hostile invading force, everyone just seemed to smile and realize that they were now all in this together."

...

...

... BECAUSE THAT'S PRECISELY WHAT PEOPLE ARE LIKE. :argh: Look, I wouldn't mind it so much if the game just took place in a world that was brighter and more cartoonish than the real one, where a few billion murder-clones could just move in and everyone would quickly become great friends. But no, the game fancies itself very gritty and realistic and dealing with Serious Mature Topics, Yo. That sentence I quoted is at the end of a paragraph that contains the phrase "a minimum number of race riots." Which is frankly a mind-boggling phrase to begin with, how cynical (or more likely, oblivious) do you have to be to talk about a minimum number of race riots, but I DIGRESS! This is a game that claims to deal with PTSD and the soul-destroying experiences of total war, yet at the same time has an entire generation just shrug and let go of their experiences of fighting a visually distinct group of people because, well, they're very sorry and they didn't mean to do all that racial cleansing they did, so bygones, right?

Again, I'm not opposed to a game where forgiveness is easy and war is just a bit of fun. I'm also not opposed to a game that deals seriously with weighty subjects like trauma and prejudice. But PICK ONE! :argh: I'm getting whiplash from the way this game goes back and forth whenever it suits it.

Okay, okay, I'm calm, I'm calm... The Nazzadi were under the impression that they had a vaguely Japanese warrior culture, but they've all given up on that and become eclectic artists and hipsters instead. I mean, it doesn't use the term "hipster," and if I were speaking my native language right now I might use the more charitable term levnadskonstnär (literally, "someone who makes an art out of living"), but, well, what else do you call in English someone who is all about mixing and matching styles, the more obscure the better? :tongue: Also, they're really into tattoos for some reason.

See, I kind of feel like that's a missed opportunity. There'd be a weird sort of poignancy in it if they kept their given culture alive because it was the only one they had, despite knowing full well that it was entirely fictional. And that seems like something people would do. In the Philip K Dick novel that Blade Runner is based on, there is a religion that is publically proven false by the villains. And the prophet of the religion basically shrugs and says, "they'll never understand why this won't change anything." I think that's what would happen, in this scenario - not to all Nazzadi, but to a lot of them, and to varying degrees. You'd have a lot of them defiantly going on praying to gods that were invented by a race of scheming aliens, because the alternative would be having no one to pray to at all.

But oh well.

Humans and Nazzadi can interbreed (they are the same species for all intents and purposes, after all), but Nazzadi are intolerant of mixed marriages albeit not of mixed flings. They figure that they're a young species and need to establish their own identity before they can start mixing with humans, and never mind that they are mostly establishing their own identity by taking bits and pieces of human culture... They make up about 40% of the population of the planet, so I'm not sure they have that much to worry about anyway.

Anyway, some of them actually defected back to the Migou when they appeared, and most of the ones who didn't are royally pissed off about that and want the loyalists' heads on platters. Nazzadi communities are still being watched for possible subversives, though, which is a nice touch in that it's at once completely unfair and entirely understandable.

The next section is titled "Life in the Strange Aeon." It starts by describing the seemingly idyllic state of the NEG, high employment, technological progress, everyone's spirits are high, etc. Then it admits that the government spends a lot of effort drumming up war fervor and insisting that they're totally winning, including by locking up anyone who dares to suggest otherwise. They even have a Ministry of Information who manages the narrative. What, "the Ministry of Truth" was taken? :tongue:

People live in arcologies, carefully planned, high-rising cities where you're guaranteed to live within walking distance of everything else. Only emergency vehicles are allowed within the arcologies, so travel is either by slidewalk or automated monorail. Okay, speaking as someone who's a city boy to the core and hate walking anywhere? That sounds absolutely wretched. It's like they've turned a whole city into a giant airport! I have seen the future, and its name is Heathrow! :tongue: In fairness, the idea seems to be to both take care of the environment by concentrating the human population so it doesn't need to spread out over the remaining pristine wilderness areas, and also make it easier to defend the public by putting them in a relatively small place that can be surrounded by heavy fortifications.

There are still people who live outside of arcologies, because they can't afford the rent inside or because they have "Sick Building Syndrome," which isn't explained here. There's a bit of hard feelings between the rednecks and the city slickers, because some things never change. Nazzadi are also a lot more accepted inside the arcologies than outside.

Magic is a thing that people know about now. Sorcerers need to register with the Office of Internal Security. Magic books and equipment are considered controlled substances. There's a black market called the Arcane Underground for illegal sorcerous goods and services. That's kinda cool. Organised crime is on the rise, and the Death Shadows are flattered that you noticed. Bits and pieces of occult lore have also floated into pop culture, so you get things like passages from the Necronomicon being sampled as club music. Okay, that's genuinely pretty awesome. :grin: Discontent young punks mess around with magic, because of course they do, and while most of the time they don't get anywhere sometimes they by sheer accident manage to attract the attention of something with too few vowels in its name.

The section ends by stating that most NEG citizens can kind of feel that things are maybe not going as well as advertised, and that there are plenty of stuff happening that they aren't being told about, but they mostly resolutely refuse to think about it. Okay, I actually like the ambience of that.

The Aeon War! It's basically a summary of things we've already been told, with some new bits and bobs here and there.

The NEG is basically just trying to hold on to its remaining territory and kiiiiiiind of succeeding, for now. They are concentrating on the Migou, but that might be because they just don't want to admit just how potentionally dangerous the cults could be. Regardless, their plan is to just keep the cults at bay until they can (somehow) beat the Migou, at which time they will turn their attention to the cults.

The Children of Chaos are pally with the Death Shadows and more or less civil with the other cults. They have also infiltrated them, so that whatever the other cults discover, they can make use of too. Heh. Their main objective right now is basically just to annoy the hell out of everyone and make them lose control. They also really freaking hate the Tagers and want them all dead. I assume the feeling is mutual.

The Disciples of the Unnamable is hitting the NEG hard. They've burned and pillaged their way through south-east Asia and China, and now they have their eye on eastern Europe and the East Indies. They've left some pockets of survivors in their wake, who are now in hiding. Kind of cool, you could run a post-apocalyptic sort of game of refugees trying to survive in Storm-controlled territory - essentially a zombie survival scenario, except the zombies have machine guns. :tongue: They're also messing with Migou population centers in Mongolia.

Meanwhile, the Death Shadows are trying to turn everyone into dirty perverts. "Japanese sex cults have experienced a sharp rise in popularity," apparently. Yeah, of the two subcults, I'm feeling more and more that the Death Shadows is the underachiever. I can just imagine how the meetings go in the Ruined King's citadel in Leng...

RAPINE STORM REPRESENTATIVE: *chews on the table* GAW GAW GAW! WE LOOTED AND PILLAGED AND BURNED ACROSS THE LAND! STONE WAS NOT LEFT ON STONE! THE BODIES WERE PILED THREE DEEP! BLURGHURGHURGHURGHURGH!!!! *fires a gun into the air, then realises that he hasn't killed anyone since lunch and rips a servant's spine out*
DEATH SHADOW REPRESENTATIVE: "Er..."
DEATH SHADOW REPRESENTATIVE: "Uhm..."
DEATH SHADOW REPRESENTATIVE: "We made a few Japanese businessmen get laid more...?"
THE RUINED KING: *reveals his true mindshattering visage and bites the Death Shadow representative's head off*

The Esoteric Order of Dagon isn't trying to conquer anything, because when Cthulhu comes back he's going to kill everything that doesn't have gills anyway. Instead, they're focused on getting hold of more arcane lore so they can find Big C and tell him to get on with it. They did recently conquer Iceland from the Migou, though. They are doing horrific experiments on captured Migou, because turnabout's fair play. They're also setting up shop on the coasts of Africa, Europe and the Americas to kidnap people and see if any particular race of humans breeds better hybrids than the others. Oooooookay...

The Migou do not discriminate - they hate the cults and the semi-sane humans equally much and are trying to enslave the lot. They have occupied Scandinavia (hey!), most of Russia, a portion of Mongolia, Korea, New Zealand, Antarctica, a tiny bit of South America and they're advancing across Alaska. They are methodical and relentless.

The NEG is considering evacuating a breeding population by space ship, though they're not sure where to, or how to get past the Migou Hive Ship. (can't they launch from the opposite end of the planet or something...?) This initiative is called "Project Mayflower." They are also not sure what happened to the space colonies, but they are still trying to get in touch with them.

The chapter ends with a propaganda flier for the NEG army, ranting about how great it is to be in the NEG army.

Next we dive into the mechanics.
 
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For xenomix (human/Nazzadi) children, there is a much higher chance of parapsychic ability (covered in Vade Mecum), so the risk of having the next Akira may also be a factor in how interbreeding is viewed.

Vade Mecum also details the Occult Underground further. The main campaign was an OSS game investigating the OU and it was a pretty mix of cyberpunk and occult concepts.
 
I would have to reread the Eldritch Skies thread to be certain, but so far it seems that CT is hurting you in a much more visceral manner than ES did.
 
(I seem to recall that the Robotech novels big reveal in later post series books, besides what happened to the SDF engines and other things, turns out Zentradi race really are just humans, just genetically engineered heavily into the giant art-less beings of the "Robotech" era. No idea how this jives with Macross canon or not.)
 
I would have to reread the Eldritch Skies thread to be certain, but so far it seems that CT is hurting you in a much more visceral manner than ES did.

Well, yeah... ES annoyed me mostly by being so dead set on not exciting me in any way. In a piece of entertainment, I feel, this is a major failing... but there is only so much emotion you can muster for something failing to make you feel any emotions. CT, by contrast, is dead set on pushing my buttons. It's just that it seems not to have gotten the Human Being user manual, so it keeps pushing the wrong buttons. :tongue:

To put it another way, ES felt like it was written by a high-strung puritan, the sort of person who considers anything more racy than a cup of milky tea to be unbearably stressful. CT feels like it was written by a heavily autistic otaku who needed to turn everything up to eleven to experience any feelings at all. I can roll my eyes at the puritan, but it's the otaku that I feel could use a solid kick to the backside. :tongue:

Chapter three: The art of the game
We get the sort of "What is Roleplaying?" piece that is usually at the start of the book. I'm sure you can all recite it by heart now, so I'll skip it. It's worth mentioning that CT is being fancy and having its own names for stuff, though. It doesn't have a GM, it has a Storyguide; it doesn't have PCs, it has Dramatic Characters. This is because it's a game of telling compelling stories, not that dungeon-crawling nonsense.

Dude... your game is about riding a giant mech and punching Cthulhu in the face! Now, I'm all for that, but it ain't gonna be Shakespeare! How are you being this pretentious about it? :argh:

See what I mean here about the weird disconnect between the writers and, well, the human race? They seem to be the kind of nerds who stick up their noses and claims that "video games are AAAAAAAAAAAART!!!!" And those annoy me quite severely, because I've played a bunch of video games in my life and of those I think that... two or three might be "AAAAAAAART!!!" The rest are entertainment, which is a fine thing to be, but they're not going to be part of the Western Canon anytime soon. There are some roleplaying games that aspire to be art, I think, but they are, quite frankly, kinda boring. And they definitely and categorically do not have anime furry succubi in them.

Okay, I got one page in and already I'm having a meltdown. Okay, I got to pull myself together here, this is going to be a long let's-read if even the dry nuts and bolts of the rules drive me to ranting...

The rule system for CT is called the Framewerk (sic). It's a d10 dice pool roll-over system - you roll a bunch of d10s and try to roll over a Difficulty that goes between 7 (for Easy) and 32 (for Legendary). Okay, fair enough. You roll a number of dice equal to your Skill at what you're doing, plus your applicable Specialization if any, and you also add a number to the result equal to your Base, which is the Attribute attached to the Skill.

Here's where it gets fiddly. See, you don't just add your die results together. Instead, there are three different ways to get a result out of the way the dice have fallen, and you pick the one that gives you the highest result on a given roll. You can take the highest single die result. You can take the sum of any multiples. Or, if you roll three or more dice, you can take the sum of any sequence three or more long.

So... let's say you roll 3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10. (I'm not sure you can even get a dice pool that big, but work with me here) That gives the possible results of of 10 (the highest die), 3+3+3=9 or 6+6=12 (the sum of multiples) or 5+6+7=18 (the sum of the sequence). So in this case, your result would be 18, since that's the highest of the possible results. Then you add your Base to the total, and that's the sum you compare with the Difficulty. Okay, that's a little too fiddly for my taste, but fine, I guess you'd get used to it.

Some special rules follow. When the GM... ugh, sorry, Storyguide doesn't want to slow the game down with a bunch of trivial roll, he can declare that the result of a roll was just the Base+7. If you beat the Difficulty with 10 or more you've rolled a Critical Success and something good happens. If half your dice or more come up showing 1s, you've rolled a Critical Failure and the GM gets to mess with you. It doesn't mention if you have to actually fail the roll for that to be the case, so I guess you don't.

If a Skill applies but its regular Attribute seems a bad fit, just use whatever Attribute seems more appropriate as the Base. So I guess if you try to impress a university professor with your grasp of ancient languages to make him more predisposed to tell you about his research, you could use the Language Skill with the Presence Attribute instead of Intellect. Works for me. If you lack the Skill for something but you do have another one that could kiiiiiiind of work in a pinch, you can use that one but you roll one die less. If you don't have any Skill at all that applies, roll one die and halve the result. Okay, that all sounds pretty good to me, actually.

Each Attribute has a Feat Skill assigned to it - so Agility Feats, Intellect Feats, etc. You use those when no existing Skill applies. If a Skill applies, you always use that one. Again, works for me. If you fail a Test you can try again, but the Difficulty goes up. Some Tests are Extended, meaning you need to succeed at more than one over a period of time. More than one person can help out on an Extended Test, while this is impossible for a regular Test. If you have the luxury of being able to take extra time on a Test, you get +4 for taking twice as much time as usual and +6 for taking four times as much time, but that's as far as you can push it. You can also choose to take damage in return for a bonus, signifying that you're really giving it your all in the best spirit of overblown anime. You get +2 to the Test for each 1d10 of damage you take, with the damage applying immediately after the Test is concluded. I... actually kinda like these rules? :shock: I mean, they're not brilliant or anything, but they provide common-sensical rulings for most of the situations that tends to turn up a lot in games. I look forward with dread to how the later chapters are going to find a way to ruin it all.

Contests are when you roll against someone else, the one who rolls the highest wins - your basic sneaking-past-the-sentry thing. A character can take more than one action per round, depending on how quick he is, but he takes a -2 penalty to all Tests if he performs two actions in that round and a -4 penalty if he performs three. Reactions (like parrying, I guess?) do not count towards actions.

There's a bit about language that I don't quite understand - I think the idea is that you shouldn't have to roll to see how well you can speak every time you say something, so instead your Skill level determines how much you can reasonably communicate? Well, okay, I guess.

Drama Points! You can spend them to mess with the results of Tests. Each Drama Point spent lets you roll an extra die, or let another character roll extra dice, or reduce another character's dice pool by one (to a minimum of zero dice, which makes his result equal to his Base). In the first or second case, you can spend Drama Points either before or after the roll, in the third case you can only spend them before. Dunno how I feel about that. I am normally in favour of having some mechanic for pushing especially hard on something you really, really need to succeed at, but here you already have the option of taking damage for bonuses. And being able to assist or sabotage others is just weird. Is it meant to represent the power of spirited support ("I believe in you! You can do this!") and heroic defiance ("you will never win while people of honour still remain!"), or something? That does sound anime-ish enough, come to think of it...

Okay, I'm a little freaked out here, because this actually all sounds kind of fun. Isn't the rules supposed to be the very worst part of CT? No, like I said, it must be that they mess it up with the specific applications. That tends to be the case with a lot of games, sadly.

There's an example of play in which a pack of Tagers sneak into a house that's under police surveillance to search it for clues. It works pretty well, I guess.

The chapter ends with some advice for how to assign Difficulties. Which is very nice of it, actually - I don't think I need this, but that's because I've gotten used to doing this work on my own. Most games just blithely assume that you know how a "Tough" challenge differs from a "Hard" one. So, yeah, bonus points.

I liked this chapter. I actually liked this chapter. I mean, other than the clueless pretentiousness on the first few pages, this is actually good stuff. I don't trust this... it must be a trap... :shock:
 
Like most things CTech, the rules are in reality better than the loudest critic on the internet would have you believe. Especially once you consider this was a first outing for all involved.

The base mechanic in Cthulhutech is actually pretty good. The fact that this translate over to mecha combat is even better. Drama points are good too as they are a push your luck thing.

Where they come a little unstuck is in places like the number of skills, the grind of damage, the imbalance between character types, and the gulf between scales. All of which are relatively easy to fix IME.
 
Chapter five: Alter ego (part one)
Hang on, what happened to chapter four? Oh... it turns out that chapter three was just the whole what-is-a-roleplaying-game thing, and chapter four were the actual rules. I completely missed the chapter break. Oh well.

Bla, bla, lots of twaddle about how you should make a character you "can really sink your teeth in," whatever that means... Your character will likely be working for either the NEG, the Eldritch Society or the Engel Project (which is part of the NEG, technically, but gets treated as its own thing). Now, you'd think that this is just another way of saying that you'll either be an Engel pilot, a Tager or a regular schmoe trying to fight the good fight in a world gone mad, those being the three power levels the game pretty obviously exist on, but no, this is not how it's presented. "Any type of Character, except a Tager, fits well into a NEG story," for instance, Engel Project stories recommend playing archanotecnicians and occult scholars in addition to Engel Pilots, while in Eldritch Society stories arcanotecnicians, occult scholars, intelligence agents and soldiers "work just as well" as Tagers.

Okay, let me make one thing very clear. If I'm going to be playing in a game with giant mecha fighting kaiju abominations, then bitch, I am not going to be stuck in a lab. Give me a giant robot of my very own, or I'm out of here! Likewise, there is absolutely zero reason to play a regular mundane soldier in a game with people who can turn into big-ass monsters that can rip regular soldiers to pieces. Game balance isn't everything, I firmly believe that the emphasis should be on equal spotlight not on equal power level, but seriously now. :tongue:

Look, I think I see how the writers' thought process has run. They want to emulate the likes of NGE, where the support crew are as important as the actual pilots. And I am all for that in theory. The problem is, it's really hard to make that work in a game, especially one with a traditional structure that has a lot of rules for combat, a few rules for investigation, and almost no rules at all for dealing with personal issues. And so far, CT seems to have a very traditional structure. I think that if you put Engel pilots and nerdy scientists in the same game, then at any given time half the party will have nothing to do.

And don't give me that crap about how "it's not about what you can do, it's about your character's unique personality!" If it's not about what I can do, why do I have a convoluted rule system outlining precisely what I can do and how well I can do it? Don't give me cool skills and powers if you don't expect me to want to use them. If I wanted to do nothing but have angsty conversations, I'd go play Hillfolk or something! :tongue:

Anyway, Professions. There are seven to choose from:
  • Arcanotecnicians are a sort of mix between sorcerers and scientists.
  • Engel pilots pilot Engels.
  • Intelligence agents unearth sinister conspiracies and generally put their noses in everyone's business.
  • Mecha pilots pilot mecha that aren't Engels.
  • Occult scholars are the pure sorcerer types.
  • Soldiers are the poor suckers who have to go into battle without mecha. (I guess they might get power armour, though?)
  • Tagers are shapeshifting badasses.
There are two races, humans and Nazzadi. With all due respect to their supporters here, I remain unconvinced that the Nazzadi have any reason to exist in the setting.

You are required to choose one Virtue and one Flaw for your character, which are roleplaying tools to help you remember to be at least somewhat nuanced. That's good, I find that that system works pretty well in other games.

You distribute 35 points between your six Attributes: Agility, Intellect, Perception, Presence, Strength and Tenacity. Tenacity combines physical and mental endurance, the others mean pretty much what you think they mean. There's a sidenote that Presence denotes attractiveness and charm between members of the same species, but between different species it just means how much of an impact you can make. There ain't such a thing as a sexy Migou, but some of them are scarier than others. Attributes are rated from 1 to 10.

You have 20 points to spend on skills, which are rated from 1 to 5 and you can't start with any higher than 3. You can trade in one Skill point to have a +1 Specialization to two different Skills of your choice. Also, you buy Assets with Skill points, but they will annoyingly enough not be explained until later. Conversely, you can take up to 10 points of Drawbacks for more Skill points. You automatically start with each Feat Skill at half the Attribute it's associated with, rounded down.

Secondary Attributes are derived from the regular ones. You can have one, two or three actions per turn depending on how high your Agility+Perception is. Movement depends on your Agility+Strength. You have Orgone (magic energy used to fuel spells) equal to your (Intellect+Tenacity)/2 (round down) + 5. Your Reflex (which seems to be used to determine initiative in combat) is your (Agility+Intellect+Perception)/3 (round down) and your Vitality is your (Strength+Tenacity)/2 (round down) + 5. You also start the game with 10 Drama Points. Okay, that all sounds fair enough.

You start with gear determined by your Profession. Attempting to sweet-talk your Storyguide to give you more stuff is allowed.

Finally, you get 6 Cheats that can be used to raise your stats with. You can increase an Attribute by 1 for 3 Cheats, get 2 extra Skill points, raise your Orgone with 1 or your Vitality by 2 for one Cheat, or purchase spells. Spells also have Tenacity requirements and require you to make Insanity Tests when learning them. Aoch.

There's a bunch of questions to help you flesh out your character. They're pretty standard, except for the last one: who would your character have been if the world had been a different place. Okay, that one does feel nicely poignant and setting-appropriate.

Next up we go into the races and Professions in more detail.
 
I am maybe a jaded MF but I failed to grasp the internet outrage about the rape camps of the EOD. IRL, sadly, rape is commun by-product of war and given that all the antagonists of the setting want at best enslave Mankind in sordid servitude and at worst kill, maim and burn it (and not necessarily in that order), the existence of such terrible camps is to be expected. But maybe it was part of the outrage campaign against the game from trolls.
 
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I am maybe a jaded MF but I failed to grasp the internet outrage about the rape camps of the EOD. IRL, sadly, rape is commun by-product of war and given that all the antagonists of the setting want at best enslave Mankind in sordid servitude and at worst kill, maim and burn it (and not necessarily in that order), the existence of such terrible camps is to be expected. But maybe it was part of the outrage campaign against the game from trolls.

I suspect part of the reason for the complaints is just the writers' complete lack of taste and tone - which is a problem that doesn't just afflict the rape camp thing, but is consistent throughout all of the fluff. I once heard someone note that a sociopath says "rape" in the same tone as he says "tree" - it creeps people out when you don't seem to have the correct emotional reaction to stuff, and the writers of CT come across as weird aliens at the best of times.

That said, I don't think there is anything wrong in itself with really making things 110% soul-scarringly horrible, especially if you want to tell the sort of war story where complete mental breakdown in the face of the horrors you see is as much of a danger as injury or death. And I also agree that the world is full of people who are adamant that nothing must ever creep them out, and how I feel about those people I had best leave unsaid. :tongue: But considering the how dark the topics the game tries to handle are, and how ham-fisted it is in handling them, I don't think it's a mystery why it came under particular fire.

Man, that dice pool mechanic sounds waaaaaaay more fiddly than anything I would want to deal with.

Yeah, it's not my kind of thing either. I don't like dice much in the first place, the less I have to fiddle around with them the better. But apparently a lot of people are really into making the resolution mechanics as complicated as possible. :tongue:

Chapter five: Alter ego (part two)
There's a list of star signs and the suggestion that you can base a character on one if you can't think of anything better. Sure, works for me. Then there's an example character made, a Nazzadi Engel pilot. Nothing very remarkable there.

Races! Humans are still the most common species on the planet, though not by much. They are different from the humans of today due to having lived through so much horrifying shit. However:

They’ve created coping mechanisms that allow them to rationalize the horrors of the world around them and have been forced to acknowledge things they were not meant to know.

Humans in CthulhuTech are a hardy breed of people without many of the petty worries and prejudices that plagued the race in centuries past. Despite the challenges and terrors that face them, they are a stalwart race who have strangely found hope in and amongst the almost overwhelming darkness.

Okay, but if they are enlightened beings who shine all the brighter the darker things get, why is there so much PTSD and corruption and insanity? I want to note again that I'm not against the idea that in this, our darkest hour, we have become the people we always should have been. That's uplifting and inspiring and good for the sort of game where heroes of all races and creeds stand side by side as brothers, bravely facing whatever may come. But it's all wrong for a Lovecraftian game where everything is kind of fucked and the more you learn the worse it turns out to be. And it will never stop frustrating me that the writers don't seem to know which kind of game this is, or indeed seem to be willing to even acknowledge that there is a contradiction. They just keep claiming that it's a fusion of the two, and what that seems to mean is that it's whichever one they feel like at any given time. Blargh.

Anyway, humans get +1 to an Attribute of their choice and +2 Skill points.

Nazzadi are black-skinned humans with red eyes and fangs. Created by the Migou, turned against their makers, you know the drill by now. They get +1 to Agility and night vision. I'll note that the +1 to an Attribute in combination with point buy just means that Nazzadi can start the game with Agility 11 and can't start it with Agility 1, while humans can start the game with one Attribute of their choice at 11. I mean, other than that you're just going to take whatever stats you want.

There is a basic guide to Nazzadi names. No complex vowel sounds (like "oe" or "au") or consonants (like "th" or "ch"), everything is spelled phonetically. Names ending in "-a" are masculine, names ending in "-y" are feminine, words ending in "-i" are neutral. Nazzadi don't have surnames but identify themselves by home and profession. They considered taking on family names, but it was generally felt that no one wanted the reminder that their real "ancestor" was a cloning vat somewhere on Pluto. Aoch. Yeah, I see their point.

Professions! They are starting places only, you can develop your character in any direction. For that matter, all the Attribute and Skill values listed are suggestions only, so it's more a time-saver than anything else - the only thing they really decide is your starting equipment and some mandatory Assets and Drawbacks. The only exception is that you can't be both a Tager and an Engel pilot, because Engels freak the fuck out if a Tager tries to climb inside of them. I understand this is a sticking point for a lot of people, but I don't see the problem with it. I've always been fully in favour of keeping the peas separate from the porridge. :tongue:

If anything, I feel that the game doesn't go far enough, because again, Tagers and Engel pilots are ridiculously superior to other characters - like, it costs something like 4 Skill points to be able to turn into a superhuman killing machine and even less to be able to pilot an unstoppable juggernaut. The Tagers and the Engel pilots will be basically as good as any of the other Professions most of the time, and orders of magnitude better whenever they can put their special abilities to work. It really should have been, one game for Engel pilots and mecha pilots (who can at least keep up) and maybe some mission-control type if the game could offer some solid guidence on how to keep those relevant. One game for Tagers, where everyone has some other Profession in addition to being Tagers. And one game for regular soldiers, investigators and scientists.

And yeah, yeah, sure, balance isn't everything, but if we're not bothering with balance, why have a point-buy system in the first place? Why add all that complexity? Just have people pick the stuff they want.

Okay, that was a whole other rant.

Arcanotecnicians are your basic tech support guys, only for giant robots. They are divided into technicians (who do the actual welding) and engineers (who draw up the blueprints). Engel pilots and mech pilots are ridiculously identical. Like, they have the exact same suggested stats except that Engel Pilots need to have slightly higher Tenacity. Otherwise they can shoot, fight, pilot giant mechs, you get the idea. Intelligence Agents get research and surveillance skills and some marksmanship. Also, Engel pilots, mech pilots and intelligence agents all get "concealed armour." Interesting. Occult Scholars have tons of occult know-how, natch, and also speak a lot of dead languages and possibly some ones that aren't so much dead as they eternally lie. :tongue: Soldiers, are your basic tough and manly types who can shoot, fight, survive in the wilderness, advance on an enemy position unseen, that sort of thing. Tagers, finally, are the totally-not-werewolves who sneak around and fight the shadowy threats while the NEG is occupied with the obvious ones. Good fighting skills, some broad scouting-and-investigating ones.

The last page of the chapter just lists the XP costs for raising your stats during the game. It also mentions that you can change your Virtue and Flaw if your character really goes through something life-altering. Do those have some mechanical impact, then? Because otherwise it's kind of a moot point.

Okay, so that's chargen. Next, I'll try statting up a character. Stay tuned.
 
Okay, let's make a character. I don't want to have to fiddle with mecha, Tagers or magic before I have gotten to those sections, so let's imagine that we're playing a street-level game and make an Intelligence Agent. His name is Derek Frost, stone-cold OIS agent keeping the world safe from unspeakable horrors and also making sure that people don't speak of them. He's having a bad year, what with his wife leaving and his drinking problem and that time a giant alien grasshopper tried to lay its egg in him, and he's officially getting Too Old For This Shit, but someone's got to do it. Just the facts, ma'am - after the apparition ripped your husband's head off, in which direction did it depart? His Allegience is of course to the good old NEG, his race is Human and his Profession is Intelligence Agent. His Virtue is Dutiful and his Flaw is Hidebound.

As an Intelligence Agent, it's suggested that he focus on Intellect and Perception. Okay then. His Attributes are Agility 6, Intellect 7, Perception 8, Presence 4, Strength 6 and Tenacity 5. His health isn't what it was, and he's frankly the sort of boring stick in the mud that people try their best to forget, but he's still in decent shape and he doesn't miss a beat.

He's got 22 points to spend on Skills. He's got Duty 2 (he spends most of his time on the job) and Authority 3 (as a federal agent), which leaves him 21 points left. Let's take Wary for 2 points while I'm at it - Derek hasn't survived this long without learning when to duck and cover. He is also Fanatical in his duty and would risk his life rather than let some sorcerous scumbag get away, so that gives him 2 points back, and his Habit of drinking is worth 2 points more. I'll also give him a Prejudice against the Nazzadi for 2 more points - yes, he knows that we're all supposed to be friends now, yes, he knows that they have considerably bigger fish to fry, but he spent his formative years hearing wartime propaganda about how they were the evil alien invaders coming to exterminate us all and he has trouble getting over that. That's a total of 8 points of Drawbacks and 5 points of Assets, giving Derek a total of 25 points to spend on Skills.

It's suggested that he focus on Bureaucracy, Misdirect, Observation, Security, Stealth and Surveillance. Let's say that he has Bureaucracy: Adept (3), Misdirect: Student (1), Observation: Adept (3), Security: Novice (2), Stealth: Student (1) and Surveillance: Adept (3). That's 13, leaving us with 12. So let's also give him Dodge: Student (1), Fighting: Student (1), Marksman: Novice (2), Occult: Novice (2), Business: Student (1), Criminal: Novice (2) and Intimidate: Novice (2). We'll split the last point in half for two Specializations, Interrogate for Intimidate and Otherworldly Creatures for Occult. In addition, he gets Language (English): Expert (4), Literacy: Novice (2) and Regional Knowledge (LA Arcology): Novice (2). He has Agility Feat: Adept (3), Intellect Feat: Adept (3), Perception Feat: Expert (4), Presence Feat: Novice (2), Strength Feat: Adept (3) and Tenacity Feat: Novice (2).

For Secondary Attributes, Derek has 2 actions per turn, a running speed of 27 yards per turn at max and 6 yards per turn when being cautious, Orgone 11, Reflex 7 and Vitality 10. He starts the game with "a suit of concealed armor (such as Sentrytech Mk-IV or Mk-V), a sidearm (such as a UT-7 Hornet, CS-40 Defender, or CS-44 Enforcer), surveillance gear, and a good portable computer." I don't know if those weapons are any good or not, but let's hope they can stand up to the occasional nightgaunt at least.

Then we have Cheats... I could raise his Attributes a bit more, but then I'd have to recalculate his Secondary Attributes, which I don't really feel like doing. :tongue: So let's just blow it on more Skills. That means 12 more points. I'll raise Misdirect, Stealth, Dodge and Fighting to Novice (2) for 4 points. I'll give him Novice (2) in Language (Spanish) for 2 more points, and raise his Marksman to Adept (3) for 1 more. Then I'll take Streetwise: Notice (2) for 2 points, Research: Novice (2) for 2 points, and Savour-Faire: Student (1) for 1 point. Okay, we now have a proper skill monkey capable of turning over all sorts of rocks.

That seems to be it. Okay, that was fairly painless and I ended up with more or less the character I had in mind. Next up is the skill list.

Name: Derek Frost
Allegience: NEG
Race: Human
Profession: Intelligence Agent
Virtue: Dutiful
Flaw: Hidebound

Attributes:
Agility 6
Intellect 7
Perception 8
Presence 4
Strength 6
Tenacity 5

Attribute Feats:
Agility Feat: Adept (3)
Intellect Feat: Adept (3)
Perception Feat: Expert (4)
Presence Feat: Novice (2)
Strength Feat: Adept (3)
Tenacity Feat: Novice (2)

Secondary Attributes:
Actions 2
Movement 11 mph (27/6 ypt)
Orgone 11
Reflex 7
Vitality 10

Assets:
Authority (3)
Wary (2)

Drawbacks:
Duty (2)
Fanatical (the OIS; 2)
Habit (alcohol; 2)
Prejudice (Nazzadi; 2)

Skills:
Bureaucracy: Adept (3)
Business: Student (1)
Criminal: Novice (2)
Dodge: Novice (2)
Fighting: Novice (2)
Intimidate: Novice (2), Interrogate Focus
Language (English): Expert (4)
Language (Spanish): Novice (2)
Literacy: Novice (2)
Marksman: Adept (3)
Misdirect: Novice (2)
Observation: Adept (3)
Occult: Novice (2), Otherworldly Creatures Focus
Regional Knowledge (LA Arcology): Novice (2).
Research: Novice (2)
Savour-Faire: Student (1)
Security: Novice (2)
Stealth: Novice (2)
Streetwise: Notice (2)
Surveillance: Adept (3)

Equipment:
Suit of concealed armor (such as Sentrytech Mk-IV or Mk-V)
Sidearm (such as a UT-7 Hornet, CS-40 Defender, or CS-44 Enforcer)
Surveillance gear
Good portable computer
 
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I also own some of the Cthulhutech books. I really liked the art and a lot of the setting elements.

I tried to run a campaign with it, but my players never warmed to the fiddly dice pool system, so the campaign ended prematurely.

I agree with Skywalker Skywalker that the game has far to many skills. I fixed the problem of character balance, by having every pc be the same thing.
I asked my players what they were interested in playing, and they chose to be Tagers.

I would like to run a game again, but I would have to find another system then. That would involve conversion though, and I have other stuff I'm doing, so it will have to wait.
 
The Disciples of the Unnamable are the foul minions of Hastur, the Dead God. They're centered on the plateau of Leng, where Hastur resides in his dark evil citadel in the form of his avatar, the Ruined King. They are divided into the Rapine Storm, who's a huge rampaging army of monsters and lunatics, and the Death Shadows, who are scheming infiltrators trying to bring down the NEG from within.

The Rapine Storm is mad, bad and crazy. As the book puts it:



Okay, see, those first two were effective in making the point, but in the third case, murder and exterminate mean the same thing. The difference is just in what sort of moral weight you assign to the action. :tongue: But that aside, well, you get the idea. Basically, the average Rapine Storm soldier is a howling madman who gets grouchy if he has to go more than fifteen minutes without getting to kill something. They don't bother with tactics, instead relying on the simple fact that if you bring enough brute force, you don't need them.

The Rapine Storm doesn't have an overarching command structure but is divided into small war bands led by the biggest, baddest mofo of the bunch. Hastur sends them divine commandments in their dreams to make sure that they are all at least approximately moving in the same direction at the same time.

Blood for the blood god, Khorne!

The Death Shadows, on the other hand, are smart cookies. They try to destroy the moral fabric of society by catering to everyone's basest urges. Enough sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, they figure, and people will be too venal and self-indulgent to resist Hastur. Okay... but let's remember that for later, because I think at some point the game is going to start bragging about how how wise and enlightened the NEG is for not having any of those puritan hangups anymore. Anyway, they also collect blackmail material on everyone who's anyone so as to get more control and clout.
Slaannesh!

It really does seem like definitions and such were taken from a mishmash of places throughout the whole thing- but those two just screamed Warhammer 40k.
 
Man, that dice pool mechanic sounds waaaaaaay more fiddly than anything I would want to deal with.

Its essentially just poker where you add dice of the same kind or in straights. I found it was easy for people to understand in practice.

It’s a fun way to handle Crits and when you add in the Drama points which people can spend to maybe get just the right result to turn a result under 10 to one over 40 it adds a gambling element as well.
 
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I also own some of the Cthulhutech books. I really liked the art and a lot of the setting elements.

The art is 100% where the books shine. And yeah the setting elements themselves are good, even if they are written pretty meh.

I fixed the problem of character balance, by having every pc be the same thing.
I asked my players what they were interested in playing, and they chose to be Tagers.

I think that was always the way it was intended to be played. I just think they were shit at communicating it.
 
You know, this is worrying. For all that this game pisses me off in a lot of ways, it's starting to look like it's at least redeemable. And that means that I'm going to start feeling guilty for not paying for it, and that means that I'm going to have to buy the stupid thing. *checks drivethrough* 36 dollars... I suppose I could find that in my budget for this month...

I'll hold off on it, though. Maybe it crashes and burns later so that I'm off the hook. :tongue:

Chapter six: Skillz
Skills, then, which are plentiful. Ones marked with an asterisk are Professional Skills, which can't be attempted untrained. Aw, that's a shame. I kind of prefer a system where you always have a chance, however miniscule, to succeed at a task. That encourages players to try - which of course usually means failing horribly, since the chance is miniscule and all. And players failing horribly at stuff is hilarious! :grin:

Skills are organised with a suspiciously World of Darkness-like description for what each level (Student, Novice, Adept, Expert and Master, if you hadn't already gathered) represents in terms of ability. There's also a helpful list of Specializations. The Skills themselves are sort of Call of Cthulhu-esque, though not quite as detailed - one of the things the game seems set up for is to have you examine crime scenes, analyse clues, sneak into enemy territory and all that sort of thing.

Arcanotech and Arcanotech Engineering stand out for requiring that you have several other Skills already at Adept before you can even start to learn them. That's something like 9 Skill points before you can even take your first level in being an Engel repairman. I suppose the idea is that arcanotech is really insanely complicated and and not the sort of thing you pick up taking night classes, but still, anyone who picks the Arcanotechnician Profession is going to be spending half his Skill Points just taking the bare essentials his character needs...

The same is true for a couple of other Skills, on a second look. Engineers and medics also need a solid foundation of other Skills before they can even get started. Okay, I can understand the realism of it, because doctors study for an insanely long amount of time to be doctors and thus presumably don't have time to also become master snipers or whatever, but still, it will make it kind of hard to distinguish your character from all the other ones with the same fancy degree as him.

Aside from the investigation skills, I also note a certain military bent to others - there's skills for weapon repair, communication, demolitions, all that sort of thing. Makes sense, since one common campaign type is going to be playing NEG grunts of one sort or another.

Science is divided into "Science, Life," "Science, Physical" and the somewhat confusing "Science, Earth." The last one apparently involves such things as geology, meterology, archeology and geography. Just... knowing stuff about the planet, basically. Er... okay, I guess?

Combat skills are Armed Fighting, Fighting (which, by process of elimination, is unarmed), Marksman, Dodge, Thrown Weapons and Support Weapons. I feel like the difference between Marksman and Support Weapons is a little arbitrary (is it really that different to aim with a submachine gun and a machine gun) but I suppose you always have to draw the line somewhere and it always looks a bit odd. Possibly you can do the not-quite-but-almost thing with guns that aren't the right kind of guns, and fire them with one die less?

Okay, so that was skills. I don't know, it's passable, I guess? At fifty or so, with a number of them explicitly group skills (the Piloting Skill requires you to specify which vehicles you've mastered, for instance; you get one pick per level) it's on the hefty side, but, well, I've seen more convoluted ones. I am a little concerned about it being too easy to hyperspecialise yourself into a one trick pony, though. I mean... shouldn't it be possible to be the field medic in a group of soldiers without having to have multiple academic degrees?
 
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You have failed to mention that the chapter is entitled Skillz. If critics are to be believed, this deserves quite a bit of attention and derision. I guess. :grin:

Marksman and Support Weapons makes more sense as a distinction when you get to mecha combat, where non-direct fire weapons like rocketpods comes under the latter. It helps to add a bit more flavour to fighting styles from frontline shooters to artillery support and the like.

My main issue with skillz is that some concepts (science and technical ones being the most obvious) require so much more skill points than others, especially when you factor in prerequisites and the like. As their base, skillz are fine and work regardless. But it can feel like a tax for PC concepts that aren't always the most exciting and often support cheaper and more exciting options.
 
FWIW if you are looking for some pre-made scenarios for Cthulhutech scenarios, I wrote four which are pretty extensive (40+ pages and pregenerated PCs etc) and were highly regarded enough by the authors to consider publishing at one point.

They cover the games various PC options - Engel Pilots, Parapsychics, Tagers, and Mecha Pilots/Nazzadi, and are respectively inspired by various anime in line with the RPG - Evangelion, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Gundam Seed.

The last scenario covers the point at which the Nazzadi turn from enemies to allies and is designed to be run with 2 GMs.

I was planning on writing a fifth and final one covering the Occult Underground and Sorcerers inspired by Cowboy Bebop, but never got around to it. This thread may inspire me to do so :grin:
 
Did you skip the rules and chargen or is it really this front-loaded with 'lore?'

Mecha + Cthulhu seems like a no-brainer mashup but I get the feeling it may be better done as a 36-48 page game.
 
Did you skip the rules and chargen or is it really this front-loaded with 'lore?'
Game Rules are chapter 4 and Character Creation is chapter 5. Both have already been covered by Baeraad above, include an example of creating a character.

There is about 47 pages of art, setting and fiction in the book prior to hitting the rules. This is comparable to World of Darkness rulebooks, which Cthulhutech most closely follows in terms of presentation.

Mecha + Cthulhu seems like a no-brainer mashup but I get the feeling it may be better done as a 36-48 page game.

Cthulhutech is more than just Mecha + Cthulhu though, even if that is the elevator pitch. It also covers magic, psyhics, symbiots, powered armour, spaceships, and normal humans. Essentially, it presents a dark futuristic setting for Lovecraftian horror to play games inspired by a wide range of anime. As such, 36-48 pages wouldn't cut it.

I think the current plan is to split the corebook though, much like World of Darkness does for each supernatural type. One corebook focuses on the Aeon War with mecha and the other the Shadow War with tagers. Though that will solve a number of issues identified, I actually think its a shame. I kind of love the kitchen sink of Lovecraft meets anime of the RPG and I had no issues in adding whatever focus I wanted when I ran games of it.
 
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You have failed to mention that the chapter is entitled Skillz. If critics are to be believed, this deserves quite a bit of attention and derision. I guess. :grin:

Well, critics should lighten up. Gratuitously replacing Ss with Zs have a long and respectable history. It's basically how American spelling conventions were born. :tongue:

FWIW if you are looking for some pre-made scenarios for Cthulhutech scenarios, I wrote four which are pretty extensive (40+ pages and pregenerated PCs etc) and were highly regarded enough by the authors to consider publishing at one point.

They cover the games various PC options - Engel Pilots, Parapsychics, Tagers, and Mecha Pilots/Nazzadi, and are respectively inspired by various anime in line with the RPG - Evangelion, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Gundam Seed.

The last scenario covers the point at which the Nazzadi turn from enemies to allies and is designed to be run with 2 GMs.

I was planning on writing a fifth and final one covering the Occult Underground and Sorcerers inspired by Cowboy Bebop, but never got around to it. This thread may inspire me to do so :grin:

Cool. :smile: Where can I find them?

Did you skip the rules and chargen or is it really this front-loaded with 'lore?'

No, I'm doing it in the same order as the book... though I think that's the order I prefer, anyway. I want to know what the rules are for before I bother learning them! :wink:

I think the current plan is to split the corebook though, much like World of Darkness does for each supernatural type. One corebook focuses on the Aeon War with mecha and the other the Shadow War with tagers. Though that will solve a number of issues identified, I actually think its a shame. I kind of love the kitchen sink of Lovecraft meets anime of the RPG and I had no issues in adding whatever focus I wanted when I ran games of it.

I, on the other hand, must declare myself fully in favour of the idea. I feel like the book is spreading itself way too thin trying to cover two different things at once. There isn't enough material to fully develop the Engels or the Tagers, because both require so much material that it just can't fit in a single book.

Chapter seven: Qualities
Qualities is what Assets and Drawbacks are called as a group. We've seen them already - you can buy Assets with Skill points and get more Skill points by taking Drawbacks. I'm not too happy with the way they are inherently tied to Skill points, by the way, it feels unnecessarily confusing. It effectively turns Skill points into Skill-and-Quality points, if you see what I mean. It's not like you can't figure it out if you read the description carefully, but ideally these things should be as intuitively obvious as possible. Ah well, it works once you have gotten a good look at it.

There's a finger-wagging reminder to try to tie Qualities to your character's backstory instead of just treating them like mechanical widgets. Fine, fine...

A lot of Assets are fairly modest, they just give you +2 to a certain Skill in a certain situation or similar. Given that a usual result of a roll is somewhere north of 10, that won't put you over the top more than occasionally, so I think that from a pure numbers perspective you're better off with more Skills. Then again, since Skills are capped at 3 at chargen and 5 after, I guess Assets still have their place if you want to really specialise in something. Also, some of them give you extra Drama Points that can only be used for a particular purpose, which is rather more impressive.

There's an Alluring Asset and a Sexy Voice Asset. Oh, and there's a Seduction Skill, for that matter. I roll my eyes just the tiniest bit at that. :tongue: I mean, fine, I've roleplayed out PCs getting their way by flirting and having sexual relationships, so I do think those things have their place, but here the game seems to be going out of its way to make "pornomancer" a viable character concept. :tongue:

Allies and Contacts are here, working the same way they do in the World of Darkness games. There's also a bunch of ones that involve being part of an organisation, which is good, since that's explicitly the expected playstyle. Commendation and Famous Incident both let you start with some past service record that earns you respect, so that's a nice way to have your character be someone right from the start. Elite and Wealth, conversely, gives you a place of note among the decadent civilian populace - handy if you want to come from a long line of aristocratic officers or such.

Latent Para-Psychic is a placeholder that doesn't get you anything now but it might once they the GM gets hold of the sourcebooks where the rules for para-psychics can be found. :tongue: Eh, interesting choice... I mean, I guess it's nice that they had a game plan and didn't just randomly add stuff, but I don't know that I want to pay 4 Skill points for something I might or might not get later. I mean, let's face it, most campaigns don't last that long anyway - it'll probably fall apart long before the GM gets around to introducing the new rules. :tongue:

4 points also lets you be a Tager, and 6 points lets you be an extra-awesome Tager. You can turn into a horrific monstrosity and fuck shit up, which is always fun. It does force you to make regular Tenacity Tests to keep from going increasingly crazy, though, which I admit might be an issue in a longer campaign... but again, most campaigns, in my experience, ain't that long.

Drawbacks! Amnesia makes you a mystery to yourself. The GM spends part of your Skill points on stuff you won't find out about unti later, and can also saddle you with an unknown Drawback. Ooooooh. Kind of cool and scary, actually. It's suggested that that the Dark Secret Drawback is especially hilarious nasty, since it means that you've done something horrible that you can't remember. Nice, shades of Silent Hill. Big Ego makes you turn people off by being too full of yourself. It's noted that people with both Alluring and Sexy Voice probably have Big Ego too. NOT THAT THE WRITERS ARE BITTER OR ANYTHING! :tongue: Chronic Pain is sort of nicely depressing, it gives you -1 to everything unless you can pass a tough Tenacity Test at the start of the session. Okay, a -1 isn't a big deal, but it's to everything and it's all the time. Looks like it would work nicely to represent old war injuries.

There's a bunch like Code and Fanatical and Compulsive Behaviour that has you cling to some idea or habit to keep from going crazy. Likewise Duty, which means that you have responsibilities to some organisation. Good, good... Damaged means that you are fucked up from "physical, emotional or sexual" abuse and now you have trouble forming healthy relationships. Er, okay, that got a little too real there. :tongue: Debt is the opposite of Wealth, it means that you're poorer than a regular starting character.

Engel Synthesis Interface... is a Drawback. For some reason. I mean, it's just a 1-point Drawback, but... what? :shock: I suppose the idea might be that it makes you slowly go insane, same as being a Tager does, but that it's trivially easy to keep you from getting to your Engel if the GM is so inclined, while a Tager has the option of tentaclesploding any time she wants... but still, it's a Drawback to be one of the coolest people in the setting? No, that's just weird.

Habit, naturally, is for having turned to drink and drugs to not go crazy from all the bad shit you've had to see. Hunted means that someone's out to get you, like the Nazzadi Anti-Defamation League. Okay, that struck me as funny for some reason. Watched means that you're under close scrutiny, whether because you're an ex-con out of probation or because you've got a high security clearance and the government can't afford you getting compromised.

Ineptitude limits one Skill of your choice to Student (1), in return for 2 Skill points. It does note that it needs to be a Skill your character has had some reason to at least try to get good at, so I guess you can't make your soldier extra-good at shooting by making him hopeless at arcanotech engineering. :tongue: Mystically Void means you have no Orgone, at all, ever. That sounds like free Skill points to me, because unless you play a sorcerer - which, I understand, is a niche character type at best - why would you care? It does also make you especially vulnerable to sorcery since you lack a regular person's natural defenses.

Oath makes you have sworn to do or not do something. I think it's meant to represent religious or sectarian obligations of some sort, since the examples are things like celibacy, vegetarianism, obedience and poverty. I'm not sure where that fits into the setting. Is it for if you want to play a member of a semi-benevolent cult or something?

Outsider Tainted makes you a freaky mutant who isn't allowed to enter arcologies, and you also can't be a Tager or an Engel pilot. On the bright side, you get double your starting Orgone. I'm thinking this is more of a villain Drawback than anything else? It sounds like a decent justification for why Rapine Storm and Esoteric Order sorcerers can do more than PC sorcerers can, but playing a character with this would seem to be impossible in a regular campaign. Also, you have some physical deformity, like unnatural eyes, nictitating membranes, extra digits, unnatural cravings, vestigial claws, or... hentai genitalia. Seriously, guys? :tongue:

Anyway, I think this is a good spread, overall. There's a lot of Qualities that has to do with your background, standing and affiliations, which is good for a game where you're meant to be part of a hierarchy instead of being a wandering adventurer. I'm not sure that it's at all balanced, but that's usually a futile goal anyway - something that is super-useful in one campaign can be super-useless in another, so about the best you can do is make sure that players at least have to stop and think before loading their characters up with everything but the kitchen sink.

Next up, the white-hot touch of technology!
 
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