Quick Review: Cthulhu Apocalypse

[angelfromanotherpin]

So I look at the Trail of Cthulhu stuff when it comes through the store, because while the system itself is problematic, there are a lot of decent ideas coming out of that line. The best of those is probably The Armitage Files, which is a very sandboxy adventure, especially good in contrast to the linearity the system seems to induce in writers.

Anyway, Cthulhu Apocalypse is different, because it's all about the actual end of the world that the setting is always promising. Or rather, an end of the world, given how it starts with a general discussion of how to come up with your own end-of-the-world scenarios. The bulk of the book is a campaign set in an original such scenario, which is the focus of my attention here. I'm going to do my best to do it spoiler-free.

The Good
- The original monster is quite creepy and cool.
- The setting is a nice blend of generic postapocalypse and Lovecraftian tropes.
- The post-apocalyptic setting renders a lot of the usual investigative abilities pointless, but the authors do a fair job of both replacing the completely obsolete skills and showing unexpected uses for less obsolete ones.
- There's a point where the PCs get to experience pre-Apocalypse life again, and their context has been so changed that what used to be normal now causes Stability checks.

The Bad
- The several scenarios that make up the campaign are extremely linear. While there are some significant moral choices to make, player agency is mostly fucked.
- Not specific to this campaign, but I think going through the actual world ending is kind of bad for specifically the cosmic horror genre. Like a movie monster, the idea of the thing is much more frightening and effective than seeing the thing.

The Ugly
- Racism. So, the apocalypse provides details of how it destroys Britain and also the USA, 'thus, the human race nears extinction.' What. The only mention of other places is that an important story element comes from Russia, and maybe a threat wiped out Asia as a stepping stone to the U.S. west coast.

The real telltale is that in addition to Asia getting a backhand footnote and South America and Africa not rating a mention, it is specifically 'Britain' that gets wiped out, and not 'the British Isles.' And also Europe is barely mentioned. This is old-timey Anglo-American racism, from back before White Supremacy Club admitted the Irish, the Italians, and the Germans. The reservoirs of Anglo-Saxonism are wiped out, 'thus the human race nears extinction,' fuck everyone who isn't white, and most white people as well.

This reads like either the authors are either neo-nativist chuckleheads hoping to slip their extra-retrograde prejudices past people who don't know how racism used to be, or a deliberate reference to the racism of Lovecraft time that had the disclaimer sidebar misplaced in editing. I don't know enough about either author to make a call, but either way, it looks heinous.

The Takeaway
If you can get past the racism, it's definitely worth a read, and given that its only 35 $US for a 200+ page glossy hardback, maybe even a buy. The campaign works better as a campaign seed that you can flesh out than an actual prewritten adventure, but the general postapocalypse notes, like how fast human technolgy fails without maintenance, and the relative difficulty of finding/making things as that failure continues could be useful in many contexts.

[OgreBattle]

So is this mainly for generating a setting, or does it have its own rules for playing the post apocalypse too?

[angelfromanotherpin]

By page count it's mainly about the pregen campaign, but like I said, there are rules for skills to replace the skills that no longer matter once society is over, and there are also rules for scrounging and cobbling together things you want, and how hard it is to do so depending on how long it's been since everything ended.