Anatomy of Failed Design: Cthulhutech

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talozin
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Post by talozin »

The problem seems to be that one guy says that Lovecraft's fiction is about the ultimate hopelessness of humanity's struggle for survival in an uncaring universe populated with ineffable cosmic horrors, and a bunch of other guys hear him and think "ultimate hopelessness" means "you fail every fvcking time."

I mean, we've mentioned "The Call of Cthulhu" and "Shadow Over Innsmouth" already and neither is exactly devoid of all hope. "The Dunwich Horror" revolves around a college professor successfully preventing the spawn of Yog-Sothoth from opening the world to their progenitor. "The Dreams in the Witch-House" ends with the immortal witch and her rat familiar dead and Nyarlathotep frustrated in his scheme to do whatever. The body-swapping old dude from "Thing on the Doorstep" winds up dead and thwarted in his quest to live on through his luscious daughter; the zombie giant or whatever the fvck in "The Shunned House" gets destroyed through the extremely simple and mundane method of pouring sulfuric acid on it. Even "The Shadow Out of Time" is more about how there's some seriously weird and crazy shit going on and that humanity isn't the center of the universe, rather than being about that we're all going to die in terror and fire and be eaten by mad gods.

Yeah, Cthulhu starts reforming right after the ship runs over him, and the implication is that eventually he will get his shit back together and try again to come out and eat the world. But that is a far cry from "we are totally helpless and nothing we do can even make a difference." Just because humanity will some day be destroyed by an uncaring or actively hostile universe doesn't mean there's no point in trying to push that day as far ahead as possible.
TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

So, in other words, Arkham Horror isn't as bad an adaptation of Lovecraft to the tabletop as many Lovecraft fanboys might believe?
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Post by John Magnum »

"The Colour Out of Space" ends with everything buried under an artificial lake. And so on.
-JM
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

90% of Mythos monsters should be less scary than indiscriminate disassembler nanites. If the Britain of the Laundry Files thinks it has a fighting chance in a Nightmare Green scenario, then a tech-up to the point that people are waving plasma cannons around and have sorcerer colleges should mean at least even odds.
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Post by talozin »

RadiantPhoenix wrote:So, in other words, Arkham Horror isn't as bad an adaptation of Lovecraft to the tabletop as many Lovecraft fanboys might believe?
Setting aside mechanical issues, the main beefs I have with Arkham Horror from a thematic sense are:

1) Going to other worlds feels much more common than in actual HPL fiction. I guess if you think of a single game as being like a collection of short stories, and each journey into another world is kind of like an individual story, that works a little better.

2) I wish they had gone a slightly different direction with the Old One fights. When Cthulhu rises, you should be hoping someone in the group knows about a building that's scheduled to be demolished (so you can collapse it on him) or is the captain of a steamship you can run him over with or something similar. A system where you spend the main game trying to balance "collect shit you can use to stop cultists and monsters" with "collect shit you might need to stop Cthulhu if everything goes to hell" would have worked better for me. But strictly in terms of being able to stop an awakened Old One, that doesn't bother me.

Some people don't like the tone, which is slightly on the camp side, but honestly "Herbert West - Re-Animator" and even "The Dunwich Horror" were kind of on the camp side themselves. There's a cogent argument to be made that "Dunwich Horror" is actually Lovecraft satirizing himself.
John Magnum wrote: "The Colour Out of Space" ends with everything buried under an artificial lake. And so on.
I deliberately left this one out because, while it does end with everything buried under the reservoir, it also ends with everybody on the farm dead and the whole place barren and corrupted and gradually spreading year by year, and the narrator thinking the reservoir water probably won't be safe to drink. So to me "Colour Out of Space" is one of those where the PCs fail to stop the cosmic horror, but it doesn't result in the end of the world.
TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.
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Post by Maxus »

The Dreams in the Witch House has the witch being killed, but her familiar killing the main character afterwards.

That one got me off-guard.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

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Post by Prak »

icyshadowlord wrote:If the general idea is to fight back, what's the fucking point if every pre-written adventure has a no-win scenario?

Kind of mixed messages / false advertising if you ask me.
This is far from unique to Cthulhutech. WoD is intended to be no-win, overall if not exclusively. If you're playing a garou, and fighting wyrm beasts and expanding the size of the garou race, whether through good means or bad, it doesn't matter, because the apocalypse will happen and fuck everything you fought for. I think it was kind of the same idea for the cthulhu mythos.

I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's out there, and popular things use it.
Red Lantern wrote:
Koumei wrote:
Red Lantern wrote:The rape bit was blown out of proportion,
Isn't that was Akins and Mourdock are saying right about now?

So, blown out of proportion, or it actually is a big deal and people really are legitimately offended by it?
Don't compare me to republican retards.

I said that the rape camp meme made sense in the game was not gratuitous. In the context of the EoD needing lots of combat able soldiers in a hurry and the fact that deep one children take a long, long time to mature and can't work technology the mass creation of hybrids made sense. it was not put in for a gross factor or anything like that. Within the framework of the game it is a valid thing for the EoD to do.


people act like it was put in for shock value or something and dominates the game. Neither is true.
Even more efficient than rape is cloning. Throw in some Holocaust era unethical medical experiments, and you're golden so far as the horror element goes, and the EoD has shit tons of soldiers and a fighting forces motto taken from a crisps company.
Last edited by Prak on Sat Nov 10, 2012 12:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Hypotetically, you could play a Mage, accumulate enough XP to hit 10 in all Spheres, and say "fuck you, I'm God" to every problem in the entire setting.

But when Cthulhu's awakens, he'll teach us new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy ourselves, supposedly. It's the end of the world as we know it, but it's not the absolute end of the world. It's just a change. We learn from the Great Old Ones, and become more like them as a result. We cease being recognizably human, and appear insane to those of limited awareness, but this can't be describes as a bad thing.

Consider, for a moment, how insane a modern human would look to a person just a couple centuries ago. An average guy with a smart phone taking to people using his bluetooth headset would look like an absolute lunatic to someone who didn't understand the concept of a telephone.

The real scary thing about Call of Cthulu is that those cultists, they're the sane ones. Normal people look at them and think their crazy only because our perception of the world is narrow and incomplete.
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Post by Prak »

Well and a crack team of Glass Walkers could assault Malpheas with a few bottles full of awakened percoset and toss one in each of the Wyrms' mouths, and vampires could hunt down rival antedilluvians with flame throwers and napalm, and Lucifer could actually tell the other demons "hey, I'm right here guys" and take the fight to heaven and win this time.

I'm talking about the way the games were intended to be played.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Prak_Anima wrote:Well and a crack team of Glass Walkers could assault Malpheas with a few bottles full of awakened percoset and toss one in each of the Wyrms' mouths, and vampires could hunt down rival antedilluvians with flame throwers and napalm, and Lucifer could actually tell the other demons "hey, I'm right here guys" and take the fight to heaven and win this time.

I'm talking about the way the games were intended to be played.
I'm pretty sure that the canon ending for Werewolf is that the Black Spiral Dancers were the real good guys all along, the Wyrm is just misunderstood, and the Weaver is the real villain. And then you kill the Weaver and free the Wyrm and everyone lives happily ever after as immortal spirits.
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Post by Korgan0 »

hyzmarca wrote:
Prak_Anima wrote:Well and a crack team of Glass Walkers could assault Malpheas with a few bottles full of awakened percoset and toss one in each of the Wyrms' mouths, and vampires could hunt down rival antedilluvians with flame throwers and napalm, and Lucifer could actually tell the other demons "hey, I'm right here guys" and take the fight to heaven and win this time.

I'm talking about the way the games were intended to be played.
I'm pretty sure that the canon ending for Werewolf is that the Black Spiral Dancers were the real good guys all along, the Wyrm is just misunderstood, and the Weaver is the real villain. And then you kill the Weaver and free the Wyrm and everyone lives happily ever after as immortal spirits.
Wait, seriously? I haven't read much Werewolf, but in the bits I read they seemed to be pretty clear about the fact that the things that the Wyrm does are pretty much unarguably evil.
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Post by Ted the Flayer »

If I did a Lovecraftian future sci-fi rpg, it'd probably looks at least a little like THIS. The good guys will be outumbered and outgunned, but there should always be hope that a skilled set of heroes can punch out Cthulhu.
Last edited by Ted the Flayer on Sat Nov 10, 2012 1:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
Prak Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.
Frank Trollman wrote:I don't think that is any excuse for a game to have bad mechanics.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Korgan0 wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:
Prak_Anima wrote:Well and a crack team of Glass Walkers could assault Malpheas with a few bottles full of awakened percoset and toss one in each of the Wyrms' mouths, and vampires could hunt down rival antedilluvians with flame throwers and napalm, and Lucifer could actually tell the other demons "hey, I'm right here guys" and take the fight to heaven and win this time.

I'm talking about the way the games were intended to be played.
I'm pretty sure that the canon ending for Werewolf is that the Black Spiral Dancers were the real good guys all along, the Wyrm is just misunderstood, and the Weaver is the real villain. And then you kill the Weaver and free the Wyrm and everyone lives happily ever after as immortal spirits.
Wait, seriously? I haven't read much Werewolf, but in the bits I read they seemed to be pretty clear about the fact that the things that the Wyrm does are pretty much unarguably evil.
It's in Werewolf: Apocalypse, part of the Time of Judgement series, which was supposed to end the oWOD.

It contains four different adventures. The canon default is that you're supposed to help a guy called the Perfect Metis (who is a Metis without any deformities) take over the Black Spiral Dancers and free the Wyrm from its imprisonment. This is presented as a good thing.

The Wyrm is supposed to be a spirit of balance and renewal. All of the evil shit is because it's wounded and trapped and can't do it's job right and isn't really thinking clearly. So it just kind of randomly pokes its fingers through the bars, and that doesn't have good results.

In the end, he's freed, and the first thing he does is unleash a roar which kills you and destroys all traces of human civilization. This is presented as a good and upbeat ending.
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Post by Whipstitch »

The good guys will be outumbered and outgunned, but there should always be hope that a skilled set of heroes can punch out Cthulhu.
Unless running an Aliens style bug hunt I would actually go the opposite direction--humanity as a whole can win, but only if they can resist snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Which, incidentally, is part of why I find Ctech so utterly useless. In a perverse sort of way I think it's actually a bit less grim derp if humanity is still an ambitious pack of assholes post invasion. The notion that everyone would come together in open warfare and yet we're still losing is anti-climactic, grim and leaves very little room for player agency. In short, I think it'd run better if you are basically the MiB or X-COM--you traverse the globe putting out the worst fires, do research and make backroom deals and perform political favors to make sure everyone works together smoothly instead of making a premature power play to become post-invasion Earth's lone super power.
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Post by Red Lantern »

Prak_Anima wrote:
icyshadowlord wrote:If the general idea is to fight back, what's the fucking point if every pre-written adventure has a no-win scenario?

Kind of mixed messages / false advertising if you ask me.
This is far from unique to Cthulhutech. WoD is intended to be no-win, overall if not exclusively. If you're playing a garou, and fighting wyrm beasts and expanding the size of the garou race, whether through good means or bad, it doesn't matter, because the apocalypse will happen and fuck everything you fought for. I think it was kind of the same idea for the cthulhu mythos.

I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's out there, and popular things use it.
Red Lantern wrote:
Koumei wrote:
Isn't that was Akins and Mourdock are saying right about now?

So, blown out of proportion, or it actually is a big deal and people really are legitimately offended by it?
Don't compare me to republican retards.

I said that the rape camp meme made sense in the game was not gratuitous. In the context of the EoD needing lots of combat able soldiers in a hurry and the fact that deep one children take a long, long time to mature and can't work technology the mass creation of hybrids made sense. it was not put in for a gross factor or anything like that. Within the framework of the game it is a valid thing for the EoD to do.


people act like it was put in for shock value or something and dominates the game. Neither is true.
Even more efficient than rape is cloning. Throw in some Holocaust era unethical medical experiments, and you're golden so far as the horror element goes, and the EoD has shit tons of soldiers and a fighting forces motto taken from a crisps company.
Uh, sorry, but if you're doing 'realistic' cloning the clones would take just as long to grow and still need a womb to grow in, and would take just as long to mature, train, etc.

Realistic cloning isn't like in SF movies, a clone still has to gestate, be born, grow, be taught, it's not an instant carbon copy.
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Post by John Magnum »

Red Lantern wrote: Uh, sorry, but if you're doing 'realistic' cloning the clones would take just as long to grow and still need a womb to grow in, and would take just as long to mature, train, etc.
I'm having a hard time comprehending precisely how obtuse and idiotic you're being right now, but among other things this is a setting with LITERAL FUCKING MAGIC, a shitload of pure black box supertech, giant fucking walker mechas, and goddamn Cthulhu.

But obviously whatever style of cloning might exist in the setting would have to conform very closely to how it operates in the real world.

The ridiculous levels of rape in Cthulhutech exist in the game because the designers had a shitty one-note conception of evil, not because of any thematic or narrative necessity.
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Post by Whipstitch »

people act like it was put in for shock value or something and dominates the game. Neither is true.
It's hilarious that you think that statement is a defense of the work. If they didn't look at what they wrote and consider whether the shock value was a net plus or a net minus before including it in the final product then they are way more incompetent than has been previously intimated in this thread. Because, seriously, the shock value is definitely there, and pretending it isn't means you're either way naive or disconcertingly out of touch with reality. Now, whether such themes can work or not comes down to commitment and execution and the Ctech guys dropped the ball there--perversely enough, it can be better to go ahead and let such themes dominate the work rather than treating them like window dressing. For example, a big reason Alien worked is because the creators all understood that there was no way to get the genie back in the bottle once they unleashed the central imagery of the movie on the audience so they doubled down on the phallic objects. After all, once you center your movie on some dude getting orally raped by a space vagina and dying in a grim parody of labor it becomes kinda hard to pretend that your work isn't about violation anymore.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sat Nov 10, 2012 5:30 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by sake »

hyzmarca wrote:
the Wyrm is just misunderstood, and the Weaver is the real villain.
It wasn't that out of left field. There had been several books early on that said the Wyrm used to be a mostly neutral force of entropy that broke things down so they could be remade into something new. But then the Weaver got pissed that the Wyrm kept screwing with all it's stuff, so it tried to trap the the Wyrm, which drove it insane, turning it into the cosmic entity equivalency of a Captain Planet villain.

Not defending the actual god awful Apocalypse book, mind you But the Weaver being the real bad guy did make sense in the overall train wreck metaplot
Last edited by sake on Sat Nov 10, 2012 6:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Koumei »

sake wrote: Not defending the actual god awful Apocalypse book, mind you
I really loved the "End of the World for everything" release. Not because the endings and adventures were good, of course, but because I had some small hope that there would be no more WoD ever.
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Post by Username17 »

I think I did not spend enough time talking/ranting about the villains in Cthulhutech. Cthulhutech has a lot of villains. All of them are rather vaguely defined and perplexing. As previously noted, we got corporate villains, we got cultist villains, we got alien villains, and we got monster villains. We'll take them one at a time.

The first villain is the Chrysalis Corporation. They are bad. They are a big corporation that does a bunch of military contracting and is secretly working for cultists. Now, secretly evil corporations are a staple of futurism and I'm not going to fault them for being included. But honestly? These guys really don't work for me. I think it's because they are explained as being a secret tool of the Children of Chaos in the mini-glossary included in the "Welcome" chapter. And that glossary is in alphabetical order and their name starts with the letter C. It's really hard to get the "secret villain" thing going if they've been exposed as villains before the people they're supposed to be betraying have even been introduced. Also, their evil is exposed in the book before any of their power, wealth, and reputation are even really addressed. And those things really aren't gone into in sufficient detail to be convincing. You're left basically puzzled as to why they don't just get arrested and stop existing.

It also doesn't help that the corporation isn't really shown making anything or providing anything that is in any way necessary or even helpful. It's not like how Mr. Burns owns the power plant or even how Aztechnology makes your precious pull-tab burritos. We're just supposed to accept that the Chrysalis Corporation has managed to remain undetected in its evil plans for nearly thirty years, even though those evil plans are marked in the god damned timeline and there are player character organizations that explicitly have the skizzy on the whole thing. And they never get shut down because they are "rich" - even though the only thing they actually seem to fucking make is "monsters of the week" that the PCs (sorry Dramatic Characters) can beat up.

But now let's get into the Cultist factions. The authors throw the word "Cultist" around a lot, but they seriously seem to have no idea what the fucking word means. Are cults secret organizations operating inside normal society? Are they fucking countries that have their own territories, laws, and militaries? The authors seem to be deeply confused on this point and sort of waver back and forth between these two extremes. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the book contains no fucking map. As we mentioned with the War! rageview, it is basically impossible to have a military campaign of any kind without some kind of map to look at. The lack of a map bleeds through all over the place when talking about cults (and indeed about all kinds of events and agencies in this book), as regions will be described as untouched by war in one segment only to be described as razed to the ground in another.

You can't talk about the bad guys in CTech without talking about rape. In general, I think that the authors probably should have followed Stephen Colbert's advice on this subject and gotten a pencil in hand before they started typing up stuff about rape. There are rape camps, there's personal rape, there's magic rape, there's just really a lot of rape. And the fact that there are different flavors of mass rape really doesn't make me want to fight the villains, it makes me kind of squicked out by the authors themselves.

But anyway, the Cultists. We have the Children of Chaos, the Disciples of the Unnameable, and the Esoteric Order of Dagon. The Disciples of the Unnameable are actually two essentially unrelated cults which are the Disciples of Death's Shadow and the Rapine Storm. The Children of Chaos have a splinter faction that is running the Chrysalis Corporation, and another splinter faction that is running the Eldritch Society (which is one of the handful of organizations that you can actually work for), but when the words "Children of Chaos" are used on their own it is mostly just talking about an independent cult faction that goes by that name. It's important to note that this list isn't comprehensive in that as soon as they get to more books they add new Cults like the Blood Brigade and the Army of the Third Eye and they have the horned ones of Shub Niggurath making their own rape camps and shit. But for now, let's just talk about the three (OK, six) cults described in the main book.

The Children of Chaos are... essentially Sailor Moon villains. I have no other way to describe it. They are described as alternately being rich secretly evil corporate types, being an actual army who controls territory comprising a considerable portion of the planet, and being a bunch of super villains who have secret meetings in abandoned factories. In any case, what they actually do is to transform normal people into monsters and then send those monsters off to do stupid missions or just run around breaking shit. In short: they are Sailor Moon villains who turn people into Youmas. They are supposed to be the bad guys from Guyver who are mixed haphazardly with various "cultists" themes from Call of Cthulhu in a manner that makes them really incoherent. The net result is "inexplicably rich crazy hobo who shows up and transforms a random passerby into the monster of the week". Or in other words: This Guy. I'm pretty positive that wasn't intentional.

The Rapine Storm are... well for fuck's sake their name actually has rape in it. They rape. It's what they do. Also, their goal is apparently to kill all humans. Also all nazzadi. They are composed of humans and nazzadi for the most part, but they also have monsters. Despite this being obviously suicidal and definitionally no more than a laughable fringe sect under any possible circumstances, they are supposed to be a big military threat. This is really weird, because they are supposed to destroy all humans and remove all vestiges of human civilization. So they supposedly don't maintain like factories or anything. And they are a major military power that is conquering things despite having no industry, no supply chains, and no readily apparent source of soldiers. It's like expecting Al Qaeda to show up and fight the UN in open combat. But more stupid even than that.

The Disciples of Death's Shadow are a Hastur loving splinter group. These guys sell drugs and pimp prostitutes and somehow rig the news to show more violent things (I am not making that one up) in order to corrupt people in the traditional way of getting them to pay money and compromise their principles. Their ultimate goal is to undermine the New Earth Government in some undefined fashion. Their's is mostly an image problem. It is simply very hard to consider how one could possibly go about doing this. It's hard to imagine because they call themselves the fucking "Death's Shadows" and have "we are totally evil" stamped on their faces for all intents and purposes. It's also hard to imagine because the future will just let you have hyperporn and you can watch it while standing in line at the grocery store and no one will care. So it's really hard to imagine what a villainous cult could possibly offer that would get substantial numbers of people to betray the hugely popular and omnipresent big brother police state. These guys seem incredibly pointless, in no small part because there are specifically an unnamed and unknowable number of "minor cults" who operate in secret by corrupting or secretly indoctrinating people into service of the dark gods. So having a "major" cult that does that is dramatically useless - any adventures you wanted to have involving the Death's Shadows" could be done just as well or better with a stand-alone cult.

The Esoteric Order of Dagon is alternately supposed to be semi-secret and also supposed to be a vast army that controls the seas and a good chunk of the land. These guys very prominently feature rape camps front and center. They rise out of the sea, conquer a coastal village, and have a bunch of fish men rape everyone. In camps. This is, as far as I can tell, completely pointless. It's completely pointless to their plans, because their plans are to find Rlyeh and awaken Cthulhu. But here's the thing: Rlyeh is 100% under water. They control the entire ocean. They don't get anything for fighting wars with humans, because their victory condition is completely orthogonal to that. But it's also completely pointless to the story. Their nominal reason for setting up the rape camps is to breed new generations of hybrid soldiers to fight their apparently meaningless war against the surface folk. But here's the dealio: according to the timeline, they started doing this shit eight years ago. The very first of this new generation of rape camp based soldiers are seven fucking years old, you twatwaddles! So the entire rape camp plot has generated zero hybrid soldiers, because all the hybrids are in second grade if that. And as previously mentioned, the whole point of having old ones and mecha in the same setting is to be able to punch out Cthulhu - and this game really doesn't deliver that. The Esoteric Order of Dagon is only depicted with one mech-scale monster and it's a Star Spawn. No giant fish, no Cthulhu, no Mother Hydra. Just a Star Spawn. It's a major let down.

There are also alien invaders. The ones it concentrates on are the Migou (bugs from Pluto), and their creations the Nazzadi. The Nazzadi joined Earth for the most part twenty years ago, but there are still Nazzadi who are fighting Earth for no adequately explained reason and with no adequately explained logistic train. Seriously, I have no idea where the Nazzadi who are still fighting get ammunition or even food. But there are also other aliens: The Elder Race, the Great Race, and the Valusians, but these guys are all explained to be essentially rumors in the main book so we'll skip them.

The Nazzadi are based on the Zentradi of Robotech. However, while you will not understand what the fuck is going on (what with them being an alien-made warrior race who switched sides and integrated with human society because of friendship speeches and J-pop) unless you accept their Robotech origins, there are enough differences that you will be pretty much continuously confused. First of all, they are all about human sized (though slightly on the large end). There are no giant warrior types, they are all miclones. Second, they are drawn as Drow. Seriously. Despite being Zentradi, they are drawn as gracile, black-skinned people with white hair. Wat.

Then there are the Migou. They are bugs who have their own giant robots. They created the Zentradi Nazzadi to invade us, and when that didn't work out because of our protoculture they invaded their own damn selves. They are the Invid from Robotech with a very slight Mythos pastiche.

And finally, we have outright monsters. The list is way too short in the main book, and the way to integrate them into military campaigns seems under concepted to say the least.

-Username17
Last edited by Username17 on Sat Nov 10, 2012 7:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

sake wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:
the Wyrm is just misunderstood, and the Weaver is the real villain.
It wasn't that out of left field. There had been several books early on that said the Wyrm used to be a mostly neutral force of entropy that broke things down so they could be remade into something new. But then the Weaver got pissed that the Wyrm kept screwing with all it's stuff, so it tried to trap the the Wyrm, which drove it insane, turning it into the cosmic entity equivalency of a Captain Planet villain.

Not defending the actual god awful Apocalypse book, mind you But the Weaver being the real bad guy did make sense in the overall train wreck metaplot
That is essentially the way it is, and I think there's at least one camp (of Glass Walkers, I think), that sees things that way. The only real problems with that apocalypse scenario are:
1) The Black Spiral Dancers are portrayed as good in any way, shape or form (redeemable, or controllable with the right leader, might be ok, though)
2) The Wyrm destroying eveything is supposedly a good thing. This is the epitome of WoD's stupid grimdark "standing on a turd in a toilet and someone just flushed" setting. Were I to actually run that, I'd probably have the Wyrm only destroy his corrupted children, possibly burning the corruption out of fomori and BSDs, leaving damaged, but not-evil, servants of balance.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Koumei »

FrankTrollman wrote:Or in other words: This Guy.
Link isn't working for me, it sends me to the actual website, not even featuring that specific picture. But I'm going to go totally out on a limb here and guess it's a picture of Nephrite.
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Post by Desdan_Mervolam »

Prak_Anima wrote:and vampires could hunt down rival antedilluvians with flame throwers and napalm
That's not so easy. From what I can tell, pretty much every unambigously successful attempt to kill an antediluvian was done before the beginning of written history(Such as Triole diablarizing Brujah). Saulot took over Tremere and start playing Super Reverse Mole Double Agent, and everyone though Lasombra was dead until they started comparing notes at a party one night and realized everyone remembered the night exactly different (I don't recall if that plot point went anywhere). I think Tzmince was supposed to be dead, but then he turned up in a as a cave under Manhattan Island. Maybe Agustus Giovanni's diablarie of Cappadocius worked, but I seem to recall hearing that when Gehenna happened, all the Giovanni turned to ash instantly. I cannot cite that though.

And woe betide you if one of them wakes up while you're at it. Ravnos, one of the weaker Antediluvians (Who might actually have been 4th generation, as I think of it), drove the world mad for an entire week as it wreaked havoc across Southeast Asia as a bunch of vampires, mages and Hengeokai totally failed to stop it, until the Technocracy decided that the best solution was to turn on a Orbital Solar Refractive Laser and then nuke the site from orbit*, further making people wonder how exactly the Technocracy was the bad guy here.

*It IS, after all, the only way to be sure.
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Post by Red Lantern »

John Magnum wrote:
Red Lantern wrote: Uh, sorry, but if you're doing 'realistic' cloning the clones would take just as long to grow and still need a womb to grow in, and would take just as long to mature, train, etc.
I'm having a hard time comprehending precisely how obtuse and idiotic you're being right now, but among other things this is a setting with LITERAL FUCKING MAGIC, a shitload of pure black box supertech, giant fucking walker mechas, and goddamn Cthulhu.

But obviously whatever style of cloning might exist in the setting would have to conform very closely to how it operates in the real world.

The ridiculous levels of rape in Cthulhutech exist in the game because the designers had a shitty one-note conception of evil, not because of any thematic or narrative necessity.
Yes, numbnuts, there is magic in CT and mecha and so on. Where does that imply you can create fully grown, trained, educated soldiers out of nowhere overnight?

Even the elder gods have to recruit cultists, they can't just create a batch of worshippers with a spell or something.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

That's the question at hand, though. Why not? The setting has magic and super tech, the only reason for rape camps instead of bastard farms with accelerated gestation and brain-uplink training to the point where they can just pop a six pack of clones to pursue the protagonists is for poorly written grimdark that is completely unnecessary.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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