Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[Avoraciopoctules]

From a discussion that started Here in the Image Macros thread, some old posts quoted for context

There are 4 finished and 1 unfinished detailed reviews linked here:
http://tradwiki.foxxtrot.net/index.php/ ... iends:_B-C

The response to the reviews seems to be a universal "Ctech would be good if only had another system and fixed up the fluff." At which point you surely say "Ctech would be good, if it were completely redone."
I think that there's some pent up demand for a scifi mythos RPG which isn't too creepy and the mechanics work.

I think that there's some pent up demand for a scifi mythos RPG which isn't too creepy and the mechanics work.

Yeah. Actually I'd go even farther and say that there is demand for a scifi mythos/anime mashup which is either not too creepy or is creepy in a "this is really spooky" sort of way and not a "I think the authors like to talk about rape too much" sort of way, and where the mechanics work.

When you say "It's totally Anime ripoffs and you play Evangelion pilots who fight Mythos monsters" people (myself included) pretty much say:


And then you read it. And it's incoherent shit fuckery. And the Animes they ripped off are ripped off so closely that it doesn't feel like a shout-out so much as an actual rip-off. And the Animes they chose to rip off don't even make any sense together and they don't come up with a dynamic whereby all the player characters can even be in the same fucking room as each other. And all told, it's like...


But yeah. I really wish someone would go back and do the exact thought processes that gave us CthulhuTech, and then make an actual game that isn't ass. Something that had some fucking Zords for the superhero characters so that your man-sized heroes could actually fucking do something when the giant robots fight it out.

-Username17

I suppose I could try expanding the old notes I used for the quote below into a full design flowsheet. We'll see.

When I was thinking about how I'd make a non-terrible game inspired by Cthulhutech, I tried drafting a list of classes something like this:

- Supersoldier: a cyborg who can take light tank rounds and keep moving. Tiny reactor inside of body powers regenerating plasma shields and can also be used to power stuff that fits the Supersoldier's spinal USB ports. The Supersoldier is really good at demolition, piloting vehicles, and resisting mental trauma/psychic attack. Can wield heavy weapons without setting them up in place, but that's inaccurate enough that it's only good against stuff tank-size and up.
- Wizard: is kind of squishy, but has a bunch of funky rituals that do specific things, some of which are assumed to have modern improvements. As example, the wizard can throw a spear that never misses, and usually duct-tapes a C4 charge to it. Can raise the dead, and automatically comes back as a ghost capable of rezzing himself with a little help. Restocks on prepared magic (including no-miss javelins) between missions.
- Nano-engineer: Great at hacking, can instantly assemble equipment off of a list at the cost of nano-juice that gets replenished. Moderately easy to take out, but hard to finish off because the brain is stored in The Cloud and the body can repair itself.
- Psychic: Telekinetically block bullets, perform martial arts at range, flip switches behind shields or bulletproof glass. Mess with people's brains more effectively than many Mythos monsters. Telepathically attack monsters too, but less effectively. Set things on fire with your brain. If critically injured or crippled, transfer your mind into a clean clone between missions.

Yeah, the sense I get from the reviews is that what makes it horribly, painfully bad is that it really should be awesome.

Like mechanically they need to:

1- Get rid of that poker dice thing. I don't really know how you'd even start calculating the odds of anything.
2- Change how their damage scaling works so that Power Armor and shapeshifting monster-people are actually threatened by similar things.
3- Make casting less pathetic, and maybe give a mechanical benefit for successfully reading the fucking Necronomicon.

And they could actually make Tager, Mecha, and Normal Guy into explicitly separate campaigns, because really it's pretty clear you aren't actually supposed to combine them (Taking Tager is worth a lot more stat boosts than it costs, and aside from the stat boosts, and in exchange you make a check or lose sanity once a month, but 8 is the minimum value you can have in that stat after taking Tager, and you need a total of 16 from attribute+weird poker dice result, and meanwhile each point of Mecha health is worth 50 human health points, and also mecha armor is worth 50 times as much as human armor) Or they could rework the rules so that being a 7-foot tall needle covered beast out of nightmare makes tearing into a mecha cockpit with your bare hands theoretically possible.

Also, some parts of the setting are poorly thought out, like where the NEG is trying to destroy the Migou while "containing" the cults, when the first one of those has flying capital ships and the second one does not but is trying to summon Great Old Ones. Also there's a lot of creepy sexual fetishes scattered throughout that need to go.

The way I see it, you have a couple of ways to go:

• Human sized investigators. Characters are basically Arkham Horror characters cranked up to the anime future. So you have nanotech engineers, student athletes, bookish wizards, and such.
• Human sized super heroes. Characters are basically superheroes who happen to be fighting Mythos beasts. So you have super soldiers, guyvers, sailor scouts, and so on.
• Giant monsters/robots. Characters fight building sized monsters, and so everyone has a human avatar (who is mostly there for drama) and a giant form (who does giant monster battles against star spawn and cthonians). So the human characters can be mech pilots, priestesses of Mothra, power rangers with zords, or dudes who grow to giant size like Ultraman - but in any case their human form is a high school student with emotional problems.
• Total War. The players represent the Earth Self Defense Force as a whole, and like Ars Magica they rotate playing major and minor characters. in this setup, there are some characters who simply don't have giant robots to pilot or monsters to summon or transform into, and that's OK because not all scenarios involve giant monster battles. Some of them are cult investigations, and then the players play other characters.

CthulhuTech itself was totally incoherent as to what kind of game it wanted to be, but once you nailed that down it seems like it could be done. It also seemed totally weird to me to have two playable races and have them be Humans and Zentradi. Because it seems like once you've thrown open the floodgates of players playing non-humans, and you've brought Mythos on board, then people should be able to be Goat Spawn, Ghouls, and Deep Ones. And if people are in an Anime set in the magic-augmented future with giant robots and shit, they should be able to be Androids, Cat Girls, and probably standard order Demons. I just don't even understand the thought process of having more than one playable race and yet having less than five. Two seems like literally the worst possible number.

-Username17

I think you'd want to go with something that incorporated both human sized super heroes and giant monsters. Total War could do that, but I see a situation where human sized super heroes also have giant monster resources, but whipping out the giant monster is something you only do in fairly limited circumstances, because giant monsters cause enough collateral damage (physical, psychic, whatever) that targeting even tank forces with them usually isn't worth the cost, plus that collateral damage tends to obliterate any clues you were trying to discover, and so forth.

Basically, giant monsters would be used freely for major offensive actions against the enemy and to repel attacking giant monsters, and any other situation would be a desperate last resort. The rest of your time you get to do special operations work as a super hero.

[hyzmarca]

To start with, I'm going to arbitrilarly decide to rip off Macross 7 instead of Robotech, that way I have an excuse for Evangelleon-sized guitars and lethal rock-battles with Cthulhu. I'm sure that having impromptu rock-offs with the Great Old Ones will ruin the atmosphere of cosmic horror. I give zero fucks.

Secondly, Guyvers get Gigantic and Gigantic Exceed armor. There's no reason why they shouldn't.

Third, no separate games. Seriously, there is no reason why Guyvers and Robotech and Evas should exist in the same universe, but you can slam them together if youre willing to use some creativity and finesse. Making them completely incompatible defeats the purpose of a unified setting. Reasonably, you should be able to make a team out of any set of characters. Fuck, you can't be a psychic soldier in Cthulutech because they decided to rip off Akira and make all the psychics teenagers who aren't old enough to join the military. I mean, seriously. That's just utter garbage.

Fourthly, don't rip off the entire plots of of several different anime wholesale, especially when these plots are totally incompatible with each other and with the original parts of your setting. Really, it isn't that borrow single elements without completely replaying the entire plot.

Fifthly, more moral ambiguity. And moral ambiguity doesn't mean that the good guys also have rape camps. It means that some of the bad guys have a point. In some cases, like with the Deep Ones, the conflict should be a case of critical communication failure where no one is really in the wrong. Because, fuck, even in the original short story the Deep Ones were fairly easy to get along with. The basic gold for nookie deal is less exploitive than most forms of prostitution, and I'm pretty sure that many of the Deep Ones had actual long-term romantic relationships with humans. It would be fairly easy to paint a human-Deep One conflict as a misunderstanding, or even make them allies.

Sixth, no rape camps. Yes, I know that they exist in real life. I give no fucks. Gratuitous rape doesn't make your villains more evil, it just makes your game creepier.

Seventh, fewer major enemy factions. We don't need many. In Cthulutech you've got the Deep Ones, The Robotech Masters, the Rapine Storm (seriously?) Cronos, the Deep Ones, and fuck knows who else all at the same time and they're all supposed to be important parts of the game for various incompatible characters. One type of giant robot fights aliens and one type of giant robot fights fish people and never the twain shall meet. Fuck that.

We can cut down the number of major antagonists and make the timeline comprehensible without too much trouble.

Eighth, magic is actually useful in combat and template stacking is permitted, balanced by resource cost, so your giant robot pilot can learn how to throw magic fireballs and shit and his giant robot can throw giant magic fireballs if he's piloting it.


Ninth, template stacking isn't just permitted, it's required and assumed to be the default. All characters can hold their own at every level of the game. Your underpaid private investigator has his own giant robot. Why? It was inherited from his dad, it's an older model that doesn't do much because you never sank any resource points into it, but it still functions. Fuck, just make something up. he point is that you have a giant robot, period. There is no permissible scenario in which your character doesn't own a giant robot of some sort. For the sake of convenience , we can assume that giant robots are the sports/muscle car of the future and about as common, with military mods being less so but still easily available. Basically, we're ripping off the Big O here, where the professional freelance Negotiator has a giant robot just because, and fights giant monsters every episode. Combat Butlers sold separately.

[Archmage]

HOW TO CTHULHUTECH
Presented in the style of: The Gaming Den

Fix the fluff yourself. I don't care enough to write setting junk.

CORE MECHANICS

The core mechanics of Cthulhutech are shitty, obtuse, and needly complicated for no good reason. Strip out the awful KRAFTWERK mechanics and replace them with the Shadowrun 4th edition dicepool mechanics. Attribute + Skill or Attribute + Attribute dicepools with equipment modifiers are just fine.

Total character BP values should be approximated based on whatever the hell it is worth to be a Tager or a Mage and however many points you think people should allot for skills on average. So like 350 BP, maybe 400 BP.

ATTRIBUTES

Attributes cost 10 points. Attribute cap is 6. Augmented cap is 1.5x the racial cap. Attributes start at 1.

Humans can pick one stat and get a +1 bonus to both their current stat and the cap (so 2/7).

Nazzadi get +2 to Agility (so 3/8). Now Nazzadi are actually more agile than humans, who could previously just put their +1 to any attribute into Agility and match the Nazzadi bonus.

Merge Strength and Body into one attribute, "Toughness."
Merge Willpower and Charisma into one attribute, "Willpower."

STAYING ALIVE

Everyone gets vitality-scale wound boxes. Ten of them.
Vehicles, buildings, and so on get integrity-scale wound boxes. Ten of them. Integrity damage is ten vitality boxes per point. Human-scale people who get shot by mecha-scale weapons explode. Deal with it.

I suggest using the Light, Moderate, Serious, and Incapacitating wound system proposed in the alt.war thread:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51934& ... &start=175
CTRL+F for "written out of character" and you'll get to it right away. It explains everything that is wrong with the SR4 damage and armor systems and why they fall apart utterly when you try to scale it to vehicular combat with tanks and shit.

Sanity score. Everyone needs one. There are at least two ways to do this.

One is to have SANITY WOUND BOXES where every 10 boxes worth of SANITY WOUNDS you pick up an appropriate derangement or something. This has the advantage of sort of working on the same scale as other wounds. You can soak sanity wounds with Willpower if you're okay with the idea that mages handle weird shit better than other people (which is sort of logical). Or you can base them on some other attribute or an advantage or whatever you want and assume that everyone who wants to remain sane will buy it. It also has the advantage of not being game over until you pick up too many derangements for your character to be functional (or taken seriously).

Another is to have sanity be some fixed value (say 100 points) that degrades when you take sanity damage. At 100 points you are a functional human being. At 0 points you are catatonic. You can graduate this into 10 or 20-point steps or whatever where at 90 you're starting to fray, at 80 you have at least one moderately disabling mental illness, and so on. This creates a nice progression from sane to essentially unplayable and therefore basically dead. You can even make it possible to restore sanity in this system in a straight-out numerical sense instead of "remove a specific derangement."

You can probably devise an infinite number of other ways to handle sanity.

ADVANTAGES

You can only have one of these three advantages.

Being a Tager is like having equipment except that it is merged into your flesh in some unspeakably horrifying way. When you Tager out you get a lot of buffs to attributes and they are allowed to exceed the augmented caps for your race because you are more than human now. As I understand it, using the SR4 damage scale Tagers probably seriously need to run around with a Toughess attribute of like 20. The drawback of being a Tager is that you have in fact merged some horrifying ur-thing into your flesh in some unspeakably horrifying way. You will probably go insane (if you have not already).

Being a Para-psychic is like having a bunch of random-ass spell-like abilities that you should buy individually for points. You don't need a Magic attribute, they just operate at some fixed power based on how many points you have spent.

Being a Magician gives you a Magic attribute and lets you train in magic-related skills. It works exactly like being a Mage in SR4 except that everybody soaks Drain with Willpower + Magic.

If being an Engel Pilot is that much more awesome than driving a regular mecha it can cost something too. Let people be Engel pilots in addition to other stuff because why not.

Then you can have some other advantages. You can have disadvantages, too, like starting with derangements or at a lower sanity value or whatever. It is suggested that the costs for these things be structured such that you cannot be totally addicted to heroin (Habit worth 4 points in CT) to pay off being the dictator of a country (Authority worth 4 points in CT). (Yes, this is actually how much those things cost slash are worth in CTech.)

Note that buying sanity-related disads, if they are allowed, is like reducing your hit point value permanently no matter what sanity system you use. Your character will become unplayable sooner. There should be some strict cap on how far into the hole you are permitted to go, because "your character will die earlier in the campaign" is a meaningless disadvantage in exchange for real ultimate power. Tagers, Para-psychics, and Mages should probably be forced to choose a suitable drawback in exchange for their powers. There is no sane (ha) way to balance the cost and mechanical drawbacks of being depressed versus being schizophrenic versus being obssessive-compulsive or whatever, so assume that in the end it is not going to be balanced and just ballpark something. It will save you a lot of...sanity.

SKILLS

There are too many redundant skills in SR4, so most of them can go away and no one will miss them. There are no skill groups. Skills probably cost 2 points/rank and cap at 6 or something. Realistically you are going to come up with a list of skills and determine how many skills people should have at what rank (two 5s or one 6, max of three 4s, and the rest do whatever).

You need four combat skills. Max. Firearms, Explosives, Melee, and Gunnery. Everything from holdouts to man-portable machine guns goes into Firearms. If it goes boom, it's an Explosive, whether it's a grenade, a block of C4, or a rocket launcher. If you hit people with it, it's Melee. People who want to fist-fight with mecha or use giant vibroswords can use Melee there, too. And if it's not mounted on a mech or vehicle and you aren't aiming directly but are instead using other controls or computerized targeting systems or whatever then it's Gunnery. If you are using a machine gun mounted on a jeep and are literally standing on the back of the jeep aiming the machine gun like in Halo you get to use Firearms; if you are sitting in the cockpit operating the guns through some interface you use Gunnery. All key off Agility. You can fold Firearms and Gunnery into one skill if you think the skill list is too long.

There is one piloting skill. Pilot. It lets you drive a Toyota, a snowmobile, a helicopter, or an Engel. It's 2085. They're probably all operated with a joystick. You use Pilot to dodge attacks when you are driving shit.

Dodge is a stupid skill no one takes, so get rid of it. Climbing, Running, and Swimming do not need to be separate skills because they aren't important enough to matter. Athletics governs all this shit in addition to avoiding attacks.

People need to see and hear, so keep Perception.

Social skills can pretty much stay the same.

You need a list of Cthulhutech type Knowledge skills (Arcanotech, Bureaucracy, Culture, Law Enforcement, and so on). They probably ought to cost the same as other skills if they are going to be as important as other skills.

Computers and hacking are not that important in Cthulhutech. You need Computer and probably Electronic Warfare.

You might as well leave Engineering in and force people to choose a specialty, but allow cinematic engineering bullshit where the auto mechanic fixes a battlesuit.

The whole Stealth group probably ought to stay, but you could merge Infiltration and Shadowing.

First Aid and Medicine can stay separate in the sense that Medicine is basically a Knowledge skill.

A single Ritual Magic skill for spellcasters is probably enough, because spellcasters are going to get fucked over by eldritch power every time they do basically anything. Making them buy three different skills so that they can get fucked over while tampering with things Man Was Not Meant to Know is probably unnecessary. There will be enough drawbacks. I guess you could have an Assensing equivalent if you wanted there to be a magical "perception" ability?

MAGIC AND PARA-PSYCHIC POWERS AND TAGERS OH MY

Use spells from SR4. Convert specific powers from Cthulhutech. Add horrifying drawbacks to taste. Serve. Go find the psyker critical failure tables from a Warhammer 40k RPG or pillage something from Cthulhutech, it'll be fine.

Tagers, as previously mentioned, are like possession tradition spirit nonsense and all your attribute caps become irrelevant because you shoved the fungi from Yuggoth into your body. You spend an action to invoke your Tager power if necessary and you get all kinds of crazy powers that only work because you are being a Tager. This probably makes you go insane.

MONSTER MANUAL AND MECHA HANDBOOK

I cannot convert all the monsters and vehicles to approximate SR4-Cthulhutech equivalents in my head on the drive home from work. So you have to do it yourself. [INFLAMMATORY INSULTS AND THREATS CENSORED]

EQUIPMENT

Aren't your characters part of some organization or something? They don't even own their equipment, it's on loan from the army. Paying points for it is probably silly. Dole it out in some sane way and let people pick their gear, whatever loadout seems most reasonable to them based on utility and bulk/weight. Limit people based on logical encumberance rates (modified by Toughness) to what they can carry. You can't even carry ten machine guns, owning ten machine guns on your character sheet is pointless. If you want people to have mecha or battlesuits you're going to have to literally hand them out as the GM anyway because you don't want one guy buying a Seraph while everyone else spends all their BP on C4 and assault rifles. Mecha are on a totally different game scale, so either the whole team gets them for a mission or no one does. Case closed.

CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Brought to you by plagiarism, caffeine, and the letter T.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I'm going to try something more wargamey, maybe using Heavy Gear Blitz as a base. But I would like to use heroes, and I need 2 more classes to do a normal Game Design Flowsheet. One of them could be a quasi-shoggoth, where you compare most directly to a nanite swarm. But I'm not sure what to go with for #6.

[Koumei]

I'm pretty sure Frank once said that the Shadowrun system doesn't really work even for Space Marines and Tyranid Warriors (whereas it works awesome for Cultists and Guardsmen and Gangsters), so scaling it up to Mecha and Abominations is... unwise.

That said, I am interested in this project. I also reiterate from Prak's very similar project that people should definitely have the following skills:
[*]Do the impossible
[*]See the invisible
[*]Touch the untouchable
[*]Break the unbreakable
[*]Row, row, fight the power

...which, come to think of it, is basically the list of "You must be this tall to play" criteria for mid-high level D&D that so many fighters fail at.

Strip out the awful KRAFTWERK mechanics

Isn't Kraftwerk a German metal band?

Or you can base them on some other attribute or an advantage or whatever you want and assume that everyone who wants to remain sane will buy it.

I'd suggest not doing the Eclipse Phase thing where most stats are the same in function (they add to a bunch of skills) except one, which does that but also is the "be sane" stat and then everyone needs to max that just to be playing the game.

Losing sanity should probably not result in being stunned or temporarily catatonic, too, but instead result in you developing mental issues related to the loss in sanity, and have these issues show up when all the action finishes and everyone goes back to base. So Shinji sees a monster that opens its mouth and the inside of its face is all comatose bodies stitched together, oozing fluids, and he kind of freaks out and tells his Eva to blow it the fuck up... then when he returns to base he beats off over a comatose teammate.

[name_here]

I'm going to try something more wargamey, maybe using Heavy Gear Blitz as a base. But I would like to use heroes, and I need 2 more classes to do a normal Game Design Flowsheet. One of them could be a quasi-shoggoth, where you compare most directly to a nanite swarm. But I'm not sure what to go with for #6.

I am of the opinion that the thing which should most be salvaged from CthulhuTech is Tagers. Unfortunately, they kind of overlap with Super Soldier.

[Avoraciopoctules]

That could be cool... what if you played the tager spirit as the PC, something that could be summoned by different cultists on Team White Hat? You go into a mission with 2 redshirts, and if you die one of them gets promoted to PC host.

[name_here]

Definitely has potential, but then there's the question of interacting with other characters outside of being summoned to smash things.

I guess you could take a page from Stargate and have the guy carrying you be an NPC and communicate with others by making his eyes turn all golden and talking through him.

[Foxwarrior]

Hyzmarca: I feel like the Colossus Climber is an important role to put into a game about Colossi. Crashing a fighter jet into Cthulhu's face, then clambering out of the wreckage and throwing C4 down his throat; warping onto mecha and disabling them with rune circles; and clambering up a monster in order to claw its eyes out could all be fit into the setting. It would certainly help establish that combat wasn't just "medium combat, but with BIGGER NUMBERS (on the size attributes)"

[hyzmarca]

Hyzmarca: I feel like the Colossus Climber is an important role to put into a game about Colossi. Crashing a fighter jet into Cthulhu's face, then clambering out of the wreckage and throwing C4 down his throat; warping onto mecha and disabling them with rune circles; and clambering up a monster in order to claw its eyes out could all be fit into the setting. It would certainly help establish that combat wasn't just "medium combat, but with BIGGER NUMBERS (on the size attributes)"

Colossus Climbers have powers that are relevant in the mecha minigame. Presumably, they trade out their default mechs and use the extra resource points for dodge, climb, and weak-point location powers.

The point is that everyone gets a pool of resource points that must go towards mech-scale powers, that's usually in the form of a mech. The ability to take out a mech on foot is also relevant.
Higher level Colossus Climbers might even be able to hit Master Asia levels of proficiency,

[OgreBattle]

I think you should add Big Wars to the mix


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfCbwrEX7zg

It's about man colonizing space, then being attacked by aliens who claim they are God, and Man is only allowed to live on Earth.

War ensues.
The aliens are worshipped by some people who actually believe they are Jesus/God, or they can incept you with psychic powers to turn you into a traitor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRymfiNebg


I think this game should be called

"MINDFUCK: HUGE"

Because it is about mindfucks and really huge fighting.

[Whipstitch]

You guys should just wipe a bunch of shit from After Sundown wholesale since that's pretty much what you'll end up with anyway if you're taking alt.war style damage scaling and consolidating a bunch of combat and athletic skills.


Also, Kraftwerk was a German electronic music group rather than metal. That doesn't sound particularly noteworthy until you realize they were doing that shit back in the early '70s.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Fifthly, more moral ambiguity. And moral ambiguity doesn't mean that the good guys also have rape camps. It means that some of the bad guys have a point. In some cases, like with the Deep Ones, the conflict should be a case of critical communication failure where no one is really in the wrong. Because, fuck, even in the original short story the Deep Ones were fairly easy to get along with. The basic gold for nookie deal is less exploitive than most forms of prostitution, and I'm pretty sure that many of the Deep Ones had actual long-term romantic relationships with humans. It would be fairly easy to paint a human-Deep One conflict as a misunderstanding, or even make them allies.

This is a great point. I like the elegance of Magic the Gathering's political setup, so let's see if I can propose 5 different factions that could find reason to work together or against each other. Perhaps they could be divided into a natural ally-enemy pentacle later.

1. Humans I: Radical transhumanists, who want to embrace the new technologies and arcane secrets that are being uncovered. They want to advance arcanoscience as rapidly as possible, so humanity can grow to equal or exceed even the most terrifying aliens. And they are willing to sacrifice quite a bit in the name of becoming gods. Their Gears are easier to adapt to deal with magical fallout.

2. Humans II: Survivalists. The second major human faction wants to make sure that humanity continues to recognizably exist for as long as possible. They are willing to do whatever needs to be done to insure this. This means seizing and protecting strategic sites on Earth, but also colonizing other worlds to minimize the impact of any one extinction event. Gears are designed to deal with vacuum more easily, so they are cheaper to convert to space combat.

3. Mi-Go: They need rare earths and other precious Earth resources to sustain their standard of living back home. The Queen has finally launched a public invasion in the name of securing the oil minerals they need and spreading the Hive government style the Mi-Go see as morally best. This may involve taking unproductive citizens and sticking their brains into immortality cylinders, which are then used partially as processing unit in organic supercomputers. R'lyeh Gears are less vulnerable to conventional hacking.

4. R'lyeh: See themselves as caretakers of the planet, and think that Earth is in sufficient trouble that they, who care for it most, must take over the whole planet and protect it. Part of protecting it means appeasing horrible demon spirits, and many in R'lyeh have been tempted to go further than necessary so they can tap into this monstrous source of new allies and power. R'leh's human militia are called the Druids, and officers might use Power Sickles as weapons on their Gears. Gears are also good at dealing with amphibious and some other rough terrain.

5. ...not sure whether to go with another human or alien faction. The burrowing lava-race might be a candidate...

[Prak]

I think that there's some pent up demand for a scifi mythos RPG which isn't too creepy and the mechanics work.

Yeah. Actually I'd go even farther and say that there is demand for a scifi mythos/anime mashup which is either not too creepy or is creepy in a "this is really spooky" sort of way and not a "I think the authors like to talk about rape too much" sort of way, and where the mechanics work.

When you say "It's totally Anime ripoffs and you play Evangelion pilots who fight Mythos monsters" people (myself included) pretty much say:

And then you read it. And it's incoherent shit fuckery. And the Animes they ripped off are ripped off so closely that it doesn't feel like a shout-out so much as an actual rip-off. And the Animes they chose to rip off don't even make any sense together and they don't come up with a dynamic whereby all the player characters can even be in the same fucking room as each other. And all told, it's like...

But yeah. I really wish someone would go back and do the exact thought processes that gave us CthulhuTech, and then make an actual game that isn't ass. Something that had some fucking Zords for the superhero characters so that your man-sized heroes could actually fucking do something when the giant robots fight it out.

Is this why my Mythos/TTGL mashup received so much attention? Fuck, maybe I should go back and work on that some more...

[Username17]

I like the Total War setup because it allows one player to be a mech pilot (normal human who gets into a giant robot) while another player gets to be a power ranger (super hero who gets into a giant robot). That would normally be some kind of shit sandwich of unbalanced in a game where everyone gets one character (in that the power ranger is drastically more competent at human scale and either pays for that by sucking in his Zord or not and either way that's super shitty). But if you let the Mech Pilot player swap to playing a Sailor Scout from the same agency during the human scale Shoggoth fight, it's all good.

Further, I would suggest doing the full Evangelion: Arcanotech only works for children with emotional problems. Possibly it also works for adults whose souls have been burned out and turned into hand puppets for Mythos Abominations, but the Earth Self Defense Force obviously feels that those people are unfit for duty (considering as they are the enemy). As an Eva Pilot, you are an emotionally insecure teenager, because when you grow up it won't work for you anymore. Supers are straight up magical girls. Hell, your Director is an ex-magical girl who rants about how when she was running around in a tutu shooting rainbow sparkles at tentacle monsters she never made stupid mistakes like this. Your conjurers are, and I cannot stress this enough: Pokemasters. They are emotionally damaged and overly competitive children who have actual Arcanotech spheres that only they can use to capture Mythos monsters and force them to do their bidding.

So at any given time, every player plays a kid with special training and weird sorcery and tech that allow them to contribute to the current mission. Except one player, who plays the "responsible adult" who has actual detective skills, a cool head, and a military clearance that allows them to coordinate with the regular military.

Also: the Humans of Earth have good relations with some of the non-Humans, and many of the non-Humans on Earth fight for the Earth on the grounds that "that is where all my stuff is". So even if there are pro-Shub Niggurath Goat Spawn factions, there are still pro-Earth Goat Spawns and you can play one. Similarly with how there are pro-Azathoth Deep Ones, but also Deep Ones who think that is bugfuck insane because destroying the Earth involves everyone they know dying in a blast of Azathoth trumpet. Mythos Ghouls are pretty much already pro-Human, so I have no idea why you'd make the hopping meeping dudes NPC-only. We also need Cat Girls. You can have that be "for no reason", but if you wanted you could have them be either a Mythos creation or an attempt by humans to genetically engineer something that could handle Arcanotech at an older age. And I think bringing in "Demons" who are a mixture between the demons of Disgaea and the Demon Aliens of Urusei Yatsura is the way to go.

So to ground this: we got sexy goat girls, sexy cat girls, sexy demon girls, atlanteans, and bookish clawed monster people. Also humans. I can't see a single thing that bringing Zentradi into the game adds.

-Username17

[Koumei]

That sounds completely awesome, and also sounds pretty similar to Bakuhatsu High in the sense of "Grab-bag of anime trope teenagers are teaming up at the behest of the UN/whatever to smack giant monsters about". But potentially with more direction and the actual Cthulhu tie-in. And with actual aliens.

But this does raise a question: is there anything that is not made better by adding Pokemon to it?

[Prak]

In the general sense of "people capable of cramming powerful monsters into devices of control and letting them out to make them fight for our amusement/great justice" no, not that I can think of. I don't remember if I touched on it, but I was totally going to make monster trainer a thing in R'rye Toppa Jouku Doriru.

[Username17]

An advantage to using a proportional damage and dicepool system is that damage is already on a log scale, meaning that relative small numeric bonuses to damage or armor push things from serious damage to "bouncing off" and back again. This means that with moderate bonuses to damage from colossus climbing, you can damage a giant robot with human scale weaponry that otherwise does nothing to mecha.

That being said, I don't think I actually want to play a giant robot/giant monster game that doesn't have hit locations and critical location damage effects. That doesn't necessarily mean that you need a separate combat system for human scale and mecha scale though. There are lots of systems going all the way back to RuneQuest that have had hit locations and limb wounds as a thing. I think the thing to do under the circumstances is to simply get rid of hit points altogether, and have only hit locations and wound effects. A wound is Light, Medium, Serious, or Incapacitating, and you have a small chart for what those effects actually are depending on where you got hit.

Not the usual kind of damage system for a game like D&D or After Sundown, but I think it's probably the direction you want to go if your intention is to scale the game from slap fights among children up to giant robots fighting building sized space lobsters.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

So to ground this: we got sexy goat girls, sexy cat girls, sexy demon girls, atlanteans, and bookish clawed monster people. Also humans. I can't see a single thing that bringing Zentradi into the game adds.

-Username17

They're very tall.

The Zentraedi are the guys who grow big and get into fistfights with giant robots and monsters. Because there is some conceptual overlap with Ultramen, we can make the two the same thing.

Of course, growth could just be an upgrade that anyone can add.

[Username17]

In Cthulhutech, all Zentradi are Zentradi miclones, which means they bring essentially nothing to the game. I agree that having the giant Zentradi who can engage in h-t-h combat with mecha would be appreciably different than humans.

But as you say, once you've made "Being Ultraman" into a character class, it's pointless to have a whole race who have that as the only meaningful thing they do.

-Username17

[virgil]

But as you say, once you've made "Being Ultraman" into a character class, it's pointless to have a whole race who have that as the only meaningful thing they do.

If I recall, didn't they have a miniaturization process? It would be like Micro Lad, an alien giant who has the super power to shrink down to only six feet tall.

[name_here]

But then they're backwards ultraman as a racial feature when we've got it as a class.

[hyzmarca]

Making all the Zentradi miclones was a fairly stupid decision. With maclones, you get very interesting worldbuilding features like the Zentraedi-sized shopping malls (which was used quite well in Macross Frontier).
Giant shopping malls are actually interesting and make certain somewhat unsettling implications about the nature of the world.

We don't need Zentraedi for that, though. We can use Dagon-sized Deep Ones instead (apparently, Deep Ones keep growing and Dagon is big because he's old, any Deep One could eventually reach that size).
So instead of having giant humans buying giant bras at a giant mall while Ranka Lee works at her shitty part-time advertising job, you have giant humanoid amphibians doing the same.

[virgil]

But then they're backwards ultraman as a racial feature when we've got it as a class.

Could the Zentradi then be a race that can only take the Ultraman class (described as getting the miniaturization process)? I'll grant you that this idea is only if using Zentradi is actually to the setting's advantage, which I don't think it is.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I want to use the Color from Out of Space as one of the things making resources scarce and driving more fighting over territory. Is there anything I should be careful about? I seem to remember something about it being vulnerable to having laundry detergent or something dumped down its well, which would make it fairly trivial to deal with if it wasn't turning people into zombies to protect it or something.