Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[RadiantPhoenix]

There have been several armageddons, a holocaust, and a cataclysm. The map is fucking different. Many of the cities of today exist as ruins that are partially or wholly under water. And that is OK, because it's a post apocalyptic setting.

...and also because deep ones can breathe underwater.

[squirrelloid]

Regarding the location of Cthulhu: the problem with putting him near the oceanic pole of inaccessibility is that's near a spreading fault, which basically means the sea floor there is brand spanking new. If he's been slumbering for several million years, that's really not the place to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg

(The oceanic pole of inaccessibility is basically on the border of the Pacific and Antarctic plates, somewhere along the long east-west portion due west of Tierra del Fuego).

Fortunately, we do have sea floor that goes back to the Cretaceous, which is more than far enough. That sea floor is on the Pacific Plate near where its getting eaten by the asian continental plates.

Cthulhu is supposed to have turned a hominid species into deep ones, which puts his sleep start time sometime in the last 10 million years. My best guess is we probably want to put him somewhere near a line that runs from New Zealand to Mexico City, Possibly in or around the Cook Islands or French Polynesia.

[Username17]

I disagree. If you look at a map of the ocean floor, it's pretty much exactly what we want it to be:

Sea Floor Age Map.

Cthulhu wants to be in a place that was uncovered 9 million years ago and then covered and then uncovered again in the extremely recent past. Being near a spreading plate in the Pacific Ocean is perfect for that.

-Username17

[squirrelloid]

Cthulhu wants to be in a place that was uncovered 9 million years ago and then covered and then uncovered again in the extremely recent past. Being near a spreading plate in the Pacific Ocean is perfect for that.

-Username17

I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say here, because it doesn't make physical sense.

That deep red area is *less than 9.7 my old*, which means it didn't even exist 10mya, and about half of it didn't exist 5mya. (Because ocean spreading is a roughly constant process).

If we assume that Cthulhu fell asleep 10mya right next to the spreading zone, he'd be in the red-orange area because *that's how it physically works*. Nothing is being uncovered or recovered; new oceanic plate is being created at the spreading zone.

I think the closest we'd actually want him to be to a spreading zone is a yellow area, because the region around the spreading zone is filled with slip faults (which should minorly quake somewhat frequently to relieve stress). Seismically unstable sea floor is not the place you'd want to take a nap for 10my.

IMO, the closest Cthulhu should be to that zone is the yellow band, because by that point most of the slip faults have petered out.

[hyzmarca]

Cthulhu wants to be in a place that was uncovered 9 million years ago and then covered and then uncovered again in the extremely recent past. Being near a spreading plate in the Pacific Ocean is perfect for that.

-Username17

I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say here, because it doesn't make physical sense.

That deep red area is *less than 9.7 my old*, which means it didn't even exist 10mya, and about half of it didn't exist 5mya. (Because ocean spreading is a roughly constant process).

If we assume that Cthulhu fell asleep 10mya right next to the spreading zone, he'd be in the red-orange area because *that's how it physically works*. Nothing is being uncovered or recovered; new oceanic plate is being created at the spreading zone.

I think the closest we'd actually want him to be to a spreading zone is a yellow area, because the region around the spreading zone is filled with slip faults (which should minorly quake somewhat frequently to relieve stress). Seismically unstable sea floor is not the place you'd want to take a nap for 10my.

IMO, the closest Cthulhu should be to that zone is the yellow band, because by that point most of the slip faults have petered out.

I was actually assuming that Cthulhu was active and awake as little as 1mya, though that does take liberties with canon. I'm not exactly one to slavishly adhere to what has been written before and the Mythos was never really consistent.

------------------------------------------------
Immortality and You

In Strange Aeons even death may die.

Death isn't cheap, but it isn't insurmountable, either. The Mythos has many ways to extend one's life, and humanity is nothing but ingenious in it's ability to abuse these technologies.

Immortality to be roughly divided into five categories, Agelessness, Body Swapping, Reanimation, Resurrection, and True Immortality. .

Agelessness: The Ageless can live forever, but are still vulnerable to disease and violence can potentially live forever. Among the Ageless, the most common and the most famous are Deep Ones and Hybrids.

Deep One Agelessness is a dominate genetic trait which has been isolated and thoroughly examined. Inserting Deep One immortality genes into a human embyro is trivially easy and relatively inexpensive. Providing the same treatment to an adult human is much more costly and time consuming, but no less viable.


Body Swapping: Body swapping is a rare talent. Powerful psychics and Dreamers can potentially push a target's out of his body and take it over himself. The Great Race of Yith have mastered this ability and can swap bodies with anyone anywhere in the universe even across time.

Human body swappers now have the option of using clones of themslves rapidly grown for this specific purpose, which removes most of the moral problems associated with this sort of immortality. In addition, Powerful Dreamers who are near death can create new bodies for themselves in the Dreamlands.

Reanimation:
In the early 20th century a medical student named Herbert west developed a formula that could reanimate the dead. The only flaw of the technology was that it couldn't repair damage done to the corpse. Natural decay would destroy the brain and leave the reainmated individual a mindless zombie, unless the reanimation was performed immediately after death. Herbert West died as a result of his own unethical experiments, but it was inevitable that someone would recreate his formula.

Resurrection: Much rarer than reanimation, and currently outside of the scope of the Union's abilities, powerful Mythos creatures can restore the dead to life without regard to the condition of the corpse. Yog Sototh, for example, can bend time and make a dead person live again.

True Immortality: True Immortals can't be killed, at all, period. Nyarlathotep and Azatoth fit into this category.

Changing Demographics

Better medical technologies naturally mean older populations and immortality is no exception. No one in the Union has to die. The only obstacle between the average citizen and immortality is the ability to pay for it.

Some Zones subsidize immortality treatments and emergency reanimation, both for humanitarian reasons and to ensure that they have a substantial population of highly experienced and skilled individuals who are still in their physical prime. In these zones the population tends to be older, as there is much less impetuous to have children. In many, the lives of the young are valued less than those of the old. After all, children can be cloned, but experience can't be created in a vat.

Some Zones don't provide such subsidies. The rich and powerful just don't want to pay for Universal Health Care and the government, if there is one, won't make them. These zones tend to have very stark divides between rich and poor, with an elite cadre of superhuamn immortals ruling over rabble who struggle just to survive another day.


Repair or Replace?
Mi-Go Brain Cylinders have been reverse engineered and miniaturized, permitting the insertion of a preserved brain into a prosthetic body. Combined with ReAgent, it's a common treatment for catastrophic injury, though voluntary cyberization is rare due to the intense physical therapy necessary to learn how to control the new body as well as the inevitable body integrity issues.

It is possible to bypass the required physical therapy by controlling the body through a VR interface. This usually is not done except in an emergency, because such control doesn't feel "real' and it makes life indistinguishable from a video game.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Ooh, nice.

[Shatner]

Thread necro for great justice.


While typing up some shit about Dom4's R'lyeh and Atlantis factions, I remembered that this thread existed and went back and re-read it. There's some really great stuff here, with a very interesting setting, some cool sounding (albeit unpolished) mechanics, and a really compelling mix of themes. I haven't ran a role playing game in over three years, but if this system were available, I'd pay some money for a book/pdf and dust off my DM screen/dice bag.

The world's a little worse off because this idea hasn't been carried to fruition. If Hyzmarca, Frank, and company can find the give-a-damn, I think this would be a good idea to take off the shelf and resume.

[OgreBattle]

Cthulu-tech should also answer the question: "What if Conan was put inside of an Evangelion?"

[RadiantPhoenix]

This topic was mentioned in another thread, which made me think about it again.

We need to come up with a hit-table for normal humanoids, and mechanics for it.

Mechanics:

1. Roll to hit
2. Roll for hit zone
3. Roll to soak
4. Apply damage to zone

While some hit zones might have soak modifiers, on this table they don't.

Damage \ 1d6	1: Head	2: Torso	3: Right Leg	4: Left Leg	5: Right Arm	6: Left Arm
1	KO	Pain 1	Impede movement	Impede movement	Impede attack/defense	Impede attack/defense
2	Death	Pain 2	Leg Useless	Leg Useless	Arm useless	Arm useless
3	SPLAT, Spillover into torso	Can't stand	Spillover into torso	Spillover into torso	Spillover into torso	Spillover into torso
4		Death

Note: "SPLAT" means the brain is destroyed.

How does this look?

[hyzmarca]

I've been thinking about kickstartering this and hopefully atually paying contributors, but I'm not sure how to go about that.

I'm also aware that if I actually did that I'd have to be very diligent about only using public domain IP lest Chaosium sue me.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Quite interested.

[Username17]

I'm not sure how much Chaosium actually owns. They straight up own the registered trademark to the term "Call of Cthulhu" in a roleplaying context. You cannot reference that book's title at all. Other than that, they claim "trademark" on "All Supplements for all games," which I assume actually means all games they produce, but whatever.

All the works of August Derleth are still under copyright, and Chaosium states "Works within are quoted for purposes of illustration" (as they say for the works of Clark Ashton Smith and Ramsey Campbell), so I'm not sure they even have a deal with the estate. As far as I know, Derleth's works are all owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Brian Lumley is still alive, and Chaosium uses his material "with his kind permission." You might be able to get him to give you a thumb's up as well. He seems like a pretty cool dude. Even the pictures in Call of Cthulhu books are mostly licensed from the artists for use in an RPG and not owned by Chaosium. If for some reason you wanted to use one of the actual character drawings from Call of Cthulhu, you could take it up directly with John T. Snyder.

Anyway, bottom line is that despite the bluster, I don't think Chaosium actually owns very much. They were unable to do dick diddly about CthulhuTech happening, because all works of Lovecraft went public domain in 2008 (under most interpretations) and as long as your book doesn't look like a specific Chaosium product for the purposes of infringing on their un-registered trademarks and doesn't use the registered term "Call of Cthulhu" anywhere, you're golden.

But the biggest issue in copyright is that copyright doesn't protect characters, it protects stories. So once you're changing the setting to the 23rd century and using all original text, it's not really clear how much anyone could say about it unless you use some of the trademarks. And as noted, Chaosium seems to have only actually registered a trademark for the name of their game. The best they could hope for is to say they have an informal trademark on the names of the gods, but I don't think they even have a book called "Lloigor" (or whatever) to hang that claim on. So if you want to use Hounds of Tindalos, you just can't copypasta anything that Chaosium said about them, and if you want to copypasta anything from the original story you take it up with the estate of Frank Belknap Long.

Anyway, here's a little ~2500 word piece I knocked out yesterday that I regard as about half finished:

---

A Galaxy Both Lonely And Crowded

The spaces between planets in our solar system are unfathomably vast, and the spaces between stars are farther still. The universe is so empty that if you were to throw a rock in any direction it would almost invariably go on forever and never hit anything at all. Even though Earth is in a galaxy, and thus counted as one of the more matter-filled portions of the universe, the sky at night is still mostly dark. Almost anywhere you look at the night sky, you see nothing. The points of light are outnumbered by the shadows so completely that no human could count the ratio in their lifetime.
But while the galaxy is filled almost entirely with empty space, it also has billions upon billions of stars. And while just a tiny fraction of those stars support life of any kind, there are still more inhabited worlds in the Milky Way than there are people on Earth. Further, life first formed in our galaxy billions of years before the Earth had even cooled. The Sol system isn't a first generation star, and the night sky is speckled with the light from far away star systems that have bloomed with life and civilization only to have their stars peter out or explode long before there was a sun to give Earthlings the option of a day to view instead. While Earth is not the oldest planet, it is also not the youngest, and new planets are still being formed to this day. Some planets have only simple life or are inhabited by peoples with only low technology civilization. Humanity is one of the newest space faring races in the galaxy, but it holds that title one by dint of having escaped the gravity well of its birth fairly recently. In time, humans will be counted as an ancient race in their own rights, and with luck there will still be humans alive to see that.
Many species have colonized other planets in their solar systems or traveled to worlds circling distant suns. Further, many once inhabited worlds are for one reason or another no longer in that category, leaving the natives of those planets extinct or (if they were already spacefaring) adrift. The Sol system is desirable real estate in the galaxy, and several multi-planet empires have their eyes (or other appropriate sensory organs) on it for immigration, conquest, or exploitation. The galaxy is so vast and empty that you could fly through it for tens of thousands of years without meeting so much as a dust speck, but with the number of people and the number of worlds for those people to live on, it's really quite crowded.

The Known Universe
Sagacious creatures on a myriad worlds plotted the heavens and pondered the limits of mathematics billions of years before the first Earthbound primate hit two rocks together. It is simply undeniably true that what is known to Union science is simply less than what is known to other peoples. The Union is playing catchup and attempting to reverse engineer secrets of interstellar empires and ancient spacefaring civilizations, and in many cases is using kludges to replicate techniques that originally took thousands or millions of years to perfect. Humanity simply doesn't know what is possible or even how the universe is put together.
While the Union does refer to the timespace around them as “the universe” with the associated implication that it all fits together into a cohesive whole, how that might work is something that no human has the foggiest notion of. Union arcanotechnicians conceptualize the universe in four different non-overlapping ways. That probably isn't “right,” but it does kind of “work.”

Curved Spacetime. At the level most people are familiar with, the universe appears to roughly follow Einsteinian physics. Space and time create a continuous four dimensional whole, and are curved by the distorting pull of mass and energy. Spacetime is like a big rubber sheet, where mass and energy are spherical weights on that sheet that stretch the fabric of the universe and pull towards each other by rolling downhill into the valleys each creates. But in four dimensions. Things can't move through spacetime faster than the speed of light, but space can be curved in on itself to the point where superluminal travel may as well have occurred. The Union's understanding of curved spacetime is reasonably advanced, having predicted black holes, warp drives, and stargates before being confronted with them directly.
Warp drives are the result of matter and energy's propensity to warp spacetime, with enough mass and specific shaping, space in front of the drive can be warped to behind the drive, allowing the entire apparatus to move very quickly. Warp drives must necessarily be very big and heavy, like the temple-ships of the Shan, and the speed of a warp-capable vessel is dependent upon its mass. A warp-capable thing that was large enough could cross the galaxy or even the universe in a very short amount of time. Interrogations along these lines make Shan extremely agitated.
Stargates are the result of extreme curvatures of spacetime that loop back into spacetime at another point, allowing something at one point in spacetime to be instantly shunted to another point in spacetime. It is easier to pull an object from far away than it is to push an object to a faraway place, and it is easier still to send an object from both ends. Practically this means that while many civilizations in the galaxy appear to be able to send a man-sized creature or object to a faraway world, the sending of kaiju requires agents at both the source and the target working simultaneously.
Red arcanotechnology appears to operate on the edges of extreme spacetime curvatures. Portions of red arcanotech are bent into other places of our spacetime or perhaps into other spacetimes altogether. Where (or when) exactly it is that red arcanotechnology communicates with is unknown to Union arcanotechnicians. Some red arcanotechnology draws energy or matter from elsewhere, and others send energy or matter away.

Quantum Spacetime. For very small and very high energy things, the universe appears to operate as a series of discrete points and states where matter and energy change from one location and state to another without traveling through intermediates of any kind. There are no curves or shapes, just points and distributions. There are limits to what can be known about the points or their contents, and every movement is technically instantaneous. The probabilities of these states and movements of these very small quanta are in some ways dependent on other things in the universe, and the amounts of energy moving around these tiny interactions are staggering. The Union's understanding of quantum spacetime is probably considerably weaker than their understanding of curved spacetime, and reconciling the two into something coherent has eluded Union science. Quantum physics has produced its own forms of teleportation, communication, prognostication, and computation.
Quantum communicators allow the instantaneous transfer of information between two devices that have previously been in physical contact. Quantum cryptography allows for the creation of literally unbreakable codes that are kind of a pain to use. Quantum computers can solve very difficult math problems. The Union's prognostication engines receive yes or no answers from the future, but errors compound to make those answers less reliable the farther into the future divination is attempted.
The use of quantum spacetime for teleportation appears to be quite useless for sending a live creature, or any complex device. The probabilistic nature of the teleportation leaves the particles jumbled at the other end. The Union uses probability travel for mining, drawing particles of metals and rare earths from the inside of asteroids and the like. The Mi-Go have much more advanced quantum phase shifting technology and use it to travel long distances through space in dangerous hyper-spatial jumps.
Yellow arcanotechnology is seemingly quantum in nature. The yellow sign and all things powered by its extraction of zero point energy exist in a superposition of multiple states that give conflicting and somewhat nauseating data to human senses.

Dream Spacetime. There exists an entire dimension of the universe that affects and is affected by the dreams of sentient creatures. Dream space is coterminous with but much smaller than normal space, with the areas adjacent to parts of the universe with no dreamers in them being even more substantially reduced in size. Analogous locations in dreamspace are often quite dissimilar in appearance to their realspace locations. Very notably the dreamspace Moon has a breathable atmosphere and more people live in the dreamspace Moon than its physically larger realspace surface. While the flow of dreamtime is broadly in the same direction as it is in regular curved space, time is distorted not just by gravity but by gravitas. Literally “important” events appear to drag time out while trivial events flit by. The actual time on a clock is apportioned as weight of memory or stage time in a play. Moving through dreamspace is an effective way to move around the solar system, but even when discounted by having no sleepers, the void between stars is simply too far to travel in a lifetime.
The Union was forcibly introduced to dream spacetime during the Earth-Moon War when the Moon Beasts attacked through that medium. Since then, the Union has expanded into the dreamspace both as a place to live and as a means to travel and communicate long distances. Thoughts and dreams affect the topology and topography of the dreamspace, but nightmares do as well. Fear and uncertainty has created regions of darkness lit by death-fire known collectively as The Underworld.
Green arcanotechnology operates through dream spacetime. While it is mostly made from schematics provided by Deep Ones, it influences and is influenced by thought in the same way that the dreamspace is.

Angular Spacetime. Least understood by Union science is the concept of spacetime angles. There demonstrably are junctures in space and time with measurable angles, though what is actually in “the other leg of the trousers” seems impossible for Union science to determine. All measuring devices of Union origin are in spacetime and record things that are also in spacetime whether they are large or small, focused near or far. Spacetime that is 40 degrees away or even one degree away from the one an instrument is in appears to passively resist any investigations. Angular spacetime is not used in any technology devised by human beings or their allies, but demonstrably exists because other races have used it.
The main source of information about angular spacetime comes from the relics left by the Elder Things. Many of those objects interact with space and time in odd ways that allow users to measure the angle at which spacetime intersects with... whatever it is intersecting with. The Yithians also made devices to act and be acted upon by the angles at which spacetime intersects, but those are mostly still in use in the time war and the Union has little to work with.
Blue arcanotechnology is based on angular spacetime. Some blue arcanotechnology doesn't appear to move through time at all, and much of it has different inertia when measured from different directions.

The Known Players

The Abyss. The home of Shub Niggurath appears to be a number of planets caught in the gravity well of a black hole. Everything is dark and hot and falling forever at high speed. Nothing gets out of The Abyss by traditional means, but the minions of the Dark Mother make extensive use of gating and dream contact to reach other worlds. Long ago, they seeded the galaxy with small (that is: human-sized) spawn of the goat hybridized with local lifeforms, with the goal of having those goat spawn craft stargates to bring in kaiju sized Dark Young of Shub Niggurath.
The Abyssians seek to conquer Earth, as they have conquered many other worlds in the galaxy. This plan was delayed considerably by the defection of the Goat Spawn of Earth to the Union. Potential cultists have been recruited in dreams and yaoguai have been sent to support them. The cult of Shub Niggurath has managed to successfully gate in a few Dark Young, but it has so far fallen well short of a world conquering force.

The Time War. The Yithians, though long dead my conventional measurements, continue to exert an influence by having sent agents into their future to study and perhaps influence the time junctions. Yithian agents on Earth have the ultimate goal of preparing a time juncture in Earth's future whereby the Yithians can save their race from the destruction of Yith by shifting themselves through time and conquering Earth. The Union has a strong position in the Time War, in that they exist in the present and the future rather than only the past. However, the Union have no real understanding of how timespace angles even work, and thus have currently no means of knowing what to do to thwart the Yithian plans.
The Time War is not always fought with weapons, and indeed many actions of the Yithians lack obvious purpose – presumably being intended to influence future events towards an ultimate Yithian victory. The Yithians can send individual Yithians into the Union's present, but this is difficult for them and there are a limited number of temporal intersections they can use in this way. More frequently they send the consciousness of Yithian agents to take over the body of someone in the present for a period of time. There are also yaoguai called the Hounds of Tindalos that appear out of corners and cause havoc or attempt to assassinate temporally important individuals. If the Yithians ever produced a kaiju or spacecraft, it has not yet been deployed to the Union's knowledge.

The Shaggai Empire. The Shan are insectile creatures who created great stone warp capable temple-ships that they used to conquer and enslave several worlds. Shaggai, their homeworld, was destroyed in the relatively recent past, and the Shaggai Empire arguably no longer exists. While most of the Shan are dead, a number of their temple-ships escaped the devastation and they have a lot of firepower. The Union has not been able to determine what caused the destruction of Shaggai, and it is not clear that even the surviving Shan know the answer. The place where Shaggai once was is now an asteroid belt.
Different Shan temple-ships and thrall worlds conduct their own diplomacy, as the Great Imperial Hive that they nominally speak for was lost with the planet.

The Mi-Go Combine. The Mi-Go are winged fungal creatures from a world with completely different chemistry. They have an interstellar organization that creates mining and trading outposts in many solar systems.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I've been thinking about kickstartering this and hopefully atually paying contributors, but I'm not sure how to go about that.

I'm also aware that if I actually did that I'd have to be very diligent about only using public domain IP lest Chaosium sue me.

If you try Kickstarting this, I will totally shill for it on other forums.

[Shatner]

Love the write up, Frank.

Hyzmarca, for what (little) it's worth, I'd chip in some cash to get my hands on Sentai Fhtagn.

[Krusk]

I would pay if you could mail me a phsical book.

[Maxus]

The Mi-Go Combine. The Mi-Go are winged fungal creatures from a world with completely different chemistry. They have an interstellar organization that creates mining and trading outposts in many solar systems.

WitD gave the Mi-Go as capable of conquering early 20th-century earth fairly easily, but didn't want to do it to "save bother".

I think you could make a case for the Combine being very oriented on profit-and-loss. Engagements are entered when they're sure the winnings are worth the cost of fielding a mech or other forces. The Mi-go also cut and relatively quickly, once a battle looks like it's turned against them.

I suppose they'd also be big on battlefield scavenging after the fighting's over, especially for mech parts.

There a lies a distinct possibility that the Mi-Go are just waiting for everyone else to wear out so they can deliver a general coup de grace and lock down Earth and its resources for good.


Edit: Semi-related to the project as a whole https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeIqZ12Khek

[Lokathor]

I happen to have spoken to Newton Ewell this weekend about this very project, he has done some art for DND and Rifts and so on. He was pretty pumped up about the idea of doing work on this sort of a project. I told him about cthulhu stuff on future earth and he like it, I told him about Dagon hiding out on earth and helping earth as part of his plans against the other civilizations and stuff and he said that'd be even cooler than he'd first imagined.

He said that once were ready to put this into a more serious mode we can contact him about being an artist and he would be very interested in doing work for the project on mecha, cyborgs, monsters, all the sweet stuff.

[kzt]

The "giant mech" bit I hate, so if you build it so that you can drop the parts you hate from your game that would be cool.

[Username17]

The "giant mech" bit I hate, so if you build it so that you can drop the parts you hate from your game that would be cool.

Well, taste is taste, but so far we're looking at a book outline that looks kind of like this:

Sentai Fhtagn Outline

Introduction
Welcome to Sentai Ftagn
What Roleplaying means to us (and to you)
Needful Things [discusses die roll nomenclature in addition to telling you that you need dice and pencils]
Staffing Your Agency [discusses the fact and ramifications of having several different characters that you switch between, and raising the idea of having characters who are at times played by different players]

Book One: A Future Beyond Imagination
Mini Fiction Piece
The Year is [Decide on Year] [Overview of the future and how there are wars with aliens]
The Earth Needs You! [Overview of the overlapping agencies defending the Earth and the broad types of Earth Defenders that there are]
Things Got A Little Crazy [Timeline]
We Are Not Alone [Descriptions of the Races on our side and the antagonists]
The Twelve Wards [Broad Overview of twelve arbitrarily drawn up regionally governed areas, including the moon colony and the semi-allied Snake Cultist country]
Nameless Cults [Brief writeup of several antagonist factions]
Game Systems

Book Two: Civilian
Mini Fiction Piece
We Can Do It! [Overview of Civilian Tier character types]
If You See Something, Say Something [A discussion of the escalatory nature of summoning and the importance of human level investigations to the war effort]
Staffing Your Agency [Character generation of Civilian Tier characters]
Skills
Combat [Includes morale/despair rules]
Equipment
Sufficiently Advanced [Magical effects available to Civilian Tier characters]
Sample Characters

Book Three: Hero
Mini Fiction Piece
Great Responsibilities [Overview of Heroic Tier character types]
A Galaxy Both Lonely and Crowded [A discussion of the other planes of existence, and the worlds that Earth is in contact with for good or ill]
Staffing Your Agency [Character generation of Heroic Tier characters]
Treated As Secret [Heroic Tier equipment and bio mods and such]
Magic Beyond Understanding [Heroic Tier Magic]
Sample Characters

Book Four: Kaiju
Mini Fiction Piece
Destroying the Planet to Save it [Overview of Kaiju Tier character types]
The Great Old Ones
Staffing Your Agency [Character generation for Kaiju Tier characters]
Very Big Combats
Very Big Weapons
Very Big Problems
Sample Characters

Book Five: Further Secrets
Mini Fiction Piece
Running a Sentai Ftagn game
Running a Sentai Ftagn campaign
Character Advancement
Enemies and Allies
Monsters and Aliens
Secrets of the War

---

So if you wanted to just do agencies with no kaiju-level characters who fought in the Time War and never went up against a Dark Young or Dhole, you could do that. Giant sized enemies, such as Cthonians, Gugs, and Wendigos are faceable by Super Soldiers and Witches (where they are boss monsters) or by giant mechs (where they are mooks). If you cut out the mechs, there are still medium-big creatures to fight.

-Username17

[kzt]

If you cut out the mechs, there are still medium-big creatures to fight.

-Username17

Cool!

[Grek]

Who or what are the Mi Go working for? In previous writeups, they were variously pawns of the Shan, enemies of the Shan, rare earth metal hungry space locusts, a hive society wanting to enslave the earth, aliens seeking an ancient artifact of Azathoth or aliens seeking to make humanity give in to despair in order to defeat the Anti-Spirals. Now they're showing up with the Abyss's Quantum Teleportation technology? Does this imply that they're agents of the Goat? Or were you intending to have Shub Niggurath and the Abyss use Green Arcanotech instead of Red?

It works out fairly reasonably if we assume each type of arcanotech as two independent factions with access to it:

Curved: The Shan and the Boreans.
Quantum: The Mi Go and the Abyss.
Dream: The Moon and Cthulhu.
Angular: The Yith and the Cthonians.

I think the only one of those that needs particular explanation is the Cthonians, who use Blue Arcanotech to transfer the minds of hyper advanced apes from a distant possible future into the brains of modern day gorillas in an attempt to conquer the surface world.

[Aryxbez]

I would pay if you could mail me a phsical book.

As a supporter of wnating the Gaming Den to get new and well designed games out there, I too would help Kickstart this for a Physical copy. I could probably guarantee a Triple digit pledge, if its made worth the while for the amount.

Also, Outline-wise, is that referring to Five Literal books, or just "chapters" in that sense?

[Shatner]

Chapters of the same book.

[Username17]

Who or what are the Mi Go working for?

The Mi-Go Combine is an independent space empire that operates a mining colony out of

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Yuggoth is the Mi-Go word for the dwarf planet that humans used to call Pluto. The Mi-Go are from another star system entirely, but they have extensive mining operations in the Sol system, which are based from the hive they have made out of Yuggoth. Mi-Go do not have compatible biologies to Earth life: their chirality is reversed on their proteins and they cannot survive on Earth food of any sort (the only naturally occurring chemicals that Mi-Go gain any nutrition from are sorbitol, ethanol, galactose, ergosterol, and glycine). There are ores, organic materials, and archaeological artifacts that are worth a tremendous amount to the Mi-Go, and they are willing to trade or fight for deposits all over the system when they cannot simply sneak their equipment in and out.
As a whole, Mi-Go look like winged crustaceans. Up close, their body parts look fungal. Mi-Go have amazing technology, and have the most advanced space traveling vessels that the Union has yet encountered.

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Anyway, there are actually five kinds of Arcanotech. The fifth kind, Purple, is based on the essentially infinite variability of chemistry and biology rather than physics.

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Purple magic is the magic of the Abyss. Goat Spawn have inherent familiarity with it, and have taught it to other Union sorcerers, but it is primarily used by the forces of Shub Niggurath. The purple power symbol is called the Sign of the Dark Mother. Many of the spells of purple magic affect people at a lower level than the conscious mind, inflaming fear and lust, or transforming the body directly. Purple magic creates solidities out of shadow and cold, things which don't even exist but are merely the defined absence of something else.

Purple Technology
The spawn of Shub Niggurath know how to make various purple devices from before they know how to speak. Now that some of those creatures are members of the Union, there are unique purple arcanotechnology implementations made on Earth. Other purple technology is reverse engineered from devices captured from Abyssian or Borean invaders. Purple technology is alive, and sculpted out of living cells from various creatures. When purple devices have solid portions, they are matrices of bone, tooth, horn, and wood. Purple arcanotechnology responds to chemical stimulation and to pain, and a user typical interface is either a row of miniature hyposprays or a keyboard made of tacks.

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Anyway, non-Union factions could be divided into those on Union-claimed worlds and the truly extra-terrestrial. The Earth-Moon system has:

Valusia: The Meso-American nation of the Ophidians. I don't know what arcanotech/magic they specialize in.

Leng: The nation of the cannibalistic Tcho-Tcho and their Yeti allies. I assume these guys use Purple arcanotech and magic.

Bolgania: The nation of the great white apes of central Africa. They use Red arcanotech given them by their Cthonian puppet masters.

Cthonia: The great tunnel dwellings of the Cthonians. They are the source of most Red arcanotech on Earth.

Free Moon Kingdom: The Moon Beasts who refuse to accept the Union victory and all their slaves. They operate from the Underworld, and use Green Magic extensively.

Koth: The Gug nation in the Underworld. It's actually in the Dreamlands, but I don't think they use Green magic or arcanotech particularly. They work with the unconquered Moon Beasts and serve as Giant sized war walkers for Moon Beast attempts to reconquer the Moon.

Zin: The Ghast nation in he Underworld. These guys are also Giant sized, and hostile to the Union. They probably work with Moon Beasts as well, but I don't know what magic they actually do themselves.

R'lyeh: The pirate nation of Deep Ones who don't accept the Union. They have Cthulhu and a pack of Star Spawn kaiju, and a whole bunch of Xothan Green Arcanotech.

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I think that's the whole list of Earth and Moon antagonist factions. I think we're still going with human anti-Unionists who hang out on Mars and might use Blue arcanotech. Maybe that should be included in the previous list, I'm not sure.

Anyway, there are also plain old extra-solar factions.

The Mi-Go Combine: They have non-standard bio-chemistry and have extremely advanced Yellow arcanotech. They have the Union completely outgunned, but are kind of Ferengi-like and have no interest in outright conquering or destroying the Earth because they don't think they can profit on it.

The Abyss: Shub Niggurath's forces are stuck in a black hole, and are ultimately the source of pretty much all Purple arcanotech. They'll need to use Red, Green, or Yellow magic to get their forces out of a gravity well prison. They don't specialize in those things, and that's why they haven't so far been able to gate enough force in to conquer Earth outright.

The Shaggai Empire: The Shan are basically the Goa'Uld from Stargate. Their home planet was destroyed by Ghroth, so now they are just their giant flying pyramids and stargates. They have pretty extensive Red arcanotech.

The Great Race of Yith: They are conducting the Time War. They are long dead, but their agents from the past long ago projected into our present and future in order to arrange a farther future that they could conquer. They have amazing Blue arcanotech.

Borea: The ice planet is one of the places in the galaxy where there are humans because Boreans used to raid Earth for slaves on a regular basis. They use Abyssian weaponry and used to use Shan stargates to raid Earth. I don't know if they have any really good arcanotech of their own.

The extraterrestrial source of Green arcanotech is Xoth. But the Union presently has no direct contact with Xoth. Cthulhu and the Star Spawn are Xothan in origin, but haven't apparently been back in millions of years. R'lyeh can sort of be thought of as the Green equivalent of Yith/Yuggoth/Shaggai/Abyss.

-Username17

[Krusk]

Arter thinking about it, id probably kickstart a dollar or two for pdfs, but a lot more for real books.

Pdfs i can read and steal ideas from. Real books means i can convince my group to play it.