OSSR: CthulhuPunk
Chapter One: The Cthulhu Mythos
You don't matter in the eyes of an unflinching and uncaring universe.
AncientH:
The Cthulhu Mythos is one of those things where the
process of finding out about it is a large part of the fun; like a detective story, or initiation into a cult, or foreplay before sex. The central mystery or truth, told in the bald light of day, is not the stuff of dreams or nightmares; there is no illumination and enlightened state, there may not even be a five second orgasm. It may, in fact, just be silly. This is one of the central problems with trying to move the Mythos to a roleplaying milieu, because a) players tend to know more than their characters, and b) not all gamemasters can manage to guide the players successfully through a transformative process - which isn't restricted to Mythos RPGs, now that I think of it; the basic hero's journey works well enough in a novel, but not so much for a tabletop game. Just very few people start out as bastards and turn into heroes; mostly they start off as overconfident newbs that level up and become overconfident, overpowered assholes.
And GURPS, as we've seen, tends to tackle things directly.
Great Cthulhu is a gargantuan, immortal, extraterretrial creature of almost unimaginable power. It lies, and has lain for millennia, entombed in the sunken city of R'lyeh. It is fully described on p. 17.
FrankT:
The first proper chapter is 15 pages and starts with a picture of some punks and that well known Eldritch Horror: Veronica from Archie. I dunno what that is about, but I assume one of the uncredited interior artists was attempting to get away with something.
If we were doing the Care Bear Mythos or something, we would presumably have gotten Betty instead.
This being an RPG product from the mid-90s, we sacrifice the first page or so of the chapter into an italicized story. I'm on board with those teaser fictions being half a page – but a whole page of italics is just too much. But then, RPGs fucked that particular chicken more than 20 years ago and it seems devilishly hard to get that chicken unfucked. This particular story tries so hard to capture the in-your-face attitude of cyberpunk that it's largely incomprehensible. As in, someone seriously says “Krovvy faex, Booshk” which is like an attempt to create a future slang the way Shadowrun had frag and slitch. However, while the various chapters recycle the same characters and use these made up words enough that you can mostly figure them out eventually, this book has no slang glossary and you never quite figure out how obscene “faex” is supposed to be.
The chapter, and indeed several chapters in the book continue the Introduction's plan of having a big inner test block and a completely unrelated small outer text column. As I mentioned earlier, it's like if there was box text on every page of if each page just had bits from two unrelated chapters. This system of information presentation never caught on, and I think we're all better off because of it.
AncientH:
That was the standard GURPS plan, get used to it.
This chapter is trying to cram the Cthulhu Mythos into a nutshell. It is primarily the Chaosium take on the Mythos, but there are hints here and there that McCubbins actually knows rather more about the genesis of the Mythos than some of the actual CoC writers, or at least more willing to show his work. It's actually kind of refreshing to see the little details he manages to cram in to the rather forthright description of the Mythos.
This is, I should say, rather classic GURPS style of writing. The voice of the author is not talking
down to the audience, and indeed deliberately avoids the quasi-mystical hinting typical of most Mythos products, but it also doesn't fall into the habit of dry recitation of boring facts; the voice is colloquial, to-the-point, and communicates rather directly to what the audience should know.
FrankT:
Such that this chapter has a point, it is to talk about how the mythos interacts with history and to lay down a historical basis for the mythos. Note that this is
both the history of the mythos that was written in our world, and the history that the mythos has within its own fictional world. The chapter goes back and forth between those things, and it's all pretty odd. So we get discussions about how Nightgaunts were based on nightmares that HPL had when he was 6, but also discussions about how in the game world the Yithians fought the Elder Things in the ancient past. The chapter is divided up into 8 sections: “What's a Cthulhu?” “The Essential Meaninglessness of Everything,” “Cosmic Forces,” “Blasphemous Tomes,” “Inhuman Artifacts,” “A Mythos Gazeteer,” “The Dreamlands,” and “Timeline of Prehistory.” The side text column is also divided into four sections: “The Making of the Mythos,” “The Nature of the Beast,” “Mythos Terms,” and “Forgotten Places.”
Yes, it really has a section called The Essential Meaninglessness of Everything.
Of course, the scholarship here really isn't that great. The dates and ordering of events aren't good. But really it all comes down to the fact that this chapter is basically a 15 page book report on the book reports of the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Which as you may recall from that OSSR, there were actually a lot of those written by a various people with axes to grind over a period of decades. So when it's all condensed like this, it comes off as a bit confused. On the one hand, the book admits that “there are those who vehemently disagree with some of the directions Derleth took in his own Mythos stories,” but it still claims that “There is a definite taxonomy to Lovecraft's immortal beings.” Those two statements are on facing pages of the book! The one claiming that there's a definite canon that fans agree upon and the frank admission that fans do not agree on what constitutes canon. Grr.
AncientH:
As a distillation of the Mythos in a nutshell, I think it's actually very competent; the weird bit is that this comes through a GURPS lens, so some of the classic mechanics of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, like the Cthulhu Mythos skill (here "Mythos Lore") and increasing it by reading forbidden books is handled with the usual GURPS aplomb (i.e. clunky mechanics, including that old vanguard the Fright Check).
The result is...well, probably not enough to make anyone happy. Steve Jackson Games was not going to bring Sanity Points into GURPS, especially when they had a Fright Check system already in place, but they also jettisoned a lot of the excess baggage (and flavor) that Chaosium had generated over 20+ years of churning out content. So we still have pages listing various translations of various Mythos tomes, which challenge your sanity (though Fright Checks) and grant points in the Mythos Lore skill, but you don't get, say, average reading times or lists of spells they might have or any of that crappola. Occult tomes are right out.
FrankT:
Cthulhu is much like a corporation. Weyland Yutani can be defeated or driven back. But Aztechnology can't really be killed with bullets. The Tyrell Corporation doesn't care what you do or who you are. Ondo-Sendai can potentially live forever in its inhuman villainy.
Makes for weird shareholders meetings.
Frankly, the themes of insignificance in the face of an uncaring universe in mythos literature aren't very different from the themes of insignificance in the face of an uncaring universe in cyberpunk literature. So you'd
think that this chapter would blend these concepts, to present the essential similarities of the implacability of a dystopian future society for the individual to the implacability of cosmic monstrosities for mankind as a whole. That would be really literary and deep while also being low hanging fruit. But you don't get that. There's very little in this chapter to even mention that we're talking about a cyberpunk setting or really doing anything other than writing a book report on the essays contained in the Call of Cthulhu RPG. I think 100% of it is some speculation about how the GM might want to come up with a reason that N'Kai isn't generally known about. Even though this book is in fact supposed to be presenting a setting and thus presenting an answer to that fundamental question is probably most of why people might want to buy and read this book rather than just doing it from scratch themselves.
AncientH:
It's been observed that part of what let Lovecraft get away with the Mythos is that he lived in an age of exploration, when people were still combing the farthest corners of the globe, meeting some of the last uncontacted people, uncovering ancient ruins that re-wrote the history books, and finding new planets and shit with telescopes - and that was all shit that was going on
before he added any fictional elements. Today we continue to push back the borders, but there are fewer frontiers. Satellites can do various probes of any piece of the earth's surface, and even see what's underneath it; submarines have reached some of the deepest parts of the ocean; exploratory vehicles have landed on fucking Mars and sent back live video. So the fact that there might be a hidden race of hominds in the jungles of Africa, or a lost city millions of years old of cyclopean proportions in Antarctica stretches contemporary belief.
And this book actually talks to that, it just does the typical GURPS thing and does not commit to any one single reason for it; instead it gives a selection of reasons and tells the gamemaster that these are possibilities and that it's up to them. On the one hand, this actually works for GURPS, where you design the game first; on the other hand, I rather expected (or hoped) for more in what should have been more of a setting book than a general ingredient in a GURPS stew.
FrankT:
The most obvious thing that is wrong about the Mythos Gazeteer is that it tells you that Nyarlathotep is the King in Yellow and rules Carcosa. This is of course completely wrong. The King in Yellow is Hastur. No effort is made to nail much of anything down, nor is any effort made to tell you how to work any of this shit into a game. Carcosa is on an island in a lake on a planet around a star that is
sixty five light years away. How one might be expected to get there or care what happens in its wavering towers is left as an exercise for the reader. The original source material is an 1895 book that predates HPL altogether, and it's quite... opaque. This book is an RPG and could claim whatever canon it wanted, but elects instead to lamely admit that the original book is “swathed in untold layers of symbolism and allegory.”
Not Nyarlathotep.
Nyarlathotep is the one in the middle.
But really, it's not much of a gazeteer. It's a list of a couple of places, each getting a paragraph or two. R'lyeh gets a plug, but Y'ha-nthlei does not. More obscure Deep One cities are likewise missing. No mention is to be had of the city of Pnakotus, which is ironic considering that the Pnakotic Manuscripts warranted inclusion in the books list. Your extraterrestrial locations include Yuggoth, Carcosa, and the Throne of Azathoth, but do not include Borea, Shaggai, or Xoth. The Dreamlands gets its own “section,” but that just entitles it to 8 short paragraphs instead of two.
AncientH:
Frank's mild nerd-rage on Hastur, Nyarlathotep and the King in Yellow brings up a rather important point: in the
literature of the Mythos, very few things are concrete and nailed down; even Lovecraft never bothered to keep a lot of things straight. It is part of the reason why even today we can have nerd-fights over whether or not Hastur is the King in Yellow - which is really an invention of the Chaosium RPG, spinning off August Derleth's contributions (AWD originally wanted to call it "The Mythology of Hastur," Lovecraft preferred "Yog-Sothothery"). So equating the KiY with Nyarlathotep is only really
wrong if you accept the version of things popualrized by Chaosium and co. that Hastur == the King in Yellow. But it is a very bizarre thing to have here, and I don't know what McCubbin did it.
But again, this is rather GURPS in a nutshell. They give you the nuts and bolts, and then if you want more they point you to the source material. Where White Wolf would have filled a 350 page book full of shovelware crap on the detailed geography of the Dreamlands that was pretty much shit, or Chaosium would have filled the same amount of space with fanrants (and they did), or some fans doing a CoC spin-off like Pagan Publishing might do a painfully well-researched version of the same, GURPS gives you the important bits of what the Dreamlands are and then expects you to fill in the blank spaces to your heart's content.
FrankT:
The timeline gets as far as the Hyborian Age, and calls out the reign of Conan of Aquilonia.
Yes, that Conan.
The degree to which the mythos is connected to the Conan universe varies depending on the author. Older editions of Call of Cthulhu played it up more than newer editions. Which is to say that there are some things that even the people at Chaosium are a bit embarrassed about.
AncientH:
Well, the same goes for Marvel comics.
Conan may never have sliced off one of Cthulhu's tentacles, but he did fight Yog-Sothoth once. It...could have gone better.
The timeline ends c. -11,500 B.C. with the destruction of Atlantis, or well into prehistory; unlike Earthdawn and Shadowrun then, this rather neatly avoids a lot of overlap and discrepancies (besides, y'know, pre-human empires and all that.)
So just to restate, this is GURPS basically boiling the better part of CoC 5th edition's
fluff down into a dozen pages. It's...well, bare-bones, and in places iffy. They could have taken more time and space with it. But they didn't because things are about to get really weird...
Chapter Two: The CthulhuPunk World
Actually, HPL detested seafood because of the smell. This led to at least three otherwise rational human beings to assume that he had a phobia of vaginas, and to write it in print. Not even making this shit up.
FrankT:
This chapter is 17 pages, and we're still in the “main column and aside column” format that dogs much of the book. We get another one page story of the continuing adventures of people who use words like “nerks” and “faex” in sentences. Not much actually happens in this one, so we should skip to the main text.
GURPS CthulhuPunk wrote:Due to space constraints, and to keep the game's setting open-ended, this book concentrates mostly on the ways in which the Mythos interacts with the world at large, giving only the broadest outlines of the more mundane political and social situation.
If the GM desires more detail, any cyberpunk world can become a [b CthulhuPunk[/b] world.
No. This is wrong. This book is supposed to present a Cyberpunk Mythos setting, not to provide some scattershot GURPS conversions of some of the shit in Call of Cthulhu and then tell you to roll your own cyberpunk setting. And yet, here we are: the book
literally tells you at the beginning of the CthulhuPunk World chapter that the author has no intention of actually making a world for CthulhuPunk. One is entitled to wonder what is actually in the remaining pages. As it happens, it is to present a world, just to do it in a really half-assed way because you're probably going to roll your own anyway.
AncientH:
Which is the fundamental problem with McCubbin writing this book, I think. When Paul Hume did
GURPS CyberWorld, it was no great piece of work - maybe someone will OSSR that dog one day - but it was engagingly insane as GURPS setting books tend to be, when they sit down and decide to actually
make a setting, instead of just providing some tinkertoys to build your own. It's really why GURPS
Time Travel and
Alterante Earths became the default game setting in 4th edition; because those were interconnected worlds which allowed a maximum of possibilities while still having a thin connective tissue of material that the gamemaster did not have to pull out of their own ass. And, rather sadly,
that is the best GURPS usually gets when it comes to providing detailed settings. Not for them is the Shadowrun location book, or the White Wolf splat book, or the Dungeons & Dragons gazetteer.
So when you get this book, it is one of those bizarre (and rare) GURPS books where to use it to its full potential you sort of need GURPS CyberPunk and GURPS Cyberworld - of course, if you have those and CoC 5th edition, it's hard to say how much of
this book you absolutely need, unless you're a hard bastard for "official" statistics and whatnot.
Anyway. So, GURPS CthulhuPunk is a slightly twisted version of Cyberworld, which was a default setting created for GURPS Cyberpunk, full of typical cyberpunk tropes like augmentation technology, big monolith corporations, dirty cities, ecological disasters, early colonization of space, etc. A lot of the basics presented in CthulhuPunk are lifted pretty much directly from Cyberworld - things like Puerto Rico gaining statehood in the far distant year of 2002, etc. Where the last chapter was basically a book report on
Call of Cthulhu 5th edition, this chapter is primarily a book report on
Cyberworld
FrankT:
Shadowrun had some big plagues that killed off an ass tonne of people too. I
think this was done to excuse having the demographics of 2050 be essentially the same as the demographics of 1989. The fast growing peoples of India, Nigeria, and Brazil were hit harder, so the share of brown people in the world was no different in the future than it was in the present. I genuinely do not know why CthulhuPunk has a big plague in the late 90s, there isn't enough world building for the author to have to care what the population of France or Pakistan is in the grimderp future.
The big economic collapse makes more sense. Wage slavery and mass poverty are important aspects of cyberpunk, and mass unemployment goes a long way towards explaining how that could happen. I don't know how the author thought that unemployment could be over 30% with inflation in the double digits though. Even in the 90s that was a stupid thing to say. Six years into the Great Recession, it just seems like gibberish.
The timeline is oddly specific and goes year by year starting in 1996, but peters out and skips a bunch of years when it gets to the 2040s. This is, of course, exactly and totally wrong. If your game is set in the 2040s or 2050s, none of the characters will give a rat's ass what year Boris Yeltsin or Fidel Castro died in. But they
will care about events that took place last year or the year before. Also, your future history is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong, because truth is stranger than fiction and all that – so the closer you put your major history turning points, the more quickly you're going to look like a moron. This book came out in 1995, so by setting major turning points in 1996 it was demonstrably wrong in just a few months.
AncientH:
'95 was actually
very late-era for a cyberpunk book, and it shows because you've got stuff like MafInc which was pretty much lifted directly from Neal Stephenson's
Snow Crash, which bookends both classic cyberpunk fiction and Stephenson's ability to end a fucking book in a reasonable number of pages.
You don't really start to get any hints about integrating the Mythos into this world until fairly far in - and that by a rather bizarre crackdown on occult groups due to an assassination that reads like it was written back during the
Satanic Panic.
After that, it picks up speed, but the Mythos tends to remain fairly
sub rosa, which is an...I was going to say
interesting way to go, but that's wrong. It's kind of the
lazy way to go. Yes, it is one option; another is to go the CthulhuTech route and the Mythos is totally out in the open. I guess with a name like CthulhuPunk people might be expecting something closer to inbetween - contact with the Mi-Go and Deep Ones, some public recognition of established worship of the Old Ones, various groups and agencies jockeying for one goal or another, maybe something really bizarre like implants based on shoggoth-tissue harvested from Elder Thing cities and corners of the 'Net given over to non-Euclidean geometries; six-legged hermaphroditic Deep One corpses washing up on the shores of New Jersey because of all the chemical waste being dumped in the water, the
Necronomicon available for download, the
occult meeting the
occultech...but, not so much.
Malware, 'zude.
FrankT:
Most cyberpunk worlds posit the collapse of major powers like the United States and China. Mostly in order to lend credence to the idea that corporations hold the whip hand and can do what they want. This book posits the opposite: a United States that has annexed much of the rest of North America and a Russo-Japan union that also includes much of Eastern Europe (including Armenia and Latvia!). Really, it seems like the author doesn't much “get” Cyberpunk as a genre. I get that with plagues wiping out tens of millions of people and massive and oppressive police states dominating the globe that we are being presented with a
futuristic dystopia, but it's not actually a particularly
cyberpunk version of a futuristic dystopia. There are lots of ways for the future to be terrible, and only a few of them are cyberpunk.
Katniss Everdeen lives in a dystopian future, but it's not a cyberpunk
dystopian future by most accounts.
The world gets divided up into nationalistic empires, and India and Africa get shat upon. It doesn't
quite pen “here be brown people” on the map, but it
does literally say:
CthulhuPunk wrote:Nobody goes to Africa or India by choice – it's just too depressing, and unsafe.
I'd ask to implement some sort of policy where if RPG authors can't say something that isn't shitty and dismissive of Africa or India that they shouldn't say anything – but that leads to the current status quo where not nearly enough things are said about those places altogether. There should be
more wordcount spent on Africa and India in RPGs. Also, the wordcount that
is spent should be saying things that aren't wildly implausible and borderline racist. But instead, and especially in the 90s and before, you got shit like this:
CthulhuPunk wrote:Today, Africa is back where it was in the 19th century technologically, socially and politically.
AncientH:
I would sign that petition, Frank.
The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone wrote:Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha's coronation was splendid. Never before had the South Polar Jerusalem seen such pomp, such display of pageantry and power. Thousands of slaves, naked and gilded and draped in jewelry and feathers, paraded up the wide boulevard before the Imperial Palace. They drew, by ropes of woven gold and weizmannium, glittering juggernauts. Fountains sprayed scented wine. Chamberlains threw fistfuls of xanthic shekels to cheering crowds.
The climax of the spectacle was the march of the anthrocyberphants, resplendent mutated elephants whose cerebellums had been surgically removed at birth and replaced with spheres of human brain material cultured from clone-cells donated (involuntarily in some cases) by the greatest scientists, scholars and intellectuals in Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha's realm. When the anthrocyberphants were well grown and into their adolescence, their gonads were surgically removed and replaced with a variety of electronic implants including inertial guidance computers, magnetic compass-gyroscopes, neural transceivers.
The anthrocyberphants pranced and tumbled down the grand boulevard before the Imperial Palace, trumpeting melodies from Wagner, Mendelssohn, Bach, Mozart, vain self-portraiture by Richard Strauss, erotic fantasies by Scriabin, extended lines from Britten, discordant percussives by Edgar Varese, all in perfect orchestral harmony, all punctuated by the sounds of tympani, timbales, kettle-drums and cymbals held in writhing flexible tentacles that grew from nodes at the marchers' shoulders.
Upon the silken-draped and jewel-encrusted balcony of the Imperial Palace, the Ultimate Monarch of Laddino Imperium smiled and waved, bowed, applauded, turned to turbaned chamberlains and grasped fistfuls of commemorative favors to toss graciously upon the marchers and the cheering crowds come to celebrate the grand ceremonial.
The Laddino Imperium included all of the grand Antarctic domain of the former Israel-in-Exile and the expanded territory of Greater Hai Brasil that had extended to claim hegemony over all of the Americas, from Hudson's Bay to Patagonia, before falling under sway of the South Polar nation. The Ultimate Monarch, Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha, bowed, waved, tossed favors to the crowd. Deep in the bowels of the Earth beneath once-frozen plains and mountains, huge gyroscopes throbbed into life.
The axis of the Earth began to shift through a lengthy and carefully computed cycle. None but the servants and advisors of the Ultimate Monarch had been consulted, and none but the will of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha, the Ultimate Monarch, was considered. The ambition of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha was to give every citizen of the planet Earth, every square meter of territory, a fair and equitable access to the wealth, the beauty, the joy, the light, the warmth of the sun.
As the huge gyroscopes whirled their massive flywheels the Earth shifted its ancient tilt.
The fanatic hordes of Nrisimha, the Little Lion, poured from the city of Medina in the ancient Arabian desert, conquering all before them in the holy name of the Little Lion of God. The forces of Novum Romanum, the empire built by Fortuna Pales, and of the New Khmer Domain, created a century before by Vidya Devi, slaughtered the followers of the Little Lion Nrisimha by the hundreds of thousands, then by the millions.
How could Nrisimha continue to replace the decimated armies? How many soldiers could the single city of Medina produce? What was the secret of the fanatical hordes?
No one knew.
But they poured forth, fearless, unstoppable, unslowable, unturnable. All that the forces of resistance could do was slaughter them by the million, and they fell, they fell, but their fellows only marched across their very bodies, their strange bodies that did not putrefy like the corpses of normal soldiers but seemed instead to turn to an amorphous gel and then to sink into the Earth itself leaving behind no sign of their presence, not even uniforms or weapons or equipment, but only, in the wake of their passage, fields of strange flowers and fruits that bloomed gorgeously into towering pillars and petals and berries the size of melons, that produced sweet narcotic fumes and brought to those who harvested and ate them dreams of haunting beauty and incomparable weirdness.
Strange messengers sped across the sands of the deserts of Africa and Asia bearing the word that the Little Lion Nrisimha had come to bring peace and glory and splendor to a new Empire, to Khmeric Gondwanaland, an absolute dictatorship of unparalleled benevolence that would stretch from Siberia to Ireland and from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Good Hope.
It took remarkably few years for the followers of the Little Lion Nrisimha to complete their conquest, and few more for the establishment of an efficient infrastructure and the appointment of regional satrapies under the absolute command of Nrisimha.
Khmeric Gondwanaland was a roaring success.
It was less than a century from the complete triumph of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha throughout the Laddino Imperium and that of Nrisimha the Little Lion in Khmeric Gondwanaland, the two great empires were driven into union by the eruption of attacking battrachian forces from beneath the seas of the planet. How long these strange, frog-like intelligences had lived in their deep and gloomy metropoli hundreds of meters beneath the surface of the Earth's oceans, will remain forever imponderable.
What stimulated them to rise and attack the land-dwelling nations of the Earth is also unknown, although in all likelihood the steady shifting of the Earth's axis brought about by the gargantuan subterranean gyroscopes of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha were in fact the cause of the attacks.
The Deep Ones emerged and waded ashore in all regions at once. They wore only strangely crafted bangles and ornaments of uncorroded metal. They carried weapons resembling the barbed tridents of marine legendry. They dragged behind them terrible stone statues of indescribably extramundane monstrosities before which they conducted rites of blasphemous abandon and unmentionable perversion.
The Laddino Imperium and Khmeric Gondwanaland combined their respective might to deal with the menace, to drive the strange Deep Ones back into the murky realms from which they had emerged. By the year 2337 a unified Earth lay once more tranquil and prosperous beneath a glowing and benevolent sun.
The menace of the Deep Ones, at least for the time, was over.
And billions of kilometers from Earth, humanity renewed its heroic thrust toward the outermost regions of the solar system.
That spoilered text is from
The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone by Richard Lupoff; it is essentially the granddaddy of all Mythos cyberpunkish literature - mainly because it's actually part of New Wave sci fi, which was the immediate predecessor to Cyberpunk - and seriously, the it's the kind of thing that everybody who even thinks of doing a Mythos-in-the-future setting should read. Not because it's
perfect, but because it is
not; it's not very punk at all, really - but it does get across a setting where the Mythos
interacts with world politics and future history on a strong level without completely dominating it. Flipping back and forth through this chapter, I'm kind of upset about how
little the Mythos is in it.
FrankT:
As we mentioned in GURPS Cyberpunk, the default assumptions about how
batteries were going to work at future technology levels look completely insane to us today. Basically, back when they first did up the tech levels, they thought that people were going to be running around with futuristic power cells that were like the old D batteries that output a lot more power and that people would be powering power gluttonish future devices and burning through them like they were skittles on a road trip. This was probably a pretty terrible prediction
at the time, but of course actual power technology has gone very much the opposite direction – modern lights use literally 90% less electricity than old incandescents do. Modern flashlights use less batteries, and the batteries they use are also lighter and last longer. We aren't “Tech Level 8” by any means, but people would already look at you like you were insane if you wanted to discuss how many
pounds of phone batteries you wanted to take on a trip.
Meeting this freight train with its own unfortunate tunnel light was the fact that the tech level one point higher than “today” (which was the 1980s) was where space elevators and combat lasers lived. So not only were the power cells of the future bizarre raygun gothic retro-future things to begin with, but the kind of near future setting most cyberpunk aspired to is explicitly
lower tech than the GURPS future that has them. So we're at this weird point where the author is trying to posit the existence of an intermediary stage where portable power supplies are even heavier and more ridiculous. Where the smallest available battery is heavier than a modern AA and it only goes up from there.
Not even hoped
for in GURPS Ultratech.
The numbers aren't as silly as they were in GURPS Cyberpunk, but it was years later and the basic hilarity of GURPS's entire take on future batteries was already well established.
AncientH:
Not much is said about the Net. This was one of the great myopic oversights of a lot of science fiction, but it was '95 for fuck's sake and Steve Jackson had email and a website and shit. They really should have made more of the 'Net, and its impact on society,
and how the fuck it interacts with the Mythos. I'm actually kind of cross with McCubbins on this, because at this point Alan Moore did a better job presenting a near-retro-future Mythos setting with
The Courtyard, and that involved drugs, carving people into meat flowers, and a dome over New York City.
Trust me, you don't want the Aklo. It leads to Deep One penis.
FrankT:
Shadowrun had Shadowrunners. Cyberpunk 20XX had Solos. Mercenaries for hire taking The Man's money to fight The Man. And that was good, because you need some kind of
framework to hold a cyberpunk campaign together. Actual cyberpunk fiction tends towards the mystical at times, and really a lot of stories involve big reveals at one point or another that so fundamentally change the setting or the way the characters interact with it that a continued “campaign” of the traditional RPG variety is not likely to work.
If you want me to explain this big reveal, I will. But the next
big reveal of the series involved a space station turning into a fucking tree and your guess is as good as mine.
So to really work as a cyberpunk setting, CthulhuPunk needed to deliver some persistent Player Character shaped hole in the world that the PCs could be assumed to be in during and between episodic adventures. So while I am actually tentatively in favor of rants about how in the dark future, edgy teenagers listen to bassoon ensembles, that can't come at the cost of having a default
playable structure for stories set in this world. And this book doesn't deliver on that. It doesn't even try.
Although the idea that the cutting edge music of the future looks like this is pretty awesome and I'm totally stealing that.
AncientH:
Going with what Frank was saying, your default cyberpunk campaign tends to have you as mercenaries or criminals or freelancers of some sort employed to do some shady shit; the basic shape of cyberpunk novels from
Neuromancer on has always been based on '30s pulp detective stuff, with maybe a little John Le Carre worked in there (because Johnny was a very technical boy).
And Lovecraft's Mythos fiction was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the fathers of the detective genre; it's the reason that in Chaosium your PCs are called
investigators. So there really is a thematic and literary
link between cyberpunk and Mythos fiction that could have been exploited here - PCs that are characters on the grey or black market edges of a crumbling cyberpunk dystopia society, the general mundane dissolution of disease, ecological disaster, Big Brother surveillance, and crumbling infrastructure a thin web disguising the even more terrible reality of the Cthulhu Mythos swarming beneath the dying cities and in the depths of the ocean and the cold lonely wilds of space - and as humans get farther away from
being human and
thinking like humans, they get closer to being able to actually talk and deal with the Old Ones and their servitors and their spawn... Throw the PCs into that and hardened, jaded mercenaries see shit that would make the True Detectives urinate themselves lavishly and in unison.
But, we don't get that. Instead, we get a lot of this "How it Came to Pass" bullshit - which I hate, but which was in vogue at the time, and still is the unfortunate default for a lot of games.
FrankT:
The Mythos tie-ins are particularly weak. And by that I mean that it throws a lot of “maybes” at the reader. It's like the author did not understand that he was writing a fucking RPG setting that other people were supposed to fucking use to fucking set stories in, and that it was not fucking acceptable to tell the GM to write it themselves. Fuck.
AncientH:
As I said, I think a lot of this is on McCubbin not understanding the purpose of what this book
should have accomplished. It's not enough to say "Here's the Mythos. And here's cyberpunk. Now mash them together and have fun."
You are supposed to be doing the mashing! That is what we paid you for! Again, it's like he thought he was writing two half-supplements and then interleaved the chapters. Like he took a few pages from GURPS Vikings and GURPS Technomancer and collated them and said "Yes, I've made a new sourcebook, GURPS Vikingmancer!"
No you fucking have not.
This is seriously the most pissed and disappointed I've ever been in a GURPS book, and not even age really forgives it. And we're not even half through it yet.
