[OSSR]GURPS: CthulhuPunk

[infected slut princess]

Japanese version of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, I forget which edition. CoC and Lovecraft are surprisingly popular over in Japan.

Can you please post all the pictures from this book, or show me where to find them. Please.

[Ancient History]

It's not what you think - it's a Role & Roll book, which is like a transcript or comedy-drama of roleplayers going through a Call of Cthulhu scenario, and it's a 300 page tankobon that's mostly Japanese text. But I'll tell you what, I'm photographing my Conan comic book collection tomorrow, and if I have time I might do my Japanese Mythos collection after that.

[Ancient History]

I did not, unfortunately, have time after photographing my Conan comics. Maybe another day.

OSSR: GURPS: CthulhuPunk: Colons
Chapter 5: Investigators


Cyberpunk Investigators? Don't mind if I do.

AncientH:

Cthulhu Mythos gaming has for about forty years been in dire need of a word like cognitohazard, but has never really gotten there. The problem is, nobody wants to reach past Lovecraft's prose to really grapple with the issues that crop up in his fiction, the ones that are so poorly and so often subject to parody and pastiche. Mythos gaming really does need to be able to designate certain objects cognitohazards, and to treat any exposure to them like exposure to radiation or highly infectious disease. You can see how well this works when people break it down, understand it, and apply it to the Mythos, because this is what Alan Moore does in "The Courtyard."

I'm bringing this up because "cognitohazard" is a term of art that could have been of tremendous use to McCubbins, based on this opening bit:

In general, mankind has a frankly amazing ability to ignore the existence of the Old Ones. Nonetheless, there are a few special individuals who are capable of facing cosmic reality, at least for a time, without sacrificing their wills or their sanities. The PCs are just such people, and they are not along (although it might often seem that way.)

This is...not good. It's cropped up in some latter Mythos fiction, and it's basically the Masquerade. But it's not a good term, because while the Deep One hybrids of Innsmouth might know enough of human nature to want to hide their deformities, cultists are afeared of legal and religious prosectuion, and the Mi Go are clever enough at dealing with humans that their xenologists muck about with making bait or decoys to deal with nosy humans, but that is it. Yog-Sothoth is the gate, and it does not give one blistering, jubbly opalescent spheroid about how many hoo-mans know about it. So it's not that humans are naturally oblivious or there's a dedicated Masquerade being enacted to hide all traces of the Mythos. Knowing too much is bad for you. Cognitohazard.

FrankT:

At 20 pages, this is the longest chapter in the book, although it achieves that length in part by playing host to some sample characters, so information density is not terribly high. The italicized story in this chapter is the closest the book ever comes to telling you what hacking is about. Sadly, this is not very close. One of the characters uses a back door to get into WHATELEYNET, which apparently is a “use once” sort of deal. But then he switches to goggle vision so that the other people in the room, and the reading fucking audience, can't see what he's doing. He gets some information, and then shuts down his computer when “the watchdogs” arrive. But there's no indication as to whether he's doing that because his connection has been cut or because he was afraid of being traced or even mind-fried. Also no indication as to whether the watchdogs were automated systems or enemy security hackers. What metaphor hacking for information has in this world is left entirely undescribed. If the character had not had a back door all ready to go, there is no indication as to whether hacking in would have been “difficult” or “impossible.” Considering that the player characters are going to probably want to get information out of WHATELEYNET and probably won't have legit accounts on it, that's some pretty fucking important world building to simply voluntarily not give to the reader. The story is written in 3rd person, we could have just been told what it was Booshk was actually seeing, the author just chose not to in order to avoid committing to any particular future network description.

Most of the side text area is taken up with six sample characters. I don't call them sample player characters, they are just characters. They have lists of all their advantages and disadvantages, but there aren't point totals or point subtotals anywhere. These characters have a fair amount of backstory and are quite specific, but I genuinely don't know whether they are supposed to be as competent, less competent, or more competent than the player characters. I haven't even been given a range. Kaptain Arkane is something of a Hacker with his Computer Hacking of 14, but he has a Computer Operation of 17, and a Computer Programming of 21. Are any of those numbers... good? The game uses a curved RNG, so having skills that are different by 7 points would seem to be a pretty big deal. But since I have no idea how difficult tasks in these skills are supposed to be, I genuinely don't know if a Hacking of 14 is supposed to be comparably useful and important to a Computer Programming of 21. GURPS doesn't commit to the same number on two different skills meaning the same thing, so since the book hasn't proposed a unified theory of what the hell we are talking about, I can't evaluate these things. To the extent that these characters are about anything, they appear to be examples of characters who are in some way related to organizations being described in the chapter proper. Some of these connections are very tenuous, there is for example a scientist who doesn't want to talk about the supernatural and doesn't believe in it.

There's a fair chunk of space given over to a televised preacher who rants about the mythos and how their cults are in league with Satan. I don't know how or why I'm supposed to care, but he gets a couple of pages when you add up all his text in both text streams.


Cultists denounce each other.

AncientH:

They suggest - rather intelligently, I think - various organizations that the PCs could be affiliated with. They're not terribly good, but that's still a fuckload better than CoC ever offered. If they'd actually integrated these groups into the setting a couple chapters ago and mentioned them throughout, they might even be useful. Actually, why is that? I swear, McCubbins just set out to write page 1 and continued on until the end of the book, never looking back, always forward. Like he was determined to burn through this before his last SAN point gave out.

FrankT:

The chapter starts off telling you that it's going to be about mythos investigation organizations that the players can join, if the GM decides to put them into their campaign and if you're basically using CyberWorld and not rolling your own cyberpunk campaign world like you are obviously going to do. It's all pretty fatalistic – the author is pretty much convinced that you are never going to play a game using the CthulhuPunk world provided, so there's not much point in trying to nail anything down. This is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the CthulhuPunk world is too thin and vague for anyone to actually run a game in it.

But even this tentative focus lasts only a short while, as it jumps off into rants about how various national governments get along with the mythos. The big reveal here is that the raid on Innsmouth as described by Brian Lumley in The Burrowers Beneath is totally historical (in the original Shadow Over Innsmouth by HPL the attack on Y'ha-nthlei was carried out with torpedoes, and in the Lumley description it was done with depth charges) and the United States has been basically at war with the Deep Ones since 1928. This is a pretty big piece of history, much more interesting and important than whether or not Yeltsin got assassinated or Conan ruled in Aquilonia. Maybe it's because I have Sentai Fhtagn on the brain, but honestly I am way more interested in the fact that this is a world where the US declaring a secret war on fucking Atlanteans got declassified in the Carter administration than I am in what year Cuba got annexed or Alaska seceded.


This is the face you make, right before the depth charges go off.

Basically, the author is tacitly admitting that this is a pretty gonzo setting – one where national governments of humanity have been conducting military operations against mythos aligned nations for over a century. But what we were handed earlier was one in which the mythos was all pretty much sub rosa and didn't feature in the timeline of the modern era at all. This would call for an astoundingly vast Men In Black style coverup, which would also imply a pretty gonzo setting. Basically I don't see how you could claim that the Innsmouth Raid of 1928 was historical and not have that have some pretty visible knockdown effects on a game that's set in the 2040s. That's more than a century of warfare against fish people. So when the author tries to build up a big mystery about how a seafloor mining operation got attacked, how is that a fucking mystery? We've been at war with Fish People for so long that there are people who were born after the government's files on it became public record have died of age.

The entire Cyberpunk future angle is very lazy and tacked on. The working theory is that it's basically fraudulent. The author had no intention of writing a Mythos Cyberpunk world, he just wanted to convert Call of Cthulhu to GURPS. The cybepunk “setting” is probably tacked on in order to claim to Chaosium that they were making a Call of Cthulhu supplement for an alternate setting, rather than hijacking the game into another system. While there is some half-assed bandaids of mythosianism slapped on here and there, fundamentally the only mythos related events that are really tied down happened during Lovecraft's lifetime – and the fallout from
those has mysteriously not landed until “just now.”

The thing is... they really should have done the cyberpunk mythos mashup for real rather than just wasting space on a phoned in dystopia with instructions to the GM to bin it and start over. It puts like half the book as lazy shovelware whose only intended purpose is to confuse the purpose of the book to a license holder. And since the license wasn't renewed, it probably didn't even work.


Most people who bought this book presumably wanted something Magrunnerish. They didn't get it.

AncientH:

I will say there have been fiction efforts where the Innsmouth raid and subsequent interment camps were (partially) declassified, but as Frank said...that makes for a more interesting setting than the one we have now. There's just so little thought given to the setting for what is, nominally at least, a setting book that it's fucking insulting. At least when Charles Stross did the Laundry series and greenlit and RPG based on it, the people involved did quite a bit of work at how different aspects of the Mythos would fit into the world's history and politics, which is now full of secret treaties and occult intelligence agencies and politicians pissing in their pants in case something crawls up out of the oceanic abyss. But we don't get that, and it makes me angry of the wasted potential.

For example, the government of the United States explicitly has an anti-occult terrorist intelligence agency - but it's a piddling small taskforce with a typical strength of fifty agents. That's one per state. Doesn't even cover Samoa.


I'm Agent Johnson, my beat is Florida. And has been for two hundred years.

FrankT:

One of the ideas this book throws around is the idea of mystical organizations that can teach you magic powers. Tibetan monasteries, neo-pagan covens, tribal shamans, techno-mystics, whatever. The thing is, “whatever” is basically all you get. The author suggests, and I agree, that the GM might want to put in some organizations that teach mystical skills to player characters, but that's as far as it went. The book doesn't commit to whether the Tibetan Monks of Bri Gung are psionic or magic, or even whether they exist at all. The author continues to not understand what a book that produces a setting is actually for.


“Bri Gung” is usually transliterated as “Drigung,” and is a real place. Whether and what mystical techniques the monks there know and teach in your fictional setting is 100% your responsibility when you write about them in your personal fictional setting that you are charging people real money for.

AncientH:

As a minor nod to this being cyberpunk, we get a (very) brief discussion of possible korps and organized crime groups...it's pretty dire. It's seriously below the cultural sensitivity level of Shadowrun 2nd edition, which means that all the mob guys are straight Sicilian types like extras from The Godfather, the Russian Yakuza is...I don't know what it is, there's literally not enough information to say anything about them, and I read the write-up twice. The Triads are bullshit Yellow Menace mystical Chinese Fu Manchu crap.


Don't get me started on the cultists. Until next chapter.

Organized religion...well, there is always that classic standby, the Catholic Church. Say what you will about the Papists, but they have a long history of Inquisitions and the Vatican Library and really are the closest thing to a multinational corporation with extraterritoriality. So they get a Special Office for dealing with the Mythos, with 100-400 members. Again...bullshit small. Protestantism (which, I remind you, is a series of increasingly smaller and more bullshit groups) gets even less. Christ on a bike, even Islam is treated like a monolithic religion.

This is shit. Maybe it's just because I've read so much of the Mythos I know what's been done with it and some of what can be done with it, but...you could seriously build a better Mythos RPG out of the SCP wiki at this point, and that's a thousand monkeys on a typewriter on one side and a thousand monkeys upvoting and downvoting that shit like it's Survivor on the other. Yes, it's better than Call of Cthulhu, but that's because CoC doesn't offer you any groups at all starting off.

Chapter 6: Cultists


Pretty much what it says on the tin.

FrankT:

The Cultists chapter is 10 pages long and is dedicated to explaining the basic low level adversaries of Call of Cthulhu: crazy people.


Space gods are mostly too high level for you, so mostly in mythos gaming you fight these guys instead.

Of course, very little worldbuilding is actually done here. The cultists are described as being in no way an organized religion and being just a series of tiny cells and individuals who don't talk to each other. So there's no global conspiracies, networks of villains, or even broadly definable agendas. Even that minimalist WHATELEYNET piece of worldbuilding from earlier in the book basically just got thrown under the bus.

That's not like some grand clearing house of madness and conspiracy, it's just a mid-nineties BBS run by “less than a score” of mad enthusiasts unconnected to any international or even national level cults.

Of course, that's such a limiting concept that this book can't even stick to that for two pages – the second example cult is a series of connected cells distributed across the world. But the bottom line is that there's still no there there. We are treated to some essays about why people might want to go crazy and join an evil cult, and a few examples of specific people that are probably from campaigns that Chris McCubbin ran, but how any of that might fit into the world or even an adventure is left to the stars to divine.

AncientH:

I'm going to blame part of this on CoC, because it was obvious that McCubbin was just trying to translate the Mythos to GURPS and was following CoC's script. And in Call of Cthulhu, there are random cults, usually in backwoods places, which have very limited scope and no connections to anything else. They're like little remnants of ancient groups, or one leader and their handful of devoted fanatic followers, or a small group built around a text or in the extreme a small library of texts. But for all their cleverness or resources, their aims are usually either direct and small (whatever the implications), or incredibly obscure.



And in Call of Cthulhu this is by design. It's bad design, and in many ways I think it's unconscious design; cultist is automatically equated with "baddy" in Mythos RPG parlance, and they're all assumed to be insane, fanatical, and/or irrational and amoral. They have simple goals - when they have discernible goals - so that the PCs can beat them, and they have no connections so PCs can beat them cleanly. The "big cults" of the setting, like the Black Brotherhood or the Order of the Silver Twilight are tremendously undeveloped, but people latch onto them because they're there.



This isn't how Lovecraft envisaged it, quite. HPL actually had fairly few cults as such - there was some talk of witch cults, because of Arthur Machen and Margaret Murray, and there was the Cthulhu cult in "The Call of Cthulhu," which was very vaguely defined and mostly filled with foreigners that venerated Cthulhu. There was an extinct cannibal religious cult in "The Rats in the Walls," and there was mention of a voodoo cult in the same story. The Church of the Starry Wisdom is probably the most organized of Lovecraft's cults, because they had an actual name and headquarters and everything...and that's it. Lovecraft didn't go into the history and organization and beliefs of these groups because he didn't have to, but everybody else doesn't go into them because they're too fucking stupid to question it.

Because cults have purpose, and structure, and specific techniques and resources they use. You have religious cults, cults of personality, occult groups, monastic communities, radical groups, paramilitary guerrilla cells, criminal organizations...and any of these can be affiliated with the Mythos in some form or fashion. Hell, there are cults in cyberpunk literature - William Gibson made a point of how in a world where technology is increasingly too complex to be understood completely, there is room for mysticism to step in, and does. AIs masquerading as voodoo loas. Right-wing fundamentalist not-Mormons were responsible for the release of an ancient cognitohazard Sumerian space virus in Snow Crash. There is no reason not to have cults in Cthulhupunk, but there is also no reason why at least some of those cults shouldn't have their shit together.

To his credit, McCubbin does reel off a list of different kinds of "cultists" that the PCs might encounter, from rogue investigators to mad scientists, but it's...inadequate. Again, better than CoC, but not up to GURPS standards, and nowhere cyberpunk enough.

FrankT:

We get little rants about some of the alien races. Serpent Men, Tcho Tchos, and Deep Ones. Note that the rant on Serpent People is that they are all degenerate and stupid these days, but the rules for them in the next chapter give them +5 IQ. Also the Tcho Tcho are completely missing from the racial writeups, even though they have featured prominently in the stories and rants.


Serpent Man.


The mouth thing is a spell, Tcho Tchos actually just look like short people.


Evil short people.

The monster factions are not given motivations or plans. The sample Serpent Man Leader is just accumulating wealth and power – even he doesn't know what Yig is eventually going to want to do with it. I don't know what the author thinks a Tcho Tcho is. The sample Tcho Tcho cult leader is 5'5” tall (165 cm). The fiction piece identified them as midgets, but what the fuck? Seriously, these assholes have one trait: they are short. And this guy has stats, and he isn't notably short.

AncientH:

I would like to admit that I am 5'5", and I am not a Tcho-Tcho. Probably. Most of the fiction doesn't identify them well either, except that they're probably not really human and probably somewhere in Asia (maybe Burma); the best use of them I ever saw had them side with the Americans during the Vietnam War and a bunch of them got brought over to the US afterwards, like the Montagnards.

[Maxus]

The Ku Klux Klan incident is one of my favorite bits of Preacher.

You guys win the internet for including a page of it.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 7: Mythos Bestiary


Many of the aliens in the Mythos are not really less dumb than this.

AncientH:

We've talked about Mythos beasties before, in other reviews of other books. There's not really a lot to add here. This is pretty much a straight translation of the Call of Cthulhu bestiary, without even a solid effort to incorporate them into a cyberpunk setting. Nothing new, no real twists or evolution. I guess that makes sense in that these Mythos entities are sort of timeless, at least on a human timescale - but human culture and technology has progressed, and I'd like to think that our understanding of ghouls and Deep Ones and shit has changed to reflect that. I hate to bring up the Laundry RPG so often, but even they talked about how weird it is for Deep Ones and humans to be able to mate. Even the Witch Doctor comic postulated that it was actually an STD of sorts.

FrankT:

At 17 pages, the bestiary section is not very large as monster manuals go. It has 16 creatures in the “gods” section (including Dagon and Mother Hydra, who are not traditionally considered gods), 16 creatures in the “lesser creatures” section, and 3 NPC races. Every single one of these entries is in the table of contents, which makes this chapter loom larger in the ToC than any chapter except the Characters section (which has six entries for page 44 because every character occupation gets a line in the ToC).

Now you would be well within reason if you started asking “why the fuck do we need monster manual entries for gods?” because that is a damn good question and I have no answer for it. Obviously you aren't intended to fight Cthulhu in this game, so why does he have stats? Azathoth is given stats only for a summonable mini-avatar that is still ricockulously oversized for what you're presumably intended to bring to a cyberclaw fight, but Nyarlathotep and company are given stats for the “real deal” and have numbers that are so stupidly titanic that they are pretty much off the scale of any character in the game.


There are stats for this, no one knows why.

True story: in looking up that picture, I found out that people make Nyarlathotep pillowcases for people to masturbate with. Because Rule 34 will not be denied. And no, we will not be linking to them.

The basic logic of writing stats for monsters because you expect those stats to be important appears to be completely lost on the writers of Cthulhu Mythos gaming. Not just this book, all Cthulhu Mythos gaming. Recall that in CthulhuTech, where it would be entirely appropriate to hop in a giant robot and punch the fuck out of Cthulhu, Great Cthulhu has no stats and his awakening means you instantly lose, no save. In Call of Cthulhu, and its GURPS conversion CthulhuPunk, where you play an inquisitive nihilist with a shotgun and are a couple orders of magnitude too small to be able to expect to seriously injure Cthulhu in a straight fight – he gets stats written for him. So Cthulhu has 140 ST. That's a stupid number, but it's not actually big enough to necessarily shrug off any other arbitrarily big weapons like a nuclear bomb or whatever. So beating Cthulhu requires you to do something stupid where you have to calculate damage rather than roll it, but it's not actually that difficult. He doesn't live up to the hype.

AncientH:

This section is worse than other sections because all it does is give us a straight mechanical translation. Yes, GURPS is a better system than Chaosium's magic tea party, but it doesn't actually add anything, and again...it's just not very CthulhuPunk. I mean, I guess if you wanted to calculate the number of Magic Points you'd need to pump into Elder Signs to contain Shub-Niggurath or something you could do that, but I'm stretching here. It's not just that stats for Azathoth are meaningless in this game, they're useless for pretty much all GURPS games. Even if you had GURPS Supers in play.


Aquaman's a hero.

It doesn't help that GURPS traditionally has severe problems presenting god-like characters. Seriously, minor gods in GURPS Discworld start out at about 300 points and I think there's an example for 600 points; Hellboy form GURPS Hellboy has a lot more points than that, and is still short a thousand...and Cthulhu would eat them both.

FrankT:

Like in AD&D's Deities and Demigods, there's no way to put up numbers from gods in a way that will make people happy. Who is stronger: Thor or Hercules? Well, obviously it depends on which story you're referencing, since they are mythological characters who are anywhere from “strong as a pretty strong guy” to “able to lift and throw mountains” as befits the needs of the narrative. What possible purpose could it serve to make a formal declaration that Ghatanothoa is stronger than Ithaqua but can't lift as much as Hastur? Who gives a shit?

There are various flavors of gods in various fan taxonomies of the mythos. Great Old Ones, Elder Gods, Outer Gods, Other Gods, and if you go to some of the less popular taxonomies you also have shit like Primal Gods. Anyway, this book announces that there's a difference, but doesn't sort them differently. So Nodens and Hypnos are mentioned in their descriptions as being Elder Gods, Rhan-Tegoth is described as a Lesser God, Tulzscha is an Outer God in his text, and Yig is “never clearly described” and the author doesn't have the nuts to categorize him. And yes, with all these categories, even 16 gods doesn't give much room for any one of them.


Between the Great Gods and the Lesser Gods there are presumably some Intermediate Gods. I'd hate to put that on a resume.

Of vague interest to mythos nerds and neckbeards, this book classifies Shub Niggurath as a Great Old One, which is correct as per August Derleth (and adopted by Arkham Horror and CthulhuTech and indeed by most of the fanbase as near as I can tell), but the Call of Cthulhu RPG was classifying her as an Outer God. So obviously Chric McCubbin was doing some primary research and not just regurgitating whatever he read in the Call of Cthulhu RPG book as he had claimed.

Bottom line: 16 mythos gods is nowhere near enough to actually make sense of the mythos as a religion. But it's also way too many entries to waste on monster entries that will not be used under any circumstances. It just sits in a weird middle ground of being simply bad at doing whatever you might want this section of the book to do.

AncientH:

I can't even work up the ire to nerdrage about this properly, because it's too half-assed. If this was GURPS Call of Cthulhu, we'd probably just give this section a pass - after all, GURPS has enough monsters and critters and other NPCs in different supplements it doesn't need to go into all the generic crap that Chaosium fluffed out its bestiary with. And indeed, if your entire purpose for including this chapter was just so people could drop a Byakhee and some Mi-Go in their GURPS Space campaign, that would be cool. But it's supposed to be CthulhuPunk, fhtagn r'lyeh whagl nagl.

FrankT:

Sixteen Lesser Races is basically kind of an insult. That's 16 entries to cover everything from gelatinous monsters that leap out of the shadows to space faring empires. It doesn't do justice to anything. You get Byakhee, Colors, Dark Young, Elder Things, Dimensional Shamblers, Flying Polyps, Formless Spawn, Ghasts, Gnoph-Kehs, Yithians, Hounds of Tindalos, Mi Go, Rat Things, Nightgaunts, Shoggoths, and Star Spawn. I will tell you straight up that I do not understand any classification scheme in which Yithians and Mi Go are different from “NPC Races” but whatever.


They don't look like you, but they are tool users that know things and talk and shit.

But basically this is way way too few monsters. This entire book is just presenting a “cyberpunk world of your choice with Cthulhu monsters in it.” So they need to bring the monsters. We get no Gugs, no Moon Beasts, no Shan, no Shan slave races, no Shantaks or Hunting Horrors. Really, the sheer emptiness of this bestiary is indictment enough.

AncientH:

Honestly, I'd have wanted to see what the fruits of Dr. Herbert West's research looked like after a hundred and twenty years and the vast leaps we've made in medical science. Suicide to come back from the dead as an unaging corpse probably sounds really attractive to some rich old people who are already considering how much of themselves they can and want to replace as their organs fail. The Mi-Go brain canisters don't seem to bad considering humans will do it to themselves and for far less reason. Hounds of Tindalos should haunt physics buildings where people are playing with tachyons and shit.

FrankT:

Aside from the NPC races that are inexplicably mentioned in the Lesser Races section before, there are only 3 NPC races: Ghouls, Deep Ones, and Serpent People. The Tcho Tcho, who are by far the most prominent mythos race in the fiction portion of the book and the only race that has actually been worked into the public timeline, do not appear in this section. Because go fuck yourself.


You could play one of these.

The NPC races have been calculated according to the system presented in GURPS Fantasy Folk, which of course was also written by Chris McCubbin. Honestly, the point totals in this seem way too high. People end up paying 15 character points for having non-retractable claws. But of course, they are living in a fucking Cyberpunk future, where no one is going to wipe their ass with +2 hand to hand damage in unarmed combat. The Serpent People pay 55 points for their ability to deliver poison bites to people with 2 hex long lunges – a superpower so inferior to just “owning a shotgun” that I have difficulty even explaining it. Just being one of these assholes will set you back between 140 and 190 character points, which considering that you're supposed to make sorcerer heroes and shit on 300 points, seems like kind of a lot.

AncientH:

This chapter is symptomatic of the failures of the book as a whole. It's just not finished. If it was intended to be just a GURPS CoC port, its...the bare minimum. As a GURPS CthulhuTech project, it's just insultingly incomplete.

Chapter 8: Adventure Seeds


The bad guys are like trees or something. Whatever.

FrankT:

The Adventure Seeds “chapter” is a whopping four pages long. One of those pages is a full page illustration, and there are pen and ink doodles on all the other pages too. The ongoing story that appears at the beginning of chapters does not continue in this chapter – it's over (or at least, doesn't have any more episodes and didn't reach a conclusion). It's like the book itself doesn't consider this or anything that comes after it to be a real chapter. I basically agree.

There are a total of six adventure seeds in this chapter, and obviously none of them are more than half a page. None of them have a whole lot to say, either. So for example, one of the seeds is that there's a street gang who kill people and have the yellow sign printed on the back of their jackets as part of their gang colors. That's it. That's the whole “adventure seed.” Another one is that the rainforest is expanding and maybe trees are killing people or something.

Seriously. Carnivorous fucking trees. There seems to be like a law or something that if your plot hinges on carnivorous trees, that you have a shitty and poorly explained plot.

AncientH:

Like a lot of Cthulhu RPG adventure seeds, the hook is left up to the gamemaster. Most of these would probably make for the half-interesting premise of a Lovecraftian pastiche, but all of them assume that the PCs a) find out about it and b) give enough of a shit to do something about it. So again, the main complaint isn't just about this book specifically, but about how this book is symptomatic of the larger problems in Mythos gaming.

I will say, I like that the adventure seeds at least try to integrate the Mythos and the cyberpunk setting. Maybe not well, and certainly not in any thought-out way, but we've had so little in this book that actually speaks to the premise of Cthulhu + Cyberpunk, the little scraps of it that we do get seem like a whiff of fresh air.

FrankT:

About the closest you get to a real plot here is “people think there are Scooby Doo villains, but really there are real monsters.” That's not exactly a plot, but it's at least an excuse for a simple dungeon crawl. And um... that's it. That's as far as any of it goes. You might find an excuse to do a really simple Scooby Doo inspired dungeon crawl. Maybe.


There's nothing under here but a neck and some tendons.

Ten points if you thought of the Mighty Mouse episode when I made that reference!

AncientH:

At one point, the PCs find the (video?) diary of a young researcher in alien metaphysics that came to a grisly end yadda yadda yadda...and it says that they're worried some hacker will find it and post the rituals all over the Net. This is in the same book where the Necronomicon exists as an electronic file in English and is already on the Net. It might be a shitty translation, but it's a translation. It's out there.

See, this is...this is the generation before Napster and BitTorrent and proper filesharing. People just didn't get it. Imagination went to videophones and shit, they never saw the transformative powers of Wikipedia fucking coming, or that students at Harvard would spend their afternoons scanning and uploaded pre-copyright texts to GoogleBooks, or that pretty much the entire Corpus Hermeticum would be available for free on http://www.sacred-texts.com/ - my point being, one of the things you have to come to grips with in any contemporary or near-future or cyberpunk Mythos setting is that the old entry costs for becoming a practical necromancer drop dramatically. It's the same with being a hacker; the know-how for a lot of this stuff is available, right now, on the web if you look for it - totally free and totally illegal. The question is, what's the impact of it?

In the Laundry RPG, they go right out and say there are electronic versions of these Mythos tomes out there, but most of them are shit and they work to contain or corrupt the remaining ones on the Internet. In Gravel they make it clear that real books of magic can't be copied so cavalierly - that the medium is as important as the message. But ask yourself this: what if the Necronomicon is available on the world computer network, and people start finding out that some of the stuff works? What happens when people hack it, incorporating fractal Elder Signs into their websites and t-shirt designs, or try to summon and bind the King in Yellow to the Cloud? That is the stuff we want to see and get some answers to.

If it sounds like I'm frustrated...I am. One of the ideas I had during my run on Shadowrun was a gamechanger moment - what if somebody uploaded directions on how to do blood magic to the Matrix? Mundanes still couldn't do it, but what would happen if blood magic was just made available to any Awakened character? How would that change the setting, and people's reaction to it? What would you do as a player character, if you needed a little boost when things got tight? Would you be tempted to do it? Would you swear off it completely? What happens when it's abused, or goes wrong? How many loose blood spirits would you need to clean up? Etc.

The thing is, I would have liked to answer those questions. I would have liked to see what other people's answers to those questions would have been, in their own game. And I'm pissed at the wasted potential in this book.

This should have been the beginning, not the end.

[infected slut princess]

This review has some great pictures in it. The book itself seems like garbage.

[Ancient History]

GURPS CthulhuPunk Final Bits
Chapter 9: Conversions


We've been looking for excuses to just put a picture of Cthulhu kaijuing the fuck up in Rlyeh for some time.

FrankT:

Considering that the entire point of this book appears to be to convert Call of Cthulhu into GURPS whole hog, I really expected more from the conversions “chapter” than just 2 pages of text adapted from an article in Roleplayer Magazine written by some other dude. Roleplayer Magazine was a GURPS magazine that ran for 7 years and had 30 issues which were mostly pretty short. The first six issues were free, and before issue 15 it was only 8 pages long. It stumbled on and eventually merged with Autoduel Quarterly to become Pyramid Magazine. Anyway, apparently there was a brief set of Call of Cthulhu conversion rules in one of those issues, and rather than write something from scratch that made a bit more sense, Chris McCubbin just adapted that little piece of scrawl and walked away.

It should be noted that stats aren't really on the same scale in Call of Cthulhu as they are in GURPS. I mean, they both claim an average of 10.5 or whatever, but stats do really different things in the two systems. Having a very high Intelligence doesn't do much besides give you more skills in Call of Cthulhu, so fucking everyone has it by the buckets. In GURPS, IQ sets your skill starting values against a curved fucking RNG, so everyone wants it by the buckets (and it is therefore expensive and in many cases restricted). So this conversion guide just blithely tells you that the stats are on the same scale (which they are not) and that you can probably just do a simple substitution. Even though that's basically like claiming stats from AD&D can be used as-is in 3rd edition. I mean, you can do that, but the results are going to be stupid. If you use the conversion system here, the results are going to be stupid. And not just because Call of Cthulhu has randomized stats and GURPS charges you points for the fucking things.

The place where the book even tries to draw a line in the sand is on IQ. They note correctly that Call of Cthulhu characters tend to have Intelligence values that would be really quite high in GURPS. Their solution to this is to tell everyone to reduce their Intelligence by 2 because go fuck yourselves you little munchkin. Rather than, I dunno, have an actual conversion chart.


This is a picture of some Cenobites.

It's just kind of odd. The book is sold as being a whole cyberpunk cthulhu mythos mashup. But really it's just some spitballing on a Call of Cthulhu to GURPS conversion system with the cyberpunk elements tacked on to pad wordcount and meet contractual obligations. But when it comes to the actual heavy lifting of putting in conversion rules, it's bullshit and outsourced.

AncientH:

A lot of the conversions are for trivial shit. Which is fine, actually; most Call of Cthulhu RPGs are bullshit anyway, and this is like a homework assignment for the gamemaster anyway. In fact, this is the kind of stuff that as a Mister Cavern you might give to your players as homework. "OKay, I'm going to give you all a bunch of monster stats, I want you to convert them to GURPS. Do a good job and your character gets some XP they can spend before next session."


I had a GM when I was twelve that gave us XP for doing his homework. My Psionicist made 3rd level and then exploded.

Chapter Not Labeled: Bibliography


Books, yo.

Mine is bigger. –AH

AncientH:

Proper GURPS products are typically well-researched by people that know what they're talking about, so having a bibliography is actually a thing they do to point players to the material they're going to want to read to expand on the supplement in their own games at home. This is still sort of true; if McCubbins was completely lazy he would have simply stolen the CoC bibliography wholesale. Instead, we get a much more organized and impressive collection of Mythos literature and Mythos gaming literature, including sources Chaosium did not put down, and focusing on the stuff that was in print and relevant.

Unfortunately, this also means that McCubbins didn't have space to include any cyberpunk fiction.

FrankT:

It's two pages long, but because there are no pictures and it's just a giant list, there's probably more information here than in a couple of the other chapters. As I mentioned earlier, there are no Cyberpunk resources at all. The whole “Punk” part of “CthulhuPunk” gets zero love in the bibliography. That's pretty much inexcusable, and probably goes a long way to explain why this book doesn't seem to “get” Cyberpunk. We're not even at the stage of making inane and incorrect claims like Neuromancer being the first book to use the word Cyberpunk. There just isn't anything here at all. The author literally gave zero fucks about that half of the book's subject matter and it shows.

For the most part, I'm going to bow to Ancient History's admittedly significantly superior knowledge of mythos source material, but I am going to have to jump all over the section of the bibliography that points you to Chaosium roleplaying supplements. It isn't just that some of the things you're being pointed at are quite bad (though they are), it's that some of these things aren't even sources. It literally points you to a pack of Call of Cthulhu Investigator Sheets. [AH Note - I don't see those in the 2001 printing with the snazzy cover, so I think this bibliography was updated.] That's literally 100% useless in a game of GURPS, whether it's CthulhuPunk or not. The author was just transcribing entries out of the Chaosium product catalog without even bothering to check whether the products were useful books or even books at all!


This Shub Niggurath statue probably appears on mythos related product catalogs, but it is not a book and has no place in a bibliography.

AncientH:

The thing is, Cthulhu Now came out in 1987, and Delta Green came out in 1997. Released as it was in 1995, GURPS CthulhuPunk should have at least striven to be an update or improvement over Cthulhu Now...but it isn't. I know this is getting tired to hear, but I don't get that. Seriously, this isn't hard. GURPS already does the heavy listing of having a workable (if clunky and detail-oriented) system and lots of sourcebooks on computers and high tech shit. How the fuck did they fuck this up so badly?

And I'm going to call out the 2001 edition too, because at this point somebody should have looked at the new bibliography and said "Okay look, Delta Green and Cthulhu 2000 have come out since we wrote this book, we really need to get our shit together and rewrite it." But they didn't.

Final Thoughts


This isn't actually related. But it should be.

FrankT:

I believe that this book was never intended to present a Call of Cthulhu/Cyberpunk mashup universe for people to play around in, and that entire near future line of reasoning was just there to convince the licensing company that they weren't going to directly compete with their setting books. That being said, that's not actually an excuse for this book being as bad as it is. Having said they were going to make a mashup setting and then sold the book for real money to people presumably expecting that, they did a great disservice to their readers by chumping out.


We should have gotten something like this and didn't.

That being said, given the obvious focus of the book on the Call of Cthulhu conversion, I'm surprised and offended that it's as light and poorly done as it is. This was the author's chance to show how well he could create GURPS conversions for the entire Mythos and the Call of Cthulhu game specifically, and he just fucking fails his craft RPG roll. The GURPS rules for the Mythos stuff just really aren't that good – about what you'd expect from a GURPS GM writing it up for his home campaign without an editor. It's been a while since I was really snappy with GURPS 3rd edition as it existed in the mid 90s (that is to say: with seven fucking years of spot fixes and errata and supplements), but even a casual reading of the GURPS numbers presented in this book seem extremely wrong. Considering how many points a normal character is, it's outright fucking criminal that being a Serpent Person is 190 points on the top. That is more points than basic characters are supposed to get, and Serpent People are the kind of thing you're supposed to gun down in groups with automatic weapons.


Or great cleave them with your sword, if you're Conan and you're into that sort of thing.

On top of that, some of the rules being produced here aren't just badly converted into GURPS or badly sourced from the Mythos, but are just bad conceptually as an RPG element. The Innsmouth Look gives you 20 points to play with now and then makes you degenerate into a Deep One and become an NPC later on. That's bad design for a short game, because it's points for a disadvantage that doesn't do anything during the story. And it's bad design in a long game, because it takes a long running character and scraps them with all their progress. It's just fucking bad. It's not important how many points that thing is worth, things like that shouldn't exist in RPGs. I'm not saying you can't find shit like “borrowed time” and “dark fate” on the list of available character disadvantages in other 90s games, I'm saying that those were fucking terrible and people fucking up at White Wolf does not excuse one of Steve Jackson's minions fucking up when writing GURPS. Fuck.

AncientH:

I've never read a bad GURPS book before. It's a little discouraging. I mean, I know that statistically it was bound to happen, but this book just fails at its job and they reprinted it. It's just...it's a failure at every level of game design. It's not a particularly good conversion, it's a barely competent sourcebook to dip into to add some Mythos for your GURPS game, and it pretty much completely fails at being a Cyberpunk/Mythos mashup...and yet, that's what they were selling!

I think there are two main sins here. The first is, quite obviously, McCubbin is the B team, not the A team, and this is a very weird book that was deserving of the top talent. They should have at least paired him up with a Cyberpunk guy before letting him sit down and try to write a setting book on his own. The second is, equally obvious I think, they did not know what they were selling. I can't say that happens very often with GURPS. They tend to have a very laser-like focus. If they write a GURPS Triangle of U book, it might contain a pointer to GURPS Asparagus and a few ideas for crossing over the two, but the main thrust of the book is going to be genus Brassica. They're not going to leave out any of the mustards either.


I wrote a Lovecraftian pastiche along those lines once.

It's the wasted potential that kills me with this book. McCubbins had two jobs with this book, and he fucked them both up, and now the world is the poorer for it.

FrankT:

Integration into a Cyberpunk milieu would of course necessitate a cyberpunk world of some sort to integrate into. And for that to be a thing you would plausibly want to do, the cyberpunk world in question would have to be something that had a place for small groups of player characters with diverse talents to team up and accomplish tasks in serial format. Paramilitary strike forces made of specialists? Mercenary criminal cells? Mystery solving teenagers with a dog? Investigators working for a semi-secret government agency? Corporate risk assessment teams? Something. There needs to be some kind of place in the world that is painted for the player characters to go. It's OK to have more than one, but you need at least one, and it needs to be front and center in your world before potential players can even start to imagine themselves as characters in that world. This is very different from the needs when putting together a cyberpunk world for the purposes of a standalone story. Then you just need to have


A cyberpunk world you don't have to share authorship in doesn't even have to make sense.

Also, you really fucking need to describe how hacking works in your world. Cyberpunk hacking isn't like real-world computer use, and especially isn't a damn thing like real-world computer use in the 1980s and early 90s. For fuck's sake, Mosaic was only released in 1993. Now, if you're going to make a role playing game, you should probably have some rules to make those things work. But even if you keep it very rules-lite, you're still going to want to describe what hackers do, what they can accomplish, what they are opposed by, and what they need to have and know in order to do their job. A world in which people take expensive military computer hardware and plug it into enemy computers to drain info out of them is very different from a world in which people sit in their basements logging in to the Pentagon steal missile codes. And a world in which hackers have to constantly move around because targeted corporations are going to send brute squads to their detected locations is very different from a world in which hackers hide in their hacker bunkers because targeted corporations send mind frying signals at their brains. You have to nail that down, because the fact that it's the cyberpunk future doesn't by itself tell me jack shit about what hacking is actually like, just that it's important.


In the cyberpunk future, people are not going to be dialing up a BBS to share this text file. There's all kinds of things they could be doing, but it won't be that.

AncientH:

Now, the GURPS grognard cheesy beard argument to what Frank is saying is that all the rules for hacking and shit are in GURPS Cyberpunk (true; they're just terrible) and the default world setting stuff are in GURPS CyberWorld (true, but GURPS: Cyberworld - take a drink.)


This is apparently a real thing now.

The painful truth is, if you look at this just as GURPS Call of Cthulhu...it's okay, but it's only just okay. When GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade decided to convert over that game, they basically distilled the setting down into a nutshell and represented in, with original material and 25% less mascara-stained bullshit, and it was...good. You could argue it's better than the V:tM core rulebook. I'd argue that. Similarly, there's a good bit of ground covered here, but...not enough. It's not the whole CoC core book, distilled and ready for easy consumption. It's a chunk of it, and it's an unexamined chunk grafted onto the bleeding stump of GURPS CyberWorld. There's no insight into Mythos gaming like there should be; a lot of the bullshit preconceptions that make CoC such a terrible MTP game are still there, just...like that's a normal thing. It isn't! It should not be!

So yeah, it might be a better game than CoC just because it has a working system, but that's not a high hurdle. Not high enough, anyway.

FrankT:

Working the mythos into a cyberpunk world is not actually very difficult. You have to actually do it, but cyberpunk world have a bit of the mysticism and a lot of the nihilism in them most of the time. This book didn't do minimum due diligence on this subject, but it doesn't strike me as a terribly tall order. Characters in cyberpunk are already confronted by immortal and unbelievably powerful entities in the form of corporations and governments. Characters in cyberpunk are almost always confronting enemies that officially do not exist. Whether we're talking about corporate black ops teams or Mi Go miners from the stars, the result is – or at least should be – pretty much the same.

Really, the Mythos antagonists and the corporate antagonists and the crime antagonists need to be presented side by side. They need to be integrated and parallels drawn. The point is that these things aren't different from the standpoint of cyberpunk protagonists. This book mentions in an offhand comment that a Hound of Tindalos is not that different from a Cyberninja, but the author never internalized that truth. That should have been the thesis statement of this entire fucking book. And it wasn't. This book has no thesis statement. It's quite disappointing.

AncientH:

This has been a disappointing review. I guess I should have seen that coming. I mean, we did Call of Cthulhu 5.6, and we did GURPS Cyberpunk - that's about 90% of the DNA that went into this book right here. But I guess I expected that to be a jumping-off point - I wanted to see that DNA recombined. I wanted to see technocultists and bad 3D art and street samurai versus shoggoths; I wanted Tibetan monks to buy a computer that would calculate the billion names of god so that the stars would come right, and summoning circles you could print out.



I wanted humanity's full-steam technological advance toward the singularity to be driven by the Mi-Go, who are setting humanity up to fail or feed to Yog-Sothoth or something; I want to see Replicants fight Deep Ones and AIs driven to artificial insanity trying to comprehend alien mathematics. I want to see old horrors and new horrors confront each other in decaying urban cores, and the shadows of Carcosa to fall over the post-industrial hellhole of Detroit, so shambling addicts wander around with yellow eyes, their dream-selves lost in that endless city while their meat bodies wander and starve. I want to see corrupt corporate executives sell out everything for power, and ancient creatures who have already transcended their humanity face creatures that were never human at all.


And I want Arcudi and Mignola to illustrate it.

It's...just the waste that gets me. I'm depressed.

[Red_Rob]

I wanted humanity's full-steam technological advance toward the singularity to be driven by the Mi-Go, who are setting humanity up to fail or feed to Yog-Sothoth or something; I want to see Replicants fight Deep Ones and AIs driven to artificial insanity trying to comprehend alien mathematics. I want to see old horrors and new horrors confront each other in decaying urban cores, and the shadows of Carcosa to fall over the post-industrial hellhole of Detroit, so shambling addicts wander around with yellow eyes, their dream-selves lost in that endless city while their meat bodies wander and starve. I want to see corrupt corporate executives sell out everything for power, and ancient creatures who have already transcended their humanity face creatures that were never human at all.

What I want is for you to write all the fluff for Sentai F'taghn.

This was an interesting review. One of the big things that makes the Mythos popular is the way writers are encouraged to take the traditional elements and spin them in interesting new directions. So you get A Colder War positing Old One tech as the tinder that turns the cold war hot, Delta Green taking the themes of Hastur and Carcosa and twisting it into a surrealist nightmare, or The Laundry extrapolating the maths-as-magic of Dreams in the Witch House into handheld computing spellbooks. This kind of thing is what makes the modern mythos so engaging, and I was really hoping for more of this kind of worldbuilding from this book. I guess the fact it was never built upon kind of suggested it wasn't going to be anything that special, but it still seems like a big missed opportunity.

[Maxus]

So let's add "CthulhuPunk" to the list of things Sentai Fh'tagn could support.

I mean, it sounds like it'd just be an alternate setting for the system/rules--one without the Kaiju class, and you play at Agent level.

[Mask_De_H]

Isn't Sentai Fhtagn already Mythos-flavored (post) cyberpunk? I mean, you have the tech and the alienation and the arcologies and the omnipresent social entites, it's just most of those entities aren't trying to fuck you.

I could give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about the Mythos (or GURPS, really), but the way it's laid out in this review it seems like this book should've been a slam dunk. It is a shame they dropped the ball this hard

[DSMatticus]

Sentai Fhtagn is not really cyberpunk. There are some similarities (particularly in the "transhumanism and you - what is this whole humanity thing, anyway?" area), but the core themes are super different.

Cyberpunk heroes carve out a living by pissing into the cold, hard machinery on which the world turns and that marchinery grinds on unnoticing. The nature of the world is relentlessly immutable and no matter how great your accomplishments the world will still be ruled by emotionless, faceless constructs who give zero fucks about humanity (the corps, dystopian governments, "the man"). It's a story about hopeless insignificance in the face of a world ran by man-made forces that no one has any control over anymore - which are only sometimes literally man-made machines.

Sentai Fhtagn heroes punch humanity's existential threats in the face. The very continued existence of the world hinges on their individual ability to make that happen. The world is a candle that they must carry through the storm, and their successes buy humanity time while their failures are measured in casualties - sometimes by the handful, sometimes by the cityful. It's a story about shouldering crushing responsibility because there was never really any other option.

Now, random agents are far less subject to this, because they aren't superpowered child soldiers, they're just detectives and commandos. But it's still a story happening in a largely united (albeit heavily infiltrated) world. Humanity isn't being ruled by uncaring algorithms embedded in competing corporate infrastructures, it's being ruled by a bunch of bureacrats and generals who actually do care when cities have to be taken off the maps. Thematically, it's a lot less Wall Street and a lot more Cold War.

[Whipstitch]

I think it's cyberpunk enough to get the job done depending on your points of emphasis. Yes, cyberpunk tends to feature faceless forces, but it's also about how not even faceless forces can predict the unknowable future. The grimderp aspects of cyberpunk get all the press, but it's also heavy on black humor and how anything or anyone can be taken out of their element.

[Ancient History]

Cyberpunk is a measure of attitude more than discrete setting elements; aspects like the growth of worldwide computer network, the shrinking influence of governments, the abandonment of nation-states as a tribe, the growth of power and importance of corporations, the development of artificial intelligence, and the interface between humans and technology are very common in cyberpunk...but then, so it was in the New Wave sci fi of Phillip K. Dick and the space operas of Larry Niven; none of the science-fiction elements of cyberpunk are unique to cyberpunk. What sets it apart is the focus on the near future instead of the far future; the alienation of the self through technology; questioning what it means to be human in an age of genetic science and cybertechnology, wageslaves and virtual communities where traditional societal norms and structures break down.

[hyzmarca]

Isn't Sentai Fhtagn already Mythos-flavored (post) cyberpunk? I mean, you have the tech and the alienation and the arcologies and the omnipresent social entites, it's just most of those entities aren't trying to fuck you.

I could give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about the Mythos (or GURPS, really), but the way it's laid out in this review it seems like this book should've been a slam dunk. It is a shame they dropped the ball this hard

Sentai Fhtagn isn't an anything yet, really, other than a mishmash of ideas that need to be polished and built upon.

Cyberpunk is a measure of attitude more than discrete setting elements; aspects like the growth of worldwide computer network, the shrinking influence of governments, the abandonment of nation-states as a tribe, the growth of power and importance of corporations, the development of artificial intelligence, and the interface between humans and technology are very common in cyberpunk...but then, so it was in the New Wave sci fi of Phillip K. Dick and the space operas of Larry Niven; none of the science-fiction elements of cyberpunk are unique to cyberpunk. What sets it apart is the focus on the near future instead of the far future; the alienation of the self through technology; questioning what it means to be human in an age of genetic science and cybertechnology, wageslaves and virtual communities where traditional societal norms and structures break down.

This is very true.

[Longes]

I'm still sad Shadowrun never left its comfort zone of "Moderately immoral near-human criminals (blood mages, vampires and murderers need not apply) doing crime thangs".