[OSSR]CyberCthulhu

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CyberCthulhu

A surreal series of zine rants



That maybe doesn't look very cyberpunk or particularly mythosy and honestly, it isn't. But that's the real cover for one of these things.



I don't know what that is supposed to be, but it's more obviously inspired by Cyberpunk and Mythos. Anyway, it's the other cover.

AncientH

Frank and I have covered Call of Cthulhu, GURPS: Cyberpunk, and GURPS: Cthulhupunk, so now we're doing...sort of the same thing from a different angle.

Back in the early 90s, people could self-produce and sell zines related to their favorite RPGS; R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 had Interface, Call of Cthulhu had The Unspeakable Oath. In '92 they had a "crossover" where both 'zines had material related to "Cthulhupunk." So we're going to be looking at that: Interface Magazine vol. 2, no. 2 and The Unspeakable Oath #7.

Frank

I feel I have to go back a bit because we're reviewing articles in Zines from 1992, and in the twenty first century people don't know what Zines are. This makes me feel very old. Basically kids: Zines are like MySpace pages in print form. Fuck. That reference is itself dated beyond recognition and that was from a decade later. Damn I'm old. Anyway, you know how some YouTube channels are filled with incomprehensible rant vlogs and little clips of whatever the host happens to obsess over? Well imagine that, but in printed form and then photocopied and distributed via the US Mail or sold over the counter at head shops.

Head shops were like if Hot Topic sold weed out of the back and didn't have a regional manager whose job it was to stop it. Don't @ me.

So an example Zine I used to own was Animal Review #8: The Unreliable Edition. In addition to some True Facts about animals and some reviews of then current music, it had a deep dive into the similarities and differences between Dostoyevsky's The Possessed and LeGuin's The Dispossessed. And some rants, funny anecdotes, and some crude hand drawn pictures. So basically exactly what you'd find on an eclectic personal YouTube channel, but back then in order to make something like that you hand to type up all the scripts, do paste-up with actual paste, and then photocopy all the pages to make the booklet. I found Animal Review #8 in San Francisco in the 90s, and I have never met anyone else who has ever held a copy of Animal Review #8. Heck, it's actually labeled “The Unreliable Edition” and I don't know that there were actually seven previous issues because I've not seen them all.

Some Zines attempted to gain some semblance of “legitimacy.” Often this was as simple as just being a fanzine of some star or product and calling the object of adoration and saying “I'm making a fanzine about your work, is that cool?” Sometimes there were even commercial licensing agreements. Being the “official” fanzine of one thing or another would sometimes get you a lot more readers depending on what the fandom was. And there's definitely a spectrum of professionality: Disney maintained heir own in house “fanzine” that had glossy pages, while at the other end of the spectrum you got guys doing the Beautiful Mind thing in their own garages. And somewhere along that spectrum you got Pagan Publishing and Promethean Press – two outfits that were able to get people to write for them and submit art because they could deliver somewhat higher production values. Yes, these outfits are still basically “four guys and a dog” but people who couldn't get a gig writing for TSR or R Talsorian (yet was the implied suffix to that thought) would submit to them to these game zines. Think of it like Onyx Path, but in 1992.


The Unspeakable Oath was a semi-official Call of Cthulhu fanzine that ran 14 issues between 1990 and 2001. The numbering is complicated by the fact that several issues were “double issues” that have multiple numbers on them and at least one issue has a different cover and print size in different printings. And the first few issues came out fast and furious – the Issue 7 we are reviewing came out in 1992, so if some time between 1993 and 2001 you had thought the Unspeakable Oath had stopped being published altogether, that would have been pretty reasonable since issues weren't coming out even every year before they officially admitted they weren't doing it anymore. Interface was a semi-official Cyberpunk 2020 fanzine that seems to have only run 6 issues, but they are divided into “volumes” like they were a scientific journal. So while this is “Issue 2” it's actually the second “Issue 2” and as far as I can tell it's also the last “Issue 2.”

AncientH

Fair disclaimer: I actually published stuff in the later issues of The Unspeakable Oath.

TUO and Pagan Publishing in particular are sort of a heartbreaker's nexus; many of their products are fairly highly-regarded within the Call of Cthulhu gaming circles to this day, and the folks behind them are the ones that do stuff like Delta Green and Achtung! Cthulhu and World War Cthulhu.

This isn't quite the first "CyberCthulhu/Cthulhupunk" sort of crossover, in fiction or otherwise, and the seeds of this kind of crossover have been evident in fiction since the 80s, but the real impetus for an actual "event" like this was probably the publication of Cthulhu Now: Modern Adventures and Background for Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying by Chaosium in 1992, which introduced things like the Computer skill.

Frank

While the things Lovecraft actually wrote were collectively in the then-current genre of “Weird Fiction” which included everything from gothic horror to detective stories, he is most remembered for “The Mythos” which is essentially science fiction. So whenever some bright young lad comes up with the idea to “combine Mythos and Science Fiction” that's off to a bad start. Not that this doesn't happen all the time (see CthulhuTech and CthulhuPunk), but it's basically like someone offering to make your coffee into a hot caffeinated drink. This isn't chocolate and peanut butter being offered, they are combining orange and lemon marmalade.

The CyberCthulhu section in The Unspeakable Oath begins with an attempt to explain what Cyberpunk is. Not the game of Cyberpunk, but the actual literary subgenre. I don't think it particularly does a great job of explaining the situation, but we're talking about a fricking zine article,so I don't know what you're expecting. The CyberCthulhu section in Interface appears to have been written under the impression that the crossover was going to be called “The Dark Time” which is a better name. In any case, the Interface article begins with a tirade about how great a game Call of Cthulhu is, and introducing you to the core ideas of that RPG. This might be why this appears to be the last issue of Interface.

The Unspeakable Oath is basically a one-man show being done by John Tynes. He's the editor, publisher, and sole credited author on the entire CyberCthulhu thing. He's the same John Tynes who would go on to do Delta Green and Unknown Armies. The Interface doesn't break down who wrote what and just has six “staff writers.” Some of these guys went on to do other things, Thaddeus Howze is now a futurist essayist. Barton Bolmen appears to have fallen off the face of the Earth once the Interface closed shop. Peter Christian's work in Interface achieved some note and he appears to have continued writing for other gaming magazines in the 90s, but it's hard to tell because he has a really common name. Chris Hockabout went on to do some work on video games and also wrote some sourcebooks for Secrets of Zir'An which is an RPG you have never heard of because it had the poor timing to try to be a stand alone game system during the d20 boom. Aram Gutowski had a company called The Eighth Direction and was also in on the Secrets of Zir'An thing and now I think he makes craft beer. And finally, Kevin De'Antonio also appears to have fallen off the face of the Earth, but I wouldn't be at all surprised that he simply started spelling his name differently or something. In any case, all of these people lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1992, and most of them still do. The entire crossover idea was because they actually all met up in person and decided to do that.


We have at times called attention to the fact that, for example, the original Lion Rampant team shared a dorm room or that TSR used to recruit people directly from the local college gaming clubs in Wisconsin. Well the Bay Area gaming scene was similarly insular. I personally didn't get recruited to write for these people because I was in junior high at the time, but the fact is these guys had haunts and social circles not far removed from my own. It's almost a certainty that I've been in a game store with at least one of these authors at some point, and a pretty significant chance that we've been at the same house party. Like, if Thaddeus Howze never went to one of my uncle's massive Oakland Thanksgivings in the 90s, it was because of a scheduling conflict rather than a lack of social circle intersection.

AncientH

CyberPunk, for the uninitiated, is something of a sub-genre or style of science fiction. Writers who are frequently grouped behind the "CyberPunk author" label include William A. Gibson, Lewis Shiner, Walter John Williams, Bruce Sterling, and others. Superficially, Cyberpunk consists of two main features.

Johnny Mnemonic, based on the short story by William Gibson, wouldn't come out until 1995. Back in '92, cyberpunk was already a decade old literary trend that never really escaped the artistic shadow of Bladerunner (1982), and more people had heard of Lawnmower Man (1992) than Gunhed (1989).

So when Tynes is presenting a synopsis of Cyberpunk as he understands it, it's for an audience that would have been too young to read Neuromancer (1984) when it came out.

Frank

Did Unspeakable Oath go on longer than Interface because it had worse production values and was basically a one-man show? Quite possibly. Zines are a labor of love and obsession, and getting a group to stay together and keep doing it can be really hard. Egos get in the way and stuff. It's also possible that Interface fell apart because, well, Cyberpunk fell apart. Not the genre, but the actual RPG. In 1993, Cyberpunk 2020 went in a really weird direction with Cybergeneration, and a lot of Cyberpunk fans were very much not on board. Another edition of Cyberpunk didn't happen until 2005, and Cyberpunk 203X was so fucking weird that most fans of the game and genre were just dumbfounded by the whole thing.


By contrast, Call of Cthulhu has never done anything in particular that caused enough controversy in the community to get it to fragment. Call of Cthulhu is still very recognizably a game from the early eighties that wears its 1970s framework without shame. People get disillusioned with Call of Cthulhu of course – it's a pretty shit game engine to be honest – but people leave Call of Cthulhu, Call of Cthulhu has never left its fans.

AncientH

Call of Cthulhu never had the fanbase fracture, but it spins off games of its own all the time - usually heartbreakers, sometimes bizarre conglomerations like GURPS: CthulhuPunk. The evolving cultural context and technological possibilities of contemporary life continue to influence stories, as is very evident in Charles Stross' The Laundry series where all magic is basically computation equivalent to figuring out what the voltage is at each node in an electrical network, and major spells can be coded as apps on a smartphone. But The Atrocity Archives (2004) is twelve years in the future of this particular team-up. The internet is still a wild world wide web.

Frank

CyberCthulhu is 21 pages of Unspeakable Oath #7, and 58 pages of Interface Volume 2 #2. Almost the entirety of CyberCthulhu in the Unspeakable Oath is a scenario called Convergence by John Tyne. Interface comparatively has a lot more essays, scenarios, and vignettes, and a lot of them are made by Peter Christian or Chris Hockabout. I don't know what the other staff authors contributed, but not all the pages are attributed.

In any case, we'll be tackling the Unspeakable Oath part first, because we can definitely get through the whole zine in one post.

AncientH

Moderate your expectations. Folks hoping for Shadowrun with more tentacles are going to be disappointed; you don't get to roll up a Deep One hybrid hacker and you're not going to get a shoggothware graft on the stump of your arm. But it does get...interesting. So, strap in and prepare for a historical deep dive into a "what might have been." If anything, this is a bit similar to The Future World of Darkness, where somebody is trying to cram two flavors of ice cream together to see how they taste.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CyberCthulhu

Convergence


Basically, literally this.

AncientH

Because of these similarities. the thought of a "crossover" scenario has crossed the minds of numerous players and gamemasters. Such events have been run at GenCon. and groups of role-players have done their own such pieces. An official crossover work has not appeared between R. Talsorian and Chaosium, largely because a satisfactory proposal has never been made.

Pagan Publishing and Prometheus Press decided to fill that void (the Four "P" Pact). through the agents of our respective publications. The Unspeakable Oath and Interface. The present work is the result of brainstorming sessions between the two companies. and hopefully will provide the players of both games a little something different in their role-playing diet.

To see the beginning of this, turn the page.

Okay, so Tynes' part of the "pact" was to write the adventure "Convergence," which appeared in The Unspeakable Oath #7, which bears the rather worring tagline

in which the investigators are seduced by science, then raped by it

I've posted my thoughts on rape in gaming before, and just having it front-and-center makes this whole thing feel very edgelord-y.

This scenario is the first of two, each of which examines CyberPunk concepts in Call of Cthulhu--and vice versa This scenario. a 1990s Cthulhu Now piece. introduces a few concepts used in CyberPunk fiction as well as R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk role-playing game. It requires the Call of Cthulhu 5th edition rules-or any earlier edition plus the Cthulhu Now rules-to play. The second scenario. "Transference: will appear in issue 7 of Interface. a digest for the Cyberpunk role-playing game. It is a 2020s Cyberpunk scenario that features Mythos elements. Each scenario stands alone. and can be played independently. Their stories are interrelated. however. despite the fact that they are set 30+ years apart

Frank

This adventure is not actually a Cyberpunk crossover in any meaningful sense. It takes place in the 1990s and uses the Cthulhu Now rules. It's supposed to be a prelude to an actual Cyberpunk adventure called Transference which we are promised will come out in issue #7 of Interface. Of course, Interface never had a seventh issue to my knowledge, and the adventure in question is in issue #2 of Volume 2, which is probably the sixth and final issue. Confused? Well, obviously John Tynes was too, so don't feel bad. In any case, this adventure is a prequel, but it's a prequel to Delta Green, rather than Cyberpunk.

Actual Delta Green wouldn't come out until 1997, but this adventure has John Tynes' exact Delta Green rant in it that he'd use to launch the game five years later. Like, he specifically exactly calls it “Delta Green” and it's the exact same thing. So this was clearly a thing he was doing in his at home homebrew Call of Cthulhu campaign for many years before he made it into a standalone game that he sold to other people for real money. It's important to recall that most of the games of the eighties and nineties were actually like that – people would run homebrew campaigns for years and then try to codify what they were doing into books. The thing where games get written before they get played is an artifact of the 21st century and word processors. That didn't used to happen.

AncientH

Some of the stuff that Tynes talks are in Interface vol. 2, no. 2 (whole number 6), so whether this was a typo on his part or what, I have no idea.

Anyway, as I said, Cthulhu Now introduced the Computer Use Skill, and probably inspired some early CthulhuPunk/CyberCthulhu fiction set in the modern day or near future such as Marela Sands' "Star Bright, Star Byte" (1994), Lawrence Watt-Evans’ “Pickman’s Modem” (1992), Michael D. Winkle’s “Typo” (1994), and Scott David Aniolowski’s “I Dream of Wires” (1995). Of course, pretty much the entire Mythos was created either during the 1920s/30s (Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, etc.) or the 1960s (Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, etc.), so this was really uncharted territory - nobody knew how these eldritch horrors interacted with a dial-up modem or virtual sex. There are quite literally Call of Cthulhu adventures that deal with a Shub-Niggurath cult infiltrating a computer phone sex line and stuff like that. Maybe we'll OSSR those one day.

Anyway, the assumption is the player characters are down for a Cthulhu Now game.

Frank

Fitting this scenario into your Cthulhu Now campaign isn't easy. but then few published scenarios are.

The fact that Call of Cthulhu fans seemed to accept that the underlying pitch of the game and also the way the mechanics worked out created strong disincentives for the player characters to interact with the adventures at any level still blows my fucking mind. Like, the very first part of your adventure is the part where the players have buy-in that their characters are going to participate in the adventure. I mean, fucking obviously, right? That's not a specific dig at this adventure, it's just continually shocking to me how fucking obvious this problem is and despite that fact Call of Cthulhu has never meaningfully attempted to fix it. It's weird, because games like Arkham Horror just casually have answers to this. And of course, Cyberpunk 2020 just assumed everyone was a small time special operations mercenary and that each adventure was a job.

When John Tynes ran this adventure at home, the player characters were simply declared by fiat to be members of Delta Green. Yes, that Delta Green. And thus, the answer to why the characters were there and would keep investigating despite the fact that shit got weird instead of calling the cops was “It's your job, and you are the cops. You're the ones who have been called to deal with this.” Which is fine. But the front and center admission is that this adventure does not actually work if the player characters aren't already FBI agents who work for a shadowy anti-paranormal government task force. There isn't a lot of reason for the player characters to get involved if they are members of an established Cthulhu Now campaign. This is of course, a general problem with Call of Cthulhu.

If this premise sounds like it's ripped off from The X Files, I want to remind you that The X Files came out in 1993. Actual Delta Green of course didn't come out until 1997, and was casually accused of being an X Files ripoff most of the time it was discussed. I assume every time people said that, John Tynes made the sound that Sideshow Bob makes when stepping on a rake.

AncientH

Under the ice in Antarctica lies the Outer God Ubbo-Sothla. the Unbegotten Source. Ubbo-Sothla has been there for eons, unthinking, unmoving, simply existing, a massive bulk of primal ooze. The Elder Things long ago used matter taken from Ubbo-Sothla to construct their terrible Shoggoths: more recently, the Mi-Go have begun experimenting with the properties of this strange being.

One of the (not literal) trademarks of Tynes' Delta Green is that the primary antagonists are the Mi-Go - the fungi from Yuggoth. They play the part of the Bad Aliens in the setting, and there are no good aliens. They actually created the Greys just to fuck with humanity (not literally). Which is all fine. There are entire subsections of CoC devoted to fapping to the Mi-Go.

And entirely separate section of the Mythos faps to Ubbo-Sathla, which was created by Clark Ashton Smith and occupies a kind of weird place in the whole hierarchy, since during the initial run of stories U-S is only mentioned once or twice and kind of contradicts Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness on the origins of the human race...but nobody except true nerds get boners about that.

Mostly what you care about is that we still haven't gotten to what the adventure is about yet. The first page talks up Delta Green, the second page talks deep background the players will probably never know, which involves using Ubbo-Sathla's proto-matter to upgrade a bunch of rednecks in Groversville, Tennessee.

Frank

Regardless of how AncientHistory feels about Clark Ashton-Smith, I want to point out that the god's name is “Ubbo-Sathla” but that in this zine it is rendered as “Ubbo-Sothla.” This goes to a larger point. Not that zines are only theoretically edited and that getting upset about typos in a zine is like getting upset about repeats in Possum Every Hour or Hourly Wolves; but that 1992 is before there was an HP Lovecraft wiki to look up gods from Clark Ashton Smith short stories on. It's not quite before there was an internet, this zine says that they like to hang out on the games message board on AOL, but it's before search engines allowed you to casually answer trivia questions from your phone.

John Tynes may have never seen an actual copy of the Ubbo-Sathla story and just heard it spoken aloud. Alternately, he might have read it, but many years in the past. There just wasn't an easy way to check how ancient god names were spelled back then.

And also, it's important to note that the original authors didn't actually care very much. The whole idea that any of these gods have correct spellings of their names is a decadent affectation of modern fandom. The actual Ubbo-Sathla story opens with a tract from the Book of Eibon that gleefully spells Cthulhu as “Kthulhut,” Yog Sothoth as “Yok Zothoth,” and Tsathoggua as “Zhothaqquah.” Partially because Clark Ashton-Smith didn't give a shit, but in a much larger context because no one gave a shit before obsessive fanboys with internet connections stuck their dicks in the mashed potatoes. The whole idea that any of these words have correct and incorrect spellings was a very fringe notion in 1992.

But that's all a second order concern, because the connection between Antarctic Shoggoths and Mi-Go performing human experimentation in Groversville, Tennessee is... not obvious. Like, the Mi-Go are doing human experimentation and one of their unwilling test subjects now has terrible strength at terrible cost, and that could honestly be the whole thing. There's an Antarctica connection for no obvious reason. This ties into the proto-tech rant from the next zine, but it doesn't obviously tie into the actual adventure being presented in this zine; which is about a Tennessee hick given super strength by the painful and insane experiments of the Mi-Go.

AncientH

So, just to be clear, the "cyberpunk" aspects of this story are basically that Billy Ray Spivey has gotten some eldritch augmentations. Not because he had a terrible accident and they decided to Six Million Dollar Man him, or because he turned out to be a robot from the future, but just because the Mi-Go wanted to see what would happen, I guess. Which is to say, this is not very cyberpunk at all.

That being said, FBI agents brought in to review a case-in-progress is not the worst way to begin an adventure. So the player characters are brought in so that the Keeper/Mister Cavern can describe a grainy video of a cashier getting their head crushed to a pulp. (0/1 SAN loss)

BTW, the "proto-matter" and its properties discussed here sound a lot like what we call "stem cells" these days, in that they can turn into different types of cells...like bone or cartilage or blood cells or muscle tissue or whatever you need. That is more of a stopped-clock moment than any kind of prescience on Tynes' part. He just needed something to upgrade the rednecks with.

Frank

You might think that a manhunt chasing a superhuman rampaging monster dude with a dramatic combat to bring him down might be a good adventure for player characters to do. But this adventure is having none of that. The entire “manhunt” portion of this story with the dramatic standoff and major fight with the enhanced fugitive happens in the prologue and the players get to hear about it. At length.

No, what the player characters get to do is wander around a small town in Tennessee talking to farmers about cattle mutilations. After three days of accomplishing nothing, the players get special spray bottles that turn purple in contact with alien jizz. So basically the players then get to reenact the “semen stains” skit from the Upright Citizens Brigade.


The town is covered in semen stains.

This adventure proceeds to break many other rules of cooperative storytelling. One of the player characters is supposed to get captured off camera without the player having any knowledge or chance to avoid this fate. That is bullshit. It also expects that the player will have their character behave like a character with a zombie bite in a horror movie and hide it from the other characters, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how players operate in cooperative storytelling games so severe that I genuinely don't know what is going on. And here's what it says about the only people in town who actually have useful information that will send you to a named adventure locale:

You can make these fellows up as needed,

What the actual fuck!?

Also special props go out to the fact that the next big location is the reservoir, but if you do the obvious thing and find out about it immediately and go there before day 3 when you don't have the ability to test for semen stains, you get stone walled. This being an RPG, it is highly likely that the game just flatlines at that point, because once the characters have the reservoir crossed off their list as a red herring there's no particular reason for them to go back. This isn't a computer adventure game, where the fact that it's been rendered at all means that you'll keep coming back to “Use Spray Bottle” or whatever as soon as you get a new usable item to see if it drops a fucking rooster key.

AncientH

The plot here is a bit thin. The PCs aren't involved in the capture of Billy Ray Spivey, and they arrive in a good ol' boy town while Tynes gives an elaborate and useless background on how the Mi-Go have been manipulating NASA since the 1970s and are behind alien abductions.

Depending on how savvy the players are and how badly the Keeper wants to fuck with them, this could get seriously weird, since many entities in the Mythos are already literal aliens, and the Mi-Go are a ways down on the chart. Expect experienced PCs to be hunting up local churches and libraries, haunting graveyards, that kind of thing.

None of this is played for horror in any real sense. It's not like The Stuff. You land in a town where not much seems to be wrong and everybody tells you it's fine.


Hmm. Damn fine coffee.

Frank

This scene, believe it or not, provides an opportunity for intense drama A re-telling of what happened in play testing should demonstrate this.

Fuck you!

The re-telling of what happened is that apparently John Tynes, as MC, completely jerked people around and had a blob of goo leap out of the water and destroy a player character's handgun despite the fact that there's no reason to believe the blob could that and also that's not how combat in Call of Cthulhu works.

So it turns out that if the MC ignores the rules and the established parameters of the fictional world in order to do jump scares, the players are unnerved. John Tynes is very proud of himself for having figured this out.

Anyway, the final part of the adventure is just a dungeon crawl in a barn. I'm not actually sure how you're supposed to find the barn. The various set pieces let you see weird horror shit and mutilated bodies and so on and so forth, but bursting into the room with the blob that has absorbed all the aldermen doesn't lead to the final adventure location. The players will presumably figure out that something's up almost immediately, but you don't actually get to the end boss through any of that. Eventually the players are just supposed to see a UFO make its way into the installation and then they follow it. All the rest of the investigation is pointless and leads nowhere. Eventually the MC gets bored and there is a literal giant glowing arrow in the sky telling the players where to go.

AncientH

If any of the PCs heard this was a cyberpunk-inspired adventure and put points into their Computer Use skill, then good news! One of the victims has a computer you can hack. If you do, you get access to some files that...are...technically clues. I mean, they don't tell you what's going on and just seem like your bog-standard alien abduction/cattle mutilation/strange lights in the sky/crop circles bullshit.

That is the beginning and end of your use of Computer Use in this adventure.

As for the rape part...Billy Ray Spivey has a girlfriend.

When she was abducted, her uterus and cervix were replaced. She was already pregnant (by way of Spivey) but the replacement uterus and cervix served as accelerators. Although only three weeks pregnant, she is already at the six-month stage of development. Each week that goes by encompasses two months' worth of development by the infant-a week and a half from the start of the scenario she will give birth.

If it's in the womb, it's a fetus and not an infant, John.

Jane will give birth a week-and-a-half into the scenario. The infant is human and appears normal to doctors, but the amniotic fluids it is developing in are very different from the usual kind, and as a result the child is essentially a Spawn of Ubbo-Sothla with human intelligence and form.

This sounds like it should be important to the scenario, but ultimately it's glossed over and kind of forgotten about. Like the whole cyberpunk thing.

Frank

An obvious question at this point is probably, "where's the CyberPunk?"

Yes. That is a question I had.

This scenario is a tough one to beat. "Winning" hinges on the agents finding the Mi-Go installation, which they can only do if they watch the skies for the "UFOs" and follow them to the farm. Otherwise, they're toasl

That's not “tough” you fucking asshole! That's deus ex machina after the plot just completely fucking fails to go anywhere. There is no connection between the middle of this story and the end of this story. None of the clues actually lead to the conclusion. This would be like doing a Sherlock Holmes story where the true culprit wasn't even introduced until the final chapter and also it turned out that none of the clues had anything to do with them.

This is possibly the worst mystery adventure I've ever seen. There is seriously nothing in the entire investigation that actually leads to the final confrontation. That's so mind bogglingly awful.

Also yes, it's not cyberpunk in any way. It's only here because it's the prequel to an actual Cyberpunk adventure that's set 30 years later. I don't even words.

AncientH

I also want to add that one of the "clues" the PCs can find is an audio file.

The sound sample mentioned in "Smithee's Computer" exists. It was prepared by the author for the playtest session, using Garrick McFarlane's freeware program "Sample Editor." The sample is rather eerie. In play, the players were given a diskette and directed to the author's Macintosh. There, they experimented with the program and the sound sample until they finally figured out how to decipher it. It proved to be one of the most intense and dramatic periods of play, as they all gathered around the computer and kept refining the sound to figure out what it was saying.

'Sample Editor" requires a 68020 or greater Macintosh running System 7 or later. It also requires at least a 13" 8-bit color monitor to function. To get the program and the sound file, send a formatted Macintosh diskette (DD or HD) along with a self-addressed envelope with enough postage to mail your disk back, to: Pagan Publishing; 403A N. 8th SI.; Columbia, MO 65201 .

If you don't have the needed equipment, you can also send a blank cassette tape (again, with a SASE) to the same address. We'll put both the original sound and the deciphered version on the tape and mail it back. In play, let the players hear the first one, then ask for Computer Use rolls. If any succeed, play the second one. The players can make their best to the content, and you can ignore the Listen rolls normally called for in the scenario.

Mailing in a formatted Mac diskette is probably the most cyberpunk thing involving this scenario.

Frank

This is the start of Delta Green. A homebrew setting for Call of Cthulhu where the players play character like in the X Files.

Delta Green was not off to a good start. John Tynes basically shits all over the rules and player agency for cheap jump scares. The mystery is unsolvable because there are literally zero clues that lead to the good ending.

And the thing is, this is not remotely difficult. Consider Season 3 of Stranger Things. Hopper and Joyce find a list of properties that the bad guys have purchased, and then they fucking drive to them until they find the one with the evil machine in it. That's not fucking Shakespeare, it's basic storytelling. Making it so that the adventure locations proceeded in an order of some kind where they gave you relevant information for the next location and one of the later ones gave you the invoices on the abandoned farms or some shit and then you'd have them added to your map as locations to go to is not difficult.

This basic story structure is not complicated. You go to a town, you see some weird and horrifying shit, and then you go to an abandoned farm and fight it out with an evil wizard. I mean, it's basically just the structure of The Dunwich Horror, except that for some stupid reason there aren't any clues to tell the protagonists that the Whately Farm is a place they should maybe go at some point. I just don't even fucking know.

AncientH

Billy Ray Spivey. should any of the agents ask Derringer. tried to escape and had to be killed. Like so much else in this world. this is a lie.

This about sums up the mentality of this scenario. The PCs aren't here to "win." Hell, the PCs probably aren't even clear what the hell they're doing. They came to a hick town looking into an augmented redneck, and turned up cattle mutilations, a knocked-up young woman ready to pop, a dead UFOlogist in a bath tub, and eventually the discovery that everybody has been eating or drinking unidentified biological matter...more so than usual. Then it turns out the NSA is involved just as a giant middle finger from the world to the players in particular.

At the end of the game, it's up to the players what their report reads, and there's a good chance that they and/or everyone in town is dead. Even if they "succeed" and save the town, the NSA comes in and covers everything up.

It's bleak and nihilistic and that's suitable for a certain kind of CoC/Delta Green game. But it's one thing to know going in that in Soviet Russia, Cthulhu Eats You and something else again to just scratch your head at the end and wonder what the hell you sat down to do in the first place.

Frank

It's a canned adventure in a zine. My expectations were low and they were not met. The part that drives me nuts is how fucking proud of this John Tynes obviously is. I mean, he was only 21 years old when he wrote this, but still.

Anyway: next up the part where we talk about the stuff that actually tries to be Cyberpunk in any way at all.

AncientH

On the plus side (?), I think we found something shittier than GURPS: CthulhuPunk.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CyberCthulhu

The Dark Time


This section appears to be more on point.

AncientH

The Darktime or CyberCthulhu is a combination of those two classics, Cyberpunk and Call of cthulhu. This particular issue of Interface, will offer this unusual mixture in varying degrees. Most of the material within will function quite well without any Mythos horrors, and others will be lost without them. Feel free to pick and choose and tell us what you think. there are some new rules scattered throughout the sidebars, so pay attention.

Mythos crossovers without the Mythos seems to be missing something fundamental, but in the general sense, “Cyberpunk + Horror” has been popular in a number of incarnations, as we talked about in The World of Future Darkness. As with Tynes, the Interface lads start off with a generic “What is Call of Cthulhu” style introduction; unlike Tynes, they actually make a game attempt to combine the disparate themes of the two games and provide some actual mechanics. Being a CP2020 fanzine, their focus is on bringing Call of Cthulhu-style investigations into CP2020 terms rather than adapt hacking and cybernetics to CoC.

For those of you who have been living in a cave or been playing too much AD&D, Call of Cthulhu is Chaosium's RPG set in the worlds created by the writer H. P. Lovecraft and the subsequent score of writers who kept Lovecraft's mythology alive. Call of Cthulhu (or CoC) is a RPG masterwork of setting and atmosphere. The game is supported by more than thirty well written and researched supplements and adventures world-wide.

Remember when thirty books was a real accomplishment? Most RPGs never got beyond the first book.

Frank

The Dark Time is much better written than Convergence and appears to be actually about Call of Cthulhu being mixed with Cyberpunk 2020. That doesn't mean it's great literature, but the writing is serviceable and in-genre.

In the combat zones, lone madmen cry to the skies in succor, somehow knowing their calls have been answered.

Yeah, that's suitably dark, suitably lugubrious, suitably overwrought. They went for purple prose and they got it. More sex and death!

This is what I wanted from CyberCthulhu, and Dark Time gets me closer to that than the Unspeakable Oath bit did. Which is not a high bar.

AncientH

Beyond the introduction, the contents are...mixed. I won’t say random, but not as organized as all that.

One of the things that is a hallmark of both ‘zines is a kind of conservatism: neither wants to lose the flavor of their individual setting, even as they try to bring in aspects from their brother-from-another-dark-mother-with-a-thousand-young. There are a lot of possibilities to updating the Mythos into the cyberpunk period - digitizing the old grimoires, machines breaking ancient codes and cracking alien mathematics, etc. The tone of the game is still something to play with, because CoC is generally allergic to players having any particular agency and Cyberpunk is about very different kinds of alienation for the most part - so there is a broad spectrum for what qualifies as “meeting in the middle,” and chances are you’re going to miss somebody’s sweet spot.

Frank

Knowledge, not guns, is what will get you furthest in any CoC game, regardless of whether you are playing in the 1920s or the 2020s. PCs should be encouraged to buy multiple Expert skills, specializing in a number of knowledges not covered in the list of Cyberpunk 2020 skills.

There's a bit to unpack there. First of all, while Call of Cthulhu has always sold itself as being a game where your Lore was as important as your Fight, that's only every been true in the board games. The CoC RPG, by contrast, has never successfully made us care about knowing archaeology.

Consider the adventure from the previous zine. The only failure points to the mission that are based on the numbers on your character sheet are combat related. There are a few times you can fight a Spawn of Ubbo-Sathla and there's a dungeon crawl at the end where you fight some Mi-Go in a barn. That's it. But no knowledges or skill checks will meaningfully progress you to the final confrontation. You don't fail the mission because you fail a bureaucracy test to find the fabricated deeds, there are no fabricated deeds to find. You fail the mission because the MC doesn't have the UFO put the final barn on your map before the time runs out, which has absolutely fuck all to do with what your character is capable of or the choices you make.

But secondly, it's also true that Cyberpunk 2020's skill system is a war crime. The skill system doesn't have skills for things people would plausibly want their characters to be good at, but also the rules don't support characters being good at stuff in a way that makes sense. The core mechanic is that you roll a d10, which means that failure rates are way too high and the differences between expertise levels can't be adequately conveyed. How would a character be recognizably good at Astronomy in the CP2020 ruleset? How could you make a character that was notably very good at Astronomy in this ruleset? It's not even possible. Which is not to say that CoC has a particularly better skill system. As we mentioned in the CoC review, the CoC skill system is an absolute dumpster fire.

But it goes to a larger point, which is that the game CoC fans wish they had certainly involves characters contributing to the story progress with Sumerian and Occult Knowledge and shit. But neither the mechanics nor the adventure structures support that happening. Indeed, even the structure of the game itself precludes these knowledge abilities from ever shining the way they should. The Keeper knows what's really going on, and the players have to try stuff in the absence of knowing what the plot structure is supposed to be. That means, for example, that because the players have no reason to believe that there's an Antarctica connection to the Tennessee adventure, that the characters don't derive any benefit even if they have Antarctica related knowledge.

It's a larger and more fundamental problem than a zine article was ever going to be able to address. But the “Mother May I?” system of skill use has never and will never produce meaningful contributions to the story by characters who have an interest in Egyptology. Which is a larger and more fundamental reason why CoC is bad. Even if they managed to replace “Egyptology 36%” with something that worked when used and also made any fucking sense at all – the fact that the players don't know about Egyptian connections that exist in the Keeper's mind in order to ask to use their Egyptology abilities in the first place means the whole setup would be bad for this kind of game even if the skill system were replaced with one that was functional in another context.

AncientH

Going beyond even what Frank says, part of the problem of the Cthulhu Mythos skill as separate is that it degrades the value of related skills - if you have the Egyptology Skill, for example, do you know shit about Nyarlathotep as Nephren-Ka, the Black Pharaoh? Or do you need the CM skill to know shit about the subject, even if it’s at least tangential to what you’re dealing with?

Beyond that, there’s actually a lot of stuff from CyberPunk which, if either of the principals in this crossover cared, would be a relatively easy port. Call of Cthulhu has always had guns, and players of CoC have always liked guns; getting cyberpunk guns into a CoC game would be easy-peezy. Cybernetics wouldn’t be much more difficult: it’s just another type of gear. Cyberpsychosis works hand-in-glove with CoC’s terrible insanity rules. Hacking would just be an expansion of the Computer Use rules. This is low-hanging fruit, and Tynes let it all rot on the vine...but the Interface lads went a different way.

EctoTech by Unspeak Cyberware

Frank

The later chapters tell you who wrote them, but the equipment at the front of the book doesn't. The cyberware here weirdly gets three subentries in the table of contents, so I'm guessing that several of the “staff writers” contributed in some form to this bit. Anyway, there are seven new implants, many of which you would be shocked to learn weren't already in the list of implants you could get in Cyberpunk 2020.

The only real objection I have is that the ThermaSkin keeps you comfortable at temperatures as low as 0 degrees C. I need to point out that zero degrees is not very cold. This was written in California where it doesn't normally get even that cold, but for fuck's sake I can and do wear shorts when it's five below just because I happen to be fat and hairy. But the sales pitches for these things are indeed evocative and entertaining. The fact that the skin upgrade is “now available in Gila Monster” made me genuinely laugh and it's that sort of detail that makes settings pop.

One thing I will note is that the choice to write up individual mods in this way made it so that shit you'd think was already available like bug eyes and mandibles and thermal skin was actually not in the basic book or even in the expanded chrome book and you had to find them in obscure semi-official zine articles. There had to be a better way, although of course neither Cyberpunk 2020 nor Shadowrun ever found it.

AncientH

We don’t really get any introduction here, it’s just some slightly weirder-than-usual implants for CP2020, almost none of which are explicitly Mythos-based or related, but for anyone that wants a tentacle finger or arm sheath, they’ve got you covered.



The exception is the “Elderview Implant”:

Breakthroughs in Mythos research have led to the new Eibon Biosystems ElderView eye enhancements. Made from elderitch metals and woven with nanosurgeons through a natural eye or cybereye, this new system allows you to see the mystical radiations of many otherworldly creatures. Day or night, your ElderView Implant can provide you with the general location and size of a variety of mythos beings, even through thin walls! Although it affects natural vision somewhat, it gives you the edge any investigator needs in the field. The implant, once woven in, replaces the iris with a ridged five pointed star of a pale yellow color that covers the pupil and acts as a filter for mystic radiations.

Normal images seen through the implant are blurry, -2 to Awareness/Notice rolls based on vision. regardless of lighting conditions, images appear from red to deep violet and roughly the size of the entity viewed. The more powerful the entity, the deeper the color on the color spectrum. Non-corporeal entities may also be seen. Specific targeting bonuses are not available during the analysis phase. Images can be seen through walls of 10 SP or less. Note: ElderView only operates on independent races and servitor beings of a non-terrestrial origin, Ghouls, Serpentmen, Deep Ones, etc. cannot be detected by this implant.

It’s kooky, it’s fun, and probably a lot of CoC players would react in horror at the SAN loss involved by actually seeing Mythos criters, but definitely points for effort on this one.

Cults: Hopes and Horrors

Frank

This 7 page essay is listed as being by Peter Christian and it has a bibliography. This isn't a chapter about cultists as disposable human shaped antagonists you can gun down in action sequences, this chapter is almost exclusively about cults as a real world phenomenon. About the ways they have of recruiting people and the multiple levels of control they impose on their members. This chapter could largely be about the Branch Davidians as much as it is about the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and it is much higher brow and more even handed about this material than anything I can recall having been written for actual Call of Cthulhu products. Here is an honest assessment that people join and stay in cults for understandable reasons and that “deprogrammers” are also kidnappers and brainwashers themselves.

This is where coming at it from the standpoint of not trying to use the actual Call of Cthulhu rules really helps. You don't join a cult because “You are insane, LOL” you join a cult because it seems like they are offering something that is missing in your actual life. It might be a sense of purpose or belonging, or maybe even just a sense of certainty. But as this chapter points out: most people who join cults also leave them shortly thereafter with no repercussions. There are sincere cults and cynical cults, and this is just a refreshing way of looking at this material which is just much more mundane and real than the hyperbole you normally see in Call of Cthulhu products.

AncientH

Not very cyberpunk, eh?

This is almost GURPS-level quality of writing, which is a good thing.

The prominence of cults in CoC has less to do with Lovecraft and his contemporaries, as much as they loved a good cult, as it is the general pulp aesthetic that inspired D&D and Call of Cthulhu; it was CoC more than anything which latched onto the “Cthulhu cult” from “The Call of Cthulhu” as the de facto mode for interacting with the Mythos - because it’s a lot easier for human investigators to deal with human cultists than it is for them to tussle with actual Mythos entities. So the number of cults proliferated and got progressively zanier, until you wonder who supplies all the hooded robes and sacrificial daggers.



Cyberpunk, weirdly enough, also deals with a lot of new religious movements and that kind of thing. Religion in cyberpunk fiction is rarely the exact focus of things, but it adapts to the changing syntax of culture and technology - voudounistas cutting deals with loa in the Matrix, street preachers with wearable hologram rigs, L. Bob Rife trying to insert a malicious Sumerian code into the global computer network, etc. So there’s definitely room for cults in CyberCthulhu.

Frank

Having already established that you can have a perfectly reasonable conversation with your cousin Nancy about whether she should stop following the teachings of the King in Yellow – that it's perfectly possible for the high priest to be a cynical charlatan who is exploiting Nancy for financial gain and also that Nancy gets real social and spiritual support from the cult that is genuinely worth more to her than the tithes she pays – the essay drops the monsters in right at the end. So yeah, the Mythos is real, the Esoteric Order of Dagon has a giant man-eating fish in the basement that they feed hobos to. This is a splendid double twist and makes this essay much more, dare I say it, Lovecraftian than most CoC stuff tends to be.

One issue where it stumbles a bit is the idea that it is somehow difficult to not be in the system in the Cyberpunk 2020s. That's a problem with the compressed timeline, honestly, and it's a problem that comes up over and over again. While the whole idea of the computer picking your career at age 15 is very cyberpunk and very much in tune with how people saw the future going with a 90s idea of Progress, the fact remains that we're still only talking about 30 years in the future. People who were in junior high in the nineties are just in their forties in the 2020s. People who were born before all the babies got chipped just aren't very old, because Cyberpunk 2020 wasn't set far enough in the future to make their pronouncements make a lot of sense. But yeah, it really seems like if a vampire gets any shit about not having an electronic birth record they can just say “I'm 58, we didn't have those in 1962.”

AncientH

One aspect that isn’t focused on too heavily is “Why do Mythos entities have cults?” and that is something that could sort of be expanded on a bit. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” one of the notable hallmarks of the global Cthulhu cult is that there is no indication that the Big C gives a shit about them or even knows they exist - the cops totally raid the bayou and just arrest people. The people in the cult have a spiel about how they’re special and when the stars are right they’ll be rewarded, but there’s no objective proof of that - it could all be delusion.

Which is fine. That works. Maybe the Esoteric Order of Dagon is just humans trying to come to terms with the fact that the Deep Ones like to get their freak on with hairless hominids. Alan Moore even did that:


The rest of this comic in uncensored.

Adding a cyberpunk twist to old cults can lead to something like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, where the horrible soulless corporate horror is just the smokescreen for the real evil about to be perpetrated...when the stars are right.

From Dark Future to Gothic Horror

A Cyberpunk to CoC Crossover Rules Variation

Frank

This is seven pages written apparently by Peter Christian. The table of contents says it's thirteen pages because it completely fails to mention a scenario that starts on page 20. Now at its core converting CoC to CP2020 or vice versa isn't especially desirable because both of those systems are hot garbage. It's like if someone offered to show you their tricks for recompiling FORTRAN into COBOL or vice versa. I mean, that might be technically impressive but really you shouldn't be starting or finishing in either of those systems because they are awful.

Now Cyberpunk and CoC have things on different ranges and there are math formulas for converting them. But you also have to truncate them in various ways because also too both systems break hard if things get off the RNG and the RNG is extremely narrow and flat in both cases. Skills work badly in both systems and the conversion from one to the other hits a few major problems which Peter helpfully points out and asks you to work around them.

Do characters get better or worse when converted one way or the other? I dunno. I can't say I actually care enough to check. The raw math of converting your character is actually mercifully over in less than three and a half pages. Which probably makes you ask “What the hell are the other half of the pages of this section then?” And um.... that is a good question.

AncientH

CoC and CP2020 took different evolutionary paths as far as RPGs go, so trying to move from one to the other is a bit ugly. A sample formula for converting CP Skills to CoC skills:

(Attribute + Skill Rating - 4) * 6

Even then, he comes out and admits:

Cyberpunk speciality skills do not really convert to anything in Call of Cthulhu. in addition, these specialties are not really skills. Instead of using them as conventional skills, multiply the specialty rating by 2%, and use it as a skill modifier to any skills that are appropriate. Keep the specialty separate from all other skill ratings. A Cop would get his Authority skill as a bonus any time he was trying to intimidate or persuade people. He could use it as a bonus to his Persuade skill roll, or to his POW when attempting to overawe an individual. Or just forget the whole thing.

You see this kind of thing a lot in crossovers; unique mechanics just don’t translate well. The handling of cyberwear and SAN is actually kind of clever:

A character's Maximum POW in Call of Cthulhu is 21, -2 for every 15 points of Humanity cost of Cyberware.

A character’s POW determines their maximum SAN (POW x 5, tops out at 100), so this is actually a pretty clever little hack for how some people can stand having entire limbs lopped off and replaced, and other people get a Mr. Studd(™) implant and go insane.

The big stat boosts come from cyberwear, and...yeah, PCs can go straight superhuman and punch out ghouls and Deep Ones and Mi-Go with the right gear. I don’t actually have a problem with that.

Frank

There are some ad hoc rules for putting Mythos texts on chips, which mostly serves to underline how badly CoC handles books in general. Also you get a few rants about AIs and monsters. It doesn't go into a lot of detail, but you also only get three and a half pages for these essays so whatever.

Probably the biggest insight this section has is that Cyberpunk characters are not in fact afraid of the dark, and that horror that relies on darkness and jump scares probably isn't going to get very far. Which is true. And that's about as far as it goes here.

AncientH

Cthulhu Mythos is not really a skill in Call of Cthulhu. It is a measure of how much a character knows when he "knows too much". A character who is 50% in Cthulhu Mythos does not know 50% of what there is to know about the creatures/magic of the mythos, rather he has absorbed enough knowledge to drive a normal man insane. He only knows a tiny fraction of the awful immensity of the Cthulhu Mythos.

To reflect this, the Cthulhu Mythos skill is calculated differently from other skills. Take the character's Mythos percentage, divide by 10, and write that number on his Cyberpunk character sheet. Label this "Mythos Index". Subtract this number from his Cool or his empathy, or some combination of the two. if the character's Mythos Index ever reaches 10, the character goes permanently insane.

This is an… “eh” kind of conversion. CM might as well be a speciality skill, since it doesn’t “do” anything in this sense. It’s not a bad take, just doesn’t seem to really translate well.

There are also some...odder bits.

The Net from cyberpunk is considered another dimension in Call of Cthulhu. A character can create a Gate spell that takes him into the net. creatures which wander the dimensions freely can materialize inside the net just as well as outside of it.

So, Tron + Hounds of Tindalos. Got it. That is weirdly close to how Mage: the Ascenscion would handle the internet.

The easiest way to convert Call of Cthulhu magic to Cyberpunk, is not too.

Honesty.

Always ask yourself, "How will instant electronic communications affect this scenario?"

Wisdom!

The fun bit of these conversions is always the meeting-in-the-middle; eldritch cyberware implants and putting the Necronomicon on a datachip are a good start; in another life this could have evolved further...you but that didn’t happen.

Frank

Next up: Transference, the actual crossover adventure promised in the previous zine.

AncientH

As co-written by John Tynes. Buckle up, Edgerunners.

[SeekritLurker]

Fun fact: It sounds to me as though the Convergence scenario presented in 1992 is nearly identical to the one that was included in the 1997 Delta Green book. I mean, I don't remember the seduction tagline thing - but everything else is spot on.

That's one way to up your page count, I suppose.

If it was originally published in a zine and never edited or updated, I suppose that makes the odd reference to The Prisoner by the quest giver have a smidge more context. As in, it fits better as "part of a scenario from a zine" than it does with the rest of the Delta Green book.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: CyberCthulhu

Transference


This doesn't have much to do with the adventure, but neither does the title.

AncientH

It has to be remembered that these scenarios are weird artifacts of their time, and were never intended to be “professional” products - which is probably more damning of official game material which was the same quality or worse than it is a criticism of the abilities of the people that wrote these things. Anyway, Transference is nominally a sequel to Tynes’ Convergence, but that might be stretching things a bit.

One does not have to have read Convergence to run Transference, and the fact that Convergence takes place thirty years before transference makes running them one after another a little implausable without modification. Transference serves best to kick start a Dark Time CyberCthulhu campaign, with this scenario leading the players into deep and dangerous territory as they set out to uncover that which lies beneath…

“Thirty years later” is sort of laughably too little time for cyberpunk to develop and an eyeblink; a couple of RPGs have tried that kind of “leapfrogging” for various reasons - usually, as in the case of Vampire or Call of Cthulhu, to bridge the gaps between different time settings. It’s a thematic device which works well when used sparingly for a very episodic campaign, where there really is no going back again.

Frank

While the previous adventure squandered quite a bit of space on John Tyne's self indulgences, this adventure is allotted only five pages (and written by John Tyne and Chris Hockabout), and so it has to be really economical with its language, really tightly focused on the problems at hand, really in the now. There isn't room for asides or irrelevancies because we are pressed for space. We have to get to the meat of the matter, set up the key concepts and lay out the important events.

WHAT HAS COME BEFORE
2 Billion - 5 Million years ago: The Elder Things arrive on Earth,building an undersea city.

The Mi-Go are selling advanced bioware that has a secret mode where it can mind control the people implanted with it. That one sentence summary of the backstory takes an entire page and involves shit like a coup in Argentina in the mid nineties. I just don't even know what is going on here.

AncientH

The whole thing where Ubbo-Sathla’s biomatter somehow allowed the Mi-Go to control people was bizarre in Convergence and vaguely inexplicable here. It’s not a bad plot device to hang a scenario on - suitably weird and even vaguely cyberpunkish as long as you don’t ask how it works - but it’s also the kind of plot where you wonder how the PCs fit into it, if they’re selling this stuff on the open market.


I designed your eyes.

Frank

The mission is very one dimensional. There's a guy and he is sad because he got arrested for murder, so you go invade the lab he went all Manchurian Candidate on, and they have their world domination plans on-site. That's pretty much it.

A guy was set up with a weirdly kooky Manchurian Candidate programming that came from his new Cyberarm like that cyber uterus in AD Police. He's upset about this, and you're supposed to help him because he's a friend of a friend. And then you go wander over to the scene of the crime and there's a wall of arms guarding it and also the secret plans for world domination are on the computer server. It's very simple.

And honestly, this “the guy who is in trouble is your cousin” type shit is standard operating procedure for Call of Cthulhu because they don't have any inherent hooks to start and adventure. But Cyberpunk 2020 does not have this problem and the player characters do not need to continue running out of uncles. They could just be hired by someone to raid the lab. Honestly, the big reveal isn't especially big or reveally by CP2020 standards. “Cybertech lab secret installs mind control kill switches in their cyberware, exactly like in Robocop” I don't even think it's a new adventure hook in CP2020. I honestly think someone had done the Robocop plotline earlier than 1992 in that game line.

AncientH

Also, Delta Green are entirely absent, either because Tynes wrote this on a cocktail napkin for his part of it or because he was concerned about future IP. Most of the “Adventure” involves a little bit of old-school CyberPunk legwork, the type where everybody forgets there’s a global Net full of information at your fingertps at all times and you have to go walk around and talk to people.

I mean yes, you can and probably will do a little hacking, but the files are incomplete/corrupt, and you're penalized for thinking your hacking skills can help you.

The files go to great depth to not name names, using only a numerical code to identify those working in the project. the code directory is not in the system The files are also encrypted anc carry a virus, that if detected, if will disabled or erase the file. The virus will crash any system it is introduced to, erasing the files in the process. Liekwise, if the datafortress is breached using programs with a sTR higher than 6, the files will be automatically erased.

That translates into "fuck you" in netrunner parlance.

I really think the problem with both Convergence and Transference is a lack of scope - small Mythos encounters should hint at big consequences. If they Mi-Go were giving free neural links to grade-school children as part of an education incentive (and incidentally controlling an entire generation of humans), that would be interesting and not too hard to work into the scenario. But it's a lot more...low stakes.

Frank

This is really thin gruel as far as an adventure, there's only three locations and one of them is the place where the guy who asks you to do the job meets you. It's really supposed to be the seed of a campaign. And while it's a suitably Cyberpunk campaign, it's not a particularly interesting or Mythosy one. You presumably spend the rest of the campaign fighting a corp “because it's evil” which is a fine thing to do in a Cyberpunk game, whether it's CP2020 or Shadowrun or whatever.

The thing that leaps out is how lame this whole plan is on the bad guys' side. Mind controlling killer cyborgs in a way where they have missing time and look obviously possessed to the people around them does not give you many super soldiers and also is the kind of thing that doesn't take a lot of digging to uncover. And not to put too fine a point on it: but the Manchurian Candidate Assassin was already a solo. This is Cyberpunk, and they could have just hired him to kill the scientist who knew too much. If the bad guys behaved halfway rationally and took any advantage of the fact that hey are a wealthy corporation in fucking Cyberpunk, this adventure wouldn't look anything like this.

City Church of Our Lord Redeemer

AncientH

This is a cult! Cults have a reasonable history in cyberpunk fiction, usually because despite growing up with the Matrix, a lot of people in cyberpunk dystopias grow up both profoundly ignorant (lacking access to much formal education) and dissatisfied and alienated. Sometimes people overcome these difficulties by being self-educated or finding their own family, and sometimes...they turn to somebody else that claims to have the answers.

Frank

This is a five page deep dive into snake handling fundamentalist Christianity and written by Peter Christian. Snake handlers are of course a real world collection of Christian cults, and they are discussed in a reasonably fair and accurate manner. I can understand why people would join this cult, whether or not it is secretly sponsored by Yig (an option which is left open at the end). They also have a close working connection with a snake themed gang, which makes sense regardless of whether Preacher Paul or Deathrattle Strang have any supernatural powers.

This is much better written than the previous piece and also much more useful as a campaign seed. The motivations are believable, and the only thing I'd really want is a firm commitment to the supernatural angle (because let's be honest: the number of people who are going to run this without the Yig angle panning out is zero) and the extra space used to stat up a snake monster or something.

AncientH

The day care center that the cult sponsors is a breeding ground for little serpent-men, and the old people's companion srvice is used to gather mature serpent-people together without anyone suspecting. Strang has been driven insane by the constant touch of the snake-god and is preparing a ritual which will pollute the city's drinking water, and magically turn the entire population into snakes (ever see Halloween III?)

See, this guy gets it.


Also, this is really close to Marvel's Atlantis Attacks storyline, just sayin'

The real advantage to this cult is that it is both integrated into the setting and the NPCs have fairly clearly defined motivations, if not always goals. These are NPCs where if something goes pear-shaped, you have an idea of what they can do and how they'll respond.

Frank

I think it's telling that the City Church entry that starts from the standpoint of the human relationships and motivations is much better than the Transference entry that starts with 2 billion years of TL;DR alien history. Stories work as stories before they can work as vessels for science fiction ideas.

Also, I find that I just genuinely like the writing of Peter Christian and wish he'd worked on a better game.

AncientH

Part of the reason why this works so well is that it's very much not the normal Call of Cthulhu approach to things; usually they start with somebody getting the bad touch from a Mythos entity and move on from there, but this is closer to the other way around - personal tragedy and believing in faith healing have cost this guy everything, and now he's deluded enough to think he's doing good. It's not exactly a traditional approach to the Mythos, but it works.

The Institute for Paranormal Studies

Frank

This is labeled as a cult profile by Barton Bolmen. It is a sprawling nine pages and ventures pretty far from what you'd normally expect in a cult profile. How does it get there? Well, some of it is that Barton wrote up some scenario introductions complete with dialog. That takes up a lot of space. But a lot of it is just that it goes into more extraneous detail about shit you don't care about than you would think warranted or possible.

By the 1930s, “The Farm” was more like a fortress” - complete with bunkers, buildings with concrete reinforced walls, machine-gun nests (although the machine-guns were normally kept in the hidden armory), a fifteen foot high barbed wire dual perimeter fence and a reinforced barn containing two airplanes that used a neighboring field as a makeshift runway (complete with lamps for the occasional night flight).

That sentence is a crime against grammar, and when the Grammar Gestapo comes knocking I will personally turn Barton over to the camps. But in the larger sense, what the actual fuck is up with that? No one gives a shit what various arms and forts were set up by people in the 1930s. Even with CP2020's ridiculously compressed timeline, the 1930s were ninety fucking years ago. It isn't just that all these people are dead from old age during the actual game, it's that their children have died of old age. The key here of course is that the actual Call of Cthulhu games were normally set in the 1920s and 1930s, which means that really we're looking at someone bragging about their Call of Cthulhu campaign. For nine pages.

Now this is self indulgent and dull, but it's important to remember: you are reading a fucking zine! So while I would be pretty upset to open a normal sourcebook and have it natter on for nine pages about how crazy the home campaign of the author got, for a fanzine that's actually about the level of professionalism and focus I expect. I actually give points because this zine went 30 pages before starting a sentence with “This one time, at band camp...”


We were getting there eventually, but at least it took until page 31.

AncientH

This is, sadly, a bit more typical of Mythos cults, which seem to vary between not-enough-information and too-damn-much-and-none-of-it-is-useful. "The Institute for Paranormal Studies" is supposed to be a knockoff of real-life organizations like the Society for Psychichal Research, but it's...eh...it's somebody's personal idea of what a Mythos-hunting/investigation agency might look like.

C'mon, we've all been there at some point. It's the whole reason Delta Green and the SCP Foundation exists. But the whole reason SCP works is because a lot of what you "know" about it is suspect, misleading, or just plain false by design. Even Delta Green struggles with who really gives the orders and how you keep a conspiracy that well hidden for that long.

Frank

Reading a blow by blow account of someone's generic CoC adventures made me want to chew my leg off to escape.

AncientH

Which is fair. The thing about the Mythos is that familiarity breeds contempt. You don't get the same sense of stakes if you can just talk nonchalantly about having databanks filled with grimoires and casually using magic to stave off advanced age, and there's not a lot for player characters to do with that kind of top-heavy organization with arbitrary limits. Do they fight it? Work for it?

At least Monarch in the Godzilla movies pretty much just puts research first and crisis management second, you basically know where you stand with them, even if the leader sacrifices himself to empower a giant radioactive kaiju, the rest of the organization will continue on researching and trying to keep the military from killing any kaiju they like. It's idiosyncratic, but it works.

This...just feels silly.

Vignette: Deus Ex Machina
A Darktime Presentation


Your computer's looking a little... evil.

Frank

The Vignettes are pieces of flash fiction or mini-essays that are stand alone. They are unattributed, so I have no idea who wrote them. This particular vignette is about an AI that contains a scanned copy of the Necronomicon and is siphoning spiritual essence from netrunners in order to experiment with magic. Seems legit. This does not go very deeply into this subject, but it also doesn't fill a whole page. It is what it is.

AncientH

Before this, they explicitly said that AIs can't cast spells because they don't have souls. So this AI learned a hack to get around that. As Frank said, seems legit. It is okay to break the rules as long as the rules-breaking isn't completely arbitrary, and follows some mechanism that the players and PCs can both grok on some level - usually this involves some magical artifact or other deus ex machina, but it's okay to push the boundaries of the setting as long as you're still working within the constraints of the setting.

Usually my go-to on this is something like teleportation in Shadowrun. One of the major restrictions on sorcery in SR is: no teleportation. Can't do it. So what happens if somebody does appear to be teleporting? Well, it either isn't teleportation (but something that looks a lot like it, like zipping physically into the astral plane and out again), or it is teleportation, but it only works because of a specific, repeatable hack - and that hack changes the paradigm of the game, because now teleportation is possible. The implications are almost more important than the individual instance.

So in this case, a rogue AI figured out how to cast spells. That means there might be more out there...

Frank

Next up: A Policy of Pain

[Nath]

I think it's the same John Tynes who was credited as the author of "Nemo Solus Sapit", an adventure in The Stars Are Right, an official "Call of Cthulhu 1990s" product published by Chaosium in 1992.

Interestingly enough, that particular adventure has little to none modern or cyberpunk appeal - it involves a crazy psychiatrist practicing sorcery in its asyleum and could be set at pretty much any point between late 19th and early 21st century. There are several other adventures in The Stars Are Right who do much more effectively pave the way toward cyberpunk -- "The Professionals", by Fred Behrendt, wich involves experimental cyberware (also the FBI and an "all-male fringe group dedicated to purging all female influence from the government and business") and "Fractal Gods", by Steve Hatherly, whose central element is a computer code that draw magical portals on-screen (spread by a demomaker fanzine distributed by mailing floppy disks...).

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cybercthulhu

A Policy of Pain


Available in magic or cybernetic versions.

AncientH

A Policy of Pain is a cyberCthulu scenario set in a modified prison in Death Valley. The scenario is set up in a modular fashion so that one read-through will not necessarily reveal the major secrets. The Adventure can be set in any other arcology but the desert setting creates a sense of isolation and the fact that it was a converted prison adds to the general strangeness of the place he scenario is good for about four to six moderately experienced Call of Cthulhu or Cyberpunk players.

Call of Cthulhu adventures normally manage to suck and blow at the same time. While they do have some classic campaigns like Masks of Nyarlathotep, those aren't objectively good - they're usually objectively fucking terrible. And those are the classic stuff. The piddly shit that runs in CoC fanzines is usually worse, because there's nothing to fall back on. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk can at least cast adventures in the context of a job. Not CoC.

... but by the same token, even CP2020 adventures often blow chunks, since the PCs are usually being paid too little money to do something too dangerous and their Mr. Johnson is almost certainly going to double-cross them at least once in the process.

So let's see how these two flavors go together.

Frank

This 16 page submission by Chris Hockabout is a more standard “adventure” of a format reasonably familiar to anyone who has ever read a Dungeon magazine or picked up a prepackaged adventure going back to the letters and numbers adventures of olden yore. And speaking of the old days, the subject matter of role playing games was originally teams of armed adventurers exploring decrepit fortresses full of traps and monsters – which is weirdly specific I'll admit. But that's what the first RPG was doing, and all further RPGs have been to one degree or another based on D&D. So even for games that are nominally about something like vampire romance or mercenary future spies or whatever, the comfort zone for adventure writers is still about teams of armed adventurers exploring decrepit fortresses full of traps and monsters. This adventure is about a team of armed adventurers exploring a decrepit fortress full of traps and monsters.

So basic adventure design for absolutely any RPG no matter what the nominal subject or genre of that RPG, is to figure out an “in world” explanation for there to be a decrepit fortress full of monsters and traps and an “in character” reason why the player characters would form a team of armed adventurers to explore it. The fact that this is the basic adventure structure for RPGs doesn't mean it's ill thought of. Many clichés and cliché because they work. So you got things like Arcology Shutdown and Universal Brotherhood for Shadowrun that were fairly well regarded for their day.

A Policy of Pain is a Cyberpunk 2020 adventure with Mythos elements. It is about the player characters taking the role of an armed adventuring party and exploring a decrepit fortress filled with traps and monsters. The in-world reason for this being here is about how a decommissioned prison in the desert got repurposed into a company town by an evil developer that then operated exploitative sweat shops with immigrant labor. Honestly, that seems legit. If you want an explanation for a near-future dystopia to have a classic D&D style “dungeon” you could certainly do worse.

AncientH

Unfortunately, the sweat shop labor are Tcho-Tchos from a cult of Y'golonac. And they got management buy-in.



Okay, so the Tcho-Tcho are a "race" which depending on the fiction are either human or human-like, and come from the Leng/Tibet/Burma region. They were invented in 1932 by August Derleth and are not explicitly much of anything. They could be a separate species or an ethnic subgroup. Notably, a lot of Delta Green products posit them as one of the many and varied Asian ethnic groups with a diaspora throughout the world; there are wilder and weirder ideas behind them in various CoC-and-related-games products, but it still always boils down to Yellow Peril-lite.

Y'Golonac was created by Ramsey Campbell and isn't really explicitly connected with the Tcho-Tchos in most of the literature, I think Hockabout just liked him.

Frank

Now you may ask yourself: “Are the Tcho-Tcho racist?” The short answer of course is “Yes.” I mean, fucking obviously. They are subhuman brown people from far away. But it's actually so racist that they kind of come out the other side. The Tcho-Tcho are so foreign and subhuman that they don't really stand in for any group of people. They are covered with so much racist argle bargle that they aren't readily identifiable as Kashmiris or Tibetans or Burmese. And as it would happen, there actually was a species of near human dwarves from South Asia called Homo Floresiensis. And people from the modern era are more likely to make that connection than the weirdly reactionary fear of foreigners originally intended. That is, the Tcho-Tcho are based on a worldview colored by racial ideas involving “Australoids” and “Mongoloids” and those don't even make sense to modern audiences.

For a similar effect, consider Centaurs. They were originally a story based on Southern European horse tribes, and the stories about them getting drunk and rowdy are almost certainly racist and offensive in their original context. But Centaurs aren't identifiable as any particular group of people today and no one gets offended by Centaurs from that standpoint. The Tcho-Tcho are possibly originally patterned off of the Ghurka or the Naga, but the stories are so fucking out-there that they essentially aren't “coded” as any particular group of people. August Derleth wrote the Tcho-Tcho as mountain goblins that worshiped Arcturian tentacle monsters, and that just really isn't remotely similar enough to any actual people to offend anyone by similarity.

So anyway, there are Tcho-Tcho in this adventure and they came as impoverished immigrants and lived he American Dream of working in sweat shops and converting their corporate overlords to the worship of Y'golonac.


After discovering this in your basement, why wouldn't you join up?

Which isn't to say that this episode doesn't find ways to be racist. It totally does. It's just that the presence of the Tcho-Tchos does not itself constitute racism when used by people who aren't living in the 1930s.

Being of obvious Asian descent, they wear their hair in a bowl cut

The fact I am making this reference makes me feel old.

Anyway, this adventure involves people who live in an oppressive company town / arcology and the author is going for some kind of statement about ethnic gangs and ghettoization or something. With the amount of space this chapter actually has, it doesn't handle the racism stuff particularly well. Which isn't to say it doesn't try. There's some stuff about Hispanic and East Asians working in terrible conditions in the food processing sweat shops that is actually pretty nuanced for the amount of space it gets. But while CP2020 is in general better on racial issues than most of its contemporaries, doing a deep dive into racism in working environments is probably not something you can do justice to in a 16 page zine article about mountain goblins performing human sacrifices to conjure a headless giant with mouths in its hands.

AncientH

This is the rare CP2020/Call of Cthulhu scenario where dusting off and nuking the site from orbit isn't a bad idea.

That is to say, it's a sandbox with enough ideas to drive an adventure, but pretty much everyone inside is evil or addicted to Blue Milk or both. This is less like your standard CP2020 game than it is The Raid or Dredd without the innocent bystanders. While PCs aren't probably going to go in guns blazing, any investigation should quickly see them trapped in a giant dilapidated prison full of poor people out of their minds on vending machine drugs and television.

I kinda like it.

Frank

This adventure has more space dedicated to it than any of the other subsections, but it's not enough for like maps. It's not really a fully fleshed out adventure. There are even a number of places where the author just isn't committing to nailing down how this adventure is supposed to work. Are the Tcho-Tchos actually planning on sharing power with Crane or do they plan to sacrifice him to Y'golonac at the last moment? I dunno. The author doesn't know. There are a couple of options laid out and... that's it. This almost certainly would have been better without the dials if the options had been scrapped to make room for like maps or monsters or something along those lines.

The basic concept is reactive storytelling. If the players kill Crane early, then the Tcho Tcho priest is the main villain, if they kill the priest early then Crane is the big villain. If the PCs come in with the big guns they get to fight a Y'golonac avatar and if they don't then the rituals aren't advanced enough to summon one. I... don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, keeping everything “potential” until the PCs actually interact with it means that the story doesn't fizzle because no one checked the right sub-basement or shot the right bad guy at the wrong time or whatever. On the other hand, it's basically bears, right? There isn't actually any purpose of loading up with bigger guns if the MC is just going to adjust the opposition upwards and you're not actually accomplishing anything with your investigation if the last guy is always going to be the main villain.

Essentially, this kind of behind the scenes sleight of hand with the story structure can be very enjoyable – but only so long as you maintain plausible deniability that you're doing it. If the players ever figure out that you're changing what's behind door number 2 as soon as they declare their intention to open it then their decision to open door number 2 has no value.



Ultimately I think the part where the adventure offers alternate ways into the adventure has value. Like, maybe the player characters don't have Yakuza connections and there needs to be a different reason to go rough up a canning facility in the desertfull of immigrant laborers. But the alternate bad guy plans really don't. They are the bad guys, and it doesn't really matter what the mighty ritual of vast power does because the players are supposed to stop it regardless – but it does matter that the players have buy-in that stopping the mighty ritual of vast power is a thing they need to do.

AncientH

There are basic rules for common tests to make, like picking the electronic lock on a door, character blocks are all in CP2020 format. The basic assumption is you're running CP2020 with the aforementoned Dark Time rules rather than CoC with cyberware, but given that Interface is a CP2020 'zine, I think that's fair.

Your netrunner can hack into the Green Hope datafortress and maybe learn a few Mythos spells - say what you will, they actually try to use the rules from the previous section here!

And that might be the most notable thing about this adventure: unlike Tynes' proto-Delta Green thing, "Policy of Pain" actually tries to fulfill the promise of the premise - a scenario that incorporates both Cyberpunk and Mythos. It leans a bit heavily toward the Cyberpunk 2020 side of things, but that it attempts to actually use the new mechanics a bit at all is worthy of kudos.

We also get a new bit of cyberware, "CyberMaw or Palm of the Bloated One" which is a modified cyberhand that gives you a palm-mouth like Y'Golonac. That's kinda cool. Not something PCs would likely ever use or buy, and a dead giveaway for cultists, but the first time it's used it's gotta be great.

Frank

There is a certain tendency in old adventures to have random encounter tables. These have real value, but also lead to dumb things happening sometimes. It's a tradeoff. I think there's some fundamental problems with the way this adventure is written. Namely, the entire escalation of craziness goes on for 4 days, which means that when there's a 10% chance of the bad guys getting alerted by the PCs talking to workers this is a thing that probably won't happen at all, and it just ends up feeling clunky.

In the larger sense, having a really effective flowchart of what the hell happens if players do different stuff is difficult to do and there probably isn't space for it in a zine article adventure. But I'm kind of impressed that they even tried. This is a really ambitious adventure, especially when contrasted with Convergence.

AncientH

Overall, I'll give the adventure props for what it does and what it tries to be. It might not be the greatest example of how you might combine cyberpunk and Cthulhu, but you have a reasonable premise and a game effort to actually realize the potential of the game by engaging with the rules previously presented - and even expanding on the material slightly.

Where it falls apart a little is execution; sandboxes are really rough to do well, and the lack of maps and concrete commitment to what is really going on count against it, even with the best of intentions. Before running this, a lot more work has to be done.

Vignette: I want a new drug


First This


Then This.

Frank

This Vignette is labeled as to who wrote it: it's Chris Hockabout. Anyway, there are Deep One Hybrids who are selling a drug that contains trace amounts of Shoggoth, and when you take enough of it, your body explodes into gooey gore and a new Shoggoth is born. Is that legit? Yeah... I guess.

There's no particular reason for the Shoggoth farmers to be Deep Ones. This could have been two plots. You could have Deep Ones dealing drugs to get their fishy hands on crack whores and then also have a Shoggoth Infection that's basically The Stuff. There's no special need for both ends of this evil plot to be the same plot. Basically I think this is two ideas and if each one was developed separately it would be better.

AncientH

Readers who read this and the pregnancy subplot in Convergence might be confused, because the Ubbo-Sathla protomatter and the Shoggoth protomatter are...very similar. This has, in fact, been an issue in the Mythos before, since Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith never really consulted on their respective amorphous creations. So while this probably smells like Hockabout is riffing on Tynes, I think it more like two cases of independent creation.

Frank

And that's the last bit of Dark Time / Cybercthulhu. The rest of the issue is basically unrelated but seems fairly convinced that there would be more issues. Factually speaking there were not.

AncientH

The Book of the Worm review by Chris Hockabout discusses using Pentex as part of a Cybercthulhu campaign, where instead of the Wyrm they serve Cthulhu, and honestly I've heard worse elevator pitches.

Ultimately, CyberCthulhu is no weirder than the World of Future Darkness, which it in many ways resembles. There obviously wasn't a lot of real planning going on in all this, nobody sat down to think about worldbuilding, and the mechanical changes are fairly barebones, the actually crossover material like the CyberMaw and the eldritch cybereyes a bit of an afterthought - none of the Mythos cults are actually Cthulhu cults; the writers all seem to be gravitating away from familiar material in an unfamiliar setting, for the most part.

I wouldn't use CyberCthulhu as the basis for anything, but there are lessons here to be learned on what works and doesn't work in these kind of crossovers - who is the audience? What do they want to do? How can you provide them the material to do that? If you think of the various one-off alternate settings in Harlequin's Back, those are almost a better example of how to realize a setting and provide mechanics to go with - even if that particular adventure campaign was weird and railroady.

Anyway, food for thought, and Cthulhu finds your cyberware extra crunchy.

[Username17]

Cybercthulhu of course never went anywhere. The Interface never had any more issues and Cyberpunk 2020 went in a weird direction with Cybergeneration that no one liked and its attempt to rebirth itself 12 years later with Cyberpunk 203X did not go particularly well. The Cyberpunk 2077 computer game is getting a fair amount of hype, but no one really cares about R Talsorian's Cyberpunk Red. And that's just on the Cyberpunk side! Call of Cthulhu refuses to learn or forget anything and the latest edition would look kind of unprofessional and bad if it came out in 1992.

But while both games struggled with having bad systems and dumb timelines, there was clearly passion and even skill. Many of the things in The Dark Time are well thought out, well researched, and well written. People clearly wanted magic and science fiction cross over, and "In the Cyberpunk future, the stars are right." is as good a hook as anything Shadowrun ever came up with. Especially the Peter Christian bits aren't just passable for the genre or "good enough for a zine" but genuinely higher quality than I would expect to see in any RPG book from the time period.

RPGs are not a meritocracy. Even today you don't write for Wizards of the Coast or Paizo because you are one of the best RPG writers in the country - you do so because Mike Mearls or Jason Bulman is a friend of a friend. There are and were lots of RPG writers who are "better" than the people who worked on the big titles that never got their shot. And lots of authors were writing good things for bad systems.

It's important to realize what might have been. That people like Bruce Cordell are merely replacement level RPG writers, and that the industry has no means of farming good writers and good designers to the upper tiers. There's no sense to the fact that Peter Christian was writing for a minor and folding cyberpunk zine while Carl Sargent was writing major sourcebooks for Shadowrun.

But that's the world we live in. And I can't think of anything more cyberpunk than that.

-Username17

[fbmf]

Call of Cthulhu refuses to learn or forget anything and the latest edition would look kind of unprofessional and bad if it came out in 1992.

You may have written on this before, but how would either one (or both) of you go about building a Cthulhu Mythos based RPG? (For our purposes, let us presume you own the license to use all the Mythos names/creatures/locales/etc.)

Game On,
fbmf

[angelfromanotherpin]

They do own that license. As does everybody else.

It's pretty trivially easy to write a Cthulhu-based RPG without using any IP that Chaosium actually owns. Most of Chaosium's material is actually just “fair use” or public domain references to the works of authors who are explicitly allowing their works to be shared and in many cases also long dead. If you wanted to publish Call of Cthulhu your own damn self you could copy the game almost word for word so long as you gave it the title of a different HPL story and used a different font. CthulhuTech showed how easy that is a few years back.

[Thaluikhain]

As an aside, is there anything in the Mythos that is still someone's IP that people tend to care about? Lots of authors have added to it over the years, but I can't think of any additions off the top of my head that people would generally regret not being able to use.

[SeekritLurker]

As an aside, is there anything in the Mythos that is still someone's IP that people tend to care about? Lots of authors have added to it over the years, but I can't think of any additions off the top of my head that people would generally regret not being able to use.

I think Lumley's still alive and has some IP - though he's been notably free with allowing for people to borrow said IP and make Mind Flayers and whatnot, that's still an issue.

[Red_Rob]

neither wants to lose the flavor of their individual setting, even as they try to bring in aspects from their brother-from-another-dark-mother-with-a-thousand-young.

I appreciated this far more than I should.

The fact Convergence is basically an excuse to let the players durdle around and then spring a bunch of jump scares on them got me thinking about how often this crops up in Horror scenario design. I guess it isn't surprising given that is basically the format for a lot of horror stories in various media - the protagonists don't really do anything proactive, they just happen to go to or be at a location where bad things are happening, and bad things then happen.

It just surprises me that so many scenario writers seem to forget that players in an RPG tend to want agency and some way to affect the story, not just to be present when something happens.

[Ancient History]

Call of Cthulhu refuses to learn or forget anything and the latest edition would look kind of unprofessional and bad if it came out in 1992.

You may have written on this before, but how would either one (or both) of you go about building a Cthulhu Mythos based RPG? (For our purposes, let us presume you own the license to use all the Mythos names/creatures/locales/etc.)

Game On,
fbmf

I did that thing. Space Madness!

[Ancient History]

As an aside, is there anything in the Mythos that is still someone's IP that people tend to care about? Lots of authors have added to it over the years, but I can't think of any additions off the top of my head that people would generally regret not being able to use.

All the individual authors whose work hasn't fallen into the public domain own their own creations - but many of them are very permissive about it; Brian Lumley's permission to use Kthanid or the Cthonians is usually a formality, he only reserves the human characters in case he wants to use them again.

Which means generally speaking most the contemporary fiction involves public domain properties like Lovecraft and much of Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard - with some oddities tucked in there like August Derleth and whatnot. You've got far fewer people trying to write stories set in Pugmire's Sesqua Valley or Campbell's Severn Valley & Brichester. But even then, there are CoC products that specifically address that kind of material in CoC, and a lot of fans "borrow" stuff without asking, and the usage is minor enough not to attract a lot of fuss.

[Username17]

Yeah, Lumley's works are not public domain because he is still alive. And there are certainly a few things like Cthonians and Shudde M'ell that you might want to use. But also yes, Brian Lumley is pretty free about letting people use his stuff. Pretty much all you have to do is ask him and he'll say yes. For example, I asked him if I could use his stuff and he said yes. So I personally have all the rights you'd need to use all the Mythos stuff I'd personally give a shit about having the rights to.

You may have written on this before, but how would either one (or both) of you go about building a Cthulhu Mythos based RPG? (For our purposes, let us presume you own the license to use all the Mythos names/creatures/locales/etc.)

In the larger sense, pretty much anything I wrote would contain Mythos elements. Ten Thousand Fates would have Mythos elements, After Sundown 2 would have Mythos elements, Asymmetric Threat would have Mythos elements, and Sentai Fhtagn would have Mythos elements. Some of those would be very centrally defined by Mythos elements, while some of those would just be spiced by Mythos elements along the sides.

In a more specific sense, were I to make an RPG where the Mythos elements were front and center I would set the game in modern Urban Fantasy (AS2), Cyberpunk (AST), or full Science Fiction (SF). I don't think the 1930s era adds anything to a role playing game except uncomfortable conversations about period racism and sexism. No one wants to be told that their character can't go into a bar because it's 1932 and unmarried women are not allowed.

The Mythos is in many ways the science fiction / fantasy pantheon of the modern world. Anything written after that is subject to mickey Mouse laws - you couldn't use Lavos from Cronotrigger or the Dark One from Wheel of Time even if you wanted to.

-Username17

[Username17]

Perhaps the core of the question is what I would do to make a game where the Mythos was front and center. Like, any game system made after 1934 is going to have some Lovecraftian elements but that's not really what people mean when they talk about a "Mythos Game." But there are a few things that are really transcendentally awful about Call of Cthulhu, which I think a game going forward can learn from.

Characters Need to Go on Missions

It's something so basic that you wouldn't think it needs to be said, but it honestly does. Each adventure has to have the player characters go on the adventure or it doesn't happen. That means that the number one buy-in of the game is that whatever their characters are or do, that when the adventure is offered they fucking go on it. This is Delta Green's one and only real contribution: the player characters are supernatural law enforcement so the assumption is that they go on the fucking adventure. The thing where every Call of Cthulhu adventure has to call time and try to think up some favor to a friend or recently dead crazy uncle or something was garbage.

For Sentai Fhtagn, the characters are members of Union Defense and they investigate cultic, alien, and unexplained phenomena and activities as their job. So if the mission involves tracking Cthonians through tunnels in West Africa or solving ritual murders in Detroit, the player characters have de facto buy-in to initiating and completing the adventure.

Knowledge Needs to be Desirable

If the players find the diary of exposition and burn it without reading, your system has failed. Utterly.

The entire paradigm of seeing monsters and reading books coming at great cost is fucking unsalvageable. While there is value in having there be Rats in the Walls style corruption and that can even be a valid in-setting reason why the players keep tomes of knowledge under lock and key to be investigated by "top men" or whatever. But the incentives for the player characters has to be towards curiosity. In any RPG, but especially an RPG with any horror affectations the players should always be selecting "Yes" when asked if they want to get some more exposition. Anything else is unacceptable.

The Players Need Access to Sorcery

If there's magic in your game it's not really acceptable for none of the players to get any of it. This is just a specific case of Chekhov's Gun, but any setting that has cool stuff in it is going to have players who want to use it. And if you can't deliver it, you have fucking failed. It's like the various versions of Star Wars games where you can't use The Force. Fuck that shit. But with the Mythos, it goes beyond that because a lot of the stuff is "non huma" and the players will want to be those creatures. And if you can't deliver that, your game has failed.

So in Sentai Fhtagn, basic character archetypes include Sorcerers, Deep Ones, Ghouls, and Goat Spawn. There's room for the players to have magic or be magic.

---

Now the savvy will have noted that this is basically a repudiation of everything about Call of Cthulhu that makes it distinct from any other random D&D hack from the early 80s. And that is because I believe that Call of Cthulhu is wrong in every aspect. That there is literally nothing to learn from Call of Cthulhu except "This does not work, don't do it."

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank brought up a really good point in the review. WHY are Mythos Games so obsessed with pre-WW2 / post-Victorian aesthetics so much, aside from the fact that this is where the original fiction takes place? But that doesn't make any fucking sense. Most of Batman's mythology was laid down in the 1940s, but no one insists that his adventures should take place in that time period.

Ultimately, the Mythos games are a collection of public domain monsters, artifacts, and personalities. Stuff like Cthulhutech and even Mekton should be the standard, not the exception.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Frank brought up a really good point in the review. WHY are Mythos Games so obsessed with pre-WW2 / post-Victorian aesthetics so much, aside from the fact that this is where the original fiction takes place?

A number of people have gone into the thematic connections. The world still has mysterious regions unmapped by satellites. People are still reeling at the overthrow of Newtonian physics. Surrealist art is in its first flower. The theories of mental health are still very primitive. There's a lot of general anxiety brought on by the depression, rising dictatorships, and the looming threat of another industrial war. It all plays well with Mythos content.

This is not to say that you can't do as well or better in other times. Season 1 of True Detective does a really great job and it's set in 1995 and 2012.

I think there's also a thing where other games weren't set in that period, so for a very long time if you wanted to play in that period, this was the game that supported it, and it became self-reinforcing.

[Dean]

In fairness Batman does constantly deal with bank robbers complete with tommy guns right out of the prohibition era. If you picture someone spraying fire at Batman it's probably some dude in a fedora with a tommy gun. It's even in the opening of the 90's tv show. Batman also has the advantage of continuing to be published where Lovecraft's work definitely has a particular flavor of when he wrote it.

I definitely don't think Sci-fi is the best thing to use the mythos for, not by a long shot. Lovecraft in the 80's is Stranger Things exactly, Lovecraft in the modern day is great, Lovecraft in the 18th century lets you sail to some new land and learn that all the peoples and traditions there hide terrible secrets. I think it would be awesome to have a game let you do all of that, having consistent antagonists rather than protagonists through time jumps. So you could have 4 adventures, one in the age of exploration, one in the 19th century, one in the 1920's, and one in the 80's. It'd be cool to see the deep ones in different ages and deal with different horrifying elements their presence on earth implies.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sorry, I strongly disagree with the idea that Mythos is a bad fit for Sci-Fi. The movies Alien and Aliens exist. Case closed.

[Dean]

The claim that sci fi and mythos don’t mix well is a claim made by no one. Your claim that only sci fi and mythos mix well is the very strong claim you’ve made that is being rebutted.

I think one thing that should be noted is that lovecraftian stories often feature exploration which makes it fit better in certain genres and eras than others. So in the past you’d meet horrors at sea or in new lands. In the future you’d probably meet them, like in Alien, in space or on new worlds. Because we’ve explored most of our own little planet at this point modern day mythos stories use alternate planes and realities like the upside down. That works fine but in my personal opinion it’s not as satisfying as coming upon reality altering information during a random sweep of the moon LR44372. Possibly because discovering another reality in itself is world changing so also discovering that it’s spooky seems less important.

[Username17]

The Mythos is inherently science fiction. Jules Verne doesn't stop being science fiction because we now have an actual nuclear powered submarine called The Nautilus. Heinlein doesn't stop being science fiction now that we've been to the moon. Lovecraft's stories about time travel and distant planets do not stop being science fiction just because we have smart phones.

The Yithians are a time traveling, planet hopping enemy. They are a science fiction concept and a science fiction opponent. You can choose to have the player characters running around with swords while the main bad guys have lasers like Might and Magic 2 or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but that's a conscious choice to mashup science fiction and sword & sorcery fantasy. The parts of the story that are Mythos are science fiction. They just are. You can't make the Mythos be not-science fiction, because it simply inherently is science fiction. All you can do is make it Science Fiction plus something else. And it is my contention that people don't really want to roleplay as characters in the early parts of the 20th century for the most part, so mixing the science fiction elements with pre-atomic age pulp is just a weird genre conceit for which there isn't much justification.

Anyway, I thought of a thing that's in the Mythos I care about that maybe isn't public domain that I don't have carte blanche from the IP holders to use however I want: Ramsey Campbell is also still alive, which means I think that the Insects From Shaggai might technically be under copyright. But also a lot of people seem to have used the Shan without attribution and also while the names Shan, Shaggai, and Ghroth are made up by Campbell, the whole thing is inspired by an unfinished story of Lovecraft himself, so I'm not sure Campbell thinks he owns any of that.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

That works fine but in my personal opinion it’s not as satisfying as coming upon reality altering information during a random sweep of the moon LR44372.

How about something like the movie "Event Horizon" then? A spaceship is exploring and uses hyperspace to travel and encounters reality-altering things...

[Lago PARANOIA]

The thing I dislike most about about the Mythos works being set in the 30s is that the settings don't add anything.

Like, if the Mythos were set in a historically relevant period like the Golden Age of Sail or the 1st Industrial Revolution or the French Revolution or the Age of Imperialism, I could totally understand.

Instead, all I've seen from the Standard Mythos Setting generally ignores whats going on politically and socially in the background. No food riots, no fascist rallies. no communist agitation, no nothing. How hard would it be to have a cult that hijacks the Montana branch of the WPA for sinister plots? Even Indiana Jones tried to be more relevant. Mythos cares more about Egyptology than what's currently going on, and that shit hasn't been relevant for 10-20 years!

So if you're not going to use that shit, why even make your adventure take place in the 1930s?