Want to Game With Cthulhu Reborn?

We will be attending the (virtual) convention being run next month by the good folks at Yog-Sothoth.com (YSDC). And we’re bringing some of our games to play — APOCTHULHU, Convicts & Cthulhu, and Dateline: Lovecraft will all be represented.

The event is called ConVocation, and will be held (online) over the weekend of 25th to 27th September.

Events are all free to play in … though you need to be a member of YSDC (though not necessarily a paid patron).

Here’s a summary of the four events Cthulhu Reborn is running over that weekend

Un-Fresh Off The Boat

[Run by the scenario author, yours truly]

RPG System: Call of Cthulhu, 7e (Convicts & Cthulhu)

Duration: 2 Hours

Date & Time: Saturday, 26th September 2:00 AM *in the morning* (BST, UK)  (East Coast US = Friday @ 9 pm, East Coast Australia = Saturday @ 11 am.)

Experience required: None; also no familiarity with historical origins of Australia are assumed — necessary background will be explained in the scenario.

Scenario Description: In 1800 it was hard to imagine a worse fate than being transported to the Australian penal colonies; this scenario begins with two ships arriving in Sydney Harbour — one carrying convicts, the other free settlers. A strange disease has broken out onboard causing the colonial authorities no small consternation.

A Southern Serenade

[Run by the scenario author, Matthew Ruane]

RPG System: Convicts & Cthulhu (Call of Cthulhu)

Online System: Roll20 & Discord

Duration: 4 Hours

Date & Time: Saturday, 26th September 12:00 noon (EDT, USA)

Experience required: Some knowledge of CoC would be helpful.

Scenario Description: A small group of Australian convicts have been sent to investigate what happened to a missing work team assigned to work some newly discovered mines.

Smoke Green (Dateline: Lovecraft)

[Scenario by Noah Lloyd, run by yours truly]

RPG System: Call of Cthulhu, 7e

Duration: 4 Hours

Date & Time: Saturday, 26th September 1:00 pm (BST, UK)  (East Coast US = Saturday@8am, East Coast Australia = Saturday@10pm.)

Experience required: None.

Scenario Description: In 1928 Arkham has a new, popular brand of cigarettes … with a distinctive greenish smoke; when the owner of the company winds up dead, is it an accident, or somehow tied up with the company’s affiliations in the tense Mayoral race.

Amber Waves

[Run by the scenario author, Chad Bowser]

RPG System: APOCTHULHU / Delta Green

Duration: 4 Hours

Date & Time: Sunday, 27th September 8:00 am (EDT, USA)

Experience required: None.

Scenario Description: There’s a man with a cure for the plague that plunged the world into a verdant nightmare. He’s willing to meet the PCs half-way.

Apocalypse Unboxed

The whole phenomenon of YouTube Unboxing videos is something I don’t quite understand. However Max Writer (aka Andy), long-time friend of Cthulhu Reborn, has shared his experience of opening a copy of the printed APOCTHULHU Quickstart book. If you’ve wanted to see one in the flesh … here’s a YouTube approximation.

Thanks, Max!

[Video by Max Writer]

(Re)Views of the Apocalypse

The APOCTHULHU core rulebook is off to a great start, exceeding our expectations for sales on the first day. We are humbled and thank everyone who’s picked it up … and also everyone who’s been intrigued enough to grab the PWYW Quickstart to give the game a “test drive.”

If you’re keen to help us in getting the word out about our new game, submitting a review or star-rating on DTRPG is one easy way of doing that. Ratings and reviews are like oxygen to publishers (small and large), and do really help get more people looking more closely at the products. If you get the end of reading either PDF and have the time, logging back in to DriveThru and leaving your thoughts — positive or negative — would help us out a lot.

Alternatively, if you are a reviewer writing for a publication, video channel, podcast, blog, etc., let us know and we may be able to send you a free review copy of the APOCTHULHU core book PDF (you can get the Quickstart yourself for free if you want). Use the form below to get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.

Thanks again to everyone who’s expressed interest in our book!

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APOCTHULHU LIVES!

Reason 1 to celebrate: Today we successfully launched the PDF edition of the APOCTHULHU Core Rulebook. It’s a 330 page behemoth packed with rules, world building resources, pre-defined settings, Kevin Ross, and a couple of amazing scenarios. You can purchase it right now over on DriveThruRPG.

A print version will come … but not for a couple of months (getting print proofs takes work and waiting).

Reason 2 to celebrate: Today is also the 130th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft’s birth.

Apocalypse, Here We Come

In a day or so’s time we will be releasing the APOCTHULHU Core Rules in PDF. In preparation for that momentous event, we’ve been sharing some snapshots of the final book layout on our Twitter (@cthulhu_reborn) … for folks who aren’t twits, I thought I’d also share those pictures here.

The final book is 330 pages and contains a bunch of different stuff to help GMs and players create memorable games which sit at the intersection of the well-established “Post-Apocalypse” genre and the equally well-established “Lovecraftian Horror” genre.

The rules baked into the APOCTHULHU system are derived from D100 iterations that are released under the (WoTC) Open Gaming License, so our game system is also OGL. While many of the features of the game will be very familiar to long-time Lovecraft RPGers, the game also has some brand new features catering to some unique problem/features of Post-Apocalypse settings. In particular, there’s entire new systems for resource scarcity and character status within communities. There’s also some new material about handling “Tomes of Arcane Lore”, an essential feature of Lovecraft-lore but something that perhaps takes on different shape in the Post-Apocalypse.

Most tabletop RPGs come with a pre-defined game setting baked into the rulebook — even if that’s something wide-open like “real world 1920s”. APOCTHULHU doesn’t. We thought long and hard about what types of Apocalypses we wanted the game to support and realized that there are just so many different ways to have the world ruined by Mythos forces, that for us to design the rules with any specific one in mind would be arbitrary. What we opted to do instead was to make the rules themselves as general-purpose as possible and focus on giving the GM tools and resources for building whatever Mythos Post-Apocalyptic setting they thought would be fun to explore.

Of course, building an entire new setting from scratch is a lot of work … and while some gamers revel in intense “worldbuilding” for their fellow players, lots of others are too time-poor to get into that. To help overcome that barrier, we’ve created nine “sample Lovecraftian Apocalypses” which are extended setting outlines which someone could either pick up and use whole-cloth as the backdrop to their own adventure, or tweak and modify to suit their personal preferences.

Of the nine pre-defined Apocalypse settings included in the APOCTHULHU core book, the one I’m personally most excited about is the mini-sourcebook chapter adapting William Hope Hodgson’s “The Night Land” setting. Kevin Ross, perhaps the most prolific and experienced Lovecraft game writer still with us, wrote this … and it’s an amazing description of an equally mind-boggling far-future pseudo-fantasy/pseudo-horror/pseudo-scifi setting. WHH’s novel was written in 1913, and was actually an inspiration for Lovecraft in some ways (although thankfully not in the painfully arcane writing style Hodgson effected for the novel). With this sourcebook chapter I think Kevin has done an amazing job at distilling the essence of the highly-imaginative world described in The Night Land and turning it into an atmospheric game setting that just begs to be played.

One thing that I must confess I was dreading having to do was to draw a brand-new map of the sprawling Night Land setting. Numerous efforts have been made by Hodgson fans over the years (many of which don’t agree with one another), but hopefully the new version I’ve drawn somewhat summarizes those preceding geographical researches while also giving gamers something usable for Post-Apocalyptic adventuring.

While our book is big on providing settings/resources to support readers in creating their own original scenarios, we would be remiss in not including a couple of “pick-up-and-play” adventures. I’ve always thought it’s important that core rulebooks include content like this … since it’s sometime only by seeing a concrete scenario that it become obvious (via example) how the game can support different styles of storytelling.

For the APOCTHULHU core rules, the first of our two scenarios is a chunky (48-page) scenario by veteran game writer Jeff Moeller, called “Kick The Can.” In the near future, the world becomes “purged by flame” when one night a rain of sentient fire emerges from the heavens in a frenzy of destruction. The weird thing is that this exact event was predicted months earlier by a crackpot doomsday cult called “The Church of Melqart.” The player-character Survivors are among the few who didn’t perish during the conflagration because they were safely holed up in one of the cult’s pre-arranged bunkers. They were always told that … eventually … the call would come over the pedal-powered CB Radio, calling the faithful to assemble. As the scenario starts, weird messages have started being heard on the radio for the first time in a year; is that the message that they were told to listen out for? And should they even follow its instructions to leave the bunker and venture out into the world?

The second scenario in the core book is called “A Yellow And Unpleasant Land” and was written by my co-editor Jo Kreil. This one is a different kind of Apocalypse altogether — a “historical apocalypse” set in an alternative Victorian England. The prim and proper Victorian Age has been swept aside, even as the Queen herself has been usurped by a shadowy figure who revels in decadence and licentiousness. This mysterious “King in Yellow” and his strange attendant army of masked foot soldiers have turned Great Britain into a strangely altered place — one in which the pursuit of sensate pleasures is not just encouraged, but mandated. Most people cannot remember a time before the arrival of the Libertine King, but the player character survivors have some vague memories … which are stirred into life when they encounter a curious ancient man on one of the gilded underground Metropolitan Line trains.

Finally, the APOCTHULHU core rulebook also includes appendices with some guidelines and notes to make it easier to adapt Mythos-related elements which have been statted-up for use in other games. With over 35 years of Lovecraftian RPG material already out there, there’s so much previous content that can be repurposed for your Post-Apocalypse games with very little work. So why not recycle?

Our appendix also includes the obligatory further reading list … which we already shared in full here on the blog. There are many great movies, TV shows, audio dramas, novels, short stories, games, and comics that our writing team picked as being great examples of Post Apocalypse tales with a “Lovecraft-y sensibility.” Any or all could be mined for scenario ideas or just general notes about how this curious genre-intersection might work in practice.

 

APOCTHULHU-Speak

Recently, Jo Kreil and I sat down to chat with the fantastic folks from the Miskatonic University Podcast to speak about all things end-of-the-world … including APOCTHULHU. The recording of this lengthy eschatological rumination just came out today … listen to us here!

And in other news … we have now fixed a date for the PDF release of the core APOCTHULHU rulebook. Barring any unforeseen calamities (like that could happen in 2020!), it will hit the virtual shelves on August 20.