Hot on the heels of our release last month of the Cthulhu Eternal Medieval SRD, we are pleased to announce the release of the first PDF scenario playable with those rules. The Lord of Nombrecht is a fairly chunky and investigation heavy adventure set in the Holy Roman Empire (modern-day Germany) anytime from 1000CE to 1300CE. It went on sale yesterday over on DTRPG.
The scenario takes place in castle perched high up in the mountains. The lord of the domain lies dead, purportedly the victim of an unfortunate hunting accident. But was it really an accident? The abbot of nearby Hohenfluss Monastery has his doubts, and commissions the Protagonists (who can be either members of the monastic community or friends of the abbot) to look into the affair.
Arriving at Castle Nombrecht they are swept up in preparations for the grand ball which will signal the heir-apparent being crowned as the new Lord. Amid dance rehearsals, leisure trips around the estate, and sundry intrigues of a personal nature they must discreetly conduct their inquiries. Not all is as it appears, and what begins as a simple mystery to solve slowly drifts into stranger and stranger territory, as tendrils of an otherworldly force begin to become plain, and exert their influence on the castle community.
The scenario was originally written in German and published in Issue 3 of the (awesome) Cthulhus Ruf magazine back in 2013. This English translation expands a little on the original and introduces an all-new malevolent force of the Cthulhu Mythos to strike fear into the Protagonists’ hearts. Assuming, of course, that they don’t foil the insane machinations that threaten to unleash otherworldly horror upon the unsuspecting Holy Roman Empire.
Thomas Michalski’s adventure perfectly blends an investigation-heavy Lovecraftian pseudo-sandbox with an authentic sense of the historical realities of life in the High Middle Ages. In many ways it has a similar vibe to “The Name of the Rose”, Umberto Eco’s Medieval detective tale. At its heart is a multi-stranded mystery that is complex enough to keep mystery-loving players guessing but also clearly explained so that a GM doesn’t get lost in the interwoven network of NPC motivations. And it features a truly horrific Mythos beastie at the end (if things get that far).
The 50-page adventure is available right now on DriveThruRPG, bundled with the Cthulhu Eternal Medieval SRD rules, a bunch of digital assets for VTT play, and a collection of pre-generated Protagonists if you want to get playing immediately.
This is the first in our “Dark Maledictions” line of self-contained scenarios set in Medieval Europe and Britain (500CE to 1300CE) and infused with Lovecraftian hints of cosmic horror. We already have a second in the works … so watch this space for more Medieval Cthulhu goodness to come.
Walking the Medieval streets of Lovecraft-haunted Europe can be rough.
It never rains but it pours ichor from the interstitial void. After having a fairly slow release schedule for the end of 2022, we’re now in the enviable position of announcing the release of yet another Cthulhu Eternal SRD that our team have been slogging away on for a while — this one is the Cthulhu Eternal Medieval SRD, available right now over on DTRPG.
The SRD is written by Chad Bowser, who has written oodles of historical stuff and Cthulhu stuff and sometimes historical Cthulhu stuff, for a range of different publishers. These rules are intended to support games set in any European/British setting from roughly the period 500CE to 1300CE (yes, 800 years of history all in one ruleset!).
While the Medieval period is not one typically associated with investigative horror, many of the common themes of cosmic horror resonate strongly with the vast social and cultural changes that sweep through Europe during these centuries. Science and rational conceptions of the world are luxuries for a future age — in these times the hidden horrors exist as an unknowable cancer. Something inexorably nibbling away at the institutions that keep men safe and sane.
The church, trust in the natural order of the world, and established feudal traditions of social order … all of them are as a speck of dust when the alien forces of the Cthulhu Mythos choose to rouse. The only thing that stands between mankind and a horrific awakening of ancient terrors … is a few hardy Protagonists willing to stand against impossible odds. Because the consequences of not fighting the horrors is something even more terrifying.
So … if you’re itching to get your players into a setting where they can literally “go Medieval” on some horrors from the terrifying Cthulhu Mythos … here’s the link. Just don’t complain to us when your players’ Protagonists wind up gibbering and broken invalids, living out their cursed short lives comforted in a monastery somewhere.
We must confess we have been a little overwhelmed by all the positive support that’s been directed at our free/open collection of Cthulhu Mythos entities, rituals, artifacts … all derived from 100% public domain works by Lovecraft.
In fact we have received only one criticism about the Open Mythos — many people want to have it as a downloadable resource. Sounds like a great idea to us … and hence was born the “Open Cthulhu Mythos SRD”, a compilation of all the stats and descriptions that were Lovecraft-inspired.
While this version is text only, don’t forget that the Mythos illustrations and other artwork on the Cthulhu Eternal website is also published under an open license (in particular a Creative Commons license), so you are more than welcome to reuse any of those pieces as long as you credit the original illustrator.
We hope that by making game stats freely available for a wealth of Lovecraft creations we can provide a platform on which other creative folks (and I’m sure you’re one of them!) can make awesome new scenarios/campaigns/games.
It’s no secret that we are constantly working away at bringing out new and intriguing Lovecraftian games and scenarios using the Cthulhu Eternal ruleset. Today is a red letter day because we can announce the release of the first in a brand new line of Mythos scenarios set in familiar time-periods, but in novel geographical settings.
“The Bitter Jungle” by veteran Lovecraftian game writer William Adcock is a really interesting investigative scenario set in the Central American country of British Honduras in the early 1920s. Weird things are happening at a plantation set up by an enthusiastic entrepreneur hoping to cash in on the burgeoning demand for chewing gum … most of which is made from natural gums extracted from trees. What should be a simple exercise in commercial agriculture has turned into a nightmare, thanks to some unexplained (and perhaps inexplicable) acts of vandalism. The Protagonists are given the job of trying to understand who — or what — is destroying the plantation. The answers are much stranger and personal than anyone might suspect.
This scenario is interesting for many reasons, not least because it affords the opportunity to ditch the traditional stuffy stereotypes of Lovecraftian investigators and step into the shoes of some indigenous Central American characters who are embroiled in events triggered by colonial farmers. Six pre-gen Protagonists are included that can be used to shake up the traditional format of a Mythos mystery hunt … or you can use the scenario as a chapter in an ongoing campaign with more orthodox investigators.
One of the reasons we really love this scenario is that — like many of William Adcock’s adventures — this tale offers little in the way of morally “black and white” characters, instead delightfully playing with some interesting moral and ethical issues and letting players decide what is important to the Protagonists, and how far they are willing to go in remedying a perceived injustice. We love scenarios like that.
You can read more about the specifics of the scenario over at the DTRPG page. We hope that folks here are interested enough to check it out. If you end up running this scenario we would (as always) be delighted to hear how it went for your gaming group!
Today is an exciting day … especially if you are a creative game designer who has ever dreamed of unleashing your original Lovecraftian scenarios, campaigns, or freaky new TTRPG settings.
Why? Because today we are thrilled to be announcing the completion of a collaborative project we have been running with our excellent friends at the German Lovecraft Society … an initiative to create a truly free and open set of game statistics for all of the unique horrors invented by H.P. Lovecraft and used to dreadful effect in his stories.
We are calling this collection of game elements the “Open Mythos”. It is available right now online at: www.cthulhueternal.com/open-mythos/ … and is published under an open license, meaning the full text (and artwork) is re-usable by anyone, either for personal or commercial purposes (as long as the terms of the licenses are met).
The Open Mythos covers five major areas: Lovecraftian Entities (gods and monsters), Unnatural Rituals, Terrible Tomes, Strange Artifacts, and organized Mythos-related Cults. The entries in the Open Mythos have been scrupulously researched in order to ensure that they are purely derived from Lovecraft, and more particularly from Lovecraft stories that are universally recognized as being in the public domain. A major objective of ours was to create a Mythos corpus that is reliably free of the kinds of “licensing complications” that plague other similar bestiaries and game books which have draw upon a broad selection of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, including stories which are still under copyright.
The Open Mythos game descriptions are written to be compatible with the rules engine we have built for both the Cthulhu Eternal RPG and it’s twisted post-Apocalyptic sibling APOCTHULHU. These systems are also highly compatible with the FHTAGN roleplaying game released by the Deutsche Lovecraft Gesellschaft. In theory you could also use these game statistics for other D100 games with a minimum of tweaking.
A principal motivation shared by both ourselves and the German Lovecraft Society is the creation of a set of game resources that everyone in the Lovecraftian TTRPG community can use for free, to add creative fuel to the flames of your imagination. From speaking with many gamers, one of the most commonly cited barriers to self-publishing original game creations is the hurdle of having to either license or build-from-scratch an entire Lovecraft-fuelled game world, complete with game stats for everything. With the release of the Open Mythos we hope we have lowered the bar for indie publishers to get their unique new ideas out into the marketplace, and into the hands of gamers around the world.
For those who are curious about the details of what is in the Open Mythos write-ups, here’s a quick summary. The full gory details can be obtained via the link above.
40 Lovecraftian Entities: Azathoth, Beings of Ib, Bholes, Bokrug, Cats of the Dreamlands, Colour Out Of Space, Cthulhu, Creeping Corpses, Dagon & Hydra, Deep Ones, Elder Things, Formless Hunter, Ghasts, Ghouls, Gnorri, God of the Sunken Temple, Great Race of Yith, Gugs, Hounds of Death, Hypnos, Keziah Mason, King in Yellow, Leng Folk, Mi-Go, Moon Beasts, Night-gaunts, Nodens, Nyarlathotep, Polyp Horrors, Rat Things, Resurrected Abominations, Resurrected Corpses, Shantaks, Shoggoths, Shub-Niggurath, Spiders From Leng, Star Spawn, Winged Servant, Yog-Sothoth, Zoogs
21 Unnatural Rituals: Accelerated Healing, Aklo Sabaoth, Annihilation, Banish Entity, Body Swap, DHO-HNA Formula, Dominate Will, Elder Sign, Elixir of Life, Erase Memories, Essential Saltes, Forge Ancestral Bond, Inflict Harm, Music of the Spheres, Open Dimensional Rift, Powder of Ibn-Ghazi, Prolong Life, See Through The Ages, Sign of Koth, Summon Entities, Voorish Sign
14 Terrible Tomes: Azathoth and Other Horrors, Book of Azathoth, Book of Dzyan, Brick Cylinders of Kadatheron, CTHULHU CULT (Angell’s Files), Daemonolatreia Libri III, Ilarnek Papyri, The King in Yellow (play), Liber Damnatus Damnationum, The Nameless Book, The Necronomicon, Pnakotic Manuscripts, Scientific Notes of Dr. Herbert West, Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan.
8 Strange Artifacts: Cthulhu Idol, Golden Tiaras of the Deep Ones, Great Race Mental Projection Apparatus, Jade Soul-Amulet, Mi-Go Brain Cylinder, Mi-Go Communication Implant, The Shining Trapezohedron, The Silver Key
8 Mythos-related Cults: Cannibal Cult of Leng, The Cthulhu Cult, Cult of the Wise Ones, Cult of the Worm, Esoteric Order of Dagon, Shepherds of Hastur, Starry Wisdom Sect, Witches Covens
With all this free and fully-open game content at your fingertips (or pseudopods, we’re not ones to judge), there is no end to the horror that can be unleashed upon the gaming world.
It’s hard to believe that it’s just over a year ago that we first unleashed Cthulhu Eternal, our free/open D100 system for Lovecraft-inspired Roleplaying, on the world. And here we are announcing the release of our SIXTH era-customized version of the rules, this one catering to games set in and around the time of World War II. The new material for this SRD was all written by Roger Bell_West who did a fantastic job of sketching out all the basics you would need to run a wartime game of Cthulhu Eternal.
The World War II SRD for Cthulhu is available right now on DTRPG, and like all our SRDs is 100% open content. If you want to use it for pretty much any purpose, you’re free to do so. If you want to sell your creation, fine, you don’t need to give us a cent. If you want to include a version of the Cthulhu Eternal logo on the cover — we have a free license for one of those also.
Obviously one of the questions to be asked when developing games set in wartime eras is … where does the game sit on the spectrum of “pulp” depiction of the realities of war. And also whether it assumes action in and around actual battles, or focuses on out-of-the-way shadowy corners not directly in the line of the military stuff. For the most part Roger’s SRD is agnostic with regards to these questions — if you want to use it to run a purely historical game (or one where the Mythos has only a peripheral influence on affairs), you certainly can. Alternatively, if you want to create a game with vast occult conspiracies battling it out in some parallel hidden supernatural conflict, the rules would support that equally well. The Cthulhu Eternal system is more deadly than many games, however, so truly over-the-top pulp (“I charge the Shoggoth army with just my bowie knife and a bad attitude”) would probably require some rules work-arounds.
When depicting real-world atrocities like those that happened in World War II, it is always important to be sensitive to the real human suffering which even today is harrowing. Roger strongly recommends (and I heartily agree) that the historical horrors should never have their origins in some force of the Mythos — human beings are capable of evil enough even before they get involved in the picture, and to attribute things to this-or-that Outer God somewhat trivializes that fact. Obviously, though, it’s your game.
Go forth, grab the Cthulhu Eternal World War II SRD today and start scheming about awesome wartime Lovecraftian scenarios, campaigns, and game settings that you can use it to power! The world is ablaze, and its fire can cast dark shadows across any corner of the globe you wish …
This year has been an amazing year for Cthulhu Reborn. We have released more content in 2022 than any previous year … and while some of the work happening behind the scenes has progressed the APOCTHULHU product line and other new offerings, the vast majority of our time has been spent launching and supporting Cthulhu Eternal, the free/open game system for Lovecraftian tabletop roleplaying.
While most readers will probably be familiar with at least some of the Cthulhu Eternal stuff that’s been released in 2022, we thought it would be fun … as this dark year limps to a close … to do a bit of a roundup.
Even though our work on the rules for Cthulhu Eternal started well before 2022, it was the release of our first batch of rulesets (in the form of System Reference Documents) that marked the public launch of the game.
These three rulesets each comprise a full-featured set of rules, tailored for a particular era of gameplay. Each weighs in at about 100 pages of text (no illustrations), and covers everything from game system mechanics, details about generating era-appropriate player characters (Protagonists, in CE parlance), combat, rules for sanity, tomes, rituals, etc. Each SRD gives you the basic tools to run a detailed roleplaying game or campaign.
But the best thing about our SRDs is that every single word in them is 100% open content — which means that ANYONE (not just us) can release content compatible with these rules, or lift particular text or mechanics, or remix the content to make an entire new game. All without paying us (or any other licensor) a cent.
Needless to say these free/open rulesets have proven to be incredibly popular — and actually constitute (easily) the most downloaded products we’ve ever released. At last counting, each had been nabbed by over 6,000 gamers, earning gold medals on DTRPG. We like to think that a decent chunk of those curious folks have given the system a spin, or written their own nifty adventures brought to life by our rules. We’ve certainly heard tales of some fantastic original (and converted) games that people have run.
The launch of a truly free/open game for Lovecraft Investigation also piqued the interest of a few podcasts who invited us on to talk about the potential of the “open source” rules engine. (Of course we are always open to talking to more folks about such things, so would happily drop by other gaming podcasts if the chance arose!)
Feb to May: Our First Cthulhu Eternal Scenario
Shortly after unleashing the CE game system on the world, we put out a pair of scenarios set in 1920s Arkham. These eventually became the first entries in our ongoing “Miskatonic Mysteries” line — which has swelled to 5 titles as the year has gone on.
The initial scenarios were called “To Touch The Untouchable” and “Help Wanted” and each offer an intriguing balance of investigation and action, in the classic Lovecraft tradition. Both scenarios are also chock filled with newspaper-based props. Because we love vintage newspaper props (do we need a better reason?)
People had quizzed us a lot about whether we had plans for releasing versions of Cthulhu Eternal for eras beyond the “traditional” time periods for Lovecraft stories. We’ve always found this kind of interesting — in truth we embarked upon this whole endeavor to create a platform to release entirely new types of game Mythos setting, prioritizing the Jazz/Victorian/Modern trio mostly because previous reader polls had suggested that is what most people were interested in.
In reality, though, our approach to the Cthulhu Eternal rules was always designed to make it relatively easy to port them to a wide range of settings. In order to test this out we took a shot at releasing a version which targets mid-20th century settings, in particular those with a “cold war spy” kind of vibe. Predictably we called those free/open rules the Cthulhu Eternal Cold War SRD. Like the rest it’s about 100 pages and covers everything you need to run a seedy “spy v spy v Mythos” type of game. Or you can downplay the spy stuff and use it for more general purpose games set any time from the 50s to the 80s.
This Victorian Era scenario is quite an extravagant affair, and also occasioned some fantastic game sessions when we ran it internally for playtesting. It brings together the Cthulhu Mythos and a very famous creation of Oscar Wilde and sets things up for a deadly and very theatrical climax.
The release of this scenario was also a bit of a milestone for us — with different versions of the same adventure having been kicking around our filing cabinets since about 2011. In reality the core of the scenario is far older … dating back to the mid 1990s!
May: Our First Lost Masterpiece
Over the years we have been fortunate enough to be able to speak with many of the most prolific authors of Lovecraftian RPG gaming material. One of the things that always surprises us when chatting with those luminaries is … just how many little unpublished tidbits they have sitting at the back of their dusty old filing cabinets.
We were fortunate to be able to secure permission from Kevin Ross — perhaps the most prolific and accomplished writers for Chaosium’s “Call of Cthulhu” in its golden age — to put out a few of his very earliest pieces. We grouped two mi-go themed adventures together as “Dark Visitations”.
The first pair of 1920s Miskatonic Valley scenarios seemed to be quite popular, so we released another three entries in the series. The first two of them (Smoke Green and Spoiled Milk) are set mostly in the Arkham vicinity, but the third (Bottoms Up!) mostly takes place in Bolton, a little-used (fictional) neighboring town. It’s an industrial town mentioned in just one Lovecraft story (Herbert West of Reanimator fame lived there for a while) … but has so far not been depicted in gaming form. That meant we needed to create a whole new town map … that was a fun task (which thankfully was helped by input from Bret Kramer, renowned Lovecraft scholar and publisher of the excellent Arkham Gazette gaming mag).
Links:
Miskatonic Mysteries #3: Smoke Green
Miskatonic Mysteries #4: Spoiled Milk
Miskatonic Mysteries #5: Bottoms Up!
Aug: Our Fifth Ruleset
Not content with the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century settings we’d covered in Cthulhu Eternal SRDs, we decided to make one tailored to stories from the mid 18th Century onwards. We toyed with a few candidate titles to capture the essence of this turbulent time, but eventually settled on the “Age of Revolutions”. This is kind of fitting since the time period encompasses both the French and American revolutions … and arguably a sizeable chunk of the industrial revolution as well.
While one of our main motivations for making this version of Cthulhu Eternal is to (eventually) reboot our much-loved “Convicts & Cthulhu” setting, numerous people have pointed out that it has a lot of potential for a broad range of intriguing game settings. In addition to all the notable historical upheavals mentioned above the ruleset could feasibly be used for things like the French and Indian Wars, or Napoleonic conflicts. All it needs is for motivated writers with a historical bent …
With a range of Cthulhu Eternal rulesets out in the wild, we decided it was time to build some support for playing our game on at least one of the major Virtual Table Top (VTT) sites. We’d love to support lots of these, but our resources are limited — so we concentrated on getting Cthulhu Eternal on to Roll20. Rather than putting a bunch of different character sheets on the site, we ended up created one mega-sheet that can be reconfigured to support any of the published SRDs … and a bunch of others that we would ultimately like to release in the fullness of time.
For those who use Roll20, the mega-sheet can be selected whenever you’re creating a new R20 game (look in the section “Sheets by Publisher” — it’s called “Cthulhu Eternal by Cthulhu Reborn Publishing”).
Dec: The “Re-Animated By Cthulhu Eternal” Logo License
With five full rulesets out in general circulation, it seems that a small grass-roots community of “Open Source” Lovecraft RPG hackers has sprung up. We’re aware of several intriguing projects that have already begun. One thing that emerged as a common question was “if I publish my own scenario or game, can I put the Cthulhu Eternal logo on the cover, or claim compatibility with the Cthulhu Eternal system?”
We obviously want to make it as easy as possible to do all those things, and to clarify the whole legal situation about using our logo we created a special license which says basically you are free to use a compatibility logo (below) on pretty much any (legal) publication you might care to release. There is no charge for this, and you don’t need to get prior approval by us for using the logo.
Note that this license only governs usage of logos etc … using the text of the Cthulhu Eternal SRDs is controlled by the (WotC) Open Gaming License 1.0a.
And That’s Our Year
A year is a long time in gaming … but this year (maybe for the first time) I can look back and think yep, we sure did release a lot of stuff in 2022. Five full rulebooks, five Miskatonic Mysteries, and two other major scenarios. The only thing we didn’t do is release any physical print books (all the things mentioned above are PDF-only at present). We’re hoping to rectify that in the future, perhaps grouping together some of our scenarios into a print anthology. But that is, as they say, a future project.
So … what’s next for Cthulhu Eternal, you might ask. Well we are keeping quite a lot of stuff under wraps for now … but I will just leave this image below as a teaser for something that is currently being worked on by the illustrious Chad Bowser (famous for inventing the latest CoC Dark Ages, and the original Cthulhu Invictus). We hope to share more …. when the stars come right.
Ever since we released the first Cthulhu Eternal SRDs, people have been asking us how they can publish their own CE-compatible stuff with the distinctive CE logo on the front. We definitely want to make it easy for anyone to release cool games/scenarios/whatever that proudly declare their relationship with our free/open ruleset, so we created a version of our logo called the “Re-Animated By Cthulhu Eternal” logo, which anyone can use for free, without asking for our permission. You can see it at the top of this post!
But in essence: anyone can use this logo on published works, for free, without any prior permission from us. The only proviso is that in the (extremely unlikely) event that a published work is actually illegal (e.g., fraudulent, a copyright violation, etc) we might ask that the logo be removed. We can’t imagine a situation arising where that would ever happen, though, but it’s the only condition in the license.
We are also excited to mention that the first product bearing this logo has already been released (and it is kind of awesome, a nifty modern-day scenario): Sasquatch by Pnakotus Press. It’s Pay-What-You-Want on DTRPG, but we definitely think it’s worth throwing a couple of bucks down to support a great scenario!
Lots of folks have been asking for ages that we make it easier for people to play Cthulhu Eternal using online Virtual Table Tops. Today, we have made virtual games of Cthulhu Eternal much easier … if you’re a user of the popular Roll20 environment.
When you create a new game on Roll20, you can now select “Cthulhu Eternal by Cthulhu Reborn Publishing” from the super-long list of character sheets available.
The same character sheet will let you play games using ANY of the five eras for which we have already released SRDs (Modern, Cold War, Jazz Age, Victorian, Age of Revolutions). All you need to do is select the era from the pulldown menu at the top right of the sheet. When you do, the sheet reconfigures to show a look & feel appropriate to the era as well as the correct skills list for protagonists in that era.
To future-proof things, we have also gone ahead and built sheets for a bunch of eras we haven’t yet released SRDs for … but would really like to one day.
So, the full list of Cthulhu Eternal games that you can run on R20 looks more like this:
Happy gaming online! And if you do anything cool with these character sheets — especially the eras we haven’t yet written — we would love to hear about it. Cthulhu Eternal is a 100% community effort, so if you have some amazing ideas we would definitely like to consider incorporating them in those things we hope one day to bring into the world!
Today we are proud to announce the release of another in our expanding range of customized versions of the Cthulhu Eternal ruleset. This one is firmly aimed at historical games set in any period between 1750 and 1850. We call this turbulent century the “Age of Revolutions” since it embodied massive political and social shifts as well as great advances in industry and learning.
The Cthulhu Eternal “Age of Revolutions” SRD is available right now as a Pay-What-You-Want download on DriveThruRPG. It is a fully-featured ruleset, spanning a little over 100 pages, and is ready to bring life any 18th Century Lovecraftian game setting you wish. Ever wonder what the Cthulhu Mythos was up to during the American Revolution? Or during the Reign of Terror following the French? How about the secret Otherworldly battles that somehow formed part of the vast Napoleonic Wars? And if settings of conflict and strife aren’t your thing, the “Age of Revolutions” is also the time when both the Industrial Revolution and the “Enlightenment” were hitting their peaks — who knows what terrors might have been stumbled upon by those re-writing the established order of industry, or the longstanding worldview?
This era is also the time of the creation of the Australian penal settlements, which is a setting very near and dear to our hearts thanks to our long-standing Convicts & Cthulhu setting. In the future, we plan to reboot that line using this SRD as a foundation stone.
But for now, we invite anyone who has an interest in historical gaming, and also a fascination for cosmic horror, to consider mixing the two to build … some kind of 18th Century Mythos Monstrosity … and bring it to your game table with our SRD ruleset!
As with all our previous Cthulhu Eternal SRDs (Modern, Cold War, Jazz Age, Victorian, APOCTHULHU), this new edition is a self-contained and full-featured bare-bones TTRPG. While it doesn’t have the flashy illustrations and worked examples you’ll find in your average published game, the text of the rules are extensive and cover everything you would need to run a Lovecraftian game set in the 18th Century — everything from character development, skills, combat, sanity rules, and guidelines for building magickal rituals, supernatural effects, and adapting pre-existing Mythos horrors. Also included are some nifty character sheets (fillable and printable versions). Best of all, though, is the price tag — you can get this 100+ page ruleset for free if you want, or a small donation if you’d like to help us make more editions (we have many more planned).
Age of Revolutions Protagonist Character Sheet
We hope the creation of this new roleplaying engine will encourage folks to go back and look at this evocative (if somewhat grubby) period of history and imagine what horrors might lurk in the unwatched places as the world underwent the tumultuous events that created the world that we recognize today. Because our rules are 100% free and open (under the Wizards OGL) anything you imagine and create is yours to release (commercially if you want) as long as you do so under the OGL … Download our SRD today and start scheming.
So, find your powder horn, polish up your brace of flintlocks, … it’s time to set out into to uncover the hidden threats that no earthly revolution can harm, but which you must suppress lest all humanity fall. Nobody said it was going to be an easy life! C’est la vie.
Cthulhu Reborn 