labcats | Current RPG Reading

I'm putting Shackled City aside for the moment, and reading Witch Hunter and CthulhuTech.

Witch Hunter has made some changes to world history for reasons that seem quite clear. For example, the Black Plague killed three times as many men as women in that world, which means that there's justification for having women in non-traditional roles. Cortez and Pizarro met with disaster rather than success so that there can be (I think -- I haven't gotten quite far enough to confirm) evil Aztec and Incan empires.

Of course, the authors aren't interested in thinking through what such changes mean. For example, given the change in the Black Plague, Lee Gold asked me if that meant that the Church's position on polygamy and priests being celibate changed. Nope. And, not only was there a Protestant Reformation, which I think I can believe, but it happened exactly the same way it did in our history, which I really can't.

I don't think any of the above bug me as much as the claim that, in the world of Witch Hunter, the Renaissance and the Age of Reason weren't anywhere as big or important as in our world. If you're going to say that, you really need to explain what you mean in more detail. What has changed?

None of this makes Witch Hunter a bad game. It just keeps it from being as good a game as it might be. The system is fairly simple, which means it's a little crunchier than I prefer. It's very much like White Wolf's World of Darkness system with extras tacked on. There's also good consideration about using Virtues and Vices in Witch Hunter, what they do mechanically, and when a GM should use them.

I'm in the middle of the chapter describing the world, so I'm hoping to hear a bit more about the Aztecs and the Incans. My guess is that I'll decide that the game is solid, but not outstanding, and that I'll try to figure out how best to blend it with the Solomon Kane RPG.

Meanwhile, CthulhuTech has a future history that is utterly, utterly absurd. Oddly, it has so many absurdities that just snap my suspension of disbelief that I find I don't mind. I think this is because what I'm seeing is the authors deciding that they want a particular flavor to the world as of when play starts, game year 2085, and that they're then working backwards to establish how it got that way, without really caring if it makes sense -- or perhaps that's not exactly it. It may be more that the justification feels about as flimsy as in some anime, and since CthulhuTech is rooted in anime at least as much as in Lovecraft, I'll accept that it shares the weaknesses, as well as the strengths, of the genre. I had a lot of fun reading the future timeline to

mnemex on the subway. We both did a lot of giggling, partly because I sounded like the properly programmed Official Computer Voice of the Audio-History Book, and partly because, at appropriate intervals when I paused for breath, he'd say, "It's madness, I tell you!" or "They're Evil!"

It also occurs to me that, except for the actual system, CthulhuTech is almost what I was hoping GURPS CthulhuPunk would be, an actual blending of modern / futuristic tech and Lovecraftian horror. GURPG CthulhuPunk never quite succeeded in blending the Cthulhu with the Punk, but CthulhuTech has this bizarre blend that makes enough sense that I'll accept the handwaving about how we got there. Goodness knows that my attempts at moving my own gameworld forward have folks with any scientific or political knowledge laughing their heads off, and I don't think what I have hangs together as consistently as CthulhuTech.

I have no intention of changing my gameworld to reflect CthulhuTech. The Cthulhupunk world I created years before GURPS CthulhuPunk existed has a certain history behind it, and I like it, improbabilities and all.

I don't think I can run CthulhuTech straight. I'm just not into mecha, and I'm not very good with systems crunch.

Between those two extremes, though... I might be able to pull a few CthulhuTech elements into CthulhuPunk, and I might be able to run something set in the CthulhuTech world using a different system and something other than mecha, although I'm not sure that's as likely to work.