is it any good?
It's Fate so the answer is no.
I was unimpressed. The adventure the game centers around involves a lot of time travel. And character creation seemed only half-complete to me. If you can find it selling for a reduced price, page through the book and decide if it's a fit for you and your fellow players, but it's not a 'must buy'.
>>93880306I think they should have come up with more original Lovecraftian horrors themselves rather than copy-pasting Cthulhu, fish people, and the usual cavalcade for the 24,859th time. It's nice that the supplements gave some variety.
>>93880306Fate of Cthulhu is a game that really wants to be a Terminator game but isn't, and resents that it had to use the Cthulhu license. There's a bit in the book where Evil Shat Games writers bitch about Lovecraft's bigotry and put him down like 5 more times. I will never buy anything from those losers.
>>93880306Anything that uses the Fate system or similar is automatically bad regardless of other concerns.
I stole the corruption system to emulate Dark Side use in a homebrewed Star Wars Fate game.
>>93887229Good ideas are worth repeating, and novelty by itself is worthless.
>>93887283I find it hilarious how people claim he stopped being racist as he got older and learned more about Black people. Nah, he was racist until the day he died. Note that this was absolutely the norm for the majority of people in the roaring 20s in the USA. He wasn't some kind of frothing at the mouth cartoon caricature of "kill all blacks, race war now" racist and despised "white trash" with equal zeal. Still, it's a personal peeve of mine when people try to paint him as some kind of redeemed soul or as cartoonishly racist. Dude was just very much a product of his time.
>>93887283>is a game that really wants to be a Terminator game but isn't, and resents that it had to use the Cthulhu license.What do you mean by this?
>>93881858/thread
>>93902020Allegedly, Evil Hat really wanted to make a Terminator future war game but they couldn't get the license, so they made it a Cthulhu thing instead, but you can tell they really did not want to make it
>>93901382There is a letter a short while before he died where he talks about resenting his past intolerance, but I don't think he fully just dropped the racism like some people say, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle
>>93901382It’s more that he reflected on his earlier writings and viewpoints and hated how naive and ignorant he used to be. He didn’t suddenly turn around and start loving black people, true, it was more of a “Christ I can’t believe I was this goddamn cringe-inducing” kind of moment
Isn't it the game where the authors were shitting on Lovecraft ? Or am I mistaken ?>>93881858>>93892842Never understood the appeal of that system.HeroQuest/QuestWorlds always struck me as a system that aims at the same style of play, while being (since the 2nd edition) far more accessible and understandable.
>>93901382He became less racist (he took a trip through Canada and wrote how impressed he was by the First Nations' culture) but he definitely died a racist.But yeah, he wasn't outside the norm. If you read other pulp writers from his day and age, you find plenty of racism. And, I mean, he never burned a cross on someone's lawn or participated in a lynching or something.
>>93880306Foreword: "listen, this guy was a really bad dude and stuff so like, don't be a fan of his or anything!"Yea but, even accepting that premise... you're taking his work, the whole reason people even know of or want to play your frankly shitty little licensed game, shamelessly attempting to profit from it and freely plundering all his material... so... "Play our game, just be sure to also hate the guy responsible for the entirety of the non mechanical contents"The sort of moralistic hand wringing being roughly equivalent to: Hitler was a bad dude. That being said, we all of course love his neat quirky ideas, good luck have fun we hope you enjoy our annotated mein kampf players guide!
>>93906691Another reason why more original material would have been appreciated. Using Lovecraft's contributions to the genre as a foundation and building upon them would have given the writers more ground to stand on.
>>93880306It's giving Ctech a run for its money as the most out-of-place Lovecraftian shoehorning and that's saying something.
>>93880306It's very much a "fixer upper". And given that it uses an engine built around players contributing to the story, that's saying a lot.For starters, it felt like it wanted to be an intro to Fate, got bored half-way, and then decided to just be a supplement. But then it doesn't really give much meat as a generic "people travelling from a Cthulhu-pocalypse to the past" kind of game; there's a little bit, but not nearly enough. Once you get past that you have the highlight of the book, which are 4 scenarios detailing different future Mythos apocalypses PCs could be trying to fight. The problem is there's not really anything to support tying them together, and I suspect most GM's would have problems doing so in a way that didn't feel forced. Meaning you either don't use half or more of the cool parts of the book, or your group agrees to multiple campaigns. And even then there's not much meat on these bones; a GM can expect to have to do quite a bit of work to make these scenarios useful.Also, they remind you that HPL was a racist in the middle of the text because they know their consumer base would get upset if they didn't. But it's like half a page and the guy's long dead with no estate so... yay for virtue signaling?If you can find it for cheap, I mean real cheap, it's a good looking little idea mine. But you could probably come up with better yourself over a long weekend.
>>93901382Honestly, I think Lovecraft was as much a classist as a racist, maybe more so. Then again, I find myself thinking more and more that America loves to frame class problems through a racial lens to keep poor people more divided.
>>93880306>>93904518>>93912133It's sort of the end-point in a long debate about whether or not Fate could be used to make a horror game, and there's really no way "let's see if we can actually make Fate work as a horror game despite the inherent reasons everyone including the designers think it's bad for horror" isn't the basic design goal.And that's really where the Terminator thing comes in IMO, because the solution is to only be kind of a horror game, in the same way Terminator is (which is the correct decision, you're not running Delta Green properly with Fate.)So I haven't played it, but based on reading it, I don't like it as much as Armitage Files for ToC or Apocthulhu, both of which are actual horror games, but I think it's actually pretty successful as an exercise. Maybe faint praise, because I don't think I'll ever play it, but I think there's value in trying to stretch the bounds of how your system works, and I think it's a reasonable attempt at that.It's just even harder to talk about because of everyone being triggered by the gay anti-Lovecraft disclaimer, and because of /tg/'s weird hateboner for Fate (and most narrative games) these days.
>>93881858Hey, I happen to like Fate.But the answer is still no.
>>93915628I think you have a good point in that Fate doesn't handle horror well, and I think that's because Fate is a very "player empowering" (not player character but player!) game. I mean, if you can create Aspects in the scene to let you escape or gain an edge or whatever, that's either empowerment (which is antithetical to horror) or else forces the GM to repeatedly say "nuh uh" (which is deprotagonizing, and bad in general RPGs but even more so in Fate). It's a lose-lose scenario that at best is probably harder to navigate than it's worth, what with all the other horror options already out there.Now, having said that, I felt like Fate of Cthulhu was going for more of an action vibe anyway. The difference between The Terminator and Terminator 3 perhaps. Sure there's some horror elements in FoC, but you're playing it to punch the Mythos to save the future first and foremost. You can see this in the bright pages and art, and general language used: the days of Evil Hat putting out relatively edgy stuff like Don't Lose Your Mind are long over.
>>93918642Fair enough, but I mean I think they did as good a job as they could and sort of tried? From an art-of-game-design standpoint, I'm glad Fate of Cthulhu was written, and I think it's interesting to look at, as an occasional Fate GM.At the same time, the only practical use I have for the book isa) things to rip off for other Fate games (that aren't horror) andb) Cthulhu apocalypses to rip off for Apocthulhu (and to be fair, I already have like 12 Apocthulhu mini-campaigns I want to run some day, so I'm not sure they're NEEDED, but fun to think about.)In short, I'm glad I own the pdf, but I'm also glad I didn't pay full price for it.
>>93905519Yep. And there's something that bugs me about profiting off Lovecraft's creations while getting in some little virtue-signalling digs against him. Like wow, congrats, you're less racist than an agoraphobic dude with asperger's who was born 130 years ago. Want a cookie?
>>93925555People that virtue signal to this extent don't give a shit about the people themselves that they're shitting on, they're just after tearing down the public perception of them. Especially since HP Lovecraft's horror stories and the collective fictional works that spun off it are a big corner in nerd culture, nevermind that the dude was only ever famous and influential post-mortem. So they don't see any contradiction to leeching off the reputation of someone's famous works while denouncing them at the same time, as though they can somehow irrevocably remove the creator's influence from their own creation without losing something.
>>93925555When Lovecraft was 5 years old he was given a cat with a racial epithet for a name. Being 5, it’s doubtful that he named it, but that it was named by his parents or other adult relatives. He owned it until he was 14. He never owned another animal, but he did make friends with many strays, which he gave such names as “Little Sam Perkins” and “Old Man”. He invented a fraternity for the strays to belong to, and filled his letters with the antics of the members of the Kappa Alpha Tau (Kompson Ailouron Taxis, or Company of Elegant Cats). While there can be no question that HPL had racist beliefs, I don’t think the name of his childhood cat can be laid at his door, and he never called any other cat by an epithet name
>>93925555>hurr look up the name of his cat(which wasn't even a pejorative usage)Why are these redditors all such fucking surface level midwits. Man wrote On the Creation of Niggers, you can't come up with a better example than him naming his cat after the color of it's coat? Fucking really? Knowing that he had a cat called Niggerman that he loved doesn't make me think he was a racist. Knowing that he wrote a poem that ends>A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,>Fill'd it with vice, and call'd the thing a NIGGER.makes me think he was a racist. Like sure, it's hard to concisely explain (with examples) that one of the existential fears underlining many of his works is the fear that deep down, you are a nigger. But it's not hard to find actual examples of him being overtly racist. Read the fucking books. Come on man, it's not hard, there's not many, they're not long. You can do it in a single day.
>>93915628>It's just even harder to talk about because of everyone being triggered by the gay anti-Lovecraft disclaimerProphetic
>>93880306Generic le oppressed dramatic rebels rebel dramatically, back of hand clasped firmly to forehead the whole time.Against Cthulu.It's just a lazy cash grab on the cthulu name, with stupid noble rebels tacked on to appeal to redditors.
>>93928468To be fair, it's very much a warning sign, just not how Evil Hat Productions intended it. Cause despite denouncing HP Lovecraft's works as infested with bad thoughts, they clearly didn't have actual problems with those same bad thoughts if they're trying to profit off it, no matter how "sanitized" they try to pretend their version is. Like, I get the reason for the disclaimer, but they legitimately could have left it at "We don't endorse the views of these dead guys" since far more than HP Lovecraft contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos.
>>93928875>rebels rebel dramatically>against cthulhuWait what? So the setting is "old ones awake" and somehow humanity can fight them? Way to miss the point of Lovecraft works.>>93928920>hitler was evil and a bad painter but we hope you guys enjoy our new edition of mein kampf ;)
>>93928957I think they try to portray it as Delta Green and other rpgs do, as pushing back the apocalypse by five minutes.
>>93927541It's not that he was a multiple "ist" that bugs people, but that the authors felt it crucial you know that HPL was a racist! He was a person who Had Bad Thoughts and Said Bad Things! And devoted a rather lot of words to inform you of this. And then proceeded to mine his stuff to sell you a book inspired by the Bad Thoughts and Bad Things he had.Except really, at this point, people are plumbing decades and decades of -other- writers' and artists' ideas, and lumping it all under together. The authors of FoC didn't have to inform/remind people HPL was a racist, and they wanted you to be aware of this so bad that they couldn't just put it in a disclaimer at the beginning (a simple "While we have used some of HPL's ideas and themes, we do not condone his racist views" should've been enough to make Evil Hat's Twitter fandom happy). It's tacky, but it was also coming in at the end of a decade of near constant reminders that HPL was a racist. Because if you don't remind people that the stuff you like (or are trying to sell) was influenced by a Bad Person, they might think you're a Bad person too!Put another way: imagine a world where every time anyone mentioned the Beatles, you had to have a disclaimer that John Lennon abused his family. Now imagine that someone puts the disclaimer in the middle of the song. It's annoying as hell.But it's also something you learn to ignore and look at the rest of the work on its own merits. And in FoC it's simply not that good a book.
>>93929649Now imagine a world where any time someone brings up the Beatles, 15 people have to come in and complain about the Lennon Disclaimer, instead of talking about Abbey Road.The issue is that every time this book has come up since the day it was published, 95% of all discussion on /tg/ has just been people who didn't read the book jumping in to rage about the disclaimer from when they saw it screencapped and got mad about it last thread.The same happens with so many games, just kind of makes me sad.
>>93933354It's still just a FATE book, anon. That's not nearly the kind of loss you're trying to paint it as.
>>93933768It's not even a book I particularly like. It's more that this is emblematic of everything wrong with modern /tg/.
>>93901382He was very much against degeneracy (in a non /pol/ sense) in many forms. He wrote about poor whites degenerating into savages almost as much as he did Blacks.But what I find most frustrating about all the people that use his work and then feel the need to add these ridiculous disclaimers is that they have the option to just not use his work. Lovecraft doesn't have exclusive rights to cosmic horror as a concept. Every time they use the mythos without alterations they're piggybacking on name recognition from a man they despise. Which is an admission that they cannot compete with an old dead racist they hate, creatively. Which is both funny and annoying to me.
>>93933354That's the thing though: it's a mediocre work at best. If you took that HPL rant out of it, there's not really much left to talk about because the substance of the book is all so half-finished. Even by the standards of an RPG book where groups are expected to "bring it to life".
>>93933354I'd wager it's because there's not much worth discussing about the book itself. First, plenty of people are just not into Fate or actively dislike it. That's a barrier of entry right there. Then there is the concept. there are only so many Lovecraft fans, and pairing his (and other later writers') work with an obvious Terminator plot produces a unique combination that holds even less automatic appeal. So in concept alone, there are multiple filters. Now we move onto nitty gritty details; what's new here? Well, there's the corruption system. I do think that is a sensible change since insanity can get old and corruption is a bit more flexible. In terms of actual use, though? I've only skimmed the book, but it looks like using any of the mythos-ripped super powers is a quick way to turn your character into a villainous NPC. So your reward for playing such a character is to have a good chunk of their abilities constantly holstered.
>>93927541Actually, it turns out the authorship of "On the Creation of Niggers" is suspect. While it was written on stationary Lovecraft used, it wasn't signed or dated, and wasn't in his handwriting. And it was only brought up by a biographer who hated him and wanted to shit on him.
