Executive Sunmary: I played CthulhuTech a couple of weekends ago and it was awesome.

When I was 14 years old, my parents bought me two dog-eared paperback collections of short stories by pulp horror author H.P. Lovecraft. For months afterward, Lovecraft and his Mythos were practically all I could talk about. 

Twenty years later I had a similar response to Japanese animation, and weird series like Neon Genesis Evangelion in which emotionally disturbed teenagers piloted giant biomechanical creatures in horrific combat against alien monsters.

The CthulhuTech roleplaying game smashes those obsessions together to make something entirely new and wonderful. It's set n a gritty near-future setting where Lovecraft's monstrous aliens are waging open war against humanity, and magic and technology have merged in bizarre ways. It seems likely that humanity will lose the war and become extinct. Or worse.

A couple of weeks ago I played CthulhuTech for the first time, in a one-shot run by Eric Franklin of Talking Game. The game was a blast. I'm a huge fan of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and really enjoy the roleplaying possibilities of scenarios where ordinary people are plunged into nightmarish situations that, more often than not, will kill them or drive them mad. In contrast, CthulhuTech characters are competent professionals who are trained and equipped to go up against alien monsters. Lovecraftian horror is exchanged for horror of a different kind; a sort of existential, macro-level horror as you encounter a corrupted, doomed world.

Eric let us pick from a stack of pre-generated characters. I chose a very strong, tough character who was an expert in Military Kendo, whose Virtue was courage and whose Flaw was sadism. The character's name and call sign were up to me. From that rough sketch I fleshed out a big, angry, intimidating beat cop who wielded a police baton with deadly skill and power. His fellow officers had naturally given him the call sign "Vader".

The elements of science fiction, horror and detective noir worked very well together. As a band of police officers trying to crack the case of an unidentified corpse that had disappeared into thin air, we plundered computer networks, prowled the red light district, tapped into shadowy military and underworld connections, slammed punks up against walls, and fumed as oily sleaze merchants cheated justice. At the climactic battle we had to fight smart, and we made some hard moral choices about who got to live and who didn't.

And yes, I went toe to toe with a Deep One, and beat him to death with a stick. It was one of my most satisfying gaming moments ever.