Quote from: Settembrini;422472Still fantasizing about Deep-Ones vs. Jägermechs...

"Hauptmann Redlich, where is your goddamn Rifleman company, we need help here with that Wing of Byakee!"

"Alpha-Lance requesting LRM-strike at ze-ro-se-ven-fi-ver, Shoggoth armed and dangerous, repeat..."

"LAM-Regiment Osano-Wo: It is my honour to inform you that the Dragon has chosen you for the Kamikaze attack on Hastur. BANZAI!"

I won't lie. I'd probably play this at least once.

Quote from: Melan;422466So, lotsa rape but not quite that much rape. That's reassuring to read, since there are too few games that get the amount of rape just right.

_______________________
(caveat1: rape is horrible, evil, and I will not have it in my games. just to make this absolutely clear.)
(caveat2: the basic idea of Cthulhus-vs-mecha is cool as hell, though, the best spin on the Mythos since Delta Green)

To be perfectly honest, I didn't even really notice it until I bought the book with the psychic powers so much (with the elder god secks cults and rape mind powers).  I vaguely recall thinking that it was a little too upfront with the deep one villages, you know: we know what breeding camps are, do we really need to have it thrown in our faces that that it is 'rape camps'?

As for The Hastur cannibal connection, the fiction that establishes what is really going on there is designed to be as horrific as possible (The POV is a deep cover spy slowly growing to like the horrible stuff). I mean, if you are eating people and wearing entrails as hats, and you still aren't as nasty as your bosses, the fact that rapes (or necro-rapes, or random, not entirely natural orifice rapes) are ALSO going on is just one more overwhelmingly 'do not want to go there without lot and lots of fire-of-the-burninating-kind' detail.

But as Psuedo pointed out tengentally, there are various mind control rape powers... starting really in the supplements. Though I believe that they affect men and women in the adventure therein, though the focus is on the female victims.

I think the problem is that mere existential horror just doesn't seem very horrific to modern audiences, so they are spicing it up.  I'm reminded of Stephen Kings commentary re: tommyknockers where the dude dies to the toilet monster... if it don't make you uncomfortable it ain't really that scary.

Of course, it doesn't necessarily reverse either: Just because its squicky don't make it horror. The King died on the toilet, which is just pathetic in a vaguely amusing sense, not horrific.


I am not under the impression that the Cthulutech guys are actively promoting or glorifying rape, which is a huge step in the right direction over the alternative.  I can't tell you if their handling of the topic is appropriate or not, for me it was not offensive but it did get worse in select cases.  Recall that the explicit focus on the game is always stopping this sort of thing, there are no canon rules/examples for playing Team Evil that I am aware of. Then again, I've already been checked once...

Chaosium Mythos =/= HPL Mythos.

Chaosium has not only created images based on HPL's own descriptions, but also got rights from many Mythos authors to their creations....and many people aren't aware than only a fraction of the current CoC mythos family were actually created by HPL.    

YOU are 100% able to do anything with HPL's original writings, but your images and interpretations should not be identical to Chaosium's or anyone else.  That's where there could be an issue.

BTW, in regards to Rape in RPGs....where do half-orcs come from?  We can romanticize half-elves all day long, but not so much with the half-orcs.

Quote from: Spinachcat;422494Chaosium Mythos =/= HPL Mythos.



BTW, in regards to Rape in RPGs....where do half-orcs come from?  We can romanticize half-elves all day long, but not so much with the half-orcs.

No orcs-->no half-orcs--> no problem.

So basically the creators of this game watched abit to much urotsukidoji and hentai then mixed abit of migou mythos and evangelion into the mix along with some drow coz there awesome then said fuck it why not set it in the future and add mechs that arent evangelions coz not everyone like those kinds?

Sounds interesting though i'd definitely downplay the utosukidoji and hentai references and go for a more starship troopers style humans versus the nasty aliens style game instead or maybe a urban horror/guyver game.

Edit: just checked how much the books cost and have totally changed my mind, £35 for a sourcebook is a pisstake.

Quote from: Settembrini;422468Mecha + Cthulhu = x

Cthulhu = Tentacles, therefore

Mecha + Tentacles `= x

Mecha = Anime, therefore


Anime + Tentacles = x

I am not surprised!


What naive Settemrbini thought, though:

Cthulhu + Mecha = x

Mecha = Battletech, therefore

Cthulhu + BattleTech = x

Cthulhu = ultra-bad-ass aliens that are hard to kill, therefore

Great Old Ones vs. House Steiner == AWESOME!!

Sadly we got anime in the mix and that spoilt it all.

That's all the review the game needs, right there. It would be pretty neat without the anime.

Bloody elves raping our women...

Actually the dark secret of the High Elves in my first Rolemaster campaign was that they couldn't reproduce because they had turned away from the gods that created them.  So they'd kidnap and rape woodelves for the purpose.

There was this high elf Paladin the PCs really, really hated...

Yeah, Chulhutech; I know I've gone on record before as saying they took an awesome name and premise and fucked the whole thing up.

You'd be better off mashing up your Robotech and Beyond the Supernatural. It'd be a much more awesome game then Cthulhutech's Emo claptrap.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Quote from: Spike;422426Eh. That'll show me to ignore maps...

Don't feel too bad. I'm pretty sure that the authors of Cthulhutech don't read maps either. Not only do they not seem to appreciate how many people are on the coast of China, they also don't seem to know where cities are in Russia or even where there are rainforests in the Pacific Northwest. It's like they were operating from one of those children's maps, that contains just boldly colored countries and their capital cities but no topographical or population distribution information.

-Frank

Just for the record: I CAN read maps, and quite well.. I just don't bother with game maps...usually.

At least I know all the stuff you just pointed out, anyway.



Grumble, grumble... just gotta salvage my pride somehow...grumble grumble...

Quote from: KrakaJak;422623You'd be better off mashing up your Robotech and Beyond the Supernatural. It'd be a much more awesome game then Cthulhutech's Emo claptrap.

Hell yeah! Wouldn't it be AWESOME if someone took created a Beyond the Supernatural/Robotech mashup game?

Oh wait...



And despite what the cover might suggest, I assure you, this game is 100% tentacle-rape-free.

I once entertained the notion of running a campaign with the PCs as the Science Police, emptying Monster Island in a last-ditch effort to stave off the day of the Old Ones.

Plus Ultraman. And Spectreman, what the hell.

Lord Hobie

Yeah, the Cthulhutech / RIFTS comparison is really very apt. They were even both in lawsuits this year.

Anyway, on the rape camps thing. In the core book it isn't so bad. It tells you that the EOD (that's the Deeps Ones and Tentacles faction) have rape camps. Why? I'm not really sure, they have cloning vat technology, so there doesn't seem to be any actual reason to bother. But sure, they are bad guys. They have decided for whatever reason that they want to grow hybrid soldiers over a period of decades in rape prisons full of angry and hostile humans instead of over a period of weeks in their cloning facilities. This is the sort of thing that villain factions do. I'm sure that the EOD's leader has a backup plan where he turns into a snake and devours an energy field larger than his head to ascend to near godhood.

But as books come out, it gets ground into you like glass under Rodney King. Not only do they talk um... more about the Deep Ones' rape camps, but they add more rape camps belonging to other factions. One set of rape camps is fine in context, but there's a certain remorseless sameness about how the other factions have rape camps. It really doesn't help that the Hastur flavored rape camps are "for no reason". That doesn't make it any different from the Deep One rape camps that are there to make hybrid foot soldiers. And it's even worse when the Shub Niggurath aligned rape camps are also there to make hybrid foot soldiers, just for a different faction.

There are even rape camps there to make babies to sacrifice to dark gods. Why would anyone ever do that? There are babies already made. They are just sitting around in hospitals and daycare centers. Why would anyone operate a rape prison for 40 weeks, when you could just attack a maternity ward instead? You'd have the same number of newborns in like an hour and wouldn't have to hide, feed, and imprison hostile women for most of a year.

When you start throwing in all the monsters who have coercive sex or insidious impregnation as a special power or even combat maneuver, it goes from simply no longer being interesting or funny to being a straight up depressing theme. The game starts getting you worried that maybe the authors really like talking about rape. It's not FATAL, but it's uncomfortably close in too much of the later material.

-Frank

Cthulhutech is something I picked up cheap to mine for ideas and kind of ended up ignoring altogether... it did remind me a bit of Rifts, with less power to the fun.
I think that if I wanted to run 'Lovecraft in Spaaaaaaaace!!!' I'd go with Chaosium's 'Cthulhu Rising' (on the subtle end) or the setting from 'Dark Space; (on the wilder side)... or maybe 'Dark Heresy'.

An Ultraman/Science Patrol game sounds like a lot of fun... especially mashed up with Gerry Andersonverse elments... someone should go make that.