In October 2024 we presented the Fate of Cthulhu Bundle featuring Fate of Cthulhu, the action-horror RPG from Evil Hat Productions. In this standalone “Cthulhu Mythos meets The Terminator” RPG based on the flexible and fast-playing Fate Core system, you’re a soldier from the future who travels to our time to stop the arrival of the Great Old Ones. Horrible things will still happen, and you may give in to corruption (in order to gain powerful “corruption stunts”), but you’ll use your foreknowledge to punch the apocalypse in the face – or die trying.
Using the Fate Core rules and adding new systems for corruption (and weird corruption-based super-power stunts), time travel, and Great Old Ones technology, Fate of Cthulhu emphasizes short, diverse, highly structured pulp-horror campaigns with defined breakpoints. In a December 2019 Reddit r/rpg comment, redditor “21stCenturyPhilosopher” succinctly described the Fate of Cthulhu schema:
“You basically travel back in time from a Cthulhu Apocalypse (2030) to the first branching point in time (2020), then try to adjust the timeline, and then you take the slow way forward in time to each branch you want to change until you reach what should have been Cthulhu Apocalypse, and you find out if you really did make a difference. As you move forward, your previous success/failures affects each future branching point, making it either easier or harder. The setting is based on which Great Old One manifests in the Apocalypse (The King in Yellow, Cthulhu, etc.). So, each Great Old One has its own timeline with key branching points you can interfere with.”
This fresh approach cleverly lets traditional Fate characters – defined as “proactive, competent, and dramatic” – tackle the existential hopelessness of Mythos danger. Aaron Marks, in a Dec 2019 Cannibal Halfling review: “Fate of Cthulhu is intended to, at a structural level, give characters a fighting chance against the Great Old Ones that never existed either in Lovecraft’s stories or in Call of Cthulhu itself. […] What Fate of Cthulhu does particularly well is establish stakes for the characters, and in establishing those stakes make it clear failure is the default option. While there are plenty of opportunities for heroic reversals, these are neither assumed nor do they come without risks and sacrifices. This is, ultimately, not in genre for Lovecraft and his Mythos, but as soon as we knew the game involved time travel we shouldn’t have been surprised.
“This should be taken as a template for running games with competent characters. If characters can change the world, they can also fail to do so, or even make things worse in the doing. These stakes give weight to character actions. And that’s why a game about (no kidding) traveling back in time to fight Cthulhu manages to have some of the weightiest storytelling I’ve seen in a game recently. […] Victory may be possible, but it’s never guaranteed, and you never know when the Corrupted are nipping on your heels.”
This new Fate of Cthulhu Bundle presented the entire line for an unbeatable bargain price. There were ten titles in our Fateful Collection (retail value $62) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete standalone 258-page Fate of Cthulhu corebook (previously in our July 2021 Fate Worlds and Toolkits offer) and nine terrifying Timelines: The Ascellan Conspiracy, Rise of Azathoth, Rise of the Basilisk, Rise of Hastur, Rise of the Quiet, Rise of Tsathoggua, Rise of Yig, Rise of Yog-Sothoth, and Zombie Apocalypse.
Fate of Cthulhu and other Fate games use Fudge Dice, available from Evil Hat Productions (as “Fate Dice”), at hobby gaming stores, or from Amazon (affiliate link).
