Cthulhu Awakens – all-new through Mon 26 Oct

The October Horrors begin! Through Monday, October 26 we present the Cthulhu Awakens Bundle featuring Cthulhu Awakens, the standalone Adventure Game Engine RPG from Green Ronin Publishing of Cthulhu Mythos roleplaying across the Weird Century. As we liberated the secrets of chemistry, atomic power, genetics, and digital information, Yithian agents started operating stolen bodies to engineer history to their liking. Dagon worship moved from seaside villages to self-help paperbacks, endlessly hawked on TV and then the Web. Mi-go harvest the brains of public intellectuals. In this AGE of wars, the broken atom, subverted technologies, and the horrors of social media, you cut through the lies spread by cults and power brokers. Whether you’re a 1920s gangster who left the mob when the bodies wouldn’t stop moving, or a modern influencer confronting very strange sponsors, you dare to step through the Corridor and transport your consciousness to other times, following the trail of rising strangeness across the world and ultimately confronting terrifying revelations across the Weird Century.

Funded in a US$91K February 2022 Kickstarter campaign, Cthulhu Awakens reimagines and expands the Mythos beyond the biases of the original stories, creating a setting designed specifically for roleplaying eldritch adventures. In Cthulhu Awakens, the “canon” is a lie that hints at the truth: The forces of the Mythos, from its dead dreaming gods to its alien colonizers, have hidden behind a veil of fiction and bias, in tales told to protect the guilty. Aliens care nothing about our social distinctions, but the powerful have often harnessed eldritch forces for themselves, while blaming the oppressed for the evil unleashed on the world. In Cthulhu Awakens, anyone can reach for the terrible power of the Mythos, and everyone must oppose it.

For 80,000 years leading up to the Weird Century, humans forged bronze and fought wars to drench the idols of strange gods. Nonhuman species had their own nations, in lost islands and vast underground realms, where they used eldritch technologies. But Cthulhu Awakens focuses on Mythos horror in the Weird Century from the early 1900s to the present. Today the Mythos is never acknowledged in public life, but still represents a pervasive, dangerous influence. The US government conceals the existence of the caves of K’n-yan, and authorized visitors to an Antarctic forbidden zone must avoid using modern equipment, for fear of accidentally teaching its clever shapeshifting residents how to access computer systems or create horrendous weapons. Dozens of modern-day cults amass power and influence through social media. They range from China’s Red Mask to Thalassology, a human potential movement once known under another name – when it ruled Innsmouth.

This modern take shows throughout Cthulhu Awakens. Putting game-centered storytelling before literary homage, the setting explicitly rejects many problematic elements in the Lovecraftian stories that shaped the field. “Never approach Mythos stories as objectively true ‘canon,'” the rulebook advises. “Lovecraft was a bigot. His work evokes a world that assumes people of color are inferior, degraded, and more often than not, evil. […] It’s quite easy to decouple the worst tropes of the fiction from the best. […] The cosmic horrors serve as a backdrop to human stories, stories about how we respond to these things, and we can tell whatever human stories we want. We can respond to the eternal darkness of the eons with our own ideals.”

Green Ronin’s house system, the Adventure Game Engine, debuted in the Dragon Age RPG. Now AGE powers Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, Blue Rose, The Expanse, and the recent The Fifth Season. You need three six-sided dice, one of them a different color; the odd die is the Stunt Die. Roll 3d6 and add the relevant ability to beat a target number. On a success, if any two dice came up doubles, you get stunt points equal to the Stunt Die and can spend them on the spot for extra effects. To the basic AGE system Cthulhu Awakens adds Bonds, an evolution of the Relationships rules from Blue Rose and Modern AGE. A Bond can be a person, but also an Ideology you’d go to prison for, an Organization that still has its hooks in you, or even something like Melancholy, the specific grief of someone who walked out of the Dreamlands into this gray world. Draw on your Personal Bonds to get stunt points, even without rolling doubles. External Bonds belong to everyone else, and they’re spent against you. The ex-comrades you left behind, the faith you can’t argue yourself out of, the thing you saw in the tunnel – each one is a lever, and someone else may be holding it.

The two ugliest Bonds in the game, Enlightenment and Terror, show how Cthulhu Awakens handles the classic Mythos problem without reaching for Sanity or Madness. As co-designer Malcolm Sheppard observes in “Alienation: A Mind Adapted to the Unknown,” the unnatural doesn’t inflict mental illness. Real mental illness is an ordinary human experience, and using it as a psychic attack is both inaccurate and cheap. The Mythos harms you when you begin to understand it, and to perceive a cosmos that has no room for human life.

You get Alienated through failed Willpower tests of courage, faith, morale, or self-discipline, failures that compromise your assumptions about reality. These add points to your Terror and Enlightenment Bonds. The GM can spend points from your external Terror Bond to activate Stunts that disorient you, sap your vitality, force you to flee, or (worst of all) attract an Outsider’s notice. Enlightenment is a personal Bond that’s actually useful: The Mythos revelation grants you a helpful intuition, vision, or eldritch sign. But when these Bonds reach 5 points, you must choose a Distortion. Your character becomes Eccentric, Obsessive, Pessimistic, Primal, Quiet, Ritualistic, or otherwise unwelcome at dinner parties.

The corebook’s chapters “Fools Call It Magic” and “Sinister Treasures” reveal 66 pages of eldritch workings, psychic disciplines, weird and/or hideous artifacts, and dangerous texts such as the Necronomicon. If you have the Inhuman Legacy talent (say, you descend from Deep Ones), you can try psychic stunts, but they require a Price Test to find its side effects (usually serious). But anybody can attempt a working, an extended challenge test with many stiff requirements and ominous possibilities for Doom (backfire). For instance, hyperbolic rotation warps local spacetime so a door on one floor opens onto another. Miscast it, and the Doom transports the whole area and everyone in it to somewhere like Antarctica, or the distant past, or Yuggoth.

Face various Dooms in epic Mythos tales of cosmic horror across the Weird Century using the Adventure Game Engine rules and source material in this all-new Cthulhu Awakens Bundle. Pay just US$12.95 to get all three titles in our Awakening Starter (retail value $53) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 290-page Cthulhu Awakens core rulebook, the Game Master’s Kit, and detailed notes on an Awakens actual play, Revelations of the Bacchae.

And if you pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $19.95 to start, you’ll level up and also get our entire Awakened Bonus Collection with six more supplements worth an additional $68, including the Awakens sourcebook Cults of the Mythos and the Cold War scenario Brinkmanship, and three issues of the Awakens magazine Dreadcrawls: Strange Places, Threatening Scenarios, and Events Under Sinister Stars. And we also include Cthulhu Mythos for Fantasy AGE Second Edition. (This Fantasy AGE sourcebook duplicates much of the material in the standalone Cthulhu Awakens rulebook. It’s here so players can easily adapt the other titles in this offer to a fantasy campaign.)

Get this Cthulhu Awakens offer before the Corridor closes for good Monday, October 26.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/CthulhuAwakens