Clockwork & Cthulhu

In October 2019 the October Horrors continued with the Clockwork & Cthulhu Bundle featuring alternate-historical Mythos and flintlock-fantasy RPGs from Cakebread & Walton. A grim and gritty game of mud, blood, mayhem, and magick, Clockwork & Chivalry (2012) takes you to the English Civil War of 1645, but it’s fought with witchcraft and basilisks, with Francis Bacon’s alchemy and Oliver Cromwell’s war machines. As Cromwell and his gigantic clockworks fight against the cavalier-alchemists of Prince Rupert, magickal pollution taints the land, waking creatures long dismissed as legends; obsessive scientists make wild discoveries; crazed inventors create mad machines. Can you and your fellow adventurers, armed only with musket, sword, and magick, hold back the tide of war?

And in the horror campaign supplement Clockwork & Cthulhu and the standalone companion game Dark Streets, the stars align for the return of the Old Gods — the creatures of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Cthulhu expands the Civil War setting; Dark Streets, set a century later, casts the players as London’s first police force, the Bow Street Runners.

Clockwork & Chivalry uses the percentile-based Renaissance System based on Newt Newport’s OpenQuest, itself derived from Mongoose Publishing’s edition of RuneQuest. Originally published as a supplement for MRQ, Clockwork & Chivalry relaunched in 2012 using Cakebread & Walton’s own take on the MRQ rules set. The Renaissance rules adapt the familiar RuneQuest mechanics to the age of black-powder weapons, presenting extensive period weapons and equipment lists, dozens of professions, and rules for factions and belief systems. This “roleplaying Renaissance” later grew to encompass Pirates & Dragons (presented in our August 2015 Bundle of the Ages 2) and the two other major releases in this offer, Dark Streets Second Edition and Clockwork & Cthulhu.

There were three complete rulebooks in our Starter Collection (retail value $63) as DRM-free .PDFs, including Clockwork & Cthulhu, Dark Streets Second Edition, and Clockwork & Chivalry Second Edition (previously presented in our August 2013 Bundle of the Ages).

Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got our entire Bonus Collection with nine more supplements and adventures worth an additional $82.50:

• The big 17C Mythos investigations The Heydelberg Horror and The Köln Machinations (Parts 1 and 2 of the campaign A Clockwork of Orange)
• The epic four-part Chivalry campaign Kingdom & Commonwealth, collected in Omnibus 1 (with The Alchemist’s Wife and Thou Shalt Not Suffer) and Omnibus 2 (with No Man’s Land and Quintessence)
• Two Clockwork Mythos investigations: The Mystery of Shirdley Hall and The Case of the Missing Professor
• Three smaller treatises: Tomes of Blasphemous Knowledge, Guardians of Blasphemous Knowledge, and The Phoenix Tavern

Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to this offer’s designated charity, Rainforest Trust.

English Civil War resources

• English Civil War (Wikipedia)
• EnglishCivilWar.org
• National Archives (UK) Civil War galleries
• English Civil War timeline (History on the Net)
• English Civil War Society (re-enactors)