Sunday I ran a Cthulhutech one-off titled “Fear and Loathing on the Plateau of Leng”. It’s something of a last hurrah for me, almost certainly the last chance I’ll have to run a game here before I move in May. Also one of the larger games I’ve run in a while, with seven players, and certainly the longest single session I’ve GMed in quite a few years.
CT is a sci-fi game with Lovecraft trappings — humanity and its Giant Anime Robots vs. Migou space invaders vs. Things That Should Not Be (and their cultists). There’s a lot of truly shameless theft/homage (depending on how charitably you read it) from a few well-known anime series, though most of them are cited, so you can’t say you don’t know what you’re getting into. Macross + Evangelion + Guyver vs. Cthulhu actually turns out to be a fairly workable setting, at least at the level we were playing at, where I threw out all the rules I couldn’t remember and ran the game like an action movie.
One notable moment, which taught me to read the monster entries a little better, involved a Gug. At first it was three Gugs. Then I noticed they had armor and integrity ratings, like a vehicle or mech, meaning handheld weapons weren’t very helpful. So I cut it to one Gug. Then I noticed it was also 22″ tall.
Right.
Fortunately, there were mechs to deal with it.
The element of the one-off I’m most ambivalent about was including mech pilots as characters. There were several long overland marching sequences (and if there’s a better soundtrack for giant robots and anime action heroes marching through a Cambodian swamp than the FF6 World of Ruin overland theme, I’d like to hear it), and pretty much anything that rumored of a fight could be handily demolished with the power of Applied Giant Robot. Managed a couple of good ones, but it wasn’t until the plot wound its way into an underground complex that everyone got to throw down on the same basis.
Probably should have had a third adversary in that fight, though; after a strong opening, one of them went down like a chump and the other barely escaped alive. She did escape, though. [cue dramatic music] Sequel hook! The Children of Chaos were the ‘B’ antagonists in this story, secondary to the main threat of the Disciples of the Unnameable trying to release the avatar of the Ruined King from Leng on to Earth, where he could break into peoples’ houses and wreck up the place. The only fight I begged off was a final confrontation with a Dhole, which I’d thrown in as a set piece to arrange for a convenient tunnel collapse and which the mech pilots seemed hell-bent on fighting. Being at that point we’d been playing for about seven hours, I straight-up warned them off and went into the final few scenes.
Overall, very happy with the scenario. Much love for the Cthulhutech setting, and hopefully I can find something else to do with it eventually. Less love for the system, which played better in practice than I’d expected to from reading it, but was very swingy and the jump in range between one skill level and the next higher is massive.
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