[review] Pokéthulhu; my first game as GM ever

Little by little that need of making this review grew on me. This is a 19 year old game, with 0,0 active fanbase or discussion nowadays, but that I have very fond memories of. It was the very first game I ever GMed. I remember I convinced my friends to play rpgs around 2009 or so, and when they said yes, I went home and printed it on a whim to play that very afternoon. I read the manual as I went, and used the introductory adventure hooks at the end of the book (it was 20 pages or so) to improvise a campaign. I let everyone draw their first pokemons and we started. I don't remember many details, but I remember some. 

I drew a handful of pokethulus in a few minutes. I just sketched some shits on a paper, then added lightning, horns, extra eyes, extra anythings, fire, water, wings, tails and random weirdnesses and they were perfect. I was into the mythos while my players weren't; but I made a lot of references to them anyways, with one of the toughest pokemon being straight up ripped from Hellsing's Baskerville (one of the PCs captured without combat, with a lucky roll of a pokéball throw). There was a mechanic that incorporated making up quotes for the pokethulu fictional show in exchange for ¿successes? but we did away with that completely.

deviantart: geistvirus

The game describes itself as a joke game, but it manages to accomplish a lot of things right. Common checks for humans are d12 roll under, with easier tasks giving you more dice to roll, while thulhu combat is really cool while remaining simple. Each thulhu has up to two types (decomposing, fishy, fungous, icy, luminiscent, non-euclidean, squamous, sticky), a weakness to one of those types and three stats: power, speed and hit points. You have four choices for attacks: injure, dodge, trap or frighten. Each of them has a type adequate to the thulhu  and a number from 1 to 3 d12 to roll, under power or speed. 

The cool part is that you get to name/invent the nature of the attack, depending on the attack and its type. For example, the game lists Shub-Polywrath having a Non-Euclidean, frighten attack of 3d12. It is called Chest Swirl Display of Infinity. Mechanically it doesnt matter much: you'd roll 1d12 extra against targets who are weak to Non-Euclidean. But it is cool to know that if you choose to use your pet monster to frighten a clerk on some shop and succeed, the clerk is going to freak out gazing at infinity in the thulhu's spiral. There is a mechanical part which carries the rules, but is an analog, player made name which creates the effect. This is something that inspired me a lot and made the game very very easy to run. (The 3rd edition has an "official" pokethulu list, but when I downloaded it first there wasnt any, only a few examples)

I went as far as to implement Mythos-type magic when a PC found a forbidden book at the evil guy's lair. I gave his character a page with three spells that he could cast at anytime, each one once. I remember one of the spells "just" summoned a rain of blood. It was the kind of game that doesn't break for things like that. You can even play with the existing codes and give objects, places, people, etc types and weaknesses, such an squamous necklace or a fungous-averse library. But am digressing.

It is astonishing how well both of the settings mixed (pokemon and the mythos) answered the questions opened by the other. I have talked before on how Lovecraft's mythos are a great setting but hardly playable in my opinion in in a serious campaign. This joke game allowed me to play with them in a way that Call of the Chtulhu could not offer to me. In CoC, the King in Yellow is a book you read and makes you lose sanity, but you cannot really bring more info to your players about the city of Carcosa, the lake Hali or the King itself, as they are not described even in the books. You can only roleplay how your character goes slightly mad little by little. In pokethulu, you can rule that the King in Yellow is a book that allows passage to tattered Carcosa, where you can meet amd challenge the King into combat, steal some eldritch items and maybe capture some horrible fish type critters at the lake Hali.

On the other hand, it takes Pokèmon to its logical conclusions: What happens when pokemon turn against man? they eat their souls and marrow. Why kids get pokemon? because the world is hard and its always cool to have a friend with the destructive power of a nuke. Why only kids? Because you need a high sanity score to deal with thulhu and most adults (exception being some cultists) have a sanity score of 1. 

The implications of a world where the kids hold a power like that while adults cannot handle this madness and pretend that all this pokethulu thing doesnt exist is really really poetical, almost sublime. It fixes all the problems that modern-based fantasy settings have on a single strike, and I want to go back to this on further entries. 

suddently, all my art folder looks like pokethulhus

On the bad side, it is true that the rules gave some trouble eventually. I don't remember exactly what happened, but we found a way to break the game easily; maxing out speed + trap or speed + dodge or something like that. I think it wasn't hard to fix. I am re-reading the rules right now, after all this years and having discovered the old school D&D, and I cannot help thinking on how I would change this or that rule; lots of great ideas. 

* Stats for humans being rolled (1d12 with 9-12 defaulting to 4 instead of point buy). Buying stats at 11 or 12 made the characters auto succeed at everything from the start.

* human attacks (and other checks) being 1 dice only, lucky ability allowing 1 extra die + 1 extra if the task is easy or using an appropiate weapon or something, or taking advantage of somebody's weakness.

* Implementing hex travel, rations and pokethulu's travelling speed

* Statting pokethulhus a little lower; having 6d12 among attacks at the start for the some of the first owned pokemons is totally enough. We did it like this if I remember well.

I ram him with the bowsprit! you throw the pokeball!

I must say that the game has always been free to download, but the official web seems down, who knows since when. You can get it HERE, and there is also a web with resources in HERE. Nobody seems to know or have played this game, but from my humble blog I'd like to reccomend it to you all.

Edit: Some related link about somebody wanting to make a pokemon campaign focused on exploration.

sometimes, the line between what counts as a 

pokethulhu or a trainer is very thin. I could 

make this guy into both sides with little effort.

[illustration] SidSothoth; H.P. Lovecraft pixel art

 These are all from @SidSothoth at twitter. I found them when searching for images for an upcoming, lovecraft-related post, and could not resist saving them all. I love that aesthetics! Good art must be spread so everyone can enjoy it, and here it is! I think I am going to make a "tradition" of dumping works of inspiring artists from time to time. 

Drudgeons and Dagons

This is something I have lying around for some time. Is not that I plan to really do anything with this for now, but man, this practically writes itself.

Though I really like Lovecraft, I've always felt that Chtulhu games are very limited in scope. As a player, you're there to find out about a mystery, but the usefulness of Agatha Christie style deductions is always confronted by the genre knowledge that there is a whole lot of supernatural causes and effects in motion; but that your character is supposed to be oblivious to. This causes some bad sync between PC and Player (unless the players do not know about the genre, which is also kind of cool)

But given that this blog is for now a collection of D&D rewrites, I ask myself: what if the PCs we're already initiated into the mythos and the players just have to worry about leveling up? 

All characters start as new members of a "good" cult, settled maybe in 1930's Miskatonic. The cult is dedicated to the preservation of the mythos knowledge, to prevent that it falls in the wrong hands and to combat those who might be using it for evil. Some kind of special agency against eldritch crime with minor rapport with the government. 

The only class is Drudgeon, 1d6 per HD. You get a skill to represent your background profession (Roll under INT to perform it, maybe) and you get spells as a cleric, from level 2 onwards. This represents the hidden knowledge your cult grants you, once you get more and more involved on the work for them. You might never get to advance combat, as in this world its mainly done through guns. Instead, you get buffs to HP and better Saves.

Instead of dungeons depleting your resources, you delve in towns, neighbourhoods, societies, etc which are suspected of mythos misuse activity, and the main resource you lose is time. 

When its a matter of hours, days are divided into six parts: Morning, noon, afternoon, evening, midnight and pre-dawn. When a mission is a matter of months or requires significant travel between two points, you only get morning, afternoon, evening. 

Attempting one action (interrogating a store owner, cracking into an abandoned house, going shopping, investigating a crime scene, etc) takes 1 day part, and might require a check: If the roll fails, no progress is done but you can try again. 

Losing enough time triggers events like:

1. Your enemies getting stronger: city gangster is to busy studying the practical uses for the Vermis Misteriis and has called some armed allies to patrol the streets searching for the missing idol.

2. Somebody attacks you or your team to sabotage your investigation

3. Valuable resources leave the area (a book, an idol) which would have granted you XP

4. Possible clues wither or witnesses leave the area, or are eaten by a stellar vampire. 

5. Eldritch spawns attack the area, ghoul awakening. Chances are that the happening makes mythos a public affair (it will be on the papers for some weeks until it starts to sound like somebody made it up)

6. The stars are right / Enemy Cult forces confrontation, so you must stand with anything you've got

This is what this game "wandering monster checks" look like. Of course, sometimes a wandering monster is just a monster: there is a bestiary, in which mostly anything is too tough to be shot down nicely (ghouls, cultists, fishmen... maybe. Byakhees? Non-Euclideans? hardly). Once we get to that, the only thing to defeat them is to use magic or ancient technology (The first game I ever ran was Pokethulu, and I love the concept of catching shoggots into shining dodecahedrons)

inspiration: The Last Door

I guess that the main thematic antagonistic forces of the time would be: evil cults, criminal gangs, private collectors, lone madmen, communist factions or maybe even nazis. The main reason for which I would probably never write this is because I'm not very learned on North America, much less early XXs century North America. But its the kind of game that would be cool to mix with actual events that happened around that era. I picture the mythos themselves being treated by the populace much like UFOs were later: most anybody has heard about them vaguely, but few really have dedicated time or resources to really investigate them. But of course there are independent individuals who are fascinated by it, and keep a scrapbook with all the weird reports they read on the printed press.

I want to resist to give this project a plain XP for mission. Following the milestone approach I made on there, I'd try to make it so there is always incentives for players to go forward on their own whims, if they see that the reward is good enough. Basically you level up once you cross out one of this:

[_] [_] Recovered an ancient book or relic

[_] [_] Sealed or repelled a powerful entity

[_] [_] Thwarted the plans of an mythos misuser without it trascending to public knowledge

[_] [_] Reported back information about a rival group (your GM will tell you when you have gathered enough information to earn this, but by then the problem is probably getting out of there alive)

[_] Deal with something pending from your past, that somehow is involved on an investigation (is your call to say how the current situation has to do with that, let your GM work the details)