Fate of Cthulhu #1: An overview

I backed the 2019 Fate of Cthulhu Kickstarter, but haven’t run it until now. I’m halfway through running The Arrival of Great Cthulhu for my regular players, Jon and Terry. We’re playing online using Discord and Trello, my go-to setup for online RPG-ing.

Fate Condensed

Fate of Cthulhu uses Fate Condensed, a new iteration of Fate that is a halfway house between Fate Core and Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE). Well, it’s mostly a simplified version of Fate Core as it uses skills rather than approaches.

This is my first time running Fate with skills. I usually run (and play) FAE, and I’ve struggled with it. My main issues are:

• Aspects become less important. It’s all very well having your high concept as best pilot in the galaxy and giving yourself Drive 4. But what if someone has Drive 5? Are you still the best pilot in the galaxy? FAE simplifies things by removing skills—you are the best pilot because your high concept says you are. (That’s not to say FAE is perfect—approaches can be hard to get your head around.)
• The presented skill list is limited. No computer use, no medic. A lot of social skills – empathy, rapport, provoke, deceive. I’m not sure that level of granularity is needed here when it’s lacking elsewhere. (We’ve used rapport a lot as that seems most useful.)

While I was getting my head around Fate of Cthulhu’s skills list, I dipped into the Fate version of Achtung! Cthulhu to see what they had done—they’d expanded the skill list to include soldier (general soldiering), medic and tradecraft (replacing burglary). 

Achtung! Cthulhu replaces lore with mythos, which Fate of Cthulhu doesn’t, but I wish it did.

Fate of Cthulhu broad concept

In 2030 (or so), the stars are right and a Great Old One has risen. It’s our heroes’ job to travel back in time and change the timeline and halt (or at least ease) the apocalypse.

So Fate of Cthulhu is Terminator vs Cthulhu. However, my players, who are now in their late 50s and with their murder-hobo days behind them, were horrified to realise that they weren’t Sarah Connor or Kyle Reese in this version of The Terminator: they are the terminator itself.

The Arrival of Great Cthulhu

Fate of Cthulhu comes with five apocalypses: Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Dagon, Shub-Niggurath and the King in Yellow (Hastur). While Nyarlathotep is probably my favourite (it has shoggoths and elder things—both parts of the mythos I like), I decided that as I’ve never used Cthulhu in any of my Cthulhu gaming, it was about time I did. 

And so I chose The Arrival of Great Cthulhu.

Each apocalypse comes with four missions. Achieve those, and the PCs can (may?) avert the apocalypse. Or at least make it less-apocalypse-y. Great Cthulhu’s missions are:

• Destroy an artefact of Cthulhu.
• Stop an internet hacker from releasing spells onto the internet.
• Destroy a building made of weird concrete.
• Assassinate a cultist.

The players are given a briefing (which contains details of the apocalypse and the four key events they must change). The GM is then given additional material explaining what is really going on, plus some stats for key NPCs or monsters.

But not many stats—and if the players are proactive, they will quickly vary from the script.

I’m delighted with this, as I’m happy to improvise. If there were more detail, I would find it harder to improvise. But as it is, there’s just enough detail for me to understand the situation—and not too much to confound me.

Changing the timeline

Changing the timeline isn’t as straightforward as just completing the missions. If the players use too much magic or their corrupted aspects (Fate of Cthulhu has corruption instead of sanity), things can still turn out badly even though they get the results they wanted.

At least, that’s the theory.

From what I’ve seen in practice (as I write, we’re about five sessions in), modifying the timeline isn’t that clear. As play progresses, boxes are marked for the good guys (foiling a minion, changing the timeline in a good way) and for the bad guys (accepting compels on corrupted aspects, marking corruption). However, it seems easier to mark the bad guys’ boxes, which isn’t really the point. The PCs shouldn’t be making things worse.

Once boxes are marked, ripples will affect the timeline—so if things go wrong, the players can make things worse. 

But it all feels vague. So I anticipate hand-waving and improvising.

Actual play

Next time I’ll talk about what actually happened.