I finally finished my Fate of Cthulhu mini-campaign. Although we started well (see here, here and here), I was pretty fed up with it by the time we finished and was looking forward to doing something else.
Overall, we played 16 sessions of Fate of Cthulhu. The players succeeded in all the missions, and while Great Cthulhu’s rise wasn’t exactly thwarted, it wasn’t as catastrophic as in the original timeline. On average, each mission took four sessions.
I had some thoughts about Fate of Cthulhu in my earlier post. In essence:
Core concept: Good (travel back in time to foil Great Cthulhu), but too much murder hobo-ing for my group.
Missions: Fine. Not too detailed, so improvising is easy.
The system: I’m not a fan of Fate Condensed and much prefer Fate Accelerated.
And now I’ve finished, I have more thoughts.
Time travel rules!
The rules around time travel didn’t work for me. The idea is that as the PCs complete the missions, the timeline changes. This is represented by giving pluses and minuses to the missions they have yet to finish. But this is treated abstractly in the rules – and I didn’t find it clear what they actually meant.
For me, it would have been better to say that if you complete the mission successfully, you’ve changed time. If I were to run it again, I wouldn’t worry about all the admin involved in checking resistance boxes and what-have-you. Just do the missions – they’re fun as they are.
Missions
I gave the players complete freedom to tackle the missions in whatever order they chose, but in the end, they completed them in the order they were presented in the book. Destroying the skyscraper in New Zealand presented more challenges than usual – simply due to the scale of the problem.
However, given the nature of the game is that time is changing, there is no advice for how things might change depending on how the players are doing. In theory, having successfully completed a mission, something should have changed. But Fate of Cthulhu gives you no options – and it’s as easy to use the text as presented.
(There is one exception to this. In the last mission, The Great Serpent’s Lament, things are radically different to what the players expect. This worked for us, as it was our last mission – but it wouldn’t have made any sense had the players chosen this as their first mission.)
If I were me, I would provide options for each mission the GM can use to show how the PCs’ actions are changing the timeline.
The great anti-climax
And then there’s the end – I found that Fate of Cthulhu fizzled out. The PCs finished the final mission, but it wasn’t clear to them that they had completed it. The other missions were clear, but because the timeline had changed so drastically in this one, it wasn’t obvious to the players when the endpoint had been reached.
The final mission is followed by a scene where Great Cthulhu rises – but it was a big anticlimax.
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| Cthulhu Rising by artflow.ai |
In conclusion
Overall we had a good time, but that was largely despite the system rather than because of it. Were I to rerun it, I would use Fate Accelerated rather than Fate Condensed, throw out the time travel rules, and think beforehand about how the timeline could change. Oh, and I’d choose one mission to be the climax and instruct the PCs that they must do that one last.
But I’m unlikely to run it again.
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