[Review] CthulhuTech “Dark Passions”

I’ve played a great deal of 1920’s Cthulhu since my recent introduction to it,  and loved it. I never thought it would translate well into a modern setting… I was very wrong! The art alone has me inspired to run a modern setting with Lovecraft’s weird and creepy “twist”. Throughout H.P. Lovecraft’s work you get a sense of reality but not quite as we know it. It’s like viewing our own world through a steamy window. CthulhuTech has captured this well in my opinion.

“Dark passions” has myriad of stuff on the impact of cults on the world; from their recruitment methods to the government organisations which monitor them. I like the NPCs included. They are well filled out with a good mixture of Fluff and crunch. There is short stories sprinkled throughout the book, perfect for inspiration for that twisted adventure factory of a brain you have. I really like the stories not only for the quality fiction, but also the nice breakup they offer in the text. Nobody likes reading from a PDF, these little stanzas provide nice little spice to a cool book. Like pepper (sic) 🙂

My two favourite aspects of the book is the art and the dense content on cults, there are ALOT of cults in here with plenty backstory. Perfect for slotting seamlessly into your current campaign or as inspiration for that story arc you’ve been plotting.

The art is fantastic. Good art in a game book always adds a great deal towards their usability in my opinion. For me; if a book is beautiful, I end up reading it more often.

What I liked; The top quality art, the creepy fiction, NPC fluff and the heart of the book the Cults.

The only thing I think could have been done a little better is the layout of the NPC crunch. The stats for the NPCs are all run squished up in a sentence rather than an easier to read table format. However this is a minor gripe and to fix it would have increased page count significantly, therefore reducing the cool content. So I’ll let you off this time Catalyst game labs.

You can buy Dark passions here. I think it’s good value for money.

Want to learn more about CthulhuTech? Read on…

• WildFire: CthulhuTech Quick-Start Rules
• Atomic Array: Episode 013:
  CthulhuTech RPG
• Mad Brew Labs: CthulhuTech:
  The Game That Almost Wasn’t
• Critical Hits: When
  Horror Meets Awesome: CthulhuTech
• Kore Dice: Interview
  with CthulhuTech’s Mike Vaillancourt
• Stan!: The
  Stars Will Be Right
• Arcane Underground: The
  Saga of CthulhuTech (Updated)
• Atomic Array: Episode 040:
  CthulhuTech
• Blog of a new RPGer: [Review]
  CthulhuTech “Dark Passions”