This World is Junk – Apocthulhu

I have finished reading the quickstart of Apocthulhu and it is really cool. One of the coolest bits about the game concept is that in so many CoC games we, as players, never live long enough to discover what is really going on. What is the terrible thing that we are trying to stop happening. We try and piece clues together, swallow the red herrings, and get lost on convoluted plots, but we rarely get to see the plot through to the end.

Apocthulhu starts after the end.

We do get to see what the world is like after the cosmic horror happened. Generally, it appears it wasn’t good.

This is a game that I want to play, and I do have a working set to rule to play it. They are just going to have to take into account two or three things.

In a traditional CoC game, you can pretty much go and buy anything that would be available at that time. If you have the right contacts, you could even go and get a tommy gun and sticks of dynamite. Apocthulhu isn’t like that. Resources are scarce and money has no value. It basically don’t exist. You can find stuff but that stuff is deteriorating and most of it is junk. The entire world is full of junk and most of the stuff you make is going to be junk.

In many modern day settings grabbing a welding torch and turning a tractor into some kind of super-charged monster-truck-tank-machine was standard fayre in the A-Team and MacGyver. That isn’t going to work post this apocalypse.

Equipment failure is a serious part of the setting and it needs to play its part.

Unplanned Worlds

You are not likely to be nudged towards your investigations by a letter from a friendly antiquarian.

In Apocthulhu you will have personal and community bonds, and these feed into the game mechanics. They are important for your characters sanity. These are going to be the thing that your character cares about, and the levers that will push and pull your character into adventures.

I quite enjoy world building as I go. Letting the world unfold as I play. This is harder with Mythos games. In a 1920s game, you can picture the world, for the most part it will be as we picture it. Sure, the Keeper is holding on to secrets and there is stuff going on behind the scenes, but the world is as we expect. For a soloist there is a slight loss of shock value as we have to know what the next big threat is, or we cannot weave it into the evolving story.

I think this is going to be a little different with Apocthulhu. The world is not as we know it, and the state it is in is down to one of the big bad nightmares. That solves the problem of giving the game away, because the game is already over.

Deciding how the world ended is going to be one of the key elements of any solo rules for Apoc.