"There's a monster in my pants, and it does an Eldritch dance." This what Fred Schneider would have been singing if he had seen PokeThulhu, the Adventure game by Dork Storm Press. Being a fairly avid fan of Lovecraft's fiction, and having a soft spot for twisted cartoon animals, I jumped at a chance to pick up a copy of this parody game. I must say, I was a bit more surprised with the quality of the content than I expected to be.
The Thirty-two page booklet contains a three page "what is Role Playing" comic, Rules for the game, adventure seeds, a sample adventure, paper minis, forms for character records, two pages dedicated to the winners of a create your own thulhu contest, as well as four pages of ads (counting the inside of the back cover), and a nice black and white map of the Muskratonic valley and it's surrounding environs on the inside of the front cover.
First off, the aforementioned comic is one of my favorite explanations of our hobby that I have ever read. It's almost worth the price of admission alone.
The art is excellent for what it needs to accomplish... strange, squiggly line drawings of bizarre cute alien creatures.
Character creation is a snap. Players need only follow four simple rules when creating their cultists, and pick a personal affinity for a thulhu aspect from a list of eight, ranging from fungous to non-Euclidean. If the cultist shares the same aspects as a thulhu they want to train they get a bonus, and if they oppose each other, a penalty. The aspects also define how effective certain attacks are against the varius thulhu.
The rules are simple, requiring the player only use twelve sided dice (just like the "shining dodecahedron" used by the young cultists in combination with their pokenomicon to contain thulhu). Different numbers of dice are use against abilities, for somewhat tricky, challenging, and really hard tasks. Combat is a simple affair involving primarily rolling a number of dice equivalent to your selected attack skill and, getting under certain scores, relative to the attack you wish to preform.
The adventure seeds form a mini-campaign of sorts, jumping form episode to episode (just like that wacky PokeThulhu Television show), and actually look like it would be a fun thing to run over the course of an extended evening, or as something to provide a break from your normal game.
The adventure "Over Cold Mountain" is well done in it's comedic value as well, and reads quickly. I won't go into detail about it here, as it is probably one of the primary reasons one would buy this product.
The monster design contest winners are amusing, coming from an Internet contest held to celebrate the original Squishy Brain release of the game (of which I know nothing), and are utterly unlike that of any other monster design contest design winners.
My only real complaint with the game is the lack of any sort of thulhu compendium, instead randomly listing creatures throughout the book, either as examples or near appropriate sections in the "Over Cold Mountain" adventure, or one of the contest winners. But, being that this is a joke game after all, it's not too big a problem.
All in all, I am very pleased with the PokeThulhu game, and think that my friends and I may actually spend a fair amount of time playing it. Not too much time mind you, but that's not bad for something that was picked up for joke value.
If you think you may have any interest in this game, by all means, pick it up. I think you'll be pleasantly surprise. And hey, for $5.95, you can't go wrong.
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)