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Pokéthulhu, as its name suggests is a joke game. It's not meant to be taken seriously so it'll be reviewed in this light.
It is illustrated by John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame. His illustrations throughout the book are always funny and appropriate. Sometimes the creatures bear more resemblance to mythos creatures and sometimes they bear more resemblance to Pokémons, and sometimes they bear resemblance to both (which is really scary!) The text is all black and on a faded grey background, it is quite easy to read. Layout is in double columns with sidebars integrated into the regular body of the text, either at the top or bottom of the page. Sidebars are white on black so they stand appart from the rest of the text quite well. It definitely gets a 5 out of 5 on style.
The inside cover is a map where the Pokéthulhu game takes place, I suppose it has some resemblance to New England, but I'm not particularly familiar with that area. Pokéthulhu has the best "Introduction to Roleplaying" section that I've ever read. I suppose someone who's never played an RPG before would be able to figure out what it's about, but it's really targeted at experienced roleplayers, and it's quite funny. Oh yeah, it's a Dork Tower comic strip.
The Game. The point of Pokéthulhu is to play a school-aged cultist who has Thulhus that fight for him/her. Or in more clear terms it's Pokémon in a very tongue in cheek fashion and the Pokémons (Thulhus) have a Lovecraftian twist to them.
Mechanics are very simple, a character sheet can easily be the size of a playing card. It's a point based game, characters have 30 points to distribute across 6 abilities. The abilities are Grade Level, Pokéthulhu Lore, Phys Ed, Shoplifting, Sanity and Talking Trash. Ability scores range from 1-12. All task resolution is based off these six abilities. The game uses only d12s (Dodecahedrons in the book), it's a roll under system so you have to roll equal to or less than your score on a d12 to succeed. Difficulty determines how many dice you get to roll. A difficult task offers only one roll, whereas an easy task offersthree rolls. Each character is allowed one lucky ability. This lucky ability allows 3 dice to be rolled no matter what. Characters (and Thulhus) get to chose Aspects. A character can have only one aspect, from Decomposing, Fishy, Fungous, Icy, Luminescent, Non-Euclidean, Squamous and Sticky.
Thulhus are created similar to characters. They have 3 stats, Power, Speed and Hit Points. Scores can again be from 1-12 but can't total more than 20. Thulhus have 2 aspects that they are strong with and one aspect that they have a weakness to. Thulhus also get 4 types of attacks, Injure, Dodge, Trap and Frighten. The attacks have a number of dice associated with them (1-3) that are rolled whenever the attack is used. Each attack has an aspect associated to it, if a thulhu has a weakness an extra die is allowed. Combat is a simple affair, initiative is determined, then the Thulhus attack each other with the attacks their Cultists choose. Combat between people or people and Thulhus is also possible, although people use their Phys Ed score, and damage is dealt to their Phys Ed score instead of hit points.
3 pages of adventure seeds are given. They are 5 adventure seeds that work linearly, so they're not terribly useful. There's also a sample adventure given "Over Cold Mountain". It's a simple but fun adventure, Reading HP Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House" isn't necessary for it, but it certainly makes it more fun. There's even a provision for punishing players who have read too much - essentially their assumptions turn out to be true, and in Lovecraftian horror that's always a bad thing. There's also a mini-bestiary at the end. It contains 3 Thulhus which were contest submissions for Pokéthulhu, possibly after the first printing (I'm reviewing the second printing).
There are two photocopy sheets, one with Cultist and Pokéthulhu cards, the other which would be for paper cut outs of characters and Thulhus. The ads at the end are also worth reading as they're done in the same style as the rest of the book so they don't really detract. There's even an ad for the real Call of Cthulhu RPG on the inside of the back cover.
It's not bad for the price (even better if you download the free PDF), but I haven't read that much Lovecraft, have never played CoC and only watched Pokémon occasionally with my girlfriend, there were quite a few references throughout the book that I recognised as being from one of those sources, but I didn't know what they were. It does seem sparse at times, due to it only being 30 pages so it's understandable. However I think there's also a point at which an RPG has too little content, despite the low cost, and Pokéthulhu is just lacking a little bit in substance that it really should have, maybe at 48 pages. I'd give it a substance rating of 4 in light of that.
Pokéthulhu looks like it would be most fun for people who've played Call of Cthulhu, read all of HP Lovecraft's works and watched every episode of Pokémon, I don't know if that'd be a situation that would ever arise though. It would still be fun for people who only have passing knowledge of the above three things, but there'd be a lot of missed opportunities for inside jokes. One could easily get two or three game sessions out of it with the included material and that would be amortizing the product as it's equivalent to a short adventure, but I suppose some creative GMs and players could run an extended campaign with it if they wanted to.
Something else of note, I was coming at it from a Lovecraftian perspective, so I found it to be quite amusing. My girlfriend came from the Pokémon side of things and found it quite horrifying. That added to the humour for me, but die-hard Pokémon fans might not like it. I don't know if there's a Digimon/Beyblade/Yu-Gi-Oh rivalry with Pokémon or if they're all the same fans, so they may or may not find the relative butchery of Pokémon amusing.
The free version of Pokéthulhu can be downloaded here, and the hard copy version can be found at some game stores. The downloaded version is slightly different in terms of style and layout from the one I reviewed, and it has some extra content as well. It's a 1.1mb free download and it's 33 pages, so you can decide for yourself if you like it. I personally find hard copy is more useful for actually playing a game, but if you're just going to read it for a laugh then the download will probably do fine.
