In CoC, there were Horrors Man Was Not Meant To Know that lurked in the darkness and threatened to consume humanity. The player characters were some of the very few people who knew The Horrible Truth and had to wage a secret war to save humanity from the Nameless Horrors From Beyond because most of humanity was ignorant of The Horrible Truths. The war for humanities soul and survival was fought secretly, with the players receiving little if any aid and usually more hindrance from society as a whole.
The horror RPG genre clung to life tenaciously, and spawned some descendants such as "Delta Green", "Conspiracy X", "Code:Black", etc. The later entries into the horror RPG field usually followed the CoC model closely, with the PCs working in secret against equally hidden horrors whilst the mindless masses went about their lives in blissful ignorance. While a few post apocalypse games features horror elements, most horror RPGs followed the CoC mold closely, keeping the war a secretive one that 99% of the world knew nothing of and the PCs carried their terrible burdens in secrecy and solitude, forced to keep the masses in their safe ignorance.
Then, along came Cthulhutech, and basically tossed the classic horror RPG mold out on it's ear and changed everything, or at least almsot everything.
In Cthulhutech, there are Horrors From Beyond, but they've "come out of the closet", so to speak, and are right out in the open. The Fungi from Yuggoth have invaded Earth openly, TWICE, and are currently operating from a vast hiveship in Earth orbit. The war is not fought in secrecy and shadows anymore, it's fought on battlefields with armies, weapons and warmachines both human and alien.
The PCs no longer need battle the inevitable insanity that come from dealing with Unspeakable Horrors From Beyond alone, given the stress many people suffer as humanity battles for it's survival, having been reduced from 8 billion members to about 2.5 billion, mental illness is recognized as a valid illness and treated openly, there is no longer any stigma to receiving therapy or drug treatment.
One of the best things I can say for Cthulhutech is that it does break the horror RPG mold that CoC helped long ago in the days before R'lyeh sank and gives us a horror RPG where everyone knows at least the basics of what's going on and humanity as a whole is fighting the Unamable Things on the battlefield.
At it's heart, Cthulhutech is a cross between the world of H.P. Lovecraft and the world of anime, which has in many ways often borrowed from the visions of Lovecraft, so perhaps a RPG world combining the two was inevitable. I, for one, find it an interesting change of pace and a welcome one after decades of the "shadow war by the few to save the blind masses" setting, not that there's anything wrong with the typical horror RPG mold, but it is nice to have a choice.
A great wailing has been heard from the self-appointed "Lovecraft purist patrol", claiming that the game is an affront to HPL and other nonsense. They also claim that humans should not be able to fight the Eldritch Horrors openly as they can't have a chance to win if you play things the way HPL wrote.
I happen to have read most of Lovecraft and I happen to know that in quite a few of his stories humans not only could but did win in open battle against the Things Man Was Not meant To Know. In "The Dunwhich Horror" one of Yog Sothoth's sons and avatars was killed by a humble guard dog after the gun he relied upon to defend himself failed to fire because he lacked the knowledge to maintain it, and the other, larger spawn of Yog Sothoth was destroyed by a few old men chanting a spell.
In "The call of Cthulhu", the big C himself was basically defeated, if only temporarily, by being rammed head on (literally) by a small tramp steamer, allowing the survivors on board to escape him at the time.
"The Shadow over Innsmouth" had a deep one admitting that a 1920's vintage submarine armed with the weapons of the day hurt a deep one city it attacked. If 1920's vintage weapons could hurt a deep one city, I wonder what modern weapons would do to one?
A Fungi from Yuggoth was killed with a regular firearm in "The whisperer in darkness.".
The bottom line is that humans were not always totally weak and helpless in Lovecraft's stories, and sometimes could fight back against the worst of horrors and win, or at least survive the encounter. So don't hand me this bit about humans not being able to fight the Nameless Horrors effectively, it happened in the stories written by HPL himself.
So I do believe that the game is not a "bastardization" of Lovecraft as some have described it, and the notion of humanity fighting mythos entities is completely within the real of Lovecraft's work.
As to the details of the world setting, humanity discovers how to harness extradimensional energies that up to then had only been harnessed by "magic" and created Arcanotech, a new powersource that revolutionizes the world.
The fungoidal inhabitants of Yuggoth, the Migou, react to this with shock, then resolve to crush humanity. They stage an invasion using genetically engineered humanoids called the Nazzadi (Apparently out of some fear of revealing their true selves to humanity, much as the Klingons in FASA's old Star Trek RPG used "Fusions" to fight particular enemies so they would learn little of the true nature of pure klingons.) who revolt against their alien creators and join humanity. The Migou launch a second, open invasion by themselves.
Meanwhile, other Horrors are awakening. The Deep Ones are rising en masse and openly warring on humanity, staging mass kidnappings and forced impregnation of human women to create hybrids on a large scale. (In Cthulhutech it was said the deep ones liked hybrids because they matured much faster than pure deep one children, who took centuries to mature.)
Hastur has at least partially awoken in the plateau of Leng and has unleashed an army of Horrors on Asia, aided by degenrate human cultists called "The Rapine Swarm".
Nylarathotep is running a major corporation called Chrysalis Corp (I thought he was running Walmart or microsoft...) and seeking to corrupt the New Earth Government from within.
Some of the cultists and the Deep Ones are seeking to awaken dreaded Cthulhu himself, which is something neither the NEG or the Migou want as Cthulhu's awakening would doom humanity and the Migou.
Players can work for the NEG as various agents, some of which are riding the edge of madness as soon as they begin play. You can be a mecha or an engel pilot if you wish, but engles are cybernetic horrors that are half alive and the pilot must "interface" with them, which drives them slowly insane. Or you could be a field agent, arcanotechnician, occult scientist, etc.
If you're not a government type, you can be an independent agaent like, say, a CoC investigator, but if you know any magic you'd better make sure you're registered as a sorcerer!
Or you could work for the mysterious Eldritch society, an organization bent on keeping the old ones from returning, but stays clear of government involvement because they know the government is corrupted by Them. You can be a Tager, symbiotically linked to a powerful extradimensional entity, but beware, such places strains on your sanity as well.
The setting runs on a simple generic RPG system called "Framewerk" that is quite basic. Having gotten used to crunchier systems like GURPS and EABA I found it a little flat and vague, but it works for the most part. It's a strange d10 based system where you try to roll over a difficulty level, but when rolling you can either take the highest die, the highest pair, 3 of a kind, or a "straight". The system seems to have been meant to use hands of cards at first but was quickly rewritten to use d10's.
There are some grammatical errors here and there, such as saying a toxic dart "contains a small neurotoxin", which sounds wrong and a few other awkward bits of grammar. I found a few rules glitches, such as a comment that if a tager loses consciousness he reverts to his human form, but another part of the book said if the human part of a tager lost consciousness the symbiot would fight on. Minor and not fatal errors, still the game could have used a better editor.
The slick paper and color art make the book a thing of eerie and sinister beauty.
Cthulhutech isn't for everyone, and the "Lovecraft purist patrol" will die frothing at their mouths with hatred for it, I suppose. If you would like a good alternative to the regular horror RPG conventions, or, perhaps, would like a decent "Aliens invade earth, humanity fights for it's life" game and don't need a crunchy system, then Cthulhutech may be for you.
