I love this cover! It’s so good! Tom Sullivan’s art is always delightfully squishy.

Alas, the rest of the book is pretty blah. Chaosium released Cthulhu Now, a sourcebook for playing in the modern era in 1987, but the book is largely devoted to scenarios. Most of them are…not good. One involves a space shuttle and a color out of space. Another involves tulpas and weird science. Meh. Even the one that provides lore for a later Delta Green sourcebook is pretty flat, despite being a Keith Herber jam (Charnel Dreams, the house band of the Fate, forms out of the aftermath of “The Evil Stars”).

The rules portion was less than thirty pages and most of that was given over to equipment and firearms. They do little that would redefine Lovecraft’s cosmic horror for the contemporary period; they just give you bigger guns. It’s kind of the nightmare scenario for approaching a modern Call of Cthulhu game and it put me off the idea for a long time — I missed out on Delta Green initially because I just figured it was X-Files and big guns and tentacles. Boy was I wrong! Well, no, I was right about the content, I was just wrong to assume it sucked.