It involves: psychics, the remains of an ancient underground empire, a trip to the center of the earth and the possible end of the world. There are many factions, including a psychic who has made himself king of his Catskills village, a psychic research institute, a crypto-fascist cult that wants to defeat FDR in the presidential election, and the disembodied consciousnesses of a number of pre-humans hungry to restore their long lost culture, among others. There is an optional chapter that involves traveling into prehistory to rescue displaced consciousnesses. There are strange machines. There is teleportation via disintegration. The opening action takes place in Weehawken, New Jersey. It involves cats from Saturn. This campaign fires off like a rocket.

Befitting its pulpiness, the plot is pushed along less by investigation and more by a combination of exploration and discovery. Players move in the right direction, stuff happens, and they run a little further into the plot. The styling of that plot leans quite a bit on Lovecraft’s story “The Mound,” which introduces K’n-yan, but also Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril novel and Mike Mignola’s hollow earth stories — black flames abound here.

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Pulp Cthulhu is the pulpier version of Call of Cthulhu, which gives characters larger than life properties that allow them to survive (a little bit) longer than conventional investigators. That allows the adventures to, well, be crazier.

In this case, we have the players joining an international organization dedicated to medical relief that fronts a secret organization that fights supernatural threats. In this case, a world wide conspiracy by serpent people to either A. destroy humanity, B. enslave humanity or C. create a new hybrid human/serpent race, with the end goal being the restoration of the ancient serpent people empire.

There are a number of factions working at cross purposes, and players need to punch them all into submission. Making matters worse, these are the same serpent people from the King Kull stories, so they can take on human appearances, injecting a hearty dose of paranoia into the campaign. There are also volcanoes, lost continents, weird science and dinosaurs. If you are looking for more from a pulp horror campaign, you’re just being greedy (though, honestly, there IS more, I just don’t want to spoil it for y’all).

The game plays out over nine chapters, all colorful in their own way. One thing I love is the inclusion of playtest notes. It is always nice to see that other parties of players are just as crazy and idiotic as my own (and it is helpful to see potential pathways the players may take in their hijinx before they do).

Funny thing, though: my favorite of the scenarios is probably the one that hews closest to classic Call of Cthulhu, an investigatory mission in the Dustbowl of Oklahoma that involves a snake-handling preacher. It’s got a damn good atmosphere.

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Call of Cthulhu is a game about fragile characters. The investigators are meant to solve cases, but they are never supposed to win – eventually, the horrors they face will consume them in mind or body. This is very much rooted in the aesthetics of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction.

One of the things that made Lovecraft’s work so enduring was the fact that he allowed other authors to play with his mythology. In this way, the Cthulhu Mythos grew larger than Lovecraft. There’s all sorts of different Cthulhu Mythos stories because of this, and Pulp Cthulhu is a move to translate some of that variety to roleplaying games.

Pulp Cthulhu is about two-fisted adventurers standing against darkness, inspired by the more action-oriented pulps, particularly those of the 1930s. This was the era of the proto-superhero, of larger than life serial characters like Doc Savage (kudos, for the correction, Max) and The Shadow. That’s the sort of characters you play in Pulp Cthulhu.

It is probably a change that makes players of D&D more comfortable. You can punch stuff. You can build machines with weird science. You stand a chance of not getting squished by the first monster you meet. The stakes are still high, but the flavor changes.

In a lot of ways, this is a place Call of Cthulhu has been trying to go for a long time. Masks of Nyarlathotep, the classic CoC campaign, has a lot more in common with Indiana Jones and the The Maltese Falcon than it does with mind-bending eldritch horrors. In this way, Pulp Cthulhu is a game about narrowly thwarting doom at great price, rather than being consumed by it – a theme that has become prevalent in nearly all of our blockbuster pop culture, if you think about.

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