# Cthulhu Unleashed tags: #game/rpg/cthulhu-unleashed ![[Cthulhu Unleashed (cover).jpg]] Okay, look. You'd think by now the Great Old Ones would have run out of new ways to be dragged into the modern world, but *Cthulhu Unleashed* refuses to be embarrassed about the premise, and I sort of respect that. This is the Cthulhu Mythos as told by people whose entire worldview arrives via memes and whose existential dread lives one bad video upload away. You're a **digital native**—a journalist chasing clicks, a streamer chasing clout, a content creator chasing literally anything—and somehow *you* are the last line of defense between humanity and the abyss. That's the part I refuse to take seriously, and I'll get to that. But let's be honest: it's the same eldritch nightmare we've been playing for decades, now with better Wi-Fi and the constant, low-grade threat of having your sanity loss live-streamed to your followers. Madness, really. The engine side of things is where it actually gets interesting, because underneath all the influencer cosplay sits a stripped-down, "d100 Lite" version of *Basic Role-Playing*—which, if you've ever seen me go on about percentile systems, you know starts me off on the wrong foot. I hate BRP. I've said it more than once, relatively recently. And yet, okay: this is the *cut-down* version, tighter than the four-hundred-page behemoths that think the exact weight of a library book is load-bearing. We'll give it a fair shake. Here we are regardless. ## Die Resolution Mechanics It's the BRP percentile roll-under, through a thin veneer of modern convenience. - **The Percentile Roll:** roll d100 and pray for equal to or under your skill percentage. Hacking at 65%? A 66 is a failure, and you are, in all likelihood, about to be eaten by a data-morphic shoggoth. - **Three Difficulties**, because the GM needs to ruin your day in gradations: - **Standard Success** — roll under your skill. The baseline; what your character is expected to do on a good day. - **Complex Success** — roll under *half* your skill. For when the task is actually demanding, not just flavor text. - **Intricate Success** — roll under *one-fifth* your skill. The highest difficulty, reserved for the truly heroic or the truly stupid. - **Edge or Burden:** instead of making the GM do arithmetic, they just slap an **Edge (+20)** on you when fate winks, or a **Burden (−20)** when reality has decided you're the problem. Simple, clean, brutally honest. - **No Opposed Skill Rolls Outside Combat:** this one delighted me. You don't roll off against another skill; the GM just raises the difficulty of your check. Want to charm a guard whose Intimidation is through the roof? You need a Complex Success on your Charm. It cuts the endless "I roll, you roll" ping-pong out of the game entirely. That's the sort of quiet design decision that makes me want to forgive the influencer framing. Almost. ## Character Creation - **Attributes:** rolled as percentiles, the classic way—STR, CON, DEX, APP, POW are `3D6 × 5`; SIZ, INT, EDU are `(2D6+6) × 5`. Base **Move (MOV)** is 30ft. STR over 70 hands you **+1d4 bonus damage**; SIZ over 70 does the same instead, at the cost of 5ft of Move. Because being big is apparently a tax. - **Sanity:** starts **equal to your Power (POW)**. We'll get to why that's a problem in a moment. - **Hit Points:** `(CON + SIZ) / 10`. You're a big boy; you can take it. - **Occupation:** choose from the list—Police Officer, Independent Journalist, Urban Explorer, Software Developer, Paranormal Investigator, Content Creator, Tech Support, Biologist. You'll notice I keep coming back to Content Creator, and I'll keep coming back to it, because the game genuinely wants you to believe an influencer is the one person fated to notice the cosmic horror hiding in a viral video. They are not. They are, in fact, the last people who'd notice. That's part and parcel of the attitude, and it's off-putting. - **Skills:** you get occupation points plus a self-taught pool of `INT + EDU`, layered over starting values. Skills improve in play: once per session, roll a d100 *higher* than your current score and gain 1d4. And here's the kicker—you **cannot** improve Maximum Hit Points or Maximum Sanity. What you got is what you've got. The only way forward is down. - **Credit Rating:** a percentile representing money and standing, which also tells you your **gear allotment = Credit Rating ÷ 10, rounded up**. Everyone begins with a smartphone, which is nice, and also contains three-quarters of the gear list, which makes most of the shopping feel like busywork. Thanks, Obama. - **Tethers to Reality:** choose three. We're getting to those. ## Sanity Sanity is inevitable. Let me say that again, because it's the whole point: sanity loss is *inevitable*. The interesting part of this game is not fighting that—it's deciding, at every single shock, what you're willing to sacrifice to keep going. It's armor made of your emotional life, and it is, hand to god, the best idea in this book. **The Sanity Check:** same d100 religion as everything else. When confronted with something that defies rational explanation (and let's face it, a coffee maker plotting your demise qualifies), roll **equal to or under your current Sanity score**. Fail, and you take Sanity damage determined by the GM or the Mythos creature's entry. Straightforward. Static. Exactly as boring as you'd expect from a BRP descendant. **The Consequences of Diminished Sanity:** here's the modern wrinkle. As your sanity erodes, **AEGIS**—the shadowy government org that decided "human rights" was a pre-apocalyptic suggestion—starts paying attention. Attention becomes surveillance. Surveillance becomes tracking. And in the extreme case, where your knowledge gets too dangerous, AEGIS deploys agents to *neutralize* you. Because apparently the cure for cosmic horror is more government, and the cure for that is a quiet car ride somewhere you won't be found. **Mental Strain Episodes:** each time you lose **1/10th of your Willpower in Sanity** (Willpower starts at 100, so think of it as every 10 SAN), you get a short, intense psychological kick in the teeth. Roll on the table: | Roll | Episode | Description | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | Paranoia | They're watching you, and also your allies are traitors. | | 2 | Hallucinations | Seeing and hearing things tied to the encounter. Is that a shoggoth or a very upset homeless man? | | 3 | Phobias | A brand-new one, or the old one just got louder. | | 4 | Obsessions | Rituals, safety symbols, the compulsion to solve the unsolvable. | | 5 | Mania | High energy, bad judgment, dangerous impulses. The fun kind right up until it isn't. | | 6 | Depression | Withdrawal, despair, a pervasive sense that this was always the plan. | | 7 | Dissociation | Detachment, "lost time," floating above your own body watching yourself screw up. | | 8 | Aggression | Uncharacteristic violence aimed at anything, including the party. | | 9 | Amnesia | The memory's gone. Lucky you. | | 10 | Catatonia | Unresponsive for hours or days while your mind dips out for a moment. | **Psychic Fracture:** endure **3 Mental Strain Episodes** and you hit the breaking point—a **Psychic Fracture**, a deep, lasting scar from prolonged Mythos exposure. Roll on a second table for a persistent symptom: persistent hallucinations, deep-rooted paranoia, obsessive compulsions, severe phobias, a dissociative identity shift, memory fragmentation, emotional detachment—take your pick, none of them are fun. Recovery is a whole narrative journey—therapy, facing your fears, the works—and full recovery may *not* be on the table. Some conditions have no cure. You come away with quirks and vulnerabilities that enrich role-playing, which is polite game-designer talk for "your guy is now a problem for everyone who cares about him." **Tethers to Reality:** this is the signature mechanic, and it's excellent. Every investigator gets three anchors to their sense of self—**people** (a loved one, a mentor, a friend, even that rival who gives you purpose), **objects** of sentimental value (the heirloom, the token from a pivotal life event), or **memories** (the childhood home, the great achievement, the shining moment of happiness). Each tether starts at a **value of 30**. When the horror comes for your mind, you can **project the Sanity loss onto a tether**—the bond eats the damage instead of you, its value ticking down each time until the tether is gone entirely. And here's the cruelty baked into the design: those bonds can be strained or severed by prolonged exposure, and a consumed tether is *destroyed*. The relationship burned, the keepsake gone, the place lost. You get to choose who and what you sacrifice to stay sane for five more minutes, and then you get to live with it. It's the best and most interesting part of the game, and honestly the book never quite tells you what happens when a tether is fully consumed—it leaves that horror to your imagination, which is exactly where it belongs. **Willpower:** a measure of mental fortitude, starting at **100 points**. Spend it to nudge a failed roll into a success (pay the difference), or burn **1 point** on a **High-Risk Reroll** immediately after a failure—but fail that reroll and the consequences are *significantly* harsher, which is rulebook-speak for "your character is about to become a permanent fixture in a padded cell." Drain Willpower to **0** and you don't die—you just lose the will to continue. Motivation gone, drive gone, off to retire from the narrative. It comes back by "strengthening your resolve" and engaging your Tethers. **Sanity Recovery:** - **Natural Recovery:** downtime away from the Mythos, finding normalcy, reconnecting with people—recover **1d12 SAN**. - **Psychological Treatment:** a therapist, because this is the one game where your health insurance might actually matter—**1d3 SAN** per week of intensive care. - **Achieving Personal Goals:** fulfill an ambition, take revenge, save an innocent—**1d6 to 1d12 SAN** at the GM's discretion. - **Successful Mythos Encounters:** paradoxically, surviving and overcoming a Mythos challenge can hand back a little SAN, the amount listed in the creature's entry. It's validation, apparently. The universe confirming you could look at the truth and not flinch. *Yet some conditions have no cure.* ## Combat - **Initiative:** descending **Dexterity**; the surprising party may jump the line. Highest DEX goes first, because even the Mythos respects the turn order. - **Attacks:** melee and ranged as d100 roll-under against the relevant skill, with range, visibility, and movement muddying the waters. - **Opposing Rolls:** a defender fights back or dodges; the highest degree of success wins, and **a tie goes to the defender**. Fighting back means only the best opposed roll actually hurts; dodging gets you out of the way. - **Firearms:** this is where the modern setting pays off—semi-auto adds **+10** and buys you extra hits (Complex gets you 2, Intricate gets you all), full-auto adds **+20** (Complex puts 5 in the target, Intricate puts the whole mag). Roll **at or under 1/5th of your skill and it's a Critical Hit**—instantly lethal to a normal human, or maximum damage against the Mythos. A successful dodge slaps a penalty on the attacker: −20 Standard, −40 Complex, −60 Intricate. - **Major Wounds and Death:** one hit for **half or more of your HP** can cause a Major Wound. Drop to **0 HP or below** and you're unconscious; succeed a **Complex CON check** to keep breathing, or die immediately. First Aid or Medicine from a friend might stabilize you. This is the bit where being a big boy (your 14 HP, say) actually buys you a shrug instead of a coffin. ## AEGIS and the Information Paradox AEGIS is the shadowy organization watching humanity's contact with the Mythos, and its whole logic hangs on the **Information Paradox**: the more the horrors surface, the harder they must be kept quiet. So AEGIS surveils, contains, and—when the paperwork calls for it—neutralizes. It can loom as the antagonist, blunder in as an unwitting ally, or fold you into its ranks whether you like it or not. It's the modern setting's answer to the old "secret society" scaffolding, and by dint of being modern, it's got better logistics and worse paperwork. ## Final Verdict Look, I came in hostile. I hate BRP, I hate percentile systems, and I genuinely cannot take "influencer as the Chosen One" seriously. But *Cthulhu Unleashed* won me over where I least expected it: the Tethers to Reality mechanic is genuinely inspired, the "no opposed rolls outside combat" is a quietly brilliant quality-of-life call, and the whole package is mercifully lean—fifty pages where the competition needs four hundred. Is it going to topple *Call of Cthulhu* off its throne? No. Absolutely not. But if you want the mythos with the fat trimmed and a genuinely clever idea buried in the middle, this is a real good time. Trust me. You'll be all right. ## References - [Cthulhu Unleashed Core PDF and Softcover - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/473855/cthulhu-unleashed) - [Cthulhu Unleashed Free Character Sheet - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/475879/cthulhu-unleashed-character-sheet) - [Cthulhu Unleashed: Lysis Protocol (free adventure)](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/495617/Lysis-Protocol--Cthulhu-Unleashed) - [Vindicta RPGs Publisher Profile - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/23964/vindicta-rpgs)