HOW TO CTHULHUTECH
Presented in the style of: The Gaming Den
Fix the fluff yourself. I don't care enough to write setting junk.
CORE MECHANICS
The core mechanics of Cthulhutech are shitty, obtuse, and needly complicated for no good reason. Strip out the awful KRAFTWERK mechanics and replace them with the Shadowrun 4th edition dicepool mechanics. Attribute + Skill or Attribute + Attribute dicepools with equipment modifiers are just fine.
Total character BP values should be approximated based on whatever the hell it is worth to be a Tager or a Mage and however many points you think people should allot for skills on average. So like 350 BP, maybe 400 BP.
ATTRIBUTES
Attributes cost 10 points. Attribute cap is 6. Augmented cap is 1.5x the racial cap. Attributes start at 1.
Humans can pick one stat and get a +1 bonus to both their current stat and the cap (so 2/7).
Nazzadi get +2 to Agility (so 3/8). Now Nazzadi are actually more agile than humans, who could previously just put their +1 to any attribute into Agility and match the Nazzadi bonus.
Merge Strength and Body into one attribute, "Toughness."
Merge Willpower and Charisma into one attribute, "Willpower."
STAYING ALIVE
Everyone gets vitality-scale wound boxes. Ten of them.
Vehicles, buildings, and so on get integrity-scale wound boxes. Ten of them. Integrity damage is ten vitality boxes per point. Human-scale people who get shot by mecha-scale weapons explode. Deal with it.
I suggest using the Light, Moderate, Serious, and Incapacitating wound system proposed in the alt.war thread:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51934& ... &start=175
CTRL+F for "written out of character" and you'll get to it right away. It explains everything that is wrong with the SR4 damage and armor systems and why they fall apart utterly when you try to scale it to vehicular combat with tanks and shit.
Sanity score. Everyone needs one. There are at least two ways to do this.
One is to have SANITY WOUND BOXES where every 10 boxes worth of SANITY WOUNDS you pick up an appropriate derangement or something. This has the advantage of sort of working on the same scale as other wounds. You can soak sanity wounds with Willpower if you're okay with the idea that mages handle weird shit better than other people (which is sort of logical). Or you can base them on some other attribute or an advantage or whatever you want and assume that everyone who wants to remain sane will buy it. It also has the advantage of not being game over until you pick up too many derangements for your character to be functional (or taken seriously).
Another is to have sanity be some fixed value (say 100 points) that degrades when you take sanity damage. At 100 points you are a functional human being. At 0 points you are catatonic. You can graduate this into 10 or 20-point steps or whatever where at 90 you're starting to fray, at 80 you have at least one moderately disabling mental illness, and so on. This creates a nice progression from sane to essentially unplayable and therefore basically dead. You can even make it possible to restore sanity in this system in a straight-out numerical sense instead of "remove a specific derangement."
You can probably devise an infinite number of other ways to handle sanity.
ADVANTAGES
You can only have one of these three advantages.
Being a
Tager is like having equipment except that it is merged into your flesh in some unspeakably horrifying way. When you Tager out you get a lot of buffs to attributes and they are allowed to exceed the augmented caps for your race because you are more than human now. As I understand it, using the SR4 damage scale Tagers probably seriously need to run around with a Toughess attribute of like 20. The drawback of being a Tager is that you have in fact merged some horrifying ur-thing into your flesh in some unspeakably horrifying way. You will probably go insane (if you have not already).
Being a
Para-psychic is like having a bunch of random-ass spell-like abilities that you should buy individually for points. You don't need a Magic attribute, they just operate at some fixed power based on how many points you have spent.
Being a
Magician gives you a Magic attribute and lets you train in magic-related skills. It works exactly like being a Mage in SR4 except that everybody soaks Drain with Willpower + Magic.
If being an
Engel Pilot is that much more awesome than driving a regular mecha it can cost something too. Let people be Engel pilots in addition to other stuff because why not.
Then you can have some other advantages. You can have disadvantages, too, like starting with derangements or at a lower sanity value or whatever. It is suggested that the costs for these things be structured such that you cannot be totally addicted to heroin (Habit worth 4 points in CT) to pay off being the dictator of a country (Authority worth 4 points in CT). (Yes, this is actually how much those things cost slash are worth in CTech.)
Note that buying sanity-related disads, if they are allowed, is like reducing your hit point value permanently no matter what sanity system you use. Your character will become unplayable sooner. There should be some strict cap on how far into the hole you are permitted to go, because "your character will die earlier in the campaign" is a meaningless disadvantage in exchange for real ultimate power. Tagers, Para-psychics, and Mages should probably be forced to choose a suitable drawback in exchange for their powers. There is no sane (ha) way to balance the cost and mechanical drawbacks of being depressed versus being schizophrenic versus being obssessive-compulsive or whatever, so assume that in the end it is not going to be balanced and just ballpark something. It will save you a lot of...sanity.
SKILLS
There are too many redundant skills in SR4, so most of them can go away and no one will miss them. There are no skill groups. Skills probably cost 2 points/rank and cap at 6 or something. Realistically you are going to come up with a list of skills and determine how many skills people should have at what rank (two 5s or one 6, max of three 4s, and the rest do whatever).
You need four combat skills. Max. Firearms, Explosives, Melee, and Gunnery. Everything from holdouts to man-portable machine guns goes into Firearms. If it goes boom, it's an Explosive, whether it's a grenade, a block of C4, or a rocket launcher. If you hit people with it, it's Melee. People who want to fist-fight with mecha or use giant vibroswords can use Melee there, too. And if it's not mounted on a mech or vehicle and you aren't aiming directly but are instead using other controls or computerized targeting systems or whatever then it's Gunnery. If you are using a machine gun mounted on a jeep and are literally standing on the back of the jeep aiming the machine gun like in Halo you get to use Firearms; if you are sitting in the cockpit operating the guns through some interface you use Gunnery. All key off Agility. You can fold Firearms and Gunnery into one skill if you think the skill list is too long.
There is one piloting skill. Pilot. It lets you drive a Toyota, a snowmobile, a helicopter, or an Engel. It's 2085. They're probably all operated with a joystick. You use Pilot to dodge attacks when you are driving shit.
Dodge is a stupid skill no one takes, so get rid of it. Climbing, Running, and Swimming do not need to be separate skills because they aren't important enough to matter. Athletics governs all this shit in addition to avoiding attacks.
People need to see and hear, so keep Perception.
Social skills can pretty much stay the same.
You need a list of Cthulhutech type Knowledge skills (Arcanotech, Bureaucracy, Culture, Law Enforcement, and so on). They probably ought to cost the same as other skills if they are going to be as important as other skills.
Computers and hacking are not that important in Cthulhutech. You need Computer and probably Electronic Warfare.
You might as well leave Engineering in and force people to choose a specialty, but allow cinematic engineering bullshit where the auto mechanic fixes a battlesuit.
The whole Stealth group probably ought to stay, but you could merge Infiltration and Shadowing.
First Aid and Medicine can stay separate in the sense that Medicine is basically a Knowledge skill.
A single Ritual Magic skill for spellcasters is probably enough, because spellcasters are going to get fucked over by eldritch power every time they do basically anything. Making them buy three different skills so that they can get fucked over while tampering with things Man Was Not Meant to Know is probably unnecessary. There will be enough drawbacks. I guess you could have an Assensing equivalent if you wanted there to be a magical "perception" ability?
MAGIC AND PARA-PSYCHIC POWERS AND TAGERS OH MY
Use spells from SR4. Convert specific powers from Cthulhutech. Add horrifying drawbacks to taste. Serve. Go find the psyker critical failure tables from a Warhammer 40k RPG or pillage something from Cthulhutech, it'll be fine.
Tagers, as previously mentioned, are like possession tradition spirit nonsense and all your attribute caps become irrelevant because you shoved the fungi from Yuggoth into your body. You spend an action to invoke your Tager power if necessary and you get all kinds of crazy powers that only work because you are being a Tager. This probably makes you go insane.
MONSTER MANUAL AND MECHA HANDBOOK
I cannot convert all the monsters and vehicles to approximate SR4-Cthulhutech equivalents in my head on the drive home from work. So you have to do it yourself. [INFLAMMATORY INSULTS AND THREATS CENSORED]
EQUIPMENT
Aren't your characters part of some organization or something? They don't even own their equipment, it's on loan from the army. Paying points for it is probably silly. Dole it out in some sane way and let people pick their gear, whatever loadout seems most reasonable to them based on utility and bulk/weight. Limit people based on logical encumberance rates (modified by Toughness) to what they can carry. You can't even carry ten machine guns, owning ten machine guns on your character sheet is pointless. If you want people to have mecha or battlesuits you're going to have to literally hand them out as the GM anyway because you don't want one guy buying a Seraph while everyone else spends all their BP on C4 and assault rifles. Mecha are on a totally different game scale, so either the whole team gets them for a mission or no one does. Case closed.
CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Brought to you by plagiarism, caffeine, and the letter T.