There are a whole lot of people out there who call CthulhuTech vaporware, a term that implies a product promised but never delivered. Since I now hold one of the first printed and bound copies of the CthulhuTech Core Book, I speak with authority when I say it is not vaporware. Now that the book is weeks away from release, let me tell you our long and sordid tale so that you too might understand our incredible journey.

CthulhuTech was an accident. I’d been out of game design for years. But as any adventure game professional knows, game designers are like addicts – sooner or later we relapse. So one rainy day in Seattle, I was hanging out at my friend Aron Anderson’s comic and game store, the Dreaming. We were talking about the usual stuff like comics, games, movies, and the inevitable conversation of something Lovecraftian. I was looking around at the action figures and toys he has displayed around his store and it hit me. No one had combined true Lovecraftian-style horror with good old fashioned anime-style mecha, so I shouted out, “I got it! We combine Lovecraft and mecha and call it… CthulhuTech!”

Frankly, I thought the idea was pretty stupid. We had a good laugh. But then we both stopped and thought about it for a second. Aron got this look on his face and said, “You know, that’s not a bad idea. See what you can do with it.” What I left out is at that point Aron was also part of Eos Press, a small start-up game company in Seattle who had published the roleplaying game Godlike.

I went away and it just started coming out of me. By the end of the week, I had the basic universe and rules designed and I brought them to Aron. He liked what he saw and we started talking about Eos Press publishing the newborn CthulhuTech. It was originally supposed to be only two books, CthulhuTech and the Companion, and each was only supposed to be 128 pages and priced as an impulse buy. I called my long-time friend and gaming partner Fraser McKay and pitched him the idea to see if he wanted to do some writing for the book and Aron hooked me up with Mike Vaillancourt to do some art and art direct.

The first draft of CthulhuTech didn’t take us all that long. However, something happened along the way. The more it came into being, the more we realized that it was much more than we’d initially thought. Eos Press requested that we make the book bigger and add more of what we’d been developing. Our initial release got pushed back as CthulhuTech got a product line behind it and as the Core Book got a lot more meaty.

We’d created several playtest groups and internet forums by this point and had already established a fan-base. Most people knew what was going on and were happy to wait based on what they’d already seen of the property. Then we hit our first big hurdle. Eos Press got a hold of the Weapons of the Gods license from China. At that time, Eos Press was a small company with limited resources and Weapons of the Gods was a product that had a built-in franchise and audience. After several long conversations with the guys, we all agreed that it would be best if we took CthulhuTech solo while Eos Press spent their time, effort, and money to support a license they knew would be a solid release. (As an aside, Weapons of the Gods was originally built on my Framewerk system and you can still see its ghost in that game’s current rules.)

Now we’d gone from a group of guys essentially contracting to make a game for a publisher to a group of guys self-publishing. We could handle that, but we needed someone else to handle the actual sale of the product line. Enter Osseum Entertainment, run by a group of ex-Wizards of the Coast and ex-TSR employees, several of which I had come up with in the adventure games industry. They were slick, smart, on the ball, and fun to go drinking with. Osseum Entertainment gave us great advice and helped us on our way. We thought we weren’t far from release, only about a year off of what we would have under Eos Press. The fans were still with us.

Enter the next hurdle. Mike Vaillancourt was still on active duty with the Navy. The military decided that it was time for him to go on deployment to Japan. Suddenly, our concept artist and art director was going to a foreign country where he have limited contact with us, unreliable internet service, and not a whole lot of time to work. This set the book back six months on its own.

Mike finally returned in time to run smack into hurdle number three – the demise of Osseum Entertainment. No one saw it coming, or at least no one that was telling us. Years after we started this project we were back at square one business-wise. We had a manuscript, a stack of concept art, and no publisher or sales/distribution partner. This gave us a lot to think about.

We were forced to take the next year to set-up what we were going to do. There were lots of meetings with the SBA, conversations about finance, and research about other sales and distribution organizations. During this time, Mike was sent out on deployment again and I decided that since we were just hanging back I was going to basically rewrite the entire Core Book because I thought it could be better. Plus, I moved from Seattle to Los Angeles. And yet, somehow the fans were still talking about us. A lot of other people were not saying very nice things about us or CthulhuTech, but they were still talking about it which meant there was still interest. I’d Google CthulhuTech and was stunned by what would show up.

I’d starting writing the book that was to become Dark Passions by this point and had pages of notes for the book that was to become Vade Mecum. I’d created a complete metaplot, release schedule, and even had a pilot episode written for a television show (I’m a screenwriter for my day job). But honestly, I’d given up. We’d worked so hard and smacked into so many obstacles that I just figured the universe was trying to tell me something. And then one day it hit me like a ton of bricks. I loved this intellectual property and I owed it to my partners and our fans to resuscitate CthulhuTech. We started talking about it avidly again and were re-committed to making our dream real.

Not long after that, something special happened. Someone on rpg.net outright called CthulhuTech vaporware. Mike Vaillancourt got on there and told the story of what had happened and where we were at, for no other reason than for people to understand. A couple days later we received an e-mail from Matthew Sprange at Mongoose Publishing that basically said, “Let’s talk.” A few months later, we had a publisher and CthulhuTech was alive and kicking again.

Now we had to move into production. It was time to sink some serious cash into getting final art, a final cover, and the interior layout done. And then the government decided that it was time for Mike to go back to Japan again. Sigh. And I broke up with my live-in girlfriend and ended up without reliable internet access for two months. This is all beside the fact that we discovered that many freelance illustrators would drop a start-up like us like a hot potato if they get video game work, no matter how close to deadline they were.

This brings us to the beginning of 2007. Mike came back, Fraser was developing the business relationship with Mongoose Publishing, and I was coordinating production. Soon we had a web-site (which is a whole other story) and new forums. And suddenly, there were the fans. I couldn’t believe it. People who’d been following us for years as well as new people who’d just discovered CthulhuTech started talking on the official forums. If there was one moment that made me realize that we’d made the right choice to push through all the hurdles to get CthulhuTech into the hands of the public, this was it. After everything, there were people who were still waiting and were still excited.

And now we’re here. GenCon 2007 was amazing. We brought a print-out of the book that was at the printer and ran demos non-stop. We met a whole lot of really cool people who are into CthulhuTech, whether they’ve been into it for a while or just discovered it. Just about everyone who came and talked with us walked away with a smile on their face and a couple cool bookmarks to remind them. We tried like heck to have published copies at the show, but alas we hit our last hurdle – printer troubles.

Those problems are solved now. As I said earlier, I hold a fully printed and bound copy of the Core Book in my hands, though it is a proof copy with a few errors we need to correct before it can go into mass production. The game is real. It will be in stores very soon, if it isn’t already by the time this is printed. It is vaporware no more.

What I’d really like you to get from this is that this book is for the fans. We hit more than our fair share of hurdles, many the kind that make most people give up and go home. If I was the kind of person that only answered to myself, I’d have given up and moved on. But every time I wrestled with calling it quits, I’d turn around and be reminded of all the people that had fallen in love with just the little they’d seen and were still waiting for CthulhuTech. That’s powerful and something that couldn’t be denied. I can’t wait for all of you to finally have this book in your hands and I can’t wait to hear from you all the crazy adventures you create for yourself from it.

No matter who you are, if you play storytelling games I invite you to take a look at CthulhuTech. And don’t worry, because the Core Book isn’t all there is. We’re currently in final production on Dark Passions, a dark little book about cults, and the manuscript for Vade Mecum: the CthulhuTech Companion is pretty much complete. I think that now that we’re rolling, we’re in for quite a ride.

Welcome to the Aeon War. Nice to finally see you.