Arcane Underground

The Saga of CthulhuTech (Updated)

matthew@cthulhutech.com — 2008-12-30T14:14:21-08:00

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.

<>

Things have certainly changed since I wrote this initial article. CthulhuTech came out through Mongoose. Then Mongoose had more trouble with their internal publishing venture and eventually dumped the whole idea and went back to traditional offset printing. Unfortunately, that meant that the CthulhuTech Core Book was out of print for more than six months and Dark Passions, the first resource book, was more than six months late. It also meant that the reprint of the Core Book was in black and white, something we were not happy about.

It was in all of this chaos that we chose to switch publishers, with no ill will towards Mongoose Publishing. In July of 2008, we found a new home with Catalyst Game Labs, publisher of Shadowrun and Battletech. The new Catalyst edition of the CthulhuTech Core Book was available in limited quantities at Gen Con 2008, in glorious full-color with layout changes made in response to fan feedback. Also available in limited quantities for the first time was Vade Mecum: the CthulhuTech Companion. The longest it took us to sell out of the Core Book out of all four days was an hour and twenty minutes; the longest it took all four days to sell out of Vade Mecum was about twenty minutes.

These editions came out in full release in October 2008 and have met with wonderful response. Some sites already list Vade Mecum as being in the top 30 best-selling roleplaying eBooks of all time. A new colorized edition of Dark Passions, with new material and new art, will be released in January 2009. April 2009 will see a Player's Screen and the Damnation View, the first CthulhuTech Story Book.

CthulhuTech. It's finally here for real. Let me know what you think.

Changes

matthew@cthulhutech.com — 2008-10-29T18:50:37-07:00

Yeah, the question is, "Matthew, what kind of changes did you make to the new Core Book?" I get it. Some of you already bought the book, sometimes already twice, and you're wondering if you should fork over your hard-earned dollars to do it again.

While the content of the Catalyst edition of the Core Book remains fundamentally the same, the layout has changed in many places. It's been cleaned up all over the place. I listened to fans as well. The mecha and monster layouts changed to accommodate significantly larger illustrations. The fiction spreads have a new background that makes the art pop and the text easier to read. Much of the art has more real estate. It is, in general, a cleaner and better book and previous printings.

If it's a question of buying either Vade Mecum or the new Core Book right now, buy Vade Mecum and pick up the Core Book another day. You'll want the new Core, trust me, but Vade Mecum is very cool and is selling very well. It's in the top 30 best selling all-time electronic RPG books already.

How Many?

matthew@cthulhutech.com — 2008-09-22T20:37:09-07:00

One of the things about the bordering on ridiculous development cycle that was the Core Book is that I pretty much wrote the book twice, not including simple revisions. It went through so many iterations of what the final product was going to be that one day I woke up and read the Setting chapter and said, "I am so re-writing this." And I mean from scratch. Which applied to most of the book at that point.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I think the book wound up to be a much better and more compelling product as a result. It also helped me refine the style that is CthulhuTech to the point that now I can churn out nearly finished product on the first draft, which is very helpful.

I guess the point is that I hope you like it.

Nazzadi Dancers

matthew@cthulhutech.com — 2008-07-31T19:31:39-07:00

Here's one of my favorite pieces from the Core Book, that did not get the page real estate it deserves (by Whit Brachna). I hope we do prints of it again. I never even got one and we gave the rest away at Gen Con 2007.

New Core Book

matthew@cthulhutech.com — 2008-07-31T18:35:53-07:00

The Core Book is coming back in full-color under the watch of Catalyst Game Labs. Thank goodness. I realize that going black and white for the last print run was a business necessity, but the book never really looked as good. I just saw the new color galleys and the book looks like I always wanted it to look and the best of any edition we've printed.

Plus, I made a few revisions, based on feedback from fans. You'll find that the layout for mecha is a little different, so that you actually have larger images of the mecha. Ditto for monsters, but with a really different layout. Images have been tweaked, errata has been observed, and the splash backgrounds have been changed to match Vade Mecum. Overall, it's pretty darn cool.

I'm working out a new electronic version of the book that will incorporate all these changes and should be up for sale in the next couple of weeks.

Adding PDF to the Mix

matthew@cthulhutech.com — 2008-01-22T12:47:46-08:00

Well, it looks like we'll be releasing the CthulhuTech Core Book as an electronic book. It sounds like a good idea. Our publisher says that it's a great secondary revenue stream and that some people who wouldn't normally buy the book will buy the PDF and that some people will even buy both.

I personally think that having both a hard and soft copy is incredibly useful. But I'm frankly worried about the people who want something for nothing. Mongoose doesn't use DRM and only watermarks their electronic books. I know you can't stop pirates. Some people just can't see the harm they cause the little guy. But I would rather serve our loyal public by giving them the books in the format they want, rather than live in fear of something I can't stop.

Plus, many places did not anticipate the demand for CthulhuTech and under-ordered (both retailers and distributors) and people who want to buy the book are having problems getting it right now. Add to that the desire to have the book now so that you can start playing this weekend. An electronic version of the book would solve that. Go to the web-site, pay via credit card, and voila! Within about five minutes you have the book and can play.

We told Mongoose we'd have an answer by Friday. Free free to add comments.

Purpose

matthew@cthulhutech.com — 2008-01-10T22:28:04-08:00

In this section, I'll be blogging about anything related to the material covered in the Core Book, either setting or Framewerk related.