Today’s entry is the wrap up of the remaining chapters of the Keeper’s Guide. Not that these chapters are somehow less noteworthy, but because they are essentially a no-nonsense list of GM resources that will be of use in any WW2 game involving the Cthulhu Mythos.
After the special rules chapters, the Keeper’s Guide has several chapters that cover magic and artifacts, a spell list, horrors and monstrosities and important allies and nemeses in the setting.
Beyond those, the last few chapters include Adventure Seeds, and a Quick Play Guide and resources for the GM’s use.
Each of these chapters goes into excellent detail on the various facets presented. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that it’s essentially a toybox of Cthulu Mythos fun. NPCs provided in the chapters all have the required stat blocks for all the systems involved, which is surely no small amount of work, and the usefulness of the Keeper’s Guide is apparent to anyone looking to run a Cthulhu game in this era.
Review and Conclusion
The Achtung! Cthulhu Keeper’s Guide is a dense, detailed, and well researched book which is more than able to deliver on the promise of arming a GM with the necessary information to run any kind of WW2 game involving the Cthulhu Mythos.
The antagonist secret societies introduced in this book remain a highlight for me, as I found them to be very colorful and still very sinister, falling beautifully in that space between pulp and horror, allowing them to work in any game of the setting with minor adjustments to how they’re run.
As a GM, I can’t stress enough how the book has pretty much anything you might need. It’s best to view this book as a reference material as opposed to a standard GM guide. If you need anything, from a vehicle, to rules on a dogfight involving a flying cthulhoid creature and an airplane, to bizzare inventions used by the Nazis against Allied tanks, it’s in here.
The artwork in the book remains splendid, and the layout clear and easy to use. My only possible feedback with regards to this is that it doesn’t seem to have much in terms of a guide to how to use the book for novice GMs. It’s a lot of information, but I can see new GMs fumbling about how to use all of this, and perhaps getting a little worried that they might need to use all of it, which is certainly not the case.
More experienced GMs will know that the books is sort of a buffet of information and options that they can cherry pick only the stuff that they’re interested in and use that, without feeling that kind of pressure.
That said I cannot really say that there’s a fault in having too much information. With a discerning GM with a careful eye towards balancing authenticity with information overload, the book is an absolute joy to go through.
Achtung! Cthulhu is turning out to be quite the product line, and I would say that it is definitely a must have for any fans of games set in the era, both as a game and as a resource.
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For those interested, you can get a copy of the Achtung! Cthulhu Books in PDF format from DriveThruRPG
- Investigator’s Guide (Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu version) $14.99
- Keeper’s Guide (Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu version) $22.99
- Investigator’s Guide (Fate Core version) $14.99
- Keeper’s Guide (Fate Core version) $22.99
- Achtung! Cthulhu Guide to the Pacific Front (Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu version) $14.99
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