Today’s offering is a slightly odd one, as it relates to a product which remains, sadly, vapourware - but one which I was very eager to get my hands on. Dating back to 2007, Cthulhu Adventus was first announced as part of Chaosium’s Miskatonic University Monograph series; this never appeared, and sometime around 2010 the producers of the supplement slated it for a 2013-14 publication, this time as a liscenced product under the auspices of Stygian Fox. Whilst Stygian Fox have continued to produce a number of supplements for the Call of Cthulhu rpg, Cthulhu Adventus has yet to appear.
What was teased about Cthulhu Adventus on its dedicated blog (which remains live despite not having been updated since 2010) was the intriguing premise of a dystopian Lovecraftian 1984, in which the Earth has fallen under the dominion of the totalitarian Humanitarian Political Party, or the Polity, which exerted absolute control - Big Brother style - over the surviving populace of a post-apocalyptic Europe in the face of the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. At the time this central conceit struck me as wholly believable in relation to how a totalitarian state would seek to ‘protect’ its populace in the face of the reality of the Great Old Ones - a notion which is also expertly explored in Basil Copper’s classic mythos tale ‘Shaft Number 247’.
One of the themes which seemed to emerge from the few background details made public regarding Cthulhu Adventus was the notion that the fascistic Polity would go to extreme lengths - even to the extent of exterminating large numbers of its own citizens - in order to keep knowledge of the mythos secret (as I recall, this was rather horribly implied in a recorded playthrough of an early Cthulhu Adventus scenario which appeared on yog-sothoth.com): a case of destroying the village in order to save it - a context in which player characters as agents of the Polity might potentially be faced with some stark and deeply-troubling moral choices; in this respect, there was an implication that the setting might also explore questions regarding the nature of the monstrous in relation to how, under the auspices of thehighly-rationalised bureaucracies of modern neoliberal bation states, we ourselves are already subjects of the monstrous, indifferent forces of our own ‘Great Old Ones’.
In any case, I remain hopeful that, at some point in the future, Cthulhu Adventus may yet see the light of day.
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