27 October 2024

First Impressions - Creatures and Cultist (Eos Press)

The box of Creatures & Cultists, show a star spawn of Cthulhu sat at a table playing cards with a shoggoth and a cultist.



I originally posted this review on 27 October 2024 (so twenty years ago today!) on RPG.net and I've decided to put a copy here on my blog so it doesn't disappear for posterity.

Creatures & Cultists was originally released in 1992 to 1993 in both the fourth issue of Pagan Publishing's Call of Cthulhu magazine The Unspeakable Oathand as a stand-alone game sold at GenCon & Origins and by mail order. It is written by Jeff Barber and John Tynes, and is best described as Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos silliness in a card game.

I'd not really been aware of it until I looked at Eos Press' website to find out about the forthcoming release of Pagan Publishing's Delta Green in a d20compatible version. I saw Creatures & Cultists there with some cool art, so decided to pick it up at GenCon UK this last weekend. Interestingly, the old zip-lock bag version was on a second hand trader's stand at £75 GBP, somewhat higher than this version's £11.99 GBP.

Components The game is supplied in a 7"x5"x1" box, with an amusing cover by John Kovalic showing Cthulhu, a cultist and a Shoggoth playing the game. The box is sturdy and the lid a little difficult to remove as it is tight. The cover picture has slight wear marks on it - this was common on all the stock at GenCon UK and may be a shipping issue.

Inside the box are: - 128 colour cards (approximately the same size as a Magiccard so you can use standard deck protectors if you want to). - 3D6 - a sheet of rules - a number of cult sheets (additional copies of which which can be photocopied or downloaded from the Eos Press website ).

All the component are good quality - the cards include 4 reference cards for play and 6 blanks to add your own madness. The cards are all illustrated by John Kovalic and are very amusing, especially if you've played or read Call of Cthulhu.

Gameplay

The game can play with 2 or more players but is recommended for three to five people. Less than this and it looses the fun of interaction. More than this and it could go on for aeons!

A group of four of us tried the game late one evening, none of whom had played the game before.

The game starts with everyone picking a cult name (e.g. the 'Cult of Cthulhu', or the 'Order of Wheeltappers and Re-animators Social Club') and a slogan (e.g. "Ia! Cthulhu Phtagn!" or "Whacking wheels and dead bodies for over 2000 years"). You also pick a symbol, which really needs to be easy to draw (more later). This is written on your cult sheet. Once this important stage is done, you roll three statistics – Conjuring, Sorcery and Thuggery – on 2D6+3 and record them on your cult sheet.

Everyone is now ready to play - the cult sheets are placed in front of you.

The sheets have sections for the information just mentioned, a score track for 'Fuggly points' and 24 cultists laid out in three rows of eight. These cultists are either 'Thugs' or 'Conjurers' with strengths in magic or being violent. The rows are important because you can only attack a cultist on the front-most row, and as they are more whittled away more powerful cultists become available when a complete new row is exposed by the deaths of all the cultists on the outermost rows. Each cultist is worth a number of 'Fuggly points' if they are killed.

The aim of the game is to either kill off all the opposition's cultists (very hard) or get to get enough fuggly points to successfully summon your own Great Old One to bring on the End Times and kill everyone else off.

The game is played in rounds, during which each player has a turn. Turn order changes each round and is determined by the roll of a D6. The lowest rolling player is the 'favoured by the stars' and goes last in the round. Being favoured means that your skills are effectively 2 points higher, and that you can attempt to summon your Great Old One if you have enough Fuggly points.

Once the favoured cult is chosen, all players draw cards to a total of 6 in their hand. There are six types of card (seven if you accidently mix the blanks in like we did!):

1. Mondo cards. These must be played at the start of your turn if you have any, and the card is immediately replaced (very like the 'Secret' and 'Top Secret Cards' in Nuclear War by Flying Buffalo). Most of these have good effects on your cult and have weird titles like 'Girl Scout Raid', 'Herbert West' and 'Special Delivery'. They can sometimes have a bad effect on you.

2. Event cards. These can be played at any time in your turn on other cults and usually do nasty things to them.

3. Thuggery cards. These are used to make Thuggery attacks and include the mundane ('a Scimitar' or the 'Tommy Gun') to the ridiculous ('Blam Keg' or 'Big Honkin' Truck').

4. Conjuring cards. These are used to summon creatures to make an attack. Most of the famous Cthulhu mythos creatures are here, ranging from Cthugha to Deep Ones.

5. Sorcery cards. These are spell cards which can attack or defend, and can be played at any time in your turn.

6. Defense cards. These are specific defenses against 'Thuggery' and 'Conjuring' attacks. Examples include 'It's a Bluff' (where an innocent party gets killed instead of your cultist), 'Dodge' (where you, err, dodge the attack) and the 'Elder sign' (which wards against the mythos creatures).

With the cards in their hand, each player takes their turn. They play their Mondo cards, and then can play any event or sorcery cards. Sorcery cards require a successful roll on 3D6 under your Sorcery number to make sure the effect happens.

Each cult can make two attacks per turn – one conjuring, one thuggery – and either type can be done by either kind of cultist. However, thugs are better at thuggery, and and conjurers are better at conjuring. In both cases, the attacking player nominates a cultist on their frontmost row to attack a cultist on the enemy's frontmost row by either method. 3D6 are then rolled, with the result needing to be under their 'Thuggery' or 'Conjuring' skills to be successful.

Victims of a 'Thuggery' attack make a defense roll under half their 'thuggery' or are killed. Victims of a 'Conjuring' attack must roll 3D6 under the monster's rating to survive. In both cases, a successful defense allows a counter-attack immediately.

If a cultist is killed, the cult attacking writes its symbol on the cultist on the victim's cult sheet entry to show they killed them (Bwa-ha-ha!). They also get the Fuggly points from the victim.

Play continues around the table until the 'favoured of the stars' has their go. The main difference here is that if the 'Favoured' has enough Fuggly points they can attempt to summon their Great Old One to end the game. If this doesn't happen, the round ends and the whole process is repeated.

Game design

The description of the gameplay above shows how the game works. The section below details the key mechanics which add to the fun.

Fuggly points: Fuggle points act as a limit to when you can summon your GOO, and also can be used as a way to boost your target number to roll under. If you have spare Fuggly points you can increase your target number by +1 for every Fuggly points you sacrifice.

Spooges and Boofs: These are a critical and a fumble mechanic. If you roll 3,4 or 5 you 'Spooge'. This means something good happens (e.g. Spells can be more powerful, or if you are attacking, the attack can automatically succeed). If you roll 16,17 or 18 you'boof'. This is bad. If conjuring, you can be attacked by the creature you summoned. In the absolute worst case you can put yourself out of the game.

In the game we played this happened twice. In the first instance a player had summoned their Great Old One successfully, then another player played a special event card ('Dr Armitage suspects') that converted the success to a boof. The Great Old One turned up and duly ate the cult that had summoned it. But, showing what goes around comes around, the player who had used the event card tried to summon their GOO a couple of turns later and boofed naturally. So the same thing happened, resulting in the player in the weakest position winning!

Boofs effectively limit the number of Fuggly points you'd want to spend on boosting any individual roll. There is very little point in boosting a skill above 15 (unless its being used to defend against thuggery and would be halved) as if you roll a 16 or more you'll fail.

Onion Layer effects: The onion layer effect of having to wipe out all the cultists in one row of the cult sheet means that you have to balance protecting the last few cultists to protect the rest of your cult with getting the more powerful cultists into play. There are some cards (the worst being 'the Seed of Azathoth' ) which will attack rows further back, but generally it takes time to work through the rows. However, some 'thuggery' attacks like 'dynamite' and the 'big honking truck' attack several adjacent cultists. The 'Tommy gun' allows you to attack a whole row so can be devastating.

Conclusion


Being the first time that we played this, we took some time to get into it. At first we were worried that it was going to go on forever (like the end game of Zombies we played the night before). However, we soon realised that the aim was to summon your GOO rather than win by wiping the enemy out, which speeds the game.

The interesting thing is that you can't call the play's conclusion. The player who won was in the weakest position. Two of the other cults died in failed summonings, and the first cult to die was wiped out by all the others the turn they tried to summon their GOO as everyone worked together to finish them off. At the start of the game we'd been skeptical about it, but by the end we all thought it was great. It took around three hours to play with four people. It was faster towards the end when we were all fully happy with the game. If you wanted to play faster you could probably knock out a few columns of cultists.

It was a fun – and silly – game. If you've read any Call of Cthulhu and have a sense of humour about it you'll enjoy it. (You'd also like the Goomi's Unspeakable Vault of Doom comic which has similar humour, but that's a different story). However, knowing the mythos isn't critical - the game is fun and quite fluid. It's a bit more involved than Munchkin (for example) but not particularly complex.

I recommend it - I can see it being played again with my friends and players, unlike some games that just sit on the shelf gathering dust. Fuggly Fun!

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