Pokethulhu - Yes? No?

[Oryx]

So for those of you familiar with Call of Cthulhu, Pokethulhu is a mixture of the Cthulhu mythos and Pokemon. It's more Poke than Thulhu based, using the basic structure of a Pokemon episode (going somewhere, meet conflict, resolve conflict, resume travel), as well as the ability to capture and train Thulhu, which are mixtures of mythos creatures and Pokemon (the mascot being Pikathulhu). A good description of the entire concept can be found here. As you can see, it's more Pokemon with Call of Cthulhu added in than Call of Cthulhu with Pokemon added.

My normal group of friends that I play Call of Cthulhu with want absolutely no part in this. Our normal Keeper says that it ruins the purity of the mythos, while my boyfriend, our other experienced Keeper, thinks it's stupid and won't be fun and won't consider running it. I've never run anything before, but I was looking into running this for some friends of my best friend back home (who don't have any experience in mythos or RPGs). The skills seem easy enough to allocate, the scenario in the pdf looks easy and fast, and it doesn't seem too hard to pick up on.

When I mentioned this to my boyfriend he told me something along the lines of "I don't think you'll have fun, and I don't think a first-time Keeper can run it effectively enough to make it fun". He doesn't enjoy Pokemon as much as I do, so it's possible that he's just not appreciating the mythos mixing and it's coloring his opinion, but I wanted other opinions before I offered to my friend to run it. Should I even bother with this? Is it even worth trying?

 

[digi-kun]

So for those of you familiar with Call of Cthulhu, Pokethulhu is a mixture of the Cthulhu mythos and Pokemon. It's more Poke than Thulhu based, using the basic structure of a Pokemon episode (going somewhere, meet conflict, resolve conflict, resume travel), as well as the ability to capture and train Thulhu, which are mixtures of mythos creatures and Pokemon (the mascot being Pikathulhu). A good description of the entire concept can be found here. As you can see, it's more Pokemon with Call of Cthulhu added in than Call of Cthulhu with Pokemon added.

My normal group of friends that I play Call of Cthulhu with want absolutely no part in this. Our normal Keeper says that it ruins the purity of the mythos, while my boyfriend, our other experienced Keeper, thinks it's stupid and won't be fun and won't consider running it. I've never run anything before, but I was looking into running this for some friends of my best friend back home (who don't have any experience in mythos or RPGs). The skills seem easy enough to allocate, the scenario in the pdf looks easy and fast, and it doesn't seem too hard to pick up on.

When I mentioned this to my boyfriend he told me something along the lines of "I don't think you'll have fun, and I don't think a first-time Keeper can run it effectively enough to make it fun". He doesn't enjoy Pokemon as much as I do, so it's possible that he's just not appreciating the mythos mixing and it's coloring his opinion, but I wanted other opinions before I offered to my friend to run it. Should I even bother with this? Is it even worth trying?

No offense, I'm with this guy about ruining the purity of the mythos. For one thing, most, most likely all, Pokemon aren't even close to the level of scary or intimidating in the horror fashion that those of the mythos hold, so I don't even know how you'd be handling sanity checks on that. On the flip side, if we're talking cthulu showing up in pokeland, I'll admitit sounds interesting, but I'm generally still against it. Then again, I haven't actually played CoC yet, so....

Personally, I would say try to use a different roleplaying system to base off of.

 

[Oryx]

No offense, I'm with this guy about ruining the purity of the mythos. For one thing, most, most likely all, Pokemon aren't even close to the level of scary or intimidating in the horror fashion that those of the mythos hold, so I don't even know how you'd be handling sanity checks on that. On the flip side, if we're talking cthulu showing up in pokeland, I'll admitit sounds interesting, but I'm generally still against it. Then again, I haven't actually played CoC yet, so....

Personally, I would say try to use a different roleplaying system to base off of.

Like I explained, it's not Cthulhu with Pokemon, it's Pokemon with Cthulhu. The characters you play are kids that control "thulhu", that are Pokemon pretty much, just retooled to look similar to creatures from the mythos (Pentacruel, Blhastor, etc). It's run like a Pokemon game would be run, you wouldn't take sanity checks from seeing thulhu, although the modified stats do have a Sanity score, but that's more like a bravery score.

The problem is, my friend asked me to run a Pokemon RPG for them, but I don't feel qualified because I've only been in one and it wasn't that fun, so I don't have firsthand experience on how to make it fun. I offered to run Call of Cthulhu for them, and my friend said that they wouldn't want to actually roleplay. Pokethulhu looks pretty simple and easy-to-follow (the entire "core book" of it is about 25 pages if you take out the basic scenario/cards and such at the end), so easy to run for me since I'm inexperienced, and something that the people I want to do this for would actually agree to.

I wouldn't be comfortable at all running anything other than these two, considering I don't have any experience in them. I've never played DnD, and my experience with anything else was the one GURPS Pokemon session which wasn't fun.

 

[digi-kun]

Like I explained, it's not Cthulhu with Pokemon, it's Pokemon with Cthulhu. The characters you play are kids that control "thulhu", that are Pokemon pretty much, just retooled to look similar to creatures from the mythos (Pentacruel, Blhastor, etc). It's run like a Pokemon game would be run, you wouldn't take sanity checks from seeing thulhu, although the modified stats do have a Sanity score, but that's more like a bravery score.

The problem is, my friend asked me to run a Pokemon RPG for them, but I don't feel qualified because I've only been in one and it wasn't that fun, so I don't have firsthand experience on how to make it fun. I offered to run Call of Cthulhu for them, and my friend said that they wouldn't want to actually roleplay. Pokethulhu looks pretty simple and easy-to-follow (the entire "core book" of it is about 25 pages if you take out the basic scenario/cards and such at the end), so easy to run for me since I'm inexperienced, and something that the people I want to do this for would actually agree to.

I wouldn't be comfortable at all running anything other than these two, considering I don't have any experience in them. I've never played DnD, and my experience with anything else was the one GURPS Pokemon session which wasn't fun.

OOOOOOOOOH, it's an actual system someone else made. And here I was figuring you were trying to make your own game here, which is partially why I was so against it >> lemme skim the rules over and get back to you.

I guess the real problem now would be how experienced you are at GMing/have ideas/etc.

 

[Cirrus]

It looks pretty hilarious. I might run a game, just because of its hilarity value.

I think that if your friends like Pokemon, and if your friends have heard of Cthulhu (but have not gotten into it too much to think that it'll be bad for the two to mix), then it would probably be quite fun.