Achtung! Cthulhu specific rules
WEAPONS
The lethality of weapons in Achtung! Cthulhu is covered under a single, general rating noted as an item’s Weapon rating (quite similar to Weapon ratings on p.277 of Fate Core System). Weapons are rated from 0 to 2. Below are some examples and benchmarks.
• Unarmed attacks, batons, and blunt improvised weapons are Weapon:0.
• Knives, small pistols, and single shots from submachine guns or low-calibre rifles are Weapon:1.
• Large pistols, high-calibre rifles, short bursts of submachine gunfire, and vicious weapons like flamethrowers are Weapon:2..
These are not hard distinctions; for a given situation, the GM may declare that a weapon may be more or less dangerous than listed here, though never lower than Weapon:0. (At that point, it is not an attack, but may still create an advantage.)
When you successfully attack someone with an item thathas a Weapon rating, you add that rating to the number of shifts. For instance, someone succeeding with 3 shifts using a Weapon:1 pistol inflicts 4 shifts of damage. This can be particularly potent, as it means that the target will have to use consequences sooner than he might have expected to in an unarmed fight.
A special effect of using an item with a Weapon rating is that if you tie on the attack roll, it is treated as a success with the number of shifts equal to the rating, rather than just a boost. This means the defender has to beat, not just meet, the attack roll to be unscathed.
A Note on Ammunition
Fate does not generally concern itself with ammunition and other weapon statistics, instead relying on a combination of knowing what makes sense in the story (to the entire group, not just the GM) and using compels to cause dramatic moments, like suddenly being out of ammo.
Depending on the circumstances, running out of ammo could be a form of success at a cost—as could other moments like a gun jamming, a knife flying out of someone’s hand, etc.
If you would all have more fun tracking your ammunition, then by all means do so! Should you run out, though, it would not trigger a compel, as you are not using narrative logic to handle ammunition.
ARMOUR
Some items have the ability to blunt the damage from attacks, which is to say that they have Armour ratings. Almost everything that provides such protection is denoted as Armour:1, and not necessarily in every situation. A tin helmet offers Armour:1 against shrapnel, small arms fire, etc., but one should not expect it to help in a knife fight (unless it fits the narrative of course). Rare protection offers Armour:2, such as being hunkered down behind sandbags.
When hit with an attack that armour can blunt, you add its rating to the number of shifts your physical stress boxes and consequences reduce this attack by. For example, if you are hit for 3 shifts of damage from a pistol and you have
Armour:1, then your 2-shift physical stress box is considered a 3-shift box, which you can check and avoid taking consequence.
If, later, you take 5 shifts of damage from an attack, you can use your moderate consequence to absorb all 5 shifts, rather than the normal 4.
If you have multiple sources of Armour, you can only use the highest—they do not stack. Particularly flimsy armour may only last for one defence or one exchange, depending on the situation.
Note that having Armour:2 is the same as a free invocation for +2 to the defence roll. If the armour is situational, it is likely better covered by just creating an advantage or writing an aspect down that has a free invocation.
BITS AND BOBS
While Fate does not especially concern itself with the gear your characters have, it can be fun to know the sort of stuff that an operative in the SOE, Network N,, or a serving military character, might carry when on a mission.
Civilian characters will have to improvise on this, but there is always a thriving blackmarket during wartime (or truly inventive characters could attempt to build their own!).
(I’m not going to include long lists of available items, if you feel your character having a certain item is justified the so be it)
STRESS, CONSEQUENCES & RECOVERY
Physical and mental stress takes slightly longer to recover from in Achtung! Cthulhu, and requires a lull in the action: a few minutes of catching your breath, applying minor first aid, checking for any injuries, and so on. This means it isn’t auto-matically gone after a conflict, as it is in Fate Core. Getting into a fight in a fortress and immediately continuing to skulk around does not count as a lull. Likewise, having a shootout that draws attention likely means you won’t have time to wait around to let your stress recover. This lull doesn’t need to be played out like a scene; it just needs to have happened in the story.
Consequences recover in story time rather than game time (see Fate Core System, p.194 for the difference), repre¬senting their lingering effects in a war story. Once addressed, consequences take the following amount of time to sort themselves out:
Mild consequences take around a couple of hours. This could be due to anything from a minor injury still aching to an emotional vulnerability still bothering you a little.
Moderate consequences take around two days.
Severe consequences take around two weeks.
If the person treating a consequence succeeds with style, the consequence takes half the time to downgrade, give or take.
Skills Used in Recovery
When it comes to recovering from a consequence, various skills come into play—to different degrees, of course! Nat¬urally, the Medic skill will allow you to help someone recover from consequences that are physical in nature. Depending on the nature of a given moderate or severe consequence, you may need to get specialised medical equipment, get to some location where you can carry out proper treatment, or, at the very least, have bandages and basic medication on hand.
You can also use the Survival skill to address a mild or moderate physical consequence. Additionally, returning home after a mission counts as addressing all forms of physical consequences.
For emotional and mental consequences that aren’t rooted in sanity loss, Empathy allows for recovering from those consequences. Those based on sanity loss begin recov¬ery once you have returned home.
OVERVIEW OF THE SANITY SYSTEM
Each character has three general states of sanity, or sanity thresholds, and those three states have sanity boxes that track how much sanity you have lost so far to the Mythos. Upon a sanity trigger, the GM will have you make a sanity test, which may cause you to lose sanity. If you lose too much, you will cross a sanity threshold which will change some of the rules for your char¬acter. When you have sufficient time to rest, you can recover sanity.
SANITY TRIGGERS
In the course of investigating and fighting against agents of evil, characters will invariably uncover inhuman knowledge, as well as witness blasphemous and unnatural acts and beings. These are known as sanity triggers, and the nature of the trigger affects the difficulty (or terror rating) in resisting its effect and the severity of potential sanity loss. Sanity triggers are based on two things: situation and escalation.
SANITY TESTS: DEFENDING YOUR SANITY
When you confront a horror, you are forced to make a sanity test. Sanity tests involve rolling your Will skill, with a penalty equal to your rank in the Mythos skill (if any), against the GM’s terror rating as passive opposition. This works much like a defence action, but isn’t technically one for the purposes of any stunts that involve defence actions—sanity tests are entirely their own thing.
For example, if your Will rating is Good (+2), you do not have the Mythos skill, and the GM says the terror rating is Average (+1), you are going to roll at +2 and hope to beat the Average target. But if you have the Mythos skill at Average (+1), then you are rolling at +1 (subtracting Aver¬age from Good) and still hoping to beat the Average target. (As mentioned in the Mythos skill description on p.154, this will be easy to keep track of by noting down your effective Will for sanity tests on your character sheet once you take the Mythos skill.)
Sanity tests are always passive and instantaneous. They cannot be voluntarily refused or lost; the mind is always trying to defend itself, even if the character (for whatever reason) wants to invite insanity. Many of these results involves Will drain
representing the character’s mental resolve in successfully defending itself, for even in success a character is affected. Success with style is the only true reprieve.
When you fail, you suffer sanity loss equal to the number of shifts you failed by;
When you tie, you suffer Will drain (once per given sit¬uation or scene) and the GM has a boost against you, such as Freezing Up, Panicking, Confused, Transfixed, or similar.
When you succeed, you suffer Will drain (once per given situation or scene).
When you succeed with style, you suffer no loss or drain. There is no extra benefit like gaining a boost for succeeding with style, as having your mind completely unscathed from that moment is a great victory indeed.
Note that you cannot invoke aspects or boosts to modify the roll while you are Of Sound Mind or Disturbed. The dice stay as they land. See Sanity Thresholds and Rule Effects on p.149.
You can only suffer Will drain once per situation or scene. If there are multiple sanity tests in a scene, such as because you are standing to fight, any ties or successes after the first Will drain have no special effect (beyond the boost for tying).
LOSING SANITY
When you fail a sanity test, you suffer sanity loss. That means checking off one or more sanity boxes. Each time you lose a sanity box, cross one off on your highest available sanity threshold track. For starting characters, that will be on the Of Sound Mind track. Once that fills up, the next boxes you will cross out are on the Disturbed track. Then once that threshold track is filled, you will cross them off the Unhinged track. When that track is filled up, you are Lost to the Mythos and no longer a PC.
Sanity boxes do not work the same as stress boxes; sanity boxes are each worth just one sanity, and you cross off as many as are required.
The moment you fill the in last box on a sanity track, you cross a sanity threshold
CROSSING SANITY THRESHOLDS
Crossing a sanity threshold is a significant deal, because it means that the character’s mind is wounded by the Mythos in a deep and fundamental way.
When you and the GM have a break to talk about how crossing the threshold affects your character, such as in between sessions or during a lengthy break, come up with some afflictions that your character now suffers, and write that down in the “Current Afflictions” section on your character sheet.
These afflictions are freeform, and could take the form of some quirk, bad habit, addiction, phobia, or obsession whatever feels right for the story. What you write becomes the nature of how this change hinders you, thus defining how your threshold can be compelled against you, akin to how consequences can be compelled. Because this has a free-flowing nature, it could change over time as the player and GM discuss how it is working out in the story.
If you become Lost to the Mythos, at the end of the scene that caused it you will no longer be a PC; you are permanently taken out, though you have time to make some sort of heroic last stand.
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No matter the rules the main thrust of the Fate system is a narrative gameplay, if you want to do something and you are worried that rules may disallow it, run it past me if it's good I might allow it.