Marvels and Prodigies (2024) by S. J. S. Hancox-Li

Marvels and Prodigies is a game of contemporary Lovecraftian horror. It is intended for players who want the classic experience of investigation and horror, but who also want the possibility of exploring deeper into the Mythos—the possibility of themselves becoming dread sorcerers, ecstatic cultists, blessed avatars.

Marvels and Prodigies Kickstarter

Marvels and Prodigies (2024) is an independent tabletop roleplaying game written and published by S.J.S. Hancox-Li, whose initial publication was the result of a successful crowdfunding campaign. The core books are the Seeker’s Handbook (which contains basic character creation and system rules; player characters are called Seekers) and Gardener’s Manual (advanced rules, rules for magic, Mythos lore, artifacts, adventure seeds, etc., people running the game are called Gardeners); there is also a separate character sheet and quick rules, and a starting adventure/scenario The Thing That Comes In Autumn. All are available through DriveThruRPG.

Ever since the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game was first published by Chaosium in 1981, it has been the de facto tabletop roleplaying game experience for the Cthulhu Mythos. It has never been the sole roleplaying game to utilize the Mythos or attempt to capture the atmosphere of cosmic horror on the tabletop experience, but the widespread and long-lasting success of the game—seven editions over 40+ years, plus translations into many non-English languages—along with Chaosium’s efforts at publishing (and republishing) Mythos fiction have effectively made it the default for Mythos roleplaying in the same way Dungeons & Dragons is often considered a default for fantasy tabletop roleplaying in general.

Even if someone wants to make their own original Mythos game post-1981, it is often designed in the shadow of Call of Cthulhu, and the choices that the designers make are typically an express development from or response to something in the mother game. So, for example, the essential play space of Call of Cthulhu is that the player characters are investigators who investigate some phenomena. The details are vague because it’s a very broad and adaptable idea; the player characters might be a private detective agency in 1920s Harlem hired to look into something, or G-men trying to figure out why professors at Miskatonic University keep dying, or maybe one of the player character’s rich uncles died and left them a haunted house. Dungeons & Dragons features adventurers who go adventuring, Call of Cthulhu features investigators who go investigating.

In 2002, Ron Edwards coined the term fantasy heartbreakers in an article of the same name. While the term has come to be dismissive—a way to put down games that try to be “Dungeons & Dragons but better”—but, in a broader sense, the term effectively captures a certain segment of independent games that develop out of one game but which attempt to address some genuine issue (in terms of system, setting, or concept) that the original game lacks or does badly. Call of Cthulhu has generated any number of heartbreakers by this definition, from The Necronomicon Roleplaying Game to Yellow Dawn, Haunted West, and Space Madness!.

Marvels and Prodigies is a Mythos heartbreaker, in the best sense of the word. While obviously drawing thematic inspiration from Call of Cthulhu‘s play space, this aggressively independent roleplaying game takes a very different tack in terms of system (instead of the percentile roll-under skill system of Call of Cthulhu it uses a dice pool and hits system reminiscent of Shadowrun 4th edition or Vampire: the Masquerade) and ideology. Player characters are Seekers who want to investigate the occult, and are given access to abilities that reflect their interests, and clear ways to develop those abilities…and this is very different from the standard Call of Cthulhu scenario.

Call of Cthulhu has had magic in every edition. Characters (player characters and non-player characters alike) have the ability to learn and cast spells. However, the mechanics of the game make learning and casting spells relatively difficult, dangerous, and likely to fail, and almost always come with real drawbacks for the player character that makes the attempt. There are relatively few spells that provide some genuine benefit with minimal cost, and none of them are available at the start of play; they may never be available, since placement of tomes with spells is basically up to the gamemaster. Player characters generally can’t start out as wizards like in Dungeons and Dragons, and might never be able to be spellcasters unless the gamemaster specifically encourages that.

That is explicitly part of the design space of the game: Call of Cthulhu encourages a very different style of roleplaying to D&D. Every investigation may be an adventure, but that doesn’t mean the designers of Call of Cthulhu want you killing every non-player character and looting their corpse, like player characters adventurers might expect to do in a dungeon in D&D. Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons both focus on excitement, but CoC leans more into horror, and one aspect of horror is helplessness. In D&D, if you run into a monster you can’t defeat because your characters aren’t at a high enough level, you might argue the encounter was poorly planned or unfair because there was no way to win; in CoC if you run in a monster you can’t kill, that’s just something you have to live with. The atmosphere of the game thrives on some situations never being winnable.

It’s not that casting a fireball at the shoggoth might take some players out of the 1920s setting, the designers of the game generally appear to not want players to have fun the wrong way.

As far as discouraging player characters wizards goes, this approach to magic could be called broadly successful; the fact that the magic “system” is essentially a grab-bag of random effects with little rhyme or reason and often very little thought to organization doesn’t help. While various products and heartbreaker RPGs would tweak the system mechanics to further encourage or discourage player characters using magic, it’s broadly accurate to point out that magic rules in Call of Cthulhu and its heartbreakers are generally pretty hodgepodge and discouraging compared to games where player characters might actually want to be occultists.

What’s different about Marvels and Prodigies is that it’s not just a roleplaying game about Lovecraftian horror, but also about Lovecraftian wonder:

In Marvels and Pridigies, there is not just horror in those alien vistas, but wonder and glory too. A major inspiration for the themes of Marvels and Prodigies is Ruthanna Emrys and Anne Pillsworth’s The Lovecraft Reread. On their reading, the power of Lovecraft’s best stories comes from a tension between xenophobia and xenophilia. Alien fungi remove human brains, but enable us to travel the stars and distant worlds. An ancient race of telepaths steals souls and exterminates entire species, but does so while maintaining the greatest library in history and a convocation of our timeline’s greatest geniuses. You are descended from inhuman monsters, but their blood enables you to live forever in wonder and glory.

S. J. S. Hancox-Li, Seeker’s Handbook 2

Emrys’ and Pillsworth’s Lovecraft Reread is particularly focused on re-reading weird fiction (not just Lovecraft’s) with a fresh perspective, and without fannish reverence that might get in the way of genuine criticism. As they put it in their Introduction: “Welcome to the H. P. Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories.” If a reader feels wound up by reference to “girl cooties” and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s fiction, then they should probably go clutch their pearls somewhere else. Lovecraft is dead, his corpse isn’t going to spin in its grave, no matter what people say or feel about him.

Which is rather the point: Mysteries and Prodigies is not a game system to replace the d100s for Call of Cthulhu, it’s a game where the focus of the investigation is not just to be horrified, but perhaps to be enthralled. To find the beauty and meaning in the universe as much as the cosmic horror. A perspective that has been explored by many writers over the years, such as in the anthology Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction (2020). The focus on occult-minded Seekers and the focus on improvement often adds a spiritual component to the game: it’s not about becoming the most powerful wizard per se, it’s about how your player character’s deepening knowledge of the Mythos and dedication to their path changes you. The journey, more than the destination.

But is it any good? As indie RPGs go, it’s fine. The system is fairly quick to learn and certainly a step up from Call of Cthulhu‘s normal resolution system; like a lot of heartbreakers, it’s got a lot of quirky little tables, lists, and the like. Some of the quirkiness is endearing, some it is just the rough edges of a product that hasn’t had several editions worth of proofreading, editing, and further development. Mythos games generally don’t have a robust system of metaphysics, and Marvels and Prodigies is no exception, so some of the abilities are still very much a grab bag of effects with gaps and potential for abuse—but powergaming is an emergent element of all roleplaying systems regardless of mechanics.

If there’s a criticism to be laid against the book’s writing, it’s that there’s not much actual sense of the setting. The game is implicitly in a contemporary real-world setting with smartphones and firearms, but the impact of things like the Internet or someone uploading the Necronomicon onto the Internet Archive isn’t really addressed, and any would-be Gardner is going to have to put in a bit of work fleshing out when and where the action takes place before introducing their Seekers.

Use of AI

Cover images and certain chapter headers were generated using Stable Diffusion XL. These images are openly licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0. […] The Stable Diffusion XL model constitutes transformative use of existing images.

Marvels and Prodigies Kickstarter Campaign

Marvels and Prodigies uses AI-generated images to illustrate the book. The use of generative AI has been very contentious, given that the dataset used to train the AI was derived from human artists without credit or permission, and that the use of AI-generated images threatens the job market of human artists. In this particular case, the use of AI-generated images merits some discussion.

Independent roleplaying game books with a single creator generally have zero art budget; no human jobs were lost because no humans were going to be paid to create images for these books. Either the creator does their best to create their own art, or grabs public domain images and uses those.

The standards for fair use of copyrighted materials vary by country, but in the United States one important aspect is whether the use is transformative: simply copying an existing work is a violation of copyright, but if the work is transformed in some way—such as being part of a collage, or the addition of speech balloons to make it a kind of cartoon, etc.—it may be considered fair use.

In this respect, Stable Diffusion is being used as a fairly sophisticated spirograph (or, less charitably, a plagiarism engine where the results are so chopped up the original source(s) cannot be identified), and the resulting output is released under a Creative Commons license. While folks may still dislike that the work of various artists was used to train the AI and would have preferred blank covers to AI-generated images, from a practical standpoint this is basically little different from any creator grabbing images off the internet and tweaking them in Photoshop just enough to avoid a copyright claim, only the fiddling has been automated.

While folks should continue to push against the use of generative AI in commercial products, the availability of the technology is already making substantial inroads in non-commercial and ultra-low-budget productions like independent roleplaying games where art budgets are effectively non-existent. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future, unless legal and technical restrictions on generative AI make the availability of such applications inaccessible.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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