Don’t Let Them Take You Alive (100 pages, free at DriveThruRPG) is a wild modern horror d100 RPG which I would compare to Call of Cthulhu. To create my solo engine, I used the principals of SoloCutz (same place, same price) with the third book of the Dresden Files (Jim Butcher). I created four first level characters. The adventure is one of the ones included in the rule book.

So, the adventure started when my mage accepted a find person case in Los Angeles. He called his friends and hired them to help. On the second day, they flew to Japan and then took a boat to Battleship Island. Their first encounter was with a Japanese fishing boat (just a conversation). The second encounter was with a mastiff built from shadows and soot. My mage was the only one who could fight this thing. The mage killed it. The third encounter was North Korean spies running from a ghost. The ghost then targeted the PCs. The mage created a portal which sent the ghost to Los Angeles. At this point, the mage was out of magic points, so the group left the island and came back the next day. The fourth encounter was with a bored mercenary who was looking for something to kill. The PCs killed him, but my soldier/hacker character died. The fifth encounter was with a Warden of the White Council. The PCs stayed in place for an hour so that the warden could do this thing.

The sixth encounter was with South Korean spies. There was a stare down and both sides were wary. The seventh encounter was the mine. It was here that they fought the taskmaster. He was a brute and not human. They killed him and freed the slaves/miners. Yes, they now had the guy they were supposed to find and rescue. The last encounter was the mining office. In here they had to face a hazard (sanity check), a human guard, a locked vault (a failed roll), and the Boss Jenny. So, my remaining three PCs did survive this and did find a paper trail which proved the location of the secret Xaos temple. Going there will be the next adventure. The rescued man did make it back to his dad. Mission completed. Warning – I am rating this as “R” because of bad words, violence, alcohol, drugs, and questionable images. Try it if you dare.

An amazingly unique free product.

The idea behind this 80+ page document is that the Cthulhu Mythos has invaded cyberspace...

Interesting concept, poorly executed. The basic conceit - a timeline of the Mythos on Earth and it's interactions with humanity - is simple enough, and indeed has been done many times before. Unfortunately, it's been done better and more competently than here. The author makes a number of rather silly errors, the most egregious of which is conflating the Flying Polyps with the Elder Things, a mistake that completely re-writes the orgins of mankind and ignores the vastly different natures of the polyps and the crinoids. Still, if you're not too concerned with accuracy, it's not bad. But if you're not concerened with accuracy, why do you want a Mythos timeline in the first place?

The novel part of this item - linking "venus" fertility figurines found all over the world with various Mythos deities - has the potential to be interesting, but is rather clumsily handled. There's no real explanation of why these figurines all look like big women, or why creatures with such radically different body structures produce artefacts that look so similar. It's clever, but unconvincing.

Even as a "pay what you want" item, I find this shoddy, slapped together and more than a little lazy.

This really reads to me more like a sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu than a game in its own right. That's not a bad thing by any means - there's some good ideas for new types of characters for modern games in this, and that's welcome, although they are a bit hit and miss.

But I doubt I'll use it much partly because of the attitude of the authors - it's one thing to believe you've got a fresh new slant on the Mythos, it's another to attack other Mythos games as having got it wrong for decades because you don't like their take on it. Especially when so much of what you are doing seems heavily based on it.

Worth checking out certainly if you are looking for something new in the Mythos. There's some freshness there.