This review is for the Softcover Color Book (Standard).

The CthulhuTech setting is fantastic. It's a terrific mash-up of all my favorite tropes. Lovecraftian horror, mecha, super-powered combat, kaiju... It's all in there. And yet, somehow, it works. Somehow it makes sense to run a game where you're investigating cultists one week, and piloting a giant robot the next.

The background descriptions and brief bits of narrative in the Core Book go a long way towards making this happen. They do a great job of paintinting the picture. They really make the setting come to life. It was very easy to get my players engaged with the setting just by having them read a few of those descriptions.

The rules themselves seem a bit odd to me, coming from a couple decades of Dungeons & Dragons. It's nice not to need a whole pile of different dice... But I'm still getting used to the D10 pool system. It works just fine. It's just not very familiar at this point.

If I were rating just a PDF of these rules and setting, it'd be getting a 5/5 easily. The print version that I purchased, however, leaves some things to be desired...

It's printed on non-glossy paper, which is a bit odd for an RPG rulebook. The fantastic artwork simply doesn't pop the way it could on glossy paper. And the pages feel noticably rough. I suspect this is purely cosmetic... But I can't help wondering about the long-term durability of this book.

A bigger problem is the lack of an inside gutter, which means the inner edge of the page is very hard to read. I'm having to very carefuly bend the pages back as far as they'll go so that I can read everything without damaging the spine.

I know that V2 is currently in beta, and I sincerely hope that these issues are resolved when that goes to press.