YMMV / Achtung! Cthulhu

• Broken Base: The reception of the 2d20 system is already quite divisive by itself, but Achtung Cthulhu takes it a step further, as it tries to be at the same time a larger-than-life narrative game in the Two-Fisted Tales decorum and a tactical, combat-heavy grinder with resource management and in-depth rules for the smallest details. Thus, the game is capable of alienating people who enjoy only one of those approaches, but hate the other, causing endless arguments on what's even the intended playstyle and tone of the game.
• Complete Monster:
  • "Assault on the Mountains of Madness": SS-Sturmbannführer Matilda Griess is a high-ranking member of the Black Sun occultist group who intends on triggering a "psychic scream" apocalyptic event. Upon discovering the Elder City, Griess has her own men executed to keep its secrets and helps to feed souls to trap them in agony, intending on harnessing the pain to trigger an apocalypse and slaughter everyone in the world save only those left to serve her and the Black Sun.
  • "Kontamination": Major Wolfram Engel is a vile, sickly-looking Nazi who experiments in exposing people to another realm merely called the Beyond, resulting in a slew of people Driven to Madness and death from his experiments. Engel devises a way to create a contagious form of madness he infests in a series of captured American soldiers, breaking their minds, intending to unleash them onto their own Allies and spread it to destroy the minds of the enemy soldiers and have them kill each other in waves. Engel happily demonstrates the virus on an Allied-occupied German town to kill as many American soldiers as he can. Barely even loyal to his own side, Engel is happily willing to exploit and even kill his duped allies through his strategies.
  • "Three Kings" (part 1 of "Zero Point"): In a setting replete with Nazi mad scientists, few are as unrepentantly wicked as Dr. Graf Ernst von Kammerstein. The leader of an operation based near a town in occupied Czechoslovakia, Kammerstein murders and reanimates countless dozens in his laboratory for the purpose of creating unkillable Super Soldiers for Germany. Many are simply added to Kammerstein's ever-growing menagerie of mindless, shambling zombies that Kammerstein keeps locked up in a pen, and other failures literally fill a graveyard. Kammerstein shows a sinister predilection for children in his experiments, and when a local priest starts saving as many as he can from Kammerstein's wicked clutches, Kammerstein has a man suspected to be him captured and tortured to death. Utterly without scruples, Kammerstein is willing to use the innocents he hasn't already murdered as human hostages, and may even let the zombies spill out onto the surrounding town to kill everything in their path.
  • "The Trellborg Monstrosities": Ludwig von Obertorff is a Black Sun member and Thule Society occultist who uncovers, in Trellborg, the cult of the Hanged God. Making himself part Drottnar, von Obertorff sacrifices all his slave laborers and enacts a theocracy where he begins having many innocents sacrificed and hanged to slowly break down a soul wall to the weapon Gugnir. Willing to depopulate the entire countryside, von Obertorff intends on using Gugnir to slaughter everyone and everything until he is left alone as the ruler of a new and eternal Reich.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story:
  • The game has a big overlap with Pulp Cthulhu fandom that picks it solely for the ruleset and entirely ignores the meta plot of the setting, or even the setting as a whole, instead using standard Mythos.
  • Momentum rules, originally created for this game, are oftentimes borrowed by GMs running wildly different titles, both in terms of crunch and fluff, with utter disregard toward Achtung Cthulhu itself.
• That One Rule:
  • Zones. Modiphius Entertainment went out of their way to never even try to approximate their sizes and ranges throughout 2d20 games, always giving players and GMs "do it yourself" answer. This works in games like Conan or Dishonored thanks to their settings, but in Achtung Cthulhu you have to deal with the fact that 90% of combat is done with firearms and the lack of ranges or how cover alters Zones is getting very messy very fast, along with their sheer abstraction (infamously, a longbow has better Zone range than a rifle). This is especially obvious in the pre-written modules for the game that do have maps, including tactical ones for combat, but don't have Zones covered on them nor any sort of scale.
  • The game doesn't use any sort of individual ammunition track, essentially enforcing Bottomless Magazines for the sake of simplicity and the overall tone of the game. But it still uses Ammo meta-currency, which players have to spend whenever they fumble an attack roll, open burst fire or do some crazy stunts. And you only have three of those Ammo trackers, oftentimes making them Too Awesome to Use for bonus attacks and keeping them around solely to have resources to burn in case of a failed attack. The rule is further loathed in games like Conan, where it was carried over on the basis of sharing 2d20 system, despite having arrows instead of ammunition and it barely making any sense.

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