mellonbread reviews Shotguns vs Cthulhu

Shotguns Vs Cthulhu is a 2012 short story collection by Pelgrane Press, full of pulp action stories where humans fight supernatural forces. I won't be providing full plot summaries because I believe reviews like this are only fun for people who have already read the story.

Bonus Cleric Post: The Black Mariahs

Hutter

They looked ridiculous at a dead run. Sexless yet sensual with protective codpieces and pigeon breasted armor and thighs enormous from carrying it up endless flights of stairs and ramps and cornices. The crowd parted before them. Nobody wanted to get within arm's reach. Even brushing against them was enough to sever fingers, break bones, shave skin off muscle. Their falling bevors were peeled down so they could breathe easy as they ran and one of them had no lips and drooled steam through the gap in their perfect teeth. 

The largest one had no weapon and carried a dented shield painted with a woman embracing a barbed devil with the text HELL CAN'T BURN ME MORE THAN THIS encircling the act. The smallest wore a quilted jacket and had a carrion crawler wrapped around their shoulders like a stole. The bug held on tight with its tarsal claws but resisted the instinct to luxuriantly stroke the exposed mouth with its fluttering tentacles. To kiss and then to feed.

The middle one carried a gun. The inside of the barrel glowed, lit blue and purple by the charge rammed down the wide mouthed bore. An explosion already in progress held back only by the thin layer of sealing wax that kept the bullets from falling out.
 
Ahead of them was the terrace. The urban canyon that separated the Company neighborhoods from the wafer-thin alleys of red lit Elftown on the other side. The big one casually bundled the others into their arms without slowing. They both reached behind the giant's neck and held on to the dragstrap protruding between the gorget and backplate like a tongue of black leather. The brute pushed off with a single foot that left a cracked footprint in the yellow stone.

The moment held suspended in the air was a perk of the job, equivalent or better than the sex and potions and winning fights and the embrace of the Flesh God who drank the pain like water. To feel protected by armor and the thick body of the fighter. To fly. Over the Mulch at the bottom of the swale to the narrow balcony on the other side. Stumbling down the chute to another room that smelled like blood. Bathing, drowning in the heat and sweat of love.

Riverboat Gambler: Baradye the Blue

The edge of the old crater formed a ridgeline steep enough on both sides that the night creatures couldn't climb it. Norte sat on the edge and kicked his legs and watched the monsters crawl over each over like waves lapping at a cliff. They crawled and climbed and often managed to get a third or even halfway up the slope before the unliving pyramid collapsed and sent them all tumbling back into the pit.

He liked to imagine what the corpses did when there were no people for them to slaver at. If they rose out of the sand and stood and stared at the moons until the sun came up again. Perhaps they lived in ordered societies and spoke intelligibly to one another when nobody living was around to listen. He was a Man of the Forest by birth but he was first of his family to leave the path of flower and beast and tree. First to sail in a boat and shoot a gun and use coins dug up from the burning sands to purchase goods. It occurred to him that his father may have been correct regarding man and whether he was patient or plague. That here he was the interloper and the carpet of undead, however unnatural they might seem, were the rightful stewards of the place. 

Two shooting stars flashed before Norte's gaze. The air above the Plain was thick with them. Comets or ships in the void or celestial conflicts between elementals and the things that lurked outside the envelope of air that cushioned the world. The sparks flashed again, closer this time, a blue that hurt his eyes in the dark. Without taking his eyes off the spot he swept his hand across the snaplock of the long gun cradled across his knees. The sound, he hoped, would wake the others without the need to individually clout them to attention or hiss directions. 

Then she spoke to him.

Riverboat Gambler: Settlement Gazetteer

I wrote a bunch of desert tombs full of monsters who prey on the colonists swarming across the narrow habitable band of Hogman's Plain. Here's a basic taxonomy of colonies for them to attack. We can combine them with the river generator from Magical Industrial Gunboats to create the map.

Minidungeon: The Unquiet Tomb

In the distance, shimmering in heat haze so thick they may have been a mere illusion, a lounge of bright white lizards skated across the Plain. Their skin regulated the diffusion of heat and moisture, allowing the particles only to move one way and thereby letting them control their internal temperature in the lethal heat. By day they jogged across the dunes, legs thrashing like pistons driven by the strange energy of glowing crystals. By moonlight they climbed rock formations to sleep out of reach of the night creatures, and it was not uncommon for travelers on the plain seeking similar shelter to surprise such lizards and send them leaping out of rock fissures at top speed. Like the corpse leaping from the grave as the necromancer cast his staff in, soul returned to the place it once called home but thinking only of ruin and the necessity of flight.

The green men who called the Plain home showed the first adventurers how the skin of such a creature could be made into a heavy cloak that would protect the wearer from the heat, or a half-shelter or a tent to rest inside during the day. The adventurers built vast reeking meatcamps and slaughtered the lizards in the thousands to make garments that would permit their further expansion into the deserts of the frontier. The camps tinted the river red and blue and iridescent shades as the menu of creatures disassembled for parts expanded and the effluent from that biological pillage flowed ankle then knee deep. 

Coxinha stomped toward the jagged cliffs at the edge of the plain, wrapped in such a cloak. Her eyes were shielded by protective goggles made from the eyecaps of a Rhagodessa and smeared with a thin layer of smoke colored oil to dim the sun and stop them fogging. The cloak was wrapped around her face below the goggles to stop the superheated air from scorching her lungs. It cooled the air but the feeling of suffocation went nowhere. Slow death in a jar. A capsule confined to the airless void of space.

She couldn't see the ranger up ahead. His cloak was bright white like hers but never seemed to shimmer. Never gave up his position. Ahead of where she thought he was, the entrance. Low tide in the desert pulled the dunes away from the mouth of the cave. A tunnel without ornament but clearly artificial. Unplundered.

Unknown Armies: A Bed of Roses Playtest 3

The year was 1521. The place was Tenochtitlan, head of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire. The island-city had just been conquered following a ninety day siege by a coalition of Spanish Conquistadors and their Nahua-speaking allies from neighboring city-states. Weakened by starvation and smallpox, the surviving Mexica were at the mercy of their conquerors’ insatiable lust for gold. 

Emmanuel Leutze

In a Pochteca Guild Hall, three merchants were confined to a storeroom amid sacks of cocoa beans and bolts of cotton cloth - the majority of the Guild’s liquid wealth, which the Spaniards had no interest in.

• Jumping Spider, Merchant and luxury goods trader 
• Two Legs, Merchant and spy
• Yellow Thorn, Merchant and far-traveler

Their hands were tied and they only had a moment to contemplate what they would do next, before a group of hairy men from the other side of the world hustled them out into the banquet hall.