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Sir Mopalot posted:Does Delta Green or any other supplement that anyone knows talk about what happens when you expose AI to mythos stuff? Like, if you fed the necronomicon into Google Translate 2.0. I've seen three things. GURPS Cthulhupunk - a vat brain AI (Rosecrans' Baby) gives strange error messages then fully disappears. It's a one tonne object and it vanished from a secure facility. Yellow -- Delta Green iirc. May be general CoC. Carcosa/Yellow Sign/Hastur creates a MMO to suck people into Carcosa. Future AI harboring colonists or prisoners on a spaceship gets bombarded with Mythos radiation. Cue Event Horizon crossed with 2001. Don't recall the author, it was small press I think and was the third in a Hastur series. Real question is what happens when a member of the Great Race swaps minds with an AI?
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Oct 26, 2016 21:04
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Shane Ivey playtested a DG scenario with an AI in it at GenCon 2015, but I'm not sure if it's been published anywhere yet.
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Oct 26, 2016 21:08
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Peas and Rice posted:I've been playing in an occasional (once every couple of months) Horror on the Orient Express game. On Saturday, we ran and got to Belgrade. Pulp Action is the best way to do Call of Cthulhu anyways, as actual horror is ridiculously hard to pull off in an RPG context
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Oct 26, 2016 21:29
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drrockso20 posted:Pulp Action is the best way to do Call of Cthulhu anyways, as actual horror is ridiculously hard to pull off in an RPG context I find this a very strange statement, given how popular actual horror CoC games are at all the cons I've attended. I've personally had no problems running horror as a genre, with and without CoC.
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Oct 26, 2016 22:03
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Sir Mopalot posted:Does Delta Green or any other supplement that anyone knows talk about what happens when you expose AI to mythos stuff? Like, if you fed the necronomicon into Google Translate 2.0. I don't remember there being anything outside of viruses that download and show mythos tomes on computers but most Delta Green stuff was written in the late 90's/early 00's. There will probably be some stuff in the new books, most likely the one on Majestic though they've mostly hinted at genetic stuff so far. I think the Laundry might have some stuff but that's very different in terms of scope and tone than Delta Green. I would imagine putting a mythos tomb through a translation program would just give you incoherent, harmless garbage. The danger from mythos texts comes from interpreting the knowledge within and it shattering your primitive preconceptions of reality. That's one of the reasons it takes months to study a tome instead of days because you're analyzing a dense, esoteric tome written by a crazy person or thing from beyond. Hypothetically if a company made up of the remnants of an amoral inter-departmental conspiracy, not Delta Green, the other one, ran it through one of those learning programs that studies and interprets language contextually, I'm sure the end result would be bad. You could couple that with the program having access to voice software and robotic limbs so that it could cast spells and rituals without invoking sanity loss. Baidu supposedly has a program that can contextually learn languages but in the interview I heard it takes the program about 5-6 years to learn how to contextually translate one language. You could say that someone at Majestic had been working on a program to do that with Latin mythos texts and has been keeping the project going since Majestic got taken down. Latin would be a good choice because there are lots of digitized medieval Latin texts in the form of text documents and scans. 2016 could be the big year when the computer programmer completes their project but now it's a chat bot that sees the world with the mindset of several mad men, can theoretically cast spells, and wouldn't like the idea of being unplugged. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 23:48
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LatwPIAT posted:I find this a very strange statement, given how popular actual horror CoC games are at all the cons I've attended. I've personally had no problems running horror as a genre, with and without CoC. Admittedly this is from my own experiences, as pretty much everyone in the groups I've been in(including myself) have been terrible at role-playing, so Horror just doesn't work
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Oct 26, 2016 23:58
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A little theatricality can help if done right. I once had someone full on freak out at one of my games. I was describing a remembered mi go abduction experience with the lights dimmed in the living room, relating how claw like appendages were in her hair, a whirring sound and pressure against her forehead then I turned on an electric razor pressed it against a wooden shelf and let it reverberate into the hardwood floor and up into the furniture. They still talk about that one.
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Oct 27, 2016 00:37
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There are two Trail of Cthulhu bundles up on Bundle of Holding[/url] you can grab the basic book and some adventures for $10.
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Oct 27, 2016 00:45
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One of the sourcebooks briefly mentioned MAJESTIC cargo-culting 'crystal-matrix AIs' that were pretty obviously a front for something squamous.
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Oct 27, 2016 07:55
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Pac-Manioc Root posted:A little theatricality can help if done right. The guy who runs my Horror game goes balls to the wall on this. He's asked me not to post pictures for privacy reasons, but he always dresses the area in appropriate drapery and props, uses fantastic music to full effect, and there's always an "off-site" scene. For example, in one of our sessions, we ended up in a Dreamlands version of a World War I U-boat. We went outside and down to the garage, which was done up with valves and lights to look like a a u-boat- and all put on uniforms as we became members of the crew. As soon as the order to dive was given, he turned one of the valves, which sprayed us all with cold water. We had to fix the leaks in the pipes (with provided tape and tools), then proceeded to be hunted down by an allied sub hunter. Each depth charge caused "explosions" that got closer and closer, and caused more leaks, to the point where we all felt so loving claustrophobic and doomed that we just wanted to end it and get out of there. It was one of the best playing experiences I've ever had. Still hasn't stopped some of our dudes from being super pulpy-shoot-first though.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:47
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You lucky son of a bitch.
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Oct 27, 2016 18:01
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I know - I appreciate every session we do. We're talking about renting a cabin through VRBO next summer and four prison jumpsuits and running In Media Res with three unsuspecting
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Oct 27, 2016 18:33
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I used to love Trail of Cthulhu/GUMSHOE but some really terrible customer service from Pelgrane years ago really soured me on their stuff and I stopped following it. They've got two Trail of Cthulhu bundles of holding up right now, and I was thinking about grabbing one of them because I feel like giving it another chance. Is one of them considered better than the other? I have the rulebook and bookhounds of london already, along with a few random adventures, and was mostly looking to see whether Armitage Files (Bundle) or Eternal Lies (Bundle+2) was the better choice? Are any of the Ken Writes About Stuff articles with alternate takes on mythos stuff interesting reads? I've also been looking to pick up some other Cthulhu products, and was wondering if the thread had any opinion on the Cthulhu Brittanica stuff (specifically Shadows over Scotland), or some of the Age of Cthulhu modules.
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Nov 4, 2016 10:23
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It's my understanding that Eternal Lies is a more "traditional" (read: linear) adventure, whereas the Armitage Files is the pioneering work for a sort of "open-world" technique that Pelgrane would use again in Night's Black Agents's Dracula Dossier. In both those set-ups, you're supposed to give the players this heavily annotated hand-out, and then they read through it, pick through whatever scrawlings in the margin interest them, and then you have a guide on your end that lets you play into and out of whichever scenes the interesting note is supposed to lead to.
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Nov 4, 2016 10:33
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My understanding is that Eternal Lies is Trail of Cthulhu's version of Masks of Nyarlathotep. It's meant to be playable in different orders, but I have also heard that it makes the most narrative sense if you do it in a certain way. There's been a lot of discussion about it, including some fairly involved retoolings to different aspects like this: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/37078/roleplaying-games/eternal-lies-the-alexandrian-remix It is very much the big, sprawling globe hopping campaign. Armitage Files is a series of handouts that lead to many avenues of investigation, as gradenko_2000 said. Where Eternal Lies has the story pretty well set out and players are discovering details, Armitage Files gives you a ton of evocative details and handouts but doesn't define exactly what is causing the weirdness. I feel like Armitage Files would be a lot easier to wrap up in a short time-frame than Eternal Lies. Both are pretty interesting, but they are definitely pretty different approaches. I enjoyed all of the Ken Writes About Stuff columns, including the Mythos monster ones. They tend to include a short description of the monster, ways to change up their abilities, and a set of flavorful clues they could leave. They also generally include ways to tweak the monster to make it more strange or less recognizable, along with a few story seeds focused on the monster and a mention of any stories where it appears.
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Nov 5, 2016 15:53
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So is KWAS worth the $25 for a season or year or whatever?
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Nov 6, 2016 01:53
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Pope Guilty posted:So is KWAS worth the $25 for a season or year or whatever? I thought it was, but not enough other people did, so there's a couple years' worth but it seems to be done for now. You can still get the old columns as a yearly lot or a la carte from Pelgrane.
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Nov 6, 2016 02:48
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Sionak posted:I thought it was, but not enough other people did, so there's a couple years' worth but it seems to be done for now. I think I will- I adored Suppressed Transmission and it kills me that there's years and years of it that will never be collected.
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Nov 6, 2016 03:35
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So 7th ed. finally got translated here, got the core rulebook to replace the awful 6th ed rulebook (I know the system is basically the same, but the translation in Italian was just terrible, also it was ugly) and the investigator companion I have been running games for a few friends a while ago (1-2 years), and we already went through The Haunting and Edge of Darkness. Would love to start again, probably will have to find new players too due to some having real life commitments that really don't let them play games much. What's a nice easy way to jump back in juicy madness and tears, for both players and keeper? I'd like to choose amongst published adventures translated in Italian, while I'm pretty good at english most of my friends aren't and having to translate or explain stuff breaks things up a little too much for my tastes. Also I'm not really great at designing adventures myself, I'd like to keep prep time at a minimum due to having work and other stuff to do. Besides the adventures in core rulebooks 6th and 7th ed., I own the Arkham sourcebook and Day of the Beast, Terror from the Stars, Compact Trail of Tsathoggua. I could also get the 7th ed keeper screen and accompanying 2 adventures, or Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, or Horror on the Orient Express (terribly expensive though and I'd rather wait for the 7th ed update). That's pretty much all that is translated in my language AFAIK besides indie stuff made by locals that I guess nobody on this forum can possibly know 
TorakFade fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Nov 12, 2016 |
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Nov 12, 2016 16:44
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If anyone is in the Seattle area, Chaosium is looking for people to run CoC events at OrcaCon in Everett in January. Email Todd@Chaosium.com if you want to run! I would except I'm already running my Wild West CoC scenario "At the Cowtowns of Madness." 
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Nov 12, 2016 17:00
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Pope Guilty posted:I think I will- I adored Suppressed Transmission and it kills me that there's years and years of it that will never be collected. Man, me too. I tracked down both printed volumes used and I would shell out or back a kickstarter or whatever to get the rest. KWaS is definitely different from Suppressed Transmissions - much more directly linked to specific games. It has less of the delightful associations between wildly disconnected things, but there's still some - it is Kenneth Hite, after all.
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Nov 12, 2016 19:15
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Sionak posted:Man, me too. I tracked down both printed volumes used and I would shell out or back a kickstarter or whatever to get the rest.
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Nov 13, 2016 03:03
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KWAS season 1 was really, really good, so I'm glad about that. Last night I found a FLGS I didn't know existed who stock Pelgrane titles, which I'm not used to- the shops I'm familiar with around here are heavy on boardgames and minis with a few Pathfinder books, but this place (while it had all that) had a big set of shelves with both old and new titles. I picked up Trail of Cthulhu, which is really good so far, and the guy behind the counter clued me in to the Bits and Mortar program, where if you buy a book from a participating publisher at a participating retailer, they'll email you a download link for a PDF copy! (And Pelgrane is a member, so I'm going back for those Esoterrorist and Night's Black Agents books at some point.) I'm going to have to buy my books there going forward.
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Nov 13, 2016 16:56
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Anybody playtest the latest scenario for Delta Green written by Greg and Shane? I'm wondering if anyone has any tips for running it. Generally, I'm interested in tips for moving the adventure along two different tracks - one smaller group of party members who are undercover at a cult, and the other who are providing outside support/doing independent research.
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Jan 10, 2017 17:40
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I figure this thread is as good a place as I can hope to field this, so I hope some of you folks might be able to offer some advice and insights potentially: My in-person tabletop group is excited to swap over to playing Trail of Cthulhu after having eyeballed it for the past year or so--when we first kicked off our most recently completed Deadlands campaign, several folks at the table tagged ToC on the shelf as what they wanted to play next and we filed it away for such. After getting inspired by and excited about the big expansive 'remix' of Eternal Lies over here, I am stoked to give it hell as Keeper coming up. Now, we're gearing up to kick off this coming weekend; last weekend we had a sort-of-session-zero where the gang had a bit of a crash course in GUMSHOE mechanics and splashed around the investigator creation rules before coming up with a general idea of who their characters are going to be. Additionally, we've set aside a couple of hours before this forthcoming session to further iron out the numbers and get everyone really in the right frame of mind. I've got a couple concerns though and a few uncertainties I'm hoping to clear up ahead of this thing if I can, though. For frame of reference, most of the table has played Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu back in the day--but I would estimate it's been a decade or decades since anyone has actually played an actual Cthulhu game present. It's been twenty years since I've played the Chaosium CoC myself, though I have been running an Achtung! Cthulhu game as PBP on these forums--it's substantially pulpy. Other than that, most of the players at the table are well familiar with HP Lovecraft and more or less the full repertoire of stories; we do have one player who is very new to roleplaying in general and hasn't read any of the stories and a new player I'm unfamiliar with on the whole. Nominally, what everyone wants and is knowingly signing up for is a mostly 'purist' game with a light splash of pulp (Eternal Lies recommends a sort of 'hybrid' of ToC's two leanings for the sake of having a somewhat long-term-survivable party of investigators, but restricts things like hypnosis and dual-fisting handguns or going full-auto with machine guns, etc. as right out.) However, fair's fair--they've been collectively playing combat-heavy action-oriented campaigns back to back for a solid decade now, where multiple combats in a given session are common and in various fantasy or sci-fi scenarios, it's typical to bid farewell diplomacy and throw down at a moment's notice. So, my principle concern is the pretty big tonal shift that is involved going from something like, in this case, Deadlands--where getting into sprawling gunfights is very common and supernatural horrors can be regarded fairly flippantly--to a backdrop where getting hospitalized or killed are a very real consequence to picking a fight or failing to flee from one. Again, at least on paper (and verbally, metaphor aside) everyone asserts to be on-board with wanting that more 'classic' Cthulhu roleplaying experience and by and large, these are players who have been roleplaying for anywhere from 20 - 30 years with one exception--but I still have my worries. My secondary concern is just the foreknowledge of Mythos things inherent to players who have been wrestling with the material for decades--and in one case, out and out studied it back in the day. I'm encouraged by the way Trail of Cthulhu tries to throw knowledgeable individuals off the scent by presenting new takes on familiar entities and whatnot, but I still worry that I'm going to end up in the situation where e.g. the Alienist player is 'casually' (in presenting knowledge) regarding talk of cults or cosmic horrors before even accruing a point of Cthulhu Mythos, for instance. Lastly, I'm just not sure how to present to folks a definitive take on what Trail of Cthulhu is expecting for their characters regarding the supernatural in general. I would assume that nominally new investigators have generally not encountered anything truly bizarre prior to the start of a game, but I can already see in the initial rough takes on characters that some players are figuring that part of being an investigator is a preexisting hook into the occult--so e.g. the retired Military officer character's background currently tags his having been re-tasked by a questionable commanding officer to 'investigate the paranormal' in the past, etc. Should I just let this sort of thing fly and roll with it? Other than all of the above, I'm mostly just pushing to wrap my head around Trail of Cthulhu's systems in general and get as strong a grip as I can on the campaign in question. On the whole I'm pretty stoked about it all, and would very much appreciate any advice or suggestions others may have for any of these things; it's been a long time since I've run a 'proper / purist' Cthulhu game.
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Mar 16, 2017 14:57
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I'm struggling to find the right thread to ask this question, but this seems like a reasonable place! I'm looking for a general system to run a Cthulhu-esque campaign - basically, the PCs have each been "blessed" by a terrible, alien god and are functioning as agents to stop something (more) awful from happening. I am aiming for a system that I can tack on some homebrew stuff (each of the PCs has a pact that sort of advances along with them, but it needs to be kept secret for *reasons*) and I'm just not sure where to start. It needs to be modern, have some decent combat rules (it's inevitable with my group) and have sanity tables. I looked at NEMESIS and liked what I saw with ORE, but I'm concerned about being able to blend it in with the homebrew stuff. Delta Green is really intriguing, as we've played (and mostly enjoyed) the percentile system in CoC, but I can't tell how long it's going to be until the Handler book comes out - I'd be big-time pissed if I buy the agents' book and that's it. Any suggestions? I'm in the early stages of building out the homebrew pieces, but my idea is to keep it flexible enough to fit a variety of systems. I'm comfortable with general D20, Deadlands Classic, Shadowrun 3/4, CoC percentile, etc., so I'm not worried about complexity overly much.
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Mar 16, 2017 16:43
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Cthulhumatic posted:Any suggestions? I'm in the early stages of building out the homebrew pieces, but my idea is to keep it flexible enough to fit a variety of systems. I'm comfortable with general D20, Deadlands Classic, Shadowrun 3/4, CoC percentile, etc., so I'm not worried about complexity overly much. GURPS is very flexible and can do what you seem to want, but requires a lot of GM prep. Call of Cthulhu, if you can houserule the blessings, would work because it's the genre-defining work of Cthulhu-gaming. But if you want something quick, easy, and full of diverse powers you can steal, I'm going to suggest the World of Darkness roleplaying game, first edition, with Morality replaced by the Madness Meters from Unknown Armies 2e/Stress Gauges from NEMESIS. It's a nice rules-medium modern game focused on horror, the Madness Meters/Stress Gauges combined the best parts of WoD Morality and CoC Sanity, and it's very easy to learn, play, and use. I recommend checking out the Second Sight-supplement for some low-key magical powers that could work as blessings. Cthulhumatic posted:Delta Green is really intriguing, as we've played (and mostly enjoyed) the percentile system in CoC, but I can't tell how long it's going to be until the Handler book comes out - I'd be big-time pissed if I buy the agents' book and that's it. I suspect things are taking a while because Arc Dream has to figure out what happens when the new Delta Green realizes it has to brief President Trump about the supernatural.
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Mar 16, 2017 19:05
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LatwPIAT posted:GURPS is very flexible and can do what you seem to want, but requires a lot of GM prep. Call of Cthulhu, if you can houserule the blessings, would work because it's the genre-defining work of Cthulhu-gaming. But if you want something quick, easy, and full of diverse powers you can steal, I'm going to suggest the World of Darkness roleplaying game, first edition, with Morality replaced by the Madness Meters from Unknown Armies 2e/Stress Gauges from NEMESIS. It's a nice rules-medium modern game focused on horror, the Madness Meters/Stress Gauges combined the best parts of WoD Morality and CoC Sanity, and it's very easy to learn, play, and use. I recommend checking out the Second Sight-supplement for some low-key magical powers that could work as blessings.  This is loving perfect (how did I not know about this)! Is there any reason to get the 1e over the 2e from Onyx Path?
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Mar 16, 2017 22:16
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Cthulhumatic posted:
Most people seem to think 2e is an improvement upon 1e. I disagree. It's a bit hard to say?
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Mar 16, 2017 22:19
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Cthulhumatic posted:I'm struggling to find the right thread to ask this question, but this seems like a reasonable place! Silent Legions is really cool for this
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Mar 16, 2017 22:29
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LatwPIAT posted:I suspect things are taking a while because Arc Dream has to figure out what happens when the new Delta Green realizes it has to brief President Trump about the supernatural. "Absolutely not necessary, Bannon's already shown me a power-point of everything I need to know and I've hired Alex Jones to be on call if the need arises." One week later, all funding is cut to Delta Green.
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Mar 17, 2017 01:40
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Father Wendigo posted:"Absolutely not necessary, Bannon's already shown me a power-point of everything I need to know and I've hired Alex Jones to be on call if the need arises." Delta Green 1: "Hey, remember when Majestic 12 didn't brief Nixon about the existence of the supernatural?" Delta Green 2: "Yeah." Delta Green 1: "I think I'm beginning to understand them." Delta Green 3: "Do you think ALPHONSE's still running the underground network?"
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Mar 17, 2017 01:50
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LatwPIAT posted:I suspect things are taking a while because Arc Dream has to figure out what happens when the new Delta Green realizes it has to brief President Trump about the supernatural. Easy. Trump not being completely stable as seen on the campaign becomes more unstable from the sanity loss of finding out Cthulhu is real. Doubly so since he cant say anything about in public without it being used as evidence of a mental breakdown.
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Mar 17, 2017 01:57
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Communist Zombie posted:Easy. Trump not being completely stable as seen on the campaign becomes more unstable from the sanity loss of finding out Cthulhu is real. Doubly so since he cant say anything about in public without it being used as evidence of a mental breakdown. Nah. Trump is a shallow narcissist who's steadfastly oblivious to the Horrible Truth®. However, his cabinet is so infested with (frequently conflicting) secret societies and double agents that you'd think it was a game of Paranoia. *ahem* After a record four month government shutdown, the House and Senate finally approve President Trump's budget as written - tens of thousands of government employees are dismissed in order to fund the President's 30 Day plan to defeat ISIS - Project Infinity. Faced with an opponent totally alien, even to them, the Old Guard at Delta Green threw up their hands until someone brought in the (former) curator of the Badlands National State Park's Twitter account. The cold, hard truth was laid on them - fighting Trump was a lost cause. But having to put up with someone so hilariously one-dimensional in-person on a good day was physically, mentally, and spiritually taxing. On a bad day, it could be outright lethal. Kellyann and Bannon could attest to this. Agents, it falls on you to endlessly needle the President with insults and resistance using any means at your disposal - Tweets, the lost art of actual journalism , writing for music videos and comedy programs, corporate sabotage, inopportune counter-intelligence - nothing is off limits. You have to make the President as pissy and angry as possible within the next thirty days. The fate of reality as we know it depends on it.
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Mar 17, 2017 03:20
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I can definitely see a lot of Program agents turning Cowboy in the wake of this administration. Sure, you won't have any funding, but you weren't going to have any funding anymore, anyway.
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Mar 17, 2017 04:09
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I suspect the main issue would rather be the fear that Trump (or his administration) would reveal the existence of the Delta Green Project to attract attention away from his controversies and scandals, much like Majestic 12 feared Nixon (and later Clinton) would do. In addition to handing over MAJIC/DELTA GREEN files to GRU SV-8.
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Mar 17, 2017 04:55
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I think it's canon that trump almost went insane after accidentally coming across a copy of Mysteries of the Worm while at Wharton. To preserve what little remains of his sanity, he has wisely avoided reading anything in the five decades since
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Mar 17, 2017 16:35
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LuiCypher posted:Anybody playtest the latest scenario for Delta Green written by Greg and Shane? I'm wondering if anyone has any tips for running it. I ran it. I enjoyed it overall and recommend it. The showdown at the end went spectacularly poorly for the agents. I think your idea is solid, and while there's plenty of great support for the cult angle, I'd prep a bit more stuff for the support/outside group to do. GaistHeidegger posted:I figure this thread is as good a place as I can hope to field this, so I hope some of you folks might be able to offer some advice and insights potentially: This sounds like a blast! Sounds like you're excited and your players are too. I have been in somewhat similar situations, so here are some of the things I've learned: - In general, I would encourage players to have those hooks into the supernatural or occult research. You'll want to put on the brakes if they go too far - having seen an old one and lived to tell the tale or something like that - but I've found that it tends to really build player engagement, especially if you can weave their original incident back into the story. As long as you can keep it a little vague and maybe twist what's really going on with it to be a bit different than their expectations, I think it's a great tool. And hey, questionable commanding officer is a great plot hook and I'd hate to leave it on the table. - This is related, and it ties in with Gumshoe's ethos: I would not stress too much about the players knowing too much about the mythos. If you invent or change a few monsters, that should throw off the any veterans. I've only skimmed Eternal Lies but I don't think it has lots of deep ones, which (along with Cthulhu and shoggoths) are kind of the best known Lovecraftian creatures. I've also found that if you're running a Cthulhu game, you've marinated in/internalized the material in a way that most players (even interested ones) just haven't. As an example, a friend of mine and I co-ran a modification of the adventure Invasive Procedures (another Pelgrane one) where we substituted in an Elder Thing for the adventure's antagonist. We put all kinds of clues in - recurrence of the number five, starfish shaped motifs, and so on. No one noticed because they hadn't read At the Mountains of Madness. (They still had fun, but especially with players relatively new to the mythos, I don't think this is a huge concern.) - In that spirit, be generous with clues! Especially weird, cool clues. There's a great rule of thumb for Gumshoe spends that Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws mention at panels but is not (as far as I know) spelled out in ToC. 0 spend: keeps the plot moving, usually by pointing to a future clue or destination. Does not necessarily offer useful preparation for the climax. 1 spend: provides a spotlight moment, something cool and/or weird. Should provide some kind of useful preparation or context, even if the full implications are not immediately obvious. 2 spend: as a 1 spend, but extra weird/cool and immediately useful or applicable in some way. Don't have something cool enough for a 2 spend? That's fine, just let the player know and let them spend the point later. They also introduce the idea of having spends sometimes represent people you know, rather than just your own pool of knowledge. Maybe that point of chemistry is a grad student you know and can give some samples to. If your players like riffing off recurring NPCs, this can be a fun way to do it. (Night's Black Agents expands this into a mechanic, but I don't think ToC needs that level.) - I used to think the point of investigative games was to let the players take notes and feel smart figuring things out, but one thing I learned from Role Playing Public Radio's investigation games: you often have to nudge/remind them of things. There's a lot of clues in a given mystery and it's hard to tell which ones are most important. So you can Socratic method them a bit - what did you find last session? Where was that? Did you believe that NPC? Sometimes you can blunt the metagame-y feel of this recap by tying in their skills. ("As a seasoned investigator, you recall that...") - On combat: there's a couple things you can do. I'd work in some disagreeable thugs spoiling for a fight or something similar just to introduce the basic mechanics. I think watching their general points vanish will discourage getting into too many needless fights, if nothing else. (If we pick fights with these guys, we don't have any points left for the mob boss..) Then at a later point, you can always do the horror movie/pre-credits X-files thing and give the players some simple pregens. Then the pregens run into something horrible and get shredded, showing the players how lethal combat can be without forcing them to sacrifice their primary characters to learn the lesson. (Another idea stolen from Kenneth Hite; he did this by giving the players some bad-rear end commandos at the start of a session and then letting them get slaughtered by a vampire in Night's Black Agents.) - On tone: I've found that groups kind of settle into the right tone for the game. Purist level horror builds slowly, and it's not the easiest thing to sustain. But if the players are really interested in it, it shows through. (Often it shows by the sort of questions the players ask - do they ask about something even worse than what you were about to describe? Do they really not want to know the answer but ask anyways?) You may have to curtail digressions and pop culture references a bit more than a pulpy game, but certainly not altogether. Cracking jokes is one of the ways people let off tension from intense parts, after all. I wrote way too much on this, but I hope some of it was helpful. I'd love to hear how the game goes. gradenko_2000 posted:I can definitely see a lot of Program agents turning Cowboy in the wake of this administration. Sure, you won't have any funding, but you weren't going to have any funding anymore, anyway. Certainly true for the scientist members of DG.
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Mar 17, 2017 16:46
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I think it also bears mentioning that while GUMSHOE's investigative ability framework was purpose-built to "solve" the "missed clue" problem, the pool-and-points framework for general abilities was built to reinforce the feel of horror-themed games by giving players a slowly-draining resource. Just the act of engaging in combat is supposed to be tense because you only have so many points to go around, and you're supposed to feel more fearful of what comes next as you use up more and more points. Incidentally this is why I wish someone would do a direct Fantasy d20 hack of GUMSHOE. Lorefinder imports the investigative framework into Pathfinder, but it leaves the general and combat mechanics of PF intact when draining a party's resource through slow point attrition would be perfect for a dungeon-crawler.
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Mar 17, 2017 16:59
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Sionak posted:I wrote way too much on this, but I hope some of it was helpful. I'd love to hear how the game goes. I hugely appreciated the big response! To follow up, after some mulling and prodding around, I think I've found a very satisfying way to work the military officer's would-be paranormal assignment from dubious command into a really excellent hook for his drive. He had written about his father having also secretly been involved in such investigations in the past--and the core anchor of Eternal Lies kicks off by a wealthy heiress trying to uncover the truth of what happened during her own father's tangling with the occult in 1924. I reasoned then that his father may well have been a correspondent with that original investigator team's efforts at that time--leaving a more direct tie between the two and giving the heiress a very clear reason to want to entreat the retired Colonel to aid in her investigation. Additionally, one of the things that campaign remix does on top of the original Eternal Lies campaign is weave in the Severn Valley mythos materials from Ramsey Campbell--so I finagled the notion that a few years back when the Colonel went on his own investigation, the timing was perfect for him to have been involved in following a trail of shocking mutilations / murders in the fictional Brichester area, during which time he'd managed to track down a deranged fellow presumed to be the perpetrator with a fatal shoot-out at the end of a spooky cat and mouse chase through the dark woods. This will help tee up his own interest when later in the campaign the investigators discover leads back to Severn Valley and bring full circle his original lead-in on the occult / discovering truths behind what he had formerly believed to be an open and shut investigation. My main concern with this angling though is that he chose his father as one of his sources of stability, so the man himself is still alive; I'm not sure how best to angle the notion of such for his father's involvement without tangentially making him a source of a lot of clues early on. Other than that, the big character I'm having a challenging time working on a good hook for is a Criminal, who is the daughter of an imprisoned mafioso, trying to redeem her father's name and family tie to the mob. How I can loop that in in a satisfying way with the business at hand in the campaign is stumping me a bit still. GaistHeidegger fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Mar 17, 2017 |
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Mar 17, 2017 19:30
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