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Johnny Truant posted:Just from the tone of your posts it sounds like they think they're physically invincible, and that should be punished pretty severely in CoC, imo. One more question it says at the conclusion of the prologue the players can be rewarded if they free Larkin from Nyarlathotep's influence, is that a pulp thing? Or how are they supposed to actually do that without any knowledge of the Mythos, let alone Nyarly. Or does that assume the players are coming in from other scenarios/campaigns?
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Apr 27, 2020 20:31
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Phi230 posted:Any tips for portraying insanity besides just rolling on the insanity table? Leave aside for the moment the critiques of the portrayal of mental illness. The problem with a completely random check on a large table is that it doesn't necessarily further the story. Oh, sure, some randomness may help encourage the idea of the unfairness of the cosmos or whatever, but what I would do is take a look at the characters and I would figure out specific delusions, hallucinations, or aggravated details which you would then record, and when they reach a certain break point, you hand that over. Andre the guy whose parents died in the influenza epidemic becomes a hygiene freak; Betty the gal who's flapping as hard as she can to get past a fundamental anomie has a depressive episode; etc. That said, this is a big trick I use for con modules, which are self contained. What you could do if this is for the quick-hit, "temporary insanity" results is prepare a list of four/six/eight possible freakouts and then roll to consult THAT table, which you put together based on the ambient stimulus of the immediate area. It would even be appropriate to the source material if occasionally one of these entries is "you feel wretched and terrified but you remain fully in control."
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Apr 27, 2020 21:14
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You could just lean into the Indiana Jones and play masks in pulp cthuluhu style if you think you would have fun with it. I think the length and leathality of masks would work well with it, though I would prefer to run it in base cthuthulu aswell
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Apr 27, 2020 21:15
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Phi230 posted:One more question it says at the conclusion of the prologue the players can be rewarded if they free Larkin from Nyarlathotep's influence, is that a pulp thing? Or how are they supposed to actually do that without any knowledge of the Mythos, let alone Nyarly. Or does that assume the players are coming in from other scenarios/campaigns? I understand this as killing Larkin. I don't think there's any way to un-Nyarlathotep him due to the spoopy magic tattoo, and there's a real quick sentence where he says something like "thanks for freeing me" if the investigators put him six feet under. Agreed on what was said above regarding the insanity table. Just rolling on it is very impersonal; spice it up for stuff specific to your investigators. Again fixating on the plane: what if one of them goes temporarily 'insane' and does irreparable damage to it in a fit of madness so as to prevent the furthering of the investigation? I don't think I've ever used the insanity table for PCs, only for NPCs. And I feel like your main problem is that you don't know how you want to run the campaign. Your players are fine playing spoopy horror as they have done in the past, or as pulpy gunslingers, what they're doing now. You've had the talk with them, and they've left it up to you, so decide on one and stick with it. Also post results! I wanna hear about these Indiana Jones fools' escapades!
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Apr 28, 2020 15:19
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Phi230 posted:Oh we've had the talk, and I said there's real danger coming and they were absolutely fine with it. Problem is maybe I'm too lenient, I thought the turning point would be a kharisiri attack but like I said, blammo I get this, because it's something I struggled with a lot when I started running games. Certain consequences seemed too punitive, too unfair, and generally too mean-spirited. And that's not a bad instinct. Some consequences are too much. Don't outright cancel out a victory by the players. But at the same time, they did sign up for Call of Cthulhu and said that's what they want to play. Sometimes harsh is absolutely the way to go. Call of Cthulhu means risk and a certain amount of unfairness. People love the Dark Souls games, right? And those games are harsh and punishing to the player. But you can make progress anyways, and that's where a lot of the fun comes from. So providing them with challenges - some of which are unfair - comes with the territory. Done right, it will add to your player's fun, not take away from it. Just make sure that the obstacles bring interesting new challenges, like the plane crashing on a weird deserted island. That's still easy to say, but can be hard to do. One way you can practice is to premediate the meanness. Greg Stolze suggests in the third edition of Unknown Armies to split your GMing into two phases, the prep phase and the game phase. The prep phase is what you do between games and it's when you're really antagonistic. (I think he calls it the antagonist phase). At least for me, it's a lot easier to come up with complications and challenges between games. It's hard to improv them during games, as you look at your players' hopeful faces. This is the time when you come up with the mean stuff. You can take a few days to refine it and see if it's too much. In your case, I think this will involve customizing things from the book - it sounds like, as it's been, that material isn't ending up quite as dangerous as you'd like. This is when you sit down and, as others suggested, think about the meanest trick(s) that smart, desperate cultists can pull to get even. The game phase is when you take the ammunition you built up during the prep phase and throw it at your players during the actual game. At this point, it's easier to be a fan of the characters, but part of that means seeing them overcome long odds and challenges. And you have to provide those challenges. You still want to read the room and may not use all the tricks you prepared during the antagonist phase. That's okay! But having the list of harshness ready means that you've always got a complication in your pocket instead of, in the moment, thinking about wrecking the plane and then second guessing yourself. There's some more advice in this article https://www.geeknative.com/53937/tips-running-delta-green-dennis-detwiller/ about Delta Green, a modern-day spin on Call of Cthulhu: quote:Only in the face of death can the most heroic moments be found. The tone described there might be a little too much for your players, but it's a good insight into how these games can run. You can find some Delta Green games run by the authors on youtube and elsewhere if you'd like to see these principles in action. Phi230 posted:Overall it seems like I need to take the gloves off more, stop revolving the world around the players, and figure out how to better do horror. You've got some good advice already. Insanity effects should be tailored to the character and/or to the situation. I actually haven't read CoC 7th Edition, so I don't know exactly how it handles insanity effects. But Delta Green gives players limited options when they lose 5 or more sanity at once. Based (somewhat) on actual trauma responses, characters can fight, flee, or freeze. And they have to keep doing that for a while, or until the threat/source of the sanity loss is gone. Seeing your options limited to one area can drive home the stakes. Players can still choose how they do these things, but the walls start closing in. DG also suggests that certain experiences are more likely to lead to particular disorders. Seeing violence leads to PTSD, while being held captive can lead to anxiety, and so on. In general, you can think about how the character might try to cope with this overwhelming experience that's represented by the sanity check. Johnny Truant posted:And I feel like your main problem is that you don't know how you want to run the campaign. Your players are fine playing spoopy horror as they have done in the past, or as pulpy gunslingers, what they're doing now. You've had the talk with them, and they've left it up to you, so decide on one and stick with it. I agree. It can be pretty hard to come up with good horror and good complications in the moment. So do some of that ahead of time. When you're doing dishes or whatever, think about the type of creepy stuff you'd like to see come up and the overall tone, and work that into the antagonist phase if you're using that approach. It's extremely helpful to describe the kind of horror/mood you're looking for in each chapter. Is New York focused on paranoia? Is one of the other countries focused on alienation? Good horror movies are about a particular type of fear, interpreted through a monster or circumstance. What type of fear are you focusing on, and how does the opposition embody it? For instance, werewolves are about savagery and being unable to read people's true natures. If you don't have a clear idea for the mood and type of fear, the tone will default to your players' Indiana Jones type antics. You can go back and read the story "The Call of Cthulhu" (assuming you enjoy Lovecraft's writing) if you want a refresher on world-spanning cults. And the even in that story, there's some action and the sailors do pretty well for themselves - they send Cthulhu back to sleep - but the cost is terrible. Several go mad, one falls through an angle in space, and the imagery used along the way is vivid and unpleasant. The idea of the story is that it doesn't really matter where you go - the influence of the old ones is present from the South Pacific to Louisiana to Norway. It's wherever you look, if you scratch deep enough. And even knowing about it will get you killed. A dispiriting way to communicate this in your game would be for the cults to start going after informants and allies of the PCs. Not all at once, but the realization that the player characters asking someone for help led to that person's death is a pretty disturbing one. quote:Also post results! I wanna hear about these Indiana Jones fools' escapades! Same! Sionak fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 18:42
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Yeah I'm absolutely hoping these people go through the campaign through madness and horror and death and yet nonetheless at the last ditch, the Indy theme comes on and they succeed, whatever the cost.
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Apr 29, 2020 01:57
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Well our next session is Thursday, then Saturday so next week will probably have more to post. Right now there's not much to write home about. So far, all they've done is basically stumble through the streets of Lima, Peru and do a breaking and entering of the hotel room of the person who hired them to go on an archaeological dig in the highlands. The party was initially split on whether not to trust him. Pretty much all of them were suspect of him, thinking he was running a criminal enterprise. The players loved the idea of getting involved in crime so they were more than willing to go along for the payday. After a lot of arguing they broke into the hotel room and found an ancient Tiwanaku artifact that gave you grotesque visions of the future. Naturally, the players each took turns incapacitating themselves by peering into this hell-mirror, passing it around like a joint. Half the players failed their POW rolls so the mirror didn't do anything, to their disappointment. The other half saw horrid visions of the future of the campaign (out of context of course). Next up they met with Jackson Elias, the friendly NPC and decided to follow him along the next day to meet with a local professor concerning the dig. They meet with the professor and are essentially given a choice: stay with Larkin ("criminal" leader of the expedition - really a vessel of ol' Narly) or go with the good guys - Jackson Elias - to beat Larkin to the dig site and preserve the local artifacts. The players were leaning towards looting the dig site for a big payday. However they were willing to entertain the professor to pump him for more information. The professor says that his undergrad assistant has found something and will return shortly with more info. Time passes and she does not return, so the party goes into the basement to look. They find the poor undergrad's drained body, her notes, and an ancient artifact in the form of a gold inlay with intricate markings. Presently they hear a scream, and retreat back up to the source of the scream which is a man who has been stabbed. They send Elias to a set of phone booths to call an ambulance, but Elias luckily notices that the professor, whom they left alone, was in trouble. The players go and find the professor writhing on the ground, complaining that a man had assaulted him. They do medical hullabaloo and while inspecting him, they feel something squirming in his abdomen. Naturally, they decide to cut him open then and there. Luckily they did an extreme success on their medical roll so they didn't kill the poor professor, but out comes a monstrous maggot creature that scurries around like a chestburster from Alien. It attacks one member of the party and latches onto his face. This gives one of the players an opportunity to use their bullwhip, Jones style, to whip it off his face. They then gun down the maggot creature. In inspecting the notes and mulling over clues, they decide to go to Puno with Elias to follow up a lead - that of a local healing woman who knows more about all this stuff. Getting there before Larkin is a hassle, it could take a week or more of travel to get to Puno. However, one of the players owns a flying boat. They decide to Indiana-jones travel by flying boat to Lake Titicaca, beating Larkin to the dig site easily by 3 days or more. Now this is where I ran into some issues. The player's plane only had a flight ceiling of like 9k feet, whereas the elevation of Lake Titicaca is something like 12-15k feet. I allowed the player cross the perilous Andes just barely arrive at Lake Titicaca after a series of a few hard successes on their pilot rolls - the players of course joked they would crash and have to roleplay the next several sessions as Alive, eating the pilot's rear end cheeks for sustenance. Should I have just crashed their plane? Or, I guess to make up for it, should it be more or less impossible to leave, the plane being unable to take off entirely? That's where the players were at. They had a minor exposition episode with the local healing woman, where they were attacked by evil vampire creatures. However, they brutally gunned down the vampire creatures (though they are not dead, only incapacitated).
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May 5, 2020 18:24
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I'm not a pilot man but I think that the ceiling for the plane is more for the occupants rather than the machinery. They're probably all suffering from hypoxia now from the rapid shift in altitude so it might be a good (fun) time for some Reality Checks. I'd say making the plane unable to lift off for various reasons might be a good twist, especially if it's the work of the enemies they left for dead but I wouldn't be surprised if your next report is "my players surfed the plane down the mountain"
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May 5, 2020 18:40
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Phi230 posted:Naturally, the players each took turns incapacitating themselves by peering into this hell-mirror, passing it around like a joint. Call of Cthulhu in a nutshell, also new thread title? 
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May 5, 2020 18:45
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RudeCat posted:I'm not a pilot man but I think that the ceiling for the plane is more for the occupants rather than the machinery. They're probably all suffering from hypoxia now from the rapid shift in altitude so it might be a good (fun) time for some Reality Checks. Nah man, this is a 1919 era flying boat. poo poo cannot fly above 9k for this model of plane. It really shouldn't be able to generate lift or have the engines continue operating at these altitudes. People are generally fine until ~15k. Lake Titicaca is 12k, which is fine for flying without oxygen. I made the conscious choice to allow it, now I feel it was the wrong choice basically.
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May 5, 2020 18:49
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RudeCat posted:I'm not a pilot man but I think that the ceiling for the plane is more for the occupants rather than the machinery. They're probably all suffering from hypoxia now from the rapid shift in altitude so it might be a good (fun) time for some Reality Checks. As you go up, the air is thinner, so it's harder for the plane to generate lift & climb. You need more runway to get off the ground, especially if your engine is kinda marginal anyway. Here's somebody trying to take off on a hot day at high altitude (6,370 ft) with 4 passengers and a full load of fuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVM3RRd1vf0 Your players should have probably had a heck of a time getting up to that altitude. I'm just spitballing here, but you might say "You guys can't take back off... too much drag from the hull in the water combined with the low air density means you just can't get off the water".
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May 5, 2020 18:53
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Phi230 posted:Campaign stuff Sounds like things are fun! A few random comments/suggestions based off some of your previous posts about trying to ramp up the consequences with some potential opportunities if things come up again next time (feel free to completely ignore!): When your players were passing around the mask, were the ones seeing visions suffering sanity loss? Did any of them hit a threshhold for a temporary insanity? Doing stuff like is extremely dangerous and often fatal, and if I remember right sanity hits for mask usage are pretty massive. Did anyone see them breaking into the hotel room? Does/can the guy who hired them figure out it was them? That's a pretty brazen thing to do, and I imagine the employer is extremely displeased. Local police could be involved, the employer could actively work to sabotage them, etc. In terms of the plane stuff, from some cursory googling the issue seems to be that the higher you go, the thinner the air gets, which means you need more airspeed to get enough lift on the wings. At a certain point, you can't maintain level flight because the plane simply isn't powerful enough to generate enough lift to stay steady. It's fudging a little bit, but I don't think it's that unreasonable to say that with some extremely careful piloting they were able to land the plane in extremely perilous conditions, but they'd also probably know that takeoff would be near-impossible, especially maybe if there's some bad weather conditions happening like a rain or wind storm. Similarly, given how rough the landing probably was and how delicate amphibious aircraft tend to be, it's also very likely that the plane's wheels and keel were substantially damaged during the rocky landing, especially if they just landed in like a mountain field and not a smooth, level, paved airstrip. Also, is this flying boat different than the sea-plane you mentioned before? If they just abandoned the sea-plane back in Lima after pissing off a guy who hired them and attracting cult/police attention, that plane is probably blown up, impounded, or (more fun) carefully sabotaged in a way that won't be noticeable until it's in the air.
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May 5, 2020 18:57
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Aerox posted:Sounds like things are fun! A few random comments/suggestions based off some of your previous posts about trying to ramp up the consequences with some potential opportunities if things come up again next time (feel free to completely ignore!): 1. They did suffer sanity loss, but no triggering of temporary insanity. Those who did not see visions suffered no loss, they just stared into a gold mirror that made them feel funny. 2. The hotel owner was witness to the BnE into the hotel room. The Employer is a vessel of Nyarlathotep, and has vampire henchmen. He became suspect of the party, and cast a spell on one of the player characters, forcing that player character to essentially inform on the player party on one occasion. So the employer knows everything the party is up to. Also the party decided to beat the Employer to the dig site, which again, is a hive of vampires. I left out this detail in my post, but the's already sent a telegram to the vampires active in Puno to treat the party as hostile. As of this moment, the Employer and his vampire cult are openly hostile to the player party. Which leads me to a question: someone suggested I have Larkin summon a monster or use magic to waylay the party when they reach the dig site. Problem: it is impossible for Larkin, or his main vampire Henchman (a 400 year old conquistador vampire) to actually arrive at the dig site before the players. All I can have is the 2-dozen or so vampire henchmen as enemies, unless Larkin can teleport using mythos magic (which he can, but I'm not sure if there's a spell for it) 3. My plan now for the plane is two fold - have a stowaway attack the party if they try to leave, and for the plane being totally unable to take-off from Lake Titicaca. The plane is in good shape, but I will just follow the realistic scenario here and have them be physically unable to take off The plane is the same.
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May 5, 2020 19:15
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I've been thinking of running a game where the investigators are explicitly trying to be wizards and ascend past their humanity and become a spooky cthulhu monster. So far I've been thinking about ways to keep PCs viable while being wannabe sorcerers. So far I've come up with either allowing players to meditate on their magical art and gain a small pool of temporary sanity points to alleviate San loss each session, or having them run back up the Sanity track as their 'enlightenment' track once it hits 0. The Enlightenment track would go 0-99 and they become totally inhuman by the end. I'm looking for advice or thoughts? I feel like wizard call of Cthulhu is an idea most Cthulhu players concieve of at some point, but maybe I should try and run it in a different system then classic Cthulhu.
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May 8, 2020 15:17
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Badactura posted:I've been thinking of running a game where the investigators are explicitly trying to be wizards and ascend past their humanity and become a spooky cthulhu monster. Take this with a grain of salt from someone who enjoys reading the thread but has not yet been able to find a group for CoC: that sounds pretty neat, and I personally like the idea of the "enlightenment" track. I envision things getting pretty rough as you're shedding your last few Sanity points, and you may be temporarily incapacitated when you lost the final point / gain the first enlightenment point, but then it's "smooth sailing". Could advancing the enlightenment track actively drain points from "human" skills like driving, archaeology, etc.? I'm imagining your wizards just becoming less and less able to function in regular human society as they move toward the conclusion.
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May 8, 2020 15:28
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People trading in their sanity and humanity to become something else, something more powerful, is also a theme in Unknown Armies. You might be able to draw some inspiration there. I've thought about doing an all-cultist/all-wizard game as a one shot, but I think it'd be a bit more challenging as a campaign. While challenging, I think it has a lot of potential; it's just not what CoC is built to do out of the box. Some considerations: - Do you see all the characters as being in the same cult? Different mythos-worshipping cultists have pretty different views of the world and may not get along well long term. In Unknown Armies, this is part of the point - seeing what happens when incompatible and potent ways of viewing the world come into conflict. But I'd think about it ahead of time. Is it a race to be the first to ascend among a cult? Is it a practical battle to see whose mythos patron is currently strongest? Why would these people stay together (if they do) and what (if anything) keeps them from stabbing each other to make things easier? - I like the idea of the enlightenment track, but I think it's a chance to get into why cultists act the ways they do. Maybe once they've hit zero sanity, only certain things increase enlightenment. For instance, reading a new mythos tome, or performing a sacrifice, or actually summoning/beholding your patron. These milestones could have set values for increasing enlightenment. Unknown Armies has a system for the group called Goals I think you could borrow from, too. If the group decides their goal is "Open a corner store" then that functions like a group skill. Every time they do something story-wise that moves that closer (buying the property, etc) they get to increase the Skill percentage. Once they hit 100% the goal happens. But if they want to try before they've hit 100%, they can roll for it. Success means the goal happens, but failure sets them back or may even make the goal unattainable. (Actual UA goals tend to be more esoteric, but this is a simple example.) You could do something similar with enlightenment. Even if one character is way ahead in Enlightement percentage, someone else might get desperate enough to roll the dice and trying to ascend when only half ready. (I wouldn't just let them roll - it'd still take a suitably dramatic ritual - but it might add some more tension to know that's an option.) I think the meditation/casting pool idea is pretty solid. You'll definitely need to fiddle with the spellcasting system a little to keep things both interesting and practical. Sionak fucked around with this message at 16:25 on May 8, 2020 |
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May 8, 2020 16:18
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I think Unknown Armies would be a great start for ideas even if you don't use the system. Essoterrorists also deals with people trying to shed their humanity and ascend to god wizards but they're portrayed as the antagonists. There was a card based RPG system kickstarted called Sign and Sigil where you play cultists and mythos monsters but I dunno how it's progressing.
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May 8, 2020 16:24
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We had a very successful session last night. I decided to gradually ease the players into more harsh/more horror rather than rapidly switch tone. The players started where they last left off, that is standing on a floating island in Lake Titicaca. They start interrogating some NPCs as to what they were just attacked by. They get some more information, and pressed for time they get directions to where the ancient pyramid supposedly lies in the highlands, a 3 day march from Puno. Luckily they already purchased camping supplies and pack animals earlier, so they decide to move quickly and return to Puno proper. However, while they are arguing and bickering one player remains outside the hut. He fails a Listen roll, and one of the Kharisiri they thought they killed (they cannot be killed by mere gunfire) grab his ankle out up from the water and pull him down. Luckily he rolls very good strength rolls and remains desperately holding onto the pier on which he stands. The players run out and wrench him free after some effort, pulling up the Kharisiri with him. They dismember it and behead it, but they don't burn it - huge mistake, this Kharisiri will return later (they can put themselves back together, but a beheading takes a long time to 'heal'). While they're fretting over the corpse, gunshots ring out. There's a silhouette on the water, from which muzzle flashes are emitting! They get into a gunfight with the two unknown assailants (two other kharisiri, but not in monster form. One of them is from the pair of kharisiri they shot earlier, again not dead). There was a firefight, and most players only have pistols. In fact only two players have long-weapons, that being a 30-06 rifle and a 12 gauge shotgun. There's a decent fight, only one player gets shot for minor damage (again, I'm taking it easy on the players, and gave the Kharisiri only .22 rifles). Eventually our player with the .30-06 hits a Kharisiri for a near-"fatal" wound and that is sufficient to drive them off. I didn't want the fight to last too long considering most players couldn't actually do much in combat, and they weren't being super creative. They decide to get the hell out of there, and in paddling back to Puno on a reed-boat they make a commotion and are easily spotted by the angry mob that has gathered on the shores. Remember - this town has been victim to vampire attacks for months, its paranoid, superstitious, and distrustful of white europeans (considering the Kharisiri are generally european). So the gunfight on the water has forced a mob to assemble. Luckily the players don't do anything stupid, and plead with the villagers for help to defeat the Kharisiri menace at the pyramid. Unfortunately the players don't appreciate that the townsfolk are a scared, superstitious people who absolutely will not, under any circumstances, venture out into the wild to fight the kharisiri directly or go to the ancient ruins which they view as extremely cursed. The crowd disperses, and the players take their pleas to the mayor's office (unsuccessfully). Meanwhile, while most of our player party is trying desperately to enlist the aid of the townsfolk, our intrepid pulp hero pilot with the seaplane decides to leave, to his seaplane, to fly back to Lima to retrieve the ancient gold inlay they left there. See, they finally connected the dots too late that the inlay they found has supernatural importance, and is the key to stopping this whole mess. They finally clue-in that when conquistadors stole a piece of gold-inlay from the ancient ruins, it unleashed an ancient evil upon the world, and that returning it will trap whatever dark forces lay imprisoned there. Well here's where the stakes get kind of higher. He tries to take off, but since he is at such a high altitude he simply can't. He is perplexed, and keeps trying. After failure to take off, he returns to the docks. I'm upping the horror here. Every time he stopped on the water to inspect his plane, I made sure to stress how quiet it was on the water, the creaking of the wood of his plane, lapping of water, and bobbing being the only things in the stillness. He hears a glass break in the cabin while in the cockpit, he investigates but nothing happens. He tries to take off again, fails. He returns to the docks. When he does, he hears something shift and fall in the cabin behind him. He draws his gun and investigates, he's suspicious now because he rolled an extreme spot hidden success while out on the wing of his plane inspecting the engines earlier, he saw subtle sooty footprints on the wing leading to the cabin door. He though, fails very badly at this new spot hidden check while he's investigating the cabin and is ambushed by our Kharisiri stowaway. This Kharisiri is carrying a maggot of the Lord of Maggots in his distended belly. The stakes here being that the Kharisiri can very much overpower our player and then "infect" him with the maggot. Turning him into a Kharisiri if the maggot is not removed in ~12 hours. The player fails his sanity roll hard, not enough to go temp. insane, though. He shrieks and drops his gun (he relied so hard on it in the past). He and the Kharisiri tussle, its honestly not an even match. The Kharisiri has the a slight advantage in stats so the fight is very tense and high stakes. The Kharisiri delivers a major wound in the form of a knee to the ribs, and our player is knocked down. He, very luckily passes his CON roll to remain conscious, but now the Kharisiri is upon him and trying to pass the maggot to him. He's desperately resisting on the ground when he notices an entrenchment tool on the floor, a piece of their camping equipment that they piled up in the cabin, and picks it up and drives it deeply into the Kharisiri's head, "fatally" wounding it in one strike. Black blood oozes out from the wound, and while he stands, he notices that the thing's distended belly is shifting in the light. He drags it out of the cabin and throws it in the water - this kharisiri will be back. That last segment with our lone player kind of is the culmination of the tone shift from pulp to horror and the players liked it a lot. I'll come in with some questions I have later.
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May 8, 2020 19:05
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Badactura posted:I've been thinking of running a game where the investigators are explicitly trying to be wizards and ascend past their humanity and become a spooky cthulhu monster. You will want the group - collectively - to have a broad goal, which they can share to some extent. This should ideally be rooted in human motivations to some extent. Even "ascend past my humanity and become a monster" has some kind of implicit underlying purpose -- is this anomie writ large? Rejection of (insert large mundane sociocultural force here)? Ol' Howie's fiction has a range of motivations. I would work this out with the group and I would then make an outline, potentially in secret to some extent, with key milestones. At these milestones the members of the group would gain power of some kind. What those milestones are would depend on their tone and what you're all kind of going for. You probably are going to need to roll your own to some extent although you can certainly draw on the ideas already present in the various bestiaries.
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May 9, 2020 04:23
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My group has introduced wizard characters over the last few seasons and we've adapted a lot from the Elder Godlike book from Achtung! Cthulhu. You'll have to do some slight tweaking but their system for generating characters with powers has worked very well for us. You're strongly encouraged to just make up your own stuff though; the sample powers they list in there aren't very interesting, but it's a very flexible system.
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May 9, 2020 04:27
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Phi230 posted:We had a very successful session last night. I decided to gradually ease the players into more harsh/more horror rather than rapidly switch tone. That sounds great! Especially the confrontation at the end sounds fantastic and tense.
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May 11, 2020 18:32
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Phi230 posted:We had a very successful session last night. I decided to gradually ease the players into more harsh/more horror rather than rapidly switch tone. This was a great write up and I loved reading it.
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May 12, 2020 21:14
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Phi230 posted:We had a very successful session last night. I decided to gradually ease the players into more harsh/more horror rather than rapidly switch tone. Fantastic! I'm going to write up our Peru shenanigans here pretty soon as a way to journal what's going on in my campaign, as well. 
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May 12, 2020 21:19
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If I wanted to run a campaign set in a mixture of Stross' Colder War and Powers' Declare, so basically 1980s Cold War but Cthulhu creepies are real, what game you recommend I use as the baseline? CoC, Delta Green, The Laundry?
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May 13, 2020 07:05
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HerraS posted:If I wanted to run a campaign set in a mixture of Stross' Colder War and Powers' Declare, so basically 1980s Cold War but Cthulhu creepies are real, what game you recommend I use as the baseline? CoC, Delta Green, The Laundry? Definitely Delta Green, probably Fall of Delta Green although ti'S 60s Cold War instead.
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May 13, 2020 08:07
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MonsieurChoc posted:Definitely Delta Green, probably Fall of Delta Green although ti'S 60s Cold War instead. If you end up using Fall of Delta Green, Night Black's Agents can probably help bridge things into the 80s since it covers the more modern side of things.
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May 13, 2020 08:20
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I doubt I'll ever run a modern-era game, but it did get me thinking. So regarding eldritch tomes, it's not the physical medium of the book itself that has power, it's the knowledge contained in it. So you could put Mythos knowledge on the internet just fine. I'm imagining Geocities-looking websites with the ravings of cultists and people who have had run-ins with stuff they shouldn't have. Instead of barely-legible handwriting, there are puzzling capitalization and punctuation choices, weird spacing, sections where the writer just held down a key for way too long or even mashed the keys at random. Maybe incoherent MS Paint scrawlings and weird pictures and random animated GIFs scattered about. Most people who see this would just hit the back button immediately, because it appears to b nonsense. But there's actual Mythos knowledge there. But some people read it and are amused by it. It gains a following and becomes this world's version of Slenderman or SCP. Kids and teens even are reading it and making their own versions of it. Most of the time this just makes it difficult to sift through and find legitimate Mythos writings on the Internet... but sometimes the knowledge touches people in the wrong way. Some teens got into the news the other day for trying to kill one of their friends, and rambled on to the police interrogators that they did it to please Dagon. Probably too obvious and someone thought of all this already, but I think that's how I'd approach a modern game. Seems easier to run a 1920s game though.
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May 13, 2020 22:31
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BattleMaster posted:I doubt I'll ever run a modern-era game, but it did get me thinking. So regarding eldritch tomes, it's not the physical medium of the book itself that has power, it's the knowledge contained in it. So you could put Mythos knowledge on the internet just fine. I think this could be a hook, and I think that the idea of some kind of fanatical, careful reading of some kind of SCP-esque webpage might reveal something or even provide a smidge of Mythos is a cool idea. If you wanted to get high concept, you could say: Nothing in (for instance) the SCP archives is "actual" mythos lore in the sense of SCP-6969 actually being a thinly veiled set of instructions to cast summon/bind Nightgaunt. HOWEVER: Going through all of those things and reading them would have cumulative impacts on the human psyche and awareness - which might both "open the gates" to other topics, or in some fringe cases, allow them to make something "real." Some kind of accursed NES emulator that actually does that creepypasta stuff. You then get the question of "why do it?" but that's where you start getting a "story" as opposed to "a cool idea."
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May 13, 2020 22:37
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Nessus posted:I think this could be a hook, and I think that the idea of some kind of fanatical, careful reading of some kind of SCP-esque webpage might reveal something or even provide a smidge of Mythos is a cool idea. If you wanted to get high concept, you could say: Nothing in (for instance) the SCP archives is "actual" mythos lore in the sense of SCP-6969 actually being a thinly veiled set of instructions to cast summon/bind Nightgaunt. I’ve always liked the idea of one of those REAL SPELLS DOT COM websites that the F Plus does every year or so having some wheat to separate from the chaff in there, though I was going to have it be a ritual to summon the Organ Grinder from The Book of Unremitting Horror.
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May 13, 2020 22:42
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That's a pretty good idea. A cult could be putting out "real" creepypastas or hacked video games as part of a larger ritual. Or maybe put up by a maddened person - maybe someone who got way into the "SCP"-like stuff - who wasn't thinking about what it could do to people. I also love the idea of a real spell getting mixed into a dumb witchcraft website. Maybe planted there on purpose, or the curator of the website just made a few google queries and stole whatever they found from other websites, and just so happened one of those other websites contained the ravings of a cultist. I'm also thinking of websites that purport to have the contents of the Necronomicon because someone saw it in a movie or something (like sure, maybe Evil Dead still exists) but is just some weird fanfiction. The idea of some real stuff mixed in with people having fun is more interesting than "someone can just download Eldritch tomes!" I felt like handheld instant communication and library access would make a modern game harder to do mysteries with than a classic game but maybe it just means you'd have to refocus things a bit and really lean into what could happen with the combination of the internet and dangerous knowledge. Especially if there's a lot of copycat poo poo that may be entirely bogus or may have only small nuggets of truth in it. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 23:02 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 22:58
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It would also make perfect sense if these people found something on accident or by independent research... that could be a fun twist, make them think the creepypasta site was just a big old red herring and then SUDDENLY: SQUIDWARD OFFS HIMSELF.
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May 13, 2020 23:04
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Around 2008 I wanted to do something related to the financial crash, and came up with a scummy PowerPoint presentation that claims to have a get-rich quick system for playing the stock market. The only problem is that its mathematical system accidentally creates a connection to Daoloth. These days I’d also want to get cryptocurrency into the mix.
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May 13, 2020 23:44
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I can't find it now, but one of the Delta Green contest scenarios involves a game that's basically "Doki Doki Literature Club! meets The King in Yellow" and it's driving playtesters insane. The agents "win" if they track down and destroy every copy of the file before it gets out on the open Internet. That would be neat, especially if you had the right group for it.
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May 14, 2020 05:51
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Algorithmic content is a really rich source for horror, too. Those endless reams of Finger Family childrens' videos on YouTube have a kinda hosed-up, uncanny vibe to them -- in part, I suppose, because they genuinely are created by an inscrutable entity that doesn't understand human motivations or needs and is interested solely in predating upon us in pursuit of its own goals. It's just that in this case, its goals are maximising likes and subscribes.
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May 14, 2020 08:28
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Whybird posted:Algorithmic content is a really rich source for horror, too. Those endless reams of Finger Family childrens' videos on YouTube have a kinda hosed-up, uncanny vibe to them -- in part, I suppose, because they genuinely are created by an inscrutable entity that doesn't understand human motivations or needs and is interested solely in predating upon us in pursuit of its own goals. It's just that in this case, its goals are maximising likes and subscribes. For you see, the time would be easy to know; for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. And that isn't gonna happen if everyone's on god drat Twitter.
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May 14, 2020 09:38
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I'm actually about to start spinning off my recent Call of Cthulhu ideas into a Miskatonic Repository book of mythos organizations for modern campaigns, like the organizations in (I think) the Player's Handbook. I'm gonna have a few more than this (probably) but my main three are: --A group of nurses, doctors, etc. in Arkham whose hospital treats an unusual amount of Mythos-related injuries and ailments. Essentially a medical drama about treating patients with a mix of practical science and arcane ritual. --An organized online group of online investigators stationed around the US who've taken it upon themselves to investigate surreal internet phenomena, creepypasta/nosleep stuff, etc. in their area. They've got a coalition with local redneck militias for weaponry, but their funding is about as far below Delta Green and The Laundry type things that it can be. They're literally just internet nerds and the rednecks accompanying them, and basically only a handful (including the PCs, because duh) have ever encountered ACTUAL mythos activity. --Crimson Chevron, an FBI offshoot who specialize in Dreamlands, King in Yellow, Nyarlathotep, and other surreal, perception-altering entities. Basically a group of highly bizarre, idiosyncratic weirdos who just so happen to be FBI Certified, and can change their rigid mindset just enough to deal with bizarre goings on in the world.
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May 20, 2020 00:42
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:
I like all three ideas, but I really like this one. Might borrow it for a game
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May 20, 2020 03:51
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:--Crimson Chevron, an FBI offshoot who specialize in Dreamlands, King in Yellow, Nyarlathotep, and other surreal, perception-altering entities. Basically a group of highly bizarre, idiosyncratic weirdos who just so happen to be FBI Certified, and can change their rigid mindset just enough to deal with bizarre goings on in the world. That said, are you imagining this as like an official subgroup or more like a deliberately less wargrizzle grimacepouch Delta Green?
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May 20, 2020 05:21
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:--An organized online group of online investigators stationed around the US who've taken it upon themselves to investigate surreal internet phenomena, creepypasta/nosleep stuff, etc. in their area. They've got a coalition with local redneck militias for weaponry, but their funding is about as far below Delta Green and The Laundry type things that it can be. They're literally just internet nerds and the rednecks accompanying them, and basically only a handful (including the PCs, because duh) have ever encountered ACTUAL mythos activity. I had a similar idea for a modern investigator framework, but with online true crime fans who get drawn into Mythos activity when one of their own goes missing investigating some unsolved creepiness (in this case, the Corbitt house from The Haunting).
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May 20, 2020 15:43
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 01:33 |
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Its basically "big foot hunters find some real poo poo" sort of scenario. You can retool it to be ghost hunters or whatever super easily as well. It can also work as a framework for an actual delta green game, where they know this group has stumbled onto something (but don't have access to all the info to just send the team to get the target) and so the cell is tasked with infiltrating the group and going on the 'hunt' with them for whatever. Lots of fun moments for the GM and players as clueless NPC confidently declares its <insert bullshit pseudoscience> and they just need to <insert clearly ill advised activity>, and watch the players scramble to come up with reasons why they should do the actually smart thing. Also good chances you'll be able to seed in some sympathy pet NPCs.
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May 20, 2020 16:55
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