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You could also take a look at Cthulhu branded versions of other games, such as Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu.
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Jul 31, 2020 11:18
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I'd like to strongly second Pandemic Cthulhu, especially if your family has already played Pandemic.
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Jul 31, 2020 15:59
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It’s the best edition of Arkham Horror ever made.
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Jul 31, 2020 16:59
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Cool, lots of options! I'll run it by the rest of the crew and see what they like. Having something more co-op will be a nice change from the cutthroat tactics that occur in basically all the other games 
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Jul 31, 2020 21:26
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Yeah I looked into it and there's way more and better warnings than my initial skim found. 2020 is absolute Fuckworld and I'm on pins and needles about poo poo like this :S Of course, this means it's a bit of a hand grenade when it's used by someone like Helix's Keeper, who it sounds like only skimmed the setting or latched onto stuff which hit his Magical Realm.
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Aug 1, 2020 13:25
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Pandemic Cthulhu arrives Tuesday. Should be fun!
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Aug 3, 2020 04:58
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Warthur posted:You sure about that? In my copy various ways of resolving it are discussed on page 190-192. So, our DM very heavily lampshaded that the pit of dead souls in the ghost dimension or whatever would completely obliterate everything, even a god, that got pushed in there, so that's what we did. Then everyone who went into the dimension was instakilled. When I asked how, specificially we were supposed to deal with this and not get waxed, he kinda handwaved that we could just wait for it to leave its dimension and come into our world. Unsurprisingly, completely refusing what seems like the normal plot progression and idly waiting for an evil god to complete apotheosis involved like, dozens of rabisu mooks pouring out and an insane HP and damage monster that probably would have wiped the whole party, because we had two fighters*. He sorta trailed off and I assumed that meant he hadn't really gamed any of this out in advance was realizing the answer was 'you're hosed no matter what, happy ending scenario is a few members unwittingly swallow an instakill fishhook.' Is there a method of winning that module that doesn't rely on a cheap 'And then you all die, nyah!' ending, and doesn't depend on your Team being Seal Six? *For how much this game (base, not pulp) wants you to play some accountant or chauffeur or something, all the book-based modules I've played (as in the ones I didn't either rewrite or do up from scratch) assume most of the NPCs will be brawlers gunners. I've also asked why I have to roll SAN for seeing an embalmed dead body at a funeral but not for beating a man to death in the street with a hammer. Character creation is 'Choose a career and roll your stats. Ok, we've given you 240 skill points, of which 100 will be grounded into dumpstats you might never see used. The balance you put in brawl, persuade, and spot hidden.' I should make it clear I've had fun with this game, but it feels incredibly half-written. Like they came up with 500 character classes and didn't grow any of them out /design any modules to accomodate any of them beyond 'fighter' or 'rogue'. Or consider what sort of things actually gently caress actual humans up permanently and which ones are just sort of uncomfortable. I get this could be a me thing, but it seems like the DM has to do a lot of heavy lifting to round this game out. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 19:24
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"Beyond the Mountains of Madness" has some gunplay in it but is heavily privileged towards antarctic survival and scientific operation skills. I don't know the Berlin scenarios but your GM is bad. That also said, to some extent this is a difference in focus, the purpose of this game, its general through-line is different. They didn't include all these sample professions to give you trap options, it's because the idea is that your character is very likely an accountant or a chauffeur, and the idea is that you're having this person encounter cosmic mystery and horror and deal with it, growing, changing and being mutilated along the way. While your bad GM means that this may not be certain, you may legitimately not like this - it may bother and frustrate you when your character is not optimized in this way. That is okay! It's not bad! And there's even room to do it in Call of Cthulhu, to a certain extent.
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Aug 4, 2020 20:49
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Trying to think of some more rooms to add to Night Floors for my 1960s San Francisco game. I have a player who listened to the RPPR runthrough of the scenario and I want to throw in a couple of monkey wrenches.
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Aug 5, 2020 02:02
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Lumbermouth posted:I have a player who listened to the RPPR runthrough of the scenario and I want to throw in a couple of monkey wrenches. Make the entire apartment building and Night Floors the red herring and have Abigail actually be the one who used her credit card in Maryland after escaping the building. 
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Aug 5, 2020 03:27
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Nessus posted:"Beyond the Mountains of Madness" has some gunplay in it but is heavily privileged towards antarctic survival and scientific operation skills. I don't know the Berlin scenarios but your GM is bad.
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Aug 5, 2020 04:29
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mellonbread posted:Mountains is a superb scenario but I would not recommend it for a group whose interest in Call of Cthulhu is flagging. It has a great payoff but it takes many, many sessions of work to get there.
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Aug 5, 2020 04:36
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Nessus posted:"Beyond the Mountains of Madness" has some gunplay in it but is heavily privileged towards antarctic survival and scientific operation skills. I don't know the Berlin scenarios but your GM is bad. Yea, our GM sucked. But I was given 'Crimson Letters' to run, and there were no skill checks called out in the module to advance the plot but spot hidden, persuade, and psychology. I've had fun doing this game, but it's specifically when I choose to expand on the modules or make my own thing up. Everything that bugged me about lovely GM was his slavish devotion to the sourcebooks. Adding nothing, subtracting nothing, refusing any idea or solution not explicitly accounted for in advance. My beef is with him, but it wouldn't be nearly so boring if the sourcebook he followed like gospel assumed any player would want to explore more than 30% of the character sheet. You can argue that it's being a lovely GM to do it how he's doing it, and I agree, fully. But he kinda fell into a trap set for him with the way the modules are written. Never played one, but I assume D&D books don't allow you to create random golem hedge wizards or gnome bards then provide instruction only for what happens when a human fighter comes in and swings his sword around. The base game as sold is 70% of a good time. I get it. You made it clear a while ago that you're not interested in hearing more of my saga. Which whatever, but also, this isn't the busiest thread ever, and a guy replied to me and I'm replying to him. I sunk probably 12 hours into that stupid module and jaundiced as I might be I'm legitimately interested to see what the other potential endings were. And a good way to prove I'm up my own rear end here would be to wait for the guy who read the sourcebooks to explain how in that one module the players come to a satisfactory conclusion. PC deaths make sense and seem justified, challenges are meetable with a variety of different team compositions, etc.
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Aug 5, 2020 04:37
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That's fair, I'm not the boss of you. I imagine some of the Spot Hidden or Persuade calls are because there is a situation where it's like "OK, this guy wants to pull the trigger and fire the Cthulhu Bullet. Talk him down or wrestle him for it." And Persuade is the "talk him down" skill. Ditto "search the office for, uh, stuff" -- if someone explicitly says "I check his desk drawers," you just tell them what they find, but if they're like "We search his office," well, Spot Hidden, folks, high rolls find the knife. But for a lot of situations I would leverage all of these skills to let people seek out more information on various things. For instance, there's been a murder and people want to find out more about it -- maybe they use police/detective type skills, maybe they use antiquarian skills because someone mentioned there had been one like this ten years ago and they find evidence that there HAS been a murder like this every ten years for the last two centuries... Trail of Cthulhu kind of formalizes this practice although it puts a fair amount of improvisational work on the part of the GM. Indeed I would not be shocked if you have, accidentally, found one of the motivators for Trail of Cthulhu being authored!
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Aug 5, 2020 04:50
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Also, as an unrelated thought, your earlier example of a character made me think of a convention module - someone's going to stage a film version of some kind of "Requiem Mass for Suggie" on the soundstage across from where the Marx brothers are filming. Obviously, you name it "A Night at the Opera."
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Aug 5, 2020 05:01
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This might interest some people here: https://twitter.com/SpeaktheSky/status/1289694538257186816 I'm running a game jam (not a competition) for Trophy Dark incursions written on trifold pamphlets! It's deliberately lo-fi, no pressure to do fancy layout or art; just print-friendly text on 2 sides of paper, plus simple art if you feel like it (and it's not too hard to find royalty-free assets that'd fit). Also, you're fine to license and price your work as you see fit (aside from giving correct attribution to the Trophy Dark is a rules-light game of gothic, eco-, and psychological horror, a fusion of Cthulhu Dark (with the Insanity/Insight equivalent being 'Ruin') and a couple parts of Blades in the Dark. The SRD and default character creation options are freely available; the full game, some incursion writing advice, and an incursion are in Codex – Dark 2. There was an official incursion-writing contest last year and all the contest entries are available in the state they were entered. The characters are treasure hunters going where they shouldn't go, seeking riches and glory for recovering lost treasures in a massive forest that devoured the lands of an ancient civilisation—but basically you can do anything in any setting and genre as long as you can fit it to the structure, or rework the structure to fit the setting/genre. What structure? Well, each Trophy Dark scenario, or ''incursion', works like this:
If you're wary about having to learn to write for a system you don't know, there's a bunch of resources on the jam's page and in this thread in its forum, as well as on the Gauntlet blog, and there's a strong culture of actual play on the Gauntlet forums. There's a lot of resources out there, from youtube videos of actual play to podcasts from the publisher and writers and designers. I've also published some simple trifold pamphlet templates (I wanted them to be general-use, so unfortunately they're not set up for people to just drop text in, but incursions are already heavily structured).
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Aug 5, 2020 12:58
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UnCO3 posted:This might interest some people here: Oh man, you just reminded me there's a sequel to The Vorrh I've never read. I'd check it out if you haven't, give you a lot of good ideas.
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Aug 7, 2020 03:08
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Nessus posted:Also, as an unrelated thought, your earlier example of a character made me think of a convention module - someone's going to stage a film version of some kind of "Requiem Mass for Suggie" on the soundstage across from where the Marx brothers are filming. Obviously, you name it "A Night at the Opera." Hah. Everytime the shuggoth tries an attack, it turns out Harpo did the leg gag with its pseudopod. 
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Aug 7, 2020 03:12
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Nessus posted:if someone explicitly says "I check his desk drawers," you just tell them what they find, but if they're like "We search his office," well, Spot Hidden, folks, high rolls find the knife. Yea both of these are things I came up with independently after my first day running a module. Not trying to say I'm a genius it's just how glaringly obvious/necessary these particular tweaks are, even to people with almost no background in tabletop.
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Aug 7, 2020 03:16
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I just ran 7 people through Night Floors. God drat is that a good scenario and hoo boy is it hard to run when you have like three different groups exploring the McAllister.
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Aug 9, 2020 22:39
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Lumbermouth posted:I just ran 7 people through Night Floors. God drat is that a good scenario and hoo boy is it hard to run when you have like three different groups exploring the McAllister. What do you like about it? What makes it good?
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Aug 9, 2020 23:13
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Elendil004 posted:What do you like about it? What makes it good? It just oozes atmosphere. It's pretty modular as far as Cthulhu scenarios go, but does a fantastic job in the opening parts of setting up that something is decidedly wrong in the Macallister building. The first time one of my players said "wait, how are there six floors in a three story apartment building?" was really effective in setting the mood. I definitely modified it a bit for our 60s San Francisco game. It was a concerned girlfriend asking a fellow commune member to look for Abigail instead of a credit card tip and I decided that she could be found, but up in the Gallery of Shades assisting Hildred Castaigne with his genealogy of the True King so that the scenario could have a bit of closure instead of "examine Night Floors, leave." My players didn't burn the building to the ground and there's no Delta Green incentive to do so, so they may be back.
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Aug 10, 2020 00:28
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While our GM is bringing us through The Great Pendragon Campaign, I've been tasked with running the next long, multi-session adventure. Given my predilection for The Thing, and my groups knowledge/liking of Call of Cthulhu, we decided I should run Beyond the Mountains of Madness. Taking a huge amount of inspiration from mountainsofmadness.org/, I've decided to send my adventurer's an invitation package. As of now, it will consist of:
Eventually I'm gonna send em all some Pemmican, which they will undoubtedly hate. I'm most proud of the Nat Geo I made. It took me quite a few hours to format the fonts, line up the pages, find appropriate pictures, and make sure everything was legible. It needs a fine tooth comb edit, but I think it's really neat. I'd be happy to share the Scribus file if anyone wants to edit it for their own play group. (You need Futura font sets though.) If anyone has any feedback, I'd be happy to hear it. Edit: I've updated the Nat Geo links to the more current, spell checked and minor edited version. Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 18:04
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The only feedback is holy poo poo that's incredible. The NatGeo is fantastic.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:21
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 Yeah, uh, that's incredible. You're exceptionally talented and your players are incredibly lucky!
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Aug 16, 2020 20:42
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That is loving awesome. I wish I was better about props, they're one of my favorite bits about Cthulhu adventures.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:47
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I’m gonna post everything in an editable format so that anyone who wants to use it can do so without putting in the hours. I used Scribus and GIMP, both free open source platforms for layout and image editing. I took some modern photos and made them greyscale, adding a little lens blur to make them seem more appropriate. I’ll see if I can also find a download pack for the Futura font set. Unfortunately I don’t own the rights to any images, so keep it on the down low. Obviously I don’t have permission to use the name “National Geographic”. As far as everything goes, it’s mostly just a copy/paste job from Beyond Papers P.1 (player handout) and Appendix 2 in the book, with relevant game data removed so as to make it look like it’s an article. (Hence the “translation” caption on the Frostbite table.) I used the 1932 National Geographic as reference, and also used some of the photos they had of the Byrd Expedition. Back in the 30s they hadn’t settled into the Geographic typeface yet (a proprietary paid font set), so I kind of updated it using Futura, an era appropriate and parallel font. The MountainsofMadness website has a link to the NatGeo map I’m gonna send everyone. They cost from $10-20, but if you can ever play in person again, you’d only need one. Unfortunately my group is spread across the country, so everyone has to get their own. If anybody wants any of the resources I used, lemme know.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:52
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That is bad rear end, Dr. Lunchables. Post a pic of the entire kit before you mail it out if and when you have it together?
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Aug 16, 2020 21:44
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Nessus posted:That is bad rear end, Dr. Lunchables. Post a pic of the entire kit before you mail it out if and when you have it together? I absolutely will. It might take me a year, because we're still in the Boy King period of Pendragon, so we've got quite a few sessions left for me to spend money on physical items. edit: here's a folder with the Scribus file and the Futura font zip. Feel free to make your own copy. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uf1TaVhK-bvdZvRL7ubE63FWRJhExN57?usp=sharing double edit: I would recommend putting the Futura fonts in your Fonts folder before opening the Scribus doc, so you don't confuse the document. Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Aug 16, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 22:53
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I really appreciate Call of Cthulhu's popularity in the RPG marketplace because hot drat do I love researching for period mystery and crime games. My next campaign is going to be set in 1920s Miami and I've got two audiobooks and Golden Goblin Press's Guide to the Caribbean lined up for inspiration. I'm not even sure how much Mythos stuff I'm going to put in it.
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Aug 17, 2020 21:18
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Would it be too much to add an expedition flag (say 2’x3’) to the package? To be planted at the South Pole or the top of an unexplored peak? My wife says yes. (I’m already looking at sending everyone a 1930 copy of the Narrative of Arthur Pym)
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Aug 19, 2020 04:40
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Barring a few errors, I have now managed to convert Mountains of Madness to 7th edition, stat blocks, skills, everything. It didn't take nearly as long as I was fearing it was going to. The next step is starting to upload everything to Roll20, including finding appropriate backgrounds. The art in the book is kind of dogshit, so I'll try to find appropriate stuff. There's going to come a point in a few months where I'll have to sit down and actually edit all this slipshod work I've been doing, and I fear that day. But today is not that day!
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Aug 23, 2020 01:46
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Really been meaning to update my Masks of Nyarlathotep scenario shenanigans, but have been too busy till now. A whole lot has happened, including some of the luckiest rolls I've ever seen at the perfect times! Sorry for the absolutely huge post.. New York and London spoilers ahead! So the investigators split up, with half of them going to talk to Hilton Adams and the other half taking a train to Boston to visit Miriam Atwright at the Harvard library. This was a dead-end, as she didn't know much else about Africa's Dark Sects, and could only describe a hunting horror's smell on the day the book was stolen. Wamp wamp. The three that went to speak with Hilton learned about Mukunga's involvement with the cult, the approximate areas where the killings don't happen(all around the Ju-Ju House, hmm...) and that Hilton was definitely framed by the popo. They get Hugo out of what they termed the "Jello Prison Hospital" since Hugo could not get a jello to save his life, and then proceed to, in the late afternoon/early evening, go and break into the Ju-Ju House! Hugo picked the outside door excellently, but then absolutely fumbled his Stealth roll upon opening the front door. Luckily for him, Silas failed his listen roll EVEN HARDER so he chocked it up to his old ears playing tricks on him. They set up an ambush on either side of his doorway then shoved over a gigantic stack of African trinkets to get his attention, getting him in a chokehold once he pops out from behind the curtain. They find all his cult stuff, but he's reticent to discuss anything. They break into the basement and engage in a full-fledged shootout with the four zombie ciimbas down there, luckily the literal first shot that my cop investigator took blew the dome off of one, and when I not-so-subtly told them that body shots appear to have no effect they immediately started aiming for the head. BUT, while cop-investigator(Clint) was about to pull back the curtain to reveal the ciimba, simultaneously two of the other investigators cranked open the winch to the chakota, exposing it basically right when the zombies popped out, wamp. While everyone was busy blasting at the zombies, Hugo yelled for a gun then proceeded to... empty its chambers into the only enemy that is not hurt by bullets at all, the chakota  They killed the ciimbas, turn to Silas and are basically like "uh dude,  " Levi, the bible-thumping Southern man of justice, decides the best course of action is to gangland style execute Silas. Then they go out to their trunk and drop five sticks of dynamite into the chakota's hole, sealing the stone over it and beating feet away from this scene of heinous crime committing. And it's only 7:45pm at night, so they decide they're feeling peckish and go get some burgers, lmfao.They meet up the next day for an occult research party, and our artist-in-residence Jimmy decides to be the guinea pig and put on the Mask of Hayama. Luckily he rolls to have a vision of Nodens, who could possibly be benevolent towards them and maybe help them out! ...nope, Jimmy flubs his dialogue and Nodens just goes "kbye stupid mortal".  Clint decides they have enough evidence to get the Ju-Ju House raided, and probably shut down the cult, so they set up a meeting with Lt. Poole in Central Park, where everybody except Murray, the oldass artifacts dealer, goes to meet up, where they give him the skinny on all that's happened(minus the overtly spoopy stuff). They promise to lay low while Lt. Poole investigates, but at the exact same time the group makes this promise Murray notices a cultist staking out his first floor storefront/second floor apartment. He calls in Hilton's buddies from the war, and they ambush and absolute trounce this cultist in broad daylight at about 8am, then drag him into Murray's storefront. At this point the rest of the investigators get back and immediately go "welp there goes our promise of laying low!" So they proceed to use, for the first time in this universe, CIA torture tactics to get this idiot cultist to talk. They force-feed him booze, threaten him with Russian roulette, and convince the cultist that Hugo is off his rocker(he kinda is tbh) and will gladly do much worse if they leave him alone with the cultist, so the cultist spills allllllll the beans.They call Lt. Poole and have him come over, but not first without giving him a promise of "look we tried to lay low, buuuuuuut..." hahaha. The cultist's confession about the cult, Mukunga, Ju-Ju House, and the evidence they stole from the JJH, all amount to enough that Poole organizes a raid on JJH. An extreme group luck success has Poole find Mukunga red-handed at the JJH about to literally burn it down, so they wrapped up everything incredibly neatly! Like, honestly that luck roll I think was a 1 or a 2 so I was like well, poo poo, I'll have their main adventure be resolved so perfectly neatly that it'll hopefully give them these great expectations of doing the same thing in London, only to have them be absolutely wrecked by the Cult of the Black Pharoah.  Their trip to London is fairly uneventful; practicing some shooting, learning Spanish(lol they're never gonna need Spanish again after the Peru chapter but que sera sera), and reading Africa's Dark Sects. Upon arriving in London they go stay with Murray's aging mother(I didn't stick them in a basement, that'd be too on the nose). They head to the London Library to try to get some background info on the Carlyle expedition(what they should've already had from Erica Carlyle, but WHOOPS Hugo almost started blastin') and have a successful research day. They meet up with Mickey Mahoney at The Scoop, and he starts the meeting off with our now-most-used British phrase "OI WOT'S THIS THEN!?" I had decided if they succeeded in a Hard+ LH roll while looking into the articles that Jackson snagged from The Scoop, they'd also find an article about The Thing In The Fog.. but Jimmy fumbled his roll so instead of finding the article, he knocked over the box that it was in, which they will almost certainly realize when they go back to try to research TTITF after it attacks them(I'm really looking forward to that). Their meeting at the Penhew Foundation with Gavigan isn't until the following day, so they follow up on the story closest to them: Miles Shipley and his lizard poople spoopy paintings! They are met at Shipley's front door by his mother Bertha, really Ssathassaa wearing Bertha's skin!  I accidentally missed the part where the scenario book says Miles would show them around his paintings, so I had little ole lizard lady take them straight to the attic. I had each of the investigators look closely at a different painting, and two of them failed their SAN rolls so badly they go temporarily insane. Clint sees in one of the paintings a monster that started his investigations into the occult, screams bloody murder, then promptly passes out. Levi sees a ritualistic scene very close to something that happened to him as a child, and just goes into absolute catatonic shock. Miles rushes in upon hearing Clint's scream, and helps lizard-mom and the rest of the investigators to get Clint/Levi down to their parlour. At this point they've been in the house and passed lizard mom's main room, so I have them roll SH, which only Hugo succeeds at, to smell a very strong reptilian stench emanating from one of the rooms. Once they have Clint/Levi laying down on couches, Hugo decides to broach the smell by turning to Miles and his lizardmom and saying, in true Hugo form, "so, your house smells like a petshop. are you lizard people?" Word for word direct quote, lmfao I was going to have lizardmom and Miles slowburn this one, but, well, lizardmom is now in full-on OH gently caress mode at how these random people waltz into its home and IMMEDIATELY call it out on being a lizard poople. So she manages to charm Jimmy and Samuel and Murray to follow Miles upstairs to buy a painting, while she casts a spell on Hugo, who is watching over Levi/Clint, causing him to erupt in boils and blisters, have a grand-mal seizure, and lose consciousness. She picks his limp body up and literally throws it down the basement stairs, locking the door after him. She stalks upstairs, where she separates Jimmy and Samuel and Murray by saying Hugo has requested Samuel and Murray to come down to help with Levi, who is regaining consciousness. He heads downstairs, and as soon as he is on the ground floor she slams the door to the attic shut and enthralls(or whatever the spell name is) Jimmy very quickly with a spoopy strobing light coming from her eyes, that takes over his mind. He gets tucked away in a bedroom, while she then catches Samuel snooping around the ground floor, and again hypnotizes him. At this point the investigators are flipping their poo poo, since they just got separated in a lizard poople's murder house, and are probably going to be dinner. Murray finds lizardmom and Miles on the second floor, and manages to convey that he's freaking out cause his friends are dropping like flies, and pulls out his gun in panic. Lizardmom tries to hypnotize him, but he manages an extreme close-range success gunshot that catches her in the arm, causing her consume likeness spell to fail. Her skin sloughs off in a bubbling pile of blood and ichor, and Murray fuckin BOOKS IT the gently caress out of the house, managing to drag the catatonic but still walkable Levi with him. He slaps Levi back to consciousness, who draws his pistol, and they re-enter the lizard poople funhouse, oh boy! They wake Clint up, and find Hugo(who pooped himself cause he fumbled a CON check to regain consciousness  ) and the rest of the gang, before properly exploring the house. I had Ssathassaa decide to totally bail once Murray escape, so they find Miles body completely eviscerated, and the lizard poople gateway painting in the attic missing. But they take relevant spoopy paintings with them, as well as finding Miles stash of the Plutonian drug. Hugo puts on a pair of very ill-fitting pants he stels from Miles, to cover up his dookie, before they call the police to report the anonymous murders, giving the British popo the amazingly British name "Willoughby TweedBottom III"Phreow, that's a lot of writing! I'm going to break it up into another post that I'll write later on, but goddamn are we having a blast. It's definitely less spoopy and serious than I anticipated, but that's just making it even more ridiculous, and will make the first investigator death/crackping sanity that much more serious. They don't think they're invincible, but I have a feeling they definitely feel more safe than they should, which I am going to start challenging with Gavigan's methods of intimidation.
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Aug 30, 2020 16:47
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I'm starting to plan out my next campaign, which will be a published CoC campaign (almost certainly Masks of Nyarlahotep, with Beyond the Mountains of Madness as a dark horse contender. My issue is that each one has a couple of red flags that I know I need to deal with, so I wanted to hear from people that have played them and how things shake out in practice. For the record I'll be doing this on Fantasy Grounds as an all-text, no-voice experience (partially as a throwback experiment to the days of MUDs), and recruiting soon. My big thing with Masks is the notorious lethality. For me, Mythos campaigns are all about the slow decay of body and mind, and how that reveals/changes things about the investigators. I want players to build investigators they care about, and want to put on the metaphorical dissection table to see how they tick - and I'm concerned that doesn't clash with the liberal application of dynamite & tommyguns that busting up the various cults requires. However, I still want to keep the inherent lethality of guns & magic that are built into the setting, as that's a way to build mood and create tension. On paper, it seems like it should be reasonable to make the encounters more survivable by paring down the number of participants but (mostly) keeping their armaments the same. I'd like to make the chapter climaxes more about investigation & planning than charging in guns blazing. Then there is BtMoM, which I feel better suits my inclinations about mood & tone, but is notoriously....dense. Like, fall-asleep-on-a-glacier-and-never-wake-up dense. Do the logistical challenges play out overly dry, or is it a matter of the players getting into the spirit of slowly freezing to death (I feel like The Terror is a good touchstone here, in either book or TV form) and letting them turn the screws on each other and the NPCs? I've always been fascinated by the possibilities of literal player versus environment gaming, but Antartica feels like starting that on hard mode. Also, I loving hate HATE the climax of the adventure and would absolutely need to create alternate paths to success. Anyone played a game of Masks with the pulp turned down, or BtMoM and enjoyed (almost) freezing to death?
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Sep 1, 2020 22:26
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Played a game of the Laundry RPG. THE BOOK The book was written around the time of Fuller Memorandum. Content from the later novels is covered in later splats. I don't know how far exactly, but at least up to Apocalypse Codex. The core rules do a good job of summarizing the setting of the books, while also extrapolating some original stuff that fits with the established world. The system is a clone of CoC 6e with a few rules changes. The magic system is new, designed to reflect the cosmology and mechanics of the setting. We didn't dive into it at more than a superficial level, but there's a big focus on preparing various dirty tricks to cast spells without paying the full cost yourself. Writing and running rituals on your phone, so you don't have to compute the occult equations yourself and open your brain up to the Feeders. There are also rules for ritual and gutter magic. These function closer to default CoC spellcasting, but also carry the risk of deadly miscast effects and eventual Krantzberg-Godel Spongiform Encephalopathy. There's a budgeting minigame where you roll your Bureaucracy and Accounting skills and spend points from a pool to acquire personnel, items, magic spells, intelligence, and trainings that raise your characters' skills. At its best, it's a fun way to gamify the "bureaucratic horror" elements of the novels. At its worst, it's a painful extension of the usual "everyone spends an hour searching the gear list and arguing over what they might need before the game can actually begin". For a setting with such a big focus on bureaucracy and established procedures, some "standard issue" gear loadouts for different mission types would have been great. It had the usual bullshit Call of Cthulhu hair splitting on skills. Separate percentile ratings for Knowledge: Occult, Science: Thaumaturgy, and Sorcery. Separate skills for punching people versus grappling them. A skill for every conceivable sub-type of firearm. You know the drill. THE SESSION I was thinking about making a Plumber who was also an actual plumber, but one of the other professions in the table of organization caught my eye. So began the saga of Argo Klamm, Grade 1 Shoggoth Keeper, and his faithful companion Douglas. Douglas was a rescue. Some chavs in Lambeth were feeding him people and getting high off the liquid he spat out. They were drinking the Elder Thing equivalent of brake fluid, and it would have eventually killed them anyway, even if the Laundry hadn't intervened. I rolled badly for INT, so the Shoggoth had one more point of intelligence than its handler. Fair play to the Keeper for letting me get away with this character concept, while coming up with interesting challenges that couldn't just be smashed by a 20 ton ball of tar. There were two other players, who both grabbed pregens rather than deal with the headache of the character creation rules. A necromancer from Residual Human Resources, and an MI5 spy conscripted into the Laundry. The adventure we played was LAMBENT WITCH, from the Black Bags scenario book. In the first act of the scenario, the players are emergency deployed to an oil rig in the North Sea, which just pumped up an ancient evil from the depths of the North Sea and became infested with brain-devouring exonomes. The players get to command an SAS squad from the Artists Rifles, so if everyone brought computer scientists and librarians the scenario doesn't flounder and die in the first combat encounter. It's not just a meatgrinder of mindless shooting, though. There are rooms to explore, computers to hack, files and handouts to read, puzzles to solve, and magic spells to cast and un-cast. A couple characters from the novels make appearances, in situations that don't feel stupid or obviously crowbarred in. Call of Cthulhu works best if the players aren't already intimately familiar with the source text, but I worry that Laundry RPG might have the opposite problem. Hypothetically, you could run the game with people who had never heard of the books, and start their characters off as similarly clueless neophytes, who slowly gain an understanding of the world of magic and mystery around them. In practice, if LAMBENT WITCH is any indication, the game is quite demanding of the players' specific setting knowledge. The specific example I'm thinking of is the feeders aboard the oil rig. At the beginning of the scenario, the players are told that camera footage of the platform showed people with glowing green eyes. Anyone familiar with the novels knows this is a sign of feeders - low level "information predators" that slip into our world through improperly cast magic spells and infect people's brains, spreading from person to person via touch contact, converting victims into mindless zombies. The proper response to a feeder infestation is to grab a high level ward, load your weapon with banishment rounds, and pull on a suit of painter's coveralls with a full face mask. If nobody in the group has this setting-specific knowledge, the consequences can be game ending. There's a specific point in the scenario where anyone wearing anything less than a Class Three ward is subject to possession by roving spirits. The ward player characters get by default is Class Two (though this is never mention in the chargen section, only the gear list). Being possessed is survivable, if you're exorcised within minutes equal to your character's POW score. Anything beyond that and your brain is too full of holes. And exorcism also requires specialized knowledge and equipment. We had a couple veterans of the series, so we were fine. The second act of the scenario is a little weaker. The players discover that the shoggoths siphoned off the ocean floor, along with the binding stone that kept them dormant, have been shipped to a secret MI6 facility in Scotland. This section is basically a mandatory combat encounter with some machine gun wielding security guards, and a Shoggoth Lord for a boss fight. Thankfully, the security cameras at the facility are all backdoored with the SCORPION STARE network, meaning a single phone call allows the players to delete the entire garrison in a haze of excited silicon atoms and gamma radiation. Thankfully, the conclusion isn't as railroaded, offering the players a few different outcomes, along with a description of what happens in the broader world if each is chosen. I wrote a little debriefing for afterward. The world of Laundry is more interactive than default Call of Cthulhu. The players have more options for dealing with the supernatural than just running away or blowing it up. Letting the players systematically manipulate magical energy, creatures, etc robs them of their mystery, but is also more interesting and fun than just "wow that's hosed up, roll SAN". As a result, Laundry doesn't really work as a horror game. But in my opinion, neither does Call of Cthulhu, most of the time. Laundry lacks the mechanical quality of life improvements that 7E or Delta Green bring to the Call of Cthulhu system, but I'd play it again. The developers understood what people liked about the book series, and what made a fun RPG, and combined the two wherever they could. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 18:21
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I'm doing a little photoessay about the current state of my Beyond the Mountains of Madness intro package that I plan to send to my players. I can't share this with anyone that I'll be playing with, so you guys are unfortunately my only outlet. Prepare for a buttload of pictures. First we have the 1932 National Geographic Antarctica maps, which I've managed to find enough copies of for all my players as well as one for myself.   Next we have the HP Lovecraft Historical Society Nansen Passport. You can buy these direct from their store and they come with...   ... customs stamps and stickers (to be used as rubber stamps over the customs stamps). The passports are set up for a globetrotting Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, but I was able to use some of the locations. They didn't have everything I needed, so I mocked up a rubber stamp for panama, which I printed on Avery clear label sheets. The Panama duties stamp is printed on lick-n-stick perforated paper. I ended up buying some 1930s printed proofs of real duties stamps that I scanned and formatted. Unfortunately I think it's a little too large, so I've got some smaller stamp sheets coming in the mail.   Newsclippings, printed on real news stock, via Geedunk. I printed both sides for that real authentic advertising broadsheet feel.   Bravado letters from Starkweather. I printed these using the Geedunk letterhead on heavy manila stock, then typed em up using my typewriter. I'm a huge fan of signing off from letters with "Dictated but not read," because it means your never-thanked secretary is literally typing as you make stupid proclamations. Also shows what kind of guy Starkweather is from the get-go.  The invitation letter from Moore. The whole thing is written in Lovecraft's own script. I cribbed the first three sheets from Mountains of Madness, who I've stolen a ton of inspiration from. I also wrote up (using HP Lovecraft's handwriting font) a short manifesto of the things contained within the package, as well as a sign off page.   Miskatonic University hardcover journals. These were from redbubble, and while a little expensive, should be a real nice gift for my players that like to take physical notes. I ordered an extra one for myself, cause I like em so much. It says "Liber Ivonis Eibon" on the spine (a little over-printed, but whatever) which I think is a fun little easter egg.  What good is a journal without a proper pen? I've always been of the mind that writing with a nibbed pen kinda takes you out of yourself and makes you think in the way someone without access to a million disposable pens would. The simple problem of how to make strokes to make sure the ink flows is enough to jostle the uninitiated. These are, of course, disposable fountain pens, but it will still do the trick. I've often bought boxes of these pens and small moleskines to give to players for in-person games, encouraging them to keep a journal of day to day activities as we adventure.  A USB drive, in metal, shaped like a key. Currently within that drive is:
  Finally, the packaging. The journals all came in re-sealable plastic bags, so I threw the pen in there and taped the USB Key to the outside. I placed all the stamps and stickers inside the passport and threw them in a ziploc so they wouldnt get damaged or lost in the big manila envelope. I used a comicbook bag and board to protect the map and the newsclippings. Cant let 90 year old maps get banged up during shipping. So what's left? Well, I've still gotta get expedition patches made, as well as print a copy of Starkweather's business card for everyone. I'm in the process of printing and mocking up the next round of handouts and letters, which I'm keeping in a separate manila envelope for now. There's a few handouts the players get when they arrive in Antarctica, so the later stuff is on the back burner. I've fully converted the 6e adventure to 7e rules (thanks for the free trial of Acrobat Pro, Adobe), but now I've gotta really read the thing in detail and start roadmapping and outlining my adventure. Beyond that, I need to get images and music to plug into Roll20. I plan on keeping a copy of everything I've ever sent and worked on, so when the adventure concludes, I'll have all kinds of extra poo poo to add to another one of these posts. In the mean time, I'm prepping to run Dead Man's Stomp for some new players this October. I have plans to give everyone a player binder with rules hints and all that jazz. I will post a giant photobomb when I get that assembled. My apologies for the massive size of this, and for everyone on mobile who has to load those images. e: I'm always open to ideas. If you think "man, it sure would be cool of my Keeper sent me X before a game" I wanna hear about it. Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 21:29
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So, this is a little weird, but have any of you ever heard of the Kaiserreich mod for Hearts of Iron 4? It has Germany winning WWI due to US non-intervention. The important thing is, it has a 4 way US Civil War between leftists, fascists, a MacArthur coup, and the pacific states. I plan on using Acthung! Cthulhu to run a campaign where the characters are members of the left-wing rebel movement. Now, I need to revamp the stuff in the rulebook to fit with the new geopolitical scene. I've already figured the fascists should be using mythos stuff, but I need a way to filter that through the intense christian fundamentalism of the southern US, where that faction is based. Canada, where the royal family has fled to after a revolution against them established a left-wing government, takes and puppets new england during the fighting, so they will be the antagonist during the second phase of the game and the true source of the mythos weapons the fascists use. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to them.
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Sep 13, 2020 23:17
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Well, Huey Long is the leader of the America First Party, and Louisiana has always had an interesting relationship with Christianity. Hoodoo, Santeria, spiritism and witch doctors all have a little bit of Jesus in there. Think of the church stuff in True Detective. Something old lives in the swamps. There is a perversion of any religion that travels to the region, and it mutates into something new, something... uniquely Louisiana. Also considering Huey Long’s love of grift, patronage, and salt of the earth hokism, I could see his old town church rising through the ranks with him. He probably has a cousin in some position within there. Long loves a story, an anecdote; but most of all he loves power. It would be foolish to assume he doesn’t see the importance of the church in the American south. And don’t forget that the people loved him. He fixed roads, built schools, and actually improved the infrastructure. That patronage means little kickbacks for everyone in his sphere. But maybe the power he’s inherited is flawed; or tainted. Like everything that comes to Louisiana: it is changes by the landscape. E: could be he puts a church up in every region, quickly staffed by old Louisiana preachers. There’s no love of the Catholic Church at that time in the south, so maybe standing southern Baptist churches are infiltrated. The churches, and maybe the source of Long’s power and influence, could he provided by the royals. But maybe he twisted it. Maybe it’s not being used the way they thought it would be. Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 23:35
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Mycroft Holmes posted:So, this is a little weird, but have any of you ever heard of the Kaiserreich mod for Hearts of Iron 4? It has Germany winning WWI due to US non-intervention. The important thing is, it has a 4 way US Civil War between leftists, fascists, a MacArthur coup, and the pacific states. I plan on using Acthung! Cthulhu to run a campaign where the characters are members of the left-wing rebel movement. Now, I need to revamp the stuff in the rulebook to fit with the new geopolitical scene. I've already figured the fascists should be using mythos stuff, but I need a way to filter that through the intense christian fundamentalism of the southern US, where that faction is based. Canada, where the royal family has fled to after a revolution against them established a left-wing government, takes and puppets new england during the fighting, so they will be the antagonist during the second phase of the game and the true source of the mythos weapons the fascists use. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to them. If you are going with the latter then you could probably make a lot of hash out of one specific thing that the fascist folks are doing, whatever that might be. For instance, perhaps their New Order Garbage Mysticism Neo-Religion just happens to have a lot of oceanic stuff and they have a lot of gold specie around, which seems to come through (insert appropriate coastal location, IDK this setting; Cape Fear in North Carolina is appropriate). Weird! Wonder what's up with THAT. As for the fundamentalism of the southern US, if you are aiming for historical accuracy the Christian fundamentalists might be potential allies in this period, or at least, the great political realignment that made the evangelicals staunch rightists has not happened, and might never do so. Character concept: Liberation theology -- or perhaps inventing the Chick Tract a little early and distributing the Elder Sign. And of course, snake handling churches all but have a big sign out front saying "DEAR YIG: PLEASE COME TAKE US OVER." If you would like the heroes to be able to call on a Mythos ally of their own, why, there is a pan-ethnic religious group spread throughout the world already, rules as written; one which has a remote fastness and which seeks to bring the world to a place where people will be able to shout and revel with joy and something something something and anyway at that point the Old Ones shall return and teach us new ways to etc. etc. It would not be hard to slightly alter emphasis and make the "Cthulhu cult" a mystery religion, and to mash up the Internationale with "Octopus's Garden." Perhaps the dolphins know more than they seem to... e: A somewhat less awesome but significantly more "tactically realistic" option might be the left front getting support from the mi-go, who presumably realize the monkey boys are starting to twig on and the space-horse has left the space-barn. All they want to do is mine weird rare deep-earth minerals, so arranging for a friendly government to seize New England - through discreet inquiries, you understand, perhaps through a party of mediators - isn't the worst idea. e2: What year is the Kaiserreich stuff happening in? The events recorded in the original "The Call of Cthulhu" story happened in March of 1925, suggesting that the stars were at least kind of right at the time. And there might not be any meddling Norwegians in the area if one were to go to the south Pacific and try to find a certain place and help wake someone up. Nessus fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 23:43
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I just have to say you are an absolute madman and your players are super lucky. Dr. Lunchables posted:Something old lives in the swamps. There is a perversion of any religion that travels to the region, and it mutates into something new, something... uniquely Louisiana. There is something that lives in those swamps. From the Call of Cthulhu quote:In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire. Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 00:05
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