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Mycroft Holmes posted: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. The British royal family? The same royal family that included Nazi sympathizer Edward VIII?  Pictured: your campaign's big bad?
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Sep 14, 2020 00:35
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mellonbread posted: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. This is a really nice way to do cthulhuesque horror. The whole point of the genre is that all the guns in the world are no use to you if you don't properly understand what you're up against -- so why not give the players lots of guns and minions to point them, and lots of opportunities to point them at the wrong thing? mellonbread posted:the game is quite demanding of the players' specific setting knowledge. This is totally unforgivable though. If I wanted to be tested on my knowledge of a bunch of books I'd be at a quiz, not an RPG.
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Sep 14, 2020 10:52
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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. As to zealot fundies siding with Cthulhus, Zack Parson has a whole series with this as a jumping off point: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/insidious-beast-hand/1/ editing cause you were asking for rulebook stuff and I went on one about my own modules that I've aready discussed anyway. Gonna leave this here though: Anyway, not like you have to make your lefties bad guys also, but I like the whole 'no way out/no good options' of the Cthulhu mythos stories. People had fun though, and I've found the best part of a homebrew is you can create stuff directly at your players, instead of trying to invest them in someone else's writing. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 17:51
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Anyone ever read Hospital by Toby Litt? I'm toying with the idea of doing a one-off in the same kind of setting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_(novel) Litt initially adopts a realistic tone, portraying several conventional scenarios associated with medical drama, including a nurse's romantic interest in a doctor, the arrival of a coma patient from another hospital, a young boy's stomach-ache (which he believes to be the result of an apple tree growing from a seed he had earlier swallowed), and the medical troubles of other patients. As the novel progresses, situations become increasingly surreal, as the ritual slaughter of a baby by Satanist doctors causes an impenetrable fog of implicitly supernatural origin to beshroud the hospital, impeding contact with the outside world. As the young boy continues to search for an exit, various bizarre events occur: a group of patients begin to worship the comatose man who had been transferred into the hospital earlier that evening; meat in character's stomachs regenerates into the animals it had been taken from, ripping their torsos open; and the young boy's fear that an apple tree is growing inside of him is realised. Wikipedia doesn't make it super clear but basically no one can die, or even stay hurt, everyone heals (or rather their 'bodily integrity' is always restored, see the animals reviving and a really squick scene with a woman who was giving birth when the weirdness came down I'd definitely skip). I really like the idea of there being essentially no way to physically die, other than being put into the fog and this leads to mental insanity, as since people still feel pain, torture and violence become widespread once society breaks down into full on Lord of the Flies with Satanists. The best way to do it would be to have a character get mortally wounded/killed, as them magically coming back all of a sudden in the OR, wounds instantly stitching up and all, would be an immediate 'Ruh-roh, Raggy' for the group and give them an intro to the idea of what they're dealing with. Hell I could have a scalpel or foreceps get sealed up inside that leaves them incapacitated with pain until someone cuts it out (anaesthesia and other drugs also don't really work for the same reasons, everyone's basically Wolverine). Basically I feel like gameplay would be faster and crazier if jumping down a 5-story elevator shaft to escape (or just beat someone down the stairs) is a totally valid strategy, as long as your SAN can take having your shinbones pushed through your chest cavity and dealing with the pain for a minute or so. Anyway, I'd like it to seem like a natural transition from the usual unexpectly old tomb in a pyramid or a speakeasy with a fish-man in the back to a left turn that happens before anyone quite realizes. Opening the scenario with 'Ok, rolling a d6... Joe, your guy is shot to death, you're bleeding on the street' is cheap and weird, as would be any opening scene that just functions as a cattle chute to get someone killed/incapacitated with no escape. I'd also like it to be a PC that's hurt for the stakes, not like, the group is visiting somone's sick aunt. Could be I'm asking too much here, but any ideas? PipHelix fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 18:11
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PipHelix posted:Anyway, I'd like it to seem like a natural transition from the usual unexpectly old tomb in a pyramid or a speakeasy with a fish-man in the back to a left turn that happens before anyone quite realizes. Opening the scenario with 'Ok, rolling a d6... Joe, your guy is shot to death, you're bleeding on the street' is cheap and weird, as would be any opening scene that just functions as a cattle chute to get someone killed/incapacitated with no escape. I'd also like it to be a PC that's hurt for the stakes, not like, the group is visiting somone's sick aunt. Could be I'm asking too much here, but any ideas? If you want to introduce this idea IMMEDIATELY you could do something of a split scene where the character who rolled an 11 while having 9 HP is in surgery - and wakes up on the table. If you want a slower burn and might enjoy borrowing from Silent Hill, open the scenario with a luck roll - winners take 1 HP, losers take 1D4 HP - and the reason is that the car they were in got suddenly run off the road!! And flipped!! But they're all fine, just bruises. (In actual fact they were all nearly killed but the curse recovered their bodily injury.) e: So my greater point is that you can just have some drunk rear end in a top hat plow into them in an interstitial scene at any point
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Sep 14, 2020 22:21
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Nessus posted:Contrive slightly to have some social connections among the PCs - doesn't have to be everyone but, say, two of them are related or they're two/three couples. Then at your opening ask them all to roll 2D6 and explain that play will begin with everyone down that many HP, due to the car accident they were in on their way to their cabin in the woods. I actually talked to the DM of my current game and he's down. I'm gonna get a little tap on the shoulder next time we're about to get into a situation that will likely end with a PC hosed up on a lifeglug in some ICU somewhere so I have my notes ready (I had to specify, that like, being dragged off by ghouls or eaten whole by some hellbeast isn't gonna work for the intro). So like, we get in a fight, someone gets their neck snapped or gutshot or whatever, combat resolves, DM pushes his chair back and I plop down and like, narrate him or her being carried off in an ambulance, does anyone go with them, do they comfort them, what is said, what do they do as they wait around for surgery, , do they... maybe go to the cafeteria and have a burger (hee hee) and as EKG starts flattening out do they have any final meaningful words... followed by a flash, everyone gets a blinding migrane for a second, the dying PC seals up in as grotesque a manner as I can imagine, followed by shouts of joy and screams of pain and horror throughout the halls, and scene, see you all next week to figure out what the gently caress. Lots of development yet to do but, idea is the 'coma man' is/was a powerful Mythos cultist who hosed up a dimensional gateway spell and fried his mind, at the moment of braindeath his dying psyche split a bubble of the universe off into limbo. The satanist doctors, the nuns working as nurses, the janitor who is secretly a Santeria/Obeah/Cernobog priest (depending on what part of Europe we're in when this happens) will all assume it's something to do with them, and send the team off on random bloody goose chases that will mostly just serve to show how out of their depth everyone is (and give them someone who can interpret the tattoos and scars on the coma man, or his journals if they can find his personal effects). Unless/until I come up with a better idea the best option for escaping will be cutting him open and climbing through, and since he's the only one who can be physically harmed and die, there won't be enough time for *everyone* to go through before his body dies. And when the cultist dies every mind trapped in the bubble dies with him. So anyone who escapes wakes up in an Andrea Doria ghost ship of a hospital with everyone dead, but bodily completely free of whatever disease or injury or disfigurement brought them there in the first place. A good 'No good ending' since by escaping the way they do they're condemning at least a couple dozen innocent people, but there's no way to get more than like five or six people out even if the group all sacrifice themselves and stay behind. Good chance for the 'dead' PC to die staving off the rest of the hospital, while at the same time introducing some noble doctors or nurses and such that the player might want to pick up as a replacement. Or who knows they could greedily fight to be the first one through to get a deathmulligan and leave someone else in the party stranded. Just now had a brainwave that I can handwave away Pediatrics by saying a polio outbreak required the whole hospital to be cleared of children except for like, one or two moppets who were stuck in iron lungs. That way it's a small enough population the group can have a Newt to keep safe (or I can just decide they're hiding if the group doesn't go looking for them) and we don't have to worry about what happens to the kids in the hospital when it goes Grand Guignol. Like, I'm just gonna steal shamelessly from the book and that book gets nasty. Opioid addicts smashing up the pharmacy, satanist doctors torturing people to escape, etc.etc. If anyone asks what about the adults (I honestly dunno what the implications are for polio infections in adults, I'm not 95 years old) I'm just gonna slowly repeat that There. Are. No. Children. In. This. Hospital. and hope that's both the end of the discussion and some drat good foreshadowing. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Sep 15, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 22:43
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On the topic of children in the place: If it's in the modern day there is likely a separate Children's Hospital building, and you'd obviously be in the trauma ward to start with, so you might have a moppet or two but not giant mobs. On the patsy: My suggestion is (if you want a classic horror thing rather than just a "horrible bizarre poo poo is happening" scenario) to have the cultist be a knowing wizard who nonetheless, due to exposure to bad poo poo and being such an rear end in a top hat that even other cultists didn't come to visit, is dying on tubes in a ward. Their mentality could manifest in the area, with text drops and so forth, and the group can make their way to go kill the guy in the bed - he might be able to snap off a spectral razor or something but this is, basically, a murder. They just have to find him and apply fists. And yet -- what if his prayers to his dark gods that led to this horrible offering were to be delivered from this rotting shell? DID the magic fail?
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Sep 15, 2020 20:35
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So the Haunting was a hit with my group and I'll be running an altered Edge of Darkness, linked to it by a few changes. Marian Allen is already linked to the Chapel of Contemplation, making it slightly more explicit he learned some of his sorcery from the sinister Pastor Michael Thomas (my group has hit on him as a *weird* element of the whole Corbitt mystery and so he'll probably become a campaign problem). But the issue I take with the adventure is that you're dealing with a monster in the attic who can leave the house and hunt a little, but not far, as the wards are only just failing. The entire adventure is just going into the house and repeating a chant for 2 hours while the monster tries to freak you out or interrupt without being able to directly interfere; the mechanics are mostly just rolling Sanity and hoping it goes well without really making any decisions or discovering any clues or making preparations beyond 'have one PC standing by with the trusty BAR in case of trouble'. What are some suggestions for things I could add to put some more decisions and strategy into this instead of just the PCs trying to survive a bunch of San rolls? The final plot of the Thing is just showing itself and hoping someone loses more than 5 on a d8 to disrupt them at the finish line, and that feels like a weak final challenge or last emergency.
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Sep 15, 2020 20:41
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Nessus posted:On the topic of children in the place: If it's in the modern day there is likely a separate Children's Hospital building, and you'd obviously be in the trauma ward to start with, so you might have a moppet or two but not giant mobs. It's 1930s, I'm just gonna handwave it with some polio filler. I like that it *isn't* recognizeable horror but (assuming I set the scene right) is pretty horrific. Gonna try to run it in 3 or 4 3 hour sessions, so by the time the group has their head around the new rules the door is barricaded against the rest of the hospital, whichever doctor or whoever they ally with is hooking the patient up to transfusion bags to keep him alive long enough for them to climb through and readying the bonesaw. I'm a big Coen Brothers fan and one of my favorite things about them is in their best movies, *no one* knows what's going on. Lots of people think they do, they're wrong, and every action they take based on their wrong ideas makes things worse and more complicated for everyone else. So yea, I like the idea that this guy was a pretty leveled-up wizard who still nonetheless bit off more than he could chew, and at least three religious factions are all going to claim credit for/insight into the situation and immediately go to meaningless, futile war with each other and try to enlist the group The way I keep it from becoming a total wild goose chase is at the end of the 2nd module, if they haven't explored or asked around enough to learn of the cultist, well, the rest of the shell-shocked, terrified people in the hospital will have found him and begun forming opposing cults centered on the McGuffin (Cult A: Maybe if we revive him it will all be over? Cult B: Maybe if we KILL him it will all be over, Cult C:NO! He's been spared this torment, he must remain asleep! Nun Nurses: You're all heretics! Satanist doctors: No, over here, look at US WE'RE running things now! Service level pagan cultists: Silently working the corners and using access keys to cut power/water/gas to unfavored levels, loot drugs from the pharmacy/non-meat food from the cafeteria to gain the allegiance of the jonesing and starving ex-patients) The intent is to sketch these groups out, let the players decide who they want to ally/fight with and only flesh those out. That way it seems like a huge world with lots of possibilities but I am not working a full time job prepping the next week.
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Sep 19, 2020 15:28
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Night10194 posted:The entire adventure is just going into the house and repeating a chant for 2 hours while the monster tries to freak you out or interrupt without being able to directly interfere; the mechanics are mostly just rolling Sanity and hoping it goes well without really making any decisions or discovering any clues or making preparations beyond 'have one PC standing by with the trusty BAR in case of trouble'. Ooof I've hated the modules I've played that end like that. It takes (at least) two characters completely out of the action for the climax. In the one I did that called for it, I skipped the chant and made it so that they find at the end the ritual required a human sacrifice, and had them deal with a couple unpleasant npcs along the way. They killed most of them outright, but for reasons of timecrunch/police interference threw one of them, unconscious, into their trunk. And still by the time they got to the end they'd completely forgotten him and had almost resolved to murder the most annoying PC before someone recalled he was in there. I'm 'always give people something to actively be doing'. In the lovely games I've played, the one main thread is player boredom and disengagement. "Your turn. Yea, I'm what, just chanting? Yea for another two hours. Ok, I keep chanting then, I guess." Bleh. E: Or, OR, make it clear from the start that whoever is chanting when the ritual is complete gets, like, knowledge of a (not terribly powerful) spell or something. So that the booknerd characters have something to look forward to by game over, as they're huddled into a corner mumbling while the brawlers defend them in epic battles for the next two hours. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Sep 19, 2020 |
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Sep 19, 2020 15:38
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PipHelix posted:Cthulhu Megathread: I'm just gonna handwave it with some polio filler. 
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Sep 19, 2020 17:11
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PipHelix posted:It's 1930s, I'm just gonna handwave it with some polio filler. Even in "The Fog" it took a few hours!
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Sep 19, 2020 22:43
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Nessus posted:My only comment here then would be that it would be more versimilitudinous if the PCs wake up late, or had to go through some other area that caused a time warp, because I do think it would take people somewhat more than a few minutes to form fratricidal religious orders and such. Oh sorry. Let me explain. You straight up can not die (or at least, stay dead), but also can not leave. It's going to take a while for people to get over the 'ok this is weird but lets just keep it together until help comes.' or 'Holy poo poo I can walk/see/breathe again!' to 'Kill The Pig, Slit It's Throat, Drink It's Blood!' Think Groundhog Day. I believe Bill Murray is supposed to be trapped in Punxatawney for literal years of the same day. It's my intention that I'm going to give the players a hospital, a very lightly sketched out set of new mechanics (clue 1: Their friend walking out of the morgue saying something like "holy poo poo you guys I died and I'm alive and I literally watched my chest stitch itself up, here are all the friends I made letting ex-corpses out of coldboxes!) and a cast of NPCs to interact with and just let them run. If the PC's get stumped for something to do, I'll give them a prompt along the lines of 'A week passes... No word reaches the hospital from outside, no one who ventures into the Fog returns. A thoroughly panicked night porter with a wife and newborn at home made the attempt with a rope around his waist. The second he was enveloped the rope fell to the ground, cleanly severed at the point it entered the fog. No further attempts have been made.' 'Another week passes. On Wednesday (?) evening (??) a doctor suffered a mental breakdown, and began hurling invective at anyone near him. It got so bad a nurse snapped and stabbed him through the eye with a letter opener. After he recovered from the shock, he bludgeoned her to death with a paperweight, precipitating a bloodbath melee between doctors and nurses that mostly demolished the resident's lounge and half the administration wing before tempers cooled. A cabal of doctors have since announced they are reserving the entire top floor as their personal domain. Anyone caught trespassing will be flung from the roof. Repeat offenders will be stripped before hand and their personal effects appropriated or burnt." 'Two weeks pass, and with them the Food Riots like a passing fad. The experience of starvation has become so universal and common that people have more or less stopped even commenting on it. The crowds at the hospital chapel that had been thinning, essentially tail to zero. Nuns are a less common sight, suggesting some of the sisters have abandoned the habit for secular clothing and membership in one of the Floor Gangs, Coma Cults or suicide by Fog. Sister Christian Motorin (yea I love bad jokes and I can not lie) remains, faithful to the end. She might welcome the company and a chance to unburden herself.' Don't want it to be railroady, but since I'm also REALLY switching things up here, the only thing I can guarantee my players is that the experience will be novel. So I want them out quick enough (in real people time) the novelty can't wear off. The two weaknesses are that you can full-on-die by entering the Fog, which I'm certain will be exploited but it is canon and anyway I need a way to keep them all in the hospital. Second is that the coma guy is very clearly Capital S Special. In the immediate aftermath, I'm gonna say no one is going to pay him much mind, they were just cured of, like, bone cancer. Or they're studying the cured with the idea of becoming the world's most famous doctor, or a saint, or the Antichrist. So the PCs won't know about him unless someone declares they're going ward by ward bed by bed to Figure This poo poo Out. After that but before society breaks down, the doctors and nurses and nuns are going to be highly defensive of him, because of their oaths and because he's their last link to normalcy (and the secret satanist doctors/administrators are going to want to monopolize access to him). After it's all the way broke down, he's basically going to be Haram Es Sharif for every splinter cult in the place. A very fragile peace that the PCs can exploit by siding with one or another group and steal him away in the confusion. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Sep 20, 2020 |
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Sep 20, 2020 02:32
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EDIT: I didnt read far enough in the keeper guide I'm running Highway of Blood which is a 1970s grindhouse film kind of scenario. The players are in a prog/metal band touring through the southwest. Tonight's session is a prologue that will help everyone remember how to play so I want to give them a fist fight, a short car chase, and some sanity loss via LSD to get them familiar with the game mechanics. That way when we get to the real fights and car chases of the scenario, hopefully I wont have to remind everyone how to do those things. Anybody here run this scenario before? First few sessions are linear and then it's a big sandbox. ape!!! fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Sep 23, 2020 |
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Sep 23, 2020 20:36
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Ran a game of Laundry RPG. I have to retract some of my praise for the Budgeting, Training and Magic subsystems I handed out in my previous post. The ideas behind all three are great, but the math just doesn't work. Budgeting In the budgeting mini game, you get a budget of points to spend. 25 for a moderately important mission, 50 for a serious one, more for an apocalyptic mission. When you want to spend your mission budget, you roll a D100 versus the Status score of the player character requesting the item or service. If you roll under, you get the item without spending anything. If you roll over, you pay the difference out of the mission budget. If you run out of mission budget, you can try a Bureaucracy roll to pay for it out of your departmental budget instead (though this will have consequences for you later). The difficulty of the Status roll can be modified based on how soon you need the the thing, how expensive or difficult the thing is to get, what priority level your mission is, etc.
At the end of the game, if you have money left over in your mission budget, you can spend it to send your characters to skill training. This is a five step process for each training:
Some trainings have progression trees, requiring you to take lower level courses before you take the higher level ones. You don't have to actually learn anything at the low level courses in order to get into the high level ones, which is a nice touch. Magic Finally, the magic system. You can cast pre-baked applications with spells on them for free, no questions asked, as long as you have the software and a computer to use. You can get up to Level 2 spells using this method if you've got a good enough computer. What if you want higher level spells? In that case, you've got to use computational demonology to boost your spell power somehow. But to do that, you have to actually know the spells you're casting, instead of just hitting a button. What spells do you know? At 15% in the Sorcery skill, you know how to cast all Level 1 spells. At 30% you get all the Level 2 spells, at 45% you get Level 3, and 60% you get Level 4. Far as I can tell, the highest Sorcery skill you can start with in the base game is 10%. That means you don't know any spells. If you chew through the lower level training courses, you can get to some higher level stuff that might give you some points, if the dice go your way. In concept, I kind of like this. It marks the progression of a cube jockey to a Deeply Scary Sorcerer as the players discover things they're not supposed to know and accumulate power and influence. In practice, it has the same issues as the budgeting system. Denying the players access to the good poo poo is all well and good when you're preventing them from tossing fireballs around. But when the game world is filled with parasitic spirits that can infested anyone without proper magical defenses, and can only be exorcised by high level magic spells, you've got a real issue. In Play The adventure I ran was DOMINO REDSHIFT, a scenario I wrote myself. One of the Laundry's Shoggoth Keepers is missing, and the Agents are activated to quietly track him down and bring him home safely before someone freaks out and calls a Code Blue over his absence. I wrote and ran the adventure using only content in the corebook, not from any of the later splats (although I allowed the players to draw from the Agent's Handbook when requisitioning equipment). I had one player who had read the novels (and all the splats for the RPG), and two who hadn't read any of them. Two of them used characters they made themselves, the third grabbed a pregen from the Agent's Handbook splat. The team was focused on technical and bureaucratic skills, with a Computational Demonologist, a Lawyer, and a Civil Servant. They got through the whole adventure without firing a shot, and brought the wayward handler home before anyone noticed he was missing. They did this by carefully listening to people's concerns, mollifying their anxiety about losing their jobs, and using the information they weaseled out of them to go to work on the next person in the chain. In other words, exactly like working in a real government agency. Which sounds like hell, but the players said they really enjoyed it. The game does a good job simulating office life in a way that's fun and not bullshit. Except for the aforementioned subsystems I described above. You can address all three of the problem areas by being more generous than the book suggests, which is what I ended up doing. The game didn't break after a single session just because I let the players spend their budget on a few Level 3 wards and some body armor. It didn't even break when one of them checked out a basilisk gun (which he never fired). The primary constraint on spellcasting is having a powerful enough computer, favorable enough conditions (which the playerers have to work to engineer) and enough casting time to actually get enough POW for a higher level spell to work. You don't need an additional "thou shalt not" on top of that. And the training system could be fixed by eliminating the Teacher's teaching skill from the equation entirely, and just skipping straight to the rolls versus the players' skills. Whether I run Laundry again will depend on whether I have an idea I like enough to go through the pain of dealing with the game system. Even when you fix the game's unique systems, it's still got all the old CoC 6e clunkiness under the hood. You could port the whole thing to the new Delta Green for a more streamlined bureaucratic horror experience, but then you'd have to rebuild the chargen process with new professions, and potentially a new skill list. And then you've done significant work for a relatively niche product that you still might not use much in the future.
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Sep 24, 2020 06:48
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Has anyone noticed that E.T.I by the Blue Oyster Cult is the Delta Green theme song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7cEu0H3jq
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Sep 25, 2020 11:40
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Delta Green would never listen to Cult. Too much hippie poo poo, and they've probably had at least one military action against Imaginos.
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Sep 25, 2020 11:53
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mellonbread posted:Ran a game of Laundry RPG. Training sounds like, yipes. Magic... not quite sure what's happening with apps and computers. Can humans actually do magic in this? Maybe just D&D and have some weapons/armor be enchanted or whatever the word would be in this one?
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Sep 27, 2020 03:41
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Anyone deeper in the mythos than me want to help with an appropriately sharklike (but definitely great white or bigger sized) mythos monster the group could encounter in Limbo? I've decided the endgame of my module in the hospital is going to require them to side with either the satanist doctors (expert surgeons), the nuns (skilled nurses) or the janitorial staff (access to medicines, blood for tranfusions etc) to cut the hole in the comatose Cultist to escape. They can of course try it themselves, but none of them have medicine skill enough to perform what is essentially open heart surgery without almost instantly killing the patient. Plan is, the different allies will be able to keep the patient alive for different amounts of time, but all of them will demand to be one of the first through, consuming 'one tick' of alive time (except the nuns, but a bunch of nurses with no medicine aren't going to get you much in surgery. Problem with siding with the Good Guys). Once the timer runs out, the patient dies, the reality bubble his husk had been maintaining pops and everyone left over is cast into limbo. At which point we transition into Quint's Indianapolis Speech. There's going to be about 300 people total thrown out of the Hospital into Limbo with them and every round I roll a 3d<remaining living people>. And the three people whose number comes up get eaten, with the PCs who didn't escape through the cultist numbered 1, 2, 3..etc. They gotta POW roll to find a gate, POW to float to it, POW roll to open it, and decide whether to stick around and help anyone else escape or chickenshit out and force the next PC to roll to open the gate again. Idea is the highest POW PCs will be the ones to find and open the gate, with the lower POW PCs only task is having to flail their way through The Nothing after the high POW ones. Unless high POWs don't wait and peace out, which I and hopefully they would find hilarious. Anyway, what's an appropriate type of monster that could be snatching people up. I googled Byakhees but surprisingly the wiki makes them sound like weak mooks. E: did the math, with 3 PC's in Limbo, the odds everyone gets out alive is better than 50/50 until 20 turns are up, and with fewer PCs (I don't think I'll throw more than 3 out unless they do something massively stupid) the odds are even better. I see the whole escape taking like, 5 turns, 10 at the outside if they eat absolute poo poo on the POW rolls. So that's 75% chance of everyone getting clear, in the worst case (3PCs, 10 turns). But of course the RNG is the RNG. Does this seem fair and survivable, but also threatening enough? I want my players appropriately freaked during, and if someone gets it they get it, that's the game, but I'm not trying to pulp the party. And VV: Bholes sound good. They're Dreamlands monsters which fits the whole 'outside of any actual plane of existence' setting. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Sep 29, 2020 |
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Sep 29, 2020 18:15
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Dholes or Bholes Chthonians
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Sep 29, 2020 18:50
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Depending on the power of your party, dimensional shamblers could be a good option. They breach dimensions, so when the bubble pops, the could invade. Hounds of tindalos could also be attracted to perversions of space time.
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Sep 29, 2020 21:19
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The things what exist intertwined in our dimension but are mutually invisible and intangible with us in From Beyond, the kind that would normally require the Tillenghast Resonator to view.
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Sep 30, 2020 01:24
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I found Hunting Horrors and like the idea of that. Appropriately dragon/sharky, appropriately sized. And if one of them goes for a PC, I can have it not be an instagib like a massive sandworm Bhole. But even so I'm rolling a 2d10 and if they survive, that fucker's taking at least a foot off and that is gonna be canon from then on if they get out. To keep from getting out over my skis I'm gonna focus on running this module. But finishing up the last Vorrh Book, I just got a brainwave for another homebrew. Gonna need to come up with an excuse to send the group to the Congo. Gonna keep the the Book's idea of the magical realist evil forest that holds the Garden of Eden as a starting point. Gimmick is that humans weren't cast out, they escaped. ctrl+F ing the wikipedia for mythos gods and found: Rhogog, The Bearer of the Cup of the Blood of the Ancients; A black leafless oak tree, hot to the touch and with a single red eye at the center. Bingo, so there's your 'tree of knowledge'. Gonna say that the angels (Elder Things) set up a research station around it tens of thousands of years back, experimented on animals using its influence on sentience/souls/whatever you wanna call it, including a pair of australopithecenes. One of whom used his brief moment of sentience to swear an oath to the Rhogog to save itself and its mate. Violence ensues, order breaks down the Elder Things get eaten/corrputed by the things they should never have meddled with (as usual) and now the forest is more or less ruled by more or less ensouled animals including The Original Man, kidnapping anyone dumb enough to enter the forest and either stealing their souls or feeding them to the tree. And thats where the PCs come in because there's miles and miles of valuable hardwoods in that forest and King Leopold needs a new cocobolo armoire. Basically Heart of Darkness meets Planet of the Apes meets a PETA Ad. Gonna call it "In the Arms of The Angels". And though I didn't start from the dumb name and work backwards, the dumb name was like, idea 3, and it definitely influenced everything else  E Including my fervent wish that they side with the nuns cause their ally NPC is gonna be offered at the end as a replacement for the PC who dies to get them into the hospital. Sister Christian Motorin is a tough old broad with a deep SAN pool and tons of POW (unshakeable faith) and I'm looking forward to her choking Adam to death with a vine or something. But also, mustn't weight those scales. Gotta let the PCs PC. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Sep 30, 2020 |
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Sep 30, 2020 17:30
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quick question: what sort of mythos beast would be haunting a coal mine?
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Oct 10, 2020 19:11
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Chthonians, Dholes/Bholes, Fungi from Yuggoth, the K'n-yan, Dimensional Shamblers (why not), etc..
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Oct 10, 2020 19:20
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Fire Vampire
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Oct 10, 2020 20:30
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Mi-gos
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Oct 10, 2020 20:55
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DukeDuke posted:Mi-gos Or just old, malfunctioning equipment from a long-abandoned clandestine Mi-Go lab.
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Oct 10, 2020 21:16
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Man w/ a big knife
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Oct 10, 2020 22:21
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Subterranean Spider Crab what eats coal
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Oct 10, 2020 22:25
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Piss Meridian posted:Man w/ a big knife
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Oct 10, 2020 22:36
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Piss Meridian posted:Man w/ a big knife There's a DG scenario (A Night on Owlshead Mountain) I really like where the backstory of the whole thing is that this backwoods mountain zone is an old Mi-Go landing site/mining zone where they used to go now and again to dig minerals and freshen up seals keeping a Dark Young under wraps. But system travel becomes a whole drat thing so they start tasking people with watching the site for them and at one point in the 1920s they find an ex-con on the run from being a backwoods moonshiner/shitkicker and are like "hey man you wanna be our property owner to keep an eye on poo poo for us? We will make you immortal". His response is "gently caress yes make me immortal" so they load him up with biotech that makes him functionally unkillable in addition to being immortal; his body keeps adapting to poo poo and he eventually just goes insane in the woods from loneliness and his repeated failed suicide attempts leaving him unable to breathe and not needing to eat or sleep or poo poo combine to just turn him into this murderous and unstoppable boogeyman. And at some point the Dark Young gets loose and causes some deaths in addition to Mountain Man Dan murdering people with an axe when they get too close to the Mi-Go poo poo...but DG and past DG investigators who hosed around on the mountain knew about the old weird seals but not the murderman. All DG know is people are dying on the mountain and agents should try and find out what's up. So there is a dude running around with a really big knife knifing people in addition to the more outright mythos poo poo. (the way to solve all problems is to call the Mi-Go and manage to communicate there's a Dark Young and a serial killer and get them to give you poo poo to clean up their messes. Success of communication is not guaranteed and they don't tell you which thing they give you stops which threat.)
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Oct 11, 2020 01:53
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I kind of like this mythos version of Jason Voorhees.
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Oct 11, 2020 16:06
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Dawgstar posted:I kind of like this mythos version of Jason Voorhees.
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Oct 11, 2020 17:32
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For those who might be interested, I've started a campaign of Masks of Nyarlathotep (in Fantasy Grounds), and will be posting session writeups to the game's thread.
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Oct 13, 2020 21:27
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kaynorr posted:For those who might be interested, I've started a campaign of Masks of Nyarlathotep (in Fantasy Grounds), and will be posting session writeups to the game's thread. Wait hold the fuckin PHONE. There's a Masks premade thing for Roll20?!
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Oct 13, 2020 22:06
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Johnny Truant posted:Wait hold the fuckin PHONE. There's a Masks premade thing for Roll20?! No, but there is one for Fantasy Grounds, a paid VTT
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Oct 13, 2020 22:21
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Dr. Lunchables posted:No, but there is one for Fantasy Grounds, a paid VTT Ohhhh okay, I thought that was just a module or something for Roll20. I swear I can read properly... 
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Oct 13, 2020 23:47
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My friend, I also wish for greater Roll20 integration and support. Even more one shot adventures. I’d buy em all...
Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Oct 14, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2020 00:07
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| # ? May 29, 2024 09:51 |
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The expedition patches came in! Now I’ve got the introduction package prepped for all players. Only thing left to do is wait an interminable year for our Grand Pendragon Campaign to finish. (Pendragon is very good, I just wanna get these in my players’ hands.) Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 21:55
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