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mellonbread posted:New Delta Green errata is out. You're welcome.
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Feb 16, 2021 22:51
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Vehicles are devastating in horror. That boat KO'd Cthulhu, but it only took a van to ruin the Dark Tower.
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Feb 18, 2021 02:01
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I need help with an idea for an April Fools game. The core conceit is thus: the little mermaid is within the mythos. King Trident is Nodens, hoary old Nodens. There are fish people trying to mate with humans (natch). There are tentacles sea witches who wish ill on humanity. Perhaps a prince named Eric meets a unique girl who sings a siren song and is intent on marrying her, while the PCs are hapless sailors in the navy? I need to know how the players can both witness and interact with the story, without spoiling the stupid stupid plot line. Who are they? How are they adjacent to this happening? How can they touch it with their idiot fingers? Beyond that, what other mythos crap fits in (a little too well) with the Little Mermaid? I want all of your worst puns and bad jokes here.
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Feb 19, 2021 03:26
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Dr. Lunchables posted:I need help with an idea for an April Fools game. Assuming the latter: Your characters are key officers, perhaps including the lord, of a barony by the sea or whatever is appropriate. Your apparent problem is going to be something else. Ideally you will have the princeling/the lord's son return from a sea voyage and shortly thereafter you will have a figure arrive who resonates with some sort of dark prophecy or other augury. This will guide the PCs to desperately attempt to interrogate Ariel (who should not be named Ariel, obviously) and perhaps you encounter some kind of creepy details, such as her Brown Jenkins-but-a-crab ally, but the set-up should make them be thinking this redhaired woman is something she's not. It is at the dawn of your final act that the players should realize what movie they're actually in.
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Feb 19, 2021 03:38
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Nessus posted:What time period are you setting this in? Are your characters established for a campaign, player-created, or are you creating the characters? This is exactly what I’m going for, but I don’t wanna stop the brainstorm. 1920/ session, standard 7e rules. All characters will be pre-gen. What’s the hard misdirect that they would attend to? Is a dark augury too much of a red herring? Red hair-ing? What puns do we need? OR!: we go in a completely different direction. The only necessary thing is hard clues in act three to clue in those paying close enough attention, and perhaps a conclusive climax that makes things explicit (probably the Ursula wedding sequence). Let’s ride this stupid train.
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Feb 19, 2021 03:58
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Anyone looking to play a homebrew module? There's a discord with a bunch of goons, I have 2 recruited and would like at least a third, can accommodate up to 5 or so
PipHelix fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Feb 21, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 03:50
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As for the Little Mermaid, Maybe this prince is some inbred idiot everyone WANTS to be rid of? Maybe his congenital defects are why he's so into this woman with a strong 'innsmouth look'? Also, skim through the Odyssey. That that story casually ablates so many sailors -also- trying to get home to raise the stakes always bugged me, even as a kid. Scylla, Charybdis, Witches turning people into pigs... Maybe the angle they should be going for is organize a mutiny before Prince Eric gets them sucked into the giant whirlpool at the end. '20s is old school enough that taking on a 'shipwrecked damsel' would explain some of the weird occurrences, bad luck having a woman aboard after all. The monsters invading could just be her dad's buddies trying to rescue his 'kidnapped daughter'. I'm thinking Return of the Obra Dinn style.
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Feb 20, 2021 04:00
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PipHelix posted:Anyone looking to run a module? There's a discord with a bunch of goons, I have 2 recruited and would like at least a third, can accommodate up to 5 or so n@to or some other discord?
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Feb 20, 2021 04:01
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"Indie Gaming Tabletop"
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Feb 20, 2021 04:20
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Dr. Lunchables posted:This is exactly what I’m going for, but I don’t wanna stop the brainstorm. 1920/ session, standard 7e rules. All characters will be pre-gen. What’s the hard misdirect that they would attend to? Is a dark augury too much of a red herring? Red hair-ing? What puns do we need?
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Feb 20, 2021 04:23
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Give the NPCs the last names of people involved in the film production - Benson, Musker, Ashman, Caroll, Clements, Auberjonois, Menken, etc. The players most likely won't catch on unless they're big Disney fans, but it would make a fun Easter egg. E: Also, if you can work in the French chef who tries to kill Sebastian, you definitely should.
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Feb 20, 2021 05:21
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Pththya-lyi posted:E: Also, if you can work in the French chef who tries to kill Sebastian, you definitely should. Benson Le Poisson, and Oh! how the prince LOVES Le Poisson!
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Feb 20, 2021 16:28
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Elendil004 posted:n@to or some other discord? Just to follow up, are you interested? You seem pretty dug into the CoC scene, be honored to have you play along.
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Feb 23, 2021 05:46
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PipHelix posted:Just to follow up, are you interested? You seem pretty dug into the CoC scene, be honored to have you play along. I've ironically, never played CoC  DG all the way. And I'm in a bunch of games right now, was just curious about the community, sorry if that was confusing.
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Feb 23, 2021 17:16
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moths posted:Vehicles are devastating in horror. Jesus Christ
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Feb 24, 2021 03:30
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lmfao My investigators in Masks are en route to Cairo right now, about to have a rude awakening at Port Said. BUT! While aboard the ship, the player who has consistently made the best decisions decides to transcribe all the Arabic spells into a ledger, then plans to burn the scrolls afterwards. That's.. a pretty great idea, drat! He messages me today "actually, am I sure the spells will work without the scrolls?" So I say well, your character has cast two of them without the scrolls being present, so infer from that what you will. He pauses for a few minutes before messaging me "after I transcribe all the spells, I burn the scroll that contains the Send Dreams spell. Then that night, I cast it on Hugo(fellow investigator) to make him dream of fire. If the spell works, I burn the rest of the scrolls, as well." Hugo's backstory: he was burned in a terrible fire and has awful, disfiguring scars all over half of his body. He absolutely, 100% has a phobia of fire.  Now I have the rest of my work day to contemplate what exactly Hugo will do when he wakes up from this dream 
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Feb 26, 2021 18:49
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ah the classic Cthulhu party dynamic of 'I found something spooky and weird to test out...come here, Jim, and hold still.'
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Feb 27, 2021 04:09
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I had a blast of insight today about the earlier discussion RE: how Wizards in the CoC/DG setting manage to stay sane and recover their stats in between casting spells. If you've ever read Discworld, you've probably heard of the Unseen University. The wizards at UU cast spells once in a blue moon, and spend the rest of their time eating huge amounts of food, drinking huge quantities of tea and alcohol depending on time of day, sleeping, ignoring their paperwork, making up stupid games, and generally dicking around. They refrain from casting because they believe magic is incredibly dangerous, and rarely the actual solution to their problems - both due to the high cost of spellcasting, and the inevitable unintended consequences. In other words, they cast one spell, then spend months recovering SAN, POW and other stats before doing any more magic.
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Mar 10, 2021 21:38
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BRP cousin Pendragon basically treats magic the same way. You can make a magic using character, but they have to sleep for a few years and commune with nature to regain the ability to cast again.
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Mar 10, 2021 21:56
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I guess it seems consistent with the fiction (for what that's worth in an RPG system) that you only cast spells occasionally and as a last resort if you want to stay somewhat sane. For instance, the investigators in The Dunwich Horror probably never cast another spell in their lives after banishing the creature. Casting spells constantly is reserved for 0-sanity NPC villains, who would be like Ephraim in The Thing on the Doorstep. Or maybe the timescale between castings was such that Ephraim managed to maintain his sanity, too?
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Mar 10, 2021 21:56
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mellonbread posted:I had a blast of insight today about the earlier discussion RE: how Wizards in the CoC/DG setting manage to stay sane and recover their stats in between casting spells. Will you've certainly given me something to think about here… And you're right. To paraphrase Discworld, the mark of a truly wise wizard is that they know how to cast magic and doesn't because they know what a bad idea it is. There's a great bit in one of the books about a magical device that can show anything at all anywhere in the universe. It is noted that it is one of most powerful magical objects in the world and "therefore one of the most useless" because holy hell, there is a lot of nothing in the universe and getting it to show something you actually want to see is an unbelievable pain in the rear end.
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Mar 10, 2021 22:50
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BattleMaster posted:I guess it seems consistent with the fiction (for what that's worth in an RPG system) that you only cast spells occasionally and as a last resort if you want to stay somewhat sane. For instance, the investigators in The Dunwich Horror probably never cast another spell in their lives after banishing the creature. Casting spells constantly is reserved for 0-sanity NPC villains, who would be like Ephraim in The Thing on the Doorstep. Or maybe the timescale between castings was such that Ephraim managed to maintain his sanity, too? Of course, Wilbur Whateley also wanted to "clear off the earth" for the Old Ones, which is not necessarily a sympathetic goal.
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Mar 10, 2021 23:34
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I think it’s most useful to see SAN as a mostly player-facing thing. Exactly how evil sorcerers can even exist within the rules has been something of an issue for CoC for a while, but the rules are primarily written for player characters, for whom magic is almost always incredibly dangerous because that’s the tone of the game.
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Mar 11, 2021 07:57
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LatwPIAT posted:I think it’s most useful to see SAN as a mostly player-facing thing. Exactly how evil sorcerers can even exist within the rules has been something of an issue for CoC for a while, but the rules are primarily written for player characters, for whom magic is almost always incredibly dangerous because that’s the tone of the game. Oh yeah, I'm a big proponent of character mechanics mostly affecting players, and GMs being able to do whatever they want with NPCs within the boundaries of the fiction without having to justify it mechanically, especially in non-tactical games. But it's still kind of interesting to see the design process of the game for the goal of a Lovecraft fiction emulator. As Nessus said, it seems as though evil people who are devoted to dark powers who reach 0 sanity seem to have a different outcome than normal people (like players) who don't want anything to do with that stuff who reach 0 sanity. The latter utterly break because they've seen things they were never equipped to deal with, while the former just reaches a point of no return from the darkness - they can still keep on a socially-acceptable guise when needed, but are now fully dedicated to whatever drew them in.
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Mar 11, 2021 08:34
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BattleMaster posted:But it's still kind of interesting to see the design process of the game for the goal of a Lovecraft fiction emulator. As Nessus said, it seems as though evil people who are devoted to dark powers who reach 0 sanity seem to have a different outcome than normal people (like players) who don't want anything to do with that stuff who reach 0 sanity. The latter utterly break because they've seen things they were never equipped to deal with, while the former just reaches a point of no return from the darkness - they can still keep on a socially-acceptable guise when needed, but are now fully dedicated to whatever drew them in. I can't really think of any sorcerers who actually go mad in Lovecraft's stories, though. Dr Henry Armitage is troubled by reading books, but nothing particular is mentioned when he makes the Powder of Ibn-Ghazi, I think Charles Dexter Ward has no problems with sanity--just naivete--and Walter Gilman seems troubled more by what he sees and is made to do than by the magic he practices in his dreams. Maybe I'm forgetting a story, but Lovecraft's fiction doesn't seem to posit magic as quite as inherently sanity-draining as Sandy Petersen does.
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Mar 11, 2021 10:03
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The game's sanity loss from various events is definitely inflated and it takes a relatively small amount of (compared to what you are capable of losing from many different things) it to cause indefinite madness, which definitely isn't reflected in HPL's work. Think of all the protagonists who list off the terrible tomes they've read - which in the game, don't cause sanity loss until you find out that the stuff in it is real - but don't lose their mind when faced with an alien or god or monster. I feel like the level of sanity loss in the game, including casting spells, isn't reflected in the stories and is set to maximize the chance of something exciting happening at the table during a short session. But to cast magic is to make use of the real science of the universe that humans weren't meant to comprehend so while it's not explicitly stated, it seems consistent that magic use would chip away at you. And the stories are short and people don't cast many spells, so it wouldn't be obvious. Or maybe I'm just way off and ascribing things to HPL's stories that came from other writers of the cosmic horror genre since his day. Call of Cthulhu has rolled in enough of Derleth et al.'s stuff that I wouldn't be surprised. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 10:57
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Omnicrom posted:Will you've certainly given me something to think about here… I think the wizards in Discworld only cast "real" spells in one or two books, and when they do, it's reality-collapsing apocalypse-level stuff. I think the most notable case was the book with city-eating parasitic shopping malls. They simultaneously implode and explode the sentient mall beast.
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Mar 11, 2021 17:12
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Afriscipio posted:I think the wizards in Discworld only cast "real" spells in one or two books, and when they do, it's reality-collapsing apocalypse-level stuff. I think the most notable case was the book with city-eating parasitic shopping malls. They simultaneously implode and explode the sentient mall beast. They do magic rarely, but they do tend to cast magic in the books a little more than that. In the aforementioned book with useless powerful item Ridcully transforms a thrown chair into a flock of birds (meanwhile the rest of the wizards are at the buffet table), and in Thud! the wizards provide Vimes with a pumpkin powered cart to get somewhere fast for the climax (which they only do when allowed plausible deniability as to whether they did any magic, because wizards don't cast magic and the spell was too useful). There's also the bursar whose primary joke is that he's drugged with hallucinogens to hallucinate that he is sane, with the side effect that he sometimes hallucinates he can fly. Which he can, because he is a wizard. This is considered an acceptable state of affairs. As for magic in games I still stand by Arkham Horror LCG as my favorite instance of Mythos magic. In that game magic is risky and often unreliable and might have unpleasant costs that you have to pay to use it, but you can still definitely be good at magic without going nuts after casting a few spells. The main thing behind this is that casting spells in the game will only sometimes trigger a backlash, and that backlash isn't always sanity loss as some spells will make you lose items or take a physical hit forced on you or something like that instead of punching you in the brainmeats.
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Mar 11, 2021 18:42
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If I was modelling something and not building entirely from first principles, I would have each 'spell' be its own little contained thing you could do, not necessarily connected to any other spell. There might be a mental hit for learning it, or for the first time you use it successfully and experience that, yes, the Voorish Sign reveals the unseen and what the gently caress is that thing in your pantry. But after that, it's just a thing you can do. If you use that one spell that lets you manipulate and move around human flesh you will probably suffer further SAN hits for it up to a point, if you use it for evil, but if you just use it to become a psychic surgeon who actually works, well congratulations. I would also probably not cast the various "Summon Gribbly" spells in this mold. They would simply be: "You know this method to contact Gribbly X with success and some degree of safety." Even contacting Deep Ones or Ghouls would probably be mind-bending, especially at first, although I would also be inclined to say that you could probably come to an accomodation with them or similar entities in the generally humanoid scale of things. But the costs would come in the initial learning, or in the provable objective discovery that everything you knew was wrong, rather than being like you have to push three SAN points out of your brain, like an old time bus changemaker, to cast Banish Nightgaunts. In the general sense a lot of the cosmic horror seems to be coming out of the general, "objective proof that your understanding of reality is wrong," which means that you would probably be able to get the same effect with different stressors nowadays. There is of course a certain abstract quality to it, with sorcerers like Old Man Whateley, Asenath Waite etc. accomodating themselves fully to a more accurate understanding of reality while others do not. Though the other big thing that comes to mind is, I can't think of too many stories of old HPL which actually do end with the character indefinitely committed.
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Mar 12, 2021 00:41
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Nessus posted:If I was modelling something and not building entirely from first principles, I would have each 'spell' be its own little contained thing you could do, not necessarily connected to any other spell. There might be a mental hit for learning it, or for the first time you use it successfully and experience that, yes, the Voorish Sign reveals the unseen and what the gently caress is that thing in your pantry. But after that, it's just a thing you can do. If you use that one spell that lets you manipulate and move around human flesh you will probably suffer further SAN hits for it up to a point, if you use it for evil, but if you just use it to become a psychic surgeon who actually works, well congratulations. Wouldn't this fit with the "Getting Used to the Awfulness" optional rule from the Keeper Rulebook (p169)? I'd like to imagine it would. Basically, it works like this: if you see a ghoul, you might lose 1d6 SAN. But once you've lost 6 SAN (the max amount on the available die) over a period of encounters? Then that ghoul is something your mind can comprehend. It has carved a little niche for a thing like a ghoul. You might not understand it, but you can accept that a ghoul exists. You can also see other ghouls without losing any more SAN. I like the idea of a houserule where spells work the same way. If you cast one spell, there's a ceiling you hit where it doesn't bend your mind beyond the limits of the spell. Reanimating flesh is terrible, and would cost you, but its not a world ending sinkhole, like consuming the idea of Azathoth in full. Hell, you could probably make (in)sane justifications for how it works with your limited view of science and the natural world. The cost you pay to understand is not marginal, but once deducted, doesn't need to be paid every time. You're a member of the club. Buy the ticket, take the ride...
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Mar 12, 2021 01:09
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LatwPIAT posted:I can't really think of any sorcerers who actually go mad in Lovecraft's stories, though. Dr Henry Armitage is troubled by reading books, but nothing particular is mentioned when he makes the Powder of Ibn-Ghazi, I think Charles Dexter Ward has no problems with sanity--just naivete--and Walter Gilman seems troubled more by what he sees and is made to do than by the magic he practices in his dreams. Maybe I'm forgetting a story, but Lovecraft's fiction doesn't seem to posit magic as quite as inherently sanity-draining as Sandy Petersen does. I'd generally agree. It tracks that it would be a SAN hit because again, that's the game mechanics, and you need to have some sort of limit on it. MP, spellbook slots, SAN, whatever. I generally like to add something on top - that portal spell ran a risk of a monster coming out of the in-between of the two portals, for any monster summoning spell I let them pick a target, but it's a random roll who the creature targets after the first one. And so on. You can always make there be a frisson of risk to casting a spell, but it shouldn't be such that it discourages people from doing it at all. Might be my group but if the risk is that things go absolutely sideways in a funny way people are more inclined to tempt fate than if the risk is that someone just goes 0 SAN and game over.
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Mar 12, 2021 03:34
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I might be misremembering, but I thought there were quite a few source books with evil characters who have sanity scores. Like, you can have a range of antagonists from relatively new cultists who have gotten in over their head, evil sorcerers who are on the brink, and depraved madmen who have left humanity behind completely. Don't a lot of the antagonists in Masks have fleshed out ways they went mad and manifestations of these?
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Mar 12, 2021 05:16
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I can speak for Tatters of the King having a 0 SAN dude who was otherwise roughly functional in society, specifically the dude is an author who is completely mad and terrified of the stars but people just write it off as him being an eccentric artiste. A quick glance through at least the first section of the book shows that most of the cultists have no sanity left, but they vary widely in temperament and morality. On one hand the cultist leaders really just love killing people, on the other hand there's a cultist you can pump for information who comes across as fairly ordinary. He is, perhaps, overly trusting, he's creeped out by graveyards and doesn't get enough sleep, but the book also notes that he is a skilled and respected machine worker who has occasional bad days but is other than that hold together pretty well. Going nuts hasn't IMPROVED his life, but the dude is mostly just a normal guy interested in the occult who found some bad friends. Notably, the one cultist who does have some SAN left is also the one who may get himself killed attempting to summon a Byakhee.
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Mar 12, 2021 07:34
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Anyone read or run through the new scenarios in Mansions of Madness Vol. 1? I like the idea of The House of Memphis and The 19th Hole but would like to know more about them before buying other scenarios that I already own.
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Mar 17, 2021 22:43
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Hmm, given that there's canonically no problem for an *N*PC to be at 0 SAN, and since going to 0 SAN doesn't kill a *P*C, just takes him out of player control, I'm imagining some sort of canonical construct where the PCs are basically being psychically puppetmastered by beings outside their control or comprehension, to do incredibly dangerous things against any possible best interest they might have, usually ending in their death, and that control is only broken once their brains are degraded past a certain point. Given how much of Lovecraftian Horror is how the Gods aren't even antagonistic or malicious to humanity, just massively powerful unkowable, and indifferent, and given how the players exist literally in an alternate, higher plane of reality than the PCs, and have the most tangential, abstract interest in their well-being, you could make an argument that the players are Elder Gods. I'm not smart or clever enough to come up with a module that would even function, let alone not be too twee and clever by half but I'd LOVE to play a module where the PCs try to rebel. How a DM puts someone in opposition to a literal figment of their own imagination though is, uh, tricky to say the least. I realized I just described Umney's Last Case.
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Mar 17, 2021 22:48
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You gotta take that poo poo up a level nowadays, the meta twist is obvious. We need the meta-meta twist -- the PC's secret overlords are but the servant of the dark wizard Sandy Petersen! (In himself a part of the alliance of Chaosium, and servitor to the ancient racist of Providence, HPL.) But then you need the meta-meta-meta twist, which is that Sandy Petersen is revealed to merely be somebody's Call of Cthulhu PC... More seriously some kind of game where the player role is made some kind of objective psychic intrusion/contact does have potential. However, it also seems to present major mechanical issues and I am not sure it would be possible to make it additively useful to most gaming environments.
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Mar 17, 2021 23:29
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Lumbermouth posted:Anyone read or run through the new scenarios in Mansions of Madness Vol. 1? I like the idea of The House of Memphis and The 19th Hole but would like to know more about them before buying other scenarios that I already own. I’ve run The Crack’d and Crooked Manse, and it’s a spectacular module. What I’m most interested in, however, is The Code. It presents fully written alternate paths and includes variant handouts depending on how the players act. It’s one I’m really looking forward to running.
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Mar 18, 2021 00:32
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Nessus posted:More seriously some kind of game where the player role is made some kind of objective psychic intrusion/contact does have potential. However, it also seems to present major mechanical issues and I am not sure it would be possible to make it additively useful to most gaming environments. Yea, it definitely seems like it would be more easy to do with like, PC gaming or something where the world is more 'constructed'. But I feel like I'm gonna at least have an NPC screaming about the gods that dream the world, arguing amongst themselves what's allowed to happen, to exist...
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Mar 19, 2021 04:56
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Just have the PCs dispel a ritual circle and become NPCs. Have them hot on the trail of some sort of curse or series of possessions. Only to discover that they themselves were subjects. But instead of some sort of horrible eldritch thing screaming in their ears or going for a joyride they have the players. As an epilogue for the adventure, unless you have characters that would naturally repair some sort of freaky ritual circle for more power. Or if you really need a quick transition into a weird setup.
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Mar 19, 2021 10:45
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Nessus posted:
The game starts with the PCs in a ritual circle with no memory of what happened but the notes for a ritual that they performed (ornhad performed on them) which was supposed to make them vessels for an otherworldly intelligence. In between sessions the PCs are no longer possessed by your players and do their best to undo all the work that they've done.
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Mar 19, 2021 12:15
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