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DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
Anyone ever think about putting Mind Flayers from D&D in Call of Cthulhu? Everything about them just screams Lovecraftian horror, especially the whole thing about their Elder Brains and the way that even mind flayers fear what happens if the tadpoles in the Elder Brain pools are allowed to live after a colony collapses. I've looked on Google and haven't found any talk of it, though. I just love the idea that if you place many of the monsters you see come up in a CoC context with characters who aren't heroic D&D adventurers, now they're suddenly insurmountable and terrifying creatures from worlds unknown, rather than big bags of hitpoints to be slain for loot.

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Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
I’m reading the Alexandrian and his remix of the exiles from Pelegrane press. Seems really great. Globetrotting 30s action with plenty of props, strange music, and local flavor across eight different locations.

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017

DrSunshine posted:

Anyone ever think about putting Mind Flayers from D&D in Call of Cthulhu? Everything about them just screams Lovecraftian horror, especially the whole thing about their Elder Brains and the way that even mind flayers fear what happens if the tadpoles in the Elder Brain pools are allowed to live after a colony collapses. I've looked on Google and haven't found any talk of it, though. I just love the idea that if you place many of the monsters you see come up in a CoC context with characters who aren't heroic D&D adventurers, now they're suddenly insurmountable and terrifying creatures from worlds unknown, rather than big bags of hitpoints to be slain for loot.
They discussed this topic a couple episodes back with Seth Skorkowsky on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias show. He used the example of vampires and werewolves, which are horror monsters if you encounter them in the present day, but straightforward combat encounters in a fantasy setting.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



DrSunshine posted:

Anyone ever think about putting Mind Flayers from D&D in Call of Cthulhu? Everything about them just screams Lovecraftian horror, especially the whole thing about their Elder Brains and the way that even mind flayers fear what happens if the tadpoles in the Elder Brain pools are allowed to live after a colony collapses. I've looked on Google and haven't found any talk of it, though. I just love the idea that if you place many of the monsters you see come up in a CoC context with characters who aren't heroic D&D adventurers, now they're suddenly insurmountable and terrifying creatures from worlds unknown, rather than big bags of hitpoints to be slain for loot.
They'd make an excellent Fortean, "I think we're property" entity if you wanted a more personal kind of malice from your secret gribbles than is usually the case. You could even do something fun like have them be behind the development of literacy beyond hieroglyph/mnemonics: It improves the taste.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Nessus posted:

You could even do something fun like have them be behind the development of literacy beyond hieroglyph/mnemonics: It improves the taste.

Building on this, you could have them recently discovered as an extinct species - one that influenced our beating out the Neanderthals.

It's a weird, harmless alternate history - except for the cohort of alhoon that were left behind in torpor, awoken by the excavation, and prepared to reestablish their natural order.

fez_machine
Nov 27, 2004
Blair Reynolds, illustrator for much of the early Pagan Publishing stuff including Delta Green has died
https://twitter.com/JohnScottTynes/status/1426008751639654409

PipHelix
Nov 11, 2017



DrSunshine posted:

I love this concept, it sounds so delightfully chaotic, but I would be going nuts trying to find a way to convey this and execute it in a sensible way to my players. I would be careful of the complexity, or even explain privately to the player affected out of character, like lay it out clearly how this mechanic works. Props to you as a GM to run this concept, but personally I would find it difficult.

Yea, the one thing that sticks in my craw with CoC is that the SAN is this artificial limit on your PC's survivability, and losses are almost always negative. Cthulhu mythos points are nice, but I've never managed to accumulate enough to matter before (brain)death. SAN losses are directly due to 'learning things man was never meant to know'. Learning things, even bad things, should carry some advantages. Even if it's part of a long slow slide to a PC death, it should at least be a fun ride for them.

I'm just gonna explicitly explain the mechanics, to everyone (except the Secret Words). Should make for better RP if everyone knows what's happening and what their PC knows about it. If it isn't a disaster folks should trust me the next time something weird happens and I just say 'trust me, roll with it'.

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
One thing which I would like is some kind of mechanic that rewards the characters for pushing themselves harder, for discarding more of their sanity and humanity in an effort to stop or slow the progression of cosmic horror. So that yes, by the end, you may be able to delay the reawakening of the Great Old Ones by a millennia but at the cost of becoming as monstrous as they. Something that would give them more and more of a sense of sacrificing every resource at their disposal for even the smallest chance at survival.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

DrSunshine posted:

One thing which I would like is some kind of mechanic that rewards the characters for pushing themselves harder, for discarding more of their sanity and humanity in an effort to stop or slow the progression of cosmic horror. So that yes, by the end, you may be able to delay the reawakening of the Great Old Ones by a millennia but at the cost of becoming as monstrous as they. Something that would give them more and more of a sense of sacrificing every resource at their disposal for even the smallest chance at survival.

This is what reading the book with the spell to help seal away the evil is. You lose sanity for reading the book, and in return you get to (more easily) stop the progression of cosmic horror.

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017
Lots of published modules have SAN rewards for various objectives. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason behind when and how the points are awarded - some scenarios by the same author will have generous rewards, while others will have none whatsoever.

My personal favorite implementation is in Night on Owlshead Mountain, where in addition to the various scenario specific objectives for rescuing people, hunting monsters, etc, you also get SAN rewards for reading old newspaper articles and books to discover things. It's an explicit mechanical bonus for engaging with the scenario content, instead of making the meta decision to burn everything to the ground and run away. It's explicitly contra to the game's core assumptions about collating knowledge being bad, but it encourages a more interesting playstyle than always punishing the characters for learning.

Sionak
Dec 20, 2005

Mind flay the gap.

mellonbread posted:

BLACKSAT has some cool set pieces, but from a gameplay perspective I found it pretty dull. There just wasn't that much that the player characters could actually do in a given situation, other than "roll mission-critical skill" at the narratively appropriate time. It was originally intended as a tutorial to teach the players about skill rolls, and it shows. The other modules in the Control Group pack are miles better, even when they're similarly railroaded (I'm looking at you, Night Visions).

I liked the concept enough to write my own version, set aboard an abandoned Shan teleportation satellite.

I used BLACKSAT for my GenCon online games last year. I figured it would be easier to run online, which I didn't have a lot of practice with at the time. All the games went pretty well, but you're not wrong, especially once the shuttle gets going. I mostly played up the influence that the astronauts had on the NPCs and tried to make them as well sketched out as possible.

Elendil004 posted:

The print final version of BLACKSAT removed the best line in the scenario which was that the space shuttle was not designed to fly while on fire as a reason why it was hard to try and re-enter the atmosphere with the shuttle torn up and on fire.

This is an editing crime.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
I was trying to read the pre-generated characters for masks of Nyarlahotep, but they’re only in unsupported adobe PDF files. Does anyone know where I could get duplicates?

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



Golden Bee posted:

I was trying to read the pre-generated characters for masks of Nyarlahotep, but they’re only in unsupported adobe PDF files. Does anyone know where I could get duplicates?

Those are fillable .pdfs. You've gotta use acrobat.

I can print to .pdf them if you'd like, which oughta clear up the unsupported issue.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

Dr. Lunchables posted:

Those are fillable .pdfs. You've gotta use acrobat.

I can print to .pdf them if you'd like, which oughta clear up the unsupported issue.

This would be great. I loved reading the ones from eternal lies.

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



Golden Bee posted:

This would be great. I loved reading the ones from eternal lies.

They're all here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p-uR894pmTovoL9p5OY9paI_gYoDNruV?usp=sharing

They separated the sheets into "background" and the main character sheet, but I've got em organized by PC name.

Relevant Tangent
Nov 18, 2016

Tangentially Relevant

DrSunshine posted:

Anyone ever think about putting Mind Flayers from D&D in Call of Cthulhu? Everything about them just screams Lovecraftian horror, especially the whole thing about their Elder Brains and the way that even mind flayers fear what happens if the tadpoles in the Elder Brain pools are allowed to live after a colony collapses. I've looked on Google and haven't found any talk of it, though. I just love the idea that if you place many of the monsters you see come up in a CoC context with characters who aren't heroic D&D adventurers, they're suddenly insurmountable and terrifying creatures from worlds unknown, rather than big bags of hitpoints to be slain for loot.

They're a little too powerful for CoC imo. Most of the things you encounter in CoC are something you're either able to fight off or run away from and you can't realistically do either to a Mind Flayer. They're too powerful for the scale they exist at, there's nothing that tells a PC "you should run" until it's very much too late when the horror is human sized, because human sized in the Mythos tends to mean something you can deal with. If you're telling a story that is meant to end in a TPK they're fine I guess.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
Almost as dangerous as a levitating bed.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

Dr. Lunchables posted:

They're all here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p-uR894pmTovoL9p5OY9paI_gYoDNruV?usp=sharing

They separated the sheets into "background" and the main character sheet, but I've got em organized by PC name.

So cool! Thx!

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



Serpent people and ghouls are the benchmark for CoC human sized foes

drrockso20
May 6, 2013

Has Not Actually Done Cocaine
Reminds me that I kind of want to run a somewhat higher power leveled campaign someday once my stuff from the Kickstarter arrives, something in the vein of "boomer shooters" like Quake, Blood, and Dusk where the enemies are horrifying and can squish you like a bug, but you happen to be a highly skilled badass with a lot of really big guns and can kill them just as hard

Which I imagine wouldn't be too hard to make happen considering a lot of the stories I've heard of the early days of CoC seem to go in that direction anyways

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017

drrockso20 posted:

Which I imagine wouldn't be too hard to make happen considering a lot of the stories I've heard of the early days of CoC seem to go in that direction anyways
Yup. From Elfmaids and Octopi

Black Science - Notes for a Cthulhu Superhumans RPG posted:

Part of this evolved from having run several extended Coc campaigns which left the party with high sanity scores, artifacts aplenty, money and self published spell books for dummies in their secret clubhouse. They ran bootleg hooch through a gate from Boston to England (using donkeys to pass through the gate to minimize sanity loss). They had a lethal arsenal of mausers, trench guns, browning automatic rifles and tommy guns. A gangster character had never read a mythos tome yet had his many teachers had mastered and passed onto him every binding and banishment spell before going themselves went mad. At one point on their voyage to Ralyeh, I had them battle the many characters who had become monsters and madmen over the years. This kind of resembled a superheroic battle scene. With star vampires, byakee and creatures which had once been investigators. With shotguns loaded with elder sign slugs and powder of ibn ghazi. Even a great race lightning gun. When enough investigators survive long enough they will often amass enough firepower, magic and worldly resources to terrify any state authorities. Part of this campaign book is to provide the next leval of challenges for such campaigns.

Once every one knows all the basic monsters and methodology of 1920s terrorism standard CoC loses it's zing a bit.
And this was just the base game, before the release of "Pulp Cthulhu" and other versions specifically designed to enable this playstyle.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
There’s nothing about mindflayers that make them particularly resistant to bullets, except that they’re high levels in DND. Put them at the center of a cult and the players should be able to kill them if they have the element of surprise or range.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Golden Bee posted:

There’s nothing about mindflayers that make them particularly resistant to bullets, except that they’re high levels in DND. Put them at the center of a cult and the players should be able to kill them if they have the element of surprise or range.

"We were both trying to get into each other's heads, but that thing was being too subtle about it. Turns out a 30-30 from 200 yards beats malign psychic attacks."


Was surprised to find a Kickstarter tome on my doorstep the other day. It's a real beaat.


Impossible Landscapes feels like Delta Green's Masks. It's a LOT to digest, but I love the production values with the fake margin notes and stylizing of every mention of the Yellow Sign. Also nice that they parse out for you how it's a subtlety different kind of horror: the Surreal vs. stock cosmic horror. Should help bring it back home with a different vibe if you run it as Night Floors occuring in 95, then whatever bullshit ops for 20 years for a few sessios, then pull it back around to Hastur times again.

PipHelix
Nov 11, 2017



DrSunshine posted:

One thing which I would like is some kind of mechanic that rewards the characters for pushing themselves harder, for discarding more of their sanity and humanity in an effort to stop or slow the progression of cosmic horror. So that yes, by the end, you may be able to delay the reawakening of the Great Old Ones by a millennia but at the cost of becoming as monstrous as they. Something that would give them more and more of a sense of sacrificing every resource at their disposal for even the smallest chance at survival.

mellonbread posted:

Lots of published modules have SAN rewards for various objectives. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason behind when and how the points are awarded - some scenarios by the same author will have generous rewards, while others will have none whatsoever.

My personal favorite implementation is in Night on Owlshead Mountain, where in addition to the various scenario specific objectives for rescuing people, hunting monsters, etc, you also get SAN rewards for reading old newspaper articles and books to discover things. It's an explicit mechanical bonus for engaging with the scenario content, instead of making the meta decision to burn everything to the ground and run away. It's explicitly contra to the game's core assumptions about collating knowledge being bad, but it encourages a more interesting playstyle than always punishing the characters for learning.

So, I'm not well enough versed in the lingo of improv/RP/whatever to really express myself except by analogy, but what mellonbread is talking about, I specifically do not like. "Look at painting, lose SAN complete module, gain SAN for having destroyed painting" seems equally cheap and designed to cancel the flaws of the SAN loss system after the fact instead of coming up with a good SAN system in the first place. I generally prefer having a few SAN loss points in a module, and having them be clear beforehand and fair in retrospect. To be clear, I get that I'm going against tons of HPL canon, but for me the thing that would make a person crazy isn't looking at some magic eye painting or a big lizard walking on two feet but the guilt and regret at having done horrible things to avert other worse things.

For instance, we were trading off DMing Berlin the Wicked City modules, and I hated the edgelordy grimdarkness so I threw together a homebrew I where mashed up the Terminator and Metropolis. The John Conner character (I called him 'Johann Kuhner' his picture was a still from the 1984 original, and it took me shoehorning in "Meine Mutter, Sarah Kuhner" for them to cotton on... smdh) was a super-competent Great War vet and the only one NPC with a suspicion about what was happening, but also a vicious unrepentant racist and lieutenant in the Sturmabteilung. Of course they sold him out in a hot second before they really knew what was happening, and watched him fed face-first into "Himmelnetz"s brain-sucking clone maker, along with the Weimar official in charge of the project.
So canonically the Nazis never take power because all German leadership, left right and center are replicants enacting a dumbshow of politics to distract humanity from the truth while they assimilate and replace other leaders worldwide. They turned the world into They Live only instead of Alien Capitalists its an amoral Machine God treating humanity as feedstock. But they did prevent the holocaust, and one assumes the networked replicants are better at managing an economy than the human Hoover or Hindenburg so the Depression never happens. The players in 2021 Earth Prime know this, but of course the 1920s NPCs do not, and bear the guilt of selling out humanity. Except the one who fell in love with the False Maria and voluntarily had himself replicated to try to date her. I had her let him down gently, saying she thought of him as "her brave little toaster". Organic time for a SAN roll if ever there was one

And, I might never get to run it, and the players might pick a more mundane ending, but that's what I like about that Vorrh/Wages of Fear/Burnt Out Case mashup in the garden of eden. Are these few puny mortal PCs derailing the impossibly ancient, inexplicable and unspeakable plans of an unfathomably evil Old One? Sure are, take THAT, immortals! Oh yea, they're doing it by unilaterally choosing to erase the sentience/souls of every human being worldwide. Eggs/Omelet.

Anyway yea. I want my players arguing about whether they're gonna sacrifice this infant to like, avert apocalypse instead of arguing whether they should look in the bad guy's chest of secrets that will very obviously progress the narrative but randomly dock SAN cause it's got like, spooky brains in jars in there or something. Even if -especially if- they know the san loss will be canceled after.

PipHelix
Nov 11, 2017



And just to be clear, I didn't want the players to side with the nazis. I was hoping they'd string him along enough to gain his trust, end up in compromising situations as a result and try to balance their morals vs their mission Donnie Brasco style, help him uncover what they were up against, how to fight it and THEN sell him out. Maybe even argue about who to side with. I had a whole session set up around a soccer riot I was going to have the robot instigate to use for cover as an assassination attempt at - proto nazis being assumed to be as prone to hooliganism as neo nazis.

But Nooooooo. They show up to warn him about a robot killing John Connorses, he thanks them for the warning, takes them into his confidence and leads them to the SA clubhouse to plot the assassination of the Weimar official running the Himmelnetz Project and the moment they're all out on the street they jump him and next thing you know bob's your uncle it's Judgement Day.

Trick I haven't figured is to make antiheroes and... "posi-villians?" (Is there a word for bad guy you have to hold your nose and cooperate with?) just grey enough people don't immediately try to slaughter them.

Just a disclaimer cause on the internet, no one knows if you are a dog or aren't a nazi.

PipHelix fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Aug 16, 2021

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

PipHelix posted:

And just to be clear, I didn't want the players to side with the nazis. I was hoping they'd string him along enough to gain his trust, end up in compromising situations as a result and try to balance their morals vs their mission Donnie Brasco style, help him uncover what they were up against, how to fight it and THEN sell him out. Maybe even argue about who to side with. I had a whole session set up around a soccer riot I was going to have the robot instigate to use for cover as an assassination attempt at - proto nazis being assumed to be as prone to hooliganism as neo nazis.

But Nooooooo. They show up to warn him about a robot killing John Connorses, he thanks them for the warning, takes them into his confidence and leads them to the SA clubhouse to plot the assassination of the Weimar official running the Himmelnetz Project and the moment they're all out on the street they jump him and next thing you know bob's your uncle it's Judgement Day.

Trick I haven't figured is to make antiheroes and... "posi-villians?" (Is there a word for bad guy you have to hold your nose and cooperate with?) just grey enough people don't immediately try to slaughter them.

Just a disclaimer cause on the internet, no one knows if you are a dog or aren't a nazi.

I don't know, I think "just kill the Nazi" is a good instinct to have. Related post from D&D:

Triskelli posted:

Didn’t mean to so thoroughly kill this thread. Did want to share Space Biff’s latest article about “Greenwashing”, his term for replacing real historical agents with Lovecraft aliens.

https://spacebiff.com/2021/08/12/greenwashing-history/#more-20510

Deptfordx
Dec 23, 2013

Speaking of Cthulhu Superheros, reminded me of this classic Rpgnet thread.

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/necro-mythos-supers-oh-what-may-be-wrought-with-this-hideous-might.398547/

PipHelix
Nov 11, 2017



Absurd Alhazred posted:

I don't know, I think "just kill the Nazi" is a good instinct to have. Related post from D&D:

Yea, we were playing through the Berlin the Wicked City moduleset which (IMO) SUUUUUUUUUUUCKS a big one, and that exact thing, that weird historical insertion, is part of it. The module we completed before it was my turn to dm there was some big evil doins a transpirin and the stinger at the end was what we thought was the final fight was just a distraction and really what happened was **DUN DUN DUN** the assassination of Walter Rathenau! (cue a minute of uncomfortable silence as everyone on the zoom tries not to be obvious about googling who that is and why we or our PCs care.)

I wanted to get away from all that but since we were canonically in inter-war Germany, the nazis were a given. But yea, It was in the depths of the first wave of rona with millions out of work and nothing forthcoming from the government, so I figure the historical setting rhymes well enough with now, this impotent centrist caretaker government that maintained what little control it had with out of control cops that basically killed whoever they didn't like, badly mismanaged a disaster before voting into power the literal worst people in history, making the main villain an rich public/private entrepreneur/bureaucrat NPC who could give a poo poo about the starving people outside his mansion, gobbling up scarce public resources working on what is obviously a doomsday device, but even if it worked as intended would 'only' put millions more people out of work, then mayyybe I could get them so pissed that a choice between this guy and a nazi would be a hard one to make. Literally named him Gottfried Szebo. True Horror: Trump or Bezos, make your choice!

Instead they rohrschached me and demanded armageddon.


It was annoying as a DM but heartening as the friend to all these people, and as a general person in the world, humbling. 'Yea gently caress did you expect they were gonna do with this? Be less obvious next time, dum dum.'

Morning edit to remove a rant that more befits c-spam. I'll just say that that article is way too long, not nearly thought out well enough, and for lack supporting evidence or a even just a real actual trend to discuss, includes points in the argument that directly contradict the thesis the author trying to lay out. Greenwashing is a well defined term of long standing in the left that has nothing to do with this person's weird fixation that I don't think they've defined to themselves. If you're arguing othering the victims of colonialism as literal aliens and roleplaying their actual historical exermination for fun is equal to othering the people who did the colonialization and died of old age, in their beds, wealthy beloved and honored, as literal aliens and roleplaying making them face consequences they never actually faced for those crimes... your thesis needs more time in the oven, because you don't have enough points to support it. And also needs a new term because 'greenwashing' means polluting corporations doing bad faith environmental PR and has for 30 years now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfp1Lxc2LYM

But seriously that game where you merk queen victoria to save the world looks fuuuuun.

PipHelix fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Aug 18, 2021

Warthur
May 2, 2004



Chaosium just announced that they've acquired the Cthulhu Britannica and World War Cthulhu lines from Cubicle 7.

This feels like a win-win: Cubicle 7 dropped the CoC third party licence which let them make those projects ages back, so they'd fallen out of availability, so people should soon be able to get them again thanks to this deal. Cubicle 7 don't really seem to have the bandwidth to do the lines justice, so handing over the IP in return for a chunk of change makes sense for them. Chaosium end up with some juicy projects, and even if they don't get around to doing the updates very quickly, it shouldn't take long for them to be able to put up PDF sales of the old product line to get some long tail money.

sasha_d3ath
Jun 3, 2016

Ban-thing the man-things.
Those were awesome lines when they were new and I'm sure they'll be awesome lines when Chaosium does them. Very cool news.

Down With People
Oct 31, 2012

The child delights in violence.
Just ran Last Things Last for a new group who decided to open the septic tank at night and largely unarmed. Marlene's free at last.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Down With People posted:

Just ran Last Things Last for a new group who decided to open the septic tank at night and largely unarmed. Marlene's free at last.

Anyone left to join the cell hunting her down?

RudeCat
Aug 7, 2012

The rudest cat for the rudest jobs


Down With People posted:

Just ran Last Things Last for a new group who decided to open the septic tank at night and largely unarmed. Marlene's free at last.

Last group I had tried to seal her in by parking the car over the open hatch and then set it on fire. Stranding themselves at the cabin.

Down With People
Oct 31, 2012

The child delights in violence.

Kavak posted:

Anyone left to join the cell hunting her down?

I followed the adventure's guidelines and had her claw at people for a couple of rounds before sprinting off into the woods. If she had stuck around to keep fighting I think it could have been a TPK. The agents had moved the gasoline cans around the septic tank (I change it to four 5-gallon cans instead of 20 1-gallon cans) and they kept having weird notions of like, throwing the cans at her or pushing her into the cans? I had to keep reminding them how heavy they were.

It was so funny because I made it clear to them that they could easily have guns on their person before they went to the briefing but no, they only had one handgun to share. I even put a loaded shotgun in Baughman's locker which they immediately loaded into the van.

Humiliating mission failure aside, they all thought it was a blast. They agonized over what to do for the longest time and they still hadn't reached a hard decision about what to do with Marlene when they opened the hatch. Unfortunately, the Green Beret failed his SAN roll when he saw her and immediately tried to waste her.

Elendil004
Mar 22, 2003

The prognosis
is not good.


Down With People posted:

I followed the adventure's guidelines and had her claw at people for a couple of rounds before sprinting off into the woods. If she had stuck around to keep fighting I think it could have been a TPK. The agents had moved the gasoline cans around the septic tank (I change it to four 5-gallon cans instead of 20 1-gallon cans) and they kept having weird notions of like, throwing the cans at her or pushing her into the cans? I had to keep reminding them how heavy they were.

It was so funny because I made it clear to them that they could easily have guns on their person before they went to the briefing but no, they only had one handgun to share. I even put a loaded shotgun in Baughman's locker which they immediately loaded into the van.

Humiliating mission failure aside, they all thought it was a blast. They agonized over what to do for the longest time and they still hadn't reached a hard decision about what to do with Marlene when they opened the hatch. Unfortunately, the Green Beret failed his SAN roll when he saw her and immediately tried to waste her.

Why not a single twenty-one gallon can? Agonizing players is the best part of LTL, good work!

Really though I like the 20 single gallon cans because it takes time and deliberate effort to fill the tank. More time for players to try and reason with each other or for Marlene to bargain with agents.

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:


How does Last Things Last compare to PX Poker Night as an intro operation for a group who are new to Delta Green?

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Drone posted:

How does Last Things Last compare to PX Poker Night as an intro operation for a group who are new to Delta Green?
LTL is adapted from a shotgun scenario so it's smaller in scope, tighter in plot and backstory and just overall a quicker little thing meant to dip toes and give folks an introduction to the mechanics. It's not a long game, though, you can definitely get it done in under two hours, a hour and a half, depending on how the characters approach debating the Marlene problem.

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017
The characters in Poker Night are pregens who have no knowledge of the mythos. Last Things Last assumes that the characters are members of the Delta Green conspiracy and have some minimal knowledge of the unnatural, even just that it exists. It has pregens but they're kind of bad, and the scenario is short enough that you can make your own characters instead and still get it done in one session.

I think Poker Night is a more interesting scenario overall, but LTL is a better intro because it's simpler.

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010
No CthuluhTech in the OP?


quote:

CthulhuTech is a science-fiction and horror roleplaying game created by Wildfire LLC and published by Sandstorm that combines elements of the Cthulhu Mythos with anime-style mecha, horror, magic and futuristic action. The setting is Earth in 2085 during a worldwide conflict known as the Aeon War, (from the Necronomicon quote: "And with strange aeons even death may die") wherein the planet has been invaded twice: once by a black-skinned manufactured alien race known as the Nazzadi who are derived from humans and who join forces with them, and then a second time by the Mi-Go, an advanced alien civilization seemingly bent on the enslavement of humanity.

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LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Charlz Guybon posted:

No CthuluhTech in the OP?

There's a thread for discussing CthulhuTech already, it's FATAL & Friends. :v:

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