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Seems easy enough to explain, Tcho-Tcho aren't inherently evil but the cults they're raised in make them a threat to Humanity that must be dealt with when possible(I mean they are a bunch of actively cannibalistic sorcerers and serial killers who worship alien "gods" that might bring about the end times) This is assuming you decide to keep them of Human stock though, there's a decent amount of material out there that suggests that Tcho-Tcho aren't quite as human as they appear, much like Deep Ones or Ghouls in that respect
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Nov 5, 2021 00:06
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Someone in this thread had the idea that the rituals, magics, and gods they have contact with turn a people into Tcho Tcho. Any human faction could eventually bear Tcho Tcho identity. Race in terms of ethnicity has nothing to do with it.
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Nov 5, 2021 00:41
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Someone in this thread had the idea that the rituals, magics, and gods they have contact with turn a people into Tcho Tcho. Any human faction could eventually bear Tcho Tcho identity. Race in terms of ethnicity has nothing to do with it. The idea that their language is basically a memetic virus is definitely one I've seen before
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Nov 5, 2021 00:56
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Well, which gods could speak with a tongue that turn your language into a virus? That concept alone is cool enough to explore, and it rightly sidesteps all the lovecraftian racism.
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Nov 5, 2021 01:10
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Well, which gods could speak with a tongue that turn your language into a virus? That concept alone is cool enough to explore, and it rightly sidesteps all the lovecraftian racism. Y'golonac seems like a good candidate, particularly since he has a heavy interest in Humans by Great Old One standards considering his only known form of physical avatar is a heavily modified human body, even fits with the concept of Tcho-Tcho speak being a viral meme considering there's the concept that even merely speaking Y'golonac's name can summon him
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Nov 5, 2021 01:42
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Well, which gods could speak with a tongue that turn your language into a virus? That concept alone is cool enough to explore, and it rightly sidesteps all the lovecraftian racism. Not really: discrimination on ethnolinguistic grounds and attempts to eradicate the language of a culture has a long and sordid history of being used to subjugate subaltern groups.
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Nov 5, 2021 02:06
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I think the whole Tcho-Tcho concept has too much toxic baggage to work, even if an author uses it with the best of intentions. I'd love to be proven wrong but I'm not holding my breath.
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Nov 5, 2021 02:18
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LatwPIAT posted:Not really: discrimination on ethnolinguistic grounds and attempts to eradicate the language of a culture has a long and sordid history of being used to subjugate subaltern groups. That’s absolutely fair. I only meant to say that it wasn’t the whole “ethnic group is evil,” lovecraft garbage. Though couldn’t it be more than a language? Rather a pattern to syllables rather than words that invoke a magic? It would sound like nonsense to a native speaker, but so would Azathoths flute to a musician.
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Nov 5, 2021 02:25
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Pththya-lyi posted:I think the whole Tcho-Tcho concept has too much toxic baggage to work, even if an author uses it with the best of intentions. I'd love to be proven wrong but I'm not holding my breath. Hard agree here, and it's also why I've personally decided not to have Deep Ones feature in my game either, as it has unbearable tangs of "ethnic mixing" garbage indelibly written into it.
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Nov 5, 2021 02:39
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DrSunshine posted:Hard agree here, and it's also why I've personally decided not to have Deep Ones feature in my game either, as it has unbearable tangs of "ethnic mixing" garbage indelibly written into it. I always read Deep Ones as having the horror of sexual assault and/or genetic disease. At least, that's my non-racist take on them.
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Nov 5, 2021 04:03
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My preferred reading of Shadow over Innsmouth is that it's about growing up learning to fear and hate people with a marginalized trait, such as queerness or neurodivergence, then learning you have that marginalized trait. But it certainly wasn't the reading the author intended, and it doesn't change the fact that Deep Ones are messy and problematic at best.
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Nov 5, 2021 04:13
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Well, which gods could speak with a tongue that turn your language into a virus? That concept alone is cool enough to explore, and it rightly sidesteps all the lovecraftian racism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_Changes_Everything The movie is, IMO, better. Even if the book does a better job of disorienting a reader, as one would be if consuming English were exposing yourself to a deranging virus, the movie at least makes the least bit of goddamn sense. The author literally apologized for how weird the book got in the foreword to a later omnibus. LatwPIAT posted:Not really: discrimination on ethnolinguistic grounds and attempts to eradicate the language of a culture has a long and sordid history of being used to subjugate subaltern groups. In Pontypool, the language is specifically English, and the movie ends with Quebecois soldiers bombing the radio station the protagonists are holed up in and broadcasting from. Thinking about this, I think my favorite part, which is in no way made a big deal of, is when the expository doctor describes both the zombies and their victims as 'victims'. "If a victim fails to find a victim, its death is horrible, this is why victims are so frantic to find a victim." PipHelix fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Nov 5, 2021 |
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Nov 5, 2021 04:17
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Deep Ones can absolutely be read as the "horrors of miscegenation" but there's a lot more to it. I think there's more to be saved (and worth salvaging) there than in the concept of the Tchoo-Tchoo people. The Deep Ones were conceptually a pied piper; Captain Marsh bolstered the community at the cost of its future. Because of Lovecraft's racism it's easy to read as a cautionary tale against interracial pairings, but it works better as an example of making bargains with malign forces. Sure, here's all the fish and jewellery you'd ever want. But your children (and your children's children) are going to be fish-folk who disappear and forget your ways. They'll be unrecognizable to you, will not speak your language or honor your god. It's almost more about colonization and cultural erasure, as filtered through someone deeply ignorant that this horror has already played out everywhere in the world.
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Nov 5, 2021 04:23
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moths posted:It's almost more about colonization and cultural erasure, as filtered through someone deeply ignorant that this horror has already played out everywhere in the world. Kinda like, the colonizers see the same process of colonization as the colonized do, and live in the same fear of it happening to them. Sort of like how white conservative people are afraid that kids are being brainwashed with myths in school. Myths specifically designed to promote a hosed up view of racial superiority. Projection's not just a river in Egypt, after all.
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Nov 5, 2021 04:28
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Personally I don't think they're unsalvageable but I do agree that one does have to tread carefully with some of the more human Mythos races like Tcho-Tcho or Deep Ones With Deep Ones specifically I handle it by diversifying them culturally, after all the ocean is enormous, so only a relatively small minority among them are an active threat to Humanity, most are neutral towards us, and some are even friendly towards us(if I were to run a modern day CoC/Delta Green style game it would probably end up having a lot of Men In Black DNA in it regarding how Mythos races are treated)
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Nov 5, 2021 04:31
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Pththya-lyi posted:I think the whole Tcho-Tcho concept has too much toxic baggage to work, even if an author uses it with the best of intentions. I'd love to be proven wrong but I'm not holding my breath. Just make them Scandinavian. A whole bunch of gorgeous tall cannibal Swedes.
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Nov 5, 2021 10:55
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I've heard that Deep Ones might actually be a dig on Finns, which is fair enough honestly. We’re kinda fishy.
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Nov 5, 2021 11:52
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I had my return session of Masks of Nyarlathotep in 7 months last night; I moved and couldn't run the game until my partner and I were settled. We immediately jumped right back in to "my players are trying to rules lawyer how to turn a monkey into a willing sacrifice to create a zombie" and we have determined that they need to be taught the value of self sacrifice, which basically boils down to a fifth grade reading level. I love this game.
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Nov 5, 2021 12:02
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PipHelix posted:Kinda like, the colonizers see the same process of colonization as the colonized do, and live in the same fear of it happening to them. It's beyond the scope of this thread, but yes definitely. There's often a conservative touchstone attached to explain why it hasn't happened to them, and that fear motivates its fanatical defense. We haven't been cowed by tyrants because of gun rights. Street Crime hasn't permeated my neighborhood because of strong policing. I am not actually impoverished, because this is a nation of abundant and unchecked capitalism. It's why the individual's venomous response to something like wearing a mask or observing pronouns seems so impossibly disproportional. You're not really asking for a simple consideration, you're asking them to chisel at the wall separating their lifestyle from horror and chaos. The individual's response to a cultural fear is what makes cosmic horror work, and I think that's thematically intertwined with humanity's worst urges in a way that bears examination. People tend to reduce cosmic horror to tentacles and going daffy duck, but it's more about projecting intangible insecurities into a corporeal form.
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Nov 5, 2021 12:03
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I always thought deep ones were basically mermaids, but loving creepy, that bred an army for the rise of R'lyeh. Also the tcho-tcho folks sounds like a dumb idea. Cannibals should always be among investigators without them knowing it until they get eaten.
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Nov 5, 2021 13:14
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PipHelix posted:Kinda like, the colonizers see the same process of colonization as the colonized do, and live in the same fear of it happening to them. Sort of like how white conservative people are afraid that kids are being brainwashed with myths in school. Myths specifically designed to promote a hosed up view of racial superiority. Projection's not just a river in Egypt, after all. Johnny Truant posted:I had my return session of Masks of Nyarlathotep in 7 months last night; I moved and couldn't run the game until my partner and I were settled.
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Nov 5, 2021 17:24
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One good thing about this conversation is that it led me to remember the existence of Yog-Blogsoth and all their excellent art Also random thought, do we have a definitive list of authors who Lovecraft either directly collaborated on stories with or whom he corresponded with who would go on to write stories in the Mythos themselves, while there's obviously no absolute "canon" to the Mythos beyond what Lovecraft himself wrote(and even that obviously has people debate over), that more direct connection to the origin of the Mythos does feel important to catalog(alongside those authors who either preceded Lovecraft or were contemporaries of his that we know he admired and/or took inspiration from)
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Nov 5, 2021 23:42
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drrockso20 posted:One good thing about this conversation is that it led me to remember the existence of Yog-Blogsoth and all their excellent art
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Nov 6, 2021 02:46
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The fiction page on hplovecraft.com lists co-authors on all applicable stories. Probably the most surprising - Harry Houdini! Also, "The Haunter of the Dark" is a sequel to a story by Robert Bloch (who started in Mythos fiction before turning to the psychological horror he's best known for), in which Bloch killed off a thinly-disguised version of Lovecraft. This is why the protagonist, who ends up super-dead, is named Robert Blake.
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Nov 6, 2021 03:34
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moths posted:It's beyond the scope of this thread, but yes definitely. A good observation for GM's, imo
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Nov 6, 2021 05:07
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Having digested the scenario a bit (Secondary Infections, Unspeakable Oath 25) it does an adequate job depicting a diverse AAPI immigrant community that will be more than glad to help the Agents root out the baddies. I'm going to try not to hit the third rail with it; pray for me. One thing I'm going to play up: Aklo souns alien when one of the antagonists uses it in a creole with Vietnamese. It's not a tonal language, it's got harsh consonants and glottal stops and poo poo. The phonemes just don't sound like anything Asian at all. It's the ugly tongue of monster god colonizers used to break the mind around an inhuman mental landscape. One thing I'm going to play down: The Chaucha-American Advocacy Alliance. Not explicitly name checked in this module but if I do return to these antagonists. It's too cute by half to try and say "what if the racists are right just this one time, but the evil monster people use the trappings of Woke Liberalism as a smokescreen." Frankly I don't see the Tcho Tcho as depicted in most places going for something as subtle and mundane as "public relations." Their culture is about submission, domination, and exploitation; and basically no one sane enough to play face man this kind of glib legerdemain would be enfranchised enough in the perverse cannibal subculture to carry it out. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Nov 6, 2021 |
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Nov 6, 2021 06:39
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Owlbear Camus posted:One thing I'm going to play down: The Chaucha-American Advocacy Alliance. Not explicitly name checked in this module but if I do return to these antagonists. It's too cute by half to try and say "what if the racists are right just this one time, but the evil monster people use the trappings of Woke Liberalism as a smokescreen." Frankly I don't see the Tcho Tcho as depicted in most places going for something as subtle and mundane as "public relations." Their culture is about submission, domination, and exploitation; and basically no one sane enough to play face man this kind of glib legerdemain would be enfranchised enough in the perverse cannibal subculture to carry it out. Yeah gently caress that stuff, hits waaay too many racist tropes. The one scenario that uses them I might ever run straight* is God's Breath, and it'd be really easy to replace them with some other group going "What if you worshipped The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young... on weeed?" *Possible exception for Star Chamber because it's such a unique thing.
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Nov 6, 2021 08:41
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My favorite Lovecraft-alike is Laird Barron, he's got some good ones. His story about the hunting party who assembles to hunt down the legendary Black Stag would make a good one shot. Spoilers for the whole story, I'd leave it unread until I read the story itself, it's a good one. All these rich dudes get invited to this hunt and when they get there a surly "regular guy" hunter is there also. The hunt commences and one by one the Black Stag gores all these fuckers to death and they come to understand it is actually the loving straight-up Devil here in these woods hunting them. When it gets down to just one of the rich guys the Stag tells him if he'll bring the "regular guy" to it and sacrifice him it will let the rich guy go. The rich guy marches the dude at gunpoint to be sacrificed to the Devil, only to find out when they get there that ole regular dude was already a servant of Satan and the offer was just a test to see if the rich man's soul belonged in Hell. Of course it does!
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Nov 6, 2021 14:51
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Owlbear Camus posted:Planning to run the Tcho-Tcho module from Unspeakable Oath #25 and almost feel like having their handler all but address the fourth wall with a Whoopie Goldberg Loony Tune Disclaimer. "My father fought shoulder to shoulder with ARVN, Hmong, Montagnard. Amazing people, got to meet some of the ones we got back to the states. This is different. This is you know, fictional." drrockso20 posted:The idea that their language is basically a memetic virus is definitely one I've seen before Warthur fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Nov 6, 2021 |
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Nov 6, 2021 15:16
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JonathonSpectre posted:My favorite Lovecraft-alike is Laird Barron, he's got some good ones. Big fan of Laird Barron and I've been trying to get more Delta Green people to tap his writings for inspiration. The DG Handler's Guide even includes a collection Barron's stories as one of it's Recommended Media!  I think Mysterium Tremendum is one of his strongest stories and would work well for a campaign. If you want to try Barron for free use this link here: https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Laird_Barron.html I recommend The Forest as it's a good example of Barron's particular variation on cosmic horror. Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Nov 7, 2021 |
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Nov 7, 2021 03:43
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drrockso20 posted:The idea that their language is basically a memetic virus is definitely one I've seen before
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Nov 7, 2021 13:43
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Charlz Guybon posted:All language is a memetic virus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvOoR8m0oms
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Nov 7, 2021 17:00
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Funny coincidence, I just finished The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. The line of inspiration to Delta Green is pretty clear. Half the stories are about gangsters, spies, and other hard men going up against the forces of darkness. Several are structured similarly to RPG oneshots, where a well armed group of characters fights through a soft layer of human opponents before running up against the real threat which tears them to shreds. The structure is similar enough that it starts to feel a bit tired by the end of the collection, although some of the callbacks to earlier stories are nice, like the stag and the strange red light viewed through a peephole. Dialogue is Barron's major weak point. This is best illustrated by the part in Men From Porlock where the barely literate logger telling campfire stories drops a solid page of exposition on all the mythos tomes he read as a child in his grandfather's study, which just so happened to correspond exactly to the threat the group faces later. My personal favorite was Vastation, because it's unlike any of the other stories in the collection. It comes at the subject matter from a science fiction perspective rather than trying to force it into a cosmic horror framework which is, in my opinion, a bit past its prime. Hand of Glory was a tiny bit cheesy, but probably the easiest to adapt into a good RPG adventure if that's what you're looking for. The last story, More Dark, is the weakest in the book. It's mostly inside jokes about the horror fiction scene, none of which are enough to carry the lackluster plot. Good collection overall.
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Nov 8, 2021 01:49
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So last night I ran The Warren, an extra one-off that is in the back of the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth book. My players have several games under their belts now and wanted to just use throwaway characters and have fun. This one looked pretty dangerous but straightforward. Well, the general premise is that they all have a mutual friend missing and are going to look for them. Coincidentially (or is it) there was a loud explosion heard nearby, thought to come from the Boucher estate, though the newspaper later pulled this back. My players did absolutely no research and went straight to the house, which was abandoned. Then they went through the creepy graveyard into the mausoleum, and discovered a tunnel in an empty casket niche in the wall. Two of them went in - the third a SIZ 80 strongwoman wouldn't fit. So they, uh, left her behind, and were promptly attacked by ten rat-human hybrids in the basement of the house. They manaed to flee, and fled... deeper into the basement. Oh, only one of the three had a gun, and nobody thought to bring a flashlight. The strongwoman decided to search around the property and instead of going through the front door of the house, found a three foot diameter hole in the brush and crawled in, by herself, unarmed, into the other side of the basement... and by tearing up some roots, awakened more of these hybrid things, which... attacked her. She ran into a gas chamber which nearly killed her. Meanwhile, Team 'A' managed to stumble through several more rooms of these things and make it upstairs. They searched the entire 31-room house, which was mostly bedrooms. A couple of interesting tomes (which led to one of them immediately trying to cast a Contact Deity spell, which thankfully failed though they lost some SAN and POW as a result) but otherwise fairly boring. In the basement, Estelle the strongwoman ended up nearly sinking in a bog before at the last minute breaking free, only to succumb to some rat-human beasts shortly after. The remaining two characters went back into the basement and finally came across the pile of bones that was their friend, though they failed to identify him. They went deeper into the basement, finally coming across Philip Boucher himself, the only family member not turned into a rat. After a brief speech he begins transforming into the minor god Y'golonac, which drives them both temporarily insane. One found themselves near the exit but Y'golonac quickly caught up and shriveled them to death (they were close to death as it was). The other just ran in the meantime, never looking back the entire time. Afterwards they realized they had gone in completely unprepared and with no gear, and paid dearly for it. A large lady became food for some rat things, and an adventurer became a blackened, shriveled thing, likely also rat food. It was fun but reminded me too much of a horror movie in which the people do everything they're not supposed to do. CornHolio fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 02:08
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CornHolio posted:
Eh...if they're veterans of several games they were probably just role playing their naïve characters rather than just forgetting to gear up. I mean, unless you guys had been drinking or something before hand.
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Nov 10, 2021 15:56
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thanks for the tips last page, i think i am gonna run it as more of a crazy slasher freakout thing, which mainly involves finding places to drop LORE on people without them having to take time out to read books, and adding zany hazards and traps for the party to steer monsters into/fall into themselves.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:10
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Borrowed the Handler's Guide from the library the other day, finally got around to reading it, and uh, that’s not how you write an abstract but also  I trust y'all's taste in books so I'm going to keep reading, but wow that is not a strong piece of fiction to lead with.
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Nov 13, 2021 20:45
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imo it's about the quality one should expect from nu!DG at this rate
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Nov 14, 2021 03:33
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Is that the “you might as well eat your gun, nothing you do in this game will matter” preamble?
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Nov 14, 2021 04:12
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:imo it's about the quality one should expect from nu!DG at this rate 
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Nov 14, 2021 06:24
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