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Well, my group had our second DG session, at long last. We're doing the "Dead Hand" scenario, where the players are spetsnaz operators. I picked this scenario as an initial "tutorial"/dip-your-toes-in-the-water kind of scenario, to get a general feel for the combat etc. in fairly a low-stakes situation compared to as part of a campaign with characters they made and want to hang onto. (Since I mean, if this scenario is botched and they all die horribly in their first combat encounter, it's not really a big loss. They could just take over other soldiers in the platoon, or simply fail the mission if it's bad enough) But anyway, it hasn't been good so far. It doesn't really give players as much freedom as other scenarios I feel (compared to say, if you're investigating some haunted house or what have you. Where you can go around the town talking to people and finding out more about the place, etc., maybe try to get some plans for the house from the council building etc) but it's still good for an intro. The guy who's playing the captain has failed a few sanity rolls too, which was amusing - only one other person has lost sanity, which was only a couple of points. Meanwhile, the captain nearly suffered from temporary insanity before leaving camp 234 
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Feb 6, 2023 00:02
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Major Isoor posted:a low-stakes situation
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Feb 6, 2023 00:48
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mellonbread posted:Isn't the fail state of Dead Hand a nuclear war? High Stakes would be an Elder God rising.
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Feb 6, 2023 00:59
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Rougey posted:High Stakes would be an Elder God rising.
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Feb 6, 2023 01:11
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mellonbread posted:Isn't the fail state of Dead Hand a nuclear war? Hah yes, very true!  I meant more for the players personally, rather than the characters. Like, they haven't sunk a lot of time into making the characters or carrying out some smaller investigations before a big combat encounter, is all. Sorry - poor choice of words, I know! But yeah, just 'low-stakes' in terms of time/investment for the players, is allBut yes, in-universe, it's potentially very high-stakes indeed! (although also kinda not, in a way. Seeing as... contingencies have been put in place by the government, unbeknownst to the players)EDIT: Also, I think it'll indirectly tie into the "Walker in the Wastes" main plotline for the campaign fairly nicely. Providing an early taste of the power of Ithaqua. (Especially since assuming the players succeed in the main campaign, it's not like Ithaqua has been beaten - he's still raging away up north. The Major who started the plot simply isn't aware that by causing a nuclear winter, it's not actually going to help spread his god's domain) Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 01:16
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Oh yeah! Sorry for the DP, but I forgot to mention earlier - the funny thing I found about the first half of the Dead Hand mission was how everyone was very much toeing the Party line, regarding all the goings-on. Primarily the radio transmission/warning from Major Kishenko, so far. I'd imagine most parties would treat it at least somewhat seriously, but everyone in the group immediately blew him off both in-character and OOC, talking about him like the treasonous raving lunatic Command is referring to him as. (And that's even AFTER the same officer ordered the first platoon to fly into the blizzard, causing them to crash and burn) So far it's definitely an urgent, yet routine mission against some cursed counter-revolutionaries, with some unfortunate loss of life and lunatics clogging the airwaves. Nothing more! I'd be curious to know how other groups took it all, though! Possibly approaching the situation with perhaps a little more caution, compared to my players. They'll learn caution soon enough, though
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Feb 7, 2023 01:46
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Whelp, last night was wild. We keep encountering mythos monsters, and I've had an inkling they've been summoned for a while, and after the latest attack I went out and spotted somebody who I'd seen leaving another attack. I pursed expecting to put a 9mm in the back of their head if they tried anything, but we were in a busy street when I caught up and given I was unsure of them actually being the culprit, opted instead to tackle them and inject a strong weird science sedative. Success on the brawl and extreme success on pharmacology (we roll my weird science bullshit in the field) and they're out like a light. Another PC caught up and after convincing bystanders it was a medical intervention, we drag our suspect back to the scene of the latest attack, tie them up... and then the cops arrived. One PC goes to stall with Fast Talk while I prepare a cocktail of drugs that would give Ozzy Osbourne pause. Third PC, a completely batshit archaeologist who is on a POW/SAN death spiral after making a deal with a demon (they didn't sell their soul so much as give it away like a geriatric sharing credit card details over the phone), takes up position between us talking to their sword. I start interrogating, get not just a confession but an admission and gaining some insight into what we are investigating, and call the cops in... then the NPC start casting a spell and the Benny Hill theme starts. Long story short, while I'm trying and failing to sock this tied up spellcaster in the mouth... then the nutjob PC gleefully lost their POW roll and cut the NPCs loving arm off and walked out the front door leaving me with a corpse and the cops in the next room gettinng increasing irate with our Face 
Rougey fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 02:45
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Very entertaining. I'm a little surprised this story didn't include the regulation CoC PC arson. 
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Feb 11, 2023 05:17
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Helical Nightmares posted:Very entertaining. I'm a little surprised this story didn't include the regulation CoC PC arson. And to be honest I was happy to have the cops there until the unconscious perpetrator, who we dragged into the building in front of several witnesses, including a reporter, ended up missing an arm and completely exsanguinated. Yep - I neglected to mention in the above that the loving sword nutjob has is a goddamn blood drinker imbued with the power of a demon nutjob butt dialed and that demon really hates Nyarlathotep. So the sword/demon told nutjob to kill the NPC, the loving thing started sucking out the blood - and to try and staunch the bleeding nutjob applied the blade to the wound, resulting in the sword having a nice long drink. My Character was freaking the gently caress out, which was hard to roleplay with how much I was laughing knowing how deep a hole we where in. To add insult to injury, last session me and nutjob arranged to have drinks with the head of the local police in an attempt to liquor them up and get some more information on our investigation... I guess that's off the table. In hindsight it was a dumb idea to take them there but my character has a history of trying to do the right thing, which I'm enjoying because it is creating conflict with the others (particularly Nutjob) that is just delicious. I'm a little jealous to be honest; I still have more SAN than what I started the campaign with when my entire plan was to loose sanity and go full mad scientist when I went indefinitely insane, and at the current rate that's never gonna happen. Face ended up slipping into the crowd, while my character ended up making a tactical vomit in front of the police (ingested something that would make her throw up) and rubbed pepper in her good eye and then told the police the truth - that the arsonist confessed, then was attacked by the servant of a demon. They dismissed my character as being in shock, and following a distraction made by the others, I slipped out the front door, but not before telling a reporter who had been tailing us to check out the arsonists place. We ended up at the arsonists place and found their hidden sex and/or murder dungeon, planted some evidence indicating they were after us (to help the cops connect the dots and not arrest us on sight in future), then skipped town. Also, nutjobs sanity went below their Mythos - so we now got that to deal with. Further spoilers regarding Masks of Nyarlathotep: We're in Nairobi and managed to get to the arsonists place before the police or reporter I tipped off arrived - the Arsonist was the tea peddler. We'd looted the keys of her body so we slipped in, and made a decision not to ransack the place - we gave it a once over, finding only a ledger that linked them to a previously investigated business and also several other businesses we're going to check out, before platting a letter in it and returning it to it's hiding place. I'd been writing the letter so didn't do any looking, but on the way out made a good roll and found the entrance to the basement. Face opted to stay upstairs as lookout, while me and Nutjob went down into the basement. Now the last time we were in a cultists basement was New York, where I gassed the lot of them, so I popped on my mask and prepared a Tear Gas Grenade just in case - turned out to be a really good idea as the basement was filled with some sort of incense that made Nutjob got catatonic after losing a lot of SAN and gaining the equal amount in Mythos knowledge. I dragged her up, then went back and looted the basement of some culty looking items (taking a sample of the incense) then we retreated. After checking out the items (one of them is some sort of compound that allows FTL travel?) we debated checking out the safari business which had been our planned stop after the date with the head of the local garrison, but decided it was too hot for us and it was time to move on. So the moral of the story; if there is a fire, let it keep burning - otherwise you'll need to skip town early. Rougey fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 12:19
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I remembered that VCR tape mind downloading scenario you wrote for Delta Green and tried finding it. I did, but only after searching through a bunch of your stuff and loving hell I love your stuff so much. From the Deus Ex references to the random bits of militaria to just the really good setups in a lot of your scenarios. 
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Feb 28, 2023 05:23
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LatwPIAT posted:I remembered that VCR tape mind downloading scenario you wrote for Delta Green and tried finding it. I did, but only after searching through a bunch of your stuff and loving hell I love your stuff so much. From the Deus Ex references to the random bits of militaria to just the really good setups in a lot of your scenarios. I haven't seen this VCR scenario you mentioned, (kinda curious now though, heh) but I agree - all of mellonbread's scenarios I've read are pretty great! Very helpful on the forums too, for answering the many, many questions I've asked Also, I'm a few sessions into my DG game - going good so far. Everyone's very dubious of strangers' feet now, due to stuff in Cold Dead Hand. Their characters probably look like a bunch of weirdos, but it's humorous all the same! I'm thinking I might try and slot the CDH thralls into the main Walker in the Wastes campaign though, since I noticed that there's only that... other zombie/wight kinda spawn, that ithaqua can turn people into. So I might have it so that the thralls are lower in the heirarchy (as they lose half their intelligence. So I figure they're closer to being a cunning animal, than a dumb person) and are probably created when ithaqua isn't satisfied enough with a sacrifice to make the person one of the more powerful entities. (Sorry, the name escapes me) So the thralls might end up being sicced on the players as some point late in the campaign (after visiting the temple and hopefully foiling the initial attempt, I imagine) but otherwise I'll keep things similar Does that sound reasonable enough? I haven't found much other material on ithaqua and its minions, so I'm just trying to meld CDH and WitW as well as I can, so it doesn’t seem weird having zero monster crossover Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Feb 28, 2023 |
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Feb 28, 2023 05:58
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Major Isoor posted:Does that sound reasonable enough? I haven't found much other material on ithaqua and its minions, so I'm just trying to meld CDH and WitW as well as I can, so it doesn’t seem weird having zero monster crossover Just using this to segue/tangent: How often are you folks having your PCs encounter mythos creatures and monsters? I feel like I really hold back when it comes to "creature stuff" when I hear discussions of this sort. One, because I'm not a very combat-oriented Keeper, and two because I feel like having monsters like ghouls and shoggoths kind of turns it into a stats and tactics game like D&D when I'm going after psychological unease and atmosphere.
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Feb 28, 2023 15:12
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LatwPIAT posted:I remembered that VCR tape mind downloading scenario you wrote for Delta Green and tried finding it. I did, but only after searching through a bunch of your stuff and loving hell I love your stuff so much. From the Deus Ex references to the random bits of militaria to just the really good setups in a lot of your scenarios. The brain machine was vaguely inspired by an item from the old Green Box Generator, or maybe one of the old ICE CAVE sites. The Traveler stat block was mostly created by Jibril, another user on the Night at the Opera disky. He's the one who added the "genetic memory" component to the creature, which I don't believe was in the original short story or the Delta Green scenario Puppet Shows and Shadowplays, but ended up being a key plot element in Some Body. Both of these elements were created beforehand, then combined into a scenario based on the listed contest prompts after the TOC. DrSunshine posted:Just using this to segue/tangent: The big downside to monsters is that the pre-baked ones in the book (whether you're running Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green) are already familiar to many players. A ghoul or shoggoth is not scary and not a mystery because the players already know what it is, know its powers and know its weakness. Their characters can pretend to be scared and mystified by the hosed up creatures, but pretending to discover things for the first time is never as satisfying as actually discovering something new out-of-character.
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Feb 28, 2023 17:31
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The good old CoC issue of IA PUBLIC DOMAIN FIGURE WE'VE HEARD ABOUT FOR 20 YEARS, yes.
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Feb 28, 2023 17:37
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mellonbread posted:For a second I thought you were talking about SEX TAPE, which is one of my favorites. Then I realized you were probably talking about Don't You Want Some Body [To Love]. That one was originally going to be part of a whole arc about the resurrected characters, with multiple Handlers writing scenarios. It was pretty fun while it lasted, which was a couple months. There's a real thread of continuity in my older stuff from when I was writing and running a new scenario every week, and riffing on other people's work. The downside with stuff like the early "mini campaigns" is that they're basically unrunnable because all the successor adventures are based on very specific endings of the early scenarios. I do think that element of collaboration is missing from my later work, mainly because I switched from running and playing games to just running them exclusively. I eventually found two separate write-ups of the brain machine in your stuff: one as a scenario, Don't You Want Some Body [To Love], and one simply as a weird thing you can discover. I can't remember which one I was thinking of originally, because the only thing that stuck in my head was the brain machine. It actually came up because I was playing Disco Elysium and got to the bit about the game design company with more ideas than sense. The Valley of Heads, with its 10,000 heads that can be fitted to 10,000 different bodies made me think about a bit in Fallout 2 where you can get one out of four different NPC companions depending on which brain you put in a Robobrain, and suddenly I was thinking about a cRPG implementation of your brain machine where you can download a (small) number of different brains into (some of) your NPC companions, and then I had to read the original because I seemed to remember it had some fun ideas in it. Another favourite is the schizophrenic shut-in DG friendly who runs a giant server trawling the Internet for occult porn, with a d20 table of weird things to find. Sadly, I'm not sure I could ever find a group I could ever run it for. Anyway, your stuff is cool and it's really revitalised my desire to run Delta Green. That, and rewatching Bourne Identity and Atomic Blonde while re-reading The Dracula Dossier. That whole space is probably my favourite genre?
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Feb 28, 2023 18:43
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LatwPIAT posted:It actually came up because I was playing Disco Elysium and got to the bit about the game design company with more ideas than sense. The Valley of Heads, with its 10,000 heads that can be fitted to 10,000 different bodies made me think about a bit in Fallout 2 where you can get one out of four different NPC companions depending on which brain you put in a Robobrain, and suddenly I was thinking about a cRPG implementation of your brain machine where you can download a (small) number of different brains into (some of) your NPC companions, and then I had to read the original because I seemed to remember it had some fun ideas in it. LatwPIAT posted:Another favourite is the schizophrenic shut-in DG friendly who runs a giant server trawling the Internet for occult porn, with a d20 table of weird things to find. Sadly, I'm not sure I could ever find a group I could ever run it for. LatwPIAT posted:Anyway, your stuff is cool and it's really revitalised my desire to run Delta Green. That, and rewatching Bourne Identity and Atomic Blonde while re-reading The Dracula Dossier. That whole space is probably my favourite genre? Thanks for reading, I always love to hear which adventures people like the best.
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Feb 28, 2023 22:47
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mellonbread posted:I did write a Delta Green adventure set in in the GDR called Winter Pepper, though it's tonally quite different from Atomic Blonde. It's not like the spy fiction I like is tonally consistent either. I'm just super into that whole vibe and Delta Green is one facet of it. Atomic Blonde is another. Though honestly, if I could run Delta Green games with seven-minute stairwell fights and hot spy women seducing other hot spy women, I probably would. Delta Green is, after all, just a vehicle for me to live out my dreams of being the girl with the gun in the girl-with-gun genre. Anyway, your use of a variety of sources of inspiration has made me think about a Secret Service/MAJESTIC conspiracy using the Mummy: the Resurrection Spell of Life to ensure the continuity of government and strong leadership against nuclear decapitation strikes. Some ambulatory corpse in the state apparatus that never seems to go away even as administrations change, skin yellow and waxy, capable of surviving anything but a direct nuclear strike and empowered with cosmic secrets of statecraft. (Instead of the Web of Faith, the Dead Presidents are bound to the territory of the United States itself, through the deification of George Washington!) Alternatively, a cult of biocosmic immortalist actually completed the project that SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS sought to destroy! Only, the Great Provider has not yet returned to his Third Life, and so the cult has turned increasingly to adventism and attempts to bring about the conditions for the return of Stalin.
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Mar 2, 2023 14:00
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mellonbread posted:I did write a Delta Green adventure set in in the GDR called Winter Pepper, though it's tonally quite different from Atomic Blonde. If I wrote it again, I'd include some pregenerated characters, since the players are not going to have characters from the Eastern Bloc in 1971 ready to go. Oh this scenario seems like a blast. I’ll run this as my group’s next one shot. Have any tips for it?
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Mar 2, 2023 16:33
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Bishop Beo posted:Oh this scenario seems like a blast. I’ll run this as my group’s next one shot. Have any tips for it? The first thing that comes to mind: Make sure the players understand that their (initial) objective is to help the trio of characters. On reflection the whole scenario might work better if you don't give the players the hidden instruction to kill everyone on detection of supernatural contamination. It could be better if they come to that conclusion themselves. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Mar 20, 2023 |
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Mar 20, 2023 04:21
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I FINALLY got around to starting our Edge of Darkness game. I've got 3 players, one is a good friend of mine that I've played with in dozens of games for the last 20+ years, the other 2 are a married couple that love boardgames but I don't think have much, if any, RPG experience. Went REALLY well. Everyone stayed engaged the entire time, were constantly digging for clues and more information, and pretty much stayed in character the entire time. We did basically everything leading up to the trip out to Ross' Corner and even without a ton of conflict, we stull had a really good time and got to engage with the system really well via skill checks and such. I even decided to get into prop making and made this:   
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Mar 27, 2023 01:20
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DrSunshine posted:Just using this to segue/tangent: Late response but I mostly use them as fences/sheepdogs. You need to stay in this place until you figure X out, or you need to stay the hell away from this place until you figure X out, or you need to run the hell from here to there right NOW. Generally, on the first encounter I have it absolutely shred an NPC or two so that they understand the idea is run away/keep away from it until they can figure out the magic bullet and zap it gone. Only module I've ever done where there's a monster you're supposed to punch to death is a homebrew Terminator/Metropolis mashup, and even though it's 'only' a steampunk killer robot, I specced it out that the party would need to recruit a few NPCs (this being the bulk of the module) to act as meatshields to not lose multiple members/TPK in one-on-five combat. E: oh yea and a The Thing ripoff, where what you're fighting is a chipped off shard of a frozen shoggoth that got thawed out. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 30, 2023 04:31
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So I need a floor plan for a high school. I'm running Lover in the Ice and the characters are too late to save the highschool from the Amante infecting it. It's been 1 night, and I want to set up a rad dungeon crawl like in James Cameron's Aliens, with the player characters as Ripley and a group of NPC National Guard. Anywhere I can get one online? (Not just any. I've googled, but I'm kind of overwhelmed. I just want one that'd be good for a 1 session crawl in a TTRPG, not some huge labyrinthine thing that it would be if I used a real world highschool floor plan) DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 14:10
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DrSunshine posted:So I need a floor plan for a high school. I'm running Lover in the Ice and the characters are too late to save the highschool from the Amante infecting it. It's been 1 night, and I want to set up a rad dungeon crawl like in James Cameron's Aliens, with the player characters as Ripley and a group of NPC National Guard. if you've played fallout: new vegas the x-8 research center would be perfect: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/X-8_research_center
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Apr 26, 2023 14:21
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DrSunshine posted:So I need a floor plan for a high school. I'm running Lover in the Ice and the characters are too late to save the highschool from the Amante infecting it. It's been 1 night, and I want to set up a rad dungeon crawl like in James Cameron's Aliens, with the player characters as Ripley and a group of NPC National Guard. You could use a floor plan from some old small town. For example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Durango_High_School_-_First_Floor,_1920.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Durango_High_School_-_Second_Floor,_1920.jpg
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Apr 26, 2023 15:46
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I'm running Impossible Landscapes in Delta Green, and I have a few questions regarding the second part of the campaign. I'll spoiler this in case anyone else is playing it: Why exactly is the book so insistent on wanting the Agents to be attacked by Delta Green before they go to the psych hospital? I understand the logic of why Delta Green would try to ice anyone infected with the Yellow King, but it feels like doing this before they are more immersed into the Yellow King's world in the Dorchester House breaks the campaign. I feel like the sane thing to do if you get burned by your spy handlers is to try to go to ground and hide forever, not go into a place that is (on the surface) a Delta Green front.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:42
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Whirling posted:I'm running Impossible Landscapes in Delta Green, and I have a few questions regarding the second part of the campaign. I'll spoiler this in case anyone else is playing it: Why exactly is the book so insistent on wanting the Agents to be attacked by Delta Green before they go to the psych hospital? I understand the logic of why Delta Green would try to ice anyone infected with the Yellow King, but it feels like doing this before they are more immersed into the Yellow King's world in the Dorchester House breaks the campaign. I feel like the sane thing to do if you get burned by your spy handlers is to try to go to ground and hide forever, not go into a place that is (on the surface) a Delta Green front. are you talking about the mall attack? if so I think that's mainly there for after they experience Dorchester and are looking for help or if they start digging into the history/staff of DH and start experiencing some of the weirdness before going into the facility. That whole chapter is full of a lot of things that seem to be either or experiences, my players found Night Dorchester to be more annoying than spooky so maybe it would have been better for them to experience the strangeness outside, be ambushed by the kill team, and then move on to chapter three without encountering the patzu
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Apr 26, 2023 23:00
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DrSunshine posted:So I need a floor plan for a high school. I'm running Lover in the Ice and the characters are too late to save the highschool from the Amante infecting it. It's been 1 night, and I want to set up a rad dungeon crawl like in James Cameron's Aliens, with the player characters as Ripley and a group of NPC National Guard.
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Apr 27, 2023 22:38
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Nessus posted:Use Midwich Elementary with some minor modifications. Thanks, this is perfect!
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Apr 27, 2023 23:26
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DrSunshine posted:Thanks, this is perfect!
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Apr 28, 2023 00:44
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RudeCat posted:are you talking about the mall attack? if so I think that's mainly there for after they experience Dorchester and are looking for help or if they start digging into the history/staff of DH and start experiencing some of the weirdness before going into the facility. I think it'd be neater to have it after the Dorchester House, yeah. I had Delta Green prompt them to go to Barbas's house to kill him and burn down his house to dispose of any Yellow King vectors (which they did in a hilariously messy/public way that I will milk for tension until Barbas comes back from them shooting him in the head and tossing him into a river), I'll probably have them sent off to Dorchester House next session since they have enough to convince DG that something's up there, and when that's done, I'll start off part 3 with DG trying to kill the Agents in an attempt to put a neat little bow on this outbreak.
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Apr 28, 2023 05:57
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How are the adventures in the 7e rulebook? I've owned it for awhile but never ran. I did run the Delta Green quickstart adventure once though, and had a good time (but I don't own any of the physical delta green books).
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May 8, 2023 19:34
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1upmuffin posted:How are the adventures in the 7e rulebook? I've owned it for awhile but never ran. I did run the Delta Green quickstart adventure once though, and had a good time (but I don't own any of the physical delta green books). They seem like they're ok, but we've been going through the ones from the starter box set instead and really digging it. My group is fantastic so far despite none of them ever having played CoC and most of them have minimal to zero rpg experience period.
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May 9, 2023 01:30
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Whirling posted:I think it'd be neater to have it after the Dorchester House, yeah. I had Delta Green prompt them to go to Barbas's house to kill him and burn down his house to dispose of any Yellow King vectors (which they did in a hilariously messy/public way that I will milk for tension until Barbas comes back from them shooting him in the head and tossing him into a river), I'll probably have them sent off to Dorchester House next session since they have enough to convince DG that something's up there, and when that's done, I'll start off part 3 with DG trying to kill the Agents in an attempt to put a neat little bow on this outbreak. oooh, this is very interesting! If all my players are keen for more DG after our current Ithaqua campaign (and survive) I might do something like this. Like, have a King in Yellow themed campaign (shorter than the current one though) with new characters, culminating in their original surviving characters being revealed as the hit squad tasked with taking out the players' new characters/"rogue agents". Then they can pick who to play as for the big final encounter, between the two parties. Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 01:59 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 01:51
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1upmuffin posted:How are the adventures in the 7e rulebook? I've owned it for awhile but never ran. I did run the Delta Green quickstart adventure once though, and had a good time (but I don't own any of the physical delta green books). Amidst the Ancient Trees is pretty basic, Crimson Letters is pretty sandboxy and actually allows you to set up any one of the described NPCs as the antagonist, but requires you to wing it a bit more.
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May 9, 2023 01:56
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Thank you, will consider getting starter kit either physical or digital if I end up running.
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May 10, 2023 03:56
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First impressions of the new Rivers of London RPG. It does not exactly fit the parameters of this thread but I think it's an interesting comparison with Laundry RPG and with normal CoC. Rivers of London is a book series about a paranormal investigator who works for the Metropolitan Police, the police force of London. It's an urban fantasy police procedural with light horror elements. I've read all the mainline novels (I think), most of the tie-in comics, and some of the short stories featuring the side characters. Because of its setting and subject matter, the series sometimes draws comparison to the Laundry Files books. I think the best Laundry books (Fuller Memorandum, Apocalypse Codex) are better than the best Rivers of London books, but Rivers of London maintains a more consistent level of quality (at the cost of being a bit formulaic). This analogy carries forward to the RPGs. The Laundry RPG is willing to color outside the lines, but also shits the bed on several occasions. Rivers of London plays it safe, delivering a more consistent but less exciting product. I have played Laundry but not Rivers of London, so this opinion might shift after I get some actual experience with the game. I bought the hardback book at a game store. I should know better than to buy expensive hardbacks for games I may never run, but stocking any RPG besides 5e is a financial risk for a game store, and I want them to continue doing it. It's a typical Chaosium hardback but comes with a cute folding map of London in the back. The map is loose so you don't have to tear it out, and the book comes plastic wrapped to stop the map from falling out in transit. Typography is what you'd expect from a professional product. Various types of aside are broken out using different colored text, italics, and clearly labeled boxes. Many segments of the book are written in-character in the voice of the protagonist from the novels. It's okay, much less annoying than the in-character segments of Eclipse Phase or Unknown Armies. The art ranges from good to quite bad. Some of the pieces are illustrated by people who knew what they were doing. In some the posing is quite bad, giving the characters a Fall of Delta Green style wax sculpture appearance. Some illustrations are clearly just 3D models arranged in blender, with a quick photoshop filter thrown overtop. The large number of artists working the project means we get different interpretations of the same canon characters from the books, which I like. The game runs on a simplified version of CoC 7e. SAN is gone, the skill list is drastically slimmed down, and the weapon damage system has been dramatically simplified. You don't have to roll damage for each bullet in a burst of gunfire, and nobody is getting instagibbed by a thrown pool cue. Like Laundry RPG, Rivers of London bolts its own custom magic system onto the CoC chassis. The basics are similar to CoC, you make a casting roll, spend magic points off your character sheet and get a spell effect. If you run out of magic points you can keep casting, but every spell requires a save against thaumatalogical degradation - a type of turbo alzheimer's that affects wizards in the Rivers of London setting. The real meat of the magic system is the spell tree that determines what you're allowed to learn and cast. Like in the novel, the spells come in "orders" that increase numerically as the spells increase in complexity. Your first order spells are things like "create light" and basic telekinesis. Higher level spells let you throw fireballs, create energy shields that stop bullets, blow up walls, mind control people... This is the game's main form of character advancement, chewing through lower level disciplines to get access to the showier stuff. Mastery of lower order spells lets you refine and combine them to get higher level spells. Spells can be "mastered" by investing additional points in them. Mastering a spell can crank up its power level or give it bonus effects. Sometimes you have to master a spell to learn the next one in the tree. On a cursory read, my main objection to the magic system is there are too many spells which are just minor variations on a theme. You can learn a spell that makes a light, and there's another spell that makes a light... and a little sound! In the rules authors' defense, this is backed up by how things work in the books. Improvisation is a nice party trick to amuse your friends, but if you want to cast spells reliably in even moderately stressful situations, you gotta practice until you can consistently produce the same effect. I think this should have been reflected with the spell mastery system - mastering a spell gives you access to the variations on a theme, rather than a whole new branch on the tree with its own prerequisites. It's common knowledge that the magic system in the novels is based on the one from Ars Magica. I've never read that game and couldn't tell you how the one in this game compares. I can compare it to Laundry RPG and tell you that the magic system in Rivers of London is much more player friendly than the computational demonology system in Laundry, but also less interesting. The book has a huge GM facing section with a setting gazetteer and a lot of information about the real world Metropolitan Police. There's a list of locations in London, both real world places the characters would be familiar with and fictional ones from the novel. The setting info sticks to what's presented in the novels, which is enough to fill the book but doesn't offer a lot of new stuff. The real world information is accompanied by lots of GM advice for which parts are actually useful and how. The biggest piece of advice, and the one that most sets Rivers of London apart from something like Delta Green, is that the players are legitimate members of a police force and are entitled to delegate the boring parts of an investigation to NPCs. If the players hit a wall, or want to pursue a lead that just isn't worth spending table time on, they can make it someone else's problem and get the resulting information later on. One piece of advice the book gives in the HP and damage section is how to handle character defeat/death in combat. The only ways for a player character to die in Rivers of London are to be hit with megadamage (hit by a train, brain aneurysm from critically failing a pushed casting roll, etc) and not receive medical care, or to be deliberately finished off by an NPC while in a helpless state. The default is that NPCs will either flee the scene after incapacitating a character, or kidnap them for interrogation/use as a hostage. There are NPCs and creatures that will kill a helpless player, but they're in the minority and exist mostly to add a sense of genuine danger. The game is laser focused on presenting the canonical setting of Rivers of London, including canon characters and the canon organizational structure of the wizard police. The default assumption is that the players are apprentice mages working under the big boss mage from the books. London is a swathe of territories staked out by high power canon characters, who are likewise given stat blocks and basic dossiers in the event that the players encounter them. This is a common attitude for RPGs set in established fictional universes. My personal preference for roleplaying in a fictional universe is for the canon characters to never appear at all. But I appreciate the bind the authors were in. The Rivers of London RPG is about Rivers of London and is set in London, and anyone purchasing the book is going to reasonably expect it to be filled with details about the Rivers of London version of London. If I run this game I'm going to spin up a magic police office in Scotland, Northern Ireland or some other location where I can make up my own poo poo. The GM advice section contains a discussion of tone and how it differs from Call of Cthulhu. Basically, the book admits that the novels take place in a fantasy or fairy tale version of London. The police don't brutalize suspects in custody or maltreat minorities, or cover for detectives who stalk and rape dozens of women over a period of decades. Like in Laundry, the Rivers of London novels are presented as case reports or memoirs written by the protagonist. I always suspected that the POV character was deliberately redacting things that made him and his colleagues look bad, similar to the POV character from Black Company. The game comes with two adventures. The first is a solo adventure that a player can "run" for themselves to learn the basics of the game. The latter is a full scenario for the Keeper to run. The module begins with a GM facing summary, which means it's better than 90 percent of RPG modules in existence (which require you to pick up clues as to what's happening as you read). No idea how well it actually plays. Am I going to run Rivers of London? I don't know. I'd need an idea I really liked for a scenario, and right now nothing jumps out at me. Writing my own UK magic police office would be work, but more fun than using the stuff in the book. I bet I could recycle some stuff from the PISCES Northern Ireland office I did for Delta Green. The way I heard about Rivers of London was from the Jackson Elias show. Paul Fricker, one of the show hosts, was among the book's lead devs. CoC fans may already be familiar with this podcast, it's one of the more popular non-actual play shows.
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May 22, 2023 19:42
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Hey, DG question: What happens if a character hits multiple sanity breakdowns/'temp insanity' in one bad roll/crit fail? I had an NPC team mate for the group do just that, losing (IIRC) 13 sanity in one hit. It was... very bad. I checked the rules, but couldn't find anything mentioning this kind of situation. So yeah, because he was an unimportant character and it was a real bad situation, I ended up deciding by doing another sanity check - not to lose points, but to see how adversely he'd respond to the situation...he rolled 99 So as a result, he just offed himself with his sidearm, in the face of this unspeakable horror mutilating his still-living squadmate. Kinda fit the theme at the time and I allowed it to help snap a PC out of their own stupor, as they had withdrawn into themselves after a bad sanity check the previous turn.But either way, I figure I'd better check to see if there are more proper rules than that improvised situation, just in case it happens again
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May 29, 2023 03:28
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Major Isoor posted:Hey, DG question: What happens if a character hits multiple sanity breakdowns/'temp insanity' in one bad roll/crit fail? I had an NPC team mate for the group do just that, losing (IIRC) 13 sanity in one hit. It was... very bad. I checked the rules, but couldn't find anything mentioning this kind of situation. You can't really do that unless it's from multiple things and they're all real bad. If you take say, a 40 point SAN loss, you take the loss, hit your break point, then recalc the new breakpoint from where you are at currently. Likewise, once you go temp insane, you are temp insane until someone calms you down, you pass out (or die), or you 'flee'. I have playtested a variant where you only get the disorder if you are still below your breaking point at the end of the mission, which is a lot of fun and my current preferred method for san loss stuff. Rivers of London stuff Mellon do you think the game would be 'better' if it had less focus on the canon? Like is it too constrained or do you think it would be easy to file the serial numbers off like you suggest? Once you start doing that, are you better off running something else? Delegating stuff sounds pretty neat. Elendil004 fucked around with this message at 03:59 on May 29, 2023 |
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May 29, 2023 03:56
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Elendil004 posted:You can't really do that unless it's from multiple things and they're all real bad. If you take say, a 40 point SAN loss, you take the loss, hit your break point, then recalc the new breakpoint from where you are at currently. Oh yeah, sorry - the guy had taken SAN loss from other stuff too. He was a real mess the whole mission before that happened, so he exceeded his breakpoint. You're right though - just rechecking it all now, and I guess you just ignore the fact that you hit temp insanity multiple times? So just temp insanity once while hitting the BP at the same time, then leave it at that? Also, that variant sounds good - I think I'll do the same thing. Since I was just thinking that it seems real easy to snowball into a bunch of disorders on one mission, if you're unlucky. And I dunno, I don't think I want to be quite that punishing. (Doesn't matter so much in this case though - that NPC was the only one to be in that situation. And now the players love laughing at this guy, who they've posthumously disowned due to his apparent cowardice )But it's good to know for future reference, regarding both points! It's gonna be fun to see what kind of disorders this group gets
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May 29, 2023 04:12
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We just finished our CoC game today. It went really well. We managed to survive the entire adventure of six times. Why? Unlike the scientist, we just didn't bother to look into mythos really. The one time we did the other player got brain worms and I had to chase her around town to save her. Of course, she saved me many times and I accidentally shot her in the head once. So really, we're even. Even if, as I type this, she is laughing out loud at that notion. Something about one-to-ten times, but, he,y I saved her from brain worms. But, yeah, we apparently dodged a lot. If we had bothered to investigate, we could have been pulled into azathoth or driven insane or what have you. Turns out shotguns kill everything, ghouls are cool and only eat the rich, it's always morally right to kill old rich people who want to exploit the global south, and despite my character literally acting insane because I was high on edibles IRL for multiple sessions I ended at 49 out of 50 and my assistant was at 5 out of 15 . But, really can you blame her for almost going crazy because she had to put up with my bullshit?
Covok fucked around with this message at 04:25 on May 29, 2023 |
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May 29, 2023 04:19
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