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Sweet. The campaign I ran over the last summer, the intro game of which I talked about here (non-clickers: started as one-shot Call of Cthulhu D20, everyone plays themselves, discovers occult conspiracy where former members of their gaming group are trying to sacrifice the group to Tsathoggua to gain supreme gaming power, cult leader driven off but not defeated, players beg for campaign), was collectively my best gaming experience, as it finally showed me that it could be as much fun to gamemaster as to game, something I could never understand before. Once the game resumed, the players/characters went immediately and appropriately crazy with occult investigation, and networking with everyone they could think of to try to figure out if they had missed any conspirators the first time around (they ended up being arrested for manslaughter and awaited trial for the six months that passed between the first and second games, and had plenty of time to make plans in-game). One of their first plans was to try to bust into a place they were pretty sure was a former cult safehouse. Well, one of the players had taken a flashbacks Hindrance (I converted to Savage Worlds' "Realms of Cthulhu" for the campaign), and the very first time they tried to coordinate an ambush on the water tower they thought cultists were inside, he blew his Spirit roll, and immediately thought he was back in the park where they had been assaulted by supernatural forces the last time they were planning an ambush; through re-enacting his past behaviors, he got into his nearby car and managed to botch a driving roll and drive over one of the other PCs waiting in the bushes, who of course thought he was being attacked and opened fire on the car, which managed to trigger the OTHER PC who had taken flashbacks, who then began furiously struggling against imagined cultists trying to drag him into the darkness (knocking himself out in the process through a botched Fighting roll). All while the single member of the party not either having flashbacks or being attacked by someone with flashbacks had no idea any of this was going on (I think he was wearing ear protection and did not hear the shooting), and went through with the ambush all by himself. And this was all in the first new session. I think we all were pretty sure the party was going to kill themselves before the end of that game.
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Jan 13, 2012 03:02
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:52 |
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Yawgmoth posted:At what point in all this did you begin looping Yakety Sax? Because really, that seems like a mandatory thing. The best part is that this was probably not even the worst flashback-chain-reaction in the campaign. They ended up investigating the deaths of two cemetery keepers, and discovering that basically every newly buried body was being stolen. This eventually led them to climbing a ladder down into an underground tunnel complex filled with deformed stunted humanoids, and hilarity. The second player with flashbacks from above was leading the party, when he was jumped by one of the aforementioned humanoids (ghouls, naturally), and he ended up beheading it on a critical success. This triggered #2's memory of beheading a masked assailant, only to learn he had just beheaded one of his old friends. So #2 started freaking out, particularly since one of the other masked attackers from that scenario had turned on his master and was now a member of the party, and was right behind #2 in the marching order--and was carrying a readied tear gas grenade he was about to throw down the tunnel. Naturally #2 then tried to behead the reformed-cultist, just as he had previously. Shocked reformed-cultist dropped the grenade when trying to defend himself, which looked to the first player with flashbacks (just arriving in the tunnel) like reformed-cultist had turned on the party (which #1 had been predicting would happen), leading to #1 freaking out and scrambling back up the ladder and pulling it out of the warren to save himself. This time, the hilarious "people entirely uninvolved with this catastrophe" were the two players waiting a few hundred yards away at their vehicle, trying to get a cell signal, casually smoking and talking about e-readers as the rest of the party imploded.
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Jan 13, 2012 04:28
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Yawgmoth posted:Nothing will ever convince me that CoC was intended as anything other than a dark comedy game. I just sent out an e-mail to my players recently saying that, after careful consideration, the movies that come closest to the feel I am trying to capture are Killer Klowns From Outer Space and Monster Squad. Both genuinely funny b-movies that also somehow manage to be terrifying in unexpected and disturbing ways nonetheless. If you have never seen either, I guess you have to trust me, but they both do a fantastic job playing the villains completely straight--which works wonderfully via the absurd nature of the entire endeavor, as well as the unsurprisingly comic nature of the protagonists. For example, capturing people in cotton candy cocoons should be hilarious, but then you see the fattest clown stick a crazy bendy-straw into one such cocoon and drink blood from the corpse inside, and you just do not know what to think anymore. Also I firmly believe that movie set everyone who saw it as a child on the lifelong path to clown-fear.
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Jan 13, 2012 07:19
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That sounds like exactly how any good Call of Cthulhu game should end. Though to be fair there should probably be a postscript where the guy who ran away ends up in an asylum and/or the newest sacrifice. It could even be the hook for the next group to die horribly in that mausoleum!
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Jan 16, 2012 06:02
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The fundamental reason I have never really gotten into Star Wars fandom is because I, like GaryLeeLoveBuckets, find Han Solo far more interesting than Luke Skywalker, but for some reason every Star Wars thing after the original trilogy decided to focus primarily on either Jedi or droids, both of which are pretty humdrum compared to "science fiction danger hero!!!" (opinion, obviously) I also have a special fondness for the random alien races, though, which made it all the more infuriating when The Old Republic gives you a choice between playing a human or a different human wearing make-up or a prosthetic horn. =-=-=-=-= Notable gaming experience from the ongoing Cthulhu-inspired-players-playing-themselves game I have written about here and in the good experiences thread: One game, just after finally figuring out that I am a horrible gamemaster (they found clues a couple of games in a row that there was a group calling itself DAGON and meeting in various creepy locations; tracking down one of the meetings led to discovering the Downstate Area Gamers' Outreach Network, who could not afford a nice conference room), they were going back over their notes to try to figure out what other things they thought were important that were actually just complete bullshit, and realized they had two different unrelated clues they had overlooked in tracking down DAGON, both pointing to the importance of a lightly wooded area just north of town. Upon arriving there, they found hints to the existence of an underground tunnel structure. They decided to try to find another way in, as whatever/whoever was under there would surely anticipate someone using the entrance. (Un)fortunately, the first person to try was the guy who took my "Calamitously Constructive Criticals" Edge, which makes it that there are critical failures in the first place, and that when one happens it provides an unexpected positive result to accompany the severe negative result. Walking around the field near the tunnel's entrance, he says "I am going to test the soil with a shovel," critically fails, and thus discovers part of the tunnel system by plummeting through the soil into the darkness below, shovel-first. His foot hooked another party member's backpack and pulled it in as well, conveniently spilling its contents in the process. When the plunger stopped being dazed at the bottom of the pit, he realized there was something resting on his chest. The moonlight streaming into the pit let him see that it was the little statue of Tsathoggua that the party had found earlier and assumed to be basically unimportant. The rest of the party found where he fell in, shone their Maglites down the hole, and discovered him surrounded by hundreds of ghouls, all staring blankly at the little statue on his chest, instead of tearing him to pieces. This was basically the climax of the scene, as this was the closest the party had come to definitive proof of actual supernatural events (they had encountered ghouls once before as I mentioned, but they just seemed like some weird cannibalistic humanoid), but they then went on to Pied-Piper the ghouls to an entrance where the one guy could get out on a ladder that they pulled up behind them. They then tied the Tsathoggua statue to a pick-up truck with rope and dangled it back in the hole ... until they could set off the improvised explosives they rigged up to collapse the tunnel structure, and whipped the statue out of the tunnel at the last possible second)
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Jan 30, 2012 22:33
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Actually, the username comes from the time in college when I took pre-caffeinated water (remember Crank 2.0? that) and used it to make espresso and then used the espresso to wash down NoDoz. I stayed awake for a very long time and hallucinated a bit and also I may have seen God and then I slept for a very long time. (That story was also awesome)
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Jan 31, 2012 00:51
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Mystic Mongol posted:Suck it, bitches! I won Call of Cthulhu! "Sorry I had to abruptly fly off to Hawaii for business purposes before we finally tracked down the abandoned mining complex, guys--did I miss anything?" "I'A!!! I'A!!! THE BLACK GOAT OF THE WOODS WITH A THOUSAND YOUNG!!!" "Welp."
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Feb 4, 2012 21:22
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Ratspeaker posted:a Ditto masquerading as blood cells injected into our veins
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Feb 10, 2012 04:23
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Yawgmoth posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDX1m0Y2Vkg  seems appropriate yet again. Thank you for helping me find this. Though now I want to audition to be in the movie, and this does nothing to make it any less not a real movie 
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Feb 10, 2012 05:49
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