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I really love the Call of Cthulhu stories, because they fit with how my groups have always played. For non Call of Cthulhu familiar people, short glossary: shoggoth: giant amorphous monster, made of slime, teeth, and eyes deep one: fishmen like creatures that live in the ocean Nyarlathotep: Elder god who interacts with humans to trick and deceive them Call of Cthulhu was the first game I ever ran. It was also when I learned that you should look over character sheets carefully ahead of time. Highlights included: - One character, a doctor, going to the library and spending the entire time looking for occult books, to the extent of prying up the floorboards. - Another character bluffing against a whole horde of deep ones with a pair of pants and a stick. - Same character plunging an evil, sentient artifact down his pants, provoking a battle of wills with the ancient spirit contained within. The spirit critically failed and the player critically succeeded, so he was flooded with arcane powers and physically transformed.. - but he still went insane, and developed short-term obsessive compulsive disorder, which he manifested by washing chunks of shoggoths with his new monstrous claws. Why were there chunks of shoggoth? The villain I'd come up with was a shoggoth lord, described in the d20 CoC book. They're shoggoths that have learned to disguise themselves as people. When the shoggoth lord revealed his monstrous nature, another player (whose character was a college age girl) says, "Oh, okay. I'll use the dynamite on him." What. "Oh yeah, dynamite is pretty cheap! It's in the book, so I bought 18 sticks!" What. They set the dynamite to blow the office, ran, and spattered the shoggoth lord everywhere. The remaining shoggoth jelly was "cleaned" to by the artifact possessed monstrosity. Around this point I decided that the game should end soon, so an avatar of Nyarlathotep appears to check on his artifact. The artifact-possessing character mouths off to him ("How do you even know how to pronounce your name? What's up with the idiot flutists around Azathoth?") until Nyarlathotep loses patience and obliterates him. Then Nyarlathotep gives the artifact to another player on the condition that he travel to Europe to spread discord. The doctor, who spent most of the game in the library, came outside, beheld the shoggoth bits, spattered other character, and someone else making a deal with the devil... lights a cigarette, and leaves town without looking back. I remember we posted about it on a forum, way back then, and the general consensus was that we were playing CoC completely wrong. I think we were doing it right. This was also before Hellboy came out, so at the end, when they destroy the elder god thing with a bundle of dynamite, the players all turned to me to gloat about how that's a perfectly valid tactic. Later still, they made me a red wooden box containing fake dynamite and a lighter, with glass that reads "IN CASE OF SHOGGOTH, BREAK GLASS." And it is awesome. Sionak fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Jan 20, 2012 |
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Jan 20, 2012 00:00
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Yawgmoth: I agree completely. And you should nenever worry too much what people on the internet say about your game, anyways. Gomi: I definitely do, I love that thing and getting to tell the story when people see it.
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Jan 20, 2012 01:45
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