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I'm thinking of starting a Bookhounds of London campaign at a local game store and would like to save as much time as possible. What published scenarios (either Call or Trail) would work for shady occult booksellers?
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Jan 28, 2019 15:45
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Is converting from 7e to Trail of Cthulhu similarly straightforward to previous editions? I've been looking at Fear's Sharp Little Needles for game store modern Trail.
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Feb 27, 2019 17:55
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The Dregs posted:What is a good scenario for new players involving a haunted house? I just grabbed the investigator's book for my group, but neither of the included scenarios involve one. The reason we bought it was because we play the Mansions of Madness board game and thought it would be fun to use the tiles and models in an actual game. My players absolutely LOVED The Crack’d and Crooked Manse. The Mansions of Madness CoC scenario book has a lot of gems in it.
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Sep 25, 2019 14:13
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Warthur posted:It'd work real nice for that purpose and most of the Delta Green material is pretty good except when they regurgitate racist tropes from Lovecraft uncritically. I have resolved to never involve Tcho-Tchos in any campaign I ever run and every Modern "immigrants are cutting people up and putting them in your lo mein!" scenario is responsible for that.
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Sep 25, 2019 15:58
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Yeah, I would say check out the Moon Dust Men PDF since it's like $3 and just use the campaign framework without the crunch. CoC 7e pulls in a lot of the core ideas of GUMSHOE (ie. clues that are absolutely core to the advancement of the scenario are revealed automatically to people with the right skills, the Push system as an alternative to point spends) and the two systems can be converted to each other fairly easily.
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Sep 25, 2019 17:33
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The Dregs posted:I already bought it! I was planning on running it after the Haunting, but like I said a couple posts up, the Haunting is really not doing it for me at all. Mr Corbitt is really cool, however, and it has a great hook. Mansions might be the single best scenario book Chaosium ever released. Just about every adventure in there is a winner.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:59
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I respect the effort and themes of Delta Green as a setting, but boy howdy is it hard to imagine getting my friends together on a weekend and actually playing the game as written.
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Sep 28, 2019 04:57
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I mean, from the fluff and the way y’all are describing it, it’s more like The Wire With Cultists than the X-Files. Delta Green, especially the new book, is pretty relentless with the “everything is terrible, bad people get rewarded and the hard decisions your characters make only stop the machine of misery from grinding for a second or so.” I just don’t want to end the night with all my players being stone cold bummed.
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Sep 28, 2019 13:45
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Yeah, I was fine with the original CoC supplement as written, but this is straight up copy-pasted from the first page of the Handler's Guidequote:Delta Green is not about love. Like, man I don't want to run that.
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Sep 28, 2019 14:13
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And that's the thing that I think has changed for the worse in the new edition. Like, yes it reflects current geopolitics well and thematically I respect that, but it's just not as eminently GAMEABLE as the original one was. Having established conspiracy factions like the Cult of Transcendence or The Fate may not be realistic in 2019, but it gives your players something to butt up against and feel like they're accomplishing something other than track down Monster of the Week cultists for their lovely government bosses. I appreciate the original game's tension of "you are trying secretly to do the right thing and your bosses will eventually find out" rather than "you work for something terrible, let's hope that all the other options out there are worse."
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Sep 28, 2019 14:23
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The Dregs posted:pretty much set to run my first scenario today. Any tips? Still planning on The Haunting?
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Sep 28, 2019 14:58
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The Dregs posted:Nope. I read that thing three times and I just couldn't get into it all, and it didn't seem right for my players either. I decided to run Mr Corbitt. It doesn't shoehorn the players into being some type of professional investigator, has a much more loose structure (I am one of those DM's who prefers to react to players), and has a great initial hook. Also, I suspect one of my players has already read the Haunting. Hell yeah. Mr. Corbitt is also a PERFECT scenario for that 80s kid themed horror vibe you were talking about upthread. My advice would be to give your players the clues easily and let them wildly speculate over them. I don't think any of the newspaper articles printed in the book really give the plot away, so just let them research and let them observe Corbitt doing his weird poo poo from a distance without making them keep rolling to see if you give them the descriptions.
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Sep 28, 2019 15:33
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Elendil004 posted:The devs have said many times (though you're right that it doesn't come across in writing or scenarios) to run whatever you want. You can absolutely do a game about being feds taking down cults and bad guys and actually saving the day for a little. You can lean as hard or as soft as you want on the crushing doom. Then I'd like that reflected in the book a little more, akin to how Night's Black Agents has Burn and Dust and other little knobs you can twist to reflect certain themes in games. The current DG Handler's book is like 150 pages of detailed timeline of this fictional history and why the cool poo poo from 1e like Occult Nazi Conspiracies or Mythos Crime Syndicate or Hellraiser Pleasure Cult all got destroyed and don't exist anymore. It takes all of this cool stuff away from GMs that want to follow the game setting-as-written and then doesn't replace it with anything.
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Sep 28, 2019 16:06
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The Dregs posted:First game was a resounding success! Everyone had a great time, and our other DM sounded like she was either considering running it herself, or just switching the group over to CofC for awhile and having me run it. Yeah this is pretty much how most of my Call of Cthulhu sessions have gone too. Glad y'all had fun 
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Sep 28, 2019 23:15
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JK Fresco posted:I think they were meant to clean the slate in order to make a new set of bad guys but ran out of room/time. The original box set was originally supposed to be a single book too And I'm not wild about Yithians and the Lloigor to begin with, which are the only real factions that seem to remain in the core book DG cosmology.
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Sep 29, 2019 03:11
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Or the occult equivalent of the A-Team.
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Sep 29, 2019 13:55
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99 CENTS AMIGO posted:Well, that's good to hear. It's going to be predominantly a social/crime-solving game without a ton of combat, but when there are dangerous things to deal with, CoC looks like a decent system to fall back on. I don't want them dying immediately, so I think the Quickstart rules and Pulp Cthulhu will cover me. Thanks! Check out either Cthulhu By Gaslight for earlier editions (conversion to 7e is pretty trivial) or Hudson & Brand, Inquiry Agents Into The Obscure for a 7e version that's more of a combo Victorian London sourcebook/organization and home base for the investigators to be involved in.
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Oct 2, 2019 14:58
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Warthur posted:Yeah, Hudson & Brand is quite good. The idea is that Hudson & Brand ran this Victorian detective agency which, because of their particular interests, included a number of run-ins with the Mythos; after the duo disappear at around the time of the Ripper murders (handy for your campaign plan!) the PCs unexpectedly inherit the business, including its headquarters and the servants in H&B's employ and perhaps some of their enemies. It's a nice setup because as well as providing a ready-made reason why new investigations might fall into the PCs' laps, there's also all sorts of loose ends tucked away in H&B's old files. Oh man, I did not know about those spoilers and that makes me A LOT more interested in picking up H&B for a Trail campaign.
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Oct 2, 2019 15:50
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neaden posted:Yeah, points for clues was a mistake that Gumshoe seems to be moving away from. I like Kevin Kulps strategy of points for bonuses best, but the Yellow King style pushes work well too. If I were to GM ToC I'd use one of them. Can you link to Kevin Kulp’s thing? I’ve played pretty fast and loose with my investigative spends.
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Oct 18, 2019 23:10
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:This is the second time they've burst into the thread screaming and firing a gun wildly. Best ignore them, they're posting in super bad faith. And maybe conflating Dawkins with Matt McFarland? But yeah, bad faith.
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Oct 22, 2019 04:11
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Waterfall Watcher posted:So I was thinking of getting back into Dming and I saw Reign of terror on fantasy ground. That campaign being a prequel to one of my favourite Coc campaigns Orient Express I was thinking of getting a hardback copy for quick referencing. Should I get it from chaosium for about 50 bucks including taxes and shipping but with a pdf or should I get it from amazon for 35 bucks? At this point, I'd say get it straight from Chaosium to help support them during the virus.
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Apr 7, 2020 01:12
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Nessus posted:I think this could be a hook, and I think that the idea of some kind of fanatical, careful reading of some kind of SCP-esque webpage might reveal something or even provide a smidge of Mythos is a cool idea. If you wanted to get high concept, you could say: Nothing in (for instance) the SCP archives is "actual" mythos lore in the sense of SCP-6969 actually being a thinly veiled set of instructions to cast summon/bind Nightgaunt. I’ve always liked the idea of one of those REAL SPELLS DOT COM websites that the F Plus does every year or so having some wheat to separate from the chaff in there, though I was going to have it be a ritual to summon the Organ Grinder from The Book of Unremitting Horror.
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May 13, 2020 22:42
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:--An organized online group of online investigators stationed around the US who've taken it upon themselves to investigate surreal internet phenomena, creepypasta/nosleep stuff, etc. in their area. They've got a coalition with local redneck militias for weaponry, but their funding is about as far below Delta Green and The Laundry type things that it can be. They're literally just internet nerds and the rednecks accompanying them, and basically only a handful (including the PCs, because duh) have ever encountered ACTUAL mythos activity. I had a similar idea for a modern investigator framework, but with online true crime fans who get drawn into Mythos activity when one of their own goes missing investigating some unsolved creepiness (in this case, the Corbitt house from The Haunting).
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May 20, 2020 15:43
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Secret Machine posted:Yes! Top tier GMing and PC banter made it my all time favorite rpg campaign. Another party scheme was fighting a star vampire in a small desert town and realizing crashing characters’ cars into was more effective than shooting it and failing to dynamite it. Our poor unpaid intern/writer did more damage too himself and the ex-IRA soldier with the explosives than the star vampire. God this is one of those moments that I will remember forever. I completely forgot to calculate crash damage on the drivers, so at least one of you should have died 
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Jun 19, 2020 02:58
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It doesn't even have to be violent, just chaotic! Our follow-up to the LA campaign is set in 1960s San Francisco and the investigators were at a party trying to track down an occultist's library. The staircase was being guarded, so our professor decided that the best course of action would be to break the toilet on the first floor and then ask to use the bathroom upstairs. Not clog the toilet. Straight up break it with his foot. So imagine you're the host of this party and all of a sudden you hear a porcelain smash and see a bunch of water start spraying out of the bathroom and then you're confronted with someone saying "hey the toilet is broken." Thankfully, another character used this gigantic argument as an opportunity to sneak upstairs.
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Jun 19, 2020 20:40
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Thiiiis doesn’t seem like a problem with the module, my man.
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Jul 23, 2020 12:46
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Trying to think of some more rooms to add to Night Floors for my 1960s San Francisco game. I have a player who listened to the RPPR runthrough of the scenario and I want to throw in a couple of monkey wrenches.
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Aug 5, 2020 02:02
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I just ran 7 people through Night Floors. God drat is that a good scenario and hoo boy is it hard to run when you have like three different groups exploring the McAllister.
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Aug 9, 2020 22:39
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Elendil004 posted:What do you like about it? What makes it good? It just oozes atmosphere. It's pretty modular as far as Cthulhu scenarios go, but does a fantastic job in the opening parts of setting up that something is decidedly wrong in the Macallister building. The first time one of my players said "wait, how are there six floors in a three story apartment building?" was really effective in setting the mood. I definitely modified it a bit for our 60s San Francisco game. It was a concerned girlfriend asking a fellow commune member to look for Abigail instead of a credit card tip and I decided that she could be found, but up in the Gallery of Shades assisting Hildred Castaigne with his genealogy of the True King so that the scenario could have a bit of closure instead of "examine Night Floors, leave." My players didn't burn the building to the ground and there's no Delta Green incentive to do so, so they may be back.
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Aug 10, 2020 00:28
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That is loving awesome. I wish I was better about props, they're one of my favorite bits about Cthulhu adventures.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:47
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I really appreciate Call of Cthulhu's popularity in the RPG marketplace because hot drat do I love researching for period mystery and crime games. My next campaign is going to be set in 1920s Miami and I've got two audiobooks and Golden Goblin Press's Guide to the Caribbean lined up for inspiration. I'm not even sure how much Mythos stuff I'm going to put in it.
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Aug 17, 2020 21:18
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Does anyone have any info on the kinds of scenarios that have been written for the Japanese version of Call of Cthulhu? I’ve always thought it was interesting that it’s the most popular RPG in Japan, but most of the books and zines I’ve seen are replays (basically a published actual play.)
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Dec 3, 2020 01:37
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Warthur posted:Best I have found is the page on Japanese wikipedia, which has a product list which Google Chrome's machine translation seems to largely make sense of. Yeah I’m wondering if there’s like a modern-day Japanese equivalent to Masks or SOYS. English CoC doesn’t really have any non-Delta Green modern campaigns.
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Dec 3, 2020 15:20
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Firstborn posted:Do The Things We Left Behind and Fear's Sharp Little Needles count? Oh for English language stuff, totally. I just didn’t know if there are iconic Japanese language modules or if it’s mostly a homebrew culture.
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Dec 4, 2020 18:15
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DrSunshine posted:I'd more sort of got the impression that Computer Use was more intended for, like, hackers and stuff, but I guess it could be expanded for that too. Thanks for the suggestions - I like the idea of renaming "Library Use" to "Research" as well. The Night Floors episode of RPPR has a lot of great technology fuckery: phone calls from yourself, websites that don’t exist, photos that only you can see. It’s really effective.
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Dec 11, 2020 03:09
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:Kind of an old question, sorry, but the streams I've seen of vtubers playing CoC had them using stuff from the Cthulhu 2010 book. I've never seen any translation of it though. Not at all! This is exactly what I was looking for!
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Dec 11, 2020 14:10
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Once my Trail players realized that bullets weren't doing dick against a Star Vampire, they just started grabbing cars and ramming them into the thing. It's one of my favorite gaming moments.
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Feb 16, 2021 22:44
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Anyone read or run through the new scenarios in Mansions of Madness Vol. 1? I like the idea of The House of Memphis and The 19th Hole but would like to know more about them before buying other scenarios that I already own.
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Mar 17, 2021 22:43
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The PoD versions of Horror On The Orient Express and Beyond The Mountains of Madness are apparently going live at Chaosium this month. $89 and $49 respectively.
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Mar 22, 2021 20:18
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DrSunshine posted:I want to run the "Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays" Delta Green scenario that features The Traveler, but I can't for the life of me figure out where the hell to actually buy the module. I've heard it comes with the Delta Green Handler's Guide, but it's not in the latest edition handbook that I have. Does anyone know where the first edition handbook can be obtained? It’s in this one: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/99212
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Apr 9, 2021 20:18
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