Cthulhu Megathread: It's pronounced "Khlul'-hloo" (Lose 1D10/1D100 Sanity)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Cthulhu Megathread: It's pronounced "Khlul'-hloo" (Lose 1D10/1D100 Sanity)

UnCO3: Feb 11, 2010; Ye gods!; College Slice

Are you using the Dark Tales and Dark Depths add-ons? They give you a skeleton to build scenarios onto.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 21:48

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 10:43

UnCO3: Feb 11, 2010; Ye gods!; College Slice

Graham Walmsley used to have a blog where he'd post 'globules' (tiny pieces of extra content) like Harm rules and Exhaustion rules, plus a bunch of other stuff. His Harm and Exhaustion rules worked similarly to Insanity, not the way Cthulhu Noir does it. He apparently decided that he didn't like the idea of complicating the rules with untested content of his, so he took down the blog. However, there are still a few larger documents of his around that expand or explain the rules of the game, that you might like to take some stuff from: Cthulhu Dark Tales (scenario design) and Cthulhu Dark Depths (more detail about interpreting investigation results, and a bunch of other small things).

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 08:55

UnCO3: Feb 11, 2010; Ye gods!; College Slice

sicDaniel posted:

Does anyone here have experience with playing / GMing Cthulhu Dark? It's a very minimalistic ruleset where the sanity mechanic and skills are stripped down a lot, no combat (at least in these core rules - you fight anything, you're dead). Also, rolls work differently and other players can decide to throw a "fail die" into your rolls.

I haven't played with these rules, but the way I imagine it, I wouldn't enjoy that sanity mechanic a lot. It's just a ticking clock to your investigator's death without any guidance as to what happens on the way. The GM could make something up, of course, and the players would need to roleplay it.
The skill role mechanics are interesting. The original rules make playing a bit difficult if the GM is too strict regarding the PCs values and the dice results and only says "you fail" instead of "it kind of works, but with these negative consequences". It often doesn't make sense to just "fail" and sometimes the game comes to a screeching halt. The Dark rules are really based on the latter approach, which is always better.
The fail die, on the other hand, really confuses me. Why is that put in the other players' hands? I guess the word "someone" in the rules includes the GM, but it sounds like a recipe for disaster with the wrong players.

numtini posted:

There's an actual play with the author on Skype of Cthulhu, and while it has truly dismal audio, it gave me a good sense of the system and how it's supposed to run. On the sanity die, it's Graham Walmsley, he is big into "purist" adventures where everyone dies and goes mad, so I think your sense is right on. I have to say that while I'm dubious you could run with Dark for more than a one shot, it's one of the few Cthulhu actual plays that I actually felt was kind of spooky and it seemed like the rules supported that. The full size rulebook has some good GMing advice, but I really don't care for any of the settings other than the Victorian one.

Huh, I had a post written up before I searched for some of the author's advice I remembered reading a while back and just found out that he funded a full book on Kickstarter last year. His attitude in the final notes of the new game text seems a bit more fatalistic than when he first published the rules (see here, where he says further down that he expects the average Insanity to be around 5 by the end of the story). Also, side note, it's annoying to read commentary about Lovecraft so many decades down the line whose writers can only bring themselves to say that his stories 'often come across as racist' (at the end of the free GM's notes intro on the Kickstarter page).

As far as Insanity goes, in the extra notes in the original text he says that succeeding at an Insanity roll doesn't mean you're fine, it means you're holding together. I'd say that means that you not only roleplay being increasingly on edge or unstable as Insanity rises, but also a moment of shock, a breakdown, or a burst of greater instability after every failed Insanity check that you then temporarily get on top of or otherwise keep under control (until the next failure).

# ¿ Oct 10, 2018 12:49

UnCO3: Feb 11, 2010; Ye gods!; College Slice

If anyone's interested, I've posted a run-though of the maths of Cthulhu Dark over in the game design workshop.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2019 13:02

UnCO3: Feb 11, 2010; Ye gods!; College Slice

This might interest some people here:
https://twitter.com/SpeaktheSky/status/1289694538257186816
I'm running a game jam (not a competition) for Trophy Dark incursions written on trifold pamphlets! It's deliberately lo-fi, no pressure to do fancy layout or art; just print-friendly text on 2 sides of paper, plus simple art if you feel like it (and it's not too hard to find royalty-free assets that'd fit). Also, you're fine to license and price your work as you see fit (aside from giving correct attribution to the

Trophy Dark is a rules-light game of gothic, eco-, and psychological horror, a fusion of Cthulhu Dark (with the Insanity/Insight equivalent being 'Ruin') and a couple parts of Blades in the Dark. The SRD and default character creation options are freely available; the full game, some incursion writing advice, and an incursion are in Codex � Dark 2. There was an official incursion-writing contest last year and all the contest entries are available in the state they were entered.

The characters are treasure hunters going where they shouldn't go, seeking riches and glory for recovering lost treasures in a massive forest that devoured the lands of an ancient civilisation�but basically you can do anything in any setting and genre as long as you can fit it to the structure, or rework the structure to fit the setting/genre. What structure? Well, each Trophy Dark scenario, or ''incursion', works like this:

they're made of five Rings, as the hunters go deeper and deeper into the forest. Each Ring has a set of:
1. Terrors�dangers that harm the hunters and drive them back
2. and Temptations�signs of the treasure they're after, whether evidence or the real thing, or other motivations to go on
and the hunters must encounter at least one of each before they go to the next Ring deeper.
a list of Moments�mini-scenes or pieces of vivid colour
a list of Conditions�ways the forest twists the hunters' bodies and minds as their Ruin increases and they fall under its malign influence.
a Theme at its core�a single idea that everything else in the incursion keys into, directly or indirectly. For example: Mirrors, Hunger, Despair.

Incursions work so well for character-based horror because they're inexorable�the hunters struggle past Terror after Terror, and they could turn back and save their skin, but then they see another Temptation and well they have to go deeper now because look how close they are. Every part of the structure is best written to help the players flesh out their characters through dealing with monstrous threats and alluring treasures. All that applies just as well to 'treasure hunters in an evil forest' as it does 'people investigating cults and cosmic abominations'.

If you're wary about having to learn to write for a system you don't know, there's a bunch of resources on the jam's page and in this thread in its forum, as well as on the Gauntlet blog, and there's a strong culture of actual play on the Gauntlet forums. There's a lot of resources out there, from youtube videos of actual play to podcasts from the publisher and writers and designers. I've also published some simple trifold pamphlet templates (I wanted them to be general-use, so unfortunately they're not set up for people to just drop text in, but incursions are already heavily structured).

# ¿ Aug 5, 2020 12:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Cthulhu Megathread: It's pronounced "Khlul'-hloo" (Lose 1D10/1D100 Sanity)