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My group has been playing Cthulhu for quite a while, and we just wrapped up Masks of Nyarlathotep, which was a ton of fun. My DM is now working on a completely homemade campaign, but is looking to make it WAYYY less combat oriented than Masks was, and is having some trouble wrapping his head around how to write a mostly investigative-focused non-combat CoC campaign that doesn't just boil down to knowledge rolls. Can anyone recommend a good pre-written investigative-focused module with minimal combat (of any system, really, I suppose) that he should look at just to help get ideas on how to run a campaign like this?
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Apr 19, 2014 18:10
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The Gum Wall is one of the grossest things I've ever seen in my entire life and looking at it should result in automatic sanity loss.
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Jun 5, 2014 21:58
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Sionak posted:As for these mega-campaigns like Beyond the Mountains of Madness or Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, I am curious how many people have played one or more. I never have - and I find it can be difficult to get a really good Lovecraftian or horror vibe going in a few sessions of an on-going campaign. Doing so for a year or more as part of a scripted campaign seems much more challenging to me. Are these adventures usually played in more of a pulpy vein? My group just finished a year-long Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign that was incredible -- while there was the occasional down/off/exploratory session, we typically had some sort of major threat to face every time we played, and the threat of the world ending was constantly looming over the entire campaign given the timetable until Nyarlathotep was summoned. At least one major cult leader (and often more) were in every location we visited, and they were doing all sorts of hosed up Lovecraftian things all over the world. My DM actually wrote up a short thing on Reddit about it and is answering questions, if you wanted to know more from the DM side. Our campaign was really unique -- he deviated from the books quite a bit, and we had a secret group of his friends playing the villains and we didn't know until the entire thing was over. http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/29xp9z/my_year_of_lies_part_one_my_groups_experience/
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Jul 7, 2014 18:31
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Sionak posted:It is a small internet - that thread was one of the things I was thinking about when I asked the question. I thought that was a super cool set-up; that sort of a secret PVP type thing has appealed to me for a long time, but I've never been able to pull it off. Yeah, I had a few characters die. As some backstory, the very first game our group played was 4E D&D, and I had a grossly overpowered ranger that could essentially single-handedly win fights for us, and I think a lot of people were mad that I was so OP. In the later games we played in different systems, I tried to play more non-combat characters. I hadn't played Cthulhu before, but I had heard from other friends that combat was deadly, that it was really easy to die, and that investigation was critical, so I rolled up a librarian named Violet Juneberg who tried as hard as possible to avoid combat and stay alive. Unfortunately, and I didn't realize it at the time, Masks is VERY combat heavy for a Cthulhu game. The schtick was cute for a while, but Violet's entire thing was basically refusing to enter dangerous situations and hiding any time a fight broke out. People got really tired of it because I'd always try to recommend we NOT charge into a room full of cultists and try to shoot them all. She lasted longer than any other original character besides Craig Grummins, but finally died in Australia when she decided to come out of hiding during a particularly nasty gun battle and try to save one of Jacob's characters, I think one of the Schteubenfists (I can't remember), who was bleeding out. She saved him, and then took a single bullet to the chest that instantly killed her. It was kind of a relief, because everyone in the group hated her and I was ready to play a more active character. Next character that took me almost to the end was a Grad Student of David Dodge's named Rowan Carmody. He didn't do anything particularly interesting, but was a lot more helpful to the group. He eventually died in the Ho Fong explosion debacle -- he survived the explosion, but ran out into the streets where the military was waiting and was blown apart by a ton of machine guns. Final character was the Japanese agent Isoge Taro, but I only played him for the last few sessions. He was a badass though. My personal favorite anecdotes were probably two things involving Violet. Despite being extremely combat-averse, very early on in the adventure in New York she suffered temporary insanity and ended up with the murderous rage one. We had just subduded some storekeeper who had a lot of important information for us, but as soon as I hit the insanity I had her shoot him directly in the face before anyone could ask him any questions. I tried to bring up that bloodlust now and again, but her combat stats were awful so it was hard to pull off. There was one time in Africa, though, where she happened across a sorcerer in an on-fire restuarant who had been sending death orbs after everyone. She was alone, no one else was around, and a couple of our other party members had been critically injured elsewhere. Thinking she was going to die anyway, I had her charge in at the dude with a brick in her purse, and a kitchen knife she had just grabbed from the kitchen. Thanks to an amazing roll, she singlehandedly crippled him with a brick to the skull and then stabbed him to death, walking out of the restaurant shortly before it completely went up in flames. No one else in the group was physically present to see it so everyone refused to believe her. The reveal at the time was really surprising, but then it made a lot of stuff make sense. There were a couple times we had come across some of the cult leaders fighting and doing some bizarre things, and in the back of my mind I thought it was odd that some of that would be written in the adventure. We also thought that we had just missed a lot of clues and just failed to solve a lot of subplots like the Tower of London bombing, so knowing that was all insanity going on behind the scenes with other people put everything in perspective. I was mostly impressed that James kept it a secret from our group the entire time, especially since he had told a bunch of our significant others early on apparently and they managed not to spill the beans either. We literally had no idea until the final session, and then it was like "Oh, poo poo, duh, that's why he was always texting so much while we played." It was super, super fun.
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Jul 7, 2014 20:34
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LuiCypher posted:Any tips on running Masks of Nyarlathotep? I'm not internet-rich enough to contribute to Yog-Sothoth in order to get access to the MoN Companion, so I'm wondering what advice y'all can offer me. We played without access to the Companion and it went fine. It's helpful but definitely not necessary. Have all of the handouts and stuff in the book copied, printed, and cut out entirely before you even play your first game. Make sure as a DM you're prepped and read-up on whatever area/continent the players are on. Most "chunks" of the game have multiple mysteries that don't have to be solved in any order, and there's not even really a set travel order aside from the beginning and end points -- our group went completely out of order of what the book had with no problems. Your group can and likely will suddenly decide to pack up and move to a new area with little warning to you, so make sure you're ready or be ready to call your game early that day so you can prep. Make sure your players know that this is a very combat-heavy adventure compared to a lot of other Cthulhu adventures. It's not unreasonable for your group to get in one major fight per session, if not more. Make the possibility of failure real. Part of the fun of the adventure for us was knowing we were working on a pretty strict timetable and making sure we managed our time; having the threat of summoning on a specific date gives you a timetable to work with. Keep careful track of the in-game time. You don't have to measure out each hour, but it's a good idea to keep a calendar so the players know what day they're on. It encourages them to be efficient while also preventing them from constantly sailing around the world to backtrack for clues or try to find other people/events they missed. In terms of backup characters, you may want to actually avoid having your players create them in advance -- given how much you travel the world, it can be very difficult to get a pre-genned character where you need them. Our group had a houserule in that when you died, your new character had to be from the place your previous one died in (eg. Die in Hong Kong - your new character must be from Hong Kong and you have to explain why/how he finds the group.) The exception to this was when we used some of the NPCs from the book -- I think the manual says that players should be free to use them, and they do really well in a pinch and often end up being great characters. One of the best characters in our game was an Australian Professor we pulled straight out of the book. That said, be a little wary of who you let your players be; some of the NPCs in there have ABSURD stats -- either multiple 80s and 90s in various things, or just tons and tons of skill points. The little Egyptian urchin Machmood (sp?) is completely out of control. Don't be afraid to kill characters for doing something stupid. There are a lot of nasty traps and surprises built into the book, and skimping out on them is missing half the fun of Masks. If they can come up with an actual, clever solution to a seemingly hopeless problem, reward them, but don't hand them get-out-of-jail free cards when they make mistakes. Most importantly: be willing and ready to improvise. The adventure is sprawling, filled with tons of obscure spells and events, and lots of NPCs that can easily become central to your campaign that have little written about them in the book. It is virtually guaranteed that your players are going to completely deviate from the adventure as scripted multiple times, and you should let them and tie it back into the overall campaign [One or more of your players will probably contact an Elder God at some point]. Some of the best stories from our game are things that were completely made up whole-sale. Feel free to replace villains with others, alter subquests, and tie some of the written stuff directly to the PCs. You can even work in secret with your players in advance, even, to give them personal/private motivations for joining the group. One of our PCs ended up being the son of one of the main villains and was out for revenge, and that arc provided us with almost a month of great adventuring and RP content, and it was 100% outside of anything from the source material. Have fun! It's intense and a lot of work, but it's a really fantastic campaign if you can run it consistently.
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Jul 8, 2014 05:42
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Elendil004 posted:A few raid jackets available here https://shop.arcdream.com/collections/collectibles/products/delta-green-raid-jacket I like that if you click on the tee shirt and want to see what's on the reverse you can't, because instead of a functioning product viewer they just took a screenshot of one that happened to include the "Zoom" and "Other Side" buttons. 
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Jun 29, 2017 19:42
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PupsOfWar posted:spooky pals, looking for some help here The Night Floors is pretty difficult to get killed in, pretty cool, and with some slight tweaks you could throw in a classic "everyone running through doors" montage scene. Decent chance most of the gang will end up lost in Carcosa by the very end, though.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:36
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FMguru posted:One of the things in the MoN Companion book is a big selection of fully statted out background characters for each chapter, so that you have ready-to-go substitutes to swap in for dead/maimed/insane PCs at every stage of the adventure. We're 5-6ish years out from our Masks campaign and Mahmoud, the urchin from Egypt, is now an adult, was one of the most critical figures in ending World War II, and now runs a magical school of teenagers in New York in the 60s in our game world. The background characters in Masks can be very fun.
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Apr 22, 2020 20:06
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Phi230 posted:I'm running Masks for the first time and I'm having issues establishing creepy spooky stuff when my players are like Indiana Jomes types. They even have a seaplane they're trotting around in. This may not jive with how you want to run your campaign but we started our year-long campaign of Masks out in a similar way, but a few sessions in got kind of a wakeup call when investigators started getting brutally killed off for not taking threats seriously enough and trying a bunch of heroics. The overall arc of Masks, for us, ended up being a grueling, world-spanning quest where different people from parts of the world were getting pulled in due to the threats in their regions and realizing that the stuff they were fighting would certainly eventually destroy them but humanity would be doomed if they didn't step up. Dunno if this is what you're doing at all, but if you and your players have the D&D-esque expectation that their initial characters are all going to be together at the end of the campaign, you're going to lose a lot of the natural tension and horror in Masks. poo poo is extremely dangerous, mistakes can and should be punished harshly, and killing some of the more horrific villains throughout the campaign can and should require some pretty extreme sacrifices. I think of our original group of six only one character actually survived all the way until the end, and most of the rest of us went through 3-5 characters over the course of the year and once we got past the intro sessions there was a pretty high level of tension throughout the campaign.
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Apr 27, 2020 03:03
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A good thing to remember is that Masks has a large number of active cults, many of which have significant power/financial backing around them. A bunch of foreigners running around with a lot of wealth openly asking questions about things they shouldn’t be talking about in public is absolutely going to draw attention, and cult leaders aren’t going to just send in a couple unarmed cultists to deal with them - they will gently caress them up in many ways. While TPK is a last resort there’s a lot of things the cults can and will do to slow them down or put them in the wrong path. Blow up or sabotage their plane, bomb their hotel or light it on fire, turn the city/village against them, plant false information, etc. In our game a number of the cult leaders were shadowplayed by the DMs friend and they were engaged in their own war with each other, and we got tricked multiple times into helping strengthen cult 1 at the expense of cult 2 by not fully vetting our information sources and going off to play hero too often.
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Apr 27, 2020 16:27
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Phi230 posted:Also, I'm not sure how to deal with losing investigators or even a TPK? Is the campaign over if everyone dies? Make good advantage of the huge number of NPCs in the Mask book -- give the PCs opportunities to encounter them early on and draw them into the plot. They make great replacement investigators and, assuming it's not a TPK, the party can easily recruit them and bring them along on the next adventure. In our campaign when you died you either took one of the named NPCs that the party had met and clued in on the mythos, or created a character from the current town you were in and gave them a backstory that tied them locally to the current mystery and gave them a reason to get involved. TPKs are harder but don't have to be the complete end of the line. Time can pass and family members/colleagues come looking for them after their mysterious disappearance, the local NPCs again vow to carry on the work -- maybe a small group of cultists even realize what's actually going on and decide to defect. You can also angle to try to let at least one party member escape mass death scenarios so that they can rally the troops and carry on.
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Apr 27, 2020 17:58
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Phi230 posted:Campaign stuff Sounds like things are fun! A few random comments/suggestions based off some of your previous posts about trying to ramp up the consequences with some potential opportunities if things come up again next time (feel free to completely ignore!): When your players were passing around the mask, were the ones seeing visions suffering sanity loss? Did any of them hit a threshhold for a temporary insanity? Doing stuff like is extremely dangerous and often fatal, and if I remember right sanity hits for mask usage are pretty massive. Did anyone see them breaking into the hotel room? Does/can the guy who hired them figure out it was them? That's a pretty brazen thing to do, and I imagine the employer is extremely displeased. Local police could be involved, the employer could actively work to sabotage them, etc. In terms of the plane stuff, from some cursory googling the issue seems to be that the higher you go, the thinner the air gets, which means you need more airspeed to get enough lift on the wings. At a certain point, you can't maintain level flight because the plane simply isn't powerful enough to generate enough lift to stay steady. It's fudging a little bit, but I don't think it's that unreasonable to say that with some extremely careful piloting they were able to land the plane in extremely perilous conditions, but they'd also probably know that takeoff would be near-impossible, especially maybe if there's some bad weather conditions happening like a rain or wind storm. Similarly, given how rough the landing probably was and how delicate amphibious aircraft tend to be, it's also very likely that the plane's wheels and keel were substantially damaged during the rocky landing, especially if they just landed in like a mountain field and not a smooth, level, paved airstrip. Also, is this flying boat different than the sea-plane you mentioned before? If they just abandoned the sea-plane back in Lima after pissing off a guy who hired them and attracting cult/police attention, that plane is probably blown up, impounded, or (more fun) carefully sabotaged in a way that won't be noticeable until it's in the air.
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May 5, 2020 18:57
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My group has introduced wizard characters over the last few seasons and we've adapted a lot from the Elder Godlike book from Achtung! Cthulhu. You'll have to do some slight tweaking but their system for generating characters with powers has worked very well for us. You're strongly encouraged to just make up your own stuff though; the sample powers they list in there aren't very interesting, but it's a very flexible system.
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May 9, 2020 04:27
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Lumbermouth posted:I have a player who listened to the RPPR runthrough of the scenario and I want to throw in a couple of monkey wrenches. Make the entire apartment building and Night Floors the red herring and have Abigail actually be the one who used her credit card in Maryland after escaping the building. 
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Aug 5, 2020 03:27
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I doubt this works for everyone but my DM solved it in my group by giving the person who was primarily interested in learning spells a fast ritual spell that let them immediately absorb the contents of a tome at the cost of SAN/POW loss and the destruction of the book.
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May 25, 2021 00:05
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Our GM in Masks had us find a spell early on in the adventure that allowed the caster to destroy a tome to absorb it's knowledge, with a significant power and sanity cost, which worked really well. The cost was serious enough that we had to be very specific about what books we read/destroyed and why and couldn't just chomp up every book, but it gave us at least some access to the tomes.
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Dec 28, 2023 20:30
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