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UnCO3
Feb 11, 2010

Ye gods!

College Slice

Ratpick posted:

Hey, I just got the weirdest idea and I'd like to see if this gets any traction. There might be a homebrew in this:

So, John Harper's Lasers & Feelings is pretty much the best rules right Star Trek RPG out there, and the best thing about it is that it converts to almost any genre where you can easily see two poles that are used to define characters, right? So, you could probably use it for, say, the Cthulhu Mythos as Sanity (traditional investigative techniques) & Sorcery (knowledge of how things work under the rules of the Mythos and how to use it).

What if your character's place on this scale wasn't static but it was used more as a sliding scale? What if events in the game could push your character towards the Sorcery end of the scale (as your character experiences the mythos they lose sight of reality and start to lose their mind, which also grants insight into how magic works)? Strangely enough, it produces an effect that emulates the way Call of Cthulhu is traditionally played but also reinforces the narrative of going slowly insane until the only sensible thing to do seems to be to cast that spell you found in one of the old dusty tomes, because as your character slowly loses their mind and moves towards the Sorcery end of the scale traditional investigative techniques become much less reliable and characters need to rely more on supernatural tools.
Following up on this (and the whole discussion it spawned) you might be interested in Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley. It's a rules-light mythos game with a sliding Insanity score from 1 to 6 (1 being mostly sane, 6 being insane and on your way out of the story) that can increase whenever your character comes across something horrific or risks insanity to achieve their goals (which covers e.g. blacking out in a brawl and beating someone to a pulp as much as doing sorcery or entering the Dreamlands). Once it gets to 5 you can reduce it by denying the horror and destroying evidence of it. There's a couple of rules expansions as well: Dark Tales and Dark Depths.

It's not the same mechanic as Lasers and Feelings, but it might be useful.

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UnCO3
Feb 11, 2010

Ye gods!

College Slice
Sounds like a game to run in Cold City!!

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