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oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


Nessus posted:

While true, I feel that if you were going to do some Evangelion game, you absolutely need to respect everyone's time and have EVA-01 get into a fistfight with Cthulhu.

Main thing is that would be a terrific end to a long campaign with plenty of buildup and work on both sides...but it'd be kind of lame is that's the "default" game experience where you go into any game under the assumption that at some point you will be fighting cthulhu.

Kind of like if you were playing a Star Wars rebellion era game and you spend months and months of gameplay running missions for the rebellion, tweaking the nose of imperial forces, making shady deals with black market space squids and generally being awesome and then at the climax of the campaign you find yourself face to face with Vader and have an epic fight.

Vs. playing a game where the assumption is vader or some vader-equivalent shows up every few sessions and you fight him.

It's one thing to write a game where that sort of encounter is possible and another to write a game where that sort of encounter is assumed.

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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Leraika posted:

Oh, well, if you want leads, you can do any of these things

(but they're all more-or-less useless and going to end with people trying to kill you).

This is my biggest issue with Constantinople so far. Everything presented for the investigators could do leads to a trap. Why go through all the fuss of pretending they can accomplish anything here instead of skipping right to the gently caress you?

Also doesn't seem to account for the possibility of a Turkish PC.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

We'd be better off if more games were written with the assumption you'd get to have the most interesting or exciting kind of encounter they present, actually.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Night10194 posted:

We'd be better off if more games were written with the assumption you'd get to have the most interesting or exciting kind of encounter they present, actually.

One piece of writing advice I got when I was seriously thinking about trying to write a book is: if you're not telling your audience about the most interesting time in your protagonist's life, then stop what you're doing and write about that instead.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Random Better CTech idea#38: Mi-go are the Soviet Union, Insects from Shaggai are the US, and Earth is your choice of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Korea, and Angola.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Best Cthulutech fix: Lovecraft was a huge racist and his stupid monsters are a boring grab bag that's highly overused by everyone. But let's not fix that, let's just shift it a few meters to the side. Let's replace Lovecraft with Walt Disney, and his dumb monsters with furries. And then let's switch the setting from the future to the 1930s. And boom, you're playing Talespin. Way better.

...oh right, the villains are sky pirates and Thembrians.

theironjef fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Jan 18, 2018

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck

theironjef posted:

Best Cthulutech fix: Lovecraft was a huge racist and his stupid monsters are a boring grab bag that's highly overused by everyone. But let's not fix that, let's just shift it a few meters to the side. Let's replace Lovecraft with Walt Disney, and his dumb monsters with furries. And then let's switch the setting from the future to the 1930s. And boom, you're playing Talespin. Way better.

...oh right, the villains are sky pirates and Thembrians.

Would play

Angrymog
Jan 30, 2012

Really Madcats

Since our last postBeavis and Friends return to the safety of the wilderness and continue their journey through Deck of Encounters, Set two

Ambush in the marsh

The party are ambushed by lizard men in a tropical marsh. 12 attack at first, and another 12 arrive in 2-4 rounds. They're a hunting party so have no treasure on them, but if all of them are killed, their tracks can be followed to their lair where there's some money and a potion of Dwarf control. The card doesn't specify that they fight to the death, so they could flee depending on Morale checks.

The lizardmen are skinnable and their hides can be cured and used to make scale armor. Are all lizardmen skinnable, or just these guys?

1550 xp, however, we're going to
Pass - it's just a monster attacks card, the treasure if boring, and there's no other hooks.

Who's working on the Chain Gang? Probably not these Ogres.

In some temperate hills the party encounters a bickering group of Ogres chained to each other by their arms. The Ogres beg the party to release them. If the party do so, the Ogres attack to take revenge on demi-humankind for their enslavement. If the party don't free them, the Ogres attack anyway because they're angry at not being released. The card doesn't note any combat differences between the ogres when chained together and the ogres when freed.

1620 XP for defeating the ogres, but let's just not.

Pass IMO. There's an unasked question about who's enslaving ogres and if there's anyone trying to find this group, but that's roaming into mini-adventure rather than random encounter territory.

Moving on, the party risk Frostbite

Travelling through some snowy, sub-artic hills, the party comes across the remains of a battle; the corpses of men and women are scattered around, having clearly killed each other. The women are wearing almost identical clothes; fur-lined, close-fitting jackets and leggings, covered with a bright woolen surcoat.

As the PCs are poking around the bodies looking for treasure or any more information about the combatants, one of the women wakes up and, mistaking the PCs for more of her enemies, attacks in a berserk rage. She's a second level cleric with 11 HP, and her normal spells available.

For some reason she's described as being dressed in a tattered mockery of the clothes of the other women, which isn't a detail that makes a lot of sense given the rest of the details.

90xp if the party fight her, but once more, let's Pass. Again there's potential to use the card as a jumping off point for more of an adventure, but as a random encounter it's somewhat meh. Also my players would try and bring her down alive, which would lead to a massive derail for the rest of the session as they turn it into an adlibbed adventure.

The hills warm up, and the party makes camp for the night, but oh noes! They're about to become the victim of a Practical Joke

The first person on watch is confronted by the sight of a beautiful or handsome ghost who does the whole "Follow me..." pantomine. If the character (or party) follow, they get led into a bunch of mud or a pile of poo poo (what sort? Doesn't say. Let's go with owlbears). Ghost laughs silently, then vanishes.

Next watch is interrupted by a vision of an army of elephant-riding Ogres, which vanishes when it reaches the camp. The last, by a hill giant which storms into the camp and vanishes before it attacks the party. The sound of faint giggling can be heard in the distance.

In the morning, a group of Gnomes troops through, and their leader makes them apologise.

650xp, I guess for not murdering the gnomes.

Thoughts? I'm leaning to a pass, because it's an annoyance encounter - the only use of which would be to stop the party regaining spells, and unless they're on a time limit, they'll just spend another night on the road.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

theironjef posted:

Best Cthulutech fix: Lovecraft was a huge racist and his stupid monsters are a boring grab bag that's highly overused by everyone. But let's not fix that, let's just shift it a few meters to the side. Let's replace Lovecraft with Walt Disney, and his dumb monsters with furries. And then let's switch the setting from the future to the 1930s. And boom, you're playing Talespin. Way better.

...oh right, the villains are sky pirates and Thembrians.

Nah

DigitalRaven
Oct 9, 2012




At least one cult should work like Cobra in the GI Joe comics: one part Amway, one part terrorists, lead by a used-car-salesman who got pissed off with his lot in life but who recruited a whole bunch of true believer fanatics (and a really terrible poet).

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



DigitalRaven posted:

At least one cult should work like Cobra in the GI Joe comics: one part Amway, one part terrorists, lead by a used-car-salesman who got pissed off with his lot in life but who recruited a whole bunch of true believer fanatics (and a really terrible poet).
Well, I mean, the Serpent Men are right there.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
One of the reasons Silent Legions was written was so that you make your own "Mythos" so that you weren't saddled with all of the baggage and assumptions of Lovecraft's work.

If you want an organization that's actively malevolent, do that.
If you want an organization that's structured in such a way that lets you fight Privates, then Lieutenants, then Majors, then Colonels, then Generals, do that.
If you want an "Elder God" that can be fought and killed, whether by dynamite or by battlemech, do that.

It also conveniently avoids the problem of getting "well actually"-d by people* who are more well-read than you on the capabilities and motivations of Nodens or whoever the hell.

_____

* this is of course a social problem, and not one that should be solved by rules. I was mostly joking.

SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

theironjef posted:

Best Cthulutech fix: Lovecraft was a huge racist and his stupid monsters are a boring grab bag that's highly overused by everyone. But let's not fix that, let's just shift it a few meters to the side. Let's replace Lovecraft with Walt Disney, and his dumb monsters with furries. And then let's switch the setting from the future to the 1930s. And boom, you're playing Talespin. Way better.

...oh right, the villains are sky pirates and Thembrians.

Disney was a huge racist too :smugbert:

EDIT: sometimes I almost wish I was still at my no-effort job with no future prospect, because I have so much poo poo I want to say about Dragon Mountain.

SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Jan 18, 2018

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

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SirPhoebos posted:

Disney was a huge racist too :smugbert:

EDIT: sometimes I almost wish I was still at my no-effort job with no future prospect, because I have so much poo poo I want to say about Dragon Mountain.

I think that may have been part of the joke.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
Waaaait

A potion of Dwarf control?

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy
Robin D. Laws proved that you can make anything more terrifying than the Cthulhu mythos with enough work. He made the Winnie the Pooh characters much more terrifying than those gods ever were.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
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2014-2018

JcDent posted:

Waaaait

A potion of Dwarf control?

Well, they made them for dragons, so it's probably possible to make one that works on other things.

Wapole Languray
Jul 4, 2012

I wonder how hard it would be to combine Silent Legions and Stars Without Number to make Cthulhutech but not lovely?

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Wapole Languray posted:

I wonder how hard it would be to combine Silent Legions and Stars Without Number to make Cthulhutech but not lovely?

Probably not all that hard. Both are based on B/X D&D, and both are made by the same author and are intended to be broadly compatible.

JackMann
Aug 11, 2010

Secure. Contain. Protect.
Fallen Rib

theironjef posted:

Best Cthulutech fix: Lovecraft was a huge racist and his stupid monsters are a boring grab bag that's highly overused by everyone. But let's not fix that, let's just shift it a few meters to the side. Let's replace Lovecraft with Walt Disney, and his dumb monsters with furries. And then let's switch the setting from the future to the 1930s. And boom, you're playing Talespin. Way better.

...oh right, the villains are sky pirates and Thembrians.

"Hey, what's the best way to do X?"

"If you don't do X, then you don't have to worry about how. Bam! Solved! Now go play something I like instead."

Like, yeah, most Lovecraft stuff is overused and the man himself was absolute poo poo, but there's obviously something there that appeals to people. And clearly the source material can be used well, or we wouldn't be reactingas positively to the good bits of the Horrient review. Glib "you're dumb for liking this, play something else" dismissals aren't really helpful.

It's like if someone asked about running a game of Pathfinder, and you told them Pathfinder is poo poo, and they should go play, I dunno, Through the Breach instead. Sure, Through the Breach is a better game, but it's not really a useful answer when they've already decided to play Pathfinder. I mean, we get it, you have the right nerd opinions.

If you want to engage their decision, you could ask why they want to play Pathfinder (or in this case, what exactly they're hoping to get out of CTech's premise), and make suggestions from there ("if that's what you're looking for, maybe Shadow of the Demon Lord would work better for you").

For a lot of people, I think it's just that they get a kick out of seeing the familiar monsters. It's why people still like seeing goofy stuff like mind flayers and beholders in their dungeon-raiding games. Or why people like seeing dragons in their fantasy stuff. You can talk about how it goes against the original intentions of unfathomable, unthinkable things that Lovecraft intended, but we've already established that no one should care what he intended. They're now iconic monsters, just like vampires and werewolves. They have a lot of baggage, but it can be fun to play around with that, changing up the context you see them in.

Sure, it's overused, and usually poorly done. But if someone wants to try, I'd rather help them do something interesting with the idea.

Vampires are probably the most overused monster in horror after zombies. They're far more overexposed than Mythos stuff. But Night's Black Agents gets a lot of mileage by putting them in a different context and mixing them up with spy hijinx. Hell, Horrient gets a lot out of Fenalik by putting him into the Mythos.

I like the idea of the Mi-Go/Insects of Shaggai cold war premise. It's something at least a bit different, and it gives some obvious suggestions for things players can do and threats they can expect to face.

I like the Silent Legions approach more for traditional Lovecraftian adventures, where part of the strength is the unknown qualities of the monsters and cults. But when you're putting them into other genres, they the knowns about Lovecraftian/Mythos beasties can work for you.

Cthulhu has become another monster you can go fight. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

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2014-2018

A lot of classic Lovecraft stuff - hell, even Call of Cthulhu - does weird poo poo with sanity tho. Like reading books. Reading books about the mythos drains your sanity.

Except...the Necronomicon was widely known in the original story, IIRC. It's just no one believed it was anything but a hoax or fantasy. The damage to sanity came from reading it and believing or knowing it was true.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Mors Rattus posted:

A lot of classic Lovecraft stuff - hell, even Call of Cthulhu - does weird poo poo with sanity tho. Like reading books. Reading books about the mythos drains your sanity.

Except...the Necronomicon was widely known in the original story, IIRC. It's just no one believed it was anything but a hoax or fantasy. The damage to sanity came from reading it and believing or knowing it was true.

Yeah, that's meant to be the part that's damaging. It's not knowing the stories that hurts you, it's when you find actual evidence that 'oh poo poo it really is exactly that bad' that's supposed to make you go mad. Also supposed to be where cultists come from; they're the people who see how hosed everything is and decide to get their piece of the pie before the inevitable happens.

Personally, I'd almost prefer a cosmic horror setting where encountering unknown, terrifying new things did sanity damage and then carefully learning more about them restored it, as you made the transition from unknown to known and the creature became more familiar and you figured out ways to maybe deal with it.

JackMann
Aug 11, 2010

Secure. Contain. Protect.
Fallen Rib
Going mad was actually not that common in Lovecraft's writing. I mean, it happened, but it wasn't anything like the inevitable fate it's portrayed as in games like Call of Cthulhu. More commonly, someone would be assumed to be mad because people didn't believe them, or a narrator would wish they were mad, because then the stuff they'd seen wouldn't be real.

Also, I didn't say this earlier, but despite my kvetching, I would play the poo poo out of a Talespin RPG.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

SirPhoebos posted:

Disney was a huge racist too :smugbert:

EDIT: sometimes I almost wish I was still at my no-effort job with no future prospect, because I have so much poo poo I want to say about Dragon Mountain.

:thejoke:

JackMann posted:

"Hey, what's the best way to do X?"

Hey, I wasn't suggesting replacing the CTech rules! Just suggesting the change I'd make to "fix" Ctech! Obviously I'd still want people to play dice poker or whatever the weird Ctech die mechanics were. Weirdly enough my fix is the same fix I'd apply (at first) to Pathfinder. Get all that loving mythos poo poo outta there and challenge the game writers to develop something new instead of farting some stats onto 1920s freeware.

JackMann posted:

Also, I didn't say this earlier, but despite my kvetching, I would play the poo poo out of a Talespin RPG.

I know, right? With mechanics for riding skyboards, and cool intrigue poo poo going down at Louie's Place? Oh man, what are all those off-duty Khan Industries pilots discussing in hushed tones? I bet it's adventure.

theironjef fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jan 18, 2018

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Counterpoint: There's so much good material in this big wide world that you could just not spend the effort trying to glean usable material from racist pulps maybe.

Feinne
Oct 9, 2007

When you fall, get right back up again.

Mr. Maltose posted:

Counterpoint: There's so much good material in this big wide world that you could just not spend the effort trying to glean usable material from racist pulps maybe.

Yeah but it's way easier to just literally use the stuff from said pulps of varying racism levels (some of them spent more time making GBS threads on poor people than ethnics) than to get why people find those stories evocative and recreate the aesthetic with new characters/creatures without all the baggage.

Comrade Koba
Jul 2, 2007

JackMann posted:

Like, yeah, most Lovecraft stuff is overused and the man himself was absolute poo poo, but there's obviously something there that appeals to people. And clearly the source material can be used well, or we wouldn't be reactingas positively to the good bits of the Horrient review.

There's a bunch of Lovecraft stories that are pretty decent, and some of them are even good. It's just that Lovecraft himself didn't write any of them.

Serf
May 5, 2011


Mythos stuff owns. I would make the deep ones sympathetic. That story was a smear job.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Cobra actually works even better going by the movie where Cobra Commander himself is an exile from a secretive race of really pissed off serpent-men wielding terrible biotechnology who plot the ruin of humanity, who's started his own take-over-the-world conspiracy with blackjack and hookers after working his way up from the very bottom of human society and internalising all its worst aspects.

Also, Destro's mask is to hide his identity because he's making bank selling weapons to both Cobra and GI Joe.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Serf posted:

Mythos stuff owns. I would make the deep ones sympathetic. That story was a smear job.

Mythos stuff owns because it exists at a perfect confluence of things for the nerd brain. It has like two million fiddly weird names you can memorize, and there's just enough fuzz around the edges of the stories that you can discuss them forever while getting plenty of opportunities to display all that memorized knowledge. It's like if the sum total of Pokemon knowledge was found in a shipwrecked journal.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I mean, I get arriving at 'I'd have to change so much that I should just start over because I think almost everything in this is poo poo', that's where I ended up with 40k. But using a flawed or bad idea as a jumping off point for what you'd prefer to do better has never been a bad way to start jumpstarting ideas and brainstorming.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Feinne posted:

Yeah but it's way easier to just literally use the stuff from said pulps of varying racism levels (some of them spent more time making GBS threads on poor people than ethnics) than to get why people find those stories evocative and recreate the aesthetic with new characters/creatures without all the baggage.

My point is that, like. People have already done that work. Unless you absolutely need that Cthulu Branding (and we're talking about nerds here, so the answer to that is sadly a real hard probably), there's nothing intrinsic to Lovecraft bullshit that you can't get from other places that aren't really, really afraid of The Other.

Unless what you want is material about the Frightening Other, but it's obvious no one here is down with that.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Someone pointed out to me some of Lovecraft's poems have the same meter as Billy Joel's Piano Man, make of that as you will.

The material's there, it's easier to trim off the racist bits, and without the baggage some of the weird species are intriguing - like one could a Yith currently chilling around to try to bargain for information given the race's obsession with hoarding any possible information they can get their hands on before they inevitable mass-project their minds to escape doom.

Tibalt
May 14, 2017

What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee

My favorite Lovecraft story is the one where the protagonist goes mad and commits suicide when he realizes his grandmother was African*.




*And also a sasquatch

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Apparently Shadow over Innsmouth was originally inspired by discovering he was, via a distant relative, Welsh.

I can't remember where I heard this and I don't know if it's true.

Serf
May 5, 2011


theironjef posted:

Mythos stuff owns because it exists at a perfect confluence of things for the nerd brain. It has like two million fiddly weird names you can memorize, and there's just enough fuzz around the edges of the stories that you can discuss them forever while getting plenty of opportunities to display all that memorized knowledge. It's like if the sum total of Pokemon knowledge was found in a shipwrecked journal.

I mean if you want the same feeling as Mythos stuff but don't want to use the names you could just use Silent Legions.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Serf posted:

I mean if you want the same feeling as Mythos stuff but don't want to use the names you could just use Silent Legions.

Yes! Exactly. People keep thinking it's disingenuous to suggest a fix for CTech that's "take the mythos out of there," but I'm being earnest. If I were fixing it, I'd be removing mythos, because I find it overrated, troublingly connected to a legacy of racism, and worry that it'd be impossible to run without people running in at dead sprints from the streets to well actually at me about how Hastur wouldn't do that. Putting in some less famous brain-rattling space monsters is a literal fix to my concerns.

Not my real concerns though. Those are basically "Why isn't there a good RPG that's just about dinosaurs and hunting dinosaurs? No Cadillacs, no sidelong Confederacy handjobs, just "there are deinonychus in those woods, run or fight!" Because it seems like a huge hole in the RPG world."

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

"He said 'Bill I believe this is killing me' as the flesh started to slough off his face."

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
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2014-2018

theironjef posted:

Yes! Exactly. People keep thinking it's disingenuous to suggest a fix for CTech that's "take the mythos out of there," but I'm being earnest. If I were fixing it, I'd be removing mythos, because I find it overrated, troublingly connected to a legacy of racism, and worry that it'd be impossible to run without people running in at dead sprints from the streets to well actually at me about how Hastur wouldn't do that. Putting in some less famous brain-rattling space monsters is a literal fix to my concerns.

Not my real concerns though. Those are basically "Why isn't there a good RPG that's just about dinosaurs and hunting dinosaurs? No Cadillacs, no sidelong Confederacy handjobs, just "there are deinonychus in those woods, run or fight!" Because it seems like a huge hole in the RPG world."

I have some vague sketches of ideas for a Dinotopia RPG but it wouldn't involve fighting very much.

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Serf
May 5, 2011


theironjef posted:

Yes! Exactly. People keep thinking it's disingenuous to suggest a fix for CTech that's "take the mythos out of there," but I'm being earnest. If I were fixing it, I'd be removing mythos, because I find it overrated, troublingly connected to a legacy of racism, and worry that it'd be impossible to run without people running in at dead sprints from the streets to well actually at me about how Hastur wouldn't do that. Putting in some less famous brain-rattling space monsters is a literal fix to my concerns.

You tell those people: it's the Mythos, I ain't gotta explain poo poo.

And the issues with Cthulhutech in specific are the lovely system and the awful garbage the writers added all on their own. The reason that it sucks is that the concept of "humans with giant robots fight Cthulhu" is rad but their execution is not only bad but actively offensive.

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