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CoC does have "magic items" that are unambiguously good for the players. Blessed blades, fetch sticks... there's a serious cost to creating these items, but once you have them in your possession using them is a freebie.
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Jan 2, 2023 03:04
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And where might one read about these things?
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Jan 2, 2023 03:48
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They're described with the magic spells that create them, so for example you can find a few in the Keeper's book.
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Jan 2, 2023 03:55
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No point belaboring it, but in the way the grand grimoire is a big extension of the keeper's handbook chapter twelve, it'd be nice to have a similar extension to chapter thirteen. Things created by spells are nice, but there's more weirdness out there than spells.
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Jan 2, 2023 04:24
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https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/226028/The-Book-of-Contemporary-Magical-Things https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310198
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Jan 2, 2023 10:57
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Call of Cthulhu idea/prompt: a new AI art asset has been released, showing amazingly detailed but not-quite-right images. The more refined the user makes the prompts, the closer the images become to what is desired, but a fundamental facet remains “off,” whatever it is. With enough prompts, the user can make images that reflect real world places or things. (INSERT HAUNTED TYPEWRITER/CAMERA TROPE ABOUT HOW THE IMAGES ARE NOW BECOMING REAL AND BLEED INTO REALITY) What’s actually happening is that through a system of complex eldritch maths, one is creating Tindalosian portals within the universe, showing not *images* but rather portals to different *realities*. The more specific the prompt, the more complex the formula, the more stable the portal
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Jan 8, 2023 15:44
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accidentally generated this handsome lad and thought of this thread
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Jan 8, 2023 15:53
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Hey, just wondering - has anyone played/run The Walker in the Wastes? It seems to be OOP at the moment, but after starting a prologue one-shot ("Cold Dead Hand", so it loosely ties into TWitW) I've been wondering about adapting TWitW to the '80s and slotting it in as an over-arching campaign. There'd still be a lot of work to do on it, like instead of airships being made it might be like, an icebreaker or two, among other equipment for the expedition. But otherwise, I'll aim to keep it as similar as possible. Does this seem feasible? I haven't been able to read too much about it, but have gone over the introduction/overview content, which makes it seem like it should be doable. But yeah, any opinions on it would be much appreciated! Since at the moment I'm mostly considering integrating that or Masks of Nyatwhatever into the main campaign. (Seems like all big campaigns are for 1928 CoC) Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Jan 9, 2023 |
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Jan 9, 2023 06:28
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RE: The spell talk; in my experience they cost way too much to use in terms of SAN/POW costs - which has made a recent campaign a lot of fun 'cause one of our party members has no such self preservation instinct and has straight up sold their soul to some sort of demon in exchange for power. They made contact with this entity once and I thought that would be the extent of it for a while, but they did it again next session after suffering a minor inconvenience. Our GM, the bastard, rewarded them for being so reckless knowing full well that would lead to more risk taking behaviour. At the current rate they are two or three more sessions off entering into a death spiral and are a liability and a ticking time bomb and I am here for it 
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Jan 10, 2023 03:14
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Rougey posted:At the current rate they are two or three more sessions off entering into a death spiral and are a liability and a ticking time bomb and I am here for it Out of curiosity, has this happened yet, by any chance?  Also, apologies if it's been asked before and isn't best suited for the thread, but are there any good places to get the various Unspeakable Oath issues? I know there are a few on DriveThuRPG, but most of the line-up is missing from there. I'm looking for # 16+17 in particular, in order to get my hands on the Karotechia "See No Evil" scenario. Just to see if it'd be any good to insert it into my campaign as part of a side-plot. I have another Karotechia scenario..."Dead Letter" I think? Which can be run as a standalone, but from what I've read, it's best to be run as a follow-up to See No Evil. Then after that, I think I'd probably give the group a brief finale where they raid the original Karotechia survivors' compound in Brazil, gunning down the two bigfish and any on-site security
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Jan 23, 2023 03:23
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So I wrapped up my Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign last night and wanted to post some thoughts while the experience was fresh. The summary is I found this to be a fantastic campaign, made even better by the recent release of a 5th edition. We ran it using classic Call of Cthulhu rules, and experienced (almost) all the lethality and peril that the rules are famous for. The biggest detractor I found is that it was difficult, moreso than I thought it would be going in, to adapt the specifics to accommodate a group of primarily non-combat investigators. We started out with six investigators, with maybe a total two investigators' worth of fighting distributed amongst them. For a while it was manageable to simply shrink encounters so that they always had the advantage of numbers, but that strategy didn't hold up when even a single mook with a knife can drop someone on the spot with a lucky impale (which happened twice, first in the big reveal that opens chapter 1 and again early on in an alley brawl in chapter 2). Guns were almost out of the question for the opposition, as that made it even more likely to take someone out with a single roll of the dice. I had established in a session zero survey that the players were OK with somewhat arbitrary character death - everyone was down for the Call of Cthulhu experience where the deck is stacked against you and humans are tiny, fragile things. It was more that whenever conflict loomed, generally the investigators were in a place where replacements were not readily available (they didn't attract a support entourage for a variety of reasons) and someone going unconscious or dying would mean multiple sessions before I could airdrop a replacement character in the game in a remotely plausible way. So I tried to scale back the combat and scale up the use of investigation and non-combat skills to give everyone spotlight time - which worked well for the first few chapters but by chapter 6 (which they skipped to after chapter 2) the nature of the threat demands a lot of firepower in one way or another. That said, they did make very clever (and unanticipated) use of the big MacGuffin spell to protect the city, which basically drove the cult out completely and gave them a large base of operations to launch their final assault. Oh yeah, the chapters. Masks is a massive loving campaign, even more so with all the extra stuff in 5th edition, and after almost two years we only basically ran half the game (skipping chapters 3-5 entirely, given that there is a clue in chapter 2 that you can follow all the way to the final location). It was probably largely due to the fact that I was running the game text-only (using Fantasy Grounds as our VTT), which provided to be significantly slower than talking. I don't think I would do things differently, as text gave me a great log of what happened that I could refer to later (and am slowly using to write recaps, which so help me Nodens I will finish eventually). But it meant that running all six chapters would have probably taken another hundred plus sessions and I don't think I have it in me to run the same campaign for five years straight. That said, chapter 6 is designed in such a fashion that you can easily exposition-dump the essentials so that the ultimate antagonist makes sense and the players aren't floundering on what to do. I've already complained about the book reading rules at length, those aren't specific to Masks but are a rare bit of complete terribleness in what was otherwise an extremely good rules system. Being able to spend Luck for non-combat rolls worked out really well, and the Sanity system came up just often enough to keep the investigators on their toes without completely derailing everything when someone had a bout of madness. Magic, once the investigators got their hands on some spells and took the gloves off, made a huge difference given their lack of physical prowess. Summoning Nodens on the shores of England was a treat, and I hope I conveyed that the issue isn't that the deity you summon won't help you, it's that their idea of "help" can be very different than that of a puny human. Even the incredibly academic ornithologist, who started the campaign with only 30 POW (and therefore only 30 SAN) made a huge contribution to the final battle with the Barrier of Naach-Tith, which is borderline gamebreaking if multiple casters pour their MP into it - she even went down to exactly 0 SAN casting it which made for a very cinematic moment. So yeah, Masks is a loving amazing campaign, loving huge to run, and you should read the new 5th edition if you are even thinking of running it. I'm probably done with Call of Cthulhu for a while, but this was my first time as a Keeper (I played in a few CoC/DG games back in the aughts when CoC 5th was current) and I really enjoyed the dynamic with my players of inevitable-almost-certain-but-not-quite doom. Just please, Chaosium, fix the drat book reading rules. I beg of you.
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Jan 24, 2023 23:48
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Are you talking about 7th edition? 5th edition CoC came out in 1992 and doesn’t use Spend Luck mechanics. I’d assume you are, but figured I’d ask for clarity.
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Jan 24, 2023 23:59
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What's your beef with the book rules? The learning times? If you wrote about it before, do you have a link? Sounds like you had a lot of fun! Although, tbh, from your description it sounds like incorporating some Pulp would make running it less of a hassle for most GMs. If/when I ever run it, I think that's the way I'll go with it. Dr. Lunchables posted:Are you talking about 7th edition? 5th edition CoC came out in 1992 and doesn’t use Spend Luck mechanics. I’d assume you are, but figured I’d ask for clarity. 5th published version of the campaign, not the game system, I assume.
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Jan 25, 2023 00:06
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Very, very nice! Good stuff, thanks for the write-up! Out of curiosity, how do you think it would go, if it was moved up into the '80s? I was originally considering MoN alongside Walker in the Wastes as an overarching campaign, but I ultimately settled for WitW, as it seemed a little easier to move. (And the fact that its missions are staggered out over around ~1.5 years means I can slot in a bunch of other standalone missions and side-plots in among the main missions) But that being said, if all goes well and the players (eventually) want more, I've definitely got MoN in mind, since that seems like a great campaign, from the bits I've read. So it's good to hear about your campaign! EDIT: hehehe, started reading through your campaign. I'm liking Falstaff already, with his expert graverobbing techniques
Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Jan 25, 2023 |
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Jan 25, 2023 00:24
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Major Isoor posted:Out of curiosity, has this happened yet, by any chance? Our next session this Friday with a new starter who has never done CoC before. We're doing Masks and are currently in Africa and our last session ended on a cliffhanger, so I'm ecstatic about the new player if only for the extra Tactically Ablative Armour. I REALLY want to read through your log - Masks is our current campaign. We're doing it Pulp however our Keeper pulls no punches and frankly is a big fan of brass knuckles; between some background fluff that halved my CON and fall damage I drat near died in the first encounter for New York and spent the entire chapter on a knifes edge. Rougey fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Jan 25, 2023 |
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Jan 25, 2023 02:47
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Are you talking about 7th edition? 5th edition CoC came out in 1992 and doesn’t use Spend Luck mechanics. I’d assume you are, but figured I’d ask for clarity. 7th edition of the Call of Cthulhu rules, 5th edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep. Megazver posted:What's your beef with the book rules? The learning times? If you wrote about it before, do you have a link? The reading times make no sense to me; double-digit weeks makes reading a tome not just a downtime activity between adventures, but one suited only for games where there are potentially months (or years) flying by in downtime. Which while possible, I don't think is how the vast majority of campaigns are structured. It feels like there is supposed to be a multiplier effect for successful skill checks that makes it possible for an academic character to hole up with a tome for a week or two and emerge with a couple of new spells and a brain full of Terrible Truths. Major Isoor posted:Very, very nice! Good stuff, thanks for the write-up! Out of curiosity, how do you think it would go, if it was moved up into the '80s? I think the 80s is about as far as you could modernize the campaign, you'd need to make two significant changes. The first would be to find another justification for Roger Carlyle's expedition - "millionaire playboy goes on a vanity archaeological dig" doesn't really fit that time period. The other is reconceptualizing the ultimate plan: specifically, what is going on at Gray Dragon Island. The rocket is a great image of the future being born prematurely, and all the horrors that it will bring in the coming decades. Find a substitute for that which is appropriate to the 80s and the rest pretty much drops into place. Sadly, Falstaff's player had to depart midway through chapter 2, and he was sorely missed. On a purely technical level, he was the group's only B&E expert and that took a lot of avenues for gathering information without direct confrontation off the table. That player was the unfortunate victim of both "mook randomly rolls an impale, drops a PC" occurrences. Rougey posted:I REALLY want to read through your log - Masks is our current campaign. We're doing it Pulp however our Keeper pulls no punches and frankly is a big fan of brass knuckles; between some background fluff that halved my CON and fall damage I drat near died in the first encounter for New York and spent the entire chapter on a knifes edge. I've got a long way to go to get them all written up, but having the full chat text logs at least makes the project viable at all. I really want to finish this, even if it means locking myself in a personal NaNoWriMo hell. I would definitely agree that if you want to use the encounters as written, Pulp Cthulhu or a tougher-than-average classic CoC group is pretty much required. Even then, random casualties will happen so I would recommend always travelling with an entourage of supporting NPCs or players being OK with having to spectate for a session on occassion.
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Jan 25, 2023 17:10
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kaynorr posted:The reading times make no sense to me; double-digit weeks makes reading a tome not just a downtime activity between adventures, but one suited only for games where there are potentially months (or years) flying by in downtime. Which while possible, I don't think is how the vast majority of campaigns are structured. It feels like there is supposed to be a multiplier effect for successful skill checks that makes it possible for an academic character to hole up with a tome for a week or two and emerge with a couple of new spells and a brain full of Terrible Truths. Yeah, that's a common complaint. The first time I read those rules I was like "uh, really? "The fix I've seen online and contemplated myself is "shift the requirements: x weeks instead of x months, days instead of weeks, hours instead of days".
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Jan 25, 2023 21:28
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kaynorr posted:I would definitely agree that if you want to use the encounters as written, Pulp Cthulhu or a tougher-than-average classic CoC group is pretty much required. Even then, random casualties will happen so I would recommend always travelling with an entourage of supporting NPCs or players being OK with having to spectate for a session on occassion. We just did the encounter on the train in Africa with the Fire Vampires. Three PCs and one NPC ( Definitely think we'd all be loving dead without Pulp rules. Major Isoor posted:Out of curiosity, has this happened yet, by any chance? The nutjob PC was the one who started the encounter with a bout of madness that made them flee the fight, making them useless for the first few rounds. They also failed a few roles they would have succeeded if they hadn't spent POW so recklessly 
Rougey fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Jan 27, 2023 |
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Jan 27, 2023 12:38
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Major Isoor posted:Out of curiosity, how do you think it would go, if it was moved up into the '80s? We're just starting the last chapter after two years and two months of play, using Pulp rules. To me, moving it to a different time period would lose the atmosphere. In a lot of ways, it's a guided tour of the last days of the British Empire and that empire's gone after the war. You'd have to rewrite huge parts and I think it would lose a lot of flavor. For what it's worth, I think we got a lot out of the Pulp rules in terms of players really committing to their characters and the mystery. I really feel like this is a campaign people will talk about after it's over.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:16
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numtini posted:We're just starting the last chapter after two years and two months of play, using Pulp rules. To me, moving it to a different time period would lose the atmosphere. In a lot of ways, it's a guided tour of the last days of the British Empire and that empire's gone after the war. You'd have to rewrite huge parts and I think it would lose a lot of flavor. Hmm yeah, I was afraid of that. Welp, I guess if this campaign (Walker in the Wastes, with some other missions to slot into the gaps between main missions) is a hit, I might do a kind of 'prequel' campaign for MoN. Thanks! Also, interesting - I'll have to check out Pulp rules. Is it similar to CoC rules, but... maybe a little less player overhead? (Might be way off, there. Just had a real quick look between work) Also, I've been enjoying your MoN campaign updates, kaynorr! It's been good to read through the next chapter in the group's adventures, whenever the thread is updated
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Feb 1, 2023 03:39
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It's mostly just several optional rule tweaks you can mix and match: double HP, higher starting stats, Archetypes which is like another template like Occupations that you add in addition to an Occupation, more Luck and more ways to use it, Pulp Talents which are like Feats etc in other systems and a few other minor things. Example Archetype: 
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Feb 1, 2023 03:49
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Megazver posted:It's mostly just several optional rule tweaks you can mix and match: double HP, higher starting stats, Archetypes which is like another template like Occupations that you add in addition to an Occupation, more Luck and more ways to use it, Pulp Talents which are like Feats etc in other systems and a few other minor things. Ahhh, right! I see now - I was misinterpreting similar stuff like that. Interesting, though! Definitely something I'll have to look at, since my players will be transitioning from prologue characters to 'regular' characters soon, so that might be handy. Thanks!
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Feb 1, 2023 03:52
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For what it's worth, I find that the perfect sweet spot for running a long CoC campaign without "Mork, identical twin brother of Gork the Barbarian"-level PC attrition is to run basically Pulp Cthulhu with just the survivability boosts/Luck and none of the other two-fisted action stuff.
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Feb 1, 2023 04:31
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Major Isoor posted:Ahhh, right! I see now - I was misinterpreting similar stuff like that. Interesting, though! Definitely something I'll have to look at, since my players will be transitioning from prologue characters to 'regular' characters soon, so that might be handy. Thanks! We went from being a gang of morally bankrupt assholes to being a hardened mercenary band of morally bankrupt assholes. For most of our players (including myself) it had been our first time playing CoC and that extra 100 points was great for addressing some shortcomings. I thought it was a great way of doing it, we were in over our heads for all of those scenarios, barely scraping through at times, and the pulpification of the characters felt earned.
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Feb 1, 2023 06:41
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I have some friends that are pretty new to gaming in general that want me to run CoC for them. I’ve only ever run 4/5th edition and then 90% of the time I was running Delta Green games as 90’s period pieces. I’ve decided to run a more “traditional” game for them and really want to do Masks. I don’t want to start there and drop them into that giant campaign; are there any good scenarios out there for new players? Haunting was the go-to back in the older editions but I’m not sure if there’s anything newer for 7th that has sort of superseded that as the default first game.
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Feb 3, 2023 03:25
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Edge of Darkness is the preferred follow up to the Haunting or in place of the Haunting.
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Feb 3, 2023 04:13
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The Lightless Beacon and Dead Border are my go to; I run Dead Boarder as an intro to the rules with the goal to kill everyone, and then I do Lightless Beacon but with a cache of firearms/grenades (Changed it so that one of the lighthouse keepers is gun running) and then go ham with a showdown until help arrives.
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Feb 3, 2023 04:37
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Edge of Darkness in the Starter Set is very good. The Haunting, I feel, is greatly over-rated. There are several collections of modules available if you want more. Doors to Darkness is a collection written for new GMs, (but tbh I feel most of the scenarios are so-so). Mansions of Mansions reissues several classic scenarios and is pretty fun, IMO. If you want to do a campaign but maybe don't want to do one that'll take you two years, check out A Time to Harvest. It's a shorter campaign explicitly aimed at newer groups.
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Feb 3, 2023 13:31
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Thanks guys; I went ahead and grabbed the starter set and read through a little of Edge of Darkness. It looks pretty good so far and basically exactly what I was looking for. What's Time to Harvest like?
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Feb 3, 2023 15:15
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EdsTeioh posted:I have some friends that are pretty new to gaming in general that want me to run CoC for them. I’ve only ever run 4/5th edition and then 90% of the time I was running Delta Green games as 90’s period pieces. I’ve decided to run a more “traditional” game for them and really want to do Masks. I don’t want to start there and drop them into that giant campaign; are there any good scenarios out there for new players? Haunting was the go-to back in the older editions but I’m not sure if there’s anything newer for 7th that has sort of superseded that as the default first game.
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Feb 3, 2023 15:55
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That one is also in the Starter Set.
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Feb 3, 2023 16:13
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I think that one was also in the old (and not great) d20 version also, right? I haven't looked at my copy in ages, but I'm pretty sure I've kept it for as long as I have strictly for that scenario.
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Feb 3, 2023 16:18
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It was in the back of the book for the edition I cut my teeth on, which I think was the one immediately prior to any D20 edition, but modern enough that they had a URL in it that wasn't like www2.compuserve.net/eric/~chaosium.
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Feb 3, 2023 16:20
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Nessus posted:It was in the back of the book for the edition I cut my teeth on, which I think was the one immediately prior to any D20 edition, but modern enough that they had a URL in it that wasn't like www2.compuserve.net/eric/~chaosium. OH that's right; it was in the 5th edition core! Totally forgot about that. I love that version; it's got all that really cool stipple art.
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Feb 3, 2023 16:22
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Yeah that art and the adventure design made an impact. It was very different than the Dungeon magazine modules my DMing adventures had brushed on.
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Feb 3, 2023 16:29
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EdsTeioh posted:I have some friends that are pretty new to gaming in general that want me to run CoC for them. I’ve only ever run 4/5th edition and then 90% of the time I was running Delta Green games as 90’s period pieces. I’ve decided to run a more “traditional” game for them and really want to do Masks. I don’t want to start there and drop them into that giant campaign; are there any good scenarios out there for new players? Haunting was the go-to back in the older editions but I’m not sure if there’s anything newer for 7th that has sort of superseded that as the default first game. I was originally going to respond thinking you were talking about D&D5e, but reread your post and saw you meant CoC 5e. But that makes me think: are there any folks in the thread who went from running D&D5e for their groups to CoC? How was it? What was your experience?
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Feb 3, 2023 16:34
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Oh sorry, hahaha yeah, I can see where there would be confusion the way I typed it. I've been playing and running various games since the early/mid 80s, so 5e D&D to CoC isn't my path BUT I did spend a lot of time running AD&D 2e, Rifts, and Robotech for my high school/early 20's group and then tried to switch to more "mature" games. I tried Ravenloft at first; didn't land, then CoC 4 or 5, ALSO didn't land, and then eventually ended up somehow getting those same people VERY interested in Vampire and Werewolf. They were all basically hack and slashers, so seeing them take to oWoD so much was definitely weird.
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Feb 3, 2023 16:51
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My D&D group is branching out to CoC sometime later this year, so I'll make sure to report back. Two of the group have experience with one of the previous editions of CoC but I think nobody else has played it. 
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Feb 3, 2023 16:57
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EdsTeioh posted:OH that's right; it was in the 5th edition core! Totally forgot about that. I love that version; it's got all that really cool stipple art. The 6th edition is almost entirely a reprint of 5.x, so Dead Man’s Stomp made it in there. That was the first RPG book I ever bought, despite having played for years.
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Feb 3, 2023 18:17
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DrSunshine posted:are there any folks in the thread who went from running D&D5e for their groups to CoC? How was it? What was your experience?
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Feb 3, 2023 22:18
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