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Night10194 posted:Look, I understand the rapier is the weapon of the gentleman. I fenced. You do not need 14 fencing actions in your RPG. To be honest they're not all fencing actions. There's 4 movement actions (1 offensive and 3 defensive), 4 defensive actions, and 5 offensive. And yes, they're only for the rapier and you need a separate set of actions for, say, a sword.
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Jan 16, 2018 18:07
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I can get wanting to give a different feel for weapons to avoid the 'just pick whatever does the most damage/gives me the most action economy with the least amount of setup' problem that plagues D&D and games that has a buttload of guns, but you have to be sensible and not swamp the GM and players with a million distinct rules you have to constantly double check.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:15
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My feeling lately is that it's better to distinguish weapon types by a unique quality, as in Mouse Guard, than by a table of different stats and modifiers for each weapon. You can see the beginnings of this kind of thing in Pendragon.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:22
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Halloween Jack posted:I appreciate that Silent Legions centers the action on cults, so your nemesis is more likely to be a retired dentist with a black robe and a personality disorder. Yeah it's actually kind of unsatisfying to 'win' through plot mcguffin, it's really way better if it's possible to just stop the horrible thing from showing up at all.
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Jan 16, 2018 20:13
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Night10194 posted:You've sold me on the ancient and terrible shadow war Ragadans fight with those bastard backstabbers the Ragadans. Ditto that. Ragadans sound like could they have an entire game built around them. marshmallow creep fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jan 16, 2018 |
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Jan 16, 2018 21:02
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RedSnapper posted:To be honest they're not all fencing actions. What happens when you have a rapier and the other guy has, say, a poleax? How granular is the fencing and warfare?
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Jan 16, 2018 21:09
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Feinne posted:Yeah it's actually kind of unsatisfying to 'win' through plot mcguffin, it's really way better if it's possible to just stop the horrible thing from showing up at all.
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Jan 16, 2018 21:21
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Halloween Jack posted:I agree. But I also feel compelled to point out that "We must stop the ritual or the world is doomed" is the most formulaic plot in Lovecraft pastiche. Derleth and Carter were all about it. As for the general fight-level in Call of Cthulhu, the GMing tomes I've read have been pretty consistent that it isn't that you want no fighting ever, it is that you are trying to emulate a genre where the climax is usually not a conventional battle. Having a couple of guys who can handle themselves in a fight, a couple of pistols, and a couple of rifles in the back of the Packard are entirely reasonable and useful things; it is when the response to Mystery is "begin LARPing 40k" that you have gotten off the rails. Also those damage bonuses are no joke; the kzin in Ringworld get comparable ones and now I want to theorycraft Ray vs. Fenalik. (Of course, Fenalik could come back after being turned into vampire carnitas; this seems like it would swiftly become a Tom and Jerry cartoon.)
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Jan 16, 2018 21:29
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Halloween Jack posted:I agree. But I also feel compelled to point out that "We must stop the ritual or the world is doomed" is the most formulaic plot in Lovecraft pastiche. Derleth and Carter were all about it. The scale is part of the problem I think. They want to invoke the big names but that often does put things into 'stop this or the world is doomed' as you note. That's part of why Nyarlathotep is so popular in use I'd imagine, because it can show up without things being the end of the world. In practice you can get much more interesting and personal stories out of situations where some monster and/or cult are just generally making some area worse without some world-shattering goal. Saving some small town or neighborhood or something from being eaten by an extraterrestrial horror or sacrificed to Yog-Sothoth so some rich assholes can use mastery of space to cut costs on transporting goods cross-country has a better feel than saving the world from nebulous destruction.
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Jan 16, 2018 21:59
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That matches something I was noodling around with while writing some game mechanics recently, which is that beyond a certain point high stakes are less interesting because you can't do as much with them. Like, if you have a dependent NPC and the question is "Do you do save Keith, or do you do X instead and let him die?" then there are almost no values of X which make that an interesting question. But if the consequences for Keith are massive humiliation, or being banished to another plane for six months, or walking with a cane for the rest of his life... you've got a lot more to work with. Also, if Keith is still alive he can stick around as a persistent reminder of the time you let him down.
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Jan 16, 2018 22:47
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Josef bugman posted:So is there one person who has to get constantly baleful influenced. I mean, if the party elects one person to always be the first person to grab the Simulacrum piece then it could play out like that; by the time Sofia rolls around that person will just be absolutely miserable, suffering migraines and chest pains and arthritis in every limb and loving whatever else you can think of. Feinne posted:The scale is part of the problem I think. They want to invoke the big names but that often does put things into 'stop this or the world is doomed' as you note. That's part of why Nyarlathotep is so popular in use I'd imagine, because it can show up without things being the end of the world. In practice you can get much more interesting and personal stories out of situations where some monster and/or cult are just generally making some area worse without some world-shattering goal. Saving some small town or neighborhood or something from being eaten by an extraterrestrial horror or sacrificed to Yog-Sothoth so some rich assholes can use mastery of space to cut costs on transporting goods cross-country has a better feel than saving the world from nebulous destruction. This is what I like about the Brotherhood of the Skin. They don't represent a cosmic danger in any sense, they just want the skin. They're monstrous because even though they can't end the world they regularly kill and torture innocent people because they want to kit themselves out. There's another cult in one of the historical scenarios that does in fact want to summon Yog-Sothoth for ambiguously evil reasons and they're much worse by comparison.
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Jan 17, 2018 00:17
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marshmallow creep posted:What happens when you have a rapier and the other guy has, say, a poleax? How granular is the fencing and warfare? Same mechanic, different skill names.
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Jan 17, 2018 00:34
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Down With People posted:This is what I like about the Brotherhood of the Skin. They don't represent a cosmic danger in any sense, they just want the skin. They're monstrous because even though they can't end the world they regularly kill and torture innocent people because they want to kit themselves out. That does kinda fit with them being one of Nyarlathotep's cults, since it pretty much just comes and goes as it pleases there's less emphasis on 'we will summon our master ... step three profit' and more on whatever they're convinced they're getting out of the deal and whatever meta-objective they're being set up to die accomplishing for the Crawling Chaos. Which is sometimes just that it's suffering the sort of boredom you get as the herald of primal forces and feels like jerking some people around.
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Jan 17, 2018 05:19
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Nyarlathotep is, if I recall, a cultist who won completely and now finds he has the worst job in the universe, which he takes out on humans.
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Jan 17, 2018 05:21
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Night10194 posted:Nyarlathotep is, if I recall, a cultist who won completely and now finds he has the worst job in the universe, which he takes out on humans. Yeah Herald of the Outer Gods sounds awesome on paper but that means you're the guy who gets sent to hang out with loser cultists because Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth would literally rather do anything else and Azathoth is too far from anything recognizable to even communicate intelligibly. Realistically a lot of the unpleasant poo poo cultists get up to is because Nyarlathotep is jacking around with them, since the Outer Gods are more 'cold indifferent primal force' than outright evil. Feinne fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 05:35
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So Fenalik wants to wear the Simulacrum? What happens if he does?
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Jan 17, 2018 05:51
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White Coke posted:So Fenalik wants to wear the Simulacrum? What happens if he does? That has a lot of benefits, but the big one for him is that he would be able to have like, quality of life again. When he had the Simulacrum he was able to walk around in sunlight and be part of society, doing his whole Countess Bathory-type shtick. Whereas when we find him in Horrient, he's a crazy hosed-up monster. We'll be getting into all the ins and outs of Simulacrum ownership in the next set of updates.  BY THE SKIN OF THEIR TEETH – PART ONE Wherein the investigators reach their last stop, and find there betrayal and despair, and the makings of ever deadlier puzzles. Background A long time ago, a man named Sedefkar discovered the Simulacrum and wrote the Sedefkar Scrolls. When he was killed, these came into the possession of a powerful vampire who came to be known as Fenalik. When his mansion home was raided, the Simulacrum and the scrolls were taken as prizes by the raiders. Four of the five scrolls eventually made their way to Topkapi Museum in Constantinople, where they were read by a scholar named Selim Makryat. Selim was a rationalist with a sadistic bent, and he became fascinated with the scrolls for both the power they symbolised and their disgusting content. When he discovered that the rituals described had actual power, he was consumed by ambitions of becoming the next Osman and formed the Brotherhood of the Skin. They seized the Shunned Mosque, built on the site of Sedefkar's own Red Tower, and from there ruled in the shadows well into the 20th century. Now, Selim is old. The magic of the scrolls has extended his life and let him replace every part of his body except his heart, which the Skinless One lacks. Death is inevitable. He now hungers for the discovery of the lost Simulacrum that he might perform the Ritual of Enactment, an unholy rite that will fuse his body with the statue and make him a living avatar of the Skinless One; he will be immortal, and the Brotherhood will worship at the foot of their god for eternity. Having lost since lost his drive and vitality, he sent his devoted son Mehmet Makryat to find the Simulacrum for him. But Mehmet is a heretic. He has studied abroad and attained a great understanding of the Mythos than Selim ever did. He is not interested in serving his father for the rest of his life. He has stolen one of the Sedefkar Scrolls in secret and made his own plans to acquire the Simulacrum. Now that the investigators have arrived in Constantinople, these plans are finally bearing fruit. So how is the Constantinople scenario? In a word...bad. The plot twist that occurs here has always been one of the most controversial elements of the campaign, but I think part of this is due to the way it's delivered. The Brothers seem to be countless in number and have control over everything in Constantinople to the extent that the investigators are hosed pretty much as soon as they get off the train. The Brothers easily find out who they are, where they are and what they're planning, so they decide to toy with them. The investigators can look forward to getting jerked around the entire time they're in Constantinople until dumb luck lets them escape. And that's not even getting started on Mehmet! What makes this worse is that while the rest of the campaign made an effort to incorporate socio-political events that were happening throughout Europe, the portrayal of Constantinople seems to rely on old Orientalist cliches more than anything. I'm not an expert on Turkish history by any stretch, but this is Constantinople in 1923, the very year that Mustafa Ataturk becomes the first President of the new-forged Republic of Turkey. I would assume that things would be looking up for most of Constantinople's (Turkish) populace. Even if you must insist that the depraved back-sliding Turk is in cahoots with the Mythos, how come the foreign military occupying the city aren't at least a little curious about a cult that treats them as equal opportunity targets? What I'm trying to say (probably very badly) is that the Brotherhood of the Skin depicted in the Constantinople scenario just isn't believable. They are just totally immune to the great political forces acting upon the city, a depiction which has only been chosen to justify why the investigators are totally helpless before them. Contrast this with pretty much the entirety of Delta Green, or even earlier parts of Horrient that actually incorporate the politics of the era into the scenario. It's loving disappointing. Anyway. Anyway.  Welcome to the poo poo-show The investigators arrive in Constantinople and almost immediately lose their luggage in the chaos at Sirkeci Station. This probably means losing parts of the Simulacrum unless the group made very careful precautions and don't let the bags holding the pieces out of their sight. The various officials at the station ensure the return of the luggage within 1D3 days, but the Wagons-Lits staff get it back to the investigators in no more than an hour. Either way, a Luck roll is required; failure means the Brotherhood have discovered the investigators. If the investigators happened to miss or lose any pieces on the way to Constantinople, they receive a telegram from Mehmet-as-Beddows advising them to check the local Societie Generale. The missing pieces are there. Thanks Mehmet! The book advises that keeping the Simulacrum secure should be a constant concern for the investigators. Ironically, the best move is probably to just leave them in suitcases in the hotel room. Obvious protective measures attract interest and storing the pieces in a bank vault or something like that calls for another Luck roll to avoid discovery. If the Brotherhood's spies find out, the book suggests that a gang of maybe a dozen Brothers might be sent by Selim to steal the Simulacrum, but it doesn't really provide any support for how that might go down. If the investigators play it stupid, they get kidnapped by the Brotherhood and things move quite a bit faster. An interesting piece of news that the investigators hear about when they arrive is the kidnapping of a child, taken from the front of his family's tea house in broad daylight, the fifteenth such kidnapping in recent weeks. The police suspect Greek slavers, but I'm sure you can guess who's really behind it. The idea that the Brotherhood can just like, steal that many children so brazenly without any kind of huge public outcry really stretches my suspension of disbelief. Remember how crazy people got back in Venice just because of two murders and a flood?  Also, should the investigators explore Constantinople at night, they find themselves being followed by a Romani and a bear. Trainers with dancing bears aren't an unusual type of street performer to find here, but these two are always seen lurking in some dark alley, watching the investigators. The first time they are seen, a Listen roll lets them hear the Romani mutter, 'Take care, my friends' as they pass. After that, the sightings of the pair grow stranger as their silhouettes seem to distort or combine into one entity. Whatever other grievances I have with this scenario, some of the imagery it uses is beyond reproach. Next time: (useless) investigations!
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Jan 17, 2018 06:29
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Feinne posted:That does kinda fit with them being one of Nyarlathotep's cults, since it pretty much just comes and goes as it pleases there's less emphasis on 'we will summon our master ... step three profit' and more on whatever they're convinced they're getting out of the deal and whatever meta-objective they're being set up to die accomplishing for the Crawling Chaos. Which is sometimes just that it's suffering the sort of boredom you get as the herald of primal forces and feels like jerking some people around. Nyarlathotep is pretty much entirely motivated by boredom and is like a more malevolent Xom (from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup). He messes with humans because they're more entertaining than alternatives, though it's important to note that he never really gives an "unwinnable" scenario because that's boring, though the path to victory can be extremely narrow. His cultists, of course, never really get that the end goal is to be entertaining, if they did, they might have more success.
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Jan 17, 2018 06:34
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Oh boy your enemy is unstoppably powerful and all your plans mean nothing? The best part of any campaign with conspiracies!
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Jan 17, 2018 06:35
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Obligatum VII posted:Nyarlathotep is pretty much entirely motivated by boredom and is like a more malevolent Xom (from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup). He messes with humans because they're more entertaining than alternatives, though it's important to note that he never really gives an "unwinnable" scenario because that's boring, though the path to victory can be extremely narrow. It should also be noted that just about the most entertaining outcome for him is to watch you struggle and suffer and almost get to the end only to fail and die, screaming. This of course applies to his cultists just as much as investigators. And given his love letter to the Simulacrum suggests he's going to eventually want it back once enough people have suffered and died as a result of its presence it's very possible the big N wants it to be destroyed. I mean the ritual or w/e the investigators are supposed to use is from the scrolls that were directly information from Nyarlathotep right? There's no reason for such a thing to be in there at all unless it's supposed to eventually get destroyed. Feinne fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 07:27
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By including that ritual he gets to watch investigators desperately struggle to destroy it, cultists desperately struggle to stop it being destroyed, and brave men ruining their minds by reading the scrolls to find the destruction ritual. It's win-win-win.
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Jan 17, 2018 08:38
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The Lone Badger posted:By including that ritual he gets to watch investigators desperately struggle to destroy it, cultists desperately struggle to stop it being destroyed, and brave men ruining their minds by reading the scrolls to find the destruction ritual. It's win-win-win. In the modern era, Nyarlathotep just watches day-time talk shows instead.
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Jan 17, 2018 11:23
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By the way, what's the deal with the avatars of the gods? Are they distinct entities, or are they just a puppet show for stupid cultists?
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Jan 17, 2018 11:42
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JcDent posted:By the way, what's the deal with the avatars of the gods? Are they distinct entities, or are they just a puppet show for stupid cultists?
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Jan 17, 2018 11:53
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JcDent posted:By the way, what's the deal with the avatars of the gods? Are they distinct entities, or are they just a puppet show for stupid cultists? Puppet show, I think. They're an extension of the will of the god in question, a smaller part of the larger whole. You can't really have a personal interaction with Shub-Niggurath because she just operates on a scale you can't comprehend, but the Walker in the Woods? That's manageable, a little bite-sized chunk of Mythos for you. There's examples in the Mythos of people who do end up having more personal relations with the Old Ones or the Outer Gods, but they're special cases. Nyarlathotep is kind of a special case because he operates on a closer level with humans, but he does so through all these different guises like the Pharaoh or the Skinless One. The impression I get is that even if they are just 'masks' for him they do seem to have their own kind of identities and motivations; the desires of the Skinless One are distinct from the desires of the Haunter in the Dark.
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Jan 17, 2018 11:55
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A commonly-used analogy for hyperdimensional beings: Imagine you're a flatlander (a 2D organism). A human sticks their hand into your world. Each of the 'fingers' would appear to you to be a completely separate entity, unconnected and acting independently from each other. But to a higher-level understanding they're actually all the same entity.
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Jan 17, 2018 12:13
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Thanks! I had this question germinating ever since I read Ctech, probably. What are other personable horrors? Nyarla, Nodens and?
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Jan 17, 2018 13:07
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JcDent posted:Thanks! I had this question germinating ever since I read Ctech, probably.
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Jan 17, 2018 13:19
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Some are very approachable for their servitor races. Dagon and Hydra are very involved in Deep One society, Yig with the snake people, maybe Mordiggian with ghouls and Shudde M’ell with chthonians
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Jan 17, 2018 14:26
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Dagon and Hydra aren't Gods, they're really old Deep Ones, since Deep Ones don't stop growing. The eldest and most powerful, the high priest and priestess of Deep One society. Deep Ones make good enemies because they're like, mostly just a hostile alien race that lives in the ocean. You can shoot a Deep One and he'll die, they're still quite dangerous, they have the whole alien 'never die, only grow mightier with age' thing, they hate humans, and they have weird parallel technology in their crazy biological stuff in place of having guns or whatever.
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Jan 17, 2018 14:33
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JcDent posted:Thanks! I had this question germinating ever since I read Ctech, probably. IIRC most of the Great Old Ones are "personable" in the sense that they're still singular beings that you could physically encounter. you might not survive first contact with Big C or Tsathoggua or Ithaqua or Y'golonac or Dagon & Hydra or etc. are still more or less singular entities with physical forms that exist on our plane of reality. it's the Outer Gods that are so alien that they rarely (if ever) interact with human beings on anything approaching a personable interaction. Azathoth, Shub Nigguroth, and Yog Sothoth are all more-or-less manifestation of universal forces, so they're often represented by Nyarlathotep or other avatars because there's basically nothing they could say to an human in any meaningful way.
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Jan 17, 2018 15:11
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I like the Lesser Outer Gods with 0 Int whose description notes that Cultists mostly summon them then cover someone they don't like in whatever the stupid thing considers to be hot sauce and get out of the way.
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Jan 17, 2018 15:28
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Night10194 posted:Dagon and Hydra aren't Gods, they're really old Deep Ones, since Deep Ones don't stop growing. The eldest and most powerful, the high priest and priestess of Deep One society. What, you thought they were evil rape frogs? Who told you that, Lovecraft? That guy thought Spaniards were grease-monsters who worship the moon. Completely nuts.
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Jan 17, 2018 15:32
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I also like the Mi-Go as a foreign mineral concern that just wants to mine a bunch of stuff humans don't care about much with a minimum of fuss.
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Jan 17, 2018 15:34
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The Lone Badger posted:By including that ritual he gets to watch investigators desperately struggle to destroy it, cultists desperately struggle to stop it being destroyed, and brave men ruining their minds by reading the scrolls to find the destruction ritual. It's win-win-win. And again from that love letter the meta-win when someone finally does use the ritual, the Simulacrum and all the suffering and death it caused will get sent back to the real Nyarlathotep hanging out at the Throne of Chaos so he can relieve his boredom and hear its condensed screams for just one moment instead of THAT loving PIPING. Freaking Crumbum posted:IIRC most of the Great Old Ones are "personable" in the sense that they're still singular beings that you could physically encounter. you might not survive first contact with Big C or Tsathoggua or Ithaqua or Y'golonac or Dagon & Hydra or etc. are still more or less singular entities with physical forms that exist on our plane of reality. Yeah you sort of go from 'this extremely unpleasant false god thing will probably kill me because it does not like me' to 'this manifestation of an actual for realsies god will very likely accidentally kill me without even noticing I was there' when you move from a Great Old One to an Outer God. Azathoth is generally noted as not being intelligent because it's not communicative but personally I'd say it's equally possible the literal incarnation of destruction just doesn't give a gently caress enough to communicate with anything so brief and pathetic that it has a lifespan. Shub Niggurath is probably really important to try and communicate with in an encounter because you want to remind her you're kind of fragile. Yog Sothoth doesn't really care and unless you are physically in its way you're probably reasonably safe.
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Jan 17, 2018 16:32
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Halloween Jack posted:Actually, Deep Ones are just sexy mermaid people that the U.S. government viciously oppressed with bombing campaigns. Actually Lovecraft didn't claim Deep Ones were rapists either. Dude just super-hated "miscegenation" - the horror of Innsmouth was that its people willingly married fishpeople and established trade relations with them. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is both one of the better Lovecraft stories for craft and one of the worst for metaphorical racism (even before we get to his many awful stories for direct racism). The Shape of Water is basically Lovecraft's nightmare scenario. EDIT: it's also worth remembering that Original Lovecraft is not coherent because the guy wasn't interested in constructing a world, he just wanted everyone to live in as much fear of Poles as he did, metaphorically speaking. It's his fans, like August Derleth (Wisconsin represent!) that shaped his work into a single universe, defined 'Outer Gods' versus alien GOOs, and so on. Yogg-Sothoth.being 'spacetime incarnate' was invented to make Yoggy more godlike, when originally Yoggs was a parodic horrible version of the Abrahamic God so that The Dunwich Horror could be snide about religion, which Lovecraft thought was for rubes. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 16:32
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Halloween Jack posted:Actually, Deep Ones are just sexy mermaid people that the U.S. government viciously oppressed with bombing campaigns. Minus the "sexy" part, this is literally the premise of the novel Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys and it is very very good.
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Jan 17, 2018 16:54
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Night10194 posted:I also like the Mi-Go as a foreign mineral concern that just wants to mine a bunch of stuff humans don't care about much with a minimum of fuss. Guys, guys, look at all this limestone! We are going to be so rich!
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Jan 17, 2018 17:07
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DalaranJ posted:Guys, guys, look at all this limestone! We are going to be so rich! And then a bunch of locals with shotguns show up and assume the horrible bug lobsters are hostile. One thing leads to another, and now you've got a reputation for putting brains in jars.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:08
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Joe Slowboat posted:Actually Lovecraft didn't claim Deep Ones were rapists either. You're also right about the framework of Azathoth > Outer Gods > Great Old Ones > Servitor Races being something that Derleth started and Chaosium codified.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:41
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