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Otherkinsey Scale posted:That literally happened in Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Carter gets enslaved by evil toads who take him to the moon, but fortunately the cats maintain a military base there as an outpost against their enemies, the giant cats of Saturn, and the general there is the grandfather of a cat he fed milk to. Yeah the cats save him when the Moon Beasts try and waylay him at the big N's behest. Carter's got all the right friends really, down to Nodens thinking he's a cool cat and helping him not get bushwhacked at the end.
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Jan 26, 2018 04:41
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Cats Have A Military Moonbase To Fight Saturn Cats what brilliant madman wrote this?
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Jan 26, 2018 06:47
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the Dream Cycle is the best thing Lovecraft wrote
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Jan 26, 2018 07:15
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JcDent posted:Cats
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Jan 26, 2018 08:21
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I will totally buy cats being a major military superpower in the Dreamlands. I mean, have you seen how much my cat sleeps? And when he's not sleeping, he's training in stalk-and-kill guerrilla warfare.
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Jan 26, 2018 08:47
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Kitties are all about pets and murder.
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Jan 26, 2018 09:38
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Feinne posted:Given the Prince is a bullshit rear end in a top hat I'd personally consider having the investigators find a bunch of explosives the Brotherhood were going to use to cover their tracks at the end of this little train ride that they could put in the Simulacrum's crate and light the fuses just as they push it into the Prince's car. I've got this lovely image of a sort of stripped out drinks car filled to the brim with dynamite being pushed to the front door of the princes trolley someone knocking on the door going "Oh jigsaw priiiiince", opening the door lighting the blue touch paper and retiring. It just sounds hilarious, like a particularly gory tom and jerry.
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Jan 26, 2018 10:14
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Let's play Lovecraftian horror : There's no such thing as too much dynamite.
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Jan 26, 2018 10:33
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Josef bugman posted:I've got this lovely image of a sort of stripped out drinks car filled to the brim with dynamite being pushed to the front door of the princes trolley someone knocking on the door going "Oh jigsaw priiiiince", opening the door lighting the blue touch paper and retiring. I was thinking more along the lines of the end of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. "At last I have it! With this, my power will be absolute!" (opens box) "Oh shi-"
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Jan 26, 2018 10:51
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Josef bugman posted:I've got this lovely image of a sort of stripped out drinks car filled to the brim with dynamite being pushed to the front door of the princes trolley someone knocking on the door going "Oh jigsaw priiiiince", opening the door lighting the blue touch paper and retiring. It's called Itchy and Scratchy.
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Jan 26, 2018 11:08
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The Lone Badger posted:I was thinking more along the lines of the end of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. I didn't get to the end, but there's really no other appropriate reaction to opening a coffin with an Antediluvian.
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Jan 26, 2018 12:26
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JcDent posted:I didn't get to the end, but there's really no other appropriate reaction to opening a coffin with an Antediluvian. It was actually full of dynamite.
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Jan 26, 2018 12:28
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JcDent posted:I didn't get to the end, but there's really no other appropriate reaction to opening a coffin with an Antediluvian. Go watch an LP. Now.
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Jan 26, 2018 13:15
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 THE FOG LIFTS Wherein our heroes seek their salvation, confront a card played from beyond the grave, and end their journey as do all, where first they began. Home When the investigators get back to London, they have barely hours to spare before they are in danger of being totally destroyed by the Simulacrum's corruption. As they leave the station, they can spot a scruffy cab driver holding a sign that says 'MacRat'. His name is Bill and he was booked ahead of time by Mehmet to take him back to his Islington shop. Along the way, he can summarise the major headlines for the investigators if they haven't been reading the papers; in particular, there's been a murder and two disappearances in the area. The latest is a middle-aged schoolmaster named Arthur Bowman. There's a bunch of clues outlined if the team decides to investigate the disappearances, but considering their impending demise I don't see why they would be interested. Before Mehmet left London, he killed Beddows and turned his corpse into a little monster called a Skin Devil. It has been obediently keeping watch in the Crescent Treasury but has recently ventured out to make the final preparations for Mehmet's return. It's responsible for all of the disappearances and is currently keeping Bowman trapped in a wardrobe upstairs. When the investigators get to the shop, they'll have to fight the thing. It's not particularly tough but it's a sneaky little bastard and will probably ambush the investigators by flinging its bowel at them like a flail; this then explodes and burns them with acid. SAN 1/1D10 to see the Skin Devil, made worse by the fact that it still has Beddows' face. The Scroll of the Left Hand is in the upstairs office of the shop, along with Bowman. The carpet has been rolled back and the hardwood floor has been carved with an intricate and disturbing pattern. If the investigators check the wardrobe, they'll find the catatonic and insane Bowman, a pattern scratched into his forehead that Cthulhu Mythos or Occult identifies as being related to the one on the floor. Investigators might want to take him to the authorities, but the book encourages you to remind them that this means getting involved in a police investigation that they just don't have time for. The scroll is on the office desk, along with a translation and a note written in English apparently from one of Mehmet's cronies, reminding him that the Simulacrum must be present for the ritual. The scroll is definitely the real deal and is written in the same confusing Arabic-Turkish mix as the other scrolls; if the investigators want to cast the Ritual of Cleansing they'll need to use the prepared translation or try to get their own.  THIS loving GUY! The translated ritual is a trap. This whole set-up was Mehmet's contingency plan should he be killed before he got to London. The ritual in the transcript is actually a reincarnation spell that will summon Mehmet's soul into the body of whoever's closest to the centre of the circle carved into the floor. Whoever rolls worst on a Luck roll feels the acid drip of insanity as Mehmet screams inside their own head; they must make a contested POW roll versus Mehmet's POW 115. If they succeed, Mehmet's soul is bounced over to Bowman. If they fail, their consciousness is extinguished and Mehmet takes control of their body. Thanks for playing! Of course, it might be anticlimactic to have an investigator who's survived the whole adventure thus far suddenly bite it because of one unlucky roll. If you don't want to do that, or if the investigator makes the roll, Mehmet immediately possesses Bowman instead. Either way, the result is visceral: Mehmet Makryat is reborn into his host but sans any skin. His organs and muscles writhe across the ground like snakes as he tries to coalesce his body. A third eye blazes in his head, remaining in a fixed position in the protean mass – SAN 1/1D10. He attacks the investigators with clawed hands, and every attack steals some of their skin for himself. The book suggests now's a great time to ask Mehmet questions and wrap up any loose ends, but is it really? Mehmet shouts his triumph and summons the Skinless One. The floor quakes as he emerges from the centre of the circle, surrounded by a swirling vortex of orange smoke. True to his name, he looks like a flayed cadaver, but the investigators know they stand in the presence of a living god and lose 1D10/1D100 SAN as a result. Mehmet commands the Skinless One to attack the investigators.  OH poo poo OH gently caress … … ... The Skinless One does nothing. Mehmet grows more hysterical, shrieking that as the owner of the Sedefkar Simulacrum the Skinless One must obey him. The god looks at him, then looks down at the scattered pieces of the statue. quote:NONE WEARS THE SIMULACRUM. Mehmet rushes to absorb the pieces into his bulk and reassemble the Simulacrum. The Skinless One stands impassive, arms open as if waiting for something. The investigators don't have much time here; they can try and steal a piece and run with it but Mehmet summons a dimensional shambler to pursue them. If they're stupid they'll try and attack the Skinless One, who will point at them and make all their skin unspool from their body at once. If they're smart, they will grab a piece and toss it to the Skinless One – he deftly catches it and crushes it to dust in his hand. quote:THE USURPER IS UNWORTHY. MY GIFT IS SUNDERED. Mehmet screams and dies, collapsing into a puddle. The investigators can throw the rest of the pieces to the Skinless One, who crushes each one in turn. When he gets the Head, the investigators see the faces of everyone who has ever owned the Simulacrum flicker across its surface – Sedefkar, Fenalik, Selim, Mehmet and their own – before it collapses in on itself like a rotting fungus. quote:THE GIFT OF SKIN IS REVOKED. The Skinless One departs, descending back into whatever hell he usually inhabits. Mehmet's corpse follows. He takes any present Sedefkar Scrolls with him unless they're grabbed and held tightly. If the investigators kept the Mims Sahis, that gets sucked away too. Anyone who's still standing in the circle when this happens needs to make a DEX or Luck roll to avoid getting dragged down with him, but you could just as easily skip that if you want. With the Simulacrum destroyed, so too is its Baleful Influence. Alive or dead, the investigators have won. They receive 1D10 SAN for defeating Mehmet, 1D10 SAN if the Simulacrum was destroyed, 1D4 SAN if Bowman survived (fat chance), 1D4 SAN for knowing they defeated their enemies from Constantinople and 4D6 SAN for beating Horror on the Orient Express. If they held onto any scrolls, they decompose within a week, granting a further 1D6 SAN. In addition, the powers that be have noticed their efforts; for the rest of their lives, they are VIPs, always receiving deferential treatment in their movements in the British Empire.  Alternatively… The investigators might be paranoid enough to get a separate translation of the Scroll of the Left Hand. If they do, they get in just in the nick of time, before the 100 hours are up. They cast the Ritual of Cleansing and are safe – for the next 100 hours, that is. They have won, but they are now the guardians of the Sedefkar Simulacrum for the rest of their lives. So that's the main campaign of Horrient! Next, we'll start looking at the new alternate era scenarios. Next time: Cthulhu by Gaslight!
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Jan 26, 2018 13:36
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So after all this the well prepared party gets cursed for life. What a dick move.
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Jan 26, 2018 13:49
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:So after all this the well prepared party gets cursed for life. What a dick move. If they get fed up with it, they can always try summoning the skinless one to give him back his dumb statue.
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Jan 26, 2018 15:02
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I've always liked that. NONE WEARS THE SIMULACRUM. Cue scrambling.
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Jan 26, 2018 16:11
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That is exactly as I expected things to end if the Skinless One showed up.
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Jan 26, 2018 17:27
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Poor Mehmet, he tries so hard!
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Jan 26, 2018 17:29
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The real final boss is that d10/d100 sanity loss. Oh, and the final Mehmet Eats Your Mind gently caress You roll.
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Jan 26, 2018 17:30
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Night10194 posted:The real final boss is that d10/d100 sanity loss. Oh, and the final Mehmet Eats Your Mind gently caress You roll. That's one of the things that's always bugged me about Call of Cthulhu. Someday, I'm going to write an essay regarding how sanity in Call of Cthulhu works, and how I don't fully understand it, but the 1d100 SAN loss for the Skinless One showing up is unjustified - for Christ's sake, he's just standing there, skinless. Why charge somebody 1d100 SAN for what basically amounts to...well, a skinless guy standing there? Also, I'm Darren MacLennan, the guy mentioned who wrote the review for the first edition of the Horror on the Orient Express that got referenced here and there in this highly entertaining summary.
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Jan 26, 2018 18:19
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The thing that always bugs me about CoC's Sanity is how you can't actually interact with it at all. It's just there. An HP bar that will always go down no matter what you do and that destroys your PC or takes away your control of your PC in critical moments. And moments like d10/d100 don't even serve it as a tension-building mechanic (the slow drip-drip of sanity, staved off by accomplishing goals to keep it up, isn't the worst idea for building tension in theory) because it just amounts to a save or die. The actual intended climax is really fitting, though; realizing who Mehmet is, how he's hosed with his God, what his God is saying, and that you have about ten seconds to figure that out and toss a piece to the Skinless One in order to defeat your foe forever.
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Jan 26, 2018 18:23
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Night10194 posted:The thing that always bugs me about CoC's Sanity is how you can't actually interact with it at all. It's just there. An HP bar that will always go down no matter what you do and that destroys your PC or takes away your control of your PC in critical moments. And moments like d10/d100 don't even serve it as a tension-building mechanic (the slow drip-drip of sanity, staved off by accomplishing goals to keep it up, isn't the worst idea for building tension in theory) because it just amounts to a save or die.
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Jan 26, 2018 18:47
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Cannibal Smiley posted:Also, I'm Darren MacLennan, the guy mentioned who wrote the review for the first edition of the Horror on the Orient Express that got referenced here and there in this highly entertaining summary.
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Jan 26, 2018 18:48
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Comrade Gorbash posted:The only sanity mechanic I've ever liked is the one in Darkest Dungeon, and even that one I think could be tweaked. I imagine you partly like it because there are a huge number of ways to interact with and mitigate it, or try to push things towards the 'NO THIS IS ACTUALLY MY FINEST HOUR!' result instead of breaking down crying?
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Jan 26, 2018 19:25
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Night10194 posted:The real final boss is that d10/d100 sanity loss. Oh, and the final Mehmet Eats Your Mind gently caress You roll. What would be fair? Straight up d10 SAN loss? I mean, it IS freaky but...
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Jan 26, 2018 19:34
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What would be fair is redesigning the Sanity system. By the current Sanity system, they're really clear that encountering a major God is a straight up d100. It's just there's no real game mechanic to a d100 Sanity loss, since the chances of it causing heavy insanity or 'kill your PC' are really high. You'd check against your current San on d100, so you've got Current San % chance that you 'only' take a d10, which is usually the amount of sanity you lose for failing a fairly major san check. Then you'd effectively have a high chance of going temporarily or indefinitely mad if I remember the rules right, even if you made the roll, plus basically a second Current San % chance of going completely 'lose my PC' bonkers by getting to 0. Also wouldn't a lot of PCs be pretty shredded already at this point, after all the bullshit they've been through?
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Jan 26, 2018 19:38
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Cannibal Smiley posted:That's one of the things that's always bugged me about Call of Cthulhu. Someday, I'm going to write an essay regarding how sanity in Call of Cthulhu works, and how I don't fully understand it, but the 1d100 SAN loss for the Skinless One showing up is unjustified - for Christ's sake, he's just standing there, skinless. Why charge somebody 1d100 SAN for what basically amounts to...well, a skinless guy standing there? Oh hey. I remember loving your old review site. Do you still own a copy of Senzar? I’ve been trying to get hold of that but it is super expensive and never got scanned.
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Jan 26, 2018 19:47
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Night10194 posted:The thing that always bugs me about CoC's Sanity is how you can't actually interact with it at all. It's just there. An HP bar that will always go down no matter what you do and that destroys your PC or takes away your control of your PC in critical moments. And moments like d10/d100 don't even serve it as a tension-building mechanic (the slow drip-drip of sanity, staved off by accomplishing goals to keep it up, isn't the worst idea for building tension in theory) because it just amounts to a save or die. It is weird because 'skinless dude' is still a pretty low-tier sort of Masque in the grand scheme of things. I mean it's definitely supposed to be a 'gently caress gently caress gently caress it's Nyarlathotep we're hosed' but I'd almost say it should be greatly lessened in this specific one because you immediately realize he doesn't give a gently caress about what Mehmet says. Now a proper Outer God (including in principle whatever Nyarlathotep actually looks like though holy poo poo have you hosed up if it's mad enough that you're seeing that) or even like Nyarlathotep as The Haunter in the Dark, that'd be different.
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Jan 26, 2018 20:01
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Sliding scale of Nyarlahoteph
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Jan 26, 2018 20:32
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For sheer aesthetics I like the Bloody Tongue, but Idunno about the way his African cult is written...
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Jan 26, 2018 20:40
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I wonder if Nyarly is just sometimes chilling at his home in the court of Azathoth and then sometimes he basically just gets a cosmic text while he's in the middle of like prepping for dinner or watching someone trumpet themselves senseless in the presence of Azathoth and he's just like "...wait is that thing still out there? I totally forgot about it". So he pulls on a costume, brushes off the dust and wrinkles and pops in like "I AM HERE, I AM...[glances at tag on the inside of suit] THE SKINLESS ONE. WHAT? YOU'RE TRYING TO WEAR THAT? gently caress OFF!" and just destroys whatever he needs to in order to go back to doing more relevant things on his mind. Like I know for sure the Mi-Go actually do that poo poo, they legitimately forget they left an immortal and indestructible serial killer on Earth and will respond to appropriate SOS thrown their way with "oh for gently caress's sake we did do that, didn't we" and then leave behind a fix for it before heading out again.
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Jan 26, 2018 20:46
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Hostile V posted:Like I know for sure the Mi-Go actually do that poo poo, they legitimately forget they left an immortal and indestructible serial killer on Earth and will respond to appropriate SOS thrown their way with "oh for gently caress's sake we did do that, didn't we" and then leave behind a fix for it before heading out again. Okay I need the story behind this.
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Jan 26, 2018 20:51
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I can only really see it as a cosmic-powered unraveling of the senses, or narrated as a Lovecraftian 'And in that moment I realized that this was not some mere skinned guy, like the dozens of poor bastards we've seen over the course of our adventure, but SKINNED GUY PRIME!'
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Jan 26, 2018 20:53
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Night10194 posted:I imagine you partly like it because there are a huge number of ways to interact with and mitigate it, or try to push things towards the 'NO THIS IS ACTUALLY MY FINEST HOUR!' result instead of breaking down crying? The purpose of these huge god-exposure bombs, I think, is meant to be a way to structure the game, because you cannot just have your team encounter Cthulhu today, Yoggy next week, and Nyarlathotep after Valentine's Day; they would all crack like a cheap vase. I can also see why for genre reasons you would want to set some kind of guard rail to avoid "I become a bitter, misanthropic survivalist who owns sixty guns and greets any strange noises in the night with pipe bombs" being the outcome of every monster/cult encounter. I can think of ways to do it, the question is mostly if you want to gear for semi-indefinite campaigns or for relatively fixed arcs that don't expect you to keep using the same characters.
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Jan 26, 2018 21:02
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The skinless stuff really treads the line between mythos crazy and regular traumatic stuff, it really brings up the assumptions and quibbles of the sanity system to the forefront.
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Jan 26, 2018 21:06
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Also, I enjoyed this write up a lot. Having compared this to Beyond the Mountains of Madness, I can say that despite the grief for the climax of that one, this campaign - in all of its highs and lows - is much more railroady.
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Jan 26, 2018 21:06
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Nessus posted:Also, I enjoyed this write up a lot. Having compared this to Beyond the Mountains of Madness, I can say that despite the grief for the climax of that one, this campaign - in all of its highs and lows - is much more railroady.
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Jan 26, 2018 21:11
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:Okay I need the story behind this. Completely unrelated to that, in the 2000s a set of standing stones on a neighboring peak was demolished as part of a mining operation and released a Dark Young of Shub that the Mi-Go had trapped centuries ago because it was annoying them. The Dark Young ran around killing people and chomping on bodies before hiding out in the forest. It has recently done that again and that's why the agents are out there. Nobody knows that the killer is out there as more than an urban legend. One possible solution for the entire shebang is for the players to use the Contact Mi-Go spell and do their best to describe what exactly is happening with the killer and the Dark Young. Explain well enough and the Mi-Go will whip up two weapons that will bind the Dark Young and disable the killer's biological immortality (whereupon he will immediately suffocate to death because back in the 1970s he tried to hang himself and his body evolved to breathe without lungs). Also they booby-trap the cures because they're jerks. If they're not used within a span of time they release flesh-melting acid and destroy themselves.
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Jan 26, 2018 21:29
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 17:45 |
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If they care enough to give humans the solution is there a reason the Mi-Go can't fix their own poo poo?
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Jan 26, 2018 21:38
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