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Post by Dizzy D on Mar 29, 2022 12:57:39 GMT -5
My Call of Cthulhu campaign (with a decent heap of homebrew thrown in)
Cross-posted from other board:
So last weekend we had our second Call of Cthulhu session of the campaign (first one was mostly scene setting, character creation and introduction, combat tutorial for my new player etc.)
Our cast:
- Ray, nicknamed "Sunshine". Camera Operator (and petty thief). Player picked the nickname "Sunshine" and immediately drew the Sun tarot for his blessing. Obviously the work of a Great Old One. Protected by the Sun (though he doesn't know the details yet), some of the creatures they encounter will immediately recoil from his presence. His curse is that somebody stole his pet (The Tower. Not woven into the story yet).
- Garcon. Animal Handler and proto-Peta activist. Drew the Wheel of Fortune (allowing him to reroll, basically like Luck works in D&D). His curse is that the police wants to talk to him about a murder (Justice).
- Arthur: Carpenter and cowboy. Drew the Emperor which allows him to command non-hostile NPCs. His curse is being a former member of a cult and the parting was not friendly (Hierophant).
- Paul: Make-Up artist. Drew the Chariot, allowing him to ignore physical damage. Curse is the Empress: a mysterious person appears from time to time and he blindly obeys them.
Our "heroes" (the quote marks will return whenever they are less than heroic) were hired by the Black Pyramid Insurance agency to solve the issues plaguing the movie. The movie's budget is a million dollars and if the production fails, the insurance company has to pay. Instead they decide to offer 4 semi-competent employees $10.000 (total among them) to get things back on track. Off the various issues plaguing the movie, the 3 deaths are the most troubling (especially as the four "heroes" fear for their own safety) so they set out to investigate the deaths:
- Billy was another carpenter (but Arthur fails his roll and remembers little about him. Just that Bill wasn't a very good carpenter). Ray (who nails his roll) remembers that he once saw Bill accidentally nailing his own clothes to a set. Bill fell of a set while working in the evening and a bit of investigation does bring to attention that there might have been an oil-slick on top of the set. Bit fishy, but the investigators still think it was an accident.
- Steven was another animal handler, but Garcon fails his roll as well. He was trampled by horses, but some investigation makes everything sound really fishy: there were few horses, a single unlucky kick might have happened, but trampled in the middle of a meadow? Other animal handlers note that Steven was cruel to animals.
- Jean was a movie editor/film developer and he died suffocating in his editing boot. The police are still investigating. Ray knew him and knew that Jean was fired from another studio as his chainsmoking inside the editor boot made a bad combo with the highly flammable film and he ruined another movie that way.
Investigation follows and they find out that each of the bodies is marked with a golden tattoo. (Paul copies the tattoo on a piece of paper, but rolls terribly, so he will be mocked for the rest of the evening as various people will comment on how badly drawn the copy is. Made worse by Ray later copying the same marking and getting a critical success). The tattoo apparently has some tie to a criminal Irish gang and also to a god/demon from Syria. (They need a lot of NPCs as sources of information for this as each of our players are high STR/low INT kind of characters).
Introduced game mechanic: whenever any player states something dumb/anti-scientific/dogmatic etc. (like telling the professor of history that the Earth is only 2000 years old), they will get smacked with a textbook for 1 HP bludgeoning and 1 SAN dignity.
The trail leads them to Chicago and the Moran/Capone rivalry. They somehow manage to circumvent all possible combat encounters (Arthur's Emperor ability bypasses a good chunk of the adventure) and they never make contact with the Capone side. Not getting involved with gang wars, they find out that the golden marks are set by priests of Mammon, in this case a short Irish guy with a red beard in a green suit (they already made some Leprechaun jokes before they met him). The Leprechaun-look is a misdirect obviously to keep the Irish gang from questioning where the gold came from. The gang leader made a deal with the priest. He pays his underlings to get marked with the golden sign. If somebody dies with the golden sign (which they received willingly), they are a sacrifice to Mammon, demon of Greed, who feeds on their blood/soul. In exchange the gang leader receives gold.
They somehow manage not to antagonize the priest and avoid combat again. (Combat with the God of Gold/Demon of Greed, which would result in the Great Depression, but alas they did not take the bait. I do hope they are going to take the bait on the Mouse in one of the later chapters). They do get introduced to the major theme of the whole campaign as the priest is willing to share his knowledge: belief can empower things to become gods. Hollywood offers the opportunity to many beings
Back to Hollywood and skipping some bits as one of the players was not feeling well and I wanted to wrap up: They find out that one of the producers also made a similar deal and marked people who were detrimental to the production, then arranging for their "accidents". Our "heroes" are willing to look the other way in exchange for rewards and the promise that no more killing will take place. And they find another priest of Mammon showcasing little Mammon statues as the new prestigious awards for the best movies of the year.
Players draw cards with their rewards: Paul gets money, Garcon gets weapon skill points, Ray gets knowledge skill points and Arthur gets bonus HP/SAN (I need to balance the HP/SAN per card as Arthur picked a high level card and gained way too much HP for this early in the game.)
Next episode: The heroes meet Edward Hubble who has made a weird discovery and also go to Tijuana to bring home a drunken actor (at least that's the plan). This episode was intended to be social deduction/investigatin, next one will be more action/combat.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 29, 2022 18:52:42 GMT -5
So we are transitioning from an old campaign to a new one. We had one of our long time players have his schedule clear up so he could join, and we have another player, who is in the military (as an MP) deploying in June, so we decided to wind down the old games and start fresh. With that, I decided to start with a blank slate for the setting too, and retired the old slapdash setting I made in a hurry to launch those two campaigns last summer, as there were a lot of things I was unhappy with in hindsight. My goal is to make this setting much more collaborative and to run the game, at least at the early levels, in a much more sandbox fashion instead of having one meta-narrative thread running through it. They may discover or develop a throughline as they adventure, but it won't be preplanned. As such, I am prepping a campaign guide document. It's still a work in progress, and it will be a living document, being revised as we play, so as such I am doing it in google docs to make it accessible and revisable to all. I will have a separate DM doc that only I will have access to that will go in more depth and hold secrets the players may or may not discover in play. It's only about half done, I still have 3-4 sections to compile, but we start this coming Sunday with a prologue adventure (we did a zero session to create characters a week ago), so I made what is done available to the players. If anyone is interested in peeking at the setting, I will post the link below. I decided this time around to treat the entirety of D&D lore as a giant buffet, picking and choosing bits I liked to incorporate, leaving the rest behind, and adding my own original bits and revisions to that, as well as incorporating stuff developed by my players. To wit, I decided not to make maps this time, my first dip into the buffet was the decision to use the vast maps from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, but only keep the maps and some place names, to revise everything else to fit our tastes. I had them roll randomly to determine which map (there are 18 regional mas to the setting) to start from at the beginning of the zero session, and the map they rolled was one featuring Tula the City of Mages. My memory conflated Tula with another city of mages in the setting Valon, which was a city of Ice Wizards, and though Tula was in a cold setting and said so, and the players really dug the idea, so my first revision, once I realized my memory error was to shift the Wildelands map so the bottom maps were not equatorial, but instead were the southern edge of the southern hemisphere, so Tula now sits on the northernmost shore of a polar continental landmass, having a climate similar to that of Cape Horn in our world. And we rolled form there. The results, or at least a glimpse of them, can be seen in this Player's Guide to the setting: Player's Guide to Terra-The Southern ReachesIf anyone is interested and reading and commenting, please do. If not, I completely understand! -M I am late to respond here, but I have done a fair amount of reading of this guide. I don't know that I have anything impactful in the way of helpful feedback, but did want to say this is impressively professional looking and I've enjoyed all the detailed content! I know you didn't post just to solicit compliments, but I've really enjoyed checking this out. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 29, 2022 20:13:49 GMT -5
I am late to respond here, but I have done a fair amount of reading of this guide. I don't know that I have anything impactful in the way of helpful feedback, but did want to say this is impressively professional looking and I've enjoyed all the detailed content! I know you didn't post just to solicit compliments, but I've really enjoyed checking this out. The "professional looking" is probably down to me having been a freelancer in the industry for a few years and having received and read the style guides from a few publishers, coupled with having read so many damn rpg products to know what catches the eye and doesn't. Most of it is illusion though, it's simply using columns and a heading for each section, and knowing when to break up text with illustrations (even if the art is pilfered from the net and not commissioned or created-I'd love to be able to use art Mrs MRP and I created, but there's not time, and this isn't being published, sold or distributed, it just sits in googledocs for me and my players to reference when we need to). ). But if I were serious about doing it professionally, I would have to go in and replace all the dashes and hyphens with en dashes and that would be a major pain in the arse. -M |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 31, 2022 19:55:48 GMT -5
While at the lcs today, I picked up some new D&D stuff-Call of the Netherdeep, the new adventure booked set in the campaign world of Critical Role (Mrs. MRP is currently running a game set in said world), and one of the new Critical Role unpainted minis from Wizkids, the Gloomstalker, a cool looking undead flying beastie...    -M |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2022 19:27:39 GMT -5
Matt Colville and his company MCDM launched a new Kickstarter earlier this week for a new monster book called Flee, Mortals. I used to be big on monster books and having lots of monster at my disposal, but this one is approaching things a little differently and I really like the design ideas being implemented in this. It funded it's goal of $600K in less than a day (I think it broke a $1 million on the first day or two), so it's definitely happening, and I like that backers will get access to the monsters after they have been playtested but before the full book is finished. They also released a sample that focused on how they revamped Goblins that you can download for free (info is in the details of the vid on youtube). I read the preview and an amped to try out some of the options.
If anyone is playing 5E and might want to look at some ways to spice up the everyday monsters that are staples of D&D rather than more of the endless stream of new monsters that have no skin in the game, you might be interested in this.
-M
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2022 16:16:00 GMT -5
Couple of interesting recent acquisitions I have gotten via trades with folks in an RPG barter group I am in. A Dune RPG quickstart booklet that was part of 2021's Free RPG Day (which I never seem to remember is happening). The new Dune RPG looks cool, but it's expensive and I am not sure I could ever get a group together to play it, but I was curious so this is a good compromise to check out for me.  A "how to" book on fantasy cartography. Lots on techniques and tech to use which is what is of interest to me, less on what makes an interesting map which is a matter of taste and preference so less useful.  -M |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2022 18:58:22 GMT -5
So found some stuff at Dollar Tree of all places today that makes for great scatter terrain to use at the D&D table...  stairs...  cookfires/boiling cauldrons...  doors...  and then fairy garden decor of giant plants and beehives...   and only a buck twenty five each, as opposed to a package of 8-10 terrain pieces from Wizkids or Dwarven Forge for $50-$100. -M |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 20, 2022 9:53:26 GMT -5
The playtest rules for the new Marvel Super-Heroes ttrpg dropped today  of course you have to pay $10 to get the playtest rules and participate in the feedback so they can then later release the full version of the game and have you pay again... I am just of a mind if you want people to playtest your game for you, either you pay them to do it or offer the rules for free in an open playtest, don't charge people to do your development work for you. I am familiar with Matt Forbeck-I met him a few times at panels and such when I was freelancing in the rpg industry and attending gaming cons regularly), and I am confident it will be a well designed game, though it looks like a multiple d6 system which I am not always crazy about. I'd have to read through it to see, but again I am not paying for the privilege to playtest someone's game for them. -M |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 21, 2022 17:48:12 GMT -5
Sharing a link to my insane bestiary project The ABC image takes you to a straight alphabetical listing of creatures, including aliases, so some of the links lead to the same creature page. The next image, the party-looking one with the game pieces, takes you to the same list of creatures, grouped by game and source document. This list has duplicates, because I extracted creatures from multiple sources across multiple games. The picture with tags leads to a page of creatures grouped by tag, but relatively few of them have tags yet. Each individual creature page contains an entry for every source I found the creature in. On the individual creature pages, the first link in every line item takes you to my "sources" page (the same one linked to in the game-pieces picture), and the spot in that page which has the grouping of what you clicked on. The "source link" link is the one that takes you to some outside web site. My own copy at home has extracted PDF pages in the creature web pages in addition to the one-line info for each source, which I'm not uploading for obvious copyright reasons. Most of the "source link" links are still pretty generic. Some are just Google searches, but others have varying degrees of specificity. I'm burned out on all the critter searching, so now the next step is where it gets fun. I'm going to parse the text inside the PDFs to get the stats and convert them to my own system, and also parse out the climate/terrain where all these cuties are found, and create encounter tables from that. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2022 22:35:05 GMT -5
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Post by Dizzy D on Apr 28, 2022 4:45:09 GMT -5
Cross Posted from another board:
Third session of our Call of Cthulhu campaign
Our cast:
- Ray, nicknamed "Sunshine". Camera Operator (and petty thief). Player picked the nickname "Sunshine" and immediately drew the Sun tarot for his blessing. Obviously the work of a Great Old One. Protected by the Sun (though he doesn't know the details yet), some of the creatures they encounter will immediately recoil from his presence. His curse is that somebody stole his pet (The Tower. Not woven into the story yet).
- Garcon. Animal Handler and proto-Peta activist. Drew the Wheel of Fortune (allowing him to reroll, basically like Luck works in D&D). His curse is that the police wants to talk to him about a murder (Justice).
- Arthur: Carpenter and cowboy. Drew the Emperor which allows him to command non-hostile NPCs. His curse is being a former member of a cult and the parting was not friendly (Hierophant).
- Paul: Make-Up artist. Drew the Chariot, allowing him to ignore physical damage. Curse is the Empress: a mysterious person appears from time to time and he blindly obeys them. (Which is nice, because it gave me an out this session).
The mission:
Our "heroes" were hired by the Black Pyramid Insurance agency to solve the issues plaguing the movie. The movie's budget is a million dollars and if the production fails, the insurance company has to pay. Instead they decide to offer 4 semi-competent employees $10.000 (total among them) to get things back on track. Having solved the issue of the mysterious accidents of various less-than-useful production members, this time our heroes travel to Tijuana to get back the star actor who has been on a bender. (It's 1929, so you can't get a good drink in L.A.)
Interlude
But first a short visit to Edward Hubble, who has finalized his theory on Universal Expansion, Red Shift and Blue Shift and immediately applied it to a wandering planet that is coming straight to Earth at near-lightspeed. Also some PCs get slapped with textbooks again for dismissing science in front of a scientist (my players seem to love this rule and actively try to antagonize any specialist they meet to lose HPs and SAN). The planet/comet/sun will arrive in 3 weeks and our heroes have no clue how to do anything about it, so back to the main mission.
Back to the mission:
The heroes immediately want to set off for Tijuana, but I gently nudge them to searching Bill's (the main actor) house first to get some clues, netting them the address and phone number of the hotel Bill has been staying at. Also they think that Bill is egocentric cause he has his own movie posters at home. Off to Mexico, the group stays at the same hotel as Bill, get drunk (as they arrive late in the evening) and search his hotel room while drunk, bashing in the door. They find receipts of the bar and the brothel he's been to. At the bar, they find out that Bill, usually a depressed drunk, has had a moment of unexplained heroism, getting in a fist fight with 3 guys, defeating them, kissing one of their girlfriends and then jumping on a horse and take off into the desert (his car is still outside). The 3 guys who got beaten by Bill show up with their boss and a big guy and fight our heroes. I've nerfed Arthur's command ability for this session, simply by responding to one of his commands with "Que?" (Garcon speaks Spanish, but does not have Arthur's command ability so the heroes can communicate, they just can't bypass everything again). Our "heroes" don't get the difference between a fist fight and war, so kill at least one of them with the rest fleeing.
At the brothel, they find out that Bill is feeling like a fake, compared to the heroes he's portraying and that he met up with a mysterious woman outside. The woman handed him a package and searching his hotel room, they found the package, which contained some red crystals. 2 of our four heroes immediately try to taste the crystals and feel that they are the greatest version of themselves. They track Bill's trail into the desert.
At an old shack that was used as a base of operations by Pancho Villa's troops several years before, they find some weapons, a box full of dynamite and some information on a drug trafficking gang to the west, that were spreading the red crystals. As they load up the box of dynamite, they are attacked by 3 cars with Mexican bandits (friends of the guy they just killed in the bar). Using some dynamite, they blow up one car during the chase and we immediately switch to Lovecraftian horror as a Dhole (giant worm) appears and swallows/destroy the other car. Blowing up the Dhole with the remaining dynamite uses up all of Garcon's Wheel of Fortune ability tokens. The dead Dhole splatters corpses all over the place and the heroes find a pair of red glasses and a notebook. The notebook is not written in any alphabet they know of, but the red glasses allow Garcon to see that Ray and Paul are both have red spider-like parasites now living inside their brain (don't use drugs, kids. Or at least don't use drugs if you don't know what drugs they are.)
They follow Bill's trail to an ancient pyramid and find a drone-like cult, that are perfectly polite as long as they don't try to enter the pyramid and see in Paul and Ray some kindred spirits, that just need time. Red glasses-time: most of the others have red spiders in their brains as well and many of them have red wires growing from the back of their heads leading back into the pyramid. They get the notebook translated by a helpful professor, who notes that their goddess was attacked by assassins, but not much more than that. In an attempt to enter the pyramid, the team comes up with the worst plan possible: Paul will take more of the drug until he's seen by the cult as one of their own (as they apparently can see whether someone has a brainspider or not). He immediately is taken over by it, enters the pyramid (without his friends), mines red spider eggs for a day, than leaves again to eat (red glasses time: the food is laced with red spider eggs) and sleep.
Luckily I have blessings and curses for each of the characters that I can use to fix these type of things: During his sleep, Paul is visited by his Empress, who claims that they already own him and remove the spider (Paul is finding out that being Protected can be very worrying on its own. Paul also sees his patron as a famous gangster (the player hadn't picked up that the Empress was a supernatural entity, but gets it now and we establish that the famous gangster is just a form the Empress takes that his human mind can handle). The troop enters the pyramid at night and thanks to the glasses manage to avoid all the Possessed and also find adult Spiders in the mine itself. They nearly enter the breeding room of the spider goddess, but I manage to make them doubt that curse of action so they take a sidepath to enter the boss fight that they can actually win:
Bill, now the gunslinging hero that he always wanted to be, and two Red Spiders guard a mysterious Black Pyramid.
A long, long battle later: Bill is knocked out and tied up, the 2 spiders are killed and a horde of spiders are moving towards the room to apprehend the heroes. The heroes flee with Bill, still under the thrall of the Red Spiders.
Ending the session there and rewarding my players with cards again: 2 get money, 1 gets a mysterious artifact (I've given myself till next session to figure out what I'm getting him) and 1 gets some extra skillpoints.
Conclusion/lessons learned: D100 Call of Cthulhu is terrible for a combat system. With low rates of success on attacks for both parties, fights took ages. Next session, all my players (and their opponents) get a boost in their primary weapon skills (not going to matter too much, this was the combat heavy episode.)
They still have a possessed Bill which can they solve next time (but we were running late) and they didn't pick up the mysterious Black Pyramid which was the whole goal of this session (they are going to need to defeat the living planet coming towards them). But I can fix that next time. Luckily one of them drew a rare card so they will get a magic item, which I can use to help them along.
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Post by Deleted on May 3, 2022 11:11:17 GMT -5
This is one of the iconic D&D art pieces done by Erol Otus-it was the cover for the original Expert Rules booklet and box cover...  This is a Steve Ditko cover to The Thing #17 from 1954.  Homage? Inspiration? Swipe? The image in the scrying cloud in the Otus cover is his cover for the Basic Set...  but there seems to be some thread of influence between the Expert cover and the Ditko comic. Might not have been an intentional homage, just an imge form childhood memory that served as inspiration, or Otus could have been taking a lesson form the Wally Wood school. Not sure we will ever know? -M |
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Post by Deleted on May 3, 2022 15:36:48 GMT -5
A recap of session 3, "An Offer You Cannot Refuse" has been added to the campaign diary here-M |
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2022 12:54:53 GMT -5
This is what happens when you take Mrs MRP to a game store the day after she gets her quarterly bonus from work and they are having a storewide sale and just restocked their clearance miniatures...  we stopped in on out FCBD travels. This is from the new Bookery Games, what split off form the old Bookery Fantasy when the owner decided to stop carrying new comics and close his bargain basement and just keep his collectibles shop open, the employees bought out the game store and spun it off into its own thing and today was their grand reopening sale. -M |
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Post by Deleted on May 11, 2022 21:07:28 GMT -5
There's a new documentary on D&D in the works... articlemore in the actual article. There's a couple of documentaries out there already, I think I watched one on Prime (along with a documentary of Vampire: The Masquerade) and then there's the Blackmoor documentary that was Kickstarted a few years back (I've only seen snippets of it but it looks interesting). I am sure there will be more as people chase the trend, but if they're good and interesting, I don't care why they are made. -M |
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