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Category Archives: Trail of Cthulhu

When I Can’t Decide: Vote!

23 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by Aegeri in 13th Age, Age of Rebellion, Edge of the Empire, Force and Destiny, General, Night's Black Agents, Promethean the Created, Star Wars, Trail of Cthulhu, Trail of Night's Eldritch Agents

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#Vote, 13th Age, Promethean The Created, Roleplaying, Star Wars, Tabletop, Trail of Cthulhu, Trail of Night's Eldritch Agents

 photo sticker375x360_zpsrkt1kcd7.png

Given that it’s currently all about elections in the USA and Australia, I thought it only appropriate to do something similar with the new games I will be starting soon. I’ve had a bit of a prolonged break from roleplaying, for various reasons, so I decided to experiment with some different ideas. After much thought, I decided that it would be best to let my players decide what they wanted to play – after all, I love most of my campaign idea’s pretty much equally! I decided to put things to a vote and see how my players felt and what they might want to play most. These were the options I gave them.

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Ask the Guild: Preparation

31 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Aegeri in Advice, Ask the Guild, Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun, Star Wars, Trail of Cthulhu

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#, DnD, Dungeons and Dragons, Roleplaying, Shadowrun, Star Wars RPG, Tabletop, Trail of Cthulhu

Tome of Answers

After a bit of a delay, we return with Ask the Guild and an important topic for discussion this week: How long do I spend preparing for my various games? As well as what to do once you’ve bought one of those starter sets, such as the DnD Red Box, where do you go from there?

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The Trail of Night’s Black Cthulhu (ToNBC)

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by Aegeri in Advice, Call of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, Trail of Cthulhu, Trail of Night's Black Cthulhu

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Advice, Horror, Night's Black Agents, Roleplaying, Tabletop, Trail of Cthulhu, Trail of Night's Black Cthulhu

 photo 63152ecd34d098cdd92fed6048c0357d_zpspk990sot.jpgYour delicious spy techno thriller world is mine!

A long time ago, when I was starting to get into Night’s Black Agents I had an important question on my mind: Did I mix my peanut butter with my delicious chocolate? Notably, do I start bleeding together the worlds of my Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents games? Trail of Cthulhu is a very deliberate, slow and highly investigative orientated game. Subsequently, GUMSHOE as presented in Trail is more about the discovery of terrible mysteries about the nature of man and the insane world locked behind the curtain of our minds. Night’s Black Agents takes a different approach, with the characters being more like the protagonists of a spy thriller. High tech gadgets, high speed chases and intense combat scenes against villains – human or vampiric – are the order of the day. Investigative skills tend to get toned down, or at least aren’t the inherent focus of the game.

But what if we genuinely combined these two excellent GUMSHOE systems together? My initial thought was making the two worlds I had created coterminous would be entirely logical, until I started doing it. What I quickly found was that there were aspects of my NBA campaigns that, quite frankly, didn’t fit with the slow methodical cosmic horror of Trail of Cthulhu. Most notably is the power disparity between the inherent antagonists of the two games: Vampires are kind of small time when placed against the mythos gods, which is emphasized even more when you start saying “Vampires and the Gods of the mythos are inherently linked”. In effect, making everything the result of mythos magic seemed to diminish vampires as the core antagonists of NBA.

That felt to me like I was losing a lot of what made Night’s Black Agents, by itself, a compelling game and experience. So I decided to separate my universes back into a set “Night’s Black Agents techno spy vampire thriller world” and “Trail of Cthulhu slow horrifying cosmic horror world”. After much thought, I considered if I had perhaps given up too easily and perhaps there was a lot of merit to the idea? One thing that stood out to me at the time, was how much my players were disappointed that I didn’t actually go ahead and do this. Most of my NBA and Trail of Cthulhu players were excited by the idea of having their Cthulhu and Vampire puddings mixed together. Here are some of my ideas that I have come up with on this issue, for your digestion as well.

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An excellent resource of old occult books.

06 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Advice, Trail of Cthulhu

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Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu, Horror, Lovecraft, Occult, Trail of Cthulhu

The Black BookThis book is actually a fantastic creation of a very talented artist (who I sadly can’t find right now) and it’s my goal to one day have props/books this brilliant to use in my own games.

As I have often said several times on this blog, there is one thing that can’t be beaten at a gaming table and that’s physical props. Unfortunately, it can often be hard to acquire, outright expensive or just time consuming to make your own tomes/books (like the header image). Thankfully today I was linked to a really fantastic resource called Dark Books, which has a wide collection of PDFs of public domain old spell and occult books. Of particular interest to those of us keen on Cthulhu, is an “English Translation” of the Necronomicon by John Dee. This is the sort of thing that even if you only print off a few pages to use, can really enhance a game and give your players a much higher feeling of verisimilitude. It’s also just a fantastic resource to mine for ideas on describing mythos spells and similar, here is a sample after the jump:

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Kickstarter: 1960s Communist Themed GUMSHOE Delta Green!

03 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Trail of Cthulhu

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Advice, BRP, Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu, Delta Green, GUMSHOE, Kickstarter, Lovecraft, Roleplaying, Tabletop, Trail of Cthulhu, X-Files

Delta GreenImage of some Delta Green agents from the upcoming kickstarter.

Another kickstarter caught my eye recently, which is being run by Arc Dream Publishing who currently have the rights to the absolutely fantastic Delta Green. Aside from producing a new iteration of that book, which I almost certainly will be backing whenever I get the chance, they have also decided to work with Pelgrane Press and produce a GUMSHOE system version called “The Fall of Delta Green”. This addition is being written by Kenneth Hite (who originally wrote Trail of Cthulhu) and so immediately caught my eye and excitement.

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Trail of Cthulhu: Russian to the End (Play Report)

02 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Trail of Cthulhu

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Cthulhu, Horror, Lovecraft, Masks of the Dreamer, Roleplaying, Tabletop, Trail of Cthulhu

Masks of the Dreamer: Recovery of U-571 Part 3What lies belowThis excellent piece of concept art comes from a very exciting and now released horror video game, called Soma. It’s also very good and I recommend anyone interested in horror and science fiction play it!

The finale of this investigation has a few bits that feel forced or disjointed, mostly because of my previously discussed error. The error being that I didn’t give the investigators much of an incentive to communicate with the discovery channel crew. As a result a certain “plot” twist here is going to feel like it comes out of absolutely nowhere. On the other hand, this finale to the investigation worked out really well on several levels and developed with some interesting tension between certain PCs. This tension though was quite palpable and almost a bit too much, so I needed to keep everyone a bit after the game to talk about the “Traitor” mechanic present in the game.

Even though the landing of some of the events in this wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, it still worked well enough and conveyed some worrying secrets to the players – without giving the full story away (just yet, we’re almost at the end of this campaign).

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Training Day: Trail of Cthulhu, Blood and Ink’s Uncertain History

03 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Advice, Trail of Cthulhu, Training Day

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Advice, Blood and Ink, Cthulhu, Horror, Lovecraft, The Lost Expedition, Trail of Cthulhu

The Lost Expedition (Modern Day) with Blood and Ink (1930s Africa).

The TheftI love this image, which is from Fantasy Flight Games excellent Cthulhu card game.

For my next Trail of Cthulhu campaign, I decided I wanted to actually split “The Lost Expedition” into two simultaneous parts and have my players make characters for both. The first was my current “established” modern Cthulhu horror, which I have developed over the past few years and didn’t want to let go over a “historic” setting. Setting my Cthulhu horror games in the modern era, as opposed to the more classic historic 1920s or 1930s assumptions, has proven to have several advantages. By far the most important advantage, is that by giving my players a world identical to ours it really helps people “Get into character”. There isn’t any need to know about the culture of 1930s New York to get a feel for how they should think and act.

I also find the large amount of reliance on “current” technology that characters often develop to be just as useful for building tension. You should, as much as possible, let things like cell phones be integral parts of the game and not impede their function. Let players become as reliant on their characters phones as their actual player possibly is in reality. Then at the right moment, turn their electronics against them by having a phone ring at the wrong moment, or the device simply outright doesn’t work or even worse, cultists hack their metadata and track them right down to their hideout. In essence, the more you turn players current understanding of the world and their reliance on real things, like cellphones, against them the better the tension/horror.

On the other hand, there is a considerable attraction to me in running a historical campaign because of the interesting possibilities for different stories and roleplaying. While it can be harder to get into the idea of roleplaying characters from a different time and worldview, this problem is increasingly mitigated by numerous excellent free resources on history on the internet. While Wikipedia isn’t always 100% accurate, it’s often a very good “One stop shop” for a rough idea about where to start for storylines to pursue and general events, which occurred in your chosen regions time period. Historic storylines often exploit the lack of technology, enhanced difficulty of travel and slower means of communication of the time to build tension/horror.

This is why when I wrote the original “Staring New Campaigns” post, I decided to use True Detective as a kind of inspiration behind this campaign. In the first season of True Detective, two former police detectives are interviewed by their modern counterparts about an old cold case series of murders. During these interviews, the former detectives give some embellished and often outright lie filled accounts of their previous actions. This creates an interesting contrast, between how reliable the detectives stories are about the events of the 1990s and how in the modern era they eventually resolve the case. In The Lost Expedition I wanted to create a similar kind of unknown, where the players need to rely on accounts about what happened in the 1930s from “unreliable” sources. Essentially setting up the campaign this way I get my tension filled modern horror game style I like, while getting to have my side cake of pulpy style 1930s historic horror.

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Trail of Cthulhu: The Dark Depths (Play Report)

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Trail of Cthulhu

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Advice, Cthulhu, Horror, Lovecraft, Masks of the Dreamer, Play Report, Roleplaying, Tabletop, Tentacles, Trail of Cthulhu

Masks of the Dreamer: Recovery of U-571: Part 2What lies belowThis excellent piece of concept art comes from a very exciting upcoming horror video game, called Soma.

When I last left this game, the investigators had broken into the ships cult “Idol” room, with the two statue fetishes of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. After seeing the statue move and even excrete some liquid like stuff, they were now faced with the prospect of confronting some of the crew in here. Thankfully for the investigators it was actually not an entirely angry bunch of fishy crew, but rather the confused but stern face of the expeditions lead, Joleen. I allowed the investigators to bluff their way past Joleen, but only to an extent and she did give them some further information. Most importantly, Joleen was surprised about how much they wanted to know about Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, so I used this as a chance to give the investigators a little more information about them.

After this scene and the investigators being escorted back to their rooms, while also being forbidden to return to the lower decks without permission, attention turned to Zachary. Zachary was the fellow in charge of the discovery channel crew and they did get some time to roleplay interactions with him. These interactions revealed some important clues about Zachary’s purpose on the ship and his past. Here I made a reference to my previous campaign and the origin of one of the villains, where Zachary had led a group down into South America to go looking for missing archaeologists. Although Zachary didn’t reveal much about what they found, the investigators gathered it was bad from the evasive answers and haunted look he gave.

Unfortunately, here I let myself down a bit because I didn’t emphasize how odd this behavior was strongly enough. In reality, I wanted to get the investigators really curious about what happened to Zachary and start asking questions of his crew. This is particularly important, because one of the discovery camera crew Anitas, has a particularly interesting “hobby”. As I mentioned in the previous session’s write up, the lack of emphasis on Zachary and the discovery channel crew’s odd behavior, meant I gave little motivation for the investigators to dig into them more. The net effect of this is that something that happens towards the end of the investigation feels very “out of left field”, instead of being more set up and alluded to.

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Narrative Thoughts: Why I Hate the “Protective” Elder Sign

17 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Call of Cthulhu, Narrative Thoughts, Trail of Cthulhu

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Advice, Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu, Elder Sign, Lovecraft, Mythos, Roleplaying, Tabletop, Trail of Cthulhu

Elder SignCommon way the elder sign is depicted and used in various Cthulhu mythos related products, which originates from the way August Derleth described it.

If there is one thing I dislike about how the mythos is interpreted in a lot of modern horror games, including Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu, it’s the the “Elder Sign”. Generally speaking, it’s treated as an all purpose anti-mythos related protective symbol. When it’s placed on places, objects and people it is supposedly powerful enough to ward away even some of the most powerful of cosmic threats of the mythos. A lot of board games and RPGs use it a general symbol of protection including Elder Sign, Arkham Horror, Trail of Cthulhu, Call of Cthulhu and various others. As it’s so pervasive among Lovecraftian inspired games, it has led to some interesting problems at my own gaming table in Trail of Cthulhu and Call of Cthulhu. This problem occurs because there is an inherent expectation my players have that it is possible to “protect” yourself against mythos entities.

So following is my general description of what the “Elder Sign” was originally, from Lovecraft’s work and others who followed. Then I’m going to get into a personal rant about why I feel there should not be any one sign, symbol or concept that protects against the mythos as a whole.

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Trail of Cthulhu: Idol Worship (Play Report)

10 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Advice, Trail of Cthulhu

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Advice, Cthulhu, Horror, Masks of the Dreamer, Roleplaying, RPG, Soma, Submarine, Tabletop, Trail of Cthulhu, WW2

Masks of the Dreamer: Recovery of U-571: Part 1 What lies belowThis excellent piece of concept art comes from a very exciting upcoming horror video game, called Soma.

After a hiatus for a while from my Trail of Cthulhu campaign, we return now with the moment that defines the journey towards the end of this campaign: The recovery of U-571. This German submarine was lost during WW2, for reasons that the investigators don’t know but my players are fully aware of. While giving my players a degree of metagaming knowledge about what happened isn’t always the best idea, here it works because of how late into the game we are and the investigators are already aware of things like Deep Ones. So the prior knowledge my players bring, which their investigators wouldn’t have, does not significantly impact this investigation in a meaningful way by changing how my players would make decisions.

The gains from allowing the players to directly play through and see exactly what happened to the submarine were many. For one, it gives them a satisfying feeling of seeing how their actions changed the actual game world – such as entering the sub to see the bullet ridden uniforms and skeletons of the panicked sailors trying to open the door to the deep ones. Secondly, it allowed me to give the players who “won” some degree of interesting narrative control over what happens in the story in future from this point. Some of these effects won’t be felt immediately, but will have a lot of influence over how the game ultimately comes to its conclusion.

In any event, I actually had one main problem to overcome before I could get into this game properly. That hiatus from the game I mentioned, meant there was a substantial gap between when I last ran Trail of Cthulhu and when we resumed playing. Naturally by this point players tend to forget what has happened and important bits and pieces sometimes go missing – including on my part! So one of the first things I did was write up the earlier post about the general plot of the game, so everyone had a bit of a refresher on what was going on. Then when I restarted the game, I deliberately slowed the pacing of the plot right down in the first part.

I’ve written about the importance of pacing in the past on this blog, especially because initially my pace was far too slow. On the other hand when returning from a break you should slow things up much more for multiple reasons. The first is that a slower pace lets me deliberately reintroduce NPCs and other plot elements back to the party. Secondly it helps both me and my players ease back into character, with plenty of time to give reminders about “Why are we doing this again?”. Taking extra time like this is a good idea, especially when you come back from any kind of long break between sessions.

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