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Tag Archives: Lovecraft

Kickstarter: Lovecraftesque, a GM-less Cthulhu Roleplaying System

06 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by Aegeri in General

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Cthulhu, Horror, Kickstarter, Lovecraft, Lovecraftesque

A silent camping ground... at night

While scanning twitter tonight, I saw someone talking about a “GMless” Cthulhu roleplaying system called “Lovecraftesque”. Although it is certainly a rather crowded market, with numerous excellent options to chose from with Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu my personal favorites, I was still intrigued. After checking out their kickstarter, I felt there was a really interesting idea and wanted to highlight it on the blog. By far and away what sets this game apart from other Cthulhu based RPGs, is the unique “single character” structure and “GMless” system they have developed. You might wonder how this is supposed to work with a group of people, who are all playing the same character and this is where I think their idea is great.

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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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Narrative Thoughts: The Lovecraftian Horror of SOMA

04 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Narrative Thoughts, Video Games

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Advice, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Horror, Lovecraft, Soma, Trail of Cthulhu, Video Games

Firstly, this is the 200th post on the Roleplayer’s Guild! To celebrate, I’m going to talk about the fantastic recently released horror game SOMA. Made by the talented folks who made the equally excellent Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA improves on that game in a variety of ways – especially in the department of storytelling. In fact, one of the most refreshing things about SOMA is that it moves away from the recent “Youtube” orientated view of horror games. Most notably, it’s not simply a non-stop series of cheap jump scares every few seconds. Instead it returns to fundamentals of excellent atmosphere, an oppressive strange situation and terrific storytelling.

Naturally in order to talk about this game properly, I have to spoil a lot of what makes SOMA an incredibly compelling game and experience. Absolutely do not read this if you intend to play and experience this fantastic game for yourself. For anyone else though, there is a lot you can learn from SOMA in terms of atmosphere, the way monsters are used and yes, even how Lovecraftian the game is in so many ways.

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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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Kickstarter: Cultists of Cthulhu

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Boardgames

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Boardgames, Cthulhu, Cultists of Cthulhu, Horror, Kickstarter, Lovecraft

Cultists of Cthulhu

Recently on facebook a friend of mine linked me to this interesting kickstarter for a game called “Cultists of Cthulhu”. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you will immediately know that the words “Cultist”, “Cthulhu” and “Game” always manage to get my interest one way or another. After reading through the kickstarter and seeing what they were trying to do, I decided I wanted to make a post here about this game because it sounds awfully promising.

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Happy Birthday Call of Cthulhu Books!

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by Aegeri in Call of Cthulhu

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Books, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Horror, Lovecraft, Roleplaying, Tabletop

Today is a happy occassion, because it’s around this time nearly 20 and 17 years ago – depending on the book in question – that I got my first taste of horror roleplaying in Call of Cthulhu. My first Call of Cthulhu book, which was the 5th edition, was the first ever roleplaying book I ever owned and bought with pocket money from my parents. I still have it sealed away somewhere still, probably in NZ as the book has been badly damaged by time. My other copy of Call of Cthulhu, which is the slightly more “modern” 5.5 edition was bought in 1998 – ironically also around today, although I can’t remember why I needed to replace the old book at this point. It’s now 17 years old and essentially falling apart and has been well loved, almost continuously pawed through off and on since I could start running CoC consistently in the early 2000s.

Call of Cthulhu 1

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