Unspeakable Oath Edition (Hastur is best, Nyarlathotep is a shit.)

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What does Veeky Forums think of Gumshoe, in particular it's Mythos splat "Trail of Cthulhu"? I love the way it gets round the classic "you failed your Ancient Languages roll and now you have no leads and no obvious way to complete the quest" that seems to happen a LOT in Call of Cthulhu, not so sure I like it's combat system tho.

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We answer to /ysg/ but we're now the Nameless General
To counter that just have rather beign interludes where the Cults generally are harmless loonies.

I've played it and I like it, I agree about it solving the 'roll until you solve the mystery' issue that investigation-based rpgs usually have. Play ends up being; you have these clues available to you due to your characters' skills, use those clues to figure things out yourself, which I think works a lot better although it does require the players to be on board with solving mysteries and the GM being able to write a good (and solvable) one.

The solvable part is harder than you'd think. The rule I use is that if the players have all the clues then it's blindingly obvious what the answer is, of course the players won't find every clue and will interpret the ones they do find differently to you. This results in some puzzling out but eventually getting there, which I feel is the right balance.

thing is, there aren't much cults in the story. deMontes are ghouls, and it's a very special scenario

Anyone have unspeakable oath #23? The one with cold dead hand in it?

i think you are making your ghouls think too much like humans would. They wouldn't do such things since they can't comprehend sanity as we do.

What are YY-II, the Factory and the Serpent's Hand ?

I thought the schtick about the DeMonte clan is that they're ghouls that still want to play dress up as aristocratic humans.

YY-II runs the Ice Cave, which is where they stored the Deep Ones and hybrids taken in the Innsmouth raid, rendered comatose because they can't answer their call to the deeps.

I think they also stored the ayys there before it woke up.

Was the horror of dunwich a shoggoth? Also in shadows over innasmouth where were the deep ones keeping the shoggoths they were supposedly bringing up for world conquest? Not to mention how did they even control them when the elder things couldnt.

Yeah the DeMonte are like that but personnaly I try to make the mythos as alien as possible. I'ts a matter of taste and play/feel.

The Dunwich Horror is a unique entity we could class as a spawn of Yog Sottoth.
The Deep Ones use magic, and I not-totally-unsure that the Elder Thing ever used magic. And as you know, magic is powerful

Stuff like ghouls isn't too alien, since they are derived from humans. Lovecraft himself had Randolph Carter interact with ghouls cordially.

deMontes not just try to act like a human, they think they are better than the other ghouls plus they want to create a world where eating others is socially acceptable and so they push a lot of shit for this. If it were on them they would legalize everything from child porn to floor-tiles

What edition of Call is the best? Just getting started with this Lovecraftian genre and I have no idea where to go

Yeah of course they can be socially active, but i see them as really really old people, far far far from the actual world. Like they don't care about anything or anyone as long as their day to day life and cult goes undisturbed. They experience time like the beast they are.
indeed they are, but i don't really like the idea of them actually doing it. The push the idea through politics, they funds things like brothels and pays famous lawyers for cannibalism and gruesome cases. They don't go there and tell you about the new age of liberty, but any good party in town will end with a buffet of "that liberian dish everyone should try". Well, you'll try if you want to make a name for yourself. Did you see the Neon Demon ?

well, they actually brainwashed one agent who now has a very serious fetish for someone eating him.
And no, never seen it.

I cast Bump Against the Magic

If one was to make a space lovecraft campaign, would Xenomorphs fit in well? Seems like they would.

I just got into the game last year with 6e, then moved to 7e. I personally prefer 7e since it simplifies stats so there's less roll CONx3, POWx4, and stuff like that. And if you harp over such things, the art in the 7e book is waaaaaaay better imo.

Well this got me thinking that creepypasta might be a good jumping off point for making CoC campaigns. I'm actually trying to throw something together right now, so I may start looking to these as inspiration. Anybody have recommendations for good ones to use as a springboard?

yeah i guess so.

depends on what setting you're going to run

Probably 1920s America standard setting I guess? I just had them do The Haunting, so possibly something I could put in the same general area in case they want to use the same characters.

Properly done, they probably wouldn't be out of place as they can be terrifying. Personally I'd rather it focus on the terrors of space travels itself rather than typical 'aliens kill humans' situations though.

No idea what people's opinions of this site is, but here you go:
creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Lovecraftian

Here's the SCP website too.
scp-wiki.net/scp-series

While I'm at it, here.
pr-if.org/play/anchorhead/

Alien is very cosmic horror imo. The remoteness, the cold inhospitable planet, the spoopy alien derelict, the, er, alienness of the xenomorph. The mundane reality of space proles disrupted by contact with the utterly other. Maybe try to bring in all these aspects, not just the xenomorph itself.

You could make it even more Lovecraftian if you take into account the dropped parts of the script that imply that the Xenomorphs had their own culture.

Malleus Monstrorum mentions how you could tweak a pre-existing monster to make it an enemy.

I'm glad they left that out, to be honest. Obviously I can't know how it would have ended up, but on paper at least that seems like a really bad idea.

What are Veeky Forums's personal favorite CoC one-shots?

My personnal is a homemade initiation scenario i run almost everyyear with a different newbie group, and it never fails to convert :)
it's about a dj using tcho-tcho ritual song as a sample in a track that turn the crowd into a chanting mass sacrifice to summon some kind of horror. the PC investigate a la scooby doo, with a bad ending

I think all that was confirmed (my source was the Book of Alien) was that the Nostromo Xenomorph was basically a feral child and pic related.

It be cool if it were done right, but the odds of it being done so are so far down there, that it's better to leave it to speculation.

Trail of Cthulhu is fantastic. I really like the Gumshoe system for CoC type games and the purist style really captures it in a way I love that pulpier stuff falls short of, I think.

Not CoC proper but for Trail of Cthulhu I've got a great one.
Watchers in the Sky is a great one shot adventure for people new to Lovecraftian horror and even better for those with some introduction. It focuses on strange creatures appearing that are new to the mythos. [spoiler/]The best part is that even though but hints at all sorts of things in the Mythos at large there are no true absolute answers to anything in the game. The investigators find out more and more as they go and several horrid revelations exist to be found about the nature of the creatures but they never get all of the answers because they are intentionally left unexplained. The whole thing screws over meta gamers because even though there are similarities to other mythos creatures it never directly draws any links to them. It also has a subsystem that encourages and rewards players for driving themselves mad and really wants them to get into role-playing the slow descent into insanity. Ultimately, I just think it captures the flavor of Lovecraft's writing superbly.

Yeah, I may have misunderstood what I read but I got the impression it was gonna be a race whose young were feral monsters and whose adults had language and culture, with LV426 as their home world, and the alien derelict coincidentally crashing on one of their pyramids. One of the great things about Alien, imo, is the simplicity and elegance of the setting, and that would add a load of confusing clutter for no real reason, moving it more towards "just another sci-fi setting" instead of the cold brutal gem that it is.

...although you're probably right that a race of intelligent really alien aliens with the xenomorph's lifecycle could work very well in a lovecraft style

Nah you got the right of it. And I agree with you. A lot of Alien's success comes from how tight the movie is (the plot is pretty straightforward, with no subplots beyond Ash being an android, and hell that even ties into main plot much better than explaining Xeno culture) , and trying to bog the film with stuff like that would make that tension harder to keep. Everything in the movie all adds up to a normal space truckers finding something awful, and trying to get through it.

On another note, it's actually one of my pet peeves that Alien versus Predator exists at all. But it's a one way street, where I don't mind if Xenomorphs are in Predator, but I loathe it if Predators show up in Alien. But it does make for a really fun video game dynamic of hordes of Xenos vs squad of Colonial Marines vs a few Yautja.

I remember something someone posted here about a year ago about how in Geigers notes they actually are intelligent and they leave there young on 'daycare' worlds that were labyrinthine. They would regularly drop of other being as incubators and also as prey so there youth could get the murder/rape out of their systems.

That's deliciously horrible. It sounds like script xenomorphs could be worked up into something really good, presumably with space jockeys as the adult form, and that would make the derelict less of an unbelievable coincidence and more like "wait, did i close the door? oh fuck the kids are on board!"

Most of the scenarios are solid but I think the system exists to solve a problem that doesn't come up if you have a competent CoC GM who knows not to hinge the mystery on die rolls. It's a fine system for learning the basics of running or playing horror/mystery games, much like Dread, but the rules can start to get in the way once you know what you're doing.

New Delta Green rules and by extension 6e since that served as the basis.

it's not there.

And then there was Prometheus...

Which hit some good Lovecraftian points aesthetically, even if it did shit all over the entire institution of rational thinking.

I think Prometheus' biggest problem was that it was trying to be more than it was. And it came off feeling like a poor man's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The original scripts reason for funding the expedition was a lot better. And I'm still hopeful about Alien: Covenant, even if the only good part turns out to just be more David.

I read somewhere that a few hours were cut out which make it make sense/

Repostan my last thing from the last general, Cause I was right on the ass end of the thread.

Im planning on making a campaign based off of what I'm learning in my internship. Im working for a historical society in the Rockies, they peserve a few ghost towns from the silver rush (1880 to 1893) in the mountains around the town. So i have access to its archives, census, maps, geological studies and more. I plan on using these assets as hand is and stuff for my players as they exploar the old town sites hunting down signs of elder things.
Thedeepest mines will have breached into an elder thing outpost, and I'm wondering if the silver deposits were originally conduits or other eldritch things. Maybe the outpost is all helterskelter bevause of the geological uplift that created the colorado platue?

I'm in the first stages of research and planning at the moment but that's the gist. I'll be using the new delta green game. Any commentary on how it plays?

Hey Flash, is it alright if I plagiarize your setting as the background for a board game?

Sure thing.
While I'm here, anything else you want me to expound upon?

Tell me about the Deep Ones life cycle, and primary life goals.

The Deep Ones had lived underneath the surface of the oceans of Earth for... a long time. They do not fossilize well, bones dissolving into nothingness, and their own records are primarily oral and immensely self-aggrandizing. They have cities of coral, farm fish, and worship Cthulhu; early anthropologists identified them as worshipping a separate entity named 'Dagon', which caused much confusion for later scholars. As diplomatic relations started with an act of genocide, learning anything about these entities has been difficult and often inconclusive.
They are a degenerate race, their genome having been somehow damaged in ages past, and they turned to humanity as a source of fresh blood. They encouraged the formation of sympathetic cults in isolated seaside towns, and many ancient local myths of 'brides of the sea' are now suspected to be distorted records of long-past deals with deep ones; women for full nets. A Deep One-human hybrid begins life fully human in appearance, but as they grow older they begin to feel the call of the sea; once they have taken that final plunge the transformation is rapid and irreversible. A Deep One is not truly immortal, but they age slowly; some from Innsmouth remember the days before Columbus.
The Deep Ones found across the solar system now have little in common culturally with the ones of Earth. Starting with the Deep War of the late 1920s to early 1930s, still land-bound hybrids were recruited and indoctrinated en masse to take the fight to the enemy on their own territory; once the war was finished and the Deep Ones had retreated into still deeper lightless abysses, they formed the core of a new underwater culture; one which would be further strengthened by the development of genetic serums that duplicated the transformation in regular humans, and allowed its reversal. It is these that formed followed the rest of humanity off Earth; the 'old' Deep Ones remained behind, to welcome the return of their gods.

WHo waged the war on the human side?

What the fuck is it like to go mad in the Yog-Sothothery?

dreamquestofunknownkadath.com/2015_06_01_archive.html?m=1
An indie game on the Dream Quest of Kadath.

It feels good man.

Game's Design of Randolph Carter, gonna dump some of of their Nyarly designs too.

The main cast in their pixel designs.

First encounter with the Black King

Nyarlathotep, the Black Pharaoh.

Alt Nyarlathotep

A chat with Mr. Richard Pickman

GOod shit right there

Now, hold it right there you little shit.

Moon Cats. (The Cats from Saturn)

The Spider Queen

Seriously, why do I have to put up with your bullshit.

I hate everything.

(Forgot me image)

Possible sequel, 3 guesses to what it is.

The Wake World

dreamquestofunknownkadath.com
Link for nerds who want to check it out

I bet Hastur doesn't have to put up with this shit.

The war was waged by a combination of Deep One-human hybrids, recruited largely from individuals unaware of their heritage (of which there were surprisingly many), conventional military might, and early efforts at bio-warfare and sorcerous warfare. Along with the recovery of the first of the Elder Things, the Deep War was the first exposure of the general public to the Mythos. The hysteria was staggering. It was a fairly low-intensity conflict, despite the nearly world-war level of resources pumped into it, because the Deep Ones were not very numerous, widely dispersed, and smart enough to avoid engagement when the odds were against them. Victory was ultimately achieved primarily by destruction of cities and aquaculture, forcing the Deep Ones back into a nomadic existence; occasional guerrilla raids would continue up to the Exodus.
The thing you must understand is that there are many madnesses.
The first, the madness of sudden shocking trauma. PTSD. Shellshock. Call it what you will, but things don't need to be eldritch in the least for stress and violence to drive you mad. And delving into the Mythos, even if Shoggoth one never so much as glances in your direction, has stress aplenty; patrolling your suburban front yard at midnight for the Viet Cong, refusing to linger near right angles for fear of the Hounds of Tindalos, the neurological underpinnings are the same.
Then there is the madness of physical damage to the brain. From mercury to magnetic fields, many things can interfere with the smooth functioning of the human neural connectome. The symptoms are as varied as imagination; you could slowly lose your ability to remember new things, you could lose the concept of left, you could stop being able to distinguish faces or start seeing things that aren't there. Just the mundane sources of brain damage are too varied to elegantly lump under a single category, much less less the stranger things out there, but in the end (cont.)

it all just barely fits.
Then there's the paranoia. You can lump it under PTSD if you want to, but this is in some ways a unique sort of madness. The thing is, knowledge is supposed to dispel fear. But in such a vast universe, often the best that can be done is to plumb the depths of our own ignorance, dispel the foolish confidence of not-knowing in favor of the cold gnaw of having a vague idea of just how much is out there. I refer you to this magnificent post. The human mind is only so large and can only contain so much. And that's before you get into the deeper questions: in a universe that is the dream of an idiot god, is induction true? It is an article of faith that the universe does indeed have laws which cannot be broken, no matter how strange or expansive they are, but that's what it is- an article of faith. Will all science evaporate the next time Azathoth rolls over in his sleep? And then there's the fact that in far too many cases, knowledge amounts to "there's this thing that randomly kills people and we have no idea how to stop it." In the halls of academia, the phrase "a god of serial killers may in fact be a universal constant" has been uttered, and it can never be un-said.
Under such circumstances, wouldn't a little madness be appropriate?
(I recall a fan-made Delta Green module I found online, that had the absolute best treatment of sanity I ever read; the agents are sent to investigate a strange occurrence and it turns out to be a stable time loop. Fail your idea roll, and you think, well that's great, it's self-containing; succeed, and you realize that you could get caught in a similar loop tomorrow and there's nothing you can do about it, take [dice] SAN damage.)
Then there are the things that will send you mad just to look at them, which destroy minds as an inevitable consequence of their existence. (cont)

Cthulhu, the Lord of Dreams, heralded by the nightmares of artists and asylum inmates, is possibly one such. Possibly. (Where does extraordinary persuasiveness end and mind-magic begin? He speaks in dreams, but is his voice inherently corrosive... or is he 'simply' a very good orator?) There are things so beautiful your soul will leave your body to get a closer look, and hypnotic monsters that will enslave you with irresistible commands, and living shadows that wrap themselves around your spine and take over your body so smoothly you barely even realize that it's not you deciding to kill that man and drink his blood.
These are the things that get all the press, but it is the last that is truly dangerous, and least talked about.
Gods exist. Is it madness to worship them?
Gods exist. Is it not madness to deny them?
The universe is far vaster and stranger than you can ever understand. Is it not madness to keep acting as you always have, as if your vision was still bound to the sky, seeing the far-away clouds but never the jungle around you?
Is it not madness to take a moral code created by ignorant people on an ignorant planet, a product of a single place and time, and declare that this, and this alone, is sanity?
These are the things the propaganda broadcasts from Earth say. These are the things captured cultists say, and the reason they go to the gallows gagged. These are the things Cthulhu says in the dreams of artists and asylum inmates. These are the things the people of the Exodus do not say- they barely even allow themselves to think it- but which they all know.
Is it not madness?

Fucking rad as shit Flash, how did you git so gud?

You managed to describe every CoC scenario ever written. Can you give us less details next time and try to be even more general next time please ?

PS : i hate Gumshoe

this. in Gumshoe, the GM does all the work and that's insulting. The PC merely mention a vague intention and then listen the GM tell the story

I'm honestly not sure. I think it's mostly that I read a lot, and thus have seen a lot of the textual tricks authors can use.
What would you like me to cover next?

>you could lose the concept of left, you could stop being able to distinguish faces or start seeing things that aren't there
Someone's read Blindsight.

Eldritch Bump

Also The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

What are good Lovecraftian-themed comics?

I've read The Wake: first part was good, second wan't bad, but the ending sucked. And don't suggest Neonomicon.

> Soviets experimenting on political prisoners
For fuck's sake, it's USSR. The fucking Communism. Lunatics building the better future.

Getting volunteers was never a problem, because SCIENCE! And if it was dangerous, people experimented on themselves.

Maybe False Positive if you are into webcomics?

>and I don't suggest Neonomicon
no-one seems to

Lovecraft or cosmic horror?

Either is good. Preferably mystery investigations.

>broodhollow.chainsawsuit.com/page/2012/10/06/book-1-curious-little-thing/
Haven't read it since the end of Book 1 so I don't know how well it holds up but there is some pretty heavy Lovecraft influence going on here.

Is Shadow Over Gotham good if I want pulp Call of Cthulhu meets capeshit?

Do you mean The Doom that came to Gotham? Or is there another lovecraftian bat story?

If you did, it's one of my favourite DC stories... but then I'm not a massive DC fan.

I think so, all I remember is there's a Batman meets Lovecraft story.

I need the Lovecraft "adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenigger" pic, anyone have it?

Besides, hella hard to find OP? :/
>no title
>"cthulhu" outside the preview text
>not one mention of "call of cthulhu"
get a grip

Well, you find the occasional reference elsewhere. In Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, there's a reference to shoggoths, and Cthugha makes an appearance.

Even if it's not Derleth's Cthugha.

Rhyming demons are good shit. I've always enjoyed Etrigan.