/ysg/- Yog-Sothothery General

Apologies, missed that when I fixed up previous ysg posters OP.

>ssss
Good taste

Protect your soul, remember your elder sign.

I just read Azombeii.
Fucking great.

Who here tree and who here stars?

no idea i had made a reference but the source seems pretty good so far

Has anyone tried out the Arkham Horror card game? I can't say I've ever played an LCG, but this one caught my attention. I was wondering what you all thought about it.

How do you guys go about setting the mood and continuing it over sessions. I can do one shots very well but longer running cthulhu campaigns I run seem to turn into a mess, any advice?
Also has anyone played Pandemic Cthulhu? I've heard mixed things.

Pandemic Cthulhu is pretty nice, if you want something lighter and shorter. I prefer it over Elder Sign for that

I've played it on Tabletop Simulator (it's not yet out where I live) and I love it. And I heard from other folks who never played an LCG or were even Lovecraft fans that they really enjoy it.

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What was the first CAS story you read? He's one of my favorite authors quite easily and I'd love if he was discussed in these threads.

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Um what? This is clearly the elder sign

zadok go to bed

I researched it a ton and decided not to buy it. Still a really cool game and would play it in a heartbeat but IMO you have to be really interested in deckbuilding for it to be a worthwhile purchase. Somehow I feel like playing the same scenario over again will be much worse than in other Arkham FFG games

I'm running my first Trail of Cthulhu game with 4 friends next week, any advice?

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Honestly, I prefer the swastika to the other two signs. It strikes me as better for some kind of universal anti-baddie icon. It's simpler than the other two, has geometric regularity, and it occurs in just about every culture across the earth in some permutation.

Fucking Nazis, ruining a perfectly good symbol. Could you image if their flag had been a square or something?

>has geometric regularity, and it occurs in just about every culture across the earth in some permutation
surely that's a mark against it, why would an alien race use the same symbol that commonly appears in earth cultures or share our ideas about what makes a shape 'geometrically regular'

drip feed the horror VERY slowly.
Make it mundane with "weird" aspects for the first maybe even second episodes.
Then drop in elements which are unexplainable. Slowly introduce a creeping sense of dread and/or conspiracy, make the weird aspects pop up more and more, and (with less frequency) the unexplainable too.
Always be sure to have a reason for them to keep investigating.
Delta Green is the best mythos system for this sort of thing as it can gradually force the player characters to have to investigate without any knowledge of the weird aspects to start with.
Finally when you approach penultimate episode crank everything up to 11, but don't necessarily reveal every single aspect of the horror.
The final episode should have that honor.

Ultimately: take the pacing you have for a one-shot and divide each story beat into its own episode and use that as a seed for fleshing out the story

hope that make senses as i'm just channeling my horror GM mind right onto the keyboard

MEN SHOULD NOT HAVE THE HEADS OF CROCODILES!

I'm sure the crocodiles aren't thrilled about seeing crocodiles with the bodies of humans either

Stars (with human eyes inside) and tree branches are less otherworldly than a swastika

First experience was the shit d20 CoC. Damn the glut of ogl shit. Still, love the shit out of mythos stuff.

So I'm running delta green this weekend, we've played three one shots so far with the same agents, no one has read lost too much sanity, it was more so to introduce the system and one of the players to a more investigative rpg.

This session, instead of doing a full investigation, I want to run a series of short missions that are pretty up front, but lead to some sanity rending results (the solid ideas I have are going to a recently recovered green box to document the contents, and a short investigation to find a scientist who twisted himself out of the universe with hypergeometry.)

I want to run vignettes between each miny mission, and basically play up the more crazy weird shit and role play and less a straight up conspiracy. How do you fellas this that sounds?

Was great God pan cas? I liked that one, very /ysg/

youtube.com/watch?v=QoFaEeuQjuM

what is your guys opinion on link related?

>dime a dozen first person defenseless protagonist horror game

I think it's time we stopped doing that.

Not enough guns for you?
Your logic is what made the few actually lore based Lovecraft games all turn into shooters.
When do protags in the mythos "fight back", user? A handful of times in dozens of stories?

nowhere did he say 'turn it into a shooter' just that there are a lot of horror games which revolve around walking around in first person looking at scary things

Could be interesting. I'm waiting for footage of what you'll be doing in the game before I pass judgement.

How would you do it then? I'm honestly curious, because it actually seems pretty difficult to do raw horror games in ways other than that.

Are you at all familiar with horror games? There are dozens of titles which approach terror very effectively without a focus on action, or without being an Amnesia clone.

Honestly I'm not. The only horror games I ever played were the original resident evil and outlast. Unless you're one of those people that counts Bloodborne as a horror game.

You're missing out by not having played eternal darkness.

I do, from a content point of view at least.

I'm not sure what kind of gameplay this new CoC title's going to rock, but considering the genre, I wouldn't be surprised if it contained some more classic survival horror tropes, like puzzle-solving, inventory and resource management... you've played Resident Evil, you know the basic ins and outs. Now, that might just be wishful thinking, but I can dream.

And yeah, like the other user said, if you're at all interested in Cthulhu games, give Eternal Darkness a shot. And Alone in the Dark.

I never had a GameCube actually. That said, I've never liked third person horror games conceptually. It always felt like it takes you too far out of the characters POV and provides you too wide a field of view.

Unfortunately in general though I'm not sure how well Lovecraft translates to video games. Let alone translates to the modern era. It's a lot harder to prey on anthropocentrism when it barely exists anymore.

>I've never liked third person horror games conceptually. It always felt like it takes you too far out of the characters POV and provides you too wide a field of view.
Good horror games know how and when to control what you see, to create a greater feeling of dread and paranoia. Just like a movie, I think framing plays a pretty major role in establishing mood and feeling.

That said, I can understand people who press for first-person views out of a need for immersion, but I think if you work your third-person magic well enough, it can be more immersive than first-person.

It's definitely pulpy, too much so to be truly Lovecraft, but it uses the conventions of the medium and convey creepiness real well, and the game spans hundreds of years in a really, really cool fuckin way.

Honestly, the first part of... was it called dark corners of the earth? The Lovecraft game for Xbox was really good. Then, in the aster part of the game, you kill Dagon with naval weapons, which is fuck8n stuopid

Fuck I hate the God damn autocorrect on this phone

I dunno, Dagon's just some busta bopped up Deep One. If the Elder Things could do it, so could we.

I agree it kinda defeats lovecraft though.

The few that did so also had something strong besides resource management and that manner of nonsense.
RE was never anything but a B movie game with jump scares and science gone mad.
Demento/Haunting Ground took the Clocktower formula and added rape to it, it was very effective.
Fatal Frame is godly.
Early SH billed itself on incredible sound design with western horror novel ideals.
Eternal Darkness... had a good gimmick, but it didn't scratch the same itch for me.

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Check out The Consuming Shadow on Steam. The graphics look like shit, but the gameplay, writing and horror are pretty good, in my opinion. Despite the fact that you carry a gun around and can kill stuff.

This. TCS is a terrific Lovecraftian game that preserves its cosmic overtones even in the face of action mechanics. Like Bloodborne (I'd argue, at least), it holds back on falling into a zone too campy or optimistic simply because of its godtier atmosphere and story.

You're constantly immersed in a thick, brooding world of insanity and horror that your immediate actions only serve to push back temporarily, and greater cosmic forces can still stand up to all of your attacks while playing with your sanity simply by being near you.

The nature of the game and its presentation make you paranoid and manic, and you're never comfortable in any sense of the word, even if you're alone in your car. Especially if you're alone in your car.

All-around amazing delivery of cosmic horror, even if the content itself is pretty watered down. It goes to show how atmosphere really makes horror, even if the graphics themselves are fairly simple.

You know, I actually think that if a game gives you the possibility to defend yourself, it just makes failing even worse. If the game just never gives you a chance, you could always think "if I had a gun, this wouldn't be so bad!" but if it gives you that gun and you're still overwhelmed (which TCS definitely can manage to do), it just feels worse. in a good way.

Oh, I definitely agree.

When you play a game like, say, Outlast, even if you don't realise it, you're lulled into a sense of predictability simply because of how the game works and plays - without a weapon, you're expected to flee from hostile creatures and characters, hiding in specific locations and using cunning or speed to escape. You're locked into one path, and gameplay doesn't allow you to deviate from that without compromising your victory. As a player, you can assume fairly reasonably that you're not going to be given a gun, or dispatch enemies in a way that hasn't been written as part of the story.

This predictability is the death of horror, because once it's found by players, it mediates our uncomfort by giving us a routine to follow.

Horror games which give you weapons immediately grant you a choice, and with that responsibility for your actions. Should you stay and fight, expending your limited resources, or should you run? Would running even make a difference, or would you end up losing even more supplies because there might not be a 'safe' place to escape to?

It's a simple level of player choice, but the effect it has on horror is palpable because it means you have to think for yourself and make your own choices, all of which you should be unsure of.

Now maybe comparing a game like TCS and Outlast this way is unfair, considering Outlast is made to be cinematic. It's meant to be a linear haunted house attraction with 'boo's and jumps and shock. There's nothing wrong with that, but for me at least, it's nowhere near as terrifying or chilling as something which makes you responsible for your own safety. Makes you think in the moment and forces you to make decisions, like TCS does. Do you penetrate further into the dungeon for clues and more resources once you've completed your main objective, or do you flee and preserve what resources you have?

It's surprising how many devs miss out on this kind of thing.

exactly! and I think the fact that TCS is a roguelike helps, too. Jordan Underneath (pretty good Youtuber, check him out) once said that the fundamental difference between games and any other horror media is that, in a movie or book, you give the viewer or reader a monster to jump out at them. but in a game, you give the player a monster and *set it loose.* Games are, by their nature, more unpredictable than other media, and unpredictability is what fuels good horror.

Btw, has anyone here heard of "Stygian: Reign of The Old Ones"?

Get ready for the hose.

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This one is very niche but it is hands down the BEST way to start thinking about scenario writing and structure.

I love Cthulhu Dark. I actually modified it a bit and run it with my group currently.

Excellent collection of CoC books you got there. I've been heavily considering just biting the bullet and getting a 4th edition rulebook and taking it apart and scanning it in. It's a fucking shame neither 4th or 5th core rulebooks are available in pdf format.

BTW, I have some books not featured in your link. Like the first edition of Trail of Tsuthugga. If I go grab them later, want me to scan them in and post em'?

Do you guys have any ideas on how to work the Mythos into Judaism or Jewish mythology or anything else of the sort? I want to run a Delta Green scenario with some (possibly former) Mossad guys involved, either as the villains or as helpers to the PCs.

Elder Gods assigned places in the Sephirot seems like a starting point for me. Wrapping up the Qabbalah in Mythos business seems like the logical thing to do, but I'm not really that familiar with Jewish culture beyond the mysticism.

Really not an expert on Jewish mythology, but isn't the Leviathan from there? I mean, you have the Leviathan, you have several big evil Mythos monsters living or sleeping underwater...

This might be sort of an uncomfortable or touchy subject, but how do you guys handle sexuality or sexual stuff in relation to Lovecraft? Things like the implied relations between humans and deep ones, or even stuff like the Wilbur Whately's parentage, are treated pretty scarcely in the original works because talking about sex just wasn't really done. Now, in modern settings mainly, how do you handle that sort of thing in games or how would you treat it in fiction? The Alan Moore comic used it basically to just rip on Lovecraft, which frustrates me.

Leviathan, Behemoth, and Ziz all become Great Old Ones.

Easy-peasy.

This is why Isolation is considered one of the best horror game in our times.

>The Alan Moore comic used it basically to just rip on Lovecraft

What are you talking about? The Alan Moore comic used it to scare the reader. It's one of the few subjects that can still make people genuinely uncomfortable.

No, The Great God Pan is Arthur Machen

fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/a-tale-from-the-mukhabarat-basement
fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/cthugha-based-missions
fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/safe-house-dark

I mean, look at the section where he accuses Lovecraft of having sex with gloves on and being totally grossed out by any sex, when in reality we know that he was perfectly happy to fuck his wife. It just struck me as slanderous, and knowing Moore it seemed weirdly pointed.

one user from amateur game dev general at Veeky Forums is making a cosmic horror game

See Stygian Fox's Ladybug Ladybug Fly-away home, in Things We Leave Behind.
It has the Passover Angel as an Avatar of Nyarlathotep

I don't think "Happy to fuck his wife" is an adequate description. All indicators say he found sex uncomfortable and pointless. Moore admitted he didn't do too thorough research for Neonomicon and that was wrong. But he loves the man at least given how lovingly Providence makes him. He just has no qualms showing us all the less seemly parts of his life and work as well as the good.

Thanks although not my collection, I've been using it for a while and tried to find the actual author (NeonSamurai I think his name is) but to no avail.

Also cheers for the offer but double check to make sure it's not already uploaded somewhere in the PDF sharing thread/

Is the fourth edition book expensive? I bought one not long ago at a used book store I frequent.

>Moore admitted he didn't do too thorough research for Neonomicon
Of which he would fix in Providence by doing ALL OF THE RESEARCH

Has anybody got any advice for converting a Call of Cthulhu scenario to Trail of Cthulhu?

Isn't there advice in trail of cthulhu?

This is not spoon feeding it is a cleverly disguised bump

site.pelgranepress.com/?tag=download&cat=10

Scroll down

So I was wondering what you all thought of Cthulhu dark ages, I was thinking of running a dual campaign, one set in the dark ages one set in the present with the characters in the present being the descendants of the characters during the dark ages, and was wondering how best to exicute the idea.

Alternate between them each session? Would definitely require at least weekly sessions if not twice a week or more often, lapses in scheduling mean people are going to lose their place in the story super quickly since there's both more to keep track of and more gaps between events. It's a cool idea though, I kinda want to do something like that now.

Yes, I am fortunate enough to have a group with weekly sessions, unfortunately I will be moving soon and so will have to find a new gaming group if I want to run this campaign, but on the plus side I have plenty of time to prep. Do you think this would be a good idea to use for a relatively new group?

Sure, I don't think it really adds any difficulty other than the heavy scheduling requirements you'll need to keep it rolling cleanly. Of course the risk with new groups is that you don't yet have a sense of who might flak out, so it might be wise to break them in with a one shot or two just to feel it out first. If someone fucks the campaign up for you then it's twice as much prep work wasted.

Thanks, as far as the scenario goes, I was thinking of using a hound of tinderlos, as with it cutting throw the angles in time it would make a useful villain for both parties to fight simultaneously, as it goes after both the original party and their descendants, I was wondering though, what other myths entities have the ability to travel through time?

Daoloth.

>I've been heavily considering just biting the bullet and getting a 4th edition rulebook and taking it apart and scanning it in.
You would be the hero of internet for doing this.

Seems interesting, not certain how I could use him in a campaign aside from perhaps one of his astrologer priests traveling between the timelines, whereas the hound could be hunting the dark age PCs and their decendents.

>not wielding that Elder Sign as an unholy mockery of a blade made from star-quarried stone that flays the light from the hand which grips it
>not wielding a giant adamantine version of the other style of sign as a grotesque mimicry of a shield
>not getting these in your greenbox along with a note telling you good luck

How are you planning on ending the story in the past? It might make the story a little less tense if they know the ancestors will be healthy and sane enough to have children.

I mean, they could already have had children before the story starts

I hadn't considered that, I thought that the campaign in the past might focus more on the characters establishing there power base, becoming important members of the community etc. dealing with more common dark age problems, with sudden bouts of horror and weirdness, culminating in a sorcerer cursing their lineage or a hound suddenly attacking them while they are guests at the home of their liege Lord.

>tfw Fall of Delta Green isn't out yet

At least Cthulhu Confidential is really fucking good.

>Cthulhu Confidential
What is this even?

Same people as Trail of Cthulhu and similar system, but 1930s noir stories and aimed at one player and one GM. Very good stuff.

This seems to be a common problem in all Veeky Forums -related... Be it board games, ttrpgs or wargaming people love the idea of it but in the end all of them require more work than playing video games or watching netflix and thats where people draw the line.

I had a friend who was really interested in cthulhu rpg, so our gm sat down with him to talk about character creation and he just gave up after like ten minutes, stating that it was "way too much work for a game or whatever".

After that a few friends and I invited him to play Mansions of Madness 1e with us and in the end he didn't want to come because "the rules are like super complicated and theres too much stuff to think about lol"

At this point I started to question why I was friends with these people...

Thats what people are like, sadly.

As I understand it's not exactly cosmic horror. More like cosmic horror and magical realism mixed together. It has a lot of weird dark humour mixed into it.

user, if you have a pdf to that shit i will bless your lineage to eighth generations.