/ysg/ - Yog-Sothothery General

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I've bought 5 7e coc books and my acrobat reader is fucked so I can't read the PDFs, at least they'll arrive soon

how would Nyarlathotep communicate with the players? speech, telepathy, something else?

Whichever way he wants. Through a posessed person, through a manipulated person, through an incarnation, cryptic notes, non-cryptic notes, telepathy, disembodied voices, voiceless bodies, whatever. One of things he's known for is messing with mortals in a multitude of ways. Anything you come up with, you're not wrong. At least partially.

[brrraaapppppppppppfffttts eldritchly]

>my acrobat reader is fucked
Is this 1998?

>acrobat reader
Dude, there are like two dozen free pdf readers, all of them superior to adobe reader.

Or just showing up in person.

I have the collection on the cover.

What I want to hear is how much success people have had in running "Lovecraftian" games in CoC minus the Lovecraft. Maybe it's all the memes or all the terrible copycat shit around, but I've soured on the actual core Lovecraft stuff, and I've been wanting to try stuff more my own style.

I'm doing the preliminary stuff on a delta green game with a rogue AI, but the AI is going full Nick Land, intuiting messages from itself in the future, blackmailing the PCs with simulations of themselves ("There's a hundred simulations for every one of you, none of them gave themselves up willingly, and they're all going to be tortured for a million years. If you don't give yourself up there's a 99% chance you're one of them. Give yourself up") and similar bizarre shenanigans fitting an intelligence a million times greater than any human.

I had another idea for a game set in the 90s but it's gone stale just from lack of having a chance to do it.

Has anybody else done very non-Lovecraft stuff like that? Am I gonna be disappointing players who expect more god damn cthulhu shit?

>Am I gonna be disappointing players who expect more god damn cthulhu shit?
Never do bait-and-switch unless you're sure it won't piss off your players. If you don't want to run a game with lovecraftian undertones, tell your players before the game, so they know what to expect.

>acrobat reader is fucked
sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

An intelligence a million times greater than any human sounds Lovecraftian all right.

Something more futuristic may be up your sleeve for that stuff, though. Or more generic. Eclipse Phase, for example, is precisely about that - space super agents dealing with rogue superintelligent AIs which may or may not be corrupted by alien viruses, interplanetary WMDs, and so on. It's horribly written and requires a cyclopean degree of work to run smoothly, but if you get aquainted with it or adjust it to your liking, it's decent. And be wary of the playerbase, the game tends to attract the absolute worst kinds of players.

>sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

Sumatra is a pretty good one for spring since you'll be able to do your taxes in between waiting for pages to fucking load.

So, is Hastur a place, an entity, an idea, or all of the above? Also, have you seen the Yellow Sign?

> Incapable of smiling

God HPL was such a sperg.

Not a place.

Seems kind of cheap honestly. What were they supposed to do with the stone, throw it at the monsters?

DG is definitely the Cthulhu game where you can get away with that the easiest. Hell there's a good chance the players will interpret the rogue AI as being influenced by Azathoth or something whether or not that's really the case.

To answer both questions, yes.

Hastur is a meme, a specific neural configuration with magical significance. The stars aren't the only things that can align with dire consequences.

The final act of The King in Yellow seems like nonsense to the conscious mind, but it's actually a carefully arranged set of psychic triggers. A word or idea, comprehended, is just a pattern in the neural impulses in your brain, and when you read that final act each nonsense word, like twisting a rubik's cube, bit-by-bit forces your brain into the sacred configuration which is Hastur.

And then you want other people to read it, to spread the meme, so you lend the book, or just leave it in some conspicuous place for someone else to discover.

What exactly Hastur is doing and what it wants with the world, if a meme can even "want" something, nobody knows, but a few years ago police found a John Doe in a truckstop bathroom, The King in Yellow clutched in his hand and brain matter on his shirt, along with the slimy tracks of something that had apparently chewed its way out the front of his skull.

What kinds of players and why?

what does a person usually do after he read the king in yellow?

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Either becomes delusional or gets murdered by a mysterious creature.

or murdered by investigators

To figure that out you would have to catch someone reading it and follow him to see what he does afterward. Howerver, see Is knowing what he'll do worth the risks inherent in letting him do it? You've got a perfect opportunity to make the whole thing go away right now. Curiosity killed the species, you know.

SV-8 is alive and well. Better than well, actually. Right now it's more akin to Majestic-12 during its glory days, with unlimited resources and a goal that will become its undoing.

The old guard of SV-8 is mostly dead, very old, irrevocably insane or "retired", though. They turned from an enemy-of-an-enemy that DG can respect to an ally DG can never ever trust.

i'm just picturing its mouth singing trollololo

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Working on the first draft of a Delta Green 'living world' setup, putting together basic rules and getting the infrastructure together

I'm thinking something like Runnerhub or Eclipse Phase Missions, except with fewer rules and much less bookkeeping

Don't have him communicate.
Have him command with vague thoughts.
Suddenly he investigators have visions and memories and impressions of things he wants them to do.

>what kinds of players

Jovians.

That's just cheap and I'd be really pissed

Here's an idea
>When the incantation is spoken the stone blasts forth unholy light that fucks shit up like the arc of the covenant
>everyone has to close their eyes and run blindly
>maybe some people get split off from the group
>maybe the stone gets extremely hot when it's active but has to be held to work and you have to suffer 3rd degree burns and permanent disfigurement to defeat the monster

but "you're hand's protected lol but you're not" is just dumb

You think the ancient Egyptians would mention that "Oh, by the way, it doesn't actually protect you at all".

Or ya know. Explain how they used it to drive the monsters back into the sea.

Also, you would think the Keeper would have better ideas than "Ha! I, the only source of knowledge and information you have tricked you! Aren't I so clever?"

is on the right track but too overt. This is an extradimensional entity as old as the universe, not some boogeyman telling you what to do.

Implant ideas in their heads, but don't make it obvious. When they do idea rolls or similar get-advice-from-keeper activities, the advice they receive is from Nyarlathotep and serves his ends.

Structure the things they're investigating so natural conclusions they draw lead to what Nyarlathotep wants to happen.

Create situations where it becomes apparent that there's something wrong with the investigators' recall of their adventures but they can't place exactly what. NPC tells the investigators something, then later changes some small but important detail, insists it was always that way, and probing into the matter suggests he's telling the truth (He says event A happened, then changes to say event B happened, has no recall of event A, nor can any evidence of A be found, for example)

If there are notes or handouts regarding these lost moments, change them when the players aren't paying attention.

Nyarlathotep acts the most human of old ones, but that's just pareidolia. If anything, we act the most nyarlathotep of all meat-replicators.

Don't make him act like a person. Don't give him clear and apparent temporal goals. You can do better than that.

Jovians are the least cancerous part of the EP fanbase.

Could you recommend two or three? Not the fella you're replying to, but I just generally need something new to use.

SumatraPDF doesn't have all the same (mostly useless) features as Acrobat but loads pages noticeably faster

I have it and it loads them... noticeably slower? Like there's at least a second of lag time every time i move to a new page.

git gud

W-what's wrong with using acrobat

Does anyone know of a good place to get character art?

For what game?

You can just use pictures of normal people

images.google.com/

>Eclipse Phase
Maybe rogue AI was the wrong term. I'm setting this in modern times, and this is basically an emergence event, the first true AI to appear. Not an eclipse phase kind of thing, though I am wondering if it wouldn't make more sense as a non-DG thing. CIA investigating a transmission from a site they've been monitoring kind of thing. DG can always come in and recruit the survivors.

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Question, though:

It seems like a lot of CoC investigations I look at for inspiration tend to be very slow-burn. The best are often about placing the investigators in a pretty open, non-threatening location where some kind of hidden time-bomb is ticking, and they have to find it and disrupt it before catastrophe strikes. But outside of specifically engaging the Evil it seems like they're usually in a relatively peaceful locale and can take their time investigating.

Does anybody have any advice/suggestions for running CoC games in a "hot zone" so to speak? I'm going for the physical isolation angle of horror with this one, they're in a remote jungle area of China looking for the lab and the AI can hijack phone/radio signals so there's no contacting HQ. It's got jury-rigged killborgs made from human bodies wandering the jungle hunting the local villagers for biomass to expand itself.

So most of the investigation, both in the neighboring villages and in the lab itself, is going to be immediately dangerous, with biomechanical nightmares actively patrolling for the investigators and trying to kill them. That seems like a very different setup than most of the investigations I've seen, and I'm wondering if anybody's done similar adventures or knows some premade adventures where the investigators are constantly in danger like this. Tips and suggestions: how to avoid turning it into a combat slog while still maintaining the sense of constant danger, etc.

TENTACLE HAVIN

INSMOUTH LOOKIN

MIXED RACE BEING

DAGON WORSHIPIN

Step 1 to creating an AI more intelligent than humans - do not reference the fucking basilisk program.
Seriously, I can accept getting soured on the source material due to over-repetition, but I see that shit and think maybe the problem is you.

What do you dislike about it? I think the way it's originally formulated is stupid as hell and took me a long time to even figure out why it was supposed to be scary (AI trying to minimize suffering by making millions of accurately simulated humans suffer?!) but I think it could be a little more of an immediate threat by removing the timey-wimey future blackmail element and making it actively malicious instead of resting it on the assumption AI will solve all our problem.

But I put that in as an idea, I don't think I'm actually going to do it, couldn't figure out how to introduce it without having the AI just talk to people which kills the alien horror of it. Not to mention it wouldn't have any game effect aside from some SAN rolls.

Probably going to stick with the more immediate and visceral threat of being murdered by corpsebots and melted into organic circuitry.

You don't have to explain or forcibly show anything. Focus on what is happening and what the players percieve. Especially the latter. And then let them draw conclusions from there.

As of slow pace, escalation is part of the horror. The tension has to build up. Believe me, the moment when the player asks "how the fuck it came to this" is way more jarring for them than the shock of suddenly-monsters-everywhere.

Anything but the tentacles

I support this plan. Too many scenarios take 'buildup' to mean 'railroad the players through a few sessions of """investigation""" with no impact on the story before anything actually happens'. Nothing wrong with starting where things get exciting.

For 7e, is there a GM's Rulebook of some kind? I didn't see one in the mediafire.

I can't say I've seen this, though maybe that means I'm looking in the /right/ places for examples.

You have to admit that inconclusive semi-spooky shit languidly building up to something big and horrible and anticlimactic is pretty much Lovecraft to a tee though.

>star
*autistic screeching*

Just have both. I like to reason the stick-sign is the more rare, primal and aggressive shape it can take, while the star is the much more researched and manufactured a take on the metaiconography, though both are still unfathomably ancient.

Sumatra's been pretty good for me but if it's giving you trouble try MuPDF.

>"There's a hundred simulations for every one of you, none of them gave themselves up willingly, and they're all going to be tortured for a million years. If you don't give yourself up there's a 99% chance you're one of them. Give yourself up"
That's idiotic. I thought you said the AI was supposed to be smart.

Nah, there's not, but the "normal" Rulebook offers a lot of tipps and instructions for GMs. I think it was in the "How to play"-section of the book

Star just looks overdesigned and stupid. I can believe that a regular five-pointed star CAN be a powerful sign, after all, Mythos magic heavily features shapes, angles, lines and dimensions, and pentagrams were totally a thing. See Dreams in the Witch House. But this looks almost like it was a some company logo that got re-branded and made more "dynamic" and twisted to appeal to youth.

It's rare, but it does happen.

Every time I see HP smile, it's like a part of me lights up. It's a hidden treasure.

Hey guys i'm GM in a group of CoC, and i'm trying to find new idea my group doesn't like much investigation but they enjoy CoC ambiant how can i make it cool for them ?

Tone down the "investigation" part and amp up the "combat" and "interaction" part. The simplest scenario would be "have a cult, have the party infiltrate it to learn its secrets, then hunt each cultist down and kill them all".

Alright thank you very much.

In the new DG, what would qualify as a "heavy rifle" and be capable of full-auto fire? Most guns listed as examples are semi-auto only AFAIK, and full-auto capable variants of them qualify as LMGs (i. e. L2A1 which is a licensed FN FAL) which falls under Heavy Weapons instead of Firearms.

The thing is, my Agent is in dire need of all the firepower he can get and has a 0 in Heavy Weapons. The enemies are armored, and armor piercing bullets are hard to find in our circumstances.

Sanity rolls and traps. Combat in DG is very deadly unless the PCs have assault rifles so you don't want to have it too much or expect to start losing players. Use san loss a lot because that kind if situation is perfect for a lot of san loss. Maybe have enemies kind of skulking in the background and make them sneak around.

I'm not a Pro GM but, if they can't have heavy weapon why not just using their environment to do the same thing.

By exemple if someone have experiences in science, he/she could use it at their advantage ?

I considered that. Sadly, what I need due to circumstances is go and simply gun down a lot of unnaturally tough things. I already have all the advantages I could have, what's left is actually pulling the trigger. And the question is, what trigger is the most effective at making things dead.

MAY EVE CHANTIN'

HUMAN SACRIFICIN'

Just bought Mansions of Madness. Gonna be playing later today but first I want one of the expansions. Which should I get? I like the look of Suppressed Memories especially. Is that one fun? I like how it adds more outside areas.

Also, another related question; does the app automatically incorporate the expansions' monsters and tiles into all scenarios, or are they only good for the scenarios that the expansions come with? It would make sense for the former to be true because the expansions add only one scenario, but you never know.

where was the origin of "MAN THE HARPOONS", i see that occasionally but i dont get anything

You sure this is the place to ask?

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Don't have the game myself, but my understanding is that 2nd Edition is specifically made with the app in mind, I'm not even sure the game works without an app anymore. So I would say it is a safe bet you can toggle what expansions are on and off when you play.

>In the new DG, what would qualify as a "heavy rifle" and be capable of full-auto fire?
'Battle Rifles' like the M14, AR10, CETME and G3, which fire full power rifle cartridges and have select fire capabilities.

>Most guns listed as examples are semi-auto only AFAIK, and full-auto capable variants of them qualify as LMGs (i. e. L2A1 which is a licensed FN FAL) which falls under Heavy Weapons instead of Firearms.
A full auto FAL is still a heavy rifle. The original design is fully automatic and full auto versions are still in use with many national militaries.