/ysg/ - Yog-Sothothery General

Currently playing Ashcan Pete at medium, and I gotta say, if you don't screw up by missing on Lita Chandler, it becomes pretty easy to run through monsters like they are nothing. The only challenge has been the stress of starting with 3 mental trauma after finishing The Devourer Below. And I managed to get Medico de la Puesta, which mitigates Mental pretty well early on.

With two flares in the deck, I wasn't even scared of facing Umordoth.

Not bad. It is kind of a stretch thematic-wise to add one/both side stories to the NotZ campaign, but seeing how XP is fairly plentiful compared to DL so far, stretching it out sounds good.

Dare you proceed onto Dunwich?

Yeah, story-wise, taking the time to travel not only to New Orleans, but also to Venice, that didn't exactly fit with the urgency of what was happening to Arkham. But it was the, what, 7th time I had run the core campaign in a way or another, so I wanted to stretch it out.

If I had to chose between the two side stories, I'd do the Rougarou one. The movement restrictions in Carnevale of Horrors was a headache, and I think I only managed thanks to Duke's inbuilt move-and-investigate. That dog is the best thing in the game so far, imho.

I've already done the first scenario of Dunwich, well, the campus one. Ended up saving the students by complete accident : I had entirely forgot about the Administration Office location, since I never had a reason to even look at it.

I ran from my players Edge of Darkness few days ago as a one-shot and it went really well. Hopefully we could do Masks of Nyarlathotep or DG campaign soon.

So from what I understand from possible resolutions, you can only save either the students or the Professor right?

Must be fairly easy breezing through the first scenario with all the acquired XP and Lita and stuff, despite all the existing trauma.

[spoilers]Yeah. You have to find the Janitor while still on the second Agenda, and then it depends on which previously-inaccessible building you decide to explore. You trigger the end pretty much right then. Saving the students lets you avoid a trauma (i think) and adding a Chaos token to the pouch, but the professor card is really good, even better when Charisma will come out.[/spoilers]

It's not a very hard scenario, the encounter deck is geared toward giving you insanity, and giving you more insanity the more card you have in your discard. The Shroud value on most locations is very low, some 1s and a 3 I think. Nothing Duke couldn't let me rush through.

I think the scenario is designed to be a long-run trap. The difficulty of the checks are so low and the agenda is so slow that I could see a player deciding he's safe building his board rather than playing the scenario.

But yeah, even the trauma was nothing much, since I found that quaterback dude that heals a mental each turn.

Shit, nice way to show how long I've been away from Veeky Forums...

Indeed. That mental regen dude is pretty good to have assuming no one else needs him, although that shouldn't be an issue for solo runs.

Also, since pack 2 is already out and the cards confirmed, Charisma is essentially available since you don't strictly speaking need that card physically present, being permanent and all.

Good luck for the second scenario.

After watching too many martial arts films, I got the retarded idea to run a Lovecraftian martial arts campaign.

But I don't really know how the narrative should take shape beyond the basics.
>takes place today
>police/crime 'powerlevel', no academics from a cross-field CIA-NASA group
>typical run-or-die scenario but the horror isn't actively malicious

The basic idea would be about some entity wearing the shape of a man or woman and having a strong interest in martial arts. Kind of like an evil Jackie Chan Predator. Except completely indestructable and unkillable. It just wants to have a good fight, and through the powers of healing, it can fight you endlessly - which typically ends in some Hellraiser human-meat-jerky hell for you until you lose your mind, break and stop fighting making the entity lose interest in you. Of course at that point your mind is already gone, catathonic.

Does doing the side quests give a lot of XP (after entrance fee) and loot?

Haven't started it either. Was lucky enough to snag the big box, but missed the first mythos pack. Was lucky enough to snag the latest pack yesterday, but i doubt I'll play until i have a copy of Miskatonic Museum.

Well, having the first 2 scenarios is pretty decent enough, might as well start a run with those 2 and see how things go. Apparently the order in which you play them does result in a lot of possible resolutions.

Anybody knows how Cthulhu Confidential is coming up?

+ kudos for any user that could link pre-order materials.

Bump for interest.

What do you use for background soundtracks? I'm partial to Cryo Chamber, they have great dark ambient stuff.

Lustmord.

Those below 20 hrz sounds give it that extra oomph.
youtube.com/watch?v=qX2rOEqHzzk

It's nicely fucked up creepy, but very ambient. Sometimes I forget it's even on.

>tfw when the session over, everyone but the dopesmokers have left, and halfway through the blunt i realise the music is still playing

I'm running a new-DG campaign. The party - two feds and a military psy-op specialist - just got inducted into the Program and got a designation as a task force. Feeling pretty hyped.

Whatever fits. Cryo Chamber for general ambient, Arkadiusz Reikowski and Mikko Tarmia for different kinds of scenes. Tarmia's Panic and Paranoia is my favorite track for chases and combat. Some thematic music - country motives for rural places, for example. Sometimes I feel like making an "epic" setpiece in the traditional sense, and use TSFH.

Also, sounds of Saturn.

>The Last Equation
How's it going? Any tips?

I've been thinking of running a game with the Chaos Gods in the modern world. Could it work?

Please help me /ysg/.

I've been badly wanting to run Call of Cthulhu for my friends. I've done my reading, I've tried to get an idea of the game's community, I've looked through some published scenarios and written some ideas myself, but I'm scared as hell about fucking it up. I don't really have much experience as a GM to begin with, let alone any with horror or mystery.

Am I just out of my league here? Should I come back to this game once I have more experience writing/narrating? Should I lurk more? Or should I just pick an easy one-shot scenario someone else made, try my best, probably do terribly, and try to figure out how to do better?

It seems like there are a lot of steps to running a decent horror RP. I don't know if I need to study harder or just try and learn from experience. With how little I seem to know I probably don't belong on Veeky Forums to begin with.

Bohren und der Club of Gore is great dark jazz, drink black coffee in a warm room and look at the wood glowing orange from the fire music.

youtube.com/watch?v=L33XI7ZnNjQ

For encounters in the wilderness, desert, freakish cults, fighting terrors from other worlds, Karl Sanders's acoustic shit is great.

youtube.com/watch?v=CYwB1JEahm0

I play Karl Sanders for Kingdom Death also and it fits perfectly. If it lines up, that 5:25 part in Slavery Unto Nitokris as the monster is standing over a helpless PC, pure terror.

Do a short scenario. If your players are good, you should be fine. I had minimal experience when I ran my first Delta Green game.

Finished in one session. We managed to convince the FBI team that we were with a Joint Terrorism Task Force and that the numbers spraypainted at the crime scene were top secret US cryptography (codes to the 'nuclear football') which they needed to help us cover up and delete from all the crime scene photos. We planted a bunch of ISIS recruitment material, videos, and other Jihadi shit in the guy's dorm before any of the other investigators saw it. The only thing we couldn't prevent was the FBI mathemetician going crazy, but she was gunned down by half the police force outside the hotel after she went crazy, burned her laptop and tried to shoot one of us.

We handled a couple of the other mailing list members in vignettes at the end. One of the agents was from Montana, so she stopped in Dillon on the way home and shot the math teacher as she got out of her car coming home from work. The other two agents followed the one in Jersey around until the appointed time, then shot her right before she could gun down a classroom full of kids.

Nobody lost more than a few points of SAN until the very end

At most, maybe one in ten "horror" games will actually scare the players. It might be closer to one in one hundred. Yeah, you can obsess about tone and atmosphere and mounting dread, or you can just pick an adventure that looks like fun. Your players probably won't be frightened, but they'll still have a good time.

>Nobody lost more than a few points of SAN until the very end

Meant to finish this. It all went fine until after all the 'vectors' were sanitized and one of the agents tried to solve the equation on his own time. At the close of the scenario he'd found the margins of Wei's notes that said the exact time he'd read them, but rather than throwing them away he continued to study them. He took enough SAN damage to get a permanent disorder, meaning he's now obsessed with the sequence and will probably himself have to be dealt with.

Should I let a PC retire or force him to do DG until he goes completely insane?

How is that related to the thread?

delta-green.com/2012/10/directive-from-a-cell-104-no-gold-watch-retiring-from-delta-green/

There's always that one bastard. Why won't they learn that curiosity is a one way express ticket to hell in this business?

What exactly is the kind of psychological type that Delta Green wants?

Because self-destruction is a huge part of the horror of Call of Cthulhu games.

The "lololol never read books guys" people are awful, both for metagaming and for denying themselves half the fun of the game.

That's true and is absolutely fine. I guess I just want to see people wholly succeed at a minimal cost every once in a while.

Also, it's not about reading just a random book. The agent in question knew that the sequence is unnatural and that thing will break you, and saw the aftermath, was explicitly told not to become The Mission in general, and not to mess with this particular piece of mathematics.

It's like knowing that the pie before you is poisoned, seeing a guy eat a piece of it and die before your eyes, and then still take a bite, feel your innards burn and spasm, and then taking another.

The Gods of Chaos have always had CoC undertones, where those who fight them tend to end up dead/insane/corrupted.

I'm doing a Delta Green game soon.

Slightly alternate canon: No known copies of the king in yellow, agents are tasked with finding one that's surfaced in a scan uploaded to the internet.

The third act, the one that's gibberish, is actually a carefully constructed memetic device, each word adjusts your mental state and when the exact sequence is read all the way through it twists your brain like a rubik's cube, forcing your neural configuration into a pattern that forms a portal in your brain.

The entity that comes through then compels you to share the third chapter, stealing POW from those who do (who also incubate a memetic demon). If you can't share then it steals your POW instead.

When you die or run out of POW the thing in your head breaks free, its size and strength depending on its POW.

I'm also going by the conspiracies-within-conspiracies setup you see in Through a Glass Darkly. The DG contact is extremely secretive (they get their mission in a locked box in a PO Box, no face to face contact) and I'm going to surprise them at the end with a twist that'll completely throw their trust of delta green into the garbage.

The end of the old delta green storyline is ostensibly MJ12 shutting down and Delta Green reforming, but in practice it's basically MJ12 and DG intermingling so thoroughly it's impossible to know who's what anymore, not to mention all the former Majestic members now in DARPA, the NSA, CIA, etc. who know about DG.

If they say they're from Delta, they're lying. If something comes down the wire, set up a meet and take them out. It's us against the world now, fucker.

I think you're better off playing 40k. Just set your game on a world resembling modern. Play up the weirdness, insanity and lack of control and power.

Although if you use a generic system and never ever namedrop anything, even non-directly, not even call demons demons, forget faux-latin completely and don't include iconic organizations, that may work.

I like it. Go full circle and have DG rookies come after them with the mission worded exactly as theirs. If they win, drop the hammer hard. Involve Interpol, intelligence, militaries, make it a literal "us vs the world" scenario. If not, they play as those rookies and walk in their footsteps again, while you show what went wrong and when, only for everything to go wrong again, in a new way.

I'd even have it all lead to an apocalyptic event, but that's me.

I ran nearly the same thing before. The copy was spread by DG manipulated by Brothers of the Yellow Sign from the future, to foil Mi-Go plans through the Greys through Majestic.

It turned into a goddamn not!XCOM campaign. Bureau, not EU. Automatic weapons, explosives and flame weapons are hell of a drug.

I was planning on having a guy dressed homeless but with a silenced pistol attempt to steal the book at gunpoint, somehow knowing the time and place the contact (an FBI agent) would go to drop it off.

If he gets away, perfect, massive paranoia. If he manages to kill the guy even better, grab fingerprints and pictures on the sly before the cops show up, abuse his position to try to get info on him, drop some hints he might be associated with the FBI or even DG, then the trail goes cold. Let the paranoia simmer.

All of the chaos gods are rooted in human emotions/motivations so it would be an okay departure from the usual "man cannot possibly understand this" shtick if that's what your players are used to. It would probably work best if you don't namedrop anything specific and just stick to the general vibe of whatever chaos god you want to use, but that's true of almost any supernatural stuff that pops up in CoC games.

Anybody else hear about that DG "living world" thing they have going on at reddit? It looks like some kind of shared universe thing where you can jump in and out of different GM's games or something. Looks kind of interesting.

Not that much xp to be gained, to be honest, especially with Carnival of Horrors, since it cost 3xp to try it. On the other hand, Curse of the Rougarou has an absolutely insane level of difficulty check-wise, if you try it as a standalone. Doing it with as a side-quest lets you use the main campaign token set, which is about the only way you aren't going to end up being raped to death by wolf cock.

The loot is ok. Curse has two positive endings, one in which you can take a decent ally with good healing ability, the other really hard which gives your character the permanent ability to turn into a werewolf and switch to a combat stat line.

Carnevale's good endings give you access to the Abbess ally, which can give you or an ally a fast move every turn, which is great, and your choice of a Mask. Each masks gives you +1 of a stat, does a small effect like -1 Insanity, Wound, +2 ressource or +2 cards, and a reaction : during a test, us the stat boosted by this card instead of the regular stat, then discard this card.

Given that I play with Ashcan Pete and that I'm doing every scenario I a row I can, I chose Medico de la Puesta, which is +1 Willpower, heal an Insanity (I have 3 mental trauma), use Willpower.

I still always prefer to find Lita Chandler or even Aquinna to any of the Allies given as loot.

Given that Charisma is a thing (assuming you got XP to spare), did you keep the reward allies? Or are they not worth the deck space seeing how they dilute the deck above the 30 card limit?

I kept them. And these allies do not count against deck limit, as specified in the scenario ending section.

With Charisma now being out, I guess the dreamteam will be Lita + Abbess (+ Duke). 2x 5str attacks dealing 3 wounds + 1 free move each turn, or 3 free moves + 1 investigation at 4res from Duke.

Interesting. Haven't gotten the side stories so that's nice to know.

Also, that sounds like the ultimate solo operative (with friends). Almost like the entire gang ala Scooby Doo n friends,
since iirc you can take Charisma twice to get that campus guy at the same time.

Any chances of actual play logs somewhere about other then the one at rpg.net?

rppr actual play has a delta green podcast.

Yeah I joined up a few days ago. Created a character but haven't gotten a game yet. Hopefully it picks up some more with more players.

r/NightattheOpera for anyone curious

Does anyone have pdfs of issues of The Unspeakable Oath they can share?

Here you go user. Every book except for some very old ones should show up if you just google the name and pdf.

>'Straya is actually a seal on a great old one
>it's malign influence has created living horrors out of the wildlife and blighted the landscape
>man still settles there because he's fucking dumb
>one too many 'Abo's get addicted to huffing gasoline
>the barriers start to weaken
>shits fucked m8

The RRPR play through of Impossible Landscapes seems pretty neat. Probably pick that up when it comes out.

...

Is that you mellonbread?

No idea what you're talking about :^)

...

In my last game I stowed away an occult book from a real witch and decide againat storing it away. Rp wise its because I have a fucking 80 in occult and just got slammed by zombies and an invisible blood sucking horseshoe crab, I wanna learn to defend myself to a small degree

:^)))))))) tell me what the fucking book said. :^))))))))

Perhaps if you were to read the replies to your post instead of demanding answers from strangers on a Mongolian Claymation BBS

Dont have any drawings of Yog-sothoth but i did one of Nyarlathotep a while ago

I'm currently planning a game based on a Clickhole article.

Anons? Has any CoC or other Cthulhu Mythos rpg ever featured stats for the Buopoth? You know, that funny little elf-eared, trunk-mouthed elephant creature from the Dreamlands?

This is really cool. I mean, really. Great job! I'll even use it for my phone wallpaper. You have anything similar?

There was a book of lovecraftian creatures stats for OSR, and it had buopoths. It was called Cthuloid Bestiary.

HP Lovecraft's Dreamlands- 5th Edition

Many thanks. Huh, I'm surprised to see how little SAN loss they inflict.

Thanks a lot user!

They aren't even that weird. Just purple furry elephants with some extra bits, that are shy, unagressive and non-threatening to boot. Nothing to fear. And fear is the main source of sanity loss.

Just wanted to add the Field Guide to the Dreamlands article for ya'll.

Because they only exist in the dreamlands, where reality is more magical in general.

BEHOLD THE FACE OF INSANITY

Kinda cute. In a way.

Make sure you include waterfalls made of meat.