/ysg/ Yog Sothothery

Is the Arkham Horror lcg any good? If so are there any must have expansions?

Your player's characters aren't self aware RPG players, cause a big San check for Helplessness if they insist not to. If it causes someone to go temp insane have them open/loosen the latch just enough so that The Thing can get out.

>Is the Arkham Horror lcg any good?
All anyone ever says how great it is

>are there any must have expansions?
That's the problem. The game has almost no replay value - so they're ALL must have expansions if you want to keep playing

Probably fine

That's not how the DG Sanity system works. The purpose isn't to railroad the players into doing dumb things unless they have Hypergeometry Addiction

I'm going to tell you what I tell everyone: run Future Perfect Part 1 instead. It's a more substantial scenario (Last Things Last is maybe an hour and a half unless the players seriously fuck around), has better hooks for introducing the players to DG, and is more fun

Be a little vague about things. A player of mine reached his breaking point while doing the Last Equation and I had him develop OCD like symptoms dealing with numbers, like doing everything an odd number of times or something, but I just said he had OCD about numbers. He took it to an extent that he would only say sentences with odd syllable. Roll with the punches. You want to keep them focused, but don't railroad.

What’s a good Lovecraftian sounding pirate ship name that isn’t too on the nose?

Dunsany

Alhazred
The Yellow King
The Good Shepard
Chaos Crawls
Carcosa
John Dee
The Black Stone
Junzt

The Call.
The Goat.
Silver Key.

Providence
Delapore
Red Hook
Whipple on the Water
Curwen's Fancy

So I've only just started really reading lovecraft starting with the first omnibus.

>At the Mountains of Madness
>The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
>The Dreams in the Witch-House
>The Statement of Randolph Carter
>The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
>The Silver Key
>Through the Gates of the Silver Key

I have since moved on to a collection of his complete works that I received for Christmas. Anyway, while I definitely like his stuff like At the Mountains of Madness and Dagon that focus' on the horrors that inhabit our reality, much like how I assume that Innsmouth and Call of Cthulhu do, I'm actually finding myself preferring his stories like Polaris and The Tomb which focuses more on the blurred lines of the protagonists sanity.

Anyway I guess what I want to ask is why do his monster stories and Cthulhu seem to get so much more attention?

Investigator's book is in the trove. I don't know where the DMG went

Is there a lovecraftian god related to knowledge, or secrets?

>Anyway I guess what I want to ask is why do his monster stories and Cthulhu seem to get so much more attention?
They're a bit more accessible and have had a bit more of an impact overall to different authors and other media.

Daoloth
Nyarlathotep
Yog Sothoth

Ta mate

Glad to be of assistance

However, I would recommend avoiding named deities and great old ones whenever possible. Players will groan in recognition if the villain is revealed as yet another avatar of nyarlathotep

...

Am I the only one who thinks August Derleth was a shit author? I even think he ruined Cthulhu Mythos.

Love the game, but with it being a LCG (and fantasyflight needing to make money) it does lean towards constant expansion to keep things fresh. Personally I don't mind since what you get for each new pack exceeds the cost for sheer entertainment time and options value but that's really up to you to decide on.

Not to say you can't have fun with just the core set, but it is a diving platform for the rest of the games mechanics, stories, narrative options and investigator options. If you have Tabletop Simulator on steam you can find everything released so far on the workshop, have a look and see how the content is spread out and see if it looks like your thing.

drive.google.com/file/d/1N8GIBXJagWljhnofhdvf7qik2EqHhooe/view?usp=drivesdk
That should be it.

Insane bump

Not a bad author, he just had the bad habit many derivative writers do, nailing down specifics, filling in blanks and illuminating all crevices until there's no mystery or ambiguity left.

This is good shit, thank you.

I honestly think tardigrades are perhaps the most real life Lovecraftian creatures, simply because of how durable the little fuckers are, I mean scientists that were on the international space station actually took an open container with them in it, threw said container out into space, and after a few days had passed, brought said container back inside. Do you know what happened to the tardigrades? Nothing, absolutely nothing had happened to them, not a single one had died while they were in the vacuum in space, in fact there were actually more of them in the container when they brought the container back in than there were when the threw the container into space, meaning the tardigrades had managed to reproduce while in the vacuum of space, while at the same time bombarded by solar radiation. If that isn't Lovecraftian, than I don't know what is.

I was under the impression that's a pretty popular opinion, especially around here. At very least he took the Mythos and as said, kind of tried to define everything into too coherent of a whole, ignoring how Lovecraft's crafted mythology and giving conflicting and/or vague definitions of things was part of the appeal.

seems I need to request access to get into the drive. do you have a version uploaded somewhere else?

build them an enclosure with indoor heating, a hiding spot and some dubia roaches and lock the door after they go inside

I forgot to fiddle with settings, should be ok now.

Bloody hell it's right there in the trove.

really? because I don't see the newest versions of either in the trove. they're both there, but not the most revently updated pdfs as far I can tell. where are they in the trove?

Pretty sure most agree his contributions are thw weakest.

You're the weakest

My players have survived 4 scenarios and are getting cocky and overconfident
What can I throw at them?
I want at least one to die so they're reminded of how weak they are

20 goblins with poisoned weapons.

Everytime the PCs are on a roll, they retreat and follow them around making sure they can't rest to regain abilities and spells.

Every time they try to head to town or a haven, they try their hardest to herd them away.

Have them target their creatures and low level companions.

Have them constantly set ambushes and traps.

Every time they go to sleep, have them cause a ruckus or do raids like throwing gas bombs or constantly yelling and ringing gongs.

If they use silence or earplugs, send them in sneaking.

If they use natural formations or hide in a buildings have them try to siege it or set it on fire.

Disregard, posted on wrong thread.

So I’ve been having a blast with this really cool idea in my horror game, and wanted to share it.

I’m running an episodic, monster of the week style Lovecraftian game. At the start of one adventure, I introduced a completely new character, but acted as if he was there the entire time and admonish the players for forgetting the most memorable NPC of the entire campaign. It’s had them fucking paranoid the entire time and questioning the existence of every NPC in the game. Works great if your villain is Nyarlathotep or a Cult worshipping him.

Yes I stole the idea from the memory parasites from Rick and Mitty. Shut up, it works

...

either this or Convergence from the original DG sourcebook

What's you guys' opinion about such a great, cosmic being like Cthulhu got popped like a balloon/or broken through by mere steamboat ramming?

That you haven't actually read The Call of Cthulhu.

we're playing classic CoC senpai

Really cool premise with the whole accidentally getting thrown back in time and digging up your own skeleton in the present day before it happens; but it doesn’t really do much with it.

Any ideas that would spice it up a little more?

youtube.com/watch?v=JtI0He1Sqcg
Check this guys videos out, always has good ideas on running adventures and just general good advice

You can always take the concept and reimagine it to fit your campaign.

I like seth except when he tries to sell you his shitty novels

Never read em, they really shit?

First time keeper

Any advice?

I'm running a campaign that I hoped would just be CoC wild western Supernatural shenanigans with Eldritch Yahweh thrown into the mix along with civil war undead, hinting at judgement day is coming, but now my buddies have taken that and decided they're going to be playing as carnies. Don't get me wrong, the characters they've made are hilariously bitter and real, and their motivations to capture and kill the eldritch, IE to save their dead trope is really well thought and reasoned out, if but a bit silly, so I'm not ticked that the game took the direction it did.

But what I thought was going to be a plain jane story that I'd have no problem running since it's been a good few years since I've even run a D&D game, let alone DM'd, has turned into something I have no idea how I'm going to handle.

I have a general idea of how I'm going to run the story, Lucifer rolls into town, starts raising the dead making everybody in heaven think its finally judgement day because nobody's talked to the big guy in a few literal eternities, and turns out judgement day includes heaven's armies as well, so they're running around, "Falling" to prolong their existence and possibly carve themselves a little piece of reality, in this creating the monsters my players will trap, IE shit like werewolves and what not. Meanwhile Lucifer is raising the dead to basically create a cross the streams feedback loop, to kick Yahweh in the pants and stir him awake. Where my players fit in to all this, I'm letting them decide what they want to do but they've taken to the attitude of "The show must go on, no matter what we must do, especially when all the world's a stage."

So, is there anything I should flat out avoid doing? I know death is quick with CoC and requires a bit of finagling to keep the game rolling, but what is the bare minimum I should come to the table with?

Anything I should try and actively do?

Advice story wise?

>So, is there anything I should flat out avoid doing?
The entirety of your story there seems pretty flat out not Lovecraftian.

Bump.

>Why don't you know what Lovecraft-derived RPG my group plays? What do you mean I have to tell you?

Have you ever, like, actually read any Lovecraft?

What is your exposure to the mythos?

What led you to pick up CoC to run this game?

In short, what the ever-living fuck are you doing user?

Anyone else think that the cosmic elements of Lovecraft are the least interesting/least horrific bits? To me at least it's so large in scale that its just sort of background noise. It's like how we could all get wiped out by a gamma ray burst or a quantum reversal or something; it's sort of scary to think about but there's not really anything I can do to stop it or even probably know about it so I just can't find it really horrifying.

>What led you to pick up CoC to run this game?
To be fair to that user, it's possible that the rules might lend themselves well to what he's got going on, just not the setting. Or rather, his setting seems antithesis to Lovecraft.

While I don't find them exactly horrifying, there are a bit scarier now that I have a kid. In that, I now have fears about things I have no way of stopping from hurting my kid. When running DG, I try and keep that in mind but expand it to EVERYONE and their kids.

look at him, look at their covers and look at their titles

Is pic related the best CoC /tv/?
Fair enough but IMHO other things tap into that fear much better. Yes Azathoth waking is going to kill your kid. It's also going to kill you, everyone you know, everything you've ever thought of, and quite possibly the concept of "thought". To me my loved ones getting killed by a ghoul or a ghost or even just a cultist is more frightening because not only am I still alive to be afraid and hurt afterwards, but the world moves on, is still there. I think the idea of something insane and monstrous intruding into your life to ruin it and no one ever believing you is much more frightening than just the end of the world.

And of course I forgot the picture

>but the world moves on, is still there
It still does if humanity is wiped out. The galaxy operates as normal if there's no Earth. The universe pretty much stays as is of the Milky Way were to be swallowed.

>Is pic related the best CoC /tv/?
Probably, yeah. I'm thinking once I finish my current arc for Delta Green, I'm going to pick up something like this.

Space is scary.
Being alone in the dark void that is space is scary.

That's true in a general sense, but it's not as relevant to me. I don't really care that the universe goes on uninterrupted and doesn't care about anything that happens to me or us or Earth, because I long ago accepted that the universe is unfeeling and mechanistic and that humanity is a tiny part that's meaningless in the long run. The universe isn't a person, the galaxy isn't a person, the earth isn't a person. I don't expect it to care, but people not caring is a different story. It's much scarier to me that something should appear that is completely out of context for you and your life and scar you and shatter any illusion of normalcy and safety, then vanish and no one ever believe you. Never really look into it the way you know they need to, never look for the thing that crawled out of the mirror and took your daughter when it went back because it's accepted that things don't come through mirrors and to believe otherwise is crazy and stupid, to have your trauma and your fear and your horror be brushed off as shock and rationalization at best, madness at worst, because no one is willing to accept that they live in bright pools in a dark world and that they are always a hair's breadth away from slipping into that darkness with you.
That's a lot scarier than "space is big and full of big old things and aliens and even black people"

You're literally describing cosmic horror, albeit more on a micro-scale.

A few books, mostly yellow king.

Regardless, to me Lovecraft isn't even a setting, it's not just creepy cultists and fucking sheogoths, it was a concept, and that was the futility of man against a truth so beyond human comprehension that comfort can only be found in madness, bar nothing else, not even death. It's essentially man vs personified nature, where instead of the romanticism of men fighting bears and trees, the trees were actually the horrifying realisation that within the deepest depths of our realities, there was nothing and the bears were man's ability to imagine things that you'd never see within the heavens or Earth.

And many parallels of the elder God's mythos can be drawn to Christianity and other pagan pantheons, Azeroth in particular. Which is funny considering he was an atheist with a strong distaste for Christianity.

I wanted a western setting because it seemed fun. I chose Christianity as the big bad of the setting because it's fucking terrifying, if you've ever actually sat down and read the Bible, it was fucking terrifying, especially considering many angels were no doubt the inspiration of many of Lovecrafts monsters, especially when one is fucking flaming wheels covered in fucking eyes. It also helped Christianity was something stupidly prominent in the west.

Lovecrafts believed that there was no real good, but things out there that were more terrifying than what our comprehension could barely scratch the surface of understanding, my setting is that but saying there is a god and drawing his eye will be like ripping off the wallpaper of the veil.

And I decided to use a end of times conflict because it seemed fun and the acting forces behind closely resemble that of the outer God's, again what I'm basically using as a parallel to Christianity.

What my players decided is their own volition. They're just investigators trying to figure out how to stop what's peeking from behind the green screen.

I know. My point, rambling as though it may be, is that it kind of loses it's impact the larger scale you get and the further away you get from the personal effects of it. At least it does to me, anyway.

No that makes sense and I get what you're saying.

>A few books, mostly yellow king.
So none whatsoever?

Having said that, I don't take any issue with what you got going other than none of it is Lovecraftian.

>Azeroth
>Azeroth
>AZEROTH
Man I dislike WoW as much as the next guy but what are you on about

I'm guessing everything he knows about Lovecraft and mythos stuff is largely from sources that have just incorporated surface level stuff. There's nothing inherently wrong with that though and his setting might even be good, but I am a bit confused as to why he chose CoC for the system, but it might be the rules more accurately give him what he wants.

I think that he could be on to something interesting, if he wasn't blatantly retarded. Abrahamic faith could make for a great cosmic horror setting, because as bad as an uncaring alien god is an alien god who cares too much is far, far worse. Being eternally judged by a being who is completely beyond you and whose thoughts and methods and morals are anathema to you, with either burning oblivion or ego death and eternal servitude as the only two outcomes, is pretty scary. Not really Lovecraftian, but scary enough.

I always recommend That Insidious Beast to people looking to do some Abrahamic horror

>because as bad as an uncaring alien god is an alien god who cares too much is far, far worse.
Holy fuck yes it is.

Azathoth is what it should have been if I caught my phone's autocorrect.

I'm slightly Bellow surface level at best, I understand what Lovecraft is but every time I see it, it's always some 30-40's or 60-70's Noir or bastardised version of Noir written by someone with no understanding of such, setting with cultists speaking gibberish, sacrificing babies to summon tentacled things that will summon Cthulhu, and this all started with some nerd finding a book/template made from skin/some unknown mineral and the only people who can stop them is another nerd, detective, jock and idiot blonde in their mystery machine, at least in the games I've seen run at my shop and books I've been recommended after I stopped reading. It bugged me nobody did anything different with the setting, it was always "yep it's Cthulhu," never "Holy shit, did at some point, the old Gods win and we just go along with the ride?"

I mean, the old God's have been around since before time, there's been old gods who have been doing their thing on Earth since before civilization even began, many have been revered as God's, and there's supposedly many religions that secretly worship them, so why is it always fucking Cthulhu?

I chose the system though because it works perfectly for what I want to run

>It bugged me nobody did anything different with the setting, it was always "yep it's Cthulhu," never "Holy shit, did at some point, the old Gods win and we just go along with the ride?"
Yeah, it sounds like you've mostly seen incredibly uninspired games, so I sympathize. I run a Delta Green for my group and I try and keep unnatural stuff to a minimum without cultists for the most part. Though my own arc(I mostly used prewritten scenarios while I sprinkle in my own stuff) will have a body-swapper as the big bad who's somewhat associated with Yog-Sothoth.

Bump.

The Nautical Negro

Why does no one who makes these fucking images ever check the fucking spelling?

The prevailing wisdom is to combine Last Things Last with the Metamorphosis shotgun scenario. Baughman is running both O-Cell and the player's cell. He dies of natural causes and O-Cell, which is busy dealing with the cult of Atlach-Nacha, send the Agents to sanitize Baughman's affairs, and the Agents discover the cabin.

As the Agents recover from the aftermath of the Cabin, they will be called to the Green Box where O-Cell 'ambushes' them and the Agents have to deal with the clusterfuck of Metamorphosis.

I wish I had done that. Just did straight up Last Things Last, but I'm tying it into my over-arching plot. The players are going to find out where Baughman got the hypergeometry to do what he did.

bump

>The prevailing wisdom is to combine Last Things Last with the Metamorphosis shotgun scenario.

Er, what? No. The way to fix a terrible scenario is not to staple another scenario on. If this is the prevailing wisdom, the DG community is a good deal more cancerous than I thought.

Terrifying

Yeah for me the better stuff is dealing with possible insanity and trying to cope with seeing fragments of a world just underneath the skin of our own.

Yes, absolutely. There's a reason all the good modules focus on small scale, personal horror that the players can actually interact with. If the actions of the people playing the game can't change the outcome, why are you running it? Write a book instead.

>that image
What's that from?

youtube.com/watch?v=X_7vN78zJ1c

Tentacular Spectacular

does anyone know of any non-mythos scenarios or campaigns that would fit Delta Green?

My good sir have you ever sat down to watch The X Files?

I recommend at least the first 5 or so seasons. A bit torn on the new seasons as they don't really seem to follow the spirit that the show originally set out with.

You guys i've been playing the Ripples from Carcosa scenarios a lot recently with different groups and one of the things intrigued me

The third scenario focusses on space horror after the apocalypse. Do you guys know any scenarios that play during the apocalypse or afterwards? Thanks!

>Tfw every living entity on planet earth may be a descendant of a space-faring tardigrade.
It’s like finding out your dad is from Innsmouth.