In tremulous squamous gibbous irony, H.P.L was a nondescript white man out of his depth, a living conduit for what would become the Cosmic Horror genre. He, like his many self-insert protagonists, is to be pitied for his lack of understanding and inability to perceive the layers of the world around him.
A stepping stone to the likes of Night Vale (Very gay impossible town podcast) and Bloodborne (Japanese bloody plague video game) and, as said, the Ballad of Black Tom.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Not to detract from dunking on Lovecraft's legacy but I was swayed away from Bloodborne being Lovecraftian by some tweets once:
You don't need to go far to see how Lovecraft's racism influenced his work. It's all about how terrifying the idea that humans (i.e. white men) aren't the center of the universe, and about the dangers of miscegenation.
It's barely subtext.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
I think Bloodborne definitely takes explicitly from Lovecraft, even if in doing so with the rest of it's setting results in it looking more akin to something else
Anyway, it’s important you all know my game has characters in it called Giblet (a zombie with saw blades in their face), Tyranno (a cyborg T-Rex medieval warlord) and Zeet (Zeet is Zeet).
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I think Bloodborne definitely takes explicitly from Lovecraft, even if in doing so with the rest of it's setting results in it looking more akin to something else
I feel like there's a lot of media that is trying to be Lovecraftian or is even pulling direct ideas from Lovecraft, and then actually ending up in some other bucket of cosmic horror (most frequently Derleth, but also a lot of Blackwood and Chambers in there as well). Part of the issue there is that Lovecraftian and cosmic horror are often treated synonymously, when Lovecraft really occupied a fairly specific niche of the genre. He's treated as the only name in town, a lot of times, when in actuality there were (and are) a lot of other writers working in a similar place.
I wouldn't consider it like, an admonishment, a "Hey you fucked up making a Lovecraft game, this is Blackwood as hell," but rather, if this is what you see when you see cosmic horror as a genre, if these are the ideas that reading Lovecraft sparks in you, maybe check out some of these other authors, both because they are very good and also because they are not the king of virulent racism mountain.
I think Bloodborne definitely takes explicitly from Lovecraft, even if in doing so with the rest of it's setting results in it looking more akin to something else
I feel like there's a lot of media that is trying to be Lovecraftian or is even pulling direct ideas from Lovecraft, and then actually ending up in some other bucket of cosmic horror (most frequently Derleth, but also a lot of Blackwood and Chambers in there as well). Part of the issue there is that Lovecraftian and cosmic horror are often treated synonymously, when Lovecraft really occupied a fairly specific niche of the genre. He's treated as the only name in town, a lot of times, when in actuality there were (and are) a lot of other writers working in a similar place.
I wouldn't consider it like, an admonishment, a "Hey you fucked up making a Lovecraft game, this is Blackwood as hell," but rather, if this is what you see when you see cosmic horror as a genre, if these are the ideas that reading Lovecraft sparks in you, maybe check out some of these other authors, both because they are very good and also because they are not the king of virulent racism mountain.
Huh, TIL. I just assumed Lovecraftian horror was being rebranded as Cosmic Horror to leave behind the racist stigma. I had no idea about any of this, but I've only been tangentially interested in the genre. A couple of games, the broadest strokes of the Cthulu/Old Ones mythos, and that's it. I haven't read any of it.
All this time the people that are all "Stop making Lovecraftian games" struck me as stupid because the entire world is supposed drop an entire genre because of one racist fuck? So perhaps I'll need to revisit some of the articles and arguments because there's a chance some of them have more nuance to them than I was understanding.
Like, what specifcally is Lovecraftian vs. Blackwood or Chambers or Derleth?
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I would consider Lovecraft more nihilistic than most other cosmic horror writers. The armchair psychiatrist version of it is that he was a white man in the 1920s and was essentially used to being the center of the universe, so his greatest horror was the idea that he was actually insignificant (or that he was actually not white, which was essentially synonymous to him). His works of cosmic horror (not everything he wrote was cosmic horror, I will point out) focus a lot on the insurmountable grandness of the forces that opposes mankind. It's where we get stuff like people going instantly mad or immediately killing themselves - it's all based around how unassailable the terrors he specialized in conjuring were.
Blackwood is the author I'm the least familiar with, but his supernatural and cosmic horror works were heavily based around a man versus nature narrative, essentially. The unknown is terrifying, and there are things out there beyond our ken that will kill you in an instant, but such is the way of nature. And the way of man is that we can conquer nature - we have done it before and we will do it again, even if what we face now seems stranger and more horrifying than anything before.
When we're talking Chambers, we're talking The King in Yellow, which is a great series of short stories that later got adapted heavily into Lovecraftian mythos (more on that later). But the funny thing about Chambers is that he was mostly a romantic author, and that seeps through a bunch in his horror work as well. His characters are almost invariably artists or members of arts communities, and at least one of the stories in the cycle has a happy ending. The play and the king himself still are things that could fall into the realm of that Lovecraftian nihilism, as the play threatens to drive anyone who makes it to the second act irrevocably mad and the king is the sort of malicious figure we frequent see with Lovecraft's gods, but they're viewed a bit more at a remove - less inescapable, and more terrible things that could exist in the world.
Derleth is... well he's an okay writer on his own. He's more important for his connection to Lovecraft though. They were friends, of a sort - Derleth looked up to him a bunch, and believed that his stories were absolutely fantastic. In fact, after Lovecraft's death, he made it his whole mission to get those stories more widely published (which he sort of succeeded at and sort of completely fucking bungled). He's the whole reason that we know about Lovecraft today, the reason Lovecraft is considered the cultural titan that he is. In doing all of this though, he tried to make sense out of Lovecraft. He looked at the dozen times that Lovecraft called something Nyarlathotep and said that these must all be the same person, that this is a big jigsaw that needed to be solved. He created a pantheon, essentially, with the same sort of normative structure you would expect for any other pantheon, rather than the sort of chaotic (and probably unintentional) mess that Lovecraft had left behind.
In doing all of that, Derleth also pulled in a lot of works from, say, folks like Blackwood and Chambers, both of whom generally predated Lovecraft. Which muddles the waters even more for when we're talking about cosmic horror, because those slim references to the King in Yellow that Lovecraft made got turned into full blown gods in the Derleth system, and every future edition of the book published had a tentacle slapped on it so you knew it was part of the Lovecraft shared universe or whatever. Which in turn has been built on for the past eighty years by future generations of writers who were inspired by it, throwing an off-hand reference to Carcosa in to tie themselves to Lovecraft in increasingly strained ways.
I think Bloodborne definitely takes explicitly from Lovecraft, even if in doing so with the rest of it's setting results in it looking more akin to something else
I feel like there's a lot of media that is trying to be Lovecraftian or is even pulling direct ideas from Lovecraft, and then actually ending up in some other bucket of cosmic horror (most frequently Derleth, but also a lot of Blackwood and Chambers in there as well). Part of the issue there is that Lovecraftian and cosmic horror are often treated synonymously, when Lovecraft really occupied a fairly specific niche of the genre. He's treated as the only name in town, a lot of times, when in actuality there were (and are) a lot of other writers working in a similar place.
I wouldn't consider it like, an admonishment, a "Hey you fucked up making a Lovecraft game, this is Blackwood as hell," but rather, if this is what you see when you see cosmic horror as a genre, if these are the ideas that reading Lovecraft sparks in you, maybe check out some of these other authors, both because they are very good and also because they are not the king of virulent racism mountain.
I wanna point out that Chambers was also a racist and published a novel in 1920 about Asian people trying to racially infiltrate and destroy America
Platy on
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I think Bloodborne definitely takes explicitly from Lovecraft, even if in doing so with the rest of it's setting results in it looking more akin to something else
I feel like there's a lot of media that is trying to be Lovecraftian or is even pulling direct ideas from Lovecraft, and then actually ending up in some other bucket of cosmic horror (most frequently Derleth, but also a lot of Blackwood and Chambers in there as well). Part of the issue there is that Lovecraftian and cosmic horror are often treated synonymously, when Lovecraft really occupied a fairly specific niche of the genre. He's treated as the only name in town, a lot of times, when in actuality there were (and are) a lot of other writers working in a similar place.
I wouldn't consider it like, an admonishment, a "Hey you fucked up making a Lovecraft game, this is Blackwood as hell," but rather, if this is what you see when you see cosmic horror as a genre, if these are the ideas that reading Lovecraft sparks in you, maybe check out some of these other authors, both because they are very good and also because they are not the king of virulent racism mountain.
I wanna point out that Chambers was also a racist and published a novel in 1920 about Asian people trying to racially infiltrate and destroy America
Yeah this is a fair point. The King in Yellow stories have a bunch of stuff about immigration having been an issue for the United States (in the far off future of 1920) and are fairly anti-Semitic as well.
A lot of the other classic cosmic horror authors are huge racists, and putting forth the idea of looking at other authors as a non-racist option isn't really a framing I should have used. I would still encourage reading outside the comparatively narrow bounds of Lovecraft, but don't expect the grass to be all that green there either.
If the King in Yellow existed now then it'd be a hidden YouTube video series that algorithms take you to at 3am at your loneliest, darkest point and you don't see the morning, you're in Carcosa now...
Anyway got Eclipse Phase 2nd in the post ad uh yeah Eclipse Phase is still one of the most inventive, progressive, intelligent and thematic RPGs ever. I fucking love that game. I'm writing a campaign right fucking now.
So the current Acq Inc run of CoC and talk in here has got me wondering - Is there any post-post-apocalyptic Old Gods fiction or game settings? Basically, Eldritch-Punk, where Old God unspeakable horrors have been conquered and tamed by humans?
So the current Acq Inc run of CoC and talk in here has got me wondering - Is there any post-post-apocalyptic Old Gods fiction or game settings? Basically, Eldritch-Punk, where Old God unspeakable horrors have been conquered and tamed by humans?
I think that is part of the pitch of Fate of Cthulhu, actually? It's like a Lovecraftian apocalypse crossed with the Terminator.
I guess that's still just post-apocalyptic though.
Played a great game of Monster of the Week at PAX this week. Bernetta was a great Keeper and her podcast is here https://allmyhexes.simplecast.com/
The part of character creation where you give each other bonds was great fun, the most I've ever had pulling a group together. By the end I had a little brother, a partner in crime, and a confidant. Super-simple, flavorful, and effective. We were playing a group of high school teens, so I went with a Crooked, basically someone who's been on the wrong side of the law but comes over to the team due supernatural spookiness. Of course, my shitty teen had to be named Seth. And I picked the Burglar specialization because of course shitty teen like to break into places. It came in handy.
Does anyone know a good actual play of Blades in the Dark? I'd like to know how it goes in play. Preferably at least a short campaign, because I'm also curious about the downtime/gang/faction systems. I think I've voiced this concern before but it seems like if you're constantly giving the gang Heat, and bad Status with other factions, and Stress, you'll crush them. I'm wondering how to balance it so they're pressured but not squished outright.
FaTT did a short Blades in the dark season called Marielda
Keep in mind that they were playing it while Blades was still in playtesting, and they also did some homebrew, so some of the rules they go over were changed/they got wrong.
Nearing the end of my campaign after a year and a half. Just gonna toss some ideas out if you folks don't mind:
They just took out a huge warehouse with one of the main bosses and just a buttload of lackeys. They did this with the joint assistance of a local gang two of the party members joined (the Dock Boys) and a group of elite city guards. After they decide which of the two involved parties gets the masterwork arms and armor they just liberated, they will find out that their home containing all the special stuff needed to summon the big bad has been ransacked. Why? Because at no point did they ever do anything to make it safer. They didn't change the locks, or hire guards, or put up magic wards, hell I even offered them a chance to get a magical flying castle they liberated from the elemental plane of air and move their base to that and they decided it was too much work. So now they have to fight an evil god.
So next order of business, they know theres a cult, they know a few members of it. They also know that the cult is arming and training a second gang whom the party killed all the leaders of but didn't give the location of to the city guard or the gang they were a part of. Basically I decided that because they left a loose end, the cult picked it up for them. They also know where this training is happening and one of the other bosses is there. So they could storm that, or try and find more of the cultists.
No matter which they choose first, they have to do the other after. That takes them to just a few days (2-3) before the annual Harvest Festive to celebrate the goddess of the harvest. The end of the road is coming and I think its time they start facing the greater consequences of their decisions. They didn't stop the plague monster in the sewers? Bam now a huge section of the city (where the majority of the militia are from) has plague and is sick. They didn't follow up on that note to the assassins about acquiring a large amount of sleeping drought? Well in the final battle the city guard is knocked out cold. Maybe they'll be smart enough to arm the gang that owes them a huge favor with these new weapons and can use them as an ally in the fight. Or maybe not!
Last night my level 11 players found their way into the ruins of a warlock's tower. This warlock was big into grabbing every single magical thing he could. Which is why they found a fortune telling changing machine. A wooden seer who, for a special token, would draw you a card from a deck of many things.
One player almost drew donjon, but there was a fumble and it didn't take. Ended up with the Throne, so super persuasion and a keep, somewhere, which was great because the gang has been very much "shove the charismatic paladin/bard in front of every social encounter we've got".
Then, said paladin/bard had the clever idea of ordering his unseen servant to drop the only other token they'd found into the machine, and pulled the Sun. 50,000 xp and a wonderous item of my choice sounds great for him...but the Paladin didn't actually draw it. The servant did.
After a bit of thinking, I decided that much raw knowledge, poured into a mindless servant meant that the power of the card turned it into a level 5, tween half elf bard holding a wonderous Cli Lyre.
So they get to wander the tower keeping their new, far less leveled son alive while trying to find a way to save the world.
Then, said paladin/bard had the clever idea of ordering his unseen servant to drop the only other token they'd found into the machine, and pulled the Sun. 50,000 xp and a wonderous item of my choice sounds great for him...but the Paladin didn't actually draw it. The servant did.
This is 😙👌 I never would have thought of that.
My first instinct when I read those words - and this is just about the opposite direction of what you went with - was "this is a recurring nemesis origin story". The unseen servant would become sentient, and so become cognizant of the indignities it's been put through. "You made me polish your armor. You made me chop the wood. You made me carry the corpses." It would want to go off and free the magically-indentured servants of the world, and would cross paths with the party to try to punish them for their actions (and/or they'd get hired to put down some magical servant rebellion that would turn out to be its doing).
Then, said paladin/bard had the clever idea of ordering his unseen servant to drop the only other token they'd found into the machine, and pulled the Sun. 50,000 xp and a wonderous item of my choice sounds great for him...but the Paladin didn't actually draw it. The servant did.
This is 😙👌 I never would have thought of that.
My first instinct when I read those words - and this is just about the opposite direction of what you went with - was "this is a recurring nemesis origin story". The unseen servant would become sentient, and so become cognizant of the indignities it's been put through. "You made me polish your armor. You made me chop the wood. You made me carry the corpses." It would want to go off and free the magically-indentured servants of the world, and would cross paths with the party to try to punish them for their actions (and/or they'd get hired to put down some magical servant rebellion that would turn out to be its doing).
Well, the tween half elf bard is likely about to hit his rebellious teen years, so that's not necessarily out of the question.
And rebellious teen years for a half elf can last decades.
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
my friend is doing Lost Mine of Phandelver, my character in his game is my Boy Detective
it is very fun to play the angry hormone-filled teen with a super camera brain and a hand crossbow
especially when he's becoming an increasingly ruthless killer under the guidance of his new father figures, an incredibly intense cleric of Bane and an evil power-hungry gnome wizard.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Nearing the end of my campaign after a year and a half. Just gonna toss some ideas out if you folks don't mind:
They just took out a huge warehouse with one of the main bosses and just a buttload of lackeys. They did this with the joint assistance of a local gang two of the party members joined (the Dock Boys) and a group of elite city guards. After they decide which of the two involved parties gets the masterwork arms and armor they just liberated, they will find out that their home containing all the special stuff needed to summon the big bad has been ransacked. Why? Because at no point did they ever do anything to make it safer. They didn't change the locks, or hire guards, or put up magic wards, hell I even offered them a chance to get a magical flying castle they liberated from the elemental plane of air and move their base to that and they decided it was too much work. So now they have to fight an evil god.
So next order of business, they know theres a cult, they know a few members of it. They also know that the cult is arming and training a second gang whom the party killed all the leaders of but didn't give the location of to the city guard or the gang they were a part of. Basically I decided that because they left a loose end, the cult picked it up for them. They also know where this training is happening and one of the other bosses is there. So they could storm that, or try and find more of the cultists.
No matter which they choose first, they have to do the other after. That takes them to just a few days (2-3) before the annual Harvest Festive to celebrate the goddess of the harvest. The end of the road is coming and I think its time they start facing the greater consequences of their decisions. They didn't stop the plague monster in the sewers? Bam now a huge section of the city (where the majority of the militia are from) has plague and is sick. They didn't follow up on that note to the assassins about acquiring a large amount of sleeping drought? Well in the final battle the city guard is knocked out cold. Maybe they'll be smart enough to arm the gang that owes them a huge favor with these new weapons and can use them as an ally in the fight. Or maybe not!
My suggestion here is to avoid "This is all the shit you fucked up and it's gonna make this suck ass"
Yes it's dramatic and realistic but players tend to feel put upon when something in the campaign they never cared about makes getting the results they've been aiming for for X number of sessions harder to achieve
My suggestion is "This is all the shit you fucked up and now instead of having Both A and B supports, you have to fucking choose whether you fix A or B in time to get just that one support" Repeat for C and D, E and F, etc
Be prepared if your players manage to step up with something super clever to somehow fix both problems at once and reward them for that. The key point of offering these choices is so that the players have the ability to say something like, "Oh I didn't mean to fuck that up, my character would be interested in fixing this" all the way to "My character literally doesn't care and will accept the consequences". This way the story still hangs together and there's dramatic tension but none of the players spend the climax grousing about how mad they are that the can't be the Big Damn (or exceedingly indifferent) Heroes they pictured themselves as
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Also did the players know that they could upgrade their hideout? Had they ever came across enemy hideouts with wards, upgraded doors, locks and other things like that? It could be a situation of the players not realizing a thing that would have been obvious to their characters.
If there was no foreshadowing at all about the possibility of their place getting sacked, i could see them getting annoyed. Point to your favor though, you did offer them a flying castle.
Also, balance out consequences with rewards, like the people they helped coming back to support them
Ideally minor NPCs they helped as an afterthought or by accident as well as the people who paid them for help
This is happening, they have the gang behind them, a pair of alchenists they rescued from goblins who specialize in demolitions, and they already got help from them in a trial but they saved d group of kobold sewer workers who are going to rally some people to help
They totally were given an option to upgrade their house. The guy they had watching it even offered to get some contractors working on fixing it up and the head of the city watch offered them sine guards that they turned down, and I described the cellar as having a "dilapidated but heavy stone door that may have once been for a vault"
I'm not planning on punishing them for things they didn't do but I do want to show consequences and it could have made things easier if they decided on another direction to do things. No right or wrong answer but easier or harder. For instance when they spent half a session violently torturing a dude and they kind of forgot they asked the city guard for backup and oops now the guard walks in on you torturing a dude tarnished their image and made people leery to work with them for awhile
GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
Can I crowdsource some plot ideas for my campaign?
The next storyline is gonna be this: The evil cult wants to use 4 magical daggers to perform a ritual to summon The Great Devourer, a mystical monster that grows the more it eats and can level cities. (This is basically the plot of the first season of Lego Ninjago, but my players don't have kids) The party gets told to a) find those daggers before the cultists do, b) find out what The Great Devourer actually is and c) find out how to destroy the weapons. The current situation is that just plain destroying one of the daggers just makes it reappear somewhere else.
So now I need at least 4 places for the daggers (can be more, because some rumors can turn out to be false). I currently have:
A derelict old temple, probably snake/Yuan-Ti themed where the party has to perform some trials to gain the dagger in the end.
The hoard of the Golden Empress (supreme ruler of the entire known world) who is collecting all kinds of magic artefacts and nobody has actually seen for years. This is supposed to be super suspicious because in the end she will have been collecting all the stuff to secretly fight against the same enemies the players are fighting.
The hands of a criminal boss who resides on an island. There will be an invite-only (or cash buy-in?) tournament (playing out like a mix of Casino Royale and Mortal Kombat), where the winner can get a prize of their choice from his hold. (obv. the players can also just steal it).
The first two will be known to the players from the start. I expect them to go for the temple first, I will also place it nearer to their current location. When they go to the capital for the Golden Empress, they will also be able to gather more information (a lot of magical knowledge is centered there) and gain clues to the rest of the daggers.
Where else could the daggers be? What other movies or TV can I crib of?
I like the hook, but my first question is: how did the daggers get to their current location? Is that where they ended up after being destroyed previously, or did their current owners find them and lock them away?
If the daggers have some level of control over where they end up, then the first three locations suggest that they seek out secure places, or owners who appreciate them for their non-world-ending qualities. One such place would be in the hands of somebody who doesn't even know that it's a particularly special dagger, and naturally keeps out of the limelight - maybe a regional bandit chieftain or head of a Thieves' Guild. The players could be beset by bandits in the typical sidequesty, "DM needs to make travel interesting" way, but clues like the insignia of the rank and file men or the occasional glimpse of aftereffects of strong spells eventually clue them in to the fact that they should be investigating the organisation.
If the daggers, on some level, want to be used, maybe they seek out powerful people like in your first examples (I assume the temple was a Big Deal back in the day). What about another group of adventurers? Your group could ambush them, make a trade, or hire them to go into an area way overlevelled and take the dagger off the bloody corpse. They could even rig up a dungeon of their own devising and lure the rival group into it, and then your players play the role of the traps and monsters that they've managed to capture while you play the rivals. That might be a bit too left-field, though.
I like the idea of one of the daggers to be in the hands of some infamous assassian, if only because there's a solid chance that the party will get the idea to take out a hit on themselves to lure the guy out.
As for destruction, maybe set where they reappear as a fixed place, and they are only ever truly destroyed if destroyed in that place. Possibly the temple that the ritual to summon the Devourer would take place in. Make them protect the daggers until it's the right moment.
Oh maybe the daggers reappear somewhere else but it's not random kind of like what Narbus said and they have to also get into the place where that is and like destroy a crystal or something for each dagger
Oh here's a thing: as it stands now, if just one dagger is destroyed then your players win. There no reason for them to hunt down any more than a single dagger.
Make at least part of the destruction condition be that they must all be destroyed at the same time.
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GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
Oh here's a thing: as it stands now, if just one dagger is destroyed then your players win. There no reason for them to hunt down any more than a single dagger.
Make at least part of the destruction condition be that they must all be destroyed at the same time.
Yeah, that was the plan. If you destroy one dagger e.g. by smelting it, it reappears*. But if you destroy all together in a specific way then you can get rid of them.
* I initially thought randomly in the world, but it kinda makes sense that they seek out powerful people or that they always reappear in a specific place. If I go with the latter then the current situation has to be that they have been split up at some point, maybe by someone else who wanted to prevent the Devourer but couldn't outright destroy them.
- Dagger has been swallowed by some kind of humongous critter. Dungeons that are actually some giant beastie's guts are a time honored video game RPG tradition that doesn't filter back into TTRPGs quite as often.
- Dagger is in the evidence vault of a law enforcement group. It was recovered as part of a larger haul, and they don't know what they have. Bonus if the PCs get intel that someone in that group might use the dagger for evil if they find out what they have, and bigger bonus if there's a ticking clock on how long it will take them to sort and identify the haul it's a part of.
- Dagger is owned by a little kid. A sad, scrawny orphan. It was a gift from her beloved papa before he was eaten by giant bats or whatever. It's the last piece of property she has to remember him. What kind of fucking monster would take it away from her?
- Are the daggers a matched set? If not, this one looks like a fancy carving knife, and is used in the kitchen of the realm's most prestigious restaurant. Reservations are six months out, there is a dress code that none of your scruffy adventurers can meet, and the whole place is constantly swarming with high society types who have sufficient malice and resources to devote themselves to harassing anyone who interrupts their brunch.
- Dagger was used to stake a Dracula. Or some other kind of monster that is inhibited from regenerating if the weapon is left in the vulnerable spot. If you pull it out, they'll get better. And may be grateful? Or may just be hungry.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Posts
A stepping stone to the likes of Night Vale (Very gay impossible town podcast) and Bloodborne (Japanese bloody plague video game) and, as said, the Ballad of Black Tom.
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So today I played my dumb tactical board game DAMAGE with five whole other people! Very exciting.
It's barely subtext.
I feel like there's a lot of media that is trying to be Lovecraftian or is even pulling direct ideas from Lovecraft, and then actually ending up in some other bucket of cosmic horror (most frequently Derleth, but also a lot of Blackwood and Chambers in there as well). Part of the issue there is that Lovecraftian and cosmic horror are often treated synonymously, when Lovecraft really occupied a fairly specific niche of the genre. He's treated as the only name in town, a lot of times, when in actuality there were (and are) a lot of other writers working in a similar place.
I wouldn't consider it like, an admonishment, a "Hey you fucked up making a Lovecraft game, this is Blackwood as hell," but rather, if this is what you see when you see cosmic horror as a genre, if these are the ideas that reading Lovecraft sparks in you, maybe check out some of these other authors, both because they are very good and also because they are not the king of virulent racism mountain.
Huh, TIL. I just assumed Lovecraftian horror was being rebranded as Cosmic Horror to leave behind the racist stigma. I had no idea about any of this, but I've only been tangentially interested in the genre. A couple of games, the broadest strokes of the Cthulu/Old Ones mythos, and that's it. I haven't read any of it.
All this time the people that are all "Stop making Lovecraftian games" struck me as stupid because the entire world is supposed drop an entire genre because of one racist fuck? So perhaps I'll need to revisit some of the articles and arguments because there's a chance some of them have more nuance to them than I was understanding.
Like, what specifcally is Lovecraftian vs. Blackwood or Chambers or Derleth?
Blackwood is the author I'm the least familiar with, but his supernatural and cosmic horror works were heavily based around a man versus nature narrative, essentially. The unknown is terrifying, and there are things out there beyond our ken that will kill you in an instant, but such is the way of nature. And the way of man is that we can conquer nature - we have done it before and we will do it again, even if what we face now seems stranger and more horrifying than anything before.
When we're talking Chambers, we're talking The King in Yellow, which is a great series of short stories that later got adapted heavily into Lovecraftian mythos (more on that later). But the funny thing about Chambers is that he was mostly a romantic author, and that seeps through a bunch in his horror work as well. His characters are almost invariably artists or members of arts communities, and at least one of the stories in the cycle has a happy ending. The play and the king himself still are things that could fall into the realm of that Lovecraftian nihilism, as the play threatens to drive anyone who makes it to the second act irrevocably mad and the king is the sort of malicious figure we frequent see with Lovecraft's gods, but they're viewed a bit more at a remove - less inescapable, and more terrible things that could exist in the world.
Derleth is... well he's an okay writer on his own. He's more important for his connection to Lovecraft though. They were friends, of a sort - Derleth looked up to him a bunch, and believed that his stories were absolutely fantastic. In fact, after Lovecraft's death, he made it his whole mission to get those stories more widely published (which he sort of succeeded at and sort of completely fucking bungled). He's the whole reason that we know about Lovecraft today, the reason Lovecraft is considered the cultural titan that he is. In doing all of this though, he tried to make sense out of Lovecraft. He looked at the dozen times that Lovecraft called something Nyarlathotep and said that these must all be the same person, that this is a big jigsaw that needed to be solved. He created a pantheon, essentially, with the same sort of normative structure you would expect for any other pantheon, rather than the sort of chaotic (and probably unintentional) mess that Lovecraft had left behind.
In doing all of that, Derleth also pulled in a lot of works from, say, folks like Blackwood and Chambers, both of whom generally predated Lovecraft. Which muddles the waters even more for when we're talking about cosmic horror, because those slim references to the King in Yellow that Lovecraft made got turned into full blown gods in the Derleth system, and every future edition of the book published had a tentacle slapped on it so you knew it was part of the Lovecraft shared universe or whatever. Which in turn has been built on for the past eighty years by future generations of writers who were inspired by it, throwing an off-hand reference to Carcosa in to tie themselves to Lovecraft in increasingly strained ways.
I wanna point out that Chambers was also a racist and published a novel in 1920 about Asian people trying to racially infiltrate and destroy America
Yeah this is a fair point. The King in Yellow stories have a bunch of stuff about immigration having been an issue for the United States (in the far off future of 1920) and are fairly anti-Semitic as well.
A lot of the other classic cosmic horror authors are huge racists, and putting forth the idea of looking at other authors as a non-racist option isn't really a framing I should have used. I would still encourage reading outside the comparatively narrow bounds of Lovecraft, but don't expect the grass to be all that green there either.
Which at first sounds bad but actually who wouldn't want to watch Logan Paul claw his own eyes out?
I think that is part of the pitch of Fate of Cthulhu, actually? It's like a Lovecraftian apocalypse crossed with the Terminator.
I guess that's still just post-apocalyptic though.
The part of character creation where you give each other bonds was great fun, the most I've ever had pulling a group together. By the end I had a little brother, a partner in crime, and a confidant. Super-simple, flavorful, and effective. We were playing a group of high school teens, so I went with a Crooked, basically someone who's been on the wrong side of the law but comes over to the team due supernatural spookiness. Of course, my shitty teen had to be named Seth. And I picked the Burglar specialization because of course shitty teen like to break into places. It came in handy.
Does anyone know a good actual play of Blades in the Dark? I'd like to know how it goes in play. Preferably at least a short campaign, because I'm also curious about the downtime/gang/faction systems. I think I've voiced this concern before but it seems like if you're constantly giving the gang Heat, and bad Status with other factions, and Stress, you'll crush them. I'm wondering how to balance it so they're pressured but not squished outright.
Keep in mind that they were playing it while Blades was still in playtesting, and they also did some homebrew, so some of the rules they go over were changed/they got wrong.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
So next order of business, they know theres a cult, they know a few members of it. They also know that the cult is arming and training a second gang whom the party killed all the leaders of but didn't give the location of to the city guard or the gang they were a part of. Basically I decided that because they left a loose end, the cult picked it up for them. They also know where this training is happening and one of the other bosses is there. So they could storm that, or try and find more of the cultists.
No matter which they choose first, they have to do the other after. That takes them to just a few days (2-3) before the annual Harvest Festive to celebrate the goddess of the harvest. The end of the road is coming and I think its time they start facing the greater consequences of their decisions. They didn't stop the plague monster in the sewers? Bam now a huge section of the city (where the majority of the militia are from) has plague and is sick. They didn't follow up on that note to the assassins about acquiring a large amount of sleeping drought? Well in the final battle the city guard is knocked out cold. Maybe they'll be smart enough to arm the gang that owes them a huge favor with these new weapons and can use them as an ally in the fight. Or maybe not!
One player almost drew donjon, but there was a fumble and it didn't take. Ended up with the Throne, so super persuasion and a keep, somewhere, which was great because the gang has been very much "shove the charismatic paladin/bard in front of every social encounter we've got".
Then, said paladin/bard had the clever idea of ordering his unseen servant to drop the only other token they'd found into the machine, and pulled the Sun. 50,000 xp and a wonderous item of my choice sounds great for him...but the Paladin didn't actually draw it. The servant did.
After a bit of thinking, I decided that much raw knowledge, poured into a mindless servant meant that the power of the card turned it into a level 5, tween half elf bard holding a wonderous Cli Lyre.
So they get to wander the tower keeping their new, far less leveled son alive while trying to find a way to save the world.
My first instinct when I read those words - and this is just about the opposite direction of what you went with - was "this is a recurring nemesis origin story". The unseen servant would become sentient, and so become cognizant of the indignities it's been put through. "You made me polish your armor. You made me chop the wood. You made me carry the corpses." It would want to go off and free the magically-indentured servants of the world, and would cross paths with the party to try to punish them for their actions (and/or they'd get hired to put down some magical servant rebellion that would turn out to be its doing).
Well, the tween half elf bard is likely about to hit his rebellious teen years, so that's not necessarily out of the question.
And rebellious teen years for a half elf can last decades.
it is very fun to play the angry hormone-filled teen with a super camera brain and a hand crossbow
especially when he's becoming an increasingly ruthless killer under the guidance of his new father figures, an incredibly intense cleric of Bane and an evil power-hungry gnome wizard.
My suggestion here is to avoid "This is all the shit you fucked up and it's gonna make this suck ass"
Yes it's dramatic and realistic but players tend to feel put upon when something in the campaign they never cared about makes getting the results they've been aiming for for X number of sessions harder to achieve
My suggestion is "This is all the shit you fucked up and now instead of having Both A and B supports, you have to fucking choose whether you fix A or B in time to get just that one support" Repeat for C and D, E and F, etc
Be prepared if your players manage to step up with something super clever to somehow fix both problems at once and reward them for that. The key point of offering these choices is so that the players have the ability to say something like, "Oh I didn't mean to fuck that up, my character would be interested in fixing this" all the way to "My character literally doesn't care and will accept the consequences". This way the story still hangs together and there's dramatic tension but none of the players spend the climax grousing about how mad they are that the can't be the Big Damn (or exceedingly indifferent) Heroes they pictured themselves as
If there was no foreshadowing at all about the possibility of their place getting sacked, i could see them getting annoyed. Point to your favor though, you did offer them a flying castle.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Ideally minor NPCs they helped as an afterthought or by accident as well as the people who paid them for help
This is happening, they have the gang behind them, a pair of alchenists they rescued from goblins who specialize in demolitions, and they already got help from them in a trial but they saved d group of kobold sewer workers who are going to rally some people to help
They totally were given an option to upgrade their house. The guy they had watching it even offered to get some contractors working on fixing it up and the head of the city watch offered them sine guards that they turned down, and I described the cellar as having a "dilapidated but heavy stone door that may have once been for a vault"
I'm not planning on punishing them for things they didn't do but I do want to show consequences and it could have made things easier if they decided on another direction to do things. No right or wrong answer but easier or harder. For instance when they spent half a session violently torturing a dude and they kind of forgot they asked the city guard for backup and oops now the guard walks in on you torturing a dude tarnished their image and made people leery to work with them for awhile
The next storyline is gonna be this: The evil cult wants to use 4 magical daggers to perform a ritual to summon The Great Devourer, a mystical monster that grows the more it eats and can level cities. (This is basically the plot of the first season of Lego Ninjago, but my players don't have kids) The party gets told to a) find those daggers before the cultists do, b) find out what The Great Devourer actually is and c) find out how to destroy the weapons. The current situation is that just plain destroying one of the daggers just makes it reappear somewhere else.
So now I need at least 4 places for the daggers (can be more, because some rumors can turn out to be false). I currently have:
A derelict old temple, probably snake/Yuan-Ti themed where the party has to perform some trials to gain the dagger in the end.
The hoard of the Golden Empress (supreme ruler of the entire known world) who is collecting all kinds of magic artefacts and nobody has actually seen for years. This is supposed to be super suspicious because in the end she will have been collecting all the stuff to secretly fight against the same enemies the players are fighting.
The hands of a criminal boss who resides on an island. There will be an invite-only (or cash buy-in?) tournament (playing out like a mix of Casino Royale and Mortal Kombat), where the winner can get a prize of their choice from his hold. (obv. the players can also just steal it).
The first two will be known to the players from the start. I expect them to go for the temple first, I will also place it nearer to their current location. When they go to the capital for the Golden Empress, they will also be able to gather more information (a lot of magical knowledge is centered there) and gain clues to the rest of the daggers.
Where else could the daggers be? What other movies or TV can I crib of?
If the daggers have some level of control over where they end up, then the first three locations suggest that they seek out secure places, or owners who appreciate them for their non-world-ending qualities. One such place would be in the hands of somebody who doesn't even know that it's a particularly special dagger, and naturally keeps out of the limelight - maybe a regional bandit chieftain or head of a Thieves' Guild. The players could be beset by bandits in the typical sidequesty, "DM needs to make travel interesting" way, but clues like the insignia of the rank and file men or the occasional glimpse of aftereffects of strong spells eventually clue them in to the fact that they should be investigating the organisation.
If the daggers, on some level, want to be used, maybe they seek out powerful people like in your first examples (I assume the temple was a Big Deal back in the day). What about another group of adventurers? Your group could ambush them, make a trade, or hire them to go into an area way overlevelled and take the dagger off the bloody corpse. They could even rig up a dungeon of their own devising and lure the rival group into it, and then your players play the role of the traps and monsters that they've managed to capture while you play the rivals. That might be a bit too left-field, though.
As for destruction, maybe set where they reappear as a fixed place, and they are only ever truly destroyed if destroyed in that place. Possibly the temple that the ritual to summon the Devourer would take place in. Make them protect the daggers until it's the right moment.
Make at least part of the destruction condition be that they must all be destroyed at the same time.
Yeah, that was the plan. If you destroy one dagger e.g. by smelting it, it reappears*. But if you destroy all together in a specific way then you can get rid of them.
* I initially thought randomly in the world, but it kinda makes sense that they seek out powerful people or that they always reappear in a specific place. If I go with the latter then the current situation has to be that they have been split up at some point, maybe by someone else who wanted to prevent the Devourer but couldn't outright destroy them.
- Dagger has been swallowed by some kind of humongous critter. Dungeons that are actually some giant beastie's guts are a time honored video game RPG tradition that doesn't filter back into TTRPGs quite as often.
- Dagger is in the evidence vault of a law enforcement group. It was recovered as part of a larger haul, and they don't know what they have. Bonus if the PCs get intel that someone in that group might use the dagger for evil if they find out what they have, and bigger bonus if there's a ticking clock on how long it will take them to sort and identify the haul it's a part of.
- Dagger is owned by a little kid. A sad, scrawny orphan. It was a gift from her beloved papa before he was eaten by giant bats or whatever. It's the last piece of property she has to remember him. What kind of fucking monster would take it away from her?
- Are the daggers a matched set? If not, this one looks like a fancy carving knife, and is used in the kitchen of the realm's most prestigious restaurant. Reservations are six months out, there is a dress code that none of your scruffy adventurers can meet, and the whole place is constantly swarming with high society types who have sufficient malice and resources to devote themselves to harassing anyone who interrupts their brunch.
- Dagger was used to stake a Dracula. Or some other kind of monster that is inhibited from regenerating if the weapon is left in the vulnerable spot. If you pull it out, they'll get better. And may be grateful? Or may just be hungry.
in a very real and legally binding sense.
So my Cyberpunk name is DUKE HUSTLE
Likewise I can assume @SirToasty and @Bobble are some variation of Carolina Farts or Carolina Class Traitors
:heartbeat:
Edit: oh man, DADGUM CLASS TRAITOR
That's got some pizzazz
Hmm