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Help me GM a CoC campaign
Vic
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been GMng on and off for ages for my friends, with decent success. A while ago I made a oneshot adventure with the call of Cthulhu ruleset, a horror game that only loosely followed the lovecraftian style. While my plot was fairly transparent it nevertheless was fairly fun and atmospheric.
Now I am considering starting a CoC game again, and be more careful in my planning this time. And so, I am coming to you for inspiration.
Firstly, I know very little of Lovecrafts work. My knowledge is basically limited to the main old gods, good old Cthulhu himself, that books are generally horrible tombs of forbidden knowledge and that there are demons around. However, I feel justified in thinking that pretty much anything horrible that is mystic in nature can be fitted into a lovecraftian adventure with little fuss.
I've decided to include a few loose organisations of scholars that trade in the more benign tombs of magic, and an X-files like branch of the CIA that is trying to gather information on the supernatural whos agents sometimes don't get eaten by demons. These don't seem to fit the lovecraftian theme that well, but I feel that it is not unrealistic to assume that a few people are actually aware that there are old gods and demons without immediately rushing off to go mad trying to earn forbidden knowledge or to find a deep one to rip them in two.
Posts I would greatly appreciate:
Hints on how to run a successful Call of Ctulhu game
Ideas for cool encounters or sidestories.
General interesting information on Cthulhu mythos, and stuff you recommend that I read.
Now I am considering starting a CoC game again, and be more careful in my planning this time. And so, I am coming to you for inspiration.
Firstly, I know very little of Lovecrafts work. My knowledge is basically limited to the main old gods, good old Cthulhu himself, that books are generally horrible tombs of forbidden knowledge and that there are demons around. However, I feel justified in thinking that pretty much anything horrible that is mystic in nature can be fitted into a lovecraftian adventure with little fuss.
I've decided to include a few loose organisations of scholars that trade in the more benign tombs of magic, and an X-files like branch of the CIA that is trying to gather information on the supernatural whos agents sometimes don't get eaten by demons. These don't seem to fit the lovecraftian theme that well, but I feel that it is not unrealistic to assume that a few people are actually aware that there are old gods and demons without immediately rushing off to go mad trying to earn forbidden knowledge or to find a deep one to rip them in two.
Posts I would greatly appreciate:
Hints on how to run a successful Call of Ctulhu game
Ideas for cool encounters or sidestories.
General interesting information on Cthulhu mythos, and stuff you recommend that I read.
Vic on
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One thing that Lovecraft did was take some other writers and incorporate parts of their work into his mythos.
Hastur, for instance was derived from a collection of Robert Chambers stories called the King in Yellow.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8492
I probably wouldn't read more than the first few stories to get a feel for it, though.
Emphasis: Players, not characters.
basically, any Silent Hill soundtrack
I scared the crap out of my dnd group once when I put them up against a Wendigo. First they found the creepy remains of its cannibalistic behavior... a dead body sitting at the foot of a tree and an insately large splash of blood staining the snow surrounding it as evidence that the man had managed to run several meters with a missing arm before he collapsed and nearly clawed his own face off before bleeding to death. Set the tone of the silent woods with gently falling snow... very little in the way of description, just a blank white slate with the treetrunks that interfere with one's vision... not a single sound but one's own breath and footsteps. An eerie, eerie quiet (we were also in a pretty quiet place and I kept my voice low with no music or anything in the background).
The Wendigo was always in the corner of their eyes, always seeming to be behind a different tree, and one by one it assaulted their sanity. It would target one character, and then whisper their name. None of the other characters could hear it, because it was a mind-affecting ability. The whisper would appear to come from different parts of the darkening forest around them, increasing in frequency and volume until it reached a fever pitch that sent them to the ground, shrieking and quivering.
It scared the crap out of them because the imagery was simple enough that they could picture it easily, and the Wendigo playing with their minds became the thing that they focused upon. The treetrunks and white snow were simple, made it easy to picture something darting at their field of vision, and the dead silence made the horrible whispering all the more audible in their mind.
You can do a similar thing with total darkness... kinda like in pitch black when Vin Diesel blows fire and suddenly you see him surrounded by those damn things. That's a good way to reveal a nasty situation in a way that suprises and scares the players. Total darkness... easily to visualize... and then they turn on the lights and holyshitfangsandclawsandohmydeargodgetitoffmegetitoffme!
When I was young, something that really scared the fuck out of me was the tv-movie adaptation of Stephen King's "It". Not because the show was any good, but the idea of something that would become the most frightful thing you could imagine was ungodly horrifying. So when I bring the players in I try as much as possible to let them scare the shit out of themselves.
Heh, awesome story, and good advice. Undetailed descriptions to force the players to udr yhrit imshinsyion, accentuated by occasional gory detail would probably work well in alot of situations in a CoC campaign.
I intend to try to work at building up tension before major encounters. A setting where the characters are as helpless as in CoC is also perfect for setting up encounters where the players feel vulnerable, forcing them to run or hide. In D&D it is fairly hard to design an encounter where the characters do not either defeat their foe or get defeated and/or killed. A sword in your hand gives you confidence, often more than what is healthy for you. A gun in your hand is much less of a comfort if you know the demon on the other side of the door will just get angry if you attempt to shoot it oh god it stopped maybe it heard me breathe.