Cthulhu Heartbreakers

[Ancient History]

I'll never understand what's with people trying to shoehorn magic into the Cthulhu mythos. Please correct me if I'm wrong but... has anyone ever stumbled upon a Cthulhuverse story that actually had magic? I haven't.

Lovecraft's stories are on the edge of magic vs. sufficiently-advanced-technology, his weird fiction blends between fantasy and science fiction fairly readily.

[JigokuBosatsu]

How does Darkest Dungeon handle such troupe play differently from Ars Magica? The idea of having a main PC tier character that is your, and then contributing to a pool of researchers and other scoobies seems like a fix for that.

It doesn't... handle it, exactly. At the beginning of the game it sort of implies that the starting Crusader character is you, but as the game goes on it becomes clear that the player represents the unseen "descendant" of the guy who unleashed all the horrors on the town. Your role as player is to send adventuring parties out, try to help the survivors who return, and rebuild the town with the recovered loot. However, during the final boss fight

against the Ancestor, who has become an avatar/high priest of Azathoth, it gets a little confusing. The battle takes place in the titular Dungeon but the current party is whisked into some extradimensional space, and the whole time the Ancestor is addressing you, the descendant, who presumably is not actually there. I mean, it's possible that all the narration is you reading a journal or letter or something in his voice

so ultimately I don't know what the fuck is going on.

Other than that, using an Ars Magica troupe style approach for a tabletop version would be fine, but I think so would a Black Marches campaign.

[Nath]

B) Some kind of despair track, where people start to give in to the hopelessness of the situation and it basically encourages people to carefully choose their approach (with failures leading to more despair, and even small successes pushing it back, versus "how much more fucked does the world get if we ignore this in favor of an easier thing that boosts our mood?"), and probably also inter-party communication to help snap each other out of it.

Although it used Sanity points, Cthulhu Gumshoe had an interesting concept which had you defining what were the five pillars of your character personality. For instance, a policeman would have had the Law, the police department, his family, his Christian faith and the local Irish community. And as the character would lose sanity points during the game, the player get to chose which pillar would fall (in this case, making him, in no specific order, crooked, fired, divorced, atheist and recluse). IIRC, the only way to regain sanity points was to rebuild the pillar or replace it with a new one.

[Username17]

As we've been talking about with Ars Magica, Call of Cthulhu doesn't really own very much. You can make a heartbreaker that is a very very close rip of CoC, and many people have. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. CoC does almost everything wrong. The mechanics are bad. The layout is bad. And even the set of character concepts you are presented with are bad and wrong.

About the only thing that CoC unambiguously adds is all the nomenclature about greater and lesser servitor races and shit. And about all they really own is a couple of drawings of magical symbols from various books.

-Username17

[Fucks]

We know that classic CoC, using the BRP systems, sucks. So does the d20 version.
But what about Trail of Cthulhu; The Laundry RPG; Delta Green? Any chance that one of them is worth our money?

[Ancient History]

The Laundry and Delta Green have great ideas, but are BRP-based heartbreakers. Trail of Cthulhu partakes a lot of the spirit of CoC without using BRP, but I'm not sure Gumshoe is a huge improvement, since you're just replacing de facto magic tea party with explicit magic tea party.