Fixing Call of Cthulhu

[Username17]

That would maintain the eerie personal elements of Lovecraft (which people like, and which are good), while making a more playable game.

I would propose the following:
[*] During character generation, each investigator chooses a certain number of beneficial touched traits which are essentially magic powers. So, like Paranoia, all of the characters are themselves mutants.
[*] You can also have detrimental touched traits but only the first tier of them, to start.
In some theoretical sense, using your powers risks your humanity but this is not represented mechanically, instead...
[*] You-the-player can choose to take detrimental touched traits during play, using excuses that fit some criteria - seeing something horrific, using your powers too much, whatever - and in exchange you also get beneficial touched traits.

So sorta like champions but you can pick up new disadvantages+offsetting powers at thematically appropriate points during play. As with later versions of Ars Magica, touched-flaws are either a hindrance to the character achieving in-game goals or they create new story opportunities or both, whether the touched flaws are good in principle doesn't enter into it.

Thus, if you want to do the spiralling out of humanity arc, you can do that; but, if you want to be the stoic or irrepressible optimist who retains a humanist outlook against the backdrop of cosmic dread, you can do that instead. This decision should be made by the player and not by die rolls.

These days I'm pretty down on the whole concept of buying advantages with disadvantages. Those things aren't remotely "balanced," so why bother claiming that they offset each other in any meaningful way? If you want people to have webbed toes that they have to hide and also have magic powers that they also have to hide but are magic fucking powers, just give them both things. Like, why not?

As for everyone being a mutant per se, I would assume not. I mean, the Aquaman origin story is fine as far as it goes, but some people just really want to be a Wizard. The setting is completely compatible with normal humans who learn sorcery, so there's no reason to restrict all the PCs to genetic backstories. Some people are just fascinated with rats or like to draw increasingly complicated diagrams or whatever.

But all of that is fairly beside the point. Obviously people don't really want to play normal people who have to go do normal jobs and want access to the fucking magic powers in the fucking setting for their characters. I mean, obviously. But the question remains what it is that you actually do. Vampire obviously struggled with this most severely: now that you have your character, what do you actually do? Shadowrun and D&D are at the other end of the spectrum, and because of that they are much better games for both long campaigns and one-shots.

I would say that the core experience should be "uncovering horrible truths." And most of that is going to be Twin Peaks stuff. You investigate horrible crimes, learn about horrible things that happened to people, and learn about horrible monsters that influenced those events and do what you can about it.

-Username17

[kzt]

However interesting you make any part of the character's lives, if it's less interesting than whatever the most interesting thing they do, the players are going to want to ignore it. In any game that is "inspired by the Mythos" the Mythos crap is probably going to be the most interesting thing in it and the players are going to want to interact with it no matter how good or bad it is for the characters to do so.

-Username17

The other issue - Assume the player is in fact fascinated by their "less interesting stuff" and wants more of that, how about the other players? I have my doubts about them.

[tussock]

@kzt, ultimately it's a cooperative game.

If you design in interesting bits and "less interesting bits" the general trick is give every character type lots to do mechanically during the interesting bits and provide almost no mechanical support for the less interesting stuff beyond a quick fuzzy generic resolution system.

If you like, a character is basically a way to find out where the action is, a way to get to the action, a way to contribute to the action, and a way to survive and grow from the action. Some of those will be automatic background setting elements (like cars and cell phones and the internet exists and characters normally have access to them) and some are detailed hooks into the fussy part of the game mechanics.

And none of the background "I'm a fireman" does much of anything, maybe 3+ to not make things worse and 5+ to make things better if you invoke it at some point, +1 to the roll for a "good story".

[DrPraetor]

I wasn't suggesting that the players all be mutants sensu stricto, but that they should all be mythos tainted (which would include "knows magic") in the same way that all Paranoia characters are members of secret societies and also mutants.

The disadvantages don't have to be balanced, because you want to reward people for taking them.

On the other hand, the incentives don't want to be so great that players can't opt out of the lunacy and/or mutation treadmill and still contribute to the adventure.

Incidentally:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cm ... ref=1ct98v

is... Call of Cthulhu but only as a miniatures combat game? I won't lie, I'm tempted.

It's a disappointment that Cultist Simulator sucks because yeah, I really like that concept.

[Thaluikhain]

Incidentally:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cm ... ref=1ct98v

is... Call of Cthulhu but only as a miniatures combat game? I won't lie, I'm tempted.

Eh, Necromunda using chaos/genestealer cultists would work, and the rules for old Necromunda were open-sourced IIRC. Or the Inquisitor game, dunno if that was.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The horror of Innsmouth isn't the fact that some people are really fish people. It isn't even that you might actually be a fish and not really a human. The horror is that the government might send submarines to shoot torpedoes into an undersea housing development because of racially proscriptive ideas about who counts as a citizen.

-Username17

"Might"

In 1921, 15 years before "The Shadow over Innsmouth" was published in 1936, this happened:

Greenwood is a historic freedom colony in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As one of the most prominent concentrations of African-American businesses in the United States during the early 20th century, it was popularly known as America's "Black Wall Street" until the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which the Oklahoma state government with the assistance of Tulsa's white residents massacred thousands of black residents and razed the neighborhood within hours. The riot was one of the most devastating massacres in the history of U.S. race relations, destroying the once thriving Greenwood community.

Within five years after the massacre, surviving residents who chose to remain in Tulsa rebuilt much of the district. They accomplished this despite the opposition of many white Tulsa political and business leaders and punitive rezoning laws enacted to prevent reconstruction. It resumed being a vital black community until segregation was overturned by the Federal Government during the 1950s and 1960s.

[kzt]

"Might"

In 1921, 15 years before "The Shadow over Innsmouth" was published in 1936, this happened:

Greenwood is a historic freedom colony in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As one of the most prominent concentrations of African-American businesses in the United States during the early 20th century, it was popularly known as America's "Black Wall Street" until the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which the Oklahoma state government with the assistance of Tulsa's white residents massacred thousands of black residents and razed the neighborhood within hours. The riot was one of the most devastating massacres in the history of U.S. race relations, destroying the once thriving Greenwood community.

Within five years after the massacre, surviving residents who chose to remain in Tulsa rebuilt much of the district. They accomplished this despite the opposition of many white Tulsa political and business leaders and punitive rezoning laws enacted to prevent reconstruction. It resumed being a vital black community until segregation was overturned by the Federal Government during the 1950s and 1960s.

There were a series of these sorts of things during the period. Along with massacres of union miners, etc. The past is a foreign country.

[Iduno]

"Might"

In 1921, 15 years before "The Shadow over Innsmouth" was published in 1936, this happened:

Greenwood is a historic freedom colony in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As one of the most prominent concentrations of African-American businesses in the United States during the early 20th century, it was popularly known as America's "Black Wall Street" until the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which the Oklahoma state government with the assistance of Tulsa's white residents massacred thousands of black residents and razed the neighborhood within hours. The riot was one of the most devastating massacres in the history of U.S. race relations, destroying the once thriving Greenwood community.

Within five years after the massacre, surviving residents who chose to remain in Tulsa rebuilt much of the district. They accomplished this despite the opposition of many white Tulsa political and business leaders and punitive rezoning laws enacted to prevent reconstruction. It resumed being a vital black community until segregation was overturned by the Federal Government during the 1950s and 1960s.

There were a series of these sorts of things during the period. Along with massacres of union miners, etc. The past is a foreign country.

Massacres of people by the government because they look different are only foreign if you're not currently in the US or like 100 other countries.

[elotar]

My english is not so good, so maybe I've missed something, but I think with racial massacres we are getting to the point.

CoC should be scary. Monsters under the sea, black people just because and insanity was scary 100 years ago, now they are not.

IMO the scariest thing to the present human is that religious and other nutjobs was right all along + oncology.

So the setting:
Earth is devoured by some Leviathan like being (or was there all along).
"Old ones" are the digesting system of it, with the goal to make it part of Leviathan metabolism or something.
Life with Humanity as top of it is a process of some devoured spiritual being to defense itself from being digested.

... (got thought when writing this) ...

The theory of Concave Earth actually works here great

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Ea ... low_Earths

so the Earth is actually internal surface of the Leviathan stomach.

So obviously all astrophysics, space programs and other such thing are international conspiracies of Old Ones servants.

Then we can throw as many crap as we like:
- non white skin color is a sign of pact with old ones made by some ancient ancestors but is still binding
- vaccination is a spreading of Dagon saliva to the bloodstream of population
- internet is a system to devour spiritual powers of people
- homosexual love is an ritual to summon beasts
- "to find your talent and make the world a better place with it" actually means to make pact with some monster to enforce Chultchu goal - there is no other way to be talented
...

Then we need a way to fight "bad guys"
First, I think, is to establish, that they are not omnipotent, their logic can be understand and they can be beaten. Details how to do it may wary, but I thing we should start with the structure, that good stuff are happening randomly but for a bad stuff you should actually make dumb decisions.

And here we got cancer - obviously you are becoming insane not because you are meeting Evil, but because you explore setting and start to act according to it's logic, but by exposing yourself to it you got parts of your body contaminated, which manifest itself with cells becoming immortal (obviously Old Ones are made from such sells). So accumulation of cancer points. I think having them on the character sheet will make the game scary even without all other stuff.

So, list of ways to fight them:
- fighting monsters with guns. Works as everywhere, but obviously it's not an interesting way to explore setting. Maybe when embracing idea of switching Monster Manual for system of random generation of monsters.

- eradication of servants. It may be fun with astrophysicists or oncologists as a target, but obviously in the long run it's better to explore themes of "hatred produce more hatred".

- some religious "ways". Even as it was the spark for an initial idea, imo it's so overplayed in modern fantasy, that the only interesting parts of it may be some Talmudic or Muslim practices, or maybe some ancient blood ritual ideas. (how many kittens you are ready to sacrifice to kill one minor monster?)

- exploring alternative physics of the setting. So you can borrow astrology for some ideas for what a celestial bodies really is and how it controls monsters, homeopathy for some magical system.

- "Corporations as good" theme. Like putting Quinine (poisonous for Old Ones substance) into widely distributed non alcoholic beverage and fight for keeping it there as well as fighting others (supported by monsters) corporations, who put cancer inducing caffeine into drinks.

- Cyberterrorism. Obviously, as internet is evil, developing malware and other means to make life of everybody connected miserable is a goal to live for.

- Children. Obvious way to fight evil is to make more soldiers to do it, as they are born pure (except from pacts of ancestors), and you can train them to fight it. But then you are welcome to both make them capable to function in the modern society and not exposed to any Old Ones poisoning (compulsory vaccination, lol).

- Using monsters to fight other monsters. I think this is where the end game should be: by fighting "monster of the week" you are understanding how they operate and so you gain the powers to seriously harm their "ecosystem".


OK, too long already, need to go eat something. Maybe will continue later, but I think general idea is quite clear.

[deaddmwalking]

Then we can throw as many crap as we like:
- non white skin color is a sign of pact with old ones made by some ancient ancestors but is still binding
- homosexual love is an ritual to summon beasts

This is horrifying that you'd suggest it for the game, but not horrifying in the game.

There are 7.6 billion people in the world. It'd be nice if you make the game fun for all of them. Part of that is having characters that look like them. If people who are 'not white' are furthering the destruction of the universe, you are advocating racial genocide. Don't do that.

[elotar]

This is horrifying ...

That is the whole point - racism, homophobia and other such things are real tentacle monsters of our days. The point of horror media is not to horrify characters, it's to horrify audience.

There is easy way out used in movies - just kill the characters one by one, but it obviously will not work in a rpg.

So the only way to do horror game is to explore such concepts.

Obviously ability to play black gay oncologist should be provided, even encouraged (bonuses!). What such character should do when he finds how his actions influence the world look interesting roleplaying opportunity (NB - option "kill yourself" obviously should be presented as a "win" for the monsters).

[angelfromanotherpin]

The tentacle monster of racism is that an enormous number of people are secretly hate-filled genocide enablers, and they are becoming less secret about it. Get Out is a horror movie that explores that, and it's genuinely unsettling.

Your proposal is just white supremacist fiction that is less circumspect than the 1920s white supremacist fiction that inspired it.

[nockermensch]

Saying that black people are ACTUALLY tainted is horrifying on several levels, almost all of them bad for the game and for you.

The only way for this to be vaguely acceptable is if ALL the human peoples are actually tainted, but by different horrible origin stories. This way people can be racist in-game because they're ignorant or because they favor some horrible inhuman group over others, but it should be abundantly clear on the game material that there's not an untainted pure human race, because what the fuck.

[shinimasu]

There is... honestly so much to unpack in that post that the racism is only a small part of it. I mean it's bad, but the little throwaway to poisonous vaccines or the weird lumping together of muslim practices with blood rituals...

I think reading this gave me cancer.

[elotar]

It's funny how easily D&D panic can be recreated by switching some themes.

Even inverted hollow earth not helps to get the point across to kind of sophisticated and knowledgeable audience.

But I think it still was worth an effort to write it.
Should go back to killing orcs.

[nockermensch]

There is... honestly so much to unpack in that post that the racism is only a small part of it. I mean it's bad, but the little throwaway to poisonous vaccines or the weird lumping together of muslim practices with blood rituals...

I think reading this gave me cancer.

Yeah, while "What if Weekly World News was right?" is an interesting premise for a dark fantasy/horror setting, elotar's posts are more like "What if Alex Jones was right?"

I even think that you can hand the premise that the worldview of right-wing bigots is "cosmically correct" to someone like Neil Gaiman and end with a story that's not moraly repugnant. But having it as the basis for cooperative storytelling is some blend of insanity and evil that I don't want to parse. Even if the author's intention is to write "cosmic horror" that modern audiences can find genuinely terrifying, a non-zero number of people would just run the game straight as The Turner Diaries fanfics.

[shinimasu]

It's funny how easily D&D panic can be recreated by switching some themes.

Even inverted hollow earth not helps to get the point across to kind of sophisticated and knowledgeable audience.

But I think it still was worth an effort to write it.
Should go back to killing orcs.

Alright I'm going to be charitable and assume perhaps the mild language barrier is confusing some things so I'm going to try and give the abridged version.

- When you create a world for role playing in, it requires the players to willingly buy in to the core assumptions of that world. If you want to make a world where all black people are secretly eldritch horrors then your players are going to have to temporarily buy in to that concept in order to role play it effectively. Most players are going to find buying in to that repulsive and will not want to play it.

- The Satanic Panic was stupid for D&D because D&D did not actually have any controversial viewpoints. Killing orcs is not controversial. Unless you want it to be for some reason. The reason the Satanic Panic was stupid is because there was nothing there to panic about, not because the panickers had a point but we ignored them because art.

- If you write a game with horrible themes and people call you out on the themes being horrible that is not moral pearl clutching, that is just a statement of fact.

Edit: Though I have to say getting an actual kind of crazy racist in here is kind of fun after the disappointment that was the cult spam bot.

[deaddmwalking]

Edit: Though I have to say getting an actual kind of crazy racist in here is kind of fun after the disappointment that was the cult spam bot.

We already have Occluded Sun among others.

[shinimasu]

Ok A New crazy racist, who actually types a little like a spam bot but is in fact a human.

[tussock]

CoC should not take itself seriously. Monsters in the heavens, white people, and religion were believed to be good things in times past, now we know better!

The scariest thing to us now is that religious and other nutjobs are still wrong but are everywhere and very serious + anti-vax is a thing.

So the setting:
Earth is entirely as expected by scientific consensus.
"Old ones" are a common hallucinogenic experience of people of people with similar exposure to various fungi-based virus native to the regions where HPL lived, if they read his books or his source stuff.
Humans are just another mammal, but people think lots of strange things about religion and race and anti-science and other tribalistic nonsense. which are a genuine threat to preventing actual real world catastrophes like climate change.

... (didn't do much thinking on this) ...

So flat earthers exist, and they promote the idea that you can just disbelieve anything you want to disbelieve, because all of science is a lie. Nihilism, and it's secretly and wildly popular in the republicans and all the red and purple states, which is most of them.

Conspiracy theories abound, to the point it can be hard to spot the actual conspiracies, like how the Republican party, the old racist slavers in the south, and the craziest of the religious cults, all got together and decided to hate on every single modern social advancement for the last two centuries just for the sake of hurting various minority groups and all women, and they win elections in the most powerful country on earth, and conspire to ruin democracy and put similar governments in power worldwide every single fucking day.

Then we can tie that in with the old ones hallucinations:
- white people are genetically less diverse and so relatively more prone to getting the old-ones virus.
- anti-vax cults are associated with the virus spreading, because a stressed immune system from real disease leaves people much more vulnerable to it.
- internet is the easiest way to track all this weird shit, but full of conspiracy theories.
- homosexuals are included in the sample protagonists.
- study and git gud is how you advance in the game, hatred of learning associated with anti-vax, associated with white people, associated with Republican party, etc.

Then we need a way to reform anti-science people, which, actually, is a super hard problem in the real world, and maybe involves building trust.

First is to understand, that they are extremely powerful, they have no logic and reasoned debate is them winning because it puts their bullshit Nihilism on a level with reason. They do colossally bad things all the time and you are just a regular person who could fight all their life and maybe save a handful of people from it, so that's what you're gunna do.

So somehow the game lampshades all that super bad stuff and lets us get on with feeling good as the heroes by fixing actual small problems in the face of established active hate-driven Nihilism and deposing particularly insane instances of it by getting them to, like, pull down their pants and praise Hastur on tape. Which, they're pretty crazy, so they just do when you make your skill checks and back it up with logic and reason.

And here we got: well, lots of things are nasty shit and you can not put them in the game, like, the real world can be a bit depressing in the small everyday things like how unions have basically been crushed worldwide, which removed the strongest voice of collective progress. That's a horrible thing, but you know, lampshade, characters are union members, and can't really use that for anything, because the law forbids it.

So, list of ways they fight us:
- fighting monsters with guns. Like, the law says no, and if we use guns at all it's 25-life and new character time, but they will sometimes brandish guns and tell you to fuck off and funnily enough maybe just kill your character if you don't.

- eradication of servants. yeah, ultimately the end goal of the bad guys is genocide, if you get to play long enough, it's probably something you could become aware of as a threat, if best to nip it the bud in terms of adventure, don't go there, just see that any such suggestions of the bad guys lead to rapid player victory options in that case.

- some religious "ways". This is basically the common failure mode for dice not working, you try to logic and reason and they just shut it down with a "I'll pray for you", or "you have to have faith".

- exploring alternative physics of the setting. Is what the bad guys are doing constantly, they are the guy saying coastal erosion is causing sea level rise and plants do better with more CO2, and the elevated lead samples show a need to adjust the thresholds and then cut all the funding for sampling, and anti-vax is something the government should support as freeze peach.

- "Corporations as good" theme. The whole thing where you are one person with quite limited (but special to PC non-zero) media access and the corps might sometimes randomly support you with an add buy because you won a support there somewhere with logic and reason, and otherwise might fall for some random mechanised Nazi trolling and get you sacked instead.

- Cyberterrorism. They love it. You need the net to do fucking anything and they will dox your ass and send real crazy people to your door with guns, failure modes can get very real, very quickly, and not just against bot nets killing your stories.

- Children. Are wickedly vulnerable to Nihilism, it's sad but people stick religion in their heads young enough and they never really lose it, even if they drop the god the stories of like supercomputers just fill the gap. They lose devils and take up racism. It's just horrible to think of, really, but obviously taking people's children off them is what they do to try to get more of that happening, and that you can fight.

- Using monsters to fight other monsters. They set us against each other whenever they can. Upsetting debate with trolling, big lies to defeat urgent news, grabbing people that have tiny easily-solved problems and sucking them into a web of hate and lies.


And maybe, if you spend long enough talking to the bad politicians, or visiting people in the red states to try and talk them around, maybe you fail a save and start seeing Cthulhu too, and he tells you that all of science is a lie.

[elotar]

The scariest thing to us now is that religious and other nutjobs are still wrong but are everywhere and very serious + anti-vax is a thing.

Tussok really rises the Den from the level "total brain meltdown" to "stupid, but quite elegantly executed satire".

Got a question, buy the way (looks like the topic of fixing CoC is effectively closed) - how hatred in the english rpg-discussion sphere works?

We got rpg.net. There are many people there, so quite a lot of stupid people, and you can't say that they are stupid because moderators will instantly hit you. So everybody are "nice" but even with my limited presence I got that Zak S and RPGPundit are hated there.

Zak, as it seems to me, is a classic nut... player of Tussoks' CoC.
RPGP is a classic "player" of "mine CoC". Maybe not (vocally) in the people of color part but his article about smoking not being bad for health and other such ideas totally fit's there.

They was spotted working together on some projects($?), but judging by their web presence i can't really get their relationships. Do they hate each other?

Than there are OSR and Storygame crowds. They hate each other all right. Both characters mentioned earlier belong to first camp so maybe their hatred for the enemy do not allow their personal hatred to rise on the top?

Or it looks like there are factions in the OSR crowd who hate each other.

OK. There are neo-nazis from the new WW, who are on the one hand quite fine with Storygame crowd, on the other with James Edward Raggi and ZakS. WTF?

O. And here is Den, which are full of "players of Tussoks' CoC", but they still hate ZakS and WW and OSR and Storygames and bunch of others.

And, as it looks like, RPGP is not fine with WW. But it looks like Den still hates him.

As Frank was banned on different boards I think it will be fine to add them to the list of thouse, who hate the Den.

Am I missing something?

[erik]

For starters I’d say hate is being watered down massively by your use of it. Speaking for myself I don’t hate any of those boards. I’m just indifferent to them. At worst most of us probably hold stereotypes of other boards.

As for mixing real world racism and stupidity with the old one mythos like this:

white people are genetically less diverse and so relatively more prone to getting the old-ones virus

I don’t see why you want to validate some stupid racist premise in the setting. You can say some cult leader preaches such a thing as true and fine, you’ve cast them as some sort of shit lord but no need to make your setting intrinsically racist. How does that help a game?

[edit: unless you have fish in your genes, I don’t see why old ones give a fuck what part of the world your ancestors hail from. A defining feature is their indifference.

[Omegonthesane]

For starters I’d say hate is being watered down massively by your use of it. Speaking for myself I don’t hate any of those boards. I’m just indifferent to them. At worst most of us probably hold stereotypes of other boards.

As for mixing real world racism and stupidity with the old one mythos like this:

white people are genetically less diverse and so relatively more prone to getting the old-ones virus

I don’t see why you want to validate some stupid racist premise in the setting. You can say some cult leader preaches such a thing as true and fine, you’ve cast them as some sort of shit lord but no need to make your setting intrinsically racist. How does that help a game?

[edit: unless you have fish in your genes, I don’t see why old ones give a fuck what part of the world your ancestors hail from. A defining feature is their indifference.

"White people are more susceptible to turning evil and opposing humanity" is not the normal racist premise. Most racists would make white people more resistant to Old One corruption rather than more susceptible.

Bit of a nitpick since you're right to say it is accepting the general racist premise of "there are races that are superior" even if it's actively spitting on the race most commonly cast as the superior one by actual racists.

[Trill]

Most white racists would make white people more resistant to Old One corruption rather than more susceptible.

FTFY

[Omegonthesane]

Most white racists would make white people more resistant to Old One corruption rather than more susceptible.

FTFY

White people have a literal total monopoly on systematic racism in their favour in the real states that Tussock is obviously alluding to in his proposal to make the Old Ones map to real social issues. SO no, you didn't fix it, you ruined it.