Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[schpeelah]

I can agree these alternatives are terrible. AgnosTech sounds like a step between TheisTech and AtheisTech, ElderCraft like Minecraft mod, Teknosorcery gives me the impression of opposite implications from Arcanotech - of making technology part of your magic instead of making magic a part of your technology.

[OgreBattle]

Could just call it Arcana.

[Lokathor]

My first vote is Archanotech.

If it can't be that, then I vote for Magitech for basically the same reasons that Frank voted for Arcanotech: I played FF6 as a kid and I've always called that stuff Magitech ever since. The complaint that "Magitech makes it too much like a JRPG" is kinda bogus considering that we've got magical girls, giant mecha, witches, and sentai. The game is already a JRPG. Almost the only non-japanese thing being thrown in is the Cthulhu stuff itself. All of Earth's responses have been anime-based.

[Username17]

So on Chaosium's trademarks. I'm pretty sure they own the Yellow Sign. Not the name Yellow Sign, or the concept of the Yellow Sign, or the description of the Yellow Sign, because all that shit was written in 1895. But the most commonly used drawing of the Yellow Sign was actually from a Chaosium book. It's not even the same as what the original artist drew, the Chaosium editors screwed with it a bit. So they can validly claim trademark on it.

So we're going to need a new one. I suggest something more like this:



If that basic idea seems OK with people, I can draw one up. Modified a little bit to be a labyrinth, and I think we're good to go.

Similarly, Chaosium probably owns trademark to using a biohazard symbol as the sign of the dark mother. I wouldn't think we'd want to do that, because that's stupid, but we probably can't. Over the years, there have been a lot of Shub Niggurath glyphs drawn, and they've been pretty uniformly terrible. I suggest basically an upside down federation symbol that's purple.

The Red Sign has to my knowledge never actually been drawn. The description is basically three thick red lines oriented vertically, so basically the old Atari symbol or the symbol of the Klingon Empire would fit the bill. It's also OK for one of the lines to cross one or both of the others.

The Elder Sign has two versions. One is a funky pentagram and the other is basically a Romuva tree. I think we're using the latter option, and it is of course Blue.


Kind of like this, but in Blue.

The sign of Dagon has more versions than I care to mention. Probably one of the ones with a seven pointed star or triangle with a circle in the middle is the one we want to use.


Because this one is fucking hard to draw.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

Hmm, I thought the Elder Sign was teal.

Having done a bit of research I was apparently wrong, but what did I get that idea from?

[Shatner]

Hmm, I thought the Elder Sign was teal.

Having done a bit of research I was apparently wrong, but what did I get that idea from?

Ancient History has shown himself to be an eminent scholar of all things Lovecraft. And he and Frank recently went through Call of Cthulhu with a fine-toothed comb. If he is at all willing, I think he'd be the ideal person to consult when questions come up of how to make something more accurately Lovecraftian. Or how to make something less CoC-like. Or both.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Hmm, I thought the Elder Sign was teal.

Having done a bit of research I was apparently wrong, but what did I get that idea from?

"Blue-white" looks teal/cyan.

[Username17]

A little more clarification on the Lumley material: We aren't supposed to use any of his human characters (not that we were going to), but stuff like Shudde-M'ell is a-OK.

In other news, this is a 100% public domain Yellow Sign that I hacked out:



So Yellow Arcanotech will have that on it somewhere.

-Username17

[momothefiddler]

In other news, this is a 100% public domain Yellow Sign that I hacked out:

Oh good. Unlike the earlier one, I can look at that without thinking of an infinite treble clef

[Red_Rob]

Hmmm, my interpretation of the yellow sign was that it is supposed to show up in creepy places having been daubed by cultists just to fuck with people who know what it means - so it would follow it should be something that would translate fairly well to a graffiti format. This version seems a little too complex for that.

I could see it as a spiral with the bisecting line and counterclockwise stroke, that would be pretty easy to draw in a hurry. Or this could be the elaborate version and there's a corrupted version that gets drawn freehand. But to my mind the Yellow Sign should be able to appear in amongst some street graffiti without immediately standing out as anything out of the ordinary, unless you know what you are looking for.

[Username17]

In the original, the Yellow Sign is never described (save that it is a curious symbol that is obviously neither Arabic nor Chinese), but is found:

[*] Embroidered onto white silk.
[*] Inlaid in gold into black onyx.
[*] Sketched in pencil onto a piece of paper.
[*] Marked at the bottom of a rolled scroll.

So my interpretation is that it can be fairly complex, but it can't require calligraphic thickness changes. It has to be something you could plausibly make with only lines of a uniform thickness as with a pencil.

-Username17

[Username17]

Time to get to brass tacks on the mechanics end. Basically, we need a core mechanic and that's going to probably be 2d10 or d6 Dicepool. Essentially it depends on whether we're looking at it from the perspective of "We're doing Mechwarrior" or "We're doing Shadowrun." Both are plausible.

Regardless of which way it goes, we're looking at a game where strength and resilience need to scale a lot while other things really don't. Entirely mundane mechanics and bureaucrats need to be able to ply their trades confident in the knowledge that they will not be routinely outshone in their fields of endeavors by Shoggoths and Dimensional Shamblers simply by dint of Yaoguai being higher tier than they are. However, those same Yaoguai are intended to routine bounce bullets off their chests central regions that would kill basic lab monkeys dead.

So what this means is that Willpower and Toughness are stats that get very big, while stats that affect technical and social skills probably shouldn't even exist. So you don't have an Intelligence or a Charisma, you just have the skill groups and the specializations.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

This could just be me but I always thought 2dX RNGs seemed kind of dodgey, due to how hard it is to evaluate the worth of each +1, unlike say d20 where a +1 is always an extra 5% until you're off the RNG

[Grek]

I am not familiar with Mechwarrior's base mechanic. How's that work?

[RadiantPhoenix]

Is there a reason not to use SAME for our combat stats, with the five colors of arcanotech as elements?

Because it seems like our "scaling" stuff is mostly combat, while our "non-scaling" is pretty much non-combat.

[Occluded Sun]

I would suggest an upside-down 'power symbol', the one that has been popularized for electronics, for the Yellow Sign.

[Lokathor]

I'm with Red_Rob, that yellow sign is really hard to precisely remember and then write out yourself, even though you can recognize it on sight.

It seems like the signs should be the kind of things that are simple enough that you could quickly scrawl them in blood during a combat round if you're in a hurry. Like how "combat alchemy" in FMA uses a basic circle. And then, for complex spells and complex summons you'd have an excessively ornate version of your sign as part of the casting requirements, which is part of what makes those sorts of affairs "rituals" and not "instant" (again, like FMA).

I am not familiar with Mechwarrior's base mechanic. How's that work?

Essentially d20 but with 2d6 as your RNG instead of 1d20. You still roll high and apply modifiers and check to see if you pass or fail.

[Maxus]

Well, it could be like the Severance Rune from Tribe Twelve (slender man series).



Getting it exactly right isn't important to making it do stuff. It has to be in the ballpark, but with the correct intentions.

What is more important is that you understand it, what it represents, what it does, who uses it. That you know what it is rather than what it looks like. Even if your knowledge is incomplete. And focusing on that while drawing the symbol makes whatever properties it has activate.

I know a Lovecraftian setting thing is that you can get yourself in deep shit by messing with stuff you don't understand, but mostly that happens when people know it means -something-. Translated to here, someone with occult knowledge could draw a Yellow Sign that looks pretty crappy but it still works because they know what it means and that understanding lets them channel the Lemon-flavored powers.

[Whipstitch]

I'm not in love with Frank's symbol but I think you're overstating the difficulty a bit. It's basically a lopsided W with concentric rings in the middle that go closed, open, closed, open if you start from the center. The only real trick to scrawling it is preventing it from looking like a fingerprint.

Anyway, I actually think it's a plus if the symbols are sufficiently inscrutable that players are kinda mystified that the damn things apparently mean stuff to occult scholars from the future.

[Chamomile]

I just tested out trying to redraw the yellow symbol from memory after about a minute of study. After four or five attempts in drawing it under six seconds, what I've got is a smattering of drawings moderately recognizable as the proper symbol. It might not be recognizable on sight, but if you lined up this and a half-dozen other symbols I'd drawn and asked people "which one is the yellow symbol," they'd be able to pick it out. If I can even get close, then anyone who's invested significant amount of time into studying or drawing the symbol can probably slam one out in combat time without much difficulty.

[Username17]

The Yellow Sign is supposed to cause people headaches and confusion when they look at it too long. If I had my druthers, the Yellow Sign would be a magic eye picture or a hologram. The constraint of course, is that has to be something that can recognizably be drawn on arcanotech devices in 2d drawings in a game book. But it should still at least endeavor to be a labyrinth or an optical illusion. If it's just a three quarters circle with a line in it, it's just a team logo.

Now, the other symbols don't have that constraint. Nothing is supposed to happen to you if you gaze at the sign of the dark mother for a long time. It's just a symbol, and the fact that it shows up in glowing purple as the Sailor Scout emblem of some Witches is all the explanation you need or get as to why people think it's important. But the Yellow Sign in particular is supposed to actually irritate the senses just by looking at it.

So the Green Sign (symbol of Dagon) could be any of these versions that people have variously thrown around in different contexts:















People have certainly made more complicated symbols for Dagon/Cthulhu, but any of those would work fine. There are no constraints at all on the Symbol of Dagon save that it appear on Dagon's ceremonial structures.


Like so.

Meanwhile, the symbols for Yog Sothoth that are in use are actually terrible and stupid looking, so we're going to want something way simpler and less dorky. Really, the only universal constraint is that they should be drawable recognizably with just a ball point pen and no filling. So things with curves and spirals are fine, but things that make a big deal out of thick and thin or filled space are not.

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Anyway, Mechwarrior uses 2d10 not 2d6. Mechwarrior is the RPG, Battletech is the miniatures game. The reason you'd use a curved RNG like 2d10 rather than a flat RNG like d20 or d% is the same reason you'd use a dice pool - you want to play around with big power disparities near or off the edges of the RNG so you want to be able to express things in terms of standard deviations rather than flat chances per turn. So a bonus that gives you a large increase in probability of success can be added a second time and your chance of failure gets smaller but doesn't go all the way to zero. That gives you a lot more "room" on your RNG for large bonuses - invaluable if we are going to have characters that are fifty feet tall.

-Username17

[Grek]

I like the topmost symbol for Dagon. It's a big fishy looking eye. As for Yog Sothoth/Blue Arcanotech, how about something like this?



It's a tentacle made out of increasingly big circles arranged in a geometric pattern. It looks complicated, but you actually draw it by starting with a circle and adding circle-shaped arcs counterclockwise around it until you get tired of drawing more circles, or magic happens, whichever comes first. More powerful creatures and arcanotech get more circles, and avatars just keep going forever inward down to the microscopic scale.

[Hicks]

Hey frank, have you thought about using my 20+ system as a resolution mechanic? The mechanic was specifically designed for non-leveled, attribute/skill based modern or science fiction games where being proficient or experienced is a really big deal. The benefit of the 20+ system is that it is super quick to resolve and skilled characters "feel" skilled, trivially accomplishing tasks would stump a less skill character, while it's greatest weakness may be it's lack of granularity as it output skews upward really fast making bonuses greater than +6 nearly always a guarantee success as long as the threshold is less than the character's bonus + 20.

[Username17]

That system looks a lot like 1st edition Shadowrun. It gets a little wonky at the edges (you get a success on an average of 10 dice at TN 19, but twenty dice at TN 20), but it's basically fine for something where you expect everyone to be on the RNG all the time. Totally OK for a noir detectives game, for example.

The problem here is that we're looking at a game with harsh tiers that pushes people off the RNG altogether fairly often. And for that, variable TNs against dicepools really do work extremely badly. Look at, for example, the vehicle rules in 1st edition Shadowrun. It's... bad.

If we're going to do dicepools, we're going to have fixed TNs and count hits. Because that scales nicely and can be easily shifted without things getting wonky by handing out bonus hits and raising thresholds.

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That's a nice one, but I'm not sure how I like it for the Blue Sign. There are basically two Elder Signs, and they are both pretty familiar to people likely to play this game.


Lovecraft's Blue Sign


Derleth's Blue Sign

So since those ones are actually pretty well known, I feel that the Elder Sign we use is constrained to look like one of those two. On the other hand, no one knows what the Red Sign is supposed to look like. So the spiral of circles thing could be painted red and used as the Red Sign with no issues.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Use the tree branch for Blue, because we've got a lot of star based signs in the world but a lot fewer tree branch based signs.