I think the most important part of running Cthulhu Dark isn't about Cthulhu Dark at all: it's about horror games in general. The group all has to be on the same page about what kind of game it is, and eager to put in the work to make it happen.
Yes, he used the exact phrase "cosmic horror."
But not to describe the beings of which he wrote!
So far as I can make out, when he mentions cosmic horror --whether in his stories or his essays-- it is the ideas, not the monsters, to which he refers.
In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literatu...
The basic idea to the setting is that one of the characters has inherited some property (farmhouse + farm) from a grandmother who passed. They, and some friends, are heading out there for the weekend to take a look around, hang out, see if there's anything that needs to be saved before the house is sold, whatever.
It's a fairly remote location and is mostly surrounded by woods once you get out far enough
> The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
Layer 1 would mostly be them poking around a local gas station they find themselves in, as an introduciton. They find some stories about more-common-than expected flash floods, and complaints about mysterious strangers / vagrants / general ne'er-do-wells lurking outside the property. Might have been trying to scare the grandparents off in order to try to get the to sell or something
They start getting deeper once they reach the house proper -- while the gas station is noticeably dry and drought-stricken, the air around the farm smells like imminent rain.
They run into a family of 3 near the house who are in the process of cleaning a rabbit they happened to catch nearby. They claim to be here just incidentally -- 'they used to work for gramgram and have been keeping an eye on the place'
Inside, the house is a mess. The unchecked wet throughout the years has wreaked havoc with the interior, with rotting walls and warped floorboards. There's a tap that's apparently been dripping ever since grams passed away something like 8 months ago, so it's not necesasrily habitiable
Make sure most of your layer-advancing details aren't necessarily tied to particular locations or events, except for the stages with a requirement about that. The key to the layers is that you can introduce their qualities in a lot of different ways, making it adaptable to whatever the Investigators are doing.
Downstairs there's a generator that they can refuel to get running water going again, as well as a small number of rather underpowered lightbulbs. Otherwise they're relying on kerosene lanterns or candles, which don't like the damp
@BESW Anything that made you think that in particular?
Well, if they rush through the first layer really fast (and in my experience, they always do), the family might walk into the gas station rather than being met near the house.
But, for example, that leaky tap should be thrown in wherever it makes sense in terms of escalating the tension rather than deciding where in the house it is beforehand.
First, they might head back to the car. If that's the case, I want it to show that there are definite human factors trying to keep them there
There's a creekbed that wraps around the land, see, and the bridge that crosses it isn't sturdy enough for vehicular traffic. If they decide to head back to the car and hole up in town for the night, they find that the car has been sabotaged -- missing sparkplugs, or something similarily debilitating.
Generally, the mud is thicker and wetter than it has any right to be, as well. If they stay still for any particular amount of time, or if they look closely at the car, they notice that it's sinking into the muck far faster than it has any right to
Eventually, this triggers layer 4, which is where (sometime) night falls. I'm intending this to be a signal that it is now truly suicidal to be outside, and that danger is near
This does, however, confine them to the house, and...
It's kind of where the plan runs out of steam
I'm not sure what to set up that makes them feel like they have something to do.
I could push events that make things move along, but I could easily see that leading to minutes of silence at the table, then me announcing something spooky, and the players not really having any input
One of the most successful parts of my first CD game was when the Investigators told a local Tibetan about being attacked by a very aggressive yeti, and he said, "That's impossible! ...because yetis are such gentle and timid creatures."
The creature I have in mind here is Cthaat, or something from the Cthaat Aquadingden
Which may or may not be 'canon', but essentially is a malevolent water elemental
Maybe not quite to old-one levels
Hence the dampness of the farm, likelihood of flash floods, etc.
Maybe the locals are summoning it because it gets their fields watered, maybe it's just tradition. I think that's really more something that serves as a planning tool for me.
Right, so here's where I'd make it more telegraphed: "folktales of flash floods" is too distant from the truth for a one-shot investigation, and it's not exactly folktaleish either.
Instead, have the giving a (1) news report describing (2) plants harmed by the creature ("Wheat crops have mysterious rotted all across the county, despite record droughts.")
And then the folks in the store tell (1) folktales concerning the (2) traces of the creature's passing which they say are evidence that the floods and rotting aren't natural.
And then, there's (1) someone who talks about (2) artifacts depicting grotesque creatures in the woodwork of the PC's inherited farmhouse, before everyone else shuts him up.
And thus before they've even left the gas station, they're in level 2, maybe level 3.
And means I can hit layer 4 with the storm. Make everything I had layer 2+ a little more threatening and i won't need to agonize quite so much over what to make them do for a full layer
I suppose something I'd been considering as an ending event concerned the barrels of kerosene in the basement and lots and lots of fire
@BESW That's pretty much the exact opposite role I'd originally considered for gramgram (and the locals) but I think it works a lot better for the story.
Searching the house should easily reveal her notes, and her sorcererous materials in the cellar.
The Investigators can try to control the creature, or banish it, or whatever--but chances are that's going to involve a single Insanity die because it's neither humanly possible nor within their profession.
Gramgram's notes might even reveal her to be (5) a named human harmed by the creature when she lost control of it.
If I wanted to dress it up in pseudo-scientific terms, 'water in the lungs' or pneumonia or any of the number ailments that the elderly might get on the wrong side of
She's still gramgram, that's part of the point, I think.
Revelations about one's family are very Lovecraftian.
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Write a short (~600 wds) Lovecraftesque scenario and you can win the adulation of your peers and a copy of the game!
http://blackarmada.com/lovecraftesque-competition/
The basic concept of Morts is, what if zombie hunters are treated like septic tank cleaners? It's an important, unpleasant job most people don't think even exists anymore, and so few people want to do it that they'll hire just about anyone who volunteers.
Yeah, the zombie survival guide. He talks a bit about what sort of concerted effort it would take to make a continent habitable again after a zombie apocalypse
> The morts will happily supply anyone who signs up with a shotgun or police baton, but they haven’t been a proper military outfit for decades. General policy is that the best weapon for the job is the one you’re comfortable with. Doesn’t matter if it’s a WWII-Era Heirloom Rifle, a Scrap-Built Potato Cannon, or a Rusty Broadsword.
Being pathetically underfunded doesn't help; the perqs of becoming a Mort boil down to "room and board, on the job training, no experience required and no background checks."
The Morticians competented themselves out of the limelight decades ago: they're so good at their job most people inside the walls don't think their job is necessary any more.
hm, I hope my players have looked into making their Pathfinder Kingmaker Chars for this week, or I will have to spend the day making them with them... which might impact seriously how far we get. like, I planned to at least manage to fight the 4 or 5 bandits and then get to explore the first Hex or two...
This week I'm talking one of my new players out of making his character before the session, because Fate works a lot better when PCs are sketched out in confab and then detailed during play.
yea, FATE is much less planning... while PF is more like D&D and I have... a mixed group I believe. Well, I guess we'll make chars anyway as some of them are newbs and we play at a college club. Yes, we are actually an official college club (eingetragene Hoschschulgruppe) since 1988.
Only in the minor details. It's almost as close as 3.0 and 3.5 are from each other, and all three can be played as a single conglomerate system with relative ease.
I mean, you can't grab the background, read up to it and then decide on that, no, you have to ask your GM, who might give you only the half boiled stuff he has notes upon and say "rest is... basic fantasy"
I saw them, even gave the HD one to my sis, but at our club we only had what I said about it...
Saying that Fate has no setting or background is like saying the d20 System has no setting or background: true, but not really relevant.
The d20 System is a neutral system just like Fate, but for different play goals. It's been applied to D&D, Star Wars, Stargate, Doctor Who, My Little Pony...
but the makeup of the fate/fate accelerated rules and the GM that gives us only his half boiled stuff ruined the system for me. All in all, I guess FATE is not worse than GURPS.
well, we got enough people in our club to try and switch systems as we like.
One of Fate's (it hasn't been an acronym for ten years, by the way) great strengths is not just its ability to power mid-play setting and plot collaboration, but also its ability to NOT do that if the group prefers not to.
DFRPG is a great example of providing a fully realised setting to play in AND giving room to invent your own corner of it from scratch if you want to.
Freeport is even more detailed about giving an up-front setting premade for the group to fall into.
We did that once when our Shadowrun group was too incomplete: we sat together and had our characters play Das Schwarze Auge (the dark eye), a german fantasy RPG.
But our characters tracked down the GM in line with his girlfriend for an indie concert, and it turned out both of them had been keeping their RPGing a secret from the other, and she ran a game of Roll For Shoes while we all waited in line.
I still wait for full rules for Humans and Households, so I can toss my GM cap one of the players once in a while to have us all at the table play heroes playing a game in the mundane, ordinary world of today!
well, one of the club proposed to make a Vampire group with completely skipping chargen as known: we just ry to make ourselves as chars, then the group decides what clan you become.
That way lies broken friendships unless the group's got a really healthy social dynamic in place beforehand and effort is made to actively maintain it during the campaign.
hmm, good vid vor worldbuilding, especially in regards of Fantasy wolds for RPG, if you want to make a kingdom/other state look very realistic: youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
@Anaphory I think I prefer the large lump shifts. It's somewhat preferable to 4 15-minute shifts over the course of a month, or losing sunlight with the season.
@BESW I wish we had that where I live (46 degrees north), we go from almost 16 hours of daylight on the longest day of the year to about 8.5 on the shortest.
That query is set up to show the last month of questions, from 9/26 to 10/26.
Wow. There are ~14 times as many 5th edition questions this month than questions about the most popular non-D&D system (Dungeon World, apparently), and ~31 times as many D&D questions in general than the most popular non-D&D system.
Well, and B/X, OSR, even 1e and 2e tend to hover at the levels of non D&D systems, IIRC. It's really just 3.x/PF and 5 (and previously 4) that are the giants.
@UrhoKarila @DuckTapeAl This isn't surprising to me nowadays. D&D's quite popular, which is a factor, but it also has no shortage of confusing rules, and you can combine any two rules and get something even more confusing than both of them. The DMG also historically espouses a lot of not-that-great advice on how to run games and manage groups, so it helps DMs and players create social problems and doesn't do much help to solve them.
So it'll breed tons of rules questions and tons of social problem questions, and even moreso for its popularity.
I've played a great number of other games and had only a sliver of the questions to ask that I'd have about D&D. There's several games I've played where our group only had one (and BESW or Trogdor asked it), or there were no questions to ask at all! (I even looked for a possible point of confusion in one of the RPGs, because I wanted to claim its tags. There were none.)
Who built the dungeon, and why? Moving rock takes a lot of work. Is it worth carving lots of corridors? Are they piggybacking on cave systems? An underground chasm?
Yes, he used the exact phrase "cosmic horror."
But not to describe the beings of which he wrote!
So far as I can make out, when he mentions cosmic horror --whether in his stories or his essays-- it is the ideas, not the monsters, to which he refers.
In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literatu...
