TRPG General Chat

KorvinStarmast

00:32

@krakenships I've got an alternative answer for you. play this song in the next tavern, as background music, the next time the player insists that he knows it all. Let him know the bard on stage is singing it, and that a barmaid dedicated it to him.

@krakenships Sometimes, music gets a message across that a conversation won't.

user507974

howdy partner

Shalvenay

01:21

hey there @KorvinStarmast and @user507974

user507974

@Shalvenay how fare thee

Shalvenay

@user507974 alright here -- putting a few things up for the WB.SE folks to take a stab at

hey there @daze413

daze413

hey, Shalvenay. It's saturday here where I'm from and it's great. We do still work on saturdays, but there's a long weekend up ahead, which is nice.

user507974

@daze413 how long is a long weekend when you dont have saturdays off?

daze413

Anyone else bothered about how, in Out of the Abyss, (WARNING SPOILERS!) the gray dwarves of Gracklstugh seemingly don't know that their Wyrmsmith is replaced every 100 years? Dwarves live to be 400ish, so they'd probably see that the young red dragon get replaced by a wyrmling three times in their life. Do they all just play it cool around the dragon? Now, THAT'S cold...

@user507974 1 day long. Sundays only. It sucks, normally. :p

user507974

01:30

@Shalvenay Im just procrastinating on finishing the details for a one shot im oioding this weekend. The theme basically is everybody is a summoner.

Shalvenay

@user507974 ah yeah

user507974

Summer Knights, Summoner Assassins, Summoner Mystics, Even Summoner Janitors

Shalvenay

@daze413 depends on the dragon, I suppose

daze413

@Shalvenay it's a red dragon, the dragon doesn't know it'll get killed when it gets older. It just seems odd to me.

Shalvenay

@daze413 yeah, that is odd

daze413

01:33

The gray dwarves must be all like, "Hey, that's the dragon who's gonna get killed in *looks at watch, about 40 years."

"Don't look him in the eye."

@user507974 but this weekend, we're set to enjoy a 3-day weekend. So I got that going for me. :p

Shalvenay

I just get a normal weekend here. :p

@daze413 what systems do you play in btw?

daze413

@Shalvenay we're a catholic-centric country, so we get this holiday called "All Souls Day" basically we just camp out in cemeteries and tell spooky stories and not sleep.

Shalvenay

@daze413 ah

BESW

That's a different take on All Souls' Day from the one I'm used to.

daze413

only, DnD 5e, unfortunately, haven't got the head space to try different systems yet. Though I have been interested in getting into Call of Cthulhu (if I got the name right)

BESW

01:37

(Around here it's more of a daytime thing.)

@daze413 There is a system called Call of Cthulhu. There's also Trail of Cthulhu, Achtung! Chthulhu, Call of Catthulhu...

Shalvenay

@daze413 ah. I don't think I'd do Lovecraftian things very well at all

daze413

@BESW some of the normal people spend only the day in the cemetery. But if you live in the Philippines where it gets unbearably hot and humid especially in the middle of the day, it makes much more sense to visit the dead at night

@Shalvenay I only just realized myself that I really liked horror in RPGs, running horror games, and such, and I heard CoC is pretty much up there in the horror genre

user507974

how would you guys add elements of genres, say like horror, into stuff like dnd

another example is mystery, I am trying to figure that out for the next session of my campaign

BESW

@daze413 Fair enough. All Souls Day is during our rainy season, so that would probably have something to do with the difference in rituals.

daze413

@user507974 it's all in the narration, I find. The mechanics sorta don't really allow for true-horror-oh-god-run-away-from-that-evil-thing type of deal. You know you got the horror theme down when the players start getting quiet when they normally keep joking around.

BESW

01:44

@daze413 Personally, I feel like Call of Cthulhu is sort of the lowest common denominator of Mythos games: it tries to be able to handle every kind of horror, and winds up being mostly mediocre at any kind.

For a really Lovecraftian "cosmic dread" game, I recommend Lovecraftesque or Cthulhu Dark. For exploring a person's inner demons through a surreal dreamscape, something like Don't Rest Your Head would be more appropriate.

@user507974 Pretty sure we've got mainsite questions about those topics; try starting there.

Shalvenay

@BESW then again, part of me wants to run such a game where the mythical figure is one of the party members even though the party hasn't a clue such is so

BESW

@daze413 If you can get your hands on Nightmares of Mine, you'll probably find it very helpful. It's not a game or a system, it's an analysis of horror in the RPG medium.

daze413

@BESW what other systems do you recommend? I am not really attached to the idea of lovecraft so I have no preference to the theme

oh! *scribbles notes

BESW

@daze413 Well then, what sort of horror are you looking for? Neither Lovecraftesque nor Cthulhu Dark are tied to the Mythos setting, just the "cosmic fear" type of horror.

Nightmares of Mine catalogues different sorts of horror experiences and goals.

user507974

@BESW This BESW? rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_1565.phtml

BESW

01:49

eg, Dread (creeping fear of an unknown quantity), Terror (adrenaline-pumping moments), Gore (being forced to endure something horrific for a period of time without looking away).

@user507974 Yes.

Most stories have some of all three, but focus on a particular one as the dominant theme.

Another axis to consider is the agency of the characters: in cosmic horror, the PCs are generally helpless observers who might be lucky to escape with their lives and sanity--at absolute best they may be able to postpone the doom they've encountered.

daze413

@BESW I'll try the systems you mentioned earlier, and I'll read up on Nightmare of Mine. Thanks!

user507974

@BESW is there anything like this but for mystery/crime investigatio stuff

that would be quite invaluable

BESW

Then there's pulp horror, which is more Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: gross, scary, overwhelming, but the hero is probably going to triumph.

@user507974 Nothing quite exactly like that I know of. A lot of mystery games have good sections on it, though, depending on the themes they're focused on. I find that a combination of Cthulhu Dark's scenario prep advice and Bubblegumshoe's mystery structure is good for me.

@daze413 You might also take a look at A Penny For My Thoughts. It's not strictly horror, but has a lot of the same "discovering uncomfortable truths" elements that make Mythos-like horror successful.

There's a TON of stuff out there. All Flesh Must Be Eaten is a Unisystem game that tries to accommodate almost any kind of zombie campaign, with greater and lesser success.

Paranoia is a game of slapstick violence, but it's fundamentally about the horror of living in a world where paranoid conspiracies are the assumed normal and you can't trust anyone because the only way to survive is to rat out your friends.

(Your PC dies so often in Paranoia that you get a six-pack of clones to replace them before you have to roll up a new PC.)

daze413

@BESW whoa, that is a lot haha. I'll look into Paranoia, as well. Might have the time in the 3day weekend.

BESW

There's some Fate hacks for horror that I haven't tried, too--Fate is a little rough to tweak for horror because it runs on the assumption its PCs are competent, dramatic, and proactive.

I'm sure it's been done well, but I haven't tried any of the iterations yet to be sure.

daze413

02:04

Anyone played Darkest Dungeon in PC? IS that considered Lovecraftian, or is my ignorance showing?

BESW

"Lovecraftian" is a very nebulous term.

HPL himself was writing "cosmic fear" stories:

> 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.

But the writers who continued in his setting after his death introduced more pulp elements of heroic adventure.

Some people consider anything which uses HPL's creatures or settings to be Lovecraftian, regardless of tone or theme.

Others define it more broadly in terms of tone and theme while not really caring what precise creatures may appear.

Most roguelikes open with a vague Mythos-like quality as they're confusing and deadly: you don't know what's going on or what's possible, and then you die.

But their learning curve toward mastery quickly dispels that quality.

daze413

I cant really wrap my head around what it means for something to break the laws of nature in such a way as to make those that try to understand the alien-ness mad. Like, what kind of writing did this scroll have to have had for someone to go insane after reading it? It's fascinating :D

BESW

On the other hand, World of Warcraft has creatures directly inspired by HPL's work, but it generally abandons the tone and themes.

@daze413 The concept has changed a bit over time. HPL's original conception was about challenging the human conviction that we are important.

His fear-literature was about people who not just suspected their infinitesimal insignificance in the face of an uncaring universe, but had that suspicion confirmed in the most brutal way.

This is a less mind-blowing concept in our post-Pale-Blue-Dot world.

But the notion that the things we rely on as absolute truths are, in fact, merely local anomalies? That can still shake us up.

People in real life will riot and go to war over that kind of challenge to their conceptions.

Heck, look at how personally people take the authorship question.

On the other hand, some modern Mythos-inspired stories take a more pragmatic approach to Mythos madness.

The Laundry Files says that considering the eldritch science of the outer dimensions invites scavengers from those dimensions to eat microscopic holes in our brains. The more we think about such things, the more our brains are eaten away.

daze413

02:22

That sounds... kinda lazy? (sorry)

BESW

The Laundry Files series is... well, it's Mythos For Programmers.

It's well-written and well-constructed, but not especially mystic.

I prefer Peter Clines' 14 and The Fold, or Nnendi Okorafor's The Lagoon, for modernistic takes on similar themes.

Joel Harmon

@KorvinStarmast I have to agree, sometimes music just does it better. For example, I had my annual listen to this song today

Shalvenay

hey there @JoelHarmon

Joel Harmon

hey @Shalvenay

Shalvenay

how're things going?

Joel Harmon

02:27

pretty crazy

I'm still trying to sort out last week's gaming binge

Shalvenay

OK here.

Joel Harmon

good to hear. Got that box up and running again?

Shalvenay

working on it -- it was converted to GPT at some unknown point, so I had to redo /boot as an EFISP but haven't gotten the efibootvars setup yet

BESW

"Efibootvars" would be a good name for a goblin.

Shalvenay