Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 2:42 pm

Korgan0 wrote:, so Cairo might not be a horrible idea, or maybe Islamabad.

Within 5 minutes of reading this suggestion, I got linked to this http://www.thecairopost.com/news/133369 ... n-in-tombs

That's a bit more D&D than Cthulu or "tech", but still: apparently in the real world sorcerers are casting spells to appease ancient spirits in Cairo today.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 5:42 pm

The magic of Cthulhu is, primarily, mental in nature. He lies dreaming under the sea and spreads madness through dream sendings of his own. If R'lyeh had any of the magics that weren't psychic in nature, that would be really weird. But the big bottom line is that in the one and only place in HPL's literature that the Blue Sign is described, it is in the Shadow Over Innsmouth, where it is used to protect against Deep Ones. The Elder Magics are the one and only set of magics that the Deep Ones specifically find uncomfortable.

You could make the Deep Ones Yellow or Red or something if that was at all important to do, but they can't be Blue.

Serpentfolk I think have a very strong claim on Red tech. Some of them live in the underground kingdoms that we've established to be a source of Red Tech, and those caverns even have glowing red sigils on them, which are presumably the Red Sign.

Goatspawn have an absolute lock on Purple Tech. The Purple Sign is the Sign of the Dark Mother, and the Dark Mother is their biological grandmother.

Deep Ones have a pretty good claim on Green Magic. We have "Fhtagn" in the name of the game, and that's from the chant "Ia Cthulhu R'lyeh Fhtagn!" which means "Cthulhu Dreams From R'lyeh." From a terrestrial standpoint, the R'lyehans are the masters of Dream Magic, and it would be strange for the Y'ha-Nthleians to have wildly different magic.

Ghouls don't really do magic at all in the stories. They meep and tunnel, and their tunnels go into the Underworld (which in turn is connected to the Dreamlands). But N'Kai is connected to the Underworld as well, and that's explicitly Red. And the High Priest Not to Be Described has a connection to the Underworld, and he's Yellow. The Underworld is, in short, a pretty cosmopolitan place as far as people using different flavors of dark magic there. Any magical association to Ghouls specifically would be tenuous - although I think something could be made of the Azure Flame and the Death Fires of the Underworld both being Blue.

And Akuma of course are an extra being through in to make five. They have whatever is left, which I currently take to be Yellow.

-Username17

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 6:26 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:The Elder things were also heavy into biotech, what with the Shogoths and everything. There's even some evidence that they created most of Earth's ecosystem.
Call of Cthulhu and CthulhuPunk both spend a lot of wordcount and not a small amount of page space on blathering timelines attempting to put together a timeline of billions of years ago and figure out when the Flying Polyps made war with the Elder Things and when Yithians created a temporal beachhead in the form of the library city of Pnakotus and when that got overrun by Flying Polyps and shit. And you know what? None of that shit matters.

Wars that happened one hundred million years ago or more basically don't matter. There's no reason to commit one way or the other to their outcomes, their participants, or their timing. Flying Polyps, Elder Things, and Yithians all have Blue tech and none of them seem to like each other very much. That's really all we have to say.

The timeline we actually care about starts in 1928 when Calvin Coolidge ordered Y'ha-Nthlei bombed and illegally put a bunch of civilians from the Marsh clan into internment camps.

-Username17

My point had nothing to do with timelines and everything to do with the fact that we probably shouldn't assign one tech and only one tech to every race.

It leads to pigeonholing and stupid arguments and you have to twist one thing or another to make it fit properly.

The Elder Things have biotech. They engineered the Shogoths, some of the most impressive biotech around. They also have a variety of other technologies.

The Mi-Go fly through the aether of space with their wings and they also cut out people's brains and put them into cybernetic canisters.

Cthulhu is a massively powerful psychic who broadcasts his dreams to everyone in range, and that range is reduced by water, but he isn't associated with the Dreamlands. He's also a "non-Euclidian" being who presumably exists in four or more spacial dimensions.

While doing a one-to-one mapping of mythos races to techs is tidy, it pretty much forces one or the other into contortions.

It's also very much unnecessary.

The Mythos races can each have access to a variety of techs and that's okay.

I'm also wondering exactly how we want to do the magic/psychic divide, or if we're dropping it altogether. On one hand, it's interesting. On the other, there's a lot of overlap between the two.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 6:45 pm

Akuma should be Blue because of parallel angularly-displaced "hell" dimensions.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 7:25 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The magic of Cthulhu is, primarily, mental in nature. He lies dreaming under the sea and spreads madness through dream sendings of his own. If R'lyeh had any of the magics that weren't psychic in nature, that would be really weird. But the big bottom line is that in the one and only place in HPL's literature that the Blue Sign is described, it is in the Shadow Over Innsmouth, where it is used to protect against Deep Ones. The Elder Magics are the one and only set of magics that the Deep Ones specifically find uncomfortable.

You know, in the name of weaknesses being more interesting than powers, I'd suggest that instead of having each race associated with one tech, they instead have one tech that they don't or can't do.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 7:42 pm

hyzmarca wrote: You know, in the name of weaknesses being more interesting than powers, I'd suggest that instead of having each race associated with one tech, they instead have one tech that they don't or can't do.

And have limited ability to defend against / detect?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 11:25 pm

Goatspawn are, well, spawn of the Goat. Any of their natural abilities are, pretty much by definition, Abyssian powers. That puts any of their natural witchcraft or summoning as extensions of Purple Tech as things are understood by the Union.

If we wanted to do some kind of wheel of hate for the non-human Union characters, under the August Derleth system Abyssians are susceptible to fire and Boreans are susceptible to water. It was a strange system, but something could certainly be mined. It would imply that Blue is super effective against Deep Ones, Green is super effective against Akuma, Yellow is super effective against Serpentfolk, Red is super effective against Goatspawn, and Purple is super effective against Ghouls. Or something like that. But I'm not sure we're going that way, because honestly none of the magic types get a monopoly on "Fire" and Cthuga's powers are pretty much replicable with garden variety nuclear weapons and plasma torches.

-Username17

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Tue Jan 20, 2015 12:18 am

While doing a one-to-one mapping of mythos races to techs is tidy, it pretty much forces one or the other into contortions.
I agree. Among the Mi-go, there are engineers (who personally have blue tech), as well as priests of Shub-Niggurath (who personally have purple tech.)
Some mythos races might be restricted to a single color - I think it's not a bad idea to pick a few and make them monochromatic; so Goat Spawn can be purple tech made flesh, and only get purple spells. But the sentient and cultured aliens (including Mi-go and Elder Things) have access to all or most colors, just as humans now do.

I'm also wondering exactly how we want to do the magic/psychic divide, or if we're dropping it altogether.
Drop it altogether.
HPL makes no distinction between Magic and "weird science" of any kind. So, psionics and unnatural metallurgy and chanting unnatural hymns to demiurges are all of a piece the same thing.

HPL, in at the Mountains of Madness wrote: God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!

August Derleth was seriously scewing with HPL's stuff in making them or their Gods somehow good guys; they were almost certainly atheists, at least in the sense that they worshiped no higher power.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jan 20, 2015 10:58 pm

The bottom line on the Arcanotech divisions is that they are made from Union ignorance. Arcanotech is cargo cult shit - things that are copied from what much older space empires do and know. The Union arcanotechnicians make copies of technology from the Mi-Go (Yellow), Shan (Red), Xothan (Green), Elder Things (Blue), and the Abyss (Purple). And those copied technologies don't play nicely together because they are copied from space empires of aliens that are separated by many parsecs, many eons, and completely different biologies. The stuff the Union is cranking out might differ only in a VHS versus Betamax sort of way, but they wouldn't know because they don't understand the underlying principles that make these gadgets work well enough to make that call.

The Mi Go can make their tech do all kinds of crazy shit that Union arcanotechnicians do not know how to replicate. Because they've been a mercantile space empire for over a thousand years and actually know how their tech works. They aren't brewing space mead as a ritual exercise, they have breweries on their homeworld that make the shit in vats.

-Username17

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Wed Jan 21, 2015 4:03 am

Okay, I can gronk all that, and it is a good call.

However, unless you change the source material:

(A Buzzing Imitation of Human Speech) wrote: Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

So do the Mi-go worship Shub-Niggurath and how are they a different team? They get "Tentacles of Shub-Niggurath" but it's Yellow when they cast it? Or is Shub-Niggurath itself not purple?

Also, many of HPL's aliens are degenerate, and they don't know how their tech works any more either. This is clearly an issue for Elder Things. That doesn't mean they can't define an arcanotech color according to whatever-shit they happen to have (in fact it sorta makes it easier, if they're like the WH40K Empire is that they've ritualized their own technology.)

A more general issue which came up before, although the alien races in HPL's fiction fight a lot of wars with each-other, the current state of relations is never fleshed out. But Shub-Niggurath is a god and gets worshipped by

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jan 21, 2015 8:47 am

In an August Derleth scheme, you'd get your choice of Hastur & Cthugha, Hastur & Shub Niggurath, Cthulhu & Cthugha, or Cthulhu & Shub Niggurath. But in The Mound, the city of Tsath and its essentially Melnibonean inhabitants have statues of Shub Niggurath, Cthulhu, and Hastur all right next to each other. These obviously can't be reconciled.

In our scheme, The Abyss is a timeless void within the Event Horizon of a black hole from which Shub Niggurath plots her conquest of the galaxy through dream sendings and portals to unleash Sailor Moon and Voltron antagonists on various worlds. Abyssian tech is stuff that was either grown in the Abyss or learnt through dark visions of Abyssian goings on, and in the Union classification system everything they can get working is Purple Arcanotech.

But there's certainly nothing stopping a Mi Go from worshiping at an altar of the Black Goat and trying to summon a Dark Young kaiju. Shub Niggurath is an evil goddess and anyone from any empire is welcome to worship her, and she wants to spread Abyssian tech everywhere like spores.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Jan 21, 2015 8:50 am

Josh_Kablack wrote:
Korgan0 wrote:, so Cairo might not be a horrible idea, or maybe Islamabad.
Within 5 minutes of reading this suggestion, I got linked to this http://www.thecairopost.com/news/133369 ... n-in-tombs

That's a bit more D&D than Cthulu or "tech", but still: apparently in the real world sorcerers are casting spells to appease ancient spirits in Cairo today.

Yet another reason for me to move to Egypt.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 3:37 pm

Hey, I just realized: Yellow Arcanotech trumps One-Time Pads.

Because the encoded message has touched the code, regardless of which one is which.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 4:47 am

Yellow Hacking lets you do electrical manipulation at a distance. It can't extract data, but it can wipe a hard drive or disable a maglock. Green Arcanotech is the one that can extract meaning out of stuff.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 2:59 pm

Grek wrote:Yellow Hacking lets you do electrical manipulation at a distance. It can't extract data, but it can wipe a hard drive or disable a maglock. Green Arcanotech is the one that can extract meaning out of stuff.

Yellow does Law of Contagion.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 3:09 pm

I think that Yellow's ability to do Law Of Contagion well enough to negate OTPs would break other things. Maybe it could work if the user copied the encrypted data directly from the computer that encrypted it onto the flash drive to be hacked, but I feel like copying it onto another computer and then onto the drive or erasing and overwriting the key should block it. If people can chain the Law Of Contagion, Yellow witches could stay home with the team's wallets and use them as casting relays.

Green, on the other hand, is well within its rights to trump any encryption.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 3:48 pm

name_here wrote:I think that Yellow's ability to do Law Of Contagion well enough to negate OTPs would break other things. Maybe it could work if the user copied the encrypted data directly from the computer that encrypted it onto the flash drive to be hacked, but I feel like copying it onto another computer and then onto the drive or erasing and overwriting the key should block it. If people can chain the Law Of Contagion, Yellow witches could stay home with the team's wallets and use them as casting relays.

Green, on the other hand, is well within its rights to trump any encryption.

Well, the Union might not have that level of Yellow Arcanotech yet.

Can Green Arcanotech decrypt the messages that have been encoded using a Public Key without seeing the encrypted messages?

EDIT: I suppose we could maybe say that copying data over a network doesn't link the new data to the old data...

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:20 am

Maybe calling it dream magic confuses me. Are you saying you can pull the message out of the mind of the person sending it? That would certainly bypass encryption. Or is it working some other way that interact with machines etc?

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:31 am

Does Green Arcanotech enable you to ride around on a bioengineered motorcycle in space?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayce_and_ ... ster_Minds

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:43 am

kzt wrote:Maybe calling it dream magic confuses me. Are you saying you can pull the message out of the mind of the person sending it? That would certainly bypass encryption. Or is it working some other way that interact with machines etc?

Think of it as a set of tools that let you manipulate information that is mathematically proven to exist, but which you might not know what the exact contents are. Sort of like being able to treat any language or text or mind as a "black box" that you can x-ray and derive information from...and change...all without directly touching the box.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:54 am

DrPraetor wrote:Does Green Arcanotech enable you to ride around on a bioengineered motorcycle in space?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayce_and_ ... ster_Minds

Only in the Dreamlands. (i.e., "outer space within the Dreamlands")

Outside of the Dreamlands, that would presumably be Purple Arcanotech.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 9:45 pm

What are the aesthetics of devices that use the different colors of Arcanotech?

My thoughts:
Red Arcanotech: Curved and sci-fi-y; often glowing.
Yellow Arcanotech: Looks like "normal" stuff, but can instantly switch into different configurations.
Green Arcanotech: Liquid and flowing. Shifts slowly when people are around. (Or quickly, sometimes, but not instant like Yellow Arcanotech)
Blue Arcanotech: Straight lines and very sharp corners, but no right angles. Often crystal.
Purple Arcanotech: Zerg-ish; fleshy and chitin-y
Orange Commontech: Whatever the engineer decided to do, but looks like "real" things that are manufactured under real-world efficiency constraints.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 10:02 pm

Red Arcanotech is heavy. Looks like stuff from Stargate SG-1.

A Red Arcanotech portal in action.

Green Arcanotech is aquatic. Looks like Ilithid tech from Spelljammer.

A Green Arcanotech dreamship.

-Username17

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Mon Feb 02, 2015 7:36 pm

Also, the Great Old Ones answer prayers in a monkeys-paw kind of way.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bill-b ... god,37906/

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 10:46 pm

Friendly aliens, including I suppose the Elder Things, some Star Spawn of Cthulhu, the Mi-go ambassadors residence perhaps, should be into having humans as low-caste personal servants. That way, you have humans who are trained in how to be butlers to freaky aliens, and in how to cook for them:

http://www.dorkly.com/post/72502/dammit ... ng-bonkers

which, in the fashion of offices like the seneschal and chamberlain who were originally personal servants, is also a good way for humans to get their hands on some of that eldritch power.