I've spent the last several days mulling over the various ideas and challenges that have been tossed around, and unfortunately during that time this thread became a crazy fucked-up disaster zone. So, before I continue, let me make it very clear that I have no interest in laying the conceptual groundwork for
Infowars: The RPG or storyboarding any narratives that stem from the question "what if people who are [race] have a special relationship to [monster beasty]"?
infected slut princess wrote:Lovecraftian horror is not very effective for an RPG game IMO. While some people might think it's cool to discover their grandpa was a fishman, that might be really upsetting to some people. But how is that useful for a RPG game with a group of people?
Cosmic horror and unfathomable oblivion might be scary as well and induce an some existential crisis or whatever in people. But how is that useful for an RPG game with a group of people?
Detective work, research, encounters with scary monsters... those can be good for an RPG game with a group of people. But the other stuff doesn't really translate into fun gaming from what I can see. Lovecraft's has many wonderful tales that are unnerving and work great as weird horror stories. Trying to translate that into RPG stuff is perhaps a hopeless cause.
I think I pretty much agree with your point there; the story elements have to be removed pretty far from what you would associate with "Lovecraftian" fiction if there's to be any hope of capturing the big themes from his work, and even then those big, resonant ideas do not translate at all to an RPG
if you try to make them the central focus. They have to be worked in somehow around and behind the core game processes of "this is why a party gathers, this is what they gather to do, here are their common obstacles and their methods." So let's first talk about those things and see if we can come up with a framework that is conducive to being used as a vehicle for telling stories that might have some thematic content in common with the best of Lovecraft.
So far the greatest enthusiasm for "who are we the players playing as" is for a
cult.
The first question related to cults that I want to address is, why don't we play
Warp Cult instead of inventing our own wheel? Well, the answer is basically that this isn't a tactical miniatures game and shooty shooty pew pew is not the primary activity of characters. Also that in this game everyone seems to want to be able to become a psyker-equivalent so we're going to want to lean in to that angle a lot harder. There's nothing wrong with shooty shooty pew pew but that's not what I'm about here. However, there are definitely concepts and approaches to be
stolen from inspired by in Warp Cult, such as the Designing a Cult section, the Running a Campaign of Warp Cult section, and the Clothing Beam.
What we can do is lay down the basic premise that a
Cult is a collection of people, all of whom are in possession of
Lore, and who are in pursuit of some goal that they believe is best achieved by acquiring more. Lore doesn't have to be a page ripped from the Miskatonic copy of the
Necronomicon, and indeed probably shouldn't be. It can be something like a madman's diary, a minor eldritch artifact, a chunk of a Mythos critter, or even a painting they made after an extremely weird dream. Every PC is going to start the game in possession of at least one scrap of Lore of some variety, and every PC needs to have a backstory that explains how they came by their Lore scrap, what it is that they want such that they think that acquiring more Lore would help, and why they would coordinate with other Lore-seekers. At the beginning, these goals can be pretty nebulous and loosely-defined, or very concrete - I want to have my boss' job and I'm pursuing Lore that will help me hex him out of my chain of command, or I just want to understand why I keep having dreams where I'm being pursued by a white serpent into caves under the Temple Mount.
The party doesn't need an initial unifying goal beyond cooperation in pursuit of their personal agendas. You could, if you wanted, set up a framing device where they are all members of a small Cult led by an NPC Priest who has a little more Lore than everyone else and acts as the party's Mr. Johnson. You could also have the PCs be part of a larger organization that already has defined goals, but this isn't necessary either.
Inducting new members into the PCs' Cult may or may not be something that the PCs are interested in doing depending on the players. However, whether or not the PCs are active recruiters for a new tentacled religion of their own making, we're going to want to have a heavy emphasis on social contacts, possibly to the point of introducing troupe play. If your players are going to induct a contact into the Cult, letting the players take full control of that character only seems reasonable. It's also pretty thematic that a person who has joined a cult dedicated to eldritch mysteries might become a "new person" dominated by someone else's goals and plans. Cultivating contacts for their wealth, knowledge, or personal access to more Lore is something that the PCs should absolutely be interested in doing.
So, while classic Call of Cthulhu just kind of naturally assumes that your PCs are Investigators and that this gives local quest-givers adequate reason to come to them when there are some weird footprints in the abbey's pumpkin patch or half-chewed fresh corpses in the morgue, I'm more interested in setting up a framework where the PCs are naturally encouraged to take action in directions that will result in adventure. The drive to acquire more Lore suits this nicely, and as such the basic framework for sending the party on new adventures is going to lean heavily on the idea that, because the PCs are always in pursuit of Lore, they should pretty consistently be taking some kind of active steps to look for promising happenings. In response to their efforts, the MC's job is to contrive some way to dangle the plot hook in front of them. Voila, we no longer need struggle any further with explanations for why the police come to the Investigators for help or why the Investigators would give a shit.
Gaining the tools they need to accomplish their personal ambitions will be the driving factor pushing PCs to go on adventures, so let's next ask: what is Lore and what does it do? I imagine some kind of series of random-roll tables as a Lore generator that will have things like 1d100 "an expurgated edition of the 1872 Russian translation of..." 1d100 "... De Vermis Mysteriis". This fluff text is accompanied by game mechanics of
Point Value and
Aspect, such as "Snake 1." You can learn specific spells to do specific things if you can combine together enough scraps of lore of the right Aspect and Points Value. Initially the scraps of Lore the party starts with should be combinable into two or three spells, or however many spells is enough to give the party some nifty tricks right out of the gatee.
Let's say for the sake of argument that we have five different Aspects for Lore and they all go up to Level 10: Snake, Smoke, Sand, Salt, and Silver. Note that the names are deliberately vague and artsy because that lets us use Aspects as puzzle pieces just as much as we use them to define spell lists a la D&D Conjuration, Necromancy, Evocation, etc. You can and should expect that Snake rituals are usually themed around lies or betrayal in some way, but keeping the labels vague and artsy lets us slip in effects that are a bit off-theme. Let's say there's a spell "Your Lying Eyes", that causes its victim to perceive others as lying when they tell the truth, and that codifying this spell (i.e. making it available for casting) requires the party to expend 2 levels' worth of Snake Lore. This might be the usual fare for spells learned with Snake lore, but because we call it Snake instead of Divination, we can also have a different spell like "Unseen Fang", Snake 3, that is a combat hex that deals poison damage to a target when the caster breaks a specially-prepared bone while making eye contact with the target. We can also make Snake Lore a requirement for more complex spells, such as something that might need Salt 4 and Snake 1. I don't know what Salt is supposed to generally do; it's all hypothetical right now.
So, the second question, why don't we just play
Bookhounds of London? Well, because we're not just looking for Lore to turn it around for a quick buck - we're looking for Lore because we want to get together enough compatible bits of it to magically conjure fire inside our uncle's skull so we can inherit the Worthingford fortune. We want to be people who have ambitions and drives beyond just survival, dangerous desires that tempt us down a path of self-inflicted damnation, who could quit the cult at any time and go back to a normal life but
don't, even when the corners of the room start writhing in spasms of frenetic motion when we take our eyes off them for even a second.