R'lyeh Piercing Copper Drill: Now with Material Writeup!(p4)

[Prak]

That material writeup I just mentioned!

So, on lunch, after thinking about starting up a new game and trying out CoC while wandering the LGS, having bought Steampunk dice, and while watching TTGL, I had a strange idea...

A Call of Cthulhu game, but Steampunk, with influences of tone from TTGL.

Doable? What is the essential essence of each thing?

[Username17]

I think this wins for "weirdest idea". If you wanted to cleave very closely to TTGL for plot outline, you of course could. The major cities of the world were put into bottles and dragged under water by the servants of Cthulhu in the 19th century. Now the humans live in bottle cities that look like a cross between Victorian London and Rapture. The Deep Ones are the only ones allowed to go outside, and they are charged with killing anyone who leaves the bottle cities. he Deep Ones themselves are sterile and need humans to breed more Deep Ones.

The Deep Ones all work for Cthulhu, who has his own palace-city of R'lyeh in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It of course transforms into a giant golem, with Cthulhu controlling it. Upon defeating Cthulhu, it turns out that he is the local high priest of Azathoth, which in this case means that all the suffering and human sacrifices he was doing was actually to keep the mad god at the center of the universe from coming to eat the entire planet.

Azathoth sends heralds to start breaking shit on Earth, and eventually the protagonists must defeat him by passing through Hastur to slay the tentacled beast at the source of all their troubles.

-Username17

[Prak]

Heh, thanks Frank. I actually take the "weirdest idea" thing as a compliment.

I might use some of that, and I think I need some of that "isolation vrs. return to the surface" stuff, as that is a central theme of TTGL. I've been kind of brainstorming since OP, too, and unfortunately, haven't gotten around to reading any more Lovecraft yet, so my Mythos knowledge is still pretty spotty.

So far, I have the following very, very scattered notes:

• Stats needed: Sanity, GAR
  • Sanity: Goes down as you learn more about the Mythos
  • GAR: Goes up as you fight Eldritch Abominations, can be used to improve other rolls (do more damage, better resist sanity loss, etc.)
• Sparks: Yep, stealing right from Girl Genius here. Sparks are human prodigies touched by the Dreamlands who gain great creativity and the ability to rewrite reality slightly from it. Sparks were the ones who discovered and refined the long theorized aether, and developed the ways to use it.
• Dampfengels- Steam/Aether powered mechs created by an ancestral race to combat the great old ones.
• Yig-father of serpents, patron of the Serpent Men.
  • Has ties to Quetzalcohuatl, himself having thematic ties to a kind of DtF type Lucifer (enlightening representative of the morning star. Giver of books and the calendar).
  • Dampfengels possibly created by Serpent Men. Though this might lend a more south american/nagualic flavour to them.

[Koumei]

At first glance of the title I assumed it was another spambot.

Anyway, GAR definitely needs to let you do the following at high enough levels:
[*]See the invisible
[*]Break the unbreakable
[*]Row, row, fight the powa!
[*]Stop the unstoppable
[*]Do the impossible
[*]Row, row, fight the powa!

[Username17]

While Chaosium products do have Mythos monsters cause "sanity loss", that's not really how things go in the books. You don't look at a bunch of Shoggoths and suddenly decide that you need to start counting spiderwebs to make sure they add up to even numbers. The actual enemy, as it is in TTGL, is despair. You are constantly running into things older and vaster than you could possibly imagine and encouraged to give up your quest. Again, just like in TTGL. In classic Mythos material, you are supposed to run into ancient plans that you have no means of altering, and that causes you not to become agoraphobic or some shit, but to fall into despair and hopelessness.

The thing where it turns out that the Deep Ones have been slaughtering humans who escape the bottle cities as a means to keep the real ultimate enemy (Azathoth) from destroying the planet is a perfect fit for both TTGL (as that is essentially the revelation of what the Helix King was doing to keep the Antispiral from destroying the Earth) and for Mythos.

Because there is a lot of stuff in the Cthulhu Mythos, you can have actually more layers than the actual TTGL did. And the players can reveal these truths from the bottom up. So the top truth: the one that makes for the ultimate final battle is that in the center of the universe, Azathoth waits upon his nighted throne to go full planet-eater on entire galaxies that he sees non-demonic life getting too uppity in. Below that, you have the space empire of the Great Race of Yith. They are actually body jumpers, and the actual Great Race of Yith is inside a hollow world in a bunch of Matrix-style pods. They have demonic body shells that they project into that fly around the galaxy in giant Warhammer-esque gothic space ships collecting sacrifices from the various other worlds in their own slave shields. They make sure that no non-demonic civilizations disturb the surface of worlds and collect the sacrifices to appease Azathoth. Below that, you have Cthulhu who collects sacrifices for periodic Yithian sacrifice shipments and orders his commanders (Shudde M'ell of the tunneling Cthonians, Yig of the surface scouring serpent people, and Hydra and Dagon of the oceans). The commanders have armies of hybrid creatures (serpent people, mole men, deep ones, and Tcho-tchos) to keep the humans under wraps and send sacrifices to Cthulhu and stuff.

So first the players think that their goal is to free humanity from the bottle cities they are stuck in. Their enemies are:

But having led the way to the surface, R'lyeh rises. The player characters find out about the convoys of virgins being sent to the sunken city. They discover that their true enemy is the king. Great Cthulhu himself. To liberate the world, they must go to the heart of darkness and fight:

And then:

Victory! The Earth is saved. Except... now that the player characters are masters of R'lyeh and tasked with making a global empire, they find the ancient dread tomes that indicate something about where the sacrifices actually went. And it wasn't into Cthulhu's belly. It was into space. Now it's about fighting to take over the solar system, because the solar system turns out to be full of space flying demon things. The new enemies come in swarms from space:

OK, fighting off increasingly large swarms of space monsters is going to get old fast, so the players have to track that shit down. And they find that it's coming from Pluto. The players use ancient technology to fly there and fight the Mi Go on their own terms:

Except... oh shit, the Yuggoth base is actually just an outpost of a demon space empire. The get a cryptic transmission from the Great Race of Yith that the empire is coming to destroy humanity for getting too big.

So the player characters beat that somehow, and make their way through the Yithian portal to the very heart of the Empire of Yith. And holy fuck, it looks like this:

Now the savvy Gurren Lagann viewer will believe that this is the last shell, since that is the world of the Anti-Spirals from the show. However, there's one more shell after this, because the thing that will destroy the galaxy isn't some unspecified thing in the future if human spiral power gets too big, it's Azathoth. And he's coming to town:

And that is the final battle.

---

So basically you have GAR. GAR is what lets you do stuff. With more GAR you can activate bigger things of the elder races and fight against the armies of Azathoth more effectively. It's also basically your hit points. When your Despair rises above your GAR, you can't do anything and will allow yourself to get captured. Motivational speeches and defeated enemies (even if they were not defeated by you) causes your despair to go down. Being hurt physically, having allies killed or held hostage, seeing bigger opponents, and having enemies reveal horrid truths about why the universe is like it is and the likely negative ramifications of your actions cause your Despair to go up. You also have hit points, but most attacks do not inflict hit points (except to vehicles, which also don't take Despair).

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

While Chaosium products do have Mythos monsters cause "sanity loss", that's not really how things go in the books. You don't look at a bunch of Shoggoths and suddenly decide that you need to start counting spiderwebs to make sure they add up to even numbers. The actual enemy, as it is in TTGL, is despair. You are constantly running into things older and vaster than you could possibly imagine and encouraged to give up your quest. Again, just like in TTGL. In classic Mythos material, you are supposed to run into ancient plans that you have no means of altering, and that causes you not to become agoraphobic or some shit, but to fall into despair and hopelessness.

Good point. Madness is usually your mind blanking out temporarily. A "does not compute" result. Or better yet, a "Halt and catch fire" error message.

The long term madness in Mythos if memory serves was almost self-inflicted, in order to forget the hopeless despair and terrible, inevitable things that actually run the universe.

An idea: How funny would it be if the PCs, realizing they have to face Azathoth, who is primordial and elementally idiotic, from destroying everything, realizes that they can't defeat him per se, and end up just being able to distract/entertain him. It's not something you can do forever, and you hope to fuck that someone else comes along to take over before you can't do it any more, but it's the only thing you *can* do you know?

[Prak]

Ok, so Despair, rather than Sanity.

GAR tied to HP, some kind of parallel system... Hm, maybe GAR is just level, or double level, or something? So basically, a first level character will easily become useless, given that just a small amount Despair will overcome his GAR, and he'll have few HP as well.

And I have something of a plot that I can follow.

Now I just need system. And mech rules. And the steampunk part.

suggestions for system? I'm tempted to use D20 out of familiarity. Palladium could work, what with it's tons of robots and eldritch horror style critters between Rifts and Beyond the Supernatural. M&M has a power that would be useful in doing mech combining. With stuff from Mastermind's Manual, it wouldn't be too difficult to tack stuff designed with M&M into another d20 game.

And, I'm still left with the question of where the mechs come from. The Serpent Men as the creators was kinda working, to me, since I was able to draw parallels between Yig and some not quite so homicidal deities, but, again, I have just TV Tropes and Wikipedia informing me about the mythos at the moment, until I get through the book I'm reading and start some Lovecraft.

[Username17]

Yig isn't actually mentioned that much in the original source material. The original story is "The Curse of Yig" in which Yig gets super pissed. Today, that's pretty much the entirety of Yig as understood by mythos devotees. Yig is a giant fucking snake man who is the leader of the serpent people and he is really angry all the time and curses shit. If you have Yig show up as anything other than a giant snake man with anger management issues that sprays curses all over things like an unspayed tomcat, people will not recognize it as Yig.

Yig is, at his core, a minor villain. Has never been anything more than that and never will be.

-Username17

[hogarth]

While Chaosium products do have Mythos monsters cause "sanity loss", that's not really how things go in the books. You don't look at a bunch of Shoggoths and suddenly decide that you need to start counting spiderwebs to make sure they add up to even numbers.

Note that there are plenty crazy "bad guys" in HP Lovecraft stories, but that's "insane cultist" crazy, not OCD crazy.

[Prak]

Wiki said there were touches of and references to Quetzelcautl in Yig, and then Yig is essentially a mentor deity, apparently credited with giving humanity the calendar and books (though I think it likely wasn't books explicitly, but physical record). While Yig is frequently pissed off and curses people, this doesn't, in my mind, mean that his people, the Serpent Men, couldn't have created the Dampfengels. But, again, I know nothing other than what I'm reading on Wiki and TV Tropes, which don't have much to say about the Serpent Men.

I just like snakes, they are frequently tied to knowledge in mythology, and am perfectly fine with mentor/trickster deities with tempers (Loki, the Demon the Fallen version of Lucifer).

[Nihilistic_Impact]

There is always Nodens, he's a Dreamlands God that lives to hunt and fight the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. He would make a useful resource on where the mecha come from.

Also Yig only gets pissed off if you harm his children, so don't kill snakes.

[Prak]

Ok, thanks Nihilistic. Given that I already decided that the steampunk stuff comes from channeling the Dreamlands, Nodens is a good fit.

I guess that means the Dampfengels were created by the nightguants.

[Prak]

Ok, so I think I figured out a way to allow mech combining, without making someone sit out during combat, or trying to make combat involve both people in the mech in some weird way.

The easiest thing to do is to give characters cohorts, letting both main and cohort gain mechs, which almost always combine exclusively.

I may need to still find some way of keeping everyone involved in combat while their mechs are combined, in case players do need to combine together, but this idea would stave that off for a while.

Still need to figure out the system. If people have suggestions, or endorsements of something I already mentioned, I'd welcome them.

[Koumei]

You might want to look at BESM 3E as a baseline. I don't mean using the system, because that way madness lies. Not Cthulhu madness either. But just using some basic things:

You have three stats, Body, Mind and Soul (human average is 3 or 4, 1 would be like a toddler for Body or a hamster for Mind or a Mood Ring for Soul, maximum is 12 IIRC but I think the human maximum is said to be like 8). Any check is 2d6 + one of the above + skill ranks.

You have HP, which is going to be less than the normal BESM amount of (Body+Soul)*5, and if you want players doing mystic stuff you give them MP (again, less than the normal (Mind+Soul)*5). Combat value (~=BAB) is the average of all three. You could very easily rename Soul, MP or Combat Value to be GAR, or make it a separate thing which basically equals level and sets tiers for stuff you can do/is the despair threshold/gives bonus HP and MP.

In fact, the latter is probably the best idea, that way as the team go on to kick bigger threats in the face, they get more GAR, which makes them generically better at everything.

The RNG is seriously small there, so what you're not going to do is the thing where you give people 100 points and let them assign these points into whatever. You instead basically set each tier (or GAR level) to have X points worth of skills (include a max rank based on GAR), as well as a number of choices of abilities. Possibly even actually divide them into small templates that are basically training packages.

So at GAR 1 everyone has like HP = the average of Body and Soul and EP = Mind and one training package that includes shit like:
"Forensics expert. You flat out have Personal Gear (list forensics stuff, as well as optional Sherlock Holmes gear and a small revolver with 6 rounds), automatically get the following skills at rank blah, and also get X skill points to distribute on elective stuff (max rank blah). Also, you get (some special investigative ability)"

"Soldier. You get Personal Gear (body armour and basic firearms), a boost to HP, and a bunch of combat/battlefield skills at rank blah. You also get a small number of elective skill points, and (some kind of surge-of-heroism ability)."

And so on. They also have the ability to spend EP to use the gear wielded by Deep Ones and Shoggoths.

Then at GAR 2, aside from getting a small stat boost they get HP = Body PLUS Soul, and EP = 2*Mind. The packages would then include things like "Super Investigator. More skills, the ability to use 'alien' computers and stuff without spending EP, and sixth-sense type ability to track aliens and see into the wibbly-wobbly." and "Super Soldier. More skills, more HP, the ability to use basic 'alien' weapons without spending EP, and your actual attacks and acrobatic actions start getting infused with GAR/magic, letting you do anime leaps, infuse bullets with mana that is super effective against Shoggoths etc."

And so on and so forth. Obviously, they're actually getting more weird (and powerful) equipment as they go along.

Meanwhile, you do have the HP thing there, but while enemies may do some amount of actual HP damage which can eventually kill you, the real threat is the Despair they cause, and your Despair threshold is probably just a small multiple of GAR, so at GAR 1 all it takes is to get punched three times by a Deep One, or to watch an ally die, or for someone to explain how your whole species evolved from the bacteria inside the last ancient race the enemy wiped out to the very last, and then you give up.

So you have a basic system that's easy to pick up and use, and a certain amount of choice and flexibility without option paralysis/players putting all their points into "Gatling Mega Death Ray".

[Prak]

That works. It means writing a lot of stuff from scratch... which is... problematic for me, given lack of knowledge about the mythos beyond what I can get from the interbutts. But.... that shouldn't be too difficult, right?

Edit: Ok, and what if one has a primary player base of untrusting assholes? ...and can't find a better group, I mean.

[Josh_Kablack]

Edit: Ok, and what if one has a primary player base of untrusting assholes?

Run something more conventional first to gain their trust....

[Koumei]

What Josh said. If they're untrusting, then saying "This is a Cthulhu game" isn't going to really help matters.

[nockermensch]

While Chaosium products do have Mythos monsters cause "sanity loss", that's not really how things go in the books. You don't look at a bunch of Shoggoths and suddenly decide that you need to start counting spiderwebs to make sure they add up to even numbers. The actual enemy, as it is in TTGL, is despair.
<snip>
-Username17

So I basically registered to [+1] this post. I so want to play this campaign now.

[Josh_Kablack]

It doesn't matter so much who made the Dempfengels, in much the same way it doesn't matter who made the Core Drill.

What matters is that the dark and gaunt doctor from Alexanria Ralph T Artney travels around giving the oppressed humans exhibitions about using them. That way you can have one more soul crushing reveal in the early to mid-game, where one of the mentor / ally figures was merely trying to hasten the destruction of the human race and/or give humans the chance to live on as a servitor race.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Serious question: What is GAR?

[Koumei]

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gar

[nockermensch]

Serious question: What is GAR?

<ninja'ed>
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.p ... egm0dsorh0

[Mask_De_H]

Instead of GAR, why not use Hotblood? Covers the broad range of super robot spirits and can be used as a secondary madness track (as heavy levels of hotbloodedness can drive men mad; see New Getter Robo).

[Prak]

What Josh said. If they're untrusting, then saying "This is a Cthulhu game" isn't going to really help matters.

No, CoC is likely fine. It's the "We're going to use a system I wrote up." that would make them wary.

I'll think about running it online to start with.

[Chamomile]

That works. It means writing a lot of stuff from scratch... which is... problematic for me, given lack of knowledge about the mythos beyond what I can get from the interbutts. But.... that shouldn't be too difficult, right?

Anytime anyone confronts you with something you got wrong, invent some reason as to why it was an intentional stylistic/mechanical choice. Particularly early on, you can claim to be experimenting with different ideas, and if the original is much better than your mistake, you can revert it and label the mistake as a failed experiment.

Also, I'd be game for an online test game if you end up running one.