Cthulhu Heartbreakers

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu May 12, 2016 12:22 am

Previously, we have discussed Call of Cthulhu, its merits and and its flaws...mostly it's flaws. And we have discussed, here and there, a couple of its heartbreakers, though we haven't called them that explicitly. GURPS CthulhuPunk, CthulhuTech, Unknown Armies at a slight stretch. There are several more we haven't touched on much at all: Delta Green. The Laundry RPG. Call of Cthulhu d20. Trail of Cthulhu and Bookhounds of London. World War Cthulhu. Yellow Dawn we touched on once, I think.

The thing is, when you're talking about Call of Cthulhu Heartbreakers, there are a lot of them. Frank and I discussed it briefly, and we're in general agreement that the reason why has to do with the strong appeal of the concept and the incredibly flawed nature of the game itself - it's mechanics, its presentation and development, damn near everything, really. The thing is, people want a good Cthulhu game. And the name "Call of Cthulhu" is pretty much all that Chaosium actually owns of the game itself. So it lends itself very readily to heartbreakers. So why are all of them so fucking bad?

In large part, it's because they make the mistake of trying to follow the tropes of Call of Cthulhu or its system too much. Sanity as a damage track is a major offender here - it's a highly visible and characteristic mechanic, which gives the impression of a gradual slide into insanity. In practice, of course, it doesn't accomplish that at all, and on top of that it is both inaccurate to the source material and to how mental health works in the real world - and when you fail both simulationist and fanboy measures of success with a mechanic that doesn't work very well, you can pretty much be said to have failed completely. Which is why, of course, that games like Unknown Armies have variant takes on the Sanity mechanic and going insane. But far too many of the Cthulhu heartbreakers have made the mistake that this is a key feature of the game and strive to preserve it, or import it wholesale into this system - even the d20 folks did it.

Then, of course, there are all the other things that Call of Cthulhu generally does not do well. It does not import into other settings easily - yes, you can play Cthulhu by Gaslight, or Dark Ages Cthulhu, or Atomic Age Cthulhu, or Cthulhu Now - but those are all different supplements branching off the main game; they're not entirely compatible in any significant sense. You would have trouble transporting characters from one period to another. Skills don't match up. Hell, the setting doesn't match up. And that's why you have third-party groups like Pagan Publishing writing Mysteries of Mesoamerica, or Armitage House producing Delta Green.

It is, in fact, why you can have multiple publishers all pissing in the same corner of the same pond - The Laundry RPG, Cthulhu Britannica, and Trail of Cthulhu all produce material for a UK setting, with overlapping time periods. There's been more written for the UK in Cthulhu Heartbreakers than there has been about the two Tirs in five editions of Shadowrun, and you can basically take your pick as to what you want or don't - there's no "canon" setting, and little of it directly interferes with anything else. Not by design as much as happy circumstance: there's a lot of historical facts to shovel, and the odds of any two writers happening on the exact same thing to write about, absent a few major landmarks, is slim. I'm sure if I dug into it I'd find some kickball like Rasputin in the old World of Darkness, but for the most part it's just that...well, everybody does their own thing. Everybody has always done their own thing, right back to when Chaosium was partnering with Games Workshop.

There is quite literally no difference between a Cthulhu heartbreaker and the main game line, in terms of material. Quality? Call of Cthulhu has almost always looked like ass. Even in it's 5.6th edition, it was damn near a garage production. Many of the third-party heartbreaker products are noticeably nicer than the books Chaosium produces, in terms of art, layout, basic writing, even mechanics.

And yet...there are still some weird taboos. Magic, for example, is a weak point in Call of Cthulhu and its various heartbreakers. It seems impossible to get either a decent systemization of magic or a decent mechanical system for magic. Ghost knows it's been tried - Pagan Publishing but how The Golden Dawn, which was a crappy, skill-heavy system for basically giving PCs some low-level spells so that a shoggoth wouldn't eat their brains in the first adventure, and it's so compromised and flaky that it's a pile of ass. The Laundry RPG had an innovative idea for putting its magic on a rather firm organizational setting...and then crippled it by marrying it to the BRP POW rules...and then shot themselves in the dick by trying to import in spells from Call of Cthulhu. Even fucking GURPS struggled to figure out what the fuck to do with Call of Cthulhu's magic system.

But the thing is, people want to play a wizard. Or if not a wizard per se, they want to be able to cast spells from ancient, crumbling books of forgotten lore when the situation calls for it. It's an angle of play that gets routinely ignored and trampled over...mainly because the people that wrote Call of Cthulhu back in the 1970s didn't want you casting fireballs at the shoggoth. That's it, really. They wanted to avoid the D&D mindset, even though they were using a stripped-down, unfinished version of a 70s D&D heartbreaker to power the goddamned thing.

It's frustrating to me. And it's frustrating in part because I've been fiddling with my own damn Cthulhu Heartbreaker, Space Madness!. Which isn't going to be BRP based, at all, and I keep putting it down and working on other projects first. And the thing is, when working on a Cthulhu Heartbreaker, you need to define what that actually means, in terms of the setting and in terms of play. One of the great, usually ignored aspects of Call of Cthulhu is that its adventures are framed as investigations; they're detective stories where the PCs are the Scooby Gang...or a group of Space Marines investigating an outpost that has gone quiet...etc. It's a concept with some serious legs, is what I'm getting at, but one that doesn't get a lot of attention as people get wrapped up in the trappings of the setting.

The trappings are important. There are certain tropes of Lovecraftian fiction people expect, look for, want to interact with, and a Cthulhu heartbreaker has to supply them - even if not in exactly expected ways. Even the Hellboy RPG understood that people expect tentacles from beyond time and space.

The mechanics...aren't. Which is to say, the Basic Roleplaying Mechanics are not important. You want a set of mechanics that work, and BRP generally does not, and trying to get BRP to work is a heartbreaker trap that too many fall into.

More important than the mechanics is the gameplay. We don't talk about it much, but Cthulhu is a classless system, but beyond that it's a system that lacks a strong sense of player character roles. D&D is so combat centric, you can almost build it like a MMO raid: lancer, tank, healer, etc. Shadowrun, too, usually has clearly defined roles of muscle, magic, hacker, face, etc. Even Vampire, with its delineations of powers by clan, at least gives a division of abilities, if not a clear distinction of who-does-what. But Call of Cthulhu...it's not that your characters can't have roles, but the roles are not in any way defined. Do you need a librarian, a bootlegger, an ex-soldier, and a priest? What skills do they actually have that are critical to their supposed occupations? Actually, the skill system in BRP is warmed-over horseshit, and if you roll you fail, so don't do that. But you get the idea.

So you need, above all, some ability to give everybody a role. A chance to shine, something to do during the game.

And that is all I have for the night. More thoughts later, maybe.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 12, 2016 1:38 am

I'm curious what you think of my Steampunk TTGL-Cthulhu mashup game I haven't worked on in years...

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu May 12, 2016 3:35 am

I've heard that the goal of Call of Cthulhu is not to win, it's to die horribly in interesting ways.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Thu May 12, 2016 3:49 am

My experience with CoC is that it turns into a joke campaign pretty quick, even though that usually isn't the sell. You do stupid brave/stupid things and die in funny ways like Oceans 11 + Scooby Do.

Do other people see that in their games as well? Maybe I'm a minority.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 12, 2016 4:10 am

Yeah, I've heard the same thing, hyzmarca. That doesn't sound like a fun game to me, so when I played I statted up a cultist-destined librarian with an elephant gun and killed the fuck out of some zombie grizzly bears. Because I'd much rather play hack and slash.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu May 12, 2016 4:47 am

I really don't see a cthulhu/scooby game working well as anything other than a rules lite. Now, rules lites typically ALSO need work on their rules because typically what few rules they do have are shit, and what few things they really need to cover with their minimal rules... typically aren't covered. But all the same you should be aiming at something significantly lower on the complexity formal scale than basicallly anything you mentioned in your opening.

And it shouldn't take you long to write an acceptable rules lite.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu May 12, 2016 5:42 am

Games like D&D expect you to succeed 60-something % of the time and hit more successes that take you two steps forward than failures that put you one step back.

So couldn't you take that and adjust the odds so you're more likely to fail that succeed, and it's about seeing how many steps forward your party took and who lasted the longest before the last party member is dragged into the abyss?

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu May 12, 2016 11:25 am

What I'd recommend for a sanity mechanic is something similar to Eternal Darkness where as you accumulate madness meter or whatever the world around you starts to bleed through. Weird things happen, you see monsters more readily and they see you back. There may be doorways or objects only able to be reached if you're a bit mad.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu May 12, 2016 7:04 pm

https://danharms.wordpress.com/2015/04/ ... ng-part-2/

Something relevant, on the heartbreaker thing. Sandy Petersen once alleged that Chaosium wasn't interested in a Lovecraftian horror game at all - they wanted a period 1920s/30s game. And I think you can still really see the disconnect there.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 12, 2016 7:28 pm

Period simulation was totally the goal of most rpgs of the late seventies and early eighties. The whole BRP thing was the concept - common in those days - that a sufficiently simulationist game could be used for any genre. The fact that people in a Silvester Stallone film obviously didn't use the same physics as people in a Woody Allen vehicle didn't seem to set in for game designers until the late eighties and wasn't really established until the mid nineties. I think the first game to even address the issue was Toon in 1984.

So anyway, Call of Cthulhu really was written while being lost in the fever swamps of 1978. Any game that makes any design decision "becausr Call of Cthulhu did it" has almost certainly made a mistake.

-Username17

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Thu May 12, 2016 10:36 pm

I'd argue that the best attempt at Lovecraftean gaming in recent times has been Darkest Dungeon, and despite it being a vidya game with lots of vidya game mechanics, I'd love to see a Cthulhu heartbreaker based on it.

Shit, we're going to have to write it, aren't we?

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu May 12, 2016 10:39 pm

If you want one based on Darkest Dungeon, yes. I've started a heartbreaker which was sort of Miskatonic University + Hogwarts at least three times, and each time I stopped myself because I realized the BRP system is terrible and trying to make it work is like being in the Special Olympics.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Thu May 12, 2016 10:47 pm

Ancient History wrote:The thing is, when you're talking about Call of Cthulhu Heartbreakers, there are a lot of them. Frank and I discussed it briefly, and we're in general agreement that the reason why has to do with the strong appeal of the concept and the incredibly flawed nature of the game itself - it's mechanics, its presentation and development, damn near everything, really. The thing is, people want a good Cthulhu game.

Awhile back I read an interesting theory about why Cthulhu is so popular and gets used in all sorts of games and stories.

Ancient History wrote:The Laundry RPG had an innovative idea for putting its magic on a rather firm organizational setting...and then crippled it by marrying it to the BRP POW rules...and then shot themselves in the dick by trying to import in spells from Call of Cthulhu.

I have not played the RPG, but the magic in the novels seems to have a very high level of detail in some areas (e.g. hands of glory, basilisk guns) but a very low level of detail in others (e.g. wards, magic circles), which I imagine would make it very hard to design a game system that puts it all on consistent footing. And since the magic is explicitly done with computers, a lot of fans are going to expect mathematical levels of rigor.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu May 12, 2016 11:36 pm

Now I'm imagining Hogwarts crossed with Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, where teenage mythos gods go to school along with normal students. Openly.

Like, I'e got home ec with Cthulhu.

Nath · Post by **Nath** » Thu May 12, 2016 11:39 pm

Ancient History wrote:More important than the mechanics is the gameplay. We don't talk about it much, but Cthulhu is a classless system, but beyond that it's a system that lacks a strong sense of player character roles. D&D is so combat centric, you can almost build it like a MMO raid: lancer, tank, healer, etc. Shadowrun, too, usually has clearly defined roles of muscle, magic, hacker, face, etc. Even Vampire, with its delineations of powers by clan, at least gives a division of abilities, if not a clear distinction of who-does-what. But Call of Cthulhu...it's not that your characters can't have roles, but the roles are not in any way defined. Do you need a librarian, a bootlegger, an ex-soldier, and a priest? What skills do they actually have that are critical to their supposed occupations? Actually, the skill system in BRP is warmed-over horseshit, and if you roll you fail, so don't do that. But you get the idea.

So you need, above all, some ability to give everybody a role. A chance to shine, something to do during the game.

At that point, I'm still not sure if the characters should be primarily defined by what they get or how they get it. I see four roles that could be split between characters during an occult investigation :

- find and collect physical evidences (finding and analyzing objects, blood stains, footprints, corpses...)
- find and collect oral testimonies (finding people and getting them to talk)
- find and collect records (finding and analyzing ancient books, surveillance videos...)
- divination (dreams, visions, spirit summoning, whatever...)

Then you could also define roles or secondary skills by how you get access : burglar-type that break into places where physical evidences or records are kept ; social-type that get legit access to them (for outright bribing cops to convincing tribal elders to allow strangers into sacred ground) along with interrogating witness ; techie-type that use infrared sensors or DNA sequencing to gather physical evidences (or their steampunk equivalent).

Artless · Post by **Artless** » Fri May 13, 2016 12:36 am

Just food for thought, and this inquiry could apply to CoC-styled games in general, not specifically to heartbreakers so apologies for lack of specificity to the topic at hand.

What would be the potential problems of crafting mechanics to support an ensemble of characters, that the players would direct or occupy as the need takes them? Meaning, perhaps while the players are off doing "active" things the remaining characters from the cast could be contributing via "downtime" actions doing things like followup research, recuperating, etc. with the results of those off-player actions perhaps occurring at the end of a session to keep its bookkeeping from complicating the game.

If one of the pleasures of Lovecraft-styled games, however unfaithful to the source material it may be, is finding out what kinds of cruel fates can be visited upon our overly intrepid heroes, what would be the drawbacks associated with setting up the game in such a manner that the permanent sidelining of a major character, through death or other means, does not immediately halt a player's direct interaction with the game if only because there are still actors in the narrative they could be directing?

You could even go a step further and divorce the direct control of individual characters from individual players altogether and manage the game's order of actions into "player initiative," in that players take turns deciding the actions of one of the cast that happens to be present for where the action of the story is but don't get to be the only ones directing that character's actions. Such that the effects of one character meeting a horrible fate are felt by the entire table, since it's one of the pool that everyone would be directing that just got murdered, but no one feels like they got picked on, which I can personally attest is one of the problems that affects Lovecraft-styled games beyond the normal feelings of persecution that unlucky players might feel when at the table.

I imagine it taking a deal of finagling but I can't cite that many games that operate under similar conditions beyond a few so my assumptions as to its viability are suspect. If this or a similar scheme has been discussed elsewhere I apologize for being unaware of it.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Fri May 13, 2016 7:53 pm

I've learned from the response to Darkest Night that some players object to controlling multiple characters purely on the grounds that they like to identify themselves with a specific character in the game, and controlling multiple characters makes them feel like a disembodied general instead. I imagine those players would feel even more strongly if you asked them not only to control several characters, but to also share control of them with other players.

Of course, not every player feels that way. Lots of people are perfectly happy to play single-player party-based games.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri May 13, 2016 9:32 pm

How does Darkest Dungeon handle such troupe play differently from Ars Magica? The idea of having a main PC tier character that is your, and then contributing to a pool of researchers and other scoobies seems like a fix for that.

K · Post by K » Sat May 14, 2016 1:04 am

Eldritch Horror is a board game that clearly has the bones to be a good inspiration for a rpg.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat May 14, 2016 5:36 am

Eldritch Horror is practically a move action away from being an RPG already. I would be happy to see it make that move action and go all-in.

For "insanity", it's possibly better to break it down into:
A) Fear effects. Overall I think D&D handles that well enough, with a bunch of different statuses that can stack up and get worse, but that are basically temporary.
B) Some kind of despair track, where people start to give in to the hopelessness of the situation and it basically encourages people to carefully choose their approach (with failures leading to more despair, and even small successes pushing it back, versus "how much more fucked does the world get if we ignore this in favour of an easier thing that boosts our mood?"), and probably also inter-party communication to help snap each other out of it.
C) Something to cover anxiety/nerves/the hyper-alert state where, due to the actual monsters (and plain old "mad people with knives") leaping out, you're always in the stress state and might shoot shadows because you're too high-strung. Might be worth looking at Consuming Shadow for that.

Then call it all "psychology" rather than "insanity". Not included: seeing a million rats eating the corpses of people, then developing a fear of fish.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sat May 14, 2016 12:51 pm

The only bit of The Consuming Shadow that really simulated being hyper-alert and firing at shadows was that the insanity effects included illusory enemies, so probably not much use for ideas about mechanical implementation. "Make a Stress roll to not shoot at the shadows before determining that they are actually fluffy bunnies" doesn't look a whole lot like that mechanically.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sun May 15, 2016 6:48 am

I'll never understand what's with people trying to shoehorn magic into the Cthulhu mythos. Please correct me if I'm wrong but... has anyone ever stumbled upon a Cthulhuverse story that actually had magic? I haven't.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun May 15, 2016 7:01 am

Dogbert wrote:I'll never understand what's with people trying to shoehorn magic into the Cthulhu mythos. Please correct me if I'm wrong but... has anyone ever stumbled upon a Cthulhuverse story that actually had magic? I haven't.

Dunwich Horror is pretty notable. And the Cthulhu mythos covers a pretty large range. I think many folks would consider the Laundry series to lay within its scope and that's riddled with magic.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sun May 15, 2016 8:03 am

erik wrote:
Dogbert wrote:I'll never understand what's with people trying to shoehorn magic into the Cthulhu mythos. Please correct me if I'm wrong but... has anyone ever stumbled upon a Cthulhuverse story that actually had magic? I haven't.
Dunwich Horror is pretty notable. And the Cthulhu mythos covers a pretty large range. I think many folks would consider the Laundry series to lay within its scope and that's riddled with magic.

Also, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Although if you're on about magic that the protagonists routinely use, I'd be less confident in dropping names.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sun May 15, 2016 8:24 am

The assorted cultists and horrors routinely use magic/magic-like stuff. The Deep Ones have sorcerous fish manipulation and dream magic.

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