Tag Archives: lovecraft

Tsathoggua – Primeval Duraflame Log – Pt 1

Through no fault of my own – I swear these universes build themselves – I suddenly find myself needing to become more acquainted with the Great Old One Tsathoggua as well as figure out some very practical places for it to appear in my Call of Cthulhu game. So in my effort to figure out how to make it appear and influence my game, you get a blog post on how to better use Tsathoggua. (edit: MULTIPLE blog posts…)

According to The HP Lovecraft Wiki’s entry on Tsathoggua, he is one of the most referenced GOO’s in all of Lovecraft, which is crazy for how little he is used in Lovecraft investigation games. Furthermore, while Sath (my shorthand for it, at least for this blog post) is a creation of Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft of course took him and made him his own, and the two versions differ substantially. Finally, in most books Sath is represented as a monstrous toad-like creature who sleeps all the time – not the most horrifying of visages when put against its peers. So no wonder Sath is underutilized, which is all the more reason to figure out how to use him.

My Arkham Call of Cthulhu campaign strings together published scenarios for a group of PCs that run an antique store that was inherited by Rupert Merriweather (of Edge of Darkness fame). In the group’s first scenario – of course, The Haunting – one of the PCs got his hands on The Book of Eibon (TBOE), in which the titular wizard Eibon learns to communicate with Sath and eventually shares spells to do so (as well as summon Formless Spawn, which I’ll come back to).

I am working on a mini-game to make studying Mythos tome more fun, which is not ready to share, but for now know that I’m using it as this PC (a forgery artist named Miles) continually goes back to TBOE and tries to crack its code. TBOE is full of references to Sath and I’ve started to feed in some information, bit by bit, on what that looks like. But honestly, I don’t have a full take on how to make reading about Sath fun and interesting as well as dangerous.

Then, months later in game time, the group is now investigating a series of murders that seem not only related but powered by witchcraft (and probably Mythos magic). In this scenario (which I’ll be vague and spoiler-free for now), the antagonist has made a pact with Sath (via the mentioned murders) and the deity in turn provides all sorts of Mythos magical powers to be used in nefarious ways.

So I have two needs to crack the code on Tsathoggua:

  • What does making a pact with this deity – trading magic powers for ritual sacrifices – specifically look like for both the antagonist (who made the pact) and the PCs investigating her? How is a pact with Sath different from a pact with Nyarlathotep or any other GOO?
  • How does reading TBOE (basically an instruction manual on how to contact and make a pact with Sath) impact the reader? What changes does my PC undergo as he continues to investigate this arcane and very dangerous tome?

But before I do any of this, I need to do some research of my own and figure out who the subterranean madness this Tsathoggua fellow is.

New GOO – Who ‘dis?

One of the main reasons to own the Trail of Cthulhu book (by Ken Hite and Pelgrane Press), whether you have a weathered 1e (like me) or backed the upcoming 2e (also me), is the incredible section on Gods and Titans. Hite, a Mythos scholar if there is one, doesn’t just give static descriptions of GOOs – instead for each GOO he provides a few options of how that GOO may appear in your game that both works thematically and gives you practical advice on how to incorporate into actual investigations.

So when I am challenged to visualize how a GOO might appear in my game, this section is the first place I go. Without repeating the whole entry, after reading and mulling about, I found this entry on Sath most appealing:

Tsathoggua is a protean, formless Great Old One, usually encountered in the shape of a loathsome toad-like lump of black slime. He was the first GOO to seep onto Earth. His spawn are likewise formless, and they are his primary servitors. In some sense, all his spawn are the same being, connected through immaterial pathways of perception and lineage.

This entry has so much to sink my teeth into! It ties together how and where Sath and its servitors may appear (in the cracks of Earth), how they appear (black slime), and how they interact with each other, as well as mortals (connected through immaterial pathways of perception and lineage). This gives me everything I need to frame up both the pact and the PCs’ research (both for the PC reading TBOE and the overall group investigation).

Armed with this, I can now fill in the details on what the pact looks like.

More in Part II…

Tales of the Caribbean Kickstarter

It seems like such a long time ago, but sometime in 2014, I submitted a scenario proposal for a Golden Goblin Press book of Call of Cthulhu scenarios set in the Caribbean. Much to my surprise, my scenario was selected, and I spent some time this spring writing the dang thing up in preparation for the book’s Kickstarter.

Well, now the day is finally here, and the Tales of the Caribbean Kickstarter is live!

You can even see a picture that’s already done for my scenario…

Soufriere1

It’s so amazing to work with talented people! So you should go back it, now!

The Companion is Finally Live!

The Masks of Nyarlathotep, if you didn’t know, is often hailed as the greatest Call of Cthulhu campaign of all time, and even gets logged as one of the all time great RPG campaigns of any genre. But one of its problems is that there is a lot of room left in the story — there are so many details undocumented, questions unanswered. It’s a great campaign but could really be so much greater.

More than five years ago, Bret Kramer came up with the idea of building a companion for the campaign, and the Kickstarter for that companion is finally live. Back in 2009 I wrote a number of pieces for the book, one of which was about how to run and organize the massive game. Apparently I had some good stuff to say, because it’s one of the first pieces in the book, and my name ended up on the cover.

There is a lot of vaporware in the tabletop RPG world — material that people write that never sees the light of day. The Companion was definitely heading toward that and I am so excited and proud that it is finally going to be published. I distinctly remember writing my Companion pieces on my deck in Oregon, with my work laptop in front of me and a beer next to me and trying very hard to stay focused on completing what I had agreed to. I was so desperate to complete something, to be a part of a project, and I had no idea it would take so long for it to see print.

More importantly, I really wanted to write something that other people would read and understand and be thankful for. My key contribution for the Companion is the keeper introduction, wherein I try to help keepers wrap their heads around the enormous task of running Masks. I really enjoyed writing the piece because I felt like I had something to say and the writing came easily and naturally. You mean people want to hear what I have to say about how to run a better game? I was glad to step up and write all I could on the matter.

And with the Kickstarter now up to 20k pounds (~$30k), it’s clear my contribution is part of the greater whole that people are excited to support. The project is finally a success, and though my part in the overall book (which is bigger than Masks itself) is relatively small, it’s huge for me.

For me, 2015 is a year of “out with the old” as I not only take care of some health issues that have been dogging me for a while, but also try to clear my backlog of personal and writing projects. That the Masks Companion is finally done and going to print is very cathartic to me as it validates some efforts that have been sitting around for at least five years, and allows me to move onto other pastures.

The timing couldn’t be better.

Delta Green Conversion Notes for He Who Laughs Last

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR HE WHO LAUGHS LAST FOLLOW

REALLY, YOU SHOULDN’T

 

 

The following are notes on converting HWLL to the Delta Green RPG setting…

As a contemporary horror story, He Who Laughs Last can easily be integrated into Delta Green, Pagan Publishing’s modern day RPG setting of conspiracy and terror. The scenario needs very little to be inserted into any DG game, but there are two key components that require discussion: the scenario introduction and the use of a green box to distribute clues.

For the scenario introduction, there are a few different ways to bring a group of Delta Green investigators into the story:

  • The most straightforward option is to transform Becca’s father, Dale Kingsley, into a DG friendly who reaches out to the party for help, knowing they are capable in these sorts of investigations. Dale can be a doctor/surgeon who has helped DG in the past but now has nowhere else to turn. A simple phone call from Dale outlines the problem – his daughter has died mysteriously and he is desperate for their help. Or this call could come through “proper channels” to have the PCs reach out to Dale, again, as a DG friendly who is in trouble.
  • Perhaps Dale is a friend of one of the agents. Dale contacts his PC friend (they were college roommates or served together in the same branch of military), distraught and overcome with despair. This is just a slight change from the above suggestion – Dale still reaches out to the PCs, panicked and desperate for help.
  • Another option is to have one or more of the PCs be friends with Becca (through family or work) who are directly impacted by her “suicide.” Becca is in her mid-20s, and if any of the party is generally her age, they could have been friends with her either during or after college. Pulling the party together for this might seem like a challenge (to find a justification for all the agents to travel to LA for a funeral of someone they don’t know), but given the size and scale of the larger LA area, it shouldn’t be too hard to justify a handful of agents taking a vacation for a week to help their friend.
  • One last option would is to have Cell A (or whatever infrastructure your campaign uses) assign the DG agents directly to investigate the mystery.  Just Becca’s suicide alone could be enough to get the party involved, or the investigation could be bootstrapped by having a DG friendly point out some of the irregularities coming out of the coroner’s office.

With the introduction covered, there are still a couple of considerations to make this scenario work smoothly in the DG universe. First is that the PCs probably won’t be from the LA area and so won’t have the Hollywood connections that make it a bit easier to navigate the story (as mentioned in The Industry, pg. 12). They can, of course, play up their law enforcement credentials, or just play it straight as they try to uncover the mystery. The PCs will just have to be a bit more thoughtful and creative as they work to make connections with the various NPCs.

Finally, one easy way to get the PCs the information from David Lee (Package from the Coroner, pg. 29) is to provide it in a green box. While there is no specific need to deviate from the narrative, if the PCs ask about a green box or the party doesn’t end up meeting with Lee, send the PCs a key from a small green box located in a Burbank industrial park. You are free to put any additional information there for the PCs, but otherwise you can just substitute the green box for the the package from Lee as the mechanism to deliver the clues. Instead of receiving the package at the front desk, inside the green box they find a number of boxes, smelly and old from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, stacked in the corner, ready to divulge their secrets.

Those are all the elements that should be necessary to convert HWLL to a Delta Green scenario. Please let me know if you have any further questions on this, and I would love to hear if you successfully convert it to DG.

You can buy the scenario at DTRPG.com here.