NoD #133 — New Cthulhu

I’m visiting Helsinki tomorrow for a couple of days to see an ailing relative. Remains to be seen how that affects the writing routines.

The Thursday Meet

Our local game group has been spinning loose for a few months now; we decided to end our fork of the Coup (old school D&D) campaign in the fall due to slowly draining momentum, and then did a couple of months of boardgame nights to see if new faces could be chipped out from the casual masses to join in. The boardgaming didn’t really pan out; nothing wrong with it per se, but we got neither the participant numbers or the creative passion to make it worthwhile long-term. I’d rather not waste my time on a gaming night that’s almost just a casual beer-drinking sit-down, with some arbitrary game serving as a facile distraction.

As we’d discussed before the holiday break, the group would meet up in January and pick out something more substantial. The meeting was this week, and I went there with a prepared palette of game suggestions, things we could play next. My two foremost pitches were Transforcerers, a Sorcerer campaign in the world of the Transformers, and Wizards Diceless, an Amber Diceless variant set in Middle-Earth. Worthwile projects both, whence my interest.

The voting, where I focused on discovering the most-popular least-hated idea, narrowed us down on two main options. One was the Wizards idea that I discussed in the last newsletter, and the other was a black horse candidate of sorts: apparently the players here have a latent desire to play Call of Cthulhu, because the very vague and off-hand mention of that being a possibility (Antti suggested it, I think), and my confirming that yeah, I could do Cthulhu, suddenly elevated that into nigh-on consensual supremacy. Clearly there’s something there.

I ultimately chose in favour of Cthulhu on the premise that it’s more pick-uppable and shorter (albeit with options for extension, certainly), so generally easier on the social capital. We don’t have that many players right now, and there’s new players and players of uncertain regularity in the current make-up of the team, so some ~3 session Cthulhu thing is probably going to be better than Amber’s high social capital requirements.

(Amber Diceless expects like 5–8 players, everybody present for the first session, and regular participation after that for at least say 10 sessions to make it worth it. You could fit like four Cthulhu scenarios in one Amber scenario, in terms of social footprint.)

Suddenly, Cthulhu

Potentially short (even one-shot) as Cthulhu may be, a trivial undertaking it is not, and the set-up overhead is more like a set-up lifestyle; I don’t believe that you as much learn Cthulhu as you live it. Study the Mythos as a school of philosophy, perfect your roleplaying to be able to bring it to the table.

So being suddenly asked for some Cthulhu is, of course, an interesting challenge. I called off on starting right next week mainly on account of the hospital vigil I have coming, but it also certainly doesn’t hurt to have some time to put a thing together. We’ll have our first session on Tuesday 17.1., so that’s the deadline here.

The group seems to be slighly more favourable to vanilla 1920s Cthulhu than Delta Green, which is what I’ve been more concerned over myself recently, but overall I find the milieu unlikely to prove decisive for success or failure here. I am inclined to set the game in a Finnish setting, get a bit of distance from New England and make room for more original Mythos stylings.

I haven’t got a full picture on this yet, but I at least managed to decide what kind of Cthulhu I’ll be trying to do. CoC is a notoriously incoherent game text, with a bunch of different games potentially on offer there. I think what I’ll be trying for is a continuity-heavy “Mythos Investigation” game, a Simulationistic setting and character focused affair that chronicles the way humans can awaken to the realities of the cosmos, and what they do about it. This is different from the operational investigative wargaming focus that CoC sometimes has, but also distinct from the usual horror story oneshot approach. I’ll no doubt write more about it if I can pull a coherent campaign together.

Cthulhu Redux?

One idea that keeps pestering me is that I should maybe implement my CRedux mechanics for this campaign. I’m far from fond of BRP, the misbegotten mechanical chassis of Call of Cthulhu, but I also feel that the kind of campaign I want to run is not decently captured by traditional alternative rules… they’re too streamlined, generally speaking. Trail of Cthulhu is maybe the likeliest alternative for me, and even there I feel like I should get on board with the Gumshoe artistic program for it to make any sense to use it. If I want to do my own thing, it should probably be either with BRP rules or implementing something fresh, which might as well be CRedux.

I guess I’ll write more about that if it’s the direction I’ll take. Or, if I stick with BRP, then that’ll mean a fair bit of restructuring to get rid of the dumb stuff and make the math work and so on.

Coup de Main in Greyhawk

We play old school D&D regularly. The game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.

And, play reports on past glories:

Coup de Main #92

The Knights Temp making hay in the Gnarley Forest, specifically the Incandescent Grottoes. As per Tuomas:

Ah, a “gibbering mouther”, one of those quintessential dungeon fantasy aberration monsters. I’m not surprised that the adventurers were surprised, nobody surely expects a vaguely alive tentacle blob that causes magical confusion by “babbling”.

Coup in Sunndi #66

In the Sunndi campaign fork, we finally returned to advancing the epic “Doom of Naerie” adventure arc. Two temple guardians of Rao, along with random ne’er-do-wells, were striving to marshal the forces of the good and decent against a great doom expected to rise in the Hollow Hills. Last time we’d gotten the city of Naerie itself more or less preparing for the coming storm, so the adventurers left to travel the Hollow Hills, intent on mustering the barbarian clans that would surely be equally just as doomed as their ancestral low-land enemies if the ancient evil of Duvan’Ku got its way.

The party traveled first to touch base with the Hakadaro Clan, that one highlands clan that had suffered a major assault of the undead only to beat it back handily. They live almost in the shadow of the cursed mountain, have a significant Good religious movement among them (Pelorian sun worship), and are otherwise probably a bit of a “done deal” politically when it comes to supporting any initiatives against the cursed mountain.

This all proved to be generally the case, so no surprises there. The next step in mobilizing the clans, though, seemed like it would have to be leveraging the ethnic religious institution that the clans all shared and respected: the Temple of the Bee Queen was a sacred location commonly supported by the clans, dedicated to the ecological preservation of the kinda borderline natural conditions of the Hollow Hills. The Temple was some ways off, basically a week’s travel or so from the cursed mountain, across the inhospitable Hollow Hills, but the sheer scale of the undertaking here certainly motivated the adventurers; can’t raise an army without journeying to and fro.

The trip undertaken, the Temple itself proved to exist just outside the Hollow Hills proper, embedded comfortably in the southern edge of the Rieuwood, a major wilderness north of the Hills. It’s not very far from the main Sunndian borderlands fort used to control the Hollow Hills, really. The barbarians apparently maintain a sort of temple guardian corps of woodsmen who observe and limit entry to the temple itself, stopping foreigners and ensuring that clansmen arrive with proper reverence and peaceful intentions.

The foreign paladins were received with a fair bit of suspicion, but at least they were allowed to approach the temple itself. We found that the Temple of the Bee Queen was a bit of a self-sufficient monastery community, with the temple itself a surprisingly grandiose structure for these barbarians, built of white stone in the middle of ambitious farmworks and, of course, dozens if not hundreds of bee hives. A wealthy and prosperous place that the barbarians clearly maintained to magnificent standards.

I was prepared for the temple to take some convincing, xenophobic and suspicious of Sunndians as they were. The Hollow Hills barbarians are ethnically related to the Sunndian peoples, and the region is considered by most to be part of the cultural-political region of Sunndi, but the locals beg to differ; their herding lifestyle, ancient language and particular religious ways make them quite distinct from the lowlanders. They fight as mercenaries for distant princes and grudgingly adapt to the great mining works that imperiums bring to the Hills, but that’s not the same as loyalty and friendship.

Young Ben, one of the two temple guardians of Rao, shuffled the deck for me with a religious feat, though. Ben has a bit of history of successful meditation-based magical sensitivity at this point, and he did once again succeed grandly here, coming into direct contact with the Bee Queen, the Great Spirit glorified by this temple community. The Queen proved nigh-incomprehensible in communication, but it did indicate its favour to Ben by revealing a secret: an important relic of the temple was hidden inside one of the many bee hives dotting the landscape around the temple. By finding said item, Ben could prove to the temple hierarchy that his mission had the favour of the Queen!

So that short-circuited much of the diplomatic dickering that might have been the order of the day with the temple authorities. When Ben dug up the Staff of Perpetual Spring from its hiding place, he certainly show-cased divine favour, but he was also proposing to risk one of the greatest treasures of the temple: the Staff was a sort of magical battery maintained by the temple for emergencies and great magical workings, slowly charged in hiding over years and decades in between being in use.

As the heroes found out more about the situation, it only grew more complicated: the Staff was not trivial to use, and Ben was neither initiated or even of the correct Alignment (as a paladin Ben’s Lawful Good, while the Bee Queen and its workings are True Neutral). Traditionally the Staff would be used by an Oracle of the Bee Queen, a kind of sacred Summoner (variant Cleric), but the temple was very leery about letting either of its two Oracles go with the adventurers, what with their ritual purity (virginity; this is one of those anime teenage temple girl deals) at risk and the Oracles being essential to deciphering the otherwise unintelligible desires of the Bee Queen.

Having the Staff and an Oracle to wield it would be super-useful for sealing the cursed mountain and its ancient Duvan’Ku evil, though, everybody agreed. Apparently the Staff had traveled to the mountain to put it down last time, ~30 years ago when the clans had last mustered to cleanse the mountain of its evil. The signs of this being necessary once again were there for the faithful, but the temple also had plenty of more practical types in it, so the political situation was kinda interesting in that regard.

The players even did some lightweight industrial espionage while waiting for the temple to make up its mind about supporting the cause, sending one of the party “specialists” to spy on the temple elders. Notathief (he’s an Assassin) discovered that the elders were essentially split on this affair because their own divinations had not predicted the cursed mountain rising again. Instead, they were very worried about the new Sunndian border fort and its “Iron Duke”, whose intentions might well include attacking the temple to take an aggressive stance on the highland clans. Perhaps force them into submission.

(This Iron Duke stuff is completely unrelated to the cursed mountain scenario here, but it does hint at a couple of other adventure modules that I had prepared in the area. The fact that the temple’s divinations were so very different to what the temple of Wee Jas in Naerie had divined, and what the paladin PCs themselves had felt, was a major clue to what was actually going on in this adventure.)

Part of the fun (really, I thought that this entire situation with the temple of the Bee Queen was quite amusing) was that the two Oracle girls that were used as pawns in this affair had their own opinions about things. The brunette self-confident ambitious one was of course very angry at the foreigners who were threatening to take “her” staff away; she should of course go with the staff. Meanwhile the blonde good girl Oracle was being illicitly foisted upon the adventurers by her mother, one of the elder priesthood; she was convinced that it was fated for the Staff to seal the Duvan’Ku threat once again, see, so she was willing to go against the hierarchy on that and give her daughter to the care of the adventurers for the purpose.

Things ultimately worked out such that the adventurers agreed to a holy Oath in exchange for being allowed to take the Staff with them; it was chained on the wrist of Ben the Paladin to make sure it wouldn’t get lost. Fun times having a battery with ~1000 hit points worth of magical radiation chained to your wrist when you’re of an essentially opposed Alignment to it yourself. The temple authorities did try to buy off the adventurers with more concrete kinds of material and diplomatic support, but apparently the players believed in the Staff as something that could blow up a Lich (the current best guess of what the vaguely defined “doom” was) more than they believed in gathering an army of highlanders.

The oracle idea, on the other hand, was called off by the PCs; apparently they believed themselves capable enough of utilizing the Staff without having a sacred deredere (or not, there’s even two oracles to choose from in this dating sim) girl tagging along to operate it. They made vague plans to maybe come back to pick up an oracle later, once they saw how things were proceeding.

State of the Productive Facilities

I’ve been exercising every damn day since my lumbago pain receded; my brother has this theory about avoiding back pains via sports torture. I think it’s eating into my writing time a bit, because while the actual ski’ing/gym/hiking doesn’t take more than an hour or two per day, I’m frequently only too satisfied to sit around doing nothing afterwards. I guess I can afford to be a bit unproductive right now, so whatever. I hear that some people actually gain in productivity by exercising constantly.

Other than that, I’ll be out of town for a couple of days, so that probably ensures that little will get done meanwhile. We’ll see, I’ll at least try to publish a newsletter mid-week.