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This could well be a job for the undisputed master of the rainforest, famous for a skill in stalking and killing which often seems almost un- natural - small wonder if the characters mistake him for something far more sinister ...

Thank you very much for that idea. A temple to an Olmec or pre-Olmec version of Tlaloc, with a nearby cenote filled with sacrificial offerings and the bones of sacrificed humans, would fit my general ideas for the role of the Mystery Hill site in the setting very well - especially since the depictions of this early Tlaloc version could be some- what different from his known images and could look more like any of the va- rious Cthulhu deities, frightening the characters into believing that there is more to this than some ruins and mostly harmless remnants of a cult. A nice scary mystery without any actual appearance of Mythos creatures.

This is the plot of one of the adventures for my setting, except that the characters are actively searching for the cult's secret jungle hideout, be- cause the country's government considers this specific cult as a serious hindrance for the country's development and wants to exterminate it with the help of the characters - who are not aware that their search for a couple of ancient ruins as a possible site for a future archaeological dig is actually a highly political operation with potential consequences for the country's future. Needless to say, the cult's members are not exactly sup- portive of the characters ...

Yep, the setting has two cultures with religious traditions of that kind, one based on remnants of the Aztec culture and one on rem- nants of the Maya culture (both cultures existed in the real world history of El Salvador). It is a good idea to add a third, unrelated (and unexplained) religious tradition with strange ceremonies for the Mystery Hill site - thank you for this. However, this still leaves me with the problem who built the Mys- tery Hill structures (now overgrown ruins) about 3,000 years ago, and what deity (or whatever) was originally worshipped there. Using your idea, this would have no direct connection with the re- ligious ceremonies held there in the present by the natives, the original purpose of the site would probably have been forgotten millenia ago, but I would prefer to have something specific for the archaeologists (and other grave robbers) among the characters to discover there. Of course, "unexplained remnants of unknown culture" would also work well enough.

Some of the research material for my West Africa setting mentioned elsewhere will be sent to my new address (yep, I am moving) and is currently out of reach, so I am now again working on one of my other settings, a fictional country (re- placing El Salvador) in Central America. In this setting the Mythos has only a minor role and will only be a part of com- paratively few adventures. So far I have decided that there will be remnants of a native cult of Yig, disguised as a cult of the Feathered Serpent, and that Chthonians are responsible for earthquakes which could result in an eruption of the country's volcanoes. The third mythos influence is connected with an archaeological site, Mystery Hill, which predates the Maya civilization by at least thousand years. However, I have no idea which deity, servitor race or cult could be behind this one. It should fit into the general Mesoamerican theme, but I would prefer to avoid more cliches (the Feathered Serpent cult is enough of this, so no vampire bats) and would much prefer something plausible, but unexpected. Unfortunately most of my Cthulhu material is already packed for transport to my new home (no, not the asylum - at least that's what I was promised ...), and so I would like to consult you instead. Any ideas will be most welcome.

Provided the players have at least a basic understanding of tactics and a healthy respect for missile weapons and for superiority in numbers, BRP is not extremely lethal for their characters.

But, Bambi did meet Cthulhu ... http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/26938

Thank you very much.

For most purposes the PDF should be good enough ... http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=82099&filters=0_0_0_0_40050

The way we use them, Command skill gives a modifier for the NPCs relevant skills, from -10 % in the case of a fumble to +10 % in the case of a critical success, and Strategy (an obvious misnomer, it should be Tactics) gives somewhat higher modi- fiers for combat skills only, from -25 % to +25 %. The duration of the effect is in both cases 5 rounds. The effects of both skills are not cumulative, a character can use either Command or Strategy, but not both at the same time. The way we use it, Command is more a leadership and organization skill for civilians, while Strategy is a professional skill for military personnel. The modifiers for Command are lower, because many of the civilian skills (e.g. Craft or Repair) can not plausibly be improved a lot through good leadership, while Strategy can have a much bigger influence on the outcome of a combat - just think of a successful ambush and the- like. The duration is just an arbitrary thing introduced to avoid a boring die roll.

Thank you very much. It seems that DTRPG has the PDF of Black Seal 3, I will download it today. Edit.: A most useful article indeed, it saves me quite a lot of research time and effort.

Looking at my notes, I just realized that there could be an easier, although less realistic way to treat tropical diseases. This would require only the probability of infection (modified by the character's precautions), the duration of the incubation pe- riod, the duration of the actual disease, and the probability of a lethal outcome. The character would roll for his probability to be infected, per- haps once per month or more often in dangerous terrain like a swamp. After the incubation period, determined randomly accor- ding to the specific disease (e.g. 10 to 14 days for Malaria Tro- pica), the disease would set in and incapacitate the character for its again randomly determined duration. Finally the charac- ter would roll for survival, with modifiers depending on the dis- ease, his constitution and the medical treatment he received. This is, if there is a chance of survival, some diseases like slee- ping disease had a lethality of 100 % during the period ... but in most cases the character could not know without a doctor's diagnosis which disease he has, the symptoms of many disea- ses were almost identical (high fever, etc.). There would be no such things as daily CON rolls, and also no temporary reductions of characteristics, the disease would put the character out of business while it lasts, and afterwards he would be considered fully recovered - or dead. Well, do you think that this approach makes sense and could work ? Thank you.

Thank you very much indeed. My French is worse than that of a Spanish cow, but with a little help from my favourite online translation program I will probably be able to comprehend most of the material.

The most dangerous element in the pseudo-historical West African setting I am currently working on should normally be the various tropical diseases, for example malaria, sleeping sickness and dysentery (which actually killed most of the region's explorers and colonists). Before I begin to translate the real world diseases into game mechanics I would like to ask whether this has perhaps already been done by some- one else, since I would prefer to avoid to reinvent the wheel. I am aware of Richard Gazley's very good "Diseases for RuneQuest", and I intend to use it as the "model" for my setting's diseases, but it does not cover for example malaria and sleeping sickness. So, if you are aware of any already designed game mechanics for these or other tropical diseases, please let me know - thank you.

Thank you for your ideas. My own preliminary idea was to treat it like an axe in melee combat, mainly because the way the blades are arranged seems to support hacking better than stabbing, and to give it a small bonus to hit and to damage both as a melee weapon (because of the number of blades) and as a thrown weapon (because the blades can impale, which the blade of a throwing axe usually cannot).

Thank you very much. Your are of course right when it comes to most of the weapons, but unfortunately there are also some rather unusual types which I find impossible to treat like any of the well known weapon types, partially because it seems difficult to find out how exactly they were used in combat. This here is one example of what I mean. As far as I know, it was ba- sically a thrown weapon, but it was also used in melee.

Hmmm ... 70+ hits and no recommendations, it seems West Africa still is a "here there be dragons" region on the roleplaying games map.

Many of the German adventures for Call of Cthulhu seem to be inspired more by authors like Kafka or by the authors of the "Black Romance" movement than by Lovecraft. They do not always follow the usual adventure plot of a team of bra- ve investigators searching for evidence and then fighting Cthulhoid monsters, in- stead other sources of horror are used, and quite often they are described from the perspective of the victims of these horrors. For example, one adventure about a kidnapped child puts the characters into the mind / dreamworld of the pedophile who kidnapped the child, and they have to deal with his inner demons (like a giant version of his abusive father) in order to find and rescue the girl. Another adventure turns into a voyage through a dark version of the real world, with all the evils and horrors of modern urban civilization in the extreme. In a famous solo adventure with a Cthulhoid theme the character wakes up after a night of nightmares without a memory of the previous day and tries to find out what happened to her. She slowly uncovers that she was raped by Deep Ones and now is pregnant and will soon give birth to a monster ... To come up with an adventure of a similar kind one only has to watch the news, to take the most horrific story of the day, to find a way to put the characters into the position of the victims of the event and to raise the horror of the event to the extreme, with barely a chance to escape (and rarely to fight or defeat the source of the horror) - the characters do not watch the cultists' (or whatever the source of the horror is) activities from the outside and punish the perpetra- tors, they are the more or less helpless targets of the horrific activities and can only attempt to survive. Adventures of this kind work well with and without any supernatural or Cthulhoid element, I usually keep such elements to a minimum and leave it open whether they really exist or are only imagined. For example, cultists and other terrorists can be just as nasty and horrific if the deity or cause they believe to serve does not exist at all, and natural or technical forces can be quite as destructive and frightening as supernatural ones. However, that said I have to admit that I use Call of Cthulhu mostly for other gen- res, settings and scenarios than horror, and use all kinds of horror elements very sparingly in my campaigns. Most of the time the adventures are much closer to pulp than to horror, an occasional visit to "horror county" fits my style much bet- ter than a string of horrific events, which in my view would soon become too im- plausible, if not ridiculous.

Yes, it would help to see how others have "translated" the real world informations into roleplaying game material, from the typical cultural professions and skills to the stats of unusual cultural weapons. Of course, I can (and will) do that "trans- lation" myself, but I would prefer to have an opportunity to compare my approach to a fictional West Africa of the period to that of others. Thank you very much for the link.

At the moment I am gathering ideas and informations for a potential new setting, a fictional colonial state in West Africa (in my alternate history it replaces real world Liberia) in about 1880 / 1890. Unfortunately it seems there is not much roleplaying material for this region and time period, at least I was unable to find anything about West Africa in my Call of Cthulhu material (Congo, Kenya and Sudan are too different from West Africa), and the potentially interesting Dark Continent RPG is obviously no longer available. So, if you know any useful roleplaying oriented source (the Wikipedia and other Internet sources cover the non-roleplaying stuff quite well), please let me know - any help would be most welcome.

My impression from the various German editions of Call of Cthulhu is that the publishers occasionally introduce some very minor, usually negligible change and add some new ma- terial in order to justify the production and sale of a new edition of the core rules.

Social conflicts usually are about some specific issue and about whose proposal how to deal with that issue is accepted. Therefore we use the skill related to dealing with the issue in question and add modifiers based upon the character's status (or whatever you want to call it) and social skill used, and the better re- sult wins the contest. As an example, imagine two caravels on a voyage of exploration. The captain of one ship wants to continue further into the unknown, but the captain of the other ship wants to return to the home port. The character who begins the conflict determines which of the related skills he uses for his "attack". In our example it is the second captain, the one who wants to end the expedition, and he bases his argument on his Navigation skill ("We ha- ve no idea where exactly we are and are in danger of getting lost completely, let us sail home while we can still find the right route"). The characters add the modifiers for the social skills they use, in this case probab- ly Persuade, and for their Status (or Reputation, etc.) to their Navigation skill. In some campaigns we used 10 % of the social skill and the Status as modifiers, in other campaigns only 5 %. Then both characters make a normal success roll, and the one with the better re- sult wins the conflict. If both fail to succeed, the conflict remains unresolved for now.

As for war elephants, the ones the Romans had to deal with were a comparatively small subspecies, the North African Elephant, which should have less impressive physical stats than the African Elephant we nowadays are used to see at the zoo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_Elephant

This is a map of Livland ca. 1260, which shows the bishoprics in that area: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Livland_1260.svg/1000px-Livland_1260.svg.png However, like all maps of that time and region it is hardly more than a "snap- shot", because the borders tended to change very often, through warfare, inheritance, bequest and all the other medieval ways to aquire or lose terri- tory. Moreover, there was a huge difference between land claimed and land actually controlled, in many cases the title to a piece of land had only the value provided by the arms of the loyal forces currently there - when they withdrew or moved on, the land often became uncontrolled again.

I do not remember when the first English version of Cthulhu Now was published, but we got it as soon as it became available. We played the adventures from the book, and then used the system for quite a lot of other modern scenarios. However, we never played a real campaign with it, only short series of adven- tures, and not long afterwards turned to science fiction settings with the sys- tem as it was modified for Cthulhu End Time. Since then we have used the Call of Cthulhu system for almost every possible time period, especially various historical ones, although mostly without the My- thos or with minor influences from the Mythos only. When BRP was published, we added some of its options to Call of Cthulhu, and this mix became our stan- dard system for all kinds of scenarios and settings. Still, the Mythos only very rarely is a part of our games, perhaps because the excellent German version of Call of Cthulhu has its focus on more subtle hor- rors than monster hunting, and most of such horrors are based more on real world life than on the existence of the Mythos - just watching the news or reading a few modern history books provides enough material for horror sce- narios, there do not have to be other monsters than humans.