Travern

Secret history, rather than alternate history, in terms of genre for the Cthulhu Mythos. The latter revolves around points of divergence from “our” timeline down different paths, while in the former, clandestine plots and happenings lurk undetected behind the familiar march of events.  Contrast, for instance, Chambers’s “The Repairer of Reputations”, in which the play “The King in Yellow” turns up in an alternate future USA that diverged some time after 1895*, and HPL’s “The Call of Cthulhu”, in which the atavistic Cthulhu cult has existed through human history while the Great Old Ones covertly influence humanity’s dreams.

In any case, your campaign sounds interesting—a postmodern cut-up of the horror genre (c.f. the Anno Dracula series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Tales of the Shadowmen).

* edit: Although TRoR reads like alternate history, it’s technically regular speculative fiction.  Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald may be better a Mythos-related example.

On 9/19/2021 at 10:22 AM, MOB said:

Achtung! Cthulhu.

Which had been produced under license from Chaosium. As is usual when a license winds up, there's a lengthy grace period in which remaining physical stock can be sold 

Sure, and those details are typically set out in the original license agreement.  Licenses expire all the time, for any number of reasons - sometimes the licensees choose not to renew them when their original terms end, sometimes the licensors cancel them unilaterally, sometimes negotiations between the two parties don’t work out, etc., etc.  Plus RPGs licensed from other parties’ IP fall out of print with regularity.  (We’d have to hear Modiphius’s side of the story of their decision to switch to their in-house system for Achtung! Cthulhu for a complete picture.)  In the meantime, it’s interesting that the decision to formally declare 6th ed. CoC out of print coincided (roughly) with the launch of 2d20 Achtung! Cthulhu, on the eve of GenCon, before the end of the quarter.

It would also be interesting to hear more about Chaosium’s business rationale for declaring 6th ed. CoC OOP, particularly since this runs against the grain of current industry trends in the era of electronic publishing and “the long tail”.  WotC, for instance, keeps all its editions electronically in print, along with tons of adventures and supplements from its hefty backlist.  One can also find practically every ruleset for Traveller and Vampire: The Masquerade for sale as PDFs, and even smaller RPG like Unknown Armies or Space: 1889 keep their old editions around.  But while Chaosium offers older Pendragon rulebooks available electronically (except for the second, AFAICT), that’s no longer the case for CoC.

In the meantime, we eagerly await specifics on Chaosium’s plans to release more currently unavailable classic CoC titles, whether as remastered editions or updated conversions to 7th edition - at least once everyone’s recovered from GenCon!

Thanks again for the all information!

13 minutes ago, MOB said:

Achtung! Cthulhu.

Isn’t that Modiphius? Is there anything from Chaosium?

25 minutes ago, MOB said:

It was on the list of things to turn off, and we finally got to it.

Interesting - is there anything else on this list of things to turn off?

15 hours ago, Mike M said:

We continue to update and redevelop older scenarios in balance with new material. 

Converting older material remains an easy option for scenarios that have not yet been updated. And vice versa  

Many thanks for your info - it’s good to hear old scenarios will return in some form.  

Does Chaosium have a short list of currently unavailable classic CoC supplements that it’s considering for either revising and updating to 7th ed. or remastering as with the expanding Runequest classic line?   

And do you plan to release more currently unavailable classic CoC titles in remastered editions?

For instance, are there any plans, one way or another, for The Fungi from Yuggoth or Curse of Chthonians campaigns (these were not part of the anniversary boxed set, although the later Trail of Tsathoggua and the Fragments of Fear were included in it).  There are perennial requests for new CoC GMs looking for shorter campaigns but who aren’t ready for Masks of Nyarlathotep.

Thanks again for the information!

P.S. And out of curiosity, what was the business rationale for declaring 6th ed. officially out of print?

2 hours ago, ThornPlutonius said:

It makes no business sense, to me, to continue to sell an older edition when the focus is on the newer edition.

Chaosium’s recent Kickstarter for the 1981 anniversary boxed set attracted over 150% of the backers from the one for 7th edition.  That would suggest a healthy extant market for earlier editions of CoC.

Perhaps the anniversary 2nd edition is now the official legacy CoC line.  Once the Kickstarter’s fulfillment is finished, its assorted remastered titles will be available for sale to the regular market.

Maybe Chaosium will announce more remastered legacy titles at GenCon or additional 6th edition books to be converted to 7th edition.  (Or @Mike M or @MOB could join in this discussion to let us know.)

On 9/16/2021 at 2:44 PM, TrippyHippy said:

6th edition went out of print some time ago.

Although physical copies of the 6th ed. rulebook have been unavailable for some time, Chaosium and DriveThruRPG were selling PDFs until quite recently.  The formal notice that 6th edition is officially out of print went up just now.

What we don’t know yet is the business rationale for this, though perhaps we may learn more at GenCon (where any last physical copies from Chaosium’s warehouse may be for sale…).

Chaosium has just updated the landing page for 6th ed. CoC: “Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition is now officially out-of-print.”

(And the link to the old free adventures is now dead, too.)

While physical copies of the 6th edition Call of Cthulhu rulebook have been out of stock for a bit, its PDF version is now 404’ed on Chaosium’s web store and on DriveThruRPG.

Chaosium’s 6th edition landing page continues to advertise it for sale, however (and 6th edition supplements and scenarios are still available).

As there hasn’t yet been any official announcement about this title’s current status one way or another, is the 6th ed. CoC rulebook now officially out of print?

12 hours ago, MOB said:

Chaosium plans to rerelease these lines for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, with all-new layout and art. New titles are also planned for each.

This is great news and a big surprise! Cubicle 7’s Cthulhu Britannica and World War Cthulhu were excellent product lines, with some absolutely superb titles. 

Are you going to contact any of the original line editors or contributors about the Chaosium editions?  What are your plans for working with them on these and future projects in these series?

My deepest condolences to Perrin’s family, friends, and colleagues - his loss is profound. 

Just as The Perrin Conventions for D&D are widely acknowledged as a pivotal point in the early days of the hobby, last month I was discussing online how important his founding role in the Society for Creative Anachronism was for fantasy gaming.

And it should go without saying that the evolution of his RuneQuest house rules into Basic Roleplaying is why we’re here now.

Thanks and farewell to an RPG titan,

13 minutes ago, rsanford said:

@klescer do you know if this game uses BRP? I saw it uses D100 and wondered...

APOCTHULHU uses the Legend d100 system and Delta Green's, both of which use the WotC OGL.

23 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

Lastly, we intend to make more older CoC titles available via POD. Unfortunately, that's not always as easy as it sounds.

That's similarly great news, though it doesn't sound easy to begin with.  Even the black-and-white titles have to be scanned at high resolution, cleaned up, and formatted for printing (and that's if Chaosium can put their hands on clean physical copies that they're willing to sacrifice to this process).  In any case, we look forward to seeing more POD titles.

3 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

LATEST NEWS:  We are very close to having a Print on Demand (POD) version of Horror on the Orient Express ready. By "very close" I mean in a month or so.

That's great news!  Could you please let us know who the printer/vendor is?

Campbell used M'nagalah in story "The Tugging" a couple of years later. (I'm also going by Daniel Harms's invaluable Cthulhu Mythos encyclopedia for the Cynothoglys to Ligotti, but elsewhere online I've seen a few citations for Richard L. Tierney's The Seed of the Star-God—1984.)

8 minutes ago, SunlessNick said:

I'm curious:  A couple of the deities seem to be renamed versions of ones from the previous edition - like M'Guleloc seems to be renamed M'nagalah and Cytholos a renamed Cynothoglys.  I was just wondering why the change.

M'nagalah is the IP of DC Comics (Swamp Thing #8 by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson—February, 1974), and Cynothoglys belongs to Thomas Ligotti (The Prodigy of Dreams—1986).  If Chaosium couldn't clear the rights to the originals this time, they couldn't appear as such in the new MM edition.

12 hours ago, TRose said:

 But I think Superworld would be a good fit if you want to  run a  Chinese  Wushu style game . I mean what other system beside a  Superhero one will let you run White Snake and Green snake?

Robin Laws's Fung Shui is definitely suited for wushu.

DoubleZero went its own way in game development, and the final product doesn't resemble GORE very much.  From the publisher's blog:

Quote

The system is built on GORE™, which is an Open Game Licensed system bearing a strong resemblance to and a high degree of compatibility with the Basic Roleplaying system. DoubleZero is likely not going to share that compatibility, if for no other reason than I’ve completely changed the core mechanic and fiddled with a lot of other rules. Again, can you convert material between the two systems? Sure. Is it meant to be the BRP version of 007? Nope. I picked it because it’s a percentile system with an open license. That gave me a foundation to work with, and did a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

11 minutes ago, Archivist said:

What about having section on creating new custom monsters - how to build weird powers, bizarre weaknesses, and such.

@Mike M is also writing a "how to make a monster" guide for the new MM.

4 hours ago, simonh said:

It needs to be clear to people who are serious about publishing a game.

That might come across as being glib, but it really isn’t. There’s a whole world of difference between the considerations and trade offs involved in actually planning to publish a viable product, including thinking through what kind of concept is worthwhile to commit that kind of effort to, and Just thinking up a hypothetical edge case example.

Those kinds of considerations and tradeoffs are expected in a regular contractual license between parties and take a lot of negotiation to avoid problems for the final product.  An open license, however, must be transparent in its terms in order that the licensing party does not have to engage in any further deliberations, vide, say, Creative Commons, GPL, or WotC's OGL.  As such, it should eliminate any ambiguity, obscurity, or "known unknowns" (which is good contract law practice in the first place).  Whether the potential licensees out there are professionals, amateur hobbyists, or just dabblers is immaterial.  They should all be able to put their confidence in an open license as it is written rather than risk being told later that their project is not in compliance because it contravenes an unclear clause or unwritten rule, especially if they've already put work into researching it or, worse, begun writing it up.

Using numbers follows Exremis's plot, that's all.  If you're adapting that episode (and “Last Christmas”) loosely, then you can swap out repeated images, sounds, or whatever pattern works with your preferred skill checks.  The only question is how they should lead the players to the next stage of the investigation or the revelation.

Since you're using a dream world setting, you might consider Kingsport for your location.  Lovecraft's second-favorite town has always had a dreamlike atmosphere to it—see his stories “The Festival” and “The Strange High House in the Mist”.

Since none of your players' characters will be the Doctor, you'll have to make the pseudorandom numbers plot point a whole lot more obvious.  Since noticing repeated numbers doesn't lend itself to Spot Hidden, you've got a choice between calling for multiple Idea rolls or just repeating the same set of numbers at every point you can—dates, times, street addresses, pocket change, ticket stubbs, etc., etc—until the players notice it for themselves.  Once your players have picked up on the repeated pattern, it's up to you to tease the significance (welcome to the wonderful world of Stephen Moffat Plotting).  Maybe a successful Science—Mathematics roll will spell out the improbability of what's happening.  Perhaps the numbers are a code that the players can break with a successful Science—Cryptography roll.

Yes, you can convert CoC and ToC/Gumshoe scenarios.  Admittedly, this takes a little effort since they're entirely different skill-based systems (it's not like converting between CoC and Delta Green, which are both d100 systems).  The ToC rulebook has an appendix on conversion, and the Pelgrane website's ToC resource page contains examples of converted stats/plotlines for published CoC scenarios.  

Pelgrane's Repairer of Reputations is a ToC scenario and well worth looking into. It's a great example of how Chambers's weird horror differs from HPL's and treats the meta-game quite inventively.  The Yellow King RPG runs a modified and simplified version of Gumshoe, however.  This would be much harder to convert to CoC—you'd have to homebrew a lot of it.  Its campaign's opening 1895 Paris setting could be translated to 1920s CoC easily enough.  The other stages in later decades are tied to its overall theme of the forces of Carcosa warping time and reality.  It's fascinating material, but it doesn't lend itself to ongoing campaigns.

As for Gumshoe as an investigative RPG, it's a pool-based game of resource management.  Although players always find basic clues automatically, they have to spend their limited points for more detailed or secret information.  There's no equivalent of a "success with complication" in it (the separate Gumshoe One-2-One system has its own version of "pushes" unrelated to CoC's.)  In BRP, the suspense comes from each risked die roll; in Gumshoe, it's from the slowly dwindling amount of points as the plot unfolds.  Gumshoe rarely goes off the rails or suffers blocked bottlenecks, but I sometimes miss the randomness of BRP and the improvisation it requires.

Very ingenious!  (Recently I was idly wondering about what would be a better format for collaborative RPG design—a hypertext wiki or a distro software development environment.)

Pro Tip: Archive.org often has caches of abandoned websites and their files, including cthulhurising.co.uk.  (Archival preservation is a lovely thing.)

EDIT: Although the Internet Archive has cached the old Cthulhu Rising site, it looks like the PDFs and ZIP files are not part of their backup.