EricW

I had the best Grandpa, WW2 artillery machinist. When I was 7 he said “I know you kids are going to mess with explosives, so I’ll show you how to do it right”. Probably the only kid in the neighbourhood who knew how to blow a bank vault, or bring down a bridge or building.

Explosives are really complicated, I think you could drive yourself nuts trying to make the rules realistic. I made a lot of explosives as a kid, its what you did back in my day if you were smart, in the days before internet. Fuses are unreliable - sometimes they burn much quicker than they should. Sometimes they pause, then suddenly finish burning and detonate after you conclude the explosive is a dud and have picked it up in your hand. Electronic fuses - there is a reason people are rigorously careful with twisting wires on their detonator supply, making sure the electricity is physically disconnected before wiring up the detonator, then being really careful after the detonator is connected. Electric circuits can leak enough current to prematurely set off the detonator. Even static electricity has been known to set off detonators. Explosives and damage depend on a lot of factors, whether the explosion is contained, what the container is made of, whether the container fragments or comes apart in 2-3 big pieces. If you blow up a firecracker on your hand your hand will sting. If you close your fingers on the firecracker you could lose a few fingers. I don't recommend anyone test this - we were crazy lucky. None of us tried closing our fingers. An underwater explosion is far more dangerous if you are underwater, than an equivalent explosion in the air - water conducts the shockwave much better than air. But if you want to contain the collateral damage when say blowing a bank vault, you cover the explosive with big bags of water, to absorb the blast. Gelignite and dynamite, at least old formulations, can sweat nitroglycerine. This makes out of date or poorly stored explosives extremely dangerous, the drops of nitroglycerine could set off the explosive if dropped or heated. It is entirely possible to make extremely powerful explosives out of a few readily available household items - but I hope you understand if I don't explain how to do this.

Is there an explanation anywhere what a Reaching Storm temple does for worshippers? Very suggestive name.

Its not all the nuclear industry's fault. Can you imagine the approval process for a totally new design? There is a huge perverse incentive to stick to existing designs, however unsafe. A civil servant or politician who approves a design which is identical to a previously approved design is less exposed to accusations they did something reckless. Just making the cores smaller would be enough. Surface area to volume ratio is important for nuclear reactions, neutrons escape through the surface. The more surface you have, the harder it is to sustain a reaction. Big cores inherently have a favourable surface to volume ratio, even if they melt into a puddle. Small cores stop burning as soon as they start melting. Surface goes up with the square of the mass of core material, but volume goes up with the cube of the mass of core material. So a small core is much closer to not working than a big core - the moment a small core becomes deformed by melting or other disaster, the surface area increases (a flat puddle has more surface area than an elegantly engineered sphere), and the nuclear fission reaction stops. But cores are approved on a per core basis - so there is a perverse incentive to build large, dangerous cores, to simplify the approval process.

Depends on the light. Modern flashlights can be incredibly bright, so 50-100 yards of good illumination is plausible. 1920s flashlights were very dim by today's standards. But in the 1920s they also used carbide lamps. Carbide lamps use water dripping onto Calcium carbide (manufactured by roasting quicklime with charcoal in an arc furnace) to produce acetylene gas. Acetylene burns with a brilliant white light which rivals modern flashlights, and likely lasted longer than any modern battery. A small tin of carbide (you had to keep it watertight) would last a long time. The lights ranged from small portable flashlight size lanterns someone could carry, to large carriage mounted lights, all the way up to lamps used in lighthouses which could illuminate 10s of miles. The 1920s also had arc lamps, which you could use to light up an entire stadium, or were also used as the lamp in a movie projector. But these draw massive amounts of electricity, so they are really only suitable for fixed mounted installations or very large vehicles like ships. Kerosene lamps had also advanced by the 1900s, my grandpa used to own a gas mantle lamp which ran on gasoline pressurised with a hand pump. But the light element was very fragile, so it wouldn't be suitable for say an adventurer running around at night.

If there was a major outbreak of criminality someone would have rung the church bell out sounded an electric fire siren (invented in 1869). Local police and citizens militia would respond in minutes. Remember 1920s was only 55 years after the end of the US civil war, plenty of expert military experienced survivors had personal memories of having to defend their town and homes from raiders. Anyone who thinks someone in their seventies is too old to pick up a gun never saw my grandpa shoot. The response time would be less than today. And nobody would care if some dodgy strangers ended up dead.

HP Lovecraft wrote a few gun solves the problem stories - my favourite is From Beyond, in which a single shot stops the horror. Of course there are plenty of horrors which can't be hurt with human weapons, like Cthulhu himself. I think if they are getting a bit too handy with the weapons, try them on something like Stephen King's Tommyknockers, in which say an entire town comes under a malign influence, or maybe an encounter with hordes of horrible rat like creatures which feature in a few cthulhu stories.

Stranger things found another solution to the mobile phone dilemma. Their horror - monsters intruding from another dimension - was so weird calling someone didn’t really help. ”Find my son, he has been kidnapped into another dimension!” Then of course there is always the old standby, the authorities are part of the conspiracy, like the little girl and her sick dad being pursued across the country in “Firestarter”.

One of the first things which happens when war threatens is countries withdraw their ambassadors, because being a foreign diplomat becomes a very high risk job when the shooting starts. Usually meetings if any happen in a neutral third country, arranged by the diplomats of that neutral country. There are plenty of cases of diplomats being murdered, especially when the two parties didn't share the same tradition. Lunar diplomats trying to negotiate with light bringers, well they're all chaos fiends aren't they? You god might get angry if you send them home in one piece.

Make sure you are trying to read from the game book, and not the other one 😉

Stephen King found a solution - make the cell phone the threat.

Stephen King found a solution - make the cell phone the threat.

Gloom shark? Lusting after wealth seems awfully hungry to me. "terrible new god" doesn't necessarily mean the god was new, possibly just new to the Merfolk. Or perhaps a new hero cult. A fell pact with the chaos god of hunger, that the god could feast on the bodies and souls of the sailors, just leave the treasure for the merfolk. This also raises questions about the opening. Who exactly is the secretive ceremony conducted by sailors propitiating? They may be re-enacting a heroic quest to break the pact. Or they could be joining the fell pact, preserving themselves at the expense of anyone else who takes to the sea, satisfying their own hunger through imposing a monopoly on sea faring. Or both types of sailors could be plying the seas - those who overcome chaos, and those who propitiate chaos.

Maybe. Radiation messes up electronics pretty good, so the sensor package on the end of the tentacle would have been messed up just as quickly as the sensor package on a regular robot. Fukushima radiation levels exceeded Chernobyl at one point. Fukushima was a really dumb design, passive safe reactors which won't melt down under any circumstances have been designed and tested. I'm a big fan of nuclear reactors, despite the occasional horrible accident. One day nuclear reactors will save us all, but cutting short the dark age after our civilisation collapses. In the 1977 sci-fi book Lucifer's Hammer, about a civilisation shattering series of comet strikes, one of the few remaining centres of civilisation was a nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors, at least the western design, are tough, and they don't need to be refuelled very often - especially if power demand drops to a trickle, because most of the previous customers are currently too busy fighting off cannibal religious crazies to show up for work on Monday.

Oh but we do have important lessons to learn - we are not observing the correct forms of worship. Many of us even deny or are ignorant of the existence of the mythos. Nyarlathotep's view of how humans should behave corresponds to SAN zero, but this doesn't mean he is objectively wrong. it is just a matter of perspective - human perspective vs the preferences of an incomprehensible cosmic horror. Personally I'm happy to live in a place where screaming mobs are not marching down the street demanding I get on my knees and grovel before their insanity, or randomly attacking people for giving offence against their madness, but maybe that's just me.

If this was a case summon Nyarlathotep spells would produce a different result every time they were used. But the summon spells are predictable, at least in terms of the result they produce, the form of the visitor who answer the summons. Although who knows - a being as subtle and powerful as Nyarlathotep could arrange events so the spell he wanted was cast when he wanted, so control might only be an illusion. Nyarlathotep is cruel in human terms. But a lot of people seem to survive his attention, and gain knowledge and new insights, like the victim of Nyarlathotep's cruel joke in HP Lovecraft's Under the Pyramid. Hence my claim he is a teacher - though not a teacher most students would thank.

There is a strong suggestion the entire universe may be a figment of Azathoth’s imagination. Maybe that is why Azathoth worshippers go insane - they know with utter certainty there is no meaning, that the existence of everything they have ever known is as ephemeral as foam produced by a wave crashing on the shore of the cosmic ocean. The nihilism is the product of the utter emptiness of their existence. Azathoth is the only tangible. Or something like that 😉

An even stranger device was built. Project Orion was an attempt to design a spaceship powered by nuclear explosives. They did plenty of tests, for a while Orion was considered as the space drive for the Kennedy moon mission, before the politicians chickened out and went with the Saturn chemical rockets. Or course the Orion version of Apollo wouldn't have been just a moon mission, there were plans for a tour of the inner solar system, with landings on the moon and Mars, and a visit to Venus. They needed really small nuclear bombs for the manned version of Orion, because humans would be pulverised by the shockwave of a really large blast, even though the space ship could be engineered to survive such forces. Freeman Dyson's son George Dyson claimed in his book Project Orion that his dad designed and tested an atomic bomb which could fit in a shoebox. Only a few kilotons yield - but that would be plenty for a device that portable. Really wonder what would have happened if Project Orion had survived. The most powerful design could have powered a starship capable of 3-4% of the speed of light. At that speed, a manned mission to Proxima Centauri, or even long distance missions to visit Hastur's city of Carcosa on Alderberan, would just barely have been possible ;-).

Remember the uncanny valley. Researchers trying to build convincing android robots discovered an interesting problem. When the robot looks nothing like a human, we accept it. When the robot looks and behaves exactly like a human, we accept it. But if there is something even slight wrong, a robot with jerky movements, or the wrong skin tone, or bumps which appear under the skin in the wrong places, we feel a sense of violent revulsion. Stephen King is a master of this style of story. Many of his stories start with everything utterly normal, except just one small thing is wrong. That odd piece of metal sticking out of the ground in the Tommyknockers. The mist hanging across the lake which doesn't dissipate in the morning sunlight. People gaining feeble psychic abilities in a secret government experiment. A curio shop full of things you actually want. Everything else flows from that small initial flaw.

I'll see your bloop gun and raise you a Davy Crockett 🙂

He's my hero 😉

Anything to increase paranoia and sow disunity. If players can’t psychologically cope with having a few secrets in a game of Cthulhu they should stick to playing something less mentally demanding, like toon.

Scientists building robots with tentacles which extend across or through difficult terrain. Their vision is in a rescue situation, a bunch of long robot tentacles would enter a building and search for the humans.

Sanity is the human perspective. The more you cast spells, the more you reject humanity and embrace an alien way of being.

They’re definitely playable, but they do have strange encounters and odd problems, because by worshiping the god of illusion, disorder and mobility, they have let illusion, disorder and the need for a lot of mobility into their lives. One idea a long time ago I liked is tricksters in the vicinity of a trickster shrine are like Ogres near a Cacodemon shrine - they can’t help acting up, as they approach one of the places where the presence of their god is strong. So they can stay boring if they want - by not learning any magic. Those weird encounters? Remember tricksters have no rules about using the magic on each other. So a trickster who has just learned a fun spell like “lie” could be itching to try it out on someone, like another trickster they encounter on the way to the lie shrine! And imagine a village which is home to a lie shrine, all the weird problems they would have, with everyone suffering the influence of clever lies they still hadn’t seen through