EricW

Some people have remarkable pickpocket skills. A street magician once gave us a display of his magic skills, card tricks mostly, outside a pub in London. We were way impressed at his skill, when he finished said "wow, thanks for the show, let us give you something". He said "Then you'll be needing these", and handed us our wallets.

The Weapon Makers, a 1940s science fiction book, had an interesting take on this. The main character in The Weapon Makers uses a machine which projects him into an ethereal plane very like your description, to save himself a few hours in the future, by creating a dazzling display of overwhelmingly superior technology to intimidate an organisation which has overstepped its own rules. The characters could have entered this ethereal state because of a machine built by a scientist, as in The Weapon Makers. Their only hope of re-entering the real world is to find the portal, and fight their way through whoever is still in the lab which contains the portal. You have to think of a convincing reason why they don't know where the portal is - perhaps they were kidnapped and dumped in this bizarre place by people who thought they wouldn't survive long, a convenient way of making enemies disappear - no bodies. Of course being a Lovecraft adventure the etherial plane is inhabited, terrifying creatures which might also stumble across the portal, false paths to who knows where, temporal anomalies, the temptation to try to manipulate time for their own gain, along with awful risks of paradox or worse, and in the distance an eerie demonic piping sound...

The stories look like the list available on http://www.hplovecraft.com

HP Lovecraft's The Dreams in the Witch House is pretty Satanic, one of the protagonists is "the black man" of the old European witch cult, both an avatar of that which Christians describe as Satan and a manifestation of Nyarlathotep. Lots of interesting angles, a math genius being driven mad by nocturnal wanderings and strange journeys to the court of Azathoth, an ancient witch still preying on children. Obviously needs some work to turn it into a scenario. The investigators could be drawn in by a frantic parent searching for their loved one, or the math genius could be referred to them by a parent, friend or teacher worried about their deteriorating mental health.

I grew up in a rough area, lots of fights to defend myself when I was young. Sometimes people attacked me with weapons, though never a gun. If an attacker is close and swinging punches, pulling a weapon is very risky, you need both hands full time to try to fend off the assailant. If you drop a hand to pull a knife or gun, the assailant will land at least one or two nasty punches on your head before you can deploy the weapon - likely rendering you incapable of defending yourself. If you can break free and the assailant doesn't follow up for a few moments, you can maybe pull a weapon - but if they realise what you are doing, they will likely close in and grapple to get control of the weapon. This is one of those situations game mechanics probably doesn't handle well, but at the very least in the middle of a fight I would give the assailant a chance to seize the gun from the defender, or knock it out of the defender's hand, and maybe one or two attacks with severely reduced defence.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/ of course. Loads of stories written by the master, and other gems such as the history of the Necronomicon. The best book to understand the mythos in gaming terms IMO is the mythos stories themselves - they are the definitive source material. Also watch the movie Dagon - excellent homage to The Shadow Over Insmouth.

Seems to me that a con artist or even a cultist might offer eager players a fast means of transport. Cash up front. Step into this box, the one with the lock on the door...

True Detective Season One has references to The Yellow King and other Mythos elements. Nice and subtle. You are never 100% sure something supernatural is happening. But definitely some "slasher" elements. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_(season_1)

You could pen your own homage to the movie In the Mouth of Madness. From H.P. Lovecraft's "History of the Necronomicon" This implies that once the Necronomicon was far more accessible than today's fragmentary scraps - first editions could have been almost as readable as a modern howto book. What impact would such an accessible edition have on today's world? An electronic edition which people could email to their friends? I think you would have your slasher scenario.

The sacrificial "victims" could be leading cultists themselves - which would make the ritual a gruesome attempt to concentrate the knowledge and power of the worst humanity has to offer into one person. The investigators are expendable decoys to distract from the real rescue attempt. "Spies Like Us" meets "Night of the Living Dead" You could have all sorts of fun with the "rescue" scenarios. Furious rival cultists thirsting for revenge all alone with the rescuers, badly in need of recharging their necromantic potential. See how long you could convince players Sarah was innocent in the midst of mounting evidence to the contrary. Of course the ritual would go horribly wrong if performed, it wasn't designed for humans.

He he. Not sure it is that simple. Spending an afternoon with Nyarlethotep exploring the ruins is probably worth a mythos point or two. But the protagonist rationalised the supernatural component of the experience as a dream. Is this coping strategy really a worse outcome than facing up to the experience? Normally you have to work through your problems, but is there really a way to integrate appreciation of what really happened when confronting a horrifying mythos god with a sane view of the world? Sure his "dream" rationalisation would be shattered by another encounter - but contemplating the full ramifications of what he experienced might be even more damaging.

Only if Cthulhu tells me to... :-)

Design looks really simple. You could probably make a version which could be worn over your hand at a game convention with a few weekends of swearing at your 3D printer, an Arduino and a stepper motor. Give it a bit of paint and it would look really creepy.

Sounds similar to The Horror at Red Hook - a HP Lovecraft story about a cultist who sets up mass sacrifices on an industrial scale on the back of a people smuggling operation. Big difference is instead of gaining access to a scroll, the goal of the cultist is some ghastly sorcerous personal transformation, to defeat old age and who knows what else. The Horror at Red Hook has come under a lot of criticism for alleged racist overtones - many of the perpetrators were foreigners just off the boat, though they were led by a white occultist. Still maybe worth reading - no problem borrowing some plot twists from Lovecraft to spice up your new scenario :-)

Going temporarily insane might actually be beneficial in some circumstances. This might not be completely cannon, but a lot of HP Lovecraft's characters escape because they lost their grip on sanity. For example, consider the following from "Under the Pyramids" If the lead character in "Under the Pyramids" had not fled in blind panic, if he had tried to find a rational way to escape, he would likely have failed. Perhaps the way to handle this is to roll the character's mythos skill when they are afflicted with temporary insanity - the more mythos skill they have, the more likely they are to respond appropriately to extreme circumstances. Did the character in "Under the Pyramids" recover some sanity after surviving the horror? Difficult to say.

Don't try to help the investigators survive. CoC is lethal. D&D can turn into a big bug hunt. In CoC, the players are the bugs. Players have to learn that if they want their characters to survive more than 5 minutes, they need to think.

New CoC themed video game going to be released...

The following is a short extract of the scene I was referring to. In the Mouth of Madness is a very Cthulhu themed horror film, tentacled monstrosities taking over the world, but the opening scene of the film is pure black humour.

The opening scene from In the Mouth of Madness is dark comedy - the Sam Neill character being hauled into an asylum, starting a shout "I am not insane", which all the other inmates join "I'm not insane if he isn't".

One of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen is The Thing. There's a few utterly alien scenes with tentacles and grisly transformations, but the real terror is that nobody knows who is still human. The thing assumes the likenesses and behaviour of the people it infects - attacking people on a cellular level, until they are consumed and become a part of the alien menace. Nobody can trust anyone - someone trying to get you alone might be your friend trying to talk to you, to work out a plan to survive, or it could be the alien horror setting an ambush in the guise of someone you trust. The setting is an isolated Antarctic base, so there is no getting away - in fact, some of the people on the base are determined nobody will get away, because if The Thing escapes it might destroy the world. The only reason the world wasn't destroyed 10s of thousands of years ago is The Thing crashed its starship in the Antarctic wilderness, and promptly froze solid. But now its loose again, and trying to find a way out - the fate of the world hangs by a thread. Well worth watching, if you want some ideas on creating a setting of mind bending horror with a few simple props.

You could have some fun with Christmas - all those Christmas lights, maybe a half remembered tradition, an ancient effort to protect home and hearth from something which can't stand the light, something which seeps in through the darkness, from some foul parasitic dimension just a heartbeat away from ours, finding any convenient entrance such as the chimney of a house where the hearth fire has died, feasting on the darkness in the hearts of those who are "bad" - those who have turned away from love and life. Lets just say you wouldn't want to meet the "reindeer"...

Very mythos though - no reputable publication would print a story about monsters infesting coastal towns or islands rising from the deep or other outlandish tales of supernatural horror. Investigators would be much more likely to hear very distorted versions of such claims from disreputable tabloids which nobody takes seriously, lost in a mix of similar fabulous claims.

Claim in the Sun Newspaper that a vast city has been discovered frozen under the Antarctic ice - just like the city in HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness". They think they've found Atlantis - but mythos fans know better...

The Night Flier - that hilarious scene where the main protagonist is watching the reflection of the vampire taking a leak on the urinal behind him. Of course, you can't see the vampire - all you can see is the stream of blood hitting the urinal.

Make them act out their madness - if one of them starts hallucinating or becomes paranoid after a mythos encounter, don't tell them "you're now afflicted with paranoia", describe the world as a paranoid would see it - "someone seems to be creeping up behind you, roll a spot hidden". All their senses are twisted by their mental injury. Worse, they might start affecting other players with their paranoia, especially if you hint before the session that people who are exposed to Cthulhu mythos sometimes gain dark insights into the true nature of reality. Who knows what gruesome anti-social acts they might be tempted to perform, what division and distrust you can sow even between members of the party who normally cooperate - and what consequences the players will face, when the law finally catches up with their criminal reign of terror!