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klecser

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Posts posted by klecser

    Scent Skill

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted

    4 hours ago, imakeeper said:

    Haha, really? Roll for ☆ adorableness ☆. Haven't come across these kinds of skills yet. We will definitely have fun with it when we find one of these skills! Also I'm now imagining your investigators tumbling down mountains and yeeting babies at mythos beasts. Very peculiar!

    Yeet Child comes from a scenario where kids get infected with Something Eldritch™ and become violent. I want to say it's in OG Mansions of Madness? The investigator just picked a kid up that was threatening him with a knife and chucked him into his sister.

    Fall Down Mountain resulted from the investigators climbing Mam Tor in Masks and critically failing an attack roll on the switch backs. Off-balance on a mountain, are you? 😉 

    Scent Skill

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted

    It is also worth noting that Call of Cthulhu has a long tradition of adding skills to NPCs/Monsters that are not in the rulebook and are intended to serve whatever the needed purpose is in a scenario. Examples include "Be Adorable" for kids or "Whimper" for a pathetic creature. Have fun with these. All of my investigators have one or more deliberately comedic skills based upon an aspect of their character. Examples: "Fear the Wind," "Fall Off Mountain," "Yeet Child," and "Restrain Ally." They have very niche application and I usually start them at 70%.

    • Like 2

    Let's Build a Cult Leader!

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

    If you own the URL then you can point it where you please.  Get into "your account" on Godaddy  and look around.  To actually di it you will need some info from your new web host.

     

    Thanks. Any suggestions as to where someone can host a website for free? I am obviously a complete novice in this regard.

    Let's Build a Cult Leader!

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted · Edited by klecser

    Funny story with this one. I started building this NPC and immediately thought it would be cool to give them an actual website associated with their business. I came up with www.getyousomesnakes.com. After posting the video, I had the idea of actually registering the website as a game aide (knowing nothing about how to do this in advance). I went to a popular site and registered the domain for 3 bucks and then made a rudimentary website. You can actually go there for the next six days! The Link Six days because I didn't understand that web hosting is an additional monthly cost (duh) that I wasn't planning on paying, so it will be there until the free trial is done. I tried connecting it to a Wix site, but you have to get premium for that too. If anybody knows how to forward a Go daddy domain to a FREE web-hosting service, let me know! It was a fun idea. 😛 

     

    • Like 1

    Q about updated character sheet - Sanity box

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted · Edited by klecser

    CoC has a history of not being very precise with language. I wonder if "starting" on the new sheet is intended to mean "start of this game session," rather than "start of this character's creation." 

    Even if that were the intention, it doesn't change the fact that there would be an inconsistency/confusion in language between the Keeper book and the sheet.

    The benefit of the old SAN "block" was that you could easily draw lines where your current 1/5 value is. 

     

    • Like 2

    Keeper Reflections: Call of Cthulhu Campaigning is now available!

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted · Edited by klecser

    Now available!
     
    Keeper Reflections: Call of Cthulhu Campaigning
     
    1281210008_ThumbnailKeeperReflections.jpg.2a61f8c0752b29b4b5589b0d24e1f01d.jpg
     
    The description:
     
    Highly-lethal, one-shot Call of Cthulhu is beloved for many reasons. While advice for running individual scenarios or short campaigns is widely available, many groups wonder how to run Call of Cthulhu in a longer framework.
     
    These five short essays focus on insights, successes, and challenges from running a Call of Cthulhu campaign of 55 sessions (and counting). We run a narrative-focused game and have retired only a single investigator, by player choice. My hope is that any Keeper can find examples of choices made by both myself and my players that could be adopted or adapted to help any campaign engage in longer narratives with even more investigator development.
     
    Many of the concepts discussed within could be very useful for any table-top role-playing game. The insights described within use Call of Cthulhu examples, but the methods could apply to and improve any lengthy campaign of any game.
     
    The components include:
    -An author's note summarizing our group philosophy and our goals for story focus.
    -A discussion of a small but significant action we took to ensure safety at our table.
    -Detailed examples of actions I took as Keeper to ensure player agency guided the narrative, but still made preparation manageable and lower stress.
    -Comprehensive descriptions of the circumstances that lead to the development and use of primary campaign NPCs and antagonists. Included in this section is an example of how I altered the classic Necronomicon to craft more role-playing and cosmic horror opportunities.
    -How I build and manage a long-term network of interconnecting plot, location, and character elements, including published scenario, encounter and home brew elements.
    -The complete pathway of how I helped one of my players engage with a crafting project of weird tech that has been modified for over 50 game sessions. Including a new spell, a strange Mythos artifact, and ideas on how to use the framework for any scientific or artistic medium.
    -A FAQ section with commonly asked questions of how to handle aspects of longer campaign play and how to support the needs of community members whose perspectives and needs may differ from a Keeper's prior experiences.
     
    You also get:
     
    -Eleven excerpts of my hand-written campaign journal that show my planning process, how I keep track of complex relationships, how I script critical NPC conversations, and evidence of the importance of letting go of ideas that players do not choose.
    -A separate document that includes larger versions of these photos for those that prefer larger text.
    -An image of our campaign emblem that we had printed in sticker form as a memorable keepsake.
    *Disclaimers: This product contains minor spoilers/discussion of many other Call of Cthulhu scenarios. This product was written for gamers willing to consider how thoughtful language choice can make for a more inclusive hobby with safer, more welcoming tables.
     
    Check it out! If you are a fan of my YouTube Channel, RPG Imaginings, then purchasing this product also supports more video content!
     
    • Like 1

    Call of Cthulhu Sustained Less-Lethal Campaign Discussion

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted · Edited by klecser

    13 hours ago, JDS said:

    1) I don't micro-manage my players that way. Perhaps it is unrealistic, but I don't care for it.

    My "solution" to min-maxing is that I don't play Call of Cthulhu with those of my friends who are min-maxers. It is not an approach to gaming that I enjoy being at a table with. I play DND and Savage Worlds with my min-maxer friends. What you call "micro-manage," I call boundaries.

    But you do make a good point of one way to sustain long campaigns: go more Pulp.

    Call of Cthulhu Sustained Less-Lethal Campaign Discussion

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted · Edited by klecser

    I wonder if the Thompson/flamethrower question is not: "How do I contend with players having these?"

    But more so: "How do I prevent min-maxers from min-maxing?"

    And that does have answers.

    1) How reasonable is it to expect that your history professor would think of "Tommy gun" as the answer to [insert X problem]?

    2) There are many creatures that a Tommy gun has zero effect on.

    3) The cultists have just as easy access to the guns.

    4) A Tommy gun may be legal, but disturbing the peace and public endangerment are not.

    Of course, different groups find different playstyles interesting/fun. Can you go gonzo with weapons and have a campaign with consistent characters?

    Call of Cthulhu Sustained Less-Lethal Campaign Discussion

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted · Edited by klecser

    On 4/9/2022 at 6:04 AM, JDS said:

    So, first you build your occult organization, and then you set your PCs against it. You include lots of violence because that keeps players interested, and it keeps a lot of NPCs from sharing information (because they're dead). Slowly, a bunch of unconnected (make sure some scenarios are really unconnected) events start piling up until the players trust no one and nothing, and see conspiracy everywhere.

     

    That's how I see it being done.

     

    This is a really good example of a human cultist-focused approach.

    Another way to do it is in our campaign: Mythos creatures/deities just don't care about humans unless they: 1) get in their way or 2) can be used/manipulated in some way.

    Being a science teacher, and a big fan of theoretical xenobiology, there is a pervasive false assumption that makes it very easy to derail any realistic discussion of theoretical encounters with alien beings. Many people make the assumption that alien beings would actually care about people. And giving up that assumption is just as nihilistic and terror-filled as other common Mythos tropes. There is also the assumption that alien technology is even understandable. SETI has shifted it's focus largely from searching for intelligible signals from space to searching for phenomena that look like "magic" to us.

    In light of these considerations, I find "humans must be stopped at all costs" is giving agency to people that they likely wouldn't even have. And also results in combat encounters that most alien species wouldn't bother with.

    "But that's boring."

    If someone finds it boring, that's ok. It's your game. I don't boring. Learning that there are advanced civilizations that don't even bother with people or are even amused with attempts of people to influence things? That's an angle. "You oppose my plans? pfffft. Go ahead, you lame meat-bag." And I find that to be particularly interesting story-telling, because it forces people to confront the concept that humans likely aren't as amazing as they think they are. And I think that is truly terrifying to a lot of people.

    Now, that doesn't mean that investigators can't influence things, or have an impact. Underestimating human potential is a noteworthy theme in of itself.

    The last few posts have brought up a really great question: Why do people Cthulhu? For some, I can see that the desire to replicate the style of short-story telling that H.P. Lovecraft did is a really strong pull. And I respect that. But many of us also see novel-style or epic poem-style storytelling as being very much possible too. You don't have to sacrifice elements that make cosmic horror interesting to run a lengthy story. And I completely agree: investigators don't need to suffer frequent death in order to make those stories interesting.

    I also don't think that this discussion would surprise any of the current designers. The challenge of any role-playing game is how to effectively market it. And the types of products that Chaosium publishes don't preclude the possibility of either death-focused or long-term focused games. They have published a ton of great campaigns. Yet, the death-focused "you get to be murdered in spectacular fashion" seems to be a big selling point. And it begs the question if that is a deliberate marketing decision because it sells books, or an artifact of the historical Call of Cthulhu community. Neither answer would surprise me. Or a combination. The designers are highly educated, highly intelligent people.

    • Like 1

    My Jack the NPC dice have arrived!

    in Call of Cthulhu

    Posted

    11 hours ago, Grimmshade said:

    Seth Skorkowski is awesome. 

    Are the dice easy to read? I almost never use my fancy Q Workshop type dice because they are hard to read. 

    I would put them at level 2.5 of 4 on readability. My vision is not good and dice readability is my single greatest gaming pet peeve. Here is my rating scale:

    4 - white numbers against dark background

    3 - colored numbers against different background, but still contrasting

    2.5 - Lined designs but numbers still offset from design

    2 - Lined designs interfere with readability of numbers, rage rising

    1 - artwork obscures numbers - colored numbers on same color background - an example is Q Workshop Forest pattern, which I love the design, but would never buy because I can't read the numbers for crap!

    4 or 3 I wouldn't have to use any concentration or hesitation to read. These, I'll likely have to concentrate a tad to read, but not annoyingly so.

    • Like 1
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