SunlessNick

Wow, you weren't kidding when you said "early next week" - Sunday at 3AM!

Checking back, @tendentious does seem to be right. However that's not how I would run it.

You don't need to cast the spell to reduce a dead body down to its salts (that just takes chemistry/alchemy, though learning the spell presumably teaches you the specifics). Then you cast the spell to turn the salts back into the person, or you can cast it in reverse on an existing resurrectee to undo it and make them salts again. You can't use it to turn a regular never-died person into salts.

!! Oh yes! One guaranteed sale right here.

Oh hell yes! I am so looking forward to this one.

That's a great idea! It also potentially offers insights or leverage to Investigators. If one of them knows Jack Brady, it will be easier to get his trust - if one of them knows Penhew he might be reluctant to kill a former friend - the same probably isn't true of Huston, but someone who knew him could convince him they're willing to join him. Do you plan to have Masters serve the same role in the campaign? To some extent, she and Carlyle might be a shortchange compared to the other three - neither of them are in a condition to be interacted with much. An idea I've had in the past is replacing Masters's motive for going on the expedition - rather than guilt over an abortion, having a terminal illness, and signing on with Nyarlathotep over the prospect of being healed - a close friend of hers might know of that illness, leading to an additional note of mystery if Elias has indications that she might still be alive.

What was the original spirit?

Insane Insight could also be handled by rolling against your SAN loss as if it were a momentary skill. So, you face a deep one, fail you SAN roll and lose 3 - you want to try for insane insight, so you have a 3% chance.

Sometimes it will be worth it, sometimes not. Implicitly it will steer all the Cthulhu Mythos skills toward having an atmosphere of information rather than insight - it's slightly less in keeping with the idea that Cthulhu Mythos reduces maximum Sanity, or rolling the Mythos skills for "emergency magic/insight." If you do have have the highest Mythos rating reduce maximum Sanity, then the latter will diminish more slowly, since the individual Mythos skills will be lower than the overall one would be. That latter bit from the previous point would also make Mythos skills less likely to succeed and give good information, unless you really bump up the total points that books and similar sources give out. By not doing that with diaries and such, it makes it much easier to characterise them as very minor sources in contrast even to books like Thaumaturgical Prodigies. It will also create a greater impression of different Mythos forces not necessarily being related to each other - it is more in keeping with some Mythos entities being ignorant of one another - for instance perhaps the average Serpent Person is ignorant of the existence of the Fungi from Yuggoth. It individualises books a lot, at the cost of a lot more bookkeeping. It also makes it easier to individualise copies of a book: Nameless Cults might have a chapter on a network of sorcerers that practice reanimation from essential saltes, but the copy in one libary has had those pages ripped out, while leaving the rest of the lore intact. It allows you to believe in some of the Mythos but not all - seeing ghouls in action might not convince you of the existence of Shub-Niggurath. It makes it easier to have strands of the Mythos actually be false in a particular campaign - if Cthulhu is real, but Nyarlathotep is just a mythical personification of the process of learning magic, it lets you keep track of which Cthulhu Mythos points represent something real, and which represent lies and delusions - while not making it obvious to the players. Again at the expense of more bookkeeping. It lets cultists know a lot about their interests without giving them unfeasibly high general skills - the Wizard Whately presumably knew quite a bit about Yog-Sothoth, but there's no indication hew knew the Great Race existed at all. (You can do that anyway of course, but this way you have a mechanical way to represent it). The more of those things that seem good to you, the more worth it it will be.

Possibly use the Wartime experience package from the Investigator's Handbook if you have it - by definition, Hellfighters must have such experience.

Gumshoe is several games by different writers, so the sell for the system is expressed somewhat differently. Trail of Cthulhu is written by Kenneth Hite, who in the introduction outright calls Call of Cthulhu the greatest roleplaying game of all time - so the way he puts it is milder than what's being described here. Hite's version is in short that scenarios have a risk of stalling if a critical information-gathering roll is failed - some people have their own workarounds for that, while others actually want to have that chance of failure - but Trail is there for people who want a workaround to be put into the core of the system. When Robin Laws is doing the writing he depicts it as a much more intractible problem for all investigative games (he doesn't specify Call of Cthulhu, even in coy allusions). As regard the question in the OP, I've personally never had the problem that Trail of Cthulhu, or Gumshoe more generally, purports to solve. But I don't know if I can swear with certainty that it's because I've been good or I've been lucky. I have seen more than a few people say it's influenced how they approach designing investigative scenarios, so it's certainly struck at least that much of a chord. At the moment, it's a common practice in game design to base mechanics around narrative structure. That's also a factor in Gumshoe, and clue aquisition isn't the only way it does it.

I have to say the level of discount for previous purchase of the pdf seemed pretty generous. I wasn't expecting to be able to afford this today, but...

I wouldn't, personally, My aesthetic for the Dreamlands is to either omit them or have them be the principal focus of the campaign (which means I don't include much of the extraterrestrial Mythos). But that's just me.

Basically, just picture us as hungry chicks in a nest.

Thankyou. This is definitely on my must-have list.

VOLUME 1: Page 93: The Martense Kin appearance sections says, "Unwholesome descendants a once great family." VOLUME 2: Page 124: Five lines up from the bottom right, there's the word "identify," which looks like it should be "identity." Page 128: In M'Geluloc's physical stat block, its attacks per round entry is incomplete. Page 129: Under Mh'ithrha's cult, there's "with each believing to the superior of the other." Also, under Blessings (for hyper sight), there's "grants the ability to see all flour dimensions." Page 145: The deadly touch description has: "may cause injuring by touching the flesh" The possession description has: "most willing accept this" Page 147: The first sentence of the Bloated Woman description has "black fan, which combined with magic created the illusion" - everything else in the paragraph is in the present tense. Page 149: The Green Man profile repeats the Bloated Woman's version of what happens when it hits 0 hit points (although everything else seems to be right). Page 167: The first sentence on the page starts with "Most encounters are likely through contact with a lone "practitioner or group Human, ghoul, or otherwise)"

I don't remember, I'm afraid. At any rate, I liked the idea - it means each incarnation is sort of a different entity, but not entirely, and resulting Agarthan is an alloy of them all - it feels more magical than the other options somehow.

Double post - sorry.

A Yahoo group, but I can't remember the address.

A Yahoo group, but I can't remember the address.

Fantastic!

Huh. I thought that might be it with Cynothoglys, but I thought M'nagalah was Ramsey Campbell's invention, and couldn't see why he'd ok some of his creations and not others - checking, though, I see you're right. Thankyou.

Harlem Unbound deserves to be up for best setting as well (although I will admit to be relieved at not having to choose between it and Berlin).

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.

Well deserved.