Old Man Henerson

12 hours ago, seneschal said:

Yes.  That's why I thought you'd enjoy this discussion.

Okay, here is the plot of the game I am currently working on.

I got this idea after reading some material from the End Time monograph on the internet. The back story starts in 2020 when a group of astronauts investigate the dark knight satellite. (Wich, by the way, sounds like Batman's satellite TV service) While on the satellite, they learn that the satellite is a beacon for a great cosmic force that is approaching the Earth, and will arrive in 7 years. One of the astronauts, who is really a cultist/monster tries to take over the satellite and gain its power for himself. They defeat him and barely escape the satellite as it explodes.

Over the next 7 years te world America, Europe, and China pool their resources and start a Mars mission to send their best people to live on Mars before the cosmic force arrives on Earth, sending up 3 rockets with 100 people at a time about every 2 years. As the cosmic fore draws closer, things on Earth get worse as crime and insanity goes up and cultists, monsters, and UFOs begin appearing and abducting people. At the end of the 7 years the cosmic force arrives and envelops the Earth in a monstrous cloud that the people of Mars can't see through. A few days later, the get radio transmissions from 3 more rockets that left Earth at the last minute and are lead by Elon Musk of all people.

The main story will take place 300 years later after Elon Musk and his descendants have made the Martian Colinies into an advanced society and the cosmic cloud over the Earth has disappeared. The PCs will be part of an expedition to Earth to see if they can recolonize the planet. This ofcourse goes horribly wrong and they are attacked by psychics and cultists aided by one of the expedition leaders who has already consorted with the dark powers in order to transcend his human limitations.

The PCs will have to survive in a strange and warped world full of psychic monsters and cultists ruled by three cosmic beings that are actually children of the first cosmic force. Along the way, they will find allies among the various resistance tribes and paramilitary organizations who are fighting against the 3 rulers and learn how to gain psychic powers and defeat them. Another force Known as The Light will also help and guide them through their adventure along with providing them its power and strength.

The end goal will be to go into the psychic dream realm and steel the shards of the Earth's life force that the 3 rulers have been feeding upon and use them to defeat the rulers, and once they have enough power to defeat the cosmic force itself and free the Earth. 

I also kind of want to have them use some cool mecha suits like the one on the back of the Big Golden Book, provided ofcourse through Elon Musk Cyber technology.

What do you think of the setting?

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Not necessarily.

Look, with any discussion there are going to be conflicting  viewpoints. It better to be aware of them all  before  modifying rules  and running the game.

For instance, if  players (and NPCs) can flash fry someone per firestarter, or teleport 1000 meters into the air, or  whatever, then the GM needs to be aware of how easy that will be to accomplish, and how that will impact the  campaign, or even it a campaign is still possible. Or it psychic powers will need certain safeguards and restrictions.

The setting makes a huge difference on how the  powers impact the game too. Something like mind reading and teleportation could  greatly affect any sort of mystery adventure.

There are lots of things to consider, especially in the contest of a campaign.

One thing I'll point out is that any sort of  exceptional  ability tends to paint a target on someone back in combat. Just like how in real combat the guy carry the flamethrower tended to get shot at  more than  guys carrying  rifles.  So the GM will need to factor this into things for both he PCs and NPCs.

 

All very good food for thought. I will have to look over the psychic power list to see how it all works. I am not too worried about mind reading since my game is more action oriented. But I will keep it in mind. The enemies will have plenty of psychics as well so a good deal of the enemies will be on equal fooding with the players in that regard.

On 10/11/2019 at 2:46 AM, seneschal said:

Musing on possible Halloween scenarios, I had a random thought.  What if instead of ramping up the eldritch terror to 11 we drifted in the other direction (or misdirection) a bit?  I'm a fan of both the board game and the comedy movie "Clue."  What can we do with it?

What exactly do you mean by going the other direction? Do you mean like my post about if the mythos was not that powerful?

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

You're beating a dead horse ( I wonder how it turned out, I sure hope seneschal killed someone.).

Remember, if you beat a dead horse long enough, it will rise up as a zombie horse to plague the world of man once more. Thus it is with fandoms and genres.

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

But there are a lot of ways to run with an idea like this. Spend  a weekend binge watch Twlight Zone, Night Gallery, Kolchak, any of the Tales From series, and your bound to come up with some ideas.

I couldn't agree more with that. When I was younger, I would watch episodes of Ancient Aliens with a clipboard in hand and write down ideas from whatever zany episode was on. A few of these ideas have even made their way into the book I am writing.

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

How about one where all the PCs get murdered at the start of the game, wake up as dead, ghosts, etc. and then have to solver thier own murders so their spirits move on into the afterlife  (the question is on the application)?

That is definitely one of the more interesting ideas I have heard.  You could also have it so while all the players are arguing and searching for who the murderer is, that Mr. Body is slowly transforming into a monster and will start to feed on the players or take them through his secret portal to Planet X to be eaten there.

41 minutes ago, ThornPlutonius said:

We also live in a time wherein we are far more jaded with respect to "horror" than were folks in Lovecraft's time.

Sort of, but not really. Mankind has always had dark monsters and world ending horrors lurking around throughout all of history. This is just the first time we can discus all of them in one place.

1 hour ago, seneschal said:

For something different, check out the "Cthulhu Clue" thread.

Thanks for the link. Looks like some interesting stuff.

1 hour ago, Fenspar said:

I had the same thought after reading The Night Land, and it turns out no less a person than Sandy Petersen has had thoughts about using the setting as well.

https://nightland.website/index.php/background/essays/194-gaming-in-the-night-land

I've not tried it myself, but a cold world orbiting a dead sun, where human beings take refuge in a fortified structure menaced by almost incomprehensible forces would have great potential. One would have to give some thought to what remained in the Night Lands to explore or rescue, beyond obscure menaces, but the setting is very evocative.

There are always more secrets to find, not to mention you could have PCs who are not familiar with the book go on an adventure through it, perhaps even have them trace the protagonist's path through the book. I believe he left out entire portions of the land that you could go exploring through, not to mention what ever mission you have for the PCs could take them up beyond the walls of the canyon and into the icy ruins of the old world above where they could learn the true reason the earth has fallen into darkness. The Possibilities are endless.

I found that site awhile ago myself. Probably for the same reasons you did.  I copied all the stats and gathered some of the best pictures I found and have now been working on a world book in a word document for privet use.  I still have a lot of work to do, but I think that this would make one of the best game settings in recent years.

On 10/17/2019 at 7:02 AM, Atgxtg said:

• What if it isn't a stupid human they need to fear but another monster? All the staff at the mansion could be monsters too. For isntance, imagine that Mr. Body had various monsters working for him , including some realy nasty ones, and he still winds up dead? If something is powerful enough to get to him, what chance to the PCs have? Think of Mr. Body as King Kong and the PKs as  Bigfoot.
• A group of all Cryptids might work too.
• Maybe the PKs could be threaten with exposure and need to solve the murder before their cover is blown. Imagine if somebody had actual proof of the Mythos and was going to reveal it all to the public.
• Or maybe Mr. Body had control of something that the PK need, such as access to lots of wealth. Vampires don't keep Banker's hours. So if they want to buy a old mansion or something they'd need a middle man to do the legwork. The PKs would not only need to solve his murder, but retrieve his notebook/data to access their accounts (Swiss Bank Accounts?) so they don't loose millions.
• Note that if Mr. Body or someoneelse is ripping the PKs off of millions, they probably know what the Pks weaknesses are and would try to destroy the PKs. You could play with this with a couple of near (or not so near) misses that exploit the Pks weaknesses. Holy Water, Silver Bullets, Elder Signs.
• Along those lines, if all the PKs were vampires, you could put a Hall of Mirrors in the mansion, or maybe a Sun Room with tanning lights that actually hurt vampires. 
• If the murder took place of Halloween you could have trick or treaters show up (and maybe use water pistol to squirt holy water on the PKs), and/or have the get together for the murder be a costume party
• Oh, and if you are going all Agatha Christie here you could have Mr. Body fake his own death for some reason, like say he wanted to keep the PK combined fortunes, so he faked his own death. 
• Another take on the costume party would be if the murder were one of those "solve a muder" games that went horribly wrong. The hired servants/guards won't let any of the people inside leave until the murder has been solved, or time runs out, and they won't make exceptions even after the game turns real. If the Pks are humans then they would have until midnight, when everybody would unmask (and the PKs would be revealed to the monsters). If the PKs are monsters, say vampires, then they would need to get out and back to thier coffin by dawn, or before the fire-sprinklers come on (holy water).
• all the PKs were humans trying to solve the murder before midnight when everybody reveals themselves (and the monsters kill off the humans). The servants/guards won't let anybody leave before the murder has been solved. 

Just brainstorming some ideas there.

Sounds like Murder in Hotel Transylvania ha ha.🤣

33 minutes ago, ThornPlutonius said:

I see Occultism as sort of a mitigating discipline against the effects of encounters with the Mythos.  It establishes a framework of ritual knowledge and understanding as well as preparing the character through interactions with non-Mythos non-human entities.  I could even see a grounding in Occultism as enabling one to have one's SAN not be as vulnerable to Mythos encounters due to an existing body of experience with similarly non-ordinary entities.  My perhaps erroneous understanding concerning the sanity-damaging affect of encounters with Mythos elements assumes the person is suffering SAN loss due to how completely divorced from their ordinary understanding of "reality" the Mythos element tends to be.  Someone well grounded in Occult practices already knows there's shit "out there" that can/will mess one up, that defies "common sense".   Therefore, the effect of an encounter with Mythos is somewhat mitigated.

This leads to another question I have had in my mind for a long time. Are the sanity rules even realistic? Assuming things like bigfoot, faeries, and aliens are real and assuming even a tiny portion of encounters are real, most people are not driven insane by their encounters with these beings. To me, it seems like Lovecraft highly underestimated the strength of the human mind, as I would imagine, eldritch super beings aside, seeing something like a deep one or shogoth would be no more damaging to the mind than seeing bigfoot in the wild.

8 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

Well, that was a helpful discussion regarding psychic abilities that went south.

!i!

Yeah... Sure was.

58 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Basically the fact that many physic abilities can't really be defended against (other than by already having a high POW), tend to bypass things like armor, and there is very little someone can do about them.

Ah. I see. There are a few powers like mind shield and dead calm that could help out a little, but I see your point. I guess you could tailor your enemies so their powers were weaker than the PCs like you said a while ago, so that might be a good compromise.

42 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

I disagree. Domination or being turned into a rat will both wear off, while that enemy who  got burn't to a cinder is still dead a couple of days later. So if killing your opponent was your goal, direct damage or any sort is usually the best value for the cost.

Uh, no.

First off damage to hit locations (What you  call localized hit points) is also subtracted form total hit points in every BRP game, so you can't take any more damage. For example a character with 10 HP who takes 3 points of three different locations is reduced to 1 hit point and rendered unconscious.

The only real differences between using hit locations or not are with what it takes to disable a location, vs. infcliting a major wound. and the differences in what it takes to armor a character.

 

Fire will give you a quick kill while the other two spells you chose won't.

I forgot to take into account the lethality of the game, still in the D&D mindset 3PP/1D6 for a quick kill seems a lot more reasonable now that I think about it. Though I also see Loyd's point about causing chaos with mindcontrol and transformation spells, perhaps both types of powers should cost more points for their potential lethality?

42 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Hardly. D&D is one of the worse magic systems is any RPG, and the main reason why every version of D&D breaks down at higher level. The magic outclasses everything else. A 20th level fight is not on par with a 20th level magic user.

If anybody tries to make magic work like it does in D&D in BRP, then no one is going to want to play anything other that a mage because magic will overpower everything else.A low level D&D spell like fireball can completely wipe out an experienced group of adventurers in BRP very easily, with one action. That is precisely why a fireball with a 20 foot diameter isn't a low level spell in BRP. 

While I will agree that high level magic users are not a good idea for a long running campaign, the stories I usually like to tell are more like long, drawn out one shot campaigns with beginnings, middles, and endings. Once my PCs reach endgame level of powers, it is time to face the BBEG and finish the game. So I am not too worried about the longterm effects of powerful magic on a campaign beyond their impact on the story. To each his own however.😉

2 hours ago, tedopon said:

Supernatural has been on TV for like 15 seasons. X-Files had 8 or 9 as well.

I had thought the same thing LOL.

5 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Increasing the other spell cost would be just as fair I guess ^^

On a vaguely related topic if you can get your hand on classic fantasy for BRP they have a very long list, a well thought out and constistent spell cost and some interesting ideas on how to reduce it....

I have looked at it before, it sounds so much like the old AD&D game I have LOL.  Perhaps I will have to look into it at a later date.

The other thing I an not so sure about with psychic powers is if Astral Combat is supposed to be the main mode of combat for psychic games since there seems to be relatively few combat powers.

10 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Domination cost 3MP, polymorphing your ennemy into a rat will also cost 3MP, meanwhile burning your ennemy to cinder (say 4D6 of damage) would cost 12MP.

I hope you can see that all the elemental spell are very poor value for your MP....

Ah, I see now. so perhaps we need to reverse the cost of attack spells and manipulation spells?  Although, unless you have the extra energy super power, using MP will be rather exhausting.

3 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

We're discussing the list from the BRP Big Gold Book?  if so, you're on the money about some psychic abilities seeming more like superpowers...and you'll find them in either the magic or superpowers sections of the book.  I've used all three sections a la carte, picking the powers that suit the setting.

I have actually thought a little about doing that. I saw in the quick start edition of BRP that they had a psychic character with a healing power, so that got me thinking about just ripping the healing magic power from the magic section and turning it into a psychic power.  I also think that combining the power sections is a great idea. the other powers I wanted to make up was a psychic ability to control lightning or electricity and another one called Mind over matter that was sort of like the resistance super power where your body could keep moving and fighting despite how damaged it was, at least until you hit 0 HP or run out of power points.

3 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

Now, the setting is what's really going to determine the appropriateness of any given power, with, say, The Ipcress File at one extreme and perhaps X-Men or even Lensmen on the other.  What's the genre backdrop against which the players will be using their psychic abilities?  How obvious are the powers in use?  How understood/believed/accepted are they by society at large?  How much is too much?

!i!

Yeah, this is where my setting gets complicated. Humanity in the game as been divided in two, one half surviving on an Earth where most of society has regressed into feudalism and tribalism while being ruled by four cosmic children of a planet eater who are feeding of pieces of the Earth's psychic field, and the other surviving on Mars where they are technologically advanced and are terraforming the planet.  On Earth, Psychic powers are fairly common and are earth shattering, with storms of psychic energy warping the people and animals of the world and with at least one psychically charged human killing one of the god children  after steeling his Earth piece and forming a haven on the moon. On Mars however, psychic powers are all but unknown, or are hidden by the higher ups in the colonial government.

The PCs will be people who come to earth on a recolonizing mission, completely unaware of the state of the Earth and the existence of psychic powers, though they themselves will soon come to posses them.

3 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

After much investigation I clarified it's because of the 2 options that BRP offers for HP: localised or general.
3MP/D6 of elemental damage is fine for localised HP but is excessive for general HP and should be come 1MP/D6 for general HP!  

I have 2 questions. For localized hit points, are you talking about hit points by location?  And wouldn't 1MP/D6 ratio be extremely easy to abuse? 

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I think it depends of just what you want to add, and to what degree. You will also  need to consider the vulnerabilities that come with so much psychic ability, both in terms  of plotlines and in terms of PC survivability. 

What kind of vulnerabilities do you mean exactly?

28 minutes ago, seneschal said:

I've never read it.  I will have to hunt it down.

There is a free version here at this site. it is in the public domain now so it should be fine to download. Alternatively, you could get a book on amazon somewhere.  I hope you enjoy it. 👍

Hi guys, the game I am setting up will eventually rely heavily on th PCs using psychic powers, but the list of psychic powers seems fairly limited. I think I can overcome this if I add a few power ideas from the Earthbound series, but I am not sure if that would take away from the mental nature of psychic powers and turn them into superpowers instead.

What do you guys think?

12 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Still I think that could be just as good grist for a topic about DIY as any... How are you going to go about it?

I have just been writing lore, monster stats, and character stats down in Word Documents for the most part while keeping Big Golden Book to use as my rule book. Every now and then I will draw up a monster design in MS paint for my current campaign, although I am going to go back to drawing them in my Manga Studio EX 4.o comic book program since it has better features. For my Night land Setting, I was doing pretty much the same thing, I was however, very lucky and found a site where someone had generously made up a bunch of stats in CoC format that I was able to take for my game. For pictures, I would just gather art people had made about the Night Land book and place it into my book since it was just for my private use anyway.

If I did start on making an official setting however, I would certainly find artists for the project, or pay for some of their work. 

32 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

My eyeballs hate you.

I suppose an explanation is in order I an finishing the editing of 40 pages of text and Stat Blocks which has taken me about 80 hrs and that is just a part of the whole....VIsine, my kingdom for visine and a pack of anacin....

Cheers

 

Well... perhaps I will stick to making homebrews for the near future. Ha ha. 😅

Still, I would love making the Night Land into an actual setting, so one day I might just do it, even if it does not make much money. It will be a labor of love.

Good luck on your project. 👍 What is it about?

So how difficult would this process be? Is all we have to do is copy and paste the Big Golden Book, add some monsters, lore, maps, a few pictures and we are done?

13 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

Ah, yeah, if that's the case then it should be. I'm no expert though.

I assumed that it was how Chaosium and everyone else got their hands on the Cthulhu franchise. I will have to look into it though.

6 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

Emphasis mine.  That's an ambitious leap from A to Z.

!i!

Yeah, we will have to see what offer in the program.

7 minutes ago, g33k said:

There's cheap "stock" and even public-domain art available, but the search for just-the-right-image could be l-o-n-g (and may even prove fruitless in the end).

How much is your own time worth to you?

If you actually plan to bring it to market, you may want to hire (at least some) freelance artists... and maybe a layout person too.

1 minute ago, Bill the barbarian said:

@ochoa is advertising his work around here that he has mad skills (okay, those are my words but I like what I have seen). I have chatted with him and found him very approachable, yet to work with him but maybe one day...

 

Yeah. I would have to look into all that. I will definately keep this in mind for the future. Thanks a lot.