seneschal

The list keeps getting longer and longer. Um, you investigators better get busy. It looks as if the Mythos is winning. 😱

Great find! You’ll have to let us know what you think of it once you’ve had a chance to examine it more closely.

What titles from the Cthulhu back catalog that haven’t already been revised or otherwise made available would you like to see in print again? For me, Before the Fall and Return to Innsmouth.

Let’s be honest about the back catalog, though. While there are certainly piles of scenarios and supplements for the game, including lots of titles in PDF form, there is not 40 years’ worth of material readily available to a new player or GM. Much of that product is long out of print, selling at outrageous prices online if it still exists at all. This isn’t a slap at Chaosium’s marketing department but a plea to reprint the stuff, 7th edition conversion unnecessary. We’ve had lots of threads here listing and discussing the best or favorite or classic scenarios and campaigns but a lot of them are as gone with the wind as Scarlet O’Hara’s estate. Let’s resurrect them. (But don’t resurrect Scarlet! She’s clearly a Mythos entity of some sort.)

Surprisingly, Risus. It’s an ultra simple system intended for off the cuff silly games — but a large portion of the fan-made campaigns are Cthulhu.

So, has the OP settled on an idea for the adventure yet? 😊

Green Hornet, The Saint and Boston Blackie are all good inspirations for an urban fantasy campaign since their protagonists deal with powerful gangsters, corrupt politicians and clever fraudsters as well as garden variety murderers. And all of them tend to have complicated relationships with the authorities. Boston Blackie solves crimes so the cops won’t arrest him for them! Even if you’re not running a campaign, listen to Vincent Price as Simon Templar, “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime.” He’d rather rest on his ill-gotten gains, enjoying fine dinners and nubile blondes, but he can’t resist getting involved in other people’s problems. Another good one is The Ghost Corps, about private troubleshooters handling situations the government dare not touch in the colonial Mid-East. You’ve got to stop a war, a horde of angry subjects wants your blood, and you can’t ask the army or the city guard for help because the political situation is too touchy.

There are piles of videos online about acquiring and or making cheap miniatures. The glory of it is that the scale is set by your 1/72 or 28mm heroes. So a castoff McDonalds toy or dollar store wrestler, soldier or zoo animal becomes a giant entity. With some glued-on modifications and a new paint job, that chipped Princess Jasmine figure from Goodwill becomes a force for your investigators to deal with.

Only their “gaming sessions” were often only 15 minutes long. Want to discover whether Superman survives being locked in a trunk with Kryptonite or whether the vampire high priest gets the drop on Jack, Doc and Reggie? Tune in tomorrow at this same time and station! Unfortunately for our discussion, radio didn’t have fantasy in the Tolkien/D&D sense. But there are tons of horror, mystery and adventure shows that played out like a role-playing campaign. Recommended series: Suspense, scariest tales on radio hands down; I Love A Mystery, a rowdy trio of sometime detectives travel the globe to battle the bizarre and help the defenseless (player-characters before the concept existed); Chandu the Magician, modern day mage fights a shadowy global conspiracy while trying to protect his family; The Shadow, amateur detective with secret identity encounters anything from mundane crime to madmen or monsters.

https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Dark_Fantasy_Singles Don’t neglect old-time radio shows. Always packed with excellent NPCs, monsters and set pieces.

I know a lot of folks here don’t use miniatures in their games but this project was so cool I had to share it. Although the critter is intended for D&D I can totally see it attacking Cthulhu investigators. Made of toilet paper tubes and glue.

My local store has a lone copy of the RQ2 reprint but says the new version is sold out from any warehouse they can buy from.

Grognardism isn’t all bad. Many of your fellow posters here are Runequest, Stormbringer, Pendragon and Cthulhu die-hards who kept the faith when not much was happening officially. They can not only help you with rules but give you good advice on how to create interesting monsters and NPCs, and how to write and run a good scenario. The cross-pollination of games is a good thing, too. There’s no reason your latest Mythos beastie shouldn’t be a Bronze Age Gloranthan holdout or that cult leader shouldn’t have cribbed a spell or two from Magic World.

www.darkcitygames.com Free scenarios to download. There are also some free ones at www.flyingbuffalo.com written for Tunnels and Trolls. Don’t forget all the freebies and pay what you wants at Drive Thru RPG and RPG Now. Also, the discussion boards at www.goblinoidgames.com are loaded with page after page of excellent maps to fire your imagination.

“Hulk smash puny broo! Hulk is the POW-est there is!” 😉

That’s sort of what the authors did in a trio of Cthulhu-inspited stories: https://www.drabblecast.org/2010/07/03/drabblecast-170-mongoose-part-i-by-sarah-monette-and-elizabeth-bear-drabble-the-monkeys-by-chris-munroe/

Lots of Pendragon threads but not one for heroic Val? He had his own lusciously illustrated, long-running newspaper strip, a Hollywood Technicolor outing and a Saturday morning cartoon. He undertook more quests than Lancelot, discovered America before Columbus, found, married and stayed true to his fetching princess, and raised his kids to be epic heroes, all the while continuing his own adventures. Lance, Conan, He-Man and Fafhrd should be so lucky!

For an excellent exploration of what it means to be human, check out “A Game of Fox and Lion” by Robert R. Chase. Has wolf people but no cats. https://www.amazon.com/Game-Fox-Lion-Robert-Chase/dp/0345333845

I think my copy of the Little Black Books was the 1981 version. But worrying about race/gender/species was never a thing in my gaming groups. We role-played to escape from real world concerns. We didn’t want our fun polluted by political correctness, politics, or assorted agendas.

What about the shape-shifting, invisible-turning, soul-sucking feline monsters from 1992’s “Sleepwalkers?” And their arch enemies are ... housecats.

Are these desperate people the player-characters or NPCs the investigators will get thrown in with? Also, the Templar sounds like he was a loyal, honorable guy in life. What’s his beef with temporary houseguests?

Somehow in all this, we’ve got to incorporate Third Earth’s sheep-based aliens in the mix — if only so a short but brawny warrior can shake his horns at the player-characters and demand, “What are ewe looking at, Bub?”

Originally, Traveller was a humans-only situation, much like Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” setting. Yeah, there were weird cultures out there but the aliens were us. The non-humans got added later. In fact, three of the official aliens — Vilani, Solomani, Zhodani — are human. For non-standard aliens check out Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sure, his slinky space princesses are of the bumpy forehead variety but he also gave us insectoid hordes (Green Martians) and quadruped carnivores (Va-gas, The Moon Maid). So, has the OP selected a favorite cat type yet? Inquiring whiskers want to know.

But the H’Reli are so cuuuuuute! Awwwwww!

Tiger Man info from reprints of the original Buck Rogers newspaper strip, circa 1930. They arrived in spherical spaceships (propulsion method never explained) and were armed with staff-like force beam projectors that could pummel an opponent or pin him to a wall or floor. They coveted human anti-gravity and projectile weapon technology and also kidnapped friends of Rogers to take back home. The Americans had already built rocket-propelled aircraft held aloft by inertron (sort of like rocket-powered dirigibles), so Buck persuaded Dr. Huer to construct a space-worthy ship in order to pursue the feline marauders.