Nozbat

Apart from ALL of the above ... I don't think I've ever been 'triggered' so much as by the phrase...

'Roll for initiative'

I have nightmares where I am forced to play D&D for all eternity

End-user certificates

The trigger word wasn't Javelins but End-User certificates to start the javelin-running business and get them by the Lunar patrols

5 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Javelin prices

 

I remember planning a whole industry on the basis of Javelin prices and ways to make the Clan rich.. in the end we went with wool.. 

Not so much a trigger word as a disappointment 

On 2/27/2023 at 8:41 AM, Ian A. Thomson said:

Final Read-Through Volunteers?

Hello folks

Doing the read-throughs and formatting tweaks today, and have only found a small number of minor errors

That reminded me though, that back in the day there was always me, an editor/proofer AND a 'final read-through person'

Even then mistakes would slip through of course, but obviously a lot less of them

Am wondering if anyone is up for reading 1-3 pieces as an 'interested reader' and letting me know if they spot any errors of lack of clarity, or other incongruences?

If a few people chip in on this it won't be much work. More just a chance to read some of the material early 🙂

Cheers

Happy to do read throughs if you still need volunteers?

My players (in 1920s) regularly chose Archaeologist, Criminal, Dilettante, Doctor of Medicine, Academic, Valet, Military background, Journalist, Psychologist and Clergyman

Other less popular professions are Zealot (political/ revolutionary rather than religious), Spy/ assassin, Engineer, and a Boxer (rejoicing in the name of Ironclad Crawthers- the Brain of Boxing).

My players usually have at least one Dilettante which takes the issue of the need for money away

The RQ3 Vikings boxed set would be useful too, though not sure it's easily available. It has a number of scenarios based in Norway but easily moved to Britain.

ICE Campaign Classics Vikings is also a useful sourcebook but again probably difficult to find.

Mongoose Vikings of Legend is interesting for a more 'heroic' campaign. Likely difficult to find too though

Design Mechanism Waterlands and Logres is useful for Saxon information (although set in 500CE)but scenarios could be adapted and happily both are available still

I'm with @soltakss... BRP would be my choice of rule system but elements from both could be interesting 

12 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Ooo.. nice shot from "inside"!
Never saw that one before! 😮 🙂

Sadly not mine... I have sneakily taken some shots on the way out of Newgrange over the years but they are not as good as that and are hastily taken rather than framed properly. They don't allow anyone to take pictures inside

Another sunrise on planet earth...

I once had a twin (Ono) along with another player (On) in the RQ3 Samurai campaign. One of them was good and the other was naughty (didn't get any Santa presents) and there was always confusion about who did what. Enjoyable sub-plots

We were also part of a Biwa (Japanese lute) boy 'guitar' band with the other players and even wrote songs... sadly I don't have any copies of them. Probably due to using saki in tea ceremonies

On 11/8/2022 at 9:44 AM, Darius West said:

Just kidnap someone they care about and have them held there if it is Pulp C'thulhu.  Serve the fecking chicken-hearted gobsh1tes right!

I had thought about doing that @Darius West.. they just didn't give me a plausible justification in time

As an update... last nights session started with a firefight in the dark with ex-FreiKorps guards which resulted in accidental injuries all round (no-one could see what they were doing) and ended with cosplaying bird-watchers at the other side of the Grunewaldsee in an attempt to find out what was happening at the Jagdschloss.  Unfortunately, they picked the night of the dark of the moon (should have traditionally been a gibbous moon but the SFx couldn't afford one) and there was a major ritual occurring. One of the investigators got entranced by the unearthly music, ripped his clothes off and was about to swim the Grunewaldsee to participate in the ritual (certain death). The other investigators managed to stop adjusting their binoculars and posing in their tweeds long enough to notice what he was doing and grappled him to the ground. They dragged him back and one even kindly brought his discarded clothes for him. It might have been a long, cold, naked walk back to their lodgings if someone hadn't been so thoughtful. I suspect they might have ended up in that salacious gossip rag, the Dahlem Morgenblatt if they'd been seen.

We have now got to the point of pain and the inevitable crazy plans to eliminate the enemy. I'd be interested if other Keepers find that investigators seem to spend time discussing plans that are inoperable?

Thought I'd upload the plan of the Schloss if anyone wants to use it

As I reflect on the last ten years of this world, it really seems we are at a crossroads. Peace and Democracy are fragile and always need to nurtured and worked on. The amount of hate, fear, anger, disgust towards 'others' has reached new heights. We face many existential crises in the 21st Century and Governments forget they are there for the people, not to maintain power at any cost.

I also hope the elections are safe and fair. I also hope that people vote for the candidate that can improve their lives rather than along tribal lines or to keep the 'others' out

They are going in... it's actually not mythos stuff they are scared of .. mainly because they aren't aware of what is actually happening. They are scared of the ex-FreiKorps guards, having had a serious run in with their commander in a previous session.

I'm confident enough to have even finished my drawing of the Jagdschloss...

I spent two days researching and drawing a detailed plan of the Jagdschloss in Grunewald, Berlin for the latest episode of my campaign Nyarlathotep Rag... and the investigators were too scared to go in... fecking gobsh1tes

I'll recycle it for something else... 

I'm guessing it's happened to others? What's the worst

IMO this is always a problem and as above contributors have pointed out can be avoided by discussing with players the proposed interconnectivity of the group (@Mike M) and using clubs, organisations, gangs, organised crime etc but I also feel it takes away the ability of players to create interesting characters that they want to play. There is always a balance between being directive and allowing player self-determination.

As @jajagappa noted being part of a Spiritualist Club might be a good to bring people together. In Europe, after the Great War and because of the huge death toll, there was a growing interest in spiritualism. There were many people offering to contact dead loved ones through seances and groups that rejected the materialism and imperialism of societies by having 'alternative' philosophies about the world. Although I have never researched it, I believe the same thing happened in North America. There was a natural flow of interest in Romantic nationalist thinking and groupings to spiritualism, although IMO they also tended to be racist, white-supremacist, misogynistic and highly into ethnographic-nationalism, so I have always used them with care.

@svensson noted several useful ideas of how players might know each other, specifically through the Great War, where in Europe at least, nearly all the adult males will have had experience of military service. It might have been in the same Battalion. I have had several Officers and their Batmen types which have spawned some great lines:

Officer: Kurt, what is my Spot Hidden?

Kurt: You'll find it on your character sheet on the third column, half way down, Sir.

Officer: Oh, I see. Would you mind rolling it from me? My dice are a bit heavy for me to lift.

On a more serious note, I have often used a crisis to unite disparate groups. At the start of my recent Berlin: The Wicked City, I had the PCs all in the same Café when the Spartikistbund uprising occurred and they were stuck in a Spartikist occupied Café while the FreiKorps tried to dislodge the Spartikists using extreme force. They were captured after the subsequent firefight and accused by the FreiKorps of being KPD sympathisers, particularly when when one of the doctors in the PC group had treated a wounded Spartikist. They were about to be summarily executed when they where incidentally 'rescued' by a Golem sent to save another FreiKorps prisoner. Their motivation to stay together was that the surviving FreiKorps had their IDs and knew where they lived and who they were. They needed to either escape Berlin (unlikely) or solve their problems of imminent execution. Portraying the leader of the FreiKorps, Leutnant von Meyler, as a sociopath helped the PCs decision making, even when some of them politically would have supported the goal of quashing the Spartikistbund uprising.

I agree with @soltakss that getting the PCs to stick together after the initial scenario is difficult and not easy to justify (other than the PCs would like to play a game). I have used favours owed to NPCs, blackmail, PC goals, professional integrity to keep the group going. As long as you can live with whatever internal rationale used to justify the group staying together, there should be no problem.

I hope you succeed and do tell us how you managed it. It would be useful to add it to our own narratives for future reference.

I think its best to say Your view of the Queen may vary (YVQMV)...   I still think of them as Saxe-Coburg-Goethe rather than Windsor, a name they adopted in WW1

I'd be more upset if David Hasselhoff died

5 hours ago, Closterphobia said:

Hi @Nozbat, make sure the local game shop is a member of the Bits and Mortar program, then they’ll be able to send you a link via email to download a PDF copy of the HOTOE.

I looked at the Bricks and Mortar website. It seems if I provide proof of purchase I could get the PDF too 

Thanks for your help

I’m going to buy the updated version of Horror on the Orient Express

I was trying to buy the hard copy, two volume work to support local games shops and wanted the PDF too.

Do I have to buy it separately? I was looking but can’t find any details about if you get the hard copy, the PDF can be downloaded too

Looking for some help from a Sage

On 8/13/2022 at 6:11 PM, Bill the barbarian said:

Yep, exactly what we did for our shaman who got an heirloom pet and wanted an alynx. Any stats outside of the range of the heirloom table got capped or negotiated. Do I remember this right @Nozbat?

Yes there is a size limit for awakened heirloom animals.. and I wanted a cute little Alynx rather than a crow… so it had to be a much smaller SIZ (in Germany at the moment so I don’t have access to my character notes but from memory it was SIZ 2)

I think Bill was being nice when he allowed me an Alynx… maybe not though as the Alynx had a very definite mind of it’s own and tended to attach itself to more doughty fighters in the party. But speaking of parties.. she did set up lines of Catnip for all the other clan Alynx’s during celebrations 

My vote would be for Baltic Tribes...

23 hours ago, EricW said:

The Long Ships - a 1964 movie about vikings and arabs and Christianity and a gigantic crusader church bell made of gold.

 

It's a wonderful book... by Frans G. Bengtsson... well worth the read.. and bears absolutely no resemblance to the movie ... except for the Bell which is used to cure Harold Bluetooth's tooth ache (from memory, one of his blue teeth was causing a problem)

2 hours ago, Welkin said:

Oxford Newspeak Dictionary

It was Cambridge... not Oxford

I haven't got or seen the Big Book of Cults so not sure if these are in it. These are some of the actual Cults around in the 1920s that I had researched.. I think they can be found by doing a Google search for more information. Not all of them were 'evil' cults but they can suit whatever purposes you want:

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Illuminaten (founded by Adam Weishaupt and he wrote a number of sinister sounding books)

L'Ordre Martiniste-Martineziste de Lyon

FUDOFSI

L'Eglise Gnostique Universelle

Order of Knight Masons Plus Cohen of the Universe

Ordre De Saint Graal

Fraternitas Rosae Crucis

Ordre Kabbalistique De La Rose Croix

Our lady of Endor Coven

Thule Society

Order of the Solar temple

Fraternitas Saturni

Theosophical Society

Ordo Templi Orientis

Hermetic brotherhood of Luxor

Interesting @AndrewTBP. I've used Brollachan in several scenes for games and used the Gateway Bestiary as the basis of the stats but incorporated characteristics from Alan Garner's The Moon of Gomrath where it is a shapeshifter and has powers of possession which makes it a truly terrifying creature. It had no real intelligence of it's own, just a hunger for life and darkness and is best used as a pawn for some other more 'evil' creature. 

I've used it three times with great success, in a Celtic campaign, in Cthulhu and in a Viking campaign in Britain. It was the same group of players and they remain terrified of it and would rather try to avoid it rather than face it. 

On your previous post about Voughs or Hags, it might be good to go back to the Celtic roots. They often appeared in a triple manifestation that were interconnected in some way, such as being sisters (the triple association is a recurring theme in Celtic, Scandinavian and Greek mythology). They would live in swamps, underwater, forests etc as already mentioned and control the environs of their habitation making it hostile to intruders. I seem to recall there was a AD&D (?) scenario in Imagine (?) magazine that described Hags well and had a scenario to show their power with a submersible island in a lake. It also might have been White Dwarf Magazine. Sadly I no longer have the copies of either but if you have access to the article it might help flesh out both creatures. 

It might also be good to look at Baltic mythology creatures such as Leshy, Rusalka and Vodyanoi in Mythic Russia for other ideas to incorporate (or discard)

10 minutes ago, Soccercalle said:

I realised after some googling that the Shieldwalls part of S&S is described in the Mythic Britain-book for Mythras. Seems to be quite easy to use and you could use Battle and Orate Skills from RQG. But is probably more done for battles with 20+ fighters than for 10-15 (where individual battle skills is more important).

I think its perfectly good for 10-20 warriors and works well... but my focus is really not on combat and its therefore just another mechanism to move the narrative on. Mind you the last battles produced real jeopardy for the PCs and they thought they were going to die (heroically) defending Colnecæster from the Angles.

Individual 'Battle' skills are reflected in the difficulty of the rolls. Hardened warriors who are trained to fight in a Shieldwall make mincemeat of the Fyrd. Higher Battle skills reflect types of possible formations, morale, rallying, special effects etc. As I said above, I initially wanted more complexity but the RAW in S&S can be used in all situations and I found through playing them as written works well. 

YGMV so do what you think is best as @Runeblogger has done above