Cthulhu Mythos specialisations

[tendentious]

Has anyone toyed with the idea of, or actually implemented, splitting the Cthulhu Mythos skill into specialisations, like Science?

It kind of bugs me that, having read a book about 18th Century European witch cults, with a lucky roll a character may say "Oh, the Great Race of Yith! Sure, I know all about them!" (exaggeration for dramatic effect)

Just as being an expert in Geology doesn't really help with advanced Mathematics or Chemistry (although I can see there is some overlap there), knowing about the cult of Dagon shouldn't really lead the  character to know about (largely) unrelated subjects, like the Mi-Go.

It would also allow characters to be the go-to for different topics. One character knows about magic, another knows about pre-human history, another about major cults active in the world, and so on.

It wouldn't be too hard to implement. Maximum SAN would be reduced by the highest Mythos specialisation. The different specialisations would need to be determined, and the various tomes would need to be changed to state to which specialisations each one adds.

On a side note, this would require the tomes to outline to some extent their contents. A lot of the tome descriptions, while describing the physical characteristics and the history, don't actually say much about the contents.

Has anyone tried something like this? Is it worth the change? Does it add anything of benefit to the game?

[Nozbat]

I'm not sure that it would add anything to the game other than an extra complications particularly as you point out an enormous amount of work for Keepers to chart out the contents of every tome. But your point is valid. I tend to simplify it as a Keeper by (a) rolling players Mythos myself (b) only giving general hints about what they know if the roll is successful (c) never giving proper names for monsters (ie Burrowing Horrors= Dholes) I usually show them a picture and let them describe it and name it themselves. I do the same for spells. I find it keeps them guessing as all my players have read Lovecraft and have previous experience of other Keepers.

As Keeper you know what creatures they have encountered in the past and you can include that in the narrative of the story. For me it isn't necessarily about being accurate its about enjoyment and having a reasonably credible narrative, keeping suspense and growing the horror. 

But everyone is different and if you feel it would be a useful in your Cthulhu and it adds to it...just do it... you can share the results with us!

 

[tendentious]

On a (sort of) related topic...

Call of Cthulhu is a horror game, and resources geared towards facilitating an atmosphere of horror would seem to be a worthwhile investment.

A common use of the Cthulhu Mythos skill by characters is when they encounter one of the many blasphemies that inhabit the universe. Yet, after the Keeper does their best to describe said creature, once the player makes a Cthulhu Mythos check to recognise the creature, the Keeper typically is forced to fall back on a prosaic run-down of whatever information seems appropriate. "These deep-sea dwelling humanoids serve Cthulhu, and enter into pacts with humans to propagate hybrid offspring."

Given that the one source of the Cthulhu Mythos skill the characters probably have is tomes written by the insane, a resource that would help maintain the atmosphere of horror would be for each creature to have a Cthulhu Mythos section, with a variety of excerpts taken from said tomes. So rather than the Keeper simply relaying a summary of the information, instead the Keeper can read excerpts from the tomes that the characters have read, and allow the players to draw their own conclusions.

So if a character makes a Cthulhu Mythos skill check in regards to a ghoul, instead of the Keeper saying "These humanoids burrow under cemeteries and other places where human bodies are plentiful, as they feed on corpses," they can say "In the Necronomicon, one passage reads 'And the people of that land henceforth interred their dead in high red towers. And these towers they raised to be above the clutches of those that once were men. And those that once were men were as a reflection in a glass: opposite but the same. For they walked under the earth, and favoured the night, and fed on that on which man feeds not. But just as the reflection in the glass of a man stands near when a man stands near, and is not when the man stands not, so too those that once were men are near where men are near, and are not where men are not."

What the players do with that is up to them.

[AlonsoAguilurk]

21 hours ago, tendentious said:

So if a character makes a Cthulhu Mythos skill check in regards to a ghoul, instead of the Keeper saying "These humanoids burrow under cemeteries and other places where human bodies are plentiful, as they feed on corpses," they can say "In the Necronomicon, one passage reads 'And the people of that land henceforth interred their dead in high red towers. And these towers they raised to be above the clutches of those that once were men. And those that once were men were as a reflection in a glass: opposite but the same. For they walked under the earth, and favoured the night, and fed on that on which man feeds not. But just as the reflection in the glass of a man stands near when a man stands near, and is not when the man stands not, so too those that once were men are near where men are near, and are not where men are not."

What the players do with that is up to them.

I love that idea. I'll be stealing that for my games. Some prior prep will be needed to get the tone of the excerpts right, but I love how it builds into the atmosphere. 

[Nozbat]

23 minutes ago, AlonsoAguilurk said:

I love that idea. I'll be stealing that for my games. Some prior prep will be needed to get the tone of the excerpts right, but I love how it builds into the atmosphere. 

Some of the description can be obtained from the Monster section which quote Lovecraft's own description... but a quick way is to show a picture of the creature (and there are some great pieces of artwork available) and add a few words about how it moves, smells, size etc... and let the players call it something ...they are generally good at making up names.. saves the Keepers creativity for other things...

My players have an abject fear of goats and a pathological hatred of trees after playing Dark Offerings.. and I tend to wind them up between sessions by posting ambiguous statements alongside pictures of their enemies, monsters, or scenes... to be fair to them they play along with it

[tendentious]

2 hours ago, Nozbat said:

Some of the description can be obtained from the Monster section which quote Lovecraft's own description... but a quick way is to show a picture of the creature (and there are some great pieces of artwork available) and add a few words about how it moves, smells, size etc... and let the players call it something ...they are generally good at making up names.. saves the Keepers creativity for other things...

You have to do all of that. But after you've done your best to convey what the characters are experiencing - seeing, smelling, feeling - the players are going to ask to make a Cthulhu Mythos check to find out what they know about the creature they've encountered.

And that's where it would be useful not to distill the contents of those worm-eaten books the characters have been studying and relate it in prosaic terms, but instead just to give them the excerpts that they read in those books, in the very words that were penned by a madman. That way the Cthulhu Mythos skill is not just another source of information that tends to rob encounters of mystery and dread by reducing a monster to a wiki entry.

Edited August 16, 2020 by tendentious

[Lloyd Dupont]

23 hours ago, Nozbat said:

Some of the description can be obtained from the Monster section which quote Lovecraft's own description... but a quick way is to show a picture of the creature (and there are some great pieces of artwork available) and add a few words about how it moves, smells, size etc... and let the players call it something ...they are generally good at making up names.. saves the Keepers creativity for other things...

My players have an abject fear of goats and a pathological hatred of trees after playing Dark Offerings.. and I tend to wind them up between sessions by posting ambiguous statements alongside pictures of their enemies, monsters, or scenes... to be fair to them they play along with it

The mythical goat tree has been found! 😮

[SunlessNick]

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.

[tendentious]

17 hours ago, SunlessNick said:

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."

Certainly that is how the skill is described in the Keeper's Handbook; that "it represents the opening and tuning of the human mind to the Cthulhu Mythos." Mind you, it then operates as a source of information: identifying creatures, identifying spells, identifying tomes, etc. Of what this "opening and tuning" consists is unclear. It seems like those who pen the tomes of the Mythos are possessed of this "tuning," which can be memetically transferred through written words, independent of the content of the words. Which, I guess, is kind of the point of "The King in Yellow." But given the way TKIY is described in the rules it would seem to be the exception to the rule.

I suppose that, purely as a personal preference, I tend to view Cthulhu Mythos skill as an academic knowledge of the contents of a particular set of books. Those contents are rambling, incoherent, and incomplete, and it's impossible to know what parts of accurate and what parts are false without going out and encountering these things for oneself. Which brings it back to my idea that a successful CM check doesn't not relay direct information on the subject; it allows the Keeper to quote the contents of a tome the character may have read that relates to the subject.

I admit this view of CM skill is less compatible with the idea of the skill reducing one's maximum SAN. But then, maybe maximum SAN should instead be reduced by things such as temporary or indefinite insanity; the idea that the broken vase, once repaired, is never as strong. And as the reading of the tomes can result in insanity, the loss of maximum SAN would still occur if one reads the truly forbidden works of the Mythos. Also I realise that the idea that CM skill doesn't directly reduce maximum SAN is probably heresy.

It's almost like the skill as written is trying to do too much work: reflecting an academic discipline as well as bursts of insane insight. Given that the game already includes a stat for sanity (and extensive rules for insanity), it seems unnecessary to try to role both aspects into the one skill.

If you wanted to retain the "insane insight" aspect to the skill; one idea could be that when you roll a CM check in the face of an actual Mythos phenomenon, you then invert the roll and compare it to your current SAN. If this would result in a successful CM check but would be a failed SAN check, then you gain insight into the truth behind the strange phrases that, until now, have struck you as meaningless. For example, suppose your SAN is 60 and your CM is 20. If you make a CM check and roll 19, then invert the result - 91 - and compare to SAN. As the CM check was a success and the inverted result was a "fail" you gain insane insight into the "truth."

[SunlessNick]

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.

[RogerDee]

Just have a Mythos: Lore (General) skill, then have another one: Mythos: Lore (Old Ones), Mythos: Lore (Aliens) etc. Is that what you had in mind?

So if someone read a book on Mythos Lore (Abhumans) they would only get mythos knowledge related to them, and whatever may have been detailed without dealings without outside agencies, e.g. skirmishes with Migo, or whatever. But it would be very limited knowledge.

 

 

[Mike M]

You may want to look at the Pulp Cthulhu chapter on Sanity  - and "augmented skills".

[Nozbat]

7 hours ago, RogerDee said:

Just have a Mythos: Lore (General) skill, then have another one: Mythos: Lore (Old Ones), Mythos: Lore (Aliens) etc. Is that what you had in mind?

So if someone read a book on Mythos Lore (Abhumans) they would only get mythos knowledge related to them, and whatever may have been detailed without dealings without outside agencies, e.g. skirmishes with Migo, or whatever. But it would be very limited knowledge.

 

 

Could we have a Mythos: Lore (goats) ?

Edited August 22, 2020 by Nozbat

[RogerDee]

18 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

Could we have a Mythos: Lore (goats) ?

I will only agree to that if we include Mythos Lore: Evil Bastards Honey Badgers

 

[Nozbat]

5 hours ago, RogerDee said:

I will only agree to that if we include Mythos Lore: Evil Bastards Honey Badgers

 

I absolutely agree with that 

[EricW]

On 8/15/2020 at 5:03 PM, tendentious said:

Has anyone toyed with the idea of, or actually implemented, splitting the Cthulhu Mythos skill into specialisations, like Science?

It kind of bugs me that, having read a book about 18th Century European witch cults, with a lucky roll a character may say "Oh, the Great Race of Yith! Sure, I know all about them!" (exaggeration for dramatic effect)

Just as being an expert in Geology doesn't really help with advanced Mathematics or Chemistry (although I can see there is some overlap there), knowing about the cult of Dagon shouldn't really lead the  character to know about (largely) unrelated subjects, like the Mi-Go.

It would also allow characters to be the go-to for different topics. One character knows about magic, another knows about pre-human history, another about major cults active in the world, and so on.

It wouldn't be too hard to implement. Maximum SAN would be reduced by the highest Mythos specialisation. The different specialisations would need to be determined, and the various tomes would need to be changed to state to which specialisations each one adds.

On a side note, this would require the tomes to outline to some extent their contents. A lot of the tome descriptions, while describing the physical characteristics and the history, don't actually say much about the contents.

Has anyone tried something like this? Is it worth the change? Does it add anything of benefit to the game?

Yet there are strange underlying symmetries in maths and science.

For example, take the Fibonacci sequence - Wikipedia lists 17 diverse applications of this one simple sequence of numbers, and there are no doubt many more. Or Euler's Number, useful for continuous compounding interest calculations (in which instead of paying interest on a bank account yearly, monthly or daily, the calculation assumes an infinite series of compounding steps over any arbitrary time period), and a bunch of other mind bending uses. 

Imagine we have only just scratched the surface, and the entire universe is a network of such symmetries - and Cthulhu Mythos somehow gives you a special shortcut, an unconscious awareness of the monstrous pattern which underpins all creation. 

In this context it is not so odd that CM can tell you about monsters you've never seen or read about, because the monstrosities are all part of a grander pattern, the network of insane symmetries which describe everything there is to know. Your CM skill is a measure of your ability to apply your knowledge of these symmetries.

[tendentious]

On 9/1/2020 at 11:23 PM, EricW said:

In this context it is not so odd that CM can tell you about monsters you've never seen or read about, because the monstrosities are all part of a grander pattern, the network of insane symmetries which describe everything there is to know.

The skill as written can work well enough, essentially as you've described. I feel that the single gain with the system as written is simplicity: a single skill that covers everything in the Mythos. And simplicity in a game system is extremely valuable

What I feel you lose is mystery. One loses mystery as the players can fall back on the CM skill to define in prosaic terms anything they encounter or discover. If the players encounter a new horror - a dark young, for example - they are going to ask for a CM check to discover what they know about this new menace. On a successful check the Keeper gets to decide how much useful information they glean. Nothing kills mystery like an information dump.

It also seems to be a lost opportunity to create atmosphere. As I wrote previously, all (most of) this knowledge was gleaned from the tomes the character's have read. In that sense CM is a form of philology. Why not present that knowledge as the actual contents of these tomes and let the characters make what use they may of it? Different creature entries could be expanded with quotations from various sources. Keepers can create their own entries for those creatures the characters encounter. And entries can vary from the "academic" entries in tome like the Necronomicon, to personal revelations in diaries and videos, to demented verse from insane poets, to eye-witness accounts of ignorant bystanders.

The Pulp Cthulhu rules contain a system for 

On 8/22/2020 at 8:03 PM, Mike M said:

"augmented skills".

Why not treat CM as an academic skill that can benefit from the augmented skills rules as presented? For the staid academic who has studied the tomes of the Mythos without ever considering that the contents of the books may be true, the CM skill remains a field of expertise in ancient texts, and of academic interest only. But if the same academic has been driven insane by encountering the awful truth of the Mythos, then the hidden layers of meaning in the same texts start to become apparent.

The core rules allow the distinction between the believer and the non-believer as relates to the Mythos. The non-believer suffers no SAN loss for reading the texts, but if the CM skill reflects expertise in the underlying connectedness of the Mythos, then the non-believer would find that they have awareness of topics, the knowledge of which they cannot account for. Presumably the non-believer starts reading a new Mythos tome and gets the unsettling sense that they have read the book before, and that the contents are somehow brand new as well as disturbingly familiar.

You can always explain why the CM skill works as it does. My questions then is: is there sufficient gain from changing the way the skill works to justify the effort? That's going to come down to the individual Keeper and group of players, which is a bit of a non-answer. Hence my interest in other people's experiments with specialisations for the Cthulhu Mythos skill.

[EricW]

11 hours ago, tendentious said:

The skill as written can work well enough, essentially as you've described. I feel that the single gain with the system as written is simplicity: a single skill that covers everything in the Mythos. And simplicity in a game system is extremely valuable

What I feel you lose is mystery. One loses mystery as the players can fall back on the CM skill to define in prosaic terms anything they encounter or discover. If the players encounter a new horror - a dark young, for example - they are going to ask for a CM check to discover what they know about this new menace. On a successful check the Keeper gets to decide how much useful information they glean. Nothing kills mystery like an information dump.

It also seems to be a lost opportunity to create atmosphere. As I wrote previously, all (most of) this knowledge was gleaned from the tomes the character's have read. In that sense CM is a form of philology. Why not present that knowledge as the actual contents of these tomes and let the characters make what use they may of it? Different creature entries could be expanded with quotations from various sources. Keepers can create their own entries for those creatures the characters encounter. And entries can vary from the "academic" entries in tome like the Necronomicon, to personal revelations in diaries and videos, to demented verse from insane poets, to eye-witness accounts of ignorant bystanders.

The Pulp Cthulhu rules contain a system for 

Why not treat CM as an academic skill that can benefit from the augmented skills rules as presented? For the staid academic who has studied the tomes of the Mythos without ever considering that the contents of the books may be true, the CM skill remains a field of expertise in ancient texts, and of academic interest only. But if the same academic has been driven insane by encountering the awful truth of the Mythos, then the hidden layers of meaning in the same texts start to become apparent.

The core rules allow the distinction between the believer and the non-believer as relates to the Mythos. The non-believer suffers no SAN loss for reading the texts, but if the CM skill reflects expertise in the underlying connectedness of the Mythos, then the non-believer would find that they have awareness of topics, the knowledge of which they cannot account for. Presumably the non-believer starts reading a new Mythos tome and gets the unsettling sense that they have read the book before, and that the contents are somehow brand new as well as disturbingly familiar.

You can always explain why the CM skill works as it does. My questions then is: is there sufficient gain from changing the way the skill works to justify the effort? That's going to come down to the individual Keeper and group of players, which is a bit of a non-answer. Hence my interest in other people's experiments with specialisations for the Cthulhu Mythos skill.

Obviously you can interpret CM however you want. One thing I noticed reading the original stories (and nobody has to use them as a guide), the times the characters appeared to gain insane insights, the insights were usually not very complete, though occasionally they recalled useful passages from some book. I don't think you should just like hand over a monster sheet when someone rolls their check, more maybe give a hint that "perhaps fire could hurt it", or "run this way, it seems safer" or "that altar is important", that kind of thing.