Astral Combat

[ColoradoCthulhu]

I've been running a Call of Cthulhu game every other Saturday evening since May 2019. We've run through a good deal of the 1920s Jazz Age material, the Reign of Terror mini-campaign, and now we've also finished a Down Darker Trails campaign. Cthulhu Invictus: Britannia is next, after the Ides of March. 🙂

So far, I've had several occasions in which characters needed to engage in psychic combat with an entity on the astral plane or in the spirit world. As an ad hoc rule, I've used the character's and entity's POW scores as their Brawl score and their pools of magic points as hit points. If magic points reach zero, the character's soul or the entity is destroyed (the character's body would die as a result). No other stats are needed to resolve this kind of combat.

I don't believe such a rule set exists in the Keeper Rulebook or elsewhere. Would @Mike Mand others consider adding rules on psychic combat to a future edition of the Keeper Rulebook or as an update to the CoC rules? Considering how often ghostly entities, phantoms, psychic parasites, etc appear in CoC scenarios, such a rule set would come in handy.

[mvincent]

21 hours ago, ColoradoCthulhu said:

I don't believe such a rule set exists in the Keeper Rulebook or elsewhere. 

The Basic Roleplaying book (p.114) contains rules for Psychic Combat. However, I like your ad-hoc rules (they feel more elegant).

Also, the Ghost entry in Call of Cthulhu (p.333 in 7e) details this sort of combat under its special powers.

Edited March 6, 2023 by mvincent

[ColoradoCthulhu]

1 hour ago, mvincent said:

The Basic Roleplaying book (p.114) contains rules for Psychic Combat. However, I like your ad-hoc rules (they feel more elegant).

Also, the Ghost entry in Call of Cthulhu (p.333 in 7e) details this sort of combat under its special powers.

Thank you for your feedback. What book is "Call of Cthulhu"? 

After I made my post, I thought about the "damage" done in psychic combat that depletes the magic point pool. I used a 1D3 per success, but more powerful characters and entities might receive a "damage bonus" for high POWs, like STR in physical combat. For example, POWs of 80 to 100 would be able to do 1D4 more magic point depletion per successful hit. POWs above 100 might receive a 2D4 bonus.

[Darius West]

On 3/5/2023 at 5:52 PM, ColoradoCthulhu said:

I've been running a Call of Cthulhu game every other Saturday evening since May 2019. We've run through a good deal of the 1920s Jazz Age material, the Reign of Terror mini-campaign, and now we've also finished a Down Darker Trails campaign. Cthulhu Invictus: Britannia is next, after the Ides of March. 🙂

So far, I've had several occasions in which characters needed to engage in psychic combat with an entity on the astral plane or in the spirit world. As an ad hoc rule, I've used the character's and entity's POW scores as their Brawl score and their pools of magic points as hit points. If magic points reach zero, the character's soul or the entity is destroyed (the character's body would die as a result). No other stats are needed to resolve this kind of combat.

I don't believe such a rule set exists in the Keeper Rulebook or elsewhere. Would @Mike Mand others consider adding rules on psychic combat to a future edition of the Keeper Rulebook or as an update to the CoC rules? Considering how often ghostly entities, phantoms, psychic parasites, etc appear in CoC scenarios, such a rule set would come in handy.

You might consider trying to use RQG's shamanic combat rules and ideas of the Spirit Realm in place of the Astral Plane perhaps?  It doesn't hurt to understand the history and intellectual pedigree of what the Astral Plane is really all about either.

[Mike M]

Psychic Combat is detailed in Pulp Cthulhu. Astral Combat will be covered in the new edition Cthulhu by Gaslight.

[mvincent]

22 hours ago, ColoradoCthulhu said:

What book is "Call of Cthulhu"? 

The Call of Cthulhu (CoC) core game rulebook, by Chaosium (I believe some copies say "Keeper Rulebook" below the "Call of Cthulhu" title, but curiously mine don't). In CoC 7e, the Ghost stats are on p.333, but I believe earlier CoC versions had ghost stats too.