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Best book to understand the mythos in gaming terms


tobarstep

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I've never actually played any CoC. Mainly what I'm seeking is a source of ideas for adding Lovecraft style horror elements to various settings and genres. Would the Keepers Companion be a good source for that? Or would I do just as well getting the latest CoC core book? Or is there a better source?

Edited by tobarstep
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The Keepers Companion is a hodge podge of info - it wouldn't really be a basis for what you want, it's not really a Mythos primer.

What actual game system do you play ? BRP/d100, d20/OGL, FATE, Savage Worlds or something else ?

I'd start with that question and then see if there is a Mythos add-on for your preferred system.

If you just want a big list of creatures then Chaosium's Malleus Monstrorum is the biggest book of same for d100 systems.

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I prefer d100 systems, but I play a variety including Savage Worlds, d20, AGE, many others (though not FATE or Apocalypse World). I mentioned the Companion because the description lists numerous things that seem like they'd be pretty good to drop into various other settings, like:

  • "13 Suggestions for Keepers" — Common sense and sly applications to improve your games.
  • "Occult Books" — More than 60 occult books and references summarized, often including titles of individual chapters.
  • "Languages and Scripts" — A quick guide to when languages and language forms existed.
  • "Arcane Antiquities" — More than 20 items and artifacts not gathered in the rulesbook, taken from stories and scenarios. Background, pertinent stats, mechanics.
  • "Secret Cults" — Antagonists, allies, and scholars who know too much for safety or sanity.
  • "Forensic Medicine" — the science and techniques of death investigation, past and present, in cogent detail.
  • "Alien Races, Mysterious Places" — Two short chapters concerning special mysteries of the Mythos, from deep ones and voormis to Atlantis, Yuggoth, and beyond.

So, in that sense I'm not necessarily looking to get deeply into the Mythos, just looking for ideas on how to add Cthulhu-like elements into settings that otherwise lack them.

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I'd suggest that a good starting point would be wikipedia and then follow some of the links from there. That should give you a decent foundation in the Cthulhu Mythos. I might also suggest that Chaosium's Malleus Monstorum (currently OOP but possible to find on eBay) as that has just about everything relevant to gaming in a Cthulhu Mythos sphere. I would second groovyclam's statement that the Handbook isn't what you want for an intro to placing Mythos entities in your games.

If all you want is to know how to add horror elements to your games I'd suggest that Savage Worlds Horror Companion at $9.99 might fit your bill as it's a toolkit for putting horror elements in your games. That together with information from wikipedia should get you Lovecraftian horror in your games.

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Nigel

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Realms of Cthulhu by Reality Blurs is for the Savage Worlds ruleset and I think that does a good job of explaining the various flavours of Mythos campaigns you can run as well as covering all the usual bases of investigator archetypes and Lovecraft's monsters.

The new 7th Edition of Call of Cthulhu has a chapter (10) devoted to running the game but overall it's not that many pages for the price you would pay for a copy as the chapter deals with game rule questions as much as handling Lovecraftian theme.

A cheap copy of an older version of the Call of Cthulhu rules might be a good bargain on eBay ( 5th Edition is my favourite ).

P.S. If you do want to get Realms of Cthulhu then don't get the PDF alone on DriveThruRPG as the price is too steep - it is part of a cheaper bundle on DriveThruRPG:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/102942/Achtung-Cthulhu-Three-Kings--Realms-of-Cthulhu-BUNDLE?src=also_purchased

Edited by groovyclam
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http://www.hplovecraft.com/ of course. Loads of stories written by the master, and other gems such as the history of the Necronomicon.

The best book to understand the mythos in gaming terms IMO is the mythos stories themselves - they are the definitive source material.

Also watch the movie Dagon - excellent homage to The Shadow Over Insmouth.

 

Edited by EricW
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3 hours ago, EricW said:

The best book to understand the mythos in gaming terms IMO is the mythos stories themselves - they are the definitive source material.

I have to agree with @EricW here. Lovecraft's stories are the best source and style guide to the Mythos and how the horror works. Even though you can get the stories copyright free, I have three omnibuses of the stories that I found the most useful, you can often find them in second book stores (here in the UK) or nay them very cheap on amazon:

omnibus-11.jpg?w=497&h=372

I lent them out many time to players who would read a few stories or devour the lot.

 

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Read things written by Ken Hite. The Trail of Cthulhu rules book (a very different game to Call if Cthulhu, but made by people who love CoC) contains some very insightful writing, especially the section on the Great Old Ones. The discussion of the various monsters that can be found in the various Ken Writes About Stuff articles are excellent too. Where CoC is the true classic work of Lovecraftian gaming, Ken is is an amazing scholar who challenges you to rethink the mythos and enrich it with a range of modern and diverse ideas. There is plenty of other Hite writing on the mythos to dive into, and it's all good. 

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On 4/7/2017 at 3:17 PM, rsanford said:

In haven't read it yet but what about Stealing Cthulhu? Likewise Silent Legions might be useful.

Yes, this is the best book to run Call of Cthulhu. The author understands Lovecraft way more than Sandy Petersen and anyone in Chaosium does. For starters, what with those cultists everywhere in CoC games? Graham Walmsley seems to have read and re-read all HPL works, because he realised there were no cultists in the stories as written.

Cultists come from D&D: Cultistst are the Cthulhu goblins. But CoC is not supposed to be a dungeoncrawling game, you are not supposed to fight and fight and fight. The books states that clearly more than once. Well, 6th edition did. 7th edition is about fights and chases and gunfights (Pulp Cthulhu is the proof of that fast, furious and fun approach;maybe that sells more books, maybe Sandy likes Doc Savage more than

More than that, Graham Walmsley gives really good advice abut how to manage your entities, how to draw elements from Lovecraft (and others) stories and how to riff with themes.

Stealing Cthulhu is the book.

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11 minutes ago, Daucuscarota said:

7th edition is about fights and chases and gunfights (Pulp Cthulhu is the proof of that fast, furious and fun approach

Yeah, no.

There are rules for fights and chases in 7e, but I've yet to run a game based on 7e that focused on "Action" and have only had 2 or 3 sessions where a chase even cropped up.

And the only thing 'Pulp Cthulhu' is proof of is that 7e is easily-modifiable for compatibility with an action-based adventure, but Pulp Cthulhu ≠ 7e. I'd imagine having another book to sell means you'll "sell more books", but the only thing it's offered me is another way to play CoC and I'm not sure I can find fault in that.

Also sort of can't believe I have to quote text from the darn book itself but:

Quote

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles

I'd assume the members of this dark cult would be known as "cultists", because...well...it's a cult.

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4 minutes ago, KnygathinZhaum said:

Yeah, no.

There are rules for fights and chases in 7e, but I've yet to run a game based on 7e that focused on "Action" and have only had 2 or 3 sessions where a chase even cropped up.

And the only thing 'Pulp Cthulhu' is proof of is that 7e is easily-modifiable for compatibility with an action-based adventure, but Pulp Cthulhu ≠ 7e. I'd imagine having another book to sell means you'll "sell more books", but the only thing it's offered me is another way to play CoC and I'm not sure I can find fault in that.

Also sort of can't believe I have to quote text from the darn book itself but:

I'd assume the members of this dark cult would be known as "cultists", because...well...it's a cult.

There are many pages about chase rules, yeah. It's an entire chapter, actually, and that has to mean something. The chapter devoted to academic research (De Rerum Supernatura) was eliminated altogether, and that has to mean something as well.

Yeah, some of us play the game as it was intended to be in previous editions because we know those previous editions. But the 7th edition, which for me contains the best set of rules (asadie from the chase rules should jut be a couple of pages, not an entire mini-game), is aimed for more action and pulp adventure, even the first scenario was written like this. People reading CoC for the first time, will see it as an action game more than ever.

Your quote from the HPL story doesn't demonstrate there are cultists everywhere for the investigators to fight. The cult is not the focus of the story, the raid is not the focus of the story. We all read about those things second hand. Anyway, I'm not saying there dhoul not be cultists ever, I say there should not be cultist always.

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Right, but HPL never really explicitly included just about anything the CoC games focus on (and half the stuff is Clark Ashton Smith or other HPL neophyte inventions anyway). Most of his "Mythos" takes place in the background so it makes sense that you'd create your "Monsters" based on what you've got, which really isn't much, and then add and elaborate. 

That said, sure. Is it lazy for scenario authors to overuse this trope? Of course. But that should go without saying. Any trope if leaned on too heavily is bad. But the story the darn game is based off is centered around cultists. They don't have lines in the story, but they are at the heart of the story. I know I personally walked away with the cultist imagery as my greatest take away beyond Cthulhu himself after my first read.

Alsoplustoo: I can't leave without mentioning this: If chases are new to the rules, don't you think they deserve their own chapter? It's a pretty solid mechanic, and complex, so I personally am glad it isn't just a couple pages long. Conversely, I never bothered fully reading (beyond my first read) or incorporating anything specifically from De Rerum or the flavor chapters like "Mental Disorders" and think the Sanity chapter in 7e is much more concise and helpful.

I suppose if you're reading CoC for the first time with 7e, it's possible you think it's an action game...if you're selectively paying attention to what you're reading? Sorry, dude. I just can't agree. My current main homegroup are all new to CoC and I guarantee none of them would tell you my games are "action packed" and they're ALL 7e since 7e came out. *shrugs*

Edited by KnygathinZhaum
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Well, I agree that the chase rules are really good, I even incorporated some parts in a Savage Worlds campaign based on Mad Max classic movies. Now, rules for chases are just natural in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone is fighting for water and gasoline, but not in a story about discovering the nature of reality. I resolve chases in my CoC games with simple opposed STR, CON or DEX rolls. These chases are actually to escape a danger, they don't need a lot of rules and rolls. Car chases might be resolver with opposed Drive skill rolls.

Yeah, the rules are not bad, they are useful for chases. But the fact there is a separate chapter for them, and that it is a more or less long chapter (22 pages, a little longer than the system rules chapter), is meaningful. Ultimateley, the rules allow us to play both purist and pulpier styles, it's just the book that enfatizes the later.

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I'm not sure I accept that chases aren't part of purist Lovecraftian play. The main inspiration for putting the chase rules in 7th edition was the long, memorable chase scene from The Shadow Over Innsmouth . We wanted to make sure that you could recreate that in your game with mechanical support.

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I guess I just don't see 7e as encouraging pulpier playing (unless we get into specifically discussing the Pulp ruleset). The only chases I've had thus far were human v. human, fwiw (and I must say, they all involved a great degree of peril and/or hilarity, so I feel like I *have* to defend its use in traditional CoC) so it's not like it was some action sequence involving fight or flight against anything in the mythos.

If you're ever in The Triangle...(no, not Bermuda! North Carolina!) come sit at my table. We'll run a Pulp game and I'll show you Pulp, sir!! ;)

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3 hours ago, Scott Dorward said:

I'm not sure I accept that chases aren't part of purist Lovecraftian play. The main inspiration for putting the chase rules in 7th edition was the long, memorable chase scene from The Shadow Over Innsmouth . We wanted to make sure that you could recreate that in your game with mechanical support.

Ok, I'll buy it. It's just not the style I prefer for this game, but it's a good thing this exists for those who like it (or for me to adapt it into another game).

3 hours ago, KnygathinZhaum said:

I guess I just don't see 7e as encouraging pulpier playing (unless we get into specifically discussing the Pulp ruleset). The only chases I've had thus far were human v. human, fwiw (and I must say, they all involved a great degree of peril and/or hilarity, so I feel like I *have* to defend its use in traditional CoC) so it's not like it was some action sequence involving fight or flight against anything in the mythos.

If you're ever in The Triangle...(no, not Bermuda! North Carolina!) come sit at my table. We'll run a Pulp game and I'll show you Pulp, sir!! ;)

I can't travel, I don't have a Visa, but thank you!

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I guess the Chase rules could have been better placed being in the Pulp Cthulhu book, but as a core book the CoC 7E rulebook sits somewhere nicely between Purist and Pulp gameplay, lending itself easily to both. 

Having Pulp Cthulhu just specialises it further in that pulpy adventure noir direction. Perhaps a potential Purist Cthulhu book could be produced to further go down the cold, stark cosmic horror purism approach?

But as it stands, the 7E core book can easily be used with both play styles

Ok  sorry to digress from the thread's topic

Edited by Mankcam
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" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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2 hours ago, Mankcam said:

Perhaps a potential Purist Cthulhu book could be produced to further go down the cold, stark cosmic horror purism approach?

Maybe it's just the people in my groups, but I can't imagine one of my player's 'Jacques Cousteau v. Mythos' character who we just recently saw marching around in the snow, naked and blowing a Byakhee whistle, as cold...or stark...or horror....ok, wait. Nevermind.

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Welcome to my world - my troupies are 'Pulp' thru and thru, they would really dig Jacques Cousteau, Mythos Hunter !!!

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" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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