Count Otto Black
Active Pubber
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2019
- Messages
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I was wondering if there was any love for the Cthulhu Mythos on this forum? If so, it strikes me as a suitable game for play-by-post, partly because in terms of toughness and combat ability, everybody's the equivalent of a D&D 1e character and stays that way permanently, so you don't get too many of those fights where on a tabletop you'd be rolling fistfuls of dice for half an hour trying to put a dent in that huge ancient red dragon, and playing by post you'd literally be hacking away at the bugger for weeks.
To keep things simple and affordable for everybody, I'd use 7e but assume that if you own an earlier edition or none at all, you can get by with the 7e Quickstart booklet, which in case you don't know is a free download from the Chaosium website. The amount of additional material from the Core Rulebook which the players would need to know is very small, just a few bits and bobs I could easily post here. I'd be changing some of the rules anyway, partly to streamline a game designed for tabletop play for faster PbP, and partly because some of them don't make a whole lot of sense.
I'd set the campaign in the classic CoC era between the two world wars, but I'd be heavily editing the Mythos, altering or leaving out a considerable amount that doesn't really fit together properly, or is just plain silly, and adding anything I can think of that strikes me as interesting, so those traditional HPL monsters might not always behave in quite the way you'd expect. I'd also make it a far more character-driven campaign than is usual for CoC.
If you don't know quite what I mean by that, read the mini-scenario included in the Quickstart pamphlet. This, presumably, is how the creators of the game think it's meant to be played. For a very short narrative, it has a truly extraordinary number of things wrong with it! See how many ludicrous implausibilities you can spot (apart from excusable absurdities required by the game, such as there being an undead wizard hiding in the cellar), and assume I noticed them too and will try to write better backstories. For instance, in my gameworld the police are sufficiently competent to search the scene of a major crime well enough not to leave two dead bodies lying around for several years!
I'd take it for granted that the players would have read at least some of the works of H. P. Lovecraft and have some knowledge of the 1920s, but the background to the campaign would be the real world with only minor changes, so if I casually mentioned President Coolidge, I'd mean the real and rather boring Calvin Coolidge about whom Wikipedia has all the facts. Players wouldn't need to be intimately familiar with a complex fictional campaign setting, just the USA of about a century ago, except that it has a few extra towns and cities added by Lovecraft, notably Arkham, Innsmouth and Dunwich.
Would that sort of thing appeal to anyone?
To keep things simple and affordable for everybody, I'd use 7e but assume that if you own an earlier edition or none at all, you can get by with the 7e Quickstart booklet, which in case you don't know is a free download from the Chaosium website. The amount of additional material from the Core Rulebook which the players would need to know is very small, just a few bits and bobs I could easily post here. I'd be changing some of the rules anyway, partly to streamline a game designed for tabletop play for faster PbP, and partly because some of them don't make a whole lot of sense.
I'd set the campaign in the classic CoC era between the two world wars, but I'd be heavily editing the Mythos, altering or leaving out a considerable amount that doesn't really fit together properly, or is just plain silly, and adding anything I can think of that strikes me as interesting, so those traditional HPL monsters might not always behave in quite the way you'd expect. I'd also make it a far more character-driven campaign than is usual for CoC.
If you don't know quite what I mean by that, read the mini-scenario included in the Quickstart pamphlet. This, presumably, is how the creators of the game think it's meant to be played. For a very short narrative, it has a truly extraordinary number of things wrong with it! See how many ludicrous implausibilities you can spot (apart from excusable absurdities required by the game, such as there being an undead wizard hiding in the cellar), and assume I noticed them too and will try to write better backstories. For instance, in my gameworld the police are sufficiently competent to search the scene of a major crime well enough not to leave two dead bodies lying around for several years!
I'd take it for granted that the players would have read at least some of the works of H. P. Lovecraft and have some knowledge of the 1920s, but the background to the campaign would be the real world with only minor changes, so if I casually mentioned President Coolidge, I'd mean the real and rather boring Calvin Coolidge about whom Wikipedia has all the facts. Players wouldn't need to be intimately familiar with a complex fictional campaign setting, just the USA of about a century ago, except that it has a few extra towns and cities added by Lovecraft, notably Arkham, Innsmouth and Dunwich.
Would that sort of thing appeal to anyone?