Monster of the Week? Or something like it?

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Fenris-77

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I've had a yen to do some Supernatural or X-Files style shenanigans lately. Is anyone interested in playing or running this sort of thing? I don't know that I want to completely run another campaign, but something with rotating GMs could be very cool, kind like multiple directors in the same season of a series. I'm pretty keen on using some Nazi Germany Occult shenanigans somehow...
 
No love for undead Nazi necromancers? Reality bending outsiders summoned to power weird science? Hmm...
 
I'd like to play in a game like that - are you thinking a PBP here on the Pub?
 
We might as well use this thread for some spitballing too. I was thinking agency types, probably FBI, to make handwaving plane flights and car rentals easy. Plus it allows rotation GMs to really work their own bit of the world without running out of room.

Off the top of my head, touchstone wise, I was thinking immortal Nazis and wierd science with a lot of WWII left over history and whatnot. Hail Hydra.
 
That's the key right there. :thumbsup:
 
So what I'm picturing is kind of a West Marches thing. Short episodes, and whomever shows up, plays, but don't jump in in the middle. Rolling GMs if we can mange. Who's up to run a mystery at some point?
 
So what I'm picturing is kind of a West Marches thing. Short episodes, and whomever shows up, plays, but don't jump in in the middle. Rolling GMs if we can mange. Who's up to run a mystery at some point?
I'd run one, once I get the feel for the style after playing a game.
 
Here's my first thought. We all make up characters like we're a single group and do background and relationships. My character can stay offscreen for the first bit while we get spun up, or maybe act as an offscreen ally. He's just there for the chance that someone else runs a mystery here or there so I have a character that already has history with the group. We can decide where we're based and collectively flesh that town or city out with some faces and places, and we can do the same with some larger adventure fronts to decide exactly sort of larger tasks or enemies we'll face.
 
Awesome. Odd question, I want to play a living Shī (Guardian lion) since they guard temples, would it work better as Monstrous, or Divine? I'm not sure if I should make the character humanoid or just stick with the four-legged form, is that acceptable/doable? Does anyone have trouble with it? When not playing he could guard a local Buddhist temple or the team's headquarters, in stone form. Shishī (Stone Lion)
 
The four legged form might be a tough sell to the general public. A touch noticable, y'know? I might play him as a Monstrous. That's my first thought anyway.
 
Well. Maybe people see him as a big dog? :grin: Not what he is, but it is a disguise? Only people with the right gifts can see through it. We shall name him Scooby (and that's totally a joke...because no.)
 
Lets see what the other characters look like. It would be way more doable in a more local game. The number of places where dogs aren't allowed could be a pain though.
 
Also, if we went in more of a Dresden Files direction the Temple Lion thing would be less odd, even in straight four-legged form. It's the extent to which the average NPC is potentially inured to the odd and fantastical I think. Not at all true in an X-Files game, where the Temple Lion is maybe a poor fit, but much more workable with a different set of genre expectations. I'm happy to head in a more Urban Fantasy direction if that's what people want to do.
 
Lets see what the other characters look like. It would be way more doable in a more local game. The number of places where dogs aren't allowed could be a pain though.
Unless it's a registered support dog, which he could actually be, with human-like sapience. He knows hows how to turn on lights, pushbuttons, calm someone down (he feeds on fear, but not so completely, that it leaves someone without it, that would be MORE dangerous--or he tries anyway.) He'd just have a glamor/illusion of being a dog until he didn't need to be..?
 
I had a thought that we could add some features of the Divine to the Monstrous playbook and invert it. So the temple lion is you natural form, but you take human form for convenience, and the negatives accrue from being in human form, rather than vice versa. Would that work for you?
 
Also, I guess maybe before we start talking about characters maybe we should talk about some more specific genre goals. Are we looking for XFiles, Dresden Files, Supernatural, Twenty Palaces, The Laundry, or something else?
 
I lean towards early Supernatural, the early Laundry files (with humor), and some various fun novels like the Kitty Norville series by Vaughn, The Incryptid series by Seanan Mcquire, the Katherine Kerr Nora O'Grady Novels, and BPRD.
 
I can work with a Laundry/BRPD approach, for sure. Small field office in small city? That could be manageable. Just the one layer of local management types to deal with too.
 
So I'm thinking a puny dank little office in the downtown core, with faded upholstery and yellowed wallpaper and a sign out front that reads Bremner and Sons Consulting. A ancient secretary crouches behind a massive metal desk, a brutalist relic of some cold war college campus, who fingers an MP5 whenever someone comes in the door. Through the back is a bathroom with a toilet no sane person would ever even crouch over, and a cramped supply closet with cleaning products dating back to the world wars. You pull on a mop handle and a section of wall slides aside and you enter the inner sanctum of the your OSR field office.

Down a rickety flight of wooden stairs is another dank, cramped, office but this time with yellowed arcane parchments on the wall and an underwhelming collection of cryptozooology specimens in formaldehyde valiantly trying to fill a small set of shelves. There are six cubicles, four currently occupied (by you and you stalwart compatriots). One door on the left reads Manager in faded paint on frosted glass, and another door on the right, made of solid steel and looking like it was purchased from a submarine supply depot, reads Storage in large important red lettering, above which some funny wank has added Lip and Asshole in pink sharpie. Desultory efforts to remove the sharpie have obviously met with limited success.

Each cubicle has a desk and office chair, both of indeterminate quality and provenance. Every desk is piled high with stacks of paperwork, post-it notes, empty takeaway containers, and half mugs of questionable coffee. The two currently unoccupied cubicles have become dumping grounds for everything from outdated field manuals to half-built flame throwers to velvet bags that seem to writhe when you catch them out of the corner of your eye. The only evidence of the current century in the room are the laptops on each desk, which are quite obviously very new, and who's sleek lines suggest a level of functionality that no mere mortal will ever need.

Your desk has an sizeable collection of overlapping post-its from your manager, each with lettering larger and more jagged than the last, requesting the submission, ASAP, of your overdue A5-3 and C-44 forms from last week's field operation. Welcome home.
 
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A quick question, have any of you played or read Delta Green - Labyrinth?
 
Charm +2, Cool +1 Sharp 0, Tough -1, Weird +1

My guy is Bobby Leslie, the Crooked, a former cardshark and Grifter on the DL after crossing and owing too much to too many people. My Day Job, which I'm keeping just by my fingertips, is with The Company where I spend most of my day in the 10-year-old Dell desktop trawling betting sites, trying to beat the spread and losing on absurdly long shot parlay.

I have a Grimoire, the Dragon Rouge in patois, I won in a game of craps from a dangerous Santeria priest and steadfastly believe gives me good luck (it doesn't although it does work as described in the Playbook) and Friends on the Force who I know from my haunting of cop bars to avoid my creditors.

.38 revolver, baseball bat, .22 revolver.

6a00d83451cb7469e20263e944937f200b-800wi.jpg
 
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A quick question, have any of you played or read Delta Green - Labyrinth?
Delta Green is going beyond the Beltway! From the loathsome servitors of the 1%, to the hardscrabble faithful of the Rust Belt, to doomed idealists trapped in a world they cannot save. Modern life is a maze of twisty passages with no way out - unless knowledge is a way out . . . *

. . . I mean, no. :wink:

*Spoiler: Knowledge is not a way out.
 
I can be Shishī (Stone,; when out of the game) but in blue and white and no spots or Tianshī the first is 55-553625_fu-lion-by-cazitena-japanese-lion.jpg
The second is a humanoid formsilverlion_fursona_by_silverlion_ddsnc3u-fullview.jpg

Whichever works best for the game.
 
Silverlion Silverlion So for the Temple Lion, which we'll sort out a hybrid playbook for, lets assume you can take full human form at need, although you probably dislike it intensely. So you can play it Hellboy styles and risk exposure and censure by appearing in public in you natural form, or you can be a good company man and try to limit exposure by at least attempting to not be seen in public that way too often. We can roll with a Hellboy style approach to the average man as well where your appearance is startling, and possibly cause for cell phone deployment, but not cause for immediate panicked flight or the formation of torch and pitchfork bearing mobs.
 
Silverlion Silverlion So for the Temple Lion, which we'll sort out a hybrid playbook for, lets assume you can take full human form at need, although you probably dislike it intensely. So you can play it Hellboy styles and risk exposure and censure by appearing in public in you natural form, or you can be a good company man and try to limit exposure by at least attempting to not be seen in public that way too often. We can roll with a Hellboy style approach to the average man as well where your appearance is startling, and possibly cause for cell phone deployment, but not cause for immediate panicked flight or the formation of torch and pitchfork bearing mobs.
Alright sounds fine by me. Just tell me what books I need to Hybridize. I'll work on the rest once we've got that worked out.
 
I was thinking we could mash up the monstrous and the divine playbooks. I haven't taken a close look at them with that in mind though, I'll try and get to that today. Feel free to bash something out yourself and we can see how our ideas fit together too.
 
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