Undying Edition

Tell us about your horror settings, games, etc. Share inspirational art, prompts, etc.

>List of games:
Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Cold and Dark, Degenesis, Delta Green, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, Esoterrorists/Fear Itself+Book of Unremitting Horror, Fall of Delta Green, GORE, Into The Shadows, KULT, Little Fears, Mothership RPG, Nemesis (free on Arc Dream's website), Nights Black Agents, Silent Legions (Mostly for the tables), Stalker: The SciFi RPG, Symbaroum, Ten Candles, Trail of Cthulhu, Unisystem (All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Witchcraft, Conspiracy X, etc.), Unknown Armies, The Whispering Vault, Vaesen

>Inspirational stuff:
Caitlin R Kiernan, Castlevania, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Doom Watch, Fear & Hunger, George Romero, Ghostwatch, House of Leaves, I Am In Eskew, John Carpenter, Kolchak the Nightstalker, Laird Barron, John Langan, M.R. James, Nick Cutter, Old Gods of Appalachia, Quatermass, Ramsey Campbell, Remedy Series (Alan Wake, Control), SCP Foundation, Scarfolk Council, Shaun Hutson, Silent Hill, Stand Still Stay Silent, The Evil Dead, The Magnus Archives, The Secret World, The Stone Tapes, Anatomy, Thomas Ligotti, Twin Peaks, Vault of Evil forums, toomuchhorrorfiction

Other News:
"The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Carcosa Manifest" coming later this year
https://www.chaosium.com/blogcoming-in-2025-for-call-of-cthulhu-the-sutra-of-pale-leaves-carcosa-manifest/

Current Book Club Topic:
"The Salem Horror" by Henry Kuttner
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76108

Questions for the thread:
>Who is the longest-running antagonist you've had in a horror campaign before?
>What are the best ways to do a constantly returning villain?

Questions for Horrorverse refugees:
>Do any of you still exist?

Previous thread:
>>95531606

Please try to keep arguing to a minimum. Don't respond to bait/drama/politics posts.
And as usual, try and keep it alive, or at least... undead!

Book Club Questions
BOOK CLUB
>What works?
>What's cool about it?
>Why is it so effective?
>What is the best part of it in your opinion?
>Thoughts on the characters?
>Is the villain effective?
>If you had to pick a moment that really scared you, which would it be?
>Is there anything you feel could have been expanded upon?
>What would you change?
>Would you use it as inspiration for a game?

Any tips for getting players to be willing to separate from the party to investigate the mystery? I'm not the GM but I'm playing in a DG game and the rest of the party wants to hold hands for all the investigating. They are rather new to DG, so I'm trying to find ways to nudge them away from the mindset that the party must be together at all times. Playing Music from a Darkened Room and we haven't even entered the house yet because researching took so long.

>>95785422 (OP)
>Do any of you still exist?
I do.

>>95786238
>Any tips for getting players to be willing to separate from the party to investigate the mystery?
Without forcing them? Basically impossible; but if your GM is good, then they can absolutely find a way to bring the mystery to THEM instead.

>>95785422 (OP)
I just discovered Delta Green, it's like a proto-SCP Foundation

>>95786238
Give them limited time to investigate and too many spots for them to investigate for them to be able to get to all of them without splitting up.
Also, remember that actions in-game take longer than they do out of game. A Library Use roll may only take seconds to do in real life, but it represents hours of research in-game.

>>95786838
That's a decent way to look at it, but DG is more focused on extermination than containment or analysis.

Real life cryptids and stuff are good inspiration for a game. Anyone tried playing with monsters like bigfoot or the chupacabra?

>>95792366
Flatwoods Monster is my favorite.

>>95792503
Good pick.

In Shadow Over Innsmouth why didn’t the ENITRE town turn out to search for the MC? Was it because they were desperately trying to purge an outsider who learned too much? Or was it because he was recognized as a VIP heir and the leadership turned everyone out to bring him in? I mean, just being an outsider isn’t enough to get you purged so why were the Innsmouthers so desperate to get at Robert?

>>95786238
Multiple tasks to perform that all require doing, and some sense of time pressure which prevents them from all doing a hugbox for every task one at a time
Idk how your GM's handles it but keep in mind (almost) all agents do actually have day jobs they're supposed to be getting back to and focusing on instead of fucking around in the super secret service, you probably can't afford to have everyone do everything together and good RPers will probably indicate IC a need to see things wrapped up at some point to get back to ""real life""

t. have played one DG session

>>95792622
Shoutout to Frogman.

>>95793748
Yea, I brought that up but the others didn't care since they are gaming to hang out with everyone. We are on day 2 and I'm thinking I'm going to look up if the owners are doing an open house or anything soon. To hopefully put a fire under them.

>>95793495
I’m assuming you meant to type “why did the ENTIRE town turn out?”
And yeah, it was to purge an outsider who learned too much. After the ambush to kill him in the hotel failed, he was loose and no one knew where he was. Innsmouth did NOT want information about the town getting out since… well, we all know what happens to Innsmouth once the truth about them go out.
Being an outsider might not be enough to get you purged, but being an outsider who knows the truth makes you public enemy No. 1.

>>95793849
What the frog doin

>>95795146
shadow wizard money cult-type shit

>>95793849
Source of this gif?

Any cool artist that has done good shit with Nyarla? Looking for inspo for the next tarot card, also sorry it has taken so long I took a break from art but I'm checking to continue with the tarot set

>>95793495
It is explicitly because he was an outsider who knew too much. If the truth got out, Innsmouth would have been purged, so they had to kill him by any means necessary.

>>95795613
When I get home I’ll post several of my favorite Nyarlathotep artwork I have saved. Not mine of course, just other people’s.

>>95795004
>>95796321
So they hadn’t recognized Robert’s blood? Was it because it takes time to emerge in hybrids so before that time he would just look like a normal human at a glance?

>>95797415
Yeah, he didn’t have any of the trademark Innsmouth look at that point and they just thought he was an outsider human.

Hey guys, 40krpg tourist here. I wanna run a session about my players getting caught up in a cult in a remote village, anyone know some good one-shot or even smaller campaign stories I could steal ideas and hooks from?

>>95795613
Alright, here are some of my favorite depictions.

>>95800061

>>95800067

>>95800072

>>95800075
And, of course...

Las Vegas, modern nights. a small group of lowly vampires trying to stay undead despite ravenous hunger and constant killings. Holed up in an abandoned movie theater, they walk the spiral path of sanguine addiction and seek the heart of an ancient vampire kept undead by modern technology.
system: Blood Junkies

>>95800061
Thanks for the inspo man, some of these really make him look like a Xenomorph lmao, also
>>95800081 Fuck this manga they made my boy Tsathogghua into a sandwich

>>95795613
>>95800625
I'll post what I've got, this is my favourite one. They style of it makes me imagine seeing this being in a real art gallery showing the madness an artist suffered, like a final painting made in a frenzy of energy before death

>>95800969

>>95800978
Another pic of Nyarlathotep in his black human form. Ialways love the idea of the disguise making the skin too dark and having a pervasive strange inhuman aura being the giveaway this isn't a real human but something else posing as one

>>95800985
A classic pic used by youtubers everywhere

>>95800989
More humanoid version of his alien/beastial form

>>95800992
More beastial version of him

>>95801001
I don't have this version of Nyar close up so you get this classical painting edit of him

>>95801005
Cultists summoning him and he appears out of the darkness at the edge of the firelight

>>95801008
Last one, feel like I'm spamming. Hope these helped anon I love your tarot cards

>>95801005
I tell a lie here's the original art used in that edit. Okay this is the last post from me

>>95800061
>>95800969
Thanks for the inspo man, back on my groove
>>95799847
Any scenario that takes place in Innsmouth should be good enough, dont know any specific ones

>>95795513
Frogman, a 2023 found footage horror film. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

>>95803564
Glad to be of help, though I think there were two of us posting Nyarla inspo.
Anyways, glad to see you back on it. I’ve been loving the tarot cards.

>>95803599
For a second, I thought that movie poster was meant to be a face before I clicked n it.

>>95806391
I mean it is meant to be a frogs head, hence the yellow eyes of the moon and a street light
>>95803667
yeah there was two I'm the other guy.
>>95803564
How many tarot cards are left? any cards you're still not sure what you're going to use for them?

>>95807147
9 left, only 2 are not assigned yet

>>95807155
>Justice and Temperance
hmmm Umr at-Tawil could be justice since he's pretty friendly and tells Carter he's one of them, an ancient one and servent of Yog, before reaching Yog. So being rewarded for bravery and courage to reach the Gate and talk to Yog Sothoth himself seems like justice to me in a sense

>>95807155
I vote for Bok’rug to be Justice, considering he punishes the crimes of the Sarnathians of genociding and stealing the relics of denizens of Ib.
As for temperance… you should do a character from Lovecraft’s one pro-prohibition story. In all seriousness, maybe Y’golonac as an ironic thing?

Would shot shells loaded with wooden pellets be effective against vampires?

>>95810893
I’d say no. The original superstition about staking vampires was about keeping them in place by using the stake to pin them to the ground or bottom of their coffins, and a wooden pellet or, indeed, bullet can’t accomplish that.

>>95792503

Want to use them as a Yithian incursion, interesting appearance connection. Not sure if the incredible lame actual incident is a good thing or not regarding this (meaning: I tend to think to take contemporary folklore shit into "relatively serious" game a and whatnot you generally need it to be SOMEWHAT believable. Not really, of course, but something better than "yep, owls")

>>95811122

Yeah, always tought the gist was the staking not the material.

>>95810893
You can use dragons breath rounds to incinerate them from inside. It burns for about 2 seconds.

>>95810893
Steel-tipped wooden core sabot might do the trick. Or this >>95811441 (just keep in mind DBR has relatively short effective range)

Anyone else ever get the feeling Nyarly is the odd one out of the Lovecraft Pantheon. I mean, you've got the Other/Outer Gods who platonic embodiments of scientific, materialistic concepts that discount humanity and sapient life in general. Azathoth is Entropy, Yog-Sothoth is spacetime, Shub-Niggurath is energylife and Nyarlathotep is... what exactly? God of Chaos? Evil? Magic? Doesn't exactly fit with the purview of the others, no?
I'm not complaining or saying he's a bad character or anything, quite the opposite. It just feels for the horror beyond human comprehension he came up with, Lovecraft couldn't, in the end, escape the urge to create a Satan-like character who's the embodiment of a very human evil.

>>95811665
Lovecraft never meant to have a consistent canon or to have any of his stories or things in them necessarily connect. IIRC he said keeping it disconnected so it resembled spooky campfire stories was his intent. This is also why angels, demons, and magic appear in a few stories despite the mythos being materialistic, and why religious faith has power against entities in a few stories despite it being atheistic. It "is" whatever he wanted it to be for any given story and he directly said didn't want to make or adhere to a "canon".

Goes as far in some stories like The Call of Cthulhu to say the entire thing may've just been a hallucination by the character and nothing supernatural exists or happened at all.

>>95811665
Nyarlathotep is the soul of the outer gods. He serves them and carries out their bidding, especially in circumstances where their lack of a true personality or inability to perceive smaller things would hinder their desires. There’s a reason he’s generally the only god you can have a conversation with.
I think of him like Hermes, herald of the Greek Gods. He’s not the god of anything, but he’s the servant to all the rest. Whenever you invoke or “summon” one of the Outer Gods, it’s not really them. It’s Nyarlathotep embodying one of their aspects because he’s the only one who can show up and dumb down his form enough not to fry your brain.

>>95785422 (OP)
1348DR Bloodstone Lands
TSR Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
TSR AD&D 2nd Ed.

Low Magic/Realism Centered

Cult of the Goats Head: Fall of Vaasa
lvl 1-3

Lords of Peril: Autumn of Blood
lvl 4-9

The Wolf Winter: Sunless Valley

Lvl 9-12

A three part campaign set during the early years of the Blood Stone War. Loosely based on the slavic fable of Kochei Deathless and pieced together with the Classic Blood Stone lands Box Set and Modules. I tell my players to make three characters, and put all of them in a shuffled pile. I pick a random one. That's the one who survives all the rest die horribly.

It begins with a murder mystery and ends with desperate survival oriented finale as the surviving characters flee the Beaumaris Valley having failed to defend the Vaasan Gate.

>>95811665

You're thingink too much of the game's shoehorning.

Anyway, there is also Hypnos and Nodens as human-like gods.

>>95811821
Lovecraft and the Circle were pretty ingenuous in creating & using the Dreamlands. Let them keep all the magical, divine and folkloric elements part of the greater cosmic horror canon.

>mountains of madness campaign ended in tpk
Pro tip next time you guys wanna make a cool character who is a reluctant cultist of Tsathoggua and your GM uses this as an excuse to make the toad the main bad guy for some reason and the GM decided that instead of having the toad be a lazy fuck he instead wants to destroy the world which realisticly he wouldnt even bother to do; dont.
(Also like my character didnt even do shit to free him the Toad just freed itself cause the party decided to just leave the black tower instead of fully checking it out and dragged me away cause of bad sanity rolls that left me unable to do shit)

>>95813921
To be fair with my GM and party all of us were really done with the campaign really and even I wasnt enjoying it a lot, we had done a homebrew CoC campaign before and it was awesome but this one was just not that engaging, so maybe we were all just looking for an excuse to end the campaign so we could move on to play something else. Next time we play CoC we are totally doing pulp cause my party is way more into action which I dont mind cause pulp is awesome

I've been running Horror on the Orient Express over the past eight months and something I'm really appreciating about it is that it focuses on an underappreciated part of Lovecraft's writing: Dick-ass sorcerers.
I feel like a lot of Lovecraftian fiction hyper focuses on gods and cultists, forgetting that a good deal of his stories have random evil wizards who mostly act alone. The Terrible Old Man, The Thing on the Door Step, Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Dreams in the Witch House, etc. all feature mostly solo magic users as their antagonists.
While Orient Express does place some of these sorcerers into cults, the focus is really on them and they act more like the bad guys in those aforementioned stories. My party has been especially loving the Jigsaw Prince (though they still keep calling him The Frenchman after meeting him in Blood Red Fez).

>>95814422
Lovecraft is so flanderized these days when you actually read his stories it seems so radcially different and more creative than you were expecting.
I haven't read most of his work yet but are lovecraftian wizards just another term for his dreamers? Or are they sperate things? The festival is also another wizard I think, but I think he refuses to go deeper into the rites since everyone else is a giant overgrown earthworm that were given power and minds from eating wizard corpses, or the worms are the new body the wizard souls no inhabit

>>95814577
>just another term for his dreamers
No, I wouldn't say so. They display powers in the real world, not just in dreams, though doubtlessly many of them are dreamers or have interacted with the Dreamlands.
Arguably the one nice sorcerer the PCs meet in Horror on the Orient Express is a dreamer. I say arguable because he doesn't have any spells, but he has his own domain in the Dreamlands, can easily dream things into existence and commands many creatures to do his bidding.

>>95810893
Wood in and of itself doesn't have enough mass to be effective.

>>95812031
>Nyarlathotep is the soul of the outer gods.
This. If you want to give Nyarly a domain, it's basically sapience. That's why he embodies/exhibits many of the cruelties and irrationalities that come with complex thought. That alslo explains his soft dominion over the Dreamlands and his protection of the Dream Gods.

>>95815695
>dominion over the Dreamlands and protection of the Dream Gods.
The Dream Gods are just the same great old ones/ elder gods that dwell in the Void where Azathoth is right? They're dreaming in the dreamland because they can't die as we understand it, that's why they are blind, voiceless and mindless because all their will is in Nyarlathotep. So they are defending their own dead/dreaming bodies through him.
Or are the dream gods seperate from the dead great old ones that are on Earth. I get that lovecraft didn't put them in a hierarchy and used all these tersm interchangeably

Pardon me, /hsg/. I want to run an Asian themed horror game for my friends. It'll be an adventure as opposed to a campaign. What tale do you guys recommend adapting and how do you think it should go?

>>95816049
Not quite. The Dream Gods anon was referring to are Earth’s weak gods. Because the Dreamlands are Earth’s collective unconsciousness, every single major deity people on Earth ever worshipped exist there, even if they don’t exist in the real world. So you can run into Zeus, Ra, Kali, Amaterasu and even the Judeo Christian God (and actually likely several different versions of him given the many different sects that worship him, each with their own interpretation).
However, they’re not really gods and more glorified tulpas. They only have power in the Dreamlands because people believe they have power, and even then, their power is vastly dwarfed by the Outer Gods (who are referred to as the Other Gods in the Dreamlands), who exist in reality as well as in dreams.
As such, Nyarlathotep has been assigned to watch over and shepherd the Dream Gods, preventing people from getting too close to them and, presumably, preventing them from getting uppity against the Other Gods.
Before anyone throws a shit fit, I’m saying the Dream Gods don’t exist in reality within the context of the Mythos. I’m not making some grand statement about our reality here.

>>95816143
There's a shit ton of japanese tales and legends, specially horror ones, you can take the classic haunted school setting and pick your favorite yokai, if you want any specific inspo take a look at The Drifting Classroom or other horror manga antogies

>>95816143
Not truly Japanese, but consider pulling from World of Horror because the cases are already a bit more game-shaped, if you know what I mean.

>>95816489
>if you know what I mean
I do not know what you mean.

>>95816143
Honestly The Ring works very well as an investigative horror game. Cursed object kills people, curse affects one of the PCs, they have to track down the origin of the curse and find out the story behind it, end with confrontation with the Onryo behind the curse.

>>95816506
Japanese folk tales are often a little inaccessible, to my mind. Either very wound up in specific cultural conventions or the target of the supernatural is inescapably doomed from the start, things like that.
World of Horror is already a game, and has already done a lot of the work adapting those tales and tropes into a more palatable form for gameplay. You can easily go to the wiki, pick a case, read the steps of the case, and that'd form a great outline for an RPG adventure off the bat. Saves you at least one step compared to reading a folk tale and thinking, "OK, but how do I make that into a fun adventure?".

>>95810893
Piggybacking on this topic, how would wicken/rowan wood shot fare, for use against witches and general black magic? Would it just disintegrate?

If you read the King in Yellow past the first act, are you auto-doomed from that point forward? Is there no way to come back from descending into crazy town? Is finding the Yellow Sign an inevitability?

>>95816740
Havent read the original story in a while but i think you have to actually complete it to be doomed, the thing is that past act 1 you start to become obsessed and compelled to actually finish it, so yes your best chances of survival are stopping at act 1 but you are not a lost cause if you keep going but not finish it

>>95816786
So if you start reading past act 1 and someone snatches it away from you, are you still okay? Also, will finding the Yellow Sign ONLY happen after reading the whole play?

Finally finished this

Why does Nyarly have a worm head anyway? I've always thought of all the art for Lovecraft creatures, he might be the goofiest.

>>95818355
Looks really cool. Did you take inspiration from that freaky deep sea squid for the lower tendrils?

>>95785437
I'm new to these threads, should I answer all questions or can I just pick a few?

>>95818538
Tsathoggua might be a goofier cause he's just a fatass frog but when compared to other elders Nyarla does look a bit funny lol
>>95818544
I actually didnt notice lol i just drew legs that looked creepy to me, tbf i'm a big sea life autist so maybe i took inspo without noticing lmao

>>95818355
Nice work! Really like the masks floating around him and the star his head is wrapped around.

>>95818538
It’s based on a dream Lovecraft once had. Dereleth was the one who made it into one of Nyarlathotep’s forms. Specifically it’s the God of the Bloody Tongue.
Chaosium made it be Nyarla’s combat form, so it’s one that frequently shows up in adventures and artwork as a result, to the point most people treat it as his default.

>>95818623
You can answer as many or as few as you want.

>>95811122
Aren't vampires weak to lead in some versions? In that case just straight up shooting it would work.

>>95818544
pic related for any anons who din't know what this anon is talking about
>>95818355
Nice work anon, the spinning starrry sky reminds me of this scene from the Empty Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zjl3TgUbGo

>>95818355
Very nice!

>>95818538
This >>95818695 anon here. I found the dream in question the "tentacle for a head" design came from. It later got published as a short story after HPL died.
https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/the-thing-in-the-moonlight

>>95820503
That's pretty cool actually.

So….the Deep Ones. Are they, as a race, human-alien hybrids? Where did they (the alien part) originate from? Did they come during or after the Elder Things’ dominance of the Earth?

Also, speaking of the Elder Things, are they hanging out in deep ocean trenches or are they more non-aquatic underground locations? Do they still have an advanced civilization like the Deep Ones apparently do or are basically devolved into cavemen?

>>95821608
I much prefer Elder Things are almost entirely wiped out. They exist as beings that are at the same time totally alien, a great deal more advanced than us, and wiped out by their own hubris.

As for deep ones, I'd never really thought about it.

>>95818355
Forgot this horse version of Nyar, a bit late now but cool none the less

>>95821608
Not part of the OG mythos but I live Abe Sapiens' inhuman fishiness in fact being our transhuman descendants' form hurled back into atavistic times.

Speaking of the idea of prophesy being related to timeloops (remembering one's subjective past in the objective future) and uber-incestuous grandfather paradoxes (psychic genes are bred into the population by "grey/deep one" descendants siring offspring).

>>95821931
So, the ones thawed out in Antarctica were of the advanced variety, and sesequently killed off (entirely?) by the Shogoth. Unless there are any more of them in deep freeze that’s probably the full extent of what remains from that advanced civilization. The current-day ones, in whatever numbers are still alive, are physically degenerated (lost the ability of space flight iirc?) and hidden away in subterranean locations….supposedly, although I don’t think any such has been seen in the mythos directly. The fact that they just let humans occupy the surface the planet without making themselves known at all suggests that they’ve been reduced to a barely subsistence level of civilization.

Also, interestingly, humans are not the last rulers of the Earth. In the future the planet will be run by sentient cockroach-looking lifeforms.

>>95821608
Something I've always considered is if Deep Ones are some kind of creation of Cthulhu or one of the Star Spawn? You know, an uplifting of humanity in order to entice them into forming cults and worshiping Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones or something?

Also, the Elder Things are almost certainly all wiped out or in stasis at this point, at least the ones on Earth. Considering how advanced they are, if they had an active civilization somewhere they'd either be conquering Earth or making contact with us to form an alliance or something. Now, there's still Elder Things out in space, as we know from Dreams in the Witch House.

What are some nice horror games one can find POD on Amazon?

>>95825675
It's a viable theory but I believe the Deep Ones are supposed to predate humanity entirely. I always thought that the Deep Ones were just the first intelligent race native to the planet. They're no more or less special than humanity, they've just been around a lot longer.

>>95830737
It’s suggested in the Mountains of Madness that the Elder Things genetically engineered human progenitors (ape-looking creatures which they appeared to use for entertainment) so if true that would mean the Deep Ones have more of a claim to the Earth than we do…

>>95785437
Listened to a reading of The Salem Horror, so gonna do the book club.
>What works?
The story is essentially "What if Dreams in the Witch House" happened to a normal person. While Walter Gilman was all-in on investigating Keziah, Carson wants nothing to do with the mysterious witch room in his house. It's a nice change in pace from the usual "overly invested antiquarians" from Lovecraftian stories.
>What's cool about it?
Having a paranormal detective who is genuinely on top of things, but is also only a side character, is a nice way to keep things feeling tense but not hopeless. The ending also inspires me to want to know more about Carson's life after the story.
>Why is it so effective?
As an everyman with no interest in the occult, Carson makes just about every wrong move or assumption one can make in his situation. This keeps tension high as the reader understands how screwed he's making himself.
>What is the best part of it in your opinion?
Again, the everyman in a Weird Horror scenario.
>Thoughts on the characters?
Think I've said everything I need to on Carson. Michael is fairly understanding and level-headed as far as occultists go.
>Is the villain effective?
Abigail pales in comparison to Keziah. Nyogtha is adequately given enough menace and foreshadowing, but is under realized.
>If you had to pick a moment that really scared you, which would it be?
Oddly enough, Nyogtha retreating and pulling the massive cover over its tunnel effortlessly.
>Is there anything you feel could have been expanded upon?
More specifics about Abigail and Nyogtha. They're just a generic witch and evil slime god here.
>What would you change?
See previous answer.
>Would you use it as inspiration for a game?
Honestly, the whole scenario could work as an adventure, but with players as the occultists trying to convince a skeptical homeowner that their house is haunted/cursed as fuck and they need to get out.

How do we feel about the Laundry Files around here?
I read the first book recently and was fairly unimpressed. The author seemed up his own ass in terms of how much he could over explain in complicated detail computer systems or theoretical physics in the most boring way possible.
How did this get so popular as to get its own game?

>>95835699
It had a novel premise that appealed to the proto-redditors, and managed to achieve success in the same way a lot of other bland stuff got popular.

>>95835699
made for and by autists

I wish more games had something like Deadlands' fear levels where things slowly (or quickly) get more evil and it's up to the PCs to try and stop it from getting worse.


I also wish Deadlands itself did more with it outside Coffin Rock.

>>95840281
The problem is the game buries the lede on tale telling as an important game mechanic and raising fear levels are just a detriment to PCs. It's one of the many things I've just ditched in my current deadlands game because it disinterests me.

>>95825675
>if Deep Ones are some kind of creation of Cthulhu

They probably shouldn't be. Just because they live in the sea they are not the same shit, not anymore than living on land makes ghouls the same as mi-go.

The C Cult is all about being degenerates and YOLO, the DOs appear as slow, methodical and not particulary far reaching parasites.

>>95825675


Always assumed those were in Dreamlands, or at any rate another dimension.

If they are simply on another planet in this cosmos, they are not giving a fuck about Earth anymore. The start of the decadence in Antartica was at least in the Oligocene, with a final ice sheet cover on the city in the Pleistocene. 35 million years is quite a time even for them, it would be as if a colonial era power tried to contact a lost colony a century after the last news came from the settlement.

... unless they were so distant that they somehow lost contact with Earth that long ago? Maybe they used a portal or something, but they lost a way to contact Earth faster than light and the new planet was at 35 million LY from here (or more)?

>>95841023
It's funny that people always want to go "Cthulhu=sea." He's *trapped* under the ocean.

I always assumed the Deep Ones worshiped Cthulhu almost like the way Cimmarians view Crom. They worship him because he's down there, and he's dangerous, and because of some of their proximity to R'lyeh some of them get the crazy dreams every once in awhile, but they don't worship him like a creator God or something, it's like "maybe if we leave him some sacrifice he'll leave us the fuck alone."

>>95841149

>It's funny that people always want to go "Cthulhu=sea." He's *trapped* under the ocean.

A trend started with Derleth, even.

>I always assumed the Deep Ones worshiped Cthulhu almost like the way Cimmarians view Crom.

Or like Apophis with the egyptians, might work.

>>95841023
Oh I’m not implying Cthulhu is of the sea. I’ve made it very clear to my friends whom I’m introducing to Lovecraft stuff through Call of Cthulhu that the Great Old One is trapped under the water and he’s not aquatic.
But while the Star Spawn are on the planet with him (with many presumably on R’lyeh itself though perhaps not as dead as Cthulhu), they would certainly encounter aquatic life and could make use of them. Work with what you get to make ideal worshippers to help bring about Cthulhu’s return. After all, you’d want beings who can swim down to R’lyeh easily and the immortality Deep Ones enjoy is just the cherry on top.

Would it be, as the kids say, a Dick Move to have the monster attack on of the PCs while they're taking a shit?

>>95845526
Only if they didn't have the resources to prepare themselves for an attack had they been careful.

Setting aside the fact that getting caught with your pants down is a colloquialism anyone should be aware of, for horror specifically, the while going to the bathroom is up there with the front of a car with one of the places someone is most likely to be attacked.

>>95845526
As long as you
>1: give them a chance to foil the ambush, and/or
>2: give them a chance to escape if needed so it's not a guaranteed death trap
then it's fine to ambush your players in any game.

It's only shitty if there's no possible way they could detect the bad guys/monsters AND if you then don't give them any chance of getting out.

>>95845591
This too. If your players are specifically being careless then it's more fitting to ambush them, especially if you're doing a straight horror game.

>>95844222

That's probably unnecessary tough. Apparently the awakening of Cthulhu is determined just by stars being right, meaning at least R'lyeh needs to be over the water.
The rest is the oniric interference that seems to work fine on humans.

>>95845526

What >>95845601 said. I would add that thematically it could be a tiny bit risky, the players could be laughing at it more than anything. Per se it's a pretty good idea, mind you, players tend to expect to be relatively at the best of their PCs abilities if they don't have anything wrong on their sheets.

Pic hopefully not too related (japs and their COC's replays)

>>95840582
The part that matters is that the antagonist's shenanigans will raise the level and the party has to stop 'em

>>95850007
I'd rather that be a storytelling thing and not a flat negative that the players may or may not understand there is a way to represent.

>>95850389
Way to negate, I don't even know what happened there.

>>95849161
What all cursed tomes should aspire to be like.

>>95850400

What should be the “alien angle”? A portal into a different dimension like in the mythos? Just non-Euclidean geometry (except in 3D space which freaks you out considered it). The edge or fringe of an Other being sticking out into the periphery of human senses?

>>95855300
Maybe aliens that exist in a non-visual plane like smell or sound? Recently saw an animation where there was a race of aliens that could only be interacted with when music was played. It could also be a non-physical plane like colors.

>>95855300
Watch this video. He shows some examples of roughly what it would be like to be in a non-Euclidean space and what would make navigating it so confusing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x3uoZ4Z-Y8A&pp=ygUoV2hhdCBkaWQgTG92ZWNyYWZ0IG1lYW4gYnkgbm9uLWV1Y2xpZGVhbg%3D%3D

>>95855300
>>95856220
You can also fuck around with vectors to represent alien influences.

What are some good "first-time Keeper" scenarios for Call of Cthulhu? Especially ones that aren't The Haunting?
A friend of mine in my Horror on the Orient Express game wants to try being Keeper for a one-shot. Unfortunately, I have already run most of my group through The Haunting myself to make that a viable option. This will also be his first time GMing any kind of game, so something much more on the simple end would be great.

>>95859554
>>95856220
So, could random non-Euclidean shapes appearing in nature, the angle of the corner of a room that seems “off”, etc, could be like the antenna / feelers of an upper-dimensional being trying to perceive our plane? Something stooped over our realm, trying to examine it more closely, and casting a shadow across it?
>>95856616
Wow so Lovecraft didn’t just make that shit up he based it on mathematic concepts of the day. I seemed to pull a lot of inspiration from science in his Weird Fiction material.

>>95860851
Yeah Lovecraft was basing a lot of his stories on what was then cutting-edge scientific concepts.
He didn’t always understand them entirely well, but there are actual theoretical physics concepts in his stories. Non-Euclidean angles is probably one of the aspects people most misunderstand from Lovecraft’s works and I think that video does a great job of showing what he actually meant when he used the word.

>>95860501
I believe Edge of Darkness is generally considered the other good start module, for both keepers and investigators. I have run it myself, but it seems decent enough.

Have any of you played a Blades In The Dark campaign? Anything I should know going in?

Not sure if right thread but thinking of making a one-shot horror session that is inspired from Final Destination. How do I make it fair for the players since they're basically trying to fight off/survive from a force of nature for a couple of days, or basically make their deaths deserved if anyone do go the extra mile of trying to fight it?

>>95864601
Think of the Death scenes like combat but using non-combat rolls.
>You see a match about to drop to the floor right after gasoline spilled. Roll DEC to leap over and catch it before it can hit the ground.
>The truck across the road from you has lost control and is now barreling right towards you. Roll Drive to get out of the way.
>Your shoelace is stuck in the escalator, and the laces are tightening. Roll Strength to pull your foot free.
Maybe give Death a limited number of ways it can kill you in each scene, and if the PCs survive them all, Death will have to wait until later to try killing them.

>>95864891
This can work, thanks. But what if they fail a roll? Should it work three strikes and you're out, normal damage, or what?

>>95865192
Go with normal damage. That way it feels more fair and it's not just "One failed roll, you die." If you need it to be more realistic, make a failed roll that doesn't kill you just injure you. Something like:
>You avoid getting struck by the car, but it runs over your foot, crushing several bones.
>The falling knives don't hit anywhere vital but they stab you in several places.
Roll damage first before you describe what happens. Then, once a fatal hit actually happens, you can have the full death scene.

In honor of what day it is:
>Could your current horror rpg party survive a night at Camp Blood?
>How would Jason work in your favorite horror game?
>Have you ever done a Jason's inspired slasher?
I might try my hand at stating up Jason in CoC over the weekend. Always been a big fan of those movies.

>>95862095

That's not a horror game. Bretty gud tough.

>>95865498
Thing with Jason is his toughness and capabilities are directly proportional to the perceived profits of a sequel.

I have thought about doing a slasher game with CoC before though. Games like it are best set in circumstances like Crystal Lake where the party would realistically not be toting guns. Case in point before Jason got his wacko supernatural powers, anyone with a pistol could've taken him out.

>>95866244
Dark fantasy's horror-adjacent I'd say.

>>95785422 (OP)
> The system

I made a simple, GURPS/MAGIUS esque system. Basically, when you start the game, you get a set amount of points. You spend them to get stuff.

3 points for a Stat (like an attribute in 5e.)
2 points for a perk (just something that changes the rules. Negotiate it with your GM to determine what your perks can be until I stop being lazy and make a bunch of perks.)
1 point for a skill (thing that helps on a narrow selection of rolls), item, spell (if you're doing a magicky campaign), or technique.
Players may gain points by getting a disadvantage (being black, being female, being crippled, etc.).
Harsh penalties that restrict both what you are able to do and how people view you grant you 4 points. Ones that merely restrict you socially grant you 3 points. Ones that are just annoying grant you 2 points. Obviously don't be a faggot and let players take advantage of this.

At the end of every session, everyone who showed up gets 3 points.

Then, at the start and end of every session, you may spend points.You may also hold onto points to gain a skill, item, or technique mid-play.

Overall, negotiation between players for storytelling purposes is key to making this system work.

When intense moments happen, things are moved into a hotseat type gameplay. The players may act whenever, but when they do, the danger starts acting as well. Inspired by the Betrayal at House on the Hill.

> The setting

It is 8 years after WW2, and every member of the group got a letter from said friend, inviting them to his casino in Las Vegas, and so the group gets back together, as most of them were in the New York area still. The world is based off of American spooky mythos, so expect aliens, ghosts, vampires, and Orientalist fears from the time.

>>95867027

>>95860501
Scarlet Letters and Dead light are both good first time scenarios.

Gateways to Terror is a book of one shots and they're all decent but their appeal is that they're short.

I really like running The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse but it takes more work than the others

>>95867825
Sadly I also ran my group through Dead Light (it's one of my favorites).
Is Scarlet Letters really good for a first time? I feel like its sandbox nature and heavy focus on detectives would overwhelm most first-time Keepers.

>>95816143
Liminal Horror or Fear Itself suit the vibe of J-horror, I feel. I've long wanted to run a mini-series in the latter game with an overall focus on supernatural forces as infection/curse a la the Ring, Grudge or Noroi. The antagonist entity is like spiritual radiation, harmful to everyone the PCs ingratiate themselves with. I'd probably track a general 'Doom' quality for each PC and use it as a pool to roll with/against to trigger shenanigans.

I think the curse angle is probably the most unique thematic quality of J-horror.

>>95822908
Looks cool, there's some Nuckelavee going on here.

>>95868415
I feel like Fear Itself is a slept on system. I really want to run a small campaign in it this year.

>>95868454
It's a great intro to Gumshoe, wonderfully expanded on in stuff like Esoterrorists and NBA. I was dreaming up a lot of mini-series ideas while watching the Ju-on Origins show, which blends different points in time into a character-focused narrative. I feel like with flashbacks you could do something similar.

>>95785422 (OP)
I'd like to know your opinion on the different factions that rule over the Metropolis in the setting for my horror-themed card game
Do you think they fit the horror theme, or should I change them for something else?

Monocolor Factions
>The Gray Hand (Fear – Gray)
A brutal crime family that enforces silence through fear, loyalty, and coercion. They control the streets with threats and quiet violence.

>Zero Protocol (Curiosity – Blue)
A decentralized hacker collective exposing secrets and disrupting systems. They believe information must flow freely, no matter the consequences.

>The Anarkists (Passion – Red)
Revolutionaries and saboteurs who burn down authority in a riotous blaze. Every act of chaos is a cry for liberation.

>Celebrants of the Wild Feast (Hunger – Green)
A druidic cult devoted to predation and ritual feasting. They worship the hunt as a path to rebirth and see death as sacred nourishment.

Two-Color Factions
>Vox Broadcast (Gray + Blue)
A media empire spreading paranoia and misinformation. They weaponize truth and fear to keep the public controlled.

>The Red District (Gray + Red)
A world of vice and violence where pleasure conceals control. Fear keeps them silent; desire keeps them enslaved.

>Black Crown Holdings (Gray + Green)
An ultra-capitalist syndicate that feeds on fear and desperation. Every deal is a chain—survival, their product.

>The Ministry of Noise (Blue + Red)
An insurgent art movement using chaos and spectacle as weapons. They disrupt, provoke, and overwhelm through raw expression.

>The Ascension Clinic (Blue + Green)
Biotech radicals rewriting life itself. They seek evolution without ethics—flesh, mind, and data are all fair game.

>Leviathan Industries (Red + Green)
An unstoppable industrial engine driven by passion and hunger. Growth, production, and consumption define their creed.

>>95860851
>the antenna / feelers of an upper-dimensional being trying to perceive our plane? Something stooped over our realm, trying to examine it more closely, and casting a shadow across it?
I wholeheartedly recommend reading the SCP Foundation's Antimemetics Division Hub (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub), also available on Amazon POD as "There Is No Antimemetics Division". It has what you described and a lot more really neat suff.

>>95865498
I read some interesting rules about running a slasher-type adventure on a now defunct blog. Really cute.

https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?page_id=6065
>Characters have 4 stats, which vary based on the game, rated 1 to 5
>That is the dice pool when facing a challenge, success on 4-6
>The Evil is the antagonist
>When a player rolls, the GM may spend Evil Points to roll dice against the player: this represents The Evil choosing this moment to clash with the character, threatening to do them harm, whether the players expect it or not.

>>95867803

...should I?

>>95869987
>consooooooooooom

>>95868422
Nuckelavees are one of my favorite obscure folklore monsters I’d love to work into a game at some point.
I remember learning about them from these cards you could mail order when I was a kid that mostly told you about real animals (alive or extinct), but they also occasionally did supernatural stuff. The art was surprisingly scary for a kids product.

>>95870052
>that face
Chicken jockey!

GMs, What would your Nyarlathotep do if you showed him a soi wojak to undermine his argument?

>>95870279
Nylarly is the cosmic cuck.
>impotently rages and seethes at everything
>plans all fail, existence is predicated on failure
>ummm ackshullies in tears when dismissing humans and human religion
>respected by none, laughed at by all
>servants are weird scalies from his fap group
>arch rival is a based old white boomer god who drives a chad seashell
>always tries to appear as a black man because of wanting to feel cool, also self-loathing and a blacked fetish he denies

I GMed Delta Green last night and they said it was the best one shot they had in their lives.

>>95870473
What did you run?

>>95870537
PX Poker Night (there was no poker)

>>95870297
>always tries to appear as a black man because of wanting to feel cool, also self-loathing and a blacked fetish he denies

That would explain his popularity.

Anyway best nyarly is tentacle head nyarly

>>95869987
No. Do not pay money for games. Instead, home print PDFs from the Share Thread.

>>95845526
There are actually several demons/gods devoted specifically to the toilet. The Babylonian Sulak causes strokes and seizures, the Korean Cheuksin curses children, and of course the various Japanese toilet ghosts like Hanako-san.

>>95868415
That concept's called "kegare," a Shinto term literally meaning "uncleanliness." I love the "spiritual radiation" analogy because kegare doesn't necessarily affect only the people involved in defilement, it affects the land itself. It's why J-horror ghosts are so terrifying; they're not people you can reason with anymore, they're personifications of uncleanliness that NEED to be exorcised.

>>95871645
Yeah, that was the initial inspiration I had for my scenario, which still throws in a bit of eldritch horror for good measure but is at least thematically about kegare made harmful phenomenon. Being in the presence of and thinking about the infection would contribute to that growing pool of Doom. Again, Noroi and Incantation (as well as Impossible Landscapes) were probably the biggest inspirations floating around while I was doing notes.

>>95862095
it sucks ass and is pretty much impossible to play in character. cool for a one shot chips/beer game tho

>>95816143
i had good results ripping off the mulberry/silkworm curse from Kuon for a group that had never played it

>>95870297
>mentions interracial pornography out of nowhere
I see I see

>>95785422 (OP)
Out of all the horrors you could throw at players why does having a shoggoth that doesn’t necessarily have hostile intent but is just there
And is curious about the PC’s and may even stalk or follow them

Seem to be the one thing that consistently spooks players
Having something sanity destroying to look at and could have killed or eaten you just watching, silently following you around sometimes even throughout your daily life, flying floating it’s allways up above somewhere, it knows how to make itself translucent or stay out of sight, it’s there somewhere just behind a tall building or behind a window following you
>pic tangentially related sadly despite the SAN loss none of the PC’s were fucked with a neurological condition that allowed them to perceive shoggoth’s as cute girls

>>95870297
Hey hey people, nylarlathotep here.

>>95876564
If nyarla is sseth who would be mandaloregaming?

>>95869121
Reminds me of a combination of Pentex, the Seers of the Throne, and various SCP GOIs. Alao a little bit of Limbus. Seems like a pretty interesting way to do a horror setting by splitting it between all these amoral megacorps.

>Do you think they fit the horror theme, or should I change them for something else?
They work perfectly fine as is.

>>95874042

dndrone at his best

Are there things which should test your sanity just be perceiving them? Like, normally, you won’t perceive them, but if the conditions are just right, or if it’s trying to be seen, etc, That Which Must Not Be Seen causes psychological damage just be perceiving it. Should that be a thing? Or should psychological damage be limited to seeing Something AND trying to understand, commune with or interact with in some way? For example, just glancing through the Necronomicon or one of the other forbidden lore texts in the mythos shouldn’t be enough to cause mental damage, but trying to use the knowledge therein to enact a sorcerers rite etc may cause mental damage.

Also, should a difference be drawn between things which are so alien that human minds can’t deal with them vs things which are so terrifying that it can cause psychological damage from sheer fright?

>>95877745
Call of Cthulhu addresses this. You can read the Necronomicon and gain Cthulhu Mythos without it affecting your sanity as long as you’re a non-believer. As in, you’re just treating it as a book of folklore. However, the second you DO believe, you take a ton of sanity damage all at once because you suddenly realize all those horrible things you read are probably real.
As for everything else, it’s just a matter of different amounts of sanity damage. Seeing signs of a ghoul attack is less damaging than seeing an actual ghoul.

My regular group was on break this weekend due to some people being unavailable, so a player ran a Delta Green one-shot for two of us(was supposed to be three, but someone got sick). We did The Night Floors and had a great time with it. It ran a little long, but I think we got to a satisfying conclusion. Apparently it's the start of a whole campaign, but it worked great as a one-shot and I highly recommend it as an introduction to Delta Green.

>>95880192
It is built as a potential intro for Delta Green since like God's Teeth's Go Forth it's meant to potentially be the starting point for a long string of other operations between the big chunks of the rest of the campaignbook (Impossible Landscapes)

>>95877745
>Are there things which should test your sanity just be perceiving them?
Unless they have an overtly magical effect to them, I'd say no personally. Whether you're in Lovecraft or some other fantasy/horror setting. Reading about the Headless Horseman or Darkgod McDeathkill or whatever monster should not on its own be enough to "damage" a character. Frighten or unnerve maybe, but if you're using a system with an actual sanity mechanic, probably not directly reduce it.

Encountering the thing directly or involving magic, like
>trying to use the knowledge therein to enact a sorcerers rite etc may cause mental damage.
should though, I feel.

Heya anons. I wanted to ask. Is there a nice place to see jap replays of CoC or to read them? Or is too niche even there to have a special site or something? And also i wanted to run a CoC campaign with some friends but they are new on the tabletop. What do you recommend? (Im also a newb master)

>>95881715
日本語分かる?もし字幕欲しの?

>>95881771
Wouldn't you need to add か to your sentence endings for proper question grammar?

>>95881771
I would prefer if it has subtitles but i think i can translate it. So both options work for me anon! :D

>>95881898
全然。もし教科書通りみたいの表現をしたいなら、そうかも。状況によって「の」付けてとか「も」付けてとか何も付けずも書いていいよ。
Actual Japanese versus polite Japanese are practically two different languages. Not even getting into keigo or fucking Kansaiben.

>>95881934
Go to NND and type in クトゥルフの呼び声, クトゥルフ神話TRPG, or 神クトゥルフ神話TRPG and 朗読 or リプレイ for readings and 実況 for 'live' games.

>>95881993
なるほど。日本語分からない。無理です。

>>95882075
Thanks!

What's your favorite alternate era for Call of Cthulhu?

>>95887437
I'd love to GM some Invictus, but I'm afraid I'd sorry about it too much/my current group wouldn't really grok Rome.

>>95870052
Nuckelavees are great, but I wish there were a good fully traditional depiction. Most versions change one or more details.

Generally they either forget that the horse head has a single eye, forget the fins on the horse legs, forget the hooves on the horse legs, forget the long arms, or forget the thing is a kaijuu.

Side note: The thing is technically a fairy, continuing the long tradition of magical water horses being FUCKING HORRIFYING.

>>95785422 (OP)
So I’ve been reading some of lovecraft himself’s works and I’ve got some ideas brewing very slowly.
For some hooks

After some happenings SAN loss strange dreams and discoveries that hint at a suggestion of what might of occurred in their ancestries a PC discoveres they had a niche skill that there were unaware that they possessed such as writing and drawing on vellum with old tools playing a particular musical instrument or working with a particular set of old craftsman’s tools and equipment
That they had no knowledge training or expertise in prior, it being roughly the first time the PC picks up whatever this is yet somehow alarmingly they are a natural

If this was your character would you find this interesting or refuse to deal with it?

>>95887437
Gaslamp Britain is allways a solid
Though I don’t always like to go full alternate history, more this weird mishmash of real historical events with places that are not real such as doggerel and being a part of England or the US state of carcosa

Heck I’ve been considering running a campaign set in the early 2000s in the British autonomous province of doggerland

>>95887437
Recently played a homebrew campaign set in the 80s and it was really fun. The good thing about that era is that you can play a lot with the fears of the Cold War and hyperconsumerism of the era. 90s can also be cool with the rise of new subcultures and the war on drugs. Tho ngl there is a setting i'd kill to play in and that would be either Mexico on the 1920s or the 80s or Brazil in general considering how chaotic their history is and other crazy stories like the lead mask case in brazil or the narcosatanicos case from mexico.

Got the new King in Yellow campaign book today.

>>95890594
I’ve always wanted an official colonial America book. Something in the vein of The VVitch, with all manner of spooky things going on in the woods just outside of your small settlement.

>>95890754
>place
>place japan

First time Keeper/Gamemaster.
Thinking about starting a COC campaign with some friends.
I was probably going to go with a prewritten module (as much as it pains me to do so) for my first sessions.
Haven't read any of the rulebooks player or keeper.
What are some suggestions, warnings, or advice you anons have for a new keeper? (that isn't just the same shit repeated on reddit and yt)
pic completely unrelated.

>>95893283
Maybe read the rulebook? You don't need the investigators book but reading the keepers book is a good place to start.

>>95785422 (OP)
Does anyone think creepypasta can fit in a game? I found one story called "how to survive in hell" and the whole thing describes a ripe grimdark setting

>>95893822
A creepypasta is just a term for the story. If its nice and entertaining enough, you certainly can use it i guess...

>>95890754
>>95893205
It does feel like that in the naming. But nonetheless tell us about book-anon

>>95893283
>(as much as it pains me to do so)
Why? Prewritten stuff is great and helpful for newbies. You don't know if you and your players are even going to like playing, so why go to the effort of trying to make something(that will probably be objectively bad, anyway) from scratch?
Read the rules and familiarize yourself with how investigation-style games work. You don't have to have everything memorized. Your players should be invested enough to help look things up if it's really needed, but a lot of times it's fine to say, 'Yeah, I'm not really sure about that rule, I'll look it up after but let's keep going for now,' especially when you start getting into the weeds. In my experience you have to either do more prep or have a firm grasp on how the story will unfold for investigative games. Then, when the party does something completely unexpected or goes somewhere you didn't think they would, you're still able to pluck down something that will keep things moving. Also, don't be a faggot; that's always good advice.

>>95893283
>that isn't just the same shit repeated on reddit and yt
Best advice is that the vast majority of CoC advice you've read on plebbit and heard on YT is completely inaccurate bullshit and you should disregard it entirely.

Second, don't stress things. The system is extremely fun.

>>95895207
>Best advice is that the vast majority of CoC advice you've read on plebbit and heard on YT is completely inaccurate bullshit and you should disregard it entirely.
Not that anon, but for example? I don't go on Reddit, but there are a lot of helpful guys on YouTube if you filter for mental illness.

>>95893283
Don’t hide a plot critical clue behind a skill check. If the players looks in the right place, they should get the clue, with the skill check just bringing up further details.
For example, let’s say the players are trying to find a mysterious letter left behind by a dead friend.
>Failure: You find the letter but nothing about it seems to jump out at you. Perhaps you’ll need to see an expert about it.
>Success: You find the letter and feel like there’s something off about the signature at the bottom.
>Hard Success: You find the letter and notice that it is not written in your friend’s handwriting.
>Extreme Success: You find the letter and realize immediately that it’s written in the hand writing of your friend ornery aunt.
In addition, don’t always go for the throat right away with monsters or cultists. It’s fine to have them capture the PCs, ignore them or go after NPCs first.
And if you’re looking for a great starter module, you can’t go wrong with The Haunting.

>>95895550
Agree with this. Locking clues/information behind dice rolls means you have to either fudge things or the players *will* miss important details. This is true of any game, but especially bad for investigative games. You could come up with lots of information with all sorts of ways to obtain it so that the players can come to the right conclusions regardless of what they do, or you can plan for them to fail rolls. I like the way Delta Green does it where if someone has a particular skill over a threshold, they just get the information. That avoids the guy with search 70% failing to find the thing you really need them to. It also avoids everyone failing a skill check and then you giving out something, anyway. If they're going to find something regardless, have them find it, then roll for extra information/insight. Many games also have a mechanic where, if there is no threats or urgency, the players can just spend x amount of time to do a thorough job of something and get the clues they need.

>>95893822
Any creepypasta can be adapted for use in a game if the core concept is good and you think you can pull it off well. Jeff would be a great slasher villain for example.

>>95896723
NTA but I've been looking for a game that does episodic, pulp horror well, do you know any?

>>95897953
Pulp Cthulhu.
There’s also Monster of the Week, though admittedly I haven’t played it, so cannot attest to its quality.

>>95898113
Thanks! I'll check it out.
MotW is PbtA and I have my gripes with the system, but it's so simple I'll probably get a game going sooner or later.

Another game I've been looking into is Very Horror Stories (https://acesgames.it/en/vhs-very-horror-stories-rpg/): the presentation is really up my alley, the wife loves '80s horror flicks, but I'm not sure about the rpg/board game mix.

>>95895484
>Not that anon, but for example? I don't go on Reddit
Things the subshiddit for CoC is convinced of are:
1. No combat can happen in CoC, ever.
2. If combat happens, immediate TPK.
3. TPKs are the goal of the game.
4. Investigators should die or go insane every session.
5. You cannot use CoC for anything else other than Lovecraftian horror games.
6. CoC needs to be political/woke (though that's a given with reddit).

>>95893822
Maybe 0.5% of all creepypastas ever written are actually good, so you'd have to be extremely selective, otherwise you go from the cliche
>you saw a tentacle, you are now insane
to
>you saw hyper realistic shrek, you are now insane

Any Anons planning to compete and submit scenarios for this year's Fairfield Project Shotgun contest?

>>95898113
I tried it a bit. I think in the second edition (that one I just read, not played) it comes out pretty solid, but I'm the lonely anon here that doesn't like Chaosium to give you an idea on my tastes, so your mileage may vary.

The thing is, while it's investigative and all, it's more "squad solving problems" than actual horror, monsters or not. Also like most PBTA is not really episdic, you'll want a medium lenght campaign.

>>95900554
I bought it a few years ago back when I was “I’ll take any supernatural horror RPG” before realizing I really liked CoC and decided I would stick with it, so I never ended up playing it.

>>95898622
>TPKs are the goal
God I hate these niggers with a burning passion. The whole point of CoC is living with the knowledge that your world is a lie, and having to reconcile it with leading a sane lifestyle. That's the good shit. That's the horror. You're an ant on a motherboard who suddenly understands everything about electricity, and then has to go back to being an ant.

>>95898622
>Things the subshiddit for CoC is convinced of are:
Holy kek. Gas them all.

>>95901964
Even the rulebook itself endorses this notion.
CoC being the TPK machine is a stereotype from DnD-onlies who don’t know how to play any other type of game.

>>95902322
Even fucking Delta green, the more horrifically lethal system says this. Because if you don't play out the consequences of your brain being fucking broken, how the absolute fuck are you going to get anywhere RPwise?

>>95901964
>>95902322
>>95902425
The sub also seems to like the idea of guaranteed unplayable insanity. Basically anything that results in the PCs getting fucked, and in almost all cases it's GMs talking about how much they like doing it. They are well and truly faggots.

My proompts are passing my vibe check

>>95902633
The inevitable fate of all GM circle jerks with namefags?

>>95902633
I tend to not even do fully unplayable insanity. I trust my players enough that if I tell them to start doing something crazy, they'll act on my guidance. Because it's not fun when you fail a sanity check in the first round of combat and basically have to sit out the next six rounds or so.
Only time I'd take full control away is zero sanity.

>>95902866
That's part of why I feel like CoC's default sanity system isn't good for roleplaying especially if you play in a non-Lovecraft setting.
posted in the wrong thread lel

>>95902906
Maybe, but I still like it. In fact, I'd say I enjoy it more than Dark Heresy's Sanity system, which doesn't come up enough and, when it does, feels entirely mechanical.
I do think it's a needed thing because a lot of horror RPGs just don't have anything representing the irrational things people do when they're afraid. The fact your investigator could see something horrible and faint is a positive in terms of setting the tone and mood.

I am a published horror writer. Does anyone here write when they're not making gaemz? Here's my bibliography:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?358638

>>95901964
>>95902425
>>95902633
Speaking as someone who also somewhat frequently checks the Ordem Paranormal subreddit (thanks Google Translate), that sort of mentality regarding CoC has also snuck in over there and has thoroughly convinced them that if your system lets you fight back against the monsters at all like Ordem does, then it's actually complete shit and doesn't reflect "true horror" like CoC does. Which is hilarious because not only have all CoC editions and spinoffs argued AGAINST causing TPKs, Ordem itself is based on Esoterrorists which is all about doing investigation, locating the Esoterror cell or ODE intrusion, then blowing that shit straight to kingdom come.

The CoC subreddit simply has an abysmal idea of what 'real horror' is supposed to be and have spread that shit like a disease to other horror TTRPG subs.

>>95904200
>Doxing yourself willingly
I commend you being brave enough to try and shill your books here if nothing else. I like the titles, post an extract/ one of the short poems you did so we can judge your prose and you may get a handful of new buyers anon.
I do write stuff but its not a story just a vague compliation of ideas/ interesting lines/ things that inspired me I want to use

>>95904347
Well shit. I almost checked that place out during the 4chan shutdown earlier in the year and now I’m glad I didn’t.
Are there any other places on the Internet that have decent horror game discussions?

In defense of TPKs I feel like having them be highly likely, though not the goal, would be good for monster of the week one shots if the group wants a cheap monster movie theme.

>>95905224
>Thinks this is doxxing
>Thinks anyone who posts personal info of someone is actually the person themselves
Wow this site has fallen.

>>95905269
I actually homebrewed my own RPG for doing games based off of B-Movies and had high lethality. However, whenever your character died, your next character came in with more XP, representing more competent people learning about and reacting to the problem, but you had to play a class that hadn’t been played yet, and if the players ran out of classes, they lost.
None of the starting PCs made it to the end, but they did win the scenario and all thought it was fun.

>>95905224
Here’s a poem

>>95906005
I did post my own info >>95905637, because I realise the 4chan boogeyman is a meme.

>>95905637
>Spelling doxing with two x's
>Taking someones word they are who they are so they are
Yeah okay you got me there anon, but it seems like its him. Otherwise hes committed to being a random person.
>>95906005
cool poem

>>95905224
>I do write stuff but its not a story just a vague compliation of ideas/ interesting lines/ things that inspired me I want to use
Keep writing! If you have the guts for it, send it out and you’ll be surprised if you’re good enough. I use Submission Grinder to send stuff out. And I only recently got okay at writing short stories.

>>95906032
>cool poem
Thanks! I can show you my short stories as well. I have a puppet story or one set in the colonial era of the Philippines.
I know other anons who got into writing from playing so much Call of Cthulhu. Now they’re published writers in the horror scene.

Not sure if this is the best place to ask but any of you guys have recommendations for horror monsters I can inject into an otherwise gangland/wiseguys SWADE game and still have plausible deniability that nothing supernatural is happening? My players are on the denser side of things so I"m trying to see how long I can keep this charade before one of them calls me on it and we transition into urban fantasy proper. Although while I say that one guy did catch on and he's been egging me on as well. The other 3 not so much, I think most egregiously I had a hairy guy that may or may not have been a weakened werewolf shrug off gunshots and a car ramming him like it was nothing and the other 3 did not bat an eye. So far I've sicked a hillbilly super-mutant, jason-style slasher, and the above werewolf on them, and I"m ramping it up with one of their close allies acting eccentric due to getting possessed by a cursed artifact as well as a guy they murdered in the first session coming back as a fully bandaged up talking zombie by a voodoo inspired gang

Are there any settings in doomed worlds? Maybe not quite as swiftly doomed as Black Sun Deathcrawl or Ten Candles, but worlds where survival is a struggle at best? I wanted to make a game where simply surviving the environment is just as hazardous as any enemies one may encounter.

>>95901964

While they're obviousvly wrong, I think the "SAN 0" memorable bad ending it's not a bug, it's a feature.
So well, not TPK, but burning a few characters is definitely a thing in COC (and not one really borne from HPL or investigative protagonists, let's face it).

>>95904200
I'm slowly working on what I hope to be my first novel, and take part in a writing group in which I mostly write horror.

Does anyone know when is sec edition Trail of Cthulhu coming out?

>>95906021

Not bad.

>>95907840
The Backerkit page says July 2026. So you've got another year of waiting, though they might come out with a PDF earlier.

>>95905258
>Are there any other places on the Internet that have decent horror game discussions?
Unfortunately, you won't find many such places. They're either just as bad as the horror subreddits or they're too niche.

>>95907692
It's deep space, but one of Mothership's core conceits is its focus on having to pick between solve, survive, save, with only one or two at best being feasible in a good scenario. You could easily run Mothership in a failing starship with no aliens or murderous marauders, just based on repairs and getting back to civilisation in one piece.

>>95904347
>The CoC subreddit simply has an abysmal idea of what 'real horror' is supposed to be and have spread that shit like a disease to other horror TTRPG subs.
My unironic theory is it's just shitty GMs getting together and circlejerking to make themselves think they're not so bad. When your idea of "real horror" means that you need to do a me vs. them mindset with your players and watch them grovel while you fuck their characters over every which way, that just sucks. In horror the odds should usually be stacked against the party, I agree, but so many of those fags act like the end goal isn't to have a fun game, or even for the players to be spooked, but to sit back and watch as they have a miserable time and laugh about it. Then they end up with no games and can only go on leddit to pat other faGMs on the back.

>>95910297

Uh. Not what I was expecting. Thanks anyway

>>95912912
it's just purity spiral shit where people exaggerate a stereotype (that's usually based in fact at first) more & more to fit in and come off as 'real' members of a community. patting each other on the back is the goal not a side effect. sadly common

So everyone talks up Horror on the Orient Express, Masks of Nyarlathotep and Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
What other Call of Cthulhu campaign books are good? Not one-shot adventures, full campaigns.

>>95913961
This.

>>95785422 (OP)
Might join a Delta Green group at my LGS soon. Can I get a quick rundown of what would be in store for me?

>>95925549
DG imo is good because it tightens the CoC formula very well. You always have a reason to introduce new characters, and you always have a reason to have the equipment to fight the eldritch if needed. Lethality rolls are also very nice.
As for how it actually plays, it's a lot of the same bends as CoC. Especially if it's the original 90's system. The only real problem is that it's *designed* around having a larger agency to call on, or some company/government to pull strings in. If you just want to play a small town firefighter or whatever, you'd be hard pressed to make it work.

>>95785422 (OP)
>UA thread dies
Well fuck me, I guess. Just finished a session, it went okay but two of my players are leaving with weirdish ideas about how Thaumaturgy works, and ascribing a moral element to magic. I'm not sure how to deal with that properly.

>>95926124
What is /hsg/'s opinion on a Phoenix Point-like campaign setting?

Picked this up at free RPG Day at my FLGS… mainly because I want to see if my suspicions about this game not being very good are confirmed.
Has anyone else played the Arkham Horror RPG?

>>95932413
Cute

As a birthday gift, one of my players got me a commission of one of my favorite moments so far of the Horror on the Orient Express campaign I've been running: The destruction of the Blood Red Fez.
My players had succeeded in getting the Fez during the train ride over to Constantinople, as well as the spell book detailing how it worked and all its powers. So they decided it would be best to destroy the Fez as soon as possible even before meeting Nissra's men for the hostage exchange.
The player wearing the Fez failed the roll and asked to push it. Problem was the POW cost from pushing the roll (since pushing a failed spell requires you to pay several times the original cost) would kill him. I told him he could push it, but regardless of whether he succeeded or failed, it would kill him. He accepted the terms and made the roll (just barely), the Fez melting and burning through the top of his head while the rest of the party could only look on in horror.
The party was a mix of the pre-made characters for the chapter and original ones. The character who sacrificed himself was archaeologist Professor Harold Worth. The party members standing around the body are, from left, carriage driver Marion Knaggs, American cattle rancher Clayton Moore, British military officer Captain Roderick Barrington and Turkish historian Dr. Kasim Polat. Not pictured is British criminal George Banks, who was in bed healing up when this happened and didn't take part in or witness the ritual.

>>95931507
Lean into it.
I finished my own UA session. Holy shit, crit successes and fails turned this one into a fucking shit show. The dipsomancer almost killed himself picking a wammied lock, but then the Entropomancer one shot the bound ghost that was protecting the storage unit, after getting his 5th failed notch in Unnatural. Insane fucking ending.

>>95912642
A few months ago I finished the remaster of the mass effect trilogy
A thing that stood out for me is how the planets in the first mass effect game didn’t feel like they were designed with human habitation or even the habitation of most life in mind

These places are not for you and weee not meant for you
Gameplay wise they were boring but visually they were stunning
Planet descriptions were also surprisingly well written and felt like thousands of real planets that astronomers have discovered

The loneliness of 1 that really wasn’t matched by the other mass effects and with the realistic planet descriptions inspired some ideas in me for a longer running traveler like mothership or death in space campaign

Worlds similar to an asteroid or our moon are the easy ones
There are places people have managed to set foot on with vechiles and space suits that no man was ever meant to tread
Simply because of the uncaring nature of the cosmos and that our garden cradle was the exception not the norm, for a start look up what it would be like trying to step foot on some of the planets in our solar system

Players would be desperately trying to maintain a ship making jumps between Outland systems as stops on a long journey
that many have set foot on and have launched a mirad of probes or struck up temporary residence in these places for their bounties but only a few have stuck around in these vast reaches to call them home

>>95931507
No need to deal with it - people in UA subscribe all sorts of shit to their magic that isn't necessarily true at all.

>>95931815
It has been a dream of mine for some time to run an X-COM campaign.

>>95934641
While I'm throwing ideas around, your post and the original save survive solve concept also gets my brain going over running a longer-form Space Colony game, with the players as notable residents of some frontier colony having to maintain and grow their fledgling habitat into a place worth calling a home. Thinking Deadwood but in space. Alien's Building Better Worlds supplement actually flirts with the idea of a West Marches style approach, using a colony as a home base for outward exploration and expansion. Not sure if I would use Free League's system though.. maybe Hostile or Traveller in general.

>huge universe with tons of campaign options (hundreds of task forces, sites, researchers, normal people, ...)
>great variety of genres (body horror, psychological horror, cosmic horror, ...)
>no single canon, almost complete freedom for the GM
>semi-endless free inspiration and ideas
Is this the best horror setting?

>>95937063
>went woke
>got bloated with way too many creatures
>tons of edgy mary sue donut steel entries
>95% of content made after the first year is bad creepypasta-tier
>completely inconsistent and incoherent tone and worldbuilding
No.

>>95937141
You can make something out of it that's pretty interesting with minimal work
Plus, due to there not being canon, you can easily just disregard shit you hate.

>>95934714
Personally I like a lot of the systems in mothership and death in space
The ship breakers toolkit is great shit, but a lot of the base gear in base mothership especially Leaves something to be desired in terms of ability to traverse hostile worlds, such as a cold ice planet with an atmosphere of ammonia, (environmental suit only provides an hour of oxygen seriously?)
but that can easily be fixed by adding some extra expensive gear

>>95937063
As someone who most enjoys cosmic horror, SCP commits a cardinal sin: It makes Earth too important.
God and the Devil are there, all these cosmic forces have vested interest in the planet, there are lots of entities that focus on humans and humans exclusively. It takes me out of things.

>>95937141
It is practically public domain. You can make your own version of it.

>>95932888
God I do fucking love seeing snapshots into other people's worlds like this. Good shit, anon. That was very cool of your player to get that for you.

>>95940909
Oh I’m very happy with the gift, and my friend got it for criminally cheap. Though I have to say, the image is kinda funny due to the poses of the non-dead characters.
In the image, they’re all mostly looking on obviously taken aback, but stern and resolute, except for Kasim.
In actuality, this was the biggest Sanity hits for most of them, with Clayton and Roderick both getting hit with bouts of madness. Clayton became extremely violent, wanting to go out and throttle the Children of the Blood Red Fez cultists immediately, while Roderick developed a phobia for parasites and became convinced the blood that the Fez had infected him somehow and he went running for a Turkish bathhouse in order to rigorously scrub his body raw.

Anyone remember that one RPG where the characters were trapped in some sort of demon pact where they were trying to achieve their own goals before they were overcome?
It was talked here for a while but it disappeared.

Delta Green sounds real neato, but I'm somewhat concerned over how much the player materials bring up departmental overviews and various bureaucracy stuff. Is DG a game about investigating/countering unknown horrors and threats or should I expect most of my session time to be spent jumping through hoops trying to avoid being fired from my normie agency job?

>>95941270
Completely depends on how the handler runs the game. It seems like 90 percent of DG games are just barely (if at all) connected one shots, so I'm guessing it comes up less than the material would have you believe.

>>95941315
That's nice to hear. And reading through stuff, it doesn't seem like getting fired is even all that bad if you can creatively source shit.

>>95941211
The only thing that comes to mind is Better Angels but i'm not sure if that is what you are thinking of. It's where you play as supervillains empowered by demons.

>>95941270
Your department only comes into play if you fuck up massively. It's to ensure that you think twice before trying to get any serious equipment.

>>95941422
No thats not it. It had a very distinct art style, was like middle ages/crusades era maybe?

>>95942906
>>95941211
I know what you're talking about. It has some sort of latin name but all I'm pulling up is Libris Mortis which sure ain't it.

>>95941211

Sorcerer?

>>95941211
>>95941422
>>95942906
>>95944584
You're talking about Memento Mori.

>>95937063
I'm thinking of doing a CoC game in the 1920s with a predecessor of the SCP. Not sure if that would work. I also don't have players.

>>95945057
Fuck yeah that is exactly it.
Thanks for the save, anon.

>>95939053
True, I guess it fits in the overarching theme of "The Foundation is all-powerful and there's nothing we can't do" but I can see it's a departure from traditional CH.

>>95945543
Technically the Foundation has been around for centuries, even being under papal authority at some point, I'm sure the '20s won't be an issue.
>players
i cri 2

https://1shotadventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Gotham-39-CoC.pdf
This was much worse than I thought it’d be but my player beat it easily as an undercover Batman

>>95948981
>Much worse
Aw, that’s a shame. I have a friend who is a huge Batman fan who would have loved playing this.
What’s bad about it?

>>95949160
You can still run it! I just had high expectations because my sibling is a huge Batman fan and I wanted to wow them with a CoC adventure in Gotham.
The connections between each act are a bit flimsy and it’s too open ended in the 3rd act. There needs to be a better countdown for the antagonist to attack. Some of the clues never add up to anything and there’s too many characters, in the opinion of my player. A lot of loose ends…

Thoughts on the Scarlet King mythos?

>>95952842
I generally find SCP shit pretty uninspiring. Looking up this guy, he commits the cosmic horror sin of being actively evil/hostile, whereas I prefer them to be destructive through apathy or ignorance of their own power. It's the same reason I find demons to be incredibly dull.
Also, his name is a rip off of a rip off.

>>95953821
Some of the earliest cosmic horrors ever made (as in, older than Lovecraft's work and an active inspiration for him) were the Powers of Night from the Night Land who were not only actively evil, but also pretty explicitly demonic with vague "Powers of Good" in opposition to them. If anything, explicitly evil cosmic horrors are a return to form. Lovecraft himself even played with the concept via Nyarlathotep, who WAS genuinely malign.

>Also, his name is a rip off of a rip off.
Beyond names, they have nothing in common.

>>95953885
Sure, but personal preference, I don't generally like actively malicious/evil cosmic horrors. Nyarlathotep is fine because he's an exception to the rule of his setting and his maliciousness is born out of his own powerlessness and need to understand mortals to fulfill his function.
But having all powerful beings giving a shit about the lives of petty mortals and actively wanting to ruin them takes me right out of it. If you're so big and powerful, why do you care? Space is vast and the Earth is tiny. If you're the kind of thing that concerns yourself with the fabric of reality, how did you even find, much less get a vested interest in, one single planet?
It's like going to a beach to play with a single grain of sand, only even more extreme given how big the universe is.

>>95953992
>If you're so big and powerful, why do you care? Space is vast and the Earth is tiny. If you're the kind of thing that concerns yourself with the fabric of reality, how did you even find, much less get a vested interest in, one single planet?
The same reason why a child burns an anthill with a magnifying glass

>>95954297
Sure, but again, that only really works for me if the entity acting as such is a fringe case, such as Nyarlathotep. Do it too much and you humanize your cosmic horror to the point it isn't a vast, unknowable entity, but just a petty child. It's the same problem I have with the Chaos Gods in 40k.
Shaping your entire mythos about these cosmic forces caring very deeply about humans, humanity and wanting to fuck with them feels like you're diminishing the genre and misunderstanding what makes cosmic horror great. A black hole doesn't suck up a solar system because it hates the things that live there. It doesn't even know they exist, and sucking them up is just a by-product of its existence.
Admittedly I'm somewhat of a hypocrite here. I'm writing a cosmic horror novel with a deity that has an interest in mortal lifeforms, though in its case, it's not acting out of maliciousness but curiosity, and I'm specifically characterizing it as being like how a scientist can get interested in amoeba. We're so far beneath it that it genuinely wants to know how we function with, say, only three dimensions.

>>95954473
>It's the same problem I have with the Chaos Gods in 40k.
I'd almost want to say that the Chaos Gods are a unique situation as they are personifications of mortal emotions. To feel rage is to both worship and draw power from Khorne and so on even if you don't intend to. You're linked inextricably with this higher power and in part exist because of them so there's this deeper horror about the very act of living and being human can be twisted so horrifically by higher powers that embody vices and virtues writ large on a cosmic scale.
The real shitty part comes in when suddenly you have people left and right somehow magically overcoming impossible odds and telling them to eat shit pretty regularly.

>prepping to be a DG player
>thinking of what kind of equipment and weapons my agent would have
>tfw /k/ autism demands I identify an actual firearm vs the light/medium/heavy pistol abstraction
Kill me

>>95893283
I like Seth Skorkosky's CoC videos. They give a good intro to the game.

>>95953992
>But having all powerful beings giving a shit about the lives of petty mortals and actively wanting to ruin them takes me right out of it. If you're so big and powerful, why do you care?
The goal of purposefully malign cosmic horrors is to either A) annihilate all existence, B) annihilate all existence in the most needlessly cruel and torturous manner possible, or C) condemn every single thing that exists in reality to a fate worse than death. For the first one, it doesn't matter whether you're an individual, a planet, a galaxy, or even a universe - they kill you because you're in their way and a part of the absolute mandate they have for all things. For the second and third, they do the things they do because they delight in the suffering of mortal life. They could end it all instantly, but they WANT to draw things UT because they hate existence and they hate you, they hate all the things that make you up, they hate your world, and they hate the very metaphysics that gave rise to your mere being. Even if it's just an infinitesimal moment for something at that scale, it will draw out your anguish for as much worth as they can because it is their statement against the very notion that existing is a priori good.

>>95954473
>It's the same problem I have with the Chaos Gods in 40k.
In the Chaos Gods case, they're specifically called out as being only debatably sapient. They're just storms of raw Warp currents that exist only to perpetuate the emotions and feelings that give them form. There is no true intelligent action or design behind the things they do, merely narrative laws they act out to continue persisting like a cancer on the ass of reality. They're very different from Nyarly's brand of malice because there is no human thought process informing their actions.

A similar case applies to the Fears in Magnus Archives. Outside of two, the rest are explicit described as being closer to starving animals than people.

>>95955976
Addressing the first of your two points, I much prefer the A example over over B and C, but it is also a matter of motivation. I don’t want it to destroy reality because it hates reality, because to me, a cosmic god shouldn’t have identifiable emotions like that. If it’s destroying reality because, say, it’s an embodiment of entropy, that’s better, but I would like it to act without an active malice. See my earlier statement on black holes.

To the point about the Chaos Gods, that’s fine and dandy, but GW writers contradict it all the time. Khorne bellows with rage, the gods have rivalries with each other, Nurgle punished Mortarion for failing to kill Guilliman and getting the garden damaged. They can say they’re barely sentient, but they sure are written like they’re sentient.
To my mind, the only properly cosmo horror major faction in 40k is the Tyranids, and even then GW has been trying to fuck that up lately by having them “hate” the Blood Angels for some reason.

Has anyone ever played Horror on the Orient Express? I might run Simulacrum Unbound, which is a modern one shot that is supposed to recap highlights of the 1920s campaign

>>95956858
I’m running it right now and having a blast. We’re heading to Milan next chapter and all my players have been having fun.
Simulacrum Unbound really works best as an epilogue. Your players aren’t going to appreciate the call-backs without playing through the campaign itself.

>>95956884
That sounds amazing. I'm envious of your players
Good point. I might just get the book set and ask my sibling if they will suffer through it to play with me

Do you use VTT? If so, is Roll20 any good? I know many prefer foundry.

>>95957516
R20 ranges from "Fine" to "Fucking annoying" in it's mechanics. It'd honestly be less work just to buy tabletop sim for your friends and learn that.
Basically fine for low intensity shit. But anything more intricate than a DnD crawl will need Foundry or TTS

>>95957605
Thanks! I don't really like Roll 20 but I can't run Foundry on my current laptop, so I will just have to upgrade.

Is 7th edition Call of Cthulhu the best RPG out right now?

>>95948218
I get the opposite sense actually, part of why I don't like SCP. The Foundation seems comedically stupid and inept, and can barely even function.

>>95957750
Probably, but that's BRP in general. I think BRP is legitimately the best system there is. Very solid on its own, infinitely hackable/homebrewable. You can do anything with it and it just will not break.

>>95957605
>>95957664
IMO Foundry is awful. Overrated and horribly user unfriendly. For all its flaws Roll20 is the best option out there, especially if you like homebrew and flexibility.

>>95792366
I'm kitbashing or at least planning to kitbash a Jersey Devil for my Warhammer Fantasy Beastmen one day. Obviously can't use them for the game, but as a shelf piece, i think it could be cool. The board game Fearsome Wilderness has a Jersey Devil mini that I shall take inspiration from

>>95957886
>User unfriendly
Roll20 is good for ground level shit but foundry is infinitely better for things like scripting, or complex GM shenanigans.

>>95912642
>>95938209
I ran a session of Mothership and I really think that the system is kind of awful. Even ignoring the gay shit and Artpunk cringe (0E art was mostly trash and it's better in 1E. I also removed all of the pronoun/trans/commie garbage from the PDFs) it feels like most of the game is really shallow. Even little things like ammo consumption. Smart Gun has 15 listed for ammo, revolver has 5. Is that the total magazine size? The amount of ammo consumed by one attack? The answers, if you ask Reddit:
>dunno lol
>my group doesn't track ammo
>I use usage die
>I bought these 3d printed bullet counters on Etsy!

It just doesn't feel like a game designed for anything more than the most casual of groups, and a stage for module writers to show off how they can insert their own little shitdick political virtue signals (seriously, look at the random item search table in Dead Planet. The corpse of Lenin is included in it.)
It's a shame, because despite the culture war crap, I still backed the Kickstarter and was excited to see how the game would improve upon 0E but it's overall a very low effort product. I would love to have an easy to run, do-it-all sci-fi horror system on standby but the shortcomings of the game are enough that the amount of house rules required to run the game are approaching home brew status. Despite this, my group had fun with the one intermission session we played of it and we'll likely run at least one more to finish off the scenario.

I have the Alien RPG but have never run it. I'll probably give that a shot next time. What else exists for good sci-fi horror?
(Picrel, I guess? It was the first horrific sci-fi thing I found saved on my phone)

>>95958200
You sound like a bitch, I'm glad you had a bad time.

>>95958412
Eat my dick, gayboy.

>>95958200
I'll admit that I don't have a lot of experience with Mothership and can easily ignore any political posturing - finding Lenin would make my group hysterical. It clearly has a one-shot focus to it. There are well-documented contradictions with mechanics like combat with monsters.
Alien's been fun for my group as a one-shot, but I've also been aware of Hostile (Cepheus) for a while. Seems like Outland/Alien bundled into a Traveller sourcebook.

>>95958200
all artpunk "games" are bad

>>95959788
This is true. I also played Forbidden Psalm with a friend and, while I had a good time, couldn't help but roll my eyes at the absolute lack of depth. I get that "rules-lite" is the flavor, but most all of these games go too far in that direction.
>>95959431
First I've heard of Hostile, besides where it was mentioned earlier in this thread. I'll have to give it a look. I really like Classic Traveller so that seems up my alley.

>>95958319
Fresh horrors await...

>>95960862
Great