Your Own Private Mythos

There's much common ground between something like LOTFP (a weird horror interpretation of classic D&D) and Cthulhu Dark Ages, which takes that classic Mythos investigation experience and roots it in a similar world of swords and armor, castles and monasteries. For that matter, we could put Cthulhu Invictus in the same conversation, with it's foundation in Roman history.

I've discussed some of the differences before; D&D characters advance primarily through earning treasure; if D&D guys are encountering eldritch horrors, it's likely incidental to exploring some crumbling place seeking money.  Cthulhu investigations might kick off with a job offer, but the campaigns usually become "save the world" affairs once the characters learn what's going on.  There are some other differences too - ritual magic vs Vancian magic, sanity rules and the sanity death spiral.  Both styles feature frequent character death, and the setting transcends the characters.  It'd be interesting to take a look at how the differing mechanics inform the divergent play experiences.

Today though, how about just looking at the presence or absence of Chaosium's bestiary?  Lovecraft's work is in the public domain, but Chaosium has licensed the creations of many post-Lovecraft writers who have extended the Cthulhu Mythos, providing the Call of Cthulhu keeper a vast bestiary for scenario building.  (See Malleus Monstrorum for an excellent Cthulhu bestiary).

There's a saying writers frequently quote - something like "constraints breed creativity".  It's the idea that it's much easier to launch into a short story on a guided subject than starting with a blank paper.  In the gaming space, much of the reason folks love random tables so much is the inspiration a few cryptic results on a table provide as a departure point for creation.

So I wonder whether the more fruitful exercise is to create Lovecraftian monsters whole cloth, establishing your own Mythos along the way, or building on the preexisting forms and reinterpreting them?  Would it be more fun, say, to find a creative new use for the Deep Ones, or Fungi from Yuggoth, as antagonists in a campaign setting, or start from scratch with an entirely new Mythos race?  There's an inspirational book, Stealing Cthulhu, by Graham Walmsley, that's all about suggestions on shuffling the deck of Mythos threats while reusing the building blocks of Lovecraft's stories and his signature creations.

There's a dynamic in Cthulhu game writing of obfuscating or hiding the tracks of the monsters, since so many of them are known quantities, and the game-within-the-game becomes that moment when the savvy players go "Aha!  We've identified the bad guy!"; the base bestiary is well known after 30 years, and enough peels of the onion are eventually revealed for the players to name the threat.  Using the known bestiary provides that creative framework for the writer, but also leads to a sense of accomplishment for the players when they piece it all together.  But the use of that existent bestiary doesn't further the cause of unknowable horror. It’s perhaps the opposite.

What's the argument against new creations?  For starters, they don't have the gravitas of 80+ years of print history.  Lovecraft's creations have deep resonance.  I denigrated that "Aha moment" when the players realize what they're up against, but it can perhaps just as easily be an "Oh shit!" moment when the players realize what they're up against.  It's asking a lot for professional writers, whether it's fiction or gaming products, to measure up to The Man.  Why recreate the wheel when the building blocks are already there?

Let me see if I can reduce some of these thoughts to just a few bullet points, pro and con.  Please feel free to add more in the comments if there are important factors I missed:

Arguments for using Lovecraft's creations:

• 80+ years of print lends gravitas and mystique
• The Aha! moment when players ID the perp
• The Oh shit! moment when players ID the perp and realize they're screwed
• Lovecraft's creations already hold deep resonance

Arguments for your own private Mythos:

• Horror should be unknowable
• Only Chaosium licenses the whole thing
• It might be fun to re-imagine it from scratch

I still don't know exactly what kind of custom campaign I'm doing after the Black City run; I mean, I promised the players we'd return to Gothic Greyhawk and pick up with one of the older campaigns for a bit, but beyond that, I'm obsessed with moving forward with a horror-themed campaign.  Otherwise, I'm a hot mess - switching gears between the Caribbean, gothic Yorkshire, colonial New England, and so forth - pages of campaign idea stubs littering my notebooks.  However, I've been catching up on so much Chaosium reading lately, it seems natural to ask - why not just use the Mythos, regardless of system?  On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of Mike Mignola and the Hellboy universe, and Mignola is an example of a creator that's used Lovecraft's themes to create a mythology and universe with wholly new creations to great success.  It can certainly be done.  I highly recommend BPRD and Hellboy if you like pulp horror comics.

What do you guys think?  Seems like a good time for a new poll - Lovecraft monsters are somewhat popular out here on the blogs, are you most interested in a creative use of an existing entity or creating something new?


*The image is Ogdru Jahad from the Hellboy comic, one of the great old one like monsters from the Hellboy universe.

Nyarlathotep Made Me Do It

All my recent business travel has given me a lot of time to get caught up on RPG reading, but not as much time for blogging.  I'll be able to put up more reviews coming in the next few weeks.  One thing that's been strikingly clear re-reading pieces from the Chaosium back-catalog is that many writers suffer from "too much Nyarlathotep" syndrome.

Lovecraft's Mythos is indifferent to humanity - or at least, his most powerful tales express cosmic indifference.  The frightening beings of the Mythos are either powerful aliens or totally monstrous gods that are oblivious to us.  Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, Nyarlathotep, the supposed Crawling Chaos and messenger and soul of the outer gods, morphed into the boogeyman.   Nyarlathotep is the one that left the toilet seat up, let the air out of the tire, or drank the last of the milk and put an empty back in the fridge.  Every oddball demon is an avatar of Nyarlathotep, and every cultist plot is being moved along by Nyarlathotep like a 4-color super villain.  Muhaha.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling investigators.

It's convenient to have a personal adversary for humanity, if you're writing a pulp action campaign and/or supernatural horror.  I happen to love Supernatural Horror; I've been digging the world of Innistrad, for instance, from the Magic the Gathering card game.  It would make a fine D&D setting.  The protector of the world, a powerful angel, was trapped in the selfsame prison she was using to exile demonkind.  Humanity has been left alone to fend for itself in a  nightmare world of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night.  Everyone is a victim.  It's a great set up for all the gothic horror tropes, and the fall of the world's angelic guardian creates a sense of both loss and hope in the setting as humans cling to their lost faith.  No matter how dark the setting appears, players could always hold out hope of learning how to restore the lost guardian and return light to the world.  It would make a spectacular campaign arc for dark fantasy.

Yeah, but none of that belongs in a Lovecraft setting.

It's not particularly easy to run a bleak campaign built around themes of cosmic horror, I get it.  Much easier to write something with two-fisted action and guns blazing, and this is the form of many of the larger Call of Cthulhu campaigns, like The Masks of Nyarlathotep.  (Although I do think it would be super cool to convert Masks to a fantasy rules set and run it like a D&D game - brothers and sisters, can I get a "Huzzah" for a "Lamentations of Nyarlathotep" game?)

So yes, I blame Mythos adventure writers looking for a convenient way to string together their convoluted plots with a supernatural puppet-master pulling the strings and twirling his moustache.  But Nyarlathotep-made-me-do-it is also a problem with trying to be inclusive with all of Lovecraft's writing - does the high fantasy of the Dreamlands really have anything to do with the author's later works, which express a scientific world view and the passage of geologic time?  Nyarlathotep's speech at the end of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the most exposure we get to the being, and he's downright chummy with Randolph Carter in a good-on-ya-chap-sort-of-way, in the final sequence.

Individual referees can apply their own interpretation to reconcile the Nyarlathotep-boogeyman with their perspective on cosmic horror in the campaign, so I realize there are apologists out there; in Trail of Cthulhu, Ken Hite offers a wide range of ideas to help sort the mess, from 'Nyarlathotep is human perception anthropomorphizing cosmic reality' to a telepathic construct of the Great Old Ones, the true form behind all the gods, or even just a powerful agent.  And yes, he can even be The Boogeyman.  If you must.

The Dungeon Under the City

The City State of the Invincible Overlord (CSIO) is one of those legendary publications from early D&D.  It describes a sprawling city, very much in the Sword & Sorcery mode, with numerous malign temples, shadowy cults, and nefarious characters and activities.  The sewers beneath the city were written up as dungeons in a product called Wraith Overlord.  (I never had the originals, but had the Necromancer Games versions that were updated for 3rd Edition).

Inspired by the CSIO, Scott posted this blurb as a kick-off to such a campaign:

His Incomparable Effulgence the Dread High Dingus of the Great City of Faz has decreed that the Underworld beneath the City is open for plunder, its denizens to be regarded as caitiffs and malefactors utterly without recourse to the otherwise boundless beneficence of the law.

You have consulted with a hooded figure in a soggy reeking tavern, the consensus being that information thus gleaned is unimpeachable in such matters.  His sibilant counsel is that one ingress to the maze lies in the Furtive Quarter, in the cellars of the ruined Temple of Ghonk.  And that is where you, suitably outfitted and girded, find yourselves.
-From Huge Ruined Pile

How awesome is that?  Now, fueled by my experiences running the weekly Black City, I'll point out some additional opportunities why this type of campaign strongly appeals - besides the short walk to the home base.

Human Mayhem
The BX bestiary is filled with human opponents:  bandits, acolytes, mediums, traders, veterans, berserkers, and more.  A dungeon beneath a city could be filled with smugglers, thieves, assassins, rival priests, and all sorts of malcontents and scoundrels.  Encounters with other humans are generally excellent for my game; NPC adventurers are muy deadly; humans offer excellent roleplaying; human encounters alter the equation of attack or flee more directly than monster encounters; every encounter can be a bit of a stand-off or showdown.  Putting the dungeon right under the city ensures a regular stream of human opponents and complications.

Modularity
The transit tunnels below the ruins of the Black City are like a giant subway system, with 5 medium dungeons and another 5-6 mini dungeons separated by long hauls; spreading them out geographically gives me space to diversify the environments and create a sense of scope and distance.  I think the same effect could be achieved with a sprawling sewer dungeon.

---

Lately I've been reading HP Lovecraft's Dreamlands, a Call of Cthulhu setting based on the author's fantasy works.  I've added some more Lord Dunsany to my reading queue as well - I have a business trip coming up and expect to get a lot of reading done on the plane; plus, I always thought The Gods of Pegana were a Wilderlands influence.  The Dreamlands has plenty of sprawling cities, beneath which lie passages and ways to the many storied and monstrous realms beneath the ground, like the Vaults of Zin or the Vale of Pnoth, or the City of the Gugs.  Sewer dungeons leading to a mythical underworld are full of possibilities.

(Not saying that I'd use the Dreamlands other than as inspiration, although it does seem awfully ripe for a cool D&D campaign).

Blogthulhu

Does anyone know of some good blogs on Cthulhu and Lovecraft gaming?  I regularly read Ken Hite's and Dan Harm's blog (when they post), and Pookie's Reviews from R'hlyeh.  AD&D Grognard started a blog for Cthulhu board games.  There are lots of places that discuss Lovecraft fiction, but other than the campaign journals on yog-sothoth.com, not a lot of blogging.  (Flames Rising sometimes has COC or Trail stuff, but mostly World of Darkness).  Let me know what I'm missing!  thanks-

Happy Friday the 13th!

My kind of M:TG card!

It's Friday the 13th, and the mind invariably drifts to slasher flicks and cheesy killers in hockey masks.

Okay, well that's what I was thinking about today, at least. Such a long dreary week.  Don't Be Afraid of the Dark came in the mail, and I'm excited to experience the Del Toro remake.  Tonight is a good night for some horror!

Far and away, the worst opponents in any horror game are the psychotic humans - the mad, deranged killers, and the hillbilly clan of cannibals.  When the group's attention is focused on monsters that look the part, they often fail to notice that they've entered the domain of a two-legged monster, that looks just like them, until it's too late.

Implacable and insane human opponents play a key role in a few of my favorite Call of Cthulhu scenarios - let's take a look at The Worm that Walks, and The Hills Rise Wild.

The Worm that Walks is one of the chapters in The Shadows of Yog Sothoth campaign; while the group is visiting a benefactor, they discover a lead that takes them out to an old cabin ("Don't go in the woods!") where something occult may have happened; what's really waiting for them out there are a bunch of characters straight out Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The signature scene is when one of the killers bursts out of a pile of bones, startling any adjacent investigators, and whacking one of them with a huge axe.

In The Hills Rise Wild, the adventurers are trekking overland in rural Dunwich looking for a fallen meteor.  When they take advantage of some country hospitality, they put themselves at the mercy of a deranged cultist and his downbeaten and abused family.  It's quite creepy.

For a literary reference, take a look at Lovecraft's The Picture in the House.  It's one of the earlier tales, and has an ending reminscent of an Edgar Allen Poe story.  It's an excellently creep story.  A traveler in the Miskatonic Valley enters a lonely farmhouse when caught out in a storm; the minimalist story begins to get unsettling when he starts flipping through an old book and has a progressively more disturbing conversation with the menacing owner of the house.  I don't want to give the ending or twist away if you haven't read it; it's a short story so go check it out yourself.

I haven't been mean enough to put a nasty family of hillbilly cannibals into a regular D&D game; players accustomed to only seeing monsters where they have green skin or tusks would be far too easy to lure in - like shooting fish in a barrel.  But it's time I rectified this egregious oversight.  In the meantime, let me know how you've used "cannibal hillbillies" in the comments.

I'm off to see Don't Be Afraid of the Dark!

Vacationing at the Lake of Hali - A Carcosa Review

Carcosa is a 143 page PDF published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess; it's a setting that describes the forsaken planet of Carcosa and the Lake of Hali (the names of both locations hail from the Cthulhu Mythos and the Lovecraft circle of writers).  I had the chance to read the PDF version of Carcosa over the holidays.  The physical book is still on the way.

The PDF is nice looking and functional; the two-facing pages read very well on an iPad and the hyperlinks let you zoom all over the place.  As a publisher, LOTFP is distancing itself from the hobbyist side of the OSR by turning out progressively more polished products.

The artwork in Carcosa is amazing and it's a joy leafing through and soaking up the pictures.  Every piece is done by the same artist and he did a great job with all of the Lovecraftian horrors and scenes of high tech carnage.

So what is Carcosa like?  It's a singular piece of fevered imagination that brings me back to flipping through Heavy Metal magazine and gazing at Omni covers at my cousin's place down the street when I was a kid.  Carcosa is what happens when your Call of Cthulhu investigators fail to stop the return of the Great Old Ones, and the world is plunged into horror and madness.  Failure is an option, and that option looks like Carcosa.

The setting describes a distant planet ruled by the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos, where humanity is the bottom of a food chain that includes alien horrors, ancient serpent men, elder gods, mad robots, and cyborgs.  Humanity is hopelessly fractured into different colored races of man, and the monstrous sorcery used by the inhuman sorcerers of Carcosa uses men as components in horrible rituals.  It's a bleak setting ideal for horror gaming or adventure gaming with lots of horror elements.

What I Liked
Carcosa thrusts difficult ethical choices into the foreground, and if your table enjoys mature discussions on that level, you'll enjoy Carcosa.  Standard D&D type gaming allows players to happily stab the orcs, goblins, and kobolds in the face and loot the bodies;  moral dilemmas in the dungeon can be minimized by distinctions of race and alignment.  Carcosa removes the distinctions; there are two types of opponents - other humans, on the one hand, and all the inhuman aliens and Great Old Ones on the other.  Carcosa's approach to humanity reminds me of ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroborus, where the different races of humans are called Goblins, Demons, Ghouls, and so on, living in Demonland or Goblinland, but they're all people nonetheless.  The names are just labels.  I could probably write a lengthy post on how Carcosa's use of color generates such interesting questions - it's like the Trek episode with the black and white faced guys who hate each other irrationally - only on Carcosa, it's the whole planet.

The other element that creates ethical  problems on Carcosa is the sorcery.  The recommended magic system for the setting uses ritual magic to conjure, bind, banish, imprison, or torment various eldritch entities.  It's reminiscent of the magic system of Call of Cthulhu, where a player needs to think long and hard before choosing to learn and use magic because of the costs.  On Carcosa, all rituals require human sacrifice.  If you enjoy the high drama of Faustian bargains and deciding when the ends justify the means, this is for you.

Beyond those two points, there are lots of neat little mechanical items to recommend Carcosa.  There's a hex crawl that covers 400 hexes (2 encounters per hex) - 800 encounters.  That's a lot of coverage.  There are tons of new monsters, stats for all the Great Old Ones, rules for psionics, robots, cyborgs, and plenty of artifacts.  I can see many of the artifacts making it into my own campaigns immediately.

Issues
I have some issues with the material that I'd likely change if I were to use Carcosa as a complete setting.  First, there are a series of suggested rules that require rerolling various hit dice and damage dice at the start of each combat; even psionic talents vary from day to day.  I haven't play tested those rules, but my sense is they would create a lot of swing and reduce the player's ability to calculate and plan; a difficult foe could roll badly on their hit dice and be within the player's range, or roll well and be far tougher to beat; you wouldn't know until combat started, and that's too late to plan.

The randomness applies to players as well - the beat stick fighter could suddenly find himself with d4 hit dice.  This system would work  for horror gaming by keeping things uncertain and nerve wracking, but I'm cautious whether it's actually fun for D&D style play.  Enabling planning and calculation of resources is an important part of how I approach old school gaming.  It certainly creates a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty in a visceral, physical way, and might be okay for short forays into Carcosa.

The Great Old Ones are fairly bland in description; the barest mechanics and damage are provided, but not much about their cults or how they interact with the world.  Folks with a background in the source literature wouldn't have a problem filling in the gaps.  I'm loathe to criticize statistics for literary creations, because so much of it is taste and interpretation; I see enough of that fanboy grief in the Heroclix world (I can't believe Superman can beat the Hulk!).  I didn't agree with a lot of the stats in Realms of Crawling Chaos, either.

Will I Use Carcosa?
Absolutely!  I can say with total certainty that Carcosa becomes one of those places a party can accidentally end up by going through the wrong dimensional gate, and be forced to trek around the hex map trying to figure out a way back to their world.  Carcosa is that doomed dimension, just out of phase with our world, a sign of things to come if the Old Ones aren't stopped from gaining a foothold here, and plunging the world into madness.  There's too much awesome stuff in the book.  But I find the setting a bit too bleak to imagine running a campaign 100% start and finish in Carcosa.

Despite some quibbles, it's a 5 out of 5 on the Beedometer - the scope is far beyond anything I'd home brew, and the presentation, art, and quality of the PDF advances the state of OSR publishing.  Looking forward to seeing the actual book.

Now that the holidays are behind us, the finances should level out and I can make some more gaming purchases.  I'll be doing some upcoming reviews of Anomalous Subsurface Environment, and Book of War, and hope to pick up Weird Adventures and some of the latest S&W/Frog God stuff in the coming weeks.

Lovecraft and Me: A Confession

A week ago this place passed its one year anniversary, and I set some goals for the coming year.  One of them is to do more blogging on Lovecraftian subjects, diverse and sundry; a post per week on a topic related to Lovecraft or the Call of Cthulhu RPG.  A lot of the inspirational reading I'd like to complete this year includes Lovecraft predecessors like Dunsany, Machen, and Chambers.  I've had a long career running Lovecraftian games, so there are plenty of reviews, campaigns, Keeper techniques, and mechanics to discuss, plus the chance to get advice and insight from the community.

A blog is such a personal thing, it seems fitting to start such an endeavor with recollections of how my lifelong interest in this author's works became fixed in place.  Cast your mind back to… 1983!  Yep, that was the year I picked up one of the early Cthulhu boxed sets, the one with the stapled rule book and the classic cover over to the right:

I'll be honest with you, I had never read a lick of Lovecraft prior to getting that boxed set, and much of the flavor of the setting evaded me.  The fixation on the 1920's was baffling.  Instead of serious investigations, we usually ended up playing it D&D style, picking characters who were typically "Veterans of the Great War" so we could justify loading them down with shot guns and tommy guns, kicking in doors and yelling at the Deep Ones to "Get some!  Blam, blam blam!"  Heh.  In defense, I'll point out that we were just starting high school.

I went on to read a fair amount of Lovecraft afterward, especially the Random House editions like this one on the left, with their sensational covers promising blood and horror, but delivering only nervous aesthetes and musty tomes.  I still have a copy of that one in the attic.  My favorite story was At the Mountains of Madness, which I had read via a hardback borrowed from the town library.  It still is my favorite.

It wasn't until college that Lovecraft made sense to me, and I remember the moment clearly.  I was going to Montclair State University; it was still called a college then, and they had just initiated a liberal arts honors program; I was in the inaugural class.  Regardless of major, the honors program forced a worthy load of humanities on the participlants.  I was suffering through a sociology class that was exploring the modern mindset (Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life", that kind of stuff) when I finally made the Lovecraft connection;  HP Lovecraft's stories reflected a modern mind stripped of its romantic ideals.

In the preceding 50 years or so before Lovecraft's writing, Darwin's On the Origin of Species postulated a theory of evolution that transformed humanity from created beings to evolved animals.  Revolutions in Europe had seen the fruition of Marx's Communist Manifesto and the evidence of the Hegelian dialectic in action, a refutation of the great man theory and prior forms of historical analysis.  (Nowadays, we forget the kind of revolutionary fervor the anarchists brought, even to America.)  Freud's theories reduced the inner self to a series of mechanistic urges explained through repressed desires and childhood traumas.  Bringing it all together, the world had just witnessed the bloodiest war in history, displaying inhumanity on a massive scale across the poisoned trenches of World War I.

These new theories were an assault on the special role of humanity in the divine plan; religion was under siege.  In fact, these ideas were antithetical to any form of Romantic world view.  It was then I perceived Lovecraft's singular achievement - he was the first modern horror writer!  Lovecraft embraced man's new place in the cosmos.  We are animals, advanced and intelligent, but animals nonetheless, floating on a big rock in a sea of stars.  Not only are we prisoners on this rock, we're slaves to our biology, slaves to our psychology, and the progress of history is not the unfolding of a divine plan, but the mechanistic reactions to economic forces.  We are alone.  Except Lovecraft pointed out, we're not alone.  When he gazed into the night sky, he didn't see an empty void; he saw monsters.

So that's what did it for me; the recognition of his significance in the annals of horror made me a lifelong fan.  Bam!  Hooked for life.  Nowadays, someone would just hop on the internet, read an essay on Lovecraft on Wikipedia, or find some published criticism, but back then we had to do our own thinking, and my newfound understanding of Lovecraft seemed a profound personal achievement at the time.  I was quite proud of developing my appreciation honestly.  My games of Call of Cthulhu were never the same, and I went on to run many memorable campaigns.

These days I'm far more optimistic about the human condition than I was back in my "jaded" twenties.  Perhaps it's related to fatherhood and all the joys that can bring.  I appreciate that Lovecraft's writing appeals to both atheists and the religious minded.  For instance, one of the higher profile scholars of Lovecraft these days is Robert M Price, an American theologian and instructor at a seminary.  The connection between religion and existential fear runs deep.  But I'm afraid that will be a musing for another day.

So that's how my obsession with HPL began, many years ago.  I can assure the regular readers there will be plenty of Dungeons & Dragons posts on the way; I'll consign the Lovecraft items to a weekly flirtation.  But I'm looking forward to working in discussions of Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, horror gaming, and reviews of the source literature into my blog's regular mix of topics.  Thanks for reading!