Pulp Cthulhu Inspirations

Pulp Cthulhu: Reckless Adventures in the 1930's jumps into the decade of pulp adventure! Enter a time when the world changes. Economic despair brings a nation low, while an eldritch shift in the fabric of reality unleashes dark horrors, and tempts heroes. Join in as secret societies and occult leagues battle against horrific creatures in a timeless struggle for existence.


Pulp Cthulhu expands upon the [Call of Cthulhu] setting and rules system, allowing for fast-paced, cinematic game play. It provides rules for insane scientists, reanimators, mentalists, gadgeteers, professor-sorcerers, supernatural detectives and much more...
--From Chaosium's Pulp Cthulhu blurb

Chaosium has been talking about Pulp Cthulhu for nearly 10 years - I remember hearing about it back when Cthulhu d20 was released, and I seem to recall an early version was even supposed to be a dual-stat product (BRP and d20).  That's a long time ago.

As I'm working through the background for our upcoming Trail of Cthulhu campaign, I realize the game is already going to be heavy on the pulp side of things - the characters will be a bit more stalwart than the nervous, sensitive types in Lovecraft's bleaker stories; the struggles will be a bit more real-world and physical than philosophical and dread-inspiring cosmic nihilism.

Note:  Ultimately I would like to run a campaign that features Lovecraft's bleaker themes, but I think it's something we'd either build up to, or run some one-shots in the Purist mode first - Trail has quite a few excellent Purist one-shots I'll be reviewing in the near future.  But a pulp campaign is a safe start for D&D gamers on their first foray into Cthulhu gaming.

I recently re-read Stunning Eldritch Tales, and it struck me how much two-fisted pulp action is already in some of the Trail of Cthulhu books - you've got sinister Nazi and Japanese agents, vicious Chinese triads and gangsters, jaunts to deserted islands, and weird science.  There's even a masked crime fighter like the Shadow, or the Green Hornet, in one of the investigations.

I'm working through the Dramatis Personae for the campaign, and we've  got plans to make player characters in a couple of weeks.

I've been thinking about pulling out my Mignola Lobster Johnson stories for some extra inspiration.  So here's the question for the readers - what's your favorite bit of pulp inspiration?  It could be a film, a comic, or even a gaming supplement or book.  Thanks!

Avoiding the RPG Railroad

Going off the rails on a crazy train

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
--Inigo Montoya

Earlier this week, Drance asked the question, "Can one merge the techniques behind railroading and the sandbox style of roleplaying?"  I quipped off an answer, something like "there is no style of railroad campaign, railroading is a technique, not a campaign style".  I've often observed the term bandied about to describe Paizo's adventure paths, or any investigative scenario, as if an entire class or style of gaming is railroad after railroad.  "We don't do adventure paths, because we don't do railroads".

The problem is one person's "railroad" is the other guy's great night of adventuring.  Lots of people buy and play those Paizo adventure paths and seem to enjoy them, so something seems fishy denigrating the whole lot of them.  I had some guy telling me recently the AD&D Ravenloft module was the worst railroad ever written.  I don't know which Ravenloft he read; the one we played was a 6 month guerilla war waged against Strahd and his coven of vampires, where every session tested the player's planning and resource management.  It was an amazing sandbox game.

This goes beyond nomenclature and definitions -  the whole issue is ridiculously subjective.  There is a sliding scale around constraining player choice, with varying shades of grey, and no clear demarcation point where diminished choices become an actual railroad.  Back when a few of us were discussing quantum ogres and whether the DM could fudge dice like Al Pacino, my concern with Illusionism was that if it was well done, the players wouldn't know the difference - so where do you draw the line?

Sidebar:  Illusionism is the technique of giving the players the appearance of choice, but the DM foists his or her own plan on the situation regardless.  The idea behind the quantum ogre involved moving the DM's precious ogre encounter into whatever woods the players entered first.  If you're Al Pacino, you can get away with it, and the players are none the wiser.  But Illusionism is the Railroad's cousin.  If I had to settle on a simple definition for Railroad, it'd be something like this, "imposing a predetermined outcome on the game's events" - at least to get past the semantics.

To give you an idea of the problems with subjectivity, consider these scenarios:  Is a trap with only one solution, a railroad?  How about if the town guard is after the party, and there's only one safe way out of town?  Does your answer change if they robbed someone, precipitating the man hunt?  How about when one NPC after another keeps giving them the same, tired plot hook, leading towards the DM's prepared adventure site? Is a linear dungeon a railroad?

My own solution to the problem of subjectivity was to look at things from the game master's side of the table, and to apply the objective test based on my definition of railroad:  Is the DM predetermining the game's outcomes?  Looking at the situations above, each one of them can be construed as a railroad if the DM has predetermined a singular solution or a particular outcome - if there's truly only one way to beat the trap, to get out of town, where to adventure, or how to proceed.

The interesting thing about blogging, you get exposed to new ideas, you get the chance to reflect and mature your own thinking.  These days I don't believe the objective test goes far enough - the opposite of the railroad is agency and choice, which means the players have explicit influence on the actual events.  The test of whether player choice matters is subjective from the player's perspective.  It's not enough for the DM to do the right thing from the DM's side of the screen, but he or she needs to let the players know they're playing it straight, too.

Consider this pair of railroad examples to illustrate the concern around influence and choice:

• No matter what the players do, the villain is going to escape - invisibility, fly spell, teleport - the villain will pull something out of the hat and escape to return later in the adventure.
• No matter what the players say to the duke, they're not going to change the duke's mind.

We've all seen adventures from the 80's that required a villain to make an appearance, do some bad things, and then escape to return later.  (Poor Dragonlance, always taken to the wood shed).  When the players slap a Silence 15' spell on the evil wizard, and he uses a teleport spell to escape anyway, that kind of apparent cheating seems to cross the line - it's like the classic dice fudging problem, not letting the players win when they've played well and should have won.

But consider how the answer changes if the players subsequently learn the big bad guy wasn't actually a wizard at all, but a demon in human guise using spell-like abilities to teleport (thus circumventing the Silence spell).  Likewise, the duke has been mind controlled by his wicked vizier and the players have no chance of convincing him of their innocence because of the enchantment.  It's only when they're surreptitiously visited by the previous adviser to the Duke that knowledge about the charm comes to light and they understand why things unfolded poorly for them.  In both cases, the player's lack of influence can be mitigated when they get the rest of the information - which is why I'm putting an emphasis now on going the extra mile in terms of player-facing information.

Here’s the summation.  The appearance of being railroaded is going to come up in any game - it's subjective, because there's a sliding scale of constrained choice.  The scale starts with resource constraints and mild nudging on the one end of the spectrum, and goes all the way to the DM's heavy hand forcing the action with Mary Sue NPCs, pixelbitching traps,  and undefeatable villains on the other side of the spectrum.  It's important for the DM to avoid predetermined outcomes, but it's just as important to allow the players to influence events through their choices, and ensure that they see that they have influence, too.  The TL;DR answer to the railroad comes back to the simple principle of "saying Yes" during gaming and ensuring that choices matter.

Afterthoughts
Getting back to Drance's question, my answer stands - there's nothing inherent about a sandbox game that makes it immune to the railroad, because the railroad is a bad technique that pops up whenever the DM starts reducing choice and influence; it's not a campaign style.  There are plenty of opportunities for the DM to introduce antagonist reactions and chokepoints in a sandbox that force the direction of the game, even if the sandbox started fairly wide open and player-driven.  I tend to think what he's really asking is whether the DM can introduce events, antagonists, plot hooks, and other elements of story-driven games into the sandbox, and still give the players a full range of agency.  The answer is YES, but use these things judiciously.

There are campaign styles that are more susceptible to the railroad technique than traditional site-based locations, which is how the adventure paths and story games get implicated.  I'm doing a lot of prep for our upcoming Cthulhu games, and the investigative genre is fraught with peril.  Impactful horror games rely on the big reveal, and if you're not careful, you can find yourself taking shortcuts through nudging and leading and railroading to ensure the players get to the payoff moment.  That's a big enough topic - avoiding the railroad during horror gaming - to make it a separate, upcoming post.


*The picture is Blaine the Mono, from the cover of Stephen King's The Wastelands

Poll Results Round Up

Polls from the past few months included how people use Cthulhoid monsters in their games, how high do you like your D&D games to go, and how do bloggers keep up with their favorite blogs.

HOW DO YOU MAINLY USE THE MONSTERS OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS IN YOUR GAME?
Alien terrors in a horror game (58%) Monsters in a fantasy game (41%)

Monsters from the Mythos show up in a wide range of stories, from Lovecraft's bleak fiction in the 1920's to the weird fantasy stories of Clark Ashton Smith and RE Howard; its natural that gamers would use them in a blend of horror games and fantasy games.  I like pulling in Cthulhuoid monsters into fantasy whenever I want the D&D game to take a turn towards horror as a change of pace.

WHAT ARE THE HIGHEST LEVELS YOU LIKE TO SEE IN YOUR D&D GAMES?
Level 6 (OD&D, S&W) (17%), Levels 10-14 (until killed by the Tomb of Horrors) (38%), Levels 14 (BX) (12%), Level 20 (3.X, 1E, LL) (12%), Level 30 (4E) (0%), Level 36 (BECMI) (2%), Until godly ascension (4%), D&D never ends, fool! (11%).

More often than not, we play BX or similar systems that end by level 14, so that's probably where I voted, but I have to believe the majority of folks that voted D&D continues until the high level characters are killed by the Tomb of Horrors are the right-thinkers in the bunch.  It creates a funny mental image, high level characters besotted with ennui, marching off to the Tomb of Horrors to either end their tiresome existence or win the ultimate prize.  Honorable mention goes to "D&D never ends, fool!"

HOW DO YOU KEEP UP WITH YOUR FAVORITE BLOGS?
Google Reader (34%) G+ Stream (0%) A Blogroll (34%) RSS or feedreader (5%) Bookmark (16%) Search Engine (4%) Something else (5%)

I use Google Reader quite a bit, it's a good way to keep up with Wordpress blogs, but I learned from the comments that quite a few folks use their blogger dashboard to browse blogspot blogs in the stream.

I was surprised how many folks use blogrolls to keep up on their favorite blogs - that motivated me to make sure my favorite Wordpress blogs get added to my blogrolls.

One good thing I learned was that no one uses their G+ stream as a primary way of keeping up with blogs, so there's no major reason for merging your G+ and blogger accounts.

Psionic Alien Ghosts

One of the locations I recently put together for the Black City is haunted by a psionic ghost.

The Black City is an alien ruin because the race of Greys was slaughtered in a psychic cataclysm before the ice retreated.  Their most powerful controllers, the hive minds, were advanced telepaths, linking the entire colony telepathically.  When tragedy struck, the torment of the hive minds left behind psychic ghosts, malevolent shadows of pain and hatred that linger even now.

Thus, there's a class of psionic monsters in the Black City that can be encountered in locations where a hive mind died during the cataclysm.  While the more powerful versions will be like the Monster of the ID (drawing inspiration from that classic, Forbidden Planet) the one inhabiting the ruined "central command" is more like a vicious poltergeist.  Another one to add to the Black City Bestiary.

The calcified corpse of the hive mind still sits in the large amplifier chair that once allowed it to broadcast commands throughout the city.  A dull mauve alert has been flashing for a millennium or more, casting the large room into intermittent darkness.  The psionic ghost fettered to that crystal corpse attacks with telekinetic pushes, or seizing weapons to smack characters with their own armaments.  The push attack isn't damaging, but anyone that climbs the tall shaft from dungeon level 1 into central command from below is in for a rude surprise.

Psionic Ghost of the Hive Mind
AC as Unarmored*, MV 12, HD 5*, Atk By weapon or push, ML 12, AL C.

*The AC and HD stats are for the corpse fetter.  The actual psionic entity is immaterial.  Destroying the fetter by reducing it's hit points to zero releases the psychic residue and destroys the ghost.

Unlimited by the physical constraints of a body, the psionic ghost can make 2-4 attacks per round.

Invisible:  the psionic ghost is invisible, but any seized weapons will dance around in front of the character it's attacking.  Detect Invisible reveals the psionic ghost, which appears like a malevolent leering alien with oversized head, and the tendril fetters tying it to the crystalline corpse like a silver cord are plainly seen.  Detect Evil also reveals the ghost's presence and the fetter.

Telekinetic Push:  A character saves vs paralysis or is knocked down by the telekinetic push.  This can be used to knock characters back down the shaft, or keep them from charging the crystal corpse.

Weapon Grab:  treat each weapon as AC Chain for purpose of the grab attack; a character can make an open doors check to retain a weapon already in hand, but a sheathed weapon is yanked away for use by the ghost.

Weapon Attack:  Any seized weapons can be used on future rounds to make a 5HD attack.

The Return of the Fey

It's not uncommon in urban fantasy or speculative fiction to portray the realms of myth and magic as something just out of touch with the mundane world, occasionally intersecting.  There are even some games that have a similar theme - the premise behind Shadowrun was all the myth creatures return in a near future, at the dawn of the Mayan 6th Age, blending fantasy with cyberpunk.  I don't remember seeing that approach used with a D&D setting.

Over at From the Sorceror's Skull, Trey has been posting some weekly blurbs he's calling "Apocalypse Under Ground" - readers here should them check out.  (And, uh, Trey should label them or something so I can link to the series instead of the first post…)  The central conceit is this… what if D&D's "adventurer culture" was a recent thing?  What if some fundamental thing changed in the near past, and suddenly dragons and monsters and dungeons and nightmares of every shape and form start coming back to the surface from deep underground?

Take your favorite myth cycle or bits of legendry and develop a suitable apocalypse - perhaps it's the beginning of Ragnarok, and the barriers separating the Nine Worlds have faded.  The island of Avalon has returned, the Greater Seal of Solomon was shattered, or it's the time of the astral conjunction or harmonic convergence.  Maybe something has shifted in the cosmic battle between Law and Chaos, and the intersection of the mortal world with the magic realm is the result of Chaos triumphant.  Like the picture above, showing Oberon and Titania* re-entering the world, I would use the return of the various Fey as the initiator of "The Change".

Here's what I like about this type of campaign setting for D&D… you can take your favorite real world historical period, dump all this magic and chaos on right top of it, advance the timeline a few years, and then roll in with the adventurers.  It's the Thirty Years war, and the world groans beneath the weight of religious strife and constant warfare, until the horror is complete and the doorways to chaotic Faerie gape open again, allowing goblins to swarm across the battlefields of Europe.  Trade and travel suffers from a countryside suddenly overrun with monsters from beyond.  Where there was a barren moor, a strange tower has appeared overnight; the dead rise from unhallowed earth, and in the heart of every kingdom, at least one yawning cavern grants access to the dark places underground where the monsters have waited, and watched. The only place where people can find the kinds of weapons that can be used against the monsters is by entering the dungeons.

The problem with using the real world as a D&D setting is rewriting history to account for the presence of humanoids, demi humans, and magic, and by the time you shoehorn them into this faux history, you've pretty much rewritten The Grand History of the Realms or The Silmarillion.  I'm pretty lazy.  I'd want to use the real world as is, keep a few thousand years of world history the same, up until about 5 years ago when everything changed during the Chaos Apocalypse.  All this magic shit happened and dungeons and the Underdark appeared whole-cloth overnight.  All those things whispered about in dark fairy tales and hinted at in ghost stories are suddenly true, and they want to eat you.

Maybe you'll have other mental images, but for me, I kept thinking of one of my favorite X-Men comics from back-in-the-day, it was a two-part story called "An Age Undreamed Of" where a sorcerer from the Hyborian Age, Kulan Gath, casts a master spell that turns Manhattan into a fantastic realm of magic and swordplay.  In that particular story, heroes and villains are changed into their fantasy analogs - Captain America is a blonde barbarian with a shield and sword, for example.  Long suppressed enchantment would remake the world overnight, and humans would be forced to seek alliances with the exotic and foreign demihuman invaders as they struggle to adapt to a world where the rule of science has been replaced by magic.

I'm filing this one in The Junkyard** to refer back to on a rainy day.

Edit:  Trey is kindly labeling the series, you can find all the entries here: Apocalypse Under Ground

*Images:  The top one is Charles Vess from, Sandman: A Midsummer Night's Dream, the bottom is the cover to Uncanny X-Men #190.


**The Junkyard is the place I put campaign ideas that I'm just not ready to act on; it helps me manage my gamer attention deficit disorder by putting future campaign notes somewhere for reference and gets them out of my head for a bit.  Next time there's a TPK or we're ready for a change, I know I can visit the Junkyard and see what kind of ideas are stored away gathering dust.

Inspirations for Cthulhu Gaming

We'll be starting a periodic Cthulhu game in April, and most or all of the guys in the regular D&D game will be in that one, too.  Not the kiddos, they'll have the night off, but maybe I'll get a kid's campaign running in parallel - I've previously threatened to run Barrowmaze in Karameikos for them.  For the Cthulhu game, here's an interesting opportunity - the guys are intrigued by the game, but most of them haven't read any HP Lovecraft!

Aesthetically, I like the bleakness of Lovecraft's vision and would normally choose a "purist" track, but since these are D&D guys and not hardcore horror fans, I've already decided this campaign will swing on the pulp side of things and involve more action.  I'm going with a badges and guns theme:  Welcome to the SCD.

Here's my short list of suggestions for quickly getting the players acclimated with the tropes and conventions of the pulp approach to the Cthulhu Mythos:

Lovecraft's Fiction
I'm recommending these four stories:  "The Dunwich Horror", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward", and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

The Dunwich Horror
This story is closest in theme to actual game play in the roleplaying game - Henry Armitage is the archetypical professorial protagonist, there's a dramatic mystic confrontation on Sentinel Hill, and there's plenty of bloodshed and mayhem.  Wilbur Whately and the Son of Yog Sothoth are nice and freaky.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
This is another fine pulp investigation that leads to the kind of boss fight you might see in pulp Cthulhu gaming.  On the other hand, it's a bit long and there's a decent movie adaptation that could be watched instead (see The Resurrected, below).

The Call of Cthulhu
This is an important story for a couple of reasons - thematically, it emphasizes the ancient and disparate nature of the interactions between humans and the horrors of the Mythos.  It's a grand investigation that perfectly embodies gaming constructs like the info-dump via handouts, and target rich investigations; the entire story is nestled within the discovery of a deceased investigator's papers, the protagonist's uncle.  Um, the game is named after it, too.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth
This story has many great themes for use in gaming - the isolated and depraved sub-community, unholy bargains and their terrible prices, more development around Lovecraft's weird ideas on sexuality and humanity, and it introduces governmental cover-ups in conjunction with the Mythos, which will play nicely in the campaign.

Films
The Call of Cthulhu, The Resurrected
These are my two favorite movie adaptations of a Mythos tale, and they're both available on Netflix streaming.  The Resurrected is a retelling of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward".  I don't have a copy of The Whisperer in Darkness yet on DVD, but maybe I'll get that one too, and we can circulate it around our group.

Alien, John Carpenter's The Thing, The Thing From Another World (1951)
Any one of these movies does a good job of portraying Lovecraft's themes:  ordinary folks and the insignificance of man; science as a mechanism for revealing horror; the uncaring nature of the cosmos.  Plus, they're all excellent horror movies in their own right!

The Ninth Gate
I much preferred the original The Club Dumas, but The Ninth Gate isn't bad for introducing the world of occult book collecting and decrypting hidden clues in old grimoires.  I'm hoping to use some elements from Bookhounds of London in the New York City campaign and this is good inspiration for a bookhound.

Any other ideas on how you'd get your group of neophytes pumped up for some Cthulhu gaming?  They could be Lovecraft themes, investigative horror, or even a good movie for 1930's New York City.

Orcus Casts His Shadow Over the American League

Non frivolous posts return tomorrow

Fielder crushes baseballs the way Orcus crushes skulls

Gaming has been absent from our table the past two weekends due to fantasy baseball drafts; a buddy asked me to co-manage his team in one league, that was last weekend, and yesterday was my regular draft.  I usually try to keep the blog mostly on topic - but it's time for another (annual) frivolous post about my other fantasy obsession…

Prince Fielder is the Orcus of MLB.  He's big, mean to pitchers, and smashes baseballs the way Orcus crushes skulls.  Now he's taking his show to the Motor City and the AL Central.  We keep 10 players from the previous season's roster, ensuring some team continuity and plenty of chatter and trades throughout the offseason; it's good to take a few prospects each year and see if anyone pans out.  (Last year I struck gold drafting Eric Hosmer).  Other league notes for the baseball savvy:  10 teams, roto scoring, 6x6, and the extra two stats categories are walks (for hitters) and holds (for relievers).

I've won the league two years in a row now, taking home the coveted Captain America Bobble Head Trophy.  One of my players, Mike, is in this league, and a fellow blogger, fantasy writer Gary (over at Eye on Ashenclaw) could be this year's favorite to win it - he's got an all-world offense lined up.

Here is this year's version of Team Beedo, the 2012 Rockwood Raiders.  Bolded guys were keepers from last year:

The coveted Captain America bobble head trophy

C:  Mike Napoli
1B:  Prince Fielder ORCUS
2B:  Ben Zobrist
SS:  Elvis Andrus
3B:  Evan Longoria
OF:  Jacoby Ellsbury
OF:  Adam Jones
OF:  Drew Stubbs
DH:  Eric Hosmer

SP:  Cliff Lee
SP:  CC Sabbathia
SP:  Mat Latos
SP:  Brandon Beachy
SP:  Corey Luebke
RP:  Joel Hanrahan
RP:  Rafael Betancourt
RP:  Kyle Farnsworth
RP:  Sergio Romo
RP:  Mark Melancon

Bench Players and Prospects:
Yadier Molina, Jose Tabata, JD Martinez, Jhonny Peralta, Mark Trumbo, Anthony Rendon, Nolan Arenado

Here was last year's team:  2011 Team Beedo.  Yep, it's true - I used to have Clayton Kershaw.  I ended up trading him for Ben Zobrist, Nelson Cruz, and Mat Latos in July, giving up baseball's best pitcher (my opinion) to put me over the top and win.  Flags fly forever.  Or the cooler version:  Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory... lasts forever.