CryptWorld Kult of Cthulhu?

[DavetheLost]

While I fully realize that CW focuses on the style of Eighties horror movies, rather than traditional Gothic, or metaphysical Cthulhu, Kult, etc, I can't help but wonder how to model the latter under CW.

With the games we presently have in the Pacesetter line most of the elements seem to be available. The biggest puzzle is perhaps how to model the Cosmic level Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Cultists and lesser creatures are easy and covered between PTs, magic from Majus, and CW creatures.

The plots and schemes of inhuman agencies need not be fundamentally different in game mechanics to those of human agencies, they are mostly CM driven story elements in any case.

What I am wondering is how to handle the rare but climactic encounters with things like the Hunting horrors of Nyarlathotep or the Children of Yog-Sothoth such as appeared at the end of Dunwhich Horror. Or even Cthulhu himself. Azathoth and Nyarlathotep as well as Yog Sothoth seem to me to be beyond game mechanics. I would treat them the way Mouse Guard treated a snapping turtle in one scenario. This is a Godzilla scale monster, nothing the PCs can do will be able to harm it. In other words find a way of dealing with it other than direct combat.

How would you model Clive Barker, HP Lovecraft, and others who play with the idea that reality is not "real" at least not in the way we think it is?

[fmitchell]

What I am wondering is how to handle the rare but climactic encounters with things like the Hunting horrors of Nyarlathotep or the Children of Yog-Sothoth such as appeared at the end of Dunwhich Horror. Or even Cthulhu himself. Azathoth and Nyarlathotep as well as Yog Sothoth seem to me to be beyond game mechanics. I would treat them the way Mouse Guard treated a snapping turtle in one scenario. This is a Godzilla scale monster, nothing the PCs can do will be able to harm it. In other words find a way of dealing with it other than direct combat.

That's probably what I'd do, as a GM (CM?): make it abundantly clear in-universe that bullets *won't work*, and allow the players to either escape with their lives or find the Plot Coupon that sends the Cosmic Thing out of our reality. Ramming Cthulhu with a boat is a special case: it's a desperation move that worked because that's a whole lot of momentum, and even then it was only a temporary inconvenience for Cthulhu.

(An aside: I've never been happy with the Call of Cthulhu solution of simply giving Cthulhu 10x or 50x the size, strength, and killing power of a human being and letting players get stomped if they weren't too bright. Likewise, the SAN spiral is just a little too crude. Trail of Cthulhu's distinct "Stability" and "Sanity" ratings are closer to the mark; the first is equivalent to a Pacesetter Fear check, the second a measure of existential resilience that only erodes over time.)

Then again, I don't know if true cosmic horror really fits the implied CryptWorld paradigm of "if it bleeds/burns/loses ectoplasm, we can kill it." In a universe where our reality is just a thin film on an incomprehensibly vast ocean, how can humans really fight? Either predators in the Deep somehow need humans and human-like Things to let them in (why?), in which case the true battle is against madmen who would destroy reality, or the illusory nature of our reality is only revealed at certain "weak spots", in which case we can only mark off the perimeter and keep people from wandering in. Once Azathoth is HERE, game over, in every sense of the word.

[seneschal]

Heh, good point. If human beings are so ignorant and powerless, so accidental and incidental to the true Universe, why do cosmic entities need our help to destroy ourselves? (We're doing a pretty good job of that without them.) Wouldn't they just be able to muscle their way into our dimension regardless, especially since they've supposedly all been here before?

In regard to the OP, I agree that GM/CM fiat is the way to go. Most Cthulhu Mythos opponents do fit within Cryptworld's parameters: cultists, Deep Ones, Mi-Go, ghouls. The Big Boys rarely appear themselves. Usually their minions are enough to either eat or intimidate PCs, or to go down after a tough fight.

[greyarea]

If human beings are so ignorant and powerless, so accidental and incidental to the true Universe, why do cosmic entities need our help to destroy ourselves? (We're doing a pretty good job of that without them.)

Having only read some of Lovecraft's work and with no understanding of the various Cthulhu games, I'm not sure I agree with this approach. It's not that cosmic entities need our help to destroy ourselves. Lovecraft seemed to be saying that the universe and its entities are so unknowable, incomprehensible, and uncaring as to appear monstrous to us. They are to us as we are to ants.

Now, we might form cults around these unknowable, incomprehensible and uncaring entities and, from there, human nature takes over only in Yog-Soggoth's or Cthulhu's name. By opening our minds to these entities, it might twist them to the point of insanity (or true sanity, in which all else seems insane) and might test our bodies in the process using power that we cannot understand. But it's not like the entities need us or even care about us. A five year old can devastate an anthill with enough time, or fry them with a magnifying glass, but, in the end, cares not for the fate of such creatures (unless she goes on to be an entomologist, but I digress). People may kid themselves into thinking the entities need us to break into our dimension, or that they can tap into the entities for pure power and personal gain, but that's their own foolish pride and not the need of the entities themselves. They are beyond our understanding regardless of what some cult leader or Mad Arab or Miskatonic professor may claim.

Now, back to Cryptworld, I could see a game where PCs are facing either a cult that worships Cthulhu Mythos monsters and maybe has a "human scale" monster that is part of that (think of the monsters encountered in Lo Pan's underground in Big Trouble in Little China, which is know isn't Lovcraftian properly but evoke the idea I'm getting at) or an alien that has a Lovecraftian feel, a la John Carpenter's The Thing, which is again a monster on a human-scale level. The Elder Things at the Mountains of Madness (which are also aliens, right?) are also human-scale and could work well in a Cryptworld setting.

All of this is getting at, don't bother modeling the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. They convey power or are in the background or cause a cosmic-level event but they wouldn't be faced-off by PCs.

Just my two cents.

[fmitchell]

If you look at HPL's work (as opposed to his imitators') most of his stories involve a narrator or protagonist who stumbles on some terrifying thing -- alien colonies in the mountains, "degenerate" manlike things under the earth, mind-blowing gateways in spacetime -- and flees in terror. Occasionally a character fends off the horror, e.g. in "The Dunwich Horror", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", or "The Thing on the Doorstep". In a couple of stories the narrator embraces the horror. In most cases, though, the story is "I came, I saw, I screamed, I left".

That outline really doesn't make for a good game, though. The GM/CM must either reduce the evil to a human and therefore beatable scale (cultists, ghouls, Deep Ones, individual Mi-Go, etc.) or contrive "save the world" scenarios reminiscent of Buffy. Delta Green, The Laundry, and (if I understand correctly) Cthulhutech posit an ongoing conflict between well-trained government agents and the machinations of alien infiltrators; the aliens will win over time, and every battle is a holding action to put off the End of Life As We Know It for just a few more days.

[greyarea]

Delta Green, The Laundry, and (if I understand correctly) Cthulhutech posit an ongoing conflict between well-trained government agents and the machinations of alien infiltrators; the aliens will win over time, and every battle is a holding action to put off the End of Life As We Know It for just a few more days.

I've never even heard of these games. Are they any good?

[DavetheLost]

I haven't played any of them. CthulhuTech seems a bit like Pacific Rim, Cthulhu meets mecha anime.

I agree that most of the Lovecraft stories really don't make for good gaming. When the monsters are defeated it usually involves a combination of heavy firepower, a large scale raid by police or military, coupled with a natural disaster. The Horror at Red Hook was buried under collapsing buildings, the Lurking Fear done in by lightning strikes, the Shadow over Innsmouth was depth charged and torpedoed by the US navy, R'lyeh sank back under the ocean.

Otherwise the survivors stumble back into civilization haunted by the knowledge that they haven't really changed anything and the Evil is still out there.

Cults of humans, and near-humans work well as opposition, with an occasional summoned Thing as back up. Deep Ones, Mi-Go and Serpent Folk, as well as Ghouls are all near enough to human to be good adversaries. They are human scale in most respects, even if their motives are alien.

Cthulhu, who can take a ship through the head and just reform and keep coming is not really a player scale adversary is he? And he is on the small scale of the big horrors.

I could see a physicist tapping into the Azathoth as a source of "clean" energy without realizing what he was really doing. The goal of PCs in such a case being to shut the project down before more than a small town was wiped out by Azathoth... Certainly that is entity that cannot be confronted directly.

I currently have a Call of Cthulhu campaign that centers around an international cult of the King in Yellow. One of whose avatars is David Bowie, especially in his persona as the Thin White Duke. Fun stuff, but I don't ever intend for the players to face the King directly.

[fmitchell]

Delta Green, The Laundry, and (if I understand correctly) Cthulhutech posit an ongoing conflict between well-trained government agents and the machinations of alien infiltrators; the aliens will win over time, and every battle is a holding action to put off the End of Life As We Know It for just a few more days.

I've never even heard of these games. Are they any good?

Delta Green is a setting for Call of Cthulhu from Pagan Press. I haven't read the core book yet; a lot of people recommended it. You can read about it on the Delta Green website.

The Laundry uses a modified version of BRP that's very close to CoC. It's based on Charles Stross's spy/horror/black comedy series of the same name. I like the novels -- think Lovecraft + spy novels + bureaucracy gone mad + geek humor -- and BRP is pretty solid but I'm not sure how well a GM (especially me) can maintain the humor/horror balance.

Someone below described Cthulhutech, although I've often heard the phrase "cross between Lovecraft and Neon Genesis Evangelion". It uses its own custom system. I played one game run by someone else; it's OK, but it leans heavily toward "anime with Lovecraftian motifs".

I should also mention Eldritch Skies, another riff on Lovecraft that takes a more space opera / Golden Age SF bent. Like Cthulhutech it posits that Lovecraft's horrors became public knowledge; unlike Cthulhutech mankind received the knowledge slowly and with a veneer of super-technology. Thus mankind colonized dozens of worlds through "faster than light" ships and "stargates". A secretive government agency works to protect mankind from aliens and the eldritch horrors lurking in hyperspace. It's a neat concept, and their explanation for the "learn and go mad" trope is brilliant, but between the system (Cinematic Unisystem, the engine for the Buffy RPG) and the authors' sprawling future history it's probably not something I'd run.

[excior]

There was a Chill Module called Highland Terror that delt with a super powerful Cthulhu like creature the PC when they saw it could only cope with seeing it as a giant otter. You could not kill it only keep it from entering the world. It even had gross cross breed looking monsters in it as well. My point is I think Crypt World could do Cthulhu

[greyarea]

You find the big baddie...


You must be insane...