This is something I have lying around for some time. Is not that I plan to really do anything with this for now, but man, this practically writes itself.
Though I really like Lovecraft, I've always felt that Chtulhu games are very limited in scope. As a player, you're there to find out about a mystery, but the usefulness of Agatha Christie style deductions is always confronted by the genre knowledge that there is a whole lot of supernatural causes and effects in motion; but that your character is supposed to be oblivious to. This causes some bad sync between PC and Player (unless the players do not know about the genre, which is also kind of cool)
But given that this blog is for now a collection of D&D rewrites, I ask myself: what if the PCs we're already initiated into the mythos and the players just have to worry about leveling up?
All characters start as new members of a "good" cult, settled maybe in 1930's Miskatonic. The cult is dedicated to the preservation of the mythos knowledge, to prevent that it falls in the wrong hands and to combat those who might be using it for evil. Some kind of special agency against eldritch crime with minor rapport with the government.
The only class is Drudgeon, 1d6 per HD. You get a skill to represent your background profession (Roll under INT to perform it, maybe) and you get spells as a cleric, from level 2 onwards. This represents the hidden knowledge your cult grants you, once you get more and more involved on the work for them. You might never get to advance combat, as in this world its mainly done through guns. Instead, you get buffs to HP and better Saves.
Instead of dungeons depleting your resources, you delve in towns, neighbourhoods, societies, etc which are suspected of mythos misuse activity, and the main resource you lose is time.
When its a matter of hours, days are divided into six parts: Morning, noon, afternoon, evening, midnight and pre-dawn. When a mission is a matter of months or requires significant travel between two points, you only get morning, afternoon, evening.
Attempting one action (interrogating a store owner, cracking into an abandoned house, going shopping, investigating a crime scene, etc) takes 1 day part, and might require a check: If the roll fails, no progress is done but you can try again.
Losing enough time triggers events like:
1. Your enemies getting stronger: city gangster is to busy studying the practical uses for the Vermis Misteriis and has called some armed allies to patrol the streets searching for the missing idol.
2. Somebody attacks you or your team to sabotage your investigation
3. Valuable resources leave the area (a book, an idol) which would have granted you XP
4. Possible clues wither or witnesses leave the area, or are eaten by a stellar vampire.
5. Eldritch spawns attack the area, ghoul awakening. Chances are that the happening makes mythos a public affair (it will be on the papers for some weeks until it starts to sound like somebody made it up)
6. The stars are right / Enemy Cult forces confrontation, so you must stand with anything you've got
This is what this game "wandering monster checks" look like. Of course, sometimes a wandering monster is just a monster: there is a bestiary, in which mostly anything is too tough to be shot down nicely (ghouls, cultists, fishmen... maybe. Byakhees? Non-Euclideans? hardly). Once we get to that, the only thing to defeat them is to use magic or ancient technology (The first game I ever ran was Pokethulu, and I love the concept of catching shoggots into shining dodecahedrons)
inspiration: The Last Door
I guess that the main thematic antagonistic forces of the time would be: evil cults, criminal gangs, private collectors, lone madmen, communist factions or maybe even nazis. The main reason for which I would probably never write this is because I'm not very learned on North America, much less early XXs century North America. But its the kind of game that would be cool to mix with actual events that happened around that era. I picture the mythos themselves being treated by the populace much like UFOs were later: most anybody has heard about them vaguely, but few really have dedicated time or resources to really investigate them. But of course there are independent individuals who are fascinated by it, and keep a scrapbook with all the weird reports they read on the printed press.
I want to resist to give this project a plain XP for mission. Following the milestone approach I made on there, I'd try to make it so there is always incentives for players to go forward on their own whims, if they see that the reward is good enough. Basically you level up once you cross out one of this:
[_] [_] Recovered an ancient book or relic
[_] [_] Sealed or repelled a powerful entity
[_] [_] Thwarted the plans of an mythos misuser without it trascending to public knowledge
[_] [_] Reported back information about a rival group (your GM will tell you when you have gathered enough information to earn this, but by then the problem is probably getting out of there alive)
[_] Deal with something pending from your past, that somehow is involved on an investigation (is your call to say how the current situation has to do with that, let your GM work the details)
No comments:
Post a Comment