Call of Cthulhu

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The Cold War and the Cthulhu Mythos

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August 29, 2011
by Stargazer in , , , , , ,

"Gadget" In December 2008 I first read about Charles Stross’ short story “A Colder War”. Imagine an alternative timeline where the cold war ends in 1984 because the Soviets mistake a joke made by then-president Ronald Reagan for a declaration of war. But in addition to the nuclear arsenal, a hidden supernatural one is used. In “A Colder War” the Great Cthulhu himself has been weaponized by the Soviets and the Iran government tries to summon Yog-Sothoth into our world. The more I think about it, the more I believe a campaign inspired by that short story could be a great project for the upcoming months.

Especially in autumn or winter I love to run horror games and what could be more blood-freezing than combining H.P. Lovecraft’s work with the cold war? I think I’ll pitch the idea to my players and if they show some interest, I’ll start working on that project as soon as I have enough free time.

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The Klarkash-Ton Cycle

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May 31, 2011
by Stargazer in , , , , , ,

The Klarkash-Ton Cycle I usually don’t talk about non-RPG books here on Stargazer’s World, but I don’t think it will hurt when I do from time to time. “The Klarkash-Ton Cycle” is part of a collection of Cthulhu Mythos books published by Chaosium.

The 220-paged book contains 11 horror short stories written by Clark Ashton Smith, who was one of major contributor’s to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. The stories included in this book are:

  • “The Ghoul”
  • “A Rendering from the Arabic”
  • “The Hunters from Beyond”
  • “The Vaults of Abomi”
  • “The Nameless Offspring”
  • “Ubbo-Sathla”
  • “The Werewolf of Averoigne”
  • “The Eidolon of the Blind”
  • “Vulthoom”
  • “The Treader of the Dust”
  • “The Infernal Star”

The book concludes with detailed notes on each tale, which give the reader some interesting background information.

Especially when you are already a fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work you definitely should read Clark Ashton Smith, too. In my opinion this book is the perfect introduction to his work. Stories like “A Rendering from the Arabic” or “The Infernal Star” are classic Mythos stories, that feature everything you would expect from one of Lovecraft’s work. What actually surprised me that Clark Ashton Smith also set several of his tales on Mars. “The Vaults of Abomi”, “Ubbo-Sathla” and “The Eidolon of the Blind” are all set on the red planet and would work perfectly as inspiration for a Space 1889 game with some Lovecraftian twist.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to any Mythos fan. And since Smith’s stories are not as well known as the ones written by Lovecraft himself you have a good chance your players don’t know them. That makes using them as inspiration for your games much, much easier.

I got my copy of the book from Amazon.de, but I am sure you can easily get it through your local bookstore or any online book seller. The regular price is $14.95. Or you can order it directly from Chaosium.

Lazy Thursday video post

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April 21, 2011
by Stargazer in , , , ,

As you all well know the people running this blog just love H.P. Lovecraft’s work. So it’s no surprise that I am very excited about “The Whisperer in Darkness”, a movie that should soon be available on DVD. It was created by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society which already brought us the most awesome “Call of Cthulhu” silent movie! Check out the latest trailer below!

 

 

By the way, your favorite roleplaying games blog will be on hiatus over the Easter holidays. But we’ll be back on Tuesday with more quality content! So stay tuned.

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Player Advice: Make your character come alive!

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March 7, 2011
by Sunglar in , , , ,

This post came out of a conversation I was having with Michael over IM about my nick, Sunglar. I actually came up with the name for a story I wrote in 8th grade, before I began gaming and ended up using it for my very first character as a player. Sunglar had many incarnations in RPGs, as a character, NPC, even villain, and eventually became my identity online since the days of Compuserve.

Don’t worry, this won’t be a post reminiscing about old characters, I think we are all tired of that. Michael actually suggested I should try to write a post with some player advice and despite some initial trepidation I jumped at the idea. As a longtime GM and casual player at first I thought I might be ill suited for the concept, but figured that I could bring a different perspective to player advice from my side of the screen.

Like I have said before, the advice given here is not wholly original, it builds on all sorts of different ideas I have read in countless gaming books, so thank you to all those that came before. I hope something of what I write here may be useful to some of you out there. Interested? Read on…

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[Horror] Take Your World and Break It

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January 5, 2011
by Pointyman2000 in , , ,

One of the most powerful ways to run a modern day horror campaign is to take the familiar and start blending in a little bit of strange.  The differences don’t have to be dangerous right away, just strange enough to make the players feel threatened or at least ill-at-ease.  This form of discomfort keeps the players guessing as to what you might have next.

Here are a few ways you can start pushing your players alarms without throwing a monster right away:

  • Mystery Words – This is done best with NPCs or objects.  Have your player characters start doubting their senses when NPCs tend to repeat a given phrase, inserting it in most conversation.  Having them spot it in odd places like the nutritional information label of a soup can, or in the middle of a magazine article makes them further question their sanity.  Something cryptic would work best.  If you plan to work solely on written media, then a scrambled code or random-seeming letters / numbers  / doodles would work as well.
  • Displacement – Suddenly, somewhere or someone that the characters are familiar with is gone, and nobody knows about it.  All other people don’t know what the characters are talking about.  This is extremely unsettling when the disappeared person is a family member or close friend.  Or when the place that is gone is something big, like a shopping mall, or a skyscraper.
  • Watchers – Simply describing the fact that they’re being watched can set off all sorts of alarms for Player Characters.  Making it so that the person watching them is always in a vantage point that makes them difficult to get to is even more unsettling.
  • Time / Memory Loss – Waking up to realize you’ve lost the last eight hours of your life is another way to throw Player Characters off balance.  Some GMs usually add on further complications, like waking up covered in blood, or some other immediate situation, but sometimes having them realize that they don’t remember anything is unsettling in and of itself.

These techniques are a great way to keep players off balance without having to resort to a combat encounter.  They often serve as a hook to a greater mystery, which leads to situations where the GM can feasibly insert monsters at his leisure or just keep the players guessing and fumbling in the dark.

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Games I was sad to see go away…

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October 8, 2010
by Sunglar in , , , ,

I guess we’ve all had them. The system you love; the one you can’t wait for the next supplement to come out for. And then all of a sudden, BOOM, cancelled!

Thankfully in the age we live in most systems with a modicum of popularity live on in the internet. Some even thrive. Still it’s not easy seeing the one you love go away. If you’ve been playing long enough, before al Gore so generously gave us the Internet, you experienced it, a game line was cancelled and you had no more support, no new book coming out. It was like getting dressed for the prom and being stood up, if the prom was a game and corsages were dice!

Star Frontiers

What can I say about Star Frontiers that I have not said before? I remember when I first bought it. I saw it at the book store, I had already been playing D&D for a while and here was a game by the same company, TSR, for science fiction role playing, I had to have it. So I begged my mom for the $12 (I think that was the price but my memory is not what it used to) and purchased it. I examined the box, punched out the counters and soon was playing with my friends.

This was my first sci-fi game and I had so much fun with it. I played it through high school and into college. During those first months I got my hands in every supplement I could, which granted were not many, none of the local stores seem to have them. I had to mail order Zebulon’s Guide to the Frontier.

What I didn’t know was that by the time I discovered Star Frontiers the game was already dead! Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space (its proper name) was published in 1985. I discovered Star Frontiers in 1989, a good four years after. When I learned they were not producing any more supplements for the game I was heart broken. Mind you this did not stop me. I played the game for years; I believe the last session was played in 1993 or 1994. So it goes to show you, a game may be “dead” for a publisher but it lives on with the fans.

Despite my best efforts I’ve never completed my Star Frontiers collection. It along with the nearly, but not quiet, complete run of the Rom comic book, are among those nagging  things I have to get around to completing one day.

TORG

Despite proclaiming my love for the setting but my dislike for the game on a previous post, I was saddened to see the TORG rpg cancelled. Back then I worked on a comic book store that carried a wide selection of games (and if you are curious the shop is still around and it’s where I got the Orcus mini) where I got most of the supplements for the game. Those I could not buy I read at the store on lazy afternoons. That’s how I kept informed of the Possibility Wars.

I may not have liked every twist and turn the storyline took, but it was fun and exciting, and it felt like being part of something greater. That kind of collaboration and involvement is easy to imagine in our digital age, but back them, well it seems amazing.

When TORG ended I felt like part of my gaming childhood, or adolescence at least, died. By then I was older, wiser, and expected different things from my games. Perhaps  even took my games too seriously, but I have never given up hope of seeing a TORG revival. I guess you can’t keep a good game down!

Alternity

By this time the Internet was an integral part of my life and it was there where I learned of Alternity. TSR’s upcoming sci-fi game, a toolbox of rules and ideas that promised to do for sci-fi what AD&D 2nd edition did for fantasy! (Say what you may about the system, I was a big AD&D 2nd Ed fan, and played it for years.)

When it finally came out I snatched it up and soon after adapted a home brewed campaign I had been working on to the system. It was modular, fun, had a unique dice mechanic and is still today one of my favorite science fiction games I have ever played. It scaled easily to various genres of sci-fi and it allowed me to create the setting I wanted. Needless to say I was an immediate fan.

By this time I was not big on pre-published adventures (I’m still not a fan) so I skipped most of those. But I got most rule supplements. Many Alternity Fans are also fans of the Star Drive Campaign setting, but I was never enamored by it. Like many Alternity books it suffered from having really awful interior art. One campaign that had an amazing look and design was the Dark Matter book, the Alternity system take on modern role playing and the X-Files craze.

Both settings lived on long after the system was gone, but when Alternity was cancelled I lost what I liked most about the game line, the generic sci-fi rpg I could adapt for my compulsive home brewing. Thankfully Alternity lives on via a very active community alternityrpg.net. Every now and then I take the book down from the shelf, reread it and toy with the idea of starting a new Alternity campaign. I just might one of these days, I’ll let you know.

Big Eyes, Small Mouth 2nd Edition

I never played Big Eye, Small Mouth (or BESM) 1st edition, I heard great things about it. I have not been a fan of anime for many years but I did hear the game was easily adaptable for a super’s game. When the 2nd edition came out I purchased it for specifically this purpose, to retool it as a superhero game. Guardians of Order actually did it for me and published Silver Age Sentinels. This was the last system I used for a supers campaign and despite its problems I loved it.

When they published the Tri-Stat dX system I used it for a sci-fi game, adapting the very same campaign I had played using Alternity some years before. When Guardians of Order went out of business I was sad to see the company go, but had hopes for the system when I learned White Wolf would publish the 3rd edition under their ArtHaus imprint.

But then 3rd edition came out and for me it lost some of the magic. The book was massive, and seemed so much more complex. It was so far off from the original BESM, it was not the game for me. So I realized the 2nd edition I loved so much and the games that came from it were gone, and gaming was all the worse for it. At least dX is still out there so in a way the system I lived on.

Star Wars Saga Edition

As a child of the 70’s I grew up with Star Wars. I saw the original movie in theaters, endured the prequels and currently enjoy the Clone Wars TV series. So the attraction to a Star Wars RPG is obvious. I had the different editions of the D6 West End Games version, but never managed to get a campaign off the ground. Likewise the first two tries at a Star Wars rpg by Wizards of the Coast failed to capture the magic of Star Wars in the D20 format for me.

This all changed with the Saga System. For me it took the best of the D20 system and hammered it into a proper Star Wars game. I loved it from the time I read it; I played a short campaign using it and own most of the books. Those I have not purchased yet I’ll be getting soon.  I think the Saga System is easily adaptable to be a generic sci-fi game, and toyed with the idea of adapting it for a Rifts game. Fan made conversions for fantasy and Cthulhu games show the versatility of the game engine.

Wizards’ decision to cancel the line was a sad moment for me. By then I had stopped playing D&D 4th edition so the only products I was buying from them were the Star Wars books. When the line ended my last ties to Wizards of the Coast were severed.

I’ve said it before, you can’t keep a good system down, and one of the developers of the Saga System is working on a system neutral adaptation of the rule system e20 System Evolved.  I find it very interesting, although some of the D&D 4th edition elements in the preview worry me; I’m willing to give it a chance. I’m sure other Star Wars role playing games will come out in the future, the license is just too attractive. We’ll see what happens, but will it be as great as the Saga System?

Looking at this short list of games I realize three of the five games were sci-fi games, and another I used for a sci-fi game. I guess I’m still looking for the right game of this genre. So what systems have you enjoyed and were sad to see go the way of the dodo? I’d love to know…

The stars are right… For a winner! The results of the Realms of Cthulhu Giveaway Contest

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July 13, 2010
by Sunglar in , , , ,

Following the post for the Realms of Cthulhu giveaway, many of our loyal readers sent in their submissions and once the contest closed we sat down to give each one good read.

After much consideration and difficult deliberation, Michael and I have agreed on a winner. All entries were excellent, making the deliberation process an arduous one. We thank each and everyone who participated. It was really a close race, but we decided the winner is (drum roll please)….

  • Philip Tucker

He is the winner of a digital copy of the Realms of Cthulhu book, congratulations! Philip has an excellent blog, DMing Basics. Be sure to swing by and congratulate him!

We also have two honorable mentions in the contest:

  • David Henley
  • Karlo J. Yeager

While we don’t have a book to give them, and we really wish we had one for everybody who sent in their entry, both David and Karlo have their entries included in the PDF we’ve put together. It contains the wining entry and the two honorable mentions for your reading enjoyment.

Again, congratulations to the winner and honorable mentions and thank you to everyone for participating. We’ll have more contest and giveaways in the future so be on the lookout for them!

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