Mythos non scenarios?

Where students and faculty can talk about whatever they like.
Post Reply
Riq
Sophmore
Sophmore
Posts:58
Joined:Mon Jul 08, 2013 1:02 pm
Mythos non scenarios?

Post by Riq » Wed Jul 17, 2013 1:18 pm

Soooooo...

CitySlicker's post on non Mythos scenarios got me thinking about other non Mythos games / scenarios that would make for interesting CoC play:

Take one non Mythos scenario,
Add Mythos entity,
Roll San loss.

Do any of you have any useful suggestions, and I think this can apply to the game system itself, or a one off scenario or even scene that you feel would work well as a CoC game. This could also include computer games, board games etc.

My examples would include:

Night's Black Agents campaign the Zalozhiny Quartet (spelling to be checked later).
A fascinating game, with enough background material to develop an engaging long running campaign for modern / DG. A key element to this is the fact that you as Keeper get to decide what kind of enemy entity you use against your pcs. While the game is geared towards vampires, it would take very little to modify this into something more Lovecraftian.

Assassins Creed (computer game series), in particular the most recent game set in the US revolutionary era... a setting I *really* want fleshed out for CoC. Linked to this is Colonial Gothic, a role playing system set in that specific era with a strong horror flavour... But not a game I'm familiar with.

Examples of this being used:

A Fist Full of Misanthropes podcast gives an actual play CoC DG scenario take off from the computer game Special Ops: A Line in the Sand.

And... RPPR did an actual play podcast CoC modern day setting based on the recent 8bit computer game Hotline Miami.

trevlix
Investigator
Investigator
Posts:510
Joined:Sun Aug 19, 2012 2:58 am
Contact:
Re: Mythos non scenarios?

Post by trevlix » Wed Jul 17, 2013 5:39 pm

Funny you should mention this...I'm writing a series of blog posts where I describe doing this to an X-Files episode. Basically taking the non-mythos investigation and adding mythos elements to it. I'm 2/3 of the way through, but I just posted the first part in case anyone is interested.

But back to your question, I think any X-Files episodes contain enough scenes or plot hooks for a CoC game.

I would also love someone to take The Secret World MMO and turn it into a tabletop. Even the intro city, heavily lovecraftian though it is, contains enough scenes and ideas to keep you going for a long time.
[Trafford: Insanity: 4, Exhaustion: 2]

http://keepingthegame.blogspot.com/

Eibon
Sophmore
Sophmore
Posts:57
Joined:Tue Oct 30, 2012 10:50 am
Re: Mythos non scenarios?

Post by Eibon » Wed Jul 31, 2013 12:45 pm

Gaslight stuff should be fairly easy to develop. It was a golden age of mystery and detective fiction. The Gaslight campaign I just ran included a scenerio based on an episode of the TV series Sargeant Cork -- which have been release on DVD in the UK, but other stuff includes The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (also on DVD in the UK). Anthologies edited by Hugh Greene were also published for this series and introduced me to several excellent detectives. This series also has the distinction of the only Thomas Carnacki dramitisation I know of. It starred Donald Pleasence as Carnacki, but I have to say, it's not outstanding. The Cthulhu Britannica material from Cubical 7 can easily be adapted to Gaslight (while it makes Mythos connections, but all the stuff is obviously Mythos). Ghost stories are also excellent sources. Some of my best scares have been cribbed from M. R. James. Pagan Publishing's Golden Dawn sourcebook, although now out of print, had some great 1890s material in it. Personally I would tend to avoid the obvious: Dracula, The Ripper, Mr Hyde, Nessie, Sherlock Holmes, etc. There's stuff out there for these creatures. It was also the age of "The Great Game", so early espionage is possible. Or, if you've a desire to look at the social situation you could have someone investigating industrial deaths or the conditions of the poor. You could run whole chunks of Thomas Hardy novels and get adventures out of it without so much as a nightgaunt in sight. Then there's the Arthur Machen weirdness of something like The Terror, one of the first books where Nature turns on Mankind. How about the Hitchcock favourite: an innocent man on the run from a crime he didn't commit?

I'm generally a fan of mixing adventures up. If every adventure is Mythos it all starts to feel similar, like Scooby-Doo. Partly it depends on how your group is constituted: are they detectives (private or official), newspaper men, dilettantes, or just unfortunates? It will shape the number and frequency of adventures for those players. Generally I try a put it at least one non-mythos adventure/incident every couple of Mythos adventures. It's also possible for the Mythos to be very much in the background. I recently ran an adventure in which a stolen magical gem lead to an Indian who wanted to use its power to raise the dead of London and inflict the Victorian zombie apocalypse on the capital of the British Empire, as a blow for the liberation of India from British rule. The power of the gem was Mythos, but for the players it was filtered through the Hindu mythology the antagonist knew.

Post Reply