MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

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Zombieneighbours
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Re: MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

Post by Zombieneighbours » Sun Nov 04, 2012 7:57 am

That is beyond cute.

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Re: MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

Post by 1d4cast_James » Sun Nov 04, 2012 11:12 pm

Great episode you guys!

In regards to balancing games, I was more concerned with using the Mythos creatures to push the story forward instead of killing off characters too quickly. I guess I could always fudge rolls, limit the contact that the players have with the creatures, or any variety of other options. I did enjoy your answers though!
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Re: MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

Post by Cthuhugh » Wed Nov 07, 2012 11:47 pm

That is the cutest lil cultist I've ever seen!


Sat Nov 03, 2012 3:31 am by Keeper Jon
vladsee wrote:
Here is my daughter who was born last week! In the corner of her crib is a hand crafted doll that my sister made for my baby but I don't think it would be fair to enter it in the Celia's Cilia Giveaway since it wasn't my creation nor was it created by a child. Just want to share it and hopefully inspire others. Anyway, here is baby Cthulhu guarding my baby Sophia while she is sleeping.
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Re: MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

Post by Dr. Gerard » Wed Nov 14, 2012 2:31 am

amvteknoboy wrote:Great episode you guys!

In regards to balancing games, I was more concerned with using the Mythos creatures to push the story forward instead of killing off characters too quickly. I guess I could always fudge rolls, limit the contact that the players have with the creatures, or any variety of other options. I did enjoy your answers though!
Yeah, I wasn't sure if we really answered your question in that show. Pacing out the sanity loss and monster contact in a campaign or scenario can actually be tricky.

I have kind of a funny story about a rookie move that I did in my first campaign. I'll probably tell it on the show at some point if it's relevant. I decided to try dropping two different plot hooks at the same time to kick off a campaign. I wanted a sense of "sandbox" possibility in the game, so the players could follow what they were most interested in.

Problem is, plot hooks are pretty much evidence or events that players can't reasonably ignore. So one was a PC hiring the group to investigate a haunted place, and another was a parent concerned about their kid getting into a bad crowd. Of course, they followed up on both. Man, was that a mistake. When you run two scenarios at the same time, that's double the sanity loss with no possible recovery until the end of at least one of those threads.

But, assuming you don't do something so boneheaded as that, it's still good to throw in a few 0/1 or 1/1d3 SAN losses before the badness in your story hits the fan. Check out the rulebook for a guide to what kind of horror triggers what level of loss. (Page 76 in my bookThis is pretty much how horror stories go anyway. First, there's some small evidence of big but natural threat -- like a fisherman pulling up half a tuna or bite marks in a boat, then missing people, then a body might turn up, then noises down by the pier, people with torches out at Light House Island...you get the picture. You can add up the average losses for each character if they miss all their SAN rolls and get a good picture of how unstable they will be when you bring the Mythos Hammer down.

("Smokey, my friend, you're entering a world of pain.")

This is all more bean counting than you really ever need to do, but I think it helps to go through the process ahead of time once or twice just to get an idea of how the game tends to play out. You might use an existing scenario and add up what the average sanity losses would likely be over the course of a story.

For the climactic sanity-blasting scenes, it's good to remember the magic number of 5 -- if any one sanity loss is 5 or more, you've got a possible temporary looney on your hands. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but keep it in mind. So if the SAN loss is 1/1d6, (that format means a loss of 1 SAN pt. for those who make their roll, 1d6 for those who don't) there's a small chance that someone will flip their gourd. If you want to push for a scenario that ends in the Asylum, go for big 1/1d10 elements like corpses rising from the grave (this is the example in the book). If you want to go for more atmosphere and want to keep the PCs intact for the next scenario, dial it down so that the evidence and threat that they witness is more on the forensic, scientific or slightly supernatural level.

Likewise adjust the level of cumulative losses written into the final showdown. If you include more than one kind of monster (characters can get used to strangeness so you don;t have to roll for each instance of a Mi-Go, for example), extra bad things to witness or any of the serious Servitors within the same game hour, you might trigger the Indefinite sanity loss. If your buildup has included tons of losses, and you predict you'll have most characters at 40 or less in SAN by the time shit gets real, then you're looking at characters failing lots of their SAN checks and going batty if they lose more than 8 in a game hour. That's not a great chance for survival. Plus, any single creature that will cause a SAN loss like that is probably going to slaughter a party anyway.

At some point we're probably going to get into the 7th Edition chase rules. But I mention chases here because it's one way that you can have an action-packed scene in Call of Cthulhu that is not strictly about combat.

Okay, I've opined enough. I hope that helps, man. If anyone out there with more experience thinks I'm off the beam here, please let me know!
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Re: MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

Post by WiseWolf » Mon Nov 26, 2012 3:09 pm

TAK wrote:Not sure if he fits under underrated, but I'm not sure if this particular movie has gotten it's fair due: Lord of Illusions by Clive Barker.
I thought I was the only one who's seen this movie. Completely underrated, it stand side by side with Mouth of Madness in my mind.

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Re: MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

Post by Keeper Dan » Sat Dec 01, 2012 12:39 am

I didn't think much of it when I first saw it in the theater, but looking at it from a Keeper perspective, there's a ton of potential there. I may have to see that again sometime soon.
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Re: MUP 17- Made to Order Monsters

Post by fox01313 » Fri Nov 08, 2013 5:46 pm

Just throwing this idea out there if people want to use Glaaki more in some scenario & unsure if it was used already or not as just crawled out of my brain while listening to the MUP episode again. Don't recall it being in a story either as I've not read a ton of stuff with Glaaki in it but feel free to adapt this rough idea which is an interesting starting off point.

Cult of Glaaki needs more revelations & wants to get a bunch of people to help out but the cult is only so big. So the leader of this cult say in Boston or Arkham general area gets some of the smaller spikes of Glaaki (or spike tips) that are about blowgun dart sized. As the spike is shaved off Glaaki or something that's shed off every now & then (or given to the cult in some ritual use) so the toxin on it isn't full strength but it's enough to infect someone for about a lunar month (i.e. full moon to full moon) as well as only affecting them when they sleep. During the sleep time they will wake up in a trance like state & go start writing down some new revelations from Glaaki. If they are left alone they will write until a certain amount of time but close to waking up they will hide the papers & go back to bed like nothing is wrong. If someone (like some woman of the house) is shot with one of these darts & starts writing & her husband tries to wake them up then they might get violent as their one task is to write the revelations.

Cut to a few weeks later at the end of when the effect should be wearing off, the cult breaks in & finds the revelations and kills the people making it look like a normal break-in to cover up their tracks. Though maybe in the household with the wife for example she starts waking up out of her trance & sees what she's been hiding like her dead husband, or the cops show up to find a woman murdered but the rest of her family has been dead in a room for weeks unless the cult just starts burning some houses down.

Insert investigators somewhere like how they see that a rash of murders are showing up where a few people are shot with the dart at the same time so they can easily track the 4-6 people, wait for them to write a chapter & then finish them off. Course you could always get one of the players shot with the dart, feeling groggy for a month then dealing with the surprise cult-o-gram at the door to kill them. :o

And there's no telling what all these people have been writing on how messy that could get, course could just be Glaaki telling the cult they need to try out this new cake recipe or summon beastie.
"That's funny, usually the blood gets off on the second floor." -Mr. Burns in The Shinning episode (Treehouse of horror V)

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