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Chainsaw Hobbit
2011-02-26, 12:26 PM
I've been running a CoC home game for a while, and I've recently encountered the following problem: the Mythos doesn't scare my players anymore.
They know how many hit points a ghoul has, they can name most of the Great Old Ones, they know all the strengths and weaknesses of a cult of Cthulhu, and so on. Now that nothing is mysterious, what am I to do?

Ganurath
2011-02-26, 12:28 PM
I've never played the game myself, but as I understand it a great deal of the game's fear comes from fear of the unknown. Is there room in the current plot for either a side-mission to a homebrew villain or for some homebrew dangers to be spliced into the current villain?

HalfTangible
2011-02-26, 12:28 PM
I've been running a CoC home game for a while, and I've recently encountered the following problem: the Mythos doesn't scare my players anymore.
They know how many hit points a ghoul has, they can name most of the Great Old Ones, they know all the strengths and weaknesses of a cult of Cthulhu, and so on. Now that nothing is mysterious, what am I to do?
Change everything. IE, change the ghoul's hitpoints, the strengths and weaknesses of the cult, etc etc. Alternatively, add something new to the mix, something they wouldn't see coming.

Or just end the game :smalltongue:

Ganurath
2011-02-26, 12:31 PM
Change everything. IE, change the ghoul's hitpoints, the strengths and weaknesses of the cult, etc etc.

Or just end the game :smalltongue:No, no, there's no need to be so inelegant, and there's no need to change the game. You can keep the old, give the players something familiar... Comfortable. And gradually work away from it. Yes, ghouls have so many hit points... But on the grounds of this new cult, in the areas where there are glowing runes on the walls, they visibly regenerate if you don't aim for the head.

Ozreth
2011-02-26, 12:41 PM
I think the fear should come from the storyline, the NPC's that they WONT fight, the dark, damp rooms, the noises etc. Not from monster stats and all that.

Ravens_cry
2011-02-26, 12:43 PM
Well, the Mythos is so well known in geek circles that stepping outside it may offer a nice change of pace, even while keeping within the themes.
I mentioned this as an inspiration for a new D&D deity in another thread, but I am sure it could also be a chilling inspiration for a call of cthulhu (http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06-05/news/myths-over-miami/#) game. There is only so many cults you can stop before things feel a little samey.

jiriku
2011-02-26, 12:45 PM
Ozreth and Genureth are on to it. Uncertainty drives fear. Fill the game with things that make them uncertain. Prophecies with vague timelines. Strangers with mysterious intentions. Allies who start behaving oddly. Mysterious events with no understandable cause. Superstitious rural folk who are obviously terrified of something but don't trust you enough to tell you what it is.

Ganurath
2011-02-26, 12:53 PM
...Oh. I just had an idea. I'm not sure if it's CoC worthy, though.

The players have this mission to get some relic that some now-dead cult kept hidden in a graveyard. The cultists set up the graveyard as one giant trap to try to contain the relic, as these cultists were of the well-intentioned variety. How does the trap work? It raises regenerating ghouls within its perimeter that can be taken out of the fight with hp damage, but the only way to make sure they stay down for more than a minute is a headshot.

Now, here's where things get interesting. The cemetary has never had trouble with graverobbers, and nobody knows why. Investigation on the part of the players would allow them to note that the brick pillars spacing the metal fence have inward-facing runes or some other spell factor on them. Being good CoC players, they'll likely avoid messing with these. Especially if a cursory examination lets them know that they're in homebrew territory.

So, they head to the crypt where the cultists supposed stashed the relic, and find that the stone coffin within is actually a cover for a stairway. And so, several chambers are found, one of which has an alternative exit from the underground structure. Every room will have the rune setup from the cemetary on the corner walls, as well as the hallway support beams. Be sure to have the hallway scattered with a level-appropriate quantity of cultist corpses.

So, upon arriving in the chamber with the MacGuffin, they take whatever precautions they feel appropriate, and pick up the relic. Cue all the runes glowing a sickly sea green, and the corpses rising. So, they need to clear out the tunnels. Odds are they won't trust the side exit for now, so they'll head for the graveyard again.

Did I mention how shallow these graves were?

The Big Dice
2011-02-26, 01:20 PM
Ozreth and Genureth are on to it. Uncertainty drives fear. Fill the game with things that make them uncertain. Prophecies with vague timelines. Strangers with mysterious intentions. Allies who start behaving oddly. Mysterious events with no understandable cause. Superstitious rural folk who are obviously terrified of something but don't trust you enough to tell you what it is.

There are two types of fear. Fear of the unknown is the one that most RPGs try to encourage you to play on. Except there comes a point where that fails.

So then we have to learn how to use fear of the known. The question here is, what are you more afraid of, the deadly venomous spider you don't know about, or the one you just saw go into your boot?

So the players know how many hit points a ghoul has. They also know how many bullets they have. What if there are more ghouls than bullets? What if that puny ghoul is loose inside an orphanage?

Fear of the known is a powerful thing.

Ytaker
2011-02-26, 01:23 PM
HP lovecraft said you shouldn't have to make your stories scary. The mere fact that you're meeting aliens should be scary. That element of fear though has long since gone.

How well do you know your players? Do you know them well enough to say what their actual fears are? Do spiders make them go bump in the night, or corpses, or disfigurement? If you know what they actually fear that should make you more effective at scaring them. You can find things in the cthulhu mythos that might actually scare them.

Edit. I've never found the game that scary. The fact that your character is probably gonna die a horrible death means you can't get attached to them. I've been far more scared in dnd when I actually feel for my long lived character.

Dust
2011-02-26, 01:38 PM
Enormous post behind the cut.

List of Creepy WTF Events to Spring on your Players

For one session, seemingly everything the PCs witness occurs in increments of either 19 or 23. 23 victims in an accident. A gun stored with 23 bullets. The cab they use is no. 23, the house is no. 23. After the session, nothing has anything to do with the number 23 for a number of sessions. After a while, 23 starts creeping back in.


The PC feels he or she is being followed and sees something ducking away whenever he or she looks in a mirror...but never when turning around. Similar: if a PC wears glasses or contacts, they see movement--but only when not wearing glasses or specs.


The player gains the ability to see exactly 6 seconds ahead in time, as if from a perspective slightly above his head. Give him time to get used to this, to let him know its perfectly accurate... and then start having it go blank at times. Have him forsee events, like a waitress drawing a gun and shooting him, that don't actually happen. The vision starts centering on his forehead, and he grows a strange lump there...


Any insect in the PC's presence is completely invulnerable. A mosquito could be swatted a hundred times and continue buzzing, a swarm of ants could survive every poison. Insects start following him, never trying to hurt him.


While engaged in conversation, a PC puts down a his cup of coffee on the table. When he reaches for it again, the cup is empty and cracked, and appears to have been touched for years. This may or may not return to normal at the blink of an eye, depending on the mood of the DM.


The woods are filled with chrips, and the sounds of thriving life. But every creature seen is dead, and in a fairly advanced state of death.


The PCs, in the process of breaking into somewhere or other (especially appropriate if it's a red herring's house) are forced to kill a guard dog outside. After searching the place (as appropriate to the rest of the adventure) they leave through the same door they entered. The dog's corpse is still there, lying in a pool of it's own blood.
One of them sees it twitch. Just a tiny movement of the nose or toe-tip.
Then it wakes up. It stands up as though it had just been taking a nap, in blatant defiance of the gaping bullet hole in its face. Then it shakes itself, like any dog would on discovering that it was wet. Clumps of blood-soaked fur and rotten meat (it's only been dead about an hour, why is it so decayed?) fly everywhere. When it's finished, there's almost nothing left but cartilage and bone.
Then it charges, trailing its own intestines like a gory leash. I was doing this in 3.5, and used the statistics for a skeletal wolf from the monster manual.


The paintings in the waiting room look like ordinary pastel still-lifes, but out of the corner of the eye they look shadowy, with dead flowers, rotten fruit, etc.


When an old, rusty faucet is turned on, roaches/spiders/maggots flow out instead of water.


An affluent PC finds a mystical necklace that brings people back to life. Every time someone is brought back a tattoo of chains appears on the PCs body. After the 4th chain appears the PC disappears, everything they care for begins to get destroyed.


An NPC friend of the PCs (we'll call him Ronald) is a wine connoisseur. This works best if he has been previously introduced and is simply viewed as a friend rather than a suspiciously introduced new character. He recently purchased a large wine cask shipped over from France that is 100+ years old and invites the PCs to a taste testing. It is wonderful wine, and he fills a bottle or two of it up for the PCs to take with them.
Time passes (Several sessions, or even several adventures)
Ronald dies of natural causes (ie: not supernatural. He could still be hit by a bus or whatnot) and has left some things to the PCs. They include a small sum of money, some personal items of little value, and the wine cask. Allow the PCs to drink all they like for a few sessions. . .
Time passes.
The cask finally dries up. While disposing of it (or if they happen to open it on purpose) the PCs discover an ancient, desiccated, wine-soaked corpse which was apparently placed in the cask when it was first sealed. Study shows that the body is that of Ronald. If they still have the first bottle that Ronald gave them, testing shows that there are traces of human tissue in the wine. Ronald's grave is empty, except for the casket and anything he was buried with.


The P.C.s find written on a wall; "There was a hole here. It's gone now."


The character notices that the shadows cast by solid objects (buildings, light poles, etc.) aren't solid. There seem to be light (possibly even different colors) and dark patches within the shadow. No one else seems to think this is odd.


While reading a book (any book), the words seem to move a bit at first, before the ink melts into a liquid and starts dripping out of the book. This seems to happen throughout the pages, and go on a bit longer than you'd expect. The ink turns red and turns into blood, now pouring over their hands, but keeps flowing out, while dying every page, eventually the flow slows down, and the blood falls from the pages. It leaves behind no trace of the original text, but on each pair of pages, written in blood, is the message "words won't help when he comes back"


Behind a church altar is the scrawled writing "Jesus Doesn't Come Here Anymore".


In the middle of the summer, neighborhood children begin disappearing; The PCs become aware of it, and should begin investigating. There is no creepy guy in a van. There is no sex offender or serial killer.
But every day at mid day, the children go down to the parking lot of an old abandoned hospital (preferably one the PCs knew about and investigated, finding nothing), and play a game--this could be something as simple as tag. Something innocent.
The loser (always only one), is forced by the other children to go down into the basement of the hospital, and is never heard from again.
When asked about it later, one of the children says:
"We had to. If we wanted to keep Them in there, we had to give them someone every day."


Misplaced items start showing up in the PC's possession--they just find them, and the items aren't necessarily stuff they have misplaced. First it's odd socks, ballpoint pens, pencils, loose change, erasers, screws and bolts. Then it starts to be CDs, books--these things often have names written on them, so the PCs know it's not their stuff. A pair of pants. But then it's a pair of false teeth. And eyeglasses. And a pacemaker. And all the misplaced junk really wants to be in the same room.
This has several consequences: First, the PCs are up on mischief charges or murder charges (the pacemaker is pretty extreme). And second, the junk is assembling into something like a person. And when it can be a person, what kind of agenda does it have with regards to the PCs?

tuesdayscoming
2011-02-26, 02:13 PM
Enormous post behind the cut.

List of Creepy WTF Events to Spring on your Players

For one session, seemingly everything the PCs witness occurs in increments of either 19 or 23. 23 victims in an accident. A gun stored with 23 bullets. The cab they use is no. 23, the house is no. 23. After the session, nothing has anything to do with the number 23 for a number of sessions. After a while, 23 starts creeping back in.


The PC feels he or she is being followed and sees something ducking away whenever he or she looks in a mirror...but never when turning around. Similar: if a PC wears glasses or contacts, they see movement--but only when not wearing glasses or specs.


The player gains the ability to see exactly 6 seconds ahead in time, as if from a perspective slightly above his head. Give him time to get used to this, to let him know its perfectly accurate... and then start having it go blank at times. Have him forsee events, like a waitress drawing a gun and shooting him, that don't actually happen. The vision starts centering on his forehead, and he grows a strange lump there...


Any insect in the PC's presence is completely invulnerable. A mosquito could be swatted a hundred times and continue buzzing, a swarm of ants could survive every poison. Insects start following him, never trying to hurt him.


While engaged in conversation, a PC puts down a his cup of coffee on the table. When he reaches for it again, the cup is empty and cracked, and appears to have been touched for years. This may or may not return to normal at the blink of an eye, depending on the mood of the DM.


The woods are filled with chrips, and the sounds of thriving life. But every creature seen is dead, and in a fairly advanced state of death.


The PCs, in the process of breaking into somewhere or other (especially appropriate if it's a red herring's house) are forced to kill a guard dog outside. After searching the place (as appropriate to the rest of the adventure) they leave through the same door they entered. The dog's corpse is still there, lying in a pool of it's own blood.
One of them sees it twitch. Just a tiny movement of the nose or toe-tip.
Then it wakes up. It stands up as though it had just been taking a nap, in blatant defiance of the gaping bullet hole in its face. Then it shakes itself, like any dog would on discovering that it was wet. Clumps of blood-soaked fur and rotten meat (it's only been dead about an hour, why is it so decayed?) fly everywhere. When it's finished, there's almost nothing left but cartilage and bone.
Then it charges, trailing its own intestines like a gory leash. I was doing this in 3.5, and used the statistics for a skeletal wolf from the monster manual.


The paintings in the waiting room look like ordinary pastel still-lifes, but out of the corner of the eye they look shadowy, with dead flowers, rotten fruit, etc.


When an old, rusty faucet is turned on, roaches/spiders/maggots flow out instead of water.


An affluent PC finds a mystical necklace that brings people back to life. Every time someone is brought back a tattoo of chains appears on the PCs body. After the 4th chain appears the PC disappears, everything they care for begins to get destroyed.


An NPC friend of the PCs (we'll call him Ronald) is a wine connoisseur. This works best if he has been previously introduced and is simply viewed as a friend rather than a suspiciously introduced new character. He recently purchased a large wine cask shipped over from France that is 100+ years old and invites the PCs to a taste testing. It is wonderful wine, and he fills a bottle or two of it up for the PCs to take with them.
Time passes (Several sessions, or even several adventures)
Ronald dies of natural causes (ie: not supernatural. He could still be hit by a bus or whatnot) and has left some things to the PCs. They include a small sum of money, some personal items of little value, and the wine cask. Allow the PCs to drink all they like for a few sessions. . .
Time passes.
The cask finally dries up. While disposing of it (or if they happen to open it on purpose) the PCs discover an ancient, desiccated, wine-soaked corpse which was apparently placed in the cask when it was first sealed. Study shows that the body is that of Ronald. If they still have the first bottle that Ronald gave them, testing shows that there are traces of human tissue in the wine. Ronald's grave is empty, except for the casket and anything he was buried with.


The P.C.s find written on a wall; "There was a hole here. It's gone now."


The character notices that the shadows cast by solid objects (buildings, light poles, etc.) aren't solid. There seem to be light (possibly even different colors) and dark patches within the shadow. No one else seems to think this is odd.


While reading a book (any book), the words seem to move a bit at first, before the ink melts into a liquid and starts dripping out of the book. This seems to happen throughout the pages, and go on a bit longer than you'd expect. The ink turns red and turns into blood, now pouring over their hands, but keeps flowing out, while dying every page, eventually the flow slows down, and the blood falls from the pages. It leaves behind no trace of the original text, but on each pair of pages, written in blood, is the message "words won't help when he comes back"


Behind a church altar is the scrawled writing "Jesus Doesn't Come Here Anymore".


In the middle of the summer, neighborhood children begin disappearing; The PCs become aware of it, and should begin investigating. There is no creepy guy in a van. There is no sex offender or serial killer.
But every day at mid day, the children go down to the parking lot of an old abandoned hospital (preferably one the PCs knew about and investigated, finding nothing), and play a game--this could be something as simple as tag. Something innocent.
The loser (always only one), is forced by the other children to go down into the basement of the hospital, and is never heard from again.
When asked about it later, one of the children says:
"We had to. If we wanted to keep Them in there, we had to give them someone every day."


Misplaced items start showing up in the PC's possession--they just find them, and the items aren't necessarily stuff they have misplaced. First it's odd socks, ballpoint pens, pencils, loose change, erasers, screws and bolts. Then it starts to be CDs, books--these things often have names written on them, so the PCs know it's not their stuff. A pair of pants. But then it's a pair of false teeth. And eyeglasses. And a pacemaker. And all the misplaced junk really wants to be in the same room.
This has several consequences: First, the PCs are up on mischief charges or murder charges (the pacemaker is pretty extreme). And second, the junk is assembling into something like a person. And when it can be a person, what kind of agenda does it have with regards to the PCs?


Some wonderfully creepy ideas here, Dust. I may just have to adapt a few for my own purposes!

Clepto
2011-02-26, 02:52 PM
To start, I'm going to assume you're playing the current Chaosium version of the game.

This sounds suspiciously like metagaming. Does their knowledge of ghoul hitpoints come from actual Mythos skill points, or prior player knowledge. If the latter, they shouldn't be metagaming to begin with, and you should start changing things to compensate.

If the former, you do realize that their maximum sanity is 99-Cthulhu Mythos, right? If their Mythos scores are high enough to consistently pass and know what they're up against, then they're already screwed. They just don't know it yet. Start throwing in things that have guaranteed sanity loss. Drive their characters closer to the edge, bit by bit. They will come to regret their good Mythos scores. You don't even need to change anything. There are plenty of creatures and items that bestow a guaranteed sanity loss, even if they pass the SAN check.

B1okHead
2011-02-26, 03:27 PM
If you know how tough a ghoul (or whatever else) is, even if your character doesn't, it still takes away from the horror aspect.

WalkingTarget
2011-02-26, 03:35 PM
If you know how tough a ghoul (or whatever else) is, even if your character doesn't, it still takes away from the horror aspect.

Thus the need to present them with things that they (as players) aren't familiar with.

Running a CoC game in college with players who didn't know jack about Lovecraft? Awesome.

Playing in CoC games at GenCon where all of the players know how everything works and generally gamed the system? Tedious.

If the players know how many HP the ghoul has, stop throwing ghouls at them (or whatever actual examples you're having trouble with). The best CoC games I've ever been associated with are the ones where the players have as little information about the Mythos as possible. If your players have read the rulebook, even the Keeper sections, use other resources. If the players can't have fun in a game where they don't already know everything, CoC probably isn't for them.

VirOath
2011-02-26, 03:52 PM
Fear of the known, fear of the unknown. The game relies on the unknown to start, but as with what has been played they will learn it over time, that luster will fade.

So as others said, change things up. Be subtle. You can provoke an OH SHI- sort of fear by, yeah, having the ghoul visibly regenerate right before them. Because they know what they are up against, they likely have a basic plan for what they encounter. By changing it up just enough so that they don't know what they are fighting, while thinking they do know it, pushes them to lose the safety and comfort of that plan. Now, their fall back plan is to run away, make that a less than optimal option.

But that is the real essence of getting a Fear Mythos right for Call Of Cthulhu. Not in manipulating mechanics, but in making things seem mostly normal, just a little off. And things only get stranger, weirder as they pick at it. That is what crafts the creepy list above, things happen that your mind and the universe itself just scream at you ever so softly that it is wrong. When the rational mind can't predict the outcome of their next action, fear takes root after the fact when the realize how wrong they were.

CoC gives you even more freedom here than most games. Why? Because you don't have to worry about being fair. There is no silent agreement between the DM and players for a fair game, the game is built around being on uneven ground. You throw a first level character into a locked room with a greater basilisk in 3.5 and you're being a bad DM and breaking that silent agreement. You leave an open book on a table that is for lack of a better term "SAN check or head explodes" in CoC then that is just the name of the game.

Venerable
2011-02-26, 03:58 PM
Turn your players' complacency against them by restatting monsters. Go nuts! Make monsters tougher. Give them new powers. Swap abilities between monsters. Create new monsters from scratch. Perhaps members the Great Race can now become insubstantial, or cultists of Yig can paralyze their foes with a touch. Ghouls spit insanity venom, that kind of thing.

Flavor suggestion for this: feed your players clues about a coming long-prophecied alignment of the heavens, which grants new power to ancient evils. Let them find an ancient scroll that recounts the chaos and terror that followed the last alignment (oh, so that's what happened to Atlantis!). Then have fun watching your players' faces when they learn that the coming alignment is not hundreds or thousands of years in the future, but a mere couple of months. How will they prepare?

Ah, and never overlook the power of well-placed red herrings. My Keeper always kept his group constantly off-balance by adding to each adventure some eerie elements that didn't affect the main plot... but as we played, we never knew which elements mattered, and which didn't.

Connington
2011-02-26, 04:00 PM
As a corollary to all the suggestions of "change the rules", I'd like to second The Big Dice's point. Put them in situations where knowing the rules doesn't do much. They can name all the great old ones? That's wonderful (and give them a beefy San check by way of congratulations), but that knowledge doesn't give them any they can use to stop Nyarlathotep from killing thousands of kittens in front of their eyes.

Stack the deck against the PCs. Make life unfair. Put them up against things that they can't take head on, make them hide or flee. When they hide under the floorboards, go into detail narrating how their characters hear the sounds of heavy shuffling overhead, the whispers in a language not meant for human mouths, and then a sudden pause, as if the thing above is listening for something (this is where you roll the monster's listen check, or at least pretend to). Make them struggle for every victory, and don't be afraid to punish them ruthlessly when they fail, even if it's your fault that you accidentally made the encounter too hard.

You're problem is that the characters know they can take whatever you dish out. So you're going to have to either make it so they don't know what's going on, or make sure they know that they're out of their league. See if you can do both.

The Big Dice
2011-02-26, 04:39 PM
As a corollary to all the suggestions of "change the rules", I'd like to second The Big Dice's point. Put them in situations where knowing the rules doesn't do much. They can name all the great old ones? That's wonderful (and give them a beefy San check by way of congratulations), but that knowledge doesn't give them any they can use to stop Nyarlathotep from killing thousands of kittens in front of their eyes.
When players know the rules too well, I like to put them in positions where knowing the rules makes them more afraid than they would have been if they didn't know them. Tell them the book has called a Hound of Tindalos. Let them know the temple is protected by Formless Spawn. When they go into the woods, they see somehting that could only be Dark Young of Shub Niggurauth.

Don't give names, just describe things in ways that leaves the players knowing exactly what it is, even if the name doesn't get mentioned.

Then they start to get nervous.

Another classic horror trick, one that gets used in countless books and movies from all points of the quality spectrum is surprisingly easy.

Put the characters in a place that they don't mind being. Like say, a hotel in the mountains. Then arrange things so that they can't leave. Say with a big storm. Then either start killing NPCs one at a time, off camera and in horrible ways. Or have something try to kill the PCs one at a time.

The thing to avoid is that moment when the players go "Right, we know it's Deep Ones. We've got a boat and we've got depth charges for the ones under water. Let's go out to that island and kill everything with scales!"

Because that's the moment you crossed over from a horror story and wandered into an action movie.

Clepto
2011-02-27, 10:47 AM
You can also mess with the characters using things that have no actual bearing on the game. Investigators are usually half-mad anyway, so it doesn't take much.

Case in point: in our present day campaign, my GM had my character constantly seeing moving shadows at the edges of light sources. The first time, he saw some sort of actual creature that wouldn't go into the light, but after that it was just shadows. Nobody else in the party would ever see them. The GM had me constantly throwing Spot Hidden rolls, only to see fleeting shadows.

The end result of this is a character who walked around with at least two small LED flashlights, a 1-million candlepower spotlight, and several lighters on his person, pretty much at all times. It ended up like I was roleplaying the main guy from Darkness Falls.

Fhaolan
2011-02-27, 12:39 PM
There is a point that CoC simply stops working. The original point to the Mythos is that it *actively* makes no sense to humans. That understanding it would drive people insane.

But wrapping a game system around it makes it so that the players can make sense of it. The understanding won't drive them insane, and as long as it has stats, it is possible to kill something. As long as something is killable, then it's survivable. As long as it's survivable, in a game persepective, then it's not really a threat.

Cthulhu isn't a big-bad because he can eat 1d6 investigators per round. He's the big-bad because his mere existance is a violation of everything people believe about reality. As long as the players simply see him as a bag of XP & HP, then he's not achieving his purpose within the Mythos.

So, basically CoC is not a long-term game unless the players are 'in' to it. They need to be willing and able to suspend their own knowledge, and play the characters. To help with this, the game master has to also be willing to make some seemingly senseless stuff up on the fly. Everyone playing has to let the communial storytelling take a higher priority over the stereotypical D&D/video game mentality of 'kill things, take their stuff'. If that doesn't happen, CoC is just not playable once everyone fully understands the game.

The list of creepy thing posted by Dust have a lot of things in common. They aren't events that the characters can actually *do* anything about. They don't have stats, they can't be defeated or avoided.

rayne_dragon
2011-02-27, 01:24 PM
It sounds like your players have gone and gotten themselves some knowledge. The thing is that a huge them of Lovecraft's works was that knowledge was dangerous, sanity-destroying, and forbidden. If your players can name the hit points of a ghoul, they should have paid dearly for it, probably in terms of madness, friends, or other resources. One of the things that can be required to keep investigators on their toes is to make everything they know wrong. Flip the world on its head and when they start to think to have figured out show them just how wrong they are, just how impossible the universe is. Call of Cthulhu isn't a game about winning, it is a survival horror game where you will inevitably loose. All that matters is how long you can hold off then end. A lot of the other replies have posted great ideas on how to help convey these aspects of the game.

Comet
2011-02-27, 02:23 PM
I was always under the impression that actually making the adventure about the Mythos with a capital M is one of the most boring ways to run CoC.

In every game I've played, the Mythos has always been a sort of backdrop of amusing references and atmosphere for the veterans, but the actual stories and dangers have always been about ghosts, aliens, zombies, magicians, psychic powers, rabid dogs, corrupt priests, mad science or whatever other horrors the GM has prepared.

The Mythos appears in the form of small statues of Cthulhu on the shelf of an antique dealer, or a tome that teaches the characters to ward themselves from hostile magicians with some sort of Mythos related spelloworking, or a mad professor who claims that his knowledge of ghostly activities was given to him by some strange inhuman creatures from beyond the stars.

Keep the Mythos there, to convince your players that this is still CoC, but make the actual story about something else. There's a lot of good stories out there, the Mythos itself doesn't really make for a good story unless the players are unfamiliar with the source material.

Yora
2011-02-27, 02:38 PM
The nice thing about Lovecrafts work is that he encouraged others to not just fall into his footsteps but use his concept and do their own things with it.
And I think that's what a CoC GM has to do. So the mad wizard you're dealling with his calling on Yog-Sothoth during his rituals. The concept of Yog-Sothoth may be familiar to the players, but that really doesn't help anything explaining what's going on. They don't know what the wizard wants to accomplish, what effect his ritual will have, and what else they have to deal with outside his study.
But I think the Mythos is mostly a concept and not a mythos. For every story or adventure, the writer or GM has to come up with his own strange beings and events. Ghouls are only scarry before you see them and while you run for safety the first time. After that, you prepare for a ghoul extermination and there's nothing scary left about them.

Iceforge
2011-02-27, 03:43 PM
Sounds like they are playing CoC as if it was DnD, where the scary part is the monsters, while the scary part should be realizations and descriptions of what they encounter.

Classic example from a website with CoC advice I once read (paraphrased)

In DnD, they meet a poor beggar eating worms and other insects, the DM tell them.

"At the side of the row, is an old raggedly clad man, who clearly has not had a bath for a very long time. In his hand is a small broken plate filled with crawling worms and other insects, and he appears to be eating from the plate"

In CoC:

"In the dark dimlit alley sits a shadowry figure. As you approach a bit more, the dim light reveals it to be an old man. His clothes are half-rotten, torn and unkept, covered with what appears to be small patches of dirt here and there. An smell that is so horrible it seems out of this world, like a mixture of rotten eggs and vomit, reaches you and you cannot help but recoil you face slightly as that smell surrounds you as you approached. The old man is holding forth one hand, shakingly, clearly freezing, and at first, it appears he is holding a small cup in it, as a beggar, asking for money, but closer observation quickly reveals it to be a small half-broken plate, and something is on it, a brown, black and red mass, that appears to be moving and shifting colours, and then you see it, it is filled with worms, small red bettles, black spiders and other insects, some still covered in what appears to be mud, crawling, swarming across each other. The man moves other his other shaking hand and picks up a long wringly fat worm, it struggles as he lifts it up and sucks it inside his mouth and crush it with his teeth, a purplish red liquid is running down from his lips, almost oozing; The man grins and looks into your eyes, holding up his plate towards you 'Go ahead, help yarself, ya look hungry' he says through a wicked grin"



Anyway, I only run CoC as one-shots myself, and I dont use mythos at all, if I can help it, specially seeing how one of the players who has always been part of the one-shots so far, is a die-hard lovecraft fan, I could not satisfy him if I started dipping into the mythos, but he seems satisfied with horror, none the less.

A small idea I have for my next one shot, will be to have the group at a rather isolated area, and when taking a drive, maybe to go shop, as they are almost home in the middle of the night, they will see a figure, a person, emerging from the bushes by the side of the road, about half-an-hours walk away from their cottage (incidentially, it is about half an hour since they would have left it in the first place).

It is very late, raining, and the person (girl most likely in my execution, but could just as well be a guy) is wearing torn clothes, has blood on her but no apperant wounds and is unable to speak, clearly shocked and frightened.

The person will cheer up when/if the PC's approach her, and they will quickly realize, I hope, that the only real option, for now, will be to take her to their cottage (which will have a spare bedroom) for the night and then deal with her tomorrow.

Throughout the evening, the person is still unable to speak, but will make sounds as if attempting and gestures, but will be generally incomprehensivable, and will be shifting a lot between good and bad mood, seeming very happy and then switch right over to heartbroken the next second, seemingly for no reason.

She has no identification on her and is unable to read/write as well, she will look mystified if they show her writings and if they try and make her write, she will write something completely incomprehensivable and seem frustrated they dont understand her, at which point (I know my players well enough to know that one of them is going to suggest writing) it will seem clear that she seems just as frustrated when they dont understand her when she makes the crazy sounds.

The further into the night they come, before going to bed, the more sad and depressed the person will seem, and unless they kept a strict watch on her, she will silently commit suicide during the night, most likely with my players, they will keep watch OUTSIDE her door, afraid she will hurt them, but not where they can see her, giving her privacy to silently tear up some linen and write a note (just as incomprehensivable as everything else) and then hang herself in the room.

Further investigation will turn up nothing, nobody knows who she is, the police has no idea and there are no other appearent tourists in the area nor is there any other cottages in the area with anyone in them, but the police and rangers promise to go around and check every cottage, which will turn up nothing.

Now if the players are very keen on detail, they might start to notice some oddities, mainly that they got a spare set of everything, all food comes in sets of 5 if they are 4, the cottage got 5 rooms, and so on, but will try and keep it very discreet, and well, finally they will discover, somehow, that the person was most likely someone they was supposed to have known, but any evidence of them knowing her, who she was, her coming there with them, her ever existing, seems to have gone, except for her corpse and those incomprehensiable letters she made before killing herself.

Whatever source you make do it, doesn't really matter, if I can manage it somehow, I am even going to go so far as ending it with letting it happen to one of the others, specially if they have not figured it out, which will mean that I will seperate the players (not characters, but the one who it happens to will be seperated at the point where it happens through), and tell them to simply act as they dont know him/her, who she/he is and dont understand anything she/he tries to communicate to them

Yukitsu
2011-02-27, 04:05 PM
A monster round the corner is worth a horde in your face.

faceless horrors are less frightening than the one that keeps getting killed and coming back.

A gun is a great comfort. When bullets don't do anything, you will feel more helpless than if you never had one.

TechnOkami
2011-02-27, 04:21 PM
Summon Lovecraft. He can summon and make his own Elder Gods. Think about making it less scary and more upright crazy.

Yora
2011-02-27, 04:39 PM
Summon creativity: You can make your own elder gods.

WalkingTarget
2011-02-27, 04:55 PM
Summon creativity: You can make your own elder gods.

Exactly. Citing "canon" in the Mythos is generally only really important as far as establishing a common baseline of assumptions for discussing it (e.g. Lovecraft-only, Lovecraft+contemporaries, Everybody who's had a Mythos story published, everybody but Derleth, etc).

The Mythos is a shared "setting" and always has been - it's a series of in-jokes and mutual reference. If you've got the homebrew chops and imagination, just make something up. As was said upthread, you don't have to play fair here.

Kaun
2011-02-27, 05:04 PM
Yeah i always found with CoC that it works best if the players only use their guns on shadows or themselfs.

I always thought using the Slender man (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSlenderManMythos) as a base for a one off could be good. Some of the videos people made about this were fairly freaky.

Ravens_cry
2011-02-27, 05:07 PM
Aye, make your own cosmic horror story. There is a great chasm between gross and scary, and mowing down cultists and ghouls sounds as scary as the Doom comic. If the players know all the tropes, know all the stories, know all the data, change the rules, make things unknown again.

TheCountAlucard
2011-02-27, 08:40 PM
I always thought using the Slender man as a base for a one off could be good. Some of the videos people made about this were fairly freaky.As a matter of fact, I ran a one-shot nWoD game for Halloween, featuring Slendy. :smallamused: It turned out well enough. :smallbiggrin:

Analytica
2011-02-27, 08:44 PM
Make it personal.

That is, begin by having the players construct their characters in a mostly mundane fashion. Let them build up affluent dilettantes with fascistic political ambitions, construct elaborate relationships with each other and NPCs, write up characters that seem to know something about the Mythos and that are actively researching more. Spend some sessions letting them deal with everyday world, or do things on a whim. Basic wish fulfilment, all with the purpose of giving them things that both they and their characters care about.

Then when you introduce subtle occult and supernatural elements, make it threaten these things. The person slowly turning into a fish-creature is pitiable if it is a nameless NPC. If it is the love of your life, or yourself, then the matter is different. If they construct theories on the mythos, it might turn out they are true but in the worst possible way. Whenever possible, build on what the players have already constructed. By making them co-creators in this fashion, they will be better integrated. The priest begins to invoke angels to drive away the darkness. Then they read up on the angels, and begins to come to strange conclusions on their nature. Once the characters believe something about the world, and are invested in that belief, then subtly shaking it works wonders.

Second, freeform cutscene and scene shift tricks. One absolutely wonderful pseudo-Lovecraft scenario (which involved nothing directly recognizable from his writing; unfortunately it is available only in Swedish) had the characters read an old diary; the players then take new characters depicting the events therein for an hour or so. Later this is done with multiple metalayers, they read an old account of an expedition and take on the identities therein; that expedition then finds the logs of an even earlier expedition to the same site and begins to play those characters, then back up, and back again. The temporary characters know much less than the main characters, so being in their heads make things scarier, or stranger.

Abolish OOC talk entirely. Find really scary movie and game soundtracks (the Thing main theme is great) and shift them to shift mood. Play by candlelight only. Handouts, secret notes, whispered instructions. Work in details that seem unimportant in one scene, repeat them so they are noticed but deemed unimportant. Then later, place them so that their true import is revealed. Have flashbacks every now and then to when all the characters were young children together, with old Granny in the manor house. These go slowly forward in time until they remember what they did to Granny, and what they received in return.

Guilt, shame, etc. are nice. Imagine if all characters have somehow become tainted, but do not want to reveal this to the others for fear of what would happen. If they players know no more than their own character's secrets...

Do not use Chtulhu names directly. Use the weird variants (Tsathoggua-Sadoque, Yog-Sothoth-Iak Sakkak, Al Azif, Thoth...) instead. Use real-world mythology, religion and occultism. Dig up the Simon Necronomicon, print it, yellow it and use it as a prop. The characters can try calling on Azag-Thoth or Nergal if they like. Focus on the details, on actually being there at the scene.

Switch to another ruleset, maybe the nWoD one. Keep all rules for the supernatural a secret. Maybe even play without rules.

Kaun
2011-02-27, 09:50 PM
As a matter of fact, I ran a one-shot nWoD game for Halloween, featuring Slendy. :smallamused: It turned out well enough. :smallbiggrin:

You didn't do a write up for it anywhere did you?

Would be mucho interested to know what happened.

Kami2awa
2011-02-28, 05:39 AM
Exactly. Citing "canon" in the Mythos is generally only really important as far as establishing a common baseline of assumptions for discussing it (e.g. Lovecraft-only, Lovecraft+contemporaries, Everybody who's had a Mythos story published, everybody but Derleth, etc).


I really get the impression there is no mythos canon. Lovecraft himself used names of deities interchangeably and sometimes its not even clear if what he refers to is a place, a god, a non-divine being etc etc. The mythos works well as a toolkit for telling stories.

I've found Call of Cthulhu works best with the plot being a normal ghost or horror story with vague elements of the mythos. It also allows suspension of disbelief to continue; if elder gods were being summoned every week, surely the world would know about it by now. But if the only time they were called in the past thousand years was by a mad witch back at the turn of the century in Massachussets...

Here are some games/films/authors/websites which have really been inspiration for me for CoC:

Silent Hill
The Ring
Eraserhead
SCP Foundation
Lost
Scratches
Clive's Barker's Undying
Shadow of the Vampire
Twilight Zone
Steven King
James Herbert
99 Rooms (art installation website)
Atlas Obscura (website that catalogues strange places around the world)
Slender Man Mythos

hamishspence
2011-02-28, 08:10 AM
D20 CoC actually listed a whole bunch of books, films, TV series, etc that go well with the Mythos.

One of them was The X-Files.

Not all Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos works have the same flavour- some have a bit more action and less madness (A Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward).

So, a little action can be OK- as long as it isn't overdone.

TheCountAlucard
2011-02-28, 09:03 AM
You didn't do a write up for it anywhere did you?Nope. :smalltongue:
Would be mucho interested to know what happened.Well, one of the mercenary PCs ended up arrested for arson and the murder of his neighbor, but was found not guilty by reason of mental insanity; the British MI6 agent ended up discharged and institutionalized; the occult librarian wrote a "fictional" book that detailed the strange events, and became a best-seller; the other mercenary PC is doing okay, except that he's developed a nasty cough... :smalleek:

Rumpus
2011-02-28, 09:14 AM
Were your players ever actually scared, or did they just not know what's going on? Horror schtick is so common in our culture that it's tough to scare anybody over the age of ten just through telling ghost stories. Especially if you are playing in the same place where you sat around throwing popcorn at each other while slaughtering orcs last week. Maybe change your gaming location if you can. That being said, some groups just aren't going to be scared in a PnP setting.

I'd say you generally want to avoid combat. I can't think of a time when I was scared during a PnP, but the two scariest games I've ever played were the hotel in Vampire:Bloodlines, and the Asylum in Thief:Deadly Shadows. What both of those had in common was that for most of it, there was NO COMBAT, just scary stuff. Creepy children's music, old toys that slowly roll out of an open door, strange thumps. The thing is, you kept expecting things to jump out, but as long as they DIDN'T, it just kept ratcheting up the tension.

As soon as the players roll for initiative, it's suddenly not scary anymore because the players are on familiar territory. Delay combat as long as possible, and you have a real chance of scaring your players.

The_Jackal
2011-02-28, 09:16 AM
I've been running a CoC home game for a while, and I've recently encountered the following problem: the Mythos doesn't scare my players anymore.
They know how many hit points a ghoul has, they can name most of the Great Old Ones, they know all the strengths and weaknesses of a cult of Cthulhu, and so on. Now that nothing is mysterious, what am I to do?

You're not playing Call of Cthulu correctly. Your players should be in one of four states:

1) Dreading their inevitable demise.
2) Dying.
3) Dead.
4) Quitting the game.

Like Paranoia, CoC seems to be more of a vehicle for abusing your players than an actual game.

Yora
2011-02-28, 09:36 AM
Here are some games/films/authors/websites which have really been inspiration for me for CoC:
I add Uzumaki to that list. It's a comic that starts with only a singular mind twisting event, but then more and more weird things happen and then everything spirals downhill pretty drastically. It's really pretty much Lovecraft in a remote isolated fishing town in Japan.
There is almost no action and that little bit that comes up at the end is more about staying alive than doing anything to slow down the course of events.
That guy also wrote Gyo, which I havn't read yet, but also seems to fit the theme.

Comet
2011-02-28, 09:39 AM
You're not playing Call of Cthulu correctly. Your players should be in one of four states:

1) Dreading their inevitable demise.
2) Dying.
3) Dead.
4) Quitting the game.

Like Paranoia, CoC seems to be more of a vehicle for abusing your players than an actual game.

It's a funny joke, but simply not true.

Paranoia, at least, is a vehicle for the players to abuse themselves. CoC too, if you're running with a good group. The GM just sits back and watches the drama unfold.

The Glyphstone
2011-02-28, 10:15 AM
I add Uzumaki to that list. It's a comic that starts with only a singular mind twisting event, but then more and more weird things happen and then everything spirals downhill pretty drastically.

I see what you did there.:smallwink::smallbiggrin:

Yora
2011-02-28, 10:29 AM
But apparently only half of it. :smallwink:

WalkingTarget
2011-02-28, 10:35 AM
I really get the impression there is no mythos canon. Lovecraft himself used names of deities interchangeably and sometimes its not even clear if what he refers to is a place, a god, a non-divine being etc etc.

The problem with the assumption made here is that you're (well, all of us, generally) using human concepts to describe these things. Insane cultists might worship these beings as gods, but there's no real dividing line here between deity and interdimensional alien beyond the comprehension of mankind. It makes sense that human-level understanding of them (i.e. what Lovecraft's narrators discover or are told) is flawed and contradictory to some degree.

It's convenient to drop them into broad categories for the sake of discussion (Great Old Ones for the more *ahem* mundane big bads like Cthulhu and Outer Gods for the cosmic-scale ones like Yog-sothoth or Azathoth), but it's not totally necessary since other than scale we aren't given enough information on them for the categories to actually provide any sort of commonality between them. The only really unfortunate re-use of a term that occurs to me off-hand is "Old One" in both The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness for different things.

What I mean by "canon" is which set of stories/authors from which you draw what inferences you can. Shub-niggurath the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young is mentioned many times by Lovecraft, but never makes an appearance. Other authors (Derleth, Bloch, and Campbell, for example) filled in some details.

Arbane
2011-02-28, 12:32 PM
I'd argue that Tentacled Things From Beyond have a hard time staying scary after plush toys get made of them.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrimalFear

Go through this list, figure out ways to abuse their psyches with every one of these.

And if they're treating Investigating like a dungeon-crawl, send 'em somewhere their graph-paper will not save them.

Play something else of a while, maybe? Could be they're just burned out.

Grelna the Blue
2011-02-28, 03:18 PM
I was always under the impression that actually making the adventure about the Mythos with a capital M is one of the most boring ways to run CoC.

In every game I've played, the Mythos has always been a sort of backdrop of amusing references and atmosphere for the veterans, but the actual stories and dangers have always been about ghosts, aliens, zombies, magicians, psychic powers, rabid dogs, corrupt priests, mad science or whatever other horrors the GM has prepared.

The Mythos appears in the form of small statues of Cthulhu on the shelf of an antique dealer, or a tome that teaches the characters to ward themselves from hostile magicians with some sort of Mythos related spelloworking, or a mad professor who claims that his knowledge of ghostly activities was given to him by some strange inhuman creatures from beyond the stars.

Keep the Mythos there, to convince your players that this is still CoC, but make the actual story about something else. There's a lot of good stories out there, the Mythos itself doesn't really make for a good story unless the players are unfamiliar with the source material.

+1.

I played in a CoC homebrew once. We never used the Mythos stats, because none of those creatures ever entered the story, but any one of our adventures could easily have been written by Lovecraft or Derleth.

It did help that the players participated. A couple of us very deliberately created characters with hooks for the GM to use or abuse. One player was a member of the British upper crust who had a marble head, seemingly from a Greek statue, that he carried in his luggage wherever he went and talked to when he was alone. The other players eventually discovered this and it bothered us considerably. My character was a member of the Pettigrew family, which I envisioned as a darker and more realistic version of the Addams Family. He believed he was destined to die badly because his grandfather, a U.S. soldier, had been cursed by an Indian shaman, but eventually came to believe he was the reincarnation of an Atlantean fishman priest (by then he was probably just crazy). The GM encouraged me to come up with details of his extended family and eventually used them to creep out the other players in one adventure. The most unusual members of his clan were his cousins Castor and Pollux, extremely conjoined twins who shared a pair of legs and ran a junkyard infested with large, silent, yellow cats.

All people can be scared by things they understand that pose a threat, but it's when the world goes sideways and stops making sense that things get spooky. Your players think they understand the world they're in. Let them find out they do not.

Fhaolan
2011-02-28, 06:15 PM
I'd argue that Tentacled Things From Beyond have a hard time staying scary after plush toys get made of them.

Until your character starts coughing up stuffing at random times, as he (or she) begins the slow, painful transformation into a servant of M'u'pett the Corruptor.

Yukitsu
2011-03-01, 12:05 AM
Until your character starts coughing up stuffing at random times, as he (or she) begins the slow, painful transformation into a servant of M'u'pett the Corruptor.

No one remembers childs play around here?

VirOath
2011-03-01, 12:09 AM
No one remembers childs play around here?

I do, and don't forget Chuckie's Bride either.

Then again, my old neighbor designed and built some of the dolls for those movies, do he has them perched up around his basement with his other works. It was a fun childhood, at that.

Arbane
2011-03-01, 12:56 AM
Assuming your players' characters aren't invulnerable, remind them they're not. Have the local cultists in league with The Mob.

"The Boss would appreciate it if youse stop harrassin' his pals. As a courtesy, I'll be leavin' ya one kneecap to leave town on." *CRACK*