PDA

View Full Version : Heroes in Call of Cthulhu?



Mr. Mask
2015-10-23, 06:14 PM
This is inspired by the other thread. I was curious about the concept of a campaign set in Call of Cthulhu or another Lovecraft game, where the players were high level types, more suited to investigating and facing the horrors. That's not to say it'd become a heroic adventure, you'd still have insanity rolls and would probably make the adventure more challenging to fit the harder characters, but I was curious how such games might go as I'm more familiar with low level accountants and such getting thrown into the mines of madness.

I expect there's a splatbook where you can say, play as experienced soldiers in Vietnam, who might be sent to investigate something Apocalypse Now style.

Piedmon_Sama
2015-10-23, 06:18 PM
I don't know, but there's nothing in CoC inherently stopping you from loading up on tommy guns and TNT and just going to town on motherlovers. You don't even need to be high level (cuz a dozen bullets will kill you anyway)!

JellyPooga
2015-10-23, 06:30 PM
As mentioned in the other thread (as a complaint about the system), the numbers are against you. The system is intentionally lethal when you go in for combat. Whether you're a highly trained veteran or an office clerk. The Vet has better skills, sure, but a bullet to the head will still kill him, as will being torn limb-from-limb by some creature.

If you wanted to do "heroic" style play, you'd probably have to introduce much more arcane items and artefacts that grant wondrous superhuman abilities. If you want your PCs fighting Gugs and Shoggoths on a regular basis, they're going to need Mi-Go or Elder Thing level technology and magic as their basic equipment to even have a chance.

It's probably doable, but it will probably look more like D&D than CoC and I'd advise using a more forgiving system if you wanted to do it. Heck, wasn't there a Cthulhu D20 book released a few years back? I never want to touch it with my standard issue 10ft pole, let alone read the thing, but it might provide for such "heroic" style games.

Piedmon_Sama
2015-10-23, 06:31 PM
Like seriously, you can totally play the game as Cowboys and Gangsters vs Cthulhu if you want. Alternatively you can be awesome and play as the RCMP. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COU-0Oe1nNY)

Mr. Mask
2015-10-23, 06:50 PM
Jelly: Doesn't a deadly game theoretically work in the players' favour too? Someone gets lucky and double-crits the Shaggoth, kills it against all odds.

Heroic may be the wrong word. I figured combat vets who manage to get through meeting otherworldly monsters while actually putting up a fight and not going insane would be against the basic concept of CoC (it's certainly kind of contrary to my experience with the genre). The idea of the forces of Lovecraft needing to send a bigger monster at you to deal with the fact you have a Browning and know how to use it (and if you can get an attack helicopter, they need a bigger monster again).



Piedmon: Had wondered about just this. My thoughts in CoC is, "I'll take two tommies and a serve of Model 24 Stielhandgranate," and I always worried I'd hurt the spirit of the game.

Telok
2015-10-23, 06:58 PM
What version of CoC are you talking about? The original Chaosium rules don"t have levels, you can become more skilled at things but there's no level = hp & attack bonus in it. On the other hand there is the d20 version where levelling up and punching out Mythos monsters in hand to hand combat is viable, because it's based on D&D level mechanics.

If you want something modern with "skilled and powerful" characters there's the Delta Green book where you start out as some sort of government or military employee and get to abuse your official position and power while being part of an illegal conspiracy to save the world from the Mythos. But that's still Chaosium rules and a pistol (or a tentacle that does as much damage as a pistol) is still lethal.

Piedmon_Sama
2015-10-23, 07:04 PM
If you want to play it that way, I see no reason not to. You're in good company---seriously, the epilogue of Shadow Over Innsmouth is the FBI raids the village and takes all the fish people to jail, and then it's implied they sent a submarine out and buried the Deep Ones' city with a torpedo. Part of the backstory for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is back in Ye Olde Colonial Times a mob of militiamen smashed into a wizard's castle and shot and sworded him and all his monsters.

Mr. Mask
2015-10-23, 07:16 PM
Telok: Oh, I just use high-level to mean high-powered. So I figured high toughness and weapons stats, so you tend to hit often and hard, with a slightly higher chance of surviving a hit (good medicine skill helps with surviving that, too).



Piedmon: True. I guess I'm more concerned if the others are playing accountants with low stats, whereas I statted a crazy veteran with more guns than teeth. "Awesome, you shot the vampire!" "Vampire?" "Uh... yeah, that's... why you shot him?" "Those crazy kids, think they can break into my house and scare my dogs. ....--do bullets kill vampires?" "Huh, I'm not actually s--" "Fire in the hole!" *Grenade antics*

That, or I would try to construct a character scarier than the monsters.

JellyPooga
2015-10-24, 05:25 AM
Jelly: Doesn't a deadly game theoretically work in the players' favour too? Someone gets lucky and double-crits the Shaggoth, kills it against all odds.

Technically, yes, but the Players have to get lucky every time to pull off something like that and they need to get lucky to survive the "return fire". The bad-guys have the numbers in their favour, so don't need luck.

Yeah, after I last posted, I re-read the OP and figured I'd grabbed the wrong of the stick a bit. Piedmon_Sama is absolutely right; CoC is fine for the kind of game you're thinking, but depending on how far you take it, it might start looking a little bit like Hellboy on the upper end of the scale.

Comet
2015-10-24, 07:14 AM
Kinda funny how "heroic" seems to instantly translate to "solves problems with violence".

I'd think Call of Cthulhu heroes are sorcerers, detectives and scientists. And insane, with everything they've seen.

Kami2awa
2015-10-24, 07:33 AM
Well, modern soldiers don't win by charging in and exchanging shots until one side runs out of hit points. They plan, and prepare, and use every available advantage. Heroes in CoC, if they are going to solve things with combat, should be luring the monsters into traps and finding out their weaknesses first. Less Conan the Barbarian, and more Tucker's Kobolds.

Ashtagon
2015-10-24, 09:24 AM
You'd end up with something similar to one of:


Buffy/Angel franchise
d20 Modern's Shadow Chasers or Shadow Stalkers
GURPS Monster Hunters

Telok
2015-10-24, 04:34 PM
Telok: Oh, I just use high-level to mean high-powered. So I figured high toughness and weapons stats, so you tend to hit often and hard, with a slightly higher chance of surviving a hit (good medicine skill helps with surviving that, too).

Oh, I've done that. Old Joe the 90 year old farmer. He had a truck, a box of dynamite (for blowing up stumps in his fields), a couple extra gas cans, and was a perfect shot with a shotgun. Also, just stupid and uneducated enough to not understand the cosmic horror aspect.

Seriously, the CoC double barrel 10 gauge shotgun is going to kill anything you can kill with guns. Everything else is a combination of running away (truck), burning down the building (gas cans), blowing it up (TNT), or doing a spell or ritual to send it back where it came from (can't help ya there city boy).

Also, you mostly use medical skills to figure out how people died. Patching up wounds is closer to real life, first aid to keep them alive until they reach the hospital. "Toughness" isn't unless you can swing some sort of medieval knight reenactor guy who wears armor, and don't expect that to help much against guns or with any sort of investigation.

Mr. Mask
2015-10-25, 12:16 AM
Old Joe sounds pretty cool. Though I'd prefer a bolt-action.


Jelly: They have any Vietnam splatbooks for ToC or CoC?


Kami2awa: Mm, if you don't play it smart, you don't have enough HP in the world to survive even other humans.

Raimun
2015-10-25, 07:58 PM
The investigators of Arkham Horror (board game) are pretty damn heroic. They drive around on motorcycles and police cars and shoot the monsters dead with shotguns and flamethrowers. Some of them have actual spells and magical items and if the going gets too rough, they drink down some whiskey to clear up their heads. They fight to close the portals to other worlds... or if the day is to be truly glorious, they will take the fight directly to The Ancient One that is threatening the city and beat the crap out of it.

You could learn a thing or two from them.

raygun goth
2015-10-25, 10:43 PM
The most iconic Lovecraft stories have less typical "lovecraft endings."

Dream Quest ends with Carter becoming a powerful extradimensional psychic.

The good guys in The Dunwich Horror basically wipe the floor with the offspring of Yog-Sothoth, of all things.

Cool Air is about a guy who figured out how to be immortal, with a price.

One fun thing I've thought about doing is running a game where players make two PCs: one a hapless investigator or art student, the other a powerful wizard from Hyperboria or a dream-psychic or indifferent/even beneficent alien - they'd play their hapless character for most of the adventure, then at the end when an elder evil or something "unstoppable" arrives, they'd switch characters.

Deffers
2015-10-25, 11:55 PM
Let's not all forget Old Man Henderson. Basically did what was described here, ended up outright killing an avatar of Hastur. Over lawn gnomes that he thought some other cult's members stole (spoiler alert: turns out Henderson himself just donated them to charity and forgot).

That's how you do Call of Cthulhu heroes. Basically every page from Henderson's playbook is applicable to a CoC campaign.

Hawkstar
2015-10-26, 07:49 AM
Not a mere avatar of Hastur - Hastur himself.

That said... guns and explosives are not really ideal for taking on supernatural monsters. As long as you can keep them powered, Proton Packs and Ghost Traps work much better, because then you don't even have to bother figuring out whether it's capable of being killed permanently or not. Whatever it is, into the trap it goes!

goto124
2015-10-26, 08:12 AM
Would Proton Packs and Ghost Traps even exist in the setting?

Knaight
2015-10-26, 08:43 AM
This is inspired by the other thread. I was curious about the concept of a campaign set in Call of Cthulhu or another Lovecraft game, where the players were high level types, more suited to investigating and facing the horrors. That's not to say it'd become a heroic adventure, you'd still have insanity rolls and would probably make the adventure more challenging to fit the harder characters, but I was curious how such games might go as I'm more familiar with low level accountants and such getting thrown into the mines of madness.

I expect there's a splatbook where you can say, play as experienced soldiers in Vietnam, who might be sent to investigate something Apocalypse Now style.

It's doable, but I wouldn't use base CoC for it. With that said, between Delta Green and Nemesis, there's plenty of support. Sure, you'll still go into the void, but there's absolutely no reason to go softly into the void.

raygun goth
2015-10-26, 11:49 AM
Would Proton Packs and Ghost Traps even exist in the setting?

Elder things are just another "people" (aliens with a mindset very akin to humanity), and while they're not doing it for us (they want the world secure from the flying polyps), the Great Race regularly builds rayguns and other weird tech and leaves it behind for us to find/dismantle and decipher.

So there's two sources of advanced tech that could easily get you some of the gizmos you're looking for.

Talakeal
2015-10-26, 05:02 PM
Not a mere avatar of Hastur - Hastur himself!

Not hard when your DM decides to make up rules for methods to easilly kill the great old ones.

Nothing in CoC or Lovecraft states that a summoning ritual takes away the Old One's regenerative abilities, the very idea is, imo, antithetical to the mythos.

People who read that story tend to gloss over the fact that the DM was actually bending over backwards to let old man Henderson get away with his nonsense.

Deffers
2015-10-26, 05:50 PM
Only for that last part-- admittedly, that last part was BS. Well, the last part and the first part-- the first part being the 300 page character background including bits in German justifying Henderson's eclectic skill set in the first place. The DM was very much... well, I'm confused as to what he expected when a player basically made their own equivalent of the Necronomicon as a charsheet.

And it wasn't so much BS as poorly thought out fluff explaining a combat encounter earlier in the game used to justify a character's epilogue. And prologue, I guess.

SimonMoon6
2015-10-27, 10:43 AM
Here's my experience:

Back in the mid-to-late 1980's, one of my players made the comment that "Every monster in Call of Cthulhu is just as scary. They can all kill you easily." Which wasn't quite true, but I saw his point. What's the point in having lots of really cool, really powerful monsters if even a single ghoul could kill a PC?

So, I made a game in which the PCs were going to have superpowers in the same universe as a Call of Cthulhu game. Since the publisher of Call of Cthulhu was Chaosium and Chaosium used the same game system for all their games (including their justifiably super-obscure superhero game called Superworld), it was an easy thing to do.

The game *actually* became a multiversal game (featuring worlds from other fictions, such as Elric (and other worlds that Chaosium published games for) in addition to Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc). But for the part you might care about: having superpowers in a Call of Cthulhu world worked as one might expect. This allowed the PCs to actually have a fighting chance against, say, a Shoggoth, while still being grossly overpowered by other monsters (such as a dhole... or even a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, with its "you can't do *anything* while grappled" attack). It allowed for more of the "cosmic" part of the "cosmic horror" to become more evident.

(And eventually, the entire game got transplanted into a game system far more accommodating of superpowers.)

Hawkstar
2015-10-27, 12:45 PM
Would Proton Packs and Ghost Traps even exist in the setting?That's why you have to build them yourself! Nothing four unemployed parapsychology professors couldn't do, and they're roughly on-par with CoC investigators in power level. The thing is - real Heroes fighting against the cosmic horrors shouldn't use non-understood magic or superpowers or other things that make them into the monsters they're supposed to fight (Tip: If you think it's magic, you don't understand it). Instead, they should use rationality and the scientific method. This is not only more effective, but also more sanity-preserving.