PDA

View Full Version : DM Help All the News that's Fit to Investigate.



Hand_of_Vecna
2018-12-29, 01:41 PM
I'm still in the planning phase of a game set in the modern world with Cthulhu Mythos themes. This game will have the player characters traveling across the United States and possibly to other countries. However a major theme of the game is the social isolation of the PCs who will not be part of a Mythos busting secret society and will most likely be wanted criminals.

This means that the PCs will have to find their own leads and that these leads must take them to the cities and towns where their investigations occur. News articles and informal sources such as forums are the obvious first point of contact, but what makes a story worth investigating?

I intend for the game to be agnostic about most real world conspiracy theories ie there is no Mythos stuff going on at Area 51. Real world news has plenty of stories that don't quite add up and leave a curious reader with questions. Is the best way to preserve verisimilitude to include the PCs investigating numerous animal attacks, murders, disappearances, and weirdness; cryptid sightings, strange lights, crop circles, etc without supernatural explanations in the prologue to new mysteries?

DeTess
2018-12-29, 04:28 PM
I'm still in the planning phase of a game set in the modern world with Cthulhu Mythos themes. This game will have the player characters traveling across the United States and possibly to other countries. However a major theme of the game is the social isolation of the PCs who will not be part of a Mythos busting secret society and will most likely be wanted criminals.

This means that the PCs will have to find their own leads and that these leads must take them to the cities and towns where their investigations occur. News articles and informal sources such as forums are the obvious first point of contact, but what makes a story worth investigating?

I intend for the game to be agnostic about most real world conspiracy theories ie there is no Mythos stuff going on at Area 51. Real world news has plenty of stories that don't quite add up and leave a curious reader with questions. Is the best way to preserve verisimilitude to include the PCs investigating numerous animal attacks, murders, disappearances, and weirdness; cryptid sightings, strange lights, crop circles, etc without supernatural explanations in the prologue to new mysteries?

I wouldn't actually play out most of the hoaxes unless something interesting is going on. For example, if they investigate a dog attack, and it happened because the dog is mean and there's nothing else going on, playing that out would feel like a waste of time. That doesn't mean everything they play through has to have to do with the mythos. In the dog example above, the dog attack could be related to a rivalry between two different dogfighting rings which the PC's could get involved in. Including more mundane adventures would also keep them more on their toes because not everything has horrible tentacle monsters, but there's no way to tell what is and isn't involved.

If you want to emphasis how many times nothings going on, just give them short summaries between sessions of a couple of leads they tracked down that where absolutely worthless.