The Savage Seas of 1718 Campaign - Player's Guide

Notes on the Savage Piracy Campaign (in the rough)

For this campaign we're using the Explorer's Rules with the Pirates of the Spanish Main as the baseline. Rather than remove Guts I am letting it remain a skill per PotSP but it will automatically equal Spirit, so no points need be added.

For SW Horror Companion everyone can use any of the new edges and hindrances listed. Some of the racial options are permitted with the caveat that you are probably unique and/or very rare and hidden among men....this is the "real world" of the Spanish Main so monsters walk hidden among men, and exposing oneself to the public as a monster leads to a mob of peasants hunting you down with fire and pitchforks. 

That said....I would prefer if the party were 95% human, but if someone wants to entertain a nonhuman choice, here's the races I'll allow, with notes, include:

Angel: the only angel on record is possibly Joan of Arc, but if a player comes up with an amazing reason why an angel would be pirating I'll at least listen to it before shooting it down.

Demon - in the Spanish Main having a demonic element means you are one of the following:

1. possessed or haunted by a christian or pagan spirit

2. a changeling of some hideous sort

3. possessed by a vodoun loa

Dhampyr: perfectly permissable but remember its really sunny in the Caribbean. Vampire sire would either be old world (European in origin) or new world (Mayan/Aztec in origin)

Patchwork Man: I love the idea so if someone can think of a suitable backstory to suggest why your pirate is a patchwork golem in 1700 I'll consider it.

Phantom: conceptually sound but may require some thought on how you will interact the the world and your party. Not probably a good choice for a setting with an emphasis on swashbuckling.

Werewolf: great idea and thematically fits well with piracy, but such a pirate may need to take special efforts to handle his lunar transformations when out at sea....

Zombie: perfect choice for those willing to work with the severe limitations!

On Cultural Backgrounds:

You'll want to pick your homeland, but make sure everyone speaks a common dialect. England, Spain, Portugal, France and elsewhere are all advisable. The Colonies is also cool. Want to be a rogue Amerind who's pirating? Sure, why not. Keep in mind in this time period England and Spain have a great deal of animosity, and for campaign purposes the Spaniards are Real Bastards. 

On the Timeline

The actual frame of time for the campaign is April, 1718. Blackbeard is contemplating retirement from his short but fierce career. Other contemporary (living) pirates are numerous but this time period between 1718 and 1722 was when most of them eventually run in to their ugly fates, a perfect time to both meet some of them while allowing your intrepid crew to become the next vile pirate legend! In 1718 you might have met or had connections to Anne Bonney and Mary Read serving under Calico Jack, Bartholomey Roberts (who's career is just taking off), and Stede Bonnet.

Henry Morgan has been dead 30 years and his grave lost after a mysterious earthquake swallowed up the cemetery where he was buried in Kingston Harbor, Jamaica just four years after his death.

Starting Location: Nassau

The adventurers are all in the pirate haven of Nassau when the campaign opens up. Nassau is currently a lawless port without even a governor, a safe harbor for pirates and buccaneers. This is about to change, but for at least a few months life is still good in the beloved freeport....

Why most Video Games get Cthulhu Wrong

I wasn't sure if Extra Credits was still active and current (when it left Escapist I sort of lost touch until recently), but it's a great show and I was delighted to find new episodes on Youtube. This particular episode does a great job of explaining not just what's wrong with the Cthulhu/Mythos interpretations we see in most video games today, but also in most fan media. Watch and learn! Feel free to share with your Cthulhu-hoodie wearing cohorts who feel that having a Chibi-Cthulhu is equivalent to having actually read Lovecraft.

Review of The Void: Role Playing in a Lovecraftian Hard SF Future

A while back I mentioned acquiring The Void, a system from Wildfire available on PDF and print at rpgnow. The Void is a new game system that adopts the Cthonian Stars setting from Wildfire into its own entity (the original was Traveller-based), and is based on a "not to distant future" hard SF setting in which something out in the void is approaching the solar system, and with it comes the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos to once again descend upon man.

Characters in The Void take on the role of Wardens, solar "rangers" and peace-keepers who have the resources and the need to travel through the habitable worlds solving crimes and espionage, and also dealing with futuristic mythos-tainted X-Files situations in the process. The Player's Guide expands character creation to include all sorts of other background options, as well.

So far I have all of The Void in print, not least of which is because the standard-color print editions are pretty cheap, and this is a fun game with an easy system to learn. My goal is to run a campaign very soon, possibly starting in a couple weeks if I can convince one of my groups to go back to a bi-weekly rotation away from D&D 5E.

Anyway, here's what's out for The Void so far:

The Void Core - the main rules, which give you all the basics. Free version is available, and it's also written as a "open source" set of rules so you can produce content for the game as long as you attribute your sources correctly. I'd like to see someone take advantage of this feature, maybe even myself....

Secrets of the Void - a mess of useful ideas for GMs on the presence of the Old Ones and their influence in the solar system.

Player's Guide - hardly needed if you're just planning on running a couple games from the core about the wardens, but invaluable if you'd like to make the system and setting something you'll revist frequently. Lots and lots of new options for characters.

Horrors of the Void 0: Expanded Horrors - there are only a few monsters in the core book so this is pretty essential, containing a mix of classic and new Lovecraftian horrors and details on their role in the future of The Void. About 30 monsters in all.

Horrors of the Void 1: Body Horror - if Dead Space is going to be a major thematic influence on your campaign then these body horrors will be very useful. Lots of detail on four specific monsters and how they change their hosts...

Pandora's Paths I: Adventures - three scenarios to get you rolling. There is also a four-part scenario series in PDF only on rpgnow called the Stygian Cycle, which I am hoping is eventually grouped into its own print collection.

Some notes about these books and system:

First, they are all 5X7 digest format, and the format looks good in PDF, so if you want a PDF version these will read well on any normal sized 7 inch and up tablet. The books are all full-color and the full color editions read well in print since the text area is kept clean of any background clutter, and in a decent font size, so kudos to Wildfire for making these books nice and acessible to older eyes.

The art is great in all of the books. The full color art is evocative and the artists know their Lovecraft well enough to convey it quite nicely. I suppose this should come as no surprise since this is the same crew which devised the slavishly illustrated Cthulhupunk line. Note that Cthulhutech and The Void are not otherwise related to the best of my knowledge; the anime-mythos crossbreed of weirdness that is Cthulhutech is its own separate universe.

Mechanically the game system uses a very simple "test" mechanic where you roll a pool of six sided dice based on relevant skill and attribute. Your goal is to roll 5's and 6's, and get as many more than the target number which is usually from 1-4. Thus, you may have Demeanour 3 and Intimidation 2, and would roll 5 dice to try and intimidate a guard. The GM might declare a target of 2 to beat....get two or more 5's and 6's and you succeed.

The core rules include plenty of information on equipment, including some starships and lots of details such as planetary travel times and costs. The entire system, sans mythos, could readily serve an ordinary hard SF campaign with no problem at all....you could easily run this as an Outland-style campaign without once exposing your players to a mi-go or seethari. Heck, with a modest bit of work on adding in some FTL concepts you could use the system and most content as written to produce a near-future FTL interstellar exploration campaign, too.

The game does lots of work providing some simple rules and direction on providing for "hard SF" concepts, enough so for me to be happy with it...happier than I was when I first started reading it, in fact. Every now and then I may disagree with one or two points.....colonizing Venus, for example, is highly unlikely to happen in the form of subterranean habitats....the sheer engineering prospect alone of digging sustainable underground habitats on the Venusian surface strikes me as beyond the scope of even the future civilization presented in The Void, for example. Another one that I scratched my head at was the macguffin introduced to keep Mars safely "red" and free of terraforming...a mysterious substance that is basically useless and makes mining prohibitively costly. Whaaaaaaa???? They can dig deep int Venus and make habitats humans can live in but the outer crust of Mars is all but impossible to dig into just beneath the surface??? The purpose of this appears to be an effort to keep Mars mysterious and red, just the way we like it, but at the expense of setting up a postulate that is missing some important details that any hard SF afficionado is going to want answers to (such as what is the hard substance beneath the crust that made mining ventures ultimately futile...what is it called, and why is it useless and/or more prohibitive in cost to drill through than, say, making cavern habitats on the hideously volatile surface of Venus?) This sort of item may not bother your group, but a hard SF fan or even an armchair geologist in your group could leave you using a bit of handwavium on the donotwantium of the Martian subsurface shale....

Aside from those examples above, none of which are game-breaking by any stretch (I'm just being nitpicky) the future solar system of The Void is a very cool place just begging for exploration. The idea of making every single scenario about the mythos seems counter-intuitive to be honest....there's loads on regular SF concepts just begging to be explored here, and dropping the mythos on top of it is like adding a tasty cherry to a large banana split.

About the only other negative comment I could make is that you really will need at least "Horrors of the Void 0" to fill out the roster of potential mythos encounters in The Void. The four-odd threats in the Core are not enough for the long term. If you focused on lots of non-mythos exploration and mystery you could probably get away with limited mythos resources, but the game really could have benefitted from packing the Horrors 0 book in with core to begin with.

Anyway....the core book is Pay What You Want so check it out first! Each of the supplements are in color for standard print (I found standard had no problems in terms of quality) for $10-$19 apiece and you can get the core rules in print for $29.99 with standard color. I personally strongly recommend The Void as your go-to resource for hard SF Lovecaftian future horror.
A+++

Magic World meets Dark Ages Cthulhu

Tonight's Magic World session turned decidedly dark as the adventurers (well, Home Invaders as I've taken to calling them lately) trashed the smuggling ring beneath the warehouse in the harbor district of Samaskar and discovered that the smugglers had been leasing out the back wing to a den of serpent men cultists worshipping Hox Nagor, primordial god of serpents.

In the midst of the purge the entire event got a little Mythosesque on the group as the serpent men, while defending their turf, took to summoning something hideous from the Dreamlands in the back room. They popped the serpent man doing the summoning but not before one of these showed up:

Yep, a Gug. Most of these players are not versed heavily in the lore of the Cthulhu Mythos, but some knew enough to realize that this was not good. Suddenly, that extra book I was hauling around labeled "Cthulhu: Dark Ages" started looking a lot more concerning to everyone...

The gang eventually found a way to send the gug back to the Dreamlands, but not before realizing that they had very nearly seen a potent and horrific beast let loose in the heart of civilization. One of the adventurers, a nomad from the Aiga to the north was driven mad when the gug nearly ripped his left arm off....and the searing touch on his flesh left him with a keen sense of the beast's presence. Another, an elven thief, stole the jeweled eyes of the primordial statue of Hox Nagor earlier and suddenly discovered she could see all manifestations of the quintessence around her....and into other realms coterminous with ours, as well.

I let the group know this was still "heroic" Mythos level Howard-inspired type stuff afterwards; we're not playing with sanity rules, and these are all heroes who take for granted that the world is filled with supernatural horrors....but avoiding this thing's grasp was still an excellent idea!

What I'm Purchasing...

I want to say "what I'm reading" but I haven't had much time for reading anything lately. I did miraculously manage to run a BRP modern zombie one-shot for an old friend and his girlfriend this weekend, who is spanking new to RPGs (the girlfriend, not the old buddy). We got a convert, and I had a great time playing something that was not Pathfinder for once...! I think I've been running too much Pathfinder. But it was nice to play a game with very mortal, fallible characters trying hard to survive terrible circumstances, and for whom something as simple as a zombie bite was a big deal.

I got Runequest Monster Island in print along with Conspiracy X 2.0: Conspiracies in the mail from frpgames.com at last. Excellent! I shall now add them to my enormous pile of "to be read soon" followed by adding them to my "wish I could find time and players to run games for soon" pile.

That pile includes Numenera, as well as the first three releases for Void. I've actually been plowing through Void a bit...it's got all the bells and whistles I want and is an easy read. Not sure I'd qualify it as "hard SF" though the Cthulhu part is spot on. Hard SF doesn't just mean "we lack FTL and it's set in our solar system." Hard SF also means things like "researching how we could theoretically colonize Venus in a manner consistent with the time, effort and cost of a near-future society is likely to invest in such an effort." Underground cities on Venus are actually a much costlier and more difficult undertaking than one could conceivably imagine, and any hard SF future might look more realistically at something in orbit, or the atmosphere instead....but in the universe of Void they've got underground colonies on Venus. There are other examples, but this one annoys me (would have helped if they'd tried to explain why underground colonies on Venus were cheaper in the Voidverse to make than orbital or atmospheric colonies). Despite issues like this I do like Void and what it sets out to do.*

With work in such a state of flux (long story short I jumped ship from one employer to another who made me a more compelling offer, but with the caveat that I was going to earn every penny) it may be a while before I get any reading done, but we shall see....

*It's also worth noting that I realize that a hard SF fan's objections are extremely particular, bordering on the pedantic in contrast to what a more ordinary SF fan might worry about. To this I say "don't use the hard SF label unless you're ready to be judged by it." But Void isn't that bad, it just has little things that annoy. So far.

Don't forget to vote!

I voted early, last week....but for all of you in the US, don't forget to do it if you haven't done so yet! I don't talk politics in this particular blog, but I think we can all agree that democrat...republican....libertarian....green.....they all taste like popcorn shrimp to Cthulhu, and seriously, do you really want to vote for someone who tastes like popcorn shrimp when you could vote for the guy who EATS popcorn shrimp?

The Casting Call of Cthulhu

Also: Needs More Cthulhu!!!!

Oh, and more Cthulhu for 2012. I haven't run CoC since 2009 now, and that's really a long time to go without a mythos Fix. After all....the stars may well be right this coming year!

Putting the Mythos into Azeroth

The Real Secret: Yogg-Saron is actually a Froghemoth with Delusions of Grandeur!

Kidding!

Once in a while I stumble on a lore related blog or article about the World of Warcraft. WoW is something I have more or less successfully quit, although it is the Key Source of Entertainment for my wife, so it remains an ever-present specter in my gaming environment. I logged hundreds of hours on WoW from all the way back in February 2005, so I remember when it took months and months to get to level 60 (unlike today, where you can slam out a level 85 in a few weeks if you're sufficiently dedicated).

With Cataclysm, as cool as many of its features and revisions were, I lost steam and couldn't continue. Part of my problem is that I simply lack the dedication necessary to see all the end-game content, instances, raids, gear and such. Another part is that I am too easily sucked away to enjoy more conventional computer games which cater specifically to me with elaborate story arcs and structures, fully-voiced acting and staggeringly good graphics. I love it when a game panders to me!

Anyway, this article is apparently written by one of the more famous lore gurus for WoW out there. It's a great, weird tinfoil hat review of the mythosesque elements of the bizarre and seemingly nonsensical mythology of the game, and a demonstration of how well it seems to correlate to the actual Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos on which much of it is clearly inspired. It's fun reading, and demonstrates pretty much how anything....even a world filled with butt-slapping gnomes, shamanistic space goats and drunken kung fu pandas...can seem cooler when you inject it with a hypodermic syringe full of Mythos Madness!

It's impressive because its fun to read a serious effort at this sort of interpretation; all of the mythosesque stuff I've seen in WoW before I had largely assumed to have been wedded in sometime around the Burning Crusade era by the developers as they cast about for story/plot/villain ideas and someone got inspired after an all-night bender while reading Lovecraft (which makes sense to me, because on the surface at least WoW's cosmology seems to be a startling hodge-podge of ideas, which meshes well with the fact that over the last two decades the game world's designers, writers and developers have changed up, a lot, going all the way back to "Orcs & Humans" on up to the present 8,000 Lb. Gorilla in the House).

Cthulhuphant, from League of Legends by the Ctrl-Alt-Del guy!

Halloween Countdown Finale: DOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!!!!

And so Halloween is here! For me, there is nothing more mysterious, terrifying and tanatalizing than the End of Everything as we know it, and so I offer up some of my favorite images of the Apocalypse from conception to conslusion.

First, though it starts off with a cause....

Nuclear War...

Alien Invasion...

Cthulhu...

Meat Boy Kaiju...

Comet...

But in the end, the results are all the same...



And inevitably the struggle will begin anew!

Prehistoric Cephalopod First Artistic Serial Killer? - Film at 11

 

This announcement at the Geological Society of America strikes me as a bit on the speculative side, but the implications are fascinating.

I love the concept of a massive kraken-like giant octopus that slaughters ichthyosaurs and then, like the world's first creative-minded serial killer promptly decorates his lair with their bones to construct mosaic likenesses of himself (which subsequently last for the millions of years necessary for Mark McMenamin to find, analyze and subsequently discern their true artistic alchemy). It's the greatest lead-in to a horror novel or movie I've seen in a while, written by Steve Alten in conjunction with Brian Keene, directed by J.J. Abrahms for the big screen, I'm sure. It isn't all that great as science goes, however....maybe it's just a poorly written press release? Or am I missing something here?
Proposing that this was a giant cephalopod intelligent enough to imbue artistic intent in the detritus of its food? That's a pretty bold claim...maybe there's something about octopi I don't know about, though. Cephalopods are regarded as surprisingly intelligent. Still, if this suggestion of artistic intelligence were true, octopi would have had millions of years to develop that intelligence....hmmm....

Cultes des Goules - The Story of Dagon

More cool, weird, vaguely disturbing music well-suited to a horror RPG session as background ambience (probably not Call of Cthulhu, despite the name, unless you're running a Modern Cthulhu plotline). But for Kult, Unknown Armies or Dark Conspiracy? Definitely. Check it out...

Royalty free music for professional licensing

Some Seriously Good Horror Music - or, you got your Mythos in my Music!

I ran across Out of Orion (Ox3) entirely by accident while doing my bi-weekly Jamendo dig. They have a lot of stuff on Jamendo for private download....and it is all very, very good stuff, especially for backgound music while playing Call of Cthulhu, Conspiracy X or GURPS Horror in any flavor. Hell, it's just good for background music while reading...you name it. Here are a few samples of Ox3 for your perusal:

Royalty free music for professional licensing

Royalty free music for professional licensing

Royalty free music for professional licensing

....They have 34 albums up on Jamendo. It is all amazingly good darkambient, horror, sombient-like and, well....if you like this kind of stuff, its kind of like a goldmine of aural evil!