Suddenly – Cthulhu

It does feel very sudden. In the last four years of this gaming group’s existence, I have run a long AD&D campaign that took characters from 1st level to close to 10. I did a handful of Metamorphosis Alpha sessions. I timidly started a Star Wars KOTOR campaign that most players quickly fell in love with. I have even managed to get in a couple of sessions of my beloved Champions setting (too long ago now, around 2 years). And with Big Ben regularly running AD&D I have gotten to sit down as a player more than I have since I was a teenager.

But the entire time I have had Call of Cthulhu in the back of my mind. My “big three” games of my adult life have been 1st edition AD&D, Champions, and Call of Cthulhu. These are the games I ran long campaigns for over the years from the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s. Full, satisfying, amazing campaigns with these three genres. And seeing as during the latter part of the 90’s we only seemed to be able to get one several hour session in every month or so, I am in sort of a renaissance of gaming. Running and playing almost every week (weeknight) which a few years ago would have been inconceivable to me. But here we are literally rolling in gaming goodness.

This has given me the opportunity to branch out a bit, and that was especially good for me because after a little over two years of AD&D I was ready for a break. With Call of Cthulhu holding a special place in my heart, I could have gotten a campaign underway sooner, but in all honesty I was not sure this was the best group for it. I have Terry, a veteran of those 90’s Cthulhu campaigns (which were often mostly comprised of female players, which would be another difference from the current group), but the likes of Dan Dan the Power Game Man™ might risk it being more farce than fearful. So as recently as a few weeks ago I decided to go with Runequest, but quickly hit a (hopefully temporary) snag because of my dislike for Strike Rank. I decided after game two to shelf that, and go the hell ahead with Cthulhu. With Big Dan overseas for a temporary period, it seemed like a good time to get a session underway before he came along and futilely tried to powergame a Basic Role Playing character.

My last campaign towards the end of the 90’s was set in around 1922 or so, so I decided to have 5 years go by and set the first session on NYE 1927. My catalyst would be my old NPC “Mr. Troy,” a sort of Truman Capote look/sound alike who was a wealthy antiquarian and high society mystic. Mr. Troy featured as a sort of benefactor in my previous campaigns, at one point setting the old characters up in an occult themed antique shop on the newly built Venice Beach Canals (“Venice of America”). At the start of this game, Troy is in New York, and after character set-up I managed to tie most of them in with Mr. Troy so they can be present at his New Years Eve party at a Times Square hotel penthouse.

One character was a female Turkish Antique expert, and another a female dilettante who used her massive trust fund to travel the world and indulge her hobby in archaeology. These two I connected to Mr. Troy, them being hired to both accompany him to the “underworld” private auction where a well-preserved 2000 year old Chinese urn containing the ashes of a X’an Dynasty sorcerer. I spent a few minutes running this auction with the girls in attendance, and got to introduce a rival of sorts for Mr. Troy, “Hong Lo,” a restaurateur and reputed occultist.

One of the male characters was a young Chinese martial artist working in Hong Lo’s restaurant, which incidentally was catering Troy’s party. So that’s how I got Ben’s guy at the party.

Andy ran a 70 year old investment expert named Michael who had taken a bath in the 1893 market crash, and since then has lived frugally off of some minor, safe investments. During some rougher patches he learned to handle himself brawling for survival or profit. I got him invited to the NYE party of Troy’s because he knew Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, heir to the Whitney fortune, business-man, wanna be Bohemian, and invitee to the party and he asked Michael to come along with him and his free-spirit pals.

The Times Square penthouse party was within view of the madness of Times Square on NYE, and within a stone’s throw of the ball-dropping. The party had a Chinese theme, and the female characters, the antique expert and the archeology-loving dilettante, stayed near the displayed ancient urn and acted as both custodians for it and information dispensers. As a band played and the large, eclectic crowd (sort of reflected in the character make up; Chinese food service people, business people, academics, entertainment folk, Bohemians, dilettantes, etc) in the party danced, ate, drank (those wacky Bohemians hissing like vipers as they smoked reefer by the fireplace) and had a good time.

Not long after the time Hong Lo showed up uninvited and unannounced ( still a bit miffed that Troy had outbid him on the private auction of the urn), and with some of his Chinese thugs acting as servers, he had secretly arranged for the urn to be covented in the chaos of the midnight countdown. A gun was pulled, the urn was grabbed for, and a nice pulp action sequence began as the martial artist intervened, and even the girl characters threw some Indy Jones punches during the ensuing brawl. It was actually a pretty enjoyable action scene, and proving that CoC is pretty good for this kind of thing.

Eventually Hong Lo whipped out a special magic whistle that could summon Byakhee, and as he blew it an loud, eerie Byakhee cry brought forth one of the creatures from the air of the wintery New York evening sky. As drunken party goers screamed and ducked in fear, the Byakhee rages around the room, and a couple of the characters engaged Hong Lo (Andy’s old dude going cane-to-cane combat when Hong Lo revealed his sword cane).

First sanity loss of the game, with Terry’s dilettante taking the worst san hit for 5 whopping points. She went catatonic for a couple rounds, as Big Ben’s kung-fu cook took it to the Byakhee’s grill. His well placed kicks hurt the creature pretty bad (I threw one of the Mythos’ few harm able creatures at them for this first game), and one of Mr. Troy’s armed assistants shot it down.

So 1927 passed by with a bang, and a successful session was in the bag. I was really happy with it. In past years my D&D players would hem and haw when I suggested something like Cthulhu, but they would soon be requesting it over D&D after they saw how fun it was. I think my current group could well feel the same. I’m really looking forward to more of this!

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Cthulhu zeitgeist

There is more of it out there than I thought. Not just plushies and Miskatonic U. bumber stickers ( Go Pods!), but I’ve discovered from my Amazon.com browsing that there are a pile of Cthulhu humor books out there. “Where the Deep Ones Are” is obvious, but an interesting one, not so much humor as a “Cthulhu for Idiots” type info book, is Cthulhu 101. Made for people who don’t really know what the works of Lovecraft are all about. It gives you the lowdown on the various entities of the Cycle, goes over Lovecraft and his life, and hits on the pop culture items where the Old Ones and their crew make their mark. Cthulhu zeitgeist!

Much as I am with zombies, I’m sort of Cthulhued out (although that may not jibe with the fact that I do a twice monthly Cthulhu post). Although I’d love more than anything to have a CoC campaign going on in the coming year, I think I can take a pass on the plethora of ancillary Lovecraft floating around out there. I wonder what HP would think of all this stuff?

Call of Cthulhu Friday: South Park Cthulhu

This new episode of the long running Comedy Central staple has been airing a lot this month. When I saw that it featured our favorite tentacle-faced god-priest, I considered that I might mention it in a post. But I have to admit that the sheer weakness of the characterizing of the Great One really turned me off. Don’t get me wrong, it was otherwise a pretty good superhero parody episode. In it, all the kids of the town follow the lead of The Coon and Mysterion and create costumed identities for themselves (all of them pretty fail). But the intriguing part of it is we find out that Kenny, the group pal who dies so often, actually has some kind of power that grants him this immortality along with an affect that makes others forget that he dies. So in his torment he creates Mysterion and patrols the nightscape.

That’s all good, but then enters Cthulhu. He has arisen due to the BP oil spill, but he isn’t too pissed off to be befriended by Cartman, who takes him on a spree of destruction than includes Burning Man, Whole Foods, and young pop singer and MILF magnet Justin Bieber.

As I said, I was pretty “meh” about it, but today I read on theclicker.todayshow.com where they seem to be asking if the makers of South Park were a little hard on the crooning kid jackhole. Well, that pissed me off, because I thought who they were hard on was Cthulhu. You see, I don’t mind when I see cute Cthulhu plushies or bumper stickers. That is all harmless fun. But the very fact that the South Park dudes just used him to squash things is to me unforgivable. Why didn’t they just use Godzilla or King Kong? Because they are trademarked or something? I mean, the appearance of Cthulhu should include the stars aligning, monsters rising, and people across the globe should feel the awesome psionic affect of Great Cthulhu’s mighty mind clicking into alien high gear. But no, he just crushes Whole Foods and other American conceits.

I think the makers of South Park are smart and funny, but I guess they just don’t really know what Cthulhu represents. I’m guessing they saw the plushies at some point, or a Miskatonic U. t-shirt, and then somebody told them “Oh, Cthulhu is a big monster that sleeps below the sea waiting to awaken and destroy the world.” Nuff said.

C’mon guys, do a little fucking research. This was a great opportunity to spoof the creations of Lovecraft in some meaningful way. But no. Worse yet, South Park has a way of bringing back monsters and things for further episodes, and it will probably just be more of the stupid chickenshit fail they did with Cthulhu in this one.

South Park, this is where you really jumped the shark. May Azathoth take your minds and souls.

Call of Cthulhu Friday: Boss Cthulhu

Phew! What a week! Work work work. Made it hard to post! Looking forward the the long Labor Day weekend. Actually grabbing me a couple of days worth of Super 8 motel near Disneyland, and running some OD&D sessions at a game convention. I'm hoping it'll get my mind off the grind for a bit. Good old fashioned escapism.

OK, this has nothing to do with Cthulhu, but I hope this funny pic gives you a laugh, especially if you toil in a cubicle for "The Man" like I do. OK, my boss is cooler than Cthulhu, but you know what I mean...

Best part it, he sleeps pretty much every day of the year, so he's not seen much. Cthulhu, not my boss.

Call of Cthulhu Fridays: Time Periods

Happy 120th birthday HPL! You sick bastiche.

It has been around 10 years since my last Call of Cthulhu game, and now that my group seems to be getting more open to lots of non-D&D alternatives to our regular game, I figure next year might be a good time to introduce it to some CoC . My long time player Terry is the only one of them with any experience with the game, and she loved it. She actually had a character survive at least two campaigns with her sanity mostly intact (by staying in the background and hiring a gangster bodyguard).

But should I do it in the 20’s again? I’ve had a couple of long running CoC campaigns, and they have both taken place between 1919 and 1922. One I set in the Los Angeles area, and the other shorter campaign in and around Arkham.

Victorian England is temping, and there are sourcebooks available for that setting. And I work a couple weekends of a Charles Dickens Christmas Faire up in San Francisco during the holidays, so plenty of inspiration there (the White Chapel district that they set up inside the Cow Palace is just dark and creepy). Switch that era to the Old West, and you have a setting I would love to do CoC for. Last week I got my hands on a copy of Deadlands, and that is inspiring an old west thing even more.

American Revolution seems like untouched and fertile ground for a few games. Or how about the Elizabethan Renaissance (my Ren Faire experience should really pay off for that)?

Hell, I think CoC with some Cro-Magnon Man tribesmen might even be worth a whirl.

Oh man. If only there was time for them all.

Call of Cthulhu Fridays: The Sundered Veil

(above image is fan art for this story found online)

OK, with scheduling conflicts and so much going on right now, I won’t be running any of my game stuff for the group for a few weeks (I don’t do my main 1st edition campaign if anyone is missing, and the alternatives I do also depend on who is there). I’m going to let regular player Ben do his D&D next week for those of us available.

But without actually GM’ing, I lose a little inspiration for my blogging (so you have an idea what will happened if my group falls apart). So I thought that at least for Fridays I would keep myself inspired, and hopeful that I will get to do a CoC campaign for my group at some point, that I would do regular homage’s to stuff related to Lovecraft, which I have been reading a lot of stuff on lately.

OK, so recently I have been rereading the first two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Graphic novels, and then some. In them, Allan Moore shows an even bigger love of the Wold-Newton stuff than Phillip Jose Farmer himself! It seems like almost all of literary fiction exists in the world he has set up. Forget the laughable Sean Connery film (shame it was one of his last) based on The League, I think Moore’s LEG is one of the greatest triumphs of modern comic/lit genres. The amount of stuff from fiction created since the dawn of man that he has included is just astounding. Entire books have been written to act as a guide to the people and places he references.

In the back of the Volume 2 series (the one where the Martians from War of the Worlds meet resistance from Captain Nemo and the rest of the league), there is a text story (with some artwork) that tells a tale about an astral team-up with Allan Quartemain, John Carter of Mars, Randolph Carter from Lovecraft’s dreamlands cycle, and the Time Traveler from H.G. Wells.

Wow, who could even imagine such a teaming? The weirdo/genius mind of Allan Moore, that’s who. To add to the level of geek cool, here Randolph Carter is a great nephew of John Carter, who of course views his future dreamer nephew as a bit of a wuss.

At the start of the story, Allan Quartermain visits an old mystic friend looking to partake of the Taduki drug from his adventures in King Solomon’s Mines and other places. Passing out and going into a metaphysical trance, Quartermain enters the astral realm. Here his disembodies spirits encounters two other such souls. One is John Carter, his spirit body in transition from earth to his soon to be new home on the Red Planet. Also in spiritual transition is Randolph Carter, the grandnephew of John. As the three wonder the purpose of their meeting, H.G. Wells unnamed Time Traveler and his wondrous machine shows up. The Time Traveler tells them that fate has brought them to him, and they are to help him defeat forces of the Cthulhu Mythos. Awesome.

The quartet is soon attacked from nowhere by motley, primitive beasts that the Time Traveler curiously describes as being known both as Morlocks and Mi-Go. Escaping on the time machine, the group travels to the material world of the far future. It is the sphinx from the Eloi time, but even further into the future than that, when that once lush area is now a desert in a dying earth. Apparently the Time Traveler has made this lasting far flung structure his home base in the battle against the Old Ones. After explaining the problem of ancient Godlike creatures invading the mortal realm, both the Carters realize that they are not bound to any realm and are actually forms destined to other places, so they fade away. John goes to Mars to win Dejah Thoris and begins his adventurers there, and Randolph heads off for his adventures to Unknown Kadath.

Things go from bad to worse when Quartermain is possessed by Ithaqua the Windwalker, and returns to the mortal realm. The Time Traveler is left to his further adventures in the time stream, and Quartermain manages to become free of his possession in the earthly realm. Broken by the loss of his Taduki drug, Quartermain heads off to the Middle East to become an opium addict for awhile before he joins the League.

This team up is amazing, really. To me as a fan of all of them; Lovecraft, HG Wells, and Edgar Rice, this really blew me away. If this sounds good to you, I recommend you get your hands on either the comic issues, or better yet the graphic novels. The story is several pages long in small print, so you for sure get a lot of meat for such a short adventure.

Oh, for extra awesome, the comic book portion of the book begins on Mars, where John Carter, Gulliver of Mars, and other literary Mars figures and creatures gather to fight off the Mollusks from War of the Worlds. Too much cool, man!

MY “APPENDEX N” (hold the applause)

MY “APPENDEX N”

OK, the rage this last week was listing books that inspired your D&D ( or other gaming), so here is mine in a nutshell.

Comic Books – probably the most influential media in terms of my love of gaming, and not just my long-running Champions games from the 90’s. I have always tried to inject the drama and descriptiveness of comics into my games, D&D or otherwise. I think it is one of my greatest points as a GM. Without going too much overboard, my humanoid villains often came off a lot like Marvel Comics villains. I do try to go light on the corny dialogue, however. Offbeat, genre-slapping comics like Watchmen, Dark Knight returns, and Marshal Law also taught me to turn clichés and expectations on their ear a bit in game terms.

The Hobbit/LOTR – Natch. Nuff Said. Oh man, my mind is still on comics. Tolkien was my greatest gaming influence in the earliest days, just as it was for D&D in general.

Conan – I was in my early teens when I started devouring the first several Conan paperbacks. REH’s mood, passion, and swift and blinding violence transported me to that dark prehistoric place where Conan tread in his sandaled feet. Marvel’s Conan comics, especially Red Sonja, helped color my world as well.

Tarzan/John Carter of Mars – My dad read me the first Tarzan book when I was a kid. Years later I would jump on the rest and be transported to those awesome jungle places. And the sweeping adventure of JC of Mars really set my gaming blood on fire. I so wanted to have dashing sword fights like those in my games. Edgar Rice B. has such a terrific sense of adventure, and such a great sense of love and honor.

H.P. Lovecraft – Ok, I didn’t read HP before I got into D&D, but when I started in the early 80’s, it lead me to one of my favorite D&D alternatives: Call of Cthulhu. It was hard to talk my D&D players into trying it when I went for a full campaign in the early 90’s, but they soon fell in love with it, even the girls. It was always a great break from D&D.

Lankhmar – of course of course of course. The big guy and the little guy and their crazy city came in second only to Tolkien for my game inspirations. I could not get the most out of Judges Guild products like City State of the Invincible Overlord or Hargraves’ Arduin until I got into Leiber's great (and ahead of their time) books. This was one of those rare series that let you know how limitless the possibilities were in a fantasy world, as opposed to how limited. Somehow, the world of Fritz seems an amalgam of all the reading material I have listed above.