Last evening we were idly debating about a theme for our next adventure. We want to do a one-shot with a strong cinematic flavour, and I'm the designated DM.
A new guy in my gaming group loves Lovecraft but he also wants to try D&D (and specifically D&D). Basically, he asked for a "lovecraftian" experience in a D&D milieu.
True, we have a lot of literature about that: from the "forbidden" First Edition of Deities and Demigods, to 3.5E Lords of Madness (which openly mentions Lovecraft), to the straighter path - Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos for 5E (https://petersengames.com/the-games-shop/cthulhu-mythos-for-5e-pdf/) or even Call of Cthulhu D20 ported to D&D 3/3.5E.
However, how can something be truly "lovecraftian" in an high fantasy setting? I think it was R.E. Howard who noticed how (once the Mythos are in play) "Madness is the curse of the civilised man". To Conan, a tiger is a peril, a giant spider is a big peril and Cthulhu is an humongous peril - nothing else. Even Solomon Kane just smashed and ripped any aberration he happened to met. And I can already see the party's cleric looking at Azathoth and immediately contacting his God about "What the heck is this s**t?!" In CoC using magic always brings more pain on the PCs than it is worth - in D&D you have sorcerers with dragon blood.
I offered the new "Alien" RPG as an alternative, or even an adventure I cooked set in 2003 Iraq, on the first night of the Second Gulf War - the point being that you need science and rationality for the truly aberrant to shine. But, no, the request is "Cthulhu in D&D".
I have no interesting feelings about this setting. I simply don't know why you should "roll for SAN" when you see a Mi-go when you don't roll for it when you see (insert a random thing from Planescape here). However, I always love a narrative challenge. I'm open to ideas.
Suggestions?
Does he want Cthulhu with a great deal of mystery, dread and unseen/unknowable forces who will easily snap the PCs brains and/or bodies like a twig if they're ever truly encountered or does he mean 'Pulp Cthulhu' where there's a lot of Mindflyers and "IS THAT A SQUID? AHHHHHHH IT'S SO INCONCEIVABLE I'M GOING IIINNNSSSSAAAAAANNNNEEEEEEE" from the NPCs before they punch it in the face?
Now it's a somewhat obvious answer, but I think a very strong example of 'Fantasy with Lovecraft' would probably be Bloodborne, but a big part of that was that it didn't really overtly advertise itself as cosmic horror, instead revealing itself over half way through the game whilst prior to that you were fighting what amounted to werewolves, giant snakes and monsters that, whilst horrific, were not out of the norm for what you'd expect in a fantasy universe. Eventually, the veil is torn away and even the stock gothic horror prior to that seems almost mundane as the bloodmoon grows closer, the sky is filled with unnatural shades of colour and you encounter what kind of experiments the Church was running and worshipping.
I feel Lovecraft is massively missed in tone. I don't think its real horror (from the author's perspective) was the existence of the threats, or even as much their inevitability, but more so the fact that only a select few know and are willing/ can fight against the evil.
I mean many of his stories did effectively have adventuring groups just shoot down a bad guy (even though grave sacrifice). The central element I guess is people's willingness to betray themselves to evil for a profit of sorts, or to some newfangled ghoulish idea.
That's why I don't think much work has really captured that worldview. It's not the tentacles or gods, or even hopelessness that makes horror Lovecraftian. Its a sense of isolation.
'Things not meant for man!' isn't demanding 'take 1d4 sanity damage' but represents more stuff like 'We made a machine that can make people immortal if you feed babies into it, and nobody wants to shut it off'.
Him being a racist is an important part of it, and just because he was a racist doesn't make the work he made bad. It tied into universal elements that many people can relate too, even if normally you would be the subject of his ire.
Edit:
You can do Lovecraft with just werewolves or demons without needing tentacles or deep ones.
A story might be your just some adventurers in the backwoods, and the king and the aristocracy decided to embrace werewolfism to become nigh immortal. So the mystery unravels as the nobles become sketchier and sketchier. Maintaining the cities and past glories less and less as they promote barbarism and brutality. And as this happens they just say YOUR the crazy ones. Until by the end they go on a rampage pillaging the countryside.
The original Freeport trilogy was a decent take on D&D with a Lovecraftian twist.
What @Shrieking Banshee says is spot on. But I doubt your group means that when they say "Cthulhu".
I'm with you. I find it impossible to do Lovecraft in fantasy except on a superficial, pulpy level.
I don't think Lovecraft works in any RPG. Even CoC is basically a die roll to see if the player pretends that his character is scared. It doesn't even attempt to try and scare the player. The entire idea that some sort of creature is so weird that people will go insane just by looking at it is rather silly. Right now you can Google pictures of a dozen different real world creatures that are every bit as scary as anything Lovecraft imagined. Yet no one is going insane.
In D&D, Cthulhu is just a giant monster to be defeated.
First of all, thanks for your suggestions.
Right now I have some ideas spinning in my head. They still have to coalesce in a meaningful central plot. However...
3.5E's Lords of Madness gives us a new thing for D&D: body horror. D&D (if the DM is not a lover of baroque descriptions) is about "Taking a crit - 28HP!", not about "The axe cleaves your tight and arterial blood sprays everywhere." In LoM, however, you can find very bad and putrid "things" grafted on NPCs and PCs alike. Mutations are another option. "Why I'm mutating? I have 88 HPs!!" could be worth a SAN test.
Isolation... Let's take a leaf from the original "Alien" and put the PCs somewhere in space. An asteroid is slowly aiming for the PCs' homeworld - still years away from impact, but... Scrying spells show that inside there are halls, tortuous corridors and... "things". Three scryers out of four just went mad. The deluded "heroes" are teleported inside the rock to "see and report", only to discover that the asteroid is R'lyeh. Even worse, their spells now have, uhm... "distorted" effects, including the teleport back one. Good luck.
Another idea is being sent by the local potentate to investigate an epidemic of madness in the "Desolate Northern Wastes". I can use Ithaqua here. The very sound of the wind can cause a loss of SAN (in my CoC Keeper experience there is nothing like losing SAN "because" to ennerve the players). I could even take inspiration from an adventure for WW Cthulhu, which starts with the PCs (English Commandos) awakening from a truck crash in the middle of occupied Norway, after a sabotage mission, with what happened before actually narrated in flashbacks after this beginning in media res - and, on the top of that, half of the mission still to be completed. I won't spoil the truly horrific truth that awaits the PCs (because maybe you will play it) - but it truly goes beyond HPs and traditional spellcasting.
Hmmm... I guess that the key could be putting the PCs in a situation where the traditional D&D tropes all of sudden have no meaning anymore - and that's when things go scary.
Quote from: Reckall;1138076Hmmm... I guess that the key could be putting the PCs in a situation where the traditional D&D tropes all of sudden have no meaning anymore - and that's when things go scary.
That's not really the case. Its not about new monsters or new ooga boogas. If your fundementally expecting a monster to jump from under the bed your just not scared of it.
What I recommend is establishing a sense of normalcy and make PCs attached too it. Make PCs cherish and value the status quo. Then start slowly but surely subverting it.
I don't know that it can't be done, but I do know I've never seen it done successfully. The two of the three games where I saw someone try lost players d/t disconnection and boredom within the first few sessions. The third lasted a bit longer but that's because the Mythos-like elements only came out later--and then the game collapsed because the players (including myself) just were not into it at all and viewed it as a bait & switch.
Oddly enough, I think it can be done better in a game with more narrative elements and a lower fantasy base, like the Modipheus Conan line.
I think that to get a good start on a Lovecraftian tone for the game, the game setting has to be absent of all of the markers/tropes of a Lovecraft story. Like when you watch a good horror movie, there is a quick scene of foreshadowing (which was your Players asking for a D&D Lovecraft game) followed by some scenes that are mundane and normal to make the Players think that this will not be Lovecraftian at all (maybe some bog standard dungeon crawling). The thing is, this slow build-up cannot last more than a single session or your Players will dump the game because they will think that it isn't what they asked for.
I just read the D&D 5e rules on Madness and including a Sanity score. It does not include San loss scores for specific creatures. But leaves that up to the DM to determine what sort of save is necessary when a character encounters something truly alien.
The rules are pretty much at the DM's will. As to how harsh they will be.
But that makes sense. Because an individual DM's campaign can have wildly different levels in tone.
Also, if you look up the Warlock class. There is a section under Patrons listing Great Old One as an option. So yes, the Cthulhu mythos is definitely a consideration in 5e.
For my own games? I'd be using the SAN score pretty heavily. Because of how mind-shattering encountering really alien magic, lore, and monsters could be.
Also, I think encountering a Gelatinous Cube would be pretty terrifying and mind-shattering.
Quote from: hedgehobbit;1138073The entire idea that some sort of creature is so weird that people will go insane just by looking at it is rather silly. Right now you can Google pictures of a dozen different real world creatures that are every bit as scary as anything Lovecraft imagined. Yet no one is going insane.
Seeing a picture is never going to be the same thing.
The couple across the street from us were paramedics/firemen and both of them were in counseling and took early retirement because they couldn't take seeing that stuff anymore.
Watching a scary movie is not the same thing as taking out the garbage and finding a bear tearing through your trash can.
The confrontation of the reality of the thing, implications and consequences, can push people into states of shock.
Not to mention that some of the things from the Mythos are not entirely from our reality, they warp the spaces around them by their mere presence... which includes the minds/bodies of folks stumbling across them.
I've been scared in plenty of RPG sessions... usually when the rules are not on table (not in combat, no dice or numbers)... the GM did a good presentation but the primary reason was that I WANTED it to be scary... I was willing to be scared. GMs and other Players can undercut that in spite of me, with jokes and too much meta... but if it's going to happen at all it has to start with me, my view of the situation.
But I think I'm unusual in choosing to see the average D&D dungeon as a frightening situation, vs. a violent shopping mall.
Quote from: Simlasa;1138085)... the GM did a good presentation but the primary reason was that I WANTED it to be scary... I was willing to be scared..
Bingo. Horror in RPGs is more reliant on each player willing to be unsettled than anything the GM throws at them. The new Kult edition calls this the "horror contract".
Not really relevant to the original post, but am I the only one sick of 'Cthulhu Ubiquitous'?
Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1138095Not really relevant to the original post, but am I the only one sick of 'Cthulhu Ubiquitous'?
You mean cthulu everywhere? Or everything claiming to have Lovecraft influences?
If thats the case then yes. Il take a demon with horns over an old one with tentacles anyday.
The Lovecraft mythology (which he never intended as mythology and found the entire idea farcical) pales in comparison to all real-world mythologies. And that's not his fault. He wasn't competing as a mythology.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1138095Not really relevant to the original post, but am I the only one sick of 'Cthulhu Ubiquitous'?
Or, I hate Lovecraft so much that racist bastard and please buy my Cthulhu book.
Quote from: hedgehobbit;1138073I don't think Lovecraft works in any RPG. Even CoC is basically a die roll to see if the player pretends that his character is scared. It doesn't even attempt to try and scare the player. The entire idea that some sort of creature is so weird that people will go insane just by looking at it is rather silly. Right now you can Google pictures of a dozen different real world creatures that are every bit as scary as anything Lovecraft imagined. Yet no one is going insane.
Look for "Louis Wain Cats". He was a postcard illustrator in the Victorian Era who was absolutely obsessed with cats. Nothing wrong in this. Then he got schizophrenia and his art began to change. Wain's last drawings are still used today in the study of schizophrenia, because they are an unparalleled chronicle of a mind's descent into madness. They are absolutely alien (when you see them always remember: Wain was seeing cats). You just feel that no normal mind could produce something like that. I remember a comment by a female student: "For no reason in the World I would sleep in a room with one of those things on the wall.
https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/4579/12141236/Progression_Louis_Wain_IllustrationChronicles_1500.jpg
So, yes, psychopathologies expressed through art can produce disturbing visions. I just imagine that something totally alien can be a channel for your mind to touch the fearfully incomprehensible.
Creepy cats. Reminds me of one of those cat clocks with the eyes that move with the ticking.
I think Shadow of the Demon Lord might please your player. Some might say its 'edgelord' but it does not have to be if handled by a mature group. As others referenced, it sounds like your player wants that bleak, fatalistic feeling in their games. SOTD is all about the players being constantly aware of their imminent demise.
Schwalb is an awesome designer that doesn't seem to give a toss about being socially acceptable to the mainstream groupthink. I would argue that if your players like 5e style game mechanics, then SOTDL gives them a better version of it.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1138095Not really relevant to the original post, but am I the only one sick of 'Cthulhu Ubiquitous'?
i am too. Though i like the designs, i tend to just put such beasties as sea creatures from the deepest depths. Theyre not quite mind shatteringly bizzare, they're just creepy and use psionics.
I haven't really delved into Lovecraft, but I've considered the idea of adding horror, sanity twisting elements into the game. One thing I'd consider doing is giving every monster a "Horror" score, which would be a save DC every character has to beat when first encountering them, or be driven by the Frightened condition for 1 minute. The Horror score could be equal to 8 +Proficiency (+Cha) modifier in 5e, or 10 +1/2 HD (+Cha) in 3e (this could be increased at DM's discretion depending on the type of creature). Every time the monster does something horrific or accomplishes some significant feat (like killing someone or scoring a critical) observers have to make another save.
Arcane magic could have a similar effect as well, but for the caster. Arcane spell casters may have to engage in the use of Forbidden Lore to use magic and expose their minds to ancient horrors. This Forbidden Lore could grant them a bonus spell slot per spell level, but every time that they cast a spell they most make a Wisdom/Will save vs DC 10 + Spell Level (8+ 2/Spell Level in 3e) or be stricken by the Frightened condition for 1 minute. Additionally, if they fail 3+ of these saves in the same day they'll be plagued by nightmares that night and unable to find full rest.
Quote from: Reckall;1138068A new guy in my gaming group loves Lovecraft but he also wants to try D&D (and specifically D&D). Basically, he asked for a "lovecraftian" experience in a D&D milieu.
"lovecraftian" is a lot of wiggle room. D&D has cultists and fish men and aboleths and, of course, Cthulhu.
I think you can cater to this by including Lovecraftian tropes without driving straight into Call of Cthulhu (in which case, you're better off playing that game, IMO)
If D&D can do Alice in Wonderland and crashed spaceship, why not a small fishing town that's been taken over by a cult worshipping a dark one and slowly turning into fish mans?
My own thought is that you need to keep the players on their toes. Cthulhu is just too well known these days. I'd take the world is a lie approach. Give them their generic happy fantasy world where elves frolic in the woods and dragons brood on treasure and dwarves delve too deeply and orcs are evil monsters. But let them find reasons to believe that there is another truth. Good priests who destroy certain books when they're found without any warning. A cryptic dragon who's looking to unload a treasure because it's "too hot" even though it's just a clay jar full of gold coins with an odd emblem on them. And the more they learn the less the good guys seem to like them. Mutant children are being abandoned and picked up by a black coach and nobody knows where it takes them but most seem to think it best if they were burned. Village wise women and witches whisper about secrets they don't know and don't want to know. An undead invasion turns back and goes quietly home after meeting with a strange wanderer on a bridge. They lock the doors and won't come back out and won't say why. But everyone seems to be anxious to ignore whatever's going on and the elves are leaving, sailing over the seas on filtered starlight. And one dark night a stranger walks into the tavern and tells the players to go back to being farmers and knights and leave off with the trouble they're making or they'll bring down wrath and ruin. One night while camping the players find themselves in a blighted ghoul haunted wasteland but in the morning the forest is back and the pixies are dancing in the rain. Sometimes the stars look live tentacles or seaweed waving in the ocean. A monster ravages a village but when the heroes arrive it begs them pleadingly, "I am nothing, can't you see? I am nothing and then vanishes leaving only the ruins and corpses. A week later nobody remembers the village and there's nothing but a wheat field where it stood. Frogs chant alien incantations in the dim evening. Another village is full of strangely dismembered people wandering around as if they were whole and nothing is wrong. Sections of houses are missing and a whole girl, plain and dull sings a piping alien song for half an hour before vanishing and the village is restored but nobody remembers anything strange. One day it rains strange flowers which slowly begin spreading across the land, people start wearing them and seem very happy but soon they only sit and smile and then one by one they are absorbed into the ground in the ripest flowering fields. And as it goes on, one by one the player characters start to see the wasteland more and and the fantasy world less and less. People vanish in mid conversation. They sleep in an inn and wake up in a pumpkin patch. A merchant comes to town selling dreams captured in bottles but the dreams are strange vistas of colors and motion that leave the dreamer forever longing for something that was lost. And little by little the facade changes from a picturesque medieval realm to a barbaric and colorful ancient world full of strange cults and gods. The cleric and paladin's holy symbols remain but their churches have vanished and their spell lists are becoming more violent and bizarre. In the end they are faced with the knowledge that the world is an illusion overlying the ruin of something that was lost and while scattered remnants of that other reality still lurk here and there, they prefer the fantasy and don't want it broken.
Anyhow, that's how I'd do it.
Put the PCs into a unique setting, where certain things they'd ordinarily expect, don't work.
I don't think even the average HPL story much resembles the stereotype of "Cthulu" RPG play, with helpless PCs immediately going mad at the mere sight of a Mythos monster. Ram the Great Old One! Machinegun the swamp cultists!
I use a bunch of Mythos material in my 5e D&D Runelords & Primeval Thule games, but I don't use any Sanity mechanics - Psychic hit point damage works great.
Perhaps what the person who wants "Lovecraft in D&D" is an enemy/threat that can't just be meleed/spelled out of existence. The threat is not only to the PCs bodies but their very souls. The thing won't take people's HPs, it will make them unable to sleep, or give them a disease that can't be cured by magic, or steal their memories (XP?). Or perhaps turn the entire world into zombies!
In CoC, the PCs rarely have to actually fight the cosmic threat - they need to discover a way of ending the threat without fighting the entity directly. So they fight the cult that is going to summon it, they research a spell that might weaken the entity, they steal the MacGuffin of Azathoth Summoning and drop it into the deepest ocean. Maybe that's what he has in mind? That's pretty easy to do in D&D.
Quote from: Razor 007;1138132Put the PCs into a unique setting, where certain things they'd ordinarily expect, don't work.
I agree with this. Lovecraftian horror is a realisation that the physics and metaphysics that you believe in are wrong. The physics of D&D is the rules. I'd run it that if you cast divine magic against a Great Old One then it reaches out psionically and snaps your link to your deity: no more magic for your character [Or if you want - summons ands eats your god]. If you attack a mythos monster - you roll d10 rather than d20.
Well good horror is hard, straight out. Second buy-in is essential. Third sanity & fear mechanics are sort of a failsafe to remind "belligerently stoic" players to cut the crap and play ball with what they signed up. It asks a lot from all parties.
The good news is D&D actually is in a fantastic position to emulate Mythos because it resides smack dab in the middle of the fantastic surrounded by peril, the alien, & terror (to borrow keyword terms now familiar to many a CoC FF boardgame).
With an emphasis on pluck and meager material reserves exploring the vast mythic underworld, going against a nigh endless flow of foul patroling denizens serving even greater horrors beneath, the dungeon crawl is literally emblematic of a good Mythos story. The only major thing to add is some "good" (purple, always purple prose) exposition hinting at a pressure cooker of trouble ready to blow -- suggesting overland peace was always an illusion dependent on unappreciated sacrifice below. As for mechanics... you already have five different saves, six stats, move rate, encumbrance, & HP to work off of, if you really need to throw mods & tick down meters.
In some way letting players respond organically, rather than any SAN system, is better because there is expectation to respond without prompting on how to do so. Most people grok horror responses and can act up as the situation needs. That might be more liberating, and unsettling, if your players can go with that flow.
Quote from: Anselyn;1138153I agree with this. Lovecraftian horror is a realisation that the physics and metaphysics that you believe in are wrong. The physics of D&D is the rules. I'd run it that if you cast divine magic against a Great Old One then it reaches out psionically and snaps your link to your deity: no more magic for your character [Or if you want - summons ands eats your god]. If you attack a mythos monster - you roll d10 rather than d20.
Or Arcane magic is no longer safe to use. Any Arcane magic use carries a risk of corruption. The rules from Ravenloft, especially Masque of the Red Death, are already set up to do this in D&D.
Quote from: Reckall;1138103Look for "Louis Wain Cats". He was a postcard illustrator in the Victorian Era who was absolutely obsessed with cats. Nothing wrong in this. Then he got schizophrenia and his art began to change. Wain's last drawings are still used today in the study of schizophrenia, because they are an unparalleled chronicle of a mind's descent into madness. They are absolutely alien (when you see them always remember: Wain was seeing cats). You just feel that no normal mind could produce something like that.
Interesting how Louis Wain's work is seen as the result of schizophrenia yet the significantly more disturbing works of Pablo Picasso are not. (also, Wikipedia suggests that his painting were displayed out of chronological order in the attempt to make it seem like his condition was progressing yet he is known to have produced conventional cat paintings late in life along side his more abstract pieces).
In any event, the paintings were the result of his mental illness (and drug use) not the cause of it. I still content that merely looking at a monster, no matter how gross, will not cause a sane person to instantly go insane. Long term exposure to such situations, maybe, but even your low level D&D character has seen more death and dismemberment in one adventure than almost all modern humans do in a lifetime. Cthulhu is nothing more than a magical kaiju.
Quote from: S'mon;1138145I don't think even the average HPL story much resembles the stereotype of "Cthulu" RPG play, with helpless PCs immediately going mad at the mere sight of a Mythos monster. Ram the Great Old One! Machinegun the swamp cultists!
I was introduced to Lovecraft via D&D's original Deities & Demigods. When I finally read Lovecraft's actual stories, I was surprised how different they were. One specific example is the Old Ones in Mountains of Madness (the barrel shaped creatures with wings and starfish legs).
Here's how they are described in At the Mountains of Madness: "
They had not been even savages--for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch--perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia . . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last--what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn--whatever they had been, they were men!"
Yet in D&D they were Lawful Evil and in CoC they cause a Sanity check.
Quote from: Anselyn;1138153I agree with this. Lovecraftian horror is a realisation that the physics and metaphysics that you believe in are wrong.
Again I will disagree with that. While some of Lovecrafts writing is him erroneously reacting to scientific advancements in the day (The color from out of space is just him not understanding the invisible light spectrum), most of it errs on its effect on people or the community.
It's about the effect of new information on social dissolution, and the sense of hopelessness when it feels like your the only one bothered by it or know about it.
It reminds me how in Darkest Dungeon the twist is that the whole world is an egg for some planet-sized monster. But our reality is not really far off. Our world is a shell for a ton of magma, and if even a tiny fissure happened our entire planet would be destroyed in a manner of hours.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1138196It reminds me how in Darkest Dungeon the twist is that the whole world is an egg for some planet-sized monster.
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WTF! Are you sure about that? Playing DD now almost in the last dungeon and never heard about it.
Quote from: Itachi;1138206WTF! Are you sure about that? Playing DD now almost in the last dungeon and never heard about it.
Oops. I'm sorry, does this forum have a spoiler setting?
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1138218Oops. I'm sorry, does this forum have a spoiler setting?
Spoiler
Yes it does. The little, blue circle in the reply options. You might have to go advanced, rather than quick reply to see it
Quote from: rocksfalleverybodydies;1138220Spoiler
Yes it does. The little, blue circle in the reply options. You might have to go advanced, rather than quick reply to see it
Now I feel bad.