So as my Cyberpunk RED game is wrapping up, I've been kicking around a few ideas for what to run next.  One idea that I've hit upon is to run a campaign of the Invisible College.  I love occult conspiracy stories. There's so much you can do with them and it's a shame to me that so much of the content occult conspiracy RPG spaces falls back on the same tired, shopworn Cthulhu Mythos.  Blah blah, Cthulhu Ftaghn. Deep One Hybrids and cults everywhere YADA YADA YADA.  I do love Lovecraft's writing, but the Lovecraft Mythos horse is paste.  We should stop beating it.

I really like the possibilities of an authentic Occult conspiracy game (and I think it would be a nice diversion from bitching about Woke Companies for once) so I'd like to bounce a few ideas off you guys.  I love the concept of the Occult War.  I love how, while there are some Eldritch horrors lurking beyond space and time, the worst horrors faced by the Invisible College are the product of human actions.

If I am going to run an Invisible College game, it won't be contemporary. I'll probably set it in the past.  There are a few reasons for this.  First of all, I love history.  I'm a huge history nerd.  My playlists on Video Streaming sites are full of documentaries and I love to read books on history. 

The other reason, is a particular bête nior of mine when it comes to writing stories in the modern era: Cell Phones.
I love my Smartphone.  Having a personal organizer, games and all of my friends and family only a few fingertaps away is awesome.  When it comes to writing stories, on the other hand, they suck.  The ubiquitous adoption of Cellular Phones has sucked so much potential narrative tension.  This goes double when you have to take Player Characters into account who will be calling absolutely everyone and ruining the tension by doing boring things like Call the Police.

So there are 2 periods I'd be most interested in running a campaign in:

First: The Interwar Period 1919-1939.  There's just something cool about the 20's and 30's.  It's such a dynamic pair of decades.   The fashion was great, the music was great, you could legally by a machine gun but not a shot of whisky for much of it.  There's so much for the Invisible College or other factions to get mixed up in weather bootleggers and speakeasys in the 20's, organized crime, labor violence and political terrorism in the 30's or the Occult Renaissance that was happening as well.  This is the time period where Aleister Crowley was active.

The Occult War during the Interwar period would obviously see some difference. If we go strictly by the lore, there's no Nemites or Typhonians yet.  I would probably change the lore so that at least we get Typhonians because they're such fun bad guys.  The main, real, alpha threat however  would the Thuleans.  Thulean agents would be everywhere especially after the Nazis come to power.  Modern political grandstanding and smearing aside: real, actual, card-carrying Nazis are never not fun bad guys.  Just don't turn them into mouthpieces for your lingering resentment of your Father.

The Magic wouldn't be too different.  Chaos Magic may be less developed.  Obviously there are no Computers so Cyber-evocation wouldn't exist.  It would restore a bit of the CoC method of having to troll through rare book collections looking for occult tomes.  One positive thing is that you could quite easily re-purpose less Mythos Heavy Call of Cthulhu adventures like The Haunting or Dead Man's Stomp.

Second: the 1980s.
If Stranger Things proved anything, it's that the mix of 80's pop-culture nostalgia, Cold War conspiracy paranoia and supernatural weirdness is a potent mix.  It would be a shame not to tap into that.  The advantage of an 80's game is that most of the big factions are already in place, especially the Nemites who are one of my favorite bad guys in the Occult War.  They're weird, they're creepy, they create perfect scenarios for 80's B-monster action and they remind me of the Universal Brotherhood from Shadowrun.  If I did run an 80's game, I would probably have the Nemites as the main villains.  They're a new threat that's relatively unknown, and my players get to be the ones who uncover it and have to warn the College before it's too late.

Computers are still a totally useable  Skill for 80's games.  I personally love the idea of playing a computer nerd who knows the numbers to a bunch of Occult BBSes.

I've had a few ideas which really have me leaning towards a 1920's setting.

First off, I could totally see either an alternate version of the Cult of Typhon or an earlier iteration of it which grew out of the fusion of Post Great War spiritualism and the Nihilistic malaise that grew of the horrors of the trenches.  The raison d'être for this early 20th Century cult of Typhon goes like this: "the horrors of the Great War prove that mankind is inherently evil.  We don't deserve to live.  Opening the gate to the Nightmare Realm of Quipploth and letting the Demons eat our faces will be Cosmic Justice!"

Secondly, I love the idea of Harry Houdini making an appearance.  Harry was hugely involved in debunking spiritualists and mediums in the 1910's and 20's.  I love the idea that Houdini is actually a double-agent working for the Invisible College to keep the Occult War a secret.  Most of the mediums, spiritualists and magcians he meets are frauds, but Houdini is such a skilled illusionist that he can even "debunk" the few who actually have happened onto real magic through chance or experimentation.

Quote from: Torque2100 on August 19, 2021, 08:46:39 PM
So as my Cyberpunk RED game is wrapping up, I've been kicking around a few ideas for what to run next.  One idea that I've hit upon is to run a campaign of the Invisible College.  I love occult conspiracy stories. There's so much you can do with them and it's a shame to me that so much of the content occult conspiracy RPG spaces falls back on the same tired, shopworn Cthulhu Mythos.  Blah blah, Cthulhu Ftaghn. Deep One Hybrids and cults everywhere YADA YADA YADA.  I do love Lovecraft's writing, but the Lovecraft Mythos horse is paste.  We should stop beating it.

I really like the possibilities of an authentic Occult conspiracy game (and I think it would be a nice diversion from bitching about Woke Companies for once) so I'd like to bounce a few ideas off you guys.  I love the concept of the Occult War.  I love how, while there are some Eldritch horrors lurking beyond space and time, the worst horrors faced by the Invisible College are the product of human actions.

If I am going to run an Invisible College game, it won't be contemporary. I'll probably set it in the past.  There are a few reasons for this.  First of all, I love history.  I'm a huge history nerd.  My playlists on Video Streaming sites are full of documentaries and I love to read books on history. 

The other reason, is a particular bête nior of mine when it comes to writing stories in the modern era: Cell Phones.
I love my Smartphone.  Having a personal organizer, games and all of my friends and family only a few fingertaps away is awesome.  When it comes to writing stories, on the other hand, they suck.  The ubiquitous adoption of Cellular Phones has sucked so much potential narrative tension.  This goes double when you have to take Player Characters into account who will be calling absolutely everyone and ruining the tension by doing boring things like Call the Police.

So there are 2 periods I'd be most interested in running a campaign in:

First: The Interwar Period 1919-1939.  There's just something cool about the 20's and 30's.  It's such a dynamic pair of decades.   The fashion was great, the music was great, you could legally by a machine gun but not a shot of whisky for much of it.  There's so much for the Invisible College or other factions to get mixed up in weather bootleggers and speakeasys in the 20's, organized crime, labor violence and political terrorism in the 30's or the Occult Renaissance that was happening as well.  This is the time period where Aleister Crowley was active.

The Occult War during the Interwar period would obviously see some difference. If we go strictly by the lore, there's no Nemites or Typhonians yet.  I would probably change the lore so that at least we get Typhonians because they're such fun bad guys.  The main, real, alpha threat however  would the Thuleans.  Thulean agents would be everywhere especially after the Nazis come to power.  Modern political grandstanding and smearing aside: real, actual, card-carrying Nazis are never not fun bad guys.  Just don't turn them into mouthpieces for your lingering resentment of your Father.

The Magic wouldn't be too different.  Chaos Magic may be less developed.  Obviously there are no Computers so Cyber-evocation wouldn't exist.  It would restore a bit of the CoC method of having to troll through rare book collections looking for occult tomes.  One positive thing is that you could quite easily re-purpose less Mythos Heavy Call of Cthulhu adventures like The Haunting or Dead Man's Stomp.

Second: the 1980s.
If Stranger Things proved anything, it's that the mix of 80's pop-culture nostalgia, Cold War conspiracy paranoia and supernatural weirdness is a potent mix.  It would be a shame not to tap into that.  The advantage of an 80's game is that most of the big factions are already in place, especially the Nemites who are one of my favorite bad guys in the Occult War.  They're weird, they're creepy, they create perfect scenarios for 80's B-monster action and they remind me of the Universal Brotherhood from Shadowrun.  If I did run an 80's game, I would probably have the Nemites as the main villains.  They're a new threat that's relatively unknown, and my players get to be the ones who uncover it and have to warn the College before it's too late.

Computers are still a totally useable  Skill for 80's games.  I personally love the idea of playing a computer nerd who knows the numbers to a bunch of Occult BBSes.

There's an excellent documentary called "Secrets in plain sight". It's about how so many buildings of the world seem to conceal esoteric and numerological patterns, alignments and "coincidences". It's life-changing, and right up your alley. Not everything is true in it; there are some errors and subjectivity in it, but many things are undeniably true, enough to make you think.



There's also part 2 if you're interested

Then there's "Do you believe in Magick?". It's about 9/11 being a ritual. Also interesting. There's also the urban legend of the Tzar being killed in an occult kabbalistic ritual by bolsheviks.

You might wanna check out Feng Shui. It's an RPG about the "Chi wars"; control over flow of the Earth's energy. Some places concentrate and harness it better than others, and whoever controls those places will have dominion of the world; their plans will come into fruition. There's plenty of time travel and wacky stuff; maybe not what you're looking for exactly but an excellent source of inspiration

These both sound like interesting ideas for settings.

Keep in mind that for the default (modern) setting of Invisible College, I specifically address the "cell phone question".

In a pre-internet game, aside from certain groups and even certain styles of magic not even existing yet, you'd also have the issue that some forms of magic become much more difficult to learn, and much more difficult to even operate (since you'd have to obtain/make all the ritual components yourself, etc).

In essence, doing the College curriculum would be even more advantageous. Trying to go it alone as a chaos magician even more difficult.

How about running a game during the Salem witch trials era, but set just a few days' journey outside of Salem?  Perhaps in a remote village, just outside the sway of Salem?

Quote from: Jam The MF on August 27, 2021, 04:21:08 PM
How about running a game during the Salem witch trials era, but set just a few days' journey outside of Salem?  Perhaps in a remote village, just outside the sway of Salem?

Sure, that could work too. Just as long as the village wasn't Arkham..