Call of Cthulhu: Cthulhu Rules/Explanations
Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 2:19 pm
Here I am going to explain the flavor and expectations of the game style and later the rules since not everyone may have access to them.
__________________________________________________________________
The world itself is normal in all respects, people go about their lives and such. What 99.99% don't know is there are things that are beyond human comprehension that exist and that they occasionally creep into where we live. The demented artist who paints scenes that would make Geiger proud probably was in the Dreamlands which is a real and physical place but luckily we rarely can get there and when we do only for brief moments. Hospitals are full of people that simply cracked after seeing some "thing" in a trenchcoat in a dark alley that moved in ways people should not be able to move. Researchers read books of dead cultures that reveared deities that asked for and received sacrifices and rituals that entire countries would go to war to prevent their practice.
In essense your body is 10 times more stable and resilient than your mind in this game. The very description of some Old One could cause you to suffer mental illness much less a picture drawn by some "enlightend" priest. But you have to persevere through these books and murals and the recordings in gibberish languages to gain the tools by which you may have a chance to stop some ineffable uncaring force from ending the world as you know it. Reading the chant in some ritual may teach you how to interrupt it, joining some cult may allow you access to steal some integral artifact, that artifact may have some function that you have to divine so it can close a metaphysical portal. But each step brings you closer to either joining your enemies due to their subversive influence or changing physically into some monstrous beast or if your lucky retiring into the insane asylum.
The game does this by giving you 2 scores that are relevent in this. Your Sanity and your Mythos. Everyone has Sanity even if it is 0 (which means your a gibbering, catatonic, meat sack) but you start out with a decent amount (up to 99) and it can go up with time and treatment, not as fast as it drops though. Then there is your Mythos, it represents your knowledge of the "real" supernatural stuff out there, actual ghosts, spells, rituals, knowlege of cults to Old Ones, etc. This is like everything else and rated 0-100 (well most everything else is limited to 99) and the higher it is the more you know and the easier you can use it. Every single point in this skill is from doing, seeing, reading, hear, being near something supernatural. And every single time this has a chance to go up 1 or 2 points you will be rolling to see if your Sanity goes down 1-12 points. Not all things that make you lose Sanity give you Mythos (like killing in cold blood, doesn't matter if he was a raving cultist, he was human) Sanity restoral is reeeeeeeeaaallly slow like a d3-d6 per campaign or maybe a point or 2 a session if you did not encounter anything bad.
If you lose more than 5 points of Sanity in one session you get a new mental derrangement/psychosis/madness/etc. You could realize just how easy it is to kill people after killing that cultist and go on spree. Now these are typically of a temporary nature but that means 1-3 game sessions. More loss more problems. Lose enough in 1 night and you go mad permanently, like gaining the permant disability that prevents you from ever useing that hand again (That book was REALLY unclean and you cant wash off its taint and cant use the hand lest it spread) its only in your head so it is real to you.
The mortality rate in this game for characters is High (not as high as Paranoia but close). Campaigns typically provide 10+ characters so people can play a spare when they bite it. But while I am not having extra characters be made or available just yet I am going to leave avenues for new personalities to get invovled later when things get rough.
__________________________________________________________________
The world itself is normal in all respects, people go about their lives and such. What 99.99% don't know is there are things that are beyond human comprehension that exist and that they occasionally creep into where we live. The demented artist who paints scenes that would make Geiger proud probably was in the Dreamlands which is a real and physical place but luckily we rarely can get there and when we do only for brief moments. Hospitals are full of people that simply cracked after seeing some "thing" in a trenchcoat in a dark alley that moved in ways people should not be able to move. Researchers read books of dead cultures that reveared deities that asked for and received sacrifices and rituals that entire countries would go to war to prevent their practice.
In essense your body is 10 times more stable and resilient than your mind in this game. The very description of some Old One could cause you to suffer mental illness much less a picture drawn by some "enlightend" priest. But you have to persevere through these books and murals and the recordings in gibberish languages to gain the tools by which you may have a chance to stop some ineffable uncaring force from ending the world as you know it. Reading the chant in some ritual may teach you how to interrupt it, joining some cult may allow you access to steal some integral artifact, that artifact may have some function that you have to divine so it can close a metaphysical portal. But each step brings you closer to either joining your enemies due to their subversive influence or changing physically into some monstrous beast or if your lucky retiring into the insane asylum.
The game does this by giving you 2 scores that are relevent in this. Your Sanity and your Mythos. Everyone has Sanity even if it is 0 (which means your a gibbering, catatonic, meat sack) but you start out with a decent amount (up to 99) and it can go up with time and treatment, not as fast as it drops though. Then there is your Mythos, it represents your knowledge of the "real" supernatural stuff out there, actual ghosts, spells, rituals, knowlege of cults to Old Ones, etc. This is like everything else and rated 0-100 (well most everything else is limited to 99) and the higher it is the more you know and the easier you can use it. Every single point in this skill is from doing, seeing, reading, hear, being near something supernatural. And every single time this has a chance to go up 1 or 2 points you will be rolling to see if your Sanity goes down 1-12 points. Not all things that make you lose Sanity give you Mythos (like killing in cold blood, doesn't matter if he was a raving cultist, he was human) Sanity restoral is reeeeeeeeaaallly slow like a d3-d6 per campaign or maybe a point or 2 a session if you did not encounter anything bad.
If you lose more than 5 points of Sanity in one session you get a new mental derrangement/psychosis/madness/etc. You could realize just how easy it is to kill people after killing that cultist and go on spree. Now these are typically of a temporary nature but that means 1-3 game sessions. More loss more problems. Lose enough in 1 night and you go mad permanently, like gaining the permant disability that prevents you from ever useing that hand again (That book was REALLY unclean and you cant wash off its taint and cant use the hand lest it spread) its only in your head so it is real to you.
The mortality rate in this game for characters is High (not as high as Paranoia but close). Campaigns typically provide 10+ characters so people can play a spare when they bite it. But while I am not having extra characters be made or available just yet I am going to leave avenues for new personalities to get invovled later when things get rough.