#trail of Cthulhu

[sonofdysonsphere]

The key to being a good GM in tabletop rpgs is to listen to the same song on repeat and slowly going insane while thinking about a scene you are planning that your players might avoid entirely.

[lafayettenossie]

[honourablejester]

I’m watching a playthrough of the Trail of Cthulhu scenario ‘Cerulean Halo’ on youtube, and I’m not sure if the scenario is actually written like this or if it’s this particular GM, but you know when you stumble across something that just kind of completely strains your disbelief, enough to knock you out of the story?

The story is a scientific expedition to an uninhabited South Pacific Atoll in the 1930s. After a week’s voyage, the ship arrives at the island, and they set up a base camp for the first night. They play through that night, people waking up feeling something watching them from the water, and then in the morning the captain sends the boat across to check on the ship. At which point the crew of said boat come pelting back because there’s signs that the ship has been boarded in the night.

But. The thing is. It’s made obvious by the way this is done that there was no one on the ship that night. As in, the captain of a ship anchored off the shore of an uninhabited island didn’t leave a watch on his ship. And that …

If you’re in an out-of-the-way location, an uninhabited island, and your ship is your only way off it, would you not leave a goddamn watch on the ship? Leaving completely aside pirates or lovecraftian monsters or what have you, what happens if your fucking anchor gets dislodged during the night? Without the ship, you are stranded in the South Pacific with a week’s worth of supplies from the onshore base camp. For the love of god.

Now. I know why, for story reasons, you might set it up like this. You want to keep the mystery of what boarded the ship, so there can’t be witnesses, and that means either there was no watch on the ship, or else the watch got murdered or vanished. If you’re only in the opening phases of the investigation, maybe you don’t want to alarm the party that much one night in, so you don’t want to drop corpses on them or have them start worrying about getting stolen in the night. But still.

I mean, there’s already another force on the island capable of boarding and rifling through your ship. So getting vanished in the night is already a concern. Just have a pair of vanished crew from the watch, it’s fine!

And then, unless I badly misread the following conversation, after having proof that someone boarded his ship in the night, the captain sets up a watch rotation on shore, but, again, not on the ship. And I’m like. Are you asking to get stranded and whittled away over here?

Sorry. I can see why you might want to set the scenario up this way, I get it. But it definitely makes the captain look incredibly incompetent, you know?

Do people normally leave their ship at anchor unattended in the ass-crack of nowhere when it’s their only lifeline off the island again?

[skunts-own-truth]

Hey, all! Just learned Trail of Cthulhu by Pelgranepress is getting a 2nd edition! Updated and made a bit more fresh for ease of use, with a lot of best practices worked into the game after years and years of Gumshoe play. I’ll always be attached to Gumshoe as a system, having play tested for a number of games and scenarios to come out for it over the years, and I really can’t recommend it enough!

If you’ve never heard of Trail of Cthulhu or Gumshoe, the core premise of the system is to never have a moment in-game where investigators can’t move forward in an investigation because they failed a information gathering test. In Gumshoe players always gather core clues. The fun comes from how they use those clues, and the horrors they unlock as they delve deeper into darker corners of a world they thought they knew!

If you want to give it a look, sign up for their newsletter on Backerkit! They give you a quick start PDF with a fun scenario about mysterious figures being sighted around a crashed ship.

[thryth-gaming]

Mental Health in Trail of Cthulhu (1st edition)

I have a mixed history with Pelgrane published games like Trail of Cthulhu. On the one hand, the way they approach the Sense Trouble skill and investigation in general were each landmarks for in developing my particular GM style. However, I have found that the developers can be very opinionated about the right way to play a game or approach fiction in general. I've often had the experience of enjoying some of their concepts only to be brought to a screeching halt by an unnecessary segment at least bellying up to the line separating the expression of an opinion from condescension. Their approach to portraying mental health is no different.

Starting with the good things, while Call of Cthulhu does point it is representing the fictional depictions of insanity in the stories, Trail of Cthulhu makes sure to put that statement in a side-bar so that it is not easily missed. Also, the game definitely differentiates between normal mental stresses from combat, witnessing violence, near death experiences, and the like as stuff that impacts a trait called Stability. Meanwhile delving into eldritch truths impacts a trait called Sanity.

That said, I definitely take issues with their choice of phrasing... "Tediously Obligatory" falls into Pelgrane's trend of unnecessary and condescending language.

On to how Trail decided to separate mundane mental stress from eldritch corruption (but still calling the eldritch corruption "Sanity")

Their stated reasons for this is because they noticed that some of the fictional characters had lots of knowledge of the Mythos but also seemed well put together and stable. Professor Armitage from the Dunwich Horror as an example. So they decided that they needed two stats, one for ability to act rationally and plan with logic (Stability) and another representing their growing alien perspective (Sanity). Regardless of the motivation, this is a step up from Call of Cthulhu.

Another interesting thing Trail of Cthulhu does is add some narrative detail to the erosion of a characters' human perspective. For each 3 points of Sanity a character has, they name a "Pillar of Sanity" that represents the concepts that anchor this character to humanity. This could be things like a particular religious faith, love family, the desire to enjoy life to fullest, nationalism, appreciation of art, greed, ambition, belief in basic human decency, appreciation of nature, or other such things. And for every 3 Sanity lost, one of these pillars collapses.

Pillars are purely narrative with the only mechanic involving being that when someone hits 2 Sanity and loses their last Pillar that they now will have more difficulty resisting Stability losses. I am definitely appreciative of being encouraged to add little narrative flourishes like that.

Going on to neutral things. Sanity, Stability, and Health are all paid for out of the same pool of points that go to a person's active skills. Investigative skills get a whole different pool. I would also note that Sanity can never increased over the course of the game. Once the game starts, you have what you have. You can improve Stability however.

As for recovering Sanity, in the Purist mode of the game, you never recover. In the Pulpy mode of the game, you may recover small amounts or all your Sanity at end of mysteries depending on how pulpy the table wants the game to be.

And now we come to the bad, and to be honest, it's not the mechanics, but again the way they're presented. When someone has reached between -6 and -11 Stability they are considered "blasted" and will suffer a bout of mental illness. (Sanity 0 is out of the game and Stability -12 is out of the game but for non-supernatural mental health reasons) Someone who is blasted by non-supernatural stresses will suffer "Shell Shock" which is basically PTSD as you'd expect. Someone who was driven their by a Mythos event will lose some Sanity and suffer more bizarre mental issues.

On it's face, this isn't all terrible. But at this point, the afflicted character is told to leave the room while the GM and other players decide what sort of mental illness the victim will suffer. They then get together and prepare to gaslight the person rather than tell them upfront what was decided. For example, if the group decides the person has amnesia, then they might decide between that the "blasted" victim was married and has now forgotten. So they may talk about the person's wife or husband asserting that yes they're real. Another suggestion was to choose one of the character's skills and decide that every success that the character had with that skill was delusion. Or acting suspicious and passing empty notes and such.

So this is where I started to get uncomfortable. Not to say that I haven't enjoyed a collaborative approach to character mental health. My most cathartic and well-loved instance of an RPG giving me a safe approach to playing through the way mental health issues can pop out of nowhere and the effort to struggle against them came from a collaborative table experience between myself, another player, and the GM. The difference being that every was above the table in my circumstance.

No gaslighting.

The Amnesia and Megalomania (the one where they pretend you've never been successful at certain skills) options especially gall me. I can just imagine coming back to the table and learning the table has decided that my ace adventurer is retroactively a prolific lover complete with stories of past conquests of NPCs in the game. Errrg. And, yes, I know ace people can still have sex just fine.

Still, as long as everybody consents to this style of gameplay, it's fine. I can see the appeal from a certain perspective. If you have a good handle of everybody's lines and veils, this sort of immersive improv can be done and everybody has fun. But that's where we come to the next sidebar and a return to some of my issues with Pelgrane's attitudes.

It is very possible that the group in the second paragraph approved to such a mixed approach. But the way the sidebar is phrased just makes me think somebody came up to them, said "don't do the thing where the table decides my issue", and then the GM went around and did it anyway. And it just feels very much like something I could expect from the people that write things like "Tediously Obligatory Disclaimer" or "If I had my way nobody would ever get to play the good vampire in any medium ever again. It is, sadly, not up to me." (Nights Black Agents)

All said, this approach is very much in keeping with a lot of my experience from Pelgrane books: some interesting mechanics package with some very unwelcome opinions and attitudes that add little to nothing to system. You can take all the mechanics as they are and have a wonderfully fun time with some great adventure and catharsis. And the game does address the effort of modifying approaches as fitting each table.

I've run a bit of GUMSHOE and had fun with it, but there are games that better fit my style out there. And which take a much less begrudging approach to sensitive issues.

[blossomingtortoise2]

listening to Starkid

last night I watched the trail to Oregon,then I’m watching the hatchetfield series,then finally Twisted! It’s amazing so far.(I’m on The Guy who didn't like musicals(I’m in the middle of it but my dad has something I have to do)) Also the Sniggles Throughout all of hatchetfield are cool.

Update: I’m on Black Friday and I love the restless sleep of the Dead in Drowsy Town. Also I watched Cinderella’s castle and it’s amazing.

update 2:I’m on Nerdy Prudes must die and Watched Workin Boys

[lafayettenossie]

I had it since I returned from Providence in November 1925, after spending 6 months in a mental sanatorium following certain events that occurred in Innsmouth…

[krinsbez]

A Call of Cthulhu Question

So, Pulp Cthulhu is actually two things; a sourcebook for playing Call of Cthulhu games in the 1930s, as opposed to the "standard" timeframe of the 1920s, and a rulebook for adjusting CoC to a different genre.

Do other books like Down Darker Trails or Dreamlands do the same?

[lafayettenossie]

WOD / VTM - V5 / The Call of Cthulhu - Trail of Cthulhu RP account.

3 main Universes:

- 1920s New England-based lovecraftian private detective Jacques Francis Lafayette;

- 2020s-2040s New Orleans Anarch Nosferatu private detective / Camarilla Sheriff of NOLA's Court Francis Louis Lafayette;

- 2020s-2040s Alternative Universe character Hecata (Samedi) NOPD Homicide Detective Marie Louise Lafayette.

His biography (from 1888 until 2020s)

Image 1 Image 2

OCs related:

Diana Selene;

Josephine "Joey Laveau" Archer;

Nimué;

[victorluvsalice]

Hi all -- I'm on vacation this week, and I wanted to share with you some shots of my trip earlier today to Roger Williams Park Zoo to look at their "Dragons & Mythical Creatures" exhibit! This is a special exhibit running until August 11th where they've set up a bunch of simple animatronics of various mythical creatures from around the world around their Wetlands Trail path. The animatronics are a bit goofy, as you can probably see from the above pictures, but they were still fun to look at, and I had a good time going through and looking at them all with my folks. :) In order of their appearance in the photoset above, we have --

-->An alicorn (winged unicorn) right at the entrance

-->A siren by the lake -- they actually had three mermaids, but the other two were the traditional lovely ladies, so I decided to prioritize getting a picture of the one with the goofiest smile XD

-->Your traditional European dragon, who roared with glowing eyes

-->The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, depicted in feathered serpent form wrapped around a pyramid

-->The Ninki Nanka, a West African beast with the face of a horse, the neck of a giraffe, and the body of a crocodile, which lives in muddy mangroves and according to the Limba people in Sierra Leone, causes thunder and lightning -- as you can see, this one has a horn for extra value

-->An Egyptian Sphinx sporting the traditional Egyptian funerary mask for pharaohs -- honestly, between that technicolor mask and the way it was wiggling its head, it was one of the most off-putting exhibits there

-->A Japanese kappa, a mischievous creature that here appears as a turtle standing upright with a vicious-looking beak and a divot on the top of its head -- I believe that divot is supposed to hold water, and if you can trick them into bowing to you, the water will flow out and they'll lose a lot of their powers

-->A Japanese Kasa-obake, which is an old and neglected umbrella that has picked up a spirit and become a mischievous ghost with a long tongue and a single eye. ...I will admit, I immediately accused it of being a Pokemon. XD

-->A traditional griffin, with the white feathered head, wings, and talons of an eagle and the body of a lion -- I especially like this one because it includes feathered ears as well, something you don't see on a lot of griffins -- but that you do see on the GRYPHON in the original Alice books!

-->A yeti -- who you may recognize as Bumble from the Rankin-Bass stop motion Christmas films, because apparently the park couldn't resist

-->FUCKING CTHULHU. With his head out of proportion to the rest of his body. If you're wondering what the hell he's doing here, Roger Williams Park Zoo is in Providence, Rhode Island, which just so happens to be the birthplace of HP Lovecraft. I guess they felt they had to. XD

[lafayettenossie]

That book...

WET ONE

by Karen Main

[tomoleary]

Steve Purcell “Trail of Tsathogghua” Call of Cthulhu original art (1984)

[indigospyder]

I literally owe The Internet Archive my entire life I was looking for an audio recording of The King in Yellow and DuckDuckGo said “oh here’s the whole thing as the first option”

Peter Yearsley you deserve the world

[themetalwanderlust]

Short Review(s): Dethklok, Heads for the Dead, ROME, Starspawn of Cthulhu

Artist: Starspawn of Cthulhu Album: The Cursed Vision Label: Talheim Records Germany Genre: Doom Metal Release Date: January 31, 2023 Location: Italy Starspawn of Cthulhu is a two-piece Lovecraft-themed Doom Metal band from Italy, and they’re absolutely fantastic! The sounds they produce are so unique it’s almost as if a Bard joined a Metal band. The band says, “Lyrically, this album talks…

[lurks-no-more]

That right there is why Trail of Cthulhu (a RPG using the Gumshoe system) exists - CoC is built around the idea of investigations, but the rules don't actually support or facilitate that kind of gameplay. (No, the existence of Library Use skill does not count.)

Tiny Table x Call of Cthulhu Episode 7: Post Mortem

Smallest Salutations! Call of Cthulhu has died… and it's time for us to dissect it’s wriggling corpse! We’ve got some hot takes regarding this well-aged classic! This postmortem covers everything from our qualms with the system to how to gamify the different subgenres of horror. Here’s hoping our critiques are more comprehensible than these eldritch horrors!

Listen here!