#coc rpg

[i-3at-s0ap]

A doodle I did of me and my friend’s call of Cthulhu characters

[moginrambles]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work, Dick Hardy's Investigators Office, Call of Cthulhu (Roleplaying Game) Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death Characters: Carmen (OC), Vincent Shergold, Original Characters Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Horror, Spatial Horror, Animal Abuse, Blood and Injury, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Minor Character Death, sorry i put a kitty cat through the horrors Summary:

Inside the building was a box and inside the box was a building and inside that building was a box and inside that box was a building and inside that building was a very fed up delinquent who thought this was supposed to be a simple job.

Carmen often did favours for her friend down at the pawn shop and that cursed blade she’d bonded with in Walter Corbitt’s basement hadn’t been her first encounter with the supernatural either though she’d rather not think about it if you asked her.

Some things are best forgotten.

[anim-ttrpgs]

The Kickstarter for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Live!!

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is our team’s debut TTRPG, over three years in the making! The campaign will run from April 10th to May 10th!

How far would you go to learn the truth?

Play amateur detectives caught up in things they barely understand, and explore how the lives of your characters unravel as they push themselves to dig deeper into the unknown!

Tense investigations!

Delve into an investigation-focused mystery and horror system that lets players take initiative and use their characters’ unique strengths to find clues and deduce conclusions themselves. A few bad rolls won’t get the party hopelessly stuck, but at the same time Eureka respects their intellect and lets them take charge of solving the mystery!

Character-driven gameplay!

Stats and abilities are based on who your character is as a person. Freeform character creation allows you to build a totally unique little guy, and have a totally unique gameplay experience with him! This is supported by the backbone of the Composure mechanic. Stress, fear, fatigue, and hunger will wear your investigators down as they trudge deeper into the unknown. Food, sleep, and connections with their fellow investigators are the only way to keep them going!

Secrets inside and out! 

Any investigator could be a monster, helping their friends while trying not to reveal their true natures. The party will learn to trust and rely on each other, or explode into a tangled net of drama!

Intense, tactical combat! 

Hits are devastating, and misses are unpredictable–firing a gun will always change the situation somehow, for better or for worse!

Now in Technicolor!

Evocative artwork from talented femme-fatales @chaospyromancy and @qsycomplainsalot and the mysterious @theblackwarden paint a gorgeously-realized portrait of a world with shadows lurking in every corner.

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. We are almost at the end, we just need some financial support to put the finishing touches on it and make the final push to get it ready for official release!

With every stretch goal we meet, the game gets better and better. Tons of beautiful new artwork, new options for gameplay, and even two entirely new playable Monsters could be added to the book, so visit the Kickstarter and secure your copy today!

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[umbraldame]

My friends are making a ttrpg where you can play as monster mystery investigators. Needless to say I've been having a blast designing monster girls! This cute little murder blanket here is the Thing From Beyond, an alien shafeshifter with very particular dietary restrictions. (It's people!!) It's just one of the several playable monsters that Eureka has to offer. The TFB is quite special as it's a Eureka exclusive creation and based heavily off of great movie monsters like The Thing, The Blob, and many more!

[hazzkunho]

🌋 The Terminator 🌋 High Demon, conceived by the Pistol Demon and the War Demon— A rampant killing machine, made to stop the advance of the Exorcists. Created from a shot corpse, its black mist distorts space-time by conjuring up gunfire from other timelines.

[madfishmonger]

In a Call of Cthulhu game, first session, one of the players wanted to play a conspiracy theorist, but rightly knows real conspiracies are racist/sexist/antisemitic etc, so we suggested he go for absolutely bonkers stuff that he just makes up.

So far we have (that I recall):

The fish/monkey skeleton hybrids in circus displays are real animals

Big Ben is organic and was grown

Bees are harmlessly shorn to make a red food colouring

Wax figurines are replacing the royal family, but they're often replaced which is why you never see them melting (Madame Tussaud is in on this obviously)

I can't wait to see what else he comes up with. The mental image of the bees being sheared like sheep absolutely killed me. Also Big Ben growing like a tree XD

[venezashade]

The Blackstone.

FINALLY THE DAY HAS COME

My art work for Toinette’s incredible fanfic is finally out! It’s a tease for what you will all see later today, so go subscribe to https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toinette93 for CoC and Malevolent fanfic bangers! I’m going to link this specific fanfic as soon as it will come out :3 It’s not your ordinary Malevolent content, there is so much Harlan’s CoC campaigns lore……….

I’m so glad I participated for this year @malevolentbigbang ! And I could do an art inspired by my friend’s fanfic! Not gonna lie, I was really worried how it will turn out and if I could make it in time, but I did it! Go check other authors and artists’ work for Malevolent Big Bang 2024! THERE IS SO MUCH TO DISCOVER!!!

Also check @sleepinbird, something’s coming there too for this fic today tehehehehehhehehhehehehhehe

[ID: Coloured art piece with chiaroscuro and details with the characters: Neitsh, Erwin, Entie, Petra, Jan, John and Arthur trapped in The Blackstone with a visible kind of psychedelic lines around them. There are bloody Kayne’s hands that float around them and there is blood all around the line of the stone. The background is in shades of dark purple and dark red, almost black with green floaty floral additions. In all the places of the art piece, the bright colours look like they are glowing in the dark, there is a very strong contrast between the dark shades and light elements. /END ID]

[awindinthelantern]

Incomplete list of movies and TV shows that would make great inspiration/settings for RPG campaigns, or one-shots (dungeons crawls), for DnD, CoC, or others:

The Mummy (1999)

The Fall (2006)

The Cell (2000)

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) / Poseidon (2006)

Baccano! (2007)

GoSICK (2011)

Ghost Ship (2002)

Fool's Gold (2008)

Blade Runner (1982) / Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Natsume's Book of Friends (2008-2017)

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Get Smart (2008)

Feel free to reblog with your own additions

[sellsmallthings]

transperant green venom dice

[lapisslunaris]

Hey, if you followed me on Twitter please tag yourself so we can be best friends forever here too.

I just realized I can do this instead of squinting at each of my followers profiles, trying to find clues among all the penis jokes and 40 year old baby girl men.

I forgot I can also post things instead of looking at my little pony fanart

[bonesmt]

I am finally bothering to post something on this acc I made yonks ago and forgot about 👀

Anyways here’s an obligatory dump of my CoC npc Paul Arkwright! He is my babygirl and he’s a disabled investigative journalist and is a dad to his orphaned niece, Fleur! <3

[lordofthesoups]

I have never met someone who is a dungeon master for dnd who hasn’t become one out of spite, are there dungeon masters who do not form from spite or is it the main ingredient of being a dm?

[moginrambles]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Original Work, Call of Cthulhu (Roleplaying Game), Dick Hardy's Investigators Office Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Morgan O'Connell, Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu Mythos) Additional Tags: Post "The Day Off", Canon Divergent Summary:

Furious upon connecting his childhood friend's murder to one of the Faceless One's disciples, Morgan O'Connell demands to be left alone. However the elder god has an uncanny way of redirecting the conversation.

The Faceless One took his silence as a chance to speak, “You have a tendency to overthink things, Morgan O’Connell.”

Morgan couldn’t fault him there. He was angry, he was panicking, and he was thinking himself in circles without getting anything done.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Why I Dislike PbtA Games, and How Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Their Opposite

@tender-curiosities

It is no secret that I hate PbtA games.

Though due to a recent misunderstanding regarding another post, I’m going to preface this post by saying that this is going to be a very opinionated post and

I do not seriously think that PbtA games are inherently bad, though I may sometimes joke about this.

While I do often question the taste of people who make and play PbtA hacks, I do not think poorly of their moral character.

While I am going to call for PbtA to be used less as a base for games in the future, I’m not saying that the whole system and all games based on it should be destructified. It’s good for what it’s good for, but unless you’re doing that, I really think you should use something else.

Now that that is out of the way, here’s what I have to say about it.

My first experiences with PbtA games were pretty rough. Monster of the Week was not the first, but it was one of the first ‘indie’ TTRPGs I played after having previously played mostly only D&D3.5e and 5e. I really appreciated that the use of 2D6 over a D20 meant that the dice results would be more predictable, and I really liked the various “classes” I was seeing. (At this time, I didn’t really understand that they weren’t really “classes” at all, though I think I can be forgiven for this because many people, even people who like PbtA games, still talk like “classes” and “playbooks” are interchangeable.)

I was very enthusiastic to play, until it came time to start actually “making” a character, and found that I couldn’t “make” a character. I wanted to make a nuanced, three-dimensional PC who was simultaneously stereotype-affirming and stereotype-defying, with a unique backstory and dynamic with the other characters—but when I went to actually fill out the character sheet for basically any “class”, I found that most of the backstory and most of the personality for my character was being set for me by the playbook. It felt like the only thing about the character I really had a say in was their name, and that two PCs of the same playbook would actually turn out to be almost identical characters. At the time, I thought this was very restrictive and very bad design.

Later, now that I understand the design intent behind it, I still think of it as very restrictive, but I think of it as very bad design for me, not inherently bad.

When I play a TTRPG, I want more freedom in who my PC is. That doesn’t mean I want less rules, in fact having more rules can often increase freedom, but that’s a different post. I want to create original, unique characters, that I won’t see anywhere else. If it’s a class-based system, I want that class to barely touch the details of my character’s backstory or personality, so that I can come up with something original and engaging for why and how this “Fighter” fights. This means that two level-1 Fighters, despite having almost the same mechanical abilities, will potentially be very different people.

PbtA games don’t let you do that. In a lot of PbtA games, you’re not playing your own original character, you’re playing someone else’s character, that every other player that has picked up the same playbook before you has played. It’s more like “character select” than “character creation.” I think I could liken it to playing Mass Effect or The Witcher. Every player may pick a few different dialogue choices in those games that change the story, but we’re still all playing Shepherd or Geralt. No one is going to experience a new never-before-seen story in Mass Effect or The Witcher, which is very much a factor of them being video games and not TTRPGs, and therefore limited to the amount of code, writing, and voice-acting that can go into them.

This anonymous asker who sent a message to @thydungeongal seems to feel pretty similarly to me about PbtA games, and @thydungeongal's response is a very good response about how people find this appealing.

I have more respect for PbtA now than I did, but I still don't like it because to me it seems to play so much against what I consider to be the strengths of TTRPGs as a medium, much like how video games like The Last of Us and David Cage games play against the strengths of the medium of video games, and I will never like it. But other people clearly do, so to each their own.

Then another reason I don’t like it is because I think it’s oversaturating the TTRPG space. I’ve referred to PbtA before as “indie D&D5e”, and i do think that’s a reasonable comparison, because in much the same way that you always hear “D&D5e is a system that can do everything”, I think a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the PbtA system is a system that can do anything. It’s kinda the système du jour for indie TTRPGs right now, and many iterations of it make it clear that many designers do not consider how PbtA differs from more traditional TTRPGs, and how it is specialized for different types of TTRPG gameplay. Just like how I feel PbtA isn’t playing to certain important strengths of TTRPGs, I think that many—maybe even most—PbtA hacks don’t play to the strengths of PbtA. But this isn’t really PbtA’s fault, that comes down to any individual indie TTRPG developer on a case-by-case basis. And the cure for that is something I’m always saying: If you are going to be a writer, you have got to read lots of books. If you are going to be a director, you have got to watch lots of movies. If you are going to be a video game developer, you have got to play lots of video games. And if you are going to be a TTRPG designer, you have got to read and play lots of TTRPGs. That and you have to understand that TTRPGs are specialized. Even "agnostic" systems like PbtA are somewhat specialized, and therefore might really not be a great fit for the game you’re trying to make.

That and, to get more subjective again, there’s like an ocean of them, and I don’t even like the ones that are actually good.

Now that I’ve talked about how I don’t like PbtA games, I’m gonna talk about a game I do like: Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Obviously, I like it because I’m the lead writer for it, but I would also like it even if I wasn’t the lead writer for it, because it’s just my kinda game. Eureka is the opposite of a PbtA game. I wrote it to play to what I feel are the strengths of the TTRPG medium.

Eureka’s character creation uses personality traits as a mechanical element of the character, but it does so in a deliberately freeform way. You build your character’s personality out of a list of traits, so who your character is is very much linked to what your character can do, but we aren’t just handing you a pre-made character.

Eureka is designed to incentivize organic decision-making by the PCs, most often by the mechanics of the game mirroring the world they live in. Every mechanic aims to create situations wherein “what will the PC do next?” is a question whose answer can be predicted - it doesn’t need to be ordained by a playbook.

One of my favorite examples of this is, rather than a “Fear Check” forcing the PC to run away if they fail, or “Run Away from Danger” being a “Move” on their character sheet, Eureka opts for the Composure mechanic. The really short version is that one of the main things that lowers a PC’s Composure is encountering scary stuff, and the lower a PC’s Composure, the more likely they are to fail skill checks, and the more likely they are to fail skill checks, well, the less brave they and their player probably feel about them standing up to this scary monster. So if the PC has low Composure, they are more likely to choose to run away. The lower their Composure, the better idea that will seem.

This system really really shines when it comes to monster PCs in Eureka. Most monsters benefit a lot more from having high Composure, but have fewer ways to restore Composure than mundane PCs. Their main way to restore their Composure is by eating people. The rulebook never says “your monster PC has to eat people”, but more likely than not, they’re going to be organically steered towards that by the game and world itself. Sure, they could decide to be “one of the good ones”, and just never eat people, just like you reading this could decide to stop eating food. You technically could, but when your body starts to fail, how long would you? (This is a big part of the themes of Eureka and what it has to say about crime, disability, mental illness, and evil. People don’t just arbitrarily do bad things, it is often their circumstances that leads them down that path until they see little choice for themselves in that matter, and “harmful” people are still just as deserving of life as people who “aren’t harmful”, but that really deserves its own post.)

It has been said that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually arrives at much the same end as the PbtA game Monsterhearts, and I actually don’t disagree, but it gets there from an entirely different starting point and direction. The monster PCs in Eureka are very likely to eat people and cause drama, but it won’t be because they have “Eat People and Cause Drama” as a “Move” on their character sheet.

Monsters in Eureka have a lot of abilities, which they can use to solve (and create) problems as the emergent story emerges organically.

(Oh and Eureka is about adult investigators investigating mysteries, and sometimes those investigators are monsters, not about monster kids in high school, to be clear. The same “end” that Eureka and Monsterhearts reach is that of the monsters being prone to cause problems and drama due to the fact that they are monsters, though this isn’t the sole point of Eureka, just one element of it.)

You can pick up the free shareware version of this game from the download link on our website, or the full version for $5 from our Patreon.

And don’t forget, Eureka is fundraising on Kickstarter starting on April 10th, 2024! We need your support there most of all, to make sure we hit our goals and can afford to make the best version of Eureka we can make!

Interested in branching out but can’t get your group to play anything but D&D5e? Join us at the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, where we nominate, vote on, and play indie TTRPGs, all organized by our team with no strict schedule requirement! Here's the invite link! See you there!

We also have merchandise.

[hazzkunho]

🔶 The Bloody Christmas Incident 🔶 Art i've made as a gift for my first players. I've been DMing a Horror RPG using the Call of Cthulhu 7e system for a long while, and I'm very grateful for my players that are with me this entire journey. I have DMed a long campaing and a lot of oneshots, currently i'm DMing my second big campaign. This art depicts the group from the 1st campaign, there's now only one survivor.

[krinsbez]

Random RPG Thought

So, I finally got around to resuming reading Horror On The Orient Express, rather than reading the same two pages over and over because i keep feeling a need to go and watch that really cool video made for the 90th Anniversary of Murder On The Orient Express again, and then get sucked into something else, as I have the last dozen attempts. Am on page 40 of the 79 page Campaign Book, AKA book 1.

(I am absolutely not reading this whole thing. It's supposedly 1000 pages worth of stuff, and it's taken me four months to get this far)

Sorry, that wasn't the point. Currently reading the section on Air Travel. It's really interesting and has lots of cool info, but I don't understand why it exists. The "practicalities for the Keeper" section says that it's perfectly reasonable for the players to ask "can we fly?", but...I don't think it is? Granted, I don't actually play, but I cannot comprehend the mindset that agrees to play a campaign called "Horror On the Orient Express" and decides they want to travel by airplane instead of, y'know...going on the Orient Express?

Am I being a crank here?

Anyways, I'm going to watch that video again. It's sooo cool.