Let me try!
(The adventure will be set mostly in the Northern Caves, but will feature some elements of other stories of the Mythos. If there is some Lovecraftian element that should be avoided, just tell me what that is and I can probably work something around it.)
This will be a game that will progress in turns, where you will roll dice and play out scenes from the Mythos. It will be GMed using the Cthulhu game book (PDF). I will not make a lot of mistakes or get stuck on something, unless I want to; you will tell me if I make one of these mistakes.
Roles
- The GM will select the game scenario and run it
- The Narrator (usually me) will act as the voice of the story, the character who narrates events
- The Storyteller (usually a player) will role-play events
- The Narrator and Storyteller are not necessarily tied together in this role – I’ll run the Narrator and you can play as the Narrator and Storyteller or vice versa
- The Scribe is not strictly necessary, but can be useful, since I won’t be doing much GMing. I will just have the Narrator (usually me) track the scene that you play, and do the necessary math
- The Player are the players who are the characters.
Setup
I’ve chosen a fairly standard adventure for this game. It is a “monstrous terror” one, a game that starts with an encounter that’s more about how scary the adventure is than what happened. (This also ensures that there is no “one player is the protagonist” problem and that everybody sees how scary the adventure is, as most of these are pretty standard monster encounters. If this is your first time playing this sort of game, there is a lot of prep work and a few surprises that I will have to describe and talk about with everyone.)
“The Ship”
You have to choose which of the many monsters the party encounters for this game.
The Crew
A lot of monsters have crew – a ship’s crew, or whatever they’ve got. I think that some monsters are crew, some crew is the ship, some monsters are crew on the crew’s ship, etc. The monsters do not know if their ships are crew, if their ships are the monsters, what’s going on, etc. They just fight.
Players
I’ll let you choose how many people there are in your party (from 1 to 8). Players can be of any gender, but should be human or in some way vaguely humanoid (though not necessarily humanlike).
There may be additional humanoids (monsters, crew, whatever) who are non-humanoids but vaguely similar in some ways (maybe because they also have crew, or because of some other shared trait of the crew, or whatever.)
Monsters
You can create any monster. I suggest giving each monster one or more traits that make them unique (e.g. some monsters are big or small, some are slow or fast, some have wings or something else that’s weird, etc.). This is just about making sure that they are distinct from one another.
Some monsters may only want to hurt humans and they may attack humans whenever they see one. You cannot have this monster in your party – it should be one of the crew monsters, which the monsters will ignore if the player chooses to act like the monster. But in many of these adventures, humans can be attacked by other monsters, too.
The monster type is a random selection from these types:
- Mummy: a mummy from ancient Egypt or some other time and place
- Ghoul: some kind of fleshy animated corpse
- Shrieking Spawn: a human-like zombie, perhaps a person who fell victim to a shambling mound
- Vargr: a mollusc-like creature (a sort of alien slug) that has found a human-like shell in which to hide
- Banshee: a disembodied human or spirit
- Giant Rat: a normal rat or mouse-like creature that happens to be larger than others of its kind
- Mammoth: a big elephant-like thing (a mammoloph)
- Behemoth: a big herbivore monster that is vaguely like a elephant, usually slow and clumsy and dumb
- Wyrm: a dragon or other reptile (usually a dracula)
- Gargoyle: a kind of humanoid creature that used to have a human upper body but is now stuck to a giant stone face (for example, it looks out a human-sized window) and has no idea that it is a gargoyle
- Mantis: a human-like monster that may or may not be slow. Usually they’re about human size, but sometimes they’re huge, the way giants sometimes are.
- Giant Crab: a creature that is made of a human-sized shell, sometimes like a mollusc or snail shell, sometimes some other kind of shell, with a humanoid-like head and body. It may have wings or something else that suggests it has a human-like shell, or it may have the head, the shell, or a combination of both.
- Ogre: a human-like monster who is big
- Troll: a human-like creature who is tiny
- Anomalocaris: a human-like monster that is tiny (or maybe human-sized but huge) and made of shell and flesh. Usually it has a pair of “human” fins
- Behemoth: a slow or stupid humanoid giant beast who may be slow, dumb, or slow-but-smart. It may have giant arms and a giant head or a human-like body.
- Shrieking Spawn: a kind of living human-like spirit that is now trapped in some kind of stone. It may be very slow or it may be an actual person that is big.
- Anomalocaris: a tiny human-like monster that may be a crab or some sort of other human-like creature made of flesh and a human-sized head, that has evolved from a crab-like shell by some process (probably some combination of random and shambling) and is a lot smaller than a normal crab. (This may be another human-sized monster, or it may be human-shaped and the size of a normal-sized human.)
- I’ve chosen some monsters for this game. You can pick any monster that appears in the scene you