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[Loud Whispers]

I could see a bandit king or similar rallying a bunch of peasants to their cause, not a nice person by any means, but not necessarily any worse than anyone else in the running.

YELLOW TURBAN REBELLION IS IN FULL SWING BABY

[Kagus]

Okay. Dumbass build time incoming.

Since the new campaign I'm eventually going to get roped into starts at level 8, I've had to create a character for that level and as such have discovered that level 8 is a particularly curious beast of a level in the variety of builds it can support.

And so it is that I mashed together another such dumbass build this evening.


Scourge Aasimar Storm Barbarian 3/Warlock 5 (There are a couple picks for this, which I'll get into later). We take the Desert path for barb, and pick up Cloak of Flies as a level 5 invocation.

Cloak of Flies can technically be up indefinitely (provided we don't get knocked out), so it doesn't eat into action economy so long as you're okay with buzzing more than your local swarm ranger all the time. Entering into a fight, we can use our racial action and the rage bonus action on the first turn, at which point we're in full Radioactive Randy mode.

Everyone within 10' of you will take 2 fire, 4 radiant damage every turn (you also take the 4 radiant, but as an Aasimar you're resistant to radiant damage sooo...), and everyone within 5' will take an additional CHAmod poison. No saves for any of this, it just happens throughout the course of a round (start of enemy turn for CoF, end of your turn for Scourge, and bonus action on your turn for barb burn).

Now, you basically can't stand anywhere close to the rest of the party thanks to your awful technicolor radiation. Also a very significant portion of your damage comes from a once-per-long-rest ability. Additionally, there are some curious hangups with this build if we want to try being relevant outside of our nuke aura, which I'll go into here with talking about patron options:

Fiendlock seems like the obvious choice, thanks to the bonus tempHP whenever reducing something else to 0. This is especially entertaining seeing as CoF gets calculated at the start of an enemy's turn, and can potentially top us off multiple times in a round outside of our turn. We also get a couple chances on our turn, once with the fire aura from our bonus action (before we take self-inflicted damage), and once from the radiant aura as our turn ends (most likely after we take self-inflicted damage), giving us several opportunities to mitigate the damage we're eating thanks to being in the thick of the frontline while also sunburning ourselves.

For Fiendlock, we'd obviously want to pump CHA as much as possible for both CoF and tempHP, and the additional synergy between those two. ...however, by doing so we leave ourselves without any particularly good ways of dealing normal attacks, except by potentially taking Pact of the Tome and going for shillelagh. But that'd require a rageless round of buffing for a fight, which we may or may not be keen on spending. Furthermore, it locks us out of the synergies found in...

Hexlock, which is also an obvious choice, but it's an obvious choice for everything so that doesn't make it special here. This lets us use CHA for weapon attacks too, and taking Pact of the Blade means we can open up two attacks per action via Thirsting Blade, as well as Eldritch Smite which allows us to still use our spell slots even when we're raging (since it's technically not a spell). The issue here, however, is that if we're following leveling rules we technically can't have Thirsting Blade, Eldritch Smite and Cloak of Flies all at once at Warlock 5, since they're all level 5 invocations. One of them has to go. And the Hexblade's curse also uses a bonus action, but this one can be used while raging so it's less of a biggie. Not a huge amount of synergy there, but it's at least usable. Have to forego your fire damage for a round though.

If you do go the Pact of the Blade route, a couple more levels in Barbarian will get you extra attack for free, letting you replace Thirsting Blade with something else.


Now, is being able to deal about 10 damage to everything within 5' particularly overpowered? ...well, no. I just wanted to make a character stacking as many damaging auras as I could, because I thought it was funny.

[Cthulhu]

Has anybody checked out Impossible Landscapes for nu-Delta Green?  It's pretty damn good, not as expansive and open as Masks of Nyarlathotep but still big and weird and scary, and finally finally finally we have a good and comprehensive look at King in Yellow.  All through history he's either been super vague or super terrible, like whatever that blobby "hastur" shit was in Call of Cthulhu.

Spoiler: Impossible Landscapes Big Spoilers (click to show/hide)

Over the course of the campaign the players, investigating a missing woman a la Twin Peaks, eventually go onto the seventh floor of the six-floor hotel she lived in and find themselves in an infinite and impossible jumble of Edwardian-era hotel shit.  At first it's a process of slipping back and forth between the real world and the backrooms, and over the course of the campaign it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two.  They investigate a mental hospital and find themselves in a nightmare version of the hospital where the doctors treat them as patients and what are you gonna do, tell the shrink at the asylum "no you don't understand, I'm a secret government agent?" They're just gonna give you valium and put you back in your room. The only way out is through, diving deeper and deeper into the insanity in the hopes of a permanent escape, because at some point in the story the "real world" you thought you lived in ceased to exist or proved itself a fiction, and everything has become Carcosa.  The "horrible truth" that's mandatory for Lovecraft shit is the illusory nature of reality.  The instant you start thinking about the King in Yellow reality starts degrading and Carcosa slips in through the holes, until eventually there's only Carcosa.  But Carcosa doesn't go away if you think really hard about the "real world," so shouldn't the "reality" qualifier be the other way around?  Carcosa isn't a distorted version of the real world, the real world is a thin and fragile imitation of Carcosa.

It's also got lots of advice for running a horror campaign, good stuff for keeping things scary without turning it into just nonsense, maintaining a level of mundanity by roleplaying the normal things people have to do when they're not being secret agents, and how to make those sequences feel increasingly thin and hollow as characters' sanity goes down.  Lots of random weird events which are fun and nicely ambiguous as to whether they're sinister or not.

Spoiler: My favorite example, it's like a triple reverse bait and switch red herring (click to show/hide)

The investigators get in on the missing woman because there was a symbol on the wall in her room associated with the occult.  Savvy players say "oh it's the yellow sign lol" but when they get there it's the sigil of Purson, a goetic demon.  Tension deflated.  Then if they touch the sigil a trumpet blast fills the room, tension back up.  Turns out it's just a taxi driver laying on his horn outside as a hobo with a giant boa constrictor walks slowly across the road.  Tension deflated.  Oh wait, Purson is the one that blasts on the trumpet!  What! 

That kind of stuff is some of the best stuff in the campaign, weird events that seem like one thing but are actually another, and in the end it's hard to tell if it's a real unnatural event or a fake-out or a coincidence or if it's the characters losing their minds.

EDIT:  Read through the whole campaign, not entirely sure about it?  It has a lot of great ideas, but a few railroady areas, which seems like it's sort of intentional?

Spoiler: It's the first postmodern tabletop campaign (click to show/hide)

It's basically, though subtle about it, a campaign about being characters in an RPG campaign.  At first you're in the real world, you discover that there's a weird, nonsensical imitation underneath the real world, then once your eyes are open you start to realize everything around you is fake.  The world simplifies and collapses around the path you're meant to follow.  Delta Green activates the STATIC protocol (the king in yellow is contagious, kill anyone who knows about it and anyone they told) and by the end of the third adventure you're running for your life from a DG hit squad that never stops coming, bursting out of doors and around corners in literally infinite numbers.  You realize the buildings around you are plywood stage props, the people just costumed marionettes on strings, the sky's just painted on, and the only way to go is forward, into Carcosa, to the resolution of the campaign, because you're just a character and you exist to entertain invisible higher beings with the drama of your life.

Later on, just to reinforce it, you find a factory in Carcosa that makes stage props and costumes, and all the places you've been, people you've met, are in there, boxed up and ready to be shipped out to the stage that you thought was your life.

It's a neat idea, and mostly it looks like it would work well in a game, but a few parts (such as the aforementioned STATIC chase) start to push against good game design I think.  Or maybe not.  Maybe the old adage is true, and it doesn't matter if you're on rails if the scenery is cool.  I generally don't think so though.

[Digital Hellhound]

That sounds like it has great ideas. Cannibalize it for parts and make room for a less railroady ending, perhaps?

I've been struggling with all the horrors and monsters of CoC feeling a bit... dull and conventional, I guess, so this sounds great. Everything in the bestiary seems to be gross and too terrible to describe, but in the end just big monsters without anything that would give me, at least, existential dread. Except for the guys like Azathoth, but my players roughly know their deal so it doesn't feel as impactful.

Not that you have to play them like that, of course. In the (sole) oneshot I did, there was a box which contained a flame of Cthugha (who gets very, very little description, so I just went wild) that compelled all those who looked at it to give parts of themselves to it.

Someone ended up sacrificing something more abstract and got a part of their background wiped from reality, so that's more up my alley. Mostly it was fun watching my players play hot potato with it while trying to evade other spooks.

I struggle to put to words what I mean, but I guess I feel disappointed by how sparse and mundane-feeling the list of horrors in the core book is. I guess that's on the Mythos authors, but the CoC people could have tried to give more hooks for what make them unique. Maybe I just don't understand the game, though!

[Loud Whispers]

Most Lovecraftian things in Lovecraft aren't very scary. Most of the times characters see a Lovecraftian creature they're curious (scientists inspecting the elder beings in ATMOM, the psychiatrist who speaks to the thing living in Joe Slater Beyond the Wall of Sleep) and there are very few moments where someone goes insane who wasn't already insane, and of those who do get "shook" they mostly all return to normal form - even the guys who saw Cthulhu didn't lose their minds. Off the top of my head only the guy who fucked with Nyalarthotep by calling him a fraud and a charlatan (lol), the guy who got transported to the end of the world, the guy who got Dagon'd and the guy who discovered that worm-wizards walk amongst us were horrified to their core, as opposed to terrified momentarily (e.g. OH FUCK A SHOGGOTH RUN vs I don't want to live anymore to be quite honest). There's also all the dream cycle stuff where the character is arguably not insane, but they have gotten used to things that makes them look insane. Idk where I'm going with this tbh

[Cthulhu]

Started rereading the king in yellow, the original short story collection.  Repairer of Reputations is a great one about an insane person.  It's set in a really weird, sinister version of 1920s America (the book was written in like 1895) where suicide is legal and they're building "Government Lethal Chambers" in every city, Jews have been expelled from the country, there's a reservation for black people, a lot of weird ugly things but as the book goes on the narrator is so clearly insane that even those basic facts about the setting become suspect.  He shows up in the campaign as well, along with the repairer himself, Mr. Wilde.  And if you try to leave the hotel I mentioned, you can end up trapped in the book version of America.

I agree that Lovecraft stuff as written is mostly kind of bad, and insanity is kind of bad.  Insanity works in impossible landscapes because as a player's sanity goes down you can ratchet up the king in yellow shit for them, representing it less as "i'm insane" and more as "i'm seeing things the way they really are."

Which works in mundanity too.  In my eyes, Lovecraft insanity is this.  Or more generally, someone is insane when their worldview makes them unable to function in normal society.  Like, finding out Cthulhu is real doesn't mean you suddenly have schizophrenia, but when your PC kills a bunch of people and burns down a building and tells the police "i had to do it, they were secretly a cult trying to summon cthulhu, which is a giant monster under the ocean that wants to wipe out humanity" what are they gonna call you in the newspapers?  Yeah.

I think DG/CoC need a strong core of mundanity for the weird shit to hit properly.  The new DG builds this into the system with bonds, you have a life outside being a DG agent and part of the game is trying to balance your normal obligations with DG's obligations, and watching everything slowly fall apart under the pressure. 

Spoiler: Impossible Landscapes again (click to show/hide)

IL gives some good advice for this, and especially later on you're carrying Carcosa everywhere you go and realize that running to your family for a taste of sanity puts them in active danger.  You call your wife and you can hear the clatter of marionette joints when they move.  Not to mention Delta Green has very aggressive policies re: the king in yellow and will kill your family if they find out you exposed them to it

But even in the horror itself, I think it should mostly be more mundane hazards to life and limb, with the supernatural as an intrusion on the mundane world, not the norm.  If I did a coc/dg campaign I would probably heavily limit the threats in the world, like the game is specifically about the mi-go, or Cthulhu, etc.  There's too much shit, a campaign starts to feel like scooby doo if you're too varied with it.

[Egan_BW]

That moment when you build up 40 Insight and realize that the city was full of giant mind-boggling monsters clinging to the buildings all along and you just couldn't see them~

[Skynet]

I’m actually planning on running a DG campaign that uses Impossible Landscapes, and may even produce AARs (not just for people to read, but also so that I remember what happened). And yeah, I plan on cannibalizing sections of the campaign. Railroads may be fun to read, but far less fun to play.

As an interesting note, the campaign itself takes place in an alternate timeline that is meant to be a sequel to a non-DG campaign. The players were British politicians in 1986 who managed to prevent World War Three from turning nuclear. As a result, the United States and the Soviet Union are now allied together, creating The Network.

The Network actively researches the occult, while trying to stop “disruptive” research that could threaten their power. They view MJ-12 with suspicion, since they love doing research…but they’re otherwise legal. Delta Green, by contrast, are seen as dangerous terrorists (thanks to MJ-12’s shenanigans).

There is also one added issue. In the 1990s, the Masquerade (the unwritten agreement by the elite to keep people ignorant about the supernatural) broke down due to technological advancement making it impractical to keep secrets. So people now know that the supernatural is real, but are are ignorant of the details. This means you have a society that is prepared to deal with the occult (which means you don’t look insane when you’re talking about a raid)…but then you have a society that might also be more vulnerable to it as well (since familiarity might lead to unnecessary risk-taking) and you still want to cover stuff up (so people don’t realize how bad things are going to get…and you don’t want average citizens to get ideas about weaponizing the Mythos).

This is the timeline document I gave my players, which essentially said most of what I said above. The reason I posted all this though is because:

Spoiler: “Impossible Landscape Spoilers” (click to show/hide)

…since the game takes place in an alternate timeline, I can’t have players travel to different timelines. Like stepping out of a hotel only to travel to 1920’s America with “Government Lethal Chambers”. Traveling to alternate timelines sound cool in a DG game that takes place in OTL. In an alternate timeline though, you have no understanding of what is supposed to be mundane and what is supposed to “weird/scary”, so you’ll probably need to stay in that timeline longer to get yourself aquatinted to it.

[Loud Whispers]

Which works in mundanity too.  In my eyes, Lovecraft insanity is this.  Or more generally, someone is insane when their worldview makes them unable to function in normal society.  Like, finding out Cthulhu is real doesn't mean you suddenly have schizophrenia, but when your PC kills a bunch of people and burns down a building and tells the police "i had to do it, they were secretly a cult trying to summon cthulhu, which is a giant monster under the ocean that wants to wipe out humanity" what are they gonna call you in the newspapers?  Yeah.

Ah yea, that's the way to do it. Helps to isolate player characters too from civil society

[wierd]

This is why i LOVE the idea of a "raised with chronic exposure to mythos beings" character taking SAN damage from normal suburbia, such as a trip to the mall, but being just fine when having a chat with a starfish-headed elder thing about the finer points of bbq.

[Loud Whispers]

This is why i LOVE the idea of a "raised with chronic exposure to mythos beings" character taking SAN damage from normal suburbia, such as a trip to the mall, but being just fine when having a chat with a starfish-headed elder thing about the finer points of bbq.

Reminds me of a dark heresy game where one of our acolytes started acting "crazy" because he was trying to warn us that there was a demon which hunted after everyone which knew it existed, but he couldn't communicate that without also making us aware of the demon which was after him, and he refused to allow us to discover what was going on lest the demon seek us too. "Nothing's after me! Nothing!"

...Whilst refusing to dwell in any building with a door or window.

[Kagus]

So, we have a bit of a loudmouth player in our campaign. He has a tendency to just sort of barge into any ongoing scene and contribute nothing at high volume. Occasionally straight up talking over someone else in order to tell the DM (or the table at large) about some new feature of his own character that he's just realized, sometimes accompanied by a full and unabridged reading of a spell description that he's just discovered.

Already we're off to a great start. Mechanically, his character is a bit borked as well, as he's a full cleric and I don't think has ever had Bless prepared, instead opting to use his spell slots on casting Guiding Bolt with all the accuracy 14 WIS can provide you at level 6. He *has* discovered Spirit Guardians though, so even with his highly questionable tactics he tends to deal a lion's share of the damage in fights with multiple opponents (and then be extraordinarily pleased with himself).


Normally, I don't really have that much of a problem with him. Sure, him interrupting me, trying to butt into my character's scenes, and afterwards thinking that he was the star of the show is one thing... But last night there was a curious little quip out of him that's left me having a bit of a ponder.

In the session where my character joined this campaign, we traveled out into the desert and ended up falling into an underground warren/hive of beasties, with smaller ones coming straight out of holes in the walls and surrounding us. I had put together a "defensive swashbuckler" with a shield, and as this was also my first time playing with this character I didn't really have a great idea of what all I could do with him to contribute to combat. But when the DM announced that another critter was making its way out of one of the holes near me, I asked how large the hole itself was, and whether or not I could plug it by just shoving my shield over the opening. He said yes, and instead of a fully active enemy attacking our rear I just had to make an opposed athletics check. While not necessarily a "defining moment" for my character, it did show to the other players at least that I was capable of some small amount of lateral thinking in order to solve things in an interesting way. And it did end up being kind of an important note in that battle as a whole.


Last night we ventured into a new underground network, and the loudmouth player was commenting on how if he saw little holes in the walls down here too he'd get flashbacks to that time in the desert, and that he was "ready to plug them with his shield again".

He seems to have rewritten the narrative in his head so that he was the one who came up with that idea. I... I dunno man. I figured I must have misheard him, but I checked with a couple of the other players and they got the impression that's what he meant too. It's kinda surreal.

[Loud Whispers]

Major main character syndrome. How experienced are they with ttrpgs? I've had three players like that before, both were edgy chuunis but after talking them through it they grew out of it over time. The third of them however has never grown out of it, becoming calcified in their spotlight huffing ways, but at least we are great friends irl. But a corrective memory? That is something I've never had to deal with in game

[Kagus]

How experienced are they with ttrpgs?

Technically? About 13+ years. One of the other players, an eternal DM who's acting as DnD grandfather for the rest of the group, mentioned that they both started at the same time.

He added that only one of them really learned much of anything during that period.


He's an interesting chap, to be sure. I've been in parties with people who felt that they should be the hero and muscled their way to the front of the line, but in order to do said muscling you kinda have to be aware of the fact that the other people are there. This guy is legitimately oblivious to half the stuff going on around him.

[scriver]

Kagus I don't know whether to laugh or cry