My original D&D campaign is now in its fourth year, though scheduling conflicts, among other things, have made it far less of a weekly thing.
I do play in a (more regular) weekly D&D campaign, as well as weekly Adventurer's League games (often run by the friend who runs that campaign.)
I created a group in order to run one-shot games, the idea being that I could set a date and then build the adventure around whoever was able to come, of which I've run two (actually the same adventure with different players) but I do have such grand ambitions.
So, right now: my main campaign is an ongoing epic, with characters gradually uncovering dangers that will, over time, relate more and more to their own backstories.
I have two major D&D campaign concepts that I want to run.
One is set within the same world (my homebrew world of Sarkon) and would be set after the events of the first campaign. In fact, there's a particular move that I want the players to make that will set up the events of that campaign. While the current one is very Cosmic-Horror themed, the next would, ideally, be more of a Lord of the Rings-style epic war campaign in which the... um, spoilers if you're in my D&D group... Angel of Death is released from his 60,000 year imprisonment and raises and army of the dead to kill everyone (he'd probably have reskinned stats for Orcus, changing his creature type from Demon to either Celestial or Undead and alignment from Chaotic Evil to Lawful Evil - maybe futzing with a few under-the-hood things as well.)
The other campaign would be a Ravnica campaign. While I did do a one-shot (which has a second chapter if we ever want to make it a two-shot) for level 18 characters, I'd really like to also run a game starting at low levels (probably 2 or 3) and have the players work their way up. My concept here would borrow a lot from Magic lore, perhaps bending a few rules. Basically, it would start with Squee, the immortal goblin, finding himself on Ravnica and the guilds fighting over control of him. We'd have some guild-based villains to reckon with but then probably have the Phyrexians as the big bads, because I am old-school.
Then, on top of that, I'd like to run a Call of Cthulhu game - right now with the Starter Set I think it's really geared around running the pre-fab adventures, but if we decide we like it I'll probably get the actual books and try to build a game set within my own Massachusetts hometown, because even if it was a super-safe suburb, when you're a little kid you populate the spaces you inhabit with all manner of terrifying monsters. I'd like to share them!
Oh, and back to D&D!
My longterm ambition is to one day do a Chrono Trigger-style time-travel campaign. My homebrew world has a lot of different eras that we could use, and even though that would probably be incredibly freaking difficult to pull off, I fucking want to.
Oh, and also I kind of want to homebrew all the WoW races (and maybe classes...?) for D&D 5e and run a campaign set in Azeroth (though that would probably be more of a one-shot deal.)
The problem, however, is that getting a group of adults in their 20s and 30s to come together regularly to play D&D, especially when most of them work in the performing arts and have wildly irregular schedules, is a pain. in. the. ass. But that's my friends!
If I manage to check each of these off my list at some point, I'll be very happy.
Showing posts with label Call of Cthulhu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Call of Cthulhu. Show all posts
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Friday, August 2, 2019
Call of Cthulhu
I've chosen a TTRPG to branch out into. And while I'm sure it would be interesting to see heroic fantasy from a Pathfinder perspective (one of my friends says she likes it better than 5E, and she and I are both eager DMs, running ongoing campaigns with one another in them, so maybe I can convince her to run a Pathfinder one-shot or something) I've always been intrigued by Call of Cthulhu.
I think Cosmic Horror was one of those things influencing me long before I knew it for what it was. Twin Peaks, for example, was something I didn't actually watch when it was on the air (I was almost 4 when it premiered) but its effect on 90s pop culture was definitely strong. And Stephen King, whose horror is more grounded than Lovecraft's but still definitely plays with ideas of otherworldly, incomprehensible threats, got his hooks into me my senior year of high school with the Dark Tower series.
My fiction errs on the side of humanist optimism (Star Trek was also a big influence on me) but I definitely go to the well of Cosmic Horror for antagonistic forces.
So running a game based on Lovecraft sounds pretty cool. I have a lot of Cosmic Horror elements in my homebrew D&D setting, but player characters in that game are naturally quite powerful (though I haven't hit them with Star Spawn yet. Thankfully the Paladin just got high enough level to cast Revivify, so I might feel less guilty about taking the gloves off now!)
Here's the other element:
I grew up in New England.
So, the Cosmic Horror genre clearly extends beyond Lovecraft himself, and old Howard Philip has a problematic legacy. While he conceived of some of the most iconic elements of the genre - there's a reason we often call it "Lovecraftian Horror" - the man was also considered racist even for the 1920s.
And indeed, it colors some of the ideas he was working with in his fiction. Most basically, his assumption that the "other" and "alien" was inherently monstrous applied not only to be-tentacled creatures from beyond the stars, but also to, you know, people who didn't look like him. This manifests in a pervasive theme in a lot of his writing that people of other cultures are seen as evil, sometimes implying that they are corrupted with taint from these alien beings.
The notion that the same kind of existential, "pulling the rug from under you" horror from witnessing these cosmic entities at work could also come from a racist merely contemplating, say, having nonwhite ancestry, deflates a lot of the fun to be had by walking up to that scariness in a safe, fictional manner.
So from the beginning, there's a certain question of how we can explore the quite real and potent fears of humanity's tininess in a universe we only barely understand without employing outdated and hateful tropes. I think that we can, but it does take mindfulness.
Bearing that in mind, the fact that Lovecraft was a New Englander means that the areas he was talking about are, actually, very familiar territory to me. I grew up in a suburb of Boston, and so Eastern Mass. is home to me.
Likewise, I was a scared little boy growing up. I didn't have a traumatic childhood or anything - far from it - but I had an active imagination and I grew up in a creaky old Victorian house.
In my childhood, I populated most of the rooms of that house, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, with all manner of monsters. I knew which walls would stretch out with ghastly figures to grab you, why you should never use the bathroom with the shower curtain drawn, and that one tree you had to be sure to look at only an even number of times. (Incidentally, Stephen King's novella "N" really worked for me.)
Given that Lovecraft's Arkham is meant to be the fictional equivalent of Salem (infamous of course for its witch trials, though it was also a major port that briefly rivaled Boston) it occurred to me:
If you're going to run a Call of Cthulhu game, why make up a fictional setting? Why not use the city you know better than any other?
Therefore, I'm intending to run a Call of Cthulhu game set in my own hometown, probably using my own childhood home as a major location for it.
Bonus points: one of my best friends out here in LA is someone I've known since high school, and he actually went to the same elementary school (he's a year older, which is why I didn't know him until later.) I went so far as to actually look up an old 1920s zoning map of our hometown and found that, where his childhood home is, there was undeveloped land with a little stream running through it.
Given that he'll almost certainly be playing in the game, I'm for sure going to have some monstrous thing precisely where his house would later be built.
I am, of course, not yet totally familiar with the rules of the game or how to build adventures as the Keeper of Arcane Lore (the game's equivalent of DM) but I really hope I can pull this off.
I think Cosmic Horror was one of those things influencing me long before I knew it for what it was. Twin Peaks, for example, was something I didn't actually watch when it was on the air (I was almost 4 when it premiered) but its effect on 90s pop culture was definitely strong. And Stephen King, whose horror is more grounded than Lovecraft's but still definitely plays with ideas of otherworldly, incomprehensible threats, got his hooks into me my senior year of high school with the Dark Tower series.
My fiction errs on the side of humanist optimism (Star Trek was also a big influence on me) but I definitely go to the well of Cosmic Horror for antagonistic forces.
So running a game based on Lovecraft sounds pretty cool. I have a lot of Cosmic Horror elements in my homebrew D&D setting, but player characters in that game are naturally quite powerful (though I haven't hit them with Star Spawn yet. Thankfully the Paladin just got high enough level to cast Revivify, so I might feel less guilty about taking the gloves off now!)
Here's the other element:
I grew up in New England.
So, the Cosmic Horror genre clearly extends beyond Lovecraft himself, and old Howard Philip has a problematic legacy. While he conceived of some of the most iconic elements of the genre - there's a reason we often call it "Lovecraftian Horror" - the man was also considered racist even for the 1920s.
And indeed, it colors some of the ideas he was working with in his fiction. Most basically, his assumption that the "other" and "alien" was inherently monstrous applied not only to be-tentacled creatures from beyond the stars, but also to, you know, people who didn't look like him. This manifests in a pervasive theme in a lot of his writing that people of other cultures are seen as evil, sometimes implying that they are corrupted with taint from these alien beings.
The notion that the same kind of existential, "pulling the rug from under you" horror from witnessing these cosmic entities at work could also come from a racist merely contemplating, say, having nonwhite ancestry, deflates a lot of the fun to be had by walking up to that scariness in a safe, fictional manner.
So from the beginning, there's a certain question of how we can explore the quite real and potent fears of humanity's tininess in a universe we only barely understand without employing outdated and hateful tropes. I think that we can, but it does take mindfulness.
Bearing that in mind, the fact that Lovecraft was a New Englander means that the areas he was talking about are, actually, very familiar territory to me. I grew up in a suburb of Boston, and so Eastern Mass. is home to me.
Likewise, I was a scared little boy growing up. I didn't have a traumatic childhood or anything - far from it - but I had an active imagination and I grew up in a creaky old Victorian house.
In my childhood, I populated most of the rooms of that house, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, with all manner of monsters. I knew which walls would stretch out with ghastly figures to grab you, why you should never use the bathroom with the shower curtain drawn, and that one tree you had to be sure to look at only an even number of times. (Incidentally, Stephen King's novella "N" really worked for me.)
Given that Lovecraft's Arkham is meant to be the fictional equivalent of Salem (infamous of course for its witch trials, though it was also a major port that briefly rivaled Boston) it occurred to me:
If you're going to run a Call of Cthulhu game, why make up a fictional setting? Why not use the city you know better than any other?
Therefore, I'm intending to run a Call of Cthulhu game set in my own hometown, probably using my own childhood home as a major location for it.
Bonus points: one of my best friends out here in LA is someone I've known since high school, and he actually went to the same elementary school (he's a year older, which is why I didn't know him until later.) I went so far as to actually look up an old 1920s zoning map of our hometown and found that, where his childhood home is, there was undeveloped land with a little stream running through it.
Given that he'll almost certainly be playing in the game, I'm for sure going to have some monstrous thing precisely where his house would later be built.
I am, of course, not yet totally familiar with the rules of the game or how to build adventures as the Keeper of Arcane Lore (the game's equivalent of DM) but I really hope I can pull this off.
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