Wednesday, January 30, 2013

If I Had My Druthers Part Two

Following up from last week, another suggestion I had for the new Call of Cthulhu rulebook is a digest-sized, stripped-down cheapo edition that would retail for under $20, something that would look like this:


It's hard to see, but the little icon in the upper-left is a piece of sinister-looking ancient Egyptian statuary. As with the cover, I'd like to use callbacks to less tentactular elements of Cthulhu fiction to ground the book in real-world elements which recur frequently: archaeology and ancient civilisations, ancient texts and libraries, urban and rural decay, and the boundaries of human piecing together of dissociated knowledge.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

If I Had My Druthers Part One

A quick update while I work on so many things... a while ago on Yog-Sothoth.com people were discussing how they'd direct the look of the line, after the generally disliked (at least on Y-S.com) 6th edition rulebook. I'm not sure where it came from—I think it was adopted from the German edition?—but it definitely seemed at odds with the clean, just-the-facts-ma'am look the line had previous to that. I do think that Call of Cthulhu benefits from a more understated look, so in the discussion I mocked up a sample of how I'd approach designing the CoC cover with that in mind.

The idea is to combine rural decay and mystery with a deco or Bauhaus period feel.






(Photo credit: someone on flickr. If I had the original photo somewhere, I could probably figure out whose it is...)

Next week I'll have a sample so-retro-it's-now layout approach, available in the first quarter after When I Run The World.




I would be terribly remiss to end this post without joining the rest of the Call of Cthulhu community in sadness and regret for the passing of Lynn Willis. His great effort shepherding Call of Cthulhu into what it is is a large part of why I'm able to work with the people that I do, and on the projects that I do. Thanks.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

A Handful of Dust [Night's Black Agents]


[ link ]

Here's a redesigned Night's Black Agents sheet put together for a theoretical future continuation/restart/completely new Delta Green campaign I'd like to do sometime in the future.

The basics:

• It's set to DUST mode, so Health is capped at 10 and your starting General Ability points are 55. MOS rules do not apply, and characters only gain access to 8+ abilities marked with the Dust icon—Athletics (Hard to Hit), Hand-to-Hand (Eye of the Tiger), Medic (Medical School of Hard Knocks), Shrink (Talk It Out), and Surveillance (The Wire).

• It's also set to BURN mode, so your Stability is capped at 12, and your Network points are group-size dependant.

Other rules variants that apply:

• The Dunwich Sanction:
Cthulhu Mythos is in and Vampirology is out, so characters have Sanity to lose too. Also added: Fringe Science, Geology, Physics, and Theology. Because this is nominally for a Delta Green campaign, the Bureaucracy General Ability rules from Martini, Straight Up are also in, as is the Pulp-idiom Hypnosis from Trail of Cthulhu.

Special Assets gives us Necrophony (called Medium because I like the old-school Spiritualist sound of it) and Clairvoyance under 'Paranormal General Abilities.'

• And from Rough Magicks, we add the Magic General Ability, too.

Free Hexmap Templates

Hey, with the #hexplore stuff going on I figured I should clean up and post some hexmap templates I've had sitting around for a while: H...