Random Deep One Traits

Here's some random Deep One traits.

1. Misshapen crab-claw instead of a hand.
2. Huge wound removed most of face, leaving only one eye and a drooling hole for a mouth.
3. Writhing catfish-like whiskers or cilia trailing from a fringe around the face.
4. Mottled patches of apparently human skin, including part of the face, but stretched and deformed by the transformation.
5. Thick globs of algae webbing like spiderwebs across protrusions and dripping from the face.
6. Barnacles adhering to the body like buboes.
7. Misshapen teeth like a deep-sea fish, much too large for the face, with sores and wounds where they're injured the mouth.
8. Keratinous or chitinous plates jutting out at odd angles from the body.
9. Vestigial limb jutting out of an irregular protrusion from the shoulders or hips.
10. Mouldy wound where a limb has been ripped off.

The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight

A campaign frame for Trail of Cthulhu based on material from Shadows of Yog-Sothoth

The 1920s are the tail end of the “golden age of fraternalism,” when almost two out of the every five people in the United States belong to a fraternal society of some kind. Into this stew of Masonic and Odd Fellow's lodges, knightly orders, immigrants' benevolent societies, spiritualist circles and fractured churches of interwar Boston comes the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight, a rapidly-growing fraternal society with an esoteric scrim. The Order is gathering a reputation as a place where wealthy nonconformists can discuss philosophy, politics and important matters in a congenial, secluded atmosphere.

The Order meets in a late Victorian mansion on the suburban fringe of Boston. The interior has been converted into lounges, libraries and ceremonial spaces for the Hermetic Order. They meet weekly for a ceremony and dinner; the lodge also hosts talks and readings on occult subjects or formal discussions of esoteric topics.

The Order has a few hundred members; though, like many urban Masonic lodges, attendance outside of mandatory events is a small fraction of that number. Members join the Order for two reasons. Wealthy eccentrics or idiosyncratic thinkers look for like-minded (or at least similarly iconoclastic) fellows to do business with, while the true occultists join for the network of like-minded seekers after cosmic secrets. Order members begin as a Neophyte (who is instructed in the disciplines of Science, and wears a black robe in ceremonies) and progress through the degrees of Initiate (Philosophy, grey robes) and Master (Magic, white robes). Attaining each degree comes after study and participation in Order activities, and invitation to take a higher degree is a measure of the personal interest taken in the member by the leaders of the Order.

The Investigators, as they have progressed through the degrees of the Hermetic Order, have heard hints that there is a secret, inner Order within or beyond the lodge (much like the Second Order of the Golden Dawn stands above the Golden Dawn itself). It is not clear if this inner circle is interested in mundane or magical power—or what powers it already possesses. What is clearly hinted at is that membership in this inner circle depends on one's willingness to help the wealthy members line their pockets, and help the would-be sorcerers line their library shelves. The Order is hungry for secrets; as would-be initiates, the Investigators must feed it.

Missions the Investigators may be assigned (or take upon themselves):
• Research hauntings or other manifestations of supernatural phenomena, both academically and 'in the field.'
• Locate and secure grimoires or other magical texts.
• Infiltrate other secret societies or cults and report back on their beliefs and activities.
• Cleanup and assistance for other Order members.

Setting
The campaign is centered in Boston, where the Order's mother lodge meets. It's in the meeting hall that Investigators hatch their plots.

Initial investigations have Boston and New England (including Lovecraft Country) as their stomping ground, but the Order has daughter lodges in New York and other major cities of the U.S. that can provide (or request) mutual aid from mother lodge members. Wealthy Order members may also bankroll excursions to Europe or South America.

Style
The style of the campaign is occult conspiracy. Though Purist in the ultimately petty strivings of Order interests, the potential for dark deeds done at night and daemonaical manifestations is surely Pulp imagery. The game is also apocalyptic, in both senses of the word: unveiling the powers of the world in motion, and facing the destruction those powers wreak when they arrive.

Mythos
The forces of the mythos are veiled behind human rituals and mythology. Their powers underlie the reality of magic and occultism that Order members explore. Distinguishing what is human misperception and what is actually at work is one of the tasks in front of the Investigators. When any powers or entities appear, it is likely at the behest of spells, talismans or other pseudo-traditional paraphernalia, leading to more confusion as to exactly what is encountered or how to deal with it, what is real and what is chicanery. The mythos qua mythos may not be the foremost threat.

Investigators
Investigators are all members of the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight. Members of the Order have to have Credit Rating 4, or be an Alienist, Antiquarian, Artist, Author, Parapsychologist, Occultist or Charlatan. (See Rules Additions.) Order members with Credit Rating scores less than 4 may choose a wealthier Order member as their patron at character creation. If this is not another player character, briefly describe (in a sentence or two) the NPC patron and what their focus is in regards to the Order's activities. This patron may provide a temporary Credit Rating boost of 1 or 2 points whenever pursuing their patron's goals (or convincingly present themselves as doing so).

Rules Additions
Players may select the Occultist occupation from Bookhounds of London, and the Charlatan occupation from Stunning Eldritch Tales.

The game incorporates the Magic general ability rules from Rough Magicks. Characters may not purchase Magic points at character generation, but accrue Potential points during play. (Looking out for Places of Power is also on the Order's order of business.)

Investigators may, however, take psychic abilities from Night's Black Agents (pp. 196-7) or Fear Itself (pp. 22-8) at character creation. The Keeper is encouraged to abide by Fear Itself p. 23 and restrict psychic abilities to one Investigator per party.

If the Keeper wants a more magic-drenched game, they can also include the magic systems from Ken Writes About Stuff: alchemy (GUMSHOE Zoom: Alchemy), goëtic magic (GUMSHOE Zoom: Goëtia), heka (Tomb-Hounds of Egypt), and heptarchic magic (The School of Night). Voodoo (from GUMSHOE Zoom: Voodoo 1 & 2) may or may not fit, depending on whether the Keeper envisions the Order as Western-occult chauvinists.

Recurring NPCs
The leader of the Hermetic Order is John Scott, who holds the title of Noble Philosopher. A mysterious younger man, who appeared in Boston shortly before the inauguration of the Order, he sufferes from some sort of wasting disease that leaves him pale and rough-skinned. He is rarely seen by Order members outside of ritual events and official Lodge business.

Ephraim Weaver is the owner of Weaver Imports, a growing import firm with connections to Canada, Europe, and South America. Despite his business sense he's a hot-headed man who often gets raises the ire of other prominent Bostonians. The common assumption in the Order is that it's Weaver who keeps the Order's cellars well-stocked with spirits.

Dr. Edward Call, a wheelchair-bound Boston ex-physician, joined the Order after his infirmity prevented him from continuing in his practice. He expresses hopes that his Spiritualist interests may be somehow reconciled with contemporary science.

Pitch
“A Jazz Age Foucault's Pendulum,” or “The Devil Rides Out, only you work for Charles Gray.”

Call of Cthulhu: The Malleus Monstrorum Hybridized, Part Two

Part one here. Only a few entries this time, since I'm slaving away on the Dracula Dossier.

FLYING POLYP: Sometimes people just get these polyps, you know? They just sort of show up out of nowhere. They might be caused by a viral infection running rampant in someone with a compromised immune system, or just one of those funguses we have on us already suddenly proliferating. It's not weird or anything. Except when they whistle.
FOSTERLINGS OF THE OLD ONES: Already covered.
FUNGUS, VILE: Already covered.
GHASTS: One of the several sub-species of hominid created by the Serpent-Men, ghast-human hybrids no doubt occur in both nature and the laboratory, some new large, hairy, sneaky humanoid to to complicate the next season of Finding Bigfoot.
GHOULS: Already covered, in more ways than one.
GLAAKI, SERVANTS OF: Already covered.
GN'ICHT' TYAACHT: A certain thickness to the skin, a kind of barklike stiffness and thin, reedy hairs might single someone out as the child of a woman ravished by a tree spirit, or one whose child gestated within reach of one of their groves.
GNOPH-KEH: Already covered, maybe? This is a place where shape-shifting is a survival strategy, and the gnoph-keh as chimeric hybrid of bear, whale and Rhan-Tegoth might be a common kind of regal form some lost culture's sorcerers to take.
GOATSWOOD GNOMES: See Statue, Animated.
GOF'NN HUPADGH SHUB-NIGGURATH: Already covered.
GREEN ABYSS, SPAWN OF: See Boats of the Glen Carrig
GREEN GOD, CHILDREN OF THE: See The Pale Lady
GUGS: Worse than a hairlip, the jaw seems to have misgrown sideways, and the molars are wholly undeveloped. Muscles seem to be attached to anchor-points on the skull almost randomly. Another growth seems to be a vestigal arm growing backwards out of the elbow. Also, normally, we'd be in a position to perform a DNA test on the child to determine which worker in the coma ward impregnated his mother, but all the results come back as tainted samples. It's quite a mystery.

Call of Cthulhu: The Malleus Monstrorum Hybridized, Part One

Crossposted from a Yog-Sothoth.com forum post.

Human-alien hybrids in Call of Cthulhu... alphabetically.

ABHOTH, SPAWN OF: A human infected with the Abhoth-like degradation of the flesh, rendering it like rubber or tripe. This probably extends to nerves and brain-tissue, creating odd absences of human feeling or cognition.
ADUMBRALI: 'Seeker,' already covered.
AIHAIS: Possibly deriving from the same ultimate root, if mi-go experiments were responsible for the existence of humanoids on Mars. Human-Aihai hybrids might have functional second-limbs in the middle of their torso (or emerging from their second torso, depending on Aihai anatomy) and might be taller than the norm, although their height might be a response to the low gravity on Mars, in which case it depends on which planet they grow up on.
ASKALI: Might require artificial means of hybridization, but if that's done it the Askali single-eye might emerge out of the forehead, or one of the hybrid's human eyes might swell asymmetrically to accomodate it. (If the eyes *aren't* weird, you can't really tell it's an Askali, can you?) Might be related to Lemurians.
ANIMICULI: Already covered.
ATLACH-NACHA, DAUGHTERS OF: Already covered.
BYAKHEE: We don't really know where they come from; maybe they already are human-alien hybrids? They certainly resemble the human pattern more than you would expect a real alien to. Perhaps this is ultimately another mi-go tool built from human biomass, freed en masse by the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign for their own interests, or some alternate form of Unspeakable Possessor originating in the unknown biome of Yhtill.
CHAKOTA: Already covered, but there's some Chakota-hybrid-like (mini-Chakota?) monster in TUO 14/15 (IIRC)
CHAUGNAR FAUGN, BROTHERS OF: Isn't there already a form of Chaugnar-hybrid? Or is that a unique entity?
CHILDREN OF THE WIND: These sound like they might be a form of Ithaquan servitor, not unlike the (false?) wendigo. Maybe this is what happens when they're stuck in a place (Syria) that's cut off from the influence of Ithaqua?
CHTHONIAN: Leto II.
COLD ONES: Might as well be the undying remains of the human cultists of the Pole-Flame.
COLOURS OUT OF SPACE: I think this is covered in one of the Secrets books?
CRAWLING ONES: Already covered.
CRYSTALIZERS OF DREAMS: Shadow people, natch.
CTHULHU, STAR-SPAWN OF: See CTHULHU, THRALLS OF.
CTHULHU, THRALLS OF: Already covered.
DARK ONES: Already covered.
DARK SARGASSUM: See Boats of the Glen Carrig.
DEEP ONES: Already covered.
DESH: Not unlike a ghost, the human-desh is only partially in and partially out of material reality. Parts of their flesh may sublime into Tillinghast-space or rotate through dimensions (it takes a POW roll to do so consciously, as the human-desh is an awkward hypershape). Unfortunately, human-desh are natural conduits for regular desh, and though their deshness makes the process nonfatal, it is debilitatingly painful and distorts the human-material sections of their bodies in the process.
DHOLES: Dhole-like characteristics emerge out of a human after infection by dhole genetic material. If the body adapts to the replacement of carbon by the silicon-like formation dholes are comprised of, they begin to grow thick pads of skin and losing sensation throughout their bodies. While this may seem advantages in the short term, the human-dhole eventually transforms into a thick knot of dhole-skin, immobilized by their own bodies.
DIMENSIONAL SHAMBLERS: As Desh, although the humanoid shape of a Shambler makes me think that there's some human somewhere in there already.
DUST MEN: Seem pretty similar to the Paramentals of Lieber, right?
DWELLERS IN THE DEPTHS: See CTHULHU, THRALL OF.
EIHORT, BROODLINGS OF: Already covered.
ELDER THINGS: An Elder Thing seed that somehow takes root in a human may, by virtue of the extreme antiquity of its biology, displace human organs with their own functioning, and eveventually hijack the genetic expression of new cells, growing elder-thing eyestalks out of human eye sockets and healing cuts with thick, fibrous knots of cactuslike flesh. EDIT: And of course, the Elder Thing seed doesn't trigger any immune-system responses due to admin-user privileges buried deep in the shoggoth-code.
FIRE VAMPIRES: These beings appear to be normal humans, but they have a complex electro-Kirlian field extending outwards. Electronic devices short out near them, and they can use the field to increase temperatures around them to dangerous levels—or suck the electrical energy right out of you.
FISHERS FROM OUTSIDE: Slenderman.

The Wretched of R'lyeh

This is a repost of something I wrote on the yog-sothoth.com forums, because I think some people might be able to make use of it.

Problems you might find just wandering around R'lyeh:

Distortions of Space: One person unwittingly takes a wrong turn in 5-d space. If they take a "corner," it appears to the others he just vanishes, but to him, it looks like the others have gone. (Check out this game level.) If they take a "ramp" or a "slope," on the other hand, then the effects take longer to perceive: the victim has to walk farther than the rest to keep up, they shoot at something they see as nearby but the bullet loses velocity on the invisibly-long distance. Visually, perspective is all weird, like a convex or converse lens. They appear far away despite being close. They might even slide into adjacent dimensions, like Tillinghast's ultraviolet or whatever plane the Mind Parasites live on.

Distortions of Time: Individuals end up with vastly different senses of time passing. One person in the party has to make a CONx3 roll or collapse, exhausted, after what everyone else thought was a short walk down a hallway. People approaching from different angles might see each other as slowed-down processions, or half-real staccato flashes. Ghostly echoes of yourselves walk around corners. Reflective surfaces are a whole second delayed, or even seem to play faster or slower than you based on an unseen rhythm. Human tools corrode and rust as if ancient, while your flesh pulses with unwholesome vitality and oozes an oily sweat as if freshly decanted.

You could even make it a mechanical thing:

Every time a 'direction' is decided on—go left or right, climb over or turn around, stairs up or stairs down—the players must roll SAN. If they fail, they accrue 1d6 points of Lost (as in, Lost in Time and Space). If they critically fail, they gain 2d6 points. If they ever get 5 points of Lost at once, they experience a Minor effect. Once their Lost points equal their POW (or POW divided by 5 in 7th ed) they experience a Major effect.

Minor effects cost 1/1d6 SAN to experience (undeniably weird, but not immediately imperilling), while Major ones should be like 1d3/1d10 (they're weird, and they directly threaten your life.)

Minor effects mean that they and their companions are out of sync, but still sort of present—a mismatch of time passage, a sense of being distant despite closeness, slight dimensional interphase—while Major effects are getting separated unexpectedly, or suddenly being hit with damage from aging years at once, or losing all your stuff to a timewarp, or being afflicted with Deep One taint (see below). Minor effects may be good or bad depending on context—if you are out of phase with the Deep One attacking you, you get an armour bonus vs the attack, but the reverse also applies, or your increased rate of time flow means you can look ahead and warn your fellows about something, but you get hit with events like a rockfall before everyone else (so your Spot Hidden better be good)—but Major ones separate you from the party or have a chance of making you dead, incapacitated, or even a monster the PCs now have to deal with.

Once you experience a Major effect, your Lost points reset to 0. The Keeper may also provide things that reduce Lost points, like a landmark that resyncs everyone and resets Lost to 0 for the whole party (something like the monolith in "The Rise of R'lyeh" or the crypt of Cthulhu itself, which is the lynchpin of R'lyeh) or an impale on current SAN when rolling removing 1d6 Lost points.

Something else to consider:

Cthulhu and his ilk are described as "seeping" down from the stars. That might just be an extra-creepy verb to use, but what if it is meant literally? Merely being on or near R'lyeh—or any of the star-spawn—may infect you with their hideous plasticity, like a virus injected into you via extradimensional space. People who spend too long in R'lyeh start accruing Deep One taint, or some other mutation (lloigor tentacles, jellyfish-like growths, whatever sea life you hate the most). You can make this a CON roll to resist or just hit them with it when it seems dramatic.

Really, the thing to remember is that in Call of Cthulhu, R'lyeh should be the worst place on Earth. Your PCs should loathe it and fear it above all else.

Making Sense of Delta Green

From a birds-eye view, the setting of Delta Green might seem to have a problem in the sheer amount of conspiracies fighting or exploiting the Mythos. Those twelve guys in robes next to a freezer full of babies don't stand a chance, right? There's no way they can escape the notice of the FBI's Occult Crime Lab, the NSA's zombie-scanners, MJ-12's psychic monitoring systems...

This isn't actually what the books say, but plenty of people have gotten that impression both from people talking about DG as a setting, skimming the sourcebooks with all their 'Organization Resources' headers, and assumptions based on X-Files or other conspiracy-based RPG settings. And maybe actual campaigns, I don't know.

For myself, there's three lenses that I find the setting makes more sense, both in regard to a campaign's bureaucratic verisimilitude and a campaign's horror dramaturgy. And I use the word lens in both the 'rose-tinted' sense of giving everything an emotional hue, and the 'magnifying' sense of making clearer something hidden within.

The first lens is assuming that each agency has a very specific version of 'the supernatural' which is their lens for viewing strange things through. They don't perceive 'the mythos' as a cohesive set of things or an alternative cosmology (and Keepers shouldn't either, really), just a series of strange events. This human ignorance is partly the specifics of each groups' history, partly just human frailty, and partly the flying epistemological debris from the impact of any unknowable horrors.

• One of the parts of the setting that protagonizes Delta Green over the other groups is their—for lack of a better term—institutional paranoid schizophrenia. The history of types of contact with weird things they have had gives them a cult-centric focus, or one which tends to view the activities of supernatural beings as 'invasive' and 'infectious.' It's easier for them to identify patterns of bad weirdness: cults are isolated, travel in groups, hide their true non-homo-sapiens biology. The details of their practices and how they interrelate might be a mystery, but since the agents usually come from some sort of counterintelligence or criminal investigation background they can shift from crimes committed with a weapon to crimes committed with an alien servitor more easily.
• MJ-12 has an alternative mythos already, one which can deal with one half of the situation quite readily (anything that looks like an 'alien') but which might default to rationalization or total ignorance when confronted with a classical occult gloss to it (like trying to figure out a Resurrection spell).
• The Karotechia has the entirety of Aryo-Theosophy to frame their worldview, and lucky them, it's a lot of the same stuff which inspired/fed HPL et al in the first place. No wonder they make such good villains.
• PISCES, on the other hand, can be read as having a focus on identifying and exploiting or neutralizing human mutations, be they psychics or blessed of Shub-Niggurath.
• GRU-SV8's origin parallels Delta Green, and along with it can help them see the weird as an invasive or corrupting force, associated with cannibalism, the dead and the un-living, which leads to some version of classical criminal activity.
• M-EPIC is essentially a law enforcement version of the Residential Schools Act. (I'm Canadian so I might have more complex opinions about M-EPIC than the rest... also there's the [SPOILERS])
• One of the Directives From A-Cell, this one focusing on semi-aware mythos groups includes a cool idea for a French group whose 'exposure' consists of whatever they've stolen from MJ-12. This makes them second-hand dupes, and an illustration of how to draw in new groups without having to come up with a whole new overlay: they just steal someone else's.

A second lens through which to see Delta Green is that the history of these groups all stem from events that happen in the first half of the 20th century. (Glancy mentions this in the aforementioned Directive From A-Cell.) WWI birthed Delta Green and GRU SV-8, WWII fostered PISCES, the birth of the Cold War was the cradle of MJ-12—and I like to think that if any of those groups go down, there's not going to be anyone in the governmental sphere replacing them. They're becoming corrupted, breaking apart, or falling over each other.

In anticipation of the new DG RPG, I made a few alterations to the background for my last Delta Green game: replaced MJ-12 with a constellation of military contractors and biotech companies, which Kroft funnelled patents and materials into before being purged himself.

A third lens for our microscope of horrors—any of the above groups can be reinterpreted as an infection of a government by a cult. Most of them are already described as such. Others (i.e. Delta Green) can be turned into villains simply by taking their standard operating procedure to the ultimate extreme. Abducted by aliens? They shoot you. Found an artefact which has some weird snake glyphs? They smash it, your notes are stolen, and their friendlies in academia kibosh your future funding grants.

Without the proper magnification, the groups that make up the Delta Green milieu look fearsome and hardy, ready to take on all comers with ferocity. But when you get up close enough to peer into their cellular matter, you can see the weakness in their flesh.

While I'm here, I might as well plug The Unspeakable Oath to anyone who isn't already a buyer/subscriber. For $5 an issue you can get 60-odd pages of some of the finest horror roleplaying stuff being produced today. 

Call of Cthulhu: Eye of Amara — Meet the Characters

One of the groups I regularly play in—Evan's Nightwick/Uz/Et Cetera group—has taken a brief campaign hiatus, and I've stepped in to run some Call of Cthulhu. This will be only the second time I've run Call of Cthulhu scenarios using the BRP rules, after a short and violent experiment with Masks of Nyarlathotep last year, which I would get back to, at some point. Most of the time I use Trail of Cthulhu. I suspect the first couple sessions will be a little rough going, as I work out differences in the skill lists and assumptions of character competency.

Our first session was  players voted from three options for campaign organizations to belong to—and promptly tied all three. The choices were:

• A group of students at Miskatonic University.

• The Eye of Amara Society, a group of aesthetes, eccentrics and seekers who share their theories of, and experiences with, the supernatural.

• Members of a particular long-standing Arkham family, named at character generation. Characters can be related either through blood or marriage, or rely on them for employment.

After some tie-braking dice rolls and hem-hawing from the Keeper we settled on using the Eye of Amara as out base organization, but as you'll see, the stamp of Misk. U. is not absent from party.

The Eye of Amara Society (from Keith Herber's seminal Arkham Unveiled) is a small occult discussion group led by the theatrical, indolent Jason Gaspard. I'll post a more detailed look at them later.

Our party:

Pip Huxley III is a perpetual grad student in the Department of Classical Studies at Miskatonic University. He funds his long-running, wide-ranging thesis on the cuneiform of cylindrical seals ("Cylindrical Seals: A Circular Argument?") with his family's funds, gleaned from the unending river of profit that is the stock market. He lives in a the boarding house near the Misk. U. campus and spends his time off in a blind pig north of the river.

Professor Lancelot F. Simms has seen better days. Since the death of his wife, his monomaniacal devotion to illuminating the world with psychoanalysis has dominated his entire waking life, to the exclusion of his two grown children and his former associates at the Miskatonic Club. He's joined the Eye of Amara society as part of a project to expose their flimflammery and write a popular book on the subject along with the head of the . Since letting go his house staff, his Victorian mansion at the corner of West Washington Street and Hill Street has begun to resemble its owner in crumbling decay.

Robert L. Ashton, a pulp writer of some voluminousness, if not renown, has ended up in a tenement at 615 S. French Hill Street in Arkham, which he shares with his cat. He scuttles about the town's libraries, bookshops and the Exhibit Museum doing research and seeking inspiration for his weird adventure tales.