I'm having something like this occur in my game, two master Shedim are acting as Cthulhu's agents on Earth and are trying to destroy Hestaby and the group of runner she's be strining along to be her puppets. I renegotiated Cthulhu a bit and his story is that he's a wizard from the 4th age who had committed himself body and soul to the horrors (Old Ones) and the Dragon bandied together to drop he and the seat of his power (Atlantis) into the ocean. Now with the release of his two lieutenants (Haagenti and Agares) the time is ripe for his return. Only Hestaby has the right to use the spell to change the weather and prevent impending calamity as Cthulhu rises up in the Gulf of Mexico and brings a Leviathon and hurricane with him.

right western New England, getting TV signals from Springfield MA with lots of emphisis on the hills and forests, and a cemetary outside the window. yup.

Actually he lived in NYC for only a few years, most ofhis life was in Providence, Rhode Island, a small, dark (relatively) ancient New England City. You can see much of it in "The Lurker in the Shadows" which is set in Providence.

Last night TMC was running a serries of Lovecraft based movies. Roger Corman stuff that really failed to catch the feeling, I thought.

The other big hting in Lovecraft that a GM has to overcome in SR is magic/paranormal. Most lovecraftian protagonists don't even believe in that, the forbidden knowledge that can summon unpeakable things from the depths. etc. Heck most runners used magic on their last run. While a Lovecrafting protagonist hides under the covers and denies the shadows looming outside his bedroom door, the shadowrunner is likely to turn to the shaman and ask "What the frag is that ? Can I shoot it? Can you banish it?" They are going right to a well established set of rules.

Well, yeah. The point is more making a reference than whether or not the Pulse Rifle would in reality constitute any significant degree of military l33tness.

I think i would run the Cthulhu gods and their minions as free spirits. Lots of power- followers get something for being a follower, and they are hard to classify beyond free spirit for a player. So they will not always know whats going on.

Of course that means a Shaman or someone could Banish them, right? Probably not so Cthulu-esque...

who said banishment was easy... especially with powers and cultist.

right, Cthulhu could just have a massivley high force level making him almost impossible to banish-though I guess a steam ship makes a hell of a conjuring focus.

i would imagin that they would have a higher (6 and up) force rating since they are called "the old ones".
But i think i would also create special powers for them as well.

yeah, that's what's going to make them scary for the group. Experienced players can handle a tough opp, but if they don't know what it can do-like maybe corrupt the metas around it (like Agent Smith in Matrix but turning them into deep ones or something) will make the gorup question 'what is it?'

which goes right back to what knasser said about the unexpected Dragon.

In a RPGs i learned that players only fear something if there is reason to. People know what creatures do what and expect everything to pretty much be at their level or risk. Droping a hint like eliminating an npc and doing incredible damage to the players... like a limb or two. I hate to kill players but sometimes they have to be reminded that they are not invincible.

I prefer a Mythos game along the line of The Music of Erich Zann. That is my favorite story and you never really get a solution and you never find out what it was. The mystery stays and the fear stays after the game and hinting on it in later games will stir up the fear again.

Actually, there are subtle differences, at least as far as my interpretations go.

First we have the Unexpected Dragon: Purpose is to jar players out of any preconceived notions of scale. The technique is to establish a base line of perceived opposition, normally conforming to their lazy expectations, and then violate that level of expectation, typically by flattening what they thought of as their opposition with something much worse. Having geared up to deal with Level 1, and suddenly finding themselves on Level 8, their notion that the GM loves them and cares for them is gone. A loving GM can be a hindrance in establishing player fear. But gratuitously withdrawing that love without warning is perceived as unfair. The Unexpected Dragon allows a GM to insert dangerous opposition without player stupidity (or rather faith in the GM) rapidly getting them killed. This is the advantage of an explicit horror game such as Call of Cthulhu because the players start at this level. Oddly enough though, you can get a greater effect by introducing horror into a game where they don't expect it (can you believe I managed to scare my players in a certain cancer causing game? Now that's tricky!)

What you (shadowfire) are referring to is what I call the Suspected Dragon. The purpose of this technique is to conceal the nature of the opposition from the players so that their imaginations and suspicions foster an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. The technique is to provide only hints as to the nature of the enemy, preferably alarming ones, and to delay its actual appearance. It has been said before that "if it has stats, we can kill it." The corollary of that is: "if we know what its stats are, we know if we can kill it." If the party is able to make a guestimate as to their chances of successful combat, the game becomes an exercise in rational decision making. It may seem counter-intuitive, but knowing that Cthulhu is coming to your house can be scary, but there is little actual worry about what your course of action is - you either run or throw dice at your GM. But knowing only that something is moving around outside your bedroom is likely to be more scary, even though it probably isn't cthulhu, because suddenly you don't know what to do. Whilst dragons are presumably scary, Suspected Dragons are a means of inducing fear in players by undermining their ability to act rationally (they lack the information to do so). If you can't act rationally, you naturally fall back to instinct.

I could expand this thing into an essay on the different types of dragons, if people are interested. Other examples are: The Bathroom Dragon, The Dragon You Know, The Napping Dragon and the Sympathetic Dragon.

K.

Cancer causing game?

Bathroom Dragon? Is that the one you can smell before he opens the door?

What a certain other RPG is referred to in these parts (though, "Shhh! I rather like it).

http://www.shadowrun4.com/resources/faq.shtml#1



The Bathroom Dragon is that dragon which gains an added level of fear through the circumstantial weakness of its victims. It may be noticed how often horror films show lingering shots of the victim in the bathroom whilst the scary music climbs in volume. This is because it is written in the Hollywood Rules of Horror (which all must follow in return for being given a budget), that people feel more vulnerable in their bathroom. This may be due to it being a place of self-examination and judgement, the lack of windows, or simply that it is hard to run when you have your trousers round your ankles. Whatever the reason, Bathroom Dragons attack you when you're at your most vulnerable. How many times do campers in remote Scottish highlands manage to drop their mobile phone down a pit? Or the marines find that they can't use their explosive rounds because they're beneath the primary heat exchangers? Isn't it always the case that the heroine just manages to miss the last plane out or the last bus leaving and is thus stuck in the town just as the sun starts to set?

Well at least in bad Hollywood horror that's what happens. But that doesn't mean the technique isn't a valuable one, you just have to be thoughtful about how you use it. The Bathroom Dragon is a cousin to the Unexpected Dragon. Both serve to scare the players by altering what they thought the balance of the game was. But whilst the Unexpected Dragon relies on a sudden, horrible change in the nature of opposition, the Bathroom Dragon does it by weakening the characters' own defences. In a horror movie, that can be acceptable, but in a role-playing game where the impartiality of the GM can be questioned and resented you have to be careful. Of course, the impartiality and fairness of the world in a horror story can also be questioned, but in that case the world doesn't care. So for a couple of examples:

• The marines are underneath the primary heat exchangers. This is good. It's an environmental thing that was there all along, not some random chance. In fact, the victims are kicking themselves because they should have checked this out and known that they wouldn't be able to fire their rifles in that environment. Result = weakness that is non-arbitrary and can't be blamed on a GM as such.
• The campers drop their mobile phone down a pit. This is bad. This is awfully bad. Why did they have only one? Why did they become clumsy just as the plot required it? This is an arbitrary shifting of the laws of chance, contrived and inviting a severe dice-pelting on the part of the GM.
• The unit's radio unit is broken. This looks like a bad example, especially for a military unit, but in the film Dog Soldiers, you only have a moment to start to think how contrived it is before the soldier has the back off it and finds that it was disabled deliberately. Suddenly, it's not only not a bad example of a Bathroom Dragon, but becomes, in fact, absolutely great Bathroom Dragon. In fact, it's an Unexpected Bathroom Dragon Cross-Breed. They're not only weakened, but they have an enemy amongst their own side! *

There are in fact, two Bathroom Dragons. There is the sort that likes to pounce on you, with a sudden shift in the game - your friend's shin goes snap in the machinery and you're going to have to help carry him now giving the monster precious extra time to catch up with you - to the sort that likes to slowly turn the screw, allies don't respond to your radio signals, the rains come down halving visibility, the passages get narrower down here, you can barely move. Think on this quote:

"They cut the power? How can they cut the power, man! They're animals!"

Weakness. Disablement. Disadvantage. It's the flip side of the coin of your enemy's strength.

The Bathroom Dragon is in your house. It is waiting somewhere, hidden, knowing that sooner or later, you're going to have to use the bathroom. And when you do, trapped in a room of white tiles where the blood will really show up, unable to run with your pants down, or with a mirror just waiting to show you a glance of something dark, fleeting and fast in your hallway through the open door behind you... when you're at your most vulnerable, it will pounce.

RARRRGGGHHH!

-Khadim.

* P.s. If anyone hasn't seen it, Dog Soldiers is a film to watch. I'd recommend avoiding spoilers and just watching it raw. In addition to making the British Army look like something every man should be part of, it does a really good job of turning some horror conventions on their head whilst totally revelling others. I defy anyone not to like Spoon's exit scene!

I get it, uh, I think, C.C.G.?

Now I understand, like the shower scenes in horror movies.

I've seen Dog Soldiers. It was funny as hell.

Oh yes, there's nothing Bathroom Dragons relish more than a blonde in a shower. In fact, the best thing to do if you have one in your house, is to leave a blonde in the shower and then make your escape when you hear the screaming start.

Doing any sort of god-like being as a character that the PCs can interact with is a bad idea in SR, but for lesser creatures it is certainly doable, and one can certainly make the ability to banish the creature not at all comforting.


We start by creating a new spirit power

The Mouth of Madness
Some spirits are so alien to our plane of existence that reality itself shudders when they tread through. Such beings are, either wholly or in part, incomprehensible to the metahuman mind and any interaction with them, even just perceiving them, risks insanity.

For every IP a character interacts with a spirit with The Mouth of Madness, a Willpower test must be made (TN 4 for merely perceiving it, TN 5 for shooting at it, TN6 engaging it in melee combat, and TN 7 for any sort of social interaction, If the character attempts to use magic against the spirit, increase the TN by 2 (In SR 4, replace the TNs with Thresholds 1, 2, 3 and make it Willpower*2) If this test is failed, the character automatically gains one mental flaw (Negative Quality in SR4)

I think what i would do is more a little of both. Distract them with the hints of the suspected enemy and then pull the wool over their heads with the unexpected dragon. the best thing to do is let them walk right into the middle of it and discover there is no way out.

As far as the mythos having stats... i would only worry about it as far as banishing goes and a few powers that they could possible use. The real problem is those that serve the mythos and the creatures that it spawns.

I played CoC with a guy whose primary technique was to have something horrible happen, then listen to what the players discussed and use that to figure out what really had done the deed and why. It failed the day he hit us with something that was so crazed that we couldn't think of anything that could have done it and didn't have any plans other then getting the hell out of there.

Sounds like a waste of a perfectly good blonde to me. On the other hand, survival is paramount.

Dude, read Gygax's "The Slayer's Guide To The Undead". He has some awesome and brutal stuff in there along those lines. It was enough to get my fist pumping.

Yesterday I was watching a bad horror movie I rented from Blockbuster and I reflected on how annoying it was that in most horror movies that have a slasher or a humanoid protaganist that all the victims are usually extremely wimpy, besides for dropping their gear and falling down a lot. In the movie I watched, a group of campers saw a neanderthal with a maintenance jumpsuit and hand axe walking towards them when they had reason to believe he had murdered two of their friends. Their response was to run into their RV and try to drive away. I thought, "WTF?". They outnumbered him, and that guy just killed their friends! They should think, "REVENGE", they should all grab implements, and they should attack him as a coordinated group. What else would you do in a situation like that?

Whenever I have a nightmare that involves physical peril from some kind of adversary, my reaction is always to attack the adversary, even if in the context of the dream I feel scared. When I was a little kid, 4 or 5 years old, I used to have nightmare with monsters every night. I was afraid of going to sleep and would lie in bed with the lights on for a really long time. But one day, probably in a fit of lucid dreaming, I started fighting back in my dreams, and I guess that's what I've done ever since.

I usually don't have scary monster dreams anymore but when I do I still always go on the attack in my dream. Just a few nights ago I dreamed that guys with AKs were surruptitiously circling a house I'd been sleeping in and that they were coming to get me. I dreamed that I grabbed my .45 and as one of them saw me and aimed his rifle at me I shot at him several times. The thought went through the mind that I was outgunned and he'd probably blow me away in spite of my best efforts, and then I woke up. So the point is that even in my nightmares I try to fight back.

I always felt that horror movies like "The Hills Have Eyes" would be better if everyone wasn't just a victim, but one or two of the victims were hardcore and they would get Conan-rage and counter-attack the antagonists. Then the film would become a Tarantino-esque gore fest with extra brutality. In my mind that would be more entertaining than watching some vapid helpless people drop their cell phones and inexplicably twist their ankles.

Not everyone follows the Wolf totem; Sheep shamen are surprisingly common.

That said, you were watching "Jason" not "Aliens" - entirely different sorts of horror films.

-Siege

Ya, ones a real horror film while the other is just a slasher flick...

Civilians who are untrained in combat usually shy away from entering a melee with someone, especailly if that someone is armed. Even when they outnumber the armed guy, they're afraid of getting hurt, something they're not used to it. So turning to the good old "run and hide" is a understandable reaction.