Lovecraftian design

[Arpie]

I agree with CPXB, Lovecraft held society's elite in high regard and showed noticeable contempt for anyone poor, foreign or uneducated.

I'm not sure if this is really helping with the initial concept, tho. I'd like to hear more from Eric, of course. He seemed to want a pretty straight Call of Cthulhu riff where the players defined the setting elements.

So, if I understand this correctly, the cthulhu mythos is the one constant you envisioned for the game, Eric? Everything else would change from game to game?

If I'm on the right track, perhaps you could pick a central weirding and present it to the players and they would build their characters around it? Or maybe you could do a reverse time thing, where the worst has already happened (you know who's dead and who's gone mad as the game begins and you work your way back to when everything was normal?

I wonder if that would work...?

[Steve Marsh (Ethesis)]

I agree with CPXB, Lovecraft held society's elite in high regard and showed noticeable contempt for anyone poor, foreign or uneducated.

I'm not sure if this is really helping with the initial concept, tho. I'd like to hear more from Eric, of course. He seemed to want a pretty straight Call of Cthulhu riff where the players defined the setting elements.

So, if I understand this correctly, the cthulhu mythos is the one constant you envisioned for the game, Eric? Everything else would change from game to game?

If I'm on the right track, perhaps you could pick a central weirding and present it to the players and they would build their characters around it? Or maybe you could do a reverse time thing, where the worst has already happened (you know who's dead and who's gone mad as the game begins and you work your way back to when everything was normal?

I wonder if that would work...?

Whenever I see a game proposal that is up against a direct competitor, I always wonder about the threshold quesion:  what about this game would make a customer buy it instead of the competition?  What is wrong with the competition, what is right with your game?

This description of the mechanics, albeit extremely loose at present, isn't answering that question for me.

[Eric Bennett]

Wow...lots of views, lots of posts, and lots to think on. My last few days got eaten by sleep, as those two 12-4 shifts and this cold took me down a lot harder than I thought. But that is why we have penicillin.

Real quick response to Arpie: You are right about the riff thing. What I was planning on doing was having what might be expresses as three 'sub-games'. For those of you who read Zak Arnstrom's (hope I spelled that right) original Cthonian game, he had things divided up into Shocking Discoveries, Weird Tales, and Pulp Adventure, with certain mechanics changing depending on what style of game was being played.

I want to do something similar, but...more invasive. I want the game to use the same overall mechanics, and come with all three modes. However, the method of creating stories differs from mode to mode. To pull a quick example from the air, a Shocking Discovery (everybody gets to die, nihilistic Lovecraft) may start as was suggested, with each character's fate already determined and working backwards from there. Then, for playing a Weird Tale (Call of Cthulhu, Shadow over Innsmouth...basically, I see this as regular Call of Cthulhu) use what I suggested for weirding elements as the story progressses. Finally, for Pulp Adventure (Robert E. "Punch it in the face" Howard style tales) have a third structure of things, reinforcing that. Basically, I want mechanical reinforcement for each style. Hope that made sense, and I'll be back to ramble in the morning.

Thank you for the feedback, guys!

Later,

Eric Bennett