Anybody done this? It seems like a natural fit. I was just reading a novel by Charlie Stross, "The Atrocity Archive", which posits that sophisticated mathematics and geometry can open up spaces between universes, allowing Alien Things to contact Earth in the good old Lovecraftian way.

"The Many-Angled Ones sleep at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set."

The hero works for a British agency which snoops on websites and computer companies and bright teenagers, trying to keep the fragility of reality a secret. It's neat stuff, rather like Delta Green but brainier, and it seems very Sorcerer-ish.

You know, back when I was more of a graphics geek, I used to go "fractal diving". You fire up your favorite fractal generating prog (I use Fractint) and set it for maximum zoom. Select a small bit of the fractal and magnify that sucker. Repeat ad infinitum.

It sounds dull, but if you were going on a couple hours sleep and a lot of caffiene, it was like falling endlessly into some psychedelic wonderland. Especially if you set it to color-cycle. You can literally "dive" into a fractal for hours and no matter how "deep" you go it's still amazingly complex and mysteriously beautiful.

It's quite possible that something lives at the "bottom of the mandelbrot set", but I can personally attest that it would take longer than three and a half hours to reach such a place... I've tried.

Of course it was on a crappy old 486, so... heh.

I think this has been mentioned, but let's try it again. In your view, who are the sorcerers? What are the demons? What is humanity? What is lore? What do rituals look like?

Mike

I was just talking with a friend of mine about doing something like this! I was going to start it off a bit more X-Files than full-on Delta Green (Cause I don't own Delta Green.... yet) but I'll give up what I'd been musing on....

So yeah, this would be a modern setting. All the players are FBI agents. I think I was going to use standard Sorcerer descriptors for Stamina and Will, but I wanted to offer two options for Lore:
Brush with the Unknown (2) This wierd thing happened to me when I was younger and led me to where I am now. Searching fo rhte Truth.
Naive (1) I don't really believe in any of this crap but I'm stuck here anyway

I wanted to use the Dual Humnaity from Sex and Sorcery with Lovecraft style Sanity (more of a messed up exctistenialism to me) and some kind of FBI "ethics"

Demons are pretty much Old Ones, Pagan Things, and Undead. With the addition of Immenent Object demon Tomes. What these "demons" represent, for the most part, is both the Univerce's apathy and active hostility towards mankind.

Necromancy'd be there in a pretty standard form.

And that's about as far as I'd thought through. So cheers!

jason

and because I'm a complete dip....

I had also wanted to use a story set-up something like an episodic tv show. Unfortunately I'm having issue resolving this format with the standard Kickers. I was thinking that I could use the kickers for Personal Season long arcs for each PC. I just worry about deprotagonising the players that way. I was also thinking that I could have the players themselves come up with their inital "mission briefing" from which I can work out from.

just wanted to addendum that...

Jason

OK, while searching I found a post by Eric Brennan a while back that comes very close to what I'm talking about. Search for "INDIGO VOID" in this forum.

This is my less stylish approach to those one-sheet questions. I wasn't able to think of a cool name for the government demon-busters, so Extremely Unconventional Weapons (EUW, pronounced "ewww") is the term I used.

What are demons?
Demons are alien -- they come from other universes with altered natural laws. Many cannot remain for long in our universe without extreme conditions being provided. Demons run the gamut from nearly nonsapient Passer monsters to incomprehensible bits of alien technology (Object) to dumb, destructive Possessors. There are a few transhuman entities which may be contacted and whose motivations, though unknowable, intersect with Earth in malign ways. These beings are extremely dangerous to contact.

While some Demons appear actively wicked, most are inimical to human life by the fact of their existence.

What are sorcerors?

Sorcerers are those who have pierced the veil of ignorance to the unhappy and poisonous truths beyond. Most modern sorcerers come to it from a-life, AI, cryptology, or related fields, although there are a few holdovers from the old Thule-Gesellschaft days.

Who are the player characters?
Faced with secret information which threatens modern cryptography schemes, subverts public safety, and provides a nearly untraceable source of weapons of mass destruction, the federal government has developed a deep-black EUW (Extremely Unconventional Weapons) program. Some PC's may be scientists who have strayed into forbidden territory and were impressed into service; others are soldiers or law enforcement officials who are taught basic rituals, others may be relative novices brought into the field after a brush with the uncanny.

What is Lore?
In keeping with the above, Lore is slippery stuff -- on the edge of advanced mathematics and computer theory. A low Lore score means that one has been taught by rote how to operate occult devices and rituals; a very low score is the equivalent of a range safety class, teaching one what to watch out for, and why ozone and sulfur are bad things to smell while on a job.

What is Humanity?

Drawing on CoC, Humanity equals sanity-confidence in the universe and one's place in it. Humanity checks are forced by sorcery and extreme violence on the part of the sorcerer. Just witnessing some of the most severe Demons or a severe atrocity (esp against team-mates) can call for a check. Humanity Zero means either psychiatric disability, forcible retirement from the EUW program, or becoming an NPC--probably part of the problem.

Optionally, I thought of adding a second component to Humanity -- sort of a reliability score. Finishing jobs neatly and making your boss look good can get you added points, while not going through channels, using too many resources, or pissing off the chain of command can lose you points. I have a feeling that adding this second aspect of humanity would make the game more paranoid, but might lead to very short-lived characters.

What kind of rituals are used?

EUW rituals usually involve scientific apparatus and controlled environments, but retain a recognizable occult flavor. Pentagrams drawn with lasers or particle beams are instrically safer than the same ritual done with chalk on a basement floor.

Hi Danny,

about Humanity, you wrote: Just witnessing some of the most severe Demons or a severe atrocity (esp against team-mates) can call for a check

No experience, just trying to stay true to the CoC roots.

(From a quantum mechanical perspective, observation is "doing something", but let's not go there.)

This is not really intended to be a big part of the setting, anyway, I was suggesting it only be used for really extreme cases. It does muddy the narrativist waters, and so should be dropped.

DannyK wrote: Just witnessing some of the most severe Demons or a severe atrocity (esp against team-mates) can call for a check.

Taint. Check. That works really well. Hmm, that would be great for a "Colour out of Space" type story. Hint might work well, too.

"Atrocity Archive" is a good romp & lots of fun, even if not as chilling as Stross' "A Colder War" (which is possibly the best piece of Lovecraftian fiction in existence, IMO.) Stross' short stories (in Rust) and Singularity Sky (an SF novel) are also fun. :)

That said, something bothered me about the idea of putting Atrocity Archive into Sorceror; the Sanity etc concept didn't quite work. I think I finally figured out why:

You want a stat that reflects the central question of the game. In Sorceror, the question is "what will you do for power?" Humanity attempts to measure the extent to which you have, or have not, compromised your Humanity in the pursuit of power.

In Lovecraft, though, the central question doesn't revolve around the PC's search for power; nor, really, does it revolve around their flight into or from madness.

It's about Hope.

Lovecraft is a very bleak genre, because the core assumption is that the Elder Wossnames will eventually win - and most likely it'll happen because some human gives them a lever to use. The question, then, is what you're going to do about it: what will you sacrifice in the rear-guard action to keep the human race around a bit longer? All these characters slowly go nuts, lose track of family and friends, lose their faith in the value of the humans they defend: they lose hope. And when that's gone, the struggle, for them, is over.

(Could call it Faith, too, but that gets too easily muddled into religious issues.)

A link to the Indigo Void posting:

http://indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=1689&highlight=indigo+void

At zero Humanity, the PC must do one of two things before meeting their grissly end:
1) Track down a friendly NPC and recant what leads to their demise.
2) Write a letter (not e-mail) to one of their fellow PCs, presenting it for them to read.

The game seems a tad like Sorcerer & Sword, in that it's not assumed that PCs start with demons - rather that demons tend to be external inimical forces. That scenario assumes a somewhat grey morality, however.

I may be off base here, but if the PCs are Mulder and Scully-like, I'm not seeing moral dilemmas coming up very often as relates to the setting material. Oh, sure, you can orchestrate "do I kill my brother who may be an alien" sorts of stuff, but I'm not seeing characters becoming entangled, themselves, in the problems of sorcery. I'm seeing lots of punish and banish, not much summon and bind.

Is that a problem?

Mike

Well, I got interested in this idea in part because I used to play lots of Mage, especially the Technocracy faction. I'm fascinated by the central paradox of the Technocrats: they are Mages themselves, fighting a war to eliminate magic from the world. Basically, they have to keep running an elaborate mind-game on themselves to do their jobs.

So in order to do their jobs, the EUW teams have to use a fair bit of sorcery, including sometimes using their own bound demon's abilities. Also, there's got to be a temptation at times to pick up another demon or two... especially those handy "alien artifact" type Object demons. Also, at some point the players may see fit to cut a deal with some of the Immanents running around the setting.


And yeah, this is basically an extended riff on Sorcery and Sword -- I'm looking more for horrific action than psychological horror here. I figure doing dirty jobs to keep America clean is enough moral ambiguity for an evening of gaming. :)

JamesSterrett wrote: "Atrocity Archive" is a good romp & lots of fun, even if not as chilling as Stross' "A Colder War" (which is possibly the best piece of Lovecraftian fiction in existence, IMO.) Stross' short stories (in Rust) and Singularity Sky (an SF novel) are also fun. :)

Ah, so they do have demons. All good then. :-)

I can see the Necronomicon being a demon with it's spells the powers.

Mike

Danny - Sorry, I was confusing. "Hope" is not inimical to Sorceror as a stat; the problem I had was with labelling/tracking Sanity or Taint or some related stat instead of Hope.

In essence, I was looking for a "thing to track" that I felt would fit better, and thought Hope was the answer. (In fact, my first answer was "Despair", but that's difficult to make work as a descending stat. :) So, of course, the opposite of Despair is Hope, which makes more sense as a "count down to zero and extinction" stat. :) )


Is it true that nobody wants to play the Dr Strangelove RPG? I agree that the endstate of A Colder War is unplayable (the story is, well, *over*. :) )

However, this is one factor lying at the root of the endless debates on the value of CoC as an RPG.... I *can* see the appeal of playing a character whom I know will ultimately fail: exploring the theme of the value of sacrifice and struggle against impossible odds, and doing so from a variety of motivations. Others look at this and say "You cannot win" (true!) "and therefore it is pointless" (but is it?) Those who find the unwinnable situation pointless won't see the point in the theme.

Equally, the overall setting of A Colder War/The Atrocity Archive is certainly playable (and can be spun towards both the "you cannot win" and the "you can win" ends of the spectrum.)