D&D and the Cthulhu mythos: Adventure ideas?

[Desdichado]

I ran an adventure who's plot was fairly loosely based on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Except that instead of being a seaside town, it was a mining town in the desert. PC's showed up--can't remember if they were just passing through or actually looking for someone there--and checked into the inn. Folks were all surly and strange. Most were cultists of some weird aberration--I remember using specifically the picture of the Beholder Overlord, but the stats were much lower, since my PCs wouldn't have been equipped to handle that. Several of the cultists had grafts and/or mutations that gave them weird spell like and supernatural abilities.

In any case, we didn't get much buildup of tension, sadly--one of the PC's immediately cottoned on that this was a desert version of Innsmouth and started causing trouble with anyone who even looked at him funny. To be perfectly honest with you, they got their asses handed to them by the cultists, ended up fleeing barely alive, dragging a comatose PC who had failed one to many Sanity checks, and had to live like outlaws for a while until they were strong enough to make another foray into town to go find who they were looking for.

Needless to say, I was using a D&D and CoC d20 hybrid rules wise. But I think the idea is still a sound one--find an existing Mythos story, summarize it's basic points in half a dozen or less single sentence bullet points, and you've got the skeleton already of a Mythos-like adventure. You probably want to swap out the existing Mythos creatures with something else, partly to make it less obvious to Mythos literate players and partly just to make it fit the theme of your campaign.

 

[Professor Phobos]

I had a much longer post I accidentally destroyed. It was totally awesome- probably the greatest post in the history of internet forums.

Seriously. That post was great. Anyway, I have neither the patience nor the energy to do it all again, so instead...

Professor Phobos' Instant Mythos Scenario Generator! Follow these three easy steps to create a Mythos scenario.

Step 1: Pick something we value, take for granted, or otherwise respect. Faith, food, relaxation, sleep, the sky, children, education, etc. Place it within a Cosmic Horror context- i.e., invert it. Turn it into something meaninglessly destructive. Look around your house and pick a random object. Look at the context of that object and then turn that context into something toxic and corrupting. Example: I have a children's book, for the teaching of adorable little children. Inversion: Do cultist parents read to their kids? If so, what do those kids reveal to their classmates on the playground the next day...?

Examples Lovecraft did this with: Dreams, houses, books, families.

Step 2: Pick a way that dealing with this crisis can bring ruin and loss to a character. Not their life- I mean, sure, you can get killed fighting the mythos. But that's boring. Have them grow distant from their family. Give them nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, flashbacks, "the shakes", phobias and memory loss. Take away sanity, career, social status. As people face the Mythos they are in turn changed by exposure to it. They become distanced from their humanity (or Dwarvenness, or what have you). In D&D this can be tough, but think of a high-level Archmage who is more Other than man after centuries of research and battling the Mythos. Human life has no value to him, he does not remember the faces of his long dead loved ones. He's no longer human, and he lost all of that in the struggle against the Mythos. Human traits like compassion, or even negative ones like greed, all vanish after prolonged contact with the mythos. Such things become irrelevant as the mind attempts to become as the Great Old Ones.

Examples Lovecraft did this with: Mental stability (virtually every story), Family background (The Rats in the Walls), Physical mutation (The Colour out of Space).

Step 3: Add tentacles. Use words like: Loathsome, unnamable, indescribable, degenerate, beastly, prodigious, overripe, rotten, grotesque, vast, diseased, colossal, cyclopean, inhuman, sponge-like, debauched, blasphemous, ichorous and debased.

 

[Wraith Form]

I continue to be in your debt, everyone!

 

[Kesh]

D&D has a built-in mechanism to clear up one of CoC's biggest flaws: getting the adventurers together. In the actual CoC game, it can be difficult to explain why a doctor, a professor, a bellhop and a flapper all want to traipse around together battling unmentionable horrors.

CoC tried to solve that with Delta Green, making the (modern) characters government-backed, though still working in a non-official aspect. With D&D, these are professional adventurers out to seek fortunes and explore, which naturally puts them right in harm's way.

Eberron makes it even easier, with its pulp heritage, Quori and Xoriat (Far Realm). It's very easy to give the Mythos a new paint job in this setting.

 

[Wraith Form]

Professor Phobos' Instant Mythos Scenario Generator! Follow these three easy steps to create a Mythos scenario.
Step 1: Pick something we value, take for granted, or otherwise respect.

Step 2: Pick a way that dealing with this crisis can bring ruin and loss to a character.

Step 3: Add tentacles.

Interesting. Sounds a lot like the "animated cartoons from Asia" I've been watching lately. Yeah, the "adult" ones.

 

[rgard]

I'll think on this some more and try to post later, but the first that comes to mind is this:

Ur-Priests!

The Old Ones can't manifest themselves on the Prime Material, because they lack the followers and the power derived from being worshipped.

A lone Cleric or Paladin falls from grace and then discovers ancient texts describing the Old Ones. He or she then begins the quest to bring back the Old Ones while advancing as an Ur-Priest and becoming your BBEG.

The BBEG forms a cult, trains new Ur-Priests (from all levels of society) with the promise great power and wealth.

Give the bad guys attainable goals with respect to bringing the Old Ones back.

Enter the PCs...

Thanks,
Rich

 

[GreatLemur]

Funn this should come up, now. I've lately been half-seriously planning an adventure to introduce some of my RPG buddies to D&D 3.x, and it's starting to look a bit like a fantasy take on The Dunwich Horror.

The PCs (1st level, all human, possibly pre-generated) will be asked by the authorities of their home town to investigate what appears to be a month-long rash of grave robberies in the local cemetary (which is huge, as the town is very old). It'll turn out that there are actually two culprits, in this: A band of ghoul-like (that is, in the Lovecraftian sense, not actually undead) degenerate humans have been chowing down on the town's ancestors, but they're in competition with a necromancer who's been digging folks up and putting them to work.

The necromancer is not here to conquer and zombify the town. He tells the PCs at the first opportunity that he's raising an undead horde to attack a settlement on the outskirts of town. The PCs--being locals--have heard stories about the isolated family living out there, and maybe even seen a few of their more functional kin in town. They're inbred, backwards, secretive, and vaguely criminal, though generally considered harmless. But the necromancer says their crumbling estate is the site of a quiet, gradual invasion by bodiless intelligences from outside the world.

The deal is that these beings wear away at the barrier between their reaily and specific places in the physical world until they manage to gain some degree of influence in it. They subtly impose very general suggestions upon those in the vicinity, encouraging xenophobia, incest, and abundant reproduction. Each successive generation of debased humanity becomes more suceptible to the beings' influence as natural genetic law and unnatural powers promote idiocy and monstrous births. By the second or third generation, some of the offspring become sensitive enough to those outside to follow simple commands, and begin construction of devices that grind the barriers between worlds ever thinner.

Eventually, instead of merely encouraging random mutation, the beings on the other side can actually design any life that gestates within their region of influence, and they create bodies that they can control more directly, the better to further the creation of more powerful reality-piercing devices, and expand their domain. Naturally, this is the point at which the PCs would come into things, with several livestock pregnant with unspeakable horror, a number of very unsettling arcane constructions humming away and making it hard to think, and a whole lot of deformed and imbecilic servants--some with minor magical abilities--protecting them.

Clearly, it'll be a good thing if the PCs have a bunch of zombies backing them up when they storm the place, but I think the necromancer won't be all that thrustworthy. His story will be true, but he won't be in this just to save the town from mutant hillbillies. There'll probably be some Necronomicon-ish McGuffin in the inbreds' possession.

I'm not really going for a serious horror vibe, so I won't be hitting the players with sanity checks or limiting them to non-magical classes. This whole thing only ended up resembling Call of Cthulhu because I love this kind of story, and I ain't too interested in tradition D&D fantasy.

Seven mythos-themed story ideas for Dungeons and Dragons:

Those are all extremely awesome ideas, particularly "The Old Speech". Very nice work.

 

[talien]

Once I decided that Hastur was both Umor (in Arcanis) and the Unspeakable One (from Freeport), it was simply a matter of tracking down all the adventures that featured the King in Yellow or Hastur. There's quite a bit of material there, if you're so inclined:
* I converted Tatters of the King. Not as hard as you might think, given that the 1920s is a lot like Freeport. Since both settings have pistols, it was simply a matter of removing references to steamers and automobiles. Worked fine.

* There's also the .PDF adventure, "Cold Visitor," which is a homage to The Thing. I used it as the opening adventure to "awaken" the King in Yellow from the frozen wastes of Kadath.
* You already mentioned And Madness Followed.
* I converted both Adventus Regis (currently debuting in my story hour at http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=103252) and another adventure...can't remember its name, but they are both in the Monograph "Ripples from Carcosa." Adventus Regis is set in Roman times, perfect for Arcanis, and the other adventure is set in medieval times, perfect for mainstream D&D.
* I used Castle Amber to represent Castle Carcosa and filled it with appropriately pseudonatural beasts. Castle Amber has references to Great Old Ones and is set in Averoigne by Clark Ashton Smith, who contributed to the Lovecraft Mythos.


With the conclusion of Tatters of the King, a major chapter closed on The King in Yellow/Hastur. Now the PCs have to deal with Cthulhu, whom good ole Hastur was actually protecting Arcanis from. Or to put it another way, "You think I was bad? Wait til you see my half-brother..."

* I named Cthulhu "Leviathan" in Arcanis, emphasizing his octopus-like aspect.
* Black Sails Over Freeport features a cult that worships Cthluhu-esque entity, whom I've decided is the same Leviathan bad guy first introduced in Arcanis.

Both Black Sails and Tatters of the King feature overarching plots that you can go back to throughout your campaign. Tatters of the King is the stronger of the two series, but I've found even Black Sails to have some really great moments.

I rewrite everything in e-tools and convert it to 3.5 before I play any adventure, sometimes using material from other books. So for example, last night I converted Daen Danud, a lich, from Abjurer 4/Cleric 8 to Death Master 8/Blood Magus 8 (for my higher-level PCs).

Happy to share the D&D conversions of any of the Cthulhu adventures if you're interested.

 

[00Machado]

Isn't a lot of the feel in the mood, rather than the mechanics?

Change descriptors to make spells seem ...off... somehow, or like they're powered by eneregy from the Far Realm.

Possibly the Dragon issue with the Far Realms article would be helpful.

Investigation and unknown could play a larger part in any adventure.

Regarding specific adventures, I can't help much, but for springboards for adventures ideas, I'd look at Ptolus, Chaositech, and Darkness and Dread. Ptolus has inspiration from Warhammer and Cthuhlu, and Darkness and Dread I read was Mike Mearl's attempt to bring the Warhammer tone to d20 mechanics. Come to think of it, doesn't Freeport have those overtines also?

You mentioned basic plot ideas that can be lifted, and I think the above books may prove helpful. Some plot ideas that come to mind are:
*Investigation - Lots of this theme in the Ptolus setting and it's adventure ideas. I'm thining the original Freeport trilogy is good for this as well.
*Mind Control/Thralls - Take Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and replace the Naga at the end with a Far Realm snakeline or tentacular thing
*Monsters from the deep <or insert other ominious phrase here> - The Balrog of Moria, Mind Flayers, and so on could all be conveyed with the right tone. I think Wolfgang Baur's current open design project will have an encounter location that is an Aboleth controlled area.
*An awakened deity (or powerful servitor), once slumbering, has been disturbed, and now walks the earth
*I'm thinking some Mongoose books with Conan adventures might fit the bill also, but it's just a hunch.

 

[Chimera]

Much more the former than the latter. Deep Freeze is, essentially, Mountains of Madness for 2nd level D&D characters: the PCs investigate why an insane asylum is being effected by nearby mountains, wherein live...things. BIG mo-fo things trapped in ice. Alas, no madness checks. "And Madness Followed" is a bard's attempt to run The King in Yellow (the play)...and the squishy joy that follows, for 9th level characters. Again, no madness checks.

(drool!)

I may seriously have to check these out. Sanity checks can always be installed.