D&D + CoC

Although a lot of my discussion over time presages this attitude, and I've been gradually migrating this way for a long time, it hit me with sharp clarity recently that my ideal roleplaying game campaign would be one that used a rulebase and setting assumption that was loosely based on sword & sorcery, humanocentric D&D (3.5 edition, but that's neither here nor there), but which had a play paradigm almost exactly like that of Call of Cthulhu. Honestly, I think my game is already set up to facilitate that, but there's still a mental leap required to get all the way there.

Now, Cthulhu is an interesting game. I've had basically two kinds of experiences with it, and I think both are pretty typical. One type of experience is the one-shot. Held on gamedays, conventions, and just single-session one-offs, this is the deadly, meat-grinder type of Cthulhu that many people anticipate. There's usually a PC death or two, and many sanity episodes. At least one PC and possibly several more will be "lost" to sanity issues. A few PCs will manage to muddle through the scenario with some degree of success. Typically.

I've actually found that this type of game is inimical to terror, in most cases. Knowing that your character is, essentially, disposible, leads to wacky behavior. When a PC goes down, it's usually an occasion for a few laughs, not one of horror. It's a ton of fun, but in many ways, it's not what people think Cthulhu is about. The tone usually comes off completely wrong. Not necessarily; I've seen it played straight, but honestly, not very often. The environment doesn't really facilitate that kind of experience, unless all the players come to the table wanting that experience, and working hard to maintain that mood and tone.

The other type of Cthulhu game that I've seen is the long-term campaign. This plays quite differently, usually. In spite of the hype, characters die and go insane pretty infrequently here. This is the type of game made famous by the scenarios published by Chaosium (and others): Beyond the Mountains of Madness, Masks of Nyarlathotep, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, etc. Fantasy Flight's Nocturnum. The entire concept of the Delta Green sub-setting.

In these types of games, it is easier to get a feeling of horror. Your characters aren't meant to be disposible, but they are still relatively weak and fragile. Ironically, this type of game provides an environment in which the lurking, brooding horror of the game can best be made manifest, and yet it doesn't do so by ramping up the count of PC death and insanity. It does it slowly, and by whittling away the uncautious, the reckless and the unlucky. It's a game that fosters a gradually growing sense of paranoia amongst the players. But they get to maintain continuity. It's a fun game. Much more fun that the flash-bang one-shots that blow through PCs like so much chaff.

As I mentioned earlier, the challenge is getting everybody on board with that paradigm. Making the mental leap into a Cthulhu-like playstyle, even though you're using rules that appear to resemble D&D. If you don't have that, your efforts to get that kind of game will most likely be frustrating and disappointing. If players don't ever adopt the cautious, paranoid feel of a good Cthulhu campaign, then likely they'll just go through PCs quickly and either play it off for laughs, or get frustrated. It's a case of managing expectations, and is (in my experience) a little bit tricky to pull off.

Anyone have any experience in doing something like this? If so, I'm curious to hear how it's worked out for you.

My Freeport game started out much like this running the Freeport Trilogy. The PCs were low level and that of course has a very Lovecraft feel to it by design. They investigated, fought cultists, and (wisely) avoided reading the books. It was much more D&D then CoC though I feel it succeeded in making the PCs a bit paranoid about the cultists and having a feeling of dread and terror about the climactic battle scene.

There is a third type of CoC game I've seen kind of a Hybrid of the two you describe. A friend has been running connected one shots at cons for years. I think this summer with be the 6th or 7th year in a row. Each year the adventure deals with the same characters and builds on the plot that has been building through all the previous adventures. He designs it so people do not have to have played in [previous years but it does help.

I think it could be a very workable campaign. The biggest issue to get around with this type of hybrid are genre expectations.

I was a player in a GURPS fantasy/swashbuckler type game
years ago. The adventures were largely action oriented. At one point we became involved in a sort of creepy investigation. We were exploring some ruined buildings supposedly connected with some recent dissappearances. We encountered a pair of large black demonic looking dogs.
Little did we know that these were hell hounds with stats right out of GURPS Horror. There were only two of us PC's and we were both smoldering corpses within a couple seconds. It was pretty funny.
The GM was more upset about how things turned out than we were.

Point is, if we knew this was going to be a fantasy/horror campaign then expectations wouldhave been different all around.

Yeah, it's that managed expectations thing that I anticipate being the biggest challenge.

I've decided on a few things to try and keep things feeling that way from a mechanics perspective. A sanity mechanic. E6. And as clear communication as I can that the expectation is "fantasy Cthulhu."

I just wonder if anyone's done anything like it and how well it works. The hellhound incident is exactly what I fear as a kind of prolonged electroshock therapy until either the players are frustrated, or they get it. How do you get them to get it up front?

Yes, its called not giving a toss if the encounter is balanced and running a mystery style game where fights are rare but the PCs have a good chance of loosing the battle if they go in "guns blazing"

For example have that level 1 party try to save a village from the "monster eating all the sheep in the night" ala a troll.

I designed my current campaign world around a similar theme of sorts. my direction was a more Robert E Howard world. Humans vs Humans. But monsters are VERY much monsters. Horrors that are often among the last of their kind. As my RPG system leaves people relatively frail, encounters with such creatures have that excitement.

Of course, the big part is properly setting things up. Building tension. Letting the PCs know what they are in for (In game preferably). There is nothing quite like having characters hear of the horror and terror of the beast that storms through the dead town of Lorica for example... Then having an encounter where they run for their lives, entering buildings as the much larger monster chases after them, crashing into walls and tearing things apart trying to get at the smaller prey.

That sheer level of RP terror is hard to come by unless it is properly set up first. So many people like to "charge at the enemy, guns blazing" so to speak. A few good examples to show the PCs what things are like (in game) help a lot. An encounter with something they know is considered weak so they can see that if that thing is "weak", strong is certainly to be feared... Sometimes mere words are not enough... (Show me, don't tell me)
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Doulairen (Doulairen)
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Very intriguing thread, Hobo, I'd rep you if I could. For a long time I thought Call of Cthulhu, or any horror, could not work as a campaign. I'm actually dissatisfied if the PCs aren't all dead, insane, or both, by the end. In fact, not too long ago, I left a Trail of Cthulhu game because it was turning into a campaign and I'd thought it would be a single adventure over a few sessions.

To me, it's not horror unless the protagonists are steadily dying, leaving only the Final Girl alive at the end. Maybe I'm too stuck in the movie paradigm, it's a long time since I actually read any Lovecraft, though I think his stories mostly have a single protagonist and thus it's harder to draw a comparison with rpgs.

But, yeah, you've definitely given me food for thought, here. Maybe my death-lust was wrong.

Runequest, Warhammer, 3E with the sanity rules and other parts of CoC d20?



In its wierd, swords and sorcery, touches of gothic horror, finding bad things long forgotten, pcs can die bits D&D is not that far off. But there are other bits, and as you noted, attitudes, that really, really push in the opposite direction.

Beyond tone, are magic missiles and webspells and 50 hit point charecters consistent with what you want to do?

Well, if I really had my druthers, I'd houserule the magic system to be something different altogether too. But that's a lot of work, and I'm not sure that the payoff justifies the payout to get there.

But in an E6 game, I'm willing to let the magic stand. PC fragility is a relative thing, after all. Higher level spells will be Cthulhu-like incantations as it is already.

I'm not sure I understand the first part of your question. I'm thinking of using 3.5 (with a few exclusions from the race list) and the Madness rules from Freeport. Which is similar enough to the CoC version, except simpler to use.

Part of the problem is that D&D PCs are too powerful for horror. Even a 1st level character is more capable than the average person. A fighter's first impulse when faced with a threat will be to fight. Barbarians and paladins even moreso. One would expect a wizard to be intensely curious regarding strange, sinister and weird phenomena. They'll go straight toward what they ought to be running away from. Perhaps rogues and rangers are more what you are looking for, cautious types whose first impulse is stealth.

The protagonists in horror otoh are either a cross-section of high school stereotypes (if it's a movie) or antiquarians and the like (if it's Lovecraft).

If sword & sorcery is the model, then the primary S&S protagonist, Conan, doesn't act in the right way at all. He's supposedly scared of the supernatural but he seems to respond to that fear by immediately kicking the crap out of whatever is causing it, up to and including Cthulhoid monsters.