Help with a setting? CoC End Times

[Twichyboy]

Hello all, after much conflict between, wanting to run a Delta Green CoC game, or to run a Post-Apocalypse game i came to the most logical (and terrifying) conclusion to combine the settings and create an Apocalypse setting based on the End times described (very briefly) in CoC


Sadly information on the End Times is very lacking, and the only sources i found was the actual setting "End Times" by Pagan Publishing, and a book called Cthulhu's Reign which i do not own and thus cannot read

So i figured that maybe these excellent forums would help me design the End Times campaign!


------------------------------My Current Plot---------------------------------------

So far what i have nailed down is that the players awaken in a Delta Green bunker, with their last memories of being kidnapped off the streets and have been in stasis ever since.

They awaken, and discover they are in the "Generation 0" world of the apocalypse and are greeted by a computer who refers to them as the "Gnarly" cell and describes that the "Sandman" cell's operation was a success and that Operation Regicide is in stage two.

Whats going on is that the players are not actually part of Delta Green or ever were. and were put there by accident as the actual DG team did not want to be part of the plan and needed people to take their place.

Overall, Operation Regicide's goal is to displace, or otherwise deal with the Great Old Ones after the Apocalypse as at that point their return was inevitable, and through those actions, save humanity.

The "Sandman" team's goal was to find some way to deal with Cthulhu himself, with the most likely way to lull him back into his slumber at R'lyeh, which they accomplished by the (unwilling) sacrifice of several million humans.

I figured the "Gnarly" team was supposed to find a way to displace Nyarlathotep, a goal which i assume is impossible as i don't know the abilities of these gods, but Nyarlathotep seems to be the strongest out them all.

Game Mechanic wise, i decided to have all players and NPC's to have a feat, called Mental Conditioning or horror familiarity which allows their sanity to restore quickly, and not take as much sanity damage from creatures which would be very prevalent, to make the game more playable.

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Does all this seem alright? or should i change or add some things?

What would this world look like? i figured a lot of the world would be blasted and scarred but I'm not sure what the gods would do to it.

how would NPC's of this world act? how did humanity survive and what have they done to fight back/Hide from the darkness?

just overall i need help with it, please feel free to contribute anything!

 

[jonesy]

Have you read this?
Rare Documents/End Time

It's from here, which you might be able to mine for ideas:
Delta Green/Intelligence

 

[Achan hiArusa]

There is a supplement that was never published called End Time, but it deals with a colony on Mars which is all that is left of free humanity:

http://www.opifexphoenix.com/endtime/End_Time.pdf

 

[Twichyboy]

There is a supplement that was never published called End Time, but it deals with a colony on Mars which is all that is left of free humanity:

http://www.opifexphoenix.com/endtime/End_Time.pdf

Yeah i have read that, it's pretty good, but it only really deals with the mars colony and i'm looking for stuff more concerning the great old ones on earth

 

[humble minion]

My opinion (not canonical in any way...) is that there's not much of a more hopeless setting around than a post-stars-being-right DG earth.

Surviving humans would be very rare, cowering raving and weeping in holes, insanity scores out the wazoo, waiting for something to either absentmindedly obliterate them by accident while doing something entirely incomprehensible or to notice their existence long enough to swat them like a bug.

There wouldn't be a resistance, in any meaningful sense. There wouldn't be organisation enough, with most of the human population dead or insane, and the laws of causuality and spacetime twisted into mindbending pretzels. Anyone earthbound (not on the lunar colony) would be entirely concerned with survival, scavenging enough leftover tinned food or hunting rats or less pleasant things for meat.

This is probably sounding like a very limiting setting, and I'd have to agree, unless you're very big into gritty (the grittiest!) survivalism. NPC interaction is a big problem too - a Lovecraftian apocalypse as I envision it doesn't leave a lot of people around the place to talk to! That leaves the GM in with the choice of either having a completely combat-based game with no NPC interaction at all, limiting PC interaction to agents from the lunar colony, or allowing PCs to communicate/negotiate (to a point) with mythos entities, which is ... thematically questionable, let's just say!

Alternative, somehow there are humans around being kept alive by a mythos creature or creatures for a purpose of their own, which is how they've managed to survive this far. The Great Race of Yith could be an option, stretching across time trying to keep a few potential hosts still active, just in case. Ghouls could be another one - right now there's millions of bodies rotting all over the streets, but the smarter ghouls are asking what the hell they do when the good times are gone, and have captured some of the lucky survivors and are preserving them as breeding stock and then future food supply.

 

[grodog]

Have you read this?
Rare Documents/End Time

It's from here, which you might be able to mine for ideas:
Delta Green/Intelligence

There's also an ancient play by post series of sessions set in the End Time universe, also hosted from AOL way back when. I've had a couple of external HDs die in the past 6 months, but think that I still have these files from BITD. I'll do some digging and see over the weekend.

This may also help:

Downloads Manager - End Times - Yog-Sothoth Forums
and
pagan "end times " site:yog-sothoth.com - Google Search

 

[Twichyboy]

There wouldn't be a resistance, in any meaningful sense. There wouldn't be organisation enough, with most of the human population dead or insane, and the laws of causuality and spacetime twisted into mindbending pretzels. Anyone earthbound (not on the lunar colony) would be entirely concerned with survival, scavenging enough leftover tinned food or hunting rats or less pleasant things for meat.

This is probably sounding like a very limiting setting, and I'd have to agree, unless you're very big into gritty (the grittiest!) survivalism. NPC interaction is a big problem too - a Lovecraftian apocalypse as I envision it doesn't leave a lot of people around the place to talk to! That leaves the GM in with the choice of either having a completely combat-based game with no NPC interaction at all, limiting PC interaction to agents from the lunar colony, or allowing PCs to communicate/negotiate (to a point) with mythos entities, which is ... thematically questionable, let's just say!

Alternative, somehow there are humans around being kept alive by a mythos creature or creatures for a purpose of their own, which is how they've managed to survive this far. The Great Race of Yith could be an option, stretching across time trying to keep a few potential hosts still active, just in case. Ghouls could be another one - right now there's millions of bodies rotting all over the streets, but the smarter ghouls are asking what the hell they do when the good times are gone, and have captured some of the lucky survivors and are preserving them as breeding stock and then future food supply.

insofar i love the idea of humans being kept alive as cattle and plan on having the only large groups of humans left being cattle to the hungrier of the Mythos beasts, i personally love the idea of there being very little humans outside of slaves, and those who are "free" are either completely insane or concerned with survival however it would leave little interaction with NPC's.

As a player in this setting which would you prefer?

There's also an ancient play by post series of sessions set in the End Time universe, also hosted from AOL way back when. I've had a couple of external HDs die in the past 6 months, but think that I still have these files from BITD. I'll do some digging and see over the weekend.

Ooh that be awesome! i would love to see examples of other games in a similar setting

 

[talien]

What would this world look like? i figured a lot of the world would be blasted and scarred but I'm not sure what the gods would do to it.

It turns out that I've been planning precisely this stage as the next step in my campaign. It's currently in modern times and, due to the players blowing up Cthulhu by causing a nuclear sub to blow up in his face. This caused Cthulhu to spawn Cthylla (Cthylla - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), the "secret daughter of Cthulhu," to be released and a wave of madness descended upon the world. This caused my more traditional Delta Green campaign to transform into Monte Cook's World of Darkness, which has the Iconnu (basically, the Great Old Ones) invading our reality.

The next stages are, according to futuristic timelines set in the Cthulhu Mythos, are as follows: CthulhuPunk, Yellow Dawn, CthulhuTech, and then End Times.

CthulhuPunk is cyberpunk, Yellow Dawn is post-apocalyptic, CthulhuTech is anime/mecha, and End Times is the Aliens movie.

I polled my players and they're not interested in playing CthulhuPunk (they enjoy Shadowrun and feel nothing can replace it) so we're jumping to Yellow Dawn. Yellow Dawn sounds like the kind of post-apocalyptic setting that would meet your needs. See Yellow Dawn - The Age of Hastur - Role-playing game RPG for cyberpunk and cthulhu mythos written David J Rodger

The wastelands were brought about by a plague created by Hastur. It has zombies, mutants known as orcs, cybertech, and Cthulhuoid monsters roaming the wastes.

Hope that helps!

 

[humble minion]

insofar i love the idea of humans being kept alive as cattle and plan on having the only large groups of humans left being cattle to the hungrier of the Mythos beasts, i personally love the idea of there being very little humans outside of slaves, and those who are "free" are either completely insane or concerned with survival however it would leave little interaction with NPC's.

As a player in this setting which would you prefer?

As a player, I think it'd be very hard not to get bored to some degree in a game which had NO interaction with NPCs outside of combat. There needs to be something - while it depends a lot on your group, a game that revolved around not much more than sneaking around until a beastie sees you, then fighting it, then repeating next sessions would be pretty repetitive. And for longer-term plotlines, and to allow the PCs to have meaningful in-game choices, you have to have a way, as the GM, of passing useful information to the PCs, from stuff as basic as where to find drinking water, to as practical as the best precautions to take against deep ones when trying to navigate through the infested ruins of the Channel Tunnel, to as worlbreaking as the secret of chasing Cthulhu away from earth and back to Formalhaut or wherever it was he came from. NPCs are a massively useful vehicle for infodumping, if nothing else. There's some stuff you can do with ghosts, and diaries of dead people, old military records, spellbooks etc, and even (this is the far future after all) AIs like Cortana from the Halo games, but nothing beats a real live person to talk to.

They also provide moral dilemmas and inspiration. If EVERYONE on earth is dead or insane, why are the PCs bothering trying to reconquer the planet? It's lost, the planet belongs to the monsters and humanity is a couple of hundred skinny pale people on Mars who are all going to die of inbreeding-related genetic disorders in a few dozen generations. Your game setup implies that the PCs will take unspeakable risks for humanity and/or earth - if they're going to do that, the planet and the species have to be to some degree intact enough to fight for. And it lets you wedge the PCs wityh moral choices. Even really simple ones - do they or don't they use their dwindling supply of antibiotics to help the various crazed scabby sewer-dwelling survivors they meet? Do they risk discovery of their larger strategy to help rescue ghoul feeding stock before a crazed splinter group of ghouls decides they'd rather eat now than wait for natural death? If they get saved and hidden from hunting horrors by a tiny family group of survivors, what do they owe their rescuers, and can they abandon and/or betray them for the purposes of larger goals or personal survival?

NPCs open up stories and plotlines beyond 'kill X'. I'd need to have a LOT of faith in the GM to play in a game in which there weren't any.