King Arthur + Cthulhu + XPH

[Particle_Man]

I am thinking of merging much of Arthurian Adventures with the d20 Call of Cthulhu with the Expanded Psionics Handbook. Basically, Arcane Magic goes away, as do Black Knights (I can replace them with Tainted Knights from Unearthed Arcana). The only divine magic left is that of Hermits/Priests/Crusaders/Saints/White Knights of The One God.

As a loose plot line, Satan tries to summon aid vs. The One God, gets the Cthulhu crew, gets killed, and then Cthulhu take out the fey realms and all sources of arcane and druidic magic. Thus lots of magical beasts die. Meanwhile, on another plane, the psionic crew hear about this from a dying Merlin and decide to check out this new battlefront vs. their ancient enemies. They come in, and quickly adopt the local names and function as the new fey. So we have a King Arthur without Merlin or a Lady of the Lake, we have Cthulhu entities and taint running (well, moving in some manner) around, and some other new creatures that are like fey yet not resembling those that the knights, etc. encountered before.

So there is some tension in building up trust between the good guys (King Arthur's crew and the psionic survey teams) and the threat of the bad guys, plus all the tainted parts of the realm. I was also going to throw in Warlocks on the bad guy side, and allow the non-spell ranger on the psionic side. Arthurs side has the meat shields and the healers, the psionics have, well, psionics. Cthulhu just is.

Not sure how or if I will do sanity yet. Maybe just colour for NPC madness, but the PCs are Big Damn Heroes so the players can decide their own effects, or lack thereof.

Does this sound like a winner? Is there something else I should look into to add to the mix or to patch a hole?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think it has lots of potential, but I wouldn't have that kind of backstory.

I'd just file off the Arthurian & Mythos serial numbers and present a dark Celtic-oid quasi-Christian Romanesque world (without Celts, Christians or Romans) with divine magic and psionics as the two main supernatural power systems. That way, instead of having them follow in the footsteps of greatness, they get to become the legends.

Arthurian legend has a lot of Celtic stuff interwoven into it, so you might want to play that up a bit.

Are you familiar with the Slaine comic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sláine_(comics)) and/or RPG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaine_-_the_Roleplaying_Game)?

Have the Mythos/Far Realm beings be worshiped by your world's Celts, who receive their "Warping" power (one part Rage, one part Shifter shapechanging) by being exposed to raw chaos- not as an actual benefit granted by the inherently uncaring beings- as opposed to their now-dead Earth gods. If you have the RPG, you might even use the Warping as a replacement for Rage.

Add in a bit of Sword & Sorcery's Chaositech, and they'll make a nice foe for the quasi-Arthurians.

For your "Camelot," play should start near the beginning- the Round Table (or whatever you use as your version of it) has been established, and "Merlin" has educated and elevated "Arthur" to his position as king. However, the timing in this world is different from our legends: the darkness is upon Camelot even as it is being set up. In a sense, Camelot is the world's last best hope against uncaring annihilation by forces in the thrall of the Far Realms.

As such, instead of being a castle, perhaps its more of an Athenian City-State...Greyhawk/Waterdeep/Tanelorn... a city containing people- refugees from all the civilized races.

Race and Class choices should be interesting...

 

[Wycen]

I clicked on the thread title because it sounded cool. Then I read about the jumble of the devil, god and outer gods and suddenly I'm "mehh".

And I'm not sure why.

I guess because I didn't realize that Arthurian legend would mean getting rid of fantasy gods, the cool ones.

Thinking more about the old ones mythos, I'd wonder if your campaign was doomed from the beginning, or do the players have a 50/50 shot at success? By doomed from the beginning I mean like the Midnight or Dark Sun setting where eventually the bad stuff just eventually overwhelms the party.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And Wycen's post illustrates one reason why I wouldn't use the idea as you presented it.

By using things the players are intimately familiar with, they'd have certain preconceived notions about what to expect. Then, when you muck with it, some may find it jarring.

Personally, the TV series Hercules and Xena bugged me for similar reasons. Hercules messed with the Greek legends. Xena and Gabrielle OTOH, encountered personalities and movements separated by 1000's of years coupled with an almost Forrest Gump-ish type of extraordinary coincidence placing them at these historical nexuses- they knew everyone and did everything.

It was too much.

 

[Umbran]

I clicked on the thread title because it sounded cool. Then I read about the jumble of the devil, god and outer gods and suddenly I'm "mehh".

And I'm not sure why.

By using things the players are intimately familiar with, they'd have certain preconceived notions about what to expect. Then, when you muck with it, some may find it jarring.

My reaction is in line with these.

I am all for retellings of Arthurian myths. I kind of collect them. However, the least satisfying ones are usually the "Let's make it Arthurian, but not!" ones.

The point of doing King Arthur (or Robin Hood, or any well-known mythological or legendary theme) is to use the theme to set expectations. Some careful, well-considered deviations from the standard themes are an enrichment. But if you stray too far fromthe original, the audience asks, "So, why, exactly, is it important that this is King Arthur, when it doesn't resemble the stories I know at all?"

Ripping out all the magical underpinnings, and replacing them with a completely different set, seems to me to be a bit too far a deviation - farther than, say, the retellings I've seen with Arthur in modern times. I have to wonder why Arthur is at all important to this story.

 

[Nifft]

Someone very clever once showed me that the root of "Eldritch" is "Elvish".

Faeries fascinate, charm, intoxicate mortals and eventually drive us mad. That's not TOO far off what critters from the Far Realms do right out of the box. The major difference is the tentacles.

I'd spin it that the ancient horrors were always there, but people made the insanity-inducing interlopers mentally acceptable by calling them "Fairies", and made up all sorts of stories about how to deal with them.

You could make it such that fey illusions & glamors were always just the human mind trying to make sense of inherently incomprehensible input.

I do like the idea of the Round Table vs. the Table of Insane Geometries.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Faeries fascinate, charm, intoxicate mortals and eventually drive us mad. That's not TOO far off what critters from the Far Realms do right out of the box. The major difference is the tentacles.

Who said that Fey don't have tentacles?

What you said has a lot of potential- I messed around with the Fey in one campaign by making them into crashlanded & stranded Greys (Greys - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) who used their time & space warping tech to create what the natives called "Underhill"... It was great having a twist on a place in which you could lose years by staying an hour, and that was obviously much larger inside than outside.

IOW, I agree that making the Fey into creatures of the Far Realms has a lot of potential!

And, as I recall, wasn't there an article (in Dragon or some such) about Illithids that had gone to the Far Realms and returned?

 

[Andor]

It sounds really confused to me. I mean to the point where you might as well throw in Norse ninjas and Cherokee mecha pilots because, Hey it can't possibly make any less sense.

If you have Satan and The One God, then where the heck is Cthulu coming from? Who is this psionic crew? Why Arthur? Why eat all the fey? Why not throw in vampire cowboys on giant caterpillars?

I dunno. Just seems like too much of a mess to me.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You might want to get your hands on Dragon #330- it concentrates on the Far Realms- and this Wiki on the Mythos is pretty good.

Cthulhu Mythos - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I especially like how it includes the elemental link August Derleth brought up...it gives a potential hook for misguided totemic barbarian clans, shamen and druids to hang on to.

That also gives you the ability to cast them as the Elemental Princes of Evil- again, a title thrust upon them by mortals ignorant of their true natures- giving you the ability to import Temple of Elemental Evil stuff into your campaign, should you so decide.

 

[Paka]

There was a thread sorta-kinda-maybe like this on RPG.net a long while ago with some Ars Magica tossed into the mix. Here are my favorite bits that I threw into the Lovecraftian Arthur/Arthurian Lovecraft stew.

The Lady in the Lake is not dead but sleeping.

Lancelot du Lac's ancestral home, Innsmouth Keep, is known for its odd commoners, all of whom have a queer and hungry look about them.

Many peasants worship odd pagan gods, Dagon and a the queer worm of Innsmouth, the hydra.

Despite Lancelot's prowess in battle, the King shouldn't allow his wife to be guarded by that one. No good can come with Camelot's friendship with him.

A white stag was found drowned in a dank pool near Lancelot's keep. It is an omen, I tell ye.

When the stars are right, Camelot will fall.

King Pellinore and Sir Palomides hunt the Questing Beast. They arrive at manors all over the One King's lands, eyes bloodshot, hands shaky, asking questions about trails and spoor.

Rumors abound concerning the Beast and the most disquieting is that they aren't hunting her anymore. They found her...or she found them and is nesting in their chests.

Now they're hunting for a safe way to get her out of their bodies.

Tintagel Covenant studies the idea that Arthur wasn't the first One King and won't be the last. Allegedy, Merlin visited them at the founding of their covenant, aided them in the casting of their wards and charms that keep their magi, grogs and companions safe.

I hear tell the men and women of the covenant know something about the fall of Camelot and are studying the cracks in the kingdom and the forces that are causing the pressure creating those cracks.

Divination, histories and good ole fashioned questing all come into play as they study our golden kingdom and what could cause it to become a forgotten relic under a Roman or Saxom boot.

Their knowledge is a terrible thing and the weight upon them is obvious. They drag it around like an anvil around their necks.

The Lord in Yellow has his unholy banner. Knights who ride into battle against him are often found later, mad hermits, talking about a banner that seemed to be beyond time, a color that hurt their minds...

The witches say Merlin lives life backwards and began his life at the End of Time and will die when the world was birthed.

It is this vision, the scene of his birth that drives him. He knows who the players are, who will be there and who must do what in the now.

In year of the Blue Winter the Order of Hermes had a Grand Tribunal concerning threats not of God, nor Satan nor Mundane nor Arcane.

It was decided there was a threat as yet unnamed, using magicks not of this world and walking through Parma Fabulae as if they were soft cotton.

Those who can see the future said that in another place and time it was Tremere who fell. They gave in to temptation and took the power of blood over the art of magic.

In this place Criamon has fallen. Their struggle and pursuit of the Riddle that is the world has led them into its hands.

What is it?

We don't yet know.

Redcaps have been ordered to keep their eyes open and write down their findings.

The Quesitor have begun a new secret society from Houses across the Order made up of those with minds strong enough to see these threats and not lose their mind.

Magus Dextus Ward was shown to the Tribunal, a stark raving madman through dealings with this Enemy Not to be Named. His covenant fell into the ocean from its island home off Portugal's shores.

Dextus is a warning, this could happen to you. Your covenant might not fall into the sea but if we aren't carefuly your covenant will indeed fall. We are the Magi of the Order of Hermes with roots back to Egypt and beyond. We must fight this thing because the nobles, the kings the peasants are not equipped and are not Gifted.

As always, the task falls to us.