Jürgen Hubert
First Post
After reading the advice in Call of Cthulhu d20 on doing a D&D/Cthulhu crossover, I'm wondering how to pull this off. While it would feel the most realistic to create a new D&D fantasy world from scratch and incorporate the Cthulhu Mythos in it, that would require a lot of work - and I'm already involved in a major worldbuilding effort (see my signature).
So I thought it would be best to seek out an existing, published D&D campaign setting to use as the "mundane layer" above the Cthulhu Mythos, just as our modern-day world represents the mundane layer that obscures the terrible realities of the Mythos universe. To be useable, it should fulfill the following criteria:
- It should be a relatively "low-key" setting - most people won't live much differently than in our Middle Ages (or Renaissance), and magic and magic items should be relatively rare. It should be recognizeable to the players, and not have a huge number of fantastic elements. In other words, something like the Scarred Lands would be right out - it's hard to make the Cthulhu Mythos work effectively when the very land is formed out of the bodies of gigantic creatures (the titans). Humans and near-humans should be the dominant species, and truely abnormal monsters should mostly be legends or live in far-off land (at least, as far as most people know...).
- Divine powers should be low-key. There should always be some uncertaincy whether the gods of humanity exist (and in a Mythos universe, they of course don't exist, or are weak, feeble things before the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods). It should be possible to remove clerics entirely from the setting, or reduce them to some sort of prestige class, without making the setting inconsistent.
Does anyone know of a published setting that fits this descriptions? From what I've heard, Kalamar is supposed to be fairly low-key, but I don't know all that much about it...
So I thought it would be best to seek out an existing, published D&D campaign setting to use as the "mundane layer" above the Cthulhu Mythos, just as our modern-day world represents the mundane layer that obscures the terrible realities of the Mythos universe. To be useable, it should fulfill the following criteria:
- It should be a relatively "low-key" setting - most people won't live much differently than in our Middle Ages (or Renaissance), and magic and magic items should be relatively rare. It should be recognizeable to the players, and not have a huge number of fantastic elements. In other words, something like the Scarred Lands would be right out - it's hard to make the Cthulhu Mythos work effectively when the very land is formed out of the bodies of gigantic creatures (the titans). Humans and near-humans should be the dominant species, and truely abnormal monsters should mostly be legends or live in far-off land (at least, as far as most people know...).
- Divine powers should be low-key. There should always be some uncertaincy whether the gods of humanity exist (and in a Mythos universe, they of course don't exist, or are weak, feeble things before the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods). It should be possible to remove clerics entirely from the setting, or reduce them to some sort of prestige class, without making the setting inconsistent.
Does anyone know of a published setting that fits this descriptions? From what I've heard, Kalamar is supposed to be fairly low-key, but I don't know all that much about it...
