RPG systems frozen in time

[Bohandas]

I find it hard to believe that texts that give you magic powers and/or drive you insane would be freely available via google search but...

Even if not by google search than eventually someone would end up emailing it around like the tape in Rings or reading it out loud over the air like in Fistful of Boomstick or Scary Movie 3

 

[payn]

Even if not by google search than eventually someone would end up emailing it around like the tape in Rings or reading it out loud over the air like in Fistful of Boomstick or Scary Movie 3

Looking back it begs the question then if any tech will simply disseminate mythos? Why did the printing press not get copies in every library or even newspapers? The radio has been widely around since the 1920's. Why wasn't anything read aloud over the air waves back then? I find this tech argument dog doesnt hunt.

 

[MGibster]

It occurs to me that Call of Cthulhu would have to work a lot differently in a modern setting since there's not really such a thing as a rare or esoteric book anymore. You're one google search away from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Popul Vuh, the Gospel of Judas, the Enuma Elish, the Book of the Subgenius, the Zohar, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegestus, Revolt in the Stars, the Ars Goetia - whatever you want - and I'm pretty sure the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon would be no different if they were real

I remember the Dead Sea Scrolls being big news in the 1990s when they were using new imagery techology to examin them. The thing about the scrolls is there are millions and millions of people interested in them for both religious and historical reasons. Most people, even experts in the occult, have no idea the Necronomicon exists. And those who have copies of the book are unlikely to share it with the rest of the world either because they're aware of the danger or because they don't want to share power with anyone else.

Delta Green, which is a descendent of Call of Cthulhu, explains why the mythos hasn't been exposed even in the modern era with digitization and everyone walking around with a camera in their pocket. Encounters with the mythos are vanishingly rare, brief, and typically destructive. We don't tend to see it that way because we're playing a game where we engage with the mythos, but how many copies of the Necronomicon even exist? You've got the original 8th century manuscript, the 10th century Greek translation, the 13th century Latin translation, and maybe there are others.

 

[GrimCo]

In my games, magic/supernatural and tech don't really love each other. So all those mystic books, when scanned or photocopied or photographed, they miss something, something that's perceived only by human eye and brain directly reading from manuscript. Same with some of the eldritch horror, they just don't bounce light in a way needed to be properly captured on film/video. Call it aura or energy that interacts directly with human one and causes Sanity loss. Ones that do show on film/video, those are dismissed as CGI or VFX.

I ran adventure where players investigated cult. They went trough lot's of trouble finding out about cult, where it is, what they try to do (summon eldricht horror), only to find out in the end that cult used scanned copy of Necronomicon found on internet whose incantations lacked crucial chants that don't show on scans so both investigators and cult spent lot's of time and resources for - nothing.