Tutor My Pulp Cthulhu

soulforge

First Post
I've done Modern Cthulhu because I'm comfortable playing in my own age. I've done D&D, and other fantasy because everyone sorta buys into whatever I generally pull out about then... but now I wanna do 1920's london Cthulhu.

I need Help! I've seen the Godfather for 20's era info, but that's about it... sigh... I imagine that there must be some good general 20's info out there from Chaosium, Gurps, or someone? Even actual books that require the reading would be fine. ;)

I'm looking to not be 100% time accurate, but be able to bring the era to life.. there's not gaslight at that time right.. it's pretty much electricity. What level is medicine at, and firearms? I don't want to be particularly picky about the time, but just be able to provide a fun "atmosphere" of the time.. popular forms of entertainment and such.

thanks
 

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Ahhhh... another reason to alway's have a love/hate relationship with Chaosium. No bashing, but that's painful.

Well, that looks like a great supplement for what I want, but at that price it's a bit out of what I'm willing to spend. The most I ever spent was for the tact-tiles in a one fell swoop purchase.

If anyone knows of a place to pick that up cheaper elsewhere let me know.
 


soulforge said:
Ahhhh... another reason to alway's have a love/hate relationship with Chaosium. No bashing, but that's painful.

Well, i wouldn't quite blame Chaosium for that. it's an out of print book being sold by a private owner. i would search ebay, you can probably find it there for cheaper. Or not! ;)
 

1) A lot of the CoC sourcebooks and adventures (that are still in print or available through DriveThruRPG.com) will give some of the feel as you read them.

2) Movies! The Thin Man (there's a series off them), The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, many others. Now these are America of the '20s. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any specific for London of the '20s, but I'll think about it a bit. There would likely be some similarities.

3) Wikipedia (and the internet in general)! This has been a big help for my recent '20s CoC games. You can check out the styles of old cars or guns or whatever.

4) Yog-Sothoth.com! There is *much* to be found in the forums and throughout the rest of the site. There are quite a few regulars from across the pond too, and I'm sure they would be happy to answer your questions.

Those are the resources that get be through the tough times. Ia ia! :)
 

No. I don't mean to blame them. It was more meant tongue in cheek... It's sorta the thing that they right some amazing stuff them Chaosium folk do.. but then they seem to let it linger in out of print land for so long.
 

Gahhh! How could I forget the source.

HPL, Machen, Blackwood, Chambers, several others. You might not find a ton that are specifically set in London, but I think you could transplant much of what you find. Ramsey Campbell writes in Britain, but I haven't read him yet so I don't know the time period. Perhaps a passerby could help on that one.
 

OK, you asked for tutoring, so here's where I get picky. :lol:

The Godfather I was set in the 1940s- you might remember that Michael has just gotten back from fighting in WW2 at the start of the film. Godfather 2 has some scenes in the WW I and 1920s era, but unless your players are Italian immigrants they aren't going to be too pertinent.

(Incidentally, for the Prohibition version of the Godfather, see "Once Upon A Time in America").

The movies DeClench listed are all from the 40s, though some of the source material (such as Hammet's books) were written in the 1920s. Movies in the 1920s were still silent (the first major sound film didn't come out until around 1928).

(Side note: Ramsey Campbell is indeed British, but didn't start writing until the fifties. Some of his early Cthulhu stories would work in just about any time period, though).

Ok, enough irritating pedantry from me, here's my advice-

You can't really get a grip on the "average" 1920s game because there isn't going to be one, just like there isn't any average lifestyle in any period in history. Movies and source material cited in other threads will mostly focus on Jazz age, Prohibition gangster settings, which was of course only one part of life at the time. It's certainly not something Lovecraft wanted to deal with, unless hinting that the suspicious foreigners might be involved in bootlegging.

My suggestion is to decide the theme of the game you want to run, and then use that theme to focus in on the period. Like I said, a lot of the materials out there deal with Prohibition and gangsters. This is fine if you're looking to run a kind of hardboiled campaign, but not so helpful for assembling a group of academic Lovecraftian seekers.

For Academia, the recent Miskatonic sourcebook put out by Chaosium is set in the 1920s (ignore the modern-looking student on the cover). It's naturally not set in London, but should give a pretty good idea of what schools were like back then. I haven't looked at it yet, myself, so I can't say for sure. There's also an older sourcebook available in PDF, I have no idea how they relate.

Slightly related, the best literature from the time to look into would probably be Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, both of whom wrote about world travelling and the new youth movements. Hemmingway focused more on the former, Fitzgerald on the latter. They might not have much in the way of helpful details for the settings, though- since they were writing for the people of their time, they wouldn't have had much reason to explain how things were, any more than we'd need to tell a contemporary audience how to get on the internet.

Oh, last thing- what CoC base books do you have? Both BRP and D20 had articles on what things were like in the 1920s. The last BRP I have is fifth edition, but it had a price guide, notes on life, and a section on forensic medicine (short summary: yes to blood typing, no to DNA). There were also several timelines, not just important events, but "fringe" events like missing ships or rains of fish.

That's about all I can think of for right now. Like I say, I think you'll have a better time focusing on an aspect of the period instead of trying to absorb everything you can find. Talk it over with your players, too- it's likely they have conceptions about playing a historical game that will help narrow things down.
 

1920s...

The world was slowly shifting from the Imperialistic era of the late 1800s (as detailed in the fiction of Wells & Verne, and games like Space 1889), and WW1 had ended recently enough that wounds were still fresh. The world had lost between 20-50 million people to a flu pandemic (closely related to the Avian Flu that everyone's worried about today).

The World's Fairs were very popular- moreso than they are today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_fairs#1920s

Prohibition was a major driving force of social change in America (it lasted from 1920-1933) and the rise to power of organized crime.
 

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