Campaign advice for a Cthulhu Mythos-inspired Pathfinder game


3.5/d20/OGL


First off, sorry if this is in the wrong area. While I'm a veteran pathfinder player, I haven't gone on the forums here much.

In one of the gaming group's I'm part of, we're making plans for me to run a campaign in the d20 Call of Cthulhu system, once our current story arc in the main game ends. We have quite some time before that ends though, and some of the players really want to get into something Cthulhu inspired sooner. So I'm planning a Cthulhu inspired pathfinder game to act as a prelude, that we can do online while we finish up the other game. The problem is, while I've GM'd for a number of years now, I have very limited experience with horror games. So I wanted to see if anyone else had some good ideas.

Some additional details... The future CoC game I'll be running will be set in the modern era (post-2000). My first adventure will involve the players getting hired by the U.S. Government to investigate a ruin where a bunch of military troops disappeared. My plan is that it will be found by miners in Afghanistan, the miners disappear, the military goes in to check on them, they disappear. Only thing that anyone knows is they got an extremely garbled radio transmission indicating something supernatural is going on. So the party is hired as the closest thing to supernatural experts that can be found. I'm having everyone work in some sort of first- hand experience with the supernatural to justify that.

Anyway, the party will go in with another military unit, and quickly start getting picked off/stalked by monsters. While trying to investigate (or escape) the ruin, they'll end up learning somehow that Nyarlathotep has been imprisoned here for some time, and now that the temple is revealed again, a cult is now trying to release him. Either through the pc's actions, or inactions, Nyarlathotep will end up being released. The rest of the campaign will be spent dealing with the aftermath.

An idea for a campaign element I had was to throw in occasional story arcs where they have dreams/visions of other points in history where people were trying to stop the things-that- man-was-not-meant-to-know. I want to use that to drive home the Cthulhu theme that you can't stop the great old ones, at best you can delay them for a while... Metagame wise though, a lot of this group is pretty new to rpg's, and has only played 3.5 before, so I also wanted to use this as a chance to let people try out new systems. I.e., do a vision of the future, which we would play through using shadowrun. My current idea for the prelude campaign, using pathfinder, was derived from those ideas. I'll just be using this before the game, not after. Maybe have their characters from the CoC game wake up from the dream/vision of this campaign at the very start of this adventure.

So with that in mind, since that campaign will start with Nyarlathotep imprisoned, I thought it would be good to have this one end there. I'm going to be importing pathfinder stuff onto the planet earth, in a Conan style "before the rise of the sons of Aryas" sort of ancient time. So I will be including non-human races, magic, all that. I'm tentatively planning on this being straight pathfinder, just sans golarion.

I'm going to be starting with a modified version of an adventure I found on drivethrurpg called "Nevermore", a horror adventure inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe story. That adventure will end with Nyarlathotep being released into the world. I want the campaign to end with the PC's imprisoning Nyarlathotep. Ideally, it should be a Pyrrhic victory for them (I thought it might be cool to have their spirits still guarding the place in the future campaign, though that's more of a "could be a fun tie-in" sorta thing, not a necessity).

What I need are ideas for how to tie one end to the other. I'm probably going to start at a higher level (not sure how high yet), and I may include mythic material down the road, so the pc's have a marginal chance of surviving a fight with Nyarlathotep long enough to imprison him. Does anyone have any ideas for campaign seeds, adventure ideas, anything like that. I don't need someone to write it for me or anything. I just need some ideas to get me started on getting from point a to point b. I'm looking specifically for stuff for the pathfinder game, though I'd welcome any ideas for the CoC game too.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

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