Luke's Crimson Throne Campaign

Game Master GM Crimson

Yeah, Smith. Sending positive vibes your way.

Thanks for the kind thoughts.

I seem to be currently cycling through symptoms. I got my first taste of muscle pain yesterday (my legs hurt so bad yesterday morning that I couldn't get back to sleep for over an hour); not so bad now. On the positive side, it's been 36+ hours since I've had a fever, so the accompanying headaches/pressure are also gone.

If I can make it through the weekend without things seriously escalating, I think I'll be in the clear.

Nebbin thinks we should go ... or he would if he were there. :)

I think I'm through the worst of it. Hopefully, I'll be back in full (gaming) stride by tomorrow. (Crappy night sleeping last night, so multiple naps are penciled in for today.)

Thank Milani!

Rest up, Kayleigh. Your friends are bound to need your healing touch. :P

Do any of y'all have playing experience in Call of Cthulhu? I'm thinking very seriously about trying to spin up a big campaign using the Pulp rules and am looking for advice.

I've played some Pulp Cthulhu and loved it. While I haven't played the original, from all I've heard it's an upgrade from the standard game.

Since I was playing, I can only talk about it from that angle, but characters are more robust than in the original game, which makes combat a more viable option. Instead of run away / go insane / die, it's run away / try to kill it / go insane / die.

It's still better not to get attached to your characters, but they might knock off some cultists or minor eldritch horrors along the way. The way it's done is mostly through a more generous point buy at the beginning, and healing rules that make recoveries from wounds somewhat quicker. If being shot in the original is very likely to kill you, being shot a couple of times in pulp is likely to kill you.

It does change the feel of the game (as I've been told by those who have played both). Original is more Sherlock Holmes + eldritch horror, mostly investigation, maybe terrifying combat, and typically death. Pulp is more like Indiana Jones, a mix of investigation and combat, and a chance you might make it.

I'm also a total sucker for the default slightly later period setting of the 1920's - 1930's. There's a Campaign Book called Berlin: The Wicked City set in Weimar Germany I've been eying for a while now. Someday I'd really like to run it.

Um, do you mean you're thinking about running it here in the boards? <drools greedily>.

Do any of y'all have playing experience in Call of Cthulhu? I'm thinking very seriously about trying to spin up a big campaign using the Pulp rules and am looking for advice.

I've never even tried the system before.

Um, do you mean you're thinking about running it here in the boards?

Probably, yes. I have alot of reading to do to figure out which plot, or if I'm going homebrew. Which means sneaking several pdf purchases past my wife still. I can only do that at a certain rate. The upcoming Garund book put me off that project right about the time my Mythos interest was spiking. I'm definitely buying Harlem Unbound and Children of Fear for the background anyway. Masks and Horror on the Orient both look really good from afar.

Tassira: Porting over from Pathfinder, it's a little hard to grasp at first. But it doesn't take long to adjust because it's very simple.

Characters have an Archetype and an Occupation that give bonuses to personal stats and access to certain skills. By mixing and matching the two you can create more or less specialized characters.

For example, Grease Monkey archetype paired with Driver occupation gives you a pretty good idea of what the character is good at doing.

If you wanted a more generalized character you might go with something like Steadfast archetype and Journalist occupation to make a moral crusader type who can both investigate and fight.

You choices determine what skills you start with and weight certain personal attributes like Strength or Intelligence with a bonus. You have a pool of points to distribute across your skills.

Most everything that requires a dice roll uses 1d100 to resolve. These are usually skill checks, and combat is a skill check as well. You succeed if you roll under your points in a skill. For example, if you want to shoot someone with a pistol, you would roll the Firearms (Handguns) skill check. If you have 50 points in the Skill you'd hit on a 1-50 and miss on 51-100. Sneaking around or fixing a radio works exactly the same way. Roll d100 and succeed if you roll under your skill points in the appropriate skill.

Never tried CoC. A system that rewards low dice-rolling does have a certain appeal, however.

If I can avoid getting a high temperature today, I might get released back into society today when I hear from my covid tracker.

Ha! As someone who tends to be unlucky with the dice in Pathfinder, I thought the same thing Kayleigh. Guess what? I tend to roll freakishly high in CoC. If you're unlucky with dice, it seems you're plain unlucky with dice.

There is one case at least where it's good to roll high. There are no levels in CoC. Instead players track which of their skills they have used successfully. After a period of time players get to see if their character has improved in those skills they've used. They roll a 1d100 for each one and if the roll is higher than their current points in the skill, they add +1d10 (if I remember correctly) to it.

This means it's easy to advance a skill that the character has few points in, but those skills they're already very good at are harder to improve. This is offset some by frequency of using the skill. For example if a character has 80 points in First Aid they'd have to roll over 80 to advance the skill. But First Aid will probably get used a lot so more chances to improve it. On the other hand a skill like Electrical Engineering might come up only rarely. With 40 points invested, it's way easier to improve it but there may be fewer opportunities to do so.

As I recall, personal attributes don't change so Health, etc. doesn't increase over time. You do get to roll to regain Sanity and Luck points.

If you want to see what a created character looks like I've posted the one I made below.

Lian's core concept is she's an adrenaline junkie (Archetype: Thrill Seeker). She's from Shanghai originally and her family is filthy rich. She has been living in New York City for 10 years, graduating from Hunter College and then medical school at NYU. She's currently doing her surgical (of course, that's where the action is) residency (Occupation: Medical Doctor).

Her hobbies are flying (she's a licensed pilot and owns her own biplane) and motorcycling (she has her own Harley). She also skis and has done some mountain climbing. All this stuff is reflected in her skills and the points invested in them.

Her party role is doctor/medic of course, but she's also the driver & pilot, and knows the basics of mechanical repair. She's a good talker when violence is best avoided, and serves as the party's money bags patron.

Lian "Louise" Zhao

Looks like Lian's ready to go.

I've been reading the Keeper's Guide and have the Investigator's Handbook on deck. Next wave will be the Grimoire, the Pulp rules and one of the campaigns - probably Masks. I have a handful of scenarios to study already, but I want to see one (or three) of their masterpiece campaigns up-close before deciding if I want to do the homebrew thing or if I'm just running one of those because they're that good. I got a glimpse of the intro chapter of Masks and was blown away.

If it's homebrew, I already have a pile of locations and a focus for the Mythos in my head. And a mountain of background reading to do. :)

Oh, Lian's my old character from the previous Pulp Cthulhu game I played in. She's set up as a 1932 character and very much a New Yorker, so who knows if she's portable to something new.

My only remaining bit of PbP gming is I actually started a CoC game on play-by-discord with a few RL friends.

I'm running classic rather than Pulp but you're basically cranking it up to pulp serials (Flash Gordon) with higher combat stats and more fantastical elements as opposed to a purely Lovecraftian world. Pulp is probably better for the boards.

Regardless the system works for asynchronous play fairly well and there are TONS of actual plays you can listen to, or published adventures to read so you can get a sense of pacing, level of danger, and whatnot. Frankly it's a pretty easy game to run once your pieces are in place and I think it'll fit your style beautifully. Your take on CoTC is closer to a Call of Cthulhu game than a conventional Pathfinder game in some ways.

Welcome back to the world Kayleigh!

Welcome back to the world Kayleigh!

Thank you! It was nice to eat something that wasn't soup, pasta, boxed mac & cheese, or frozen chicken nuggets. Plus, I took a walk yesterday with no side effects. I lucked out and only had minimal respiratory issues (mainly just a light cough) in my encounter with covid-19; it could've been much worse. Sis is finally feeling better, too.

Well s@+$. Seems like Google's unplugged some part of their Site's support on me. I can't get the site manager to load anymore. I may have to look for another home for the thread's website. They've been warning me to switch versions for a while, but their converter turns my site into garbage.

I've been playing around in Roll20. Guess its time to look at it in earnest.

Anyone have an opinion?

I am not a huge fan of Roll20 for PBP games. Part of that is because I can't get it to load on the main computer I use (though I'm looking at a new computer, which could resolve that problem at least), but it just feels like it takes longer to load and ... frustrates me.

If you're just talking about the maps, I like Google Drawings (I know a lot of people use Google Slides, but I don't think those work as well as Drawings).

I may end up just paying for some Wordpress hosting and be done with it. I setup something in roll20 to play around but I’m not entirely happy with it. There are a few more tutorials I can watch this evening to help me with the decision. I’ve been unable to manage the google site now for about 48 hours.

That's so frustrating. Is there a customer service email that might be able to help?

I use Roll20 for the game I run, just for the mapping capabilities. It's a bit of work at times, but not too bad IMHO.

I'm afraid I don't have much experience with any of them. Sorry!

ok I need a test dummy to register on my site. It's locked down, so I need an email address to permit you as a subscriber. Drop me a PM or a post here with the email address you want connected to the new site and I'll add you as a subscriber.

You can get to the homepage here. There's literally no content there yet, but there are some menu choices.

I'm trialing a wordpress plug-in out of the gate to manage image maps, so if you get in, have a click on Old Korvosa island.

@Luke: PMed you.

Update! Now I get the Old Korvosa map-in-progress.

Thanks for all the work you've done on the maps; I use and appreciate them.

You got it. I know I owe a post and will definitely get it done this weekend. I'm trying to pull-off a total hot-swap of the website this weekend before I completely lose some of the source. I'm getting the hang of the new editor and have 5000x the space on this new site, along with the flexibility of dipping down to html or even writing some php if needed. I wonder if there's a character sheet plug-in...

Everyone else should go ahead and send me a contact email so I can register you on the new site. I'll be taking the google site down asap.

I got in to take a quick look around the new site. It looks great, and seems a little faster maybe. The clickable locations work really well and are very convenient. I like! Thanks for putting in so much work!

Glad you like it. The clickable image plug-in is pretty easy to use and I think once I get some more time to play with it, some other ideas will sprout. I can see leveraging it pretty easily for combat tokens when the time comes.

I'm plowing thru the CoC rules like a champ. I picked up the MM, the Grimoire, the Field Guide and the Pulp rules on pdf and the ideas for the homebrew are popping left and right. I think once we've moved (and my son's off to college), I should have time to keep two threads going at once and can start to think seriously about players and stuff. My last tier of pdf contraband to sneak past the wife are the pdfs of the big campaigns. 'Masks' is inspiring.

"My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives."

Ha! Nice reference with that quote. Just don't get yourself into trouble sneaking those PDFs past your wife! <shiver>

Hey I may need to be opn autopilot for a week. MAJOR incident at work.

Gotcha Regeris. Hope everything comes out ok.

Seconded.

My curiosity is overwhelming now...

Seconded. ;)

I hope it's nothing too terrible Regeris.

Hey all! It's politically terrible but not personally terrible. Employer launched a union-busting drive and it completely took things over. Still ongoing but the initial few days completely did me in. Back in action!

So sorry guys. This house-hunting thing is killing independent Luke! If I'm not driving across the state to look at something, I'm poring over listings online with the wife. I've had half a post sitting on my desktop for a solid week and just haven't had the juice to finish it.

Hey, don't sweat it on the house-hunting front. That stuff's important.

Yeah. And hard right now (at least where I am) because everything is selling SO fast. I have no idea how my wife and I are going to manage when we start looking for a new place, considering I'm an hour away and our work schedules vary so much.

Take your time Luke. It's a big decision and yeah, terribly time consuming. Hopefully the housing market there is as nuts as it is here. I have a co-worker who just finally closed on a house here after several months of looking and losing quite a few bidding wars on other places.

Yes it's red-hot here. Our house is sold as of 5/19, so now's the time for us to be hunting. Happily I sold my place to friends who have local family backup. They're letting us stay here while we hunt, but of course I want to get our butts out of their way. And I gotta move my boy up to Gainesville for college in the middle of all of that.

So if you know of anyone selling a nice house and five acres of woods in north-central florida, send em my way. lol

Ooof house-hunting is hell on earth, good luck! Hope you get some nice property.

I figured it was worth checking. Here's our first mention of the seneschal, back in 2017!

More here.

And here.

Sorry it took a while to post. I got my 1st covid-19 shot on Thursday and it whammied me, bad headache and fatigue for a couple of days.

Hope you feel better soon, Emi. One month down for me--I've got two more 'til I can get my shots.

I get my second shot on Wednesday. My wife and daughter are on Saturday and my son is May 1st and then we are done. Everyone I know who's gotten the second shot had side effects, so I expect to be a little down on Thursday.

And I think we may be done house-hunting! There are no signatures yet or popping corks, but I think we've worked out an agreement on a place in Floral City, Florida (that's a real place, you can look it up) that we've fallen for. If it's true, and we can stop driving all over the countryside and running ourselves stupid.

If it makes you feel better, I had no side effects from the second shot, other than a slight headache day of (and a little arm soreness).

--

Congrats on the potential house.

Thanks, and I have a mac-daddy gaming table to put in it too. Now you guys are all going to have to come down for an honest-to-Gozreh table session once I get the place hooked up...

Sorry, more house stuff interrupted my posting time this morning and I just decided to post what I had. We did execute on that house so that part is done. I'll consider myself very lucky to have gotten out of the market at right about the same value as I went in. We're just leaving the city, trading location for land. Now we have to do all the bank, inspection, appraisal stuff. I hope I never have to do this again. The wife and I are now trying to out-do one another naming the new hacienda. Any help winning that contest would, of course, be appreciated.

@Nebbin, that second shot definitely smacked me. I had an ugly fever for about 18 hours and still have a large swollen lymph node (a pretty common side-effect, it turns out). Whatever. Got my armor.

Gonna finish that post...