We got the excellent Dagon demonomicon article in Dragon magazine and I want more. I understand that there are probably licensing issues, but is there an "unofficial" updated pantheon for the Cthulhu mythos for my D&D campaign? I'd love to have this pantheon but all I have are Dagon and my 1st Ed Dieties and Demigods.
Thanks in advance,
-Darren
Contributor
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We got the excellent Dagon demonomicon article in Dragon magazine and I want more. I understand that there are probably licensing issues, but is there an "unofficial" updated pantheon for the Cthulhu mythos for my D&D campaign? I'd love to have this pantheon but all I have are Dagon and my 1st Ed Dieties and Demigods.
Thanks in advance,
-Darren
There's the Call of Cthulhu d20 game that Wizards of the Coast put out shortly after third edition came out. :)
There's the Call of Cthulhu d20 game that Wizards of the Coast put out shortly after third edition came out. :)We got the excellent Dagon demonomicon article in Dragon magazine and I want more. I understand that there are probably licensing issues, but is there an "unofficial" updated pantheon for the Cthulhu mythos for my D&D campaign? I'd love to have this pantheon but all I have are Dagon and my 1st Ed Dieties and Demigods.
Thanks in advance,
-Darren
I like stealing monsters out of this to throw into my DnD games. It really tends to throw off players who have seen every monster in the MM.
*It's a pretty fun game too, but CoC games are hard to do right, because everyone is going to end up dead or insane if you are doing it right. And the hard part is making sure no one ends up dying hours before the others, and thus ends up as a spectator.
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...and thus ends up as a spectator.Heh. I read this as "...and thus ends up as a specter." I thought to myself, "How would that suck?"
:D
Are you kidding? Specters and those other incorporeal-types have nothing on us corporeal undead. Sure they might be a tad more powerful, can float through walls, and drain the life right out of an adventurer, but can they drink a beer? Shake someone's hand? No! Ha, take that specter!
There's the Call of Cthulhu d20 game that Wizards of the Coast put out shortly after third edition came out. :)We got the excellent Dagon demonomicon article in Dragon magazine and I want more. I understand that there are probably licensing issues, but is there an "unofficial" updated pantheon for the Cthulhu mythos for my D&D campaign? I'd love to have this pantheon but all I have are Dagon and my 1st Ed Dieties and Demigods.
Thanks in advance,
-Darren
Just to reinforce what Mike said here, not only do you have d20 stats for Cthulhu creatures and the like in this book, there is literally an appendix in the back that details the various Cthulhu powers as D&D deities, and ranks them in terms of D&D deities, with domains, etc.
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Contributor
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Are you kidding? Specters and those other incorporeal-types have nothing on us corporeal undead. Sure they might be a tad more powerful, can float through walls, and drain the life right out of an adventurer, but can they drink a beer? Shake someone's hand? No! Ha, take that specter!
Dude... They can float through walls... right into the girls' locker room! If I were an incorporeal undead, that's totally where I'd haunt. ;P
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*It's a pretty fun game too, but CoC games are hard to do right, because everyone is going to end up dead or insane if you are doing it right. And the hard part is making sure no one ends up dying hours before the others, and thus ends up as a spectator.
I run CoC more than D&D, and more often than not my D&D sessions look frighteningly close to my CoC games...but that's not the point; I always allow my players back into the game if they die early (within the first half of the game). If a player pitches too early, I allow him or her to bring in their APC (Alt PC). All my players keep APCs as standbys in case their main persona goes down. I try to gauge (VERY hard, indeed) where I think, in the story, people will have the most trouble, and plan for the introduction of a new PC at those points. CoC doesn't allow, generally speaking, for a lot of attachment to PCs, so no-one is usually too broken up when their investigator goes down.
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The lack of attachment to characters is a factor that really bothers me in CoC. How can you hope to provide a horrifiying experiance to the player's if they dont have some sort of emotional attachment to their characters well being.I really want to run a long running campaign in the future again (just finished Shadow of Yog-Sothoth) without the player's feeling like their characters are surving purely by DM fiat. Back up characters are fine but then you lose all sorts of clues and sub plots and other details.For instance in the above mentioned campaign my players had a real hatred for Carl Stanford that developed over the course of the campaign, then during an unfortunate encounter with some mythos creatures 2 of the 3 players in the group got smeared across the ruin. Later when the final encounter with Stanford happend while they defeated him it didnt hold the same feeling of triumph for the players and their new characters.One of the corner stones of CoC is the idea that mankind are like bugs beneath the boots of the mythos and therefore cannot hope to be able to win. In fiction that works well but in a game especailly one as investigative it seems that the so called heroes deserve an edge above the common man.Im mean look at how many times Mulder and Sculley in the X-files managed to survive all the crazy adventures they went on, Ganted they didnt fight Shoggoths or Cthulhu but still encountered some deadly foes be they paranormal or mundane.Perhaps its my style as a DM that needs to be fixed, but when I read or hear about other peoples games they seem to be more or less on par when it comes to PC death and the amount of violence as oppossed to stealth and investigation. I hope to run Beyound the Mountains of Madness, the Walker in the Wastes (if I can ever find a bloody copy), or Masks of Narlyhotep some time in the future but if I do I want the game experiance to be a rewarding one for my players and myself as we only have so much gaming time available to us with other things in our lives going on. I love the mythos and I like the concept of the Basic Roleplaying Rules but I do think they need some major tweaking after how ever many decades the game has been out for. Yet I get the feeling when I voice this thought that Im sure to be condemed for heresy by those folk out there that feel this classic system aint broken and therfore dosent require fixin.Yeah....then again I could just be off my meds again.
I once was in a GURPS: Supers game that had a Cthulu-esque type adventure. It was in the adventure supplement GURPS made for Supers. That was fun. And most of the the group survived.
A few years ago I toyed with the idea of mixing Mage: The Ascension (2E) with CoC. Never got around to actually doing it tho. Over than those two scenarios I have no idea how to give a CoC game any type of longevity.
It was pretty ironic when they made D20 Cthulu. Wasn't one of the reasons TSR changed the original Dieties and Demigods because Chaosism (or whoever owned the liscense back then)threatened to sue over copyright infringment?
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Contributor
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It was pretty ironic when they made D20 Cthulu. Wasn't one of the reasons TSR changed the original Dieties and Demigods because Chaosism (or whoever owned the liscense back then)threatened to sue over copyright infringment?
As I understand it, yes, that's right. Unlike TSR, though, Wizards of the Coast has a legal department and actually got permission to do the d20 version.
Creative Director
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It was pretty ironic when they made D20 Cthulu. Wasn't one of the reasons TSR changed the original Dieties and Demigods because Chaosism (or whoever owned the liscense back then)threatened to sue over copyright infringment?
Yeah, but things like that work a lot better when you work hand in hand with the other company from the start. But the main reason WotC wanted to do a d20 Call of Cthulhu was to show at the start how the d20 system could be adapted to any sort of game; Call of Cthulhu was not only the 2nd oldest RPG still in print after D&D, but was also about as far from D&D as you could get.
I wish they'd update some of those Cthulhu monsters. That's the first thing I thought of when I saw the MM5 cover, but I doubt it. It'd be cool to see a mi-go or something in a Creature Catalog later.