|
It depends on what you are going for. If you want the feel of a Lovecraft story where the protagonists are reluctant ordinary people that have no idea what they are getting into, then I agree that PF may not be the best choice.
That doesn't sound like what the OP is talking about, though.
If you are looking for an aberrant-themed campaign that takes place in a high fantasy setting, the Pathfinder rules and campaign setting can work just fine. I've had an idea of my own formulating the past couple of weeks for just such a campaign. The challenge is making Cthulhu and his ilk more horrible to imagine than the usual demons/dragons/orc hordes. In terms of sheer destructive force, a plot like the one outlined in the OP sounds like it could fit the bill and be a lot of fun.
It's a semantic argument.
All you have to do is take the physical (supernatural) laws in existence, make them wrong somehow, and freak people out by doing so.
Casting a sleep spell....now due to dm fiat, it has a proclivity to also summon zoogs that will eat the sleepers' calf muscles raw.
Healing spells sometimes stretch the skin too much, and you can end up with bags of sickly grey rhinoceros flesh hanging off of your limbs.
It takes some work, but it can be done.
You win, because......it's boring.
Some ideas to make PF more Lovecraftian;
Make magic very rare. No magic shops anywhere.
Magic items must be taken from someone else and will always have a negative aspect to it, i.e. a magic sword that slowly turns the weilder into a DM controlled mass murderer, a wand that causes 1/10 of it's damage to the caster and so on.
Magic users should be feared and mistrusted by commoners.
Limit healing magic or make it corrupting.
Summoning spells should require a control check to see if the summoned obeys the caster or attacks the party.
Small chance that a summoning spell will bring in an aberration instead of the intended creature.
Everyone is doomed from the start and nothing they do will change that doom.
The mythos is more than just the "purists" stories like Haunter in the dark, and the colours out of space, Darkwing. The dreamland stories alone offer lovecraftian model for adventure and the mythos, which pathfinder works easily with.
But you can get more purist with it.
Focus on low level play, using the slow experience track, spin out a long slowly expanding investigative plot, using the three clue rule, use lots of social and skills based challenges, and intersperse this with humanoid and monsterous humanoid encounters. You can even have supernatural elements like undead, haunts and magic items. Hell even spells.
What is important is that the Mythos does not conform to the characters or the players expect the game to work, that the mythos is 'other'. It doesn't work by the rules of the world as the character think it works.
The purist feel comes from the slowly unravelling truth of this otherness, and the hopelessness of trying to stand against the mythos. DnD, and pathfinder by extension are not games naturally set up for the PC's to be made to fail, but such campaign can be run within the rules.
There is nothing to stop an group of PCs slowly discovering the taint in their own blood, their families secret curse, over a period of years, battling their own fate, before slowly descending into madness and fear of their own selves, with the campaigns ultimate climax being one of the PCs killing all the others before hanging themselves. There is nothing in Pathfinder that makes such a story impossible. Not a single thing has to be changed rules wise.
Even insanity can be handled without rules changes. Insanity is part of lovecraftian story telling. It has a story arch. Meerly handle it without rules, slowly change the way to deliver information to the PCs, make it so their own perception becomes unreliable over the course of an adventure, have entire NPC relationships be all in the head of but a single PCs, or after especially harrowing events, edit out of the game whole elements of the world, telling everyone but the suffer that they have never existed, and watch as the PCs do the heavy lifting and have a blast, wondering what is real, and what is false.
None of that is to say that Pathfinder is ideal for running mythos games, but it certainly isn't impossible.
|
I am doing something for my Darkened Tower campaign: I reintroduced Concentration as a class skill, and added Meditation, but then I threw out the vancian magic system and replaced it with the one from Call of Cthulhu d20. I think it will work. I also made magic very rare. Only one or two classes have access to more than one spell per class. The good news is, the spell knowledge is permanent once you have it. The bad news is it can make you go stark raving mad (or some spells might potentially kill you if you use them too often)
Pathfinder is a system created for a low to mid fantasy, high magic campaign, while I've found that Cthulhu Mythos is more high fantasy, low magic. So, that's the conundrum.
Yes, if you ignore several core concepts of the Cthulhu mythos and are willing to get pretty far from the mark, then you can get a Cthulhu-esque game.
There are a lot of things that need to be considered - for example, how does "normal" magic interact with "Cthulhu magic"? Can a player cast a mythos spell and what happens when they do?
What is the absolute minimum that needs to be done in order to create a feeling of "other-ness" in what the players are encountering? (this is perhaps the most important and difficult question that needs to be asked)
Lovecraft did not seem to agree.
While many of his stories touch on magic, it is far from a universal trend. The colours out of space for instance makes no mention of magic(so far as I can remember).
Amongst those stories that do talk of, a great many speak only of it to imply its existence, such as the dark whispers of evil ceremonies on devils reef in the shadow over innsmouth. But such magic is never seen to be.
When magic is mentioned, it is very often not even mythos sorcery, but rather strange artefacts such as the shining trapezohedron from the The Haunter of the Dark.
Active examples of mythos sorcery are rare in Lovecraft, and the vast majority of examples deal with what Call of Cthulhu terms 'spells of the greater grimoire' Spells of summoning, binging, calling, plus the creation of hyper-space and hyper-time gates.
It is a minority of a minority of stories that deal with 'spells of the greater grimoire', spells such as shrivelling.
And it is a minority of such stories in which the protagonists have such powers.
So, one does not need to talk about mythos magic to produce Lovecraftian stories at all.
However, if you do, you can, without a great deal of work. First up, a very major element of Mythos magic, AKA mythos artefacts, can be handled perfectly adequately by the rules of pathfinder. Wondrous item and cursed item rules will give all the information you would need to make your own Mythos artefacts, and require no more design chops than making any magic item for your standard Pathfinder Campaign, so long as you have a good grasp on what makes a good Mythos item.
Then you have Mythos sorcery, most of which that one might chooses to include, is first and foremost a plot device. Summon/bind [x], gate, contact [x] and call [x] need no mechanics most of the time, they exist only as a, an explanation of how a Mythos monster is present or the PCs get from point a to point b, or B, an objective the evil cult or sorcerer is trying to achieve, which is there to be disrupted.
On those occasions that mechanics are needed, it is almost always as a one off encounter element, no more complicated that do X to stop ritual Y.
If your PCs really want to use Mythos magic, sure, you might consider doing something funky and house ruling up the rituals and spells, but when you do so, your moving away from the purist mood of play.
|
Lovecraft's stuff is "Weird" rather than fantasy - a sort of mash-up of proto-SF and occult. But the genres weren't fixed in the same way, so definitive comments about what is and isn't Cthuloid seem a bit wide of the mark, as ZN points out. Taking the Mythos out of early 20th century America is already a big twist. However, other weird tales had medieval/fantasy settings - Tsathoggua (sp?) first arrives in a full-blooded "fantasy" tale by Clark Ashton Smith (I think) - so it isn't really a huge deal to transplant it to Golarion. But it is also true that the "horror" element would be diluted.
I would recommend that the OP get hold of a copy of Lords of Madness. It's a WotC 3.5 supplement but it has a lot of stuff about dealing with aberrations, both from the standpoint of monster types and how an aberrant campaign might work. Also, Heroes of Horror is another 3.5 WotC supplement which deals with how to run a horror-styled game - it's maybe a less successful book but interestng.
Lovecraft's stuff is "Weird" rather than fantasy - a sort of mash-up of proto-SF and occult. But the genres weren't fixed in the same way, so definitive comments about what is and isn't Cthuloid seem a bit wide of the mark, as ZN points out. Taking the Mythos out of early 20th century America is already a big twist. However, other weird tales had medieval/fantasy settings - Tsathoggua (sp?) first arrives in a full-blooded "fantasy" tale by Clark Ashton Smith (I think) - so it isn't really a huge deal to transplant it to Golarion. But it is also true that the "horror" element would be diluted.
I would recommend that the OP get hold of a copy of Lords of Madness. It's a WotC 3.5 supplement but it has a lot of stuff about dealing with aberrations, both from the standpoint of monster types and how an aberrant campaign might work. Also, Heroes of Horror is another 3.5 WotC supplement which deals with how to run a horror-styled game - it's maybe a less successful book but interestng.
Yeah Tsathoggua is a result of CAS's Hyperborean cycle, which was somewhere between "swords and planets", Robert E. Howard's Hyborian age, with a dash of proto-mythos.
The Hyperborean cycle is another example of how you can do Mythos fantasy.
Horror gaming certainly isn't native to pathfinder, but it can be done.
|
First off, a minor nitpick. It's Cthulhu, not Cthulhu. Yeah, I recognize the irony coming from someone with a username that spells it with a K.
You might find this helpful, if you have an extensive library of Pathfinder stuff: A Guide to Mythos Gaming.
I may stop by here again this afternoon to offer some more advice.
First off, a minor nitpick. It's Cthulhu, not Cthulhu. Yeah, I recognize the irony coming from someone with a username that spells it with a K.
You might find this helpful, if you have an extensive library of Pathfinder stuff: A Guide to Mythos Gaming.
I may stop by here again this afternoon to offer some more advice.
As I think you are aware I am a huge mythos nut. I hadn't seen this that thread. I'll definately drop by tomorrow and check it out.
Sorry, I should have said "magic is a part of supernatural in nearly all conceivable fictional realities (including Lovecraft's), but in Pathfinder magic is as common (and NON-supernatural) as tree moss".
Again, not really.
The Mythos isn't really "supernatural". Stories such as dreams in the witch house and at the mountains of madness set the mythos as being 'naturalistic' even if it is not human sanity friendly. Mythos monsters are not demons, but organisms alien to our space or time, while magic is a form of mathematics or physics so advanced as to appear to be magic to stupid ignorant humanity. Lovecraft first mythologiesed then de-mythologiesed the mythos.
Actually this can clash with the magoc of pathfinder, but for almost exactly the opposite reason to that you give. Pathfinders magic is most certainly supernatural, and makes no claim of not being, and is common abd understandable, which can clash, but such a clash can be avoided with relative ease by treating magic like gun, i.e. about as much use against the mythos as a chocolate tea pot.
I think you and I are using different definitions of some pretty common words. "Supernatural", in the way that I use it, refers to something outside of a person's everyday life as lived. As such, everything I said is accurate and, in pathfinder, there is no supernatural. Everything that a person would expect to be supernatural is, in fact, quite common and ordinary in pathfinder.Sorry, I should have said "magic is a part of supernatural in nearly all conceivable fictional realities (including Lovecraft's), but in Pathfinder magic is as common (and NON-supernatural) as tree moss".Again, not really.
The Mythos isn't really "supernatural". Stories such as dreams in the witch house and at the mountains of madness set the mythos as being 'naturalistic' even if it is not human sanity friendly. Mythos monsters are not demons, but organisms alien to our space or time, while magic is a form of mathematics or physics so advanced as to appear to be magic to stupid ignorant humanity. Lovecraft first mythologiesed then de-mythologiesed the mythos.
Actually this can clash with the magoc of pathfinder, but for almost exactly the opposite reason to that you give. Pathfinders magic is most certainly supernatural, and makes no claim of not being, and is common abd understandable, which can clash, but such a clash can be avoided with relative ease by treating magic like gun, i.e. about as much use against the mythos as a chocolate tea pot.
Having just checked four sources of definition in quick succession. Only merriam-webster contained a definition that agreed with your definition with "departing from what is usual or normal", but even then it continues "especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature"
Where as all of them share a definitions that can be expressed as "Of or relating to existence outside the natural world." many sources have multiple definitions that all boil down to that.
As so often seems to be the case when you and I clash over means and usage of words, it is you who appear to be using the unusual or false definition.
And it isn't even really a valid claim. While it might be accurate to say that magic is relatively common place in Golarion and Pathfinder RPG are not the same thing.
Pathfinder is a ruleset, and can reflect a great many different types of campaign setting(it does some better than others for sure, but that prevent you from playing in settings it does less well)
It is entirely possible to run low magic pathfinder, without changing the rules. The CR system is a guideline and explicitely states itself to be. If your playing a low magic game you simple adjust the CRs to reflect that, and build those encounters less optimally. So no, "Pathfinder magic" is not automatically as common as tree moss. Such commonality is a factor of setting, not rules.
On top of that, Lovecraft wrote stories where magic and the wondrous was common, see The White Ship, The Cats of Ulthar, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Silver Key and others besides.
And if your going for a darker, more purest mode, you need only avoid dealing with magic, and focus on the other elements lovecraftian horror, such as bad blood, alien and unknowible horrors and the descent into madness, or high light the difference between magic and the rituals of the cultists.
Your building up a problem that doesn't exist.