Grobblies or Not?

[Mick A]

I used to play a lot of Call of Cthulhu many, many years ago and recently played a couple of sessions at the local club. Back in the day we very rarely saw any grobblies except for the odd human looking hybrid or a possible corner of your eye glimpse of something, that may make you loose sanity, but you couldn't be 100% sure you saw but these two recent sessions had grobblies everywhere (last nights session even had one character seeing an elder God!). Is this typical of CoC games these days? I used to enjoy the games where you thought you heard something out there, or you were being watched, but you never actually saw anything or could find any sign of it, there was certainly a lot more tension in those games.

I suppose I had better offer to run a session or two myself and see what sort of game the other players prefer...

[LidlessEye]

While I haven't been involved in a Call of Cthulhu campaign for many years (or any sort of RPG at all, sadly), it wouldn't really surprise me if there's an increased presence of tentacled beasts in a typical game.  Many people are now introduced to the mythos via games like Arkham Horror, where an encounter with something as nasty as a Chthonian is fairly commonplace, and a direct physical struggle with an elder god the end result of a typical game, rather than the rare and sanity-blasting experience it might have been in the heyday of the RPG.  Strange Aeons can take a bit of blame for this as well, but it's very difficult to build a skirmish game with no combat!  Video games may have had an influence here as well, as some people seem a bit stuck in the model of progressively harder levels building towards an encounter with some sort of "boss".  Not necessarily awful, but it makes for pretty dull storytelling!

Of course, as it always is with RPGs, the key to success is always finding the right people to play with.  I'm certain there are still plenty of people out there (myself included) quite happy and eager to play an atmospheric adventure where the beasts of the mythos remain fringe players rather than direct participants.

[Malebolgia]

My personal preference is that there is a "gradual increase in grobblies" during a campaign. So sessions start out with minor weird stuff and as the campaign progresses and becomes more intense, stakes are raised there also appear more powerful and strange creatures. After all, in a lot of campaigns it's all about the investigators trying to stop insidious plans to take over the world/raise an elder God/etc. I think it's fitting if the bad guys use more desperate measures to get rid of the investigators. And it's also a good way of showing the mortality of the investigators if one is gobbled up now and then.

Spoiler alert for some!
For example, we're doing the "Shadows of Yog-Sothoth" campaign at the moment. An excellent campaign with a great buildup in suspense and grobblies. In the second scenario, the investigators ended up in the basement underneath a modern temple dedicated to Nyarlathotep. The investigators got real cocky by then, especially after getting time-warped to Bosnia in 1997 by Nyarlathotep himself and surviving the adventure. None of them know it's Nyarlathotep by the way . So two of them went through the basement guns blazing, getting rid of multiple guards. They finally hit the machine room, where a Shoggoth was trapped in a pumping machine, as work labour. Thinking the machine was important, they shot it with a shotgun. And out came the Shoggoth and in the pursuit it ate one of them.
A dramatic ending to the scenario, totally unexpected and loads of fun! The eaten investigator was a bit sad afterwards, but I think grobblies are an excellent way to "punish" A-team style thinking and tactics. It's not what CoC is about. And who doesn't like ending a great gaming night with an archaeologist getting eaten by a Shoggoth

[thebinmann]

I play CoC nad have done for years and I agree anything above Nightgaunt/MiGo/Deepone ends up destroying the world anyway.

It's one of the reasons I love CoC and I suppose Pendragon, combat kills! I remember running Pendragon for some DandDers who charged a Giant, he clubed them doing enough damage to squash the armour, the Knight, the Horse and a sizabel piece of land.

For me CoC with lots of monsters loses the CoC feel? I wasn't even happy when they changed the skill point rules in third (?), and for me a lot of the new stuff goes against the grain - rerolls, upping the ante, monster decks... oh well I'm an old git!

[thebinmann]

Many people are now introduced to the mythos via games like Arkham Horror, where an encounter with something as nasty as a Chthonian is fairly commonplace, and a direct physical struggle with an elder god the end result of a typical game, rather than the rare and sanity-blasting experience it might have been in the heyday of the RPG.

I think you are spot on there, I would say that if you want monsters play AH, MoM or SA

[Dolmot]

Well, if you only take a cursory look at mythos as it appears in games and media today, the typical image you get is "It's the genre where you wade through craploads of tentacled monsters Tommy guns blazing and finally that big green thing eats you". Arkham Horror and other fixed-piece games are often conveying that image.

But for another point of view, I flicked through 53 original HPL stories. That covers most of his fully self-written fiction, yet excludes collaborations and poetry. I tried to make a rough classification of what kind of creatures can be found and how these encounters are solved. Obviously there are plenty of ambiguous, debatable and borderline cases so please consider these only as approximations.

• 13 are abstract, that is, weird vistas or reminiscences without a clear plot. (The missing stories would often belong here too.)
• 14 have no real "bad guy" or other antagonist. (This mostly overlaps with the previous item.)
• 12 have a human, possibly a little unnatural, as the main antagonist.
• 8 have only such human characters.
  
• 16 have human-like creatures like undead, hybrids, degenerates etc.

Then, the outré part...

• 12 with unnatural yet Earth-bound creatures
• 8 with cosmic powers quite clearly present (no solid entities)
  
• 8 with cosmic, observable creatures
• 5 with god-like entities physically present or implied

There is overlap. And finally,

• Overall, in only 8 stories humans solve disturbing encounters with force. This includes even minor events like Pickman shooting rats behind a corner.
• In 23, a human protagonist flees, faints or otherwise survives without even attempting any combat.

What it means is that only about 15% of stories have "investigator combat" - any kind - in their plot. Furthermore, a significant portion of unnatural creature encouters take place in Dreamlands or other extraterrestial locations. It's exceedingly rare that you'd meet a sentient purple tentacle in Boston, trying to take on the world. The most typical plot lines seem to be

a) abstract, dreamy or nightmarish stories, where hardly any "adventure" takes place
b) people doing forbidden stuff like trying to escape death, conducting pseudo-scientific experiments, or doing silly stuff on a spooky graveyard. (Seriously, don't do that if HPL is around taking notes. It's like inviting your distant relatives and Hercule Poirot to a big countryside house for the weekend.)

Of course, many later authors have decided to come up with their very own great old ones and tentacled monsters. Not so many have concentrated primarily on recounting strange dreams, ancient mythology and New England's architectural details (I think).

Unfortunately, dreamy stories don't make a good game and basic mystery-solving among plain humans isn't regarded mythos enough these days. Often there's also a twenty page section of weapons, combat skills and monster stats which works quite literally like Chekhov's gun. Meanwhile, the proper combat simulation for almost any encounter in HPL's stories would be a single D6 roll and this table:

1: Die or disappear permanently.
2: Flee and go hopelessly insane.
3: Flee and develop a permanent trauma.
4: Faint and try to tell yourself it was just a dream.
5: Attempt something but flee anyway / there's nothing to do.
6: Engage in combat. It's unlikely to work against anything other than (semi-)humans, though.

Well, that may be the ultimate outcome of many CoC campaigns, but the authentic way would be consulting this table as soon as your mythos knowledge exceeds 2%.

If it turns into "Oh, tentacles again. How many sticks of dynamite do we need this time?", it starts to feel like a zombie splatter movie with different graphics. Mythos should be outré, incomprehensible, secretive and often beyond plain view. That kind of stuff just can't be randomly generated from an encounter table nor pronounced dead for collecting monster trophies.

OK, I confess running a mythos miniature game which is largely just a splatterfest. However, I think the audience wouldn't really understand if I brought 2 square metres of terrain and 200 minis but then just sat there, recounting my dreams of a distant valley and glittering spires...

[Connectamabob]

My own disappointment is mostly with the "everything is evil" bent things increasingly take. By which I mean, in the original stories many of the familiar Lovecraft beasties were ambiguous in this regard. Some definitely were outrightly malevolent from a human perspective, but others were just sort of doing their own thing indifferent to humans, and on some occasions are either benign or only "evil" insomuch as humans themselves are. Yet others are affable but completely unreliable so you're left with a head full of uneasy uncertainties. The reoccurring theme is not so much of holding back the sinister forces of doom as being confronted with things that completely scrag ones taken-for-granted worldviews. Sort of the cosmological equivalent of the trope of the sheltered small town kid taking a trip to the big city and having his/her innocence rudely smashed.

I really want to see many of these creatures/factions used in a more complex ways than just "they all want to eat everyone's face and it's up to you to thwart them".

[pacarat]

I really want to see many of these creatures/factions used in a more complex ways than just "they all want to eat everyone's face and it's up to you to thwart them".

Random behavior once a creature is placed on the table...?

• it's stationary, and/or oblivious to human presence
• it's benign and just shambles along no matter what happens
• it's benign and would have shambled along - until you mess with it (shots fired, etc.), then it eats you
• normal aggression/reaction to humans

The selected behavior is unknown to the player(s) until some trigger event occurs - proximity, activity, etc.

Others thoughts?

[Connectamabob]

No, that's all just basically raising the complexity of the enemy AI (to borrow a bit from computer games). I'm talking about treating them as characters, essentially. Their actions should be dictated by complex motivations known to the GM, not dice rolls or the presumption that they're malevolent "just because", and they should have more active roles than just "enemy".

A good game would be, say, one where after battling a farmstead full of Yog-Sothoth cultists, you find out that the whole thing was a setup and the "cultist" were just innocent people (which you slaughtered), which leads you back to the guy who hired you to investigate the cult, who turns out to be a Mi-Go agent looking to secure land for his clients. Find the Mi-go, and find out that they didn't mastermind anything, they just told him to get them some quiet land and he did the rest. They don't care that people died, but they do care that his methods led you to them, so they offer you his job on the logic that your "ethics" might give their activities a lower profile than his did. The job would actually be kinda cushy: good pay, great bennies, little oversight, and while they don't tell you what they're up to, they don't give you any real reason to think it's anything more that just covert mining. And they never explicitly say that you might end up in a baked beans tin as a "consultant" if you decline .

Other ideas:

Forcing the player to takes sides in a shoggoth vs Elder Thing situation. Help the Elder Things because they're basically refugees about to be slaughtered and not actually evil. Help the shoggoth because maybe it won't turn it's xenophobic hulk-rage on you next if it thinks you're an ally. If you do nothing the Elder Things will die, and the shoggoth will squish you. If the Elder Things live, they could actually be a much needed ally later, but if the shoggoth wins, it's grace will only be momentary.

Polyps have been emerging and killing people, and it's up to the player group to stop them. Except in reality, the Polyp attacks are a false flag by the Yithians to rile humans into attacking them. One of the PCs in the group is actually Yithian possessed, and manipulating the group. Will the players figure out what's actually going on and which one of them is the provocateur, or will they end up starting a war that will extinguish mankind?

[Elk101]

We were certainly of the 'less is more' opinion when we played the CoC RPG in the earlier editions. Things were hinted at and held in the background letting players' imaginations do their bit. When they did come across a lot of deep ones at the culmination of a cargo cult scenario two of the players blew themselves and a number of deep ones up out of desparation. The only surviving pc went mad. Everyone loved it though. In a number of our games there were no mythos creatures at all.

[Connectamabob]

When they did come across a lot of deep ones at the culmination of a cargo cult scenario two of the players blew themselves and a number of deep ones up out of desparation.

First time I read that I missed the word "up". 

[Elk101]

First time I read that I missed the word "up". 

I'm sure it goes on all the time in these mythos cults!