Cthulhu in GURPS 4e

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Anth

I think I know what you mean from other RPGs, but I have no memory of contractual magic nor taint in GURPS.
The closest that I have found is Spirit magic with spiritual distortion in GURPS Thaumatology p90.
Did you mean something else?

No, that's what I meant. I misremembered what it was called. I was in particular thinking of the "Long Term Consequences" section on THM94.

[Stone Dog]

There are also Madness checks in GURPS these days. Wouldn't those be appropriate for certain exposures to Things Beyond Our Ken?

I mean... seeing a deep one might merely be scary, but an exposure to the King in Yellow might have a different result and need a different advantage to resist...

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Stone Dog

There are also Madness checks in GURPS these days. Wouldn't those be appropriate for certain exposures to Things Beyond Our Ken?

I mean... seeing a deep one might merely be scary, but an exposure to the King in Yellow might have a different result and need a different advantage to resist...

I can't remember whether the reference is from a rulebook or a discussion thread, but I've seen someone state their opinion that the first instinct of a person seeing a real Deep One today would be to look around for the film crew.

I fairly recently watched the Extras on a Narnia DVD, and watching the "Making of" segments with characters who needed CGI-generated body parts wearing full makeup prosthetics plus radioactive-green pants with red motion tracking balls where needed was amusingly weird.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by GodlessRose

I'm planning a GURPS Call of Cthulhu game, set in the modern day. (Or possibly 1920s, but I'm not much of a history buff.) I've run the Basic RolePlaying version of CoC before, but never with GURPS. I have CthulhuPunk, Horror 3e, most GURPS 4e books, and the BRP CoC core book, 6th edition.

The first adventure will be The Haunting, which is part of the CoC Quick Start download. (I've wanted to run that for a while, but never had a group who hadn't already played it till now.) Using the guidelines in the back of CthulhuPunk, it seems simple to convert.

I've been pondering a few things, and thought I'd see what you guys think.

1) Power level: I'm leaning toward 100 point characters, on the theory that will give a sort of classic CoC feel - exceptional, but not larger-than-life heroes. I also plan to uncouple Will and Per from IQ, and charge the full 20 points per level for IQ. Which means characters will tend to cost a little more than by RAW, so 100 points might be more restrictive than I think. Any thoughts?

2) I haven't played a game with Mythos/Sanity-Blasting Fright Checks yet, but the rules seem a little harsh. Won't characters often wind up stunned and helpless as The Bad Thing comes to eat them? (I guess that's sort of the point, but still...)

There are two different 'forms' of sanity-blasting effect in the Mythos. The first can be modeled by GURPS easily enough, the kind of horror and uncertainty that comes from realizing that there really are ghouls in the city digging up graves, or seeing the huge and dangerous and alien Great Cthulhu with your own eyes. Part of this horror comes of the realization that everything you think you know is wrong, that the reality everyone takes for granted is a lie.

Thsi first kind of santy-damaging effect can be moldeled wth high penalties on various will rolls and fright checks, and by requiring fright checks under circumstances most people wouldn't have to make them.

This kind of 'insanity' is arguably actually the result of the character being 'in the know' and objectively behaving more sanely, because s/he understands reality whereas the majority don't. (Or to put it another way, if 99% of the population is bonkers, then the sane minority are in the asylum.)

For ex, if John knows ghouls are real, then he might have to do a fright check when he hears certain noises in the night that his fellows just automatically ignore as part of the background. Or if he knows that there is a byakhee after him, his insistence on boarding up the skylights looks crazy to his fellows. In fact he's behaving rationally, under high stress, with nobody to talk to or confide in or trust.

(Which in turn means his behavior can be more rational than most, and he's cracking under the pressure...)

The other kind is what comes from encountering something that the human brain is just not wired to handle. It's harder to model and also harder to deal with, it's the sort of thing you can get if you see the hyper-form of one of the Outer Gods. The human brain just can't handle seeing a perfect circle with five 90 degrees angles, it can't exist and it does exist and the brain overloads.

Modeling that one is trickier, maybe staying sane afterward would require a success on a special check at -15 or something, anda 'success' means you suppressed the memory in part or full, or something like that.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Anth

In CoC you lose SAN when you are using magic/psionics. There is no SAN roll involved - you just lose SAN.
The human mind is not supposed to handle magic/psionics so therefore you lose your sanity by using them.
I haven't found a good way to emulate this in GURPS yet.

Maybe:

Possessing psi/magic in itself means an automatic -1 penalty on all fright checks, sanity checks, or anything along those lines. Maybe the emergence/first use of a psi power or magical abtility (more or less the same thing in the mythos) automatically gives you some negative quirks, too.

After that, the GM could require that anytime the psi/mage uses his ability more than, say, once in a week, he has to roll against Will or gain some new negative quirk, or a delusion or phobia on a major failure, with higher penalties for 'big' uses, or unusual circumstances.

Over time, the character is either going to learn to be very careful with and sparing of his ability, or he's going to end up as a nutcase, a walking bundle of bizarre and contradictory phobias and disads.