Starting a new THS game saturday...

[Dinofreak2000]

as the title implies i am beginning my THS campaign Saturday. after a very odd occurance (can you say campaign killing) in the GURPS Dragonstar game i was running i feel it opened the door for this campaign.

so the input i require is merely on the creative level... i will be starting with the Singapore sling from e23. Easy enough, i love the write up (no crutch dialog boxes for the GM...) and from there i have many ideas. But what i want to throw into the game is the Chuthulu Mythos. Now i am not interested in some game with squid beasties running around. i want the mythos to be very subtle. my problem is getting the mythos into the Singapore sling adventure. i was thinking about using MAlaysia as a corrupting source.

but how should i formulate it? i have ideas for the rest of the game, but like anything, the hardest part is starting it. how does one bring Chuthulu into polotics without the "Chuthulu for PResident" bumper stickers? i am using the Chuthulupunk book as some inspiration. Aswell as the uplifted octopods (i went out and bought every THS book, i am only waiting for the sea one to get to me).

as i see it i, these beasties don't seek world domination. that never really seemed like a goal to me (granted i haven't read all the H. P. Lovecraft works, still need to read at the mountains of madness). seasoning with the group finding things leading to the things man was not meant to know, sending them investigating corporations and countries, only to find their trails end were man hasn't tread. stuff like that. maybe a strange bust up of a VR cult spreading memes ment to bring food to the sleeping masters, or genemods in a strange local that appear to be fishy/reptile-like. Nanotech corporations getting a sudden boost in their tech, but unforseen consequences with minds/personalities vanishing, only to be replaced by very alien minds claiming schizophrenic histories older than man.

after that, back to my initial querry. How can i put some Mythos flavoring into Singapore Sling?

Later Days

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dinofreak2000

after that, back to my initial querry. How can i put some Mythos flavoring into Singapore Sling?

I'm not familiar with Singapore Sling; I don't buy adventures. But if I wanted to mix the Mythos into THS, I would start out from Lovecraft's line about "the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents," and link it to the bit about an AI inventing memetics because it had a detached, nonhuman view of human behavior—and have AIs, or some AIs, have figured out that the Mythos entities were there. And then I would ask what the AIs would choose to do about that discovery.

Bill Stoddard

[MrTim]

Introduce an Octosap NPC and have him/her mention being a Cthulhu worshipper in casual conversation. (See Toxic Memes.) Play it off as a great big joke for a few sessions.

Then have a politico the PCs are investigating have connections to a New Agey manufactured religion. (If you're familiar with Shadowrun, I'm thinking Universal Brotherhood here.) Don't directly link it to Malaysia, and make it a background detail not directly related to the investigation. If they follow up on it, great: they're hooked. If not, they'll get more clues later.

Start having that group show up more and more. The meme is becoming popular among the upper crust, and the membership includes people of all political blocs and viewpoints.

The group's founder can be traced back to Malaysia, although his actual ancestry lies somewhere in Tibet, to the near-mythical Plateau of Leng . . .

[Turhan's Bey Company]

I don't suppose you could get your hands on a copy of Cthulhupunk? It's not THS, but it could get you a considerable distance towards integrating Mythos stuff into a cyberpunkish campaign.

[thtraveller]

There is a vignette somewhere about an uplifted creature (octosap?) quoting cthulhu-esque lines. And no-one knows if it is being serious or not.

With the uplifted sea creatures, dolphins, sharks and octopus as well as human aqua-mods there is plenty of ways to hint at it.

In certain parts of the world sapient uplifts, as long as they were old enough, could be full citizens and be eligible to stand for office, or even be elected by cyberdemocratic lottery.

You could also have an AI or a clique group who were focused or obsessed on the mythos as a story point. Perhaps even a theme park.

[carllarson]

Another hint, for a link or a red herring, was a vignette in Biotech 3e, and perhaps biotech 4e, about gangers getting mods to look Cthulhu-punk. Some could be cultists, and some could just be wannabees.

[Than]

In the THS setting it may be hard to identify when you've encountered genuine creatures of the mythos. Say the characters fight some amphibian "fish-men" - how can they tell if these are Deep-Ones, or just another bioroid/parahuman design. That tentacled creature might just be an uplifted giant squid... or is it?

[carllarson]

Aye, investigative genetics could be a large part of finding a secret, and bioengineering will make certain cultist secrets less suspect.

Instead of a Whateley gene puddle (not deep enough for a pool), you may have a whateley genemod. Or, the family could genefix their hereditary recessives out of the pool, and restabilize the bloodlines.

Can you tell the difference between a Deep One hybrid (probably a chimera) and a Deep One genemod or bioroid without analysis?

[Dinofreak2000]

interesting ideas... i do have the chuthulupunk book... i don't know what else to say.... maybe i will later....

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by MrTim

The group's founder can be traced back to Malaysia, although his actual ancestry lies somewhere in Tibet, to the near-mythical Plateau of Leng . . .

And the game collapses at that point.

You might be able to work subtle Lovecraftian themes into a TS game (though it's not to my taste), but the moment you mention an actual proper noun from the bloody Mythos in a room full of gamers - well, you might as well start up the Monty Python quotes. You've shifted the paradigm.