I had this idea.
I was looking at my collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios and campaigns, and mulling over something someone said about how White Box D&D was more about what the players could do than the characters when it came to solving mysteries, and I had a vision.
What if I could come up with a campaign-length set of linked Call of Cthulhu scenarios in which characters would obtain a huge scroll covered in glyphic writing, then go on to translate pieces of it by means of other artifacts obtained in each component adventure?
If the translations were of chunks of glyphic text, and were found on "Rosetta Stone" type artifacts such as tablets, fragmentary books and so forth, the players could add annotations to the scroll and gradually translate the entire thing, thereby uncovering some ghastly secret plot that would need thwarting as per usual for Call of Cthulhu.
There could also be some nice moments of darmatic tension when portions of already translated text were found with an alternate translation, sort of like the hieroglyphic writing correction in Star Gate (the movie).
This would be the sort of game in which relying on skill rolls would not help. The game would only progress by players actually doing the pattern matching (for that is what it is) for themselves in the real world.
Nor would the glyphic language need to be either Orthoganal to English or a true language in its own right. I'm not talking about an alphabet here. This will not be some sort of glorified cypher, but a true code.
Taking a leaf from actual glyphic written languages there won't have to be a grammar the players can learn either. It stands to reason that beings too outré to understand would use a written language that defied rational translation.
I've bandied the idea about. Some people object to my idea that players write on the scroll, claiming (quite reasonably) that no archeologist would so damage a real artifact of that type. My current view is that by allowing the players to write on the scroll they will have a nice record of where they are for those times when the game is put on lengthy hiatus or a player has an enforced absence from a few sessions, and get a very tangible sense of progress simply by looking at it.
As of now I'm firmly wedded to the idea and believe that the players won't have a problem. The issue really comes down to my wanting the players to be easily able to read what they are translating, which they won't if they first have to break up the scroll so it will fit in notebooks or sheets of scrap paper (which will then get lost). There is no requirement that the scroll the players use be regarded as the original document anyway. Indeed, it will probably be given to them with some work already done and explained away as a copy made from an original in the British Museum.
The artifacts that will be used to provide the translation will be more than the usual paper documents. I plan on having clay tablets, fragments of manuscripts, wooden plaques, pieces of vase and so on, and I'm going to need a laundry list of evocative names for these things.
So this is the challenge that I'll throw open to the floor. Suggest some nicely HPL-esque names I might use for something. You don't get to choose what it is to be used on. Your idea of a perfect name for an ancient scroll might be my idea of a great name for a cave painting. But I would welcome any suggestions you might have.
My first thought along these lines is "The Pottergate Shard" (most cities have a district called pottergate or something similar, the one I'm thinking of is in Norwich, England).
I'll repost any and all suggestions in the next blog posting on this thread, to be made I don't know when.
