Why Kids Are Sometimes A Good Idea

I've been running this Call of Cthulhu campaign for about a year now, extending the Keith Herber classic "Dark Carnival" (from the Chaosium publication "Curse of the Chthonians") to incorporate a saga of horror and venal goings-on involving the Wyatt family and the Corbitt family in a twisted conspiracy stretching back into the early 18th century, and it's been going well for the most part.

Last SaturdayI was looking to add Teh Awesum to my next session (which was due the next day) and I decided a nice bit of art with a given theme would do nicely, and I ordered said art from my extremely talented daughter, giving her just a few ideas and a motif that had to appear. She got right down to it and I, tired from all the management duties involved, went to bed early.

I had envisaged the art as being depicted on a monolith the players are looking for, but what she delivered up was so good I decided that it would be a wooden plaque hanging on a wall in a secret library.

It was a great hit with the players, and a great hit to the SAN scores of the PCs, driving one mad with the terrible insights it gave him into the chaos of the outer void etc etc etc.

A corespondent suggested I post it here, and I thought that was a great idea.

1D3/1D6 SAN loss for viewing the Gharne Panel.

In case you were wondering: Copyright on that image is held by the artist and all rights are reserved.

More on Massive Damage in Modern D20 Games

A brief note after a long hiatus to say that I've been running Conan with the Massive Damage rules switched on and the world hasn't come to an end yet.

No game of D&D that I've played in has been run with the Massive Damage rules in effect, and when I've asked why I've been given a variety of reasons which boil down to "the game will be far too deadly with Massive Damage". I should mention that the D&D Massive Damage Threshold is 50 points (if I'm not mistaken).

The Massive Damage threshold for Conan is 20 points, so one would have thought that if a D20 game could be made ultra player-unfriendly by Massive Damage, Conan would be the one to show that, but you know what? The monsters are the ones having the hard time of it. So much so I'm having to gently tweak them to make them a challenge. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

I'm now contemplating going "off the reservation" and running a Delta Green game under the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules (as opposed to the more usual and generally more well-thought-of in the Call of Cthulhu community Basic Role Playing rules aka BRP). One of the first things I checked up on was the Massive Damage Threshold for the game.

Call of Cthulhu uses a variant of the D20 rules that differs in detail in many places from D&D, even more so than Conan does, and one of those changes is that there's a different Massive Damage Threshold for the human players than for the non-player Mythos Monstrosities.

A player has to Fort save vs 15 after 10(!) points of damage are dealt in a single attack. A monster does so after an attack deals 50 points(!!).

It would seem, on the face of it, to be a recipe for player death on a grand scale, but then again, that's pretty much in the Call of Cthulhu mold, so I'm leaving it in as written for the time being.

This should sort out the men from the shoggoths.