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Cthulhu Traveller?

  • Thread starter Thread starter gloriousbattle
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gloriousbattle

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One of the neat things about the Lovecraftian vision is that it lends itself nicely to most rpg genres. Other than typical horror, I have also seen Cthulhu successfully added into WWII, Victorian sf, high and low fantasy, and science fiction rpg campaigns. My own Bleeding Stars Traveller campaign, while not including any strictly Lovecraftian monsters, nonetheless has a very Lovecraftian feel to it: horrible, dark, things hanging out just beyond the edge of the universe, waiting for something to happen so they can pounce on us.

Anyway, curious if anyone has ever done a Cthulhu-Traveller universe, or written up Traveller stats for Lovecraftian monsters and gods?
 
I did an episode like that. Making stats would have been irrelevant as they never found out what it was. All they found out was, "It Seeks The Lonely..."
 
Oh, my beard of the Great Old Ones themselves...no stats...pls. Take a look at Trail of Cthulhu, if you want to do the Mythos right...

I have done the Mythos as part of Traveller...in fact, I did a whole campaign that lasted 1.5yrs that deal with weekly tramping of a Free Trader called the HP Lovecraft. I have long lost the notes. But, I did motify a few Chaosium modules for Traveller.
 
Cthulhu + "Forbidden Science of the 2nd Imperium" with a side dish of Illuminati can make a fine adventure background.
 
Anyway, curious if anyone has ever done a Cthulhu-Traveller universe, or written up Traveller stats for Lovecraftian monsters and gods?

I’ve sometimes done a Lovecraftian-riff for Ancient ruins, strange things in jumpspace, and the Primordials. It's hard not to. And I also had a Deep One (complete with stats) in an adventure I wrote as part of my Landgrab of Yori/Regina ("Silence of the Goatlings").
 
This looks to rock. I had great success with using Mythos with a solar system only ATU. The game ranged from Venus (I got yer extreme atmosphere right here, bub) to the frozen wastes of Pluto (one of the way stations for the Fungi from Yuggoth).

An insanely good time was had by me. The players liked it too.
 
Dude, you really don't want to do that. No really.

Yeah, silly you. That would be almost as dumb as pronouncing, or even writing, the word "Hastur". Whoops, hang on for a minute. Something up on the roof. I'll just go check it...
 
My own Bleeding Stars Traveller campaign, while not including any strictly Lovecraftian monsters, nonetheless has a very Lovecraftian feel to it: horrible, dark, things hanging out just beyond the edge of the universe, waiting for something to happen so they can pounce on us.

Anyway, curious if anyone has ever done a Cthulhu-Traveller universe [...]?

I'm sort of doing it right now -- though in a vastly lower-key, less histrionic mode than anything the gentleman from Providence would have used. The players might never encounter anything they recognize as 'Lovecraftian' at all; especially not in the first scenario.
 
(Necromacy in action!)

Chthonian Stars is out. And IMHO worth checking out of you really want to do Cthulhu in space.
 
Is there any other kind of Traveller? Gothic, dark plots underlying everything, lightning crashing on a stormy night ... I wouldn't want it any other way.
 
How much need do we really have, in practical terms if not in terms of supporting our friends and peers trying to make a buck, for a Lovecraftian adaptation of... anything? Maybe I'm just a burnout, but it feels to me like HPL is a huge cliche, and an increasingly over-mined and sterile cliche specifically within the RPG scene. When was the last time anything fresh and startling was published in that market with a Cthulhoid bent? Ten, more like twenty years ago?

Even in the fiction genre, the very few non-moronic, non-soporific pieces by people who cite HPL as an influence, but which could be RPG-adapted, are mostly hardly recognized at all as Cthulhoid pieces by gamers. It's late and I'm kinda drunk, but all that comes to mind of semi-recent stories I've read are Caitlin Kiernan's The Dry Salvages. Which clever noses will say is a pastiche of Lem's Solaris, which I won't argue against, but think it's got a rank, squamous whiff of the Jaw from Prov as well.

Anyway, I digress... what I meant was, screw the consumer products. The Mythos is pop-culture commons now, in the good sense as well as the bad; so anything you come up with on your own is going to be about as original as anything you buy. IMO.

-- Kim
 
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