Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[WhatIsThePunchline]

Some of the Mythos races (Mi-go, Insects of Shaggai and their slaves, Tcho-Tcho, Colours out of Space, Serpent Men, Lloigor with their deformed cultists, Ghouls, Nioth-Korghai)

I don't think you can use a race named Tchoo tchoo in a horror game.

Maybe if it's literally a monstrous train and you play up the comedy to contrast the gruesome actual monster.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

I don't think you can use a race named Tchoo tchoo in a horror game.

Maybe if it's literally a monstrous train and you play up the comedy to contrast the gruesome actual monster.

Faggots complain about the Tcho-Tcho enough already, because they're literally just the Chinese.

 

[2LtMashengo]

Faggots complain about the Tcho-Tcho enough already, because they're literally just the Chinese.

One of the things I really like out of DG is that the Tcho-Tcho abuse their status as "oppressed POC" to guilt trip liberals into donating money to the cannibal NAACP.

 

[Manly_Brony]

I don't think you can use a race named Tchoo tchoo in a horror game.

Not "oo" just "o" and they work, they're the main antagonists of my current Classic Era Call of Cthulhu campaign. The Tcho-Tcho are a usually tribal, backwards people of noticeably short stature found in several remote jungles, mountains, steppes and islands of Asia who descend from dark, slimy, batrachian dwarves, the abhorrent Miri Nigri. Their unholy, grisly customs revolve around the worship of a handful of eldritch deities. Cannibalism and human sacrifice are just two of them. The game's rules state that they are born half mad and quickly lose what's left of their sanity. Even a Tcho-Tcho baby adopted by the saintliest foster family you can imagine will probably grow into a psycho who slits their throats in their sleep, rapes the still warm bodies and leaves his home with a couple of human tongue sandwiches in their backback. They started to migrate to the Western world at the turn of the last century and managed to establish themselves as gangbangers, CEOs and everything in between. This is what the pearl clutching of the present is about, they remind every lib CoC player and game designer of horrible Antisemitic and Yellow Peril tropes.

Maybe if it's literally a monstrous train and you play up the comedy to contrast the gruesome actual monster.

That's Call of Cthulhu's Horror on the Orient Express campaign after Nyarlathotep possesses the titular train. Not a spolier because it's on the front cover.

 

[WhatIsThePunchline]

Faggots complain about the Tcho-Tcho enough already, because they're literally just the Chinese.

Not "oo" just "o" and they work, they're the main antagonists of my current Classic Era Call of Cthulhu campaign. The Tcho-Tcho are a usually tribal, backwards people of noticeably short stature found in several remote jungles, mountains, steppes and islands of Asia who descend from dark, slimy, batrachian dwarves, the abhorrent Miri Nigri. Their unholy, grisly customs revolve around the worship of a handful of eldritch deities. Cannibalism and human sacrifice are just two of them. The game's rules state that they are born half mad and quickly lose what's left of their sanity. Even a Tcho-Tcho baby adopted by the saintliest foster family you can imagine will probably grow into a psycho who slits their throats in their sleep, rapes the still warm bodies and leaves his home with a couple of human tongue sandwiches in their backback. They started to migrate to the Western world at the turn of the last century and managed to establish themselves as gangbangers, CEOs and everything in between. This is what the pearl clutching of the present is about, they remind every lib CoC player and game designer of horrible Antisemitic and Yellow Peril tropes.

That's Call of Cthulhu's Horror on the Orient Express campaign after Nyarlathotep possesses the titular train. Not a spolier because it's on the front cover.

I cracked a joke but I really think the moment you actually said 'Tcho-tcho' at the table all tension would dissipate. Nothing against the name, even in the real world you can have silly sounding things across language barriers. it's just I think you'd literally have to rename them if you wanted to use them in spoken language to retain a sense of horror.

They do sound decent though, I haven't read those stories.

 

[Manly_Brony]

I cracked a joke but I really think the moment you actually said 'Tcho-tcho' at the table all tension would dissipate. Nothing against the name, even in the real world you can have silly sounding things across language barriers. it's just I think you'd literally have to rename them if you wanted to use them in spoken language to retain a sense of horror.

They do sound decent though, I haven't read those stories.

My players tend to pronounce it as one word and it sounds a bit goofy. I pronounce the name exactly like Hostess Ho Hos. The secret to these Mythos creatures with the kooky names and descriptions (Sand-Dwellers have an especially bad rep: "...rough-skinned, large-eyed, large-eared, with a horrible, distorted resemblance to the koala bear facially, though his body had an appearance of emaciation.") is to hit your investigators hard and fast with the horrifying elements. Chewed up bodies with large claw marks, terrible, hungry, fanged faces appearing at their feet from the sand, shocking tattoos, ritual scarring or a crime scene that would make Jack the Ripper nod respectfully.

 

[The greater a'tuin]

The only person to ever talk about this book was Spoony on Counter Monkey and his review is just shitty advice about not telling the players what you are running, sperging and Shadowrun glazing. So the obvious question is: is the concept any good?

If cosmic horror became a surmountable and quantifiable challenge, it would stop being cosmic horror.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

This is what the pearl clutching of the present is about, they remind every lib CoC player and game designer of horrible Antisemitic and Yellow Peril tropes.

I saw a theory that the Tcho-Tcho are supernatural in some aspect and that they can’t be classified as human. I would agree that the psychology of the Tcho-Tcho doesn’t match with humanity, but what if that is all a coping mechanism? The Tcho-Tcho are humanity unshackled by any morality, but we cover that up by saying their actions are just a racist caricature.

If cosmic horror became a surmountable and quantifiable challenge, it would stop being cosmic horror.

That’s where horror like the SCP Foundation comes in. We know what procedure 110-Montauk is, that she has to be aware of what is happening to her, and it has to happen every day.

 

[AnOminous]

My players tend to pronounce it as one word and it sounds a bit goofy.

I always tried to do accents in games like CoC and my pathetic attempt at one of them turned into a meme with the group. I had an NPC report "weird chantin' sounds" and my attempt at a hick accent was so bad it was made fun of for the rest of the campaign.

We know what procedure 110-Montauk is, that she has to be aware of what is happening to her, and it has to happen every day.

I refuse to believe that. The real procedure is they have to read her a bedtime story.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

I saw a theory that the Tcho-Tcho are supernatural in some aspect and that they can’t be classified as human. I would agree that the psychology of the Tcho-Tcho doesn’t match with humanity, but what if that is all a coping mechanism? The Tcho-Tcho are humanity unshackled by any morality, but we cover that up by saying their actions are just a racist caricature.

I've always read it as the Tcho-Tcho being a different species of sapient hominid, like Neanderthal, that can pass for human but is fundamentally different.

Of course, I've read a lot of Asian history and I stand by my assessment that the Tcho-Tcho are essentially just Chinese. Asian history in general is cosmic horror all its own.

And I must emphasize, because this always gets left out, that Howie never actually wrote a story about the Tcho-Tcho, and they aren't even his creation. The Tcho-Tcho are all August Derleth, and HPL only ever mentioned them one time in passing in his own stories. It's not like it's Yog-Sothoth (Lovecraft disliked the term "Cthulhu Mythos* and preferred " Yog-Sothothery" as the term for his setting) where if you're making CoC or Delta Green and it's specifically about Lovecraft so you have to include it. Tcho-Tchos are a tangentially related, tenuously connected bit of apocrypha, yet all the shitlibs making Lovecraft stuff insist on both including them and whinging about it. Just admit you wanna fuck up some evil gooks, man.

 

[Manly_Brony]

I've always read it as the Tcho-Tcho being a different species of sapient hominid, like Neanderthal, that can pass for human but is fundamentally different.

I'm writing this from memory and the confusing lore isn't my friend either. The lion's share of my Tcho-Tcho campaign's background comes from two flawed, marginally related scenarios: The Curse of Chaugnar Faugn and Horror's Heart and the novel The Horror from the Hills authored by Frank Belknap Long. Only the first has Tcho-Tchos in it, a single priest. Bill Barton somehow Palpatine returned the elephantine, vampiric Great Old One CF from Tibet to New York City in the first story because the Tcho-Tcho allowed it. The other scenario assumes that CF and his priest were successfully defeated in Curse and has the god surface in Montreal after a few years have passed. It also has a rich family of various werecreatures for... reasons. Here's where it gets more interesting. CF has deformed human Companions who are connected to him and an ancient prophecy exists about a "White Acolyte" who will bring the god to the New World. The Miri Nigri have been migrating eastward from the Pyrenees (Chaugnar Faugn's brothers are summoned from ancient vaults hidden in those mountains) since the Antiquity IIRC, mixed with various humans along the way and became the yellow, slanty eyed, often pointy toothed dwarves every lib wants memory holed.

all the shitlibs making Lovecraft stuff insist on both including them and whinging about it. Just admit you wanna fuck up some evil gooks, man.

Derleth and the OG CoC people did some accidental long term, beyond the grave trolling. I've read at least 10-12 stupid discussions on how to fix the Tcho-Tcho from turning them into a multiethnic gang to making them invaders sent from another dminesion to infest our world in disguise. Adam Scott Glancy who invented the Tcho-Tcho American cult/shipping company Tiger Transit for DG is under the most pressure because many found his creation "repugnantly racist" even back then. He and his FB followers latched onto a sourceless drawing of a feral, half-human, red skinned Tcho-Tcho on a wiki but that opened another can of worms. It's kino.

These midwits ignore every single heinous crime and disgusting practice "marginalized people" do in the West and all over the world to be good little allies. The Somali daycare fraud is just the tip of the iceberg. My aforementioned friend and I send links to such news articles to each other almost every week, "This won't appear in a future Delta Green scenario." became our private meme. I admit that Sandy Petersen is a bit of a lolcow himself with his failed Kickstarters and his sketchy Doom anedotes but he doesn't have to bend over backwards to love/make a living off of Lovecraft's work and already won at life. He put horror roleplaying on the fucking map. CoC catapulted HPL into the AAA video game, TV show, craft beer mainstream. And he's surrounded by a passel of kids and grandkids while the other side has to apologize for saying "Shub-Niggurath" out loud because it sounds like Nigger. Looking at you Seth Skorkowsky!

 

[Brain Problems]

Call of Cthulhu is so good and it hurts me that it isn't more popular. Very very tough to get people to learn new systems even when they're not exactly GURPS-tier insanity and arguably simpler than WGRG. I think the difficulty comes from the fact it expects players to actually fucking think and pretend they're not just murder hobos and really immerse themselves in the world when it's a lot easier to just throw people on a grid map and say, move 30ft, swing sword, get hit.

I am an absolute sucker for horror though so the second anything is remotely spooky it gains an unfair advantage.

 

[Tennessee Trash]

Your games are cool and all but can I play as Scrooge McDuck?

 

[Manly_Brony]

View attachment 8430633

Your games are cool and all but can I play as Scrooge McDuck?

Dragonbane and Glorantha have duck people.

Call of Cthulhu is so good and it hurts me that it isn't more popular

We older players and Keepers must fight the threat of the lefty activists I detailed above and the cozy gamers. Good thing the 5e with tentacles crowd has Arkham Horror TTRPG and PulpCthulhu and is out of the picture.

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

Call of Cthulhu is so good and it hurts me that it isn't more popular. Very very tough to get people to learn new systems even when they're not exactly GURPS-tier insanity and arguably simpler than WGRG. I think the difficulty comes from the fact it expects players to actually fucking think and pretend they're not just murder hobos and really immerse themselves in the world when it's a lot easier to just throw people on a grid map and say, move 30ft, swing sword, get hit.

I am an absolute sucker for horror though so the second anything is remotely spooky it gains an unfair advantage.

Also, after running many CoC games, it becomes very apparent that CoC's reputation for slaughtering players is overstated and likely just from players who treat it like a standard dungeon crawl. Yea, casualties will happen from time to time, that's the nature of the dice, but as long as your group isn't fuckin stupid, approaches with caution, remembers that the bad guys have guns too, and uses the skills they have in the first place, it mitigates a lot of the body count.

every lib wants memory holed.

*raises hand sheepishly* Liberal, and when they appeared in At Your Door, I portrayed them just as they were written.

 

[AnOminous]

Call of Cthulhu is so good and it hurts me that it isn't more popular. Very very tough to get people to learn new systems even when they're not exactly GURPS-tier insanity and arguably simpler than WGRG.

I was lucky in that in high school, all of the RPG players I knew were huge Lovecraft fans. Virtually everyone I knew had read him since they were kids, so when we found out it existed it was pretty much "Okay we're going to play this." It was probably the longest and most serious campaign (or series of campaigns since the world ended spectacularly a couple times, once directly due to the acts of the players) I've ever run.

Absolutely phenomenal game, and the system is awesome. I played almost all the other Chaosium games with the percentile system they shared, which made it really easy to treat the rules as modular and graft on rules, systems, skill trees, etc. from one game to the other to create hybrids.

Also, after running many CoC games, it becomes very apparent that CoC's reputation for slaughtering players is overstated and likely just from players who treat it like a standard dungeon crawl.

I generally played it super deadly. But after the first couple near-TPKs everyone learned to calm the fuck down and be careful. I generally allowed characters who would have been massively OP in a less murderous setting, for instance, having nearly unlimited access to firearms of every sort.

It didn't take them long to learn that while guns are an excellent problem-solver for human cultists, they don't really do dick to any major eldritch. You don't bring guns to a shoggoth fight. In fact, you generally don't fight shoggoths or anything above that level, at least not directly.

Funniest event, someone saw Cthulhu and failed his SAN check. 1d100 SAN loss. Rolled a 1. Said "I've seen dead cats scarier than that." (Had seen a cat mutilated in an unspeakably wrong way and lost 2 SAN earlier.)

ETA: and as to deadliness, while someone would die in almost every scenario, including one where the TPK was because the party opted to die to save the entire world, there were a few characters who lasted years in both game and real time.

 

[Manly_Brony]

If cosmic horror became a surmountable and quantifiable challenge, it would stop being cosmic horror.

Also, after running many CoC games, it becomes very apparent that CoC's reputation for slaughtering players is overstated and likely just from players who treat it like a standard dungeon crawl. Yea, casualties will happen from time to time, that's the nature of the dice, but as long as your group isn't fuckin stupid, approaches with caution, remembers that the bad guys have guns too, and uses the skills they have in the first place, it mitigates a lot of the body count.

The old scenarios were pretty lethal since they only had DnD modules as blueprints. This is why many have dungeons, loot and a smorgasboard of monsters. Firearms will only help you against the lesser foes so I'm not too worried about the cyborg Cthulhupunk character with the built in minigun. A Greater Brother of Chaugnar Faugn wiped out 2/3rds of my Tommy gun-toting party a few weeks ago without using spells and they had a magic Tibetan sword they found in that cave shrine too. And I have a really big brained player who frequently interrupts our game to plan every single step. You can have a magic bullet in your inventory but a whole mag is rarer than rare. And I would ban flame throwers, plasma rifles and lasers in my world to avoid an OP party. Nobody wants Robocop to come through their door to look for illegal weapons. And cultists and some Mythos races can always shoot back or have cybernetics if it's a near future game.

*raises hand sheepishly* Liberal, and when they appeared in At Your Door, I portrayed them just as they were written.

Good. Take a look at what us sane folks have to deal with:

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cthulhu-games-is-it-time-for-the-tcho-tcho-to-go-go.915702/

You are a true and honest crackpot if you have beef with the Arc Dream men over a fictional ethnicity. Those guys would be happy to watch trannies massacre everyone right of Mao and think "retiring" the Karotechia (Mythos worshiping actual WW2 Nazis hiding in South America and building an army out of boneheads, klansmen and actual resurrected war criminals) was one of the biggest mistakes in their career because we're one step away from a Fourth Reich in this day and age.

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

Good. Take a look at what us sane folks have to deal with:

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cthulhu-games-is-it-time-for-the-tcho-tcho-to-go-go.915702/
You are a true and honest crackpot if you have beef with the Arc Dream men over a fictional ethnicity. Those guys would be happy to watch trannies massacre everyone right of Mao and think "retiring" the Karotechia (Mythos worshiping actual WW2 Nazis hiding in South America and building an army out of boneheads, klansmen and actual resurrected war criminals) was one of the biggest mistakes in their career because we're one step away from a Fourth Reich in this day and age.

Maybe I'm just old, but FUCK these guys make it hard to be a liberal.

Oh, and when we did "Dead Man Stomp" and another scenario set in the deep south, all I had to do was say "Some people are going to be calling people niggers. Okay? Okay."

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

I really need to get back into CoC sometime; was always a fan of it, and the wider Cthulhu Mythos in general. Once I'm done with DND 5e, it's on my list.

EDIT: This is preaching to the choir here, but... I do honestly hate how 5e (particularly 5.5e/DNDOne) was designed more to cater to woketards and similar. It's been making me rather hesitant on making more campaigns and characters for it, as of right now at least; there's plenty of fun ideas to be had if you're willing to apply a bit of brainpower (raiding the Radiant Citadel is always a blast), but the way everything is written these days isn't the best. Like, I'm currently trying to get a character made for a annual large-scale 5e campaign in a couple of months, and my two choices for a race are either a Tabaxi (which are boring) or a Tiefling (which I have a ton of ideas for, but...).

EDIT 2: Anyone got advice?

 

[Imperial Citizen]

"retiring" the Karotechia (Mythos worshiping actual WW2 Nazis hiding in South America and building an army out of boneheads, klansmen and actual resurrected war criminals) was one of the biggest mistakes in their career because we're one step away from a Fourth Reich in this day and age.

I think the wiping out of Karotechia was fine because their kind of neo-nazism was very much a 90s thing. White nationalist militias are not the threat they once were. There’s no connections between groups; it’s all decentralized. The threat has changed.

A Telegram chat of far-right zoomers share a copy of some occult Nazi tome found online and begin enacting a ritual to bring Azathoth into this world.

An old white nationalist with ties to Karotechia sets up a whites-only community in Arkansas. An Outlaw cell wants to shut it down, but that community has all the legal protections to exist. Maybe the recent disappearances in nearby towns is connected?

A rising far-right podcaster is found dead in his home, torn to bits by what must be a wild animal. Problem is that he lives in an urban area. Could his fascination with Nordic runes play a part?