Listening to an audiobook of At the Mountains of Madness during work got me thinking, that story would be fairly easily translated to Eclipse Phase as a gatecrashing alien contact story or even a twist on the Factors in-system (y'know, assuming I could find a group that hasn't read the story already). That got me thinking about other stories of Lovecraft's and others that would be fun to translate to EP's 'verse.
Anyone got any favorite and/or tried something similar? I'm idly brainstorming a derelict habitat to host something inspired by From Beyond, with AR hacking/an exsurgent habitat mesh swapped in for actual cross-dimensional beings to get that same "they're always there if you know how to see them" horror effect. And The Colour Out of Space barely needs any changes to be effective , though I could see it going a lot of different ways other than being another exsurgent strain, maybe pulling a card or two from The Andromeda Strain
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Brainstorming Subject: Lovecraft in EP
Fri, 2016-08-12 19:38
#1
jKaiser
Brainstorming Subject: Lovecraft in EP
Fri, 2016-08-12 19:51
#2
UnitOmega
Well, right now I'm running a
Well, right now I'm running a campaign called [i]Envoy of the Yellow King[/i], which I wrote as kind of a meta commentary. It makes explicit, overt references to the Hastur mythos and other Lovecraftian concepts, but puts a twist of "this is a genre of fiction that exists" also in the universe. Such as letting the PCs be familiar with the King In Yellow short story collection by Robert Chambers. There's even a sinister Yellow Sign in the campaign. The question of how much chicken and egg the whole thing is is very much open for the players to discover, looking for weird coincidences, synergies and so on between fiction and reality. At the end I kind of want the characters (if not the players) to question what was real, what was fiction, and what is in-between.
I've also got an idea in my head for a much more classically referenced to Lovecraft scenario actually set in Post-Fall Antarctica, but that's still in the early prototype phase.
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog
http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Fri, 2016-08-12 20:05
#3
jKaiser
Huh. Never thought about what
Huh. Never thought about what would've been built there in the 150ish years of future-past.
Sat, 2016-08-13 00:24
#4
jackgraham
I love the King in Yellow
I love the King in Yellow cycle.
Detwiler's Delta Green scenario, Night Floors, is one of my favorites.
http://kinginyellow.wikia.com/wiki/Night_Floors
You'd have to do some gymnastics with tech to hack it for EP, but that's why we put petal trips in the game. ;)
—
J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!
http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham
Sat, 2016-08-13 02:27
#5
uwtartarus
I am waiting eagerly for DG's
I am waiting eagerly for DG's Impossible Landscapes, plan to mine it for ideas for Petals that aren't just bizarre dating sims meshed with surreal horror, which seems to be all I can think up for Petal trips.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Sat, 2016-08-13 03:26
#6
UnitOmega
Fun fact, I also used petals
Fun fact, I also used petals in my scenario - the PCs took one which put them in a rough version of the end of the King In Yellow play and some other surreal stuff borrowed from various Hastur sources.
The real kicker is the petal is embedded with "tags" which function like Neem - making the user remember the names and themes like Hastur, Carcosa and the King In Yellow, etc. I really had a lot of fun reading the multiple descriptions of Hastur in Trail of Cthulhu (Including the "insidious, sentient meme" one) and so I've played around with a lot of ideas of blurring "memes" and reality. I've also written to toy with some AR/VR stuff which my players haven't gotten to yet. Like I said, I like the aspects of not being sure what's real, what's fiction, and what isn't real but also isn't fiction. And the meta aspect of a narrative inside the narrative.
EDIT: Oh, another thing about EP that works great with Lovecraft. Basilisk Hacks. That idea has let me bring the Yellow Sign into the world as a real thing which is scary and unsettling. My players are going around locales on Luna and Mars asking NPCs "Have you seen the Yellow Sign?".
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog
http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Sat, 2016-08-13 03:40
#7
uwtartarus
The infectious, persistent
The infectious, persistent memetic quality of the YellowSign/Hastur mythos is great! It fits well in EP like Know Evil's Akaja, the memevirus that was a fictional character turned real.
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Sat, 2016-08-13 16:33
#8
jackgraham
UnitOmega wrote:EDIT: Oh,
Ha! OMGs, I love it. :)
—
J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!
http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham
Sun, 2016-08-14 11:12
#9
Wyvernjack
Check out Cthulhu Tech pen
Check out Cthulhu Tech pen and paper rpg. The settings have small similiarities, so I combined the two, for a transhuman space adventure with eldritch horrors.
Thu, 2016-08-18 07:09
#10
ThatWhichNeverWas
Error 409: IA CTHULHU FATGN. Please press the Gate and Key.
One thing I've brought up a couple of times is that in my EP the gate network has "volume" - it's where the ETI lives.
A scenario I was considering running would have the players actually turn up there instead of the Planet they were going to travel to, and essentially it was going to be a mashup of Carcosa and the City from Mountains of Madness - a mist shrouded lake, grey overcast sky, a deserted city of Black basalt and impossible geometry.
At the end the clouds would sweep away, and they would look up and see the same city repeated as an infinite fractal.
—
In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few.
But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
