# D&D and the Cthulhu mythos:   Adventure ideas?



## Wraith Form (May 10, 2007)

Before I ask my question, I'd like to be clear: this is a request to generate some ideas, _not_ for lists of books and published adventures I likely already have.

I've looked in CoCd20, Cthulhu Dark Ages, Heroes of Horror, the Freeport trilogy, most of my Chaosium/Pagan Publishing BRP Cthulhu books (and I have a ton of them) and even the Lords of Madness book.  I'm having a tough time actually coming up with ideas for incorporating the Mythos into my D&D game.  

Horror games?  No prob--I have scads of Ravenloft products, Darkness & Dread and even Nightmares of Mine.  I have the tools needed to _run_ a scary game.  What I don't have is Mythos-specific, Cthulhu-centric plots that I can use to challenge my (currently 3rd level) party.  I'd especially like something that can be an over-arching plot that I gradually build as my players gain levels.

So, lay it on me, baby.  Post your coolest adventure seed, squamous plot, loathsome conspiracy, hideous ritual, or convoluted investigation that mashed the Cthulhu mythos directly into your D&D game...or allowed it to subtly lurk in the darkened corners.

Please, *anything*--even if it's a few words, you'll spark ideas that will get me started.  

Oh, and a small request:  Deep Ones, sahuagin, mi-go, beholders and mind flayers are over-done, played out, cliché and tired.  I'm looking for something...different.  Heck, I'd love to hear about some _human_ opponents--after all, we're the most hideous monsters, aren't we?  ...And thank you, in advance!


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## rounser (May 10, 2007)

Hmm, they're probably all going to be variations on someone (the PCs or cultists) freeing or summoning a Great Old One, and you could use something native to D&D like the Tarrasque or the Far Realm for that.

In a fantastic D&D world, much of the alien horror of Cthulhu has it's wind taken out of it's sails.  PCs use magic, it doesn't drive them insane.  PCs fight monsters, they don't drive them insane.  The planes are wacky, and they don't drive the PCs insane either.  Differentiating a Great Old One from being just another supermonster like the Tarrasque, or Mephistopheles trying to bring about Hell On Prime is also going to be tricky.

Age of Worms also proves somewhat that the CoC research model for finding forbidden secrets is dubiously useful in a D&D context; PCs go to expert for no intuitive reason except that the module designer wants them to, expert tells them not much because forbidden knowledge needs to stay kinda secret, PCs go to next dungeon and thump some more  monsters anyway (because monsters are a big deal in the 1930s, but just another thing to slay in D&D).  It lacks a certain something.  

CoC tropes in D&D have been trendy since forever, dating back to 1st edition, and continues to get reinvented as if it were something new, but I'm not sure people have really thought it through very much.  Oh well, it gave us mind flayers and the Elder Elemental God.

I know that doesn't really offer much useful, except pointing out some hurdles.


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## Wraith Form (May 10, 2007)

It can be done, however: look at Lords of Madness.  Look at Dungeon adventures "Deep Freeze" or "And Madness Followed".

I just need some basic plot ideas that can be lifted from CoC and dropped into D&D.  I'm shocked how many BRP CoC adventures I own that would require massive re-working just to get the basic plot into a quasi-medieval setting.

Regarding the Far Realm, I know there was a post here a few months ago asking about all the Far Realm adventures/products.  Anyone happen to have a linkie to that, pretty please?


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## rounser (May 10, 2007)

> It can be done, however: look at Lords of Madness. Look at Dungeon adventures "Deep Freeze" or "And Madness Followed".



I'm not familiar with these, but am genuinely interested: Are these reminiscent of CoC stylistic aesthetics in a D&D setting, or do they genuinely turn D&D into Dungeons & Madness?  The former has been done a lot; the latter would be a real trick.  Then again, if Ravenloft can pull off horror with PCs who are armed to the teeth and can fireball an inn down, I suppose it's possible.  

Also, if Ravenloft can superimpose fear checks on D&D monsters, a CoC D&D campaign should be able to superimpose insanity checks on the same.  Again, you run up against the question of why the PCs are going insane if they meet elves down at the pub, so there's some "are monsters normal and common to the world, or completely alien aberrations of nature that aren't even supposed to exist ala 1930s earth" problems to sort out there...


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## Wraith Form (May 10, 2007)

rounser said:
			
		

> I'm not familiar with these, but am genuinely interested: Are these reminiscent of CoC stylistic aesthetics in a D&D setting, or do they genuinely turn D&D into Dungeons & Madness?



Much more the former than the latter.  Deep Freeze is, essentially, Mountains of Madness for 2nd level D&D characters: the PCs investigate why an insane asylum is being effected by nearby mountains, wherein live..._things_.  BIG mo-fo _things_ trapped in ice.  Alas, no madness checks.  "And Madness Followed" is a bard's attempt to run The King in Yellow (the play)...and the squishy joy that follows, for 9th level characters.  Again, no madness checks.    There are also a few Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics that have a "Lovecraftian feel"--Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho describes an ancient wizard that angered ultra-planar Exiled Ones, and the results when the wizard is brought back to this plane.   Cage of Delirium is an adventure concerning an asylum of the insane.  Gooey good times ensue.  They all appear to be adventures well worth their (essential) salt, though.  {Heh.  See how I did that?  Essential salt?}

There are several products for d20 that have madness rules, including Unearthed Arcana.  Heroes of Madness offers the Ravenloft-inspired "taint" as well, which debuted in Book of Vile Darkness.

I think it's almost barely arguable that the Midnight setting is modestly Lovecraft-inspired.

I'd love to design the next "Masks of Nyarlathotep" Adventure Path, built for D&D, but I'm not very good at adventure design of the CoC "layered onion" type.  LOL


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## Professor Phobos (May 10, 2007)

Seven mythos-themed story ideas for Dungeons and Dragons:

1. The Old Speech: Traders on strange vessels have arrived from faraway lands, speaking strange tongues. They're goods are odd, artistically, but nothing is dangerous about their cargoes. But the language they speak- it's hard to forget. People dealing with them pick it up quickly, and find its vocabulary replacing their own. They find themselves considering things to have darker, more malign implications than other. Sexual attraction becomes overwhelming desire for dominance and subjugation, students become mindlessly devoted to their now-cult leader like teachers, and so on. Soon they lose their ability to speak any other language, and start infecting others...friends, family, townsfolk, whoever. The PCs can be involved at any stage- hired as guards for merchants, assigned by the local rulers to investigate, infected and hoping for a cure, whatever. Eventually there will be riots as the infected descend into madness, becoming as the Old Ones. The traders depart for the next port, leaving chaos in their wake and taking with them the strongest of the infected.

2. The Sky: The PCs are underground, battling some cult or some evil underground race that already worships foul, blasphemous deities. Something alone the lines of Drow or whatnot. They discover an idol to said deity that leaves an impression in their minds- they start having strange dreams of a great eye moving behind clouds in the sky, a nameless terror of open spaces, etc. When they return to the surface they find themselves beset by a vision of the sky, one terrifying and ominous. Forced to flee for their sanity back underground, they'll have to search for source of this ancient evil in order to cure themselves of this Old One induced agoraphobia. 

3. The Gates: The PCs discover, or are hired by those who have discovered, whatever the hook, two mystical portals that lead between two important locations in the campaign. However, travelling between these portals isn't something people can just describe- they never remember exactly what it was like, just that it was unpleasant and violating. The time it takes to travel between each portal varies, and some people come through with a bizarre, fatal sickness (i.e., radiation poisoning). At some point someone doesn't come through the other side, and the PCs have to go in to get them. Say an empire was trying to use the portals as a way to secretly move troops or spies into a rival empire, and their army never appeared on the other side. Something along those lines. (Or they arrived..._changed_)

4. The Strange High Castle in the Mist: Haunted Castle. Crazy old Witch lives between the dimensions within, drives residents mad or sucks them into her crazy multi-angled plane. I.e., it's Dreams in the Witch House, only in a castle, and probably with more stabbing of things with swords. 

5. The City of the God: Decadent city in a wasteland. Fading power, evil nobility that exists only to gratify its monstrous urges...and the PCs are captured, or their beloved NPCs are capture, or the King's Daughter has been captured, or they're out to find this city to A. Enjoy its forbidden delights B. Steal something from it C. "rescue' someone who went to enjoy its forbidden delights...and may not want to leave, like the King's Evil Daughter, etc...
Anyway, somewhere in the city is a god trapped in a pit- not a Big Timey God, more like an overweight shoggoth with some spells or a lesser Old One. Anyway, like Conan, they probably have to stab it at some point to get away. Extra points if the city and its inhuman nobility are destroyed in a cataclysm as the PCs flee.

6.The Glove Cleaners (stolen from an Unspeakable Oath): Someone with access to a mythos tome and a printing press has decided to start scattering pages and excerpts from it all over the place. Never enough to assemble a whole spell, but just enough to unsettle those who read them and upset the delicate balance of the fragile or sensitive. Now the King's Daughter (i.e., insert Generic NPC In Distress) has gone mad after collecting too many of these fragments, and the PCs have to go hunt down the printer who is disseminating the forbidden knowledge. But he doesn't even know why he does it, just that he has the urge, and is otherwise a normal guy. (Probably protected secretly by a cult for your obligatory battle sequence) EDIT: Even better if you borrow from "Rome" and have it be mythos-themed graffiti against the local government or nobility.

7. The Disturbances: In the "Call of Cthulhu" short story, when the Big C stirred in his sleep as a result of Ry'leh's short rise to the surface, psychics, sensitives and artists all over the world went mad, had nightmares, or otherwise had a pretty bad couple of days. Now it's happening to the PC's homeland, continent, or to the King's Daughter. The PCs have to go and travel to the location of the not-awake-but-not-asleep GOO and stop its cultists from disturbing its slumber. They haven't woken it up, but they're causing it to thrash around a bit in its Forbidden Island/Underground/Remote Mountaintop/Ancient Ruin/Underwater Chasm/Vast Forest prison. That or it's not cultists but foolish archaelogists who happen to be mostly deep sleepers. Or...Dwarves. When in doubt, blame the dwarves...


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## DJCupboard (May 10, 2007)

Do you have a magic user in your party.  If so, you might want to start out with everyone being all "ho-hum some aberration thingy is casting spells at us again" until...the spell-caster in the party notices that these spells don't match up with any known formulas for magic and these monsters don't seem to fit fit in this world.  Everything is just...off.  Describe it better than I just did (with the resources you have that shouldn't be a problem) and segue into using the sanity rules.

Now you're free to build the mood with the rules backing you and you can do fun stuff like the elf cultists trying to turn themselves into Sahuagin by secretly sacrificing the children of a sleepy coastal town in an attempt to get the attention of some Thing From Beyond.  Why do they want it's attention?  Why do they need to become sea monsters to get it?  Have the children really been killed, or has some fate worse befallen them?


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## Wraith Form (May 10, 2007)

Wow, both posts are great!  Thanks, Professor P & DJ C!

...And yes, I have that UO with the Glove Cleaners.  (I never understood the reference--what the heck's a "glove cleaner"?)


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## Professor Phobos (May 10, 2007)

Wraith Form said:
			
		

> Wow, both posts are great!  Thanks, Professor P & DJ C!
> 
> ...And yes, I have that UO with the Glove Cleaners.  (I never understood the reference--what the heck's a "glove cleaner"?)




I have no idea either, but the name fits, for some reason.


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## Stormborn (May 10, 2007)

I have posted along these lines before, I will see if I can recreate someof the ideas:

In the City of the King:  In a great metropolis a small band of seemingly homeless wanderers are drawing strange swirling grafitti around the town.  Nothing to odd about this, until strange aberration begin appearing randomly and attacking the citizenry.  Eventually entire parts of the city begin to transfrom in to strange alien buildings as the city is slowly replaced by the Mad God City of the Far Realm.  Meanwhile strange plays are being shown, odd coins are showing up, and population of goblins/kobolds/ratmen that are normally found in the sewers and tunnels beneath the city are all leaving, having been warned by their god in a dream to flee the madness to come.  Lots of possible adventures in that scenario:
- Investigate what has the goblins stirred up
- Investigate the random attacks by aberrations (mindless horrors seemingly with no plan at all)
- Investigate the acting troupe the nobleman's daughter has joined and the strange play they are performing.

All or none of that might lead the PCs to the eventually discover the link betweent he symbols, the drifters, and the strange occurances but it may not be in time.  If not there is
- Explore a section of city that has been transformed to rescue a friend/influential person/source of information/magic artifact
- Confront pseudonatrual humans that are building strange works of art/machines to hasten the spread of the alien city
-Confront the drifters and their Yellow King, an avatar of the Mad God City. 

I will see what else I can come up with that doesnt involve deep ones or mindflayers.


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## Desdichado (May 10, 2007)

I ran an adventure who's plot was fairly loosely based on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."  Except that instead of being a seaside town, it was a mining town in the desert.  PC's showed up--can't remember if they were just passing through or actually looking for someone there--and checked into the inn.  Folks were all surly and strange.  Most were cultists of some weird aberration--I remember using specifically the picture of the Beholder Overlord, but the stats were much lower, since my PCs wouldn't have been equipped to handle that.  Several of the cultists had grafts and/or mutations that gave them weird spell like and supernatural abilities.

In any case, we didn't get much buildup of tension, sadly--one of the PC's immediately cottoned on that this was a desert version of Innsmouth and started causing trouble with anyone who even looked at him funny.  To be perfectly honest with you, they got their asses handed to them by the cultists, ended up fleeing barely alive, dragging a comatose PC who had failed one to many Sanity checks, and had to live like outlaws for a while until they were strong enough to make another foray into town to go find who they were looking for.

Needless to say, I was using a D&D and CoC d20 hybrid rules wise.  But I think the idea is still a sound one--find an existing Mythos story, summarize it's basic points in half a dozen or less single sentence bullet points, and you've got the skeleton already of a Mythos-like adventure.  You probably want to swap out the existing Mythos creatures with something else, partly to make it less obvious to Mythos literate players and partly just to make it fit the theme of your campaign.


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## Professor Phobos (May 10, 2007)

I had a much longer post I accidentally destroyed. It was totally awesome- probably the greatest post in the history of internet forums. 

Seriously. That post was great. Anyway, I have neither the patience nor the energy to do it all again, so instead...

Professor Phobos' Instant Mythos Scenario Generator! Follow these three easy steps to create a Mythos scenario.

Step 1: Pick something we value, take for granted, or otherwise respect. Faith, food, relaxation, sleep, the sky, children, education, etc. Place it within a Cosmic Horror context- i.e., invert it. Turn it into something meaninglessly destructive. Look around your house and pick a random object. Look at the context of that object and then turn that context into something toxic and corrupting. Example: I have a children's book, for the teaching of adorable little children. Inversion: Do cultist parents read to their kids? If so, what do those kids reveal to their classmates on the playground the next day...?

Examples Lovecraft did this with: Dreams, houses, books, families.

Step 2: Pick a way that dealing with this crisis can bring ruin and loss to a character. Not their life- I mean, sure, you can get killed fighting the mythos. But that's boring. Have them grow distant from their family. Give them nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, flashbacks, "the shakes", phobias and memory loss. Take away sanity, career, social status. As people face the Mythos they are in turn changed by exposure to it. They become distanced from their humanity (or Dwarvenness, or what have you). In D&D this can be tough, but think of a high-level Archmage who is more Other than man after centuries of research and battling the Mythos. Human life has no value to him, he does not remember the faces of his long dead loved ones. He's no longer human, and he lost all of that in the struggle against the Mythos. Human traits like compassion, or even negative ones like greed, all vanish after prolonged contact with the mythos. Such things become irrelevant as the mind attempts to become as the Great Old Ones.

Examples Lovecraft did this with: Mental stability (virtually every story), Family background (The Rats in the Walls), Physical mutation (The Colour out of Space). 

Step 3: Add tentacles. Use words like: Loathsome, unnamable, indescribable, degenerate, beastly, prodigious, overripe, rotten, grotesque, vast, diseased, colossal, cyclopean, inhuman, sponge-like, debauched, blasphemous, ichorous and debased.


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## Wraith Form (May 10, 2007)

I continue to be in your debt, everyone!


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## Kesh (May 10, 2007)

D&D has a built-in mechanism to clear up one of CoC's biggest flaws: getting the adventurers together. In the actual CoC game, it can be difficult to explain why a doctor, a professor, a bellhop and a flapper all want to traipse around together battling unmentionable horrors.

CoC tried to solve that with Delta Green, making the (modern) characters government-backed, though still working in a non-official aspect. With D&D, these are professional adventurers out to seek fortunes and explore, which naturally puts them right in harm's way.

Eberron makes it even easier, with its pulp heritage, Quori and Xoriat (Far Realm). It's very easy to give the Mythos a new paint job in this setting.


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## Wraith Form (May 10, 2007)

Professor Phobos said:
			
		

> Professor Phobos' Instant Mythos Scenario Generator! Follow these three easy steps to create a Mythos scenario.
> Step 1: Pick something we value, take for granted, or otherwise respect.
> 
> Step 2: Pick a way that dealing with this crisis can bring ruin and loss to a character.
> ...



Interesting.  Sounds a lot like the "animated cartoons from Asia" I've been watching lately.    Yeah, the "adult" ones.


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## rgard (May 10, 2007)

I'll think on this some more and try to post later, but the first that comes to mind is this:

Ur-Priests!  

The Old Ones can't manifest themselves on the Prime Material, because they lack the followers and the power derived from being worshipped.

A lone Cleric or Paladin falls from grace and then discovers ancient texts describing the Old Ones.  He or she then begins the quest to bring back the Old Ones while advancing as an Ur-Priest and becoming your BBEG.

The BBEG forms a cult, trains new Ur-Priests (from all levels of society) with the promise great power and wealth.

Give the bad guys attainable goals with respect to bringing the Old Ones back.

Enter the PCs...

Thanks,
Rich


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## GreatLemur (May 10, 2007)

Funn this should come up, now.  I've lately been half-seriously planning an adventure to introduce some of my RPG buddies to D&D 3.x, and it's starting to look a bit like a fantasy take on _The Dunwich Horror_.

The PCs (1st level, all human, possibly pre-generated) will be asked by the authorities of their home town to investigate what appears to be a month-long rash of grave robberies in the local cemetary (which is huge, as the town is very old).  It'll turn out that there are actually two culprits, in this: A band of ghoul-like (that is, in the Lovecraftian sense, not actually undead) degenerate humans have been chowing down on the town's ancestors, but they're in competition with a necromancer who's been digging folks up and putting them to work.

The necromancer is not here to conquer and zombify the town.  He tells the PCs at the first opportunity that he's raising an undead horde to attack a settlement on the outskirts of town.  The PCs--being locals--have heard stories about the isolated family living out there, and maybe even seen a few of their more functional kin in town.  They're inbred, backwards, secretive, and vaguely criminal, though generally considered harmless.  But the necromancer says their crumbling estate is the site of a quiet, gradual invasion by bodiless intelligences from outside the world.

The deal is that these beings wear away at the barrier between their reaily and specific places in the physical world until they manage to gain some degree of influence in it.  They subtly impose very general suggestions upon those in the vicinity, encouraging xenophobia, incest, and abundant reproduction.  Each successive generation of debased humanity becomes more suceptible to the beings' influence as natural genetic law and unnatural powers promote idiocy and monstrous births.  By the second or third generation, some of the offspring become sensitive enough to those outside to follow simple commands, and begin construction of devices that grind the barriers between worlds ever thinner.

Eventually, instead of merely encouraging random mutation, the beings on the other side can actually _design_ any life that gestates within their region of influence, and they create bodies that they can control more directly, the better to further the creation of more powerful reality-piercing devices, and expand their domain.  Naturally, this is the point at which the PCs would come into things, with several livestock pregnant with unspeakable horror, a number of very unsettling arcane constructions humming away and making it hard to think, and a whole lot of deformed and imbecilic servants--some with minor magical abilities--protecting them.

Clearly, it'll be a good thing if the PCs have a bunch of zombies backing them up when they storm the place, but I think the necromancer won't be all that thrustworthy.  His story will be true, but he won't be in this just to save the town from mutant hillbillies.  There'll probably be some Necronomicon-ish McGuffin in the inbreds' possession.

I'm not really going for a serious horror vibe, so I won't be hitting the players with sanity checks or limiting them to non-magical classes.  This whole thing only ended up resembling _Call of Cthulhu_ because I love this kind of story, and I ain't too interested in tradition D&D fantasy.



			
				Professor Phobos said:
			
		

> Seven mythos-themed story ideas for Dungeons and Dragons:



Those are _all_ extremely awesome ideas, particularly "The Old Speech".  Very nice work.


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## talien (May 10, 2007)

Once I decided that Hastur was both Umor (in Arcanis) and the Unspeakable One (from Freeport), it was simply a matter of tracking down all the adventures that featured the King in Yellow or Hastur.  There's quite a bit of material there, if you're so inclined:
* I converted Tatters of the King.  Not as hard as you might think, given that the 1920s is a lot like Freeport.  Since both settings have pistols, it was simply a matter of removing references to steamers and automobiles.  Worked fine.

* There's also the .PDF adventure, "Cold Visitor," which is a homage to The Thing.  I used it as the opening adventure to "awaken" the King in Yellow from the frozen wastes of Kadath.
* You already mentioned And Madness Followed.
* I converted both Adventus Regis (currently debuting in my story hour at http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=103252) and another adventure...can't remember its name, but they are both in the Monograph "Ripples from Carcosa."  Adventus Regis is set in Roman times, perfect for Arcanis, and the other adventure is set in medieval times, perfect for mainstream D&D.  
* I used Castle Amber to represent Castle Carcosa and filled it with appropriately pseudonatural beasts. Castle Amber has references to Great Old Ones and is set in Averoigne by Clark Ashton Smith, who contributed to the Lovecraft Mythos.


With the conclusion of Tatters of the King, a major chapter closed on The King in Yellow/Hastur.  Now the PCs have to deal with Cthulhu, whom good ole Hastur was actually protecting Arcanis from.  Or to put it another way, "You think I was bad?  Wait til you see my half-brother..."

* I named Cthulhu "Leviathan" in Arcanis, emphasizing his octopus-like aspect.  
* Black Sails Over Freeport features a cult that worships Cthluhu-esque entity, whom I've decided is the same Leviathan bad guy first introduced in Arcanis.

Both Black Sails and Tatters of the King feature overarching plots that you can go back to throughout your campaign.  Tatters of the King is the stronger of the two series, but I've found even Black Sails to have some really great moments.  

I rewrite everything in e-tools and convert it to 3.5 before I play any adventure, sometimes using material from other books.  So for example, last night I converted Daen Danud, a lich, from Abjurer 4/Cleric 8 to Death Master 8/Blood Magus 8 (for my higher-level PCs).  

Happy to share the D&D conversions of any of the Cthulhu adventures if you're interested.


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## 00Machado (May 10, 2007)

Isn't a lot of the feel in the mood, rather than the mechanics?

Change descriptors to make spells seem ...off... somehow, or like they're powered by eneregy from the Far Realm.

Possibly the Dragon issue with the Far Realms article would be helpful.

Investigation and unknown could play a larger part in any adventure.

Regarding specific adventures, I can't help much, but for springboards for adventures ideas, I'd look at Ptolus, Chaositech, and Darkness and Dread. Ptolus has inspiration from Warhammer and Cthuhlu, and Darkness and Dread I read was Mike Mearl's attempt to bring the Warhammer tone to d20 mechanics. Come to think of it, doesn't Freeport have those overtines also?

You mentioned basic plot ideas that can be lifted, and I think the above books may prove helpful. Some plot ideas that come to mind are:
*Investigation - Lots of this theme in the Ptolus setting and it's adventure ideas. I'm thining the original Freeport trilogy is good for this as well.
*Mind Control/Thralls - Take Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and replace the Naga at the end with a Far Realm snakeline or tentacular thing
*Monsters from the deep <or insert other ominious phrase here> - The Balrog of Moria, Mind Flayers, and so on could all be conveyed with the right tone. I think Wolfgang Baur's current open design project will have an encounter location that is an Aboleth controlled area.
*An awakened deity (or powerful servitor), once slumbering, has been disturbed, and now walks the earth
*I'm thinking some Mongoose books with Conan adventures might fit the bill also, but it's just a hunch.


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## Chimera (May 11, 2007)

Wraith Form said:
			
		

> Much more the former than the latter.  Deep Freeze is, essentially, Mountains of Madness for 2nd level D&D characters: the PCs investigate why an insane asylum is being effected by nearby mountains, wherein live..._things_.  BIG mo-fo _things_ trapped in ice.  Alas, no madness checks.  *"And Madness Followed" is a bard's attempt to run The King in Yellow (the play)...and the squishy joy that follows*, for 9th level characters.  Again, no madness checks.




(drool!)

I may seriously have to check these out.  Sanity checks can always be installed.


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## jdrakeh (May 11, 2007)

Somewhere, there is a free PDF setting for D&D 3x (called _The Inside_) which is specifically D&D with Cthulhu Mythos trappings. I had a copy before my harddrive on my old PC crashed, but haven't been able to track down a copy since.


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## Wraith Form (May 11, 2007)

Again, thank you for the fresh batch of incredibly cool ideas, everyone!

Any ideas where _The Inside_ might be found?  I have some decent Google-fu, but "inside" "pdf" and "Dungeons & Dragons" is a bit too open.


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## Wraith Form (May 11, 2007)

talien said:
			
		

> * I converted Tatters of the King.  Not as hard as you might think, given that the 1920s is a lot like Freeport.  Since both settings have pistols, it was simply a matter of removing references to steamers and automobiles.  Worked fine.



Terrific.  I have the book, and ironically my setting features rudimentary firearms.  I'd welcome any advice or additional info you'd be willing to provide.



			
				talien said:
			
		

> * There's also the .PDF adventure, "Cold Visitor," which is a homage to The Thing.  I used it as the opening adventure to "awaken" the King in Yellow from the frozen wastes of Kadath.



I'll look for this ASAP!



			
				talien said:
			
		

> * I converted both Adventus Regis (currently debuting in my story hour at http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=103252) and another adventure...can't remember its name, but they are both in the Monograph "Ripples from Carcosa."



Ironically, I just ordered this from Chaosium.  



			
				talien said:
			
		

> * I used Castle Amber to represent Castle Carcosa and filled it with appropriately pseudonatural beasts. Castle Amber has references to Great Old Ones and is set in Averoigne by Clark Ashton Smith, who contributed to the Lovecraft Mythos.



Are you talking about the OD&D or AD&D (with audio CD) version?



			
				talien said:
			
		

> * Black Sails Over Freeport features a cult that worships Cthluhu-esque entity, whom I've decided is the same Leviathan bad guy first introduced in Arcanis.



*gasp*  And adventure I _don't_ have?!?  I must be slipping....



			
				talien said:
			
		

> Happy to share the D&D conversions of any of the Cthulhu adventures if you're interested.



I'll take whatever you're willing to offer.  My email is wraith [underscore] form [at] msn [dot] com.

Thank you for all the great advice!  I was actually hoping to use the King in Yellow, as one of my players runs a bard who read a copy of a strange play....(wink wink, nudge nudge)


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## Jürgen Hubert (May 11, 2007)

Since you mentioned Pagan Publishing among your sources, I assume you also have Delta Green: Countdown (and if you don't, _why_ not?). I used something from this book for my WFRP campaign, but it can also be adapted to D&D:


There is an "evil cult" operating in a certain city - its members are kidnapping high-ranking guild members, merchants, politicians and other important people. And then they drill _holes_ into their heads. Many of the victims die. But the others are apparently brainwashed into joining the cult...

Of course, the real reason is that the town has a major Shan infestation. But will the PCs discover that before it is too late? Or will they instead try to kill the cultists without examining the reasons for their actions?


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## Ipissimus (May 11, 2007)

Adventure ideas. Ok, let's start with a Lovecraft classic plot device.

1. The Asylum: Deep in the mountains (or other stock remote locations that nobody goes to) is a monestary dedicated to a god/ess of healing. It houses the kingdom's criminally insane, ordinary serial murderers of course rather than monsters and those dedicated to dark gods like the advanturers usually deal with. One of these inmates, however, has unfortunately attracted the notice of dark powers, scribbling nonsense on the walls that he believes are real magical formulae. They have granted him/her a modicum of power, somehow psychically connecting him to the other inmates. It isn't long before the inmates, forming a hive mind, overpower their guardians and, somehow, turn them to their way of thinking.

The 'Dark Gift' could come in many forms or be given in many different ways. The gift could be a magical gemstone that must be gazed into in order to 'infect' the madness, or perhaps it's a gaze attack from one of the infected. Maybe the inmate's insanity allowed him to contact the secret knowledge of the Far Realms and, once completed, granted him this special ability. I'd suggest using the rules for hiveminds from the BOVD to give the PCs a real challenge and probably the Mob rules from DMGII. Or, the agent of this special ability could be a Fiend of Corruption granting the inmate's twisted wish to 'stop being lonely'.

The adventure should play on the adventurer's sense of self for the horror. If one of their number does fall victim to the madness, the hive mind has gained a powerful vessal for it's depraved ideals. The madmen don't offer the character death, they're out to bring them over to their way of thinking.

The players could get involved when, say, the abbey calls for help. Or they could be sent to the monestary when contact is lost. Or the madmen could arrive at the closest village and begin converting the local populace.


2. The Cursed Item: These days, it seems like cursed items don't get much play. Nobody halfway sensible even touches an item until it's been checked out by the friendly neighbourhood mage. But what about an item that doesn't need to be touched to cause utter havoc?

Assassins can kill alot of people in cold blood over one lifetime and the assassin Gorag managed to kill possibly more than a million people over the course of his undead lifespan. This is probably a Bard's exaggeration, since Gorag himself couldn't place an exact number on the number of people he'd killed with it, the point is that it was enough for the blade to take on a malignant life of it's own.

The Blade of Gorag loves pointless murder and worse, loves pinning the crime on innocents. In this quest, it has the abilities and intelligence of Gorag combined with the ability to move of its own accord and alter its appearance. It's current owner, a minor noble, has unwittingly inherited it from a former uncle who 'apparently committed suicide'. Determined to sell his uncle's lands and belongings, the noble has concluded his business and returned to the palace of the reigning monarch... with the Blade of Gorag.

People in the palace have begun dropping like flies, murder, manslaughter and assault are rife, men and women fear leaving their quarters though hiding doesn't seem to help. Worse, with each murder there seems to be someone to blame, someone that always hangs for the crime.

But the Blade does have a motive. Once it manages to anoint itself in the blood of a thousand innocents, Gorag will return from beyond the grave. Even now, his specter can be occasionally seen roaming the halls of the palace.

The King needs to make his palace safe again, he even fears his own guardsmen are in on what he sees as a conspiracy to dethrone him. What he needs are adventurers...

The Blade's love of murder doesn't preclude its having a


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## Riverwalker (May 11, 2007)

Stormborn's idea of the graffiti is similar to one part of the plot from Mielville's 'Iron Council' which prompted me to think of ideas from Mieville stories that could be used.  

The Slakemoths from 'Perdido Street Station' would be perfect for a CoC type scenario - I think Mielville's orginal plot is stronger than my slight tweak below but if your players have read the novel they would spot the plot a mile off, so it's probably necessary to change it a little to throw them off the scent:

The general populace is becoming more and more edgy, easily angered, etc.  This is due to them being unable to properly daydream/relax - they are always alert.  This is due to them being preyed on by other-planar creatures that feed off daydreams/hopes/aspirations/etc.  The creatures also target particulary 'tasty' individuals who are sucked dry of all their personality - leaving them blank.  This happens in day time - often in populated areas.
The creatures are invisible/unable to be percieved by people in their normal state.  However users of a particular new drug that has entered the market are able to see them.  Of course their sightings are discounted as drug induced hallunciations.  The drug induces a state where the user experiences other people daydreams/secret fantasies/etc.

The drug is actually the mother's milk of the creatures.  The creatures were summoned by a evil/chaos cult specifically to harvest the milk for use in rituals.  They also worship and attempt to breed the creatures.  

However some/all the creatures managed to escape and are now preying on the city.

So the party could either get involved completely on their own - i.e. they are affected by the creatures, or even directly attacked (i'm sure the daydreams of adventurers counts as particulalrly tasty). Or they could be hired by the cult (in disguise probably) to capture the creatures alive. Or government/forces of good/law/etc could hire the party to end the menace.

In any case to be able to see the creatures would invlove using the drug or similar - cue Lovecraftian dream sequences.  And the whole city would be taking on a horror aspect as people gradually become more agressive etc.


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## greywulf (May 11, 2007)

Call of Cthulhu makes for great D&D! Remember that Robert Howard, the author of Conan, was a pen-friend of Lovecraft's and you're more than halfway there. You've got snake cults, evil wizards and enough curses to make Samuel L Jackson blush. 

At low-level when everything taller than a goblin is frightening, throw a monster at them that's way above their CR level and watch them flee in terror. Use a Pseudonatural Displacer Beast for a Hound of Tindalos and have a few corpses be found in the PC's village. Eventually they discover that the local priest of the God of Knowledge has come into possession of an Unspeakable Tome. He's slowly becoming insane, suffering nightmares and accidentally Summoned it in his "sleep". Only by destroying the book can the Beast" be returned to it's own dimension. The priest escapes, his last words spoken in a unfamiliar language that chills the soul.......

Then of course there's Herbert Westread Necromancer.

Use the Pseudonatural template. A lot. Make sure the players get a clear sense of the wrongness of the creatures. Nothing says I love you more than a Pseudonatural Black Dragon. Chaos beast are cool too, especially if they see someone they love transform into one. Ickypoo.

Make the setting urban, but let the players feel like they're isolated nonetheless. They could be strangers in an unfamiliar city. Freeport is (of course) a natural setting for this, but Sanctuary (from Thieve's World) is great too. Even a small fishing town could hold secrets below the surface. Perhaps the local tavern is built upon the foundations of a far older structure - maybe even the impenetrable roof of a Structure Older Than Mankind. While examining the unusual floor - it's got life-sized carvings of ancient folks fighting strange cone-like beings - they press something and a hole opens up. Describe the smell of 100,000 year old air escaping. A deep thrum echoes like a giant's heartbeat. Then the entire floor collapses.

At higher levels start to have some fun. Maybe all spell-casters begin to go crazy as a 38,000 year plantetary cycle reaches it's zenith. When both arcane and divine magic fails completely it's up to the Heroes to find you where it went - and why a new island has appeared on the horizon. Maybe the magic fails one spell level per day, starting at 9th and working down. When the highest level wizard in the land is found murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion (Nyarlathotep 1, Elminster 0), that's one thing, but when even 1st level spells fail, chaos ensues. Soon the players are fighting for their lives against insane wizards and the temples echo with strange chants to the forbidden Elder Gods. Hey, it could happen.

Oh, and think back to the Crusades. Picture a victorious army returning with the spoils of the Infidel - including a casket containing Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, or even a half-insane slave who's furiously scribing the text of the Necronomicon onto any available surface, including onto his own skin. The adventurers might find that the only way to stop the wave of insanity spreading through the city is to return the madman and casket back to their own lands. That'll involve a long sea voyage (mmmmmm.... the open sea.......deep....so deep....), fleeing crazed villagers and demons of their own making before breaking into the Forbidden City where the walls themselves loath your presence. 

Hope that gives you some ideas!


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## LostSoul (May 11, 2007)

I have a strange fascination with that mad old hermit in Keep on the Borderlands, since I lost my first two PCs to him (Questor the Elf and his brother, Questor II).

Anyway, I wrote up that guy with some mythos flavour.  Looking at it again, I'd probably consult a thesaurus for different words for "fungus." 

I think it has 3.0 stats.



> 4. The mad hermit, Rog3: CR 3; SZ M; HD 3d6+9; hp 24; Init +3 (+3 dex); Spd 30; AC 18 (+2 leather, +1 deflection, +2 nat, +3 dex); Atk +6 melee (1d4+4, dagger +1); SA sneak attack +2d6; SQ evasion, uncanny dodge; SV Fort +4, Ref +6, Will +1; S 16, D 17, C 16, I 10, W 10, Ch 6; AL CE.  Skills: Listen +6, Spot +6, Search +6, Move Silently +9, Hide +9, Knowledge (occult) +4, Knowledge (religion) +4, Mythos Lore +5, Tumbling +9.  Feats: Improved Initiative, Toughness.  Sanity: 0.
> This whole area is marked by a thick and strange fungal infection.  Even the trees have succumbed to it, covered at the bottom and strangely bloated, as though they were pregnant.  All the trees are bare, even the evergreens.  The forest floor is covered with the fungus, and in deeper parts each footstep sinks into the carpet, nearly engulfed by the fungus, as it they were trying to penetrate the covered feet and feast on the flesh within.  The mad hermit lives in the centre of this madness, in a large, hollow tree that seems to have "popped".
> This hermit has gone insanely mad after submitting to a dread bargain with the Old One Einhort.  His belly is now terribly bloated, and, on close inspection, one can actually see something struggling inside, pushing to get out.  A battle with the hermit will push it over the edge, and it will rip its way through the hermit's rubbery skin.  It resembles nothing so much as a large fungus, its coat a dull grey-yellow colour, the mass of fungus writhing and snapping with thousands of small suckerlike mouths.  It has a few large, ropy tentacles that it attacks with.  It moves around on a mass of small human-like legs.
> Treat this creature as a deep one, with tentacle attacks instead of its normal ones.  Seeing this "birth" costs 1d4/1d10 sanity.


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## Wraith Form (May 11, 2007)

Jürgen Hubert said:
			
		

> Since you mentioned Pagan Publishing among your sources, I assume you also have Delta Green: Countdown (and if you don't, _why_ not?).



Safe assumption.  Rest assured, we _does_ have Countdown, oh yes we does my preciousssss.


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## Wraith Form (May 11, 2007)

Chimera said:
			
		

> (drool!)
> 
> I may seriously have to check these out.  Sanity checks can always be installed.



If you need issue numbers, I'd be happy to oblige.


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## Desdichado (May 11, 2007)

greywulf said:
			
		

> Call of Cthulhu makes for great D&D! Remember that Robert Howard, the author of Conan, was a pen-friend of Lovecraft's and you're more than halfway there.



Just because REH and HPL were pen pals doesn't mean that their stories are particularly similar, though.  Even Howards Mythos stories are only very superficially similar to Lovecraft's.  There's a theory out there--I think it's in one of the essays in the recent Del Rey Conan reprintings, that Howard's influences were much more the Adventure magazine of historical swashbuckling romances, not the Weird Tales tradition.  Which I know is ironic, since he was one of the Weird Tales "three musketeers."

I guess that brings to mind, Wraith Form--what exactly from the Mythos are you hoping to import into your game, anyway?  A D&D Mythos story sounds like it would be more like a Howard Mythos story on the face of it; yeah, you get a nice weird description of the horrors, dripping with eldritch ichor and all the other purple adjectives, but then when all's said and done, you still kick it's butt.


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## rgard (May 11, 2007)

Hobo, saw your location...are we neighbors?

Thanks,
Rich


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## Desdichado (May 11, 2007)

No... my van is by a river in the Material Plane.  Although parking it on the banks of the River Styx is a really intriguing idea.  Hmm...


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## talien (May 11, 2007)

Wraith Form said:
			
		

> *gasp*  And adventure I _don't_ have?!?  I must be slipping....



The Freeport trilogy features the Unspeakable One and the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign.  You should definitely check them out in that case, as Black Sails Over Freeport has some Cthulhu-esque moments, but the Freeport series is practically a Call of Cthulhu/d20 crossover...with pirates. For some reason.



> I'll take whatever you're willing to offer.  My email is wraith [underscore] form [at] msn [dot] com.



Sent!



> Thank you for all the great advice!  I was actually hoping to use the King in Yellow, as one of my players runs a bard who read a copy of a strange play....(wink wink, nudge nudge)



In that case you must, MUST, MUST convert Tatters of the King.  It's everything there is to know about the King in Yellow, Hastur, and the Unspeakable One all wrapped into a marvelous package.


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## Desdichado (May 11, 2007)

talien said:
			
		

> The Freeport trilogy features the Unspeakable One and the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign.  You should definitely check them out in that case, as Black Sails Over Freeport has some Cthulhu-esque moments, but the Freeport series is practically a Call of Cthulhu/d20 crossover...with pirates. For some reason.



For some reason?  FOR SOME REASON?!  

You never need a reason to have pirates.


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## talien (May 11, 2007)

"You've got pirates in my Cthulhu!"

"You've got Cthulhu in my pirates!"

Maybe it's just me.  If I had known that the first three adventures set in Freeport were all Cthulhu, all the time, I would have been more inclined to buy them.  But they didn't call it Cthulhuport.

Hmm, now there's an idea.


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## Chimera (May 11, 2007)

Ipissimus said:
			
		

> 2. The Cursed Item: These days, it seems like cursed items don't get much play. Nobody halfway sensible even touches an item until it's been checked out by the friendly neighbourhood mage. But what about an item that doesn't need to be touched to cause utter havoc?




In my last setting, there was an item called The Worm Sigil.  It was a non-euclidian statuette of a worm like thing.  Owned by Marian Applegate.  Outwardly the mom-and-apple pie owner of a very nice Inn in a major city, secretly the nasty vicious ruler of a Thieve's Guild (one of many competing guilds in that city).  Imagine Marian Ross of Happy Days secretly moonlighting as an insane Yakusa Crime Boss in a Guild War.

Um, maybe don't eat the meat pie.

Just looking at the Sigil forced a Sanity Check.  Having it around long term....   Well I honestly hadn't bothered to decide everything that it did, because I usually don't bother with such things until they become necessary.


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## Ibram (May 11, 2007)

This thread is one of the best ever...

Some ideas of mine...

Poison Gold:  A failing gold mine is suddenly revitalized... but disturbing things seem to follow where ever the gold goes.  The truth is that the sudden influx of gold comes from a temple the miners found far beneath the earth.  They have looted all the 'hurts your eyes to look' statues and melted them down, mixing it in with the gold from the mine.

Prophet of the Deep Woods: a new nature based cult is emerging, brought by currious strangers from a foreign land (when I ran it they were Elves).  Though its teachings appear to be similar to the druids there are refrences and practices that druids find slightly disturbing.  members of the cult have been leaving the city, traveling to meet the 'Prophet' of their new god... and are never seen again.


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## pemerton (May 12, 2007)

Our current (Rolemaster) campaign is set in an East Asian setting, using a mix of Kara-Tur and Bushido maps, and a mix of the Kara-Tur and Freeport timelines. By the time I ran the Freeport adventures the PCs were reasonably high level, so I had to make quite a few changes.

One thing that worked well was inspired by an adventure seed in D20 CoC: there have been a series of murders in Freeport, of increasing frequency, and the location of the murders makes a pattern with the house of the murderer at the centre (although my players never figured out this pattern, or the significance of the frequency - I can't remember now how they found the murderer's house - maybe I stuck it on top of the entrance to the cultists' lair, or maybe the Paladin detected demons).

All that was left of the murder victims was a scalped head - when the PCs eventually found the murderer's house, they were too late to stop the summoning, but found a scene of flayed bodies sitting in a cirlce, with their skins and scalps draped over them like cloaks. A Past Vision spell revealed that the summoner had opened a gate, and the Entity that had come through (T'sen, or Ssendam Lord of the Insane converted into RM stats) had consumed the summoner.

There were various lesser demons to fight, and then a confrontation with T'sen, who had flown out on his Psychic Skiff to observe the lighthouse, waiting for the arrival of the Unspeakable One.

Some other changes made to the basic Freeport scenario included having the island in fact be the body of a dead god (inspired by Requium for a God) who had died fighting T'sen and other voidal entities many thousands of years ago, and who therefore constituted a sort of interface between the material plane and the void (Far Realm). This had been foreshadowed by an earlier meeting with the dead god's mad spirit while the party was on the ethereal plane.

In conversations with the local nature spirits (increasingly driven insane), the PCs learned that the dead god's eyes had opened, with Octobats and other strange beasts coming through. This was foreshadowed with strange catches in fishermen's nets, and climaxed with a fight with a Kraken Drake (8 tentacles, two heads breathing Nether, which in D&D would probably be negative energy).

Thus was sense of wrongness created.

The overall climax I ran a little differently from Freeport - I dropped the McGuffin, and had the PCs disrupt the crystal directly. At the moment of climax, the stars aligned strangely above the lighthouse, and an evil meteor descended from the heavens. Strange beings (the Smoke Generals, lifted from the Druid limited series of comics by Warren Ellis in the mid-90s) wearing the same robes as the monks of the God of Knowledge (an esoteric Buddhis sect, in my version) also arrived on a boat, although the PCs took them for enemies rather than allies and killed them.

Instead of simply telling the players that things felt strange or wrong, I was able to introduce a number of strange effects to reflect the piercing of the barriers between the normal world and the void. Thus, the spell caster with True Sight up (looking for snake men in human form, invisible cultists etc) was able to see through the many layers of the void at once, and use that ability to move through voidal rather than material geometry (basically Dimension Door at will). When the warrior mage was cut, he started bleeding Spiderbats rather than blood. The sea turned to jelly, and the fighters were able to walk on it. The Paladin entered into communion with the Dead God, and was able to persuade him to focus on the Buddha rather than the void, and thus to rise out of the sea to deflect the dark meteor out of the sky to the bottom of the ocean. The location of a dark god at the bottom of the ocean has now become the main campaign focus.

In terms of overall flavour, I would say this scenario was somewhere between Cthulhu and Conan - there were moments of genuine disgust (eg at the flayed murder victims) and a sense of unreality conquering sanity (at the lighthouse climax), but also a lot of dead cultists, demon-slaying and bathing in the ichor of foes (Kraken Drake, T'sen, etc). I think the latter is hard to avoid in D&D-style fantasy.

One other thing I have found works well is drawing direct connections between the voidal beings and the clerical PCs. The latter are Buddhist, and thus believe in overcoming worldly entanglements by achieving enlightenment. It has thus worked quite well to prepare as player handouts a few "mad ravings" written by cultists, which talk about the voidal beings as also having travelled beyond the confines of the mundane, escaping the illusions of the Smoke Generals and realising true emptiness. This generates a sense of disturbance and a hint of corruption around what should be a comforting ideal at the heart of normality, namely, the campaign's mainstream clerical orders.

In core rules D&D, where Buddhist PCs might be few and far between, I think that Boccob, and perhaps Wee Jas, would lend themselves well to this sort of treatment. And clerics of St Cuthbert could be cast as simpletons, whose insistence on common sense blinds them to the deeper truths (of the Far Realm, etc) which can't be denied by those who have experienced them. Like an earlier poster said, to get a CofC feel, its not enough to have bad things - those bad things have to suggest that what we take to be the good things are not really good at all, but are either worthless illusions or already corrupted.


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## iron-spyder (May 12, 2007)

Hobo said:
			
		

> Just because REH and HPL were pen pals doesn't mean that their stories are particularly similar, though.  Even Howards Mythos stories are only very superficially similar to Lovecraft's.  There's a theory out there--I think it's in one of the essays in the recent Del Rey Conan reprintings, that Howard's influences were much more the Adventure magazine of historical swashbuckling romances, not the Weird Tales tradition.  Which I know is ironic, since he was one of the Weird Tales "three musketeers."





     Actually, Conan's tales take place in the same world and share the same gods as Lovecraft's Mythos, this is noted in several places, the names of the gods differ slightly, but HPL, REH and CAS (Clark Ashton Smith) were correspondents who pooled their talents, and shared ideas and entities in their work. 

     To the original poster: look into the master of weird heroic fantasy for ideas to mesh Mythos-style horror with fantasy, Clark Ashton Smith. Many of his works are on wikipedia, especially Averoigne. Check out the Ballantine Books paperback Zothique for some of his absolute best.


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## LostSoul (May 12, 2007)

Professor Phobos said:
			
		

> 1. The Old Speech:




That is so awesome.


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## Wraith Form (May 12, 2007)

Ibram said:
			
		

> This thread is one of the best ever...



Thanks...and especially a big THANK YOU to the wonderful people who responded!

There are people that (at one time) visited these boards that I'm a little surprised haven't added their unutterable wisdom to this post, but maybe they're gone now..?  Joshua Dyal?  As I understand, he often had a squamous detail or two to add...      ...and there are others.


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## shilsen (May 12, 2007)

Wraith Form said:
			
		

> Joshua Dyal?  As I understand, he often had a squamous detail or two to add...




I think Hobo is the artist formerly known as Joshua Dyal.


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## Wraith Form (May 12, 2007)

That would make some sort of crazy, twisted sense.....in a madness-inducing way....


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## Ibram (May 13, 2007)

iron-spyder said:
			
		

> To the original poster: look into the master of weird heroic fantasy for ideas to mesh Mythos-style horror with fantasy, Clark Ashton Smith. Many of his works are on wikipedia, especially Averoigne. Check out the Ballantine Books paperback Zothique for some of his absolute best.




There is also:

Zothique

and:

Eldritch Dark


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## iron-spyder (May 13, 2007)

Ibram said:
			
		

> There is also:
> 
> Zothique
> 
> ...





   Quite right you are. Zothique is an excellent cycle as well, stories like The Charnel God, The Black Abbot of Puthuum, The Voyage of King Euvoran  and The Empire of the Necromancers really stand out as excellent themes for a game blending the Mythos and DnD/fantasy. I had noted Averoigne in particular because the stories are on the wikipedia page and linked directly to the stories on The Eldritch Dark.


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## ShadowDenizen (May 13, 2007)

> Oh, and a small request: Deep Ones, sahuagin, mi-go, beholders and mind flayers are over-done, played out, cliché and tired. I'm looking for something...different. Heck, I'd love to hear about some human opponents--after all, we're the most hideous monsters, aren't we?




Take a page out of "Shadow Over Innsmouth".
Small hamlet adjacent to water, inhabited by Deep Ones.  MAybe you could even tie Abholeth into the story, segue into an Underwater adventure.  ("Lords of Madness" is well worht the price!!)

Or, Dungoen Crawl Classics #2 ("Lost Vault of Tszanthar Ro") also has a Lovecraftian fell, with a suitably eerie climax.


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## Wraith Form (May 13, 2007)

Thank you, but again, as originally stated, I _don't_ want to turn this into a "who can name the most books that Wraith Form already owns" contest.

I'd like to keep generating plot ideas of our own, not referencing existing products.  

(And I already mentioned _Tsathzar Rho_ several posts back.    )


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## Jondor_Battlehammer (May 13, 2007)

Ipissimus said:
			
		

> 1. The Asylum: Deep in the mountains (or other stock remote locations that nobody goes to) is a monestary dedicated to a god/ess of healing. It houses the kingdom's criminally insane, ordinary serial murderers of course rather than monsters and those dedicated to dark gods like the advanturers usually deal with. One of these inmates, however, has unfortunately attracted the notice of dark powers, scribbling nonsense on the walls that he believes are real magical formulae. They have granted him/her a modicum of power, somehow psychically connecting him to the other inmates. It isn't long before the inmates, forming a hive mind, overpower their guardians and, somehow, turn them to their way of thinking.





I used the free module "Where Madness Dwells" in a similar fashion. The group I play with had already run through it once while I was a player, and I did something of a "return too" as a Dm in the same world with different PCs. An old nemesis of theirs, whom the believed dead, was held in the sanitarium, but had become so trusted by the staff that she had freedom enough to move about the other patients. She was an artist, and had been creating busts of many of the patients, and a few of the staff as well. Embedded in these bust was a rune carved charm that channeled power from my version of the far realm, subverting reality to the desire of the wielder, or in this case, the fantasies of the mad. 

As the PCs confronted her, she activated them, and the full power of the charms took effect. I had patients turning into a werewolf, invisible, a child, one that flew, a pyromaniac that turned into an evocation heavy sorcerer. The looks on my friends faces when I describe the ceiling creaking above the and them hearing a loud *fe fi fo fumm!* was great. The party was separated over three stories and two wings, trying to deal with BBEG, a partially burning building, and an asylum full of somewhat dangerous foes that were in fact innocent patients that they really did not want to kill. I didn't run it as an overtly Cthulhu style adventure, but it could be tweaked. 

The original WMD had Illithids and dark portals in it, so you could run it as is, just slap on some sanity checks.


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## Clavis (May 15, 2007)

rounser said:
			
		

> In a fantastic D&D world, much of the alien horror of Cthulhu has it's wind taken out of it's sails.  PCs use magic, it doesn't drive them insane.  PCs fight monsters, they don't drive them insane.  The planes are wacky, and they don't drive the PCs insane either.  Differentiating a Great Old One from being just another supermonster like the Tarrasque, or Mephistopheles trying to bring about Hell On Prime is also going to be tricky.




Remember that CoC is actually a bit of a parody of Lovecraft's work.  Although the game has fostered the perception that in all of Lovecraft's work contact with the Old Ones absolutely destroys your sanity, its just not true in the stories.

A perfect example of how to blend the Mythos and swashbuckling fantasy is provided by Lovecraft himself, in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Hell, the protagonist even has an extended audience with Nyarlothotep himslef and comes away from it quite sane.


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## grodog (May 15, 2007)

Zothique d20 fans should check out http://www.eldritchdark.com/articles/criticism/30/zothique-d20-system-game-guide

In the past, I've converted N1 Village of Orlane into a Mythos-infestation a la Innsmouth, and run the bhut monastery from X4/X5 into a Dreams from the Witch House/Strange High House in the Mist locale.  For other ideas, see http://dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21120


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