Fudge Forum

jcfiala · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 12:38 pm Post subject: Call of Cthulhu/Lovecraft

So, I'm working on FUDGE Cthulhu stuff - largely because I've noticed that my own tendencies for running CoC shade towards ignoring 90% of the rules, and just going with what seems to make a good game.

It seems for 1890/1920's era adventuring, one good toolkit to have is the NAGS handbook from GG - I've recently gotten a copy and ran a group through an Egyptian senario that GG sent me to be run as a Demo at a con. It went pretty well, and it seemed to me that a lot of the rules structure from that book makes a good mechanical background, both for creating characters (it uses Five Point Fudge) through the combat system and on.

As for the joyful subject of sanity, I rather like a damage-track-like system that I found on the internet once... oh, dear, it seems to have gone down. Well, the sections were Shaken/Scared (-1)/Panic (-2)/Temp. Insane/Insane, with similar damage boxes. Each time a character comes across something scary, they roll their Will against the level of fear, and if their result is under the fear level, the difference between the two is used to track how much 'fear damage' they've taken.

Oh, look, I've found some suggestions for FUDGE sanity here: http://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/fsanity.html

John

Capybara · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 12:41 pm Post subject:

Interesting. It would be easy to simulate the slide toward permanent insanity by removing a "wound" box from the track every time the player is rendered "Incapacitated" or "Near Death." After a while, all it will take is one final "Scratch" to put him over the edge for good.
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All hail the Master of the Grasses!

cjh · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 1:09 pm Post subject:

Personally I like the first approach best. I guess that I just wanted something other than a variant on using the damage track. I do think that Fudge and Lovecraftian horror would be a great match. I certainly would like to see something come out along those lines.

Paul T · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 7:22 pm Post subject: Fudge Insanity

Fudge Factor to the rescue...

Maybe you were thinking of:

http://www.fudgefactor.org/2004/03/01/going_slightly_mad.html

OR

http://www.fudgefactor.org/2003/02/01/fear_checks_revisited.html

But I suspect you were really thinking of this site, which is down for some reason, but accessible via the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041028100211/http://www.cse.msu.edu/~behrends/rpg/fudge-cthulhu.html

Cheers,

Paul T

J.Tim · Fudge Forum Member Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 103

Along with the other links, this one has a mechanical conversion:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021003121800/w3.one.net/~frohlich/fudge/coc/

Capybara · Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2006 9:51 am Post subject:

Incidentally, the very best gaming resource out there now for 1920s-1930s games is Pulp Hero from Hero Games. It has a massive timeline of historical events from Lovecraft's era, an overview of the world and its governments, a guide to which inventions came out when and even a slang primer.
_________________
All hail the Master of the Grasses!

jcfiala · Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 12:46 pm Post subject:

I ran a CoC/FUDGE mashup titled 'Steam Tunnels & Trolls' and it worked out just great - I used the 'damage track' method of keeping track of Sanity loss and it worked fine.

No one went insane, but it got close a few times. Smile

Sonja · Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:54 pm Post subject: 1-2-3 Cthulhu

My homebrew very simple RPG system for Cthulhu is here: www.kisa.ca/123.html (but it's not Fudge). It's loosely inspired from White Wolf.