The Mythos Files: A Cthulhu/X-Files Mashup

Hi All,

First post for me in a while…I’d been in gaming hibrenation, but it’s Spring again…

I’ve had this on my back burner for a while, a Mashup of the [URL=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu”%5DCthulhu%5B/URL%5D Mythos and the [URL=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files”%5DX-files%5B/URL%5D. And while I’m waiting for my D&D gaming group to be available to play again in a couple of weeks, I thought I’d move it to the front burner, throw some dough against the wall, and see what stuck.

One can see how the two series would mesh well together, both center around investigation of the truly unknown and terrible (whether that be the [URL=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos_deities”%5DOld Ones[/URL] or the Aliens of [URL=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51″%5DArea 51[/URL].

Just let all that goodness soak in and get your creative juices floating on that…

A few questions for input (or at least thought by me if no one else is interested):

1) What rule set – The no-brainer is to use the Call of Cthulhu rules and update them for more futuristic things (like cell phones – whether they be the 90s monstrosities from the original series or more modern phones, gps, etc.) or something else altogether (FATE, d20, GURPS) OR even a completely homebrewed (or Frankensteined) ruleset (I dabble in these a lot). What are your thoughts?

2) Nature of the Cthulhu Mythos *actual* involvement – Is it direct and apocolyptic OR (as I’m leaning towards) very subtle and mostly an influencer of the Cthulhu cult (with an occasional off-camera intervention…perhaps with that crucial witness npc)?

3) OK, so we have the Old Ones, Cultists, FBI Agents (and other competing adventurers)? What else? Do we keep things like the Men-In-Black? What else? What would you like to see in there?

4) Other thoughts?

I’m going to keep building on this, both at rpg.net and on my blog at High Adventure Games. Your thoughts would be most welcome!

Game On,

~AoB

Back at the Table

Back at the table

Wow! It has been a while and I’d lost my way. Too much going on to indulge my hobbies, but I’m back. After some unexpected surgery and the mandatory recovery time, I’ve realigned with some of the fun things in my life.  This post was originally entitled “Father’s Day Update – Summary Campaign with my Minions”, in which I described my re-emergence, my recent involvement/re-involvement with Table-Top Role-playing Games, and described the fun new campaign I’m running with my family this summer.

You read that right….”Father’s Day”. I’ve been working on this post for more than a week now. Now some of that is related to making decisions on the nature and form of the campaign as I wrote about them, but mostly, I think I was just trying to write about too many different things at once. Obviously, that isn’t helping me actually complete any writing in a meaningful time frame and it certainly isn’t developing the sort of engagement for which I was hoping online. So I’ve decided to break things down into smaller bite sizes and see how that goes.

As chance would have it, somehow Baldur’s Gate started itself up as I was typing this….Boo must need me.

I’d been filling the gaming void in my life with some Baldur’s Gate with one of my minions (10), but it is now time to come back to the table and table-top games. Time to come back to Dungeons & Dragons.

By D&D, I have come to mean essentially any table-top role-playing game (generally, meaning with a fantasy slant, but not always).  HAG and Aega Mythea essentially grew out of my need to house-rule and tinker with game engines/mash stuff up and out-of-the-box D&D is somewhat of a rarity in my gaming history, but in this case (as it were), you will see that I actually mean actual D&D…D&D 5E to be more exact. More on that later.

With regard to the most basics of the campaign, let’s start with the players and their circumstances. First of all, due to some unexpected surgery, I am home on the mend, healing up from that. Hence both my time and inclination to play again (you look death in the face and you may find yourself refocusing your life a bit….in this case, time with family). I have three players: my wife (who loves games, but was never really into D&D, but is excited to give it a go) and my two kids (12 and 10, both of whom have a little experience with D&D and such games). We are very excited to do this together and I’ll be sure to provide updates and expansions on this post as appropriate.

With regard to Baldur’s Gate, for those not in the know, the game is now available on Steam and elsewhere as an Enhanced Edition. I highly recommend you pick it up.

~AoB

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HighAdventureGames/

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/adaen

Level 13

I’ve previously written a bit about the Imperial Destiny campaign in which I’ve played in for many years.

Over this time, we’ve been had several parties due to atrician and total party kills (TPK). One thing that’s been fairly consistent is the Level 13 barrier. We never seem to be able to clear that hurdle. Once we get characters who make it to L13, we’ve had something catestrophic happen that prevents us from progressing past that point.

Well, this time, we lost a player who’d lost interest in playing….this served as the impetus for our GM who’s been struggling with conflicting activities.  He’s decided to table the campaign….Its the end of an era. It’s been a lot of fun, Wraith.

Now I’m reduced to a bit of Neverwinter Nights for my gaming fix….not horrible, but its not tabletop either.  I’m going to have to consider finally getting my own campaign (or series of one-offs going).

All of that being said, I’m curious if others have had this experience with L13 in d20/DnD 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder/etc. Maybe its just that 13 is unlucky (and gamers are notoriously superstitious about numbers, bad/good dices, etc.) or maybe there’s about the mechanical complexity of the game that increases once 7th-level spells are in play. Or maybe, its something else all together. Hmmmm.

~AoB