Zouabar's DM Logs

Zouabar, 24, France || Beginner DM || Call of Cthulhu, D&D || Just trying to keep track of my ideas and experiences as a DM

[mightofmerchants]

Some people have asked me if I can publish my mapmaking tools. So I developed a software. 🙂

Here is the result:

Canvas of Kings on Steam

Canvas of Kings is a minimalistic mapmaking tool that focuses on randomness and auto-generated elements on user-definable and interactive pa

[tufoupiloupary]

Here’s a couple of pictures of my homemade GM screen and a couple of tokens for my PCs and NPCs to use on battle maps and such ! It’s all designed, handpainted and assembled by me. It’s a bit wonky but I’m quite happy with it for now and I had a ton of fun making it.

I won’t post pictures of the back because it’s quite a bit uglier but I glued transparent plastic sleeves I had leftover from my school days to the back so I can slide my homemade quick reference rule sheets in there and switch them out depending on the system I’m playing/my needs as a GM.

I look forward to making more props and handouts for future games !

[mamoru]

stop using hospitals as horror settings

[mamoru]

fun alternative: cruise ships. cruise ships exploit workers and can pollute as much as a million cars on a daily basis while dumping endless shit into the ocean and endangering all passengers on board because the on board air quality rivals some of the most polluted cities in the world while being a breeding ground for disease. cruise ships deserve to have negativity associated with them

[catparazzi]

also all crimes commited aboard a cruise ship is under the juristiction of whichever country they’re registered to once they’re a certain distance away from land so you have the added bonus of the crimes being very unlikely to be properly investigated (due to usually being physically so very far from the actual police whose juristiction they’re under)

[mamoru]

terrifying!

[xcekait]

On top of THAT cruise ships tend to have their own morgue, as people tend to die on ships all the time. Good for those spooky scenes.

[bananonbinary]

plus u can just like…leave a hospital. good luck escaping a killer or a monster or a curse or w/e in the middle of the fucking ocean

[sketchyfletch]

As an ex cruise ship employee, let me give you some stuff to work with!

Water tight doors! You get a special training video on interacting with these correctly because they will literally cut you in half if you try and go through them while they’re closing!

Freezer vaults for food in the sub decks - you can only get into these with the correct code and they have very thick walls. Good luck if you get shut in one of these just after the last round of checks bucko

There are cameras everywhere…except in the crew cabin corridors. Also there are no windows down there because unless you’re an officer, you live below the waterline. Day and night have no meaning because everything is in the same slightly unsettling yellow light.

Don’t piss off the guys who deal with the rubbish. They have machines down there that can crush metal barrels

As well as morgues, cruise ships usually have one basic operating theatre with all the attendant horrifying equipment in it

One cigarette thrown carelessly in the wrong place WILL start a fire that will gut half the ship.

When we’re pitching side to side, the anchor swings out and then back in, striking the metal outer shell with a noise that shakes half the ship

People disappear overboard more often than you’d really want to be a thing

A lot of cruise ships now have theatres on board (usually towards the front) with all the potential for dark corners, creepy costumes and electrical calamities you could want.

And as op says, you can’t really escape a ship in the middle of the ocean. Particularly during a storm, as then you can’t even evacuate to lifeboats unless the whole ship is going down. On the upside being on board during a storm means most guests hide in their cabins and the staff walk around like drunks, which would likely throw off a skilled murderer’s plans.

[shenaniginstigations]

Takes notes

You also have the bonus of a corporate overlord who doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits and can be reliably counted on to downplay any disaster in an attempt to avoid publicity.

[naamahdarling]

Norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships show just how fast a highly contagious virus spreads, how hard it is to avoid catching it due to surface contamination and food transmission, and how disgusting the ship rapidly becomes. Unnavigable with filth. (Seriously I won’t go into it but accounts are sometimes horrific.)

If you want a zombie virus outbreak or something like that, a cruise ship could create up to NINE THOUSAND infected. (Based on the capacity of the current largest cruise ship.)

[ezttrpg-log]

Following up on my idea plan for one-off character focused sessions :

I’ve been working my ass off on a one-shot scenario set during WWI for T. and I think I have the historical part down (at least well enough to be semi-believable to my players). I’ve mostly just spent a lot of time reading up on US intervention during WWI, major battles, and gathering visual references for locations, equipment and uniforms. Now I need to move on to the hard part, which is putting together a scenario that makes sense and doesn’t risk being derailed too badly but I’m having a couple of issues :

- First, I need the main character for this session (T.) to not get killed. If he came to die during that it would be a very big issue (which is going to be true for the characters in all of theses spin-off sessions but this one seems like it might be the most perilous of all). So I’m going to need to find ways to kind of shield my player without making it too obvious or too nice. I don’t want his agency taken away and I don’t want him to feel invincible either.

-Second, I’ve had a chat about my plans with a friend who’s not playing with us and I came to think I should link these sessions together somehow. It might seem like an easy way out but I think it’d be really beneficial and help create a sense of purpose across the group for future progress in the campaign. Given the plots I’ve devised for each character’s personal fright night (and my own inclinations as a GM), I think I can frame every arc as a form of corruption (either physical, mental, or political) and I might be able to bring all of that in to represent the influence of a single deity/entity.

I was thinking of using Hastur for that, or a lesser entity linked to Hastur. The effect of Hastur’s possession (deformity, people growing scales, etc.) are interesting to me and the Court in Yellow would allow me to tie the political aspect into all of this. Problem is I don’t know much about Hastur at all. I've watched real play campaigns where he comes into play and read the Keeper’s Manual but I’m still not fully sure about how to bring him into play without butchering the Mythos (and potentially any subsequent campaigns with this group).

Given the theme of this session, I wanted to rely on body horror, as well as the sheer violence of war and its absurdity. Some abysmal horror, befitting a life changing experience while still being strongly anchored in the realm of reality in a way. I’d like to alter the character’s senses, maybe get some to turn on the others and attack them in a bout of madness. That might suit Nodens better than Hastur. I also thought of conjuring some kind of horrible flesh golem, risen from the mangled corpses of fallen soldiers and the mud of the battlefield.

Now that I write about it I think I might find a way to make those all fit together (which could help me define a semblance of plot, fingers crossed...). If this ends up being any good, and if I ever have the time to rework it, I might try sharing the scenario as a free pdf for whoever wants to try it out. 

[ezttrpg-log]

So ! The concept of having “spin-offs” has been largely approved by player group A and I’ve started racking my brain for ideas ! Here’s a recap of what I’ve come up with this far :

- T. decided to relate every one of their traits to “the war” as a joke, I’m currently drafting a WWI* scenario, down in the trenches and the mud, featuring death, war, politics and body horror specifically for them.

- A. is a polish immigrant who moved to the US with a dream : I intend to set a session around her character and have weird Cthulhu-y stuff happen while she’s on the boat to America. I initially turned to 1889 (the Netflix show) for inspiration but it sucked so bad I couldn’t justify spending anymore time watching it past episode 4 so I think I’m gonna have to make my own stuff up from scratch pretty much.

- W. stated he was an opium user and a gambler, so I’d like to set a scenario based on addiction and its effects. This far I intend to bend his perceptions and maybe adopt some rules based on The Unsleeping City season 2 and a couple TMA episodes. I know the Berlin : The Wicked City Call of Cthulhu extension has some rules in this regard and I’m currently trying to find how to access some of those and adapt them into my game without buying the full book. (Budget is tight y’all.)

- O. is a (catholic) forensic investigator/medical examiner. I haven’t drawn up anything precise yet but I’m thinking of doing something like a reaaaaally weird case, possibly inspired by Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities — The Autospy.

- T.T. is blind due to trauma (cause of trauma unknown) and a medium, I don't have any idea how I'm gonna do this but I'd like to do a session relating to her earliest experience(s) as a medium without explaining away her blindness. The character is old enough to justify a one-shot set in the gaslight era and I really think a seance-type session might be fun.

So yeah, right now I'm mostly doing research for the first couple ones, we’ll see what it turns out as soon I guess ! 

*We’re playing classic period, not gaslight or modern so WWI just makes sense.

[ezttrpg-log]

I’ve had my first session running Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu this Sunday with a group of players who had some experience role playing for the most part, but had ever played CoC before. I chose to run “The Haunting” scenario for initiation (which I translated from English for accessibility reasons).

It fulfilled its main purpose fairly well, which was to introduce the essential rules to my players and offer them a first taste of combat and consequences (nobody died but a PC’s familiar* had a very close call), but there’s a couple things I’d like to take note of for future reference :

- First, I was well prepared system wise but not well enough on the lore side, especially on the couple of “loose ends” the scenario plants for future development. I definitely need to learn more on that end if I’m gonna be including more of this type of leads in my future games.

- Second, there are a few inconsistencies/straight up illogical things in this scenario which my players pointed out. If I am going to run it again for another group I will consider reworking them/weeding them out.

- Last thing is really on me and has nothing to do with the scenario itself but I didn’t really find a way to bind the PCs to the story and the stakes were too low for the PCs’ interest to feel natural. I lazily went ahead as is because my previous experience playing D&D with another group had worked just fine like that but I guess it’s harder to apply in Call of Cthulhu, where you want the stakes to be high from the get go. I’m wondering how I can fix that now, I’ve been thinking about doing character “spin-offs” to anchor them in this world in a way that makes sense but I feel like that might be asking a lot from the other players this early on in the game… Food for thoughts I guess !

*From what I’ve seen, familiars don’t really seem to be “a thing” in Call oof Cthulhu but one of my players made a blind PC which makes the game almost impossible for her to play, I gave her a dog to compensate for some Spot Hidden, Orientation and Combat.