Heya! I'm Thren and shortly after falling into this fandom I took it into my head to reskin a CoC scenario to BatIM and things escalated from there! BatIM sideblog. (she/her)
Blog icon by InkDemonApologist
Cthulhu AU Masterpost My Art Tag
Short Answer: Yes, absolutely!! It just might be a little longer before it is tho.
Long Answer / What's Happening: So basically, for the last 8 months, 2 out of the 5 people who play this game were completely unable to devote any time or brain to playing a TTRPG. We're finally at the point where we can start getting it going again, but there's still a list of things that need to happen before we are able to sit down and play again. (which actually ya'll will probably see before we actually start playing again, because we have like 3 episodes that are recorded fROM A YEAR AGO but not typed up for tumblr yet?? we gotta remember what the hecky we were even doing.)
But we all love these characters a lot and we will return to finish their story as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging around meanwhile!
Hehehe, I can finally post the birthday art I did for @inkdemonapologist now that the chapter it's from has gone live!!
Some of the little Sammy details from that chapter destroyed me... also couldn't help thinking of this line from Sammy about how Prophet shouldn't have to be alone in relation to a lyric from a song (Shayfer James – Where We Belong) that's got Prophet associations in the Cthulhu playlist and contains the line, "We'll be alone...where we belong."
Also waaaaaahhh check out the incredible brushed up inked and colored version she made??? Link below the cut so I can update it if needed--
But for now it can be found at the bottom of the chapter!
It blows my mind how much she took what I was going for and just made it like 10x more?? I love it so much, and I love these disaster boys sharing a body and caring about each other more than either one is fully prepared to admit...
The Cthulhu boys don’t really have a concept of LGBT Pride, and have few words for what exactly they are, but this 1930s animation studio full of queer folks finding a way to be who they are and make a life with the ones they love anyway has just… meant so much to me this past couple of years, I wanted them to be able to celebrate it too. Happy Pride, you guys!
Peter always had a strange edge as an investigative reporter from the weird "hunches" he sometimes got about what other people were thinking, that sometimes even led to strange dreams of witnessing places and events that sometimes ended up being true… that advantage served him very well, right up until he tried to snoop into a certain shady research facility, and ran headlong into some significantly bigger fish.
Now he's trapped there too and... hey, isn’t that the guy from a cold case he’d looked into years ago when a Linda Stein was looking for her husband who had vanished after looking for help with strange predictive visions and confused memories..? Well...at least now he finally knows what happened to him. In fact he's going to get to find out first hand.
It’s true subject 111’s abilities upon acquisition were pretty minor when compared to some of the other subjects, but luckily the staff at Burning Stars Laboratory have LOTS of ideas on making some.... Improvements.
a couple quick doodles of Thren's Minecraft AU guys that I realised I hadn't tried drawing yet! The Minecraft AU versions for Peter and Susie were both designed by @haunted-hijinxer
Minecraft Peter isn't a player at all -- he's a cartographer Villager that accidentally gained awareness of the world beyond his snowy mountain Village, beyond his programming... and now sometimes travels the world with Jack for help with his mapmaking!
Minecraft Susie is a player who got really into potion-brewing and dubious science experiments that have led her to spend a lot of time in the nether, where she's started to, uh, look a little different...
Minecraft Susie ended up with some ghast traits, and is an appreciator of a little good old fashioned mad science, especially potions! She's made the most of her Player advantages, venturing into dangerous places like the nether to gather rare ingredients needed for her potion crafting, which she uses to trade for other things she needs. She's mostly a solo operation lately, though back when she was getting established, she might have called on other players, especially those with an affinity for knowledge and secrets to help plan her first excursions.
Her specialty is health regeneration potions, as they're both generally in high demand, and extra useful for a lady who likes to take a risk herself now and then. And as one of the main ingredients for those is ghast tears, perhaps it's not surprising the strange affliction grafting mob traits onto players ended this way for Susie.
Susie doesn't let it get her down, though… especially as she now often floats a bit above the ground..! And having a few extra limbs is a big help when crafting, it turns out. Yes, part of her face may have gone rather ghast-y... but who's going to critique your looks when you're brewing the potions that will keep them alive and also incidentally can spit fireballs? Besides, she finds the streak of white it put in her hair rather striking. And if her preferences have shifted to favor the stifling heat of the nether, well, that just means she can make her whole home a greenhouse to grow more warm-weather potion ingredients like melons and netherwart!
I love the CoC au so much, and, if i may send a prediction for the next campaign….
Grant, minding his business, literally just trying to do his job:
The Masked Messager, looking at him: …yknow what would be really funny-
Considering all the jokes we've made about Joey's willy-nilly spending leading to Grant becoming the final boss of the campaign this prediction is hilarious Anon, glad we're on the same page!
The tabletop Call of Cthulhu game we've been running with Bendy characters is not currently over, no! We've been on a long hiatus due to a handful of big life events among the group. (And also because there were a lot of things we were excited to iron out through RP in the in-world time-span before the next scenario that we're still working on! The resulting collection of writing snippets are up on AO3, some with art!)
That said, the next scenario is planned to be the last one. So please feel free to send the lads best wishes for coming through this final gauntlet mostly whole and at least a little bit sane!
Now for the follow up question, what was the worst ending you had planned for Cthulu AU Season 2?
Hahaha, oh boy…! For a lot of these most of the ‘worst’ endings I’ve considered are the ones baked into the scenario, though occasionally the specifics of the group or additions I’ve made can add to them.
I've got some from the book and some specific to our playthrough under the cut!
For Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign, the big one (aside from just being killed by the various antagonists) is failing to stop Fowler’s full ascension as an Avatar of the Yellow King, and the dreams of everyone who has seen the sign being plagued with increasingly mind-rending visions of Carcosa for, as the scenario puts it in its final words, “as long as their sanity holds out. Soon they too will be faithful subjects of the Yellow King, devoted to spreading his Yellow Sign so that others may rejoice in his reign.” If Henry hadn’t tried to confront the sign head on and learned he could cleanse it, even with Joey miraculously never having seen the sign, this could have ended with all the other boys slowly going utterly insane... with Joey unable to stop it.
Another recurring bad-ending threat was various investigators getting kidnapped as Peter did and being lost forever in dread Carcosa. This could also happen if they interfered in the wrong way with the summoning ritual at the lake, or if things went sideways at the party. Once the threat of the party was over, anyone lost there would have been stranded in that maddening realm, just as Fowler was.
Speaking of bad things I had planned, I had strongly expected that once Peter was gone, there would be no chance to save him until the actual party, at which point he would have been much worse off sanity-wise and could have even been an obstacle, or a lure to tempt Jack into danger at the party. That would have been fun, but I have to say, I’m still delighted over the perfect storm of Mochi and Boo completely rewriting how all that went down!!
Okay, what other horrible fates had I considered… OH
A big one was that Prophet got scarily close to sacrificing someone!! When the group was all working together in the finale, everyone was mostly voicing how glad they were Prophet was cooperating to help them stop Fowler, and the plan was that Prophet who had been blessed with knowledge of the ritual would be the one to purify the stone. But if he had done it, that sure would have left Prophet with the freshly restored eldritch relic able to choose the next host of his Lord right there in his hand… if he’d cut someone with the restored stone, there weren’t any convenient time loops going on this time to bail them out, and if any of the players had contingency plans for this, I sure didn’t know about them, haha!
Joey ended up having an insanity lead to him trying to bind the stone to himself instead to remove the influence of the Yellow King, though this was at the cost of large chunks of his POW and CON. If Henry hadn’t had gold blood power left to soak some of the strain on Joey, it’s possible Joey could have completely crippled or even killed himself in the attempt. On the flip side, if Henry had tried to push into giving much more than he did, he could have given himself sufficient blood loss to have risked death as well.
BUT EVEN THEN, this left Joey and Henry badly drained by the time Prophet showed up. Prophet had a fairly difficult check to retrieve the stone from Joey-Lurker’s then-goopy form, but boy, what a time that would have been for Prophet to roll an extreme success! He would have had a few moments with the restored stone, and no one else there but Henry and Joey, prime sacrifices, helpless before him.
Another fun one was when Prophet told Fowler he served a higher power…and it was then Fowler understood exactly why Prophet had been resisting the sign, and tried to forcefully realign the ink in Prophet to the Yellow King. If Prophet hadn’t made his rolls to resist, he would have spent the rest of his ink dose as Fowler’s loyal aide, full of maddening music to share as the Prophet of the Yellow King. If Fowler had found the opportunity to grant his new minion a suitably powerful Yellow Sign of his own, he might even have stayed that way indefinitely…a fate Sammy and Prophet might both have considered worse than death.
Just lots of fun options in good ol' Call of Cthulhu!!
What do you think would be Escape Sammy and CoC Sammy's opinions on one another? (Just asking because I've recently been through the Escape AU again, and that I REALLY enjoy the Cthulhu AU. You all seem to have a lot of fun with it!)
Oh my gosh….
So first off, before you even get into anything supernatural, this would look concerning to Escape Sammy. Cthulhu Sam is still at JDS and clearly close to Joey; I think Escape Sammy could connect the dots that they’re in a relationship, and he knows that when he was with his own Joey, he also defended his overcontrolling lover and insisted everything was fine. Given time alone with Cthulhu Sammy, he’d try to warn him based on that alone – Joey isn’t good for you, escape while you can, flee the Studio.
The more he learns, the worse it seems –
Joey has a near-perfect Bendy running around, so there must be ink machine experiments already, no matter what excuse they have. Cthulhu Sammy is slightly losing his grip on reality, believes he’s seen supernatural monsters, he’s already tasted the ink and thinks that he can just drink a little when he needs it – and it starts to look like it might be too late. You can’t just stop drinking ink. You can’t.
Meanwhile, to Cthulhu Sammy, Escape Sammy sounds like… Prophet. Poor sense of direction, rambling about sheep and ink and a violent Lord. Like Prophet if he had his own body. Maybe he’d wonder if Escape Sammy was made out of ink – his shirt’s usually open enough that it's obvious he's flat-chested, and with the 4 fingers, like Prophet’s inky body had… well, it would make a lot of sense. But Escape Sammy remembers being made out of ink, and unlike Prophet, he hates it. He believes the ink messed up his head. He fears the god and the religion he once served and urges the others to get out before it’s too late. And I think Cthulhu Sammy wouldn’t know quite how to feel about this person that seems like… well, what would’ve happened to him, if he and Prophet hadn’t been split in two; lucid enough to understand the danger, but forever horribly changed by what he experienced. Would it be worth it, to have to deal with those experiences as only one person, if it set them both free?
If Escape Sammy learned about the Masked Messenger, I think that would be the worst possible thing he could learn. It’s hard enough to remember and believe that the Ink Demon was never a god, just a monster; that there was never a god behind the Ink, only a poison that messed up his mind. An omnipotent, cruel, inescapable being that’s really out there somewhere beyond… that would be his worst fear come true.
Hi! I just found your BATIM/Cthulhu AU a couple of days ago and!!! I am so glad you guys are sharing this with us folks here on tumblr because I LOVE IT SO MUCH! If I can ask, what was, in your opinion, the most stressful/tense moment(s) of Season 1 and Season 2?
Aaaaa, thank you! I'm so glad people are enjoying reading about our weird tabletop AU adventures!
And MAN, that could go a couple of different ways... It's the nature of the game to try to set up situations that will be a fun kind of tense for the players, but those are often different from the parts that might be tense as the DM/GM/Keeper?
For the players, they'd know better than me what has stuck with them as tense! But I like to think the finales did a decent job. The Masked Messenger's final sudden attempt to compel their subservience with the 'shut your mouth/eyes/ears' commands -- some of which they would have succumbed to if they hadn't managed to bolster each other! -- seemed pretty tense. And the second scenario's finale had a lot of high-stakes things all coming to a head at once, especially with Joey's 11th-hour insanity-induced bid to bind himself to the Stone!
I also suspect the times player characters have been kidnapped have been tense for them! Having your characters threatened with being fed to a crocodile, or realizing the expert they're talking to is actually pretty unhinged and also now waving a gun, or that their lives and/or sanity may be hanging in the balance based on how well they can play piano is pretty stressful! Funnily enough, about half of those kidnappings I hadn't actually considered happening, which made it tense for me as well because it had me thinking on my feet! The time Prophet first appeared and ran off into the night in his pajamas as well as most of Joey's more iconic plans have been tense for me for the same reason; I may have known the general constraints of the NPCs and environment involved, but suddenly I too had no idea what was coming next!
Thankfully this is generally a fun kind of tense for me as well, since I know my players will be, if anything, flattered if I have to call for a pause in the game to plan in response to their creative actions, haha!
Another set of moments from season 1 which I think are memorable and also get into that player/DM difference are the hallucinations from season 1. Looking back, most of those frightening visions were a manifestation of the group's repressed memories leaking through. They weren't currently real or dangerous, unless the group's confused reactions somehow put them in danger. Joey was not actually being chased by an inky abomination, Sammy was not actually turning into a goo person. As a DM knowing this, it was still a lot of fun! But less tense, as little was unknown. But to the players having no idea what was happening to their characters or how much of the danger was real, the stakes probably seemed very high!!
Meanwhile I feel like the resolution to these hints and foreshadowings fell on the opposite end of that spectrum. After the trio had hiked up to the star pools and Sammy and Joey had already vanished and Henry was sitting next to a tree alone while the players tried to make sense of what had just happened, I think for the party it might have felt like a time when the tensest moments had already passed. Catastrophe HAD befallen them, and for the moment they were just confused by this latest bewildering occurrence, with nothing actively threatening them any more.
But for me, holding my breath and on the edge of my seat waiting to see which clue would be the one to make it all click, this was perhaps the tensest part of the entire game!! The moment when Maf went from a confused, "…What…?" to "…..Oh my god, I AM crazy…!" is squarely one of my all time favorite moments from tabletop gaming.
rereading the recently posted Joey + Susie logs has been making me think about their friendship a lot.
While Susie was originally brought in by Sammy for the Alice part, Joey was unsure of the choice because even if he says Sammy has full control over the department he can't actually keep his fingers out of anything when it comes to his stories and characters. So he took Susie, who was at the time still trying to switch herself over to what the public wanted to see in a theatre actress, out for an ~audition dinner~ to find out if she'd really be just as committed to the characters and story as he was. Of course they immediately hit it off and Joey did not ruin his fresh new relationship with Sammy and Susie was cast immediately as Alice Angel, and Joey and Susie started forming a friendship over their loves of fashion, dance and partying.
But also Joey might have been the one to influence Susie to return to the short hair she loved to have, when he got very dramatic about being the person you want to be even if you need to fight the world for it.
How does the lurker feel about being in bendy form? Does he ever wish he had a unique body, one that he can truly call his?
It might be a bit of an odd perspective, but I don't think the Lurker sees the Bendy form coming from a character Henry and Joey made and it being "his" as mutually exclusive? Just as many people can look alike, or many people can have the same job title, he considers himself "a" Bendy more than stealing the form of the one and only true Bendy.
He WAS however initially worried that the JDS crew might expect him to be some version of the Bendy from the cartoons, just as the Masked Messenger before them had expected him to take on forms to bring to life the nightmares of other Hosts, distorting their expectations. But the boys made it clear to him early on they didn't expect him to be that. From his perspective, they gave him a form even though it was precious to them, and told him he could be whatever he wanted with it. He was expected to be neither the cartoon Bendy nor some specific distortion of it... Just his.
Initially I also don't think he'd even considered the concept of an identity he made completely and entirely for himself. The idea of being given one as a starting point and then being allowed to shape it or change it if he wanted was about as wonderous as he could imagine. As time went on it's possible he might have come to yearn for such a thing... if he had felt pressured into a specific Bendylike roll. But he never was. I think he feels he's been able to invent everything about himself that matters to him.
In fact in some ways, I think he's even more attached to the form because it was given to him so freely despite it resembling something that came from them. After all, that makes it just the sort of form he would have wanted for himself anyway; one that reflects him being part of their family.
