Solomon Kame vs. Nyarlathotep

This is a campaign idea I've had kicking around for a couple of month that I'd like to run, but would much rather play in!

The Ingredients:
The Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy RPG
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One of those epic Chaosium world-sprawling Call of Cthulhu adventures such as Masks of Nyarlathotep
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And run it like a D&D game, with the time period being sometime in the 16th, 17th or 18th century.

Now I gotta see if I can find a copy of the 2e "A Mighty Fortress" sourcebook ...

Kirk vs Cthulhu, Asteroid Adventure, Imaginitive Monster Lists, Stat Inflation, Intelligent Magic Items, and Music

I received some great comments regarding my off the cuff "Just Imagine" Kirk vs. Cthulhu post; two dealt with past efforts in that direction:

From DearGod:

"I once began running a CthulhuTrek game. It only lasted a couple sessions--mostly because school and work broke up the game night.

In my game Dagon had granted the deep ones knowledge of space travel. I had the players come across a derelict ship that was completely flooded with water. The deep ones knocked out the ship's shields, uploaded a virus that caused the replicators to mass-produce water, and then transported on to the ship to steal away all of the humans to sacrifice them to their fish-gods."

From Chris Hüth:

"A few years ago, when I was more enthused about 'running' Beyond The Final Frontier, I started writing an article on exactly this topic, called 'The Doom That Came From Space' or something like that.

The first part was ideas for converting Call of Cthulhu adventures to Star Trek, including series outlines for SoYS and MoN, and talking about horror in Trek, both in running it and examples of it from all the series (and negotiating the humanism-antihumanism Trek-HPL divide in tone).

The second part was conversions, revisionings and fittings of CoC things into Trek (including examples of mi-go spaceships, sinister interpretations of regular Trek species (like why the Breen wear suits), and episode outlines for each. I've got a few crazy ones (The Ruins of Aldebaran III and 65 Million Years To Earth) I still really want to run.

The SFier interpretations of Mythos elements in Trail would also be a big help here, especially for stripping out the cliche cultist/tome parts where they don't fit." 

As a relevant aside, I believe that one version of the Star Trek rpg used 3d6 stat & percentile skill system that at first glance looked to be quite compatible with Call of Cthulhu...


I've been working on a new Planet Algol adventure/"dungeon"; this one is set on an asteroid and is very influences by 60s & 70s television & movie sci-fi such as Star Trek, Doctor Who and Space 1999. Hopefully my players will take the bait tomorrow...


As part of the research for this project, I dug up some great OD&D monster lists from fellow OSR bloggers I remember really liking, and it would be despicable of me not to share them with you guys (nevermind having a compiled set of links for use in my own game):

From Aeons & Auguries: Lunar Encounter Tables.

From Sham's Grog 'n Blog: The Dismal Depths Bestiary; More Monsters; and Even More Monsters.

Dig those terse/spartan stat blocks! Especially compared to the sprawling 3rd/4th edition monstrosities, although I wish they had treasure type and morale scores ;) Not to be an edition-jerk, but it's a lot easier to write up monsters when you just need to come up with a couple of reasonable numbers as opposed to figuring out ability scores and calculating ranks in basket-weaving.

This brings to mind something I've been meaning to blog about for a while, the "stat inflation" in D&D over the editions. Reading the monster design booklet in the LOTFP referees booklet really hammered in how it may not be the best idea to inflate a creatures AC, HD and attacks; I know some B/X and AD&D monsters kind of become ambulatory tree-chippers with their multiple attacks as compared to OD&D versions, and things get crazy with 15 hit-die humanoids with armor classes of 33 in more recent editions.

This is mitigated by the inflation in stat bonus; weapon specialization; larger hit dice for PCs; more magic bonuses, and the like as D&D changed from OD&D, but I'm really coming around to the OD&D-ish paradigm of less bonuses. It makes for a faster game with less "processing cycles" needed for both the DM and players to do the math, and as long as the numbers are less for both the monsters and PCs everything should work out fine.


I've been thinking more about magic items, some of it inspired by reading about the awesome-sounding Dicitionary of Mu. I'm thinking that you have the awesome weapons and armor made by ancient master trademen using skills lost to modern man, such as Wolfe's Terminus Est; than you have the mysterious technological items, "sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic" such as the Eyes of Tekumel; and than you have the capital-A Artifacts, often intelligent and aligned, the sort of things that were wielded by legendary warlock-villainsm or are extradimindensional beings bound into a physical item, such as Stormbringer or the Shining Trapezohedron.


I haven't been posting much about music lately, which is practically criminal on my part. I've lately been revisiting a past obsession of mine, the Sun City Girls, instigated by Planet Algol campaign participant Pete's introduction of the Sublime Frequencies "Cambodian Cassette Archives" into Planet Algol background music rotation.

While reading about Sublime Frequencies releases I investigated Group Doueh, which plays some absolutely sublime Moroccan guitar freakouts!

I also read about the Sun City Girls-related Master Musicians of Bukkake. In the past, not knowing much about them, I dismissed them due to their name; but Fat Cotton told me about a great show of theirs he saw, and when I found out about the Sun City Girls connection I had to check them out..and I'm very glad I did, I highly recommend them to anyone into ritualistic/trance-inducing weirdo music!

Just Imagine...

...In the interstellar gulf of space, against a backdrop of a lurid purple and blue nebula, a bloated, plastic, tentacled, green, blasphemous form floats, propelling itself through the void by the flapping of tattered, membranous wings.

In the foreground lies a starship, dwarfed by the obscene titan, "Enterprise" on it's hull...


...on the bridge the crew a horde battles of phantasmagoria; scaled, snakey man-like things; slimy, hunched frog-fish men; pink, winged arthropods. "These creatures are highly illogical!" the Vulcan exclaims between phaser blasts.

Kirk double judo chops the Mi-Go before him in it's "shoulders" and it crumples to the deck; over the intercom he cries "Scotty! Are you still there?"

"Aye captain, enginnerin' made short work of these fey beasties!"

"Full power ahead Scotty! Full power ahead!"...


...The Enterprise accelerates forward towards Cthulhu; tentacles severed by the saucer-hull go spinning off into space before the starship plows into the looming, hideous bladder-like head.

Jets of disgusting green gases burst outwards at Cthulhu's mass deflates...

Man, I would love to play in a campaign like that!

A Picture of a Dungeon Room With Cthulhu in it...

Also, in the theme of the above, here's some concept art for ALIEN...

Carcosa and "The King in Yellow"

I'm a story and a half into The King in Yellow, having already read The Yellow Sign in an anthology, and already my imagination fevered with unspeakable visions and unwholesome inspirations.

I've already been tossing around this idea of the setting presented in Supplement V: Carcosa being a post-"Call of Cthulhu"-apocalypse setting. The investigators all died or went mad, the stars were right, Nyarlathotep does his Randall Flagg routine and pre-maddens the population before Cthulhu rises and utterly destroys humanity's works and minds. The blasphemous prehuman races run wild on an utterly reshaped planet and eventually, millions of years later, Earth is now Carcosa.

While reading The Repairer of Reputations this idea emerges that Carcosa is this parallel reality, located in "The Abyss," "Outside," "The Outer Dark," what have you. And it's trying to pull Earth into it. Trying to bring about a reality-shattering apocalypse. I'm coming around to the idea of the King in Yellow being an aspect of Nyarlathotep, with the spreading madness and all (admittedly that is par for the course with pretty much any one of the sanity-blasting Mythos big-boys) and I'm never been that fond of Hastur.

Does Leng serve as a gate between our Earth and Carcosa? The High Priest Not to Be Described appears to very much resemble The King in Yellow.