Fucked Up Cryptids, Here We Come - A mission statement

What is it? #

Fucked Up Cryptids, Here We Come is a homebrew collection for Call of Cthulhu, meant to help me run a campaign that doesn’t quite mesh with the Pulp Cthulhu ruleset. It is intended to be used as a toolbox for Keepers, and has the general goal of allowing stories of more local and/or obviously fantastical terror to be told. After all, the rules of a system are intertwined with the stories a system tells: power fantasies beget stories of dramatic heroism, not long investigations with sudden intermissions where our protagonists make a mad dash back into the frying pan. Similarly, having rules that reward character interactions at tense moments will naturally beget character interactions in tense moments.

The basic assumptions I am making about a game being run with these rules are as follows:

This is a story about (mostly) normal people. #

Although you might occasionally have someone like an elf or a dwarf show up, or someone might be able to use magic, the PCs are not action heroes. They will flip out, they will trip, they might even panic and throw the pin of a grenade if they’re given one. They have ordinary lives, and the events of your campaign are an upset to it.

Their feelings and motivations are important. #

I’m a sucker for dramatic roleplay moments where a hidden motivation is revealed, and one of my goals with Fucked Up Cryptids is to encourage those moments. Furthermore, I believe that the person who sets the stage is just as important as the one who stands atop it, and that both should be rewarded. These rules are built with a focus on the characters, not just the things that happen to them.

In the grand scheme of things, your players are an angry group of wasps. #

In a fair fight with anything of significance, your players should lose. They are not action heroes, they will die if they use action hero tactics.

Fair fights are for chumps.

Fight smart or die is the name of this game, and the bigger the foe, the more impressive the bullshit they’ll need to come up with. They’re insects in the face of the mythos, but “insect” does not mean “harmless”; we may casually backhand a wasp away from our burger, but we still somewhat fear them in spite of how lopsided any fight against them would be.

The Mythos ain’t the only horror. #

In base Call of Cthulhu, the only thing that can drive your characters bonkers is the mythos. In real life, there is no mythos, yet people go bonkers anyways. One big rule in this collection will establish an alternate Sanity System meant to take real world pressures into account, adding new and exciting ways to lose your mind… as well as to find it again.

Overall, I’d say the mood is closer to stuff like Amphibia, Gravity Falls or The Owl House than typical Call of Cthulhu fare, but also that those things are at the far extreme. I could definitely see you running a truly disastrous camping trip using these rules.

How did these rules come to be? #

It all started with a DnD “horror” campaign I played in college. It ended abruptly, at the end of the year rather than the story, but the fragments of that bigger story invited me to write a sequel campaign. It changed systems to Pulp Cthulhu once I realized I was trying to homebrew DnD into CoC, but actually running it made me realize more modifications were required. Primarily because the pulp archetypes don’t quite work outside of the pulp era.