Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

[Lumbering Ox]

I guess I have a weird thing for CoC crossovers.

 

Anyone try it. I would figure that having superheros take on the mythos would take care of the high PC bodycount that CoC tends to produce, and as Martha would say, thats a good thing.

[proditor]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Yeah, I ran a campaign that basically hit it's "Let's take a break" point and everyone wanted to put the game on hold with a big blow out adventure. So I ran "Wrath of the Seven Horsemen" combined with "At the Mountains of Madness". That was a doozy let me tell ya...

[rjcurrie]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

I was once in 4 different Champions campaigns in the mid-80s that contained elements of the Cthulhu mythos. Frankly, it's one of those combinations I really don't want to see again.

[GestaltBennie]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

I was once in 4 different Champions campaigns in the mid-80s that contained elements of the Cthulhu mythos. Frankly' date=' it's one of those combinations I really don't want to see again.[/quote']

 

I think I was in those same four campaigns. -)

 

Once or twice in a Champs/CoC, with a superb GM, is great. Beyond two games, the pleasure is rapidly diluted.

[proditor]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

I think I was in those same four campaigns. -)

 

Once or twice in a Champs/CoC, with a superb GM, is great. Beyond two games, the pleasure is rapidly diluted.

Yeah, it's like any really weird or out there arc in a comic, like the Johnny Sorrow arc in modern JSA. Once will scare the pants off your players if you do it right. Twice they start shrugging. Three times and it's as normal as a bank robbery.

 

I got lucky and figured that out by accident when I ran it my one and only time.

[rjcurrie]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Actually, I'll forgive one of the campaigns because the "Cthulhu mythos through the centuries" was one of the main thrusts of the campaign. The GM, a good friend of mine, called it a "mega-campaign" and consisted of a series of mini-campaigns with players recruited from all over the city. Nobody was allowed to play in more than two mini-campaigns and he had no trouble filling all of them. Each mini-campaign used a diifferent game. Systems used included:

 

Teenagers from Outer Space (for the Cthulhoid monsters first arriving on Earth)

Fantasy Hero

Chivalry & Sorcery 1st Edition

Call of Cthulhu

Champions (Golden Age)

Danger International (for futuristic police)

Aftermath

Traveller

Space Opera

 

and maybe one or two more.

[Marketeer]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Teenagers from Outer Space (for the Cthulhoid monsters first arriving on Earth)

 

 

...so the Cthulhu Mythos came to earth looking for a good party?

 

[gojira]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Not Champions, but I've often thought that a Dark Champions - Cthulhu crossover would be good. Especially at the level where the players don't really have enough firepower to expect to take down any of the old ones. That puts the right level of fear into a Cthulhu campaign.

[Iuz the Evil]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Champions 3-D from 4th Edition had a great adventure on a world where Cthuloid monstrosities had 'won'. 'The Anopheles Strain' or something like that...

[Metaphysician]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Well, technically, the Champions U already has Lovecraftian elements: the Qlippothic realms and the Kings of Edom.

[assault]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Not to mention Evil Cultists.

 

The main difference between the CU and the Cthulhu universe is that the CU's aliens, lost civilisations, mutants and so on aren't generally horror oriented. Some are. In CoC they pretty much all should be.

 

The Zenith stories originally published way back when in 2000AD were a published example of mixing superheroes and Cthulhuoid elements. They worked rather well, as well as being good examples of early Iron Age work.

 

The following sites give brief descriptions. The second is more comprehensive.

http://www.popimage.com/profile/morrison/012501zenith.html

http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/z/zenhist.htm

[Redmenace]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

I had a Champion's 3D, dimention hopping campaign. The Anopheles/Horror world was going to be the basis of my Halloween adventure. One of the continuing themes of the campaign was that each world had it's own unique physics.

 

On the anopheles infested earth, ambient magic powered all superhuman abilities giving all the PCs an effective 0-end for any "organic" superpowers. Being heroic sorts, our guys went about thrashing the tough but beatable minion beasts that had brought civilization down.

 

What the players didn't know was that use of powers weakned the barriers between dimentions allowing the truly unbeatable monster Gods to pass through. Being a Lovecraft homage, I ended it on a real down note with everything going to hell with the final scene having the PCs find out they'd caused it.

 

 

As an aside, If you, or someone you know, subscribe to Pyramid, the Steve Jackson Games online gaming magazine, checkout the "Let the mythos power your super heroes campaign" article. It had some wicked ideas.

[Arkham]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

I've had a campaign with elements of the Mythos...

Although it was not on quite so serious of a level...

 

Riptide, prince of Lemuria ( Pacific Ocean version of Atlantis ) was Hunted by Cthulhu 8-. While there was a bit of creepyness when the Deep Ones managed to walk into their headquarters and poke around while they were gone, what with the gibbering mad people in the lobby. Once they followed their trail back to their 'Village of Westin's Mouth' near Vallejo', it was a little more light-hearted. When Riptide started to make the Crank-Calls of Cthulhu, it was just silly...

 

Fun, but silly.

The game went on hiatus before Cthulhu retaliated for being woken up before The Stars Are Right by someone asking him if his refrigerator was running...

[Legendsmiths]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Arcane Adversaries, DEMON, and Mystic World talk about his. I thought the handling of the Qliphotic realms and Kings of Edom was sufficiently Cthluhian, as were the creatures. You could either just use the material as is, change the names to protect the innocent and fit the cthulhu universe, and or just make the stuff up.

 

Personally I think the CU's handling of the Qliphotic and Edom is sufficiently horrific (and the character builds sufficiently frightenting). I really enjoy using DEMON as bad guys, and this fits well.

[Fox1]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Personally I think the CU's handling of the Qliphotic and Edom is sufficiently horrific (and the character builds sufficiently frightenting). I really enjoy using DEMON as bad guys' date=' and this fits well.[/quote']

 

DEMON is the only supplement after UMA that I liked and thought was worth the money.

 

My only problem with it is that it's so geared to a "end of this storyline" run. Some of the best DEMON adventures IMO take place in the past (the history detailed in book) and I wish the supplement played this up more. But space limits and all...

 

While I have a second problem. They'll likely never publish adventures to take advantage of all the cool stuff in the book.

 

I'm almost tempted to buy other supplements from the same author. But I think I'll wait until someone else in the group does just to see if he's consistent or not.

[Guest Major Tom]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

You don't need to introduce the Mythos (or something similar) into a HERO

campaign to drive your PC group insane. Just trying to come up with a GM-

approved, well-balanced character is more than enough to cause anyone

to fail their Sanity Check roll.

 

 

Major Tom

Court Jester of the Elder Gods

[Big Willy]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

My old Champs campaign was a straight sequel to my running of Masks of Nyarlathotep a couple of years earlier. I played down the effects of arcane geometry and extradimensionality as being no weirder than a lot of the other stuff in a superhero universe, and relied on scale, brutality and lurid description rather than game mechanics to get across the sheer cosmic horror of it all. Worked pretty well.

 

What made it different from Zenith, say, was that my alien horrors were just horrific superpowered aliens: I figured that the difference between Cthulhu and Fin Fang Foom was largely one of storytelling style, and making the Elder Gods somehow "outside", or not native to the PCs' universe, robbed them of some of their menace. Rather than an all-or-nothing "close the Gates or we're all doomed" one-off, I decided it was far better to have Azathoth the Living Supernova sitting in ordinary space, surrounded by choirs of insane 1000+pt superbeings, like the blind idiot Kingpin of the Milky Way; the Mi-Go acting like colonial overlords, viewing the rise of human civilisation as little more than a slave revolt; Nyarlathotep playing the Loki/Mephisto role in a dozen subtle schemes at once; and so on and so forth.

 

Partly it's down to the fact that I grew up watching Doctor Who, and so always imagine Cthulhu being played by a man in a foam-rubber suit, stomping dioramas beneath his mighty heel...

[OddHat]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Even the default CU can be used for this to some extent; look through DEMON and Arcane Adversaries, then set up an Edomite threat to your campaign.

 

For my part, I've mixed Horror and Supers in most campaigns. It works well so long as you accept that it's going to end up more as a Hellboy style smash-the-monsters Horror than a Lovecraftian "everyone dies or goes mad" Horror. Or, more accurately, you can kill off your PCs or drive them insane, but if you do so, the campaign is over. Also, most groups who play Supers aren't in it for exploring themes of helplessness and isolation; if they were, they'd be playing CoC.

[Kelcyron]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

Our previous campaign had heavy Mythos influence; both the GM and I are Lovecraft fans. Many references to Mythos elements, and frequent visits to Miskatonic U.

 

My character (power armor/scientist) was a graduate of the Miskatonic U engineering program and decendent of Albert Wilmarth from The Whisperer in Darkness.

 

Kelcyron

[RobCRogers]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

I'm almost tempted to buy other supplements from the same author. But I think I'll wait until someone else in the group does just to see if he's consistent or not.

 

He's really good. I've enjoyed reading the Alien Wars supplement even though I don't play Star Hero and have no intention of doing so anytime soon.

[McCoy]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

It was thread Necromancy or start a new one.

 

I remember reading The Mountains of Madness more than 20 years ago, that it included a History of the World according to Lovecraft.

 

Don't really want to read the novella again right now. Anyone got that history in a brief outline form? Or google-fu stronger than mine to find it on the web?

 

Thank you everyone in advance!

[OddHat]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

It was thread Necromancy or start a new one.

 

I remember reading The Mountains of Madness more than 20 years ago, that it included a History of the World according to Lovecraft.

 

Don't really want to read the novella again right now. Anyone got that history in a brief outline form? Or google-fu stronger than mine to find it on the web?

 

Thank you everyone in advance!

Is this what you're looking for?

http://dracandros.com/Jebgarg/Nidoking/cthuchrono.htm

[Markdoc]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

The Zenith stories originally published way back when in 2000AD were a published example of mixing superheroes and Cthulhuoid elements. They worked rather well' date=' as well as being good examples of early Iron Age work. [/quote']

 

 

Wow! Sychronicity! I just mentioned this (rather obscure) comic earlier today in the "comics you loved" thread and here it is again.

 

To repeat what I said there, I stole big chunks of this for my own champs game and (if I say so myself) it went over rather well - multidimensional, body-stealing bad guys, doomed alternate earths (and one possibly doomed non-alternate earth), alternate history nazis and one ragtag band of arguing heroes to stop them.

 

cheers, Mark

[austenandrews]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

I would guess Cthulhu-like elements are not uncommon in Champions games.

[Blue]

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

 

The only direct CoC crossover I played was with Runequest, since the systems were pretty compatible.

 

I've always used elements of Cthulhu mythos, but never ripped anything directly off for games I run. I do like such combos though, because for once the characters are able to direclty interract on some level with the heavy hitters.

 

As a GM it would also be fun to have superheroes go insane. Muahahahaha!