So my weekly group wrapped up our Dungeon World campaign. We talked about what we wanted to do next, and I pitched Call of Cthulhu, which they were interested in. I further pitched my "After the Deep War" campaign premise, which they were also interested in.

This premise was inspired by a thread here on the site, "Is there still anything new to be done with the Mythos?"

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=25486

Special thanks to Daddy Warpig for suggesting some of the Deep One weapons in the war. I've started a web-page here:

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/callofcthulhu/postwar/

This is a setting for Call of Cthulhu, set in the late 1940s based on one possible advancing of Lovecraft's timeline. Lovecraft pictures a world on the edge of horrors, with advancing science close to uncovering secrets man was not meant to know. This is about those horrors coming true.

         The most prominent event of this timeline is the Deep War. Starting with the submarine attack on Devil's Reef near Innsmouth in 1928, a number of the advanced nations made attacks on Deep One lairs - including a British attack off Iceland in 1931 and a Japanese attack in the South Pacific in 1932. In 1933, the Deep Ones struck back for the first time.

         What followed eventually escalated into all-out war. The humans made repeated strikes on underwater targets. The Deep Ones struck without warning across the globe, and swarmed over to capture many island targets. Eventually, the key allies in the fight against the Deep Ones were the U.S., Britain, Germany, and Japan. Russia and China fought individually against incursions, but did not join the Allies. A number of smaller countries that refused to join the Allies were invaded in their effort to bring the war to the enemy.

         In 1942, in defiance of rationality and the laws of physics, the waves rose and inundated the New York area. Suddenly, Manhattan Island was under water, and only the skyscrapers remained above the waves. People crowded the tops of the buildings, hoping against hope for rescue, while thousands drowned beneath the deep, green sea and Deep Ones entered the city and began climbing the towers. Other horrendous monsters struck in and around the flooded areas as well. Later cities hit included Miami, Boston, New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Bristol, Brest, Cape Town, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Osaka.

         The Deep One advance was halted in 1945, when the U.S. dropped the first nuclear torpedo on an undersea stronghold off Bikini Atoll. The Deep Ones withdrew from New York and Buenos Aires, held for two years, but retained most of their holdings in the Pacific.

The Present

In 1948, many of the world's islands remain enemy territory, including Hawaii and the Phillipines. Key coastal cities have been devastated by the unfathomable weapons of the enemy, and are still in the process of being rebuilt.

Tone

Terrible events can happen.

Many Call of Cthulhu campaigns threaten the end of the world, but in practice not much happens beyond the deaths of a few people under mysterious circumstances. The background of the Deep War sets the tone that the world really is in danger, and there are consequences.

Player and character knowledge is similar

Because the existence of horrors is now public, players don't have to "play dumb" about knowledge of Lovecraft's writing and the RPG. They could still be wrong, though - as the real story could differ from what they know.

War is Hell

This is not pulp action, but is closer to horror and war stories that are at best darkly humorous - like Full Metal Jacket or Catch 22.

Sounds great. Hope to read more updates as your campaign takes off. Are you using any of the war or pulp supplements for CoC?

An interesting premise!

Thanks.

There are two superficially similar settings - Acthtung Cthulhu (set during WWII) and The Day After Ragnarok (set after Nazis caused an occult apocalypse). However, both of those emphasize pulp action - shooting up the Nazis and monsters.

I wanted something closer to Lovecraft, extending the world of his writing into its own future. (Lovecraft died in 1937 shortly before the start of WWII.) Call of Cthulhu tends to be similar to Lovecraft's realistic tales where only a handful of people die at most, yet threaten the end of the world. There's a huge, mostly unexplored middle ground where terrible things happen (like in WWII) but the world goes on.

I like it. I can even see a thread connecting it to modern day, where "global warming" is just a terraforming project encouraged by the Deep Ones and/or other Mythos beings.

This sounds amazing. Are you going to flesh it out further before play or leave a lot of it as emergent?

And what weapons do the Deep Ones bring? Something knowable, or so strange we can only see or feel the effects?

Unholy hell I wanna buy this!!!

Totally would run this with Savage Worlds.

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;728762This sounds amazing. Are you going to flesh it out further before play or leave a lot of it as emergent?

And what weapons do the Deep Ones bring? Something knowable, or so strange we can only see or feel the effects?

I'm definitely fleshing it out more - at least to have a rough timeline and world map in 1947.

I want to flesh out a little the Deep War timeline. I'm picturing now that Germany invades Austria and Czechoslovakia, but before Poland, Italy starts to fall apart under Deep One assaults. Occupied Venice becomes a key trouble point, along with widespread activity on Sicily and Crete.

In the Pacific, the situation is worse. Japan's expanding empire founders as the war in China and its Pacific holdings suffer from unexplainable events - as do American holdings in Guam and Hawaii.

The weapons of the Deep Ones include those causing widespread nightmares and triggered madness, along with the horrific flooding weapon. Lesser flooding and weather control was displayed before 1942, but 1942 was a much greater class of assault - flooding the entire island of Manhattan. They also have used shoggoths and nightgaunts in attacks, along with spells of protection and enhancement for themselves. They also will use captured weapons temporarily - such as guns, mortars, and so forth.

I liked the movie Abyss, too.
(There was threat of nuclear escalation between 1980s USSR v. USA, but the Underwater Terrestrials had their own "nukes" as a third player in a Mexican standoff. It was 1000'+ waves in suspended animation along every human coastal city on Earth. This initiated peace talks and deescalation.)

Now, I find CoC, like IN SJG, has a built-in Cold War cloak and dagger assumption. And once the curtain is pulled back globally, there's no going back for anyone and it's now a race to Armageddon. Given that the BBEG goal is human civ harvest when the stars are right (peak human tech & casualties), warring prematurely when immortal deep ones can hide and wait instead is a weird choice, in my view.

Is this more post-apocalyptic CoC, or more "during armageddon" CoC? And how do you avoid that Cthulhu Tech attitude from seeping in?

Quote from: Opaopajr;728903Is this more post-apocalyptic CoC, or more "during armageddon" CoC? And how do you avoid that Cthulhu Tech attitude from seeping in?

It's more "during armageddon". The devastation of the Deep War is of the same scale as WWII - which is to say, enormous but not world-destroying.

By "Cthulhutech attitude" - do you mean more pulp action attitude? I think one way around this is to make sure the occult and spells are effective early in the game, even when doing so has a great cost to the character's sanity. Hopefully, it will be set up so that characters can go insane by reading books and casting spells, but they save the day by doing so.

Oh, ok. So it is the final battle resolving. Well at this point people might be beyond shock, so like further SAN checks might likely default to 1 point from now on.

The Cthulhu Tech attitude is the blasé attitude. Basically instead of magic as tech, it'd be horror as tech. Reading a free CT PDF module I noted how a lot of the horror and mystery fizzled into survival, almost splatterpunk, horror. And the body mod weaponry available was not so much a horrifying temptation but an easily shrugged off survival necessity. Basically mood dissolved into a functional numbness, as though in a state of perpetual war shock. Survival horror works better as a night in hell and less a campaign.

That said there's a Chaosium M.U. splat, The Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan, that is set in the future totalitarian nightmare human empire post-"stars were right." I got it and it gives decent advice on the level of stark raving paranoia and fear needed to run such a campaign. The empire is a nightmare because it has to as the other choices are worse needs to be drubbed in. So then a lot of the CoC flavor is derived from the grinding pressures of the unbearable being sustained in the face of the impossible. Like a North Korean siege mentality times a hundred or something.