Welcome to RPG Reanimators, a podcast for GMs where we dissect horror scenarios and offer our experiences and advice to reanimate them at the table. This episode is a recording of our live panel From Chaosium Con 2026 with the title When Cthulhu Doesn't Answer, running CoC without the mythos. We hope you enjoy. Hello and good morning, everyone, and welcome to our panel When Cthulhu doesn't answer, running CoC mythos with the RPG reanimators. I'm Lex.

I'm Holly.

I'm Alex.

I'm Nathan.

And as some of you may know on our podcast, we typically focus on reanimating published scenarios and giving GM advice to help their games run smoothly and be thrilling, intense for players. Sorry, I had to work that in there. Rather than working on a single scenario, today, we are going to focus on reanimating some of the monstrous antagonists that. That are typically featured in scenarios. To characterize. To characterize goodness. Terrorize the characters within. We're going to discuss some of the key themes related to Mythos staples and then how they can be freshened up into novel antagonists, as well as how GMs can consider coming up with their own horrific entities and hopefully some other fuel for inspiration. We have a lot to cover, so we're going to try to keep things moving quickly to save some time for a Q and A at the end of this session. And if we are not able to get to everyone's questions, please send us a message on Discord. Obviously, we are recording this panel to be published later, so then we can answer and address those questions later to put in the published episode. Now, with all of that said, let's take the skin off the Mythos and see what's underneath. That sounded better in text. That's a little icky.

Worms. Worms.

So to kind of kick off the reason that we're hosting this panel, what's the deal with Mythos staples? Oh, God, it's early. I gotta try to do something fun here.

Yeah, I think that personally and probably a lot of folks, we've been playing this game for very, you know, years at this point, and Mythos staples can just feel overused, rehashed old stuff. And then, of course, some of it's rooted in very problematic associations. So, you know, looking for something fresh, something different is always welcome whenever I'm at the table. Anyway.

Yeah, I would like to say that, like, Lovecraft mentioned something about the fear of the unknown. So what happens when popularity makes the Mythos known.

Right.

It starts to get a little stale, gets predictable. So we're going to explore some options.

Yeah. I tend to refer to this as the Dungeon Master's guide problem. Whenever you're dealing with players that are really familiar with the mythos and these entities, then there may be a strong conscious or subconscious bias to portray a little bit of meta knowledge whenever they may know, oh, they mentioned chitinous and fungal in the same thing. There's some buzzing noises. That's amigo. They're gonna do this. So that means I should probably. And like, once something is more known, you lose a lot of the steam for horror elements. Things aren't scary whenever they are predictable. There's a phrase that I always use, like, in regards to the alien movies, is once something is known, it ceases to become a horrifying threat and. And instead becomes an obstacle to be overcome. And so trying to think of ways to keep these fresh and maybe keep your players guessing or just more in the moment narratively so they don't know off the bat. Be like, okay, so it's deep ones. I need to be on the lookout for weird bug eyed people, I guess, going on from there.

Also pass that feedback on to Ridley Scott, please.

Oh, okay.

Stop explaining the damn aliens, please.

I don't need any more origins. It's better when I don't know.

It's really the Van Helsing problem. Right? Like, Dracula's scary until you get the guy that shows up that goes, I know what we gotta do with him. Get that garlic. Get those steaks. We're going in the tomb.

Right? Exactly. Like, it now becomes the challenge to overcome. Instead of like, I don't. Did he just turn into rats? What the fuck was that? Like, it's. Keeping things unexpected can really be an effective device for emphasizing horror in your games. Anything else?

We also can't pronounce the name. So if you come up with new things, you can just be like, ah, you can't pronounce this one either. And I'm pronouncing it right every time. So that's fine.

It's unpronounceable.

It's unpronounceable.

Unknowable. Unpronounceable.

We spend a lot of time indescribable.

It's just unable.

There's a lot of pronunciation guides for things that are unpronounceable. But when should we still use fella?

Gesundheit. I mean, I think ultimately whenever we are employing some mythos entities, we're kind of Aiming for that Leo pointing gif moment. Right? You're aiming for that like, oh, there it is. I read books about that. Like ah, that guy, old Nyarlathotep, he's at it again, that rascal. And I mean that's I guess one thing that you can aim for if it is of interest for the scenario. But it's just for me it seems to immediately take the steam out of it. And so what are some things that we can try and do to emphasize that?

Yeah, well, I would like to say the benefits of a non mythos game is it keeps experienced players on their toes. You got flexible ideas, you're not really constrained by the established lore of what's already been written. And also on top of that, when you're looking to publish, you don't have to worry about permission from author estates and copyright, which can be a huge mess.

Yeah, it's not at luck notcha, it's just big spider. It's big scary spider in dreams. That's it. Don't worry about it.

It turns out it's super easy to file off serial numbers.

Sometimes that's really just the easiest way to do it. Right? Just file off the serial numbers, change it just a hair, just a bit.

And that's one of the things that we're gonna talk about. So first we wanna transition into characterizing what makes the mythos, referring to the Cthulhu mythos, generally synonymous with cosmic h to give ourselves kind of a common base to work from as we are then talking about filing off the serial numbers and making our own changes.

Yeah, they'll take it away here. So to understand what makes the mythos scary, it's pretty good to define it. So let's do that. Now I'm going to use the call of Cthulhu keeper rulebook page 214 using Lovecraftian themes. So according to the Keeper rulebook, Lovecraftian themes are fear of the outsiders, alien knowledge, fear of just like the strange. We have the corruption of body, mind and world where corruption could just fall into the decay of the mind or just straight up body horror. And then we've got the cosmic horror. It's the nightmare reality. It's humanity's place in this cold universe. And it's important to just keep these themes in mind. If you want like a Lovecraftian entity that's not quite in the established, like something that already exists.

Right. And if you're aiming for cosmic horror that isn't specifically Lovecraftian, you know, you can pull up any number of definitions about it. I personally really like the sense of existential nihilism that, you know, we as humans want to believe we matter, that we exist, and that there is a purpose in some things. And just realizing universe doesn't give a shit about that. What is the poem? Man says to the universe, I exist. Universe says, however, that does not instill in me a sense of responsibility.

That's a really good quote.

I butchered it. But yeah, it's a really good quote. I really like it. Thinking, I apologize. I've been making a bunch of lectures. So I do want to talk about a theory that I really like is self determination theory by Decky and Ryan that posits that humans have three basic autonomy, feeling like we matter and that we have agency over our own lives, competency, feeling like we're good at something and can try to answer questions that we may have, and relatedness, a feeling of kinship or similarity with some other people. Cosmic horror is assaulting this on each of these fronts. That we are helpless against outside things, that we cannot figure out why it's happening. We just know that it is and that it can irrevocably change us in ways that we are potentially unrelatable to others, either socially, physically, or what have you. We may not even be relatable to ourselves from before all of this happened before. It doesn't always just have to be ichor and tentacles.

And that's really combated too, by the system. Like when you're playing an rpg, you're going with all three of those. So you kind of have to fight against that. Maybe not competency. I've never had a competent investigator, but, you know, autonomy, relatedness, you're playing with other people. So yeah, it's an interesting balance to get with a game and just some

vehicles that you can try to drive wedges between players to try to emphasize these cosmic horror elements also. I mean, that's not to say that this is all that we can do. As everyone knows, cosmic horror has its tentacles in a lot of different horrors of genre pies. So looking at some of our favorite movies that happen to be John Carpenter films, I don't know who made this list.

What's your favorite movie and why is it a John Carpenter film?

Guilty. So, like the Thing, Classic cosmic horror, one of my favorite films ever. Also peak body horror. Right. You can always intersect these two. Also check out the Void, if you haven't already. Chef's Kiss. It's like Clive Barker meets the Thing. It goes apeshit. Love it. Anyways, in the mouth of madness from involving a loss of agency and self from people who like to read Sutter Cane. And that can slip into this cosmic horror. Just batshit insanity again. Also, as another kind of unusual example, John Carpenter's Halloween in terms of the randomness of violence. That sometimes people are just living in a town and. And this dude shows up and starts murdering people. They do not know why this is happening and all you can really do is respond. The motives are largely unknowable to them. And also as an obligatory statement, there is nothing wrong with just making a scenario. A regular monster hunt. This is my comfort food that I have been falling back on. Like find an evocative location like a spooky amusement park or something. Let something loose in there. I don't care about cosmic horror. Let's just have fun for this session. I mean, overall I just think that it's a vibe that can be translated into whatever medium that you want. So trying to think about ways that we can do that. How do we want to translate this into our games? While I have Nathan board scrolling Reddit on his phone.

No, no, this is good. This is really good stuff. Well, let's start at the lowest level, right? So you're coming in, you're looking at a scenario and you go, I want to do something a little different. There's zombies, right? And you're like, while this is the first time my players will have run into zombies, I want to do something a little different. So let's talk about re skinning.

We do things a little differently around here.

They're not looking for brains, they're looking for spleens. It's venom.

That's very specific. These zombies are med students. Be like, no, no, it's a little to the left. Yeah. I think one of the practices that I have found really helpful is to try to extract some of stranger and more horrific elements from existing creatures and then try to report that into something else. So, you know, if this is a Mego scenario, what are they? What are those little rascals getting up to? Are they stealing people's brains and having people go around and do stuff? Cool. You do not need to have fungi from Yuggoth going around doing the things. You can just make this a kind of body snatchers mentality and moving in from there. You can work with published scenarios and just essentially you're not name dropping stuff. You can if you want, if your players enjoy it, obviously, but if they don't, it can be a way to keep some things fresh.

Yeah, basically Just taking your players expectations and turning them on their head.

Right, Subverting expectations.

Exactly. So, you know, you give them those familiar, like, hints, the little crumbs where they're like, okay, I think this might be amigo. But then you give it some trait that is unexpected, that is not as written in the rule book. So they're not expecting that. And then now they have this different aspect of to what they thought was familiar again. Breaking the familiar. Breaking what we think of as, like, comfort. Oh, I know this thing. It's knowable, but now it's not.

Yeah, exactly. You just keep them back on their toes again.

Yeah. And if you look at comic books, it's such a good resource for that because they have to reinvent these characters every X amount of years. They have to always be finding something new. Like, immortal Hulk is an easy one that came out a little bit ago. Huge, big thing you can get of it.

It's great.

That took the Hulk who's like, if I get angry, I smash stuff. And they're like, well, what if instead of that, he had to die horribly as Bruce Banner every time he wanted to be the Hulk? And then he reforms out of this mass of limbs and is angry. I mean, obviously there's some things you gotta stay with. And so it became this horrible body horror thing. And all of his villains and things kind of got reimagined through this idea of like, why is the Hulk doing this? What, like, cosmic level thing is he doing? And this is from a guy that had a bomb dropped on him. Right. So, like, you can do the same thing with Mego. Like, what are they doing? Like, how are they maybe interacting with crustaceans?

Right. Like, what if Migo were like eight foot tall, like, muscled, like crab monsters? Yeah. What if they were like brawlers instead of like, the genius is. So mix it up.

Yeah. There are some resources that can try to help with this. The first example that came to mind for me was Graham Walmsley's Stealing Cthulhu. If you haven't seen this online, you can find it on DriveThruRPG. There's an annotated version that's pretty cheap to pick up. The whole thing of it is that Walmsley did an analysis of kind of the key Lovecraft stories and then pulled what are the staple elements that make something feel Lovecraftian, which also includes gambrel roofs and whippoorwills in the background. Suspiciously. But then looking at these are some of the key examples or associations with things like deep ones. Okay. We expect the coastal town, we expect fish. Now, what if we just turn that on its head? What if this is a desert facing scenario and then you're dealing with something that's closer to like a lungfish that can live in hibernation underground for some time and then start popping up again, even if a slight rain comes around. So then people are not expecting deep ones in that instance. Boom. You can use that to shake things up a bit. You can do this in greater and lesser extents. Also, I should note one of the best principles from Stealing Cthulhu I really liked is something that happens in Lovecraft stories a lot, is that you go to a place and you come back and then you go there again and it's worse this time as a way to also subvert those expectations and that familiarity that players may be getting into there too.

I think even something like the lowest, like the lowest barrier to entry, you could do something like, I think about the yellow sign and how you just mentioned, like, oh, you see an unusual sign and everyone's like, okay, well we know what this is now, right? But you can just turn that on its head even a little bit and incorporate like a modern element. And now it's not a sign. It's a stupid TikTok dance that the teenagers can't do. Like, can't stop doing, like that idea. Like, you just take the idea, make it something different. Right.

Have you seen the yellow meme?

Have I? Have you seen the yellow meme?

There is literally a comic called Mimetic that has a sloth meme that destroys the world. It's very, very fun.

But also you can use things like sharing a sign or a sigil about something that may keep your players to anticipate, like, oh, this is probably going to be haster doing that stuff again and then put something else at the end of that finish line. This is just a quick kind of. Yeah, it's a. What's the expression? Like a one, two punch sort of thing. Trying to keep players on their toes.

You're saying don't have it end with a party?

Well, I mean, maybe not. Let me think about it.

Okay, well, we're ending this at 11.

It's gonna be a blade rave instead of a masquerade party.

Yeah. I think one aspect we should also get into are mechanics because we are running games and there's a whole, like hidden bestiary that's available for you all. And it's just reskinning monsters that are existing. Like, taken in isolation. A creature's stat Blocks. They can stand in for any number of infinite creatures. Like something that's armored. You can just take a deep one and reskin it to be like a cockroach. Human, remove the, let's say, the ability to swim and breathe underwater, but effectively. They have the claw, they have the armor. That's it.

They can fly at your face erratically.

Oh, my God.

No.

I hate that.

That's gross.

Fucking cockroaches, man.

Yeah.

And two, surprisingly, the Call of Cthulhu core book has a lot of monsters that just never get used and are actually pretty neat. So that's something that's kind of fun to do, is just take a scenario that maybe doesn't have a very strong tie to the monster and just go, we're gonna change it. Like, maybe it's not the Migo. It's a dimensional shambler. Like, he's. They're not super used. They're known. But, you know, make a fire vampire thing. I think fire vampires are fun. They're tiny and terrible.

I just. I just don't want to hear something that's indescribable that is like my. Like my bottom line, do not give me. It is indescribable. It is unknowable. It is unpronounceable. Just give me something.

Give me something kind of related to these points. This is something that our friend Xander did in a recent game for us that it really got me thinking about how we want to portray these entities while gming games. Because, you know, related to Nathan's point, you can read through the core rulebook and get some ideas in there. There's also like the. What is it? The Monstrum Monstrum malus. Monstrarum Malleus monstrorum. Thank you. Reading through those things to get some ideas about the creatures that you may want to be using. Then do not describe it as a whole drip feed. Some kind of contradictory descriptions about it while your characters are in the moment in that first person narrative. Because it can cause the players to be like, wait a minute, that's not adding up. Like, in this instance, my character was going face to face with a Byaki. And so Xander describes it as like, there is this paper thin human face of someone I know that's leaning down to me, and then I do something, and it's like these small insectile grasshopper limbs are reaching out and grasping for me. Then these leathery wings and then this tail is wrapping around behind me I didn't even see before. And it's just like my brain is not Putting these pieces together. Right. Which captures that incomprehensible vibe that we're trying to do. It's just, you know, getting a little bit more creative about it. Speaking of getting more creative about things, do we want to talk about distilling things from existing media as opposed to just altering what may already be present in scenarios?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of resources out there that have really good inspiration to draw from. So like, I never feel particularly creative. There's a lot of stuff already out there that exists that isn't part of Call of Cthulhu that you can just draw from. Scp. Excellent resource. Lot of really interesting write ups. It's already there. All you have to do is find something that sounds interesting to you and incorporate it in a scenario. Even stuff like the Universal monster suite of things. I mean, how long ago was it? Forever ago. Chaosium released Blood Brothers 1 and 2, which is just scenarios. Call of Cthulhu scenarios that use B horror movie monsters. And it's very fun and pulpy and like chainsaw a little bit, you know, so even stuff like that because your players don't really expect that. I don't really expect you to throw at me like just an actual zombie, an actual vampire, an actual mummy.

Nathan loves when you throw actual zombies at him.

Yeah. Everyone runs.

So interesting every time everyone runs for Nathan. Oh my goodness. Are they coming from my brain? Who knows?

And like, there can be a little bit of hesitance for this because you're worried about like, oh, what if they've seen it? Like, what if they know what this is and it kind of spoils it. Cool. There are three words you can say that will solve this problem. It's an homage to whatever I just pulled this from. Right. Like it can be something that if your players have seen it, you're getting that Leo point moment to distill out, but also just change something up about it so it's not just a one to one. Okay, so this is the thing basically. Oh, I didn't know it could do that. Right. That's fun too. This is also where I read a lot of horror novels for inspiration to try and pull some more descriptive details and things. There also a much lower likelihood of players having read a book instead of watched a movie. So no judgment. That came out meaner than I intended.

It did. But it's accurate.

There was a little judgy tone. But you know what? I also like, I found myself in like convention games and one shots, especially where I'm sitting there and we're playing and it's like, wait, this is the plot to the thing. And I'm not, I'm not mad about it. I'm like, oh, this is the plot to the thing. This is so fun. Like, I love that kind of of stuff. Personally, I love that.

No, yeah. And like, there can be such a fun moment of discovery, especially if you're pulling inspiration from outside the horror medium for things that actually, when you think about it, this is awful. There were a couple of friends of mine who were playing in a one shot scenario where there. This town is just being decimated. There are these holes and things like, literally looks like a boulder has rolled through multiple houses. And so there's holes in everything. People are like running, they're panicking, they can't figure out what's going on. But it's like as the. The marks of this are getting bigger and bigger and it's picking up entire houses with it. They're like, what is this? This is. It's a katamari. And they were freaking out that they were playing through katamari, essentially from people responding to this little prince rolling things up to then shoot back into space. It was really unexpected and can just, yeah, be a novel and fun experience,

I would say, like from existing horror media, really. Just sit down, try to distill it. Like, what makes Jaws scary? Like, it's a big fucking monster, it's hidden from sight. So like that could translate to maybe something in the fog hidden from sight. And, oh, now it's just the mist.

Okay, you mean John Carpenter's the fuck? Oh, sorry.

Well, and if you're really lucky, the thing you're drawing inspiration from, like the Magnus Archives podcast, which we won't talk about any other gaming products that are from that, but they categorize everything so you can just go and look and be like, oh, I want to pull from this. This little jar which is labeled the kind of horror that you're looking for. So, you know, that's. That makes it a lot easier than like, what is Nyarlathotep? Like, I don't. Like if you just come in blind, you don't know what you're dealing with there. Pyramids.

I feel like Nyarlathotep is truly the lowest bar to entry that, like, don't give an explanation. This is weird shit that's going on. Do not involve anything called bloody tongue. Do not give any kind of contextualization because it's always like, he's the Loki of the mythos. So just remove the name drop. And then that may be a more interesting scenario for players instead of just, oh, it's. That got it. Great. Well, other ideas.

What if I want to run a game that has no mythos? I'm like, I'm sick of it. I don't want anything actual super supernatural.

I'm into it. I have long wanted to play and run in scenarios where we are expecting some kind of interdimensional alien monster thing to happen. And it's just realizing, oh, no, people are fucked up and having this mundane reason for something that seems so horrible, there's no way this could be real. That, you know, there is. Occam's Razor, I think, from Stygian Fox.

Yep, yep.

I wasn't a huge fan of the scenarios in there, but it can be an interesting principle, like we talked about with Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that just sometimes there's awful situations you get thrust into. Shit happens. Can be a cosmic horror genre, I suppose.

Yeah. I mean, like, there's the real life. Horror is definitely a thing. Right. They arrested, finally, a couple of years ago, the Golden State Killer, a man that was like a very prolific serial killer and rapist for many, many years and got away with it. And they asked him, like, why did you do it? And he said, their doors were unlocked, they were home. And that to me, like, that's horrible all on its own. Like, why do you do what you do? They were home, the door was unlocked, I could get in. And that's it. Like, there's no other logical explanation. But there's genuine horror in that.

Because as humans, we try to find a reason. And especially whenever we're playing an investigative horror game, like, sometimes the investigation can just be how to respond, how to survive. We can try to search for answers, but there may be no answers that we can find. And that in and of itself is a kind of horror that's, again, that's assaulting that competence that people really want to feel. And if you play it right, you know, can lead to a kind of mystery for the game itself.

And I think, you know, sometimes when we write scenarios and as GMs, we can get really wrapped around the axle about, like, the why, like, why is this happening? Why is this? I need to find an answer for my players. And it can be okay. At the end of the thing, when your players are saying, why? Why was this going on? You don't know.

Mm.

I think, like, the. The Saw movies are a good example of this. Right. Cause you start with the first and the Guy's like, it's all natural. He's coming up with these traps because, I don't know, they're bad people or something. And by the end of it, you're like, I'm not sure they were that bad. Some of the. It's like, I don't know. They deserve that. But that's also part of the horror.

Right?

Is like, why did I get stuck with a bear trap on my face? I like, I stole 10 bucks. Like, is this fair? No, of course it's not. But that's. You're there.

Yeah, you found yourself in this situation, and it fucking sucks. But there's really no good logical explanation for it.

Well, I mean, since you mentioned that too, I do recommend checking out the scenario 10, which we've covered on the podcast before.

I hate you for that scenario.

It's so fun. If you want to run a SAW scenario, that's a really good one to do. And like, yeah, she still hates me for it, so that means it's a good one. But I do agree on that too, because something that I have found both in terms of critically reading scenarios running and then being as players, I don't care about the core why as to what's going on as long as the present events make sense. So, like, as long as you're setting up these entities as kind of actors and they are making reasonable decisions given their things, the thing that is a pet peeve for me is it happens because it does. It happens because it needs to. And like, that is the immersion breaking part that can be difficult to deal with. So sometimes, you know, oh, this is just a thing that happened by. That's fine. As long as the immediate proximal responses are what makes sense for the players, because that keeps them rooted in the game.

Yeah, it's important to just make interesting situations instead of plotting things along. Like, oh, this has to happen. Then this has to happen. Then this. No, because that doesn't give players agency.

So you're saying the Thing prequel isn't good? Because that's what I just heard. The first is literally. No, no, no. But it shows up. Just shows up at the base.

Slight tangent. It could have been good. They had practical effects for the whole movie and they looked good. And then they added CG on top of it. I don't know if this is relevant. Don't add CG to your game. I don't know what the analogy for this is, but, like, that was too far.

Okay.

The analogy to that is probably just don't use AI oh, okay.

Yeah, that's it.

Don't use your AI. So, one last thing, because I know we're kind of moving on to the next part of it. You mentioned the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nathan, and I think there is room for a fun, like, we are the baddies moment that then gets turned on its head. A couple years ago here at Chaosium Con, I played a scenario called the Family that Slays Together, Stays Together by a really great guy. His name's Chris Frank. I think he runs scenarios basically every year here. And it's all just homebrewed stuff, and you're the baddies. But then there's an assault to what you're trying to do. Like, you're all serial killers. You're crazy. You run this, like, roadside motel, and then you get some unexpected guests for the night and you have to deal with that. So that can be really fun subversion of what you're trying to. What we normally expect.

I think it's all about exploring the what if scenarios. Like, oh, yes, what if we are serial killers? And then the unnatural comes. That's interesting to explore.

Well, it sounds like we're kind of deviating from finding something in media and distilling that into a kind of antagonist that you can use. So let's say we're going to cook something up from scratch. How do you want to go about that, or what advice would you be able to give?

I think it's just taking a concept that scares you and using that as the seed for the idea that makes, you know, that makes the thing scary in the first place. I've only tried to write one scenario. I hate it. I threw it in the trash. But I based it on a nightmare I had, and it was just like. That was scary. I didn't like that. And then you can just take that and use that as really the seed of the scenario. And instead of making something indescribable, it just. You don't really have to describe it really, in the actions of whatever it is that makes this thing scary. You know, for me, it was like, this thing can assume the likeness of anybody. Then you don't really need indescribable at that point because it looks like your mom. So, hey, you know, just taking something that scares you and runs with it. Yeah, your mom.

Oh, man.

Yeah. This is something that we talked about with Todd Kiesling on the podcast before that he mentioned that he did when writing the novel the Sundowners Dance, which is about a meteor that crashes into a retirement community. A New person moves into the community and like they are worshiping this meteor. And so that's the overall like back cover premise of the novel. But he was saying that I don't really think that this is spoiler. So I mentioned it's a community home. That the whole reason that he wrote this book is because he is terrified of Alzheimer's and dementia. And so really trying to crystallize like this is a deep fear that he holds. What about this is scary? You know, that slipping away, the loss of agency, other factors that may be involved with it. And then how can I stitch some legs onto this? Like how can I then make this into something that would work into a given setting, like from an evocative location? Then how can I make this a potentially physical or at least ethereal entity that I can point at as an other to do instead of just this vague concept? So finding things that are scary to you personally and then building back up from there can be one method to create your own entities.

I think though it's important since you know this is a game, also come up with a way that players can interact with it in a way that gives them that agency, that competency that is there. Because sometimes you'll run a game and you're like, that's scary. Not sure why I needed to be involved.

If you find yourself writing something and going, man, this is a really good book, then it might be time to think about it a little bit more. Because it's like, well, everyone is just being present for this interesting story.

That's a very fair point.

Yeah.

I mean that goes back to just create interesting situations.

Yeah. Ethical dilemmas. What was the other psychological problems? There's so many ones that it's like, remember the trauma that you have. That's always fun in a game that.

But also if you look at some books that have things like psychological dilemmas or so, you know, things you may have like the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Trolley Problem as a classic example. Finding other things like that where you are forcing your players into a tough decision with made up people and environments. Things that can be a way to really increase some tension and stuff between the people there. Because that's assaulting the relatedness that like we don't want to make this decision. We have different ideas about what to do. You can up the tension in games because we want nothing more than to make a game thrilling, intense.

So like just building off of what Lex said, like Prisoner's Dilemma. What if you just made the idea of that a mythos entity. Right. And then that's completely original and players have to make a hard choice. And it's an interesting situation.

Yeah. I would say just don't hold yourself back because you can't think of the whole backstory because you can't think of a reason, an explanation why it does what it does. Don't Ridley Scott yourself. It does not need the whole origin story to tell an interesting story.

This makes me think of a blurb from a really smart guy, terrific scenario author, Colin Richards, who may or may not be in this room with us here. We were talking about Signal to Noise, which is one of my all time favorite scenarios. And in it it deals with an entity. I'm not going to get into spoilers. That's just kind of. It's fitting. It's cool and evocative. You know, it fits the vibe that the scenario is going for. And whenever we were talking about like the where this came from, what it's doing here, what's going on, it was like, I don't know, like I don't know where it came from. That's not the part that matters. Like let the players fill in those details and try to surmise what it must have been up to. Because you just have this unknown thing that is doing observable things and then let your players fill in those pieces. Fill in the gaps can be a perfectly valid way of coming up with these. I think with Call of Cthulhu in particular, we may be used to needing to flesh out lots of information, explanation in detail for what's going on. We're just GMing like we're having collaborative storytelling with players. You don't need to worry about it. Just kind of give something fun. Let your players rip and then have their own story and experience from it.

Yeah, because that is one criticism we lovey at scenarios is when there is a ton of information for the GMs to read, absorb, retain that actually never even makes it to the players in the first place. And then it's like, why did you make me read 15 pages? And the players never find out this information anyway.

Sorry.

Oh my goodness. I'm so sorry.

Some publishing groups are more, more guilty of this.

I'm going to look up Ancient Peru. I'm sure this will be relevant for this scenario. I like to plan a little bit with these things. And I think that some games like Mothership has a really good system to categorize this. They use the Tomb system of Transgression, Omens, Manifestation, Banishment and slumber. It's Kind of the life cycle of a horror.

Right.

Is the. How do you get into it? What does it happen? It blows up big. It's terrible. Then you kill it. But you don't really kill it, of course. You never kill it. I think that for me, I don't necessarily have to write it down, but I like to know it as the gm. And then maybe if I'm writing it up, you can sprinkle stuff throughout, but you don't always have to call it out and make a big PowerPoint about how to kill your monster with a dagger.

I just. Yeah. My only point was don't let it hold you up and say, like, oh, this isn't ready. I can't run it. I don't have this origin story in my mind. Like, it's going to be okay. It'll be fine.

Just run the prequel of it. Just run the Prometheus, the scenario.

Believe it.

No.

And speaking of that, like, Mothership is a really good resource. Just if you were like, I need ideas to just come up with something fast because they have tables. Right.

A good resource for your Call of Cthulhu game.

Yes, of course. It's just a good resource for horror in general. Right. You have these tables, you can roll it, it's got some good ideas, and then you can just run with it.

Yeah. I also, the more that I run games, the less I care about stat blocks. I know some people really, really like that because you get that specificity that I know exactly what it can and cannot do. I've just become much more vibe based in terms of running because, like, creatures aren't scary because of their DC or challenge rating. They're scary because of what they narratively do and the threats that they are presenting or the uncertainty around it. That is interesting for the players. So, you know, if you don't have anything figured out. Also related to Holly's point earlier, if your players are catching wise onto something, throw something new at them. Be like, I did not think it could walk through walls. That complicates this thing we were doing. And so be able to do something a little different from there, too.

Yeah, I have. And this is just Holly's maybe hot take. I don't know. For me, the monster dies when it is narratively the most interesting point in a fight for it to die. You know, that kind of thing. Like, I don't know. That's just me, though. I know other folks want their stat blocks and I respect that, but.

Well, actually, you could turn it on its head. What if it dies, and then the worst thing happens to everyone.

Not its final form. Yeah.

Because I like to call this the fromsoft method.

Of course.

Yes, it died and now it's worse.

I think the next time it's going to be narratively interesting. Just have a heart attack and die. Like, right as the investigator's about to start.

Are there any other bits of advice that we can try and give?

Yeah. When it comes to creating mythos entities or creatures from scratch, I try to understand what kind of senses, what my senses can detect. So, you know, five senses. How does it. What does it smell like? What does it feel like when it's ripping me apart?

Stuff like, what does it taste like? That's what I'm wondering.

Oh, that'd be an interesting scenario.

The senses.

Yeah. And, like, it's always really uncanny and unsettling when you describe, like, either pleasurable sensations or like, good smells and associate that with something horrible. It's like, oh, yeah, this thing that's been consuming, this congealed. Congealed people. It smells like cinnamon to you. Like. Like, holy shit. Like, what's going on?

Like, how dare you take my favorite smell.

Yeah. And just corrupt that.

What about chicken pot pie? That kind of sounds right for me.

It's all another way of so averting those expectations. Right. You know, if something is monstrous and horrific, we think bad. We associate with bad things. Like, yeah, I am so accustomed to, like, it smells like decay and sulfur. Be like, it smells like dawn hand soap, chocolate, what the fuck? And then it causes that suspicion of. Then, like, as you are describing the environments. And be like, what is this place? Smells like bleach. Like, oh, no, is it clean or really bad? Because I know that it smells like bleach. Like, being able to. To add in those unexpected things. Again, keeping players on their toes, that's going to be the essence of good horror there, too.

And I think there's also space to take a leaf out of the Ten Candles book, which uses for inspiration in your Call of Cthulhu Grace, for inspiration of, like, having your players give a description of the thing, the monster, giving them a little bit of power to create one horrific, one horrific detail to the monster. Because it's always the rule is something that is. It makes the creature more powerful, not less powerful.

Or like, we just talked with Jason Cordova and, you know, that's the method that he uses in a lot of games is okay. And here's how it's worse than that. Like, asking your players for some description of something that they may be seeing or experiencing. And then building on it to really emphasize more horrific elements.

He always prompts his players to paint them a picture. But it's not just like, oh, well, what is it? No, it's more focused. It's like, what about this monster reminds you of your worst childhood night? Right? Like, that's a focus prompt. It's not just, oh, here, hot potato. And then your player's like, this monster

gave me a B on my report card.

Well, and one thing that's very satisfying as a player is sometimes he'll go, I can't think of anything worse than that.

I love when our players give us more than we were gonna when we

were expecting, give us ammo to use against. But just continuing on, like, another resource I really love to when creating monsters from scratch is when I am just considering tropes of the horror genre. A really great website I use occasionally is tvtropes.org legitimately.

Yeah.

So they have a random trope button. And what sometimes as a brainstorming or creative challenge I set for myself is I hit that random button and I try to just mash those ideas together. And then you get something completely unique.

Enemies to lovers. Enemies to lovers. Enemies to stop.

Lovers to enemies.

Oh, no.

Okay.

But like. And also, all of these things that we're talking about can obviously be put back to just altering the present mythos. Entities that are in scenarios too, that, you know, we're just really trying to brainstorm ways to keep the antagonists fresh. Like, I have such a clear image in my mind whenever I was running a scenario. It's why I mentioned Migo in the beginning because, you know, trying to distill these elements of it. And it's like, it's this bizarre thing that's multicolored and lands down from the sky that seems to almost float despite the wind as it opens up. You know, it's this weird mucosal tissue blossoming in front of them. And then I mentioned one word, chitinous. And then as soon as the players realize, like, oh, it's translucent space fungal chitin, it's amigo. Like, seeing their enthusiasm kind of dim that much because it was something very intriguing. And then it's. I know what that is. It's the reason why we wanted to host this panel to try and just give some more ideas to keep some things fresh, because you can always, like, have the. The post scenario debrief of, like, what even was it be like? Well, that's for you to figure out.

Or the next game that's it. Yeah, yeah. And I think that I. And I've played in games before where the GM is, you know, we've all played Cthulhu for many years. Everyone at the table has played it for many years. So instead of even giving us a description, it's like. And amigo enters the house and it's like. I mean, even if that to me is like, lowest barrier of entry is like, if you're gonna use a mythos entity that exists already, you don't have to, like, tell me what it is. Like, give me something. Give me crumbs, Give me a little taste. But don't just literally tell me. And Cthulhu rises up from the sea, right?

It's not a ghoul. It's some kind of cannibal or something. Like, go for it from there.

Well, I'm gonna say I really like the word mucoidal or whatever that was. There one thing you can do to make any monster scary is make it wetter. I don't know why that's true. But just the slimier. There's something visceral about that of just being like, yeah, it licks your face. And like, no, no, thank you. Maybe that's me. I don't know.

I always think there was a behind the scenes featurette that was about the dawn of the Dead, the remake that came out, like, in 2004, I think I was about to say recently, and I'm dying inside, but the creature effects designer had said, like, there are a few things that are always scary. Three things. Eyes, teeth, and hands. If you want to make something scary, add more of that, make it more visible. We don't like it whatsoever.

Yeah, that explains your obsession with teeth.

Hey, hey.

I do have an example. Just like, just to put this stuff all into action here, but let's. So we talked about, like, cockroach humans earlier. So just thinking about that, right? They probably live in some kind of trash heap, and then they probably feed on the dead and decomposing. And now that I'm thinking about it, this is just the reskin ghoul, right? So you can easily reskin something by distilling what makes it unique, right? So ghouls subterranean feed on, decomposing. Okay, well, cockroach people also do that too. So that's something new and not mythos.

Well. And. Yeah, and then you start going like, well, what's. What? Like, transition point would you get. Like, you'd see a guy and it's like, oh, completely normal, dude. No problem. Then his eyes do the little cockroach, like, the dog thing. And you're like, okay, so now you're wonderful.

You're just. You're the creature wearing an Edgar suit.

Yeah, pretty much, you know.

Yes.

Except more chitinous.

Be careful with that word.

No mushrooms, just chitin.

That's it.

It's getting out of control. Kill it.

Q and A time.

Yep.

Yep.

All right, so we are just over 45 minutes, trying to set some time aside for a brief Q and A. Do folks have any questions or things? I'm going to restate them into the mic here just for podcast purposes, but, yeah, any questions, comments? You can throw overripe vegetables at me. That's perfectly fine.

We will not accept any criticisms.

Yeah, no criticism. I will take overripe vegetables over criticisms any day of the week. Yes.

So the question was, what if, in a Call of Cthulhu scenario, we have unreliable witnesses? And, yeah, I think that's appropriate because that serves as an obstacle, and I would personally reinforce it with a proper clue trail of definitive clues so the investigators can deduce what actually happened when they're comparing.

Yeah, and I like that. I like that fire bit, because, yeah, your investigators can look at that and go, there's nothing. Bert, like, okay, this guy's. Something's not adding up, Right.

I love unreliable witnesses. The way that I tend to handle it is what are the actual descriptors of the thing? And then what is one degree separation from that? And then something wrong associated with that, too. So it's, you know, in the same way that we're thinking about, but reskinning these creatures, just reskin it with that degree of separation where what would a regular person seeing this for a split second see? And then whenever they're scared, what would they make up to. To kind of complement that, too? We see that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The question was, since CoC is heavily based on sanity and that has extensive ties to Cthulhu mythos, then how do you kind of roll with that if we're separating ourselves from it? This is where, like, my answer will be. I go based on vibes pretty often where, like, 01 is, oh, that's unpleasant. And then a D4 is, oh, that's not good. D6 is whenever something is bad. And then from there on, you can just say, like, how much is this going to mess someone up? Like, how much would they have nightmares and trauma from this to increase the die size for it there? I'm a bit of an outlier. I do not use the Cthulhu Mythos skill in my games because I find that it is often at such low percentages and. And I refuse to accept that if I see a few ghouls, I may know something about Deep Ones and Dagon that, like, I don't like that era of transferability between them. I think that that is a. An artifact from previous editions of the games that we're assuming very Mythos savvy investigators that I don't think really holds for a lot of scenarios these days.

So I've got a different answer than Lex. But it is. If there is some kind of monster, it depends on how much work the keeper wants to put in into the background information that investigators can potentially find out. So with my example of, you know, cockroach people, if you discover that there's cockroach, There's a cockroach person. Great. And then you find out there's evidence of a cockroach person society, then that isn't that unlike like, that. That is like the mythos because it's like, this is a hidden world that humanity didn't know of until your investigator stumbled upon it. So I would say, yeah, that could still add to Mythos. Yeah.

And I think even is that example of, like, I see a dead body. That's a good one. Because the context is so important. Right. Is if I'm at the coroner's office and I see the dead body, it's scary, but, I mean, if you're shocked, you're not paying much attention. If you come home and hanging from the ceiling fan is, you know, your uncle, that's probably a bigger sanity drop.

Yeah. I would say also just taking a leaf out of the Delta Green rulebook where the sanity loss can be categorized as from violence or from the unnatural. And that kind of really encapsulates to me, like, really more about the human element of it because most of us don't, like, regularly see horrific violence or unnatural. So that can be a way, like, are they experiencing something very violent? Are they experiencing something that is unnatural, unexplained, something that is, you know, they can't wrap their mind around. Then to me, that's. Yeah.

This can also be a good opportunity to ask your players something that I'm trying to remember. It was a scenario that was run from Ain't Slay Nobody. I think it was the. The Waking Children as an AP that I really, really like the way that the GM handled it where I recall Bridget Jeffries was one of the players in it, and their character came across a dead body. They Passed the sand roll. So it's like no penalties. And then the GM asked, what in your past makes you be able to look at this mauled body and not flinch? And so give some opportunities for role play or cognitive processing of things to really keep. Increase your players investment while they're there too. That would be my response. One more and then we'll be in.

All right.

I think that. Yeah. Before we close, do closing statements to build on that. The RPG system Bluebeard's Bride does take advantage of that, where it's like if you as a player are uncomfortable, then you do this thing. Like if the moment has made you squirm, has made you go like recoil, be uncomfortable, then you pass the narrative. So yeah, something else I thought about

and sometimes you can even just say, like, take a step back and think like of the last days in your character's life. What have they gone through and what choices have they made? Are those the choices of a sane person? And usually the answer is probably not. And that just kind of draws them back in because after a while, people are gonna get used to anything, right? They're gonna be like, well, we gotta burn down this church too.

It's normal to them, as one does.

Yeah, exactly. But you start asking like, what's your last week look like? And you go, well, that's five days of church burning. All of a sudden then they start going, I think I should see somebody about something.

All right.

And that's all the time that we have. Thank you all for attending. All hundreds of you, dozens of people in the room. Thank you all so, so much. If you'd like to hear some more chats from our disembodied voices, you can find our podcast RPG reanimators on most streaming platforms, YouTube, other places on the Internet and in certain arcane tomes with licensing policies. You can also follow us on social media. Please follow us on Discord. We are almost always on there and happy to chat anytime. I hope you all enjoy the of this convention. Take care everybody.

Thank you.

We are terminating.

Also, I'll recruit if we're always looking for players too. So jump on the Discord if you ever want to join in games. We always need more. Our test subjects.

Yeah, we always need test subjects.

That's it.

Victims.