New rules within Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur
I’m currently running the fabulous Call of Cthulhu campaign, Horror on the Orient Express within the post-apocalyptic universe of Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur. I’ve made a number of tweaks to the original story, primarily to spice things up a little with my own particular flavour and to stop my players using the Internet to find out what’s happening and what’s coming next.
Side note: I’ve already seen a few looks of shocked realisation on a couple of faces and the story veers off in quite an unexpected direction *dark smile*
I also made changes to be able to incorporate a luxury train journey on the Orient Express in a landscape left to become a new wilderness by the event known as Yellow Dawn.
Playing since last summer, the players have come to realise they are being stalked by several individuals and entities; they suspect the latter are Mythos are in nature, and have successfully identified one as being a member of the Great Magi, a new non-human species I’ve introduced into Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos via the Yellow Dawn rulebook.
As such, very little is known about The Great Magi, and their inclusion in the YD universe only gives a brief description at the moment. You can download a free Yellow Dawn supplement called Monsters of the Mythos from the official Yellow Dawn webpage. I’ve written some expanded notes but these haven’t been included for release yet.
Monsters of the Mythos: (New) This free to download supplement expands upon the concept of the Cthulhu Mythos, introducing a raft of new Great Old Ones, Outer Gods and non-human species for characters to encounter.
Download,
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What this means is that the characters have something very dangerous and with significant Mythos powers on their heels, a thing that is shadowing every move they make. They realise that it is likely to try and make a move against them very soon.
But how do they stop it?
Many games will resolve this with a gunfight.
A few will offer up the idea of a scroll or spell or some kind of arcane conjuration that can defeat the entity.
These are possible, but the gunfight is likely to end up badly for the characters and the scrolls, spells and conjurations – well, what are they, where are they and how can the GM justify introducing them to a group of player characters who are mostly ignorant of the Mythos?
I developed a relatively quick system that allows characters to use Research to explore an unknown subject; with the hopeful result that the GM hands over information they can use and exploit – if their Research is good enough.
This system is a new addition to the Yellow Dawn rulebook, included in the recently released new edition (version 2.5).
I’ve extracted it and placed it below for you to use or modify as you wish.
In this particular case, the character, Josh, is using the Internet to try and find a way of defeating or weakening the Great Magi.
See below and go to:
Using the Internet for Research
If looking for the answer or clues to some kind of general query:
I rolled 1d6 to see how many successes Josh needed to get a full account of what the Great Magi is.
He had to make 5 successes.
It took him a few weeks to achieve this; every attempt taking up 4 hours of “within game” time – and he quite often failed, despite having a high Research skill, due to a low amount of Mythos skill.
Finally, after getting 5 successes I revealed the following:
- The Great Magi have the ability to phase between different locations at will. They can’t time travel but they can step-out-of-nowhere to appear in any particular place – attack – and then depart again.
- The Great Magi have vast knowledge of magick, but when hunting, which involves an important sense of honour and tradition, they only use Captivate and Illusion style operations.
- The Great Magi normally do not kill indiscriminately but select a target and hunt them using basic skills and the “natural weapons” of their true form: claws and powerful jaws ridged with sharp teeth.
- This particular Great Magi has been corrupted by centuries of worship of the Skinless One (an aspect of Nyarlathotep) and is not behaving entirely within tradition; it is rogue.
- The Great Magi have a psychic carrier wave allowing them to communicate with others of their kind across vast distances. However, it is uncertain if this particular Great Magi will be using this – if it is indeed a rogue.
Using the Research system, Josh was then able to target any one of these things with a view to finding a way of reducing the ability or removing it entirely.
Josh decided he wanted to tackle the Great Magi’s ability to phase in and out of locations; restricting its ability to ambush.
My thoughts are this:
1d6 successes would give Josh the ability to reduce an ability by 20% (he finds a sigil that radiates a negative influence against the Great Magi).
Any critical successes could go towards increasing the penalty against the Great Magi ability – or removing it entirely.
It all depends on what kind of narrative the GM can dream-up to validate the crunchy numbers of dice rolls and dice modifiers.
For me, this adds more tension to the scenario rather than just giving away one thing that acts as a silver bullet to all of the character’s problems.
But that’s just me and my style of GMing.
With time, Josh could use Research to identify every bit of information available about the Great Magi and find ways to reduce or remove their abilities, but, time is running out.
Using books & Scrolls for Research
Occult & Mythos documents contain the clues to other operations – even if they’re not actually listed as being included in the document. A student could piece together the knowledge of an operation from reading, comprehending, and understanding; then, studying the content they have learned to deduce further information – such as an all important “command” or “dismiss” invocation.
It works like this. The GM states how many “successes” are required in order to piece together enough information to give you the details of a complete operation. This is entirely down to the GMs discretion but as a rule-of-thumb:
For the Occult:
Any Minor Operation: requires 1 success
Any Significant Operation: requires 2 successes
Any Major Operation: requires 3 successes
For the Mythos:
Any Commune: requires 1 success
Any Conjure: requires 2 successes
Any Command: requires 3 successes
Any General Operation: requires 4 successes
Any Render: requires 5 successes
Any Dismiss: requires 6 successes.
Definition of Success
Pick up a book or scroll that’s relevant (Occult or Mythos). Roll 1d100 and try to score beneath the “+ to skill” value. If this fails then that document doesn’t contain anything relevant to the information you’re seeking; the document can not be used again for this particular query – although it can be used for future queries regarding different operation. This takes 4 hours to deduce, either way.
If the 1d100 roll did score below the “+ to skill” value, then the document does contain relevant information. Now try to extract and comprehend the required piece of information; to do this, you need to spend 4 hours studying the document followed by a relevant skill check (Occult or Mythos). If the study roll fails, you can try again, spending 4 hours on each attempt until successful. That is the definition of 1 success.
If you require more “successes” then you can try to use the same document again, by rolling 1d100 and scoring beneath the “+ to skill” value. However, as soon as this is failed, the document can no longer be used for that line of enquiry. You’ll have to move on to a different document. The more documents you have in your library, the better chance you’ll have of piecing together disparate bits of information into the operation (or solution) you’re after.
Don’t forget, if this is an operation you’re after: you’ll then need to learn it (see earlier in this chapter).
Clarity DM: any operation that’s been stitched together from different sources may contain flaws, either contained within the original text that you failed to detect or inserted through your own lack of knowledge. For any operation assembled through this method, make one Occult or Mythos skill check (whichever is relevant); if the skill check succeeds, then the operation is flawless, if the skill check fails, then write the amount failed-by down beside the operation as its Clarity DM. This will impact your ability to learn it – and has further consequences when a person comes to use the operation.
Using the Internet for Research
Specifically, research that involves Occult or Mythos themes. The trouble with the Internet is the vast amount of rubbish that clogs up any search-filter. It needs to be picked through, validated and then studied to extract any real informational value: does the bit-of-detail you’ve found actually help you answer your query?
Every Research skill check takes 4 hours. It is very hard to find valuable data online. The GM may apply a DM based on the difficulty of what is being researched.
If successful: the value of the 1d100 dice roll for the Research skill check also needs to be equal to or lower than your Occult skill or Mythos skill (whichever is relevant).
If the one dice roll is successful on both counts, then continue:
What do you find?
If looking for the answer or clues to some kind of general query: then you have made 1 success; this may be enough, you may need more; the GM will know how many successes any particular query needs to become fully resolved.
For example: if a character is being harassed by some Mythos entity and wants to know what weaknesses it might have; the GM decides the character needs to make 5 successes to find an answer. This can be done through “using books and scrolls for research” or online research. Note: there may be no actual answer to this query written down in a scenario; but the GM should feel confident to “dream one up” if the character manages to find… something.
If looking for “+ to skill”: the GM should roll 1d6.
[1 to 5]: you come across a fragment of knowledge that has an effective “+ to skill” of 1d3%. It has a basic reading time of 1d3 x 4 hours. It has a Clarity DM of (3d6-10) x 5%, in other words, rolling an 18 would give a penalty on clarity of -40%, probably due to bad translations from the original source text. There is a 1% chance that is contains an operation of some kind.
[6]: you come across a pay wall demanding 3d6 x 10 credits for access to the information. If paid, then make a LUCK roll otherwise the thing is bogus and a waste of money. If genuine, then you come across a curated piece of information that has an effective “+ to skill” of 1d3+1%. It has a basic reading time of 4 hours. It has a Clarity DM of (2d6-10) x 5%, in other words, rolling an 12 would give a penalty on clarity of -10%. There is a 2% chance that is contains an operation of some kind.
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David J Rodger – DATA
