Can Such Things Be?

[Vinegar Tom]

Greetings! As a long-ago tabletop CoC player, I felt a twinge of nostalgia. Not being in a position to join a live game, I thought I'd try PbP. I nearly gave up, since my first few attempts were on sites devoted to PbP games of all kinds, mostly D&D, and about 99.9% things that weren't CoC, so the choice was very limited indeed, and the games tended to be extremely elementary and not terribly well run. And then I refined my search-terms and found you lot - this looks more like it!

[Tabs]

Love your avatar, he looks like Rasputin. Oh, welcome, by the way.

[Vinegar Tom]

Actually he's Fantômas, the "hero" of a French supervillain movie made in 1913. I thought that would be appropriate.

[Abdul Alhazred]

Welcome Tom!

Like you I had a good look around before discovering YSDC. I've just started a PBP game of ToC and the standard of role playing is excellent, far better than other non-Cthulhu games I've participated in.

Welcome! Oh, and by the way, I love the avatar too!

[Vinegar Tom]

Dear old Fantômas, the most unjustly neglected literary character ever! Apparently there were copyright problems with the author's heirs holding out for decades for too much money, until they ended up with none because everybody had forgotten about the fellow.

In the context of this website, he's probably an avatar of Nyarlathotep, given his total lack of motivation other than evil for the sake of evil, the more unnecessarily complicated the better. At one point he unleashed bubonic plague on a luxury cruise liner, horribly killing thousands, basically just because he could. Strangely charismatic, a master of disguise, and sometimes partially foiled but never permanently defeated, Fantômas is exactly the right age to be the Joker's dad (if we assume the Joker to be the person who first met Batman in 1940, not Caesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, or Heath Ledger).

He gets a nod in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the graphic novel, not the dreadful movie) when Mina Harker claims he's worse than Count Dracula, since at least the Count was human once. And he's the great-grandfather of Phantom Limb on The Venture Brothers. If Sherlock Holmes thought Moriarty was bad news, he'd definitely have met his match in this guy! Unless he was anything like that fellow in the new movies who calls himself "Sherlock Holmes", in which case I expect he'd have solved everything by inventing an amazing suit of nuclear-powered steampunk flying armour.

Anyway, I hope to be both an Investigator and a Keeper on this site, but there's not much point in my trying to start my own game until I've got a better idea how things work around here, and for that I need to play something first. Apparently some games here require a considerable amount of commitment - I gather there's one zombie-fighting campaign which has taken seven years of real time and over 14,000 posts to advance one day in game time! Which is slightly more commitment than I had in mind. So I'll wait until a new game starts up that's similar to what I'll hopefully end up running - a traditional CoC campaign with a beginning, an end, and in between them a middle of finite length - and see how I get on as a player in that.

Oh, by the way, I don't see a dice-roller or any other game mechanics anywhere. Are they hidden somewhere, or are we all trusted to roll our own dice at home and not tell lies if we roll 00?

[Mr. Handy]

I'm the one running Zombie Apocalypse, which is actually a good deal longer: the first two chapters are on another site. We reached the second day two years ago, and many characters are approaching the 36-hour mark. It does look intimidating, but the commitment isn't as much as you'd think. Players drop in and out all the time, and I'm the only one who has been there from the beginning. Players are expected to post only once or twice a week, which is one reason it moves so slowly. It is very different from traditional CoC, however, since it's survival horror rather than investigative horror, and it's very open-ended. My other games are more traditional, but they're well underway, so you'd have to join in the middle. There are a few other games just starting or in the early stages that might interest you.

Most games here use Invisible Castle to roll dice. There is a built-in dice roller, but it has to be enabled for each board that uses it, and it doesn't have as many features (you can't roll 1d6+1d4, so you must roll both dice separately, for instance). Invisible Castle also makes searching previous dice rolls much easier. There are other dice-rolling sites out there too that are often acceptable. Some Keepers would trust their players to roll physical dice and report the results honestly (I'm one of them), but it's really up to the individual Keeper.