Play@YSDC

Taavi wrote:Hi all,

After a bit of thought I've decided that I would be happy to have idiosyncratic magic use in the game, as described in the rulebook - that is, peculiar little rituals with a price, that can give you an edge in certain situations, not fireball-throwing. I imagine this might be something Harwood or Laura would be interested in adding to their characters.

I suddenly realised that a lot of you may not have access to that particular bit of the ToC rules, so here they are:

Idiosyncratic Magic

Book-hounds, their customers, their contacts, and all those who haunt the Mythos black market are superstitious, obsessed, and widely read in the occult. This is the kind of combination that leads people to try magic, and in keeping with the weird, uncanny setting, some of it might work. As an entirely optional rule, the Keeper can allow an Investigator (or NPC) to make a 3-point Stability test to exchange 2 Stability pool points for 1 pool point from another Ability. The exchange can happen after the die roll. The player must say what weird ritual action her Investigator is (possibly retroactively) performing, give some notion of the oddball theory by which it works, and tell where she learned it if this is the first time she has made this particular exchange. The primary restrictions are: no player (including the Keeper) should consider it grotesquely abusive, it must be strange and eerie, and it should have a necessary condition. The Keeper is allowed to enforce these conditions for similar trades from here on.

For example: “Rose really needed to make that Sense Trouble test – I’m trading 4 Stability for 2 Sense Trouble, so she gets a ‘5’ on the die roll instead. Rose is smoking cigarettes soaked in rats’ blood and saffron oil, since we think the plague demon we’re hunting is from Russia where saffron grows, and she’s watching the smoke pool around its invisible hidey-hole. She learned this trick from that crazy White Russian who used to trade books for vodka money down in Spitalfields last winter.”

Creative Keepers and players will be able to justify all sorts of weird, eccentric magics to boost Athletics (“I twist the strand of human hair around my neck and pull myself over the fence”), Disguise (“I’ve got his mummified thumb in my ruddy mouth, of course I look like him”), Fleeing (“I cut my finger, let it soak my glove in blood, toss it onto the boot of that speeding car, and run the other way”), Shadowing (“I’m only looking in shop windows with her first initial in them”), and so forth. Keepers may rule that any idiosyncratic magic must have a Mythos source (forcing Investigators to read their wares), that it must involve the caster’s blood (either a token amount, or 1 Health point), or any other restriction she feels suitable. At the Keeper’s discretion, some parts of London may be more conducive to certain magics (the Isle of Dogs for hunting magic, say), lowering the Difficulty of the Stability test from 4 to 3.

The ToC Supplement "Rough Magicks" has more examples for Idiosyncratic magic, which I can share with those interested. Or do people think that this overdoes the supernatural?

I have no problem with Idiosyncratic Magic appearing in the game, but I will not be using it with Mr Grant. It doesn't fit my idea of him as an apparently conventional Victorian-Edwardian middle class Londoner.

AndrewTBP wrote:I have no problem with Idiosyncratic Magic appearing in the game, but I will not be using it with Mr Grant. It doesn't fit my idea of him as an apparently conventional Victorian-Edwardian middle class Londoner.

Agreed - I think the more socially marginal your character, the better this sort of thing fits.

Because sums are bandied around a bit, I've done a bit of number-crunching to come up with average daily and yearly incomes for different Credit Ratings in 1930s UK; just so you know how much you have in your pockets for lunch, tips, bribes, purchases, etc.

UK Trail of Cthulhu

Title...........CR Daily Lower; Daily Upper; Yearly lower; Yearly Upper
Charity Case...0....0............1/-............0...............£20
Working Poor..1....1/-..........2/6...........£20............£50
Working Class..2....2/6.........10/-..........£50............£200

Lower-Middle..3.....10/-........£1............£200...........£400
Middle Class...4.....£1..........£2/10........£400...........£900

Bourgeois......5.....£2/10......£5............£900..........£1,800
Wealthy........6......£5.........£25...........£1,800........£9,000
Ruling Class...7+.....£25+.....................£9,000+

Taavi wrote:

AndrewTBP wrote:I have no problem with Idiosyncratic Magic appearing in the game, but I will not be using it with Mr Grant. It doesn't fit my idea of him as an apparently conventional Victorian-Edwardian middle class Londoner.

Agreed - I think the more socially marginal your character, the better this sort of thing fits.

Yup I would agree. I can completely see Laura using some hobo ritual for pathfinding by tossing coins, or Harwood using a 16th century invisibility charm involving a Hand of Glory or perhaps the Captain using a clever little trick he picked up in India for calming riding animals by whispering the many names of God to them or similar. Time to get out the grimoires of folk magic then.

As before, I'm using Art History & Document Analysis & Textual Analysis to keep the EYT watching me and not Harwood or Laura. I don't want to make spends on the Granada & Columbus but this time I'm prepared to make spends on the Alhambra manuscript.

Sorry for the delayed response - busy couple of days.

I'm pleased to announce that a new player will soon be joining us. WinstonP, who you may know from the yog-sothoth forums, will be playing the upright and only slightly penniless Reverend Oliver Poole, CoE, vicar of the Church of Little St Hugh in Smithfield. He has often dropped in to sell or peruse the odd tome or two, and I believe knows Harwood. I don't doubt that the reassuring presence of a man of the cloth will be most heartening to all good Englishmen (and women).

AndrewTBP wrote:As before, I'm using Art History & Document Analysis & Textual Analysis to keep the EYT watching me and not Harwood or Laura. I don't want to make spends on the Granada & Columbus but this time I'm prepared to make spends on the Alhambra manuscript.

So, no clues in the Alhambra manuscript worth my spending any points on?

I think there is a bit of confusion between the closely related skills of Bibliography, Library Use, Textual Analysis and Document Analysis and so I want to clarify what I think each can be used for.

Bibliography covers everything about books as collectable objects. Whast they look like, how much they go for, the history of particular tomes, the history of various presses how they are made, where to find them, etc. It may help in spotting a forgery, e.g. if the binding, printers mark or date of publication is wrong.

Library Use covers books as sources of knowledge. If you want to quickly skim a book for key facts, search through an archive for the relevant document, anything to do with extracting facts from their repositories, it's library use.

Textual analysis covers books as part of literary traditions. It's the sort of thing you learn by studying english literature at a University or good school. Things like who inspired whom, which school they belonged to, the ability to comprehend allusions and metaphors specific to time of writing, or to laugh at jokes in Olde Englishe etc. It can be used to identify who (or what sort of author) wrote a book that is unsigned, based on the language, characteristic phrasing, etc, or spot a fake lost Shakespeare play that contains words the Bard never used.

Document analysis covers books as physical objects. Size, type face, paper, chemical composition, binding, handwriting style etc. Of great use in spotting (or making) a forgery, proving who wrote or typed that anonymous ransom note to the courts satisfaction, tracing a book back to the printer, etc.

Art history applies to art generally, but might also cover styles of binding, plates and illuminated manuscripts and type faces - books as objet d'art.

Obviously there is a fair bit of potential overlap between these skills and so I'm willing to let people apply one similar skill to a situation which really calls for another on a two-points-for-one basis, or listen to arguments about why one or another should really apply in a particular situation. As a rule, though, only Bibliography or sometimes Art History will tell you how much you can sell them for and to whom. Given that its early days I'm happy if people want to rejig their skills accordingly.

I've since had one more inquiry. Given WinstonP will shortly be joining us, I'm inclined to say we're full, but if people think there is a big gap in the group, I could ask if the new person could fill that gap. Dr Blood worth has told me he has dropped out, so if people like the idea of having a dissolute aristo hanging round, I could ask the new person to fill Llewellyn's shoes. But Llewellyn could just as easily be an npc.

Taavi wrote:I think there is a bit of confusion between the closely related skills of Bibliography, Library Use, Textual Analysis and Document Analysis and so I want to clarify what I think each can be used for.

This accords with how I've treated them as a Keeper, and since Grant is more interested in the books than the sale, why I left Bibliography to the other players.
Being the Bookseller and expert on Textual and Document Analysis is enough spotlight time for me.

I've been home sick today (bleargh) and so have spent some time livening up the threads with appropriate images from the period. Feel free to do the same.

Huzzah, I can post at last.

I just wanted to say hello and thank you all for welcoming me into your game. I'm WinstonP (though my real name is Bret; I answer to both) and I'll be playing Rev. O.G.L. Poole, the impoverished vicar of the Chapel of Little St. Hugh near the Smithfields Market. This is my second game of Trail, so be gentle as I try to figure out the rules (I'm pretty dyed in the wool for BRP, but I love the Bookhounds setting). In real life I'm a stay at home dad with an 11 month old child (who is currently waving and squealing at me to let me know her nap didn't last); I'll likely be posting from my cellphone rather than a laptop. Please excuse typos and overlooked autocorrecting errors (for example, I recently told my wife that our daughter "had not Ethan enough toady"... damnable contraption)

I will post my character description today and will dive in.

Cheers,
Bret

Welcome!

Taavi wrote:I've since had one more inquiry. Given WinstonP will shortly be joining us, I'm inclined to say we're full, but if people think there is a big gap in the group, I could ask if the new person could fill that gap. Dr Blood worth has told me he has dropped out, so if people like the idea of having a dissolute aristo hanging round, I could ask the new person to fill Llewellyn's shoes. But Llewellyn could just as easily be an npc.

I think offering them Llewellyn is good, and allow them to tweak a bit.

AndrewTBP wrote:

Taavi wrote:I've since had one more inquiry. Dr Bloodworth has told me he has dropped out, so if people like the idea of having a dissolute aristo hanging round, I could ask the new person to fill Llewellyn's shoes. But Llewellyn could just as easily be an npc.

I think offering them Llewellyn is good, and allow them to tweak a bit.

New player justinhorner1 (Justin) has indicated he'd like to play Llewellyn. I've discussed tweaking the character to fill areas the party is a bit weak on (the sciences) with him. With that I think we have as many as we need or I can handle.

Hi chaps! Apologies for my quietness, now I'm back and I (or in fact Jory) will get posting as of tomorrow sometime, once I've caught up. Cheers, Andy

Welcome back dude.

We are drawing towards the end of scene 1, the first day of the campaign. Various things have been set in motion that will require subjective time to pass. Once you've wrapped up the business of your current interaction, please give some thought to how your character will spend Saturday night and Sunday morning - going to church, getting over your hangover, or something in between? I have something specific in mind for Harwood and Rev Poole, both of whom should be church going in any case, which we will handle via PM.
Grants shop is closed on Sunday, as are all the others. The races begin late morning and are a very popular way to spend Sunday afternoon. And of course there is stock to price, accounts to do, etc. Given the pressing business at hand of the Contessa's commission, the next Group scene will be early Sunday afternoon in Grant's shop, unless anyone has anything requiring everyone to get back together earlier.