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| Source: rpggeek.com |
Tiny Cthulhu is the next game in our Tiny d6 tour, and it adapts an entirely different system than D&D (Chaosium's Basic Role Playing, the engine for Call of Cthulhu among many other games) to its engine. BRP runs on percentile dice, ability scores, and relatively granular skills (a CoC character sheet has something like 40-50 skills listed on it), and Call of Cthulhu is particularly noted for its Sanity mechanic, which tracks the psychic damage of exposure to the bleak secrets of the universe and functionally acts as "mental hit points" for CoC characters.
The typical arc in a Call of Cthulhu campaign is a race between the characters' increasing competence at fighting the elder horrors of the cosmos and their decreasing ability to function in human society, punctuated occasionally by direct threats to life and limb. Tiny Cthulhu replaces the Sanity mechanic with a stat called Corruption, which behaves very similarly to its counterpart. Exposure to deeply shocking phenomena forces a Test roll, and a character who fails can choose between spending 1d6 days recovering their mental balance or spending a Corruption point to carry on immediately. Losing one's final Corruption point means losing one's mind to the terrors of the universe and removal from play.
All Tiny Cthulhu player characters are human, so instead of Tiny Dungeon's Heritages players build their characters on Archetypes that characterize their approach to fighting entities of the Cthulhu Mythos. These are drawn from the professions list in the original Call of Cthulhu, but are less detailed in scope and therefore more adaptable to various character concepts. My inspiration for this exercise was a Jesuit priest I had created for CoC; after a little reflection I decided to make the new character a sister from the teaching orders who had Seen Some Shit and was already pretty hardened. Clergy might be more naturally drawn to the Spiritualist or Mystic archetypes, but I wanted something more hard-nosed and settled on Investigator. My teaching sister would have a reputation for getting to the bottom of these eldritch mysteries and be the sort of person a mother superior or even a bishop might call in if her expertise seemed to be needed. Faith might put steel in her back, but her intellect did most of the heavy lifting.
The Investigator archetype's benefits are a solid 6 hit points for absorbing physical damage, an equally solid Corruption Threshold of 6 points, and an extra Trait (bringing the total up to four). The first obvious choice is Inured, which adds 2 points to your Corruption Threshold and seems tailor-made for the character who has Seen Some Shit. I wanted a comparable physical Trait, so I opted for Diehard, which once per session can be invoked to leave a character standing with 2 HP when an attack would otherwise reduce them to 0.
Having established my nun's physical and mental fortitude, I wanted to give her some more active Traits as well, Tome Reader would let her comprehend grimoires of the Mythos in their various languages, and Eidetic Memory would give her an edge in recalling details that might prove important clues (by giving her a target number of 4 instead of 5 to do so).
Each player character then chooses a Weapon Group to be proficient in and a specific weapon to master. That seems kind of absurd for a schoolteaching nun, but we must remember that she has Seen Some Shit and is perhaps a little more careful about her personal safety than her colleagues, so she trusts in God and packs a 9mm pistol when out hunting horrors--but refuses to use it on fellow human beings no matter how depraved they may have become. The weapon group is Ranged, the mastered weapon is the automatic pistol. She'll also start with an Investigator's kit of basic monster-hunting gear: a flashlight, a pocketknife, two changes of clothes (informal and formal Ursuline habit), a book of esoteric lore, and a magnifying glass. We'll add some more tools of her specific trade at this point: a Bible and a rosary.
Next we choose a Family Trade to give our character some (unquantified) background skills. I want to make my nun a lifer, committed to the religious life as a young teenager (whose parents had no means to bring up another daughter). Ursuline Nun may seem like an odd family trade, but it's basically all she's known since she hit adolescence. And we known her by the name she took when she swore her vows: Sister Marie Bonaventure, child of Quebec City and product of its Ursuline convent school.
Finally, our investigator needs a Belief to sustain her in her quests. Im think her outlook can be summed up by Look evil in the face and spit in its eye. Pity is for the redeemable, not the creatures of Satan.
Born in 1854, Sister Bonaventure began teaching in Canadian Catholic schools by 1872 and faced her first Mythos horror shortly afterward as two children from her school in rural Ontario were abducted by a vaguely humanoid creature that splatted through a wall, leaving only a thick layer of slime on the blocks of stone. She committed herself to the study of demonology in an attempt to understand what had happened, and word eventually spread around the diocese of this petite sister's deep understanding and iron will. Even archbishops learned to defer to her expertise and persistence, and now into her eighth decade she looks quite frail until you see into her steely eyes. She may harbor some doubts about how what she's seen fits into Catholic doctrine, but her faith that something God-like stands behind her as she faces these horrors is beyond question.
And now for the statblock:
Sister Marie Bonaventure, Ursuline Nun Who Has Seen Some Shit
Age: 72
Residence: Quebec City, Canada
Archetype: Investigator
HP: 6 Corruption Threshold: 8
Proficiency: ranged weapons
Mastery: automatic pistol
Gear: Investigator's kit, Bible, rosary, 9mm pistol
Traits:
Inured (+2 Corruption threshold)
Diehard (once per session, immediately recover 2hp when reduced to 0)
Tome Reader (capable of reading the Mythos' mind-bending grimoires in various languages)
Eidetic Memory (TN 4 on Tests to recall details)
Family Trade: Catholic teaching sister
Belief: Look evil in the face and then spit in its eye.
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