Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft: Can NIGHT SHIFT Do Cthulhu?

Guest posting by Tim Brannan

Today, August 20, would have been H. P. Lovecraft's 136th birthday.

Lovecraft has been part of my gaming DNA for almost as long as D&D has. Maybe not quite as long, but close enough that it is hard for me to separate the two anymore. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, all that wonderful old weird fiction eventually found its way into my games. You can see that in my other blog, The Other Side. You can see it in the kinds of games I talk about.

And, of course, there is Call of Cthulhu.

I have played Call of Cthulhu on and off for decades. It is one of the great horror RPGs, full stop. If I want the classic experience of investigators slowly uncovering truths humanity was never meant to know, watching their sanity fray while something impossibly old stirs beneath the earth, it remains an obvious choice.

But sometimes I want something slightly different.

Sometimes I want the Mythos, but I also want witches (ok. I always want witches), monster hunters, psychics, occultists, and people who can actually fight back. People who have a chance. 

Sometimes I want Lovecraft, in the vein of the kind of games I have been playing since D&D.

That's where NIGHT SHIFT: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars comes in.

I Want Cthulhu, But Tonight Is D&D Night

Any long-time gamer will be familiar with this kind of problem. You have an idea for a game. The characters might come across a cult using an old church, or there could be something beneath the university library. A professor has a book in his collection in a language no one can place, and people are all having the same dream before they go missing. The police are baffled, the locals are afraid, no one knows what is going on.

You know precisely the sort of game you want to run.

Your players, on the other hand, are used to D&D. They have their classes and levels down pat; they know Armor Class and Hit Points; they know a saving throw when they see one. Above all, they are comfortable with the rhythm of it; the players put forward their actions, the GM makes a call, and when the dice are called for, everyone is on the same page. Attacks, damage, saves. All second nature.

One could always convert D&D. Gamers have been at it ever since the rulebook was first off the press. Yet after you have reworked the magic, the monsters, the firearms, the healing, and half the rest of the rules, you have to wonder if you are still converting D&D or have set about designing something new.

Well. We have done that work for you. That is why we put NIGHT SHIFT together.

If you have any experience with older editions of D&D or the like, much of what you will find in NIGHT SHIFT will be second nature. The world and what lurks in it are not the same, but you already know how to proceed.

The Investigators Can Be Weird Too (In Fact, They Should Be)

Mixing cosmic horror into the mix brings out another distinction.

In Call of Cthulhu you have your typical investigator, a doctor, a journalist, a private eye, the ordinary sort who thinks they know how reality is supposed to function until reality has other ideas.

NIGHT SHIFT can handle that. Our Survivor type is ideal for someone who shouldn't be part of any of this but manages to keep their head above water. It is my go-to class for everything really. That and the Sage. 

But then again, the professor could be a witch. The P.I. may have a psychic gift. The journalist has been through something ten years ago that eludes the memory of others. And that odd woman who is always around when the cult puts in an appearance? She may not be human at all.

My group becomes less a bunch of unfortunate academics and more of a supernatural ensemble. OH, they can still be unfortunate, but their beginings feel more like a D&D group than an after dinner party at the local college. It also doesn't take away the horror so much as make it of a different order. These are people who know ghosts and demons are real; the witch has talked to spirits, the hunter has put down things that ought not to be here. 

Then comes the Mythos, and now they realize their knowledge of the supernatural was but the shallow end of a very deep ocean.

Fighting Back Is Not the Same as Winning

It is easy to object that having witches and psychics on hand runs counter to what we think of as cosmic horror. 

Not really. There is room between the helpless victim and the superhero who would put Cthulhu in its place. A lot of room. An entire game full of room, really. 

With NIGHT SHIFT the characters can put an end to the ritual, do in whatever the cultists have called forth, even put the haunted farmhouse to the torch. They can save the world tonight.

That is not the same as vanquishing what is behind it all. The Old Ones remain old, and the universe is as vast as ever. Humanity is yet to put some things to rest.

An investigator might put an end to a cult only to find they were the ones keeping something far worse in its slumber. A witch could come to the conclusion that the odd symbols on her mind predate any magical lore she is familiar with. Or perhaps a psychic will at last make sense of the whispers in her dreams and wish with all her being that she hadn’t.

You can have your victory in the adventure and still not win the universe. That is also cosmic horror.

I like to call it turning the Horror Dial. With NIGHT SHIFT, I am in control of the kind of horror I want to put on the table. Want something in the vein of Buffy or Supernatural? Fine. The characters are heroes, tough and capable; let them be bloodied and put down for a while, and they will rise again. I can also make it nastier. Make the healing come at a price. Make the monsters more lethal. Have the characters wonder if another fragment of the truth is worth the cost. There is room for corruption, for consequences, for madness. Guns can be deadly or another weapon. All of this is built right into NIGHT SHIFT from the word go.

The rules do not insist on a single flavor. This is handy with Lovecraft, as there is no one way to play a Lovecraftian game. You have your investigation and survival, your pulp adventures and occult conspiracies, your monster hunting, and the dawning sense that reality itself is flawed. NIGHT SHIFT lets me move among them all.

And Lovecraft need not be confined to the 1920s, much as I enjoy that era for gaming. Put the Mythos in Victorian London (my favorite), or 1986 (er, and also my favorite), or 2026. Why not a small Midwestern town where everyone is on a first-name basis and there is an old schoolhouse everyone concedes is haunted? Take my Jackson, Illinois, for instance. That place has its share of local legends, thin places, and witches and demons. There are enough teenagers who have found their hometown less dull than they gave it credit for. I would not put it past something older and considerably less human to have taken notice of Jackson. In fact, it has probably done so already. If it is anything at all like the real town I'm basing it on, it most certainly has. 

NIGHT SHIFT is well suited to this. There is no official cosmology I must adhere to. If I want Lovecraft’s universe to underpin everything, so be it. If I want the Mythos to be but one odd corner of a wider supernatural world, or have the witches and demons proven wrong by it, I can make that happen. It is my Night World. I do what I want. You can too. I am just a designer, not your dad. (But if I were, I would say, call your mom; she misses you.)

As for replacing Call of Cthulhu? No. That is the wrong question. When I want the classic experience, I will play Call of Cthulhu; it has been around for forty years for a reason and does what it does exceedingly well. I have multiple editions of it, including my very well-loved 5th edition that has sadly fallen apart.

But what if I want to mix in some classes and levels? What if I have a witch, a psychic, and a monster hunter looking into the same case? What if I want my players, who are used to D&D, to be able to put down a cultist, save the sacrifice, and put a bullet in whatever is coming through the gate, and then learn that was the least of it? Or what if I don’t want to put them through a new style of RPG before I can get to the adventure I have in mind?

Then I will use NIGHT SHIFT. Sometimes I don’t want to stand helpless before the Mythos. I want to put up a fight, even though deep down I know we are likely to come off second-best in the end.

SO, Happy birthday, Mr. Howard Philips Lovecraft. The stars are not right for it just yet. But we are still working the NIGHT SHIFT.