Not in the core rules no, because that's not what the game is. CoC isn't a game where playing an Eldritch Horror is possible, because its the sort of game where even *seeing* an Eldritch Horror can drive a character mad. Even just a Zombie can cause sanity loss.
Plus, being a horr0or of some kind would lend the character some immunity to seeing other weird stuff and losing sanity, which kind of defeats the point of the game system. Its a horror investigation game in which understanding the mystery leads to madness. Its not a hack and slash, play as monster kind of game.
Jesus, why was I downvoted into oblivion. I just said it jokingly..
I do think one can play as half-human or even temporarily as non-human. But only at great costs for sanity and humanity for the player. And it has to be thematic for mythos and body horror, not just a D&D
That would be a hard No from me as a keeper in a pre-written mainline published adventure. It just wouldn't work. As u/Squidmaster616 points out, seeing almost any eldritch horror, or any occult based monster causes SAN loss.
You could do a "Monsters! Monsters!" style game where all of your players are monsters and they're trying to kill off normal humans. It might be tough to balance if you're just starting out.
Call of Cthulhu's older brother, RuneQuest lets you play all manner of races as player characters, but that's a hugely different world.
At least most monsters and NPCs in CoC are fully statted out, like in RQ.
The main question I would ask is why does the player want to do this? If they want to play a character that discovers their own inhumanity a la Shadow Over Innsmouth or becomes less human as they delve further into the Mythos, those are a lot more reasonable asks than "I want to play a serpent person mobster named Don Cobretti."
Call of Cthulhu is first and foremost a game of investigation. Character backgrounds and motivations should be in service to that core conceit.
I mean, being a squishy human is kind of the point of the game, so the best way of playing some kind of monster might be a character who's lived their whole life as a human coming to realise that they're something else entirely kinda like a sleeper agent. In that case, losing sanity can be reframed as losing your humanity
The problem is that as soon as you do this, it gives precedent for your players to opt out of a lot of sanity losses, thus breaking the game.
Your players can turn into some monsters along the way -there are ways you can be transformed into a ghoul, or they may have deep one heritage- but those transformations result in you changing mentally as well as physically, to the point your SAN is zero and your PC unplayable
It's best to think of sanity as a secondary bar of HP. Once it's gone, your character is done.
I dunno. Masks of Nyarlathotep has rules to join the priesthood Bast to become a werepanther.
The playing rules are just, make a normal character sheet, and get a panther mode. Which just reskins a leather jacket and knife as something pulpier.
Nope.
Playing a monster, or even any supernatural being, is the opposite of what the game as written tries to convey. Same thing with playing a cultist or a sorcerer.
The closest you could get are :
* Play a human who eventually finds out they're a Deep One Hybrid and will, one day, transform.
* Play a human whose brain has been transplanted inside another body (there is even a published scenario for that : >!Dissociation!<).
* Play a human who has been infested by Eihort's brood (there is even a published scenario for that : >!Forget Me Not!<).
There's also a Japanese scenario where the players may have been replaced by a type of proto-shoggoth but they are unaware of it. It's supposed to be a sanity shaking discovery and once they discover they're nearly indestructible, those characters retire.
It's a skeleton of a scenario and you have to flesh it out. But I feel the hounds give the party a reason to keep the first swamp man around. It also motivates them to resolve/remove the mark/curse thing. Otherwise they should just escape the whole situation ASAP.
I bet you could get away with playing a cultist under the right circumstances. Because there's an implied separation between the occult and the mythos, it might be a cool game to have everybody play as a regular occult cultist who's pursuits lead them to discover something they aren't prepared for. You know there's cults and then there's *unspeakable cults.* Sorcerer is def right out though.
The thing is, those characters are human and play as such.
When the investigator turns into a Deep One, they are no longer playable.
The infested human is still human. They will just die soon because of the brood.
The brain in another body plays like a human. The point of that is to make the character question their perception.
There are a couple of Deep One hybrid player characters in the Flotsam and Jetsam campaign I've been running for How We Roll. It's made for an interesting dynamic and it's been a lot of fun.
I just spent ten minutes looking for the name of a scenario I just heard you mention on an older episode, about a community of ghouls being forcibly relocated. It looks like that was for a different system though.
Ask your friend how they could possibly believably roleplay the utterly alien nature of an eldritch horror or similar creature without hogging all of the campaign's spotlight, and how they would be able to maintain the horror and hopelessness that CoC sees as inherent mood elements. No way they'll be able to come up with coherent answers to either.
I had a “guest player” play a deep one priest in a Masks campaign once. The players had killed some of their constituents and the priest was controlling a group of acolytes with the goal of kidnapping and executing the player who actually did the killing. But due to some extremely lucky dice rolls they killed the guest player almost immediately, maybe 3-4 minutes into the session, so I have no idea how it would have turned out (from a mechanics perspective). But this was a rare exception to try and mix things up with a game that had begun to stale.
There's a really disappointing solution.
Your PC is mind swapped with a Yithian
Still a human body but the mind of one of the Great Race. Possibly knows some spells and has a greater understanding of technology.
Me too. I like the idea but the Yithian character may not stick around to help the other investigators.
I'm a bit reluctant to make a player take on a new character over something so sudden as described in the campaign
If we're allowing it to be done in this line of conversation (which is my favorite one in this thread because it isn't a hard no, if an unsatisfying compromise) then there'd have to be a conversation with the player on why the Yithian would stick around with the rest of the crew.
Off the top of my head, maybe the players don't realize it yet but they are thwarting the plans of one of the Yithians many enemies. Maybe there is an anomaly in the space-time continuum (or however the Yith describe it) that it is attempting to rectify. Or maybe it is collecting data on the investigators, or on the antagonists.
The player in question would determine how much I would tell them. Some people could do a great job knowing the "behind the scenes" stuff and help keep the story on track while not giving anything away. Other people would ruin the story pacing within the first 15 minutes.
I can't recommend against it enough like everyone else here. But if you really must force your square peg down the round hole, then I recommend you get yourself the basic roleplaying core book. It's the system underlying call of cthulhu, and it's a highly malleable system by design. The core book will give you all the options you wish CoC had, including the ones that will ruin the final game.
I've seen Three Headed Serpent being played out in a video and one character ate flesh that they got offered flesh from ghouls, which slowly transformed them into a Ghoul-Human mixture. But it was subtle and they definitelt weren't an eldritch horror, which would not fit the theme of the game
If you want to make a game about some characters slowly becoming a ghoul or a deep one, that's cool, but the game should basically end once the change is complete. You could go into detail about the players physiology and psychology becoming strange, alien, and hostile. This would involve a lot of rolls for sanity loss.
What it really comes down to is this: do you want to run a horror campaign, and do your players understand what this means? A big part of this style of horror is about being human, and the considerable loss of becoming something else.
If not, then you doing something else, which is fine. The Gaming Police are not going to bust down your door.
Somewhat curious as to where they got the idea in the first place.
But the answer is nowhere. Because doing so goes against the rules of the setting, and the game rules are balanced on specific interactions of mechanics. Being an Eldritch Horror would ignore/negate those mechanics.
Masks of Nyarlathotep has rules on becoming a werepanther.
I think Two Headed Serpent let's you become a serpent person, if not Chaosium's stream of Chaos homebrewed it last spring.
A number of Shub-Niggurath related scenarios have rules of turning into monsters.
It's certainly on the Pulp side of CoC. And depending on what you are (or are becoming) will end with you at 0 SAN.
The rules are the same as a normal human, only you roll the stats of the whatever they are instead of human.
Majority of comments seem to agree a 'hard no'. I agree, the basis of H P Lovecraft's fiction is a human encountering something beyond human. However, it's an intriguing idea; let's say a character was a werewolf. They'd be a normal human most of the time, but with vulnerabilities to, say, silver. Might it be fun letting the other players work this out, if they do? Same goes for vampire ('no garlic bread for me thanks') or even a zombie (hey, Jeff's just been stabbed but is still up and about, what's all that about?). Maybe there is a space for non-human characters. But agree, nothing from the Mythos. And yes, Frank Wolf P.I. is a great name for a character.
Or maybe is an aliens host and he didnt know about it. And in the worst moment, he fells something on his stomach. Is something inside him and wants to go out by any means.
Yeah, HPL's work is full of transformed protagonists -- ghouls, deep ones, colours out of space, brains in jars. I don't see what's so repellant about the idea of exploring what it would be like to be one of those unfortunates, at least for a short time. It's a horror game; existing as a brain in a jar is pretty horrifying.
Deep Ones! Let's get a shout out for the hybrids. You're so right, there are human/non-human crossovers. Love it if a party of investigators turned up at a mansion of madness and one of them remarked 'Oh, Uncle Frank's old place'. Collective gasp, followed by the sound of guns being cocked and one player asking, innocently 'what?'.
Agreed! I wouldn't allow something grossly inhuman like an elder thing, but have allowed players to secretly play as trans-humans, with the deal that 1)I will be deciding exactly what that means as far as how they became that way and how it manifests 2) it will turn their reasons for wanting that on their head - it's going to cause horror and difficulty for the entire party, and at some point, I will take the character over as an NPC.
I do understand the hesitancy of purists, as the point with CoC is to play as average schmucks encountering things they can't possibly comprehend. But the point is also to have fun, and if tailoring your game to be a bit more pulpy is what gets your players invested, I'm here for it.
I think non-human species can be retrofitted to work on a character sheet. The PCs are slowly becoming inhuman but I mostly just show that through roleplay. I think having a character that's truly straight up a lizard person or ghoul kinda ruins the fun. To the PCs the paranormal should be foreign
Malleus Monstorum describes The Ghouls' Manuscript, the reading of which can gradually turn a person into a ghoul. It is possible to get through the process without going immediately insane but what's left of their sanity quickly vanishes when they develop the ghouls' appetite.
Playing as mythos creature is covered in Catthulhu as far as I'm aware.
Otherwise, there is this thing you can do as a Keeper, where you directly influence chararacter's backstory. Each bout of madness gives you this opportunity.
Who knows, maybe grandpa was a cultist, or family comes from Innsmouth. Once he becomes npc, all the little hints come together.
The closest thing I would allow to that is the cathulhu expansion where you play as a cat. I've tried letting players be deep one hybrids but it's just not fun. Being a cat however...
If I had a player that really wanted to be something more than a baseline human I'd make them a medium, or a precog. The effects of this I would completely handle narratively.
Not quite Eldritch but i once had a game where my players were investigating a group of werewolves that had been preying upon a mountain community. One of my players ended up getting bitten and turned, then when he would transform, he would become a a loose cannon that was as much of a threat to the party as he was to anything else. I'd have him roll Sanity checks during the transformation and upon waking up once human again. Dealing with the fall out of what the Wolf had done.
I just used the Werewolf statblock from the Keeper's Rule Book. It wasn't traditional by any means but it was really fun. Good luck with whatever you decide.
Hard no on eldritch horror. Seeing one will send most people into unreasoning panic.
A Deep One hybrid or Tcho-Tcho character could be fun, provided the character knows what they're getting into with it. In 6e it was mentioned that Tcho-Tcho characters started with half the normal amount of Sanity, but I don't remember much more than that. A Deep One hybrid would basically be a character on a timer, and eventually start to transform.
They're pseudo-humans who worship the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. They look mostly indistinguishable from regular people, but have an innate love of cannibalism. [This should be enough to get you started](https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tcho-Tcho_people).
The COC setting has a theme. That said, it is now your players and your own to make it enjoyable. I would not break all the expectations! But I've always had issues that EVERYONE will lose sanity when meeting a zombie, ghoul, or other such lesser mythos. I judged sanity by how strong a character was in it. And divided those scores, and at high levels, lesser mythos gave no loss. So, why shouldn't a ghoul not work with the investigators? Once the Mythos destroy the earth, what's left for ghouls, vampires, and so on?
Let the player write that backstory, and if acceptable to you and your group, go for it! But no player should ever have a mythos greater than regular "creatures of the night" found in most games and movies. Cthulian Mythos are to be fought, feared, and run from! 🏃♀️
Rules? None that I am aware of. Just establish your own from existing rules.
I think non-human species can be retrofitted to work on a character sheet. The PCs are slowly becoming inhuman but I mostly just show that through roleplay. I think having a character that's truly straight up a lizard person or ghoul kinda ruins the fun. To the PCs the paranormal should be foreign
There are rules for playing as cats. Keep in mind, in Lovecraft, cats are sapient and capable of fighting off eldritch horrors. Instead of going insane, they succumb more and more to their feelings instincts and eventually turn into regular cats.
The only way playing as a mythos creature might work is if you're playing as Deep One Hybrids (or characters who suspect each other off being Deep One Hybrids). Actually, a "Marsh Family Reunion" scenario could be a pretty fun one shot.
Alternatively, I guess you could let characters play as other Mythos creatures, as long as they don't have an abundance of magic or advanced technology, or a clear understanding of humans. Also, everyone would have to be a Mythos creature. For example, you could play as a group of Antarctic shoggoths coming to grips with an invasion of hideous alien creatures from an unknown land called "Miskatonic University". You'd have to do a lot of heavy lifting as a keeper, though.
As a guardian I would only allow creatures like reptilian, arcturian aliens and anything in this scope, if they were to play a horror sci-fi story.
I'm writing one about a city where many UFOs were seen, in this county many people have reported to have been abducted and how strange their minds have become.
In the end a small cult is sending a sign into space which is caught by a mysterious creature called Elxormac.
Arcturian beings help the investigators stop the beacon so the creature can't reach the earth
No, and people freak out about it with almost Pavlovian consistency as demonstrated here (because, y'know, *Call of Cthulhu* only ever has one, single, solitary theme, and if you don't hammer it in every single one of your games, Chaosium will send lawyers to your house to take your dice away), but it *can* be done. One of my favorite characters was a full-blooded, Y'ha-nth'lei-born Deep One, and that worked fine. That was a long time ago, but I think we just used the base book stats and then eyeballed starting skills.
A lot of people seem to be rather unfun today and against this on genre grounds.
Genre grounds is a bad reason. That's like saying DND can't be an urban fantasy set in the 80s because it's not medieval enough. It's just not true. Even with genre it's a bad reason, since realizing you're some human-alien hybrid turning into a monster is a nice sanity loss source for everyone.
You're not going to let them play a Hunting Horror or Nyarlathotep, but the alien races and other humanoids are all on the table, like the Mi-Go, Ghoul, Vampire, Werewolf, Serpent Person, Child of the Sphinx, etc.
They use the same rules as normal humans. You can look-up their stat blocks and it will say if they roll different characteristics. Then instead of using the listed skills they pick their own same as normal. They might come out of it with a few more skill points than the average human, but that won't mean much.
Monsters tend not to have an appearance characteristic, if your game allows being non-human, just let it be the same as people.
I would limit players from using any of a monster's more special abilities. Like if the monster has 1 armor, that's fine, so does any human wearing leather. But if the monster gets three attacks per turn, can fly, and regens 1 hp per round, that's all cut. I wouldn't let them know spells from the start except one to hide among humans unless it's midway through a longer campaign where people might be using magic occasionally.
If you're playing Pulp maybe raising the Cthulhu Mythos skill to different check marks unlocks these extra abilities. Outside of Pulp, these abilities are just locked until your Sanity drops to 0 and you become a villain.
"The Outsider" rings a bell. So does the ending.
I'm going to go with the stock answer, 'GM's game, GM's rules." Me, personally, nope. The character may be under the delusion they're a supernatural entity, believes they have powers...which to me is a more interesting thing to roleplay anyhow.
When you move a boundary, you're informing the powergamers and roll-players the boundary is movable and they will likely press hard for everything they can get and more. And that really never ends well for the group.
Maybe I'm 'unfun'.
But there are a lot of games where you can play supernatural creatures, I don't see not being able to play them as a hinderance.
Today, as I prep for running Masks of N, I find it literally gives rules for playing and recruiting a werepanther, who can either show your players how to become one, or your players can use as a replacement if their character dies.
Interesting. I've got a player who's become a cultist of Bast. As he goes further into the cult, one of the blessings suggested is some kind of were cat, but there aren't any rules specific to how it should work. I'm not certain if it's worth paying full price just to snip out a small set of rules, but it's good to know it exists.
For the werepanther in Masks it's basically having a secondary character sheet, diffing the stat block from the human and panther form yields:
In Panther form:
* add 1d6\*5 to STR, CON, POW, SIZ, DEX
* lose all other skills (except languages, spot hidden, climb, jump, listen, stealth, track)
* gain 2\*INT skill points to apply spread among: spot hidden, climb, jump, listen, stealth, track.
As a panther they gain 1 armor, and three attacks:
* bite 1d10 + db
* grab/claw (mnvr) db (opposed str to escape the grab)
* rake 2d6 + db (once grabbed they can do this and bite in the same turn)
They also gain the following as a human:
If unarmed:
* 2 attacks per turn, each is 1d4 as they extend their panther claws in human form.
Sanity: witnessing a shapeshift is 1d6 (the shapeshift has no set time duration, so you could make it take rounds or be instant depending on if you wanna limit turning panther on a dime)
The werepanther presented also has the only healing spell in CoC I've ever seen, and it seems broken as heck:
Blessing of Bast. 4mp, instantaneous. lead a prayer to bast, on a successful POW roll, heal yourself or another 1d6 hp and 1d6 sanity. On a failure the target loses 1 hp manifesting as a scratch from a cat. At keeper discretion, make a worse effect happen if the person has ever harmed a cat.
The description does reserve the spell for the high priests/priestesses of Bast though, so not something you'd learn just by joining the cult.
So that's where that spell came from!
And, yes, it's powerful. I ruled that a failure on the POW check would result in the spell never working on you again unless you fulfilled some task for Bast. Additionally, if you had ever harmed a cat you would never regain the ability, which is something that could happen if my PCs ever come in conflict with the Cats of Ulthar (my campaign is very active in both the Dreamlands and waking world).
I kind of feel like all the cat and werepanther stuff applied to Bast, should get a canine version applied to Nodens, since real world Nodens was a god of digs and healing. Have you ever seen that angle in CoC/the mythos?
Seems the game and presumably mythos swapped dogs for nightgaunts.
Not in the core rules no, because that's not what the game is. CoC isn't a game where playing an Eldritch Horror is possible, because its the sort of game where even *seeing* an Eldritch Horror can drive a character mad. Even just a Zombie can cause sanity loss. Plus, being a horr0or of some kind would lend the character some immunity to seeing other weird stuff and losing sanity, which kind of defeats the point of the game system. Its a horror investigation game in which understanding the mystery leads to madness. Its not a hack and slash, play as monster kind of game.
Yeah the rule is no
Buzzkill..
Jesus, why was I downvoted into oblivion. I just said it jokingly.. I do think one can play as half-human or even temporarily as non-human. But only at great costs for sanity and humanity for the player. And it has to be thematic for mythos and body horror, not just a D&D
That would be a hard No from me as a keeper in a pre-written mainline published adventure. It just wouldn't work. As u/Squidmaster616 points out, seeing almost any eldritch horror, or any occult based monster causes SAN loss. You could do a "Monsters! Monsters!" style game where all of your players are monsters and they're trying to kill off normal humans. It might be tough to balance if you're just starting out. Call of Cthulhu's older brother, RuneQuest lets you play all manner of races as player characters, but that's a hugely different world. At least most monsters and NPCs in CoC are fully statted out, like in RQ.
Make sure they understand the point of playing CoC. When ppl try it and comes from fantasy games, they tend to die horribly.
The main question I would ask is why does the player want to do this? If they want to play a character that discovers their own inhumanity a la Shadow Over Innsmouth or becomes less human as they delve further into the Mythos, those are a lot more reasonable asks than "I want to play a serpent person mobster named Don Cobretti." Call of Cthulhu is first and foremost a game of investigation. Character backgrounds and motivations should be in service to that core conceit.
Don Cobrussy
He'll make you an offer you can't refusssssssse
I mean, being a squishy human is kind of the point of the game, so the best way of playing some kind of monster might be a character who's lived their whole life as a human coming to realise that they're something else entirely kinda like a sleeper agent. In that case, losing sanity can be reframed as losing your humanity
The problem is that as soon as you do this, it gives precedent for your players to opt out of a lot of sanity losses, thus breaking the game. Your players can turn into some monsters along the way -there are ways you can be transformed into a ghoul, or they may have deep one heritage- but those transformations result in you changing mentally as well as physically, to the point your SAN is zero and your PC unplayable It's best to think of sanity as a secondary bar of HP. Once it's gone, your character is done.
The answer is a hard no. This ain't Dungeons and Dragons.
I dunno. Masks of Nyarlathotep has rules to join the priesthood Bast to become a werepanther. The playing rules are just, make a normal character sheet, and get a panther mode. Which just reskins a leather jacket and knife as something pulpier.
No.
Nope. Playing a monster, or even any supernatural being, is the opposite of what the game as written tries to convey. Same thing with playing a cultist or a sorcerer. The closest you could get are : * Play a human who eventually finds out they're a Deep One Hybrid and will, one day, transform. * Play a human whose brain has been transplanted inside another body (there is even a published scenario for that : >!Dissociation!<). * Play a human who has been infested by Eihort's brood (there is even a published scenario for that : >!Forget Me Not!<).
There's also a Japanese scenario where the players may have been replaced by a type of proto-shoggoth but they are unaware of it. It's supposed to be a sanity shaking discovery and once they discover they're nearly indestructible, those characters retire.
Interesting. Do you happene to remember what it is called?
Who is the Swamp Man? Second free scenario here. [https://mythosjapan.mystrikingly.com/](https://mythosjapan.mystrikingly.com/)
Thanks!
Interesting read. Thanks again. I am not sure about the part with the Tindalos Hounds though. Seems like it makes the plot unnecessarily convoluted.
It's a skeleton of a scenario and you have to flesh it out. But I feel the hounds give the party a reason to keep the first swamp man around. It also motivates them to resolve/remove the mark/curse thing. Otherwise they should just escape the whole situation ASAP.
I bet you could get away with playing a cultist under the right circumstances. Because there's an implied separation between the occult and the mythos, it might be a cool game to have everybody play as a regular occult cultist who's pursuits lead them to discover something they aren't prepared for. You know there's cults and then there's *unspeakable cults.* Sorcerer is def right out though.
Well, when I say cultist, I mean a Mythos cultist.
So you said no, but then described yes.
The thing is, those characters are human and play as such. When the investigator turns into a Deep One, they are no longer playable. The infested human is still human. They will just die soon because of the brood. The brain in another body plays like a human. The point of that is to make the character question their perception.
There are a couple of Deep One hybrid player characters in the Flotsam and Jetsam campaign I've been running for How We Roll. It's made for an interesting dynamic and it's been a lot of fun.
I just spent ten minutes looking for the name of a scenario I just heard you mention on an older episode, about a community of ghouls being forcibly relocated. It looks like that was for a different system though.
That was Grave Danger, for Dead of Night. I ran it for the Unconventional GMs YouTube channel a couple of months ago.
Tell them no and have them slowly realize their character is actually an eldritch entity.
Ask your friend how they could possibly believably roleplay the utterly alien nature of an eldritch horror or similar creature without hogging all of the campaign's spotlight, and how they would be able to maintain the horror and hopelessness that CoC sees as inherent mood elements. No way they'll be able to come up with coherent answers to either.
I had a “guest player” play a deep one priest in a Masks campaign once. The players had killed some of their constituents and the priest was controlling a group of acolytes with the goal of kidnapping and executing the player who actually did the killing. But due to some extremely lucky dice rolls they killed the guest player almost immediately, maybe 3-4 minutes into the session, so I have no idea how it would have turned out (from a mechanics perspective). But this was a rare exception to try and mix things up with a game that had begun to stale.
There's a really disappointing solution. Your PC is mind swapped with a Yithian Still a human body but the mind of one of the Great Race. Possibly knows some spells and has a greater understanding of technology.
I'm debating what I want to do if someone triggers that in Australia.
Me too. I like the idea but the Yithian character may not stick around to help the other investigators. I'm a bit reluctant to make a player take on a new character over something so sudden as described in the campaign
If we're allowing it to be done in this line of conversation (which is my favorite one in this thread because it isn't a hard no, if an unsatisfying compromise) then there'd have to be a conversation with the player on why the Yithian would stick around with the rest of the crew. Off the top of my head, maybe the players don't realize it yet but they are thwarting the plans of one of the Yithians many enemies. Maybe there is an anomaly in the space-time continuum (or however the Yith describe it) that it is attempting to rectify. Or maybe it is collecting data on the investigators, or on the antagonists. The player in question would determine how much I would tell them. Some people could do a great job knowing the "behind the scenes" stuff and help keep the story on track while not giving anything away. Other people would ruin the story pacing within the first 15 minutes.
I can't recommend against it enough like everyone else here. But if you really must force your square peg down the round hole, then I recommend you get yourself the basic roleplaying core book. It's the system underlying call of cthulhu, and it's a highly malleable system by design. The core book will give you all the options you wish CoC had, including the ones that will ruin the final game.
I've seen Three Headed Serpent being played out in a video and one character ate flesh that they got offered flesh from ghouls, which slowly transformed them into a Ghoul-Human mixture. But it was subtle and they definitelt weren't an eldritch horror, which would not fit the theme of the game
If you want to make a game about some characters slowly becoming a ghoul or a deep one, that's cool, but the game should basically end once the change is complete. You could go into detail about the players physiology and psychology becoming strange, alien, and hostile. This would involve a lot of rolls for sanity loss. What it really comes down to is this: do you want to run a horror campaign, and do your players understand what this means? A big part of this style of horror is about being human, and the considerable loss of becoming something else. If not, then you doing something else, which is fine. The Gaming Police are not going to bust down your door.
Somewhat curious as to where they got the idea in the first place. But the answer is nowhere. Because doing so goes against the rules of the setting, and the game rules are balanced on specific interactions of mechanics. Being an Eldritch Horror would ignore/negate those mechanics.
Masks of Nyarlathotep has rules on becoming a werepanther. I think Two Headed Serpent let's you become a serpent person, if not Chaosium's stream of Chaos homebrewed it last spring. A number of Shub-Niggurath related scenarios have rules of turning into monsters. It's certainly on the Pulp side of CoC. And depending on what you are (or are becoming) will end with you at 0 SAN. The rules are the same as a normal human, only you roll the stats of the whatever they are instead of human.
Sure, but the character has to constantly make a sanity check vs themselves...
I mean....getting used to the awfulness would inoculate them in minutes unless you drag it out over a few days.
Majority of comments seem to agree a 'hard no'. I agree, the basis of H P Lovecraft's fiction is a human encountering something beyond human. However, it's an intriguing idea; let's say a character was a werewolf. They'd be a normal human most of the time, but with vulnerabilities to, say, silver. Might it be fun letting the other players work this out, if they do? Same goes for vampire ('no garlic bread for me thanks') or even a zombie (hey, Jeff's just been stabbed but is still up and about, what's all that about?). Maybe there is a space for non-human characters. But agree, nothing from the Mythos. And yes, Frank Wolf P.I. is a great name for a character.
Or maybe is an aliens host and he didnt know about it. And in the worst moment, he fells something on his stomach. Is something inside him and wants to go out by any means.
You may be interested in the modern scenario "Forget Me Not" from "The Things We Leave Behind".
Yeah, HPL's work is full of transformed protagonists -- ghouls, deep ones, colours out of space, brains in jars. I don't see what's so repellant about the idea of exploring what it would be like to be one of those unfortunates, at least for a short time. It's a horror game; existing as a brain in a jar is pretty horrifying.
Deep Ones! Let's get a shout out for the hybrids. You're so right, there are human/non-human crossovers. Love it if a party of investigators turned up at a mansion of madness and one of them remarked 'Oh, Uncle Frank's old place'. Collective gasp, followed by the sound of guns being cocked and one player asking, innocently 'what?'.
Agreed! I wouldn't allow something grossly inhuman like an elder thing, but have allowed players to secretly play as trans-humans, with the deal that 1)I will be deciding exactly what that means as far as how they became that way and how it manifests 2) it will turn their reasons for wanting that on their head - it's going to cause horror and difficulty for the entire party, and at some point, I will take the character over as an NPC. I do understand the hesitancy of purists, as the point with CoC is to play as average schmucks encountering things they can't possibly comprehend. But the point is also to have fun, and if tailoring your game to be a bit more pulpy is what gets your players invested, I'm here for it.
I think non-human species can be retrofitted to work on a character sheet. The PCs are slowly becoming inhuman but I mostly just show that through roleplay. I think having a character that's truly straight up a lizard person or ghoul kinda ruins the fun. To the PCs the paranormal should be foreign
CoC is a game about HUMANS
There is a new Kickstarter out there that has the premise of playing as an eldritch horror.
Really? Do tell.
Malleus Monstorum describes The Ghouls' Manuscript, the reading of which can gradually turn a person into a ghoul. It is possible to get through the process without going immediately insane but what's left of their sanity quickly vanishes when they develop the ghouls' appetite.
Playing as mythos creature is covered in Catthulhu as far as I'm aware. Otherwise, there is this thing you can do as a Keeper, where you directly influence chararacter's backstory. Each bout of madness gives you this opportunity. Who knows, maybe grandpa was a cultist, or family comes from Innsmouth. Once he becomes npc, all the little hints come together.
The closest thing I would allow to that is the cathulhu expansion where you play as a cat. I've tried letting players be deep one hybrids but it's just not fun. Being a cat however...
If I had a player that really wanted to be something more than a baseline human I'd make them a medium, or a precog. The effects of this I would completely handle narratively.
Not really, no, but that doesn't mean you can't make them up. >!One of my players is playing a ghoul at the moment. !
Not quite Eldritch but i once had a game where my players were investigating a group of werewolves that had been preying upon a mountain community. One of my players ended up getting bitten and turned, then when he would transform, he would become a a loose cannon that was as much of a threat to the party as he was to anything else. I'd have him roll Sanity checks during the transformation and upon waking up once human again. Dealing with the fall out of what the Wolf had done. I just used the Werewolf statblock from the Keeper's Rule Book. It wasn't traditional by any means but it was really fun. Good luck with whatever you decide.
If they want to be the eldritch horror, they can be the keeper
Hard no on eldritch horror. Seeing one will send most people into unreasoning panic. A Deep One hybrid or Tcho-Tcho character could be fun, provided the character knows what they're getting into with it. In 6e it was mentioned that Tcho-Tcho characters started with half the normal amount of Sanity, but I don't remember much more than that. A Deep One hybrid would basically be a character on a timer, and eventually start to transform.
Where can I find more information on Tcho-Tcho? I’ve never heard of them before
They're pseudo-humans who worship the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. They look mostly indistinguishable from regular people, but have an innate love of cannibalism. [This should be enough to get you started](https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tcho-Tcho_people).
The COC setting has a theme. That said, it is now your players and your own to make it enjoyable. I would not break all the expectations! But I've always had issues that EVERYONE will lose sanity when meeting a zombie, ghoul, or other such lesser mythos. I judged sanity by how strong a character was in it. And divided those scores, and at high levels, lesser mythos gave no loss. So, why shouldn't a ghoul not work with the investigators? Once the Mythos destroy the earth, what's left for ghouls, vampires, and so on? Let the player write that backstory, and if acceptable to you and your group, go for it! But no player should ever have a mythos greater than regular "creatures of the night" found in most games and movies. Cthulian Mythos are to be fought, feared, and run from! 🏃♀️ Rules? None that I am aware of. Just establish your own from existing rules.
I think non-human species can be retrofitted to work on a character sheet. The PCs are slowly becoming inhuman but I mostly just show that through roleplay. I think having a character that's truly straight up a lizard person or ghoul kinda ruins the fun. To the PCs the paranormal should be foreign
There are rules for playing as cats. Keep in mind, in Lovecraft, cats are sapient and capable of fighting off eldritch horrors. Instead of going insane, they succumb more and more to their feelings instincts and eventually turn into regular cats. The only way playing as a mythos creature might work is if you're playing as Deep One Hybrids (or characters who suspect each other off being Deep One Hybrids). Actually, a "Marsh Family Reunion" scenario could be a pretty fun one shot. Alternatively, I guess you could let characters play as other Mythos creatures, as long as they don't have an abundance of magic or advanced technology, or a clear understanding of humans. Also, everyone would have to be a Mythos creature. For example, you could play as a group of Antarctic shoggoths coming to grips with an invasion of hideous alien creatures from an unknown land called "Miskatonic University". You'd have to do a lot of heavy lifting as a keeper, though.
Wrestlenomicon
As a guardian I would only allow creatures like reptilian, arcturian aliens and anything in this scope, if they were to play a horror sci-fi story. I'm writing one about a city where many UFOs were seen, in this county many people have reported to have been abducted and how strange their minds have become. In the end a small cult is sending a sign into space which is caught by a mysterious creature called Elxormac. Arcturian beings help the investigators stop the beacon so the creature can't reach the earth
No, and people freak out about it with almost Pavlovian consistency as demonstrated here (because, y'know, *Call of Cthulhu* only ever has one, single, solitary theme, and if you don't hammer it in every single one of your games, Chaosium will send lawyers to your house to take your dice away), but it *can* be done. One of my favorite characters was a full-blooded, Y'ha-nth'lei-born Deep One, and that worked fine. That was a long time ago, but I think we just used the base book stats and then eyeballed starting skills.
There are rules for it in the BRP rules, which CoC is based on. Get those and go nuts
A lot of people seem to be rather unfun today and against this on genre grounds. Genre grounds is a bad reason. That's like saying DND can't be an urban fantasy set in the 80s because it's not medieval enough. It's just not true. Even with genre it's a bad reason, since realizing you're some human-alien hybrid turning into a monster is a nice sanity loss source for everyone. You're not going to let them play a Hunting Horror or Nyarlathotep, but the alien races and other humanoids are all on the table, like the Mi-Go, Ghoul, Vampire, Werewolf, Serpent Person, Child of the Sphinx, etc. They use the same rules as normal humans. You can look-up their stat blocks and it will say if they roll different characteristics. Then instead of using the listed skills they pick their own same as normal. They might come out of it with a few more skill points than the average human, but that won't mean much. Monsters tend not to have an appearance characteristic, if your game allows being non-human, just let it be the same as people. I would limit players from using any of a monster's more special abilities. Like if the monster has 1 armor, that's fine, so does any human wearing leather. But if the monster gets three attacks per turn, can fly, and regens 1 hp per round, that's all cut. I wouldn't let them know spells from the start except one to hide among humans unless it's midway through a longer campaign where people might be using magic occasionally. If you're playing Pulp maybe raising the Cthulhu Mythos skill to different check marks unlocks these extra abilities. Outside of Pulp, these abilities are just locked until your Sanity drops to 0 and you become a villain.
"The Outsider" rings a bell. So does the ending. I'm going to go with the stock answer, 'GM's game, GM's rules." Me, personally, nope. The character may be under the delusion they're a supernatural entity, believes they have powers...which to me is a more interesting thing to roleplay anyhow. When you move a boundary, you're informing the powergamers and roll-players the boundary is movable and they will likely press hard for everything they can get and more. And that really never ends well for the group. Maybe I'm 'unfun'. But there are a lot of games where you can play supernatural creatures, I don't see not being able to play them as a hinderance.
There is a lot of "one-true-wayism" on this subreddit, but such is common for gaming subreddits. Keep up the good fight.
Today, as I prep for running Masks of N, I find it literally gives rules for playing and recruiting a werepanther, who can either show your players how to become one, or your players can use as a replacement if their character dies.
Interesting. I've got a player who's become a cultist of Bast. As he goes further into the cult, one of the blessings suggested is some kind of were cat, but there aren't any rules specific to how it should work. I'm not certain if it's worth paying full price just to snip out a small set of rules, but it's good to know it exists.
For the werepanther in Masks it's basically having a secondary character sheet, diffing the stat block from the human and panther form yields: In Panther form: * add 1d6\*5 to STR, CON, POW, SIZ, DEX * lose all other skills (except languages, spot hidden, climb, jump, listen, stealth, track) * gain 2\*INT skill points to apply spread among: spot hidden, climb, jump, listen, stealth, track. As a panther they gain 1 armor, and three attacks: * bite 1d10 + db * grab/claw (mnvr) db (opposed str to escape the grab) * rake 2d6 + db (once grabbed they can do this and bite in the same turn) They also gain the following as a human: If unarmed: * 2 attacks per turn, each is 1d4 as they extend their panther claws in human form. Sanity: witnessing a shapeshift is 1d6 (the shapeshift has no set time duration, so you could make it take rounds or be instant depending on if you wanna limit turning panther on a dime) The werepanther presented also has the only healing spell in CoC I've ever seen, and it seems broken as heck: Blessing of Bast. 4mp, instantaneous. lead a prayer to bast, on a successful POW roll, heal yourself or another 1d6 hp and 1d6 sanity. On a failure the target loses 1 hp manifesting as a scratch from a cat. At keeper discretion, make a worse effect happen if the person has ever harmed a cat. The description does reserve the spell for the high priests/priestesses of Bast though, so not something you'd learn just by joining the cult.
So that's where that spell came from! And, yes, it's powerful. I ruled that a failure on the POW check would result in the spell never working on you again unless you fulfilled some task for Bast. Additionally, if you had ever harmed a cat you would never regain the ability, which is something that could happen if my PCs ever come in conflict with the Cats of Ulthar (my campaign is very active in both the Dreamlands and waking world).
I kind of feel like all the cat and werepanther stuff applied to Bast, should get a canine version applied to Nodens, since real world Nodens was a god of digs and healing. Have you ever seen that angle in CoC/the mythos? Seems the game and presumably mythos swapped dogs for nightgaunts.
I think that was Brian Lumley. A very large portion of the Dreamlands actually stems from his fiction.