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21:19, 28th March 2024 (GMT+0)

A Desperate Hunger for Snow.

Posted by tibiotarsus
tibiotarsus
member, 200 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Mon 26 Oct 2020
at 08:53
  • msg #1

A Desperate Hunger for Snow

A long shot worthy of Natty Bumppo here, but don't ask don't get, so here goes...I'm after something that feels like Black Stars Above - like Jack London or Fenimore-Cooper or Lovecraft's occasional historical forays, with more strange and less settler bias/casual white supremacist narration. As such I'd prefer Russian America to American Alaska if the game was set over there, but would love any setting from northern colonial (or pre-Colonial!) New England upward. Would accept 1900s plague-era Pacific Northwest or the fictional regions of Lovecraft's Massachusetts. Looking for decent historical accuracy, cultural sensitivity, verisimilitude. Something more investigative or trade/exploratory than warlike - violence should feel like something to be avoided, with a brutally high cost for engaging (but not voyeuristically gore-focused).

Preferences: small group, shortish game, G/M-rated, post rate around 3/week.
System suggestions: Cthulhu: Dark Ages (unless there's a book for this?), Dread, if more solidly a horror game (super-easy to pick up & I have a well-tested RPoL hack) though that could also work fantastically for a small group being stalked guerilla-style by another. Savage Worlds mostly for the ease and familiarity, though the system is honestly more pulp! combat! than I'm after...I actually own the American Revoloutionary Zweihander book from a freebie that might be adaptable for the French-and-Indian wars, but haven't read it. Sort of bemused it exists.
JAM2019
member, 46 posts
Mon 26 Oct 2020
at 18:49
  • msg #2

A Desperate Hunger for Snow

would you be interested in something set in colonial america, free-from, horror-survival type of setting? something akin the the witch meets indiana jones. not straight horror, not straight action. low pulp, more historical bias with some lovecraftian touches.
tibiotarsus
member, 201 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Mon 26 Oct 2020
at 23:18
  • msg #3

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


Hmmmm...see, I definitely perked at the VVitch description, but even slightly pulpy action sounds a bit too cartoon for what I'm after - I badly want to feel like I'm in a wood and can smell the snow and hear the wolves outside some warm place I've scraped for myself and am about as likely to die of horrible European diseases/dysentry as to go mad, eat my brother/friend/child and turn wendigo.


I don't know how/that freeform horror would work exactly, either: as far as I can picture it, it'd end up as just a flavour to the action-heroism - sort of like a different hat and plastic fangs on the Bad Guys that the latter genre tends to have. In that vein, treating cosmic horror as squid suits for boss fights, or Lovecraftian entities as actually evil (rather than just incompatable with human sanity/safe existence like bleach is incompatible with the human digestive system) makes me very sad, so I'd rather have something more folklore-grounded like "idiot colonists brought an Old Country vampire over somehow and now they have an exponential Problem and the locals have no idea what's going on, cue dire-straits teamup" than...non-cosmic horror goofy spooks (bless 'em) painted up like tentacles, if you see what I mean. I'd definitely want something deep enough not to be lazily offensive the way dear Indy is when it comes to non-European cultures.

I think actual horror does need a system - even one as utterly pass/fail basic as Dread - because there truly needs to be an element of pure luck. If a character lives for a predictable set of reasons that're the same every time, or dies because the player wasn't up to writing a clear enough narrative argument for survival that day, the tension would press higher OOC than IC, and that wouldn't let me immerse/unwind enough to fully play.


In short: listening, but dubious as to whether we want near enough the same things to fit in one game to mutual satisfaction. Either way, thanks for the response, at any rate.
tibiotarsus
member, 202 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Mon 2 Nov 2020
at 09:30
  • msg #4

A Desperate Hunger for Snow

Still afflicted by the hunger, with a bump/update to mention I have recently acquired the OSR book Times That Fry Men's Souls from that largest RPG download site's Halloween Sale (& until midnight tonight in...California? Maybe Texas? ...you can too) for system availability. That said, it's been a very long time since I touched anything with a d20 base to do anything other than convert it to some other Frankensteinian thing, so maybe just consider it a chapbook of ideas.
tibiotarsus
member, 203 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Mon 9 Nov 2020
at 18:00
  • msg #5

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


*bump* please please please please please */bump*
tibiotarsus
member, 204 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Mon 16 Nov 2020
at 21:47
  • msg #6

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


Still hungry, though getting tired. Snow?
cowleyc
member, 1 post
Tue 17 Nov 2020
at 17:10
  • msg #7

A Desperate Hunger for Snow

I have been in the Alaskan wilderness, surrounded by snow and deafened by its silence.  I have seen the eyes of animals at night, watching and waiting, but not following.  I still remember the first I read of the Wendigo, that howl in the wind that drives a man mad, that craving for flesh that burns deep in the soul.

I would be interested in taking this on, though I'd have to find an appropriate system (Call of Cthulhu seems perfect, given that it includes sanity).  I envision an 1870s Alaska, where America had just purchased the state.  Settlers and explorers step foot with blank maps, hoping to find their own piece of land.  But the mystery of the land goes deeper than just hidden valleys and rivers, but into the snow and soil itself, into the history and lore of the native people... mysteries that helped drive away the Russian occupancy.
tibiotarsus
member, 205 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Tue 17 Nov 2020
at 18:06
  • msg #8

A Desperate Hunger for Snow

Ah! Yes! Like that!

Only I'd rather shunt the era of play to a bit before (trust me, Russian America would be amazing as a CoC setting: you'd get the intact native systems but also a looming Church, the secrets of a land so much more huge and vast and unknown to humans than even the wilds of Canada brought over to mingle in) or somewhat after the change because if you read native/US officer-class accounts the Russians actually treated their subjects as decently as any others and on the day of the sale unlanded Americans literally rushed in for an armed takeover of people's homes, land, churches and property due to the American colour bar meaning indigenous or foreign citizens couldn't legally own things. So...I'd rather not be the bad guys.

Unless they're Russian bad guys, then they'd just be bad on their own account. In fact, a set of dispossessed Russian/Native/mixed-heritage Investigators pushed into an area generally avoided for Mysterious/Mythos reasons might make a good setup and reason for the group to be together.
cowleyc
member, 2 posts
Tue 17 Nov 2020
at 18:49
  • msg #9

A Desperate Hunger for Snow

If anything, I would push it to just a bit later, closer to the end of the 19th century.  I've read several books that are set roughly in that timeline, and it makes more sense to me.  Don't worry about being a part of the rampant colonialism, as you would have come after the white man had swept in, but only taken the land that was easily accessible.  Mapping expeditions were sent out along certain routes, many were never heard from again.  Many others saw an opportunity for escape.  After all, those who travelled to Alaska were either running to or running from something.  Whatever your reason, the freedom from the shackles of mundane life drew your interest.
tibiotarsus
member, 206 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Tue 17 Nov 2020
at 20:07
  • msg #10

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


Sure, the mid-1880s do have some sweet apocalyptic set dressing, what with the Krakatoa sunsets and all. I'd miss interacting with mostly-intact indigenous cultures but if you wouldn't object to my bringing a descendant of...haha, no, wait, I might actually have a character concept already, but we'll see how rolling up goes when we get there. If we get there? Let me know if I can help any.
tibiotarsus
member, 207 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Tue 24 Nov 2020
at 18:28
  • msg #11

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


Due to epidemic-related disruption, one more nudge. Anyone out there read Journey Into Mohawk Country and wanted very badly to explore the old-time wooden castles whilst they were still warm with living folk and furnished with painted hides and careful weavings?

.
Jon Canuck
member, 14 posts
Wed 25 Nov 2020
at 21:04
  • msg #12

A Desperate Hunger for Snow

One of the projects on my someday/maybe list is a zombie apocalypse in the Canadian North, something like the Dead of Winter board game. I was thinking of a truck stop on the Stewart-Cassier Highway, and probably using the AFMBE system. But the zombies don’t get too far north because they freeze and there’s not enough brainz, so the game would mostly be about the essentials of human survival—chopping wood, moose hunting, ice fishing and staying dry—along with truck stop rumour management and cabin fever. Then the zombies arrive towards the end, once everyone’s paranoid, factionalised and at each others’ throats.

It would take a ton of historical reading—but I could transfer this into a setting like A Few Acres of Snow, around the French Indian Wars.  I’d be keen to hear suggestions for game systems and source materials, but given current commitments I wouldn’t be ready to run until mid-next year or so.
tibiotarsus
member, 208 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Wed 25 Nov 2020
at 21:31
  • msg #13

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


I...would advise running an interest check to see if you can definitely net more players than myself for that kind of committment, and will RMail you. That said, by late spring '21 I'll probably be after sand or sagebrush desert...I am a creature of deep yet seasonal compulsions.
tibiotarsus
member, 211 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Thu 3 Dec 2020
at 08:38
  • msg #14

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


Anything? I have run out of games and my last few GMs have died on me, I only hope not literally. Was listening to the Ravenous soundtrack last night and yes, I still want a game like this. Endless frozen pines, the brief era when the gun could be an honourable weapon, the vast intricate land-knowledge and ability to survive possessed by native northern peoples...
tibiotarsus
member, 214 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Thu 10 Dec 2020
at 09:06
  • msg #15

A Desperate Hunger for Snow


Are there any Lord Huron fans about? Not that the band is composed of any actual Hurons, but if I said I wanted something that felt like the song Frozen Pines and/or Yawning Grave, but more snow, you might know what I meant. A prospect of vanishing in the vast, of things not quite wolves that hunt, nights illuminated only by moonlight and by fire. Spruce tea and salt. Will someone join my camp out there?
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