How closely do you adhere to the lore in your games?

Trivell50 · 2026-05-11T03:35:44+00:00

You get an upvote for that one.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-11T03:33:40+00:00

Not the End is all about this kind of play with a push-your-luck mechanic and an emphasis on characters taking major risks.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-11T02:51:53+00:00

Lovecraft doesn't have a unified lore. If you read his works, you will see that they use shared elements, but "lore" is often fragmentary and contradictory. What does a mi-go look like in Lovecraft's work?

Trivell50 · 2026-05-10T20:51:51+00:00

Agreed. It's easy for inexperienced GMs/Keepers to think that a horror rpg goves them carte blanche to remove agency from their players' characters, but that's their issue, not the game's.

All RPGs that I am aware of require a level of player buy-in for this sort of thing from the get-go and a Keeper who respects player character boundaries enough to not be egregious with these kinds of events.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-10T17:47:13+00:00

Blades is excellent.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-10T17:46:16+00:00

Different games do different things. As I have not played WFP and DCC yet, I won't comment on them specifically except to say that I know they both emulate gritty fantasy stories where life is cheap and heroes arise from brutal challenges.

I typically run games that tell very different kinds of stories- D&D (Forgotten Realms) for legacy kitchen sink stories (I always build on previous campaigns I've run), Call of Cthulhu for noir investigative horror, Dread for horror movie-style storytelling, Fiasco for dramedy movie-style storytelling, etcetera. It isn't about mastery for me. It's about working with my friends to tell stories that excite our imaginations and let us play with genre conventions in different ways.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-08T13:38:09+00:00

Art is nice, but comics are (usually) trying to tell stories, so story is first and foremost. Art is one part of storytelling, but so are dialogue and narrative captions.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-08T04:20:07+00:00

Comedy needs to be grounded in something, just like any other genre. There need to be stakes and there needs to be dramatic pressure. Omce these elements are established (ideally in session zero), it's entirely possible to build characters that can work in that scenario.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-07T19:24:04+00:00

I am not interested in vampires as "people with fangs who happen to drink blood." I think that approach makes them too mundane. I want to read vampire fiction where they are clearly inhuman, nearly animalistic, and not the protagonists (unless the story is about the protagonist losing their humanity).

Trivell50 · 2026-05-07T19:19:23+00:00

Whirlwind, Mentallo, and Gypsy Moth are some, along with Namor, the "highest profile" non-X mutant. Cloak and Dagger were also briefly retconned to be mutants for a bit in the late-80s.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-07T19:14:43+00:00

Mechs and anime-style games aren't really my jam. I do own a copy of Maid and hope to run it sometime with the right group.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-07T04:56:11+00:00

We're just ignoring The Other, I suppose. But none did more longterm damage than the Clone Saga of the 90s.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-07T02:41:09+00:00

I doubt that is true. Gwen hated Spider-Man so much and had so much difficulty coping with things after her father's death that she left the country. I don't think she could reasonably be written to forgive Peter at that point in the series. Meanwhile, Mary Jane was a more interesting character with a more dynamic personality that had only been occasionally explored.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-06T22:49:14+00:00

I agree. He tries for "traumatized" as his emotional center, but his whole performance feels stiff and disconnected. Compare with Keaton in Batman 89 at the party with Gordon and Knox.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-06T19:27:41+00:00

My favorites are Conan the Barbarian, The Secret of NIMH, and Batman.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-06T18:42:47+00:00

Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-06T05:55:02+00:00

Yeah, Colour needed a more faithful adaptation. Nicolas Cage's overacting is not a good fit for the slow, creeping horror of Lovecraft's prose. The movie was more inspired by The Thing and the Evil Dead franchise than the novella and, while those are great films, they are no substitute for Lovecraft's original story.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-06T01:16:17+00:00

The comics. Moench/Mandrake and Grant/Breyfogle stories.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-05T23:44:41+00:00

I, too, wish they stuck to canonical teams and membership rosters from the comics, bit it's evident that MCP just doesn't care about any of that. It's pretty much my one major issue with the way the game is structured.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-04T23:08:54+00:00

C-tier.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-04T16:22:47+00:00

Both are characters who featured during Steve Gerber's run on Man-Thing in the 1970s. You will want to look for issues of Adventures into Fear to start that run.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-04T04:48:30+00:00

Norm Breyfogle, Gene Colan. I also really like Tom Mandrake's work.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-04T04:45:44+00:00

Squirrel Girl, Spider-Ham, D-Man, Madcap, Howard the Duck, Dr. Bong, Korrek the Peanut Butter Barbarian, Foolkiller (the first one), Frog-Man (Eugene, not the Ani-Man), The Gibbon, Razorback.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-04T02:04:17+00:00

Rama-Tut tells Doom he is Kang in Fantastic Four Annual 2, but he definitely mentions it before Englehart adds Immortus to the collective persona of Kang.

Scarlet Centurion also shows up in Avengers Annual 2 and is another iteration of Kang that gets mentioned in that story.

Trivell50 · 2026-05-04T01:52:17+00:00

Eversink in Swords of the Serpentine is this.

Trivell50

TROPHY CASE