Having played years of WFRP3, even more of Call of Cthulhu, and a fair amount of EoE now, I'm ready to try something a little quirky.

For years I've wanted to run a Cthulhu game set in Ancient Rome. Finally, I've found the players interested in giving it a go, so I'm launching Cthulhu Invictus campaign Legacy of Arrius Lurco.

The quirky spin is that I will not run it using BRP as a rules engine, but instead an evolved version of FFG's WFRP3 informed by Star Wars advances. I'll use WFRP3 dice and fortune points. From Star Wars I'll use talent trees (hate Action and Talent Cards) and have Expertise dice upgrade/cannibalize characteristic dice. I will use the Star Wars characteristics, which fit better for a Cthulhu game.

Much like WFRP3 has a corruption threshold, I anticipate a sanity threshold beyond the wound and stress thresholds.

There a fair amount of work to do over the next couple months to steep the Star Wars character creation (skills, careers, specializations) in the Cthulhu Invictus setting.

I think this will work pretty well, but I value any tips, suggestions, or ideas from the members of this board.

Salve!

I have not played EoE. So I have no tips regarding the integration between those systems.

However I have played a fair amount of Trail of Cthulhu, and I must say that not rolling to find clues (in an investigative adventure) is really great. Few things are worse as a player than to miss a core clue due to a bad die roll. As such I often give the players the clues they need during investigative adventures as long as they look for them. Which means that the players can focus on the fun part of connecting those clues and work out what they mean.

Also, you could use stress from WFRP as short term mental trauma, and use the corruption rules for long term mental damage. If you exchange the roll to resist corruption with discipline and give out permanent insanities when a player exeeds the corruption threshold instead of mutations. You could also have the players make corruption checks when a player has had lot of stress during an encounter. Making it more of a "build up" towards getting insanities.

Thanks for your response.

I've played plenty of Trail and honestly I never knew a BRP CoC Keeper who would let an essential clue go unfound because of a missed roll. IMO good GMs advance the story as needed regardless of dice or system. When it comes to clues, I'm with you 100%. What I like to do for failed searches for clues is make those successes ... with consequence.

You're comment about stress and "corruption" is what I was thinking too. Corruption is replaced by Sanity Threshold. It's an easy swap. Sanity trigger events, "damage", and check difficulty shouldn't take much effort to configure.

My game will run more like Star Wars mechanically (characteristics, talent trees, dice pools where expertise replaces characteristic dice, and XP/advancement), but I do plan to use WRFP dice and fortune points. I'm debating the entertainment value of stance vs. complexity/effort it brings.

I think stance is useful for the players to reflect how their character approach the roll. Foremost I find that stance makes it easier for me as a GM to come up with chaos star and bane results on the rolls. They also have the benifit of the delay and exertion symbols. I feel stance dice can really be used to add further depth to dice rolls.

You could let everyone have 2 green, 2 red stance pieces. Or you could just rule that if a player declares that they do an action recklessly they get to swap 2 blue dice for 2 red ones, if they do it in conservative they swap 2 blue for 2 green dice. Could cut down complexity while maintaining the fun parts of using stance dice.

I am opting for running the game with Star Wars dice and rules, and reskinning skills and talent trees. It's the more elegant way around my problem. I would much rather see skulls, eagles, swords, etc. for flavor of a Roman game, but it's mechanically more sensible to run SW rules instead of trying to rig SW rules to WFRP3 dice.