Hello again,

Mulletcheese's thread about houseruling the game to strengthen the theme made me think of something slightly related. (I tend to spend more time dreaming about this game than actually playing it. Oh, the horror.)

Between all the extra content there's to find in the expansions, there are those elements (AO's, Heralds, Guardians, expansion Mythos decks, etc.) that tend to fit together based on the original mythos fiction. Has anybody ever listed these "original combinations"?

This is what I can think of straight off the bat:

• Nyarlathotep + The Dark Pharaoh Herald + Curse Of The Dark Pharaoh Mythos deck;
• Hastur + The King In Yellow Herald + The King In Yellow Mythos deck;
• Shub-Niggurath + The Black Goat Of The Woods Herald + Black Goat Of The Woods mythos deck;
• Yog-Sothoth + The Dunwich Horror Herald + the Dunwich board & mythos deck;
• Cthulhu + Father Dagon & Mother Hydra Heralds + the Innsmouth board & mythos deck;

And maybe slightly less obvious:

• Bast along with Dark Pharaoh, because of the shared Egyptian origin;
• Nodens along with Nyarlathotep, because if I'm not mistaken The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath describes them as a sort of adversaries;
• Kingsport has connections to quite a few elements, but these tend to be barely superficial or limited to things like Ally cards.

More ideas are welcome!

Hamu said:

House rules and variants are more or less what Mulletcheese's thread is for. This one's more about which components go together based on the stories themselves (the "fluff" as it were).

The reason I'm curious about it is because there are a lot of components I'm not intimately familiar with since my own knowledge of Mythos fiction is mostly limited to HPL's body of work, a little bit of August Derleth and two Chaosium short story compendiums.

For instance, Tulzscha is unknown to me fluff-wise, and it would be fun to know if he's thematically connected to, say, an AO or somesuch.

Somwhere in this forum lies living memory of Tibs' League. He studied a series of ten Scenarios specifically for a) introducing new players to the game by progressively increasing the difficulty of the game and introducing new elements and b) deploy specific themes. I played a couple of them, and they were really good.

Thanks Julia! So far as I know, Tulzscha is an entity in and of itself, with no specific affiliation.

I will have to revise my scenarios in light of the two newest expansions, so be on the lookout for an update to that.

Tibs said:

That's cool! Welcome back to the forums :-)

Ghroth plus Azathoth seem like a thematic combo, simply because they both resemble astronomical objects and both herald destruction and the end of the world. I don't really know Ghroth's background to judge whether or not this is a thematic pairing.

Thematically, no I don't think Ghroth and Azathoth go well together. Ghroth's purpose is to drift across the universe, awakening the Old Ones sleeping inside planets and stars. Azathoth isn't really in any place like that.

Try Ghroth and Glaaki, or Yibb-Tstll, or Eihort, or Y'Golonac, or Daoloth. You'd be pairing Campbell and Campbell.

Hmmm, that reminds me I still have Ramsey Campbell to read. Thanks for the suggestions so far.

Another question: do Yog-Sothoth and the Lurker have a common literary source? I haven't yet read The Lurker At The Threshold, but they seem to fit each other's bill somewhat, and I seem to remember reading about a connection between the two.

The Lurker at the Threshold is Yog-Sothoth. It is a good read.

A lot of connections between the GOOs and boards can only be made if you are well versed in the lore of the RPG, otherwise it's all a mystery.

As an example let's take Abhoth, most people don't know this but a "piece" of him lies almost right under Wizard's Hill in Dunwich. And the Devil's Hopyard is the entrance to a Mi-Go complex. But you know it only if you read the source book about Dunwich for CoC.