Malcolm Cain, the Muscle who Lost his Face - Facing the Nightmare in the Mundane with Damianoddson (Call of Cthulhu 7e)

Hello friends welcome to characters without stories a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled I'm star. This episode is a very special episode that I recorded on Tik Tok live with Damien odsonne. For that reason, you may notice that the audio quality is not at the level that I had hoped. So please enjoy. And I hope it's not too distracting for you. Thank you. I'm very excited to talk to Damian, about a character for Call of Cthulhu. Which I haven't done one of those yet. So that's exciting. greatly enjoy. Yeah. And Damian is actually running a, like massive Call of Cthulhu, like multiple threads multiple games happening at the same time, which is really fun. I'm very excited about it. I haven't gotten to play yet. But I've been watching all of the chit chat in the channels. It's a lot of fun.

Yeah, I think I think some of the threads have finally reached the point that I can drag you and another person. And if there's time, it's all a matter of where characters end up.

So your description that you sent me was a TTRPG malcontent who just wants to attend their garden and tell stories with friends, which I think is I don't know that that's that's actually true. I wouldn't call you a malcontent.

Oh, I have my moments, I can be a little boisterous from time to time.

So Damian, who are you bringing to the table today?

Yeah, so today, this is actually a character that I figured would just be a name, and wouldn't have to ever flesh out like not even a full NPC. But because of some of the choices that were made in a recent Call of Cthulhu campaign, I was, I was coming to the realization, they may actually need a character sheet at some point. So this is Malcolm Cain.

Okay. And we're talking about Call of Cthulhu. Can you tell me Give me like a brief overview of how you build a character in Call of Cthulhu? What's the first thing that you do?

Well, so the first thing I do is I, I decide what kind of poor unfortunate is going to be dragged into some kind of awful cosmic horror. So depending on the setting, and the, the information I've been given about the story, I've, in the past played, librarians, private detectives, I haven't played a barber, who just happened to be kind of a, an offshoot of a family that was an heir to a fortune. It's, it's one of the fun things about Call of Cthulhu is the the investigators generally tend to start out as completely normal, average jobs. So it works a little differently from you know, any, any TTRPG that has something remotely like a class system involved, cuz you don't have adventures?

Yeah. And so it's, I think one of the things that you recommended we do when we are building characters, was choosing a profession.

Yeah, in the case of Malcolm because because I had a little bit of who he is and how he fits into the world determined already. It was it was easy to pick background for him. Because I just had to go straight for smuggler

and what what kind of skills does your smuggler have?

So he he has a focus on there are a lot of skills on Call of Cthulhu the character sheet but his focus tends to revolve around skills like appraise fast talk, because he's he's used to being on the spot having to do deals with these antiques that he deals with. Also, brawl and and firearm proficiency because if you get in a sticky situation, you want to be able to extricate yourself and to kind of really play into the smuggling aspect. I also gave him skills like piloting boats, navigate stealth. Just sort of really fill out the the idea that he's nefarious and up to no good.

It's funny how much that tells you about the character just right from the start like boat proficiency and firearm proficiency. Yeah, like, I know that that person is

he's he's, he's somebody that spends a lot of time going to and from in places that he shouldn't.

So, tell me a little bit more about Malcolm. How old is he, for example.

So I decided to put him at 38 years old, which for, for the way the Call of Cthulhu system works, the characters do actually get modifiers down, depending on the age bracket, they're in, which in Malcolm's case, just means the increased his education stat, just to reflect the experience that he's gained over being live for several decades. Right? If I, if I pushed him older, his physical stats would have started to drop a little. And that would obviously kind of inform how I was approaching the character, like, an older criminal works just fine, but they're probably not as likely to be running around on heists, they're more likely to have tried to build a little Empire for themselves. So they don't do it themselves. Right, I wanted him to be hands on.

It's interesting, because sometimes the skills your character have may not seem that useful, because you're thinking you're coming at it from like a gaming standpoint of like, oh, like, what is going to be useful in the situations that my character is going to be put into, but then a lot of times, like you're building characters who aren't like you, like you said, they're not adventurers. So like, their skills are elsewhere?

Yeah, that that's, that's, that's the whole the whole point of cosmic horror, just as a genre is like very normal people who are thrown into this situation for which they have little to no preparation. And in in Call of Cthulhu, the nice thing is the way it's structured, is that even if your skills don't immediately seem obvious, with a little creativity, you can usually apply them in a more lateral sense.

Right, right. Do you think that Call of Cthulhu encourages creativity just because of the basis of this system and the way it's applied?

Definitely. I think it's one that although it doesn't necessarily have a kind of codified system for social interactions. I mean, there are social skills like there are in lots of other TTRPG is, but there's not like a set laid out pattern to follow for social interaction actions, sorry. But it definitely encourages roleplay. There are multiple sessions that I've played in and like GM for where the roles that the players have made have been, like maybe one or two roles each over the course of three hours. Because it's driven by the store.

Right, right. So for Malcolm, what kind of work? Do you have something in mind, like a story in mind when you are building them? Or was it just kind of like somebody you might slip in somewhere?

Yeah, so I had a very specific idea of who he was from a starting point, which was that him and his younger brother ran a small, upscale like antiques boutique, where they specialized in in replica pieces. With the idea that if if they just so happened to occasionally sell an authentic piece, they would be shocked to discover that the idea being that they they use it as a front to move, stolen art from various cultures and places around the world, their their nefarious, and the way that physicians are in the story is that if there were players who are investigating old artifacts, peculiarities, that that gave them a potential connection that they could utilize. Or even if it was wanting to check somebody on the brothers customer list, it would it would give them that sort of in to the shady side of art collection.

I think one of the things that came up for me when we were playing is that you kind of invent people you know, a lot in the game you're like, Yes, I do this for a living. I must know somebody who works on library you know, are exempt. Yeah, so I think it like it really encourages you to like build relationships, both with the other characters, but with NPCs all over the world, because getting information is a huge part of the of the game.

Yeah, absolutely. Like it's, it's at its core, it's an investigation. So gathering information, super important, sort of starting to join the dots from A to B, until the whole thing derails with tentacles and so forth. But up until that point, it's, you know, it's it's very kind of encourages a sort of methodical approach, figure out one puzzle piece than another start to put them together. And, and so having contacts out in the world definitely facilitates.

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that, you know, that's kind of the core of Call of Cthulhu, is that you're very fragile. And you, you, your character, may not make it to the end of the game either may not make it, they may die, or they may go completely insane. Because of what they do.

It's one of the things I love about the system is, is that winning is not, by any means the default end state for the game.

Building a character for Call of Cthulhu, you have to be a little bit less, I guess, precious with them, you have to be willing, if you have to get to let them go to certain extent, right.

I, to a certain extent, agree. But I think that being invested in the character definitely helps. Because you want to see them succeed, even though you kind of know at the back of your mind that they might not. And it's that sort of striving against impossible odds can be very compelling. Especially if your characters are making connections with other characters in the process. It's kind of people being thrown together into an outrageous situation and trying to help each other survive. Because the characters obviously don't know exactly how fragile they are in the face of what's coming. There's, there's always that moment of revelation, usually where it dawns on them, but but for the most part, they have no idea.

So let's, let's go back to Malcolm a little bit about details about Malcolm. Now his profession, we know his age. And he he's a man.

Yeah, so he's this is because I like to challenge myself with roleplay, I decided to make him straight and cisgender. Something that I have some experience role playing in the past. So he's, yeah, he's in his late 30s is just some white guy, you know, kind of working criminal class. He's about roughly six foot tall, quite broad, just from the amount of manual labor he's done over the course of his life. And he kind of he's, he's more the back end of the business, whereas his brother was the face of the operations. And Malcolm is usually pretty dressed down, ready to kind of get very hands on with practical work, as opposed to his brother, who was the one who had the charm, the panache the style due to the events that occurred, before I ever realized that he was going to need to be flushed out. While he was, while he was away on a business trip, somebody came looking for him and his brother. And his brother did not survive the encounter. And so Malcolm comes back to tragedy, and is sort of thrown into actually caring about what happened instead of just it being a peripheral thing that was occurring in his life.

And was the thing that happened to his brother, do you? Do you want to go a little bit into what exactly happened to him? Is it part of the investigation?

It is part of the thing, but it won't make sense to most people, so I'm happy to even if even if some of the players are watching. So him and his brother were contacted to try and chase down some old statues that had been supposedly created for the for the benefit of worship by ancient Roman mystery cults. And these statues were like, slightly defaced versions of the gods. So they were unusual. They were rare. And they weren't necessarily allowed to be traded freely. Which is why these smuggling brothers As we're contacted, and in the process of chasing down one of these statues, Malcolm leaves the country to go and help facilitate the deal. And in the meantime, somebody else that's interested in the statue because secretly contains comes to the shop and find Benny, who is, was sorry, por bene very standoffish with somebody trying to get a look at their client list. And this is this is a pretty big reveal. And I apologize to my players. For them hearing this. Something that was not entirely human came looking and kind of dressed Benny like a Sunday roast when he wouldn't answer the questions. So when Martin eventually returns to the country with the statue, he's going to find chaos and disarray in the shop and what's left of his brother.

Yeah, that's, that's rough. Yeah. They were close him and his brother.

Oh, absolutely. They spent all their lives looking out for each other. They'd come up together, they definitely relied on each other because they complemented each other's skills. So well.

You have an idea of what Malcolm looks like their physical appearance.

So this is something that I don't usually do when I make a character. But Malcolm in terms of appearing is a little bit of a self insert. Normally when I play TTRPG, is I tried to go for the less kind of default human sort of approach, but Call of Cthulhu is full of them. So he's, he's he has, you know, close cropped graying hair. He's got whiskers that are usually trimmed enough to be presentable, but not necessarily neat. The real difference is that he has these gray, very serious eyes as opposed to, I suppose to my blue peepers. But yeah, he's he's, he's broad, kind of definitely a little beaten around the edges. Like that permanent frown lines, very used to scowling just just to sort of make sure that people are more likely to talk to his brother than than him

an occupational hazard. You mentioned that you don't usually do a self insert character. Is there? I know and I know you play a lot of different TTRPGs. Is there an approach that you usually take to building a character does it depend on on the system is there kind of like a way that you start?

So my, my initial starting point is always what what do I feel is going to be an interesting perspective into the world and the adventure for me. So it ends up varying wildly from system to system but also from game to game within the same system. Because if somebody's trying to tell the darker story, I'm not going to necessarily make the same kind of character, as if it was a slightly cozier adventure, even if it is using the same system. I always start from that point, and then I start using the mechanics to kind of build around that core concept.

And for Malcolm, what was the thing that sparked his character idea?

The spark was like I say, it was very different from usual from Malcolm, the spark was that somebody chose to speak to him instead of his brother, initially. It could have gone either way, like I had, like a vague silhouette in mind for both of them. And when they chose, that was when I started in my head to kind of flesh out, like, okay, so I know roughly, I know this, this this two dimensional, this this caricature of what the character is. So now, let's actually refine that down a little bit make him more human, more of a person than just a shadow puppet.

Right, right. Um, that's an interesting idea is what do you think it takes to make a character human?

I think it's, it's figuring out what their authentic reactions to things would be. The obviously the main difference between a PC and an NPC is the NPCs are there to help drive the story. Whether we like terms like railroading or not. TTRPG is have rails of some kind. They have things that help us move from one scene to the next. And that inevitably helps us tell the story. NPCs are usually one of those rails, like they have useful information, they have a contact that we need an item that we need, even if they're seemingly inconsequential, even if they're secretly the BBEG. NPCs are a rail, which means they don't necessarily need more than like in a video game more than that sort of bottled dialogue. And the difference between that and a player character is that they they have the capacity to behave unpredictably. Like player characters tend to, like real people tend to pose a question as a good question there in the chat, random NPCs that fill the world. So yeah, the interesting thing about random NPCs that fill the world is that unless somebody has gone to great excruciating detail to fill out their world, with phone books worth of NPCs, that will never be spoken to. And I don't recommend that approach to anybody. There is no such thing as a random NPC. But even if they even if the player reaches out to speak to somebody on the street for no reason other than to speak to them, as soon as they come into contact with the players that part of that story, that part of what's shaping the direction the players go.

Yeah, definitely. How much do you build a character during the game? Like, are you coming in with with things pretty settled? Or are you coming in with something more sketchy? And then doing a lot of decisions? I mean, I think all characters are going to change during play. But how are you approaching it?

Yeah I'm, I'm an absolute fiend for the multi page backstory. Because I enjoy telling stories. And that includes the past of the characters. I'll always, I'll always include a summary for the poor GM a couple of bullet points that are important, but I like to think about where they came from, and like how they've interacted with the world up until the point that they become part of the story. Because anytime this conversation comes up, I like to remind people if, if I became an adventurer, or of some sort tomorrow, I have 40 years worth of backstory. But it may not, it's not all adventure worthy. But all the things that have happened to me inform the decisions that I make. So I may not go into that amount of detail. But I like to think about, you know, how they feel about authority. Some of the moral quandaries they may have faced over the course of their life, because that is a pretty defining feature for an adventure. Much more so than just slapping an alignment on for example, the core beliefs, some people who are important to them, places that are important to them. And like I say, it's all things that can be summarized. And it may not all necessarily be relevant, but it's there, if it needs to be touched upon. It's good to have those little touchstones. The other thing, though, is like none of it has to be set in stone. As you say, characters definitely are going to change over the course of an adventure, partly because they don't necessarily know what the world looks like. So it's impossible to plan for certain reactions and influences. Until Until the detail is actually touched upon. I don't consider it to be set in stone. Once Once it is once it's become irrelevant, it's but until that point, it's just a possibility. It makes it easier for me to have those possibilities outlined.

Yeah, that makes sense. So then, when you're talking about building a backstory, you know, you mentioned a couple of things you mentioned moral quandaries they might have encountered. What do you think are the important like the most essential things you need to put in a backstory?

I would say the most essential things are the motivation for the character to get off their butt and go out into the world is the most important, even if that motivation is just they were bored, because you need to know why they're there. And that is still technically a valid reason, you may end up with a fairly chaotic character in that instance, They may end up being a bit of a tourist. But it's a reason, at least. And then, of kind of secondary importance is it's nice to know where they came from. Because again, that sort of informs a lot about a character, that that their place of origin helps you determine how unusual it is for them to be who they are, like somebody who comes from a dirt poor origin, who then goes on to become some sort of incredibly well trained warrior. something remarkable happens between those two points for that to happen. Whereas somebody from that same origin who say, becomes a bit of a roguish character a bit of a thief sneak, it's like, well, that makes a little more sense, potentially, because they've had to learn those skills to survive based on where they came from. It's a completely different path. And obviously, the path they walked is part of what defines them doesn't have to be, again, it doesn't have to be cast in stone, you can always play outside of those character archetypes that exist, but they're a useful starting point.

To then, you mentioned that, you know, the the death of Malcolm's brother, is kind of why he joined this investigation, or why you would join this investigation. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the things that you put in Malcolm's backstory, like you're talking about where they came from, how they got to where they are now.

Yeah, so Malcolm and his brother were both. They both started out as kind of down and out youths back in the kind of, so the game is set in 1987. That's important to know, before, say this. They kind of spent their youth in the streets of Birmingham and Coventry and other parts of the West Midlands in England. And at the time, industry was kind of a little bit shaky. So there were a lot of people that were down on their luck. And the two of them found other means of getting by, and those are the means started to escalate in scale. So it might start with taking a couple of boxes off the back of a truck to take an old truck, eventually, once they learned the skills for how to do that. And then using the the money that they gained from those various operations, they invested in their own operations, they grew that business, branched out into other avenues of criminal enterprise, and eventually kind of hit upon a niche that they found worked really well for them. The veneer of respectability that Benny very much enjoyed, because he liked the finer things he liked, kind of being at least, alongside that sort of more high society crowd, even though he couldn't necessarily belong to it. Whereas Malcolm was just happy to be working with his brother, and you know, have a job that letting go all around the world and see interesting places.

Interesting. Yeah. We talked a lot about Benny, but does Malcolm have other family?

They do not. That's this is the reason that the death of Bernie is such a defining moment for him is because that was his only family. So to have it, taken away from him prematurely is a bill spike of motivation to figure out who, why.

Let's talk a little bit about the actual character sheet. Yes, and maybe you can kind of explain what that looks like and Call of Cthulhu.

Yeah, so in Call of Cthulhu, we have a character sheet that has kind of three main sections on the on the on the character page we have, the sort of primary attributes are something that we refer to as derived statistics, and then their skills. So their primary attributes are things that for the most part, have you played any TTRPG at all kind of makes sense? I think, strength size, dexterity, appearance, Constitution, Intelligence, power, education and luck. So there's more of them than a lot of systems use. And there are, of course, multiple different methods for defining those, depending on how comfortable you are with the system. So there's, for people that are new to the game, there's a nice simple stat array that they can use to just drop numbers in. Somewhat unusually, the dice rolling method requires additional maths beyond just roll some numbers and add them together. There's like multiplication involved and bracketed sums in some cases, which is fine. The what we call the derived statistics are dependent on the primary abilities, which is things like the hit points, which are very low. And then things like their movement speed, their sanity, and any kind of damage bonus that they get for combat situations when those eventually arise. And then the skills is the bulk of the character sheet, because it's kind of the bulk of the character. So the skills, it's a big long list, and it comes with a bunch of blank spots as well, because the idea is that they're not trying to necessarily define everything your character can do and be there, they're leaving that space for you to talk to your keeper, which is the GM equivalent. And say, you know, I, this skill isn't on the character sheet, but I feel like it's something that they would have as a kind of a very sort of honed ability in their, in their arsenal. And you can just add that to the sheet instead. And because those skills aren't necessarily directly related to the primary abilities, you don't have to worry about figuring out exactly how those scores would relate to when you're making good skills, which is nice.

Yeah, and there are percentages, right when you're talking about skills, so you're like,

yeah, so So the Call of Cthulhu system is a roll under D 100. System. So you either you will need the role of D 100, or percentile, D 10s. I do use a D 100. Because it's a nice excuse to roll it, your skills and abilities are expressed as percentages because you're trying to roll under the number on your sheet. So the higher your number, the skill, the higher the likelihood that you're going to pass a test. And there are certain things that everybody can try to do. But if they have no experience, no training with it, the starting statistic might be very, very low. That represents the idea that sometimes pure luck comes into things. But it also sort of represents the idea that, hey, maybe, maybe there's an off chance that they remember a conversation that they had about this thing, or they watched a movie, or something. And that sort of little spark, just just happens at that moment to engage and they know how to deal with this situation using that skill. It's very difficult. It's a low number, obviously, by design. And it can be it can be a little difficult to improve your skills as well, which is one of the nice things I like about the system. The skill improvement, the higher your skill is, the harder it is to improve it, which kind of reflects any any sort of craft or skill that you have in real life, the better you are at it, the more you have to work to kind of exceed that previous plateau that you've reached.

Right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, with Call of Cthulhu do you usually play kind of a shorter term game, or is it? Is it flexible? Because I'm curious about this kind of like improving or some other games? We'll call it leveling up?

Yeah, so generally speaking, the format for Call of Cthulhu is an investigation that's designed to take place over several sessions. It could be anything from kind of typically four to 12 sessions, depending on how in depth the the investigation is supposed to be. It kind of follows this very normal, typical kind of a three act sort of structure. You have the the the opening stage of the investigation, we'll be introducing the investigators to the scenario to the world that it's taking place in and as you move into act two, that's when they start to really get their teeth into the meat of the investigation start to make connections potentially start to realize that the world is a little stranger than they previously imagined. And the third act is usually quite chaotic, because that's when revelations begin to occur. That's when they know See how awful things are around them, and are trying to deal with that. So the third act can sometimes only be like one or two sessions, out of a dozen, because they spend the bulk of the of the time putting these pieces together slowly building a picture that leads them to that fatal encounter that's waiting for them. Right? Cuz that was the question you asked, usually the leveling up, I remembered, happens at the end of what's described as chapters in the story. So anytime the keeper feels like, that would be kind of one chapter of this investigation is closed, we will look at the skills that you've used and test those skills to see if they improve. Yeah, great, because it means even if it's a skill, they don't have training, if they used it, and they succeeded. That gets to improve as well.

Oh, that's interesting. I like that. So the other thing I think is interesting is that your character can be changed for the worse. They can go mad. So can you maybe talk a little bit about how sanity works in this?

Absolutely. Sanity is one of the defining qualities of Call of Cthulhu games. And it's not necessarily intended this. So this can be a thing that a lot of people find a bit off putting about this kind of game like sanity mechanics, in general, can feel like they trivialize mental health problems. So it's always worth talking to players and the keeper about how they're handling it beforehand. Like you don't want somebody in the middle of a session to suffer a bout of temporary insanity and play it in a really offensive way that might hurt people at the table. But the sanity mechanic reflects their, their grasp on their sense of normalcy. So there are lots of things that can cause sanity loss, and some of them are incredibly mundane. And that sort of makes sense. Anything that can cause you to be shaken, to lose your composure can potentially cause sanity loss. So that could be something like stepping into the road and almost getting run down by a car that would shake somebody that can potentially cause panic and all that sort of thing, finding a body whether or not be one, that can be a bigger loss of sanity, because that is an incredibly shocking experience.

I would hope.

Yeah, there are certain backgrounds that offer it kind of as partial immunity to that sort of thing. Like for example, a paramedic is used to dealing with that kind of thing so that it makes you jaded towards that sort of sanity loss. But then the other important form of sanity loss is it comes when they encounter things that are not mundane. And those are the those are the ones that are usually a real doozy. So anytime people lose sanity, they, they have their sanity score, they try to roll under that number to maintain their grip on their composure. Usually, anytime you test your sanity, you lose at least one point. Like there's always that kind of slow erosion of that statistic. And if you fail that sanity test, if you if you roll over your number, that's when you have to roll another die to see how many points of sanity you lose overall. So the more horrific more terrifying something is, the bigger that die is going to be. So for, for almost getting rundown in the street, you might roll one day for or or even like one, day three, day six and a half for seeing what appears to be a dead body rise from a slab you might roll on the sixth. For a creature that shouldn't exist slowly pulling its way out of the shadows, you might roll to the eighth sanity loss and to see great Cthulhu themselves rising from the depths of the ocean, you would potentially be rolling a d 100 to see how much sanity you lose in one shot.

Yeah. That would be a big loss.

Yeah, the so that the impact that that has the sanity loss. It becomes dangerous when it's five or more points from a single source because that triggers about temporary insanity. So what that means is that the player is typically going to lose partial control over their character. The keeper the GM is going to sort of inform them of how they're going to react to certain things. And depending on the severity of the situation that could be anything from going catatonic temporarily to running off into the shadows and having to be for found by the other investigators later to usually also causes some kind of fear phobia, paranoid response to a particular trigger, which will persist for days within the game. So if the investigator encounters that trigger, they're going to lose more sanity, if they're at risk of going off again, for the big sanity losses. If you lose a fifth of your sanity points in one go, you go irrevocably insane. If you lose your sanity points altogether, you go irrevocably insane. That's when the character might have to be institutionalized. And the player can either say goodbye, or roll up a new character, depending on how they feel about the story. At that point, they could be some poor, schmuck that gets roped into things far beyond their ken at that point.

Do you think there'd be any way for a character in this game to see Cthulhu and come out on the other side?

The nice thing about the D 100. And rolling under is, there's always a chance, even if it's very slim, if you if you roll the right thing, there is that slim chance that you might survive might come out of it, okay? You're not necessarily going to enjoy the place you find yourself. Sometimes surviving a situation does not equate to surviving the greater change to the status quo. But also, that's the nice thing about the as much as the original author was trash, the kind of stories of the Cthulhu Mythos are often seeing these horrific things happen, potentially up close, and then managing to kind of claw yourself back from the precipice by the skin of your teeth. The short story involving Cthulhu themself involves freighter kind of running aground on an island that isn't supposed to be there, which they start to investigate. And it turns out that due to some strange fluke of weather and ocean currents, this island was uncovered great Chtulhu is seen slumbering on that throne. And that drives the crew to flee before their sanity escapes them completely, and just head back out to sea, hoping never to see such a thing again, but knowing that it's out there. So you could survive, but it's going to leave them completely changed forever.

Right? How can you go back to your day to day when you've seen that kind of horror? Yeah. You mentioned a little bit about how certain traits, your character's background or skills might give them a little bit, maybe not immunity, but a little bit of a resistance to the effects. I'm curious, what do you think Malcolm would have that kind of resistance? Like what what would he be resistant to?

So due to the nature of his business over the years, he has been exposed to violence in some various forms. So there are certain displays or acts of violence that you wouldn't necessarily find as unsettling, depending on what's enacting them, like a person horribly, slaying another, you know, it's tragic, but it's human nature in a way for them to war against each other like that. Seeing some thing, appear as if from nowhere, tear somebody asunder and then fade again into the night. Even, you know, even even a hardened criminal is going to be shaken by that. So it's really the precise source of where that sanity loss comes from. The blood fine tentacles, not so much, you know.

What do you think Malcolm is not so good at?

Malcolm is terrible with other people. He has no charm. He is very bad at understanding when he's being led astray or deceived he used to rely on his brother for that kind of thing. Malcolm is very straightforward. By despite being a criminal, he prefers to kind of deal straight with people like this. This is what I want. This is what you want. How do we make both these things happen? Just nice and straightforward. Point A to Point B, no deviation. So if people are trying to manipulate him to gain kind of some sort of advantage over him, it's entirely likely that he's not going to notice somewhat easily led by the nose in those situations.

That's Mmm, could be a bad quality to have in Call of Cthulhu.

Open to manipulation is is not necessarily a good thing, when the world isn't what it appears to be.

So how is it important to you in character building in general is it to have these kind of flaws built in?

With everything that isn't? Based on the maths of the game? I don't think it's necessarily vital to have it built in, but I enjoy systems that do, because it makes it easier for entry level players to have those touchstones or for people that aren't comfortable with roleplay. To have those touchstones. So, if you know that your character has a certain phobia, and if you're not sure how to deal with the situation that arises, you can look at your character sheet, you can decide if that would have some kind of effect and act accordingly. It's you're pulling the less from like nowhere, which is really beneficial for some people. I don't, I don't mind not having those things personally, like, I'll happily just straight into all these roleplay situations and load about the character as I go. But that's that's not necessarily what everybody enjoys doing. So having systems that that give you some way of like defining a floor or defining a virtue or a drive, I think is important. It makes those games more accessible.

Definitely, I think, yeah, I think personally for me, like I'm not at the level with role playing where I can just just pull things from the ether. And so having those kinds of scaffolds is really helpful.

Yeah, definitely. When I, when I first started playing TTRPG, it was really useful to have those things like, I could just I could just list some qualities that weren't related to rolling dice, but that would affect choices that I made. So if I wasn't sure what to do, I could just look at it and say, well, that kind of applies. So let's go this way.

What's the last nightmare? You remember having?

Oh, that is a good one. Okay. So I think the last nightmare that Malcolm Cain remembers having is moving through a darkened warehouse, kind of bouncing from the stacks as he tries to run around these corners, looking for something but not quite understanding what it is that he needs. Just feeling this deep sense of need to find it, whatever it is, this, this necessity that's gnawing at him eating at him. Just one load up is driving him forwards, and eventually finding it. This thing, this object is strange orb that he seems fixated on just as he reaches for it, and claps him on his shoulder and spins him around and his brother is standing, tears falling from his eyes that slowly turn crimson. And he asks why, why? Why weren't you here? Why am I gone? And you're still here? And then he wakes up in a dead sweat.

Wow, that's great. I can tell that you have some experience coming up with things on the spot.

Yeah, it is the approach that I take to GMing is about 80% of it is on the spot, which you know, after I've come up with it, it becomes fixed. So the longer I play in a particular campaign, the more predefined qualities there are to begin with. It's all you know, loosey goosey.

So when you eventually you get to play, Malcolm, is that nightmare now part of the canon for him, right?

Yeah, that would that would, that would be how he defines how he's driven, like, he knows that his brother was taken from him. He doesn't know exactly why. And he wants to know that. And at the same time, he has this deep underlying guilt for having failed the person that he was closest to in the world. Which is great, because then it gives me a very important piece of information from Malcolm now, if he forms a connection with another investigator. If he starts to feel responsible for them, there's or there's every likelihood that they're going to become kind of a proxy for those feelings that he still has about his brother, which may lead him to make bad choices in an effort to look out for that person.

That's, that's a little heartbreaking actually.

It's cool to feel that you got to have that tragedy.

And if you don't already have it coming in, you will get it sometime during the game.

100%

I just want to say thank you so much for doing this with me.

It's been really fun. I enjoyed this Sound my own voice and I like talking about TT RPGs so I'm happy to do this sort of thing