Eric Cross

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Coauthor か　ず　ま
Info: みら僕に分からされて死んだ @anju_inami


scores=345 Vote
2019
Story=Joan and Tom have been married for many years. There is an ease to their relationship which only comes from spending a life time together and a depth of love which expresses itself through tenderness and humour in equal part. When Joan is unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer, the course of her treatment shines a light on their relationship as they are faced with the challenges that lie ahead and the prospect of what might happen if something were to happen to Joan. ORDINARY LOVE is a story about love, survival and the epic questions life throws at each and every one of us
duration=92 m
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countries=UK
Greetings all, for what I hope is the first in a long line of many posts of a topic and game I hold very dear to my heart. For the first time in a long while, I've started playing D&D again, running Curse of Strahd and taking a break from my favourite RPG system, Call of Cthulhu 7th edition. It's only been three sessions, and I've already had so much fun. Even if it's been displaced as my favourite system, there's still a feeling I can only get from D&D. Prepping encounters, rolling for initiative, dungeon crawls. I love it all. And yet, the eldritch forces are once again calling me home... In this series of posts, I hope to give a convincing way of running Curse of Strahd using the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition system. I'll be getting into the reasons why I believe CoS is uniquely qualified for this rewrite down below, but first, for those that don't know Call of Cthulhu (or CoC as I will generally refer to it from now on), I think a little primer is required. What is Call of Cthulhu? Call of Cthulhu is a tabletop RPG developed by Chaosium Inc. that sees its players battle the dark and terrible forces of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The Cthulhu Mythos reflects Lovecraft's nihilistic worldview, that human life is insignificant, doomed to ruin and that if there is anything else in the cosmos, we are so little to them that just looking upon them would be so far beyond our comprehension that it would drive most people mad. These dark forces are on Earth, and seek the end of humanity so that the planet can be reclaimed in the names of their wicked gods. But that's where the players come in. Their role is to hold the line against the Mythos for just a little longer. If humanity gets to survive another year, another week, or even another day, they'll have done their job. Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, players don't control "adventurers" but instead, the player characters are called "investigators", which better reflects their role in this grim universe. You can't go wildly swinging your sword at monsters in CoC and expect to win, or even survive. You are playing an ordinary person who can die to ordinary people things like getting hit on the head too hard. Imagine you were going through Death House using the commoner stat block. That's how dangerous life is for an investigator. The monsters are much more lethal than in D&D as well. A ghoul in D&D is a decently dangerous undead. In CoC, a ghoul could kill an average investigator in one hit, and it's one of the least deadly creatures you can encounter. There are plenty of monsters that the players are expected to flat out just run from. It's a horror game after all. You can't be scared if everything is killable. CoC's main claim to fame is its notorious Sanity system. On their travels the investigators will encounter creatures and knowledge that are far beyond humanity's understanding. This is reflected in the Sanity system. Reading about the Cthulhu Mythos causes you to lose sanity. Encountering monsters causes you to lose sanity. Using magic will cause you to lose a lot of sanity. Lose too much in one go, and your character will lose control for a certain amount of time, acquiring all sorts of entertaining neuroses. And if your sanity hits 0, you lose control of your character forever, doomed to the worst fate of them all; becoming an NPC. Now with that little description finished, let's talk about Curse of Strahd. What's Wrong with D&D? Nothing! Curse of Strahd is a D&D module. The original Ravenloft was a D&D module. If you and your players love D&D, and can't imagine changing systems, I'm certainly not going to tell you to stop playing your favourite system. I'm loving running CoS in D&D and I'm not gonna demand that my players switch systems just because I have a few ideas. However, sometimes you need a break, or want to try something new, and that's who I'll be writing this for. CoS is wonderful, but I think CoC is wonderful too (and those acronyms aren't going to get confusing at all). I think they can work very well together, and so for those who want to mix things up, I hope you can indulge me as I explain... Why Call of Cthulhu? It's a good question. You could run CoS with D&D as intended, or just run a typical CoC game if you want that experience. But the qualities of Curse of Strahd are actually very well suited to the mechanics of CoC, and in some ways, may suit it better than D&D did. So let's start with the big one... A Horror Game for a Horror Campaign Call of Cthulhu is a horror tabletop RPG, as opposed to D&D's usual fantasy adventure genre. Curse of Strahd is a campaign, that even if you don't call it outright horror, certainly is meant to evoke the themes of gothic horror as you traverse Barovia. Players of Curse of Strahd should feel like they are in constant danger, that they are never truly safe. However, D&D is a combat focused game, and the expectation of getting into fights can sometimes feel counter-intuitive to the CoS experience. Now, obviously players are underleveled for a lot of the campaign (which is something I will get to) but it sometimes feels like CoS is hamstrung by the D&D system instead of being aided by it. But Call of Cthulhu is a horror game. The expectation going in is that when the players encounter a threat, they won't be able to tackle it head on. How great would it be if instead of either TPKing your players at Old Bonegrinder or having to modify the location significantly to keep them alive (not a dig at the amazing work done by other people on the subreddit by the way, I've taken a lot of their advice for my CoS game), the players knew that there was no way to win a fight if one broke out because the system they were playing was a sign that they are at the bottom of the food chain. Imagine how high the tension could be while talking to these old ladies! I've seen my CoC players face to face with gods, knowing that one wrong move would mean instant death, and it kept them on edge for the whole conversation. I'm pretty sure those same players would try to eldritch blast Orcus in the face if we were playing D&D. Additionally, I think CoC's sanity system is perfect for CoS. There are so many little moments in CoS that seem to be begging for me to say "Give me a Sanity roll". Things like one of the bodies at the crossroads looking like one of the PCs, or the multitude of times where they may spot an animal working for Strahd silently watching them. Not to mention the bizarre and alien nature of Barovia itself. It's incredible! It was reading about the crypt with a PC's name on it in Ravenloft that inspired me to write this post. The slow degradation of the players' sanity could not only reflect the mental and physical toll this journey has taken on them, but how urgent their need to escape Barovia is. Mystery, not Mayhem Call of Cthulhu is not a combat driven game. In CoC, if you get into a fight, there is always a chance you won't get out of it alive. It's dangerous, and players that fight everything they encounter will find themselves in a coffin not long after. As I said earlier, being weak is the atmosphere CoS is trying to evoke, so the danger of combat would actually be to the campaign's benefit. But if combat is taken out, what is it replaced with? Well, it's what you call the player characters. They're investigators, so they investigate. The main crux of CoC is uncovering mysteries and finding out what's going on. If you can't fight a problem head on, you have to find other methods of dealing with it by gaining information on your enemies and learning their weaknesses. Curse of Strahd already has tons of this. A lot of the campaign is about gathering relics that can kill Strahd, gaining the trust of his enemies so they can help, and weakening his control over Barovia to make the final battle easier. Finding the treasures from the Fortunes of Ravenloft could easily make up the majority of a CoS campaign, even in D&D. In CoC however, it can go deeper. CoS is a pretty roleplaying heavy module, and CoC is a very roleplaying heavy game. It's like a match made in heaven. Also, CoS presents several intriguing mysteries in its backstory that the players can learn during the campaign. The most vital weapon a CoC investigator has is information, so creating a good, steady stream of information on these mysteries can really get the players engaged as they learn more about Barovia, Strahd and Ireena. The core mysteries of the campaign are important enough to a CoC-ran campaign to warrant their own post discussing the topic, so I'll save my full thoughts in it for another day. No Levels, No Problem! I'll be honest, as much as I'm enjoying my new CoS campaign, I don't think D&D's level based progression suits it. A common critique of the campaign I've found is that the middle section can sort of feel like doing sidequests to level up so that the players are capable of winning the big fight, and I agree. There has been a lot of good work done to flesh out the less necessary parts of the campaign, and I'll certainly take that work into consideration when discussing individual locations. But it doesn't change the fact that if the players aren't a high enough level, they'll have no chance of killing Strahd. This is where Call of Cthulhu comes in. CoC investigators don't have levels. Instead, they have a large list of skills that they invest skill points into at character creation to define what their characters are good at. As they practice and use these skills, they will gradually increase over the course of the game. There's no completing an area and a magic DING! going on above someone's head and they're now suddenly stronger. To me, this fits a roleplaying heavy, weakness hunting game like CoS much better. Your HP at the endgame will be the same HP at the start. This makes Strahd and his cronies just as dangerous later on as it did when the players first enter B
Still have tears when listening to this beautifull alot sade for giving a shout out to single moms in the world. Ordinary Love is a really surprising film. It's by no means a perfect film but it is a really enjoyable film with emotion done well without feeling too over the top especially for a cancer film.

Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville are really great here. They really do carry this film. Since it is primarily focused on these two characters and pretty much no one else. Liam Neeson is really great here and it makes me wonder why he hasn't done more action films. Overall it's a very simple told very effectively. It does have a lot emotion and it really does work especially the ending. But it's definitely worth watching. This is almost a fly-on-the-wall style telling of how an ordinary couple discover and come to terms with one of them having cancer. It is told in an intimate but not sentimental way, and is really quite touching. Owen McCafferty's script uses humour, sex, pathos, occasional anger, and a relationship with another couple in a similar (though more terminal) situation to help convey the deep senses of frustration, helplessness and hope as they go through the testing and treatment procedures. Liam Neeson plays his part well; though the script doesn't give him too much to work with. Lesley Manville is superb, though - really very convincing; she elicits sympathy by the bucketful. It doesn't pull it's punches so be prepared for a tough watch at times.