States of Being Besides Nirvana
February 23, 2016 5:09 AM   Subscribe

After many months, Something Awful (and now also The Bad Guys Win) comedy/insanity writer Zack Parsons (previously) has finally confirmed the long-promised finale of his and Steve Sumner's series of Call of Cthulhu 1990's Handbook campaigns starring Kurt Cobain, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes and Eazy-E as they battle forces beyond human ken: the custom module Hard Ticket to Baghdad. (He also eventually finished the Tooth Tooth series because word is bond, god.) Beneath the fold: the entire story so far, including the recent 'solo project' campaigns.

(In other news: Something Awful is among several websites being archived by the Library of Congress. No mention of The Bad Guys Win - I can just imagine our distant descendants losing their minds over not knowing what happens to Kurt - unless the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine hold out.)

ACT ONE: The Invisible Pattern (1, 2, 3)

ACT TWO: Saved by the Yith (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Art contest announcement and winners

ACT TWO POINT TWO FIVE: Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes in The Toné Out of Space (1, 2)

ACT TWO POINT FIVE: Kurt Cobain in Serving the Servants (1, 2)

ACT TWO POINT SEVEN FIVE: Eazy-E in Straight Out of Coptic (1, 2, 3)

ACT THREE: Hard Ticket to Baghdad (coming soon - maybe not next Thursday or Friday or whenever the hell he's updating now unless he and Steve decide to point at a sourcebook and laugh at it)

Other Zack & Steve Call of Cthulhu Campaigns:

Mansions of Madness (never completed, stars video game character Karnov) (1, 2, 3)

Achtung! Cthulhu: Catch-666 (completed) (1, 2, 3)
posted by BiggerJ (16 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite
 
Steve: He is not East Coast. He lives in space.

There's a story in one of the Delta Green anthologies with an off-brand Kurt Cobain entangled in cosmic weirdness. It doesn't give him concealed tonfa holsters but it does posit Courtney Live as a method entity, which is kind of harsh but let's face it, fairly plausible.
posted by Artw at 6:54 AM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Steve: You are in your house working on some music when the phone rings.
Zack: I wait for Courtney to pick up.
Steve: She doesn't answer it.
Zack: I sigh and take the heroin needle out of my arm and answer the phone, GRAND CENTRAL?
Steve: It's Eazy-E. He says, "Yo what is up, home slice?"
Zack: Okay, first of all, he would not talk like that.
Steve: That's 90's rap slang!
Zack: Don't be racist, just have him talk like a normal human being.
Steve: Fine. You set me up on this one. "Hey, Kurt Cobain, how are you doing? I need your help with something."
Zack: "Sure, home slice. Anything for my main home slice. What is up?"

i love these two so much... see also, the extensive archives of WTF D&D? (and Rifts, and V:tM, and lord knows what else they dig into..)
posted by FatherDagon at 7:01 AM on February 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


There's a front page?
posted by entropicamericana at 8:00 AM on February 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


O. M. G.
You’re Eazy-E, level 10 nasty-talking, gun-slinging Compton gangster turned rapper.

Steve: Is he multi-classing or dual classing?
This is so great!
posted by ignignokt at 8:01 AM on February 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


It is so, so good. I would very much like them to Kickstart a 90's CoC sourcebook.
posted by rifflesby at 9:53 AM on February 23, 2016


I would very much be up for playing a '90s CoC play-by-forum game if someone is able to run it.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:51 AM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


I would very much be up for playing a '90s CoC play-by-forum game if someone is able to run it.

I had fun last time but I'm waaaayyyy too busy lately.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:27 AM on February 23, 2016


"Courtney Love is dressed, as usual, in her labcoat."

Ohhh, I like this.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:02 PM on February 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


*ahem*

Metafilter: Nobody wants to go into the meat basement, but there isn't any alternative.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:49 PM on February 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


Hang on, I thought Metafilter was a play by forum CoC game!
posted by fallingbadgers at 1:04 PM on February 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


Zack: Station is much bigger than a camel. He rips the costume when you put it on him and ends up looking sort of like a giant mound of garbage with a dead camel skin over top of it.

Steve: I’ll just tell everyone my camel is sick.


I am at work, crying with the effort of avoiding laughing out loud.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:40 PM on February 23, 2016 [5 favorites]


There's a front page?

:golfclap:
posted by Sebmojo at 2:01 PM on February 23, 2016


Everything Zack does is gold. One of my many regrets is not joining FYAD once I became aware of it around 2007. I joined Metafilter instead, and it's made me more informed and less funny, which is fine, but it didn't have to be an Instead.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:51 PM on February 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


Zack: E loses 5 sanity so he goes immediately and temporarily insane. In this case I am going to say he starts babbling, but instead of just regular babbling he starts singing high-speed reggae.

Steve: Like Snow?

Zack: Yes. All of the lyrics are horrible mythos secrets.

Steve: Like Snow?

Zack: Yes, except instead of singing about Toronto he is singing about the cold plateau of Leng.

posted by salix at 11:12 PM on February 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


Zack: Okay, Steve, you just rode a huge mythos frog monster onto the set of a live TV broadcast in pursuit of the presidential candidate currently leading in the polls. This is a big deal and it is bad.

Steve: It's cool. Left Eye slowly walks up to the microphones and she starts singing the national anthem.

Zack: Morton Downey is sort of bewildered by the moment.

Steve: Kurt and Station are covering their hearts with their hands.

Zack: Station does not have a heart.

Steve: I don't believe it. That guy has so much heart.

posted by Mayor West at 6:18 AM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


This is the only way my friends and I have ever played Call of Cthulhu. We never play actual Lovecraftian investigators--we just play one-shot sessions where famous authors or musicians are brought together from across time by some interdimensional vortex. The first time we did this, Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe brought us together to decide which of the two was the greatest horror writer of all time, but it quickly turned out that the way it was to be decided was by seeing which of their respective creations could rack up the most kills.

As I recall, Rudyard Kipling was eaten by some kind of Lovecraftian living plant, Dr. Seuss was torn apart by the invisible tentacle monster from The Dunwich Horror, Shel Silverstein died of hypothermia in the woods after running away from The Colour Out Of Space, Robert Anton Wilson was murdered by the lunatic from The Tell-Tale Heart, Laurell K. Hamilton was bricked up in a wall in the basement by Poe, and my character, Ernest Hemingway, had his throat torn out by the orangutan from Murders In The Rue Morgue. The Marquis de Sade convinced everyone he was really Voltaire, then developed a debilitating phobia of the dark by trying to sleep with a ghoul. He spent the next 48 hours refusing to come out of his bed, and broke the tie for kills by just voting for Poe, then ran away.

I'm not sure what exactly happened during the second session, because my character, Lord Dunsany, got killed right away when William F. Buckley shoved him down a staircase and then shot him to death with Dunsany's own prize pistol.

When we played musicians, I was Frank Zappa, and had a dental floss garrote, an 80% ability to ride pygmy ponies, and the ability to call any vegetable, and the chances were good (90%) that the vegetable would respond to me.

I highly recommend playing authors sessions like this if you're ever playing Call of Cthulhu; it's great.
posted by branduno at 8:11 PM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


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