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A Double Standard Mouse

My Rogue Handler is coming back next week, but as a completely system neutral book, aimed at any d100 modern setting Cthulhu game.

This post is not about that, it is about something I noticed while updating the booklet.

If you managed to buy the previous version, you will have seen the lists of things that your character may encounter in terms of sights, sounds, and smells. There is a sample below just in case you haven’t seen it.

These are quite firmly in the realms of horror RPGs. This is no surprise, the entire Cthulhu genre is cosmic horror.

While doing the update to becoming system neutral it was necessary to rewrite all the examples and the longer example of play that appears at the back of the book.

When rolling what would be the open question oracle in most books, this one has your roll for a random page, paragraph, and sentence in any suitable book. It was originally the handler’s guide but now the text suggests using any suitable book, be that rulebook, source/setting book, or any Lovecraftian fiction.

So, there I was rolling a dice to pick a book (I own Fall of Delta Green, Delta Green, Apocthulhu, Dark Streets & Darker Secrets and Eldritch Tales in this genre) then a d100 for page, d6 for paragraph and d6 for sentence. You then pick out words from a couple of sentences to answer your question.

In my example the character had pulled a shoebox out from under a suspect’s bed and I wanted to know what was in it.

The words I rolled suggested a mouse trap and a dead mouse.

My reaction? I cannot put that in a book.

This is a book where the suspect that I am investigating is suspected of being a cannibal assassin planning on killing an innocent.

So cannibalism is fine, a mouse trap is not.

When I caught myself doing this I started to rationalize it along the lines of ah, but the mouse is innocent. What am I thinking? The mouse doesn’t exist, nor does the cannibal assassin or the victim for that matter. To make things even more inconsistent, look at the very first thing on my bad smells oracle.

Mouse, Nager, Animal, Cute, Rodent

I think there should be a little notification saying that no mice were hurt in the writing of this booklet.

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