Project Nemesis is a fan driven website for games that use the One-Roll Engine (like Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign and Monsters) or Chaosium's Basic Roleplay System (BRP) (like Call of Cthulhu) and the Delta Green setting.
Aklo is a surreal binary ritual. This two-stage occult act involves a bizarre white powdery alkaloid which is used in conjunction with the spoken word. The substance has hallucinatory and hypnogogic effects which renders one receptive to the UR-language subreality that is AKLO.
In the early part of 2003, I asked the SA list a quick question based on my experiences as a Keeper; could modern Investigators with no religious beliefs successfully use a 500-year-old Christian prayer/spell designed to repel a Nightgaunt? What followed was a fascinating discussion about the nature of Magic and Magick in CoC. At Agent Donald’s kind invitation I’ve gathered the strands, roughly divided into four areas, and put them in to some kind of order. Although Part 1 and Part 2 naturally follow on from each other, Parts 3 and 4 should bee seen as slightly separate but have been included as they were interesting at the time.
Part 4 of 4: Magic & Ritual in CoC – Does it need explaining when “It just works, ok?” does the job?
I generally agree with the widely-held feeling that many aspects of the Mythos & Mythos Magic were never meant to be understood by the poor saps who come up against it. But when it comes to being a Keeper I feel that when using Mythos Magic in a game it is really important to avoid the whole ‘Deus-Ex-Machina’ problem.
Part 2 of 4: Magic & Ritual in CoC - A Question Of Belief. Is faith in a religious system necessary for a ritual or spell in that system's tradition to work?
I started Refing (Keeping?) CoC the year it came out - and went to a convention about six months after the game came out...
When talking to other players at the con - the common thread was "Cthulhu? Euuuuh! That's thegame where everyone dies or goes insane - where's the fun in that?" It got my hackles up a bit - and I decided that I needed to run a CoC game that went beyond that impression.
Having run a single on-going campaign since forever I have a couple of rules that I use to prevent the "monster /cultie/gate/end-of-the-world a week" mind-set.
Or why most people won't connect the dots. Players sometimes fall in the trap of metagaming when their characters are investigating strange groups and evil organizations. Metagaming is using the sort of omniscient knowledge that only a reader of Lovecraft would have.
ORE Horror 
