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Friday 16 October 2020

That's dark


Our group are trying Cthulhu Dark. It's a super-simple set of rules, which makes it ideal for playing online, and for the win we have Ralph Lovegrove as our guest referee. From the reviews, it looks like one of those games where you play in an author role rather than strictly in-character:
"If there’s anyone at the table who thinks that the story or mystery would be more interesting if you fail, they can step in, describe what would happen if you failed and roll a Failure die."
My knee-jerk to that kind of thing is to say, "I'll just roleplay going mad, thanks. I don't need insanity points and other players to write the arc for me."

But is that true? I have played in Cthulhu campaigns and I always take it that madness is inevitable -- though there are arguments against that view and in Lovecraft's fiction it's a characteristic of his chosen narrators that cosmic horror drives them mad; it may not be the inevitable reaction of any character to the same events.

Say it is inevitable, though. In GURPS I refuse to take mental disadvantages because they are so prescriptive, but to some extent playing insanity is going to yank you out of character anyway. As the insanity progresses, an ironic distance grows between player and character. You know that complete mental disintegration, suicide, whatever are inescapable. So you can't help thinking authorially -- "Is now the time for me to run gibbering?" "Do I leap off the building?" Unless you have the misfortune to be suicidal in real life, you can't wholly drive that from within. The character's end comes when you step aside and ordain it, more as an author than an actor.


Arguably the authorial approach is the only way to run an authentic Cthulhu game, if you take it as given that the characters are doomed to fail. Their madness can't just be a set of character quirks, like in GURPS. We're talking about the real horror of madness that leaves you absolutely helpless and bereft. And if we're simulating an HPL story there's never any real agency anyway. Against immemorially ancient and vast entities, indifferent to the "trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns", there is nothing you can do to "win". It's only when you intervene an authorial view and recast reality in the shape of a story that you can perceive it as any kind of satisfying closure.

So, it's not how I normally like to roleplay. In fact I wouldn't even quite call it roleplaying. But it may well be the only fit for the subject matter. What I'm less convinced by is the designers' attempt to avoid what they see as the elitism inherent in Lovecraftian fiction, where an uneducated and either foreign or scarily feral mob revere the powerful other-worldly beings. Instead Cthulhu Dark makes the player-characters the oppressed (not that HPL's narrators are often very privileged) and substitutes as bad guys the most empowered people: the wealthy, bankers, politicians, socialites. I've used that as a bait-&-switch trope myself, but it just reinstates the Gothic tropes of degenerate, inbred aristocrats that Lovecraft was reacting against.

And to play a character from a genuinely deprived underclass, you again probably need to go with an authorial rather than an in-character approach. Do you know what it would be like to be brought up without any exposure to education? Like the very poorest people in mid-Victorian London, say? Prejudiced, illiterate, ignorant, made unhealthy and desperate by the most brutal existence. What you most definitely wouldn't be thinking is anything like, "I am of course a victim of the unbridled capitalism of my era and am unfairly kept down by the rich." Fact is, you'd be pretty much semi-feral. I could simulate it after reading Mayhew, but it would require a hell of a leap of imagination to get inside the character's head.


It should be an interesting experience. I'll report back -- if Azathoth doesn't devour my mind first.

11 comments:

  1. "...as bad guys the most empowered people: the wealthy, bankers, politicians, socialites" also risks running into the anti-semitic tropes that are currently in the resurgent, thanks to the orange-in-chief and his mate the Prince of Naples.

    Of course, as a hint for the kind of game this seems to be, you could watch Lovecraft Country, which I'm sure you would enjoy fully as much as the Watchmen TV show.

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    1. My heart sinks every time I hear players telling me about the liberated, smart, confident, karate-trained, sharpshooting female or working class character they're playing in a Victorian game. It's social tourism; mere cosplay. I'd make them read Gissing's The Odd Women and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable to get a sense of what it's really like to belong to an oppressed or disadvantaged group. On the other hand, it has been said that my insistence on serious cultural roleplaying is out of fashion now that every action drama or genre TV show is shot through with RTD- and Whedon-inspired silliness.

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    2. Re the unsavoury anti-semitic flavour stirred into class warfare by populist conspiracy theorists, that was one of the inspirations (by way of Jon Ronson's book Them) behind "The Unseen Hand" scenario I ran a while back.

      http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-unseen-hand-scenario.html

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    3. Roger Bell_West of Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice emailed me with some thoughts that Blogger wouldn't allow him to post as a comment. The charge sheet against Blogger is growing by the day. Anyway, with Roger's permission I'll quote him here:

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    4. 'It seems to me that there's a third potential leg of villainy, rather than just "the poor foreigners" and "the old decaying aristocracy" -- it's the new men, the nouveau riche if you like, the ones who are moving into positions of Power and pushing out the aristocracy. Which can again be anti-Semitic of course but certainly doesn't have to be; I'm reminded of Uli Steinhilper's _Spitfire On My Tail_, in which he points out that under the Prussian system a schoolteacher's son like
      himself would never have had the chance to learn to be a pilot - that was reserved for the right sort of chap who could be a cavalry officer. One of the reasons for early Nazi popularity was that they were perceived as breaking that old-family chokehold on all the good
      stuff. (And then keeping much of it for themselves, but that's less obvious at first.)

      'On another note, I think there's a balance to be struck between realism and fun. If the setting allows the liberated, smart, confident, karate-trained, sharpshooting female character to exist and not be locked up in an asylum by her male relatives, then I think the only real danger is to think that this is what actual history was like and so why didn't more women do it. (But there's a more general problem with assuming that primitive equals stupid…)'

      - RogerBW

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    5. Agreed, the Nazis were perceived and usually portrayed themselves as radical and disruptive as an antidote to the ossified notions of the establishment. Hitler himself ran up against that when rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, which is often interpreted as evidence that he lacked artistic talent, but those institutions were not egalitarian. Turn away the wrong student and he might apply his clearly exceptional graphic design skills to designing an iconic political flag -- and the rest is infamy.

      That does become very interesting as the PCs could belong to the aspirational lower classes whose struggle the Nazis (or equivalent) are appropriating for their own ends. Not every art school reject has to embrace fascism, after all.

      Realism vs fun is proving a sore point for me at the moment. Our current Last Fleet game is a tug-of-war between the players who want to emulate the dark, desperate, morally conflicted tone of the Battlestar Galactica reboot and those who really want it to be Buck Rogers. More posts upcoming on this topic.

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    6. "Or indeed who initially go along with this because it seems like a grand idea if you don't look too closely, throwing down the old corrupt order (which is after all _genuinely_ old and corrupt). I've been running an occult-WWII game for some years and it matters to me that I get e.g. the senior German magicians' personalities right -- idiot fanatics are _boring_, but at the same time they can't be good guys.)"

      - RogerBW

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    7. I've listened enviously to your occasional references to the WWII campaign on the podcast, Roger. (I just hope your players are keeping a write-up.) Maybe that's the answer to my realism problems; none of my players would try to treat a campaign in that setting as just gung-ho adventure.

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  2. Incidentally we played the scenario, and it turned out we weren't disadvantaged characters at all, but a group of ad men, political fixers and socialites gathered around a character who was standing for mayor. We ended up at a party in the Hamptons, so more Great Gatsby than Horror at Red Hook. I lost all my sanity in the very last scene, after it seemed the horror was over. It was fun, but a bit flimsy to build a campaign on -- not that you could get much of a campaign out of it anyway, seeing as characters will soon end up dead or mad. Worth trying, but I'd prefer to have had a slightly less well-to-do character (I was the Madison Avenue exec).

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  3. It's not that I disagree with what you guys are saying here. But I wonder about its utility in general terms, in a roleplaying game. My players don't read books, at all. They couldn't name one Conan the Barbarian story, let alone give a remotely informed account of a working-class Victorian Londoner's life.

    This is IMHO why realism must take 2nd place to fun always: your way seems to rely on too much knowledge that not everyone can be expected to have. This is of course fine if your whole gaming group is on the same page, but I have never been so lucky.

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    1. If your players aren't curious enough about the world to read books, they presumably won't care about the reality of life for the underclasses of Victorian London or Depression-era New York -- or even be much interested in playing in those settings. I don't expect anybody to come to a game with prior knowledge of those things, but if they can't bring themselves to read a book there's always YouTube. We live in a time when knowledge has never been more widely available to anybody who cares to look for it. Or they could just do dungeon-bashes -- cultural roleplaying only appeals to those who are eager for new imaginative experiences, which is why it remains a niche in roleplaying.

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