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Wednesday 6 April 2016

The sanity clause


There have been a few recent posts (eg here and here) about Victoriana and the Cthulhu Mythos because those have been the setting and theme of our current campaign. Actually, when the campaign began I thought it was Victorian, period. (Or Victorian Period, take your pick.) All that Lovecraftian stuff came later – presumably because the opening scenario was borrowed from Cthulhu By Gaslight – but it’s in the nature of such things to set a course for the rest of the campaign, so now I’m resigned to facing mi-go and shoggoths every fortnight.

I’ve nothing against Lovecraft, let me say. Quite the reverse. His stories may not be the sort of thing I’d typically read for pleasure, eldritch or otherwise, but I greatly respect him as a creative innovator. Here's the snag: taking a body of literature and reworking it for role-playing inevitably steers the whole thing towards the reefs of parody. Imagine an RPG based on Crime and Punishment, with the consequent thumping emphasis on Ruthlessness and Guilt points. Or a Hemingway RPG which reduced Papa’s entire body of work to just booze, machismo and bull-fighting. So usually when I’ve played Call of Cthulhu (which isn’t often, I admit) it’s felt like nothing more than a lark, a one-off session of light relief for the players in between real role-playing.

But there’s always a silver lining. In that reductive approach involved in distilling a role-playing game out of an author's canon, there are going to be some interesting questions, at least a few nuggets gleaming in the mud. Take Call of Cthulhu’s SAN (sanity) rules. Is it actually the case that coming face-to-polyps with a Lovecraftian monster automatically drives you insane? And if so, why?

In the literature, you see, Lovecraft always starts off with a neurotically unstable lead character. That’s his shtick. He doesn’t pit a Steve Costigan type against the nameless spawn of the cosmic abyss, so we don’t know if they’d end up a gibbering wreck like a typical HPL protagonist or whether they’d wade in undaunted with fists flying and guns blazing. Actually, there is a famous round-robin story, “The Challenge From Beyond”, where Lovecraft brought the plot to a shuddering cliffhanger and Howard continued it, lustily and hilariously jettisoning Lovecraft’s psychic meltdown in favour of some raw, red-blooded action. (When you read it, just remember these guys were having fun with their public images, m’kay?)

But could a hero made of the sterner stuff that flowed from Bob Howard’s imagination face Elder Things with impunity? Or did Lovecraft intend that his monsters radiated some sort of frightful psionic effect that would drive even Conan mad? I found a debate about this online.
“A Lovecraftian monster is one in the style of H.P. Lovecraft's writing, which has a lot of vague depictions of unfathomable, indescribable, alien monsters. You would lose your sanity because that's what usually happens when you see one, like how looking at Medusa would turn you to stone.”

“I disagree. Medusa turns you to stone because of some kind of magic. Lovecraftian monsters do not inherently ‘cause insanity’, the loss of sanity is something that happens in our human minds because we can't comprehend them.”
Ah, now there we might be onto something. Except… can no one comprehend them? And the degree of unfathomability always drives a person mad? I can accept that a medieval crusader would find these critters freakishly scary, but what about a trained biologist? If you're accustomed to peering down a microscope at unearthly little boogers like dust mites and hydrothermal worms, would you still take one look at a fungus from Yuggoth and start screaming that such things cannot beeeee? Might there not be some scientists who would be more curious than scared? A commenter called ShakaUVM addresses this point:
“Lovecraft thought that people couldn't deal with the actual reality of the universe. As it turns out, though, people like Carl Sagan managed to [contemplate the reality of the universe and] keep their sanity intact. Ultimately, it's because Lovecraft believed in certain Victorian tropes, like people passing out when something became overwhelming – his heroes faint all the time – and that knowledge could drive people insane.”

“The kind of horror that Lovecraft writes about would come from the realization that there is no God, that the universe is vast, chaotic, undirected, and unthinking.”

“When we have pictures of our place on our world in an insignificant solar system in an insignificant galaxy, we don't go insane from the insignificance of it all. We can comprehend that and still want to wake up and go about our business every day.”


That chimes perfectly well with my own view of the universe. I don’t personally think there’s a God or that the universe has “meaning”, and that doesn’t bother me at all. Facing the realization that we are an insignificant speck in the universe – well, of course we are. Ten billion Earthlike planets in this galaxy, a couple of hundred billion galaxies at least, and the distinct possibility that our universe is a tiny local phenomenon in a possibly infinite metauniverse. “Yes, Z, you are insignificant.”

Anyway, I can’t quote the whole discussion here. Shoot over and take a look at it. I’ll wait…

OK, so the assertion of Call of Cthulhu is that there are some things so completely unthinkable that every single human being, if forced to confront them, would go insane. But maybe what we have here is an observer bias. As a writer, Lovecraft was especially interested in neurotic characters, and may have intended us to conclude that the people most readily drawn to Cthulhu cults and manifestations were psychically the most sensitive and fragile among us. His chosen genre was horror, his intent was to unsettle, his style – let’s be charitable and call it Poe turned up to eleven. His fiction is bound to portray a terrifying, unspeakable, mind-blasting universe the way Hallmark movies always present a saccharinely sentimental one.

Writers flavour the world they create in their stories. They don’t necessarily intend for us to take that as a template for how the universe works, because literature is never intended to be an undistorted reflection of reality. So in drawing inspiration from literature for our role-playing system, maybe we need to be wary of using the whole cloth of an author’s work. Making a universe that’s going to last a whole campaign requires a bigger box of tricks than a set of stories built around a single theme and authorial voice.

And yet... it's a fine line, isn't it? A Lovecraftian role-playing game in which none of the neuroses is baked into the rules mechanics would be effectively indistinguishable from any other 1930s RPG. Which in turn invites the question: does literary style have a place in role-playing? Is it right for the system to impose that kind of prescriptive story framework on the players, or should the themes of a campaign emerge in play from the interaction between the characters and the world? Over to you.

37 comments:

  1. I wouldn't want to play a game with *no* literary style, but not every game of Call of Cthulhu needs to have Lovecraft's literary style (and it baffles me how people purport to have played multi-year campaigns in anything approximating such a style).

    To be honest I'd say I've played more CoC games in the style of PG Wodehouse than in Lovecraft's, but then most of the gamers I've gamed with are quite silly.

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    1. I think there is a tendency (I'll be charitable and not call it cultural chauvinism) for 21st century people to think of the Victorian era and early 20th century as "joke" settings. That might be because a lot of literature of the time is comedic, from Jerome K Jerome to Wodehouse himself. I don't see it myself, but then I (a) read a lot of serious literature of the period and (b) am bored by send-ups.

      I'm interested by your point that you like a game to have some literary style. Other than CoC, I've never thought of literary style having *anything* to do with role-playing - but I'm willing to concede that could be a blind spot :-) Can you give some other examples?

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    2. I mean, even Dickens (the undisputed king of Victorian literature) gets pretty silly a lot of the time. I think a Victorian setting delights roleplayers because it can take everything from grisly horror to high camp in its stride without an eyelid being batted.

      On reflection perhaps "literary style" was the wrong phrase - I've never played e.g. a Nabokovian game, more's the pity. But my personal roleplaying bias is towards storytelling, be that cinematic, dramatic or literary. Given that roleplaying games tend not to be written down it's see them working cinematically than literarily, but nevertheless I don't see why, if everyone's read a lot of HP Lovecraft, a CoC game wouldn't or shouldn't take on Lovecraftian literary flavours; likewise Malory/Pendragon, Tolkien/MERP etc etc. Why wouldn't we want our games to resemble the works of art and culture that inspired them?

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    3. Right - well that's what interests me too, the storytelling. But then the question becomes: is it one person at the end of the table telling everybody else a story, or is it a narrative that emerges from what all the players do? If the latter, then (like life) it's not so likely to have a style as such - though it's not impossible. The lives of the Bloomsbury Group could be said to have had one style, quite different from the "world style" of the Heian court, say.

      >Why wouldn't want our games to resemble the works of art and culture that inspired them?

      That made me think of the LotR movies... and how, to my inexpert eye, they don't seem to resemble Tolkien's art and style in the slightest. But only a Middle-Earth fan could say if that's a good or bad thing ;-)

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  2. Would Steve Costigan be affected if he encountered something that gave off gamma radiation or sarin gas? I'm going with yes. It's pretty easy to accept physical effects to which no human is immune (direct hit from a bazooka, nuclear explosion, etc.). Given that, it seems reasonable that there are also mental/psychological effects to which no human is immune. It's not that Great Cthulhu is a big scary squid monster. It's that he's Wrong and inimical to our reality. He's mental sarin gas and he'll utterly kill your sanity through too much exposure.

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    1. I understand the analogy, but I'm not sure that gets us any further. *Is* there anything that is so "wrong" in human terms that it would drive absolutely anyone mad? In bosonic string theory, spacetime is 26-dimensional. Yet mathematicians don't (all) go mad.

      The human brain is an extremely adaptable organ. Some people, faced with something they cannot accept, simply shut down. Others find a new world model that allows them to keep going. The universe we live in is inside our heads, after all, and catatonic shock is not the only response to mental traumas that occur in real life. Yet in Lovecraft's stories, his characters not only react catastrophically to Cthuloid monsters, they react as though neurotic:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Neuroticism

      (A good reason for which is that Lovecraft, as a neurotic himself, was deliberately aiming to create neuroticism as part of his fictional milieu.)

      In any given literary style, it is legitimate to have only characters of one particular outlook. Conan as a character makes no sense in a Lovecraftian world, because he's not the sort to dissolve into shrieking madness. A Gary Cooper sheriff makes no sense in a Quentin Tarantino western. That's fine in fiction, but what about in roleplaying -- or should we just stipulate that every character in a Cthulhu campaign must have a high level of neuroticism? There's no room for any other response to mental trauma, even? That's why I can't see a Lovecraftian campaign lasting very long.

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  3. Could you see a "Walking Dead" post-apocalyptic campaign lasting for a while? Would there be a need for a character who is "really, really healthy and immune to the zombie plague?" Such characters would greatly reduce the fear and dread within such a campaign without the threat of "one bite and you're done."

    For me the point of Call of Cthulhu isn't playing girlish man-babies who suffer the vapors and faint at the sight of a tentacle. It's the idea that the more you learn and encounter the Mythos, the less of you remains intact. You don't learn the Cthulhu Mythos skill, you're colonized by it. It's a kind of mental cancer.

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    1. A virus, radiation or poison gas are objectively lethal. It's a category error to draw an analogy with fear, which is subjective. That's why I say that a role-playing game that says that people are killed by exposure to sarin is not "literary" in the same way as one that insists on scariness as an objective characteristic of certain creatures.

      Think of it this way. You're reading a novel in which aliens turn up. They shoot people with their energy weapons and they are vaporized. OK, so we can accept that as "realistic" - there are forms of energy that can jiggle the molecules of a human body apart. But now suppose the novel said the aliens told jokes that everybody on Earth finds hilarious. "What if you've got no sense of humour?" we'd ask. "What if you can't stand aliens and don't find anything they say amusing? What if your cat just died and you aren't in the mood to laugh?" We would understand that was a literary device on the part of the author. It's whimsy or it's magic realism; we aren't expected to believe it in the same way as we believe falling off a cliff will kill you. And there's the difference.

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    2. There's an RPG from the 90s called TORG that explores these ideas. The concept is that Earth has been invaded by multiple other dimension. Within the territories of those dimensions, reality works according to the conventions of those dimensions. The real secret behind the dimensions is that they're actually story-telling genres. Player characters going into those realities would be somewhat bound by their conventions, though there were things they could do to loose themselves from such strictures.

      So, in a TORG version of Lovecraftworld, characters from that reality would have some kind of Sanity stat (or something else reflecting the idea that exposure to the Mythos leads to madness). People from other realms could also suffer madness, but they would have the option to shield themselves (in ways that involve getting way further into the TORG rules than anyone cares to do right now).

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    3. That sounds a little meta for my tastes, John. By the same token, I'm left cold by those "storytelling" RPGs where players are invited to deploy Inciting Incidents and other tropes to authorially control a scene. In that case, why not just write a novel, methinks. But, different strokes and all that...

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    4. It's a fun setting for adventures. One of the realities is the Cyberpapacy. It's a cyberpunk setting controlled by a 14th century theocracy.

      A semi-typical adventure would be something like Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, James Bond and Batman have to stop Count Dracula and Darth Vader from stealing the One Ring from Frodo.

      You don't play actual literary characters but the character come from differing genres, including those from Earth. In this case Earth is probably closer to the Earth of Die Hard than to our own world.

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    5. Sounds like it certainly comes down on the side of self-awareness of genre and story tropes. I prefer my roleplaying done straight, so that the story is simply what the player-characters choose to do. That tongue-in-cheekness of a game like TORG gets my goat tbh!

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    6. That might be part of it, but a lot of is more like something from a time travel or Star Trek game. It's best to play along and use the tools of the reality until you get to critical points. Then you can break out the blaster or magic spells or pulp powers and use them to their full effect.

      Presumably you will place campaign limits on what the PCs choose to do. If I were playing a scientist-engineer in your Victorian campaign, you would probably balk if I said "I want my character to invent sarin gas 50-60 years ahead of schedule. What rolls do I need to make to do that?"

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    7. Of course, because you wouldn't be speaking there as the character. But when people are roleplaying properly, I find it doesn't even occur to them to use their knowledge as players. It's almost a kind of recreational split personality thing.

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    8. Perhaps a better example would be "Can I bring my GURPS Supers character into your campaign?" I'm making the assumption does not include powered superhumans whatever other supernatural effects (magic, psychic powers, spiritualism, etc) might exist. If I want to play a character in your Victorian campaign, I need to play one who is from and bound by the same rules as everyone else.

      When you play Call of Cthulhu, you enter a world where encountering the Mythos is as objectively bad for mental healthy as getting shot is bad for physical health. Even within that realm, you don't have to play a neurotic. Just make sure you have a high starting Power and thus a high Sanity. The sailor who rammed Cthulhu in the story probably had that.

      I also note that acquired mental difficulties isn't exactly unknown even in our world. Figure there's plenty of veterans that didn't want to end up "roleplaying" PTSD.

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    9. I wouldn't want you playing a Marvel-style superhero, but that's not baked into the rules. It just wouldn't make sense to have a 1960s character in the 1890s - unless your super power was time travel, of course. But if the campaign allows for the powers from Supers, they could presumably be applied to any setting. I have to point out that GURPS categorizes a lot of such abilities as Cinematic, implying that you must play them using the story tropes of the appropriate movie genre, but it's not impossible that you could disregard the tropes and just play them realistically. Compare Chronicle with Age of Ultron, say. The former throws out the tropes and just keeps the powers.

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    10. In terms of using and tossing tropes, one movie I think did that well was Cowboys and Alien. The starts as a western, introducing the outlaw with a conscience, the world-weary sheriff, the powerful cattle baron and his vicious son. The slowly starts pulling them in toward the climax and then aliens show up, grab people and start blowing the hell out of everything, forcing the story in a very different direction.

      I have a character that would be fun in Call of Cthulhu - an adventurous chef ala Andrew Zimmern who seeks out creatures of the Mythos in order to eat them.

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    11. Talking of westerns, Jamie recently recommended The Salvation, with Mads Mikkelsen. There's nothing there that's particularly original (vested interests, greed, revenge) but it's carried off with panache. In the best westerns (The Searchers, Warlock, Day of the Outlaw, etc) there's the sense that the patterns of behaviour everyone is scripted to follow stem from the culture rather than being merely par for the genre. But modern westerns are too self-aware for a distinction that fine.

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  4. I agree. Asuria Awakens has some Lovecraftian elements in it and I originally had a sanity stat to measure this, but I didn't like the effects as I would be taking control away from the player if they got less sane, making the gamebook less enjoyable, so I made a point of making the hero a hardened warrior who had faced similar creatures before. I have never throught that since most of Lovecraft's heroes (one sailor from Call of Cthulhu kept his wits about him enough to ram Cthulhu with a ship)went mad from seeing eldritch abominations, it was actually to dowith the heroes rather than the abomination, but it makes sense. The guy from Dagon had been marooned for ages. Randalph Carter was very fragile before his boss got killed and Herbert West's assistant was a bit fragile too. However, since all of these people go mad from Lovecraftian stuff, the game rules mean that anyone could. Lovecraft decided to focus on fragile people and the effect it had on them. It's like saying that everyone in Star Fleet is an officer because Star Trek focuses exclusively on the lives of officers. Lovecraft has selected a group for a particular characteristic and we have assumed that it applies to everyone in the world simply because it applied to everyone in Lovecraft's world. So now it's like the game system itself is railroading players to behave like a Lovecraftian hero which means that the game is likely to end with all characters going mad. Maybe referees feel that they have to use sanity draining creatures because of the sanity stat. In theory, you could use the Call of Cthulhu system to do a standard 1920s detective agency when the crime is completely mundane (that would keep the players guessing) and do that for several sessions or a whole campaign. After all, in Lovecraft's world, most people are completely oblivious to these monsters (indeed, that's what protects them). Maybe there are some clues here and there - a book, a diary, a quick glimpse of a fishy creature from a boat, but nothing earth shattering. Just because there's a stat for something doesn't mean it's got to be pivotal to the game. Fighters in DnD have a charisma score, but I bet they hardly use it. Torchwood pulled this trick in one episode, where the people going missing in Wales turned out to be due to a group of human cannibals. No aliens, no tech, just a mundane (if bizzare) human crime. I guess if people are using adventures from a limited amount of source material, they need to stop and think about whether this describes what goes on in the world or is it going to be the exceptions and then think about what degree they will include it. Just because Cthulhu exists, it does not mean that every adventure has to include it.

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    1. I'd forgotten about that Torchwood episode, Stuart. It's a good point. If you're an investigator in 1920s New England, how often are you going to come across Cthulhu cultists - assuming you don't deliberately go looking for them. In the end I gave up on B.P.R.D. because the Cthulhu stuff and the frog wars just got boring. If they'd mixed it up with some non-Lovecraftian adventures that wouldn't have happened. In the stories, Lovecraft's characters usually have a personal reason for getting involved in this stuff - frequently because it turns out they're "blood tainted" by Cthulhu critters in their family tree.

      Good point about the Charisma stat too. I hate having stats that force you to play a certain way. By which I mean, it's fine and right that the player acknowledges the stat's value and plays that way, but when the rules tell you to make a roll and go mad, I think: why not just role-play?

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    2. Well, sure you could do that. You could also strip out all the magic and unreal creatures from Dungeons and Dragons and play it as a mundane medieval campaign.

      Figure for private investigators, cops, etc. in a CoC world, the stuff that gets played out is the interesting stuff.

      Example1

      PCInv1: What do we have?
      NPCCop: The husband was drunk and stabbed the wife eight times with a butcher knife, broke down crying, called us and confessed that he did it because she was nagging him.

      Example2:
      PCInv: What do we have?
      NPCCop: We don't know. The neighbors reported flashing lights, screams and we found some weird symbol burned into the kitchen table, No blood or remains. Everyone supposedly living here is just gone without a trace.

      Which one would guys rather play through?

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    3. Me, I'd rather play the former. Ordinary people always make for more interesting stories than monsters do ;-)

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    4. Who says there's monster (in the nonhuman sense) in the second one? It could be something supernatural or a hoax or special effects or something else. The point is that there's a mystery. There's no mystery or conflict or really even story in the first scenario. The drunk dude killed his wife and confessed. That's it. The only suspense here might be will your character successfully make his Do Paperwork roll.

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    5. Mysteries are particularly interesting because roleplayers tend to assume that they should play out in the same way as a mystery movie or novel, an approach that can only lead to a force-to-fit solution. In fact a mystery in a roleplaying campaign is more naturally going to unfold along the same lines as real police work - which can be fun too, but it lacks the Chandleresque dramatic points people might be expecting. That's a topic worth covering in a future post.

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    6. I still prefer the first one. I had a rule to make my encounters as mundane as possible. If I want a combat, I would use a human with a knife rather than a magical creature or even an orc. Of course, if I wanted a magical creature, I would have a magical creature. This would keep the magic special. The first scenario could also be down to mind control magic. The way it's presented would mean that the players would not expect that, so it would be a good surprise. There is also mystery to this scenario too in a mundane way, such as the story that lead to his breakdown.

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    7. In fact, Sherlock Holmes highlights how the mundane can have mystery. In one book, he destroys Watson's misconceptions over a domestic abuse story in a paper (Watson assumes the husband was violent, but it turns out the wife was a nag)

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    8. An excellent point, Stuart. I'd forgotten that Holmes story, but I agree, I still prefer the first example. In my own games (including Dragon Warriors) even when there's magic in the mix, the real root of the trouble is almost always a human. People make for complex and interesting adversaries; monsters are just special effects.

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  5. Reminds me a little of Douglas Adam's Total Perspective Vortex.

    Alan Moore has some fascinating things to say about deciding to be a magician, and being mentally prepared for weird experiences:
    "The schizophrenic has had their window kicked in, the magician has got a body of law – probably most of it bollocks, it doesn’t matter. The magician’s got a system into which the alien information that will be pouring into him or her will be fitted. They’ve got a filing cabinet, like the Qabalah, which is a filing cabinet for ideas. It divides the whole universe up into ten drawers. Any experience can be passed into one of the drawers. The schizophrenic is probably having exactly the same experience as the magician but has no context in which to understand it. … The schizophrenics I have known, the most evident thing about it is the interconnectedness of everything. That’s standard lunacy, it’s also standard magic. But with one of them, it is uncontrollable, you are lost in a world in which everything is obviously connected by symbolic threads. That is what the magician is seeking, to see these threads that connect things up. If you’ve got a system – even if it’s a completely made-up bogus system – then you’ve at least got a filing cabinet to sort this stuff into, you don’t have to get crushed under it."

    Full interview: http://www.harrybravado.com/articles/alan-moore-interview/

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    1. A great quote there from the ever-reliable Mr Moore. Thanks for drawing that to our attention, Jon. It's the point I was trying to make - CoC campaigns assume everybody is like the schizophrenic, but what if you're in fact the magician? Then you have a mental model that accommodates the "unknowable". In our campaign, I just decided that my character doesn't believe any of it. His mental model is that the entire campaign is in his imagination... which is a bit meta, come to think.

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  6. I always felt that Lovecraft, King in Yellow etc. and a lot of Poe's writings concern automatic insanity because they are by their nature metaphors for catastrophic mental breakdown/illness and the images and emotions associated with them.Therefore they are direct attempts to describe these situations. Therefore they were never really meant as role playing games involving Arnie-types or Aliens-type marine characters, although there's no reason that writers inspired by their works shouldn't mash up the characters and styles in this way, if that's their cup of tea, or ectoplasm.

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    1. Ate, well there's the rub. Call of Cthulhu imposes sanity rules as a kind of metastory measure, in order to force events in the campaign to follow the same kind of literary style as Lovecraft's work. Personally I prefer a set of rules simply to evoke the mechanics of the world - its physics, so to speak - and leave the story to emerge from what the players choose to do. But these authorial rule systems are in vogue among designers who've read Robert McKee and Joseph Campbell and who see roleplaying as a storytelling exercise rather than a story creating exercise.

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    2. That was supposed to be aye, not ate, but my autocorrect stuck its irritating fingers in!

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  7. I see your point, it's a balance between whether the story guides the players or vice versa, as it is in all rpgs, and we get the best of out of both when there's a healthy bit of give and take.

    But I'm not sure what a strong character in these stories by HPL, Poe or the others would do..either dispel or destroy any baddies out of hand as I guess as they cannot exist in the real world at all...the breakdown or lapse in reality (or breach) seems to depend on the willingness of a weak or weakened character believing in and succumbing to them. I.e. I think a lot of Lovecraft is illusory or only half-physical, and is related that way in the text, so it shouldn't really exist as a purely physical or mechanical concept. So all this should depend on the main character's state of mind I think. I've not played CoC before but I doubt they account for this?

    Sorry seems a bit rum me ranting on about this when I've not even played the game, but I have read a few of the stories and that's how I interpret their gist I guess.

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  8. Or to put it another way, mythos creatures can only exist if the protagonists are bonkers,or are in the process of going so.

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  9. Well, that's what the post is asking -- but each person has their own answer, it seems :-)

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  10. Not to directly contradict Mr Morgan, but actually Lovecraft is notable for the solidity of his threats. There are very few creatures which could be described as spirits, and most of those are out of phase rather than actually insubstantial. Almost all his threats are real and physical.

    Also, not all his heroes go nuts. The Dunwich Horror is notable for ending with a group of people who research the threat, prepare a plan and execute it, resolving the problem. They don't exactly enjoy the experience, but they don't go mad either. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is similar: Twice in fact as the flashback scene ends that way as well. In fact, the Chaosium SAN system is far harsher than Lovecraft was

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    1. Thanks, Alistair, as you've prodded my memory there. I have read all of Lovecraft's work (except for Dream Quest) but it was so long ago that I'd allowed CoC's take on his work to overwrite the genuine article. You're right, he was writing science fiction rather than fantasy, and as such was trying to create a universe that credibly had such creatures in it - and with a credible range of human reactions to those creatures.

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