Monkey gland madness

Listening to the Cautionary Tales episode “Dr Brinkley’s Miracle Cure for Impotence”, I thought of a Cthulhu RPG scenario in which a quack doctor in 1920s America is treating impotence by transplanting glands that turn out to be from Deep Ones – or some other nonhuman species. 

OK, that could make for a scary adventure, albeit with a strain of body horror perhaps a bit too reminiscent of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". There's only one problem with it. By setting the story in the 1920s, the whole idea becomes -- well, kind of quaint, right? It loses the immediacy that could make it genuinely unsettling.

Now suppose we set it instead in the present day. The same therapy is being promoted by a Goop-like company in 2025. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do not mean to imply that Goop actually uses alien glands in their products.) Now it’s much scarier. We live at a time when the US administration has been telling citizens that the best counter to a measles epidemic is not the measles vaccine but large doses of vitamin A, and medical researchers have been told to avoid mentioning mRNA in their grant applications if they want federal funding. So gland transplant nuttiness is not only more uncompromisingly horrific in a modern context, it’s also starkly credible.

This is why Paweł Dziemski and I chose not to set our upcoming Cthulhu gamebook in the traditional Depression-era milieu but instead in a near future in which history has taken some very dark turns. We don't want readers to have the get-out clause of imagining it all in a hokey playacting past. This is horror you're going to have to face without a comfort blanket. More on that project to come, so stay tuned.