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.

The mirror crack’d

And moving thro' a mirror clear 
That hangs before her all the year, 
Shadows of the world appear…

Hang on, I’m about to completely lay waste to Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” in an act of shameless cultural vandalism. If you haven’t read the poem, I implore you to do so now before looking at the rest of this post. That way at least you’ll have encountered it first as Tennyson intended. There are two versions, but for my money the 1842 text is better.

All right, warnings duly issued, here we go. I was introduced to the poem in an English lesson in my second year at grammar school. My interpretation of what was going on portrayed the Lady as a visitor from another world whose ship had malfunctioned, stranding her on Earth. Seeing Sir Lancelot on her ship’s scanner, she identified his shield as containing some mineral or gem needed to repair the ship, but she could not tolerate exposure to Earth’s atmosphere and died before she could reach him.

I’d pity the English master I inflicted that science fictional analysis on (to the great amusement of the rest of the form) except that he later put me in detention for writing an essay that he deemed obscene. So, you know, screw him. Although come to think of it I suppose that does give me a kind of honorary membership of the oppressed artists’ club, a taste of the crushing fascist jackboot that wants to stamp on every freethinking writer’s face. Hmm. A useful lesson after all, then. Mind you, I’d still be tempted to do what De Milletail does to De Blayac in Ridicule.

Festering schoolroom resentments aside, it struck me that you could turn that interpretation of “The Lady of Shalott” into a fun little roleplaying scenario for a game like Pendragon. If you want to end it in a big fight, she could be a shapechanger or even a (lady) dragon, rather like Al Williamson’s classic EC Comics story “By George”.

Twists-in-the-tail like that are a bit passé, though – and hard anyway to get the twist across to the players. Having lopped off the dragon’s head, how are they to know it was a stranded space-traveller who only wanted to fix a broken fluid link? And if they do find that out, why wouldn’t they just hand it over to her?

Well, they could do that, and thus it's all wrapped up as an uplifting interlude, but my view is that the scenario needs conflict. How about if the item she needs to repair her vessel is Excalibur itself? That’s not getting handed over without a struggle. And to make it more interesting than a head-to-head fight, how about those “webs” she’s said to weave:

But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights

Are those artificial constructs based on the people she sees in the scanner? “I am half-sick of shadows” – surely the lament of somebody who’s spent too much time playing on the holodeck. But she could use that web-weaving ability to create a simulacrum of one of the characters – or of Arthur, or Guinivere – to try to trick them into handing over the item she needs. Or she could be attended by a doppelganger of a knight known to the characters, either to establish her credentials or to trigger a feud with the real knight as a distraction.

The other question is: where is Shalott? Or at any rate, where is the lady/alien/visitor from? In my English class I was envisaging another planet. But maybe she's a time traveller? (That image above by William Holman Hunt strikes me as having quite a steampunk vibe.) Or might she be a Cthulhoid creature? An X-Men style mutant? A phantasmal shadow-version of Morgan le Fay? Over to you.