OSSR: Call of Cthulhu (5.6)

[silva]

Please stop engaging the well-established liar and troll.

Liar ? Troll ? All Im doing is showing relevant facts. If you cant deal with opinions distinct from your own, you shouldnt engage in discussions.

And as is always the case with these reviews, if you ignore Frank nonsense it gets pretty good and relevant. Ancient is such an awesome reviewer.

[Ancient History]

Fuck off, silva.

[ScottS]

focusing only on the titular "AK" model, the current AK-105 is made of entirely different materials, is 3lbs lighter, fires different ammunition, has a folding stock, and has attachment rails and a flash hider

WHY YOU WANT RAIL FOR KALASHNIKOV? IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH AS PROCURED FROM IZHEVSK MECHANICAL WORKS?

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I look forward to your thoughts, AH, in this review of In Rerum Supernatura, as a possible segue into the general field of "Mythos scholarship".

[kzt]

WHY YOU WANT RAIL FOR KALASHNIKOV? IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH AS PROCURED FROM IZHEVSK MECHANICAL WORKS?

Give me a break. Everyone knows that Tula is where the best AKs were made.

[kzt]

The original creator of the game bargained away the entire social contract of cooperative storytelling to get one cheap scare, and he probably thought that was awesome. If he had a golden goose, the knife would already be in his hand, and he wouldn't even understand why he was poorer later.

Pretty much. Sandy wrote CoC as a very deadly game in which the players got killed or went insane on a regular basis, and that's how he really wanted it. Now that isn't how lots of people played it, including me - I don't think I've ever played in any game like this, but you and AH are not wrong to see the game as almost as unbalanced as paranoia.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Sandy Peterson and what he did in CoC and in Glorantha. I ran some RQ3 games for him at GenCon back in the day, before he caught the boeing and paid off his mortgage with his first profit sharing check from ID Software. But I'm glad I never played in a CoC game he ran.

[Ancient History]

I can do that.

Game Systems
Sanity and Insanity


It was that or Ricky Martin.

Musical selection: Darkest Of the Hillside Thickets - Innsmouth Look

AncientH:

Sanity rules are one of the hallmarks of the Call of Cthulhu game, because before this madness was basically done by the permanent effects of the confusion spell and after this it was all SAN loss or fishmalking. Or, if you were unlucky, both.

And I'm not just talking out of my ass here. According to Sandy Petersen:

SANITY
The central driving mechanic of Call of Cthulhu is Sanity. This stat starts pretty high, then deteriorates over time. Though there are methods of raising it, usually you can tell how long you’ve been playing a particular investigator by how low it’s dropped. Lots of folks have told me how ingenious and revolutionary this concept was, and I’ve seen it adapted to many other games under many different names.

As such I’d like to take full credit for inventing it. But I can’t, alas. The original concept was published in an article for the Sorcerer’s Apprentice magazine, where the authors (whose names are published in other interviews of mine) suggested that the player be given a Willpower stat or some such thing, and if he saw something too scary, he could take a Willpower check, and a bad enough failure could reduce it permanently. Reduce it permanently?! This was what I hung my hat on. I took the fundamental idea, called it Sanity, made it the focus of the game, and instead of, on rare occasions, lowering this stat, I had almost every encounter and event reduce one’s Sanity, till player-characters could become gibbering wrecks, or even turn into GM-controlled monsters.

It worked like a charm. In the very first game I ever ran of Call of Cthulhu (long before the rules were finished), my players found a book which enabled them to summon up a Foul Thing From Otherwhere (a dimensional shambler) and decided to do so. At the moment they completed the spell, the players suddenly chimed in with comments like "I’m covering my eyes." "Turning my back." "Shielding my view so I don’t see the monster." I had never seen this kind of activity in an RPG before - trying NOT to see the monster? What a concept. You may not credit it, but I had actually not realized that the Sanity stat, as I had written it, would lead to such behavior. To me it was serendipitous; emergent play. But I loved it. The players were actually acting like Lovecraft heroes instead of the mighty-thewed barbarian lunks of D&D.

I knew I was on to something and kept refining the Sanity mechanic, in conjunction with the people at Chaosium, until it reached its current state. One big change was that I had concluded that Sanity should only diminish, and never increase, and the folks at Chaosium thought that was too negative even for a game about Cthulhu. They were right, I feel. And after all, Sanity still trends downwards, so I got my way in the end. If anything it’s more agonizing for the players this way, because they are fooled into thinking they can work their Sanity back up. Ha ha.

Left: Sandy Petersen. Right: Bronze bust of H. P. Lovecraft. Yes, I paid money to the kickstarter. No, it probably wasn't worth it.

FrankT:

The Sanity rules get 11 pages in the book, and despite their primacy to the game, there are few Call of Cthulhu fans who won't admit that these are a flaming piece of dogshit.

Usually when you call attention to a rules problem in Call of Cthulhu to a fan, they will respond either confrontationally or avoidantly. If you talk about the weapon specialist scenarios that the game so blatantly encourages, you will bluntly be told that you are “doing it wrong.” If you want to talk about how painful and silly the “impale” rules are, you're going to get more of a shell game. The rules talk alternately about “impale” being literally a thing that only happens in combat when people are poked with pointy objects, and as a set of source code that your keeper is supposed to recompile in order to make spot rules for extraordinary success with other skill rolls. And of course, the impale rules can simply be ignored entirely. So you're up against some pretty serious denial-in-depth if you want to talk about the impale function, with fans having two entirely different versions to retreat to if you start complaining about any one of the three possibilities.



But the sanity rules aren't like that. They actually say what they mean, they are extremely important to the game's concept, and they work as well a lockpick made of dried rat jizz. This is the part of Call of Cthulhu which gets most radically revamped in peoples' homebrew systems. In Unknown Armies, they have separate trauma tracks. In Delta Green, they “customize” it to “reflect a somewhat more sophisticated understanding of trauma and post-traumatic stress” and so on and so forth. While a bog standard set of Call of Cthulhu houserules like Unknown Armies calls its job finished by just twiddling slightly with the auto-succeed, roll dice, auto-fail trichotomy that defines a Call of Cthulhu action – everyone knows and admits that the sanity rules need a lot more work.

AncientH:

Basically, Sanity represents a sort of mental hitpoint system, with the idea that the longer you play, the closer you get to losing it all. In the long run it's a zero sum game, sort of like how the early Spawn comics were.

There are...to put it mildly...issues with this approach. From a verisimilitude angle, people just don't work that way. Well, except in Hollywood. From a gameplay perspective, Sanity points are sort of treated like a resource - and as any Magic: the Gathering player that has mastered Necrodisk will tell you, sometimes it's worth it to cast from hitpoints. Most players don't get to the point of actually gaming the system, however; they just take the long slow trudge toward One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.


If you thought Cthulhu was bad, in the 1890s they still thought five enemas a day would help cure your fear of pineapples.

FrankT:

Insanity always works the same way in Call of Cthulhu: a downward spiral of a series of small hits to your sanity followed by a rapid chain of large hits to your sanity and leaving you a gibbering lunatic or driving you to suicide. The shocks themselves aren't necessarily “bigger” in the decline stage, but the lower your sanity goes the higher a chance each subsequent shock will dish out the big insanity losses. Described like that, it could be said to be a broad outline of the descent into madness in some Mythos fiction. But first of all, the thing that actually breaks you is generally supposed to be the “big reveal” in such stories, rather than just seeing another zombie or something, but now your sanity is on edge and you tend to fail your sanity checks causing such things to take a bigger bite out of your smaller brain cookie. And second of all, a lot of stories where the protagonist falls into despair actually only have one big reveal or one horrible trauma – and that's exactly the sort of thing that isn't going to do dick diddly to you in this system (since you're probably going to make your san check if you're playing with a full deck). Arthur Jermyn would probably just figure it out, make his san check, lose a d6 of San, get it back for solving the mystery, and move the fuck on with his life.

So even when it's “working correctly” it does a pretty bad job of genre emulation. Which is a big problem, because it's the primary mechanic. And it's very importantly a part of the system that the players have relatively little control over. You obviously aren't “doing it wrong” when you're making sanity checks, so there isn't a lot of ways for people to apologize for this shit. And of course, what few ways there are to proactively interact with these rules create some pretty shitty incentives.


Reading books is dangerous, so a lot of veteran gamers simply don't do it.

You get nailed in your sanity for seeing things. Which is something that should come up fairly frequently as an investigator. But that creates solid incentives to simply not investigate. Many veteran players simply burn diaries and dynamite temples rather than risk actually seeing the grisly contents. That's so out of genre that it's hard to even describe – but that is the kind of bullshit the mechanics actually incentivize.

AncientH:

For anybody that's never seen it before, here's the skinny. You're starting SAN = POW x 5, capped at 99. Your max sanity is equal to 99 - your Cthulhu Mythos skill. If you encounter something scary or which shakes your belief in the universe or read Mythos tomes, the Keeper has you make a Sanity check - roll d100 and try to get under your current SAN rating. Sanity checks are written like "0/1d2" (surprised to find a mangled animal carcass) or "2/2d10+1" (surprised to see a giant severed head fall from the sky - these are actual examples listed in the book, by the way). If you pass the Sanity check - that is, roll under - you subtract the sanity points to left of the slash from your current sanity. If you fail (roll over), you subtract the number to the right of the slash.

Less sanity you have, easier it is to fail (unlike Unknown Armies). However, the initial shock hardens you against repeated exposure...for a while. So like, if you see Cthulhu (1d10/1d100), and then you run around the corner, and you peek around it and Cthulhu is still there, you don't roll enough Sanity check. This keeps people from losing their shit every time they see a Deep One when raiding Innsmouth.


"Game over, man!"

If you lose 5 or more SAN to a single roll, you have to make an Idea roll. We sort of skipped over that because it's boring, but basically that's a roll-under against your INT x 5. If you fail, you repress the memories like you were molested by Satanists by your parents; if you pass you go temporarily insane, and roll on the Temporary Insanity Table, with maybe a lasting psychological disorder or phobia for your troubles.

(The first time you suffer Mythos-induced insanity you gain 5 percentiles in CM, so most PCs start off the end of their first adventure with a max SAN of 99 - 05 = 94).

If you lose 20% or more of your current Sanity in a game hour, you go indefinitely insane.


Look, it was this or Wicker Man.

At zero SAN, you go permanently insane and your character is force-retired. Thanks for playing.

FrankT:

Too soon?

In addition to the downward spiral of “sanity hit points,” there are also temporary insanities. These include things like fainting, which the book continually reminds us is a thing that happens to people in genre fiction quite a lot. Fainting is super useful, because it means that you can stop writing dialog when a character has nothing more to say in a scene or fade the whole scene to black and jump ahead in the story. It was also a lot more socially acceptable in the 1920s and 1890s, a period where coincidentally people got a lot less protein and iron in their diet and were physically more susceptible to such things.

But the basic problem here is that the list they have of potential temporary insanities is pretty much horse crap on a stick, and the basic rule is that you roll a ten sided die and get a temporary insanity that doesn't make a lot of sense in any circumstance and in your specific circumstance probably makes even less. We're talking about going from “you rolled poorly after seeing your friend's violent death” to “your character has an erection that lasts for three days.” Seriously. That's actually a possible result. We're not rolling on a huge chart, that's not even unlikely.



Your other option is to “work it out yourselves.” For which, um... good luck? There isn't really a good model of craziness to be had here, and the player and keeper are just supposed to come up with “something” if they
don't want to roll on the stupid chart. And since the chart is stupid, you don't want to roll on it.

AncientH:

The thing about any Call of Cthulhu game is that you're likely to have at least one PC pick up some psychological hangup per session, and so there's this section on how to play the insane. It basically reads like an introductory manual to White Wolf products. There are also ways to regain Sanity - psychotherapy, medication, Keeper awards for achieving scenario goals (since XP is out of the question), increasing a skill to 90%, increasing POW - actually, I'm not sure how that's supposed to work at all, since your current SAN can totally be lower than your POW x 5, and Max SAN is supposed to be capped by Cthulhu Mythos rating, so...I honestly have no fucking clue how that's supposed to work.

A big chunk of this is cribbed from an earlier book called Taint of Madness, also from Chaosium.


Fuck it.

FrankT:

Taint of Madness was a 122 page book from 1995 that had expanded insanity rules in it. Also a bunch of wikifacts about psychiatry and the history of mental illness and its treatment. A bunch of the stuff from that book is copypastaed into this book. Even in its original context it wasn't really “medical” enough to be realistic, wasn't really “playable” enough to make for a good game, didn't have the incentives pointed the correct directions to encourage the “right” kind of player behaviors, and wasn't really “genre appropriate” enough to simulate the source material stories. It was kind of more like a book report on a book about the history of psychiatry. The abbreviated materials that made it back into the core book are like a book report of a book report of a book about the history of psychiatry.

So there's a timeline which tells you that malarial fever therapy for syphilitic psychosis was introduced in 1917, but there's absolutely no indication of what that means or why that's important. By the way, what it means is that syphilis is caused by a spirochete, which in later stages invades your nervous system and makes you go crazy. Since it's a foreign organism, raising the patient's temperature to near lethal levels destroys a lot of the spirochetes and reduces symptoms of the disease. Why it's important is that this cemented the idea of insanity as “mental illness” rather than “personal failure” or “demonic possession,” by proving that insanity was caused by and could be treated as a purely biological phenomenon.

It's a fascinating part of psychiatry as medicine and even though we don't actually infect syphilis patients with malaria anymore (turns out that regular antibiotics are much more effective and you don't get malaria out of the deal), it was an invaluable breakthrough in finding biological causes for mental disorders. But here's the thing: this game is basically zero percent about psychiatric problem with biological origin and almost 100% about post traumatic stress. Post traumatic stress was of course poorly defined in the 1980s in light of research on Vietnam era soldiers. In the 1920s, the condition was even worse understood and was called “shell shock,” a term I haven't even found in this book. Fucking fuck.

AncientH:

Most players treat temporary insanity and its treatment as a sort of extended vacation for the character; they activate their back-up while Professor Snider is off at the Looney Bin trying to convince the nurses that their socialized medicine covers sex therapy. That's if your lucky enough to get Private Care or Institutionalization. Option three is that you're wandering around homeless, and roll a d100 every game month with a five percent chance of dying.



Example of Play

When people talk about Call of Cthulhu, they try to paint it like this. And if you're lucky, it is. But most of the time it is not.

FrankT:

The example of play is two pages long, and has a keeper and four players. It skips a lot of dialog and mechanics, is annotated unevenly, and doesn't go anywhere. It's almost like a parody of an example of play. I genuinely don't know what they were going for here. The most annoying part of this writeup is that the keeper tells the players when they can put a check next to their skills so that they can check for skill ups later on. Holy crap, does it really expect the keeper to keep track of which skills each individual player has successfully used during the game? Fuck that.

AncientH:

Yeah, actually it does. Because it is about the only way those player characters will ever improve.

Magic

A lot of people want to play sorcerers in supernatural horror games. This game really really doesn't want you to do that.

AncientH:

Besides Sanity, Magic is the other big system for the game. At the time, this was nothing even remotely like anything else that existed - it wasn't Vancian magic, there were no spell levels, no magic-user classes. In Lovecraftian fiction, odds are that you can cast a spell by accidentally reading it aloud from a musty tome as much as being an ancient and immortal sorcerer, and most CoC games tend to reflect the former a lot more readily than the latter. So while PCs want to be spell-slinging, Mythos-bustin' wizards, in practice that pretty much only happens when the players get off their ass and write their own rules for that.


The Collect Call of Cthulhu. Yes, this was an actual Ghostbusters episode.

The thing about Lovecraftian magic though is that it is evocative. It was evocative back in the 1930s, when real-world occultists would write Lovecraft letters and try to get the skinny on his lore. In D&D you have spellbooks, but in Call of Cthulhu you have stuff like the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon, Unaussprichlechen Kulten and the Cthäat Aquadingen. Entire works of fiction and academic articles have been written on those books, and the lore and the spells they contain. Hell, they're so popular there's a shitload of them that people have made in real life - and I should know, because I own quite a few.

For all that, though, the mechanics of tomes themselves...don't really reflect the contents. If you read and study the books, you make your Sanity checks and gain a few Cthulhu Mythos percentiles, maybe learn a spell or two. Mythos spells themselves are a bit of a clusterfuck.

FrankT:

At 13 pages, the Magic chapter is about as long as the Combat chapter would have been if the author wasn't hipsterishly pretending that the game was too grim and hopeless to have a Combat chapter. Much of that is taken up with lists of books. There is an “Examples of Occult Books,” and then a “Major Books of the Mythos I,” and finally a “Major Books of the Mythos II.” Those three lists take up five whole pages, and then there are two half-page lists called “More Mythos Tomes I” and “More Mythos Tomes II.” So all told, that's 6 pages that are just listed of books. Not a bad resource, but also not directly related to the magic system per se.


So... if I get one of these, can I do magic? No? What the fuck is wrong with this game?

Tomes of Mythos Lore are not generally books of spells. They are books of Mythos Lore, which is that skill that does funky accounting with your sanity. Once you've spent some sanity and had your mythos lore go up (costing permanent sanity cap), you get to find out if there are any spells in it. At that point, the keeper is obliged to troll you by coming up with bullshit names for the spells that confuse the issue. And then finally, actually learning the spell takes 2D6 game weeks, which means that by the time you've learned how to banish the monster in the current adventure, it's too fucking late and the adventure already ended for good or ill like a month and a half ago.

AncientH:

...which is another reason why Keepers and players tend to bend the rules. Hell, most scenarios straight-up tell you that you only have a couple days to read a book, and give you a flat 50% chance to find some relevant spell (which you don't learn, but you can read it straight from the tome). Most PCs just skim the book to figure out what it's on and if there are any spells in it (with, hopefully, less SAN loss).

Anyway, here's a typical book writeup:

MALLEUS MALEFICARUM - in Latin, by Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramertrans, 1486 A.D., then many trans. The 'Hammer of Witches.' A guide for Inquisitors of the Middle Ages on the identification and torture of witches. This terrible book sent an estimated nine million people to their deaths. The German translation of 1906 has the excellent title Der Hexenhammer. No Sanity loss, unless combined with Mythos lore; Occult +3 percentiles; no spells.

This is an example of an "occult book," which gives your percentiles in Occult. You'd think that would mean you'd have Engineering books that give you percentiles in Engineering, but you would be wrong. Anyway, the major difference between this format and earlier editions is that it says "No spells" or includes a list of spells - earlier editions had something called a "Spell Multiplier" where you rolled to see if there were any spells in the book like it was a oD&D treasure type.

There's a lot of fun to be had with the concept of Mythos tomes and occult books; most Mythos fans have at least a vein of the bibliophile in them, and it's fun to read up on antiquarian lore - fuck, there's an entire setting called Bookhounds of London where you play as owners of a fucking bookstore. Part of the appeal of the game is all the lore loaded into these forbidden books.

Magic is inherently flexible (anyone can learn it, there's no mucking about with levels or learning one spell before another, you can cast it whenever you have the necessities together for it, etc.), but is completely unbalanced and is designed to be a pain in the ass to learn and use. Basically, everybody has Magic points based on their POW. Spells can be learned from tomes, or Mythos entities. Learning spells doesn't cost SAN (although the circumstances around it might). Casting spells tends to cost SAN, and often Magic points. Non-Mythos magic also exists, is supposed to be weak, and is often effectively just portrayed as weaker forms of Mythos magic that cost more Magic points or less SAN.

You would think you'd need a Cthulhu Mythos skill to cast spells but...not actually. Your character just does what it says in the spell description.

FrankT:

NPC sorcerers are, of course, better than you. For one thing, they get to keep fucking around doing shit after having gone insane without going catatonic or killing themselves or anything. For another thing, they have a bunch more POW than you will ever have, because go fuck yourself. There's actually a half-page sidebar of various optional rules the keeper can claim to be using to explain why NPC sorcerers are so much better than you. That sounds like I'm caustically making fun of the book, but that's seriously what it says.

Where did it come from? The following ideas are mostly intended to rationalize non-player characters.

Really, you just want to be a sorcerer, because there are like four ways to interact with the mythos in the original source material and that's one of them. Also because it is by far the most interesting way to interact with magic. But it's NPC only, because go fuck yourself. Honestly, I have never had my character cast a spell in any edition of Call of Cthulhu. The extremely long spell learning times and prohibitive sanity entrance fees kept it from ever being an option. I tried to learn a spell once, and spent a shit tonne of time and failed. Fuck this game.

AncientH:

We're technically outside of the magic system, even though we haven't actually gotten to the spell descriptions or artifacts or any of that. I just checked the 6th edition book, and even though they updated the font and layout to look like a 2000s-era WoD book, it's still got pretty much exactly the same material in exactly the same order.


So we'll get to this later.

I kind of want to emphasize that this is really one of the major selling points of the game - the Mythos books and the lore behind them are often as compelling as Cthulhu or any of the other horrors - and there are entire game products devoted to, basically, making more tomes, and using tomes in your game. And this was long before Ed Greenwood was doing Pages from the Mages, or Earthdawn cribbed the idea for their own grimoires.

Seriously, the limited edition of Bookhounds was mailed to you in what was supposed to look like a WWI carrier bag.

Shadowrun could have gone this distinctive-grimoire route, but chose to go more meta and abstract instead; it was a bold choice, and it served them well...and which hits on a sort of grey area. What happens if you copy a Necronomicon? If it's the 90s, you could be sharing the shit around usenet. In the 80s, you could have photocopied editions at every college library. Even in the 1920s or 30s there were the possibility of photographic plates, or just straight up reprinting it. Handpresses are possible all the way back to the Dark Ages. A couple products touch on the subject, but the normal approach to this issue of the promulgation of Sanity-draining lore in CoC is...pretty much to ignore it, or claim that the books are so rare it would never happen.

Anyway, next section is the Cthulhu Mythos, and we'll get to Neb's request.

[Ancient History]

Reference
The Cthulhu Mythos

For now, you can listen to Slovakian Lovecraft-inspired black metal band Azathoth.


The “Reference” chapter is the longest in the book, and also in no particular order.

FrankT:

Clocking in at 124 pages, the Reference chapter is nearly half the book all by itself. Parts of it are in character, parts out of character. It includes some rules and systems (that possibly should have been included with the chapter nominally about that), some discussions of canon and fanon, and some other stuff. It doesn't hold together even in concept as a chapter. Organization of this book is a fucking mess. You'd think that the spellcasting rules would be in the “Magic” section of the “Rules” chapter while the lists of rare book names used in source fiction would be in the “References,” and you'd be wrong about that. That sensible organization scheme is literally the opposite of what is delivered.

There are a lot of ways to organize an RPG book. Ultimately, it's a reference book for a game, so putting information where the users expect it to be is more important than putting things in an order that makes sense on first reading. But the organizational scheme of this book is just fucking wrong. It's not that there are a few things that are in a puzzling location or some related concepts are repeated or split up unnecessarily, it's that fucking everything is an organizational clusterfuck. It's like every rule and piece of fluff text was simply written down in the order the author thought of it and you're reading it in first-in-first-out format. It really feels like you're flipping through some guy's circa 1986 three-ring-binder of Call of Cthulhu essays rather than a published product.


People used to put their gaming notes into these things.

Anyway, the Reference chapter begins with a five page section on the Cthulhu Mythos, which attempts to create a unified timeline and hierarchy of gods and aliens. This is nowhere near enough space to mindcaulk all this shit together. Not only do we have multiple authors writing, but not all of the books were originally intended to play nicely together in the first place. Plus, some of the source material is urban fantasy while other material is science fiction horror. So while the Fungi From Yuggoth are pulling all their “supernatural” stunts with science fictionish goodness, the Lamia are just sorcerous negresses. Reconciling those two branches of Lovecraftian horror would probably be a lot of work, which might be why this book doesn't bother trying.


Many monsters from the Mythos are better in written form, where their incompatible traits form nightmarish images in your mind than they are drawn on paper, where they just of look clumsy and hodge podge.

AncientH:

Here's the thing about the Cthulhu Mythos: the great appeal of the stories are the little connections and interactions that build up between different pieces, slowly revealing more and more of the universe. It's not that people didn't understand the idea of authors with distinct settings back in the 20s and 30s - fuck, Baum had Oz, and Burroughs had Tarzan and Pellucidar and Mars - but if you used Pellucidar in one of your stories then Burroughs would sue you, while in Weird Tales you'd have two or three different authors whose stories might include mentions of Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, or the Necronomicon. It got to the point that readers actively thought that this was some common if obscure set of myths and that the Necronomicon really existed, because the idea that authors would share their creations was just not on the fucking map yet.

And fans being fans...well, we like tracing down connections and pride ourselves on obscure lore. True of comic books, true of religion, pretty much everything. It's right up there with writing fanfic...which, of course, is what happened next. But you have to remember that this was before the internet, back when business was still largely done by mail, and missing one issue of Weird Tales meant you'd never see the contents of that issue ever. So fans talked seriously about timelines and chronologies and connections, looking at how this factoid could fit in with that one, connecting up the family trees of different Mythos entities into a great, sprawling mess, which they then gleefully added to. And that's all shit that took place before Call of Cthulhu the Roleplaying Game came out. That was before the tremendous explosion in Mythos fiction.

This doesn't even scratch the surface.

And by luck, CoC was right in the middle of it - largely because of the Call of Cthulhu Fiction line, which was a (very) well received series of anthologies collecting and reprinting often-obscure works by Lovecraft and others which essentially became the canon. That's not even touching on its tremendous influence in Japan or anything. So with this chapter, you have to remember, was never going to be exhaustive - there's just too much. There was too much in 1981, there was way too much in 1999. This was just to give people a taste of the fan-madness, and I think if it accomplishes it then they probably figured they'd succeeded. But yeah, it's a completely random mishmash of mini-essays, trying to give some sort of shape to the whole Mythos, just so that the players and Keepers and writers have something to work with.



I'm not even gonna try to summarize this here. There's Elder Gods, Outer Gods, Other Gods, Great Old Ones, Elder Things, the Fungi from Yuggoth, the Great Race, witch-cults, etc. The language that this game specifically introduced is servitor race and independent race, often given in "lesser" or "greater" varieties, which denote an alien/supernatural species which serves a particular Mythos entity or entities or...doesn't. Think of it like Romania and Switzerland in WWII, if that helps.

FrankT:

The end of the mythos summary is a rant about how the author left some stuff out. He specifically calls out some stuff that he things is super dumb, like characters being able to actually do things or Cthulhu being associated with water. It's... a pretty weird rant actually. I understand that people have straight up made contradictory declarations about how the Cthulhu Mythos is or ought to be, but this reads like someone taking their ball and going home in diary format.


That'll show 'em!

The supposed reason it doesn't make sense for Cthulhu to be associated with water is that he spends his time when the stars are not right and he cannot live under the sea. I read and reread that objection several times, and it still doesn't make any sense to me.

AncientH:

It's a big kerfluffle that still rankles some feathers even though all the parties involved are dead (mostly), but I'll give you the short version. For the slightly longer version look here: Black Seas of Copyright.

In 1937, H. P. Lovecraft died. There was some argument about his estate, and eventually one of Lovecraft's correspondents named August Derleth bullied and badgered and bargained his way into essentially controlling the literary rights to Lovecraft's stories, which Derleth then published through Arkham House and ruled with an iron fist until he died. Now, Derleth got Lovecraft's stuff published, and he kept it published, but he was an asshole doing so, and he probably never had a right to do it, so that's half the reason the fanbase doesn't like him.

The other half of the reason the fanbase doesn't like Derleth is that he wrote a bunch of Mythos fiction - really bad Mythos fiction - a good chunk of it labelled as "collaborations" with Lovecraft, who was already dead at this point. This is where you get weird shit like where Derleth tries to categorize the Great Old Ones into the four classical elements - and yes, I realize that's completely fucking weird and doesn't seem to work. Cthulhu looks a bit like a squid and is under the sea, so Derleth assigned him as a water elemental...even though Cthulhu was technically imprisoned under the sea, and the water was supposed to damp down his telepathy or something. You can see that this was some crazy-ass fan shit, basically grounded in some fundamental disagreements in the expanded universe which nobody had a phrase for yet. (The other side of that is that because Lovecraft never made a "fire" elemental, Derleth did - and so we have Cthugha.)


I will only explain this if you absolutely want me to.

FrankT:

The timeline of the world has a key element that the continents moved around pretty much like they did. This is not a wild anachronism, but an important part of the mythos as understood by HP Lovecraft. He was an early adopter of continental drift theory, accepting the evidence that the continents had moved from earlier positions on the globe decades before anyone figured out tectonic plates. HP Lovecraft was as ahead of the times in geology as he was definitely not ahead of the times in anthropology. The thing is that even though that's fascinating, it doesn't really matter. If the Nameless City was built half a billion years ago or just a hundred million years ago, that doesn't really affect the players in any way. It's all just “the before time” as far as any actions matter in the here and now. Sure it's fine for Elder Things and Shoggoths to be pissed off at each other for things that happened 250 million years ago, but it was 250 million years ago! It honestly doesn't matter whether any of that shit actually happened or not. The stone tablets that recorded the original incident have long since crumbled to dust only to have that dust be compressed back into stone by geologic compression. You don't have a hope in hell of ever finding something more than a few tens of thousands of years old that's still vaguely legible – meaning that the hundreds of millions of years shit is like the ten thousandth turn of generational telephone.

It's all puzzling and pointless, because the shit you actually care about is shit whose time frame you might actually interact with – like when the first member of the Marsh clan started fucking fish people or when Cultes de Ghoules was penned. None of that crap gets on the timeline. The timeline ends with the beginning of human history, and the cheese stands alone.

AncientH:

It could be worse, I'm pretty sure they had the crucifixion of Jesus on there at one point. Anyway, I can't really fault them for including the geological gulfs of time because that shit really is in the Cthulhu Mythos; they're just presenting the source material. Bitching like that is a bit like bitching about a Buffy the Vampire RPG for including rubber-forehead vampires.

The Necronomicon



I pretty much said the magic words.

AncientH:

Most of this section is cribbed directly from Lovecraft's The History of the Necronomicon, with a few adornments and glosses that cover uses of it after Lovecraft died. As with calling Cthulhu himself, the book has a prominence in the extended mythology which is kind of absent from the actual stories - no one in Lovecraft's fiction ever goes mad from looking through the Necronomicon - but it's one of those things people tend to latch onto.


I have no idea why this Necronomicon has tits...wait, yes I do.

FrankT:

If all that seems like two and a half pages that we didn't really need, and perhaps more specifically that it was information that should be included (or not) in the lists of books... yeah. Like the Mythos timeline and similar crap, this Necronomicon section is an essay written by Keith Herber, and it is included in its entirety as a standalone piece rather than spare any attention on the part of the editor or primary author to blend it into the main text. I bow to Ancient's massively more detailed study of all things Necronomicon, but the typesetting nightmare that this section represents should not go overlooked. Quite simply, it doesn't fit in the book. It doesn't fit stylistically, it doesn't fit conceptually, and it's just a waste of wordcount.

This could have been two and a half pages explaining police response times in the 1920s or something, and it would be way more helpful for actually running a game. Putting this right in the middle of the book just comes off as obsessive and insane.

AncientH:

Again, playing to the audience. It probably pays to note that this isn't your standard roleplaying game - this is, in fact, the longest-lived and most influential licensed roleplaying game, and like all licensed games paying homage to your source material tends to trump basic considerations of realistic play...plus, we're now in the quite bizarre situation where CoC has generated far more fictional content than Lovecraft and his friends ever wrote for the Mythos proper. Funny old world.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

This is HP Lovecraft


This is Hulk Hogan.


Tofu.

FrankT:

Having a mini-biography of HP Lovecraft in the middle of Call of Cthulhu isn't quite like putting a mini-biography of Gary Gygax in the middle of the Player's Handbook, but it's a whole lot like putting a mini-biography of Tolkien into the Monster Manual. Quite simply: there is very little reason for this essay to be here. It's an interesting subject matter to many Call of Cthulhu gamers, but it has no real relevance to Call of Cthulhu games. If you play Mythos based role playing games in the here and now, you're not actually interacting with HPL's life. Heck, both Role Playing Games and the idea of there being something called “The Cthulhu Mythos” for you to be roleplaying in were developed after HPL's death.

HPL was an incredibly influential writer, but most of his influence was not felt during his lifetime. Cthulhu is a household name now, but it sure wasn't then. In a very real way, this game isn't playing in the world of HP Lovecraft, it's not even playing in the world of Lumley or Derleth – it's playing in the world that was created by the collective fanon of a couple of generations of science fiction and horror fans for whom all of those authors were considered classic literature.

So what's really important would be a discussion of perhaps ideas that HP Lovecraft had that are still scary alongside his other ideas that are not scary at all any more. Like the big reveal at the end of Medusa's Coil is that Marceline has a little bit of African ancestry. Dun dun DUN! In the era of having an actual Black president, the reaction of the reader is not to gasp and clutch at pearls, but more to say:

Seriously.

A dry list of HPL's correspondances doesn't mean dick. The literary movement he was instrumental in starting didn't take off until after he was dead, and the important thing is how it has grown and changed since he was alive, not who he was working with at the time. Fuck.

AncientH:

Well, it's a little important. Lovecraft encouraged the development of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and C. L. Moore among others...but yeah, I have no idea why his biography is here instead of crammed into an appendix somewhere. I guess it's important to players pretty much because it's important to fans (and, in a slightly different direction, to English majors), in pointing out different writers that you can totally steal from to generate material for the game.

FrankT:

That too.

AncientH:

On the racist front...yeah, Lovecraft was prejudiced and xenophobic and adhered to some quite weird racialist and anthropological views, probably because they spoke to and supported his prejudices about black people. At this point I feel I should do the apologist thing and tell you that "On the Creation of [EDITED]" was written when he was a teenager and was never intended for publication, that his views on things like Nazis did change over the course of his life, and that he is never recorded actually speaking out or advocating violence against Jews, black people, homosexuals, etc. ...but I think you can pretty much get the gist. It was the 1920s and 1930s, and there was shit that it was okay for people to think back then which is just completely fucking abhorrent to us now, and we call that progress. When we talk about the wrong side of history, that's the kind of thing we mean. A hundred years after the fact the only people really questioning a woman's right to vote in the America is Ann Coulter, professional troll.

None of this which is in any way actually reflected in this particular mini-bio, but it's the kind of thing that gets brought up - not because none of your other pre-Civil Rights authors weren't racist, misogynist, or anti-LGBT, but because we published Lovecraft's letters where he actually wrote that shit down.


This is the World Fantasy Award which, since 1975, has been cast in the image of Lovecraft. People have been kicking shit up about that lately because some of the winners are people of color and don't care for Lovecraft's racism.

In Rerum Supernatura

This picture doesn't have much to do with the section, but the section doesn't have much to do with the game, so we're even.

FrankT:

Given the fact that Ancient History explodes into nerd rage on an 11 or less when exposed to bad HP Lovecraft scholarship (a disadvantage which would net him 10 character points in a different 80s era gaming system), this section was specifically requested for him to rant about – so I'll mostly keep hands off. Just so I have something to do on this section, I'll deliver some dry background.

In Rerum Supernatura is a set of “in-character” essays written by William Hamblin under the name of his character: Phileus Sandowsky. It's six pages long, and formatted like a fake academic paper. I don't mean it's a fake academic paper, I mean it's formatted like someone who didn't know what an academic paper looks like might think a fake academic paper should look. It's very strange. It starts announcing that it is by “Herr Doktor Phileus P. Sandowsky” from a university in Bulgaria (which importantly is and was a school in Slavic Bulgarian, not German), and ends with a “Conclusion” like it was a fucking English assignment. And everything in the middle is stupid or crazy or both.

So since I'm sure that fake scholarship masquerading as fake-real scholarship makes Ancient History check for nerd rage twice, I'll let him take it from here...

AncientH:

You actually get a lot of these in the Cthulhu Mythos, some better than others. Part of the conceit of Lovecraft's fiction is that he never starts out with some batshit insane abomination from the darkness beyond the stars or a college professor trying to read an incantation from a book bound in human skin as bullets hit the shoggoth with a dull "thup." He pretty much always starts off in a completely mundane and often painfully researched setting, and the events are often recounted in the form of a pseudo-document, a technique that harkens back to "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa" (1815) and whatnot, and the writers are usually intelligent - and occasionally academic - men who are striving to give a full and proper recording of what happened. It's a different style from the noir fiction of Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett, is what I'm getting at, and there are roots to it. Often, these sort of documents tie in with the elaborate literary history of the Mythos itself, blending real and fictional events into a new whole, so that the average reader doesn't know how much is true and how much is false, gradually wending its way to some completely supernatural conclusion - but being all the more exceptional for all that, because the reader is brought there by degrees instead of all at once. It's the sort of thing that is done in the manner of an elaborate hoax, and indeed, elaborate hoaxes have been played with style that have totally fooled people - there are still card catalogs at libraries with listings for the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, for example, and morons still quote Colin Wilson's introduction to Necronomicon: the Book of Dead Names. Fuck, I've done it.. I even accidentally trolled Wikipedia once when I did it so well that somebody actually cited some of my make-believe sources in the article on tentacle erotica (scroll all the way to the bottom).

But, it can also be done poorly. This section, In Rerum Supernatura is a take-off of De rerum natura, and is designed to be sort of an explication of some stuff in the Mythos that doesn't add up - specifically, some weirdnesses and inconsistencies in the history of Lovecraft's Necronomicon. It's dry and quasi-academic, and it handles such old (and perpetual) questions as the meaning of "Abdul Alhazred" (which is not a real Arabic name, because Lovecraft didn't know Arabic and just liked the sound of it, and which has been puzzled over for generations even though the answer was, and always shall be, "lulz." Hell, I have even fallen into this trap and gave a good argument why the original name should be something like Abdullah az-zahr...look, I'm doing it again, let's move on.)

Even given the stupid format and rock-hard grognard erection required to write this piece to begin with, I'm going to defend it's inclusion here on the grounds of world building. Because it is totally an in-character document, the kind of thing you could xerox and hand to players and let them argue about. It provides real information that gamemasters might use, like different words that might refer to different Mythos entities in different real-world languages. And that is important. Nobody really gives two tugs of a halfling's cock what the word for "orc" means in the Wood Elf dailect, and that's never going to be a major or minor factor in the plot for any generic fantasy game because in D&D every race = culture = language. You almost never get the idea that there are French Elves and German Elves, you get something like High Elves and Dark Elves, and at once you reduce and simply the cultures and languages of the different groups in your game down to a couple stereotypes and some hard game mechanics.

Well, Call of Cthulhu does it differently. It's set in something mostly analogous to the real world and a lot of their sourcebooks read like really crappy history books but because of that you can pretty much include as much real history and real-world complexity as you stand. Sure it'll suck if you try to play racism and gender-roles straight in the 1920s, but at least that's a thing you can do without blushing when you tell somebody that their Drow Ranger has to use the service entrance at the back of the fucking High Elf restaurant.


Scandalous!

So yes, these pseudo-academic pieces appear from time to time, in part because that's the nature of the genre, and in part because they're world development. Often they're...well, pretty crap. But because they're grounded in the real world, they tend to have a verisimilitude that equivalent pieces in other RPGs lack. And there's no end of samples they can base this stuff off of.

FrankT:

We done? Good.

Mental Disorders

This book isn't the dumbest thing you'll see about mental health this week.

AncientH:

I should mention a lot of this stuff was taken from things published after the initial edition, and then added to the core document. However, it was literally added, not worked in. By any proper route of organization, this should have been placed back when we were talking about rolling up your temporary/lasting insanity, but for whatever reason it isn't, it's here. That's sad.

FrankT:

Is it really “nerd rage” when it's medical in nature, and literally life or death for millions of people? Yeah, I guess it probably is.

The author here didn't give himself very much space to handle diseases of the mind, and obviously doesn't understand the subject very well and very likely didn't care. Basically there are four sub-sections that are written in very different tones and were probably cribbed from different sources. You get: a list of culturally specific conditions from Malaysian Amok to Pacific Northwestern Wendigo Syndrome – in the modern age such a list would have been “researched” on Cracked, but at the time it probably was cribbed from a pop-psych or pop-anthropology book; a list of then-modern psychiatric diagnoses which was almost certainly abridged from the DSM; a rant about substance abuse which apparently claims that LSD causes people to become homicidal, so I assume this was taken from a Reagan-era drugs pamphlet; and finally a list of the proper names of phobias, which since it includes Gephyrdrophobia (Fear of Crossing Bridges), I can only assume the source here was one of those books of stupid and obscure words.

Now obviously we're on shaky ground here. It's a game about going insane, so naturally you're going to need to write something about that topic. But gosh you'd hope that after a decade and a half of helming a game about going insane that the author would know something about the topic. In the 90s, you mostly had games list psychiatric diagnoses until the author couldn't remember any more, which led to Fish Malks because a really disruptive condition like multiple personality disorder is a lot more memorable than something that grinds away at the patient's self esteem and health like anorexia nervosa. So I guess that the book was trying to elevate things a bit by busting out the DSM and laying down some sciencish words. But that's just it: this isn't scientific terminology, it's sciencish terminology. The author properly places multiple personality disorder under “Dissociative Personality Disorder,” but if you actually read the description it's still Fish Malk bullshit:

Players may need several or many investigator sheets for their investigator's different personalities.

God dammit!

The bottom line of course, is that very few of these diagnoses are things that people acquire by being subjected to gruesome imagery. That's psychological trauma, and it can cause or exacerbate anxiety disorders. But it's not going to give you a chemical imbalance or a brain structure anomaly. You do not become narcoleptic because you saw a severed head. You are narcoleptic because you have low levels of hypocretin. Indeed, since we know why the character is going crazy (they saw, participated in, or were victimized by something horrible), we already know the fucking diagnosis. It's post traumatic stress disorder. And in the
1920s, that term hadn't been invented yet, so it would be called “shell shock” instead. Any and all discussion of other diagnoses are therefore mostly superfluous. The key would then be to determine how well the book handles the different manifestations and symptoms of traumatic stress.

after a traumatic event, perhaps years later, the character begins to relive the trauma through persistent thoughts, dreams, and flashbacks. Correspondingly, the character loses interest in daily activities.

Really. That's it. That's the entire description of the actual condition that your character is going to acquire. Now, leaving aside the fact that this is in reality a small sampler of the available manifestations of PTSD, I think this warrants a bit more than 2 vague ass sentences in the whole goat fucking book. Can we have some rules up in this for intrusive thoughts, nightmares, and disruptive feelings of guilt and fear? I mean, it's supposed to be the focus of the entire fucking game, so shouldn't it say something? Fuck!

So that's the main narrative of the chapter: someone busted open a real book on real psychiatric disorders in order to lay down some real terminology. But it's all cargo cult, no understanding. The author didn't read deeply enough to realize that a lot of his descriptions of how things worked were bullshit (or he just didn't care), and had no idea of what the significance of any of the sentences being copied is. There is no effort to distinguish between a symptom and a disorder, and I doubt the author knows what the differences are.

But what about the other three sections? Well, they sure as fuck aren't going to win any prizes for accuracy or completeness. The list of phobias is literally just a list. It was probably copied from a book of stupid words that technically exist because you can slap Greek prefixes to Greek suffixes and make new English words whenever you want. No attempt is made to integrate any of that into the game in any way. The section on drug addiction is... puzzling. Obviously they had access to some kind of text on drugs, but again they didn't spend any effort in contextualizing any of the information in there.

So Ketamine is in the same class as PCP. It's in the same class because they are both dissociatives and operate on similar parts of the brain. There are important reasons that they are in the same class. But those are not important at the level that investigators would give a shit about. PCP ends with people stabbing each other and ketamine ends with people curling up on the floor whimpering about how they've lost their name and are no longer allowed to stand. From the standpoint of their effects in a game, you'd put ketamine in with opium and PCP in with meth and crack.

The final bit (actually the first bit) is the short list of specific societal psychological problems. Those are fascinating and cool, but there isn't any information or context there.

AncientH:

Academics have had a tendency to decry the readers of Lovecraft and Tolkien as "cults," and there's a bit of truth to that. There's something of the air of religion that people can develop about Lovecraft and the Mythos, you hear words like "canon" thrown about unironically, and as we have already seen people treat the Call of Cthulhu corebook like it's a fucking Torah as far as exact transmission goes. Fan dedication by itself isn't bad for a game but...well, as you see with this portion, it has its downsides. If this were a GURPS product, the Sanity rules would have been written by or in collaboration with someone with actual degrees and experience in psychology, psychiatry, pharmopscyhology, psychopharmacology...whatever. People that know what the fuck they're talking about. Instead, we have the actually very vague term insane thrown about, and misused and misapplied, compounded by the sad but seemingly perpetual misunderstanding of mental disease, and you get the point where people think that seeing the starspawn of Cthulhu can cause Tourette's.



So, this section is by itself one of the reasons why Call of Cthulhu seriously needs an update. I don't know if 7th edition will deliver. Indeed, I kinda fucking doubt it, and the old fans would probably declare heresy if it did. But there you go.

Next up: Keeper's Lore.

[Whipstitch]

I loved the Real Ghostbusters so much when I was in single digits. I have no idea if even a shred of it holds up but I'm always a bit perversely proud when I see something on the internet about how crazy nerdy that show could get.

[hogarth]

..or the rules are simply good enough for them.

And Runequest 6 was released just last year and is getting very high praise from players and reviewers everywhere. Being from the same kernel as CoC, I suspect it says something positive about Chaosium design prowess.

There are thousands of people using D&D rules without using official campaign settings like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, etc.

There are approximately zero people using Call of Cthulhu rules without the Lovecraftian setting or Runequest without Glorantha.

I suspect that says something extremely negative about Chaosium design prowess.

[Laertes]

After reading AH's eloquent nerdrage on the topic of bad Lovecraft pseudoscholarship, and Frank's eloquent nerdrage on the misuse of real-life medicine, I'm inclined to say that we're done here. Not on this OSSR, but on OSSRs in general. We will never have another example of people nerdraging this hard and this readably on things which they know so much about. It is magnificent. It is the high point of the medium. Nobody will ever out-rant this. From here on we live in twilight.

[Longes]

So, with all this glorious fun presented to us here, does anyone want to run a PbP Call of Cthulhu campaign? Roll untill you are happy with the character, die at the racist whim of the keeper, and all that? I've heard a lot of good things about Masks of the Nyarlathotep (although I've never read it).

[silva]

Yup, Masks is widely regarded as one of the best campaigns out there.

What about an OSSR of it ?

[Ancient History]

So, with all this glorious fun presented to us here, does anyone want to run a PbP Call of Cthulhu campaign? Roll untill you are happy with the character, die at the racist whim of the keeper, and all that? I've heard a lot of good things about Masks of the Nyarlathotep (although I've never read it).

I just wrapped up a bizarre hybrid Conan d20/Call of Cthulhu d20 mashup game, and I don't think I have the fortitude to do an old school CoC PbP at the moment.

[Shatner]

Musical selection: Darkest Of the Hillside Thickets - Innsmouth Look

Oh sweet! Someone else who listens to DotHT. They're a lot of fun.

Great OSSR fellas. Really enjoyed it.

[Ancient History]

...it's not over yet.

[silva]

So, with all this glorious fun presented to us here, does anyone want to run a PbP Call of Cthulhu campaign? Roll untill you are happy with the character, die at the racist whim of the keeper, and all that? I've heard a lot of good things about Masks of the Nyarlathotep (although I've never read it).

I just wrapped up a bizarre hybrid Conan d20/Call of Cthulhu d20 mashup game, and I don't think I have the fortitude to do an old school CoC PbP at the moment.

Share it with us! Conan + Cthulhu is liquid awesome.

[Ancient History]

Shadow Over Stygia

"sure goddamn its the fat princess tactic, what a fiendish man."

[erik]

Sshhhh, nobody tell silva about other parts of the forum. Must keep the fuckery contained.

[edit: Dammit Ancient.]

[Krusk]

I've got the 6th edition of this. From what was described here, there were absolutely no changes. It's a really special game.

The references chapter really is the best part. It's like 100 pages of arbitrary shit sometimes tangentially related, sometimes not.

[hyzmarca]

You know, I'm not sure exactly where the whole go insane thing actually comes from. Because the insane tends to manifest as doing things that are perfectly rational in a worldview that accepts this stuff as real.

If you draw pentagrams in your own feces to ward off the invisible killer mountain goats that are after you, then people will think you're crazy. But if there really are invisible killer mountain goats after you and they really are warded off by feces pentagrams, then you're perfectly sane and rational.

INsane Cultists aren't insane if their rituals actually work.

[name_here]

Well, that's largely because while the cultists are correct about how Cthulhu and co can be summoned, they also somehow believe that summoning them is a good idea.

[Laertes]

From my experience, there's three very different things in CoC which can all be called "insanity." Only two of them involve the SAN characteristic.

A) Direct neurological damage, the sort that comes from seeing Cthulhu rise from his watery grave.

B) PTSD based on horrible experiences.

C) Perfectly rational behaviour based on information not widely available. ("Did that guy look like he had fishy skin? Quick, kill him!")

The type of insanity the cultists are correct about is C. The sort you can treat is B. The sort Lovecraft stories are mostly about is A.

[TheFlatline]

Dark Heresy basically had CoC's sanity mechanic, though I felt that it handled things better. Chaos shit had terror ratings 1-3 generally speaking that inflicted sanity damage, and you could accumulate PTSD sanity damage as well. While the symptoms of rampaging insanity in the game were pretty much CoC tripe, the one thing that I liked is that your insanity rating counted up instead of down, and the 10's digit became your innoculation against shit. Most demons and shit had a terror rating of 1, so once you were fucked up enough in the head and your insanity rating hit 11 you were immune to terror 1 stuff. In-game, the shit outside your head didn't bother you quite so much, because the shit *inside* your head was worse. Of course, to battle great demons and shit without blinking meant you pretty much had to be disconnected from reality to begin with.

Seeing as my game had almost no chaos stuff in it (the big bad guys were smart enough to not deal with chaos, and when they did, it was with the deck severely stacked in their favor), so I ran with sanity being a PTSD thing. You could push yourself to do horrible things and not roll or worry about it. You'd just accumulate some mental scars that would show up... later. It was sort of a credit card system for atrocity. You could either deal with the mental fatigue right then, or you could suppress it and do what was demanded of you and realize you probably were going to have some shitty nightmares for... well... years.

It worked well. If I ever roll back to old school CoC I'll probably approach sanity the same way.

[silva]

Sshhhh, nobody tell silva about other parts of the forum. Must keep the fuckery contained.

Too late.