Fixing Call of Cthulhu

[Mask_De_H]

If you really wanted to keep the "oh my god there's something terrible inside me" you'd probably just work with "regular" old mental illness rather than weird racist crap. This even fits Lovecraft's biography (IIRC) as his mother had a breakdown when he was young, got institutionalized, and basically gave him a fear of mental illness. You could certainly run something where instead of being "a fish dude" you have a family history of Alzheimer's instead (speaking from experience Alzheimer's is terrifying) and you come up with some kind of mechanic where you try to prevent this instead.

Really, a lot of the terror of Lovecraft is that his protagonists are all the same sheltered vaguely educated white dude actually leaving the basement for once in their lives, and then going back into the basement whining about how they met a black dude on the street. You're mining Lovecraft for the barely fleshed out mythos and evocative names, and most of his themes (aside from Scary Monster, AAAA!) get thrown by the wayside.

You also need to deal with players inevitably wanting to play sorcerers and cultists rather than generic boring sheltered white people.

Unfortunately at that point we're just re-inventing Vampire, the Masquerade, and is that really what we're after?

VtM got people money and sex, which are two things a lot of people are after, so yeah.

[Mord]

The horror of Innsmouth isn't the fact that some people are really fish people. It isn't even that you might actually be a fish and not really a human. The horror is that the government might send submarines to shoot torpedoes into an undersea housing development because of racially proscriptive ideas about who counts as a citizen.

I wrote up a whole spiel about different kinds of revelatory moments of personal transformation, but I don't like how it landed and am still thinking about it and will probably throw it out. In the interim and for the sake of having something else to chew on, let me ask the following overwrought questions:

Are you sure that there is no horror to wring out of the idea that you are actually not the ten-fingered, lung-breathing, career-having, hobby-pursuing person you've spent your whole life becoming? That you cannot continue on the path you have made for yourself thus far, that all of your hopes and aspirations are impossible, and that you will never see your friends or loved ones again because of the immutable fact that your parentage has, through no fault or choice of your own, doomed you to be transfigured into a radically different life-form, to live out the rest of your life in the cold depths of the ocean, and to forsake everything that you have thus far known in life?

A follow-up question: in Robert Olmstead's case, he knew exactly what he was turning into and had a chance to come to terms with it; good for him. He was lucky in that a Deep One does not seem to be intrinsically dangerous like a Wolfman or a Thing or a Chaos Spawn. What if he didn't know what he was becoming, if he were only aware that his (apparent) humanity was flaking away to reveal something totally alien to his experience, with no clue as to whether the thing that molted from Robert Olmstead would have any sense of identity in common with the man from whom it clawed its way free? Does that have a different answer?

I'm aware that, as horror goes, we're well away from "cosmic" and into "personal" now, but eh; I'm cool to follow the winds where they blow.

[Username17]

The one sentence description of the stalks of grass crowding our vision and the sounds of our companions rustling through the grass inches away invisibly was terrifying. I was literally envisioning Velociraptors taking us out one-by-one without anyone realizing. A feeling of helplessness combined with the unknown were powerful.

Dread and jump scares is an effective form of horror. When people think of Lovecraft, they mostly think of something a bit more cerebral. A growing realization of doom followed by a moment of despair after a big reveal.

The problem of course, is that serial storytelling such as any RPG campaign is pretty much completely incompatible with "big reveals" and moments of despair. You can't do one of those every session, and that means most sessions will be off theme. Maybe all of the sessions will be. You can only ever do that sort of thing as a one-shot because you can't give up more than once.

The nature of the RPG campaign structure necessarily means that you have to interact with your horror setting in a different way. And I think the reason people keep coming back to a "monster of the week" format where the horror monsters get defeated over and over again is because that fucking works.

-Username17

[Axebird]

If what you're looking for is the trappings of the mythos- either because you feel an RPG is incompatible with its themes or you just want something with rad monsters and cool otherworldly names- playing as the cultists seems like a good way to go.

You can have adventures where your cult squad seeks out lost occult documents or raids another cult's base for esoteric materials. Defend your home turf from summonings gone wrong or investigators knocking at the door. Put together materials for neat rituals so you can beseech the outer gods to smite your neighbor for growing hedges on your side of the property line. Complete your ultimate summoning at the end and get your moment of madness and despair anyway as you realize none of it mattered and you're going to be crushed underfoot by a being that didn't even recognize your presence. Or something like that.

Point is being the cultists is cool, and you don't need to dick around with writing mysteries for every session when the party's goals are pretty similar to an asshole D&D party.

[Username17]

Are you sure that there is no horror to wring out of the idea that you are actually not the ten-fingered, lung-breathing, career-having, hobby-pursuing person you've spent your whole life becoming? That you cannot continue on the path you have made for yourself thus far, that all of your hopes and aspirations are impossible, and that you will never see your friends or loved ones again because of the immutable fact that your parentage has, through no fault or choice of your own, doomed you to be transfigured into a radically different life-form, to live out the rest of your life in the cold depths of the ocean, and to forsake everything that you have thus far known in life?

Such horror exists. But remember that the horror aspect of this is that society rejects you. It's the horror of finding out that you can't get your next promotion because you're a woman or they won't let you lead the neighborhood scout troop because you are gay.

From the standpoint of the protagonists, the enemy is societal apartheid regimes, not the fact of people having scales. It's The Shape of Water - the fish man is a stand-in for how people of color, homosexuals, women, and the disabled are treated by society - not as objects of horror in and of themselves.

-Username17

[Nath]

I think Gumshoe Trail of Cthulhu hit something with their rules for pillars of sanity. Basically, your character was losing important aspects of his life - his/her marriage, job, faith... - as he/she was losing sanity (because they sticked to CoC 100 scale, a pillar was worth 20 SAN). In a way, the components of your normal life were your hit points.

If I was to design an horror game, I'd probably try something related, where characters pick Backgrounds at chargen, that they may lose, or discard, and replace with mental illness, new Backgrounds or new capabilities, depending on what happened during the adventure (replacing a lost marriage with a romantic interest met during the adventure, discarding your medical diploma and the social status that goes with it for the Cryptozoology skill, and so on...). The difference between 1920 and 2010 could be handled through Backgrounds being more "social" or more "personal."

[hogarth]

My experience is that Call of Cthulhu campaigns don't work, but one-shots (where the PCs inevitably lose, or have a Pyrrhic victory) can be occasionally entertaining.

Entertaining sounds like you had fun?
Did you feel sad after the one shot? Depressed?

Yes, I have had fun playing Call of Cthulhu, although "satisfying" might be a better word than "fun". It was satisfying to come up with a result that felt worthy of a Lovecraft short story. One thing that helped was having two PCs for each player, so that one PC death didn't mean the end of the game for that player.

I wouldn't say I felt depressed during or afterwards; it was more vicarious in a "oh man, this guy is screwed" sort of way.

My proposed resolution mechanic: whenever you're trying to accomplish some task, flip a coin. If it lands heads, you succeed but ultimately it doesn't make any difference. If it lands tails, you fail but ultimately it doesn't make any difference. Play continues until each PC is dead or in the illusion of safety.

[Username17]

I don't think losing tethers to a normal life is a very solid basis to fit an RPG over. Players have tethers to normal lives in their actual lives and putting those aside to roleplay as an extraordinary character is the entire medium. You're basically just asking people to roleplay out starting to roleplay - dragging out the origin story for the entire campaign. Players will ask why they can't skip to the part where they quit their job and become a wizard. And it's a fair question.

[Longes]

Are you sure that there is no horror to wring out of the idea that you are actually not the ten-fingered, lung-breathing, career-having, hobby-pursuing person you've spent your whole life becoming? That you cannot continue on the path you have made for yourself thus far, that all of your hopes and aspirations are impossible, and that you will never see your friends or loved ones again because of the immutable fact that your parentage has, through no fault or choice of your own, doomed you to be transfigured into a radically different life-form, to live out the rest of your life in the cold depths of the ocean, and to forsake everything that you have thus far known in life?

Such horror exists. But remember that the horror aspect of this is that society rejects you. It's the horror of finding out that you can't get your next promotion because you're a woman or they won't let you lead the neighborhood scout troop because you are gay.

From the standpoint of the protagonists, the enemy is societal apartheid regimes, not the fact of people having scales. It's The Shape of Water - the fish man is a stand-in for how people of color, homosexuals, women, and the disabled are treated by society - not as objects of horror in and of themselves.

-Username17

It doesn't have to be societal. Finding out that you've been born with a genetic disease, or inherited the secret debts of your parents, or are under a family curse because your grand grandfather sold his soul to Satan. It's, in a narrow sense, the horror of being fucked by circumstances of birth, and in the broad sense the horror of just being fucked by the circumstances outside your control.

The main scale here is probably from "Circumstances which are fine by themselves but make you ostracised by society", i.e. being born black or gay, to "Circumstances which fuck your life regardless of the society", i.e. the prospect of going mad in your 40s or needing to drink warm blood of resisting virgins to survive.

[Thaluikhain]

The main scale here is probably from "Circumstances which are fine by themselves but make you ostracised by society", i.e. being born black or gay, to "Circumstances which fuck your life regardless of the society", i.e. the prospect of going mad in your 40s or needing to drink warm blood of resisting virgins to survive.

I think the problem would be that while that'd be totally horrible in real life, it's not even outlandish for RPG characters.

[erik]

I’d totally be down for Axebird’s cult party game, 10/10.

I’d have to be dragged to play these dread focused games except maybe as a one off. Even then I’d want a safety call so I could escape if it goes as poorly as I’d expect.

[Chamomile]

It's been pointed out that pretty much every Lovecraft story is about the same sheltered middle class white dude going outside one day and meeting a black person, and that's a fair judgement, and obviously something to be avoided. There is another perspective on that formula that can be salvaged while still rejecting the other, though: The idea that cosmic horror can ambush anyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't have to be actively investigating the occult or living in occult country, you can just be living a perfectly ordinary and even sheltered life, and then suddenly a shoggoth is trying to eat your face. Now either you're going to become an occultist to learn what a shoggoth is and how to avoid being devoured by one, or else you're going to be devoured.

[Username17]

I’d totally be down for Axebird’s cult party game, 10/10.

I’d have to be dragged to play these dread focused games except maybe as a one off. Even then I’d want a safety call so I could escape if it goes as poorly as I’d expect.

That's the core issue right there. A roleplaying game by definition biases players towards playing characters who make interesting life choices. While it might be correct to keep your job at Circuit City and save money in a health insurance account rather than running off to learn sorcery from a mad painter with a calamari obsession, no player is ever going to choose that road for their character. For the player character, the only lifepath worse than a short one is a boring one. If your character dies you get a new character and keep playing the game. If your character's story isn't interesting you stop playing the game.

Refusal of the Call is step two of the Hero's journey, and it is good for at most one session of an RPG campaign. After that, you want to get your fucking fish wizardry or whatever going because step three is supernatural aid.

-Username17

[Calibron]

That's the core issue right there. A roleplaying game by definition biases players towards playing characters who make interesting life choices. While it might be correct to keep your job at Circuit City and save money in a health insurance account rather than running off to learn sorcery from a mad painter with a calamari obsession, no player is ever going to choose that road for their character. For the player character, the only lifepath worse than a short one is a boring one. If your character dies you get a new character and keep playing the game. If your character's story isn't interesting you stop playing the game.

Refusal of the Call is step two of the Hero's journey, and it is good for at most one session of an RPG campaign. After that, you want to get your fucking fish wizardry or whatever going because step three is supernatural aid.

-Username17

Probably a bit outside of the actual topic, but what about a setting where your normal life is already Interesting and Fantastic, and the inherently unknowable rears its ugly head and refuses to be ignored.

The first thing that came to mind was some kind of pseudo-singularity neoenlightenment futureworld where post-humanity's fallen back into the trap of believing they know everything there is to know, and've got models for most of the likely outcomes for what can't be nailed down. But I realized it could also be done in a modern day setting, just one where occulted magic, superscience, psychic powers and such exist. Where the PCs are doing the impossible on the fringes of society and human understanding while leading double lives. Here the threat is only partially getting your shit ruined or getting your perception of reality broken beyond repair, but the danger of the effort and stress making you lose your edge; and you absolutely need that edge at its sharpest in order to just do your normal fantastical fvckery and not lose everything. The dread of dealing with things that, by any structural laws anyone is familiar with, just should not be, that reality itself cannot be relied on to be consistent, that all your lives could be devastated regardless of your incredible power, that chaos reigns and nothing can matter, coupled with the fear of fucking up or relatively mundane things spiraling out of your control as you now have to spread yourself even thinner as some brand new problems or responsibilities you can't ignore impose themselves into your awesome life that you love.

Mirroring the latter scenario, I also considered PC's as monsters, classic whitewolf BS, but that seems to run into the problem of monsters just not knowing enough about what's what to not simply experience this stuff as weird monster shit they just happen to not be familiar with, rather than things and events that should not be.

[Username17]

Probably a bit outside of the actual topic, but what about a setting where your normal life is already Interesting and Fantastic, and the inherently unknowable rears its ugly head and refuses to be ignored.

Well you've still got the situation where the players are going to do whatever tells the more interesting story and ignore the other stuff. If a character fights monsters by night and is a dentist by day, the players are going to want to timeskip all the dentistry and get to the monster fighting. If a character is a ghost hunter at their day job and volunteers at the old folk's home at night, the players are going to want to time skip the extracurricular activities. And so on.

However interesting you make any part of the character's lives, if it's less interesting than whatever the most interesting thing they do, the players are going to want to ignore it. In any game that is "inspired by the Mythos" the Mythos crap is probably going to be the most interesting thing in it and the players are going to want to interact with it no matter how good or bad it is for the characters to do so.

-Username17

[Mord]

If you really wanted to keep the "oh my god there's something terrible inside me" you'd probably just work with "regular" old mental illness rather than weird racist crap. This even fits Lovecraft's biography (IIRC) as his mother had a breakdown when he was young, got institutionalized, and basically gave him a fear of mental illness. You could certainly run something where instead of being "a fish dude" you have a family history of Alzheimer's instead (speaking from experience Alzheimer's is terrifying) and you come up with some kind of mechanic where you try to prevent this instead.

It doesn't have to be societal. Finding out that you've been born with a genetic disease, or inherited the secret debts of your parents, or are under a family curse because your grand grandfather sold his soul to Satan. It's, in a narrow sense, the horror of being fucked by circumstances of birth, and in the broad sense the horror of just being fucked by the circumstances outside your control.

Yes, exactly. "Turning into a Deep One" can be a metaphor for more than one specific thing, and what it is used as a metaphor for, exactly, depends entirely on context. If our Deep Ones are just average folks but with gills, then trying to paint turning into one as a horrific or bad thing is going to get you lumped in with NuNuWhiteWolf as a transphobe and possible Nazi. If our Deep Ones are actually intrinsically savage and murderous, more akin to the Wolfman or Chaos Spawn than Atlanteans, then we're in a different situation. Or, if being a Deep One is explicitly a painful and unpleasant way to live, even if there were no bigotry or mindless violence involved you would not like the idea of becoming one. If the thing you're becoming is a thing you can recognize as being bad on its own merits, then turning into that thing can very easily be depicted in unequivocally horrific terms, whether they be those of a struggle against a horrible wasting physical disease or a struggle against mental illness or both.

Now, in the specific case of Deep Ones, that well has already been tapped. Trying to say "no, our Deep Ones are actual monsters" is still close enough to NuNuWhiWo territory that I'm not willing to make camp there. So if I'm going to play with turning-into-a-monster identity horror, it will be with some other kind of beings who do not already have a pre-existing backstory that describes them as being persons worthy of equal protection under the law and such.

Really, a lot of the terror of Lovecraft is that his protagonists are all the same sheltered vaguely educated white dude actually leaving the basement for once in their lives, and then going back into the basement whining about how they met a black dude on the street. You're mining Lovecraft for the barely fleshed out mythos and evocative names, and most of his themes (aside from Scary Monster, AAAA!) get thrown by the wayside.

You also need to deal with players inevitably wanting to play sorcerers and cultists rather than generic boring sheltered white people.

If we're talking about an RPG, then Lovecraft's usual story beats and protagonists are mostly out the window anyway. Still, let's not use the weakest and worst-aged of his story elements as an argument to throw out everything wholesale; I think that a lot of the themes are worth salvaging. The frailty and irrelevance of humanity especially - as others have pointed out, playing from the cultists' point of view promises to be a lot more fun, and then you can engage with questions like "if power is on offer and the human race is meaningless, why wouldn't you throw away your 'humanity' for power?" Because, really, what separates a cultist from an investigator?

For Lovecraft, cultists were cultists because they were already degenerate non-Englishmen who had nothing to believe in. If you look at it from the POV of an old-timey xenophobe racist, it seems self-evident that a bunch of semi-human persons would lack any kind of culture with any higher ideals to strive for, so why wouldn't they do baby massacres for Hastur? Really, any magical benefits to be derived from doing so are basically irrelevant anyway, since the main draw of doing so is just because it's in your nature to do horrible things like that. It's kind of like asking why Tolkien's Orcs would be willing to show up to work for whatever nickel-plated Sauron cosplayer declares himself Dark Lord this week; it's just what they do.

For us, however, we can look at it as a way to allow players to draw their own lines in the sand and identify their own values - OK, yes, I will murder a man in cold blood in the name of Hastur if it brings my wife back to life, but I definitely won't paint the walls with baby brains for any reason. I'll definitely learn the names of the blasphemies and study forbidden tomes and maybe sacrifice a few cats, but only because I need the knowledge to oppose a greater evil, such as that guy who keeps painting rooms with baby brains. This here is a case where applying some existentialism to the setting can introduce interesting problems Lovecraft never had the mindset to explore.

So let's not think of things as "cultists are insane." Neither "cultist" nor "insane" is a good word to describe what is going on here. What we are talking about is people who want things and who are are subject to corruption, trauma, and despair in varying degrees. From the Call of Cthulhu OSSR:

Call of Cthulhu's insanity system is trying to do three things:

• HP Lovecraft style Despair, where things become too much for characters so they give up and the story ends.
• Traumatic Stress, where people have horrible experiences and that leaves psychological scars.
• Mystical Corruption, where characters exposed to the black arts give up their morality and start murdering people to advance their dark knowledge.

So, this is kind of where I'm at - a game that is about people getting introduced to the existence of things that society doesn't acknowledge, and these people navigating a course for themselves between the temptations of power and whatever conscience they choose to retain. They come into conflict with other such people who may be further along this path than themselves, either having attained more power through long study or through retaining fewer scruples. Shake well and occasionally summon some kind of nightmare critter to strangle the other guy in his sleep.

Unfortunately at that point we're just re-inventing Vampire, the Masquerade, and is that really what we're after?

So, this is a really huge question. Given that White Wolf Classic was able to keep to its "being a vampire is actually terrible" party line for the ten minutes between VTM 1e and The Succubus Club, how are we going to do any better with keeping something horror-ey in a similar setting?

One of the things that makes being a cultist different from being a vampire is that you really can just stop (early on, anyway). Once you're a vampire you have to actively kill yourself to stop, and you wouldn't want to because the downsides are few and downplayed and there are a boatload of upsides just for getting up in the evening. A cultist, however, has to be driven by something to do the things they do, and can decide at any moment that they just don't want it bad enough to paint that room with baby brains.

But, even putting it that way reveals the weakness in that position. Do you really have to get so grimderp as "painting a room with baby brains" for an RPG player to actually consider the morality of what their character is doing? Yes, probably, or else you're going to have a really uncomfortable session where you have to contemplate real-life horrible things in real-life terms for the sake of keeping the in-game stakes suitably calibrated.

Like, vampire feeding as depicted in VTM is pretty much just drugging a stranger at a nightclub and raping them. That's what it is.

But no one plays it that way because that's way too real-life uncomfortable to justify whatever in-game thematic resonance the act has. Yes, if you dwell on the rape you are totally living out the Gothic-Punk Personal Horror. And then half the people at the table are leaving and never coming back because you have violated their comfort zone, and the other half are That Guy who isn't fazed by the rape at all and would actually like there to be more rape. Then you the MC throw out your box of d10s, burn your books, and swear never to play Vampire again.

So, if we're trying to stay away from the World of Darkness "superheroes with fangs" because ours is a game that's really about the horror god damn it, but we don't want to drive away every single person you might actually want to play a game with... well, fuck. Making the violence cartoonish or otherwise morally unobjectionable to blunt the mental impact on the players is what we're left with. So we're back to "the cult leader sics four cultists and a Byakhee on you; you blow the Byakhee in half with a shotgun and there is much rejoicing."

I think the other point of reference to keep away from here is Unknown Armies, but it is worth noting that the UA setting is way more mysterious and therefore closer to what I'm going for than the World of Darkness. Part of that might be because UA has fewer splatbooks and never gave a shit about actually writing any setting material, so I may be confusing incompleteness for successfully-executed authorial intent.

[Calibron]

Well you've still got the situation where the players are going to do whatever tells the more interesting story and ignore the other stuff. If a character fights monsters by night and is a dentist by day, the players are going to want to timeskip all the dentistry and get to the monster fighting. If a character is a ghost hunter at their day job and volunteers at the old folk's home at night, the players are going to want to time skip the extracurricular activities. And so on.

However interesting you make any part of the character's lives, if it's less interesting than whatever the most interesting thing they do, the players are going to want to ignore it. In any game that is "inspired by the Mythos" the Mythos crap is probably going to be the most interesting thing in it and the players are going to want to interact with it no matter how good or bad it is for the characters to do so.

-Username17

Oh, yeah, of course, no one's gonna want to roll under to fight plaque. Depending on how the game is set up, balancing relationships amid the inhuman and new eldritch pressures could be a suitably interesting portion of the game to dedicate a small amount of table time to, or something that's just handled in a single stress roll or relegated to a fluff section that only comes up when people reach a new level of fvcked up within the course of active play.

I suppose I was thinking if more along the lines of the unknowable horror often being outside the PCs ability to actively pursue right off the bat, and that with an otherwise fun and engaging/tense game/story that gets disrupted and usurped by the heavier stuff you could have a workable concept. Also the idea that the cosmic horror should tend towards the extreme side of tension and unease to the point where you wouldn't be able, or want, to keep that mood going all the time, rather as something discordant and disruptive, or climactic.

Obviously your point still stands, but I think this angle has potential to do something that doesn't have to fall harshly into either the monster of the week only or one shot only categories; most likely some monster of the week stuff as the cake(or long reaching conspiracy, or world saving, or personal horror, or whatever works well) and the more raw, unknowable horror as the icing.

It might work well as cake with icing, instead just a big tub of frosting for desert ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Wiseman]

If we're talking about an RPG, then Lovecraft's usual story beats and protagonists are mostly out the window anyway. Still, let's not use the weakest and worst-aged of his story elements as an argument to throw out everything wholesale; I think that a lot of the themes are worth salvaging. The frailty and irrelevance of humanity especially - as others have pointed out, playing from the cultists' point of view promises to be a lot more fun, and then you can engage with questions like "if power is on offer and the human race is meaningless, why wouldn't you throw away your 'humanity' for power?" Because, really, what separates a cultist from an investigator?

For Lovecraft, cultists were cultists because they were already degenerate non-Englishmen who had nothing to believe in. If you look at it from the POV of an old-timey xenophobe racist, it seems self-evident that a bunch of semi-human persons would lack any kind of culture with any higher ideals to strive for, so why wouldn't they do baby massacres for Hastur? Really, any magical benefits to be derived from doing so are basically irrelevant anyway, since the main draw of doing so is just because it's in your nature to do horrible things like that. It's kind of like asking why Tolkien's Orcs would be willing to show up to work for whatever nickel-plated Sauron cosplayer declares himself Dark Lord this week; it's just what they do.

For us, however, we can look at it as a way to allow players to draw their own lines in the sand and identify their own values - OK, yes, I will murder a man in cold blood in the name of Hastur if it brings my wife back to life, but I definitely won't paint the walls with baby brains for any reason. I'll definitely learn the names of the blasphemies and study forbidden tomes and maybe sacrifice a few cats, but only because I need the knowledge to oppose a greater evil, such as that guy who keeps painting rooms with baby brains. This here is a case where applying some existentialism to the setting can introduce interesting problems Lovecraft never had the mindset to explore.

So let's not think of things as "cultists are insane." Neither "cultist" nor "insane" is a good word to describe what is going on here. What we are talking about is people who want things and who are are subject to corruption, trauma, and despair in varying degrees.

This here is what I've found to be a very good essay on how cults work, how they attract and keep people, how they exploit them and so forth. It's been helpful for me when writing.
https://www.orange-papers.info/orange-cult.html
https://www.orange-papers.info/orange-cult_q0.html
https://www.orange-papers.info/orange-cult_a0.html

[maglag]

It's kind of like asking why Tolkien's Orcs would be willing to show up to work for whatever nickel-plated Sauron cosplayer declares himself Dark Lord this week; it's just what they do.

Sauron specifically rules Tolkien's orcs by fear and magic, and in private we see those orcs whisper among themselves that they really hate working for Sauron but are simply too afraid to disobey. The "heroes" may kill them, but at least it will be a clean swift death while Sauron can and will inflict long agonizing pain to any orcs who disobey.

[erik]

This here is what I've found to be a very good essay on how cults work, how they attract and keep people, how they exploit them and so forth. It's been helpful for me when writing.

But is that what we care about for RPGs? I'm more than happy to misuse the word "cult" for this type of setting, and will continue to do so. I honestly don't care if in a Lovecraft game the "cultists" have a charismatic leader imposing their will upon followers or if they are a freethinking commune, so long as they are using other worldly powers to do magic. Once you touch the special sauce and decide to use it, you're a cultist.

I'd dig a Lovecraft game where there's plenty of competing cults and the party is all in the same cult (typically), trying to advance whatever agenda they feel is right. While there can be temporary alliances between cults, the emphasis is on temporary because usually their goals are mutually exclusive as bringing about an apocalypse is a zero-sum game. Maybe they want to prepare for Cthulhu's arrival as the star's are nearly right. Maybe they are white hats who are focused on thwarting cults bent on ruining existence for everyone.

It's nice since you can have tiers of cults, at the bottom with a couple demented children who stumbled upon a spell, to family clans with strange rites and fishy ancestry, and on up to seriously powerful cults.

The really successful cults would be the ones that have co-opted government agencies and become their own MIB organizations like the Invisible College/Laundry in Charles Stross' Laundry series. Presumably these cults have a more benign goal than killing everyone because they're already at the top of the food chain and in a good position to get shit done... but if not, say if their grand ritual is pretty expensive (sacrifice a billion souls to summon Azathoth? challenge accepted.) and they have been gradually accumulating the resources to make it a sure thing, then that's a great big bad to try and tear down before they complete their goal in rending reality asunder.

Adventures can consist of gaining your own power (temporal or mystical). Investigating strange occurrences. Shutting down rival cults. Avoiding the notice of more powerful cults (setting up your rivals as fall guys as a BOGO deal is nice).

If you want to have a NPC pretender for each cult wherein your party goal is to elevate your pretender, that'd be a fine way to go as it provides copious amounts of hooks. The pretender can provide missions and also get into trouble for the party to bail them out of.

[DrPraetor]

I'd dig a Lovecraft game where (a cool game, but not very lovecraft.)

So I acknowledge that I'm contradicting myself, but that isn't a very Lovecraftian atmosphere.

On the small scale, Lovecraft stories don't have any party politics in them. The evil cult can be one guy, and the challenge is, he's been inviting you over for interesting dinner conversation and you don't want to kill him. Cultists are authentically deranged, there a threat to themselves as much as to you, and so on. This works fine - even enables interesting stories, I would say - for an episodic X-files type story, so it isn't an aspect of Lovecraft that you need to expunge to make an RPG. You do need the player characters to have tools and mechanisms to interact with the setting, though, rather than just being dinner guests of some guy who kills people to make paintings with their blood or whatever.

On the larger scale, Humanity is doomed, because the nature of the universe is to crawl towards depravity and chaos, not because there's a great conspiracy (which you could then combat), trying to destroy the world. Even Call of Cthulhu doesn't read like late X-files, it reads like early X-files - investigators show up, there's a monster of the week or some eerie mystery they stumble across, the cultists murder some people, you have your anagnorisis and that's it.

Frankly, raising the stakes to a world-threatening conspiracy was a bad move for the X-files, for V:tM, and etc. So even for your Cults Across America RPG (which I do endorse), I'd leave the scale local and more personal.

[erik]

I don't know if it would help from a horror perspective to have the more magic you do the more horrible things happen around you as you weaken the barrier between our world and other planes. Sorcery doesn't just corrupt the caster, it corrupts the locality.

This would explain why so much crazy shit happens in Arkham, it's a death spiral where each incident makes the next more likely. Maybe have increasing terror levels as the veil weakens and tears. Eventually something is going to consume that town all the way down to memories of its existence among the normals (which is why you cannot point to Arkham on a map anymore, it's capital-G, Gone.)... and surviving characters (if any) will move on to a new location, and process repeats.

So you can go with an impossible struggle to survive and prevail as your existential dread. Basically Arkham Horror the RPG, except losing is the only option. I'd rather play Cults Across America RPG (which I would call "Unaussprechlichen Kulten"), but I could see some appeal in a descent into doom game where you keep trying to push back the doomsday clock.

[Username17]

Depending on how the game is set up, balancing relationships amid the inhuman and new eldritch pressures could be a suitably interesting portion of the game to dedicate a small amount of table time to, or something that's just handled in a single stress roll or relegated to a fluff section that only comes up when people reach a new level of fvcked up within the course of active play.

If the interpersonal relationships are interesting enough, the players will flash forward through the monster fighting sections and fill up most of the role playing session doing various situation comedy hijinks to hide the fact that they are monster hunters from their mothers and boyfriends. Remember that some people do role playing where they have completely mundane jobs like teachers or nurses.

In general, the game is going to offer a core experience that people will mostly gravitate towards, and other aspects of the character's lives will serve as obstacles or comic relief. Which raises the question: what is the core experience of the cultists supposed to be?

Now I've already mentioned that Robert Olmstead has the exact backstory and powers of Aquaman. So it's a pretty hard sell to get people to not want to be Mythos flavored superheroes. Superheroes are the mythic characters of the moment, and story characters get fit into that mold even when it isn't appropriate. And obviously, for people like Robert Olmstead and Henry Armitage are appropriate for that model. They genuinely have superpowers and are motivated to fight monsters that do crimes. But of course "super heroes" still covers a great deal of ground, with Winter Soldier being a spy thriller, Ant Man being a heist movie, and Man of Steel being an extended meditation on Objectivism and is a failure of a movie because of it.

Whatever the headline concepts being thrown about are, I would say the absolute key experience is that characters should spend a significant time going through archives and gaining disturbing insights. A painter's work that gets increasingly grisly, a diary that starts casually describing hideous crimes, a set of photographs where seemingly identical people show up in multiple distinct time periods, a facebook timeline where people admit to horrible political views, whatever. Characters doing Mythos investigations are supposed to read books, look through piles of pictures, listen to recorded interviews and otherwise disect archived information. It's an important motiff, much more important than concepts of despair or madness per se. Sometimes you turn up evidence of sexual impropriety, sometimes you turn up evidence of murder and cannibalism. But the key point is that you spend some time going through archived information and have revelations from it.

This is important, because this kind of thing can be a bit of effective horror even if the resolution of the story is that the characters go to the Whately farm and use spells to blow up the extraplanar demon that's causing the problem. Because when you go through the diaries and realize that there was horrible child abuse (or whatever) in the past, it's already happened so the powerlessness inherent to effective horror media is still present. But you do so without robbing the players of agency for their characters in the present.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

That would maintain the eerie personal elements of Lovecraft (which people like, and which are good), while making a more playable game.

I would propose the following:
[*] During character generation, each investigator chooses a certain number of beneficial touched traits which are essentially magic powers. So, like Paranoia, all of the characters are themselves mutants.
[*] You can also have detrimental touched traits but only the first tier of them, to start.
In some theoretical sense, using your powers risks your humanity but this is not represented mechanically, instead...
[*] You-the-player can choose to take detrimental touched traits during play, using excuses that fit some criteria - seeing something horrific, using your powers too much, whatever - and in exchange you also get beneficial touched traits.

So sorta like champions but you can pick up new disadvantages+offsetting powers at thematically appropriate points during play. As with later versions of Ars Magica, touched-flaws are either a hindrance to the character achieving in-game goals or they create new story opportunities or both, whether the touched flaws are good in principle doesn't enter into it.

Thus, if you want to do the spiralling out of humanity arc, you can do that; but, if you want to be the stoic or irrepressible optimist who retains a humanist outlook against the backdrop of cosmic dread, you can do that instead. This decision should be made by the player and not by die rolls.

[GreatGreyShrike]

A lot of people in this thread are throwing around ideas that remind me a lot of Cultist Simulator. You play as a person in a mythos universe who starts getting into more and more esoteric texts and occult lore, and you form a cult and start recruiting people to serve as acolytes and summoning horrors using your occult knowledge and degenerate into madness. You can work at jobs that include progressively more disturbed painter, and you can undertake missions to send members of the cult or summoned monsters out to locations to find rarer occult texts and items. As things progress you learn more obscure languages, and repeatedly enter a surreal dreamscape that contains horrors that allow you to bring back knowledge or magical auras, and you attain more and more magical lore and can cast various spells by sacrificing things.

The game has a few ways for you to fail - you can be detected and tried by mundane authorities trying to suppress the occult; you can be driven to madness or despair by picking up too much fascination or dread; you can lose all your health from various events such as illnesses; etc.

The flavour is really awesome, and I'd love to play a game with these themes that wasn't fucking terrible.

Cultist Simulator, because of it's game design elements rather than it's themes or ideas, is squarely in the 'fucking terrible' end of things - it's extremely tedious and slow; it takes forever to do things; the game is poorly designed so more time is spent fussing with arrangements of cards than doing interesting things; it's opaque challenges mean that you tend to lose in ways that are very unfun and feel like not your fault; and more than anything else, it is extremely repetitive. I don't actually recommend anyone play Cultist Simulator, because the implementation is so unbelievably shitty. But the game's concept has legs - I played Cultist Simulator and it took quite large amounts of shittyness to cut those legs out from under it.