This post costs 0/1d2 SAN to read, five minutes to study and comprehend

[dorchadas]

So there was a dust-up on social media about sanity rules in RPGs recently, kicked off by this tweet:

There are no sanity rules in Fate of Cthulhu. We don't require anyone to play or perform mental illness.
(If you choose to, we have guidance on how to do it respectfully.)
Instead your PC gains Corruption, a potent, alluring slice of the Elder Gods' power.https://t.co/v0F853zsM0 pic.twitter.com/13tLqmE3wR

— Evil Hat Productions (@EvilHatOfficial) January 30, 2020

And of course, since Twitter is a terrible medium for most discussion, everything descended into hell. But I'm going to talk about it here where I can write as much as I want!

My first response was a shrug, because Eldritch Skies took the same tack years ago since it was based on different Lovecraft stories, and it even had the same similar downside with "hyperspacial corruption." But then I thought that it's worthwhile to have more specifically Mythos RPGs to push back against the idea of the Mythos as being unknowable or unstoppable, and that seeing it instantly breaks someone's mind.

The thing about Call of Cthulhu as a system is that it bills itself as a Lovecraftian RPG but it's based on a very thin slice of Lovecraft's works. Specifically, it's The Dunwich Horror: the RPG, where some weird cultists in a rural area are doing rituals that threaten the world until they're opposed by some septuagenarian white university professors, who read old books and find a ritual that stops the cult. That's like half of all Call of Cthulhu plots right there--just add a mysterious friend and some world traveling. It's so much the standard plot of Call of Cthulhu the RPG that in Call of Cthulhu 7e, they replaced The Call of Cthulhu, which had been included in its entirety in the book for six editions, with "The Dunwich Horror."

But that's not even all of Lovecraft's plots! You can't use it to run At the Mountains of Madness, where the protagonists discover the secret history of the Earth, including that all life is an accident as the result of Old One biotechnology, and that the ancestors of humanity were used as food by the Old Ones, and they don't suffer serious mental damage from that. Nor do the scientists who are studying the frozen Old Ones. You can't use it to run The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where the main character goes from horror while running for their life through the streets of town full of demonic fishmen to curiosity when investigating their family tree and then fascination on learning that their own ancestors came from Innsmouth and they are destined to become a demonic fishman themselves:

"I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."

And you definitely can't use it to run The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where Randolph Carter talks to ghouls, flies on night gaunts, leads a ghoul army against the moon beasts, meets Nyarlathotep, and never once suffers the classic Call of Cthulhu-style SAN loss. Even in "The Call of Cthulhu," the protagonist's despair is based on knowing that Cthulhu isn't dead, the cult is still out there, and they're probably going to assassinate him, all of which he is 💯 correct about. He's suffering mentally for entirely logical reasons!

If I were a Lovecraftian protagonist, I would simply not go insane. RIP to the guy from Dagon but I'm different.

When Call of Cthulhu first came out, Sanity was a revolutionary mechanic because it implied that there was a separation between the player's mindset and the character's mindset, but it never really evolved past "mental hit points." There are other versions of sanity mechanics that I like a lot better from other games, like NEMESIS's (PDF warning) "Madness Meters," where there are four axes, Helplessness, Self, Violence, and Unnatural, and each can be either "Failed" or "Hardened." Someone with a lot of Failed Violence notches will flinch at a raised voice or be unable to stand the sight of blood, and someone with a lot of Hardened Violence notches could eat a sandwich as they investigate the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. Both of these would make the hypothetical "normal person" extremely uneasy, and it's a more nuanced way of dealing with the issue than just a single number that goes up or down.

On the other hand, in my longest game of NEMESIS I was running for three psychologists, so if there ever was going to be a game I participated in with a sensitive, knowledgeable portrayal of mental illness, that was it.

I admit that for most of my life, I thought that the classic Lovecraftian protagonist's attitude toward the unnatural things they saw was unreasonable. That all changed when Google put out the test images from Deep Dream--if you remember from five or so years ago, it was a Google image recognition AI that took perfectly ordinary pictures and turned them in a weird nightmare of melting faces, eyes everywhere, and muddy colors. I could not look at them without getting viscerally disturbed, to the point of having to almost go off the internet for a week during their height. I clearly remember one gif of a Deep Dream'ed frog, where it was pulsating and almost oozing, the wrong color and with eyes opening and closing on its body, and I had to close the window immediately as part of my brain shrieked "ItswrongitswrongnonoitshouldnotbenonogetawaynokillnokillnonokillitkillitKILLITKILLITKILLIT" Make that the size of a minivan and it's basically a shoggoth, so. Sanity works pretty well as a mechanic for representing that kind of visceral horror and the PCs reacting based on it, but I really don't like it when it turns into "Well, you were chased through the streets by zombies so now you have obsessive-compulsive disorder." That's a complete misunderstanding of mental illness and the effects of trauma.

Really, I feel like Mythos horror as such would be much better done as just PTSD and its aftereffects rather than trying to either make some super-special category of Mythos mental illness or, like I said above, having OCD-causing zombies. Of course seeing a vast amorphous mass, eyes and mouths constantly forming and disappearing, with an overpoweringly strong foetor, rushing down the corridor toward you while repeatedly screaming "TEKELI-LI! TEKELI-LI!" is going to cause trauma! Of course similar circumstances are going to bring that up again! Especially if someone you know was eaten by it, which is something that Call of Cthulhu as I’ve experienced it also doesn’t deal well with (I’ve never been asked to roll SAN for having a party member die). And you could even draw a parallel between Mythos cultists and the cycle of violence--in the way that abuse perpetuates itself due to trauma if not caught and the trauma dealt with, Mythos cultists are people exposed to the Mythos who deal with the experience by trying to perpetuate it. All of this has the chance to go pretty wrong, of course, but I think it'd go less wrong than a lot of modern sanity mechanics.

Remember how White Wolf used to call mental illnesses "derangements"? Good times.

Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of Fate as a system, but hopefully Fate of Cthulhu finds an audience.

Comments

[symbioid]

I feel like I may have posited this before in one of your posts or at least in my DW.

A "sanity loss" system where the game rules themselves get fundamentally altered on a meta level. possibly by chance.

To me "sanity" in this case isn't even about psychosis, but existential despair. Like if you accept The Old Ones as literally existing, how is "losing your mind" actually "losing your mind" and not just "perceiving reality as it is".

[dorchadas]

I think that would make a great horror RPG, since it's a lot easier to change the rules under the player under those circumstances without anyone making mistakes or screwing things up.

isn't even about psychosis, but existential despair.

I do like that kind of "G-d exists and It is evil" cosmic nihilism and I think it's kind of common in Lovecraft's heirs, but I don't know that it would fit a cosmic horror RPG very well, not least because I think there's enough existential despair in modern life that it wouldn't be a very big difference.

[tcpip]

> The Old Ones as literally existing, how is "losing your mind" actually "losing your mind" and not just "perceiving reality as it is".

Which is why maximum SAN is traditionally 100%-Cthulhu Mythos.