Call of Cthulhu as a Horror Game

[Celebrim]

I have just finished a year long CoC campaign. It ended much as you might expect, with a near TPK and the mentally shaken badly wounded survivors fleeing out of a doomed New England town ahead of unendurable horrors.

I can't say that I was fully satisfied with the campaign. Part of that is that the group dynamics are more 'beer and pretzels' and they prefer more straight forward kicking the door down and punching Cthulhu in the face to the investigative play and thoughtful planning CoC encourages. But the more salient part for me is that rarely if ever did it come off as a horror game. Indeed, I felt we managed to obtain many more moments of actual horror in my long running 3.Xe D&D game than we managed in CoC.

The CoC game had intended to be a bit of a mental break for me after 7 years running D&D with largely homebrew content. After writing some 2000 pages of campaign notes, I was a bit burned out and the quality and timeliness of my writing was faltering. I didn't feel I was doing the game justice, and didn't want to see it end on a wimper. So I turned to CoC as a game which I thought would offer a considerably different style and theme, as well as being a game famous for offering a lot of high quality scenario content that I could draw on with minimal preparation for play. As it turns out though, not only was the content not nearly as ready to play as I would have hoped, with much of it requiring the same sort of expansive prep that needs to go into 1e AD&D ere modules to make them run well, but everything I perused was decidedly lacking in what I felt were mythos horror themes, or really even in good horror themes at all.

So far as I can tell, the writers of CoC scenarios relied principally on the themes of violence and squick to try to achieve a sense of horror and that is about the extent of it. But not only are neither of those themes I feel at the core of the discomfort of Lovecraftian horror, but both I think in play aren't particularly effective at generating horror in your average RPG player. RPG players are simply too jaded by violence and squick in their games to really be bothered by it.

Violence is somewhat self-explanatory. It's the application of force against the human body to control or destroy it. The rending of flesh by tooth and claw, the charring of it by flame, or the dissolving of the tissue by acid or other corrosive action is a thing of horror. But it's also an ordinary aspect of play in pretty much any game which features regular combat and doesn't adopt the conventions of a comic book code inspired game. Having violence in a game doesn't distinguish it as a horror game.

Squick is a term I use to cover anything that causes feelings of disgust and distaste in persons of normal sensibilities. This includes things which for humans represent disease reservoirs such as body fluids, corpses, decaying things, dirt, filth and actions which violate taboos which are often related to avoiding the spread of disease such as cannibalism, promiscuity, and such like. Squick does have a certain place in Call of Cthulhu horror, as HPL strikes me a sensitive frail neurotic which lived in squeamish terror of almost everything. But, the problem for me is that squeamishness is for most people among the weakest sorts of disgust and horror, and its employment usually strikes me as being both cheap and ineffectual. Afterall, for most people squick is triggered by a sensory experience that is difficult to replicate at a table, and in most adults at least it has been well controlled. You don't maintain a conceptual horror of squick after you've worked fast food, changed diapers, cleaned up a partners vomit when they had the flu, been a plumber, dressed your own game, raised animals, and otherwise engaged with the world with adult responsibilities. Besides, many people don't feel a particular degree of squeamishness at all, nor do we live in a society with strong taboos against broaching subjects that might provoke squeamishness. As such, when reading potential scenarios to offer, the employment of squick in the service of horror mostly struck me as pointless, or childish, or simply in groan worthy bad taste that would provoke more eye rolling or contempt for the author than any sort of contemplative horror (the cult orgies with their frequent racist undertones in 'Masks of Nyarthalotep' or the fetishization of child abuse in '‘Let the Children Come to Me’).

My general feeling after running Call of Cthulhu over a lengthy period is that good scenarios are actually much rarer than I expected and require more work to pull off than I expected, as scenarios tended to follow in that 1e AD&D format where the constraints of page count meant that you actually had 1/2 to 1/3rd of the details you needed to run the scenarios remotely smoothly (and quite often what areas the author had decided to lavish details on seemed rather randomly chosen). But more than that, I really felt that the published scenarios didn't make the most of the material, or when they did seize upon something that seemed the core of a good idea, they rarely made an interesting game out of it (as for example the scenario "Bad Moon Rising" which has a great moment sandwiched between terribly designed bookends).

Contemplating all of this, I thought of a lot of things which I thought were mythos scary (to me), but couldn't figure out how to make a scenario of them. Many of them were abstract and it wasn't clear how to reify them. And to be fully truthful, since the whole point of running CoC in the first place was to take a mental break, I really didn't want to sit down and bleed out a bunch of scenarios that were up to the quality I was looking for even if I could manage to create something up to my ambitions.

So, this brings me to the question I'm interested in, which is, "What do you think makes a game actually scary and horrifying?" Have you achieved horror in a Call of Cthulhu game before, and if so how did you do it? Or for that matter, how do you achieve horror in any game at all, and can you apply those lessons to spot lighting the sort of Cosmic Horror which I think is at the core of how HPL's stories rise above run of the mill pulp stories written by an uncomfortable racist? Or is the problem that Cosmic Horror is such a well explored theme that its just about impossible to deliver a scare with it, and for that matter is the modern audience just to jaded to give even a momentary scare?

 

[Henry]

A disclaimer: I don't really enjoy horror games - I feel enough helplessness and discomfort watching the daily news, and part of my reason for RPGs is to offset it. However, if I were to run such a game, I think the three things I would focus on are as follows:

1. Get buy-in from the players for a horror-focused game. Just as much as having two players who want to play a different game from D&D could easily sabotage a D&D game, a joking attitude or a 'Leroy Jenkins' mindset will torpedo hours of prep and atmosphere-building. If you can't get that, then you'll end up with either slapstick or dark humor (both are fine in their own right, but they're not what you sound like you're looking for).
2. Get the consent of the players for a horror-focused game. This may sound the same, but I'm speaking more of the fact that horror is about both helplessness and discomfort at the situation in which one finds oneself. This may sound a little 'PC' or 'touchy-feely' to some people, but I think it's important to state up-front: "Look, this game, as part of a horror genre game, may have some dark situations, some uncomfortable subjects included. This includes, but not necessarily limited to, _______, _______, and ______. Are there ANY subjects that anyone at the table, these subjects or any other you can think of, that we need to just draw a hard line and say, 'nope, not here.' I'm being totally serious here, no ribbing each other for anything." Some people do "X" cards and that's totally a table preference thing, but having an up-front discussion for a game where the GM is trying to evoke a very horrific atmosphere is going to possibly involve some themes that are going to be off the table for some folks.
3. Finally, I would determine (from prior table experience or personal knowledge) what kinds of subjects make your players uncomfortable. This is the part that makes point #2 important. Not so much specifics, but the general concepts. Feelings of entrapment in dangerous circumstances? Body horror such as parasites or transformations? Sensory confusion or loss of the self? Being alone in dangerous situations? Darkness and uncertainty of surroundings? I would then introduce these circumstances, taking care to describe them but not to expound overly. Sensory confusion could be as simple as making a hidden roll, passing them notes of something they see but no one else, and making sure the discovery is ambiguous enough that it COULD be true, but there's no easy way to tell. Body horror could be as simple as describing the chills, the aches, the feeling of not being well, the discovery of a tiny protrusion from the back of the neck that feels like a tiny tail, or a tiny little clawed foot that playfully grasps your finger when you feel for it beneath the hairline... (During a Starfinder campaign involving parasites, I described the tail of the parasite coming through the back of the throat as a tickling feeling, almost like a hair in their throats, as the disease progressed the tail grew larger and if they died it would basically break their jaws as it exploded forth and attached to the spinal column, to control them as undead with whiplike tail/tongues until the final life stage...)

Anyway, that's where I'd go with it.

P.S. Case in point for the second item: I run with a pretty jaded group for my Pathfinder game - we can get pretty "blue" in our humor. We played an evil campaign early this year; everyone said they could handle it, at table discussions everyone affirmed there was NO subject off the table.

About four sessions into play, however, the subject of enslavement and murder of children as a means to accomplish some goals came up (trying to incriminate a noble we knew was guilty of the same crimes, and pinning it on him). No one described anything graphically, and it was mentioned about as matter-of-factly as a news report, but it derailed the whole session for basically the rest of the afternoon. We walked it back, and a lesson was learned. While not a horror game, it was a learning experience to all at the table that, yes, we need to rethink that question very seriously before answering in such blasé fashion. If we ever run an evil or horror campaign in the future, I'm probably gonna suggest that "X" card...

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Horror games don't work since I've never been scared playing any type of game. I think you need people who are wanting to deeply role-play and find that fun to make CoC really work. Books and movies have given me a honest sense of dread, but a game? Nope.

And in gaming I'd be more Titus Crow than a scared typical Lovecraft protagonist. The only real horror game we played was 1e Chill and that was more Supernatural than Lovecraft. "Some ancient horror is lose? OK boys, grab the shotguns and lets roll!"

 

[Jer]

The best CoC games I've ever played were one-off scenarios at conventions. At least when you know that you've got a four hour slot the mechanics of insanity and death create some stakes that can create tension. I haven't played in a scenario that actually scared me, mind you - but I've played a lot of scenarios where playing with the tropes of horror was fun and where there was at least some tension if not actual fear. Personally I think that might be the best you can do - create tension as a substitute for actual fear.

I've never been able to pull off a horror campaign that doesn't turn fairly quickly into "horror-themed adventure" - my pitiful attempts start resembling Supernatural or Buffy fairly quickly. Part of that is the groups I play with, part of it is my own inability to be scared by traditional horror tropes (I don't think I've been scared by a horror movie since I was 12) and I assume part of it is an unwillingness to bring the things that actually scare me into games (there are some Unknown Armies scenarios that I've read that would probably horrify my players if I ran them, but holy cow would I be uncomfortable running them. And I still don't think it would be scary - just horrific.).

(To top it off, I don't find Lovecraft particularly scary in the first place. A universe that is indifferent to whether humanity lives or dies is not particularly scary to me, his fear of people different from him strikes me as more pitiable than scary, and giant monsters rising from the sea and leveling the Earth sounds more like a reason to build giant robots to fight back than something to go mad and faint over. I enjoy playing with the tropes in his works but nothing in his stories has ever struck me as particularly scary as opposed to just weird.)

 

[J.M]

I think horror requires a high standard of scenario writing, perhaps higher than other genres.
Also, you need players who want to be scared. If they're in the mood for "beer and pretzels", better to go with the flow than try to change the mood.
There are a lot of mediocre scenarios, as you pointed out, so my recommendation would be to look not just at CoC but also other games for those hidden gems. Yes, it means you might have to do some system conversion but that's probably less work than the kind of prep you were doing.

Off the top of my head, here are some of the best horror scenarios I've come across:

Continuity, for Eclipse Phase was fantastic in play. Other horror-themed scenarios like Glory and Million Year Echo also look good, but I haven't played them.
The Dance in the Blood, for Trail of Cthulhu
Invasive Procedures, for Fear Itself
Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home, for Call of Cthulhu
Jailbreak, for Unknown Armies (not classic horror, but very tense)
I've hear good things about Ten Candles but never played it

I've experienced memorable and tense gaming moments with these scenarios. I'd say "scary" even, depending on how you define it. Let us know what you think if you get a chance to look at some of these. Perhaps others will chime in with hidden gems to add to this list.

 

[Celebrim]

A universe that is indifferent to whether humanity lives or dies is not particularly scary to me, his fear of people different from him strikes me as more pitiable than scary, and giant monsters rising from the sea and leveling the Earth sounds more like a reason to build giant robots to fight back than something to go mad and faint over. I enjoy playing with the tropes in his works but nothing in his stories has ever struck me as particularly scary as opposed to just weird.)

This does go to a portion of my question, which was, is it even possible to scare a modern audience with cosmic horror. I can't tell if the problem is that the themes of cosmic horror are simply so well known at an intellectual level these days that people have already intellectually dealt with them, or they are simply too big for humans to intellectually process, or if the problem is that right now we are so comfortable as a race its hard to frighten us.

For example, faced with the concept of giant alien monsters devastating the Earth, you reply, "Let's just build giant robots to fight them." This indicates to me that at some level, you can't even process the possibility. Your distance from Godzilla is vastly further than the distance which a people who had endured having all of their cities carpet bombed, culminating in the only two uses of nuclear weapons in anger in human history. They I think could conceptualize the fear of a monstrous entity destroying all in its path. You are struggling to even imagine being helpless in the face of a disaster vastly larger than yourself. I don't know that I'm any better off than you in this regard, as the prospect of giant alien monsters rampaging over the Earth doesn't trigger the same response in me, but it doesn't frighten me either. As for Godzilla, it wasn't more than a decade or two before the makers and audience of that film got over their fear of it as well.

Lovecraft was terrified of a lot of things. The sight of a cooked fish was sufficient to see him fleeing from the room in a cold sweat, bile building in his stomach, shaking in terror. I think his stories are so effective because he was a man acquainted with fear and subject to it. Of course, he can't quite make the reader as terrified of fish people and octopus headed immortal horrors as he was, and some of his terrors seem as you say pitiable to most modern readers. But I personally feel that what make his stories more enduring is less the visceral squick of seeing fish of a phobic man, but the intellectual horror he wove into the story in response to seeing his intellectual world collapse. It's those intellectual horrors that I'd most want to see channeled by an inventive author.

HPL was a well read man of post-Enlightenment European philosophy. He was comfortable even obsessed with the 19th century world view - a materialist, eternal universe without need of a creator, but which had birthed mankind who was in turn destined by the very laws of the universe to progress and evolve to ever greater heights. All of that world view came tumbling down in the early years of his life. Certain fundamental comfortable assumptions about the nature of the universe fell apart.

Things that horrified HPL in a very real way include ideas like the insolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem and the insolvability of Diophantine sets. Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle very likely would have shook him to his core. Quantum Mechanics would have been just as uncomfortable of a discovery as it was for Einstein, and I think he would have railed against it in the same way and for the same reasons. The existence of the Big Bang, and thus the finite nature of the universe (or coupled with general relativity, the finite nature of the observable universe) would have been problematic to a person who grew up believing in a world without beginning or end. Now we hear about the heat death of the universe and we just shrug, as HPL would have put it, blissfully unable to correlate all the contents of our own minds. Mechanical predestination doesn't bother us. Nor are we easily frightened by what first frightened me reading a HPL story, which is the vast gulfs of matter which are empty of anything that we can comprehend as anything, so that perhaps we ought to properly view everything including our own bodies as insubstantial wisps of vapor that are realistically speaking barely even there.

HPL would have said that we being protected from what we know by the editing of our conscious mind, which continually hides from us the nature of reality which - if we took it seriously - would drive us insane.

This is the level which I would like Call of Cthulhu games to work at, but instead they worked mostly on the level of violence and squick and typically involve solutions of employing greater force - like your proposed solution of fighting giant monsters with giant robots.

 

[dco]

99% of horror movies won't scare me and the same happens to a lot of persons, that doesn't mean they are not horror movies. A RPG that is played with a group, sorry, it's 100% impossible that I will be scared, same with a lot of people, if you want to scare you need the correct audience.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don’t think the point is to actually scare the players. It’s more about letting then experience their characters being scared. It may seem like a subtle distinction, but it’s pretty significant.

If your players can ever feel whattheir characteds feel....if they feel a sense of accomplishment after the characters achieve a long fought for goal, if they feel satisfaction when the characters catch the recurring villain, if they get mad when a villain kills a party member or an NPC ally and then escapes....then they can feel horror for their characters.

I don’t think it’s easy to achieve, though. Most players won’t allow themselves to feel such negative emotions. They kind of “parachute” out mentally.

But if you have players who are willing to buy in, and you do a good job of portraying the situation the characters find themselves in, and it’s one that’s weird or scary or uncomfortable, then the players can definitely catch the right vibe.

I’ve done it in my D&D game, and horror’s not even a preferred genre of mine, nor one my players would typically respond to. But it happened. All I really had to do was convey the scenario in such a way that it impressed the veteran players that their characters were in over their head, and that weird stuff was happening. I didn’t use any typical D&D tropes or creatures....I didn’t make it so that the players could say to themselves “oh it’s a wight” or anything like that.

I think that you have to work at it to achieve that effect, and the players have to be willing to go alongb for the ride. Just as a movie or a book or any other kind of story can scare people, so can a RPG.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Two thoughts.

First, it takes a group of players willing to be very role play focused. Lots of horror elements will require things happening to people and places that the players and through them their characters care about.

Second, I think Gothic horror, along the lines of Ravensloft works better as role play horror than Lovecraft horror. It is hard to roleplay players going insane as their reality crumbles around them.

 

[GrahamWills]

Horror is hard.

It is much easier to make players feel noble, angry ... even sad, than it is to make them feel horror. In a one-shot you stand a much better chance because you are able to stack everything in your favor — the premise, the characters, the plot — you have a lot of preparation in terms of writing and experience making that 4 hours of play a great experience.

A campaign is much, much harder. In fact, I would go so far as to say that making every session — even most sessions — of a horror campaign actually horrific is not something I believe really possible without godlike GM ability. And I’ve had a lot of great GMs.

I’ve run Dracula Dossier, Masks of Nyarlathotep, Beyond the Mountains of Madness and Eternal Lies for 2+ years each. Of them, Masks had honestly very few horrific moments; it was nearly all adventure rather than horror being predominant. In the other campaigns, there were moments of horror, and the fact that they existed added continuous tension to the game. So even if the episode seemed mostly adventurous, the players remembered previous horror and so were always on edge. I am happy with the way all these campaigns ran, so I think for me, that’s the goal — a successful horror campaign is not uniformly horrific, but the players know that at any moment it may become so.

I do not do a lot of body horror or squickiness in my campaigns. That is a brief flash and doesn’t worry the players in future sessions. I prefer horror that promises a bad, long-lasting effect on their characters. That keeps a state of nervous energy that motivates and scares *players*. Examples:

A great Trail of Cthulhu suggestion is on insanity. In traditional CoC a player who gets a permanent insanity gets a phobia or something like that. That’s not really horrific. In TOC one thing they suggest is you change their character. So I sent the player out of the room and we decided as a group that their character actually did not possess one of the skills they thought they did, and were delusional in thinking they did. We acted that out over several sessions until the player figured it out, and from then on players were much more nervous about insanity inducing events — going insane might mean that you lost something you really cared about.

A classic I used in Dracula Dossier was to threaten sources of stability. These are objects/people that the characters trust and love, and mechanically ones the players use to recover stability, so threatening them is scary for both the players and the characters (always a win). As the campaign became more intense, one player’s brother was controlled by Dracula into abducting and murdering young children. That was a genuine moment of horror as the players realized that Dracula was now focusing his full attention on them and could transform something they loved into something evil. I would suggest that threatening such a transformation is much more powerful than threats of death (the book Dracula is explicit in this — Dracula transforms pure good women into evil satanic child killers)

Another good horror trope that only works in campaigns is the slow burn. Over multiple sesssions, introduce something creepy and keep ratcheting it up without the players being able to address it. Ideally it is something they should address, but they need to do other things more urgently. Maybe one of them is slowly transforming into something awful (e.g. a deep one), maybe they keep receiving fed ex packages with body parts. Anything that builds tension.

So my overall goal is tension — something bad is about to happen. Maybe every 6 or 8 episodes I will straight up add a horror scene in and spend significant time and energy planning it. One successful technique I use is to run mini-adventures for solo characters. When you have a character who has to crawl alone into a vampires tomb along a long tunnel, and the GM has told you that he is comfortable with character death at this point, and you really are not sure if you can make the will check to kill the countess in her sleep ... you worry — and you listen intently to details of the tomb.

It is also very important to know your group. Your goal is get as close as possible to the line of discomfort for the players without crossing into the area where they want to X card you (and make sure they can do that if they need to!). It’s like eating hot peppers — eveyone’s threshold is different, and you want to be just below it.

Long post; the TLDR is that I think that for a horror campaign you should aim for tension and an ominous atmosphere. Actually horror should be relatively rare, but always on player minds. That is, for me, an approach that has worked.