A new "Cthulhu" Mythos

[takyris]

I've had good luck with both the familiar and the unfamiliar. In a lot of cases, it depends on the situation with your group. If you have a very imaginative and immersed group, then having the bank teller suddenly rake her fingernails across your wrist and leave a bloody trail of scratches that itch intensely and ooze ink instead of blood can be terrifying. If you don't, though, they're going to go "huh, ink-blood, huh? That's probably poisoned. How much damage did it do? Are her fingernails artificially long?"

On the other hand, if you've got a more crunch-minded group that is very aware of the game-like-nature of what you're doing, then sending in a monster that they know has a death-effect gaze, a slam that bestows negative energy levels, and the ability to shoot a stream of ichor for 5d6 acid damage is gonna be darn scary. A more immersed group will probably react gamely to such a monster, roleplaying their fear, but the players will most likely be going "Okay, it's a monster, I'll act afraid and then, when my character gets desperate enough, he'll Double-Tap on his first attack and move to be 40 feet away from it, out of gaze-attack range."

My group has a mix, which is unfortunate. A couple of players are perfectly capable of freaking out when I describe a hallucination of snakes crawling out of the eye sockets of a murder victim, while a couple others react with "Oh, yeah, snakes, okay, I back away. That's not good."

The one thing that I've noticed seems to work for everyone is something I'm getting better at: Destruction or deformation of the body. When a hallucination or a crime scene involves someone who has been eviscerated, with their guts spread around them in a circle, tied spread-eagled to the four corners of the room with their own tendons, and with every tooth in their mouth pulled out and shoved into their now-oozing eye sockets, both the immersed people and the game people get worried.

 

[Prest0]

[pimping]My Bloodlines mini-campaign is highly Cthulhu-influenced.[/pimping]

I think Zappo hit the nail on the head, though. It isn't the dark, nameless horrors-- it's how they warp our own world. It's the total strangers asking "Have you seen the yellow sign?" It's the cellular phone that connects you with your dead relative. It's the radio that tunes into a broadcast 5 minutes into the future...

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

Eh. Personally, I'm quite bored with the constant streams of "disturbing" imagery and seemingly random, nonsensical events.

Long-dead family members appearing for a moment isn't scary. Nor is a sink that begins pouring blood. They're cliches.

 

[Prest0]

Eh. Personally, I'm quite bored with the constant streams of "disturbing" imagery and seemingly random, nonsensical events.

Long-dead family members appearing for a moment isn't scary. Nor is a sink that begins pouring blood. They're cliches.

I guess it depends on what you've been exposed to, and how much. Anything can be over-done. So what DO you find scary?

 

[Henry]

Eh. Personally, I'm quite bored with the constant streams of "disturbing" imagery and seemingly random, nonsensical events.

Long-dead family members appearing for a moment isn't scary. Nor is a sink that begins pouring blood. They're cliches.

How about scenarios based on common fears and occurances?

My personal favorite was an instance I introduced in a Cthulhu game about a year back. Imagine someone taking a bath, and going under to rinse their hair, but not being able to rise back out of the water (the old "trapped beneath the frozen lake" theme). You're defenseless, you can't get precious air, and have nothing to break out with - yet there's NOTHING holding you under - just the surface tension of the water hightened to an impossible degree.

Now, imagine trying to free someone from this fate - but even bullets bounce off, and you have to watch them look at you and drown.


Other fears that can be modified to some scary events:
--Insect under the skin
--Extra body parts growing and acting independently, or other body modifications (eyes or mouth sewn shut)
--Paralysis
--Intruder in your home just out of sight; you know they are there, but cannot find them.

Just some thoughts...

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

"Normal" people and their behavior. (Not suitable for most people's Mythos games, I suppose.)

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

"Normal" people and their behavior. (Not suitable for most people's Mythos games, I suppose.)

There are several neurological disorders that might prove useful in a game. For example, rarely people become convinced that their loved ones are been replaced by exact duplicates. They acknowledge that the person in question looks, acts, and in all ways seems to be who they're supposed to be, but they have an utter conviction that they're not. It's thought that this is caused by damage to the "emotional response and familiarity" memory systems - it's rather like retroactive amnesia, only with recognition instead of memories.

What if the person is perfectly normal, and they're sensing something intuitively? What if the loved ones really had been replaced?

Or what about a person who's had brain damage and can no longer recognize faces? (We're primed to interpret images as faces, which is why the highly stylized "smiley face" is perceived as such.) Imagine a game where a patient suddenly begins recognizing certain faces as terrible things. Because they can no longer use their brains' automated facial recognition modules, they are free to notice disturbing patterns most people can't perceive...

 

[adwyn]

I wrote a CoC adventure that I ran at several cons. It dealt with the PC's being black in the early 20th century and having to travel into a remote southern locale to deal with a dread thing from beyond. What scared them wasn't the evil beasties, it was the oppressiveness of Jim Crow laws, the mindset that generated those laws, and the primitive conditions and stark contrasts of wealth in Appalachia in those times. My point is simply that it is the subtle changes in the familiar that shake people up more than trying to describe awful things.

Since I have found fear is evoked best by disrupting the players expectations. This is hard. Too much and they just return to ho hum, but when done right they'll react the way you want.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

I'm not really sure why facing Cthulhu or any other members of the mythos should be a huge focus in any game of CoC. I think the powers that some of their followers have is enough to be definitely frightening. Using the known and just putting little twists on things can be wonderfully effective to the point that you hardly think about what the hell that creepy guy is summoning, and more that it's bad and you want nothing to do with it. The best example I can think of is the only CoC game I've ever been in. Fellow EN Worlder (and now mostly lurker) Fayredeth came up with a great scenario for CoC: high school freshmen snowed in at our alma mater--their new school. For four seniors who knew our high school like the back of our hands it was a marvelous setting. Just slight differences and the uncertainty of what exactly was going on at good old BHS made the place come alive and be QUITE creepy.

We never fought great Cthulhu or Azatoth, but we had plenty to be frightened of: a creature summoned by a witch in our party that she couldn't control running around the ventilation ducts, odd things lurking in darkened corridors, teachers dissecting students in search of souls, and a security guard that just didn't seem right at all. That game was probably my pal's brightest moment as a GM, and probably some of my best moments of roleplaying (playing a quiet super religious member of a bible study club who underwent years of therapy to try to forget the horrors he had witnessed... slowly losing control as he lost many sanity checks... man that was fun).

I dunno, I don't really see the need for a NEW mythos of gods, but if Lovecraft encouraged it, there's no reason not to. New is good, but there's nothing really wrong with the old if they're used right and not overused. That's my two cents.

 

[Gothmog]

I'm just saying, "A tentacled Henry Winkler? Scary!"

I'm just saying.

Let's take the mouldy Arabic text issue. What are other creepifying sources of knowledge?

How much SAN loss would a tentacled Henry Winkler cause?!?!?! 1d10/5d10?

Anyway, one creepifying source of knowledge I used about 10 years ago in a CoC campaign were the writings of a Roman centurian captain sent to Germania and Caledonia in service to the empire. During his tenure, he and his men dealt with cultists of Shub-Niggurath and a Dark Young in Germania, as well as forged an alliance with some Caledonians against the awakened threat of Cthonians in Britain. Other minor mythos events were also recorded (the Yellow Sign, an encounter with a moon beast). True to Roman writing fashion, I exhaustively detailed his encounters, and wrote them up on parchment papers along with sketches an art major friend of mine made of some critters, relics, etc. Interestingly (esp since there is a Spear of Destiny thread running concurrently right now), the centurion involved in all this was Longinus in my game. Due to his somewhat unhinged mind, Longinus was recalled to Rome and found incapable of leading troops anymore, however he was reassigned to the Judea area. His spear was a gift from a Caledonian shaman for use in combatting the Cthonians, but he later stabbed Christ with it because he believed he was a Cthulhu mythos monster possessing/inhabiting a human body. His journal goes on to state that in the weeks following the death and resurrection of Jesus, Longinus was visited by strange lumenescent beings who worked on his psyche and eventually he became a convert of Christianity. He was eventually stoned to death by an angry mob of Roman citizens. His journal was taken from imperial officials before it could be used to root out other sympathizers of Christianity, and hidden away in a German monastery where it was revered as a holy tome through the middle ages and Renniasance. When my players read all this, it sent chills down their spines, with the implication that maybe Christianity is designed to set up worship of one of the Old Ones.