Anyone else having trouble rationalizing CoC sanity loss?

[Tsyr]

You can say that "Oh, I've seen pictures of a Dragon... so seeing a real dragon wouldn't make me go insane."

A few problems applying that to Cthullu.

1) In the Cthullu world, people DON'T see pictures of these guys in books, not if they are lucky.

2) As I have tried to stress in earlier posts. Cthullian stuff, be it mythos monsters, or forbidden secrets, or lost history... is, by it's very nature, intrinsicly _WRONG_ to the human brain. It's not just that they are creepy or anything. They are _WRONG_. There is no way to make a comparison here to something else, that I can think of... but... It's kinda like Dragon Fear. I mean, an adventurer could read about dragons, see pictures of dragons, watch a fight against a dragon from a safe distance, and _KNOW_ that he had a better than average chance in his next fight because of his Ring of AC+50 Against Dragons and his Sword of Dragon Slaying +50... but he would still have the chance of being scared of the dragon, because of Dragon Fear. It's kinda like that, in a way, except completely different ... When you see a Cthullian creature, something in the deepest, darkest parts of your soul knows that what you are seeing is WRONG. No matter how mentaly prepared you might think yourself, your "inner self" knows better.

 

[Tristissima]

And now for something completely different . . .

Well, for a completely different, non-Lovecraftian explanation . . .

In my homebrew, Nomenclature, which is inspired both by HPL and by certain elements of queer theory, sanity is a result of the World Before being ripped apart by Hamada of the Red Earth, who Named the world, creating the World Now. The resulting races, bound by names and labels and language, simply cannot handle viewing even the tiniest hints of what it was like before Hamada created the world.
Unfortunately, hints like this are littered throughout the world. Indeed, every race except the humans (descendants of Hamada himself) resembles, in some slight way, what the world was like before. Thus, every race is rather insular and isolated from each other (although the non-human races will sometimes make contact with the humans and a few humans have become a sort of diplomat among the races).
Sanity loss therefore is more the witnessing, or the remembering, of things which cannot be put into language, or words. These things cannot be completely conceived of by the mind. Such things are inherently un-understandable and will break the mind.

Sorry for those who don't care, I'm just eager to post

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I think another way to look at is along the lines of what has already been said by a few others - we're talking about stuff that can't be imagined. The Cthulhu tomes somehow reach into one's mind, figuratively (heck, it'd be cool if thay did it literally, huh?), and actually open the mind up to seieng these impossible images.

How many dimensions are being postulated by science now? 12? More? Just by virtue of our 3 dimensional nature we can't even imagine anything beyond that (well, beyond 4 if you count time as a dimension) except on a mathematical level. But suppose that someone invented a viewer of some kind, or devised a type of brain enhancement (surgical or otherwise) that allowed a person to see 8, 9, 10, or more dimensions (sorta like From Beyond, in a way). The person who was able to actually perceive those dimensions would have a frame of reference which the rest of us could not possibly relate to. The definition of sanity for this person would, by necessity, differ from ours. Perhaps they wouldn't be insane, strictly speaking, but they would be differently sane. Or, to use perhaps my favorite Lovecraftian term, they would be unsane.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

The movie was called Warlock on international release. I'm not sure if that's the name it goes by in the US. As far as the tetragrammaton - I must admit that I know of no references re-dating the 1890's, but I'll believe you. However, this still doesn't make it Christian belief - as you yourself say, it's occult lore.

The occult is a competing discourse to Christianity. I should have made myself more clear initially - the notion may predate the eighties but it is most certainly not Christian.

Warlock! That's a great film!

Regarding the Christian element: I was careful to say Judeo-Christian in my earlier post. I'm not trying to offend anyone, but I'm looking at it from a mythological standpoint. Certainly none of this has anything to do with modern, mainstream Christianity, anymore - even less so - than voodoo has to do with Catholicism. But at its core, it has to do with very early Judeo-Christian elements. For example, Abramelin the Mage (from the 12th or 13th centuries, I believe) used what seems to be at least a variant of the tetragrammeton. But, again, I'm not trying to offend anyone or disparage their religion. If I have inadvertently caused offense, I apologize.

EDIT: By the way, if anyone can correct me on any of this, feel free to do so. I may very well be wrong. It could be I'm misreading.

 

[333 Dave]

If you don't believe that reading a Mythos tome can make you go crazy, go to www.timecube.com and read the whole thing straight through without taking a break. Then put it through Bablefish, convert it to German then back to english, then read it again. Then multiply that by 1000. Thats a mythos tome. And the idea for San loss for reading a tome is your trying to understand it (thats how you learn spells from it). Yeah. Reading won't make you crazy .

 

[333 Dave]

OH, and this thread SO belongs in the d20 System Games board..... where are moderators when you need them...

 

[ColonelHardisson]

No, it doesn't. This is more about rationalizing magic items and how they work than about a specific game system and its mechanics.

It would suck to see it moved and fall into oblivion. Some people just can't seem to let others have a good time.

 

[333 Dave]

Uhh, CH, what the hell are you talking about? Are we looking at the same thread?
No offense intended, I just fail to see how this doesn't deserve to go to d20 System Games (Which is not oblivion, like Plots & Places ).

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Yes, we're reading the same thread. The stuff we're talking about here could easily apply to any game - it's not about game mechanics, except in a rather small way. It seems almost a perfect fit for General Discussion. What about threads like "Which Games Converted to d20 have the feel of the orginal?" or "About Ravenloft"?

 

[gregweller]

A couple of thoughts here. First, madness as it relates to hallucinogenic drugs. I remember a party back around 1971 or so. There was a pitcher of beer in the kitchen. I didn't want to stand in line at the keg, so I had a couple of glasses out of the pitcher. A couple of minutes later, someone asked, what happened to all the electric beer? It turned out that there were a 1/2 dozen hits of acid in the beer. Now, not having been a stranger to some of the more esoteric chemicals, I just quietly sat in a corner and prepared to go quietly insane for 8 hours or so. My point is that I knew what to expect. Now imagine someone who didn't know what to expect. Or even more importantly, someone who had no idea that something like that could happen to their mind. Maybe that's a better way to approach what it would be like to experience the Mythos. And no, I'm not having a flashback .

Second, I think what the Colonel is talking about is the idea of the Kaballistic tradition, which is defined as ' A body of mystical teachings of rabbinical origin, often based on an esoteric interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures.' Now, this might not be part of any particular person's experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it's pointless to deny that this does exist. As strange as Crowley's or Blavatsky's beliefs may seem to a heterdox interpretation of Judeo-Chistianity, it does exist as part of a continuum of belief whether or not one chooses to believe in it. When you get into stuff like the Enochian Keys, or the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, or the Seal of Solomon, this is historical stuff. Whether or not you believe it individually or not, you can't deny that this stuff has been believed by some people at various points in history. These are the historico-literary precursors of the Necronomicon as a literary text.

I just thought of one more thing to throw into this discussion, and that's the poetry of William Blake. Now if you look at Blake's 'prophetic works' such as 'Jerusalem' or 'The Four Zoas', there's definitely a different order of reality at work here. And there's evidence that Blake really did experience this stuff. Now does this make him mad, or simply in possession of knowledge that 'man was not meant to know' ? ...if you want to consult the original texts, his complete works are available here: http://virtual.park.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html

(I always did think that it would be interesting to bring Blake's works into a CoC module ...

(and if you want to see what Blake's works looked like in the original, you must check out the Blake Archive at

http://www.blakearchive.org/main.html
truely one of the great treasures of the Internet. )