Celebrim
Legend
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?
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?