Call of Cthulhu as a Horror Game

[MGibster]

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.

My last CoC campaign ended with a narrowly avoided TPK because one of the PCs managed to give birth to herself. CoC can be weird sometimes.

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.

It's hard to run a horror game when everyone isn't on the same page. I participated in an Esoterrorist campaign and we had one player who didn't have a lot of fun because he was the "kick the door down and punch the cosmic horror in the face" kind of a guy. We had another player who treated everything as a joke of little consequence even which kind of killed the mood. It made the campaign a bit difficult to get into.

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?

I think the toughest part is making a scenario that people can relate to.
So I usually make other humans the antagonist who are motivated by very human goals. Well, mostly human goals. So I don't make scenarios involving the end of the world or some apocalyptic event because when the stakes are that high it's hard to relate.

I have a scenario idea involving insurance fraud, the KKK, the drought of 1930 (American South), and I've thrown the mythos into the mix. I find that doing something like this leaves the players a little more invested in the scenario as they can understand the motivations of greed and racism whereas the mythos is mostly unfathomable.

 

[Celebrim]

I think the toughest part is making a scenario that people can relate to.
So I usually make other humans the antagonist who are motivated by very human goals. Well, mostly human goals. So I don't make scenarios involving the end of the world or some apocalyptic event because when the stakes are that high it's hard to relate.

I have a scenario idea involving insurance fraud, the KKK, the drought of 1930 (American South), and I've thrown the mythos into the mix. I find that doing something like this leaves the players a little more invested in the scenario as they can understand the motivations of greed and racism whereas the mythos is mostly unfathomable.

I think you say a lot that is true and which indicates you are quite experienced with horror themed games. And while I can see merit in the position you outline here, it does also I think speak to the problem I'm addressing, which is, is cosmic horror really something the modern reader can relate to?

Your suggestion that cosmic horror and the mythos be abandoned as unfathomable and therefore not horrifying at least within the context of a game suggests to me that our modern generation is greatly practiced at what HPL called not "correlating contents of its mind".

Relatable horror like you describe tends to make me angry and not afraid. What I found disturbing about HPL was its insistence on correlating the contents of what I believed. So, as I suggested, I quite knew that the distance between the nuclei of the atoms were astronomically large compared to the scale of the atoms, but I'd never actually imagined these gulfs within my person and the things around me. I was acquainted with Godel's incompleteness theorem, and the Big Bang, and the heat death of the universe, but unlike HPL, I'd never constructed a philosophy which depended on not knowing of these things. So, the discovery of these things could not bowl me over in terror as my intellectual underpinnings gave way, as it did I think for HPL. But then, I notice that many people who know of these things, are smug about them, as the Victorians and their like were smug regarding their knowledge of the universe, but also that the Victorians had vastly more reason to be smug. So I ask, is it possible for the mythos to be frightening to a modern comfortable educated person - the sort that would boldly claim we'd build mecha to fight Kaiju - and so is it all reduced to just blood and squick?

 

[MGibster]

I think you say a lot that is true and which indicates you are quite experienced with horror themed games. And while I can see merit in the position you outline here, it does also I think speak to the problem I'm addressing, which is, is cosmic horror really something the modern reader can relate to?

Is cosmic horror still frightening to a modern audience? Let us first define cosmic horror. In a nutshell, cosmic horror is about the insignificance of humanity and our powerlessness in the face of a cold indifferent universe. The horror in a Lovecraft story mainly comes from people learning some facet of the true nature of the universe combined with their inability to make any meaningful changes in broad scheme of things. This is a fairly abstract fear and I don’t think it would work on most people in 1932 never mind in 2019. But that doesn’t mean cosmic horror can’t be used effectively.

A decent horror story involves a threat to something we hold valuable. Losing a child scares the hell out of most people so we could relate to the Freeling family’s search for Carol Ann in Poltergeist, Get Out deals with bodily autonomy and racism, and Jeff Goldblum’s The Fly touches on the uncontrollable changes that come to our bodies during our lifetime. So for cosmic horror to be effective it’s got to be targeted at something we care about. Let’s take a look at one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Part 1: The narrator in Shadow is an antiquarian doing a little genealogical research and happens upon Innsmouth where an old man named Zadok tells him a lurid tale of the town's history of sex, murder, and the worship of some damned God in the pursuit of material wealth.

The narrator finds Zadok's story unnerving but doesn't believe it. When he finds that the bus has broken down and he must remain in Innsmouth overnight he's apprehensive but doesn't feel endangered.

Part 2: The deformed citizens of Innsmouth with their wet bulging eyes, pale bloated bellies, and peculiar gaits come for the narrator at night. The narrator escapes and when he gets a really good look at the strange creatures chasing him he passes out. When he awakens he tells the authorities and the US Navy and Marines show up, kick ass, and all seems well.

So in this part we have the risk of losing life and limb but more importantly it confirms that Zadok's story is true. There's intelligent life in the sea, they're breeding with humans, and they've killed to keep their secret. Not only that but this life has a good deal of control over what goes on in the ocean. Learning that there's another intelligent species on Earth that's malevolent has got to change your worldview, right?

Part 3: Many years after the threat of Innsmouth has abated the narrator comes to a realization. He's related to Obed Marsh and the blood of those fish things runs through his veins. He's turning into one of them and soon he will slip into the sea forever. But first he's got to break his cousin out of the asylum so they can go to sea together.

So the horror here is that the narrator really isn't human any more and has come to not only accept his fate but to embrace it.

Cosmic horror can be effective but it's got to threaten things the player character cares about. It's got to threaten their families, their sense of identity, their faith in the pillars of society, etc., etc. The cosmic horror comes when the things the players care about are either destroyed or his faith in them are destroyed.

Lovecraft had it easy because he had narrative control over his stories. As a GM you don't have it so easy because your players might now allow their characters to feel any genuine fear.

 

[Celebrim]

Is cosmic horror still frightening to a modern audience? Let us first define cosmic horror. In a nutshell, cosmic horror is about the insignificance of humanity and our powerlessness in the face of a cold indifferent universe. The horror in a Lovecraft story mainly comes from people learning some facet of the true nature of the universe combined with their inability to make any meaningful changes in broad scheme of things. This is a fairly abstract fear and I don’t think it would work on most people in 1932 never mind in 2019. But that doesn’t mean cosmic horror can’t be used effectively...Cosmic horror can be effective but it's got to threaten things the player character cares about. It's got to threaten their families, their sense of identity, their faith in the pillars of society, etc., etc. The cosmic horror comes when the things the players care about are either destroyed or his faith in them are destroyed.

Ok, that's seems like a self-evident observation, but to put it plainly like that is clarifying and like many observations that are self-evident when you hear them being able to state them with clarity requires more understanding than one might think.

Yes, the reason cosmic horror was deeply effecting to HPL is that discoveries in math and science undermined his faith in things he cared deeply enough about that they defined his identity. His beliefs were shook. So it stands to reason that concepts like "insignificance of humanity and our powerlessness in the face of a cold indifferent universe" will only be horrifying if they can be made to intersect something that someone in 2019 deeply cares about. I would also suggest that the power of horror is to make you do more than reflect upon something you know to be true (or hope is not true), but to actually feel it. In other words, you have to not only know about the heat death of the universe, but feel that in some way this is real and impacts on you - the difference between mere intellectual affirmation and actual belief. Horror makes you not only know that being alone in the dark with unidentifiable noises can be scary, but actually feel that fear. That I think is the hard part in trying to obtain the result of horror in game. You have to someone trigger a deeper introspection than normally happens in a game.

I would suggest that the same sort of cosmic horror that HPL felt could be visited on people from 1932 or 2018, but it is very hard to get people to introspect deeply on the sort of things that trigger that horror. Most people are, like the characters on the edge of an HPL, quite happy to ignore all the evidences of their senses and their intellect if in doing so it will prevent them from contemplating something that horrifies them. In Charles Stross's laundry files, Stross voices what I think is a very Lovecraftian sentiment through the voice of his protagonist Bob, when Bob stats that he would prefer to live in a universe without gods, but the reality of a true religion has been forced on him quite against his will because he knows he lives in a universe with deities, and it is horrifying. Likewise, to pick up some communities that I hope do not have too many members here (and if anyone feels attacked, I assure you I'm more sympathetic than you might imagine and please IM me about it), a Flat Earther or someone convinced that the universe is 4000 years old, or someone convinced that the moon landing was a hoax, is I think doing quite a good job of blocking out thoughts that horrify them and would be quite as troubled as HPL was by the Big Bang. Again, if anyone feels assaulted by that, I assure you I think such behavior is human behavior and not a sign of uncommon mental or social defect, as someone as bright as Einstein is asserting very much the same horror in a statement like, "God does not play dice with the universe." As much horror as quantum dynamics had for Einstein, imagine how much worse it would have been had Einstein been forced to confront evidence that the 'god' in that statement was not a metaphorical or pantheistic impersonal summation of the laws of the physical universe, but the sort of personified being that Bob is forced to accede the reality of in the Laundry-verse.

Picking on Stross, one aspect of the Laundry verse that I think ruins the horror is one that I felt ruined the horror in my attempt at a CoC campaign, and that is the sense that an RPG tends to give that the protagonists have some measure of control. The horror of the laundry-verse has for me been continually diminishing as the protagonists in the setting 'level up' to increasing degrees of (to use the technical term) "badassery". Whereas in the CoC setting one would expect that as you learn more mythos lore, and in particular as you become more of a Lovecraftian sorcerer, one would get more and more unstable and monstrous until ones humanity is stripped away. But in the Laundry-verse, this hasn't been happening as Stross moves away in the story from contemplating the things that horrify him. Rather, as the story continues Bob is more or less friends with a variety of Lovecraftian horrors and gets more and more in control and less and less in danger as the story goes on. Indeed, lately Stross has been less contemplating the horror of being forced to contemplate a theistic universe that he doesn't want to exist that we see in 'Colder War' or 'The Atrocity Archives', than he has been contemplating how cool it would be to live in a universe where he could be a superhero that could punch Dread Cthulhu in the face. Consider the difference between what you related regarding the story of "Shadow over Innsmouth", and the way Deep Ones have been treated in recent Laundry verse stories as being friendly sexy superheroes rather less alien or frightening than J'onn J'onzz. "Shadow over Innsmouth" ends with the cosmic horror of evolving into something horrifying in form and mind. The Laundry verse is increasingly about humanity leveling up, as if Lovecraftian transformation was something to be welcomed and not feared.

Which has prompted me to say several times that the Laundry files are from a Lovecraftian perspective, most horrifying viewed from the meta perspective.

This is similar to the idea "Wouldn't it be cool to live in the universe of Pacific Rim?" suggested by the idea that if Kaiju were real, well then giant battling robots would be real too and so in that sense it might be desirable to live in a universe with giant rampaging monsters. "May you live in interesting times" seems to have lost its power to terrify. The deep sense of cosmic horror people once felt about ideas like nuclear war seems to have largely faded away. That horror has become abstract as well, and in that sense I think you are probably wrong about the relative portion of people who could be horrified by abstract ideas like the inability of mankind to save themselves from destruction comparing 1932 and 2019. Bring up the extinction of humanity these days, and there is a not insignificant portion of the audience that avows that would be a good thing.

So what are the things which a modern audience is going to be actually threatened by? What horrifies the modern reader? Sure the insolvability of Diophantine sets is an abstract thing, but underlying it is a profound weirdness that attacks deeply held intuitive convictions many people have, which might be described as the conviction that there is a solution within the grasp of humanity for every problem. But, supposing it is too much to write an adventure that conveys that connection, what can you write an adventure about that actually stops a modern player in his tracks and makes him go, "Woah." You mention the body horror of The Fly, and I think of the rather well received Delta Green adventure Convergence (?, I think I have that name right). But too much body horror is not only repetitive it tends to end up in just squick, with vomit and the like provoking disgust and squeamishness rather than intellectual horror. So where else can we go to threaten the basic beliefs of someone in 2019 and force them to think of things that they'd rather not think of (well, at least in some sense, since obviously the whole point in a horror game or movie is to make you think things you'd rather not think for the visceral thrill and frisson of doing so).

 

[Nebulous]

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 ran Masks over 10 years ago. LOVED IT, but it was not particularly scary, and I ran it in the d20 system so it was even less scary, but it was deliberately played like an Indiana Jones pulp action adventure, and it was perfect for that.

 

[Celebrim]

I ran Masks over 10 years ago. LOVED IT, but it was not particularly scary, and I ran it in the d20 system so it was even less scary, but it was deliberately played like an Indiana Jones pulp action adventure, and it was perfect for that.

I had heard really great things about Masks, so I bought a pdf copy of it intending it to be the basis of my campaign. I was so disappointed with it, that I kept putting off playing it, and never ended up actually using it.

It certainly isn't scary, and while I considered running it as a more Pulp action adventure, if you are going to do that then IMO the CoC sanity rules actually get in the way since so much of the adventure is "Yogsothoth in a Closet" in that any attempt to actually even watch much less participate in the big climatic scenes involves so much potential SAN loss as to cripple the investigators permanently. This often happens without due warning, and not merely as a climax of the entire campaign since after leaving New York there is at least one 3d10 to 1d100 SAN loss scenario at the climax (or more likely, anti-climax) of every location where the closet door is open.

[sblock]The easiest approach to the whole scenario is to avoid investigation entirely, and simply overcome the problems and NPC villains by the liberal application of military grade firepower. (Indeed, this is actually explicit to the text of the climax scenario, where the best solution provided by the text seems to be requisition some howitzers and never know or see just quite what you blew to smithereens. Here, not knowing is half the battle.) This ironically makes the agents of law and order the biggest obstacles for most of the campaign since if you are dragging around a Vickers machine gun and enough firepower to equip a WWII platoon, it's the police that are a bigger problem for you than most of the villains in the campaign, and therefore made me want to introduce a CHILL style global anti-mythos organization for the PC's to join to smooth over the disjoint between the scenarios and the setting.[/sblock]

The big problem with investigator crippling SAN loss aside from it ending a campaign, is precisely that I'd be OK with investigator crippling SAN loss if there was corresponding basis of horror in the player. But jump scaring "You open the door and you see Yogsothoth." (or in this case Nyarthalhotep) doesn't in any fashion do that. Sure, maybe opening a door and seeing Yogsothoth would blast any shred of sanity from your mind, but HPL knows better than to pace his story in that fashion and there are far better ways to deal with "what you see can kill you" going all the way back to Medusa story.

So sure, you could run "Masks" as an Indiana Jones pulp action adventure, but if you do, it probably works even better in a different system than CoC.

 

[Jhaelen]

So sure, you could run "Masks" as an Indiana Jones pulp action adventure, but if you do, it probably works even better in a different system than CoC.

Since the release of the 'Trail of Cthulhu' RPG, I actually wouldn't consider using any other system for a Mythos campaign. It actually puts the focus where it (imho) belongs: on the investigation. Also, it support both pulp action and a more traditional approach.

There's an excellent conversion of 'Masks' available for free.

 

[Nebulous]

Since the release of the 'Trail of Cthulhu' RPG, I actually wouldn't consider using any other system for a Mythos campaign. It actually puts the focus where it (imho) belongs: on the investigation. Also, it support both pulp action and a more traditional approach.

There's an excellent conversion of 'Masks' available for free.

If I ran it again that's what I would do, Trail + the Pulp rules.

 

[Terry Herc]

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 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).

I think this gets close to the heart of the matter - there is a difference between horror for the players and horror for the characters.

When it happens to the characters, we are playing a role and we can imagine how it would make the character feel, while safely allowing ourselves to appreciate the experience at a distance. When it happens to the players, it creates genuine feelings of discomfort with the risk of causing real trauma. If you can do both and everyone is comfortable with that sort of game, that can be a delicate place.

I would suggest that horror is best when it focuses on characters. You and your group create an atmosphere that the characters exist in, and the players can safely observe, the same way we do when reading a book or watching a movie. You need the right kind of players tho, ones that willingly play the roles of characters in such an atmosphere. As others have said, the "beer and pretzel" crowd may not be right for this mood. If that's what your players want, maybe try Pulp Cthulhu or something in that vein, they might enjoy it more.

 

[Voadam]

I remember really liking the advice from the First 2e Ravenloft boxed set.

Particularly the part about show, don't tell. It matched my existing 1e DMing style of describing monsters without naming them.

One of the scariest games I ran was probably the Moathouse in Temple of Elemental Evil in 1e during high school. The party had been in the dungeon a bunch of times but one overnight game, it was just two PCs at my friend's basement with a fire going in the fireplace and not much light and we were quiet so as to not wake his family. They were elves and found a secret door that had been missed in past forays and so were cautiously going deeper into the unknown underground with a much smaller party than normal. I ran the game fairly straight with the dungeon as written and tons of PC freedom. They knew they might be in over their heads with their characters at risk but wanted to explore. The tension was high and when they finally came upon the New Master's personal guards for the first time they freaked and physically jumped in surprise. They attacked, killed some guards then fled not stopping until they made it back into town and feeling lucky to be alive.

It was great.