Call of Cthulhu: The Nature of Madness?

[Tom Cashel]

My reply isn't very speculative or philosophical, but...

"Insanity" in Call of Cthulhu has nothing to do with real-world, clinical mental illness. In the game, it is a system used to reproduce a literary convention; in this case, the sanity-shaking effects of the Mythos as described by the protagonists of Lovecraft's stories (see the recent Bruce Baugh-scribed PDF Modern: Madness for an excellent and level-headed discussion of this).

Many reasons for why H.P. Lovecraft chose to use that literary convention precisely as he did will be found in his essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature.

Re: atheists. Don't you think they'd be just as shocked as the rest of the world to discover that there IS, in fact, a god...and his face is a writhing mass of tentacles and, oh! here he comes over the horizon?

And that a DM knowing just which kind of effect he wants to apply will lead him to run a much better CoC campaign then if he just shrugged and said "it makes you crazy".

I don't think you'll be doing a CoC campaign any great service by delving too deeply into why Investigator X went crazy upon seeing a Deep One. How well the PCs roleplay the madness that afflicts them is much more entertaining, and will go a lot further toward establishing a mood reminiscent of a Lovecraft story.

And isn't that what the game does best?

Cthulhu fhtagn!
Tom

 

[Planesdragon]

An explanation, I hope

Interesting thread, and I certainly don't want to step on anyone's toes, but...

Nisarg, if I were running an CoC game and you asked me the same question, I'd probably respond as follows:

You're right. The mere knowledge of Cthulu is not enough to drive your PC insane. There are plenty of sane people that believe far odder things -- that NASA never reached space, that the moon landing didn't result in a succession of corpses due to radiation poisioning, that a man who walked on water could feed an entire crowd with crumbs -- and some minorly insane folk whose insights are emmintely reasonable but their reacitons to them so extreme as to eliminate their possiblity to function.

However, the Cthulu Mythos is not a descent into insanity. It's an ascent away from it. The world that your PC, his mother and father, sisters and brothers, teachers and students and colleageus all know is not only not real -- it's a deliberate insanity. At the moment of your birth you saw a delusion so delightful, that there was reality and distance and objective truth, that you bought into it lock stock and barrel and tossed your understanding of the real world away.

As you learn new things, though, you slowly remember that you ARE living a lie. When you see elder runes, you recognize a lanuage you knew before brith. When you are shocked, you momentarily recall that this horrific dream is only a dream.

But when you see Cthulu in the flesh, stretching across ten dimensions and beautiful in the way only truth is beautiful, you realize that reality is better than a dream, and if you know what's good for you, you just skirt away along the sixth dimension to shine and shade and move along the dull life that is your lot, forgetting the pleasant delusion that we would otherwise call reality.

 

[Tom Cashel]

C-T-H-U-L-H-U

Who? Cthulhu!

No offense, Planesdragon...it's my new mission.

And Nisarg...there's no "DM" in Call of Cthulhu. "Keeper of Arcane Lore," if you please.

 

[Krieg]

Planesdragon, that gave me chills. Nicely said.

The stars are almost right you know.

 

[Trepelano]

It doesn't sound like a cop-out, but I think that you need to consider this from the DM point of view.

I think that your point is that the real experience of Mythos-induced madness cannot be comprehended in any accurate way, and that's true.
But I think the nature of the cause for this madness, in very general terms, must still be understood by a DM as the premise before starting his campaign.

In other words, if you as the DM have an idea in your mind of just why it is that the Mythos makes men go mad, you will also know in that way the particular nature of the "terror premise" of your campaign.

I'm suggesting that a campaign where the DM has it in his mind that the Mythos drives men mad due to the "radiation effect" is going to be very different than one where the DM has it as his premise that the Mythos drives men mad because of the "sentience is an illusion" effect, and either of these would be very different than a campaign where the DM's premise is that the Mythos madness is caused by the "overwhelming evil" effect, or the "reality is purposeless" effect.

And that a DM knowing just which kind of effect he wants to apply will lead him to run a much better CoC campaign then if he just shrugged and said "it makes you crazy".

This is completely different from telling your players just what effect it is. You probably don't want to actually make an exposition explaining the whole thing to the players, they should never be told the "why" of Mythos madness; but the fact that YOU as the DM knows will help make your campaign much more focused.

Agree? Disagree?

Nisarg

Honestly, I mostly disagree.

I think its quite possible for a writer or GM to convey the sense of horror that Lovecraft did without understanding how the Mythos drives those who learn it insane. Of course, we try to develop theories, but then we see flaws in those theories (as you have pointed out) and realize we still just don't know. I am not even sure that Lovecraft really knew. Most of his "explainations" are little more than playful allusions. He dances around the topic without any explaination forth coming.

Lovecraft understood that what frightens us the most is the dark...or rather what lies within it. We fear what we don't see or understand, and our minds fill with shadowy "edges" of nightmares that never quite take solid shape when we try to peer within. No writer or GM can conjur up a horror as uniquely frightening as the blurry images that form in the mind when left to fill in the dark places.

You don't have to understand why the Mythos causes insanity - you merely need to provide your players with a dark canvas to paint their own horrors upon. In fact, they should get the feeling that if you or they could accurately explain why it happens then you would both go insane yourselves.

 

[Tom Cashel]

Amen, brother.

 

[bodhi]

I am not even sure that Lovecraft really knew. Most of his "explainations" are little more than playful allusions. He dances around the topic without any explaination forth coming.

I will now use several hundred words to describe just how indescribable a particular horror is. Also, I am so terrified, I will spend my last few minutes of life writing about my terror so someone can find my blood-soaked journal. I will inspire the creation of the Castle of Aaaargh.

That being said, I like the explanation that also shows up in Kult. The more you understand the true nature of reality, the more other ("normal") people think you're insane because the truth is so different from what we think. Sort of the flipside of what others have already said, from your viewpoint, it's not that you're going insane, you're becoming sane in an insane world that denies the truth.

Another way of looking at it is that SAN loss, at least early on, doesn't necessarily indicate mental dysfunction, but rather a belief in something that the world denies. An otherwise perfectly mundane civilized adult who professes a belief in Santa Claus will be thought of as an eccentric, humoring the children, or perhaps overly holiday-spirited. The same individual who then explains that Santa is a construct of the Elder Gods, and that what he's really doing is seeking out naughty children for soul-sucking psychic surgery to turn them into Mythos cultists, will probably not be thought of so generously.

 

[billd91]

Yes, that's a good point. And you could certainly argue that part of the "temporary" SAN loss (the type that you can recover with therapy) is due to shock, etc.
However, remember that the rules STILL make a distinction between "temporary" SAN lost by regular horrific acts and the kind due to exposure to Mythos effects: the former you can develop an immunity to over time, whereas the latter will always continue to have an effect.

Ie. if you see dead bodies, at first you lose san but over time your character becomes "immune" to losing san over that as you become desensitized.
On the other hand if you see Deep Ones, you lose san, and if you see them again later, you lose SAN again. You never develop immunity to seeing them.

Nisarg

It was my recollection, from the original CoC game, that you actually did become de-sensitized even to mythos sanity loss. Encounter deep ones 6 separate times (because they cause d6 SAN loss) and you'd be desensitized. I could be mis-remembering though. Of course, you'd still have to encounter (and survive) Great Cthulhu 100 times to be desensitized...

 

[Sugarmouse]

Nature of Reality and Insanity

Consider the following:

Your mind actually filters out 50% of all the things that you can perceive at any one time. That's right. You only ever actually experience half of the things that you are capable of interacting with. That is your current consensual Reality (consensual ion that the majority of people filter out the same raw data, and understand the concepts of what is perceived in the same context as your own.)

This is either a defense mechanism on behalf of your psyche, or a deliberate stunting of human abilities. Take your pick, or develop another theory.

How does this tie in with insanity, or the CoC question?

Think of insanity as being able to perceive more of what goes on around you (past the levels of what is usually filtered out), but as you have no points of reference and context to really deal with what you are now actively perceiving, you are unable to meaningfully relate those experiences.

Example: A human moves through three dimensions that he is able to perceive. However, there are other dimensions through which a human moves. (Depending on the theories that one can follow this can be anything from 4 to an infinte number of dimensions (although 7 seems to be a more commonly talked about state of existence.)

One day, you are able to perceive the other dimensions of your existence, and those that exist around you. How would you try and relate that to someone who has not experienced the same? The same way that you could not relate colour to someone that has never seen colours before, and never will.

Insanity, I believe, is someone breaking through the filter conditioning and being able to perceive more around them than other people could. However, they are not able to cope with the extra input of raw data that they are processing from our point of view. They literally begin to exist in a different state of reality then those of us who are not processing on their level.

Converse, they may also be losing the ability to filter on the same level as everyone else, actually reducing their capacity to understand and perceive what goes on around them.