Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TerraDave" data-source="post: 1930596" data-attributes="member: 22260">As a game mechanic [and an aside], sanity is great, slowly eroding away as your knowledge of and experience with the Cuthuhlu Mythos increases.  It feeds on itself, the lower your sanity, the more likely you are to loose sanity.  It ensures that if for some strange reason your charecter isn't killed, he or she will loose it.  (For all its grimness, it is actually pretty entertaining in play)I think the explanation for sanity loss can work on various levels, there doesn't have to be an exclusive explanation.  Going back to Lovecraft, one key element was just the pure horror of the knowledge or experience.  It was just wrong. Like the weirdest/crudest true life stories multiplied by 10 or 100 or 1000.  I think it would be closest to post traumatic stress disorder, but made more horrible and lovecraftian.Beyond this, sanity loss may also reflect a strange kind of higher awareness (that makes you act crazy once in a while, at least as percieved by the "unenlightened"), as implied by the aptly named The Horror.  The link in original CoC between the sanity score and the Cuthulu Mythos score points to this. I would just assume most charecters would be athiest or agnostic (did Lovecraft have any religious charecters?).  In any case, it is the encounter with the supernatural, a wierd and horrible supernatural, that gets them, not the loss of some pre-existing religous beliefs (lots of things do that, and it doesn't nec. make people crazy).  And it is important that there is no upside here, no good gods or angels or white magic, just pure horror and dread.  Or worse, the feverish euphoria of hoping the old ones will return...</blockquote>

Verification