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Call of Cthulhu: The Nature of Madness?
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<blockquote data-quote="Planesdragon" data-source="post: 1932074" data-attributes="member: 11133"><p><strong>An explanation, I hope</strong></p><p></p><p>Interesting thread, and I certainly don't want to step on anyone's toes, but...</p><p> </p><p> Nisarg, if I were running an CoC game and you asked me the same question, I'd probably respond as follows:</p><p> </p><p> <em>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.</em></p><p> <em></em></p><p> <em>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.</em></p><p> <em></em></p><p> <em>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. </em></p><p> <em></em></p><p> <em>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.</em></p><p> <em></em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Planesdragon, post: 1932074, member: 11133"] [b]An explanation, I hope[/b] 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: [i]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. [/i] [/QUOTE]
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