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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 1642763" data-attributes="member: 1757">Forgive the soapbox stance, but IMHO, the idea of (in)Sanity put forth by CofC has no place in a D&D universe. The philosophy that informs Lovecraft's idea of the disaster that occurs in the human mind when it encounters the Mythos is based strongly on the assumption that modern man (or man of the 1920s) inhabits a psychological universe that rests strongly on several assumptions: Humanocentrism, the dominance of (human) technology, civilization, and (Western) morality, and certain scientific truths. The ability of creatures, strange settings, or even dreams to warp sanity in Lovecraft's universe has far more to do with the fact that they violate our basic assumptions about the universe than that they're so ugly-looking that we get scared. Even the non-Euclidean geometries of R'lyeh cause "Sanity loss," largely because men just can't accept the notion that there can be angles greater than 180 degrees. The argument can be made that even we, who inhabit a universe not distant from HPL's characters, are probably less vulnerable to "SAN loss" than those characters. The excellent post-Lovecraft story "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone"  is all about this; the story is based around the idea that in the far future, physics, biology, and society, as well as the sheer flow of information, are subject to such radical change and distortion from the strict norms of the 1920s that the protagonists of "Ghooric Zone" welcome HPL's horrors with wonder rather than terror.What this rant is getting at is that the D&D universe doesn't really have the boundaries of HPL's modernity. D&D characters inhabit their universe with the tacit understanding that pretty much everything is possible, that even the worst horrors and most eldritch beauty are quite imaginable, and that humans and human ideas, civilization, and psychology are far from the dominant, let alone sole, intelligent paradigm. Given all this, it's hard to imagine what would make a D&D PC, who fully expects to encounter outer-planar demons, divine manifestations, grafted, mutated life, and incessant defiance of the laws of science (which don't even really have meaning in D&D), go ga-ga. Why would PCs take San loss from seeing a shoggoth when grey oozes and gelatinous cubes are reasonably common and expected sights? Is a deep one intrinsically less disturbing than a changeling, shifter, or even half-orc, all of which would invoke the same sense of disturbing difference, frightful miscegenation, and inhumanity if they showed up in an HPL story?CofC d20 sort of addresses this with the Sanity resistance rules in the D&D conversion section, but the fact is that the gap between D&D PCs and CofC Investigators is dramatically greater than a few points of San resistance can demonstrate. In short, if I were to do a CofC campaign in Eberron, I'd use Sanity loss only for special magical effects (including, perhaps, the effect of beholding one of the Great Old Ones or a similarly-powerful Mythos creature), or reading weird books. What I would do is run it as a proper horror campaign; in other words, make the players frightened. Setting, narration, and encounter design can be used quite easily to do this; one simple way of changing the tone from pulp adventure to pulp horror is to make foes MUCH tougher than the PCs, emphasize detective work over combat (and make combat a disastrous option), and work at bringing out the grotesque, disturbing, and despair-causing elements in your game.</blockquote>

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