The Necronomicon does not cause insanity.

[Tsyr]

Well, I'm not so sure of the necronomicon, but I do know for a fact that reading Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time can cause insanity. (I'm actually serious about this! Have you ever known anyone taking a high level physics course? They're all a little freaky - like they've learned the horrible cosmics truths!)

I'm not insane...

[malkavian laughter]

I'm more sane than you, because I realize the horrible truth of it all!

[/malkavian laughter]

Sorry.

Actually, I have a lot of fun with a few friends of mine who don't have an easy time with hawking... I got one of them to just start covering his ears and saying "Black magic! Black magic!" whenever I started talking about it.

 

[The_Gneech]

Hey, Tom Cashel! Why did your icon resign?

-The Gneech

 

[Tom Cashel]

Why did your icon resign?

Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself.

 

[Geoffrey]

Errr, only a difference in Geoffrey's interpretation. Aren't you the guy who started that thread a few weeks ago about only allowing like half a dozen spells as "canonical" mythos spells too?

Yes, that was me. I'm not trying to dictate anyone's game to him. Sometimes I think that less is more, and I'm just trying to expand people's options. If anyone likes to run his CoC campaign by the rulebook, I don't have a problem with that.

 

[danzig138]

Nowhere in any of these stories does reading the Necronomicon make the reader go insane. It makes them shudder and recoil from the blasphemous truths contained therein, but they do not go insane.

For most copies of the Big Book in d20 CoC, the maximum Sanity that can be lost is 30 points: up to 10 initially, and up to 20 for reading the complete thing. If you want to interpret this in a Lovecraftian fashion, the shuddering and recoiling is the Sanity being lost. By the rules, the average person won't be driven insane from reading the entire tome.

CoC gamemasters who wish to more closely approximate Lovecraft’s stories

Or, they may want to play with the rules as listed, since those work.

 

[Desdichado]

Oh, I know. I think several posts have described my position on it, though -- it doesn't literally "make you insane" according to the rules, either, although it contributes to the process. In addition, your proposal creates a fairly strange situation in which the Necronimcon wouldn't cause sanity damage while other books would, in spite of the fact that it's supposed to be pretty much the worst of the "horrible ancient tome" collection mentioned in the Mythos.

I think the game rules actually simulate Lovecraft's "reality" fairly well, while your suggestion makes it not make any sense.

 

[Harlequin_1998]

One thing you may wish to consider is that in many of the stories, the characters read a translation of the Necronomicon, and not the actual book itself (or even a direct copy). Such translations would undoubtedly be missing or misinterpreting information. The logic for this is simply that anyone who read the original and went mad would not be able to (coherently) translate the text. Therefore, people reading the copies may not be subject to sanity loss, but the contents of the copies should still hint at the sinister contents of the original.

 

[The Little Raven]

I hate Malkavians.

I hope their progenitor awakens and devours their grey matter.