Lovecraftian design

[Eric Bennett]

Hello there, everyone,

I haven't been around since my splurt on Hearths, mostly because a computer error shortly thereafter wiped both that and almost four months of RP logs from me, which kinda nerfed my enthusiasm in a big way. Now, I've been orgainizing some seriously large and very fun Lovecraftian RP on a MU* recently, and I've decided to take tonights opportunity of my being stuck behind a desk with nothing to do for four hours and make something of it. This probably isn't going to be very structured, so please forgive me in advance for that. In the meantime, however, let me throw some preliminary stuff out here.

Writing Environment

Comfortable
Behind a computer
1920s era building
at night
Winter coming on strong

Materials
1 of each size die, 2 of d10
Two very nice pens
Good quality bound notebook
The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets CDbaby clips (for lo, I am cheap)
Masks of Nyarlathotep (for pulp)
H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham (for classic goodness)

Goals

- Provide a platform for Lovecraftian storytelling by
   - "get out of the way" style mechanics, no more than two dice rolled on each side of a conflict at once, ideally only one with some sort of modifier
   - Communal storytelling. Players should decide out of character before hand certain elements of a game session.
   - Guided story creation, transforming the mundane into the weird.

What do the players do?: Decide era, setting, mundane thing being weirded, characters, and protagonist/antagonist split, frame scenes ala Shab-al-hiri Roach

What do the characters do?: Investigate, explore, go insane, gain understanding, prepare to confront the evil, get killed, antagonize.

I'm posting this but continuing to write, so that I can monitor initial responses.

[TonyLB]

What do the characters do?: Investigate, explore, go insane, gain understanding, prepare to confront the evil, get killed, antagonize.

I'm ignorant of Lovecraft's answer to a basic question:  why the heck do these investigators do these things, rather than grabbing a bottle or three of hard liquor and burning out however many brain cells they need to in order to stop thinking about the horrors they've already seen?

Is this one of those answers that would be perfectly obvious to someone who's read more of the literature?  I really don't object to being told that.  I've got no pride at stake, only curiosity.

[Eric Bennett]

Forgot to refresh this here for a bit. As for why they do all that...well, because it is what the story demands. At least, that is what I would argue.

I've done a lot of MU roleplaying lately (no system, total consent, no GM-position for anyone) and one of the things that I have definitely noticed is something like genre physics. Even from scene to scene, if we are doing something for a certain mood or intent, the 'rules' get changed, character motivations tweaked, etcetera. Now, I'm sure that is unsurprising to the tenth power, and a repeat of what has been said before. However, I think it addresses the question.

They do it becaus that is what they do.

However, in d20 Cthulhu there is an obscenely excellent bit on the Cthulhu Mythos that sums up what -I- find most appealing about things, as a player.

Cthulhu is about heroism. What defines a Cthulhu character is the decision to, bascially, stand up against insurmountable odds and burn themselves out fighting back. An individual cannot -sustainably- stand up to these forces. However, by reducing yourself to a physical and psychological cinder, victory is possible for a time. Sorta. ;)

[Eric Bennett]

Oh, and yes, that answer isn't from Lovecraft directly. If you like, I have access to a copy of his letters, and I imagine such delving would prove personally beneficial to me

Goal added

-The burn out rule

[dindenver]

Hi!
  I've alway fealt there were two archetypes in these lovecraftian stories:
Power begets greed - These characters learn of a simple tip of the iceburg of the cthulu mythos and the potential amount power that they imagine or are promised by the servants of cthulu drives them to dig deeper
Knowledge begets curiousity - These characters find an artifact that hints at more knowledge and they keep digging deeper.

There is sometimes a third, the dupe. These guys are duped into investigating something at the behest of someone smart enough not to mess with it themselves

As to why a character would continue after they peer into the darkness that is cthulu, well, that is a character design/motivation issue. It is probably not covered in cannon, I haven't read a ton of Lovecraft, but I don't know of any recurring characters. I guess you could be heroic and save the world from itself...

[Eric Bennett]

So Eric, what makes something Lovecraftian?

To me, Lovecraftian means

... the normal becomes the weird

... The weird is -incidentally- bad. No demons, no Martian invasion. Things suck for people when this stuff happens just because we are soft and squishy.

... fighting back.If things just happen and then everyone dies, then you are watching a slasher flick, not Lovecraft.

Now, I am aware that Lovecraft means much, much more than this. However, this is the part of gaming Lovecraft that I am choosing to focus on for this draft. When these three fields are satsified, I will look at expansion. So then, let us begin.

The normal becomes the weird

This is the keynote for me about what this sort of gaming is. Therefore, the start of each story/adventure will consist of each player contributing one 'normal' aspect of life or one 'mundane' event, that will be made unspeakable by the events of the tale. Once he player has contributed one such aspect, they are randomized and given back out again, secret from the other players. When it comes to this aspect in the story, the player in possession of that aspect has nearly total control of it. They decide what is strange about it, and when that strangeness becomes apparent. They could hold it back for a scene, or throw it out there early. Their choice.

When each aspect has been weirded, the endgame is triggered, with whatever mystery or monstrosity that is revealed by these aspects being confronted and dealt with. How is a solution defined? Easy. When the final reveal is over, they determine the conditions or sets therof (there may be multiple sets, depending upon how the players want to define it) at which point the mystery is "resolved".

Is this kinda sloppy? Yes. However, it does give a nice structure to things, if one looks at it on a 1-1 ratio of aspects to scenes, followed by a climax. This needs playtesting, which..hey, I'll be able to do tomorrow. Huzzah. Flexible people in search of RP rock. And so does sleep. My apologies for any rambling incoherence, as I appear to have not eaten as much today as I should have. To bed with me.

Later,

Eric Bennett

[Arpie]

My wife and I are big fans of Lovecraft, but in that sad kind of way where we like his faults better than his strengths (he was pretty awful at dialect and was pretty much a white boy of his time when it cam to having an open mind.)

Lovecraft's characters often seem motivated to horrible investigations of the weird because A) it was the right thing to do at the time the stories were written (protect the world from alien/foreign corruption) and B) they kind of like spooky stuff (or, at least, secret ancestral stuff.)

I'm kind of working on a lovecraftian multi-setting idea, too. A little. I've tied it together with space travel cliches and hausmarchen motifs to contrast the weird and normal in different settings, but that's probably not what you had in mind. (I prefer the weird adventure side of Lovecraft as opposed to the atmospheric horror side, for instance.)

But, here's a suggestion:
Gore. Lots of it. You want to make the players nervous and afraid? Make character creation swift and brutal, always including a "next victim" link. It's an old CoC practice, I know, but maybe you could tie in the replacement system with the rules itself.

Like... uh... oh, I know. You could do something like Primetime Adventures and make the character replacement a vital contact. The GM uses the contact as a voice when handing out meanings to clues and puzzles that the characters turn in for analysis. (In other words, the players pretty much rely on their contacts for hints and leads during play while the GM uses them as a convenient foil.) then the contact becomes the next character...

Perhaps the contact could build up points each time the player uses them.
I'll try to clarify that:
Let's say that characters are built with a certain amount of points (stupid perhaps, but this is just a sounding), each time a player has his character hit up a contact (one of his contacts?) for information or interpretation of a clue, that contact gets a point (hash mark next to it) - when the player's character gets kakked or goes mad, the player takes up the contact (one of the contacts) as his or her next character - getting a bonus in character points equal to those invested so far in the contact.

This would neccessitate characters with very few scores, perhaps. Just roll 2d6+score vs. difficulty or something old hat like that? I dunno, what do you think?

[mutex]

I always considered the motivation in Lovecraft stories to be obsession.  Even when the protagonist was heroic, they were usually just shy of being cowards, but they're ultimately driven by obsession?

[Mark Woodhouse]

One question to ask yourself is probably what kind of stance you envision players having toward their characters. I've had some great experiences with games like this where the players were very much Author/Director toward their players, and enjoyed putting them into trouble and tormenting each other with escalating madness and terror. Actor stance is tough - the problem of motivation rears large.

[Eric Bennett]

One question to ask yourself is probably what kind of stance you envision players having toward their characters. I've had some great experiences with games like this where the players were very much Author/Director toward their players, and enjoyed putting them into trouble and tormenting each other with escalating madness and terror. Actor stance is tough - the problem of motivation rears large.

Just a quick reply while my brain warms up and breakfast cooks...

Thank you for pointing that out Mark, or I wouldn't have thought of explicating that. Yes, this would definitely (from what I know of the term) be a game where players were Authors rather than Actors, or at least the game would focus on that. I've found from my MUSHing that we have had grand times doing truly unspeakable things to each other and our characters, putting them into situations (like in a very nice piece of Silent Hill roleplay I had the pleasure to get into) that were all but bound to leave the character in some serious trouble.

After framing the scenes, though, I think we often slipped back into being Actors, and working our way out of the danger from the perspective of the characters. Even then, though, one of the players who wasn't in direct danger (and we often used this so scenes did not have to include all characters, but all players would still be able to play) would take on a GM role and do Author from there. We still all had one primary character, but going back and forth between the two positions towards them made for excellent play when all was said and done.

I'll reply to the rest and dare to take a look at what I wrote last night after these waffles have a chance to get eaten, so I'll be back.

[sayter]

I think a big part of lovecrafts ethos in his writing is simple. Almost all of the "heroes", if you can even call them that, are educated gentlemen. Almost every one of them is either studying at Miskatonic, or has some sort of educated background in archaeology, investigative work, antrhopology, etc.

Considering that in real life, these individuals go to GREAT lengths to unbury the secrets of the past he likely used his common sense and research into such fields to acentuate this curiosity. HEck, most of us in these sort of situations would likely want to know more. Why? Because we are the same sort of people. We (the RP community) tend to have a little more "intellect" than our fellow man. His writing, in particular, was aimed at people like us.

Pair this with the post-ww1 mindset of people in north america, and you have a winning combo. We can still relate to these precepts today, as since WW1 the nations of earth have been in a state of almost constant war. The particular brand of terror in the tales he writes are definitely centric to this sort of cultural view...conflict, mystery and most of all, the WHY to go with the WHAT.

However, also bear in mind that a HUGE aspect of his writing is blatantly racist, and no one denies the fact that lovecraft was a bigot. Im sure there was also a vast majority of his styling which centered on his outlook. Of course, in that time period racism was more than common, and widely accepted due to the fact that there was little knowledge of other cultures. The situations the characters found themselves in placed them in these foriegn locations, although lovecraft himself wrote of them only by what he had read...I doubt very much that he had ever been to most of these places. Authors in those days likely werent the richest of people.

I think I am losing my train of thought somewhat here...But in any case, I love the Lovecraftian tales, and the more the merrier I say. Heck, my own RPG (Realm) has a large amount of lovecraft influence in the "dark" side of the mythos of my world.

[Arpie]

Sorry, back again, with a thought on the racism thing.

Miscegenation is a major motif in Lovecraft's work - which he represented in a negative light. Considering, however, that there is a strong desire amongst gamers (at least online) to be something other than human, perhaps you might try putting a positive spin on Lovecraft's favorite boogeyman.

Tales like The Outsider and Pickman's Model and the Shadow Over Innsmouth and even the Thing on the Doorstop talk about the nasty side of having inhuman forebearers.

But what if that was an important part of your game's thematic structure? What if the idea is that your investigators are drawn to the strange and unearthly 'cause it's "in their blood" so-to-speak. They slowly turn into monsters while they chase the weird, all the while becoming part of a greater whole.

Oh well, it's actually an old idea, but maybe you could make it one that isn't horrible in and of itself. It just starts out horrible and turns into the normal. Du musst Nyarlathotep werden.

[CPXB]

This rambles a bit.  ;)

Lovecraftian gaming is always an odd duck, because so many people have such strong opinions about it.

Lovecraft isn't actually a good model for gaming.  He almost always has lone protagonists who rarely appear again.  There is one big exception -- Randolph Carter.  But Carter's adventuring career would scarce resemble any HPL inspired game I've ever seen.  He doesn't try to save the world.  He is an occultist who is fascinated by a dream world, burns out on it and goes into a quest to find something comparable narrowly avoiding death several times, before he tries to find the dream world, again, and almost succeeds but because he fails to follow Yog-Sothoth's instructions gets trapped in the body of a near immortal lobsterman in another galaxy tens of thousands of years ago only to build a ship capable of returning to earth and just when he is on the verge of regaining a human body it's ruined and his lobsterman personality takes over and he runs away.

While Carter's life is certainly weird, and sometimes horror happens to him, it simply does not in large resemble the sort of thing a person sees or hears others talk about in HPL inspired games.  In HPL inspired games the PCs are usually visualized as "investigators" who routinely stop supernatural evil from doing horrible things.  The characters are do-gooders, taking up arms against supernatural horror.  That's just not very Lovecraftian.  I can't think of any of his protagonists who routinely took this position.  They might stop a local "evil" from spreading, but they don't actually seek it out and recurrance of characters in Lovecraft's work is rare -- and in many cases, the protagonists are just <I>witnesses of the horror and very passive characters.

For me, however, where the real fun lurks is the world where the characters <I>don't come from -- the world of the antagonists.  While the heroes are usually accidental and often passive, there is this world out there of sorcerers and cultists that is just <I>dying to be explored, IMO.  The active characters in Lovecraft's works are almost always the <I>villians.  You've got witches, wizards, demon cultists, insane poets, mad artists, twisted scholars, aliens in a staggering array . . . why do we always focus on the pedestrian narrators of Lovecraft's stories?

[sayter]

Perhaps because he had a fixation on making the "every man" the focus of his various ramblings and stories. Instead of having the heroes be able to do backflips while firing totaly accurately without needing to aim through 50 sheets of glass and a monkey. Rather, these guys can barely even RUN successfully. They aren't in very good shape, aren't incredibly atheletic...and have a tendency to be very easily affected by things which might make one of us 21st century folk afraid...but certain not a gibbering lunatic ? (okay, I doubt I could look on Yog-Sototh and not become insane...since its apparently mind bogglingly strange and terrible...but yea...)

[CPXB]

Chris,

Um, educated gentlemen aren't "the everyman".  Lovecraft did not write about the "everyman".  As you noted, he wrote about an educated elite, which is every bit as different from the everyman as the physical superman.

Indeed, honestly, often it is the antagonists who are the everymen in HPLs works, at any rate.  Sailors, rural farmers, the lower class generally are the people who belong to these cults in the industrialized world.