Drifting to R'lyeh:Facing the Problems with Call of Cthulhu

[Andrew Norris]

This may be apropos of nothing, and I know Ron's addressed it already, but I had a comment about the idea that 'nameless horrors' lose much of their punch when they're statted out with helpful illustrations.

I just wanted to point out that I've seen this sort of thing dealt with in quite a different manner, in the _Dying Earth_ RPG, based on Jack Vance's series of fantasy novels. In those books, the characters are routinely threatened by horrific creatures such as deodands, pelgranes, erbs, grues, and leucomorphs. (I love those names; evocative while revealing absolutely nothing.) Only one creature, the deodand, is described in detail in the source material, as a jet-black carnivorous humanoid. Another, the pelgrane, we know has large wings and a taste for human flesh, but that's it.

What the RPG does is to give vague capsule summaries of the creatures' abilities, along with *several* descriptions and theories about their behavior each. The idea being, no one's ever actually survived an encounter with most of them, and so the information is unreliable. (Two entries, for instance, use the same picture along with a caption indicating the latest research says this is definitively what that creature looks like. The dissonance is amusing.)

I'm not saying we should send someone back in time to rewrite post-Lovecraft Mythos stories, and the CoC RPG, to match this style, but I think it's something to consider when crafting scenarios or playing any horror game. Information about a Nameless Horror actually can build suspense, when the information is vague or even self-contradictory.

[James Holloway]

I'm not saying we should send someone back in time to rewrite post-Lovecraft Mythos stories, and the CoC RPG, to match this style, but I think it's something to consider when crafting scenarios or playing any horror game. Information about a Nameless Horror actually can build suspense, when the information is vague or even self-contradictory.

One small problem with that in terms of publishing an RPG is that it's a bit crap as a revenue model -- as is publishing historical games in general. In CoC, we don't get:

- funky character powers or groups that get their own books
- weird fantastical locations (well, in general; there's the Dreamlands, and of course there are plenty of weird fantastical locations in the real world)
- rafts of super funky equipment

So if you take away books about monsters (which I think is eminently sensible -- who gives a hoot whether Aforgomon's "instant death touch" is 99 or 100%? What does it mean?), then we're left with scenarios. And scenarios, so says the received wisdom, don't sell very well. Which may explain why Chaosium hasn't published anything new in a coon's age (and this is what people mean by "unpopular," too: the company's been right next door to the poorhouse for ... uh ... well, ever, as far as I can tell).