In Lovecraftian horror stories, since what seems to be insanity is actually insight into how the world really works, couldn't we replace "insanity" mechanics with some kind of "clarity" or "insight" mechanics?
This blog post is my long way of saying "I don't think so."
Before we get started, as always, please don't take my comments to be about the advisability of a game design direction. I have nothing to say to game designers; they have bigger problems to worry about than anything I could raise. As always I'm really talking about campaign construction within constraints of group decisions, what game you've decided to play, etc. If you're going to play this type of game, here is my advice. I'm definitely not saying anything about what type of game should be designed or selected. People who say "well, let's just not do Lovecraftian horror", cool, don't do it. Nothing that follows applies to you.
This isn't a theoretical question for me because I actually just got done with a 8 month long Call of Cthulhu 7e campaign. Using the absolutely top-tier and recently-disappeared-from-the-web World War Cthulhu: Cold War supplement from Cubicle 7, I designed a campaign in which the PCs were all spies in 1969 Czechoslovakia a year after the Warsaw Pact invasion that ended hopes of liberalization there for a generation. They had to juggle their actual spy missions and objectives against their secret anti-Mythos investigations and, of course, avoiding the cults and secret police that seemed to lurk around every corner. If you haven't read either 7e Call of Cthulhu or World War Cthulhu, I recommend them both although I suggest starting with the World War II era of the WWC line, as it's a little easier to conceptualize and a little bolder in its direction given the jejune treatment of Nazi occultism in tabletop RPGs before this point. See the previous post on this blog for more.
Call of Cthulhu made big changes in the 7th Edition. Now when you hit a particular Sanity loss level, the GM gets to add to or alter the background sheet. This could mean introducing something from their still-extensive copy/paste of mental illnesses, but it could be something along the lines of writing down that you have a brother who you talk to on the phone when you need help. And the game leaves explicitly open the question of whether this is you leaning more on a brother that existed before, whether this brother is a rupture of reality that didn't "exist before" or whether the brother's a delusion. So I was thinking, should I put stuff on people's sheets that felt like insights or felt like impairments. Or neither?
Call of Cthulhu made big changes in the 7th Edition. Now when you hit a particular Sanity loss level, the GM gets to add to or alter the background sheet. This could mean introducing something from their still-extensive copy/paste of mental illnesses, but it could be something along the lines of writing down that you have a brother who you talk to on the phone when you need help. And the game leaves explicitly open the question of whether this is you leaning more on a brother that existed before, whether this brother is a rupture of reality that didn't "exist before" or whether the brother's a delusion. So I was thinking, should I put stuff on people's sheets that felt like insights or felt like impairments. Or neither?
Part of the key to why I decided against just treating it as straight insight is that Lovecraft didn't really write any protagonists. Nobody in Lovecraft is an actual character, from the short stories to the novels. You can replace them all with a video camera and tape recorder to experience the scary events and you don't lose anything. Nobody in a Lovecraft story actually takes strong action in order to accomplish some desire, or grows or changes at all. (Compare this to the Poe protagonist who is almost always obsessed in some way and who always wear their hearts on their narrative sleeves.) This means that RPG players and designers have had to come up with what a "Lovecraft hero" is from scratch. Early Call of Cthulhu said "well, they're an investigator. Make someone who wants to investigate". It's fine but drab. It's not just a task based system, it's a task based motivation.
And while it's now de rigeur to mention Lovecraft's various bigotries in reviews, collections or other derivative works, RPGs have rarely described explicitly what those bigotries added up to in terms of the worldview of his fiction. The human mind is said in a Mythos tale to be self-deluding, and thus able to function. If we truly understood our place in the universe, we would "go mad".
The Cthulhu Mythos therefore explicitly stands in for the social, religious and racial upheavals of the 1920s as viewed by a guy who fantasized about living in the world of the 1820s. This fear was not unique to Lovecraft - plenty of authors, even pulp authors, looked around at jazz music, the apparent rejection of Christianity at the moment of its greatest political accomplishment (Prohibition), the rocketing advancement of science in the form of the theory of evolution and radio and said that the "natural" place of man in the universe was being usurped.
Horror has always been a conservative art form; always. You stand on the way things are and amplify the fear of how things might be. There are a few exceptions but they are...a few exceptions. (The "conservative" label is such a derided one in art at this point that I feel I should say that it isn't a slam on horror to say that it's largely conservative.) Thus, the typical horror hero is an everyman, a stand-in for the audience. Lovecraft (and he was and is not the only one to fall into this problem) takes this too far and makes the protagonist a pile of grey mush who doesn't take any dramatic action because dramatic action might make them an actual character, separate from the audience's experience.
So Mythos RPGs have been stuck in the bad situation of knowing they had to somehow make the characters have mental breakdowns but rejecting the real-world core of the Cthulhu Mythos that would make the breakdowns occur. I often say that today we genuinely are living in Lovecraft's nightmare world - the world he would paint as what would happen if the Old Ones won.
But, in fairness to them, Mythos RPGs can't stand where Lovecraft stood even if they wanted to; they have to work for modern players! Where do you go from there? Call of Cthulhu just used the Sanity Point system, copy-and-pasted a bunch of mental illnesses and called it a day. Again, they looked at the question as one of reductive, materialistic tasks. There was no real attempt to situate it in any kind of actual portrayal of mental illness, because honestly, "madness" as depicted in Lovecraft is nothing of the kind. When people "go mad" in Lovecraft stories (and don't join the bad guys) they don't really do anything and wouldn't be interesting to play. So Call of Cthulhu threw up its hands. It should go without saying that this is, independent of the Mythos elements, a Really Bad way to depict mental illness in any kind of thoughtful way and encourages players to recreate harmful stereotypes. As provocative as the Sanity Point system is in a task-based game, it isn't actually saying anything valuable about mental stability.
Many Mythos games have improved on this over time. Trail of Cthulhu introduced the idea that really the threat was that the truth would undermine your mental strength rather that introduce some kind of mental "wound". Cthulhu Dark's playset approach let you craft how the human mind would respond to specific Mythos provocations. Fate of Cthulhu has their "corruption" mechanic which is about how your action-adventure might be compromised.
So the new Call of Cthulhu sanity system is embodied in the real world in the form of the GM as gatekeeper of fictional reality. "Hey, this brother you wrote on my character sheet, are they really real?" you say to the GM, who merely looks innocent and smiles and asks what you want to do next.
So all this is to say that I actually thought about making "clarity" style changes to the PC background sheets when I was running a CoC7 game. Putting things in like "you have a new mathematical theory which will revolutionize nuclear theory" or "they're wrong about the vice-president!" But I realized that the "real understanding of what's happening" in Mythos gaming is what the real life players do. In other words, you come to a creepy old house, you find out it's infested with an evil fungus from a meteor, and you have to destroy it with salt; that's clarity, that's what's "really going on". It's the player who makes the clarity seem crazy when they go racing into town and run into the grocery store screaming that they want to buy every bag of salt in the place.
Ultimately, the modern Mythos hero has a modern motivation (even if portrayed in a historical setting), whether that be compassion or ambition or obsession because the real motivation for the player character is...literally, the player. So the positive elements of understanding what's going on can be delivered to the player, not necessarily to the character. The GM is portraying a hostile universe, so clarity and understanding should be delivered outside of that portrayal. You use what you learn in my Call of Cthulhu game to make me say "the fungus dies from you pouring salt down the sink".
That's, in sum, why I don't think swapping out Victorian-era "madness" for "real understanding!" works in Mythos RPGs. It might in other forms, but understanding is a player accomplishment in Lovecraftian games and should be put into their hands, not into the hands of the game system.
