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The House on the Borderland Q5 - Gaming Cosmic Horror
There are umpteen different Lovecraftian games, from the classic Call of Cthulhu and it's spinoffs (like Trail of Cthulhu) which model things like investigations and sanity, to more esoteric story game type efforts.
Which games do you think are particularly good at capturing Cosmic Horror? What does a gaming experience need in order to model Cosmic Horror? Are Cosmic Horror gaming campaigns necessarily short? Or can they also be longer campaigns? Are there any non-Lovecraft games of Cosmic Horror?
Comments
Interested to hear what will be discussed here
A couple of problems when it comes to answering this. I'm not a fan of horror generally. That means I don't really know what "cosmic horror" is. (Wikipedia describes it as horror based on the vastness of the cosmos and our insignificance in the face of it.)
Regarding systems...
If we go with that definition of Cosmic Horror, being overwhelmed by the vastness of things, you need something that represents that in the game.
Within just that definition, the Sanity mechanic of CoC does a decent job. You see something shocking, roll to see if you're overwhelmed. Where CoC comes unstuck, I think, is dealing with the long-term consequences of those shocks. One-dimensional Sanity is a poor model for mental health and mental health injuries.
I think that Unknown Armies' Madness Meters would do a better job of tracking how mental damage accumulates over time, but I'm not sure that's the idea of cosmic horror.
Another approach would be the use of freeform traits, as in Cold City / Hot War. As you get exposed to horrors, you get traits that reflect those experiences.
Regarding game length...
I'm not sure that Cosmic Horror is suited for long-duration campaigns. There's the shock revelation and the consequences of that, then the story moves on. After all, this book was really about two fairly short and discrete events, rather than a story of a long "adventure."
@NeilNjae Totally agree that it is hard to model mental states of PCs systematically. I don't know how madness meters work in Unknown Armies. Could you explain a little bit? Thanks, BC
There is a horror version of Unknown Armies called Nemesis that uses the madness meter. Jocelyn Robitaille ran a session of this at the Grand Roludothon that was supposed to be something like Fantasy Vietnam.
I think the best horror mechanic I played was the modified version of Trail of Cthuhu's system that gives each character three 'pillars of sanity' - basically 3 credos or rock hard beliefs that the character lives by. Then, as game play progresses and the character gets shocked by madness again and again, they eventually face the choice of letting one of these 'pillars of sanity' crumble and replacing it with a new belief. This is turn changes how the character is played.
But that's just a horror mechanic. I can be applied to any horror. Cosmic Horror, specifically, seems like a really tough nut to crack these days. For one thing, how does the GM help players to imagine a defined universe that suddenly expands to something they never imagined? That seems to be the essence to me. I'm sure it can be done through narrative description - but is it something one can convey in a ruleset or setting?
In one of our Mythic Babylon sessions, I wrote an email between sessions to a player whose character had entered the underworld. It was very descriptive and not something I could put together in a session, I don't think. And I think it evoked more 'cool' than 'horror'.
Never played any Cosmic Horror themed games. Not really a "type" I've ever been too interested in exploring.
Are we in fact collectively too inured to horror these days for it to have much impact as a genre? In film / TV it seems to me that much of the emphasis is on making the menace / injury / whatever more and more explicit, whereas older forms worked more by suggestion and inuendo - I'm, thinking Hitchcock here. So maybe (and I'm speculating really) horror in the sense of dread only works when it provides a blank space into which each person can project their own existential anxieties, and the modern trend is to turn it into something explicit and explicable and therefore either cool or titillating.
@RichardAbbott Yes, quite possibly.
One quite effective tension building game (I assume, as I've never played it myself, just read it) is Dread, which doesn't use dice for resolution, but a Jenga tower. So every time an action is taken that can add to the tension, a Jenga block is pulled. This models the ramping up of tension - the building of dread. The first actions are pretty innocuous and don't feel too threatening (though some degree of threat always exists), but eventually the tower is like a Swiss cheese - people can see the doom coming, and that it's coming soon. On the next pull? The one after? The emotion of dread is not quite the same as horror, but they seem to go hand in hand in gaming.
That sounds a really cool idea! What happens when the tower collapses? Or is that situation-dependent?
That's a cool way of helping the table organise the role-playing. I might try that at my table.
It might be that we collectively are in denial. I'd say these are all methods to "avoid the void" if you like. Playing at horror is a way to help manage and regulate emotions that really do threaten the basis for our contrived and constructed social reality. Will talk about this in some other comments.
Reading the comments from the last day or so it struck me that in many ways we are talking about what OD&D / AD&D alignment could be used for - to articulate the irrational basis for conduct that a player needs to incorporate into their PCs in-game rational decisions.
otion of dread is not quite the same as horror, but they seem to go hand in hand in gaming.
Generally, if your pull makes the tower collapse, your PC dies. But I'm not an expert on the game.
The meters cover five areas (Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self). For each, the character has a rating in Hardened and Failed. Every time something bad happens, you roll some dice to see if it affects the character. If you fail, the character is forced to do fight/flight/freeze, and you increase Failed. If it doesn't affect the character, increase Hardened.
As these two ratings increase, you're meant to portray increases in vigilance (Hardened) and fatalism (Failed). When any of the ratings max out, the character is insane and incapable of normal function.
One benefit of Hardened rating is that characters ignore shocks that are less than the Hardened rating.
I think there's a way to recover them, but I'm not an expert on the game. But also, skills are based on the level of the meters, so you may want some of the meters filled in to have competence in other areas. Unknown Armies is a game of obsessed, damaged people doing more damage to get power. It's a very personal horror, rather than the cosmic horror of Hodgson.