The Unspeakable Oath #23.pdf

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I
ssue
23, A
ugust
2013
Contents
Columns
t
he
D
reAD
P
Age of
A
zAthoth
t
he
e
ye of
l
Ight
& D
Arkness
D
IreCtIves from
A-C
ell
2
6
67
Chase W. Beck, Jamie Chambers, Bobby Derie, Adam Scott
Glancy, Daniel Harms, Shane Ivey, Ben Mund, Matthew Pook, Ben Riggs, Brian
Sammons, Paul Stefko
Wr ite rs:
I LLUSTR ATORS:
by Samuel Araya
Matthew Hansen, Ben Mund, Todd Shearer; cover art
A R T D I R ECTOR :
PAGE DESIGN E R :
Dennis Detwiller
Daniel Solis
Tales of T er ror
C
oDe
A
DAm
t
he
f
unerAl
t
he
W
AtChers
4
60
61
E D ITORS:
Daniel Harms, Shane Ivey, John Scott Tynes
FOU N D I NG E D ITOR :
John Scott Tynes
Arcan e Arti fact
t
he
l
Ast
s
elf
-P
ortrAIt
of
l
ArIssA
D
olokhov
72
E D ITOR- I N- CH I E F:
Shane Ivey
Brian Appleton, Monte Cook, Adam Crossingham,
Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, Daniel Harms, Kenneth Hite, Shane Ivey,
Greg Stolze, John Scott Tynes and Ray Winninger
Brennan Bishop, Stuart Dollar, Liam Jones, Andy Lilly,
Chris Malone, Ross Payton, Ed Possing, Harald Schindler, Ralph Shelton, Sean
Whittaker
All contents are © 2013 by their respective creators. The Yellow
Sign design is © Kevin Ross and is used by permission.
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The Unspeakable Oath
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Scenar io
C
olD
D
eAD
h
AnD
8
E D ITOR IAL BOAR D :
Featu r es
B
uIlDIng An
e
lDer
g
oD
B
onus
C
ArDs
59
u
nConventIonAl
f
IreArms
62
PLAYTESTE RS:
Message i n a Bottle
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eAsts
80
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Ig
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nnsmouth
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AgAzIne
h.P. l
oveCrAft
f
Ilm
f
estIvAl
n
eCronomI
C
on
P
rovIDenCe
C
thulhu
m
ythos
e
nCyCloPeDIA
B
umPs In the
n
Ight
B
Its AnD
m
ortAr
D
eltA
g
reen
: s
trAnge
A
uthorItIes
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Dar
6
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6
Issue 23
1
The Dread Page of Azathoth
B
y
s
hAne
I
vey
“The oldest and strongest emotion
of mankind is fear, and the
oldest and strongest kind of
fear is fear of the unknown.”
— H.P. Lovecraft,
“Supernatural Horror in Literature”
I have a bone to pick with
Call of
Cthulhu.
A bloody, broken bone.
Call of Cthulhu
is the first and
still the greatest roleplaying game
dedicated to fear. Its player characters—
Investigators—deliberately seek to
uncover mysteries that will surely
scar or destroy them. They are under
constant threat of mortal peril (12 or
13 hit points don’t go very far) and
their mental well-being deteriorates
in an ever-tightening spiral of crisis
and collapse.
More importantly, their personal
vulnerability makes explicit the fragile
place of humanity itself in a hostile
cosmos.
And that’s where
Call of Cthulhu
games too often fail.
Too often the personal horror of
violence and madness becomes the
goal in itself. We focus so heavily on
personal horror that we lose a sense of
the cosmic terror that was Lovecraft’s
entire purpose. Or maybe it’s better to
say that when we struggle to convey true
Lovecraftian cosmic terror, we lean
too heavily on the mundane horrors
of gore and suspense.
And that’s a shame. Only when it
reaches beyond personal horror to true
cosmic terror does
Call of Cthulhu
reach
its greatest heights.
“This type of fear-literature must not
be confounded with a type externally
similar but psychologically very
different; the literature of mere physical
fear and the mundanely gruesome.”
(H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural
Horror in Literature”)
I’m borrowing the dichotomy
between personal horror and cosmic
terror from hoary literary theory going
back centuries.
That tradition considers “horror” to
be the sense of revulsion at atrocity. It’s a
sickening encounter with gore and death.
It is the realization and confirmation
of physical awfulness. “Terror” is the
anticipation of something monstrous
and awful that may be nearly present.
Terror is portent, possibility and dread.
In that sense, terror, not mere
physical horror, is the mood that
Lovecraft and so many horror writers
before and after him struggled to evoke.
In
Call of Cthulhu
and in fiction it’s
easy to rely on the horror of gore and
destruction. Wet bones and viscera, a
knife in the dark—that kind of dread is
easy. It’s certainly easier than instilling
terror at the incomprehensibility of the
cosmos. But it’s a crutch. Relying on
it ultimately leaves the game weaker.
Think of “The Haunting,” the
most classic of
Call of Cthulhu
scenarios,
featured in the rulebooks from the
first edition to the sixth. (If you fear
spoilers, skip this paragraph.) Diligent
Investigators may find the diaries of
wicked old Walter Corbitt. Reading
them, we deduce, the Investigators
could learn something of his loathsome
practices and his transformation to an
undead horror. But we have to deduce
it because it is never spelled out. The
scenario focuses on the violence of
Corbitt’s assaults and the gruesomeness
of confronting him. The assaults have
supernatural elements, sure, but the
emphasis is on the personal risks to the
Investigators. It starts and ends with
personal horror. Cosmic terror—the
awfulness into which Corbitt delved—is
only implied.
“The true weird tale has something
more than secret murder, bloody
bones, or a sheeted form clanking
chains according to rule. A
certain atmosphere of breathless
and unexplainable dread of outer,
unknown forces must be present; and
there must be a hint, expressed with
a seriousness and protentousness
becoming the subject, of that most
terrible conception of the human
brain—a malign and particular
2
suspension or defeat of those fixed laws
of Nature which are our only safeguard
against the assaults of chaos and the
daemons of unplumbed space.”
(H.P.
Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror
in Literature”)
The personal horror of violence
and atrocity is useful. I defended it
in a recent Dread Page of Azathoth,
and Nyarlathotep knows this issue’s
Spetsnaz-centered scenario is loaded
with it. But always remember that it’s
only a tool, not the ultimate goal. The
goal of a
Call of Cthulhu
game should be
a deeper, more fundamental terror: a
sense of the failure of the laws of nature
that we think we understand and on
which we rely.
In most
Call of Cthulhu
scenarios,
that can be as simple as letting the
players glimpse what’s behind the
horrors. If they survive all the knives
and claws and tentacles and spells,
make sure they hear something about
the eldritch monstrosity, the roiling
hungry impossibility, at the root of it all.
If you’re running “The Haunting,”
see to it that the Investigators come
to understand that Corbitt has bound
his existence up with forces that they
can barely comprehend—perhaps
the aeons-old monster Tsatthagghua,
hungering in the black pits of the Earth;
or maybe a demon-god called Yog-
Sothoth that infests, in certain times
and circumstances, every point in this
cosmos and every cosmos.
Better yet, leave the ultimate source
of the evil vague, or give it a new name
that the players have never heard. Why
go straight to Tsatthaghua or Yog-
Sothoth (“Quick! The Dismiss spell!”)
when you can have Corbitt’s diaries
rave about Those Who Hunger In
the Void? Push the players’ fear of the
unknown. Have you ever suffered from
an ailment that defied diagnosis? Putting
a name to a threat gives you a sense of
understanding it, and understanding
helps you confront it. As Keeper, your
goal is to
not
let the players recognize
and quantify what they’re up against.
Don’t give them that much ground to
stand on. Give them instead the vertigo
of boundless inimical possibilities.
Of course, sometimes purely
personal horror can show such a depth
of human helplessness that it evokes
terror with cosmic implications. That
was the genius of “Convergence,” first
seen in
The Unspeakable Oath
issue 7 and
later in
Delta Green.
(Again, skip this
paragraph if you fear spoilers.) The
Investigators there come to suspect
some unseen influence corrupting and
harming a town and they learn it has a
physical source or vector in loathsome,
unnatural protomatter. Worst of all, they
learn that—but no, I won’t give it away
even with a spoiler warning. If you’ve
read it or played in it, you know. And if
you’re like me, you’re shuddering with
dread just thinking about it. One or two
scenes of the appalling vulnerability of
the Investigators said everything about
the flickering frailty of humanity itself.
And sometimes, personal horror
that’s not supernatural at all can cross
the line into cosmic terror. What is
more ordinary and mundane than
death? There’s no magic in it, no alien
powers at play. Mere death defies us to
find any meaning at all in life. Is that
not our whole reason for reading and
creating horror as a genre?
But it takes a skilled hand to evoke
existential despair with the power of
cosmic terror. My favorite instance has
always been the final passage of Thomas
Harris’ novel
Red Dragon.
I don’t think
a spoiler warning is needed, though
you can avoid the following excerpt
if you’re worried. It has nothing to
do with the plot. A character who has
been savaged by violence remembers
a long-ago visit to the Tennessee park
that memorializes the brutal Battle of
Shiloh. He remembers thinking it had
been haunted by the ghosts of dead
soldiers in their thousands.
“Now, drifting between memory and
narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh
was not sinister; it was indifferent.
Beautiful Shiloh could witness
anything. Its unforgivable beauty
simply underscored the indifference
of nature, the Green Machine. The
loveliness of Shiloh mocked our
plight.…
“Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh.
Shiloh isn’t haunted—men are
haunted.
“Shiloh doesn’t care.”
It’s not enough to make your
players fear for their characters’ lives.
Knives in the dark, fangs and tentacles,
screams and blood, those are only tools
to drive the players and their characters
to fear for the nature of reality itself.
The truth of cosmic terror is not
that humans are victims of alien forces
that eye them with cruel intent. In their
power and alienness, the Old Ones see
nothing in humanity to excite them to
cruelty or anything else. Humanity is
a shadow flitting for an eyeblink—a
few hundred thousand years, maybe
even a few million. Soon we’ll die out
or become something unrecognizable.
Great Cthulhu had slept two hundred
million years before the first primates
ever emerged. He will still be here long
after humanity has guttered out.
The truth of cosmic terror is that
our fate will be just as accidental and
meaningless as our evolution. We won’t
even have the comfort of knowing that
Great Cthulhu hated us enough to
destroy us. That’s the theme that
Call
of Cthulhu
is particularly well built to
explore—if we remember to explore it.
You don’t have to hammer it home
or spell it out explicitly in every session.
But that’s the sense that players ought
to get from their glimpses of infinity
and all their moments of struggling,
abject helplessness.
Cthulhu and all the other Great
Old Ones aren’t out to get us.
Cthulhu doesn’t care.
Issue 23
3

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