Shorthand for Nothing

We played a one-off Call of Cthulhu session the other day. The system is really nice for the cosmic horror genre. It’s pretty easy to understand, doesn’t have a lot of fancy things going on for it, and ultimately your skills are probably going to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Sure, you can equip yourself to deal with the eldritch monstrosity, but the odds are pretty good it will still shatter your mind. This is how horror works. There may be a solution that works, but it’s hard, it’s not obvious, and even then it’s only dubious–maybe it only works half the time, or maybe it’s only put things off for a while.

You are alone in an uncaring universe. Your character is unremarkable, and even if you win it was probably mostly because of luck, and the odds are you’re probably permanently scarred by the experience.

The most interesting thing, to me, is that in CoC and some other horror-genre games, you’re not playing anyone special. Almost every other system, from D&D to White Wolf, is about playing someone who is more awesome than regular people. In horror, you play someone who at best knows how to use a gun or pick a lock, neither of which are impossible for anyone with the time and the tools to learn. It’s fundamentally a story about real people in situations that are beyond them, and the depths of the human psyche.

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An excerpt:

I wish I could say “time stopped moving.” That would be easier. I wish there were some clear logical way to explain it, some rules that it followed. There aren’t any. The nearest I can get is this:

Time stopped moving, but everyone kept going anyway, for the most part.

Except it didn’t really stop. It just moved in fits and starts. The sun would be hanging in the sky for three days and then suddenly it’s night time, two weeks later. Or sometimes it would just be a few hours later. Sometimes it’s like everything stopped happening and sometimes it’s like the clocks and the sun aren’t moving but the trains still run and we could still do whatever.

The worst part is that the intervening time didn’t happen. It’s just suddenly I’d be somewhere else, a new context, in the middle of something sometimes, and I’d just have to figure out what’s going on. Eventually you learn to play it by ear.

It’s hard, though. “Relearning to walk” doesn’t begin to cover it when it’s the rules you thought the universe followed that have stopped working. And they don’t even have the decency to break them in ways that make sense.

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Faced with a looming deadline and an inadequate script, I have been forced to radically revise the script of Let My Sting Be Fatal. Here it is for your viewing pleasure. (more…)

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