Call of Cthulhu d20

I was about halfway through Call of Cthulhu d20's (Monte Cook and John Tynes) "Sanity" chapter when the realization struck me like a bolt from the blue - this entire subsystem, the signature mechanic of Call of Cthulhu an rpg franchise, was entirely vestigial. It added literally nothing to the game, nor to the stories the game wants to tell.

I figure some of you right now are staring at my words as if I were quoting the Necronomicon, but think about it. "Sanity" is a social construct which means player characters automatically "go insane" the more adventures they survive.

Hold onto that feeling of confusion. It will make my point more eloquent. In the system, the PCs lose sanity for seeing weird creatures, like say, a dead body rising up from its repose to become a murderous zombie. Now, take out the dice rolls and the charts and the Sanity Points and just think about the logical narrative consequence of such an event - the PCs would become the sort of people who believe dead bodies may suddenly start attacking people.

Maybe that doesn't seem like "insanity" to you, but let me paint you a picture. Just a couple nights past, the heroes fought a dread necromancer, and as the blade slid into his chest, he screeched out his haunting final words, "You really think this is the end? It will never end! Ha! Ha! Ha . . . gasp . . ."

And now you're at funeral of one of your party members, who your friends, families, and various mutual acquaintances know better as your college roommate. I, the GM, ask for your Spot modifier and roll a die in secret behind my screen. Then, I announce, "The recumbent body of Sasha, in the casket at the end of the room, does not appear to move."

What do you do?

I'm guessing it's not something that will terribly impress your NPC family with your calm and collected sanity. 

I know what you're thinking. It's not the same thing. The PC isn't a "raving lunatic." They're in full control of their faculties and their actions are a reasonable and proportionate response to threats they have good reason to expect. Oh, so you mean their expanded knowledge of the cosmos is causing them to act in ways the uninitiated can't comprehend?

And I swear, I'm not being stubborn here. Obviously, the Sanity meter is meant as a balancing mechanic. Take too many risks, learn too much, too fast, and you're forced to act in ways that are harmful to your character. But I still think it's vestigial. Because this purely emergent "sanity system," where inevitable rpg protagonist behavior is framed as insanity? It's also a case of your knowledge causing you to act in a way that harms your character, it's just along an axis of harm that rpgs don't usually measure. 

"Oh, our child suddenly quit their job, sold their possessions, emptied their bank accounts, and told us they would be traveling to Tibet indefinitely. I think they're having a serious mental health crisis."

A completely reasonable reaction for parents to have. They don't know about the Tibetan Star Squid. They can never know about it.

The same process applies to the spellcasting system. Dominate Person costs 1d6 Sanity points to cast, which is a fair chunk (PCs can typically expect to start with 50-70), but what if you got rid of the cost? What if dominating people was just something you could do? As much or as little as you want? How would having that little trick in your back pocket change how you treated people? How would it change how you viewed people? Maybe you're never rolling on a chart and potentially picking up a personality disorder, but who would ever be able to tell?

The madness of casting Dominate Person is . . . casting Dominate Person. Just as the madness of encountering mythos creatures is in changing your life to protect yourself from mythos creatures.

On the other hand, keeping the chart would be entirely worth it if your first and only madness result was Teratophilia. I mean, maybe it's a situation that could emerge organically in the course of normal play, but that game would be fucking wild.

"The cultists finish their chant and the deck of the ship rocks wildly under the sudden wave. With a long, primeval roar, the sea parts for rising R'lyeh and backlit by the waning moon you see the writhing form of the Great Cthulhu, glistening as the fetid waters of the lost city pour off his back. One of his massive tentacles reaches for you . . . and, why are you all biting your lips and staring at me? Oh, god, what's going on under the table?!"

Yeah, sometimes the dice can play an important role.

Although, I think, on the balance, I'm against it. The Sanity system simply isn't a very sensitive or nuanced way of depicting mental illness, and Call of Cthulhu d20's in particular is frozen in time. It still lists transgenderism as a mental illness.

Obviously, this is offensive as hell, but there's a certain part of me that smiles at the thought that it could be the same sort of emergent "clarity about the true nature of the universe is interpreted by society as madness" non-madness madness system as the rest of the stuff we've been talking about. "I looked into the trackless realms of infinity, across immeasurable distances and through uncountable eons . . . and I've realized I'm a girl. Yog-shothoth says 'trans rights.'"

To be clear, I don't think that should actually be something that shows up in a game, it's just something that kept intruding upon my thoughts as I tried to read my fucking 7th version of the basic d20 combat system (just over the course of this project - over my lifetime, you basically have to double that from when I read all these books for the first time)..

Eh, the mechanics aren't that bad. It's about as stripped-down as the original 3.0 rules system can get.  It's just, I can never help but think that I could just skip these chapters and no one would ever know. 

Except, of course, that I'd know. How does your Sanity system handle something like that, Call of Cthulhu?

Finally, there is one last, awkward thing I need to talk about. You all knew it was coming. White people in 2001 were just absolutely reckless with the racism.

Now, to the book's credit, it doesn't actively amplify the racism of the source material. I'm perfectly willing to believe that the monster section was assembled through a sort of oblivious bumbling that made curation choices based on "spooky vibes" and "genre legacy." But c'mon, the Tcho-tcho could not be more obvious. They are pretty much every anti-Asian stereotype, down to the haircuts, and they run weird ethnic restaurants that secretly feed people human meat. It's . . . a lot.

That one big issue aside, the racism also pops up in the sort of implicit pulp adventure structure. Find creatures in the African jungles or Harlem jazz clubs. And maybe some Native American tribes worshiped a giant evil serpent god or something. I could tell that they were trying to hedge on this a little bit, putting in some qualifiers and counterexamples that Lovecraft probably wouldn't have approved of. But that almost makes it worse. Because now I know that they knew how bad it looked.

I don't think it's a fatal flaw, because it's marginal and you can sort of write it off as the mythos being active at all places and in all times of human history (for example, the book mentions that during the Cold War, dark magic cults happened "more often among America's allies than its insurgent enemies."), but if you use this book, the genre's . . . less than reputable legacy is going to be something you're going to have to work around . . . just like the book tried to work around it. And what makes you think you're going to be any better at it than they were?

Maybe being at two removes will help. Plus, you've got 24 years more experience, most of that on the internet, where it's actually possible to hear the perspectives of marginalized people on these matters. But surely, even then, you'd want to start with a more contemporary edition of Call of Cthulhu?

What am I even doing? Don't get this book. Nobody is going to benefit from that. 

I guess my takeaway from this game is that it does pretty well when it sticks to weird creatures from a billion years in the future, or like, they're indescribable colors that will make your blood explode if you look at them, but it stumbles when it gets to depicting actual human people. It's a good source of recognizable names to attach to your spooky vibes and I'll always be grateful to it for introducing me to the Cthulhu mythos. It's a great horror sub-genre, with some unfortunate baggage. 

So, I guess I'll call this a reminder for me to track down a better version of the game. Which isn't too bad for a book this old.

Ukss Contribution: There's a creature that can "damage you by eating your shadow." Cool as shit.