Greetings
So i'm trying to make my players go insane in more lovecraftian ways and am asking for a little bit of help.
So here's the game
Easy Mode: Give a Lovecraftian Insanity
Hard Mode: Give a specific example of insanity in Lovecraftian fiction.
Eldritch Mode: Quote the passage
>>44580273
The trick isn't to make it edgy, but to make it personal. You need to pick up the player where they are, and then increase tension incrementally. You make the symbols, you don't have to be overt about it, or crude.
CoC pretty much leaves you alone with the san countdown. At best it offers ways to flavor it (Monophobia), but the inner mechanics of the game seriously lack. To amend this introduce the Madness Meter, or play with another system altogether (UA, Nemesis, DG).
Basically every Lovecraft character has some kind of unhealthy fixation. It isn't about finding clinical terms but about undercutting the shared delusion that we call sanity. The characters do not go insane, they realize that in face of the reality they have uncovered all of mankind is doomed and failing to admit it to itself. This removes them from the usual context of human interaction in polite society. But to call them insane requires a shift of perspective away from the character and back into the society they originated from. Forget all you have learned with/through the character and their actions and expectations appear dissociated from reality, but you as reader know the actual reality where these actions make sense.
To put it into game terms: Do not define the character as insane. Instead reveal the universe to their squinting eyes and define everyone else as oblivious and therefore problematic to interact with.
>>44580442
Not that anon, but thanks, that's a nice PDF, I'll use it.
I want to adapt some Delta Green adventures to Eclipse Phase. I'd ask in /epg/, but I couldn't find it. Looking for advice, especially how to deal with the fact that no one uses papers and books anymore.
>>44581508
DG relies heavily on law enforcement and alphabet soup tropes. You'd have to install those in EP first, and I don't see it working.
>>44580442
>Monophobia
That is Dementophobia. And it's not in English. So blerg that
>>44580273
>TFW you bitch about something and /tg/ makes it happen the same day
I fucking love you, anon
>Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat;
>It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine, but the drug has given only ransient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all
Dagon
>I think I screamed frantically near the last - I was almost mad - but if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths.
>Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable coupled of the mad Arab Alhazred, wo dreamed of the nameless city: [...]
>Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of snake-tongued fiends.
The Nameless City
>Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did - that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust;
>Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored [...]. He had wild and original ideas [...]
Herbert West - Reanimator
>>44586322
>And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
The Hound
>It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living... Why shouldn't rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things?.. The war ate my boy, damn them all.. and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret... No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was NOT Edward Norrys' fat face on that flabby fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer?... It's voodoo, I tell you.. that spotted snake.. Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do! ...'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust... wolde ye swynke me thilke ways?.. Magna Mater! Magna Mater!..Atys..Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun.. augs bad sunach ort! Dhonas's dholas ort, agus leat-sa!.. Ungi.. ungi..rrlh..chchch...
>This is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat.
>When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls
The Rats in the Walls
>>44586587
>Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome looking pedestrian, furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour.
>[..] At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing.
The Horror at Red Hook
The Color out of Space mentions an entire family going mad in a similar strain. Now that I look of it, it's pretty much always the same: Incoherent shrieking and gibbering, running, forgetting about everything and some sidekick maybe dying of a heart attack.
Digging through my notebook didn't bring up much interesting to light, but I'll post it regardless:
1. Alien Hand Syndrome: May occur after an apoplexy and is pretty much what it says on the can
2. Sporadic Fatal Insomnia: Randomly occuring, progressively worsening insomnia, accompanied by hallucinations, phobias, paranoia and dementia. It can't be cured and you die after approx. 18 months. Sleep tight tonight, anons.
3. Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome: A rare inherited enzyme deficiency, one of the most unsettling symptoms of which being autoaggressive behaviour, including autocannibalism
I love you guys. What's a good one shot for a first-time keeper? Wasn't fond of the 2 scenarios from the core book. Doing 7E.
>You Dumb Shit
I lost it.
