Computers in CoC

[Adrian66]

What happens when you store large amounts of mystical knowledge on a computer?  Does it mean you can avoid insanity by spreading the knowledge out or does the computer go insane?

[Mysterioso]

Not sure if this is tongue in cheek or not.  In case not: The person who did all the data entry would go insane. The computer would not, unless you were playing a science-fiction/future scenario wherein the computer had become sentient.

[Baulderstone]

1 hour ago, Mysterioso said:

Not sure if this is tongue in cheek or not.  In case not: The person who did all the data entry would go insane. The computer would not, unless you were playing a science-fiction/future scenario wherein the computer had become sentient.

Depends if the data enterer knows the language. I could enter an entire Latin Necronomicon without understanding enough to lose much, if any, SAN. I seem to remember that Illuminated Bibles were sometimes written by monks who couldn't read what they were copying. It would be reasonable to rule that there would be a higher chance of ridiculous typos slipping in if the typist didn't know the language. 

As for the effect on the computer, you can go a number of ways. From a purist Lovecraftian perspective, their usually isn't anything innately evil about tomes. They just happen to contain some messed-up information. In "The Dunwich Horror", Armitage has looked through the Necronomicon before with no ill effects. He only has a near nervous breakdown when he reads it in preparation to fight the horror, knowing now that it is describing things that are real. In "At the Mountains of Madness", Danforth has read the Necronomicon with no harmful effects as well. Once again, it isn't until he is confronted with evidence in the real world the substantiates its contents that his sanity starts to slip. This suggest that mythos tomes are just books, and that a mythos.doc file would be just a .doc file. 

Of course, who says you need to be a purist? There is nothing wrong with making tomes in your setting objects possessed of pure malevolence. If we take this route, then the same thing could happen with files. Files in the same folder necronomicon.doc become corrupted and changed,  disturbing images are set as wallpaper on your notebook and inopportune times, the letter on the keyboard rearrange themselves when nobody is looking, etc. I could go on, but my computer needs a restart, so I am ending here. Clearly it feels I have said too much. 

[soltakss]

If you scanned the images form the book then some of its power would accompany the scanning process and imbue the scanned file with power. OCRing the image would concentrate the power, as you are effectively turning pictures into knowledge/information. 

I am not sure what effect it would have on the computer itself, but reading a tome on a computer should have the same effect as reading the actual tome itself.

Computers storing many such tomes might become self-aware, in the same way as magical libraries in Discworld. That would probably be a bad thing.

[mdomino]

A lot of these ideas are covered in the Stross Laundry book series.

Mike D

[Simlasa]

I'd prefer to not have the Mythos 'infecting' inanimate objects that way. That roams a bit closer to a fantasy approach to horror... more traditional sorts of tales with haunting spirits and such. Not that I don't like that stuff to... it's just a different flavor to me and I like to try to keep CoC stuff a bit closer to weird science fiction.

Now, if someone read an ancient tome and was then inspired/enabled to build a sentient computer that housed some malevolent intellect from 'outside'... that I'd go for.

Edited December 14, 2015 by Simlasa

[Mysterioso]

10 hours ago, Baulderstone said:

Depends if the data enterer knows the language. I could enter an entire Latin Necronomicon without understanding enough to lose much, if any, SAN. I seem to remember that Illuminated Bibles were sometimes written by monks who couldn't read what they were copying. It would be reasonable to rule that there would be a higher chance of ridiculous typos slipping in if the typist didn't know the language. 

As for the effect on the computer, you can go a number of ways. From a purist Lovecraftian perspective, their usually isn't anything innately evil about tomes. They just happen to contain some messed-up information. In "The Dunwich Horror", Armitage has looked through the Necronomicon before with no ill effects. He only has a near nervous breakdown when he reads it in preparation to fight the horror, knowing now that it is describing things that are real. In "At the Mountains of Madness", Danforth has read the Necronomicon with no harmful effects as well. Once again, it isn't until he is confronted with evidence in the real world the substantiates its contents that his sanity starts to slip. This suggest that mythos tomes are just books, and that a mythos.doc file would be just a .doc file. 

Of course, who says you need to be a purist? There is nothing wrong with making tomes in your setting objects possessed of pure malevolence. If we take this route, then the same thing could happen with files. Files in the same folder necronomicon.doc become corrupted and changed,  disturbing images are set as wallpaper on your notebook and inopportune times, the letter on the keyboard rearrange themselves when nobody is looking, etc. I could go on, but my computer needs a restart, so I am ending here. Clearly it feels I have said too much. 

I'm pretty sure skimming even draws a SAN loss. (Though I missed the Kickstarter on 7th edition and thus can not state whether this has been addressed there. For 1-6 E, IIRC, skimming rules were in one of The Keeper's Companions.)

And, as the above quote very much jives with HPL stories, but, maybe, not so much Call of Cthulhu RPG rules on SAN loss, the OP might want to clarify if this is a general question or one specific to the RPG.

 

[Baulderstone]

35 minutes ago, Mysterioso said:

I'm pretty sure skimming even draws a SAN loss. (Though I missed the Kickstarter on 7th edition and thus can not state whether this has been addressed there. For 1-6 E, IIRC, skimming rules were in one of The Keeper's Companions.)

And, as the above quote very much jives with HPL stories, but, maybe, not so much Call of Cthulhu RPG rules on SAN loss, the OP might want to clarify if this is a general question or one specific to the RPG.

 

Yeah, I was just making the point that tomes in Lovecraft's stories aren't innately sinister. They just contain sinister information. I'm just taking that to mean that from a Lovecraftian perspective, they wouldn't have an adverse effect on a computer storing that data. 

I realize that CoC has a different interpretation of sanity loss than the stories though. I tend to play with the rules a lot depending on the feel I want for a particular game. I don't think there is anything innately better about sticking to pure Lovecraft over the CoC interpretation. 

[Aycorn]

True, in HPL's stories the books themselves are not innately sinister - but they are in some other authors'.  Manly Wade Wellman even wrote a tongue-in-cheek tale where pages from The Necronomicon attack the reader.

 

 

[K Peterson]

On 12/14/2015 at 8:54 AM, Aycorn said:

Manly Wade Wellman even wrote a tongue-in-cheek tale where pages from The Necronomicon attack the reader.

I'm reminded of Army of Darkness, where Ash is bitten, buffeted, and nearly consumed by a flying Necronomicon. 

 

[fox01313]

I follow the Delta Green/Unspeakable Oath podcast on this when they were talking about the topic. Yes you can find some information on computers for some things but if it's not some insane cultists putting up crazy stuff online, the documents you find will either be 20 generation Xerox scans of something that might be a summon spell or a lolcat picture or (holding it the wrong direction) a coupon for a free cheesesteak sandwich or just the publication information for some book. Just having the contents of some mythos tome either in a library or online is just paper & words, not until you put all the stuff together with a variety of skills is when things get messy & deadly.

Case in point, something more well known to occultists. Look at the Key of Solomon online & just how many damn versions there are, some being real, others fake, others really really fake. Same goes for the mythos as the main people unhinged enough to put it online have such a low sanity after reading it that it won't make any sense.

So for Keepers, if you are playing a modern game & your players want to look things up on their phone, just think of ways for the signal to get blocked/misinterpreted/broken then they should be sufficiently unprepared for the thing following them. Also remember what Lovecraft said about putting together the pieces of a puzzle (not a good thing & they might just want to end it now).

[HierophantX]

Having recently done a detail related to my job involving data recovery, my view...

Depending on the method of transfer, if the person entering the data knows the source language they should suffer negative effects.  If not it's just character groups.  Mitigation for the worldview of the individual.  Debunkers think it's all bs but when they SEE a Deep One then maybe a cumulative omg is in order.  

[Duck of Death]

I have an issue of The Unspeakable Oath with details on a " virus" that infects systems with Mythos lore.