Alternate Insanity Rules

[Archivist]

I'm 100% behind the gradual descent into madness, but the "you gradually gain random multiple DSM disorders" always struck me the wrong way. I get that exposure to the mythos drives you crazy and makes you non-functional, but having it randomly cause Manic Depressive disorder isn't really what I'm into.

Does anyone have an alternative system for making characters less functional as they loose sanity without gaining a list of DSM disorders?

[Vorax Transtellaris]

I've always thought a list of symptoms of Mythos Exposure would make more sense. You can pick a symptom that makes sense considering the particular Mythos experience the PC is having, make it completely random, or order them into a specific sequence of increasingly debilitating afflictions.

Edited April 1, 2018 by Vorax Transtellaris

[Archivist]

That's good advice !

[Vorax Transtellaris]

I have not put this into some formalized list or table but I always think in terms of symptoms of Mythos Exposure when I run CoC. Stuff like fobias, anxiety, paranoia, nightmares, hypervigilance, hallucinations, loss of appetite, insomnia, etc. Somatic symptoms may also be appropriate: heart palpitations, stomach aches, nausea, diarrhea, skin conditions, etc.

[EricW]

Temporary insanity or uncontrollable phobias are well supported by H P Lovecraft's writing.

The Horror at Red Hook

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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. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.

He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.

 

The closest comparison to fictional Lovecraftian madness is survivors of psychological trauma - people with PTSD, rape survivors, victims of wartime atrocities. Some people seem to survive relatively unscathed, though who knows what horrors they endure in the prison of their own minds. Others become completely dysfunctional - people develop insane obsessions like compulsive hygiene, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, all sorts of weird and horrible problems.

When you consider the possibility of such stresses being coupled with experiences which shake the foundations of someone's sense of reality, you start to wonder if the game san check system is too generous.

None of the people who see Cthulhu walk away unscathed. Some dropped dead of fright, some gibbered and drooled, lost complete control of their actions, the one person who survived and escaped was the closest to a functional survivor, but he was plagued by horrific nightmares.

The Call of Cthulhu

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Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
 

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
 

Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

 

Where is the "drop dead of fright" check? Two out of six suggests a 30% chance people who see an entity like Cthulhu should simply die on the spot. Johansen managed to maintain a facade or normality, after a prolonged period of shock, but who knows how long he would have been able to maintain that facade of sanity if he hadn't been murdered? 

[BWP]

I think that a chance of dying-of-fright (for PCs) is at variance with the concept of Maximum Game Fun, but as a GM I'd be happy to just decree that various NPCs can die in that fashion, to heighten the dramatic tension or whatever.

If someone really wanted a rule for it, I'd say that any fumbled SAN roll, or anyone who loses an amount of SAN equal to or greater than their current CON, has to make a CON roll to avoid an immediate coronary (or perhaps a brain hemorrhage).

At the same time, sometimes SAN loss is over-emphasised both in the rules and in various published scenarios.  I don't have any specific examples immediately to hand, but as a player I'm unimpressed when asked to make a SAN roll for something that is, in the scope of things, pretty conventional.  See a close friend mysteriously swell up and explode messily while you're standing next to him?  Sure, I'd be prepared to pay a penalty for that.  Stumble across a decomposing corpse of a complete stranger in an isolated location?  Well, I've no arguments that it would not be unpleasant, and perhaps a good reason to lose my lunch, but as a reason to lose SAN it seems excessive to me (particularly if my character is no stranger to the sight of unpleasant corpses, e.g., a Great War veteran, a police surgeon, etc.).

[EricW]

On 02/04/2018 at 11:07 AM, BWP said:

I think that a chance of dying-of-fright (for PCs) is at variance with the concept of Maximum Game Fun, but as a GM I'd be happy to just decree that various NPCs can die in that fashion, to heighten the dramatic tension or whatever.

If someone really wanted a rule for it, I'd say that any fumbled SAN roll, or anyone who loses an amount of SAN equal to or greater than their current CON, has to make a CON roll to avoid an immediate coronary (or perhaps a brain hemorrhage).

At the same time, sometimes SAN loss is over-emphasised both in the rules and in various published scenarios.  I don't have any specific examples immediately to hand, but as a player I'm unimpressed when asked to make a SAN roll for something that is, in the scope of things, pretty conventional.  See a close friend mysteriously swell up and explode messily while you're standing next to him?  Sure, I'd be prepared to pay a penalty for that.  Stumble across a decomposing corpse of a complete stranger in an isolated location?  Well, I've no arguments that it would not be unpleasant, and perhaps a good reason to lose my lunch, but as a reason to lose SAN it seems excessive to me (particularly if my character is no stranger to the sight of unpleasant corpses, e.g., a Great War veteran, a police surgeon, etc.).

Someone who goes permanently insane could make a con roll - I mean, they're out of the game anyway.

Seeing a decomposing corpse - not pleasant. But it can affect people. Your war veteran might have seen one corpse too many. Anything unusual, like suggestions the person was murdered horribly - I mean, the killer might still be out there. Über stressful if you are alone in an isolated location, and suddenly frightened for your life.

People can be fragile. Look how many people have nervous breakdowns because of money stress or relationship breakups. Add even a tincture of supernatural horror and its easy to see why people's brains would run out of their ears.

[klecser]

EricW, I honestly don't care how well supported CoC elements are in H.P.Lovecraft's writings.  Lovecraft was a racist and an ableist and we don't have to match his precise writings in our games (or your perceived interpretations of them) if we don't want to.  You aren't helping the OP by ignoring their original question and just diving straight into your "Canon at all costs" defense that you seem so eager to give at any inkling that someone would dare play CoC a different way than you.  Please just stop.  You don't have to agree with people.  But a common rule of message boards is generally that if you can't contribute something constructive, consider not contributing.

Edited April 11, 2018 by klecser

[EricW]

@klecser at what point did I suggest everyone should play canon? In what way is mentioning my interpretation of HP Lovecraft's take with supporting references not constructive? You're reading stuff into my response which isn't there.