Sword & Sanity

I used to have a page called Sword & Sanity where I talked about my concept of my game being a hybrid of D&D-like fantasy and Call of Cthulhu-like investigation/horror game. I didn't coin the term, I found it on another blog years and years ago, but then again, the concept is hardly a new one. As the blog there suggests, arguably the entire original sword & sorcery mode of genre fiction was a weird tale with Lovecraftian horror themes inherent throughout.

Some other guys have tried to hybridize the two officially too. Swords Against Cthulhu was an early effort in fiction, and the Greyhawk Grognard came up with an AD&D/Cthulhu hybrid he calls Swords of Cthulhu. Sandy Petersen, the creator of the venerable Call of Cthulhu game itself, wrote a pretty hefty 5e product that hybridizes them. 3e had Heroes of Horror (which isn't overtly Lovecraftian, but tries to hybridize fantasy and horror, certainly.) Paizo had a similar product, as well as two adventure paths that are meant to be horror/fantasy hybrids, including "The Carrion Crown" which is mostly Gothic, Transylvania-like horror, although with a Lovecraftian chapter, and "Strange Aeons" which is much more overtly Lovecraftian. And as I've said before, that was in many ways the conceit of the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system; that it offers Call of Cthulhu scenarios in a D&D-like setting. More or less.

As an aside, the Q Workshop Strange Aeons dice set is my favorite set of plastic dice.

Let me quote just a little bit from the prologue or introduction to Petersen's book. This is pretty good advice for anyone wanting to explore this hybrid tone in setting.

M. R. James was a writer in the early 20th century who specialized in creepy ghost stories. One of Lovecraft’s favorite authors, James wrote an essay in which he laid out three rules to construct an effective ghost story. His rules apply to any type of horror, however, and I consciously apply them to scenario-building and when running horror-themed games.

The first rule: Don’t use Jargon

Nothing spoils the sense of fear more than bringing the player out of the game and back into real life. Every time you refer specifically to game rules or introduce concepts by means of technical terminology, you lose a bit of potential creepiness. The game is filled with tactical options, all of which use precise terms, which means you, the game master, need to find ways to avoid saying things like, “Let’s see… the shoggoth acts on initiative count 21. It rolls and hits with an… er… pseudopod attack, inflicting 3d10+9 bludgeoning damage, plus 2d6 acid. What’s your Constitution save bonus?”

Don’t articulate monsters’ actions, but instead do the rolls, avoiding overmuch commentary. You still need to inform the players of damage inflicted and special restrictions, but you can accomplish this without parroting specific game rules. Use evocative descriptions, like “the creature moves with sickening speed, lashing out a tendril dripping with hissing acid.” Experienced game masters may already be doing this—it is one of the basics of drawing players into an adventure.

The second rule: Make the enemy malign

Friendly ghosts aren’t scary—it’s a fact of life. This applies to monstrous forces too. If the players find out that the fungi from Yuggoth are trying to establish a quiet mining base, all terror of them vanishes. The Mythos is full of entities that players can interact with, but all of them are malign and creepy, even the sometimes-peaceful ones. You can learn the language of ghouls, but even when they are friendly, they are always eyeing your physique with an eye to how tasty you look. Even the small and seemingly harmless zoogs gleefully trap and eat visitors to their forest.

Fortunately, the Mythos is filled with terrifying purpose. Sure, the fungi from Yuggoth might only say they want a quiet mining base, but there must be more to it than that. What are they mining? What is their underlying purpose? Are they using the ore to construct some sort of gigantic bio-techno-magical device? If so, what will it do? At first glance, the great race of Yith appears respectably neutral—even benign. That is, until you realize that they periodically exterminate entire sentient species by mass mind-swap to continue their existence! (Humanity has only escaped this fate because it is too puny for Yithian ambition. Thus far.)

The Third rule: use a mundane setting

James points out if you set a ghost story in an esoteric and inaccessible locale, readers can’t easily imagine themselves in that situation. As a result, he set all of his stories in the places and locales he knew well: seaside hotels, old country churches, public libraries, and so forth. You have a major advantage here, since you are running a roleplaying game. Your players normally throw themselves into the roles of their characters, empathizing with them and cross-exchanging personality traits. As a result, they know and feel their characters, and it’s easy for them to buy into the setting you choose.

You can make the story even more dangerous by putting it right in the heart of the players’ stomping grounds. You could set up an adventure with a shoggoth as a dangerous enemy under a distant glacier, but the players will be more invested if you have that same shoggoth patrolling the sewers under your campaign’s capital city, sneaking up through openings and pulling victims down to feed. Knowing that shoggoths exist in some distant place in the world is one thing. Knowing that there is a shoggoth in your home city eating folks every night is another thing entirely.

Adding horror to adventures

Horror is a delicate topic. When horror is combined with another genre, the usual result is that the other genre wins out. For example, most horror-comedies are really just comedies with a horror element. Many attempts have been made to mix horror and superheroes, and, again, the end result is generally a superhero story with a horror element. Most players of fantasy roleplaying games understandably are focused on high adventure, derring-do, and sword and sorcery. And of course, when horror is added to the adventure theme, just as with other genres, the adventure is what remains, though now horror-tinged.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider the difference between the films Alien and Aliens. The first is a horror movie. The second is an adventure movie with horror elements. Both are great films.

This definitely reinforces to me the wisdom of the decision I've made to pull back from a lot of exotica in the Dark Fantasy X setting. If anything, it's almost more familiar (at least to Americans) than the general Medieval-like setting, because where it differs from generic Medieval, it is most likely to veer into frontier Western America. The races that aren't human, which I've deliberately de-emphasized, all have a horror kernel to them if you dig into their nature sufficiently. So, there you have it. Sword and sanity revisited.