As I mentioned in Cthulhu Eternal - Custom Rules for Motivations, I have been running and playing in a lot of Lovecraftian horror investigative games the past two years: Delta Green, Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Eternal. The genre is compelling to me for many reasons that I won’t get into here.
One of the reasons that is relevant to this post is that the genre itself is easy to get immersed into. You play normal human characters. Thus relating to and role-playing your character is easy and natural. You don’t have to fully understand the cosmic horror elements. In fact, not understanding them is key to the setting: the monsters and gods of this setting are above human understanding.
However, since we are playing normal humans in this setting, the issue of mental health representation is an important one. Ever since its inception with Call of Cthulhu in the early ’80s, the genre has had sanity, madness and other mental issues as a core conceit. With this came the onus of realistic (or at least, not diminishing) representation.
Most of the games in this niche do have warnings that the gameplay elements of Sanity, Disorders, Insanity, etc. are not meant to be realistic depictions of real life mental issues. But yet they continue to hold on to these vestiges. I think it would be worth addressing and reframing these elements.
One approach I developed while ruminating over this is simple to implement. It’s something gamemasters use all the time when they don’t have time to develop new material: reskinning. We reskin dungeons to abandoned scifi laboratories, we reskin bears to new monsters, etc. Taking this approach to the Sanity mechanics I developed the following.
(These assume the Cthulhu Eternal system)
We can reskin Sanity as being the slow corruption by the Mythos forces of the universe (Cthulhu radiation?). Thus, it’s not that the characters “go crazy,” but, rather, that they are corrupted in an outright supernatural manner by the alien magic of Yog-Sothoth and his buddies.
- rename Sanity to Control
- We want to preserve the direction of the value. Higher is better
- The SAN abbreviation becomes CTRL
- an alternative could be Balance (BAL)
- rename Disorders to Corruptions
- reskin Disorders as being supernatural in manifestation and origin.
- ex.: Depression is not about a mental disorder, but a ghost that haunts the PC draining their life force; Paranoia is not the RL disorder, but ghastly aliens whispering intrusive thoughts into the PC’s mind, etc.
- the mechanics stay pretty much as is, for minimal work.
- the GM could adapt them based on the individual conditions that triggered the PC’s Breaking Point.
- to enforce that these are supernatural in origin, the GM may dictate that the victim is slowly being physically warped by the Corruption. With each Corruption gained, the GM may say that the victim’s body mutates in a weird way. These flare up during a Corruption Episode (see below).
- Here’s a random table for that. These should be toned down for a modern day setting. Ex. Getting a result of “Mutations: Animal eyes” means the victim gains an almost cat-like eyes that are only partly noticeable (an Alertness check, perhaps).
- reskin Disorders as being supernatural in manifestation and origin.
- rename Acute Episodes to Corruption Episode
- ”acute episode” is a mental health term
- using Psychoanalyze to aid someone during a Corruption Episode can still make sense in the fiction. The corrupting influence of the Mythos erodes human connection. A trained Psychologist would be able to restore that connection.
- rename Temporary Insanity to Fleeting Corruption
- the three options of Freeze, Fight, or Submit may stay as they are, as they are not outright connected to mental disorders. This is just the human reaction to the supernatural horrors they encounter
- Violence and Helplessness stay as they are
- They erode Control (Balance) and make the character more susceptible to otherworldly Corruption
These changes involve minimal work on part of both the players and the GM, and completely avoid any awkward discussions on what exactly Depression means in this game.
You are of course free to play with the current approaches if your group is okay with it. However, I have personally had to have many discussions about these representation across several groups. Every time it just devolved into “well, this is not real mental issues. It’s just a gaming representation-simplification.” So then, I wondered, what was the point of holding on to these terms at all?
^lxx1hx: This is free OGL-based “clone” of Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green. Check it out, it’s great! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/384110/Cthulhu-Eternal—Modern-Age-SRD