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Mythos fiction tends to be well-stocked with mysterious tomes filled with enigmatic lore. When running a good Mythos adventure, you’ll often want to drop similar tomes into the hands of the players.

Broadly speaking, there are two structural functions these tomes can fulfill.

First, they can deliver a specific clue — i.e., you read the book and discover that athathan panthers can only be harmed in moonlight.

Second, they can provide a research resource. These are books like the Necronomicon, Nameless Cults, Tobin’s Spirit Guide, or The Revelations of Glaaki that are an arcane repository for a great mass of Mythos lore. Characters can refer to them time and time again across disparate investigations, and often find useful references.

TOME AS CLUE

If you want the tome to impart a specific clue (or clues), you might simply cut to the chase and give them the clue: “After staying up late into the night poring over the strange, bloodstained book you found on the altar, you unravel a ritual for summoning athathan panthers in exchange for human sacrifices. The victims must be sleeping and the ritual must be performed in moonlight, because that’s when the athathan are weakened.”

But this is also exactly what lore book props are designed for. That link will take you to a full description of how lore books work, but the short version is that they’re a kind of executive summary of fictional books. The experience of “reading” a lore book prop is more immersive for the players, particularly because you can embed the clues you want them to find in the description of the book, so that they can actually extract them from the text for themselves.

The trick with lore books is that, by their nature, they tend to deliver a lot of information in a single package. As a result, it can be easy for them to tip over into the neatly organized summary of what’s going on that we specifically want to avoid when designing Mythos scenarios. So you want to make sure, when writing Mythos lore books, that they remain a confusing and contradictory source text: A mythological understanding of mythology as transcribed by madmen. The longer text doesn’t necessarily bring more truth; it just gives a more dizzying array of mythological angles all looking at the same truth.

Another technique I’ve found useful is to identify one specific slice of the Mythos entity in question (i.e., the clue you’re trying to deliver), focus entirely on that one slice, and then build out a micro-story around it that’s largely or entirely unrelated to the rest of the Mythos entity. (For example, to convey some information about L’rignak’s strange matter, you could create a story found only in the unredacted, original manuscript of Sir Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights that deals with some orphan boys in Persia who find the strange matter in a cave and bring it home to the ruination of all who interact with it. The name L’rignak might not even be mentioned in this text.)

This technique can be quite effective at evoking the scope of the Mythos entity: The suggestion that it is not some new manifestation, but has rather always been entwined with human destiny. A great, strange mass which has made its presence felt throughout the world and history, but whose true immensity has never been glimpsed… until now.

TOME AS RESOURCE

The basic idea behind a tome that serves as a research resource, on the other hand, is that, if the PCs can rifle through the text, then it can help them to both “know” things and also figure things out. The exact mechanical representation of this will depend on the system you’re running (and possibly the tome in question), but a fairly typical structure looks like this:

Studying. Before the tome can be utilized as a resource, the PC must spend some time familiarizing themselves with it (e.g., a day, a week, a month, or until they succeed on a skill check of some sort).

Mechanical Benefit. Once the PC has studied the text, they gain a mechanical benefit when using it as part of a knowledge-type check. For example:

• They gain advantage on relevant checks.
• They gain a pool of points they can spend to enhance relevant checks. (Either once per scenario or a set pool that, when expired, suggests that the book’s usefulness has come to an end / the character has completely learned its contents.)
• The PC gains a permanent bonus to a knowledge-type skill or similar ability.

Usually a list of topics covered by the book determines which knowledge-based checks the book can be used to enhance. (For example, Tobin’s Spirit Guide might grant bonuses to checks related to the afterlife, undead, strange gods, and transdimensional travel.)

Cost. Books that reveal things man was not meant to know can be inherently dangerous, and it’s not unusual for studying a Mythos tome to inflict a cost (usually along the lines of lost Sanity or attracting the attention of powers who can sense those who know the Truth).

These tomes can also be presented as lore books, and, in fact, it’s ideal if they are. In addition to the list of topics covered by the book, you want to understand the nature of the book well enough that it can serve as a convenient vector for improvising where the knowledge came from. (Nameless Cults, for example, is primarily a study of cults by Friedrich von Junzt written in the 19^th century. So if, for example, the PCs pull information about werewolves out of it, then the GM might relate the information via a lycanthropic cult in Prussia.)

CREATING TOMES

Of course, some tomes might be both: They provide an initial clue relevant to the scenario where they’re first encountered, but can also serve as a general resource for future research. (In other words, the initial clue is built into whatever the fictional frame of the book is.)

As you’re creating your own tomes, I generally recommend not making any single tome so vast in its contents that it becomes universally useful. Unless you want one specific tome to be the pillar around which the campaign is built, it’s generally better to break information up and spread it across a multitude of sources: First, it motivates the players to continue seeking new knowledge. Second, the disparate sources given you a multitude of vectors for coloring and contextualizing information as it flows into your campaign. Third, this diversity in sources also makes it to improvise interesting angles for presenting the information. The more generic and all-encompassing a source becomes; the more it becomes a bland encyclopedia, it follows that referencing the work becomes more and more like a blank slate.

If you’d like to see copious examples of what Mythos lore books look like, the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies contains literally dozens of them, including:

• Books of the Los Angeles Cult (both the UCLA Lot and Echavarria’s Library)
• Savitree’s Research
• Revelations of Glaaki (found in the Severn Valley props packet)

This vast number of tomes, however, should not be mistaken as model for how many lore books you need in your own campaign. The Alexandrian Remix is a special beast, and in practice a little can go a long way. In fact, it can be preferable for such lore dumps to be rare, making each lore book the PCs get their hands on a rare and precious prize.

On the other hand, for a truly hypertrophic of how far lore tomes can be pushed, consider the examples of The Dracula Dossier and The Armitage Files. The latter, designed for Trail of Cthulhu, is an entire campaign built around the players being given dozens of pages from “real” in-world documents and then puzzling their way through them to identify leads to pursue in their investigations. The former, designed for Night’s Black Agents, pushes the technique even further, “unredacting” the entire epistolary novel of Dracula and recharacterizing it as an ops file from British intelligence complete with marginalia and, once again, inviting the players to pore through the text to identify a multitude of leads.

I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, this is not so surprising.

After all, everyone knows that reading a Mythos tome can drive one mad.

Mythos-style horror is a pervasive theme in RPGs. It’s tough to get it right.

On the one hand, you don’t want everything to fall into random weirdness. The essence of Lovecraftian horror is the slow discovery of a monstrous and palpable truth shrouded from human perceptions. Plus, it’s just not as much fun for the players when everything in a session is capricious. It’s difficult to have meaningful gameplay or player agency when the game world is incomprehensible noise.

On the other hand, the players also shouldn’t be able to achieve a perfect understanding of what’s happening, either. I’m usually a pretty big advocate of “prep stuff so that you can show it to your players” – if you’re making something cool, let the players in on it! – but the Mythos is an exception. Perfect understanding of the Mythos renders that which should be too vast for human comprehension into mundanity.

The Mythos is also not the only place such ineffability may be desirable. For example, Numenera takes place a billion years in the future, after eight mega-civilizations which mastered incomprehensible technology have risen and fallen on Earth. The default setting is a Renaissance of sorts, in which mankind searches through the numenera – the broken technological remains of these mega-civilizations – while being unable to truly understand it. In this, Numenera is a sort of inverted Mythos, possessing the same sense of enigma, but generally (although not always) filled with hope instead of horror.

Regardless of tone, the technique I use for Mythos-style revelations is to think of them as three layers.

LAYER 1: CANONICAL TRUTH

For each Mythos element, start by clearly and concisely summarizing the “definitive” truth of it. Because this is Mythos stuff, this will still be weird, supernatural, mind-bending, alien to human thought, and probably even self-contradictory, but it’s your personal canon.

For example:

L’rignak is a multidimensional creature that lives in the heart of neutron stars. It seeks to colonize other stars. It also creates Great Attractors, either to form new neutron stars or to create whatever the structure is in the Laniakea Supercluster. (Is this an even greater mass into which it hopes to seed its consciousness some day? Or perhaps it’s already its seat of consciousness and the neutron stars are merely nodes or perhaps incubators for its offspring?)

Given proper conditions, L’rignak can open microscopic portals to the heart of its neutron stars. Strange matter erupts from these and they usually affect local gravity in strange ways. In our local spacetime, its greatest goal is to alter the sun (possibly be seeding it) to become an attractor (or otherwise start its impossible path to becoming a neutron star).

L’rignak’s cultists often speak of a time “when the sun’s light is made right.”

This is your lodestone, and it will keep you oriented even when “reality” transcends into the incomprehensible. It’s a guide that you can refer to and extrapolate from when prepping and running your scenarios. It’s scripture that lets you ask, “What would L’rignak do?” It’s the bedrock that everything else will be built on.

But the players will NEVER discover this plain, definitive truth.

LAYER 2: THE LENS OF MYTHOLOGY

Instead, you’ll break your canonical truth into chunks – i.e., each definitive statement or fact about the Mythos element. Then you’ll want to mythologize each chunk.

What I mean is that, for every chunk, there should be multiple interpretations, and these interpretations should be arcane, alien, and ineffable. Think of yourself as the blind men trying to describe an elephant — one grasps its trunk and describes it as a snake; another the legs and says it’s a tree; a third its ear and think it’s a kind of fan. You are trying to express TRUTH, but you can only do so through an imperfect lens.

To approach this mythological quality in a more practical way, it may be useful to think in terms of:

Paradox. Describe Mythos elements in impossible dualities. A darkness that illuminates; a vast, bulking mass of solidity that seems to float and ooze over the rocks; a warm glow that inflicts hypothermia. The impossibility, of course, is the point. The paradox cannot be resolved. Or, more accurately, it cannot be resolved within the limits of our human senses and science.

Dialectic. Along similar lines, think in terms of a truth reached through the resolution or confrontation of contradiction. When pointing your double-slit spotlight at the strange matter of L’rignak, for example, don’t just give the PCs the notes of a scientist grappling with “elements unknown to human science.” Also give them the heretical Christian texts describing it as “the flesh of god”; the cultist’s mad ravings about “the apocalypse’s gift”; and the strange references in Nameless Cults to “manifestations of faerie circles.”

Ironic Specificity. You don’t need to reveal the totality of your Mythos element. (At least not now, and possibly not ever.) But, importantly, you want to do so in a way that hints at the whole which is never revealed.

For example, your L’rignak scenario might focus exclusively on the eruptions of strange matter in the Appalachian Mountains that are harvested, worshiped, and turned to gut-churning purpose by the ancient cults there. The star-born nature of L’rignak and its transgalactic agenda are never brought up, except that when the PCs first interact with the strange matter they have an immense, cosmic vision, the afterimage of which momentarily leaves the stars in the sky knit together in a kaleidoscopic quilt of lightless lasers; a darkness that illuminates and seems to sear their eyes before it breaks apart into dark globs and then fades into the small, black spots that always seem to float through your vision. (Invoking the cosmic dimensions of a Mythos entity, of which — like the tip of an iceberg — only a small part can actually be seen to manifest clearly in our local spacetime, is quite common with this technique.)

This specificity can also manifest in historical, arcane, or scientific sources the PCs pursue even when you’re intending for the PCs themselves to have a more holistic experience. You can imagine 19^th century scholars examining strange matter eruptions or Kepler’s secret notes documenting “strange novae,” with neither grasping that they’re only looking at an elephant’s trunk through a funhouse mirror.

Multiple Titles/Names. We label reality and give names to things because it gives us an illusion of control and understanding. We nail the winged thing to a bit of thick paper and label it a “dragonfly” and it’s no longer an enigmatic visitor from the realm of the fey, but rather something which has been fully compassed by our minds; classified, categorized, and neatly settled.

Defy this sense of understanding by invoking many names and titles for the same thing. L’rignak, for example, was known to the Aztecs as Tōnatiuh. They are also the Dark Star, the Psychopomp of Shapshu, and the Coming Night.

Parable, Allegory, Analogy. When the human mind struggles to grasp something, it will often try to find parallels within its experience to try to grapple with its meaning. This can easily give you a multitude of angles to approach the Mythos element from, but it’s also useful to think about useless and/or warped trying to apply an analogy of human experience to the fundamentally inhuman can be. (For example, don’t shy away from invoking paradoxical analogies.)

I find it can be particularly effective to think about how pre-Enlightenment science (or lack of science) might have attempted to grapple with these impossible truths. For example, modern science might talk about the “mutagenic effects” of some of L’rignak’s eruptions of strange matter, and how they rewrite mitochondrial DNA, creating a new structure that appears to enslave the host cell with chimeric properties. But older sources might describe them as a “fifth humour,” demonic possession, or the “font of godshead.” (Was the Oracle at Delphi a manifestation of strange matter?)

Confusion/Shaded Truth. The PCs are not the only ones incapable of understanding the Mythos element, so as they encounter other characters and sources attempting to describe it, it’s okay for a “truth” to be colored by falseness — apocrypha and flawed translations accumulating over centuries and corrupting the original statement.

This was the primary approach when the players in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign wanted to research the name “Saggarintys,” which they had encountered in the Banewarrens. (SPOILER WARNING!) The true version of events was that Saggarintys the Silver King was a silver dragon who worked with the Banelord to construct the Banewarrens, a vast vault in which artifacts of great evil were to be sealed away from the world. The Banelord eventually became corrupted by one of the artifacts, betrayed Saggarintys, and imprisoned him in a cube of magical glass.

Saggarintys was not, therefore, an ineffable Mythos entity, but I knew that he had lived so long ago that any contemporary references they found would be fragmentary at best. So I could use a similar mythologizing process and when the PCs did their research, what they found was:

In the fragmentary remnants of the Marvellan Concordance there is a reference to “Saggarintys, the wanderer of the West” or “from forth the West” (depending on the translation). There is some speculation that this may indicate that Saggarintys is an archaic name for the Western Star.

(This is rooted in the fact that dragons came from the West in my campaign world. So Saggarintys was literally “from forth the West,” but this is then colored with the false conclusion that this is a reference to the Western Star.)

The name appears on Loremaster Gerris Hin’s list of “Allies of the Banelord.” A “Saggantas” is also referred to as the Secret Lord of the Banewarrens.

(Here the name has been corrupted into “Saggantas” and Saggarintys’ role as the Architect of the Banewarrens has caused his identity to become conflated with the Banelord. Note the multitude of names and titles.)

Saggarintys, the Silver King, is the name of a legendary sword said to be the Destroyer of Banes.

(The mythologization is heavy here: The seed of truth is that Saggarintys was opposed to the evil artifacts known as banes and may even have researched how to destroy them. I imagined chivalric tales interpreting “destroyer of evil” as obviously referring to some powerful weapon. Another influence here is the Sword of Truth, a holy artifact that was used in the construction of the Banewarrens and, thus, was another “enemy of the banes” that could have gotten mixed up with Saggarintys.)

A children’s rhyme from Isiltur describes Saggarintys (later shortened to Saggae or “Silver Saggae”) as a friendly spirit who lives in the Land of Mirrors and aids youngsters in need.

(Here the glass prison of Saggarintys is interpreted as a mirror and the context is shifted to a children’s story, naturally warping the nature of the narrative.)

LAYER 3: WHAT THE PLAYERS SEE

You’ve broken your canon into jagged, overlapping pieces and mythologized them, but this still isn’t what the players actually see at the table. Even if they conduct research at Miskatonic University, they won’t get a neatly organized fact sheet summarizing the mythology.

Instead, what they’ll find – through research, investigation, interrogation, or supernatural manifestation – are clues.

In fact, you can often think of all those jagged, mythologized pieces as a revelation list. Note that, even though these revelations are mythologized, they can still be practical and actionable (e.g., “go to a room without corners to avoid the Hounds of Tindalos”).

Like any revelation list, of course, you’ll want to respect the Three Clue Rule. However, as you’re crafting these clues, I recommend being a little more, let’s say, poetic than usual.

In the modern world we often think of poetry as just being “pretty words,” but the heart of poetry is the difference between comprehending something and apprehending something. Comprehension is when you rationally work your way to a conclusion, but apprehension is when you seize hold of a truth through a sort of instinctual sense. It’s the music that accompanies the lyric and a factor beyond the literal sense of the passage. It’s an intersection of ideas and also the transcendence of meaning.

The best clues often suggest a conclusion rather than spelling it out. What I’m suggesting here is that, for these Mythos revelations, you can consciously choose to evoke that suggestion instead of expecting logical inference. Perhaps moreso than with other revelations, I also recommend strongly differentiating the clues pointing to a single revelation, with each evoking the truth of that revelation in distinct ways. This will encourage the players to poetically synthesize the disparate imagery of those clues, creating “truths” that are grasped only in silhouette and which change and shift as each new clue is added to the picture.

This can also be extended to the revelations themselves. Sufficient mythological bifurcation might result in the same canonical concept becoming two “separate” revelations. (Such revelations might even contradict each other.) Maybe the players never realize the connection between these revelations, or maybe they can perform the intuitive dialectical leap and synthesize some common ground of “truth” for themselves (which may or may not resemble what you “know” to be the canonical truth those revelations were extrapolated from). Either way, mission accomplished.

As you can see from the examples above, it’s likely that the mythologization process itself will begin generating, or at least strongly indicating, some of these clues (e.g., there are references to L’rignak in Nameless Cults). In fact, as this suggests, the clues themselves will be formed from an additional cycle of mythologization. They should be indirect, arcane, and contradictory understandings of the revelations (which are, themselves, an indirect, arcane, and contradictory understanding of the “truth”).

The corollary to all of this is, once again, that the clues are the only thing the players will ever definitively learn. And so your players will ultimately be staring at a mythology (the obscured “truth” of Layer 2) through the lens of mythology (the clues of Layer 3). There are, therefore, multiple interpretations built atop multiple interpretations, which will naturally lead the players to begin creating their own interpretations, no two of which will perfectly align.

Perfect understanding becomes impossible, but it will also feel like it’s just out of reach. The players will feel as if they can surely come to grips with this forbidden knowledge… if only they stare into the Abyss a little longer.

And that, of course, is exactly what you’re looking for.

Go to Part 2: Mythos Tomes

Released by Chaosium in 2021 as part of the 40^th Anniversary celebrations for Call of Cthulhu, Keeper Tips: Collected Wisdom on Running Games is a pocket-sized hardcover filled with exactly what the title promises — a motley collection of small tips and random thoughts, each generally no longer than a paragraph, about running Call of Cthulhu games and RPGs in general.

(A “Keeper,” for those out of the loop, is what a game master is referred to as in Call of Cthulhu.)

It’s a handsome volume, with a faux-leather cover and gilt print accompanied by a burgundy bookmark ribbon. Very much the sort of thing you can drop into a pocket and draw out from time to ruminate upon its contents, which are roughly divided into a number of categories:

• Ground Rules
• Inclusivity
• Preparation
• Players
• Sensitivity
• Designing Scenarios
• Gameplay
• Keepering
• Horror
• Sanity
• The Cthulhu Mythos
• Non-Player Characters
• Monsters
• Online Play
• Props & Handouts
• Miscellaneous

The tips themselves are drawn from almost two dozen Keepers associated with Call of Cthulhu from its very beginning to its most recent days. As editor Mike Mason writes, “Some of the tips are contradictory. Some repeat or reinforce advice. Imagine, if you will, that you are sat with a group of experienced Keepers, each sharing and building upon the ideas of the others. Take from this what you will.”

As you read through Keeper Tips, you will undoubtedly encounter much that is familiar, much that you agree with, and also much that you will disagree with. You may even read certain passages that will raise your hackles. But as I’ve slowly worked my way through the book, it has never failed to provoke a thoughtful insight.

I say “slowly,” and indeed this is how I would recommend one experience Keeper Tips. It’s a collection that invites you to read perhaps one or two pages at a time and then set it aside while you think about what you’ve read. Was there some new insight? How will you use it? Was there a unique twist or perspective on something you’ve done yourself? Is there something you vehemently disagree with? Why do you think it wrong and what would you do differently? Is this tip useful for tables with new players, experienced players, or both? And why?

Then, perhaps later in the day or the next day or a week later, you’ll pick the book up again and choose another page to meditate upon. Perhaps the next page. Or perhaps one that you flip to randomly.

To gives you a sampling of what you can expect to find inside, consider these tips:

Counsel your players to create characters that are involved in the story, rather than be passive observers. Example: an expedition to the Antarctic will be an active game for scientists and explorers, not so much for the pilot and radio operator.

Undermine the pillars of the PCs’ confidence. Are they members of an anti-Mythos organization? Drop hints that it has been infiltrated. Do they have academic allies? Strike those mentors with public disgrace. Do they have family? Keep the PCs afraid for them — or of them. Do they have high social statue or loads of income? Chip away at that through media gossip, the Company Board turning on them, threats of unemployment, a hostile company takeover, or a stock market slide.

When making NPCs, assign each of them an adjective (greedy, suspicious, trusting, etc.). This makes them easier to portray in a memorable and fun way for the players.

Pre-made NPCs can be useful as instant replacement investigators.

For an extended game, ask about an investigator’s history, and then say, “What was your first experience with the Mythos?” and let them make it up. The reason is to get past the boring, “No, no, this isn’t real,” part of the scenario. They ‘know’ it’s real.

Never be afraid to rewrite a scenario’s plot hook to better fit your party’s occupations or backstories. All the details in published adventures should be considered more as suggestions rather than as strict guidelines.

If you’d like to see more of the book “in action,” so to speak, I’ve actually featured it a few times on my Twitch streams, using it very much as I describe above as a spur for commentary and deeper thought. (You can see one of these streams here.)

Along similar lines, I think it could be quite rewarding to organize a GM’s book club, gathering fellow masters of the game and using Keeper Tips as a prompt text for any number of wide-ranging discussions.

Ultimately, whether for your own private circumspection or as the nucleus for shared discussion, I can strongly recommend slipping a copy of Keeper Tips into your own pocket.

Grade: B+

Editor: Mike Mason
Contributors: Daniel Aniolowski, Sean Branney, Allan Carey, Keris McDonald, Jason Durall, Paul Fricker, Bob Geis, Lynne Hardy, Bridgett Jeffries, Jo Kreil, David Larkins, Mike Mason, Mark Morrison, Thom Raley, Matthew Sanderson, Becca Scott, Seth Skorkowsky

Publisher: Chaosium
Price: $17.95
Page Count: 128

The first sanity mechanics appear in Call of Cthulhu in 1981 and, in many ways, it remains the definitive mechanical model: The character is confronted by something unnatural, stressful, or terrifying. They make a check using their Sanity attribute. If the check succeeds, everything is fine. If the check fails, they take damage to their Sanity attribute based on the severity of the event that triggered the check. If the damage is sufficiently large (either immediately or in aggregate), they suffer some form of temporary or indefinite insanity. These insanities often force a particular action on the character (fainting, fleeing in panic, physical hysterics, etc.).

We can identify three distinct elements in these mechanics:

• The trigger which requires a sanity check.
• The check to see if the trigger causes harm to the character’s sanity.
• The reaction of the character to the trigger (usually due to a failed check).

This is a fortune at the beginning mechanic: You make the sanity check and THEN determine what your character does based on the outcome of the check. It is also a reactive mechanic, by which we mean that it is used in response to a triggering circumstance rather than resolving a statement of intention.

(Thought experiment: What would a non-reactive sanity check look like? It would probably be part of a wider array of personality mechanics which the player could use to interrogate their character’s state of a mind; a very non-traditional form of player expertise activating character expertise, with the player essentially “asking” their character whether they’re scared or aroused by Lady Chatworth or tempted by the devil’s offer. But I digress.)

RESOLUTION SEQUENCE

In my experience, most GMs resolve sanity checks in the same sequence listed above: they describe the trigger, make the check, and then determine the reaction.

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! Make a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I failed!

GM: You take (rolls dice) 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

In this, they are usually mirroring how the mechanic is described in the rulebook: this is what this rule is for (the trigger), here is how the mechanic works (the check), and here is the outcome of the mechanic (the reaction).

This all makes sense.

But in my experience, it’s not the most effective way to run sanity checks. Instead, you usually want to invert the check and trigger, like so:

Player: Bertram very carefully turns the handle and eases open the closet door.

GM: You peer into the closet… There’s… Yes! There’s something moving in there! Give me a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I fail!

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! You take 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

It’s a subtle distinction. What difference does it make?

First, the mechanical resolution now functions as foreshadowing: While the check is being made, tension builds at the table as the players anticipate whatever horrific thing might be triggering the check. (What’s in the closet?!)

Second, by resolving the check before describing the trigger, you allow the players to have an immediate, immersive response to your description of the trigger.

Which makes sense, right? When Bertram sees the tentacular thing he immediately wants to scream and run in terror. He doesn’t want to wait a minute while dice are being rolled.

So, in short, you heighten the emotional engagement of the moment both coming and going.

In my experience, the exception to this is when the trigger for the sanity check is generated by a different mechanical interaction. (For example, watching your friend’s brains get sprayed across the wall by a sniper’s bullet.) This is more a matter of practicality than effectiveness (unlike the tentacular horror slithering out of the closet, the GM doesn’t know whether or not the bullet will hit their friend until it does, and the whole table often learns that simultaneously), but does serve as a reminder that the “proper” ruling in an RPG is rarely a simple black-and-white affair.

TRAIL OF CTHULHU – LIMITS OF SANITY

In Call of Cthulhu, PCs start with a fairly large amount of Sanity and usually lose fairly small quantities in each session of play. There’s generally no way to recover lost Sanity, so over the course of a campaign, their Sanity is slowly eroded away by the horrors which they’ve seen, until finally the last few points are taken away and they are left permanently mad and broken by their experiences.

This is very effective at evoking the slow, inexorable destruction of Lovecraftian fiction. But, like hit points in D&D, you generally don’t feel actual risk until near the end of the process. There are some mitigating factors, but this can easily have the effect of reducing the impact of Sanity losses.

In Trail of Cthulhu, Kenneth Hite does a very clever tweak on this system by splitting it into two separate tracks: Sanity and Stability.

As in Call of Cthulhu, Sanity generally can’t be restored once lost. However, you also don’t lose it directly. Instead, you usually only lose Sanity as a result of your Stability meter hitting 0.

The Stability meter CAN be restored when depleted, but it’s limited enough that it can easily be wiped out in a single session (which would result in Sanity getting hit).

This allows the system to create a mechanical sense of risk that builds over the course of each session (as Stability is depleted), while ALSO capturing the long, slow, inexorable, and irreversible destruction of a character’s psyche (as Sanity is depleted). It allows characters to brush up against madness without being permanently broken.

If you’re a Call of Cthulhu GM coming to Trail of Cthulhu for the first time, you’ll want to consider how the hard limits in each system are different. This will affect both scenario design and the pacing of individual sessions. In some ways Trail of Cthulhu is more forgiving (because Sanity is “shielded” behind Stability), but in other ways it is considerably less forgiving (because it’s relatively easy to completely blast through Stability in a single session).

The game is fairly well-tuned so that in a typical scenario some or all of the PCs are likely to feel the risk of running out of Stability, but it won’t actually happen in every single session. (Which is also good, because if it’s getting hammered so hard that it IS happening like clockwork every single session, that also deflates tension.) But this is something you’ll want to monitor and adjust in your scenario design and rulings: If their Stability is rarely or never at risk of running out, check to see if you’re not calling for Stability tests as often as you should. If their Stability is being sand-blasted away, see what you can tweak to get a more balanced result.

UNKNOWN ARMIES – A MULTITUDE OF MADNESS

Unknown Armies by John Tynes and Greg Stolze has several more features in its sanity system (which, in the first edition, was called the madness meter and was resolved using stress checks).

First, instead of having a single track, the system has five separate meters, one for each type of psychological stress the character might experience:

• Helplessness (unable to take action you feel is necessary)
• Isolation (when you’re cut off from society or loved ones)
• Violence (pain, injury, death)
• Unnatural (challenges to your perception of reality)
• Self (violations of your deepest beliefs)

This paints a more evocative picture of a character’s psychological state. It also allows the game to track separate effects for each type of trauma, while still measuring overall psychological stability across all the meters.

Having these separate meters also allows Unknown Armies characters to become hardened: Each stress check adds a hardened notch to the associated meter. Each trigger is rated by its severity, and if a character has a number of hardened notches in a meter equal to or higher than the rating of the trigger, then they don’t need to make the stress check. (They’ve seen so much Violence, for example, that someone being punched in the face no longer has a psychological impact on them.)

Systems that harden you against tests can suffer from a “plateau effect” where you reach a certain level equivalent to whatever style of play you prefer and then stop rolling checks (see Katanas & Trenchcoats). This also happens in Unknown Armies, but it sidesteps the problem by having the five different meters: You can plateau in one, but the character will remain vulnerable in the other meters (and realistically can’t plateau in all of them because there are cumulative psychological consequences based on the total number of hardened notches the character has).

Unknown Armies also does something interesting with the reaction phase of the resolution: If the PC fails a stress check, they have to choose fight, flight, or freeze – in other words, is the character’s reaction to furiously attack the source of psychological stress, flee from it in a panic, or simply lock-up in indecision, terror, or a “deer-in-headlights” effect.

The cool thing about this mechanic is that, although the failed check constrains the available options, the player still remains in control of their character. Conversely, even succeeding on the check gives a roleplaying cue (because becoming psychologically hardened is meaningful) that the player can pick up and run with.

SANITY CHECKS FOR NPCs

Something which many games with sanity mechanics miss (and which, in my experience, many GMs ignore even in the games which do include support for it) is to also make sanity checks for the NPCs.

If you aren’t already doing this, it’s well worth exploring. It can really push the narrative in cool and unexpected directions.

It can also emphasize how dangerous and unusual the PCs’ lives are (and, therefore, how extraordinary and meaningful their actions are). It can also remind them why they need to be the ones to solve the problem and that it may be a very, very bad idea to call in people who aren’t prepared to deal with it.

On that note, remember that NPCs will generally only have a fraction of the screen time that the PCs do, and, therefore, will only have a fraction of the opportunities to make sanity checks. Don’t load ‘em all up with the default maximum Sanity ratings for starting PCs. Seed in a broad range of Sanity ratings, from those who are fairly robust (at least to begin with) to those who are already psychologically unsound.

A DIGRESSION ON MYTHOS MADNESS

So it turns out that there are aliens. And some of them have visited Earth. Maybe they’ve even been involved in genetically engineering human beings.

… why is this driving me insane again?

As Unknown Armies demonstrates, sanity mechanics are not ineluctably linked to the Mythos. But they did originate there, and so pervasive is the influence of Call of Cthulhu that any Mythos-based game seems almost incomplete without them. So this feels like an appropriate time for a brief digression on why Mythos-inspired madness exists.

Partly this is just cultural dissonance: At the time Lovecraft was writing, these things were not part of pop culture, so it was possible to believe that people would find their existence unsettling to their settled views of the way the world worked. The understanding of how insanity worked was also different in some key ways. And, of course, Lovecraft was a huge racist and had a plethora of mental issues himself, so there is some projection of his own preexisting mental infirmities into the mental state of his characters.

So, to a certain extent, it’s like wondering why women faint all the time in Victorian literature.

On the other hand, there’s a bit more to it in terms of the time when the “Stars Are Right,” which suggests a fundamental reordering of the laws of the physical universe. The creatures of the Mythos literally belong to a universe incompatible with the universe we think we live in. To put it another way: We live in a little tiny pocket of abnormality which uniquely makes it possible for human life and consciousness to exist and/or prosper. The idea that at some point the Earth will leave our zone of grace, the stars will right themselves, and our little epoch of abnormality will come to an end can be rather unsettling in a way that “there are aliens” isn’t.

But more than that: The creatures of the Mythos are a living connection to the way the universe is supposed to work… and the way the universe is supposed to work is inimical to humanity. At extreme levels it can be like trying to run COBOL programming through a C++ compiler. At lower levels it’s more like trying to run a program through a buggy emulator. It’s not just “that monster is kind of creepy,” it’s “that monster has connected my brain to a place where my brain doesn’t work right.” (This idea also works in reverse: Mythos creatures are operating in a semi-insane state within this period of abnormality. That’s why Cthulhu is lying in an induced coma below R’lyeh… he’s trying to minimize the damage.)

But even more than that: The damage being done to your mind is actually a direct result of the mind desperately trying to rewrite itself to cope with the true nature of reality. Mythos-induced insanity? That’s not the mind breaking. That’s the mind trying to fix itself. It just looks like insanity to us because we’re all broken.

Back to the Art of Rulings – NEXT: Traps

Go to Part 1

Here’s my random tip for using Idea rolls as a GM:

Don’t.

Let me start by explaining what I’m talking about: In Call of Cthulhu, an Idea roll “represents hunches and the ability to interpret the obvious.” In some of the older scenarios published for the game, this roll would actually be used to prevent players from having their characters take certain courses of action because the character wouldn’t know to do them — sort of aggressively preventing player expertise form trumping character expertise.

There are some obvious problems with that, too, but what I’m interested in right now is the far more common technique of using the Idea roll to tell players what they “should” be doing. For example, if the players are talking about how they can get an audience with a casino owner, the GM might call for an Idea roll and say, “You could disguise yourselves as high rollers.” Or when the PCs stumble onto a bloodstained altar in the center of a stone circle, the GM might call for an Idea roll and then say, “You could try putting that idol you found earlier on the altar!”

Even in games that lack a specific mechanic like this, you may see similar techniques improvised (usually with some form of Intelligence check).

GM-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS

The basic function of the Idea roll is essentially like using a walkthrough in a video game: You don’t know what to do, so you have to consult a guide that can get you past the point where you’re stuck. A GM-initiated Idea roll, though, is often more like having an obnoxious friend sitting with you who’s played the game before and simply WILL NOT shut up and let you play the game for yourself.

If you’re a GM prepping a scenario and you come to a place where you think an Idea roll will be necessary, that’s a really clear sign that you need to DO BETTER. Saying, “I need an Idea roll here,” is basically saying, “I have designed a scenario where the players are going to get stuck here.” Instead of prepping an Idea roll, figure out some way to redesign the scenario so that the players won’t get stuck there. (The Three Clue Rule will often help.)

What about run-time Idea rolls? In other words, you’re currently running the session, you can see that the players are irreparably stuck, and you need to fix the problem. Well, there are two possibilities:

First, they’re not actually stuck, in which case you don’t need to use an Idea roll.

Second, they ARE stuck and definitely need help to get unstuck. In which case, you shouldn’t be rolling the dice because failure is not actually an option: You need to give them information. Therefore you should not be rolling to see whether or not they get it.

PLAYER-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS

On the other side of the screen, a player-initiated Idea roll is generally more viable: This is basically the players sending up an emergency flare and saying, “We’re lost! Please send help!” To return to our analogy of the video game walkthrough, this is the player who has been stymied to the point where they’re no longer having fun and just want to be able to move on in the game.

In my experience, it should be noted, what such players are looking for is often not the solution; what they are looking for is an action. They feel stuck because they don’t know what they should be doing. A Matryoshka search technique, therefore, is often a great way to respond to this.

Something else to look for is the clue that they’ve overlooked. Not necessarily a clue they haven’t found, but one which they don’t realize is actually a clue, which they’ve radically misinterpreted, or which they’ve completely forgotten they have. For example:

• “You realize that patent leather can also be used for furniture, not just shoes.”
• “While S.O.S. could be a cry for help, couldn’t it also be someone’s initials?”
• “You suddenly remember that you still have Suzy’s diary in the pocket of your trench coat. Didn’t she mention something about the color purple, too?”

Trail of Cthulhu innovated a cool mechanic along these lines for its Cthulhu Mythos skill: You can use this skill to “put together the pieces and draw upon the terrible knowledge that you have been subconsciously suppressing, achieving a horrific epiphany. The Keeper provides you with the result of your intuition, sketching out the Mythos implications of the events you have uncovered.”

There are two important features to this mechanic: First, it doesn’t require a roll. (Again, if the players need help, then denying it to them on the basis of a dice roll doesn’t make sense.)

Second, it has a cost: The sudden insight into the terrible realities of the universe will cost you Stability and, quite possibly, Sanity. Importantly, this cost is NOT exacted “if the player deduces the horrible truth without actually using [the] Cthulhu Mythos ability.” The cost, in my experience, not only dissuades players from relying on the mechanic instead of their own ingenuity, it also enhances the sense of accomplishment they feel when they solve the mystery or gain the insight without using the mechanic.

The 7^th Edition of Call of Cthulhu has similarly modernized the Idea roll, using a fail forward technique where a failure still gets the PCs the necessary clue/course of action, but also results in some sort of negative consequence: Getting the clue might bring you to the attention of the bad guys; or you might waste weeks of time digging through a library before finally stumbling across the right reference; or, like Trail of Cthulhu, the insight might force a Sanity check.

Another cool technique it suggests, particularly in the case of failing forward, is to aggressively reframe the scene: Jump directly to the point where the PCs have followed the lead and gotten themselves into trouble as a result.

A final interesting variant here is to make the Idea roll concept diegetic instead of non-diegetic; i.e., to make it a decision the character makes instead of the player. In a fantasy setting, for example, the character might literally make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Knowledge in order to receive a divine vision.

GM DON’T LIST #10.1: TELLING PLAYERS THE PLAN

Like an aggressive Idea roll on steroids, some GMs will go so far as to just literally tell the players what their characters will be doing for the entire scenario.

For example, I was playing in a convention one-shot where we were street samurai who got hired to be ringers on a Blood Bowl team in order to rig a high-stakes game. This was a really cool premise, turning the usual expectations of the game on its head and giving us an opportunity to explore how the PCs’ heist-oriented abilities could be used in a completely novel environment.

Unfortunately, the session quickly went completely off the rails. Rather than letting the players make any meaningful decisions, the GM had pre-scripted every play of the game: We were reduced to simply rolling whatever skill had been scripted for us. (It didn’t help that the rolls themselves were essentially pointless since the outcome of every drive and most of the plays had ALSO been planned ahead of time.)

This was an extreme example of something closely related to GM Don’t List #7: Preempting Investigation, but I bring it up here mostly because I’ve seen several GMs who use Idea rolls to similar (albeit usually less absurd) ends. These game are characterized by the players making an endless stream of Idea rolls, with the GM constantly saying things like, “Pierre [your character] thinks he should come back and check out the Le Petit Pont after dark.” Or, “You could probably get a pretty good view from the top of Notre Dame. You’ll need to figure out some way to get up to the top of the towers.” Or even, as literally happened in one game, “Rebecca thinks she should stab the Archbishop in the chest.” (“No, really, she thinks this is really important.”)

Basically: Don’t do this. Present your players with problems, not solutions. Give them the space to mull over a situation and figure out what they want to do (or what they think they need to do) in response to that situation.

Go to Part 11: Description-on-Demand