Fear of the Unknown

On Saturday, I participated in the third run of Dom Camus' Call of Cthulhu one-shot game.  This is, I think, the only "tabletop" game* that I have played all year, and my biggest regret of 2014 will probably be that I didn't get to role-play nearly as much as I would have liked.

The game was truly excellent and a lot of fun, and had an interesting pre-amble.  I'm used to the gamesmaster explaining the background and setting of the story at the start of the game, but Dom gave a quick briefing about Call of Cthulhu's literary history.  What I had not realised previously was that so much of the material that I recognise from the role-playing game and Arkham Horror comes not from HP Lovecraft's books, but from the work that Sandy Petersen did to fill in the gaps.  I can understand why this was necessary for a role-playing game; gamers need insight into the material if they are going to create their own stories in the Mythos.  However, this got me thinking about whether filling in the gaps meant sacrificing part of what makes Lovecraftian horror so effective - and whether the rules of role-playing games might have this effect on other types of horror.

Part of the scariness of Lovecraft's works comes from gods and monsters that are incomprehensibly alien.  They not only play on fears of monsters and the existential terror of an uncaring universe, but also on fear of the unknown - more than that, the unknowable.  Part of the artistry of Lovecraft's creatures is that they remain mysterious even after they have been witnessed directly and investigated closely.  However, when a game inevitably must give numbers and rules to those creatures, it seems to take some of the scariness out of them.

Only some of it, of course.  Lovecraft's monsters certainly have the advantage that they are terrifying on multiple levels; they're still vast, powerful and hostile, and they inhabit a merciless cosmos in which humanity's insignificance is utterly apparent.

For a more solid example of role-playing rules detracting from horror, I would probably refer to White Wolf's vampire games - Masquerade or Requiem.  The more they codified vampires, the less scary they became.  I'm not surprised that - after 1st edition - Masquerade progressed from a game about personal horror to being about the politics of super-powered immortals.  Having rigid definitions about who can do what is useful for creating divisions, but useless for fostering a fear of the unknown.  Vampire books invite participants to know the source material - to read about what the various clans can do and what varying capabilities vampires have.  As a result, the setting doesn't deliver shocks to the players, even if it should to the characters.  To achieve that effect, a storyteller would probably need to cast a lot of source material to the wind.

The unknown seems to me to be a vital tool for cultivating a sense of immersive horror for players - so that they are actually daunted and not just affecting fear for their characters.  The most success that I have had trying to make a game scary was a session of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space - an episode I called "Dead Memories".  I think that it worked because the antagonist was not a familiar monster or alien from the Doctor Who television series; I came up with an alien that fed on nostalgia and induced hallucinations to trigger memories.  The players had no frame of reference for what they were facing, and I think that this made them respond with more authentic trepidation.

Threats for which we have no frame of reference seem to work well as sources of horror in other media as well.  I think that one of the most effectively scary aspects of Silent Hill was its lack of familiarity.  It provided no clear details about what was happening; players could only really figure things out by experiencing them.  Similarly, I found that Time was a very eerie antagonist in Sapphire & Steel, due to ambiguity about its capabilities.  It certainly helped to give a science fiction show the feel of ghost stories.

One thought that occurs to me is that some heroes in science fiction and fantasy have ambiguous abilities.  The Doctor is a good example, but pulp heroes sometimes fit the bill too.  They are often able to pull off incredible feats, but the audience is not expected to think too closely about how they managed those feats.  Characters that have great power but loosely-defined limitations can be fun or scary, I suppose, depending on whether they are on your side or not.  Perhaps the Doctor, for instance, is an eldritch horror because of his ambiguous capabilities - from the perspective of a Dalek or a Cyberman.



*Granted, I spent most of the game sitting on the floor.