Recommended Reading/Viewing

NATURALISM

  • The Open Boat by Stephen Crane

  • The Awakening by Kate Chopin

  • To Build a Fire by Jack London

COSMIC/LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR

  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

  • Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  • Color Out of Space by Richard Stanley [2019]

  • Spiral and Uzumaki by Junji Ito

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Joss Whedon [TV Series]

  • H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon by H.R. Giger

  • Alien written by Dan O’Bannon and directed by Ridley Scott

About Call of Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu is a horror/mystery tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) published by Chaosium, Inc. A Game Keeper leads their investigators through a world full of Cthulhu Mythos, monsters, and cosmic terror. Unlike games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, the investigators are all human, with soft human bodies and limitations, so the focus is more on finding out why things are happening and stopping them than combat. The investigators’ Sanity plays a major role as well, as the human mind tries to grapple with forces beyond their ability to understand. You can lose a character to Sanity loss just as surely as HP loss, and both go much more quickly than you’d think.

Also unlike their fantasy counterparts that use a d20 die, Call of Cthulhu is played using the d100 percentile and d10 dice. Skills and characteristics have percentages out of 100; roll anything below the listed skill, and you pass. Roll above the listed skill, and you fail.

For example, if your character is a lawyer, they’re going to have more experience in Law than the average person, closer to 70-80%. The average character may not have any experience with Law beyond what they’ve read in the newspapers, so they would have a 5% chance of passing a roll. In order to pass a Law check, the average character would have to roll under a 5; the lawyer character would have to roll under a 70-80, giving them a much higher chance of succeeding.

About Cosmic (Lovecraftian) Horror

The game is centered and builds upon the worlds, mythos, and creatures originally created by H.P. Lovecraft, though existential/cosmic horror (interchangeably called Lovecraftian horror) was also the domain of Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Bloch, Algernon Blackwood, Robert E. Howard, and August Derleth. Lovecraftian horror begins with naturalism, a literary movement from the 19th century that explores how the environment, the natural world, shapes and challenges mankind. In naturalism, nature is often seen as indifferent to the humans trying to survive in it, if not outright hostile to those foolish enough to try.

Cosmic horror takes the idea of an indifferent or hostile environment and expands it to cosmic proportions. If naturalism is staring at an ocean and feeling that deep fear of the unknown, of the weight of being so small in front of such a powerful force, cosmic horror is staring into the void of the universe, realizing it isn't empty, and feeling a fear that defies description and all understanding. The risk in cosmic horror is far more fragile, however. At the heart of Lovecraft's work is the thin veneer of the ordinary that, once punctured, reveals a reality (or many realities) so alien, abstract, and Other that it shreds the mind of the person peeking beyond the veil.

This type of horror was and continues to be highly influential, inspiring many modern day writers and artists, including Stephen King, Junji Ito, and Sam Raimi.

While Lovecraft has changed the landscape of horror, we can’t recommend and will actively dissuade you from reading his works. The TL;DR on it is that he’s openly, bluntly racist to an intensely insulting degree. He was a weird, garbage human, and one of our goals for the podcast is to show that you can have cosmic horror without discrimination.