Cthulhu Mythos misconception

I didn't. I got straight into the mythos because the imagery and themes were fascinating.
Maybe that's why I know it's bullshit.

Congratulations you're a 1%er rarity, do you want a certificate of greatness? The hoards of people who were playing D&D and then their GM got bored and wanted to a 1 shot of CoC eclipse you're experience.

Yeah and unless the disease is removed it's going to continue to propagate. Its like D&D being the defacto rpg to everyone who hasn't played a game. The poster child for how Cthulhu works is you look at something weird and lose your mind because it's how Cthulhu games work and it isn't going to change unless it focuses on literature again or the games are eclipsed by another set of games that don't do it but good luck doing that with CoC being 5 years older than D&D for legacy and influence.

>All these people I killed? Don't worry, they were CULTISTS. Yes, even their kids... though they're not really human children, you know. Wait a second, don't lock me up, I saved you all!
Reminds me of some CoC-style campaign setup I read, where the PCs are police dealing with what appears to be a terrorism-related hostage situation. A crazed middle-eastern man has wired himself with explosives and holed himself up in a daycare, yelling some nonsense about the children being possessed by great evil and that unless somebody get an imam who can exorcise them he'll have to blow up the whole building.
Of course, it turns out the guy is completely correct: the daycare teacher is secretly a cultist, and has gotten the children possessed by some horrible evil. But are you really going to believe the crazy guy wearing a vest made of explosives?

In Lovecraft's stories, books make you crazy (unlike monsters) or scared. In the real world, books make you stupid.

shit, that's a good setup.

>if everyone would just fix the fandom the way I like it, everything would be fine
Just give it up user. RPG's are a different medium, and Lovecraft's work is just a loosely connected group of old horror stories, not some mythos that has to be interpreted "correctly". I'm not a fan of how pop culture has diluted and parodied the stories, but that's why there's still a market for new writers and film directors to creep us out in new ways.

Everyone I've ever played CoC with got into Lovecraft through pre-existing interest in sci-fi and fantasy. Some of them got into it through references in other media, but no one started with the rpg.

>May the rats eat your eyes!

Mostly because of unsetleing realizations on certain things that are blatantly mythos now that you "woke" up to it. It's like PTSD in wartime it's perfectly reasonable because the over reactions will probably save you more than be a determent but it's inappropriate when moved into other settings, only with the mythos things the tome reader is set up to be correct and the entire world is burning themselves with eldritch fire and they don't know it. I can't think of any real phobias in lovecraft happening but merely the mental breakdown of everything they know is wrong but I can imagine a few of them who "recovered" would have shit like avoiding buildings constructed a certain way because they read that some alien entities can view the human world through the walls and making leaps of logic that either the culture is intentionally doing this even though all the information they have is a well detailed few pages in the necronomicon. Inanity in humans isn't that you act irrational or don't follow logic, it's just that you act differently that the majority of people and they have deemed that harmful.

So you have a group of unicorns? how magical. Try going out into the larger world and you will find people who don't have that. Even the Necronomicon they have in providence every few years had a big divide on people in it from/for the literature and people who are in it from/for the game. The literature people gave up on actually trying to do shit cause it's just a mass of people who have only picked up one or two of the stories but have played a dozen scenarios. I think the final word on most of the organization is "At least the games might bring people into the literature" and still have their lecture or two while there are a dozen people talking about lovecraft games and only the games.

The people at my FLGS, with the exception of two or three people, absolutely refuse to play anything Lovecraft-related. CoC, ToC, or any other system that's introduced mythos creatures into it's bestiaries. Not because of the games themselves (they've never played them) and not because of his writing (they'd never read them). Their reason for their refusal is because of how they've seen it presented or interpreted in various forms of media. A good example would be the movie Cloverfield. Their expectation of Lovecraft's writings or the games is that it's going to be a survival-horror video game where everyone comes up against spoopy monsters 24/7 and goes insane.

Well that's because they're correct. I'll amend coming in from D&D because one of the larger (not sure if actually majority) of the demographic is literately dieing off people who went into the game from AD&D way way back when and never left. Though even if 1 out of 50 people migrate from D&D to a year CoC that's still thousands of fresh blood keeping the bad idea engine alive.

The only reasonable way to understand the sanity rules in Call of Cthulhu is that sanity is a measure of your resistance to trauma.

You see scary things and they don't magically give you schizophrenia, they're just traumatizing the same way traumatizing events usually are.

People who've read notable mythos tomes like the Necronomicon will connect the dots upon seeing Mythos beasts and realize "holy shit that book was for real", and then realize that so much of what they believed was a lie, driving them into deep depression and likely nihilism, which would appear delusional to the uninitiated.

But yeah, the madness that results from encountering a Mythos entity should usually either be similar to PTSD, or play on existing untreated disorders the patient might have already had.

That said, it is worth noting that Wilcox's dreams of Cthulhu drove him to fever and delirium in The Horror In Clay, which only ceased when R'lyeh sank beneath the waves again. Of course, he was under the direct psychic influence of Cthulhu at the time, but there are SOME beings (like Cthulhu) that can magically make you crazy.

People consider Cthulhu a demigod.
He got killed by a being hit by a fishing boat.

Anyone care to explain the Cthulhu boners everyone has these days.

Cthulhu got hit by a fishing boat, walked it off, and went back to sleep

The reason he's the posterchild for Lovecraft is because giant squid-dragon is easier to make art and models of than 'sapient black hole', 'the multiverse', 'sentient meme', and 'sentient space dust cloud' who are the actual biggest threats in the mythos

Yeah but it's not automatic, and Wilcox was "psychically sensitive" and already an eccentric.
So, as said earlier, it largely depends on the character.
He looks really really cool and he's one of the only mythos monsters that's given a really dramatic, badass introduction that makes him sound godlike, whereas all the others are introduced like "what the shit is this fucked-up thing?". And even though Cthulhu gets temporarily beaten by a boat in an anticlimactic way, everything that led up to it is still very impressive.

The thing about Cthulhu is that he's the guy who's guarding the metaphysical corpses of the gods. R'lyeh is basically a shitload of portals to every reality-devouring world-ending cosmic threat that dwarf Cthulhu by comparison.
And that's what really scares the writer of the call of cthulhu: he knows that Cthulhu is literally just the tip of the iceberg.

But even then, he doesn't go mad, he gets killed by cultists before that.

Mental disorders are heavily linked to society, and normal people are ignorant of Cthulhu. Someone rambling about deep ones and mi-go will end up in an asylum, even if it's the objective truth. He's not crazy, he just doesn't fit in society anymore.

Becoming totally insane in CoC is relatively rare (unless your GM is a dick).
Failing a san check means you've got an involuntary reaction, like screaming when you fall knee deep into human bodies, like shooting in reflex at a chtulhu stone statue, or freezing for a second when some abomination is charging you. It's no different from fear mechanics in other games.
Temporary insanity is gained from events that are reasonably traumatic (like seing a mangled human corpse, and only IF you failed your check), indefinite insanity is gained if you lose something like 20 points in a single day, which is something like seing your entire dead family rise from the grave and visit you one afternoon. Honestly I'd question my sanity and gain a few quirks if that were to happen. Besides, most of the insanity results are basic defense mechanisms like manias or phobias.

Also, you can regain sanity by getting mental care or simply resting, amongst other things. And exposure to supernatural sources reduce your vulnerability.

Only gripes I have with the system is that Cthulhu mythos knowledge reduces max sanity, and that the effects don't scale with the loss, which can lead to some hilarious results, like fainting over some relatively petty things.

Seriously guys, I'm seeing psychotic people at work most of the day; if losing your job can fry your brain, seing some squid from another dimension certainly can.

>inb4 some egocentric asshole says that giant squid monsters from another dimension are nothing compared to human drama like seeing your mom die because that happened to him and he's therefore now more emotionally hardened than a fucking vietnam vet.

I might be a massive iconoclast, but whenever I'm doing Lovecraftian horror games, I use the Unknown armies sanity system instead. It's much closer to a working mental health system than most games have produced.

how does it work?

I wholefully agree. It always kinda bothered me how you instantly go mad for 1d100 san damage for seeing cthulhu when in the original a guy was rational enough to ram the fucker with a boat.

The ways to truly end up a gibbering mess in arkham would be like you said; a person's whole worldview collapses such as a holy man, being the survivor of a traumatic event like a summoning gone very wrong or being on the run from a hound of thyndalos.

It has four to five tracks, depending on which version you use, covering violence, helplessness, the unnatural, self and, variably, isolation.

When ever you get stressed by some trauma, you make a roll. If you make it, then you add a hardened notch to the respective track, representing how your character becomes desensitized to that stressor (which in turn allows you to ignore stresses less than your hardened notches).

If you fail, then you mark a failed notch and have a temporary reaction, initially of the players choosing (either to freeze, fight or flee).

Both hardened and failed notches on your tracks have representative effects that the characters are supposed to roleplay(hardened notches in self represent growing dissociation and loss of identity, whilst fails tend to represent more a dissonance between how people peceive you and how you actually are) , and with enough fails then they get specific mental maladies.

A very religious man (provided he's not too attached to the details of his dogma) would probably have an easier time coping with that shit than a rational materialist like most of lovecraft's protagonists.

I mean it's probably why he almost always makes his characters obsessively rational, so that their human-centered worldview can get challenged by what they consider to be superstitious bogus.

that sounds very sensible

I quite like it, my experience is that players are quite happy to ham things up, and I like it better than CoC's sanity points system

>killed

Nope.