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CTHULHU PUNKS, F@#K OFF!
Writing and Role-Playing the Insidious Presence of the Cthulhu Mythos in Punk Subculture
For the longest time I’ve had this notion that Punk and Lovecraftian horror have a connection, that they belong together somehow through some obscure creative or philosophical DNA they share. I can’t say where it came from. I was thinking there might’ve been a specific story or game scenario that brought the two concepts together for me. There are examples of The Punk and The Lovecraftian coexisting in the same literary, film, or game space, but everything other gamers and Lovecraftians have shared with me has either been new to me or familiar but only tangentially related to Punk.
Certainly there have been efforts to “punk” Lovecraft, either through additions to the genres Cyberpunk, Steampunk, or Biopunk. All cool ideas, but not the same as feeling the Cthulhu Mythos and Punk subculture belong together, conjoined like the two halves of the Rebis in alchemy; hideous, but also complete and with purpose. I can envision the prototypical and eponymous Punk Rocker shredding his fingers bloody against his guitar strings, the shrieks and ululations that pour forth from his mouth into the microphone prompted not by a human tongue, but by some sinuous, prehensile alien appendage–and all’s right with the world.
So I’ve done what I always do when an idea won’t leave me in peace: I’ve dug out my books and started researching. My resources for this project include my foundational text, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which is a must-read as far as I’m concerned for anyone who wants to talk about modern subculture or pop culture. Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures: Music, Media and Cultural Capital is also relevant, as it adds a 1990s layer to what Hebdige wrote in the 1970s. These works of cultural studies create a lens through which can I view one of the most intimate and accessible resources on Punk subculture: Penelope Spheeris’ documentary series The Decline of Western Civilization. Decline Parts I and III focus on the punk scene in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 1980s and in the mid 1990s. Beyond that, I’m utilizing four written works on Punk Rock and Hardcore music: McNeil and McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Spitz and Mullen’s We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History, and Rettman’s NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980-1990.
Now, I want to acknowledge that what I’m getting into is contentious. Punk means a lot of things to a lot of people. Its very possible my ideas about Punk and the modern American and UK Punk scenes will leave out what some people consider critical information, portray the scenes in an unflattering light, and possibly offend people. I think its only fair to offer such people a punk-appropriate retort: FUCK OFF! This is my interpretation of Punk and my interpretation of the Cthulhu Mythos. You want a better one, go write it yourself.
To put it another way, I know that the “Punk” movement, the “Punk Rock” music and bands, and the “punks” I refer to below are not monolithic constructions. There are lots of different shades of Punk: Peace Punks, Skinheads, Oi!, Hardcore, Straight Edge, Skate Punk, East Coast, West Coast, UK, and so many more. I’m choosing to set aside the complexities and interwoven natures of these subcultures because I’m trying to get at Punk/Punk Rock/punks as a literary device for telling or gaming a certain kind of horror story. This is not an essay meant to recognize and acknowledge any reader’s lived experience. My goal is to help readers craft interesting storylines and NPCs that ring true in the mind of the initiated and uninitiated reader or player.
A final thought before we dive into this subject: I’m not here to talk about specific bands or musicians at all really. I will not discuss or give my opinion on what is or is not Punk or Punk Rock. I happen to think that is a very personal thing. My concern is Punk Culture, specifically the Punk Culture of the 80s and 90s North America as written and recorded by the above resources—as inseparable from the music as it might be. I’m not a musician, I’m not musical, and I don’t even dance that much. I just enjoy the music. When music is being played, my place is at the back of the crowd, taking it all in like the ethnographer I am. So, I want to write something that’s going to reflect the crowd as I see it, and the meaning I see them make as the music is played and Punk subculture disseminates among them.
After reflecting on my source material, I’ve come to understand the reason I see a link between the Cthulhu Mythos and Punk subculture: Punk is ultimately vulnerable to the malevolent influence of the Great Old Ones. Certainly all human groups are fair game for alien horrors in literature and TTRPGs. However, there are just some groups where the ways those horrors get their hooks in are just obvious. For me, Punk is one of those groups, and I think my creative logic is functional enough that its worth sharing with others. Punk may use its sound, its aesthetics, and its philosophies to reject the mainstream, but in doing so, its adherents become an ideal vector for the Cthulhu Mythos and its cults that wait until The Stars Are Right.
Below are some key strategies a Mythos cult or entity can use to worm itself into a given Punk scene and find the converts, soldiers, and sacrifices it needs to perpetuate itself. Each of these could form the node around which you build your Punk horror scenario or campaign:
PUNK AND PUNK ROCK ARE FOR EVERYONE
Indonesian Punk Rockers Punk Rock was one of several subcultural responses in the late 1970s to the growing exclusivity and stratification of popular Rock and Roll. Not everyone has the time and support to be an Eric Clapton, a Keith Richards, or a George Harrison. Musical aptitude in the professional, popular realm takes both skill and financial backing. Punk responded to the vaunted status of popular musicians by spawning a musical rebellion where anyone with the anger and the will to say something about it could pick up a guitar or sit behind a drum kit, learn some simple techniques, and start producing Punk Rock then and there. Punk could focus on the message and distribute that message in a more egalitarian fashion, with less buy-in and exclusivity where skill was concerned. Bands play and sing, and no matter their skill level or quality of their musical set up, if it is loud and aggressive, punks will turn up to dance and hear the message.
The Vulnerability: The Mythos is Also for Everyone
“the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames;”
–H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”
At their core, the ritual practices of Cthulhu Mythos cults simple and straightforward as well. All you need is blood, music, and the willpower to scream until something awful takes an interest in what you are doing. Any elaboration or embellishment is just there to support the intent. Just like the Punk, Cthulhu Mythos cults want people to show up and hear the message. All they have to do is wait until everyone is too drunk to notice they’ve switched out “I wanna be anarchy!” for “Cthulhu fhtagn!” The violence of a mosh pit guarantees enough spilled blood to wet an Old One’s appetite, and you can easily hide a human sacrifice amidst the chaos. Who knows? Get the angry kids drunk enough at your show and they might just slur their words enough to pronounce the Aklo with an alien cadence and intonation fit to wake a dead dreamer.
PUNK EMBRACES THE GROTESQUE
The Washroom at CBGB, a Study in Hygiene 
Punks Embrace their Grotesque Reputation with a Sense of Fun and Irony 
Punk Art Imitates Punk Life Punk is not afraid to get dirty. It blows snot rockets in the face of normalized manners and hygiene practices. Grotesque displays can serve to create community bonds through esteem and storytelling, as well as a shared space for insiders. The grotesque drives away outsiders and posers who are repulsed. Punk can tell its truths through the grotesque. No topic is off limits. Stories of family annihilation, sadomasochistic sex, blasphemy, drug overdoses, and suicide are like lullabies for punks who want to shake their deep-seeded discontents through a steady diet of dance, drink, sweat, and vomit.
Vulnerability: The Cthulhu Mythos Embodies the Grotesque
“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them.”
–The Necronomicon in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”
Human beings might not be able to stand against the Great Old Ones, but we can smell them coming and be somewhere else when they show up. A combination of evolutionary adaptations and cultural learning allows us to avoid dangers through our capacity to be repulsed by the toxic, the rotting, the alien, and the wrong. But what if, in an effort to defy the status-quo, a human group embraces these things? The stories of Lovecraft and other Mythos authors are full of morbid and mad protagonists who are drawn to the inhuman against their better judgement, and it never ends well for them. I would imagine one of the most difficult things about recruiting for a Mythos cult is getting would-be disciples past the notion that “god” is bloated, squamous, and covered in pustules. Hardcore punks might be less inclined to fear such things.
PUNK IS DEBAUCHED AND VIOLENT
I got a six pack and nothing to do
I got a six pack and I don’t need you
$35 and a six pack to my name
SIX PACK!
Spent the rest on beer so who’s to blame
SIX PACK!
They say I’m fucked up all the time
SIX PACK!
What they do is a waste of time
SIX PACK!–“Six Pack,” Black Flag (1981)
One reason punks band together is a mutual sense that society has exploited them and then conveniently ignored the misery and trauma it has caused them. When your mentality is one of feeling pissed-on or having fallen between the cracks, drinking and drugs are not just a pleasure, but a welcome relief. It is easy to fall into, or even revel in, excess and addiction. But Punk is not soft in its revels. On the other side of the Dionysian coin is violence. Punk has a long list of people it wants to kill: police, politicians, religious leaders, and anyone else that wants to reign it in or hold it down. And if it can’t find something “normal” or “mainstream” to fight in its excess, Punk will fight itself. This might be ritualistic violence in ther mosh pit, or all-out brutality such as when there is a disagreement between punks espousing radical left-wing and right-wing politics.
Vulnerability: The Cults of the Mythos are Also Debauched and Violent
How will we know when The Stars Are Right? Castro told Inspector Legrasse that, “The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy.” Mythos cults might not just see Punk as ripe for recruitment, they might see it as proof that the time of the Great Old Ones is at hand. Sure, it’s a difficult and dangerous life being a disciple a Mythos cult, but can you imagine the horror of being chosen as its prophet?
PUNK IS ANGRY AND DESTRUCTIVE
I hate the united nations, I hate their disinformation
I hate military actions, I hate fascist right wing factions
I hate all the isolation, I hate all the desperation
I hate it all
Smash the state–“Smash the State,” Naked Aggression (1996)
Another trait that ties various groups of punks together is their rejection of the mainstream. They hold incredible anger for a society that they feel has no place for them, has actively abused them, and has intentionally given them no opportunities for success and happiness. Keith Morris, in looking back from the mid-1990s to his youth as the lead singer of The Circle Jerks says, “Kids now have even more reasons to be angry and upset. Our society, kind of, almost pushes them in that direction. They’re basically trapped. They’re cornered, and they’ve got to fight their way out of these corners.” Punk is not concerned with what comes after that fight, only that the fight needs to happen. The current order, with its corruption and criminal privileging of the wealthy, must be rejected and torn down. “It certainly hasn’t got any more beautiful,” Morris says of the world looking back over the last two-and-a-half decades, “but then the Punk Rock thing was never a beautiful thing.”
Vulnerability: The Mythos Can Give Punk the Destruction it Craves
When you have no opportunities, no way forward, and no community that wants to help you, a cult promising the end of the world as you know it might not even have to lie about its messaging to get you on board. The Mythos will happily bring an end to the old order in accomplishing its alien goals. Because Punk’s goal is rejection and destruction, cults need not concern themselves with concealing the apocalyptic outcome. A Mythos cult can offer Punk an opportunity to sate its anger and meet its adherents where they are. We see a similar approach in Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom where the titular character actively chooses indifferent, world-ending destruction over the evil human beings intentionally do to each other.
PUNK DIES YOUNG
… Teddy sniffing glue he was twelve years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was eleven when she pulled the plug
On twenty six reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, fourteen years old
He looked like sixty five when he died
He was a friend of mine–“People Who Died,” The Jim Carroll Band (1980)
Punk Rock of all Stripes is Replete with Death Imagery. Death and Punk are close companions. Death features frequently as a theme in Punk Rock lyrics; referring to one’s own death or, more often, desiring the death of another individual or group. Punk has a laundry list of performers who have died young and, in Spheeris’ documentary work in the 1990s it becomes clear that many of the young people she is interviewing are not long for this world. There are two deaths discussed directly in The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 3: one takes place during filming and we see members of the documentary cast reacting to it, then another immediately after filming is noted in a short epilogue. When asked, many of the young “squatpunks” or “gutterpunks” interviewed by Spheeris do not expect to live to see the next decade. It would not be out of place to suggest that some of these hopeless, angry individuals are succumbing to slow suicide through substance use, or consumption that leads to death by misadventure.
Vulnerability: The Mythos Needs Sacrifices
While the rites, rituals, and reasons might be different depending on the story, its clear to any long term reader of Cthulhu Mythos fiction that a fair bit of human blood and sacrifice is needed to wake the Great Old Ones from their death-like slumber. A Mythos cult recruiting in a Punk community is likely to find both volunteers for its death rites, and the means to conceal those rites from scrutiny. They might not convince punks to kill themselves outright, but they can certainly supply the means and temptation to do so. A cult gathering that supplies a banquet of alcohol and drugs is likely to get the attention of punks looking to lose themselves.
It might also be easy for manipulative Mythos cultists to find victims of suicidal ideation among punk groups and utilize their desires to their own end. Darby Crash of The Germs, a talented and popular performer in his time, frequently spoke about killing himself according to friends and associates, to the point many became irritated with him. Geza X called him, “a premeditated would-be apocalyptic cult leader,” and said that, “he chose his doomsday,” and he, “preyed on the female instinct to save things, especially the certain types of female who go for guys who seem doomed, where the infatuated female is led into believing she will be the one who saves him from himself,” and this fits with the story Casey Cola tells of her and Crash planning a mutual suicide. Cola woke up after their shared, intentional overdose, but Darby Crash did not.
Finally, society takes it for granted that punks die young, whether by suicide, overdose, violence, or misadventure. Punk life is frequently short and has a messy end. And where most people with mainstream ethics and morals might see tragedy, a twisted Mythos cult might see opportunity. Punks disappear frequently and the mainstream doesn’t miss them. So if a punk becomes a human sacrifice, you’ve got one less body that’s going to get attention as you go about completing the rites that appease your sleeping god.
PUNK ENCOURAGES TRANSFORMATION OF THE SELF
Flesh, flesh, flesh
Flesh tantrum
Flesh, flesh, flesh
Flesh tantrum
You make my skin crawl
It’s way down under all
And I’m wild, I’m free
I’ve got the fever now–Flesh Tantrum, Dwarves (1990)
To Punk, the human body is not just a vehicle or a shell encasing the soul, but rather is it the only thing a person can say for certain they own. Society constantly tells its membership what to do with their bodies: how to dress, what to eat and drink, and how to behave in ways that fall within social norms. Punk rejects this notion and encourages ownership of one’s body through transformation. If the body is your vehicle, then you are well within your rights to, “drive it like you stole it.” The body is a canvas on which an angry punk can paint their disdain and rejection of society and its values. Piercings, tattoos, scarification, and other body modifications are statements of adherence to the Punk philosophy, and provide social capital within Punk communities.
Vulnerability: The Mythos Also Encourages Self Transformation
Contact with the Cthulhu Mythos can be a transformative experience, often whether you want it to be or not. Alien mutation, possession, and parasitic infection can turn the body into a host for the Mythos. While repulsion is a reasonable reaction to corruption of the body and mind by things from other worlds or dimensions, we have already established that Punk does not follow the social norms where disgust is concerned. If an eyeball or similar growth were to appear on a punk’s arm or neck, I think its fair to say their community might not have a uniform reaction of disgust. It might be better odds than a coin toss that the tainted punk would be rejected, but there could be a minority of community members who seek ownership and transformation of the body so far beyond the social norm that their reaction would be, “Cool! Where can I get one of those!?”
PUNK HAS A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP WITH IDEOLOGY
If you’ve come to fight, get outta here
You ain’t no better than the bouncers
We ain’t trying to be police
When you ape the cops it ain’t anarchyNazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!–Nazi Punks Fuck Off, Dead Kennedys (1983)
Anti-Religion 
Anti-Capitalist 
Anti-Fascist Originally, I had it in mind to approach the topics of religion, political ideology, and exploitation in Punk subculture separately, but too many threads weave together too easily. Instead, you get an essay within the essay.
I’ve already mentioned previously that Punk, as an ideology, is focused on rejection of mainstream society rather than replacement of it with something better. Punk is fleeing a world that attempts to trap, control, and abuse it. All the world wants is to put Punk to work for the social elites until it drops dead. Punk lashes out at government, education, religion, corporate greed, and law enforcement because it knows most people are just fuel for the societal furnace. While Punk burns, the rich get richer, the poor stay poor, and the system stumbles on, crushing the majority of those that cling to it. So Punk fucks off. It doesn’t care where its going. Anywhere is better than here.
Many punks take this philosophy to heart not just by enjoying the music and the subcultural community, but they also hit the road and wander. Spheeris interviews squatpunks in the 1990s who seem utterly fearless of a life without a fixed home or possessions. Despite their hardships, they extol the virtues of their lifestyle in statements like, “I can go anywhere.” And it is true that Punk subculture creates welcoming, communal spaces for those that know where to look. There is no uniform structure, but “Punk houses” around the world can temporarily take in hitch hikers and travelers as long as they play by the unwritten rules and help the community. This cultural construction of communal living and travel seems to date back to Punk’s beginnings in the 1970s. Interviewees in Spitz and Mullen’s We Got the Neutron Bomb talk about how, in the early days, when the subculture was at its smallest, Punk was a connected series of artists communes. A punk could crash at a friendly house, an apartment complex, or a practice space and spend their days listening to poetry, playing music, reading literature, and talking political and moral philosophy. There was plenty of liquor and drugs to be had as well, but the interviewees saw indulgence as secondary to what was being learned and shared amongst early punks.
All this is to say Punk is a subculture where ideas about what to do next circle and percolate freely. Again, the shared element is the rejection of mainstream society. Punks leave behind hypocritical religions, punitive education systems, exploitative working environments, and abusive parents. Their cohesion comes from the fact they can all say, “I was fed up, I turned my back, and I walked away.” When it comes to the question of, “What do we do now?” other than celebrating their liberation through shared music and indulgence, there is no confirmed next step. This fluidity was tenable when Punk was a very small subculture of free thinkers. As soon as it started attracting more and more adherents though, the balance could not hold.
Camps formed based around different Punk philosophies, and because punks are not opposed to posturing and aggression toward insiders or outsiders, the camps began to separate and fight. Some of these camps took a dark turn in their philosophies, which began as efforts to push back against mainstream society with edgy, inside jokes. You can see it if you watch the interviews in Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization, Parts I and III back-to-back. In the early 1980s there are young interviewees wearing nazi symbols and regalia as a way of appearing oppositional and hostile. They joke that they’d never actually beat up Jews, but “hippies” and non-whites who invade their spaces seem to be fair game for physical confrontation. Meanwhile, a decade-and-a half-later, interviewees are dealing with nazi punks who frequently invade their shared cultural spaces looking to pick fights. Obviously, the “ironic jokes” didn’t stay jokes.
This is a hard truth about Punk subculture: because it doesn’t have a cohesive direction, its vulnerable to exploitation by other movements that do have cohesive directions. Sometimes this isn’t a bad thing, as the early Peace Punks helped with the cultural dissemination of feminism, anti-war sentiment, awareness of the AIDS crisis, and other important social movements that later generations would build into their collective senses of identity. The majority-positive opinions on LGBTQ rights we see in Gen Z are a result of a lot of cultural heavy lifting during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s; Peace Punks were an important part of that effort. On the other hand, the Rock Against Communism (RCA) movement that Peace Punks frequently fought managed to pass its reactionary and fascist ideas on to future generations as well. Even though the dominant culture is naturally progressing toward a mindset that favors diversity and inclusion–and the fascists are just getting louder as they are pushed out of the Overton Window–a lot of people are getting hurt today because of the ideological heavy lifting RCA did.
Vulnerability: The Mythos Can Hijack Punk Too
Following the throughline of Spheeris’ interviews, a narrative emerges. In the 1980s there were some angry, young punks who decided to wear nazi paraphernalia as part of their effort to look hard and push away outsiders. This allowed them to form their own insular, subcultural group, where they could safely create and pass on the ideas and traditions amongst themselves, as well as those they allowed through the boundaries of their community. Fifteen years later, there are fully-formed gangs of nazi punks making life hell for squatpunks who value a degree of diversity and inclusion as they struggle to live on the streets. How did we get between point A and point B? The obvious answer is that someone got to our punks in the 1980s and moved them from being a group that jokingly utilized nazi symbology as an in-group/out-group marker, to a group learns and propagates nazi ideology. It goes to show when you have a cultural hate symbol being used ironically, you will inevitably attract real adherents to the ideology who are all too happy to induct you into their group, co-oping your movement for their own purposes.
In a world where the Cthulhu Mythos walks the Earth, those nazis could be Cthulhu cultists instead. They can employ the same methods, allowing parts of their philosophy and symbology to trickle out amongst the hardened, angry youth. It starts in the 1980s with wayward punks wearing pins or getting tattoos of occult sigils that make the lame mainstream types uncomfortable. Maybe a few verses from the Book of Eibon or the Necronomicon end up in some bands’ lyrics–just enough to tantalize and encourage exploration. A local news crew film a group of kids chucking beer bottles at cops while shouting, “Cthulhu fhtagn! Fuck the Pigs!” Fast forward fifteen years to the mid 1990s: there are gangs of Cthulhu punks abducting squatpunks and runaways from shows and skinning them alive before a makeshift idol in an abandoned industrial park. They don’t even need the more senior members of the Cthulhu cult to help with the rituals, this group is completely autonomous with its own symbology, initiation rites, and leadership.
Punk subculture, while a source of progressive change, political awareness,
and artistic experimentation that has made indelible marks on modern human
history, has also been a vector for the endurance of fascist ideology that has
been lurking on the edges of the cultural milieu and waiting for its
time when The Stars Are Right. Mythos cults could and would
follow the same path and obtain their own horrible results. They could
even outdo the fascists, as they can better contend with Punk’s discontent for
mainstream religion. Are you angry God isn’t depicted as a woman?
We have a Black Goat with a Thousand Young we’d love to tell you all
about! Want to watch civilization crumble and burn? Make a bloody
offering to Cthulhu, Shudde M’ell, or Tulzcha! Are you more the
bookish-type who wants to wield power against your enemies? Sacrifice to
Yog-sothoth and learn real magic to make greedy pigs you hate pay dearly!
Or maybe you’re sick of it all and just want to end it? Why not join us
in the waking of Azathoth to pop creation like a snot bubble!PUNK IS IGNORED BY THE MAINSTREAM, AND THAT’S INTENTIONAL
Now here’s another hard truth about Punk and about rebelliousness that focuses on youth and aesthetics in general: its all part of society’s plan to support and maintain the mainstream. While it’s risky to try and personify culture rather than the individuals that make up the culture, I’ve gotten comfortable with two notions that rely on society having wants and needs that could be deemed part of a “persona.”
The first notion I absorbed while studying anthropology and folklore was that society has an drive to perpetuate itself. It wants to survive, it wants to pass itself on, and it wants to continue to exist. The second notion is a little bleaker: society doesn’t care if people are happy as long as it can achieve perpetuation. Humans are just the fuel to make society go. Some of us get to burn hot and bright, and a lot more of us get the “meat-grinder” treatment.
Society has strategies and stop-gaps to aid in perpetuating itself. One such strategy it has adopted in the last century is to expect a degree of resistance to the cultural norms from younger generations. How does it handle this resistance? It sections off the rebellious youth, tags them with identifying markers, and lets them out to play until they’ve worn themselves down and either stop resisting, get with the program, or die. Punk is one in a long line of youth subcultures that allows discontented younger generations to express themselves and expend volatile energy in a relatively harmless direction before they are reincorporated into adult life.
Punk accepts everyone, but only into places and spaces where there is no mainstream power. Punk uses aesthetics to communicate its ideas and perceptions and to keep outsiders away. Conveniently, Punk aesthetics also warn mainstream types not to interact with punks, preventing the exchange of radical ideas. Punk revels in the grotesque, disgusting, and encourages body transformation—out of sight where mainstream doesn’t have to watch. Punk is angry, debauched, and destructive, while corralled in spaces where the blood and vomit aren’t going to get on important people’s shoes. Punk is a subcultural space where ideology can be questioned, examined, and transformed, but it inherently never touches mainstream ideology. Punk isn’t the only rebellious youth movement that wanted to change the world, and it isn’t the only one to fall short of its revolutionary goals.
Rebellious youth movements are allowed to persist in every generation because they are kept out of the halls of power and relegated to spaces where they cannot do any direct harm to society. This social construction became particularly evident with Punk because it was a rebellious youth movement actively wanting to harm society. When we didn’t see banks, churches, and government offices burning, the shape of the boundaries around Punk became obvious. Punk was violent, angry, and destructive, but it was set aside by society in a place where it could be easily ignored and forgotten.
Vulnerability: The Mythos hides in Forgotten Places
Child of Innsmouth
Cast into the sea
Never to return again
Until the day of judgment
This sickness, it’s taking over me
Mirror shows my Innsmouth look–“Dagon,” Raukous (2016)
While the above analysis is a bit of a downer for folks like me who love a bit of upheaval and progressive cultural transformation, it doesn’t have to be that way in a world where the Cthulhu Mythos stalks humanity from the shadows. The Mythos thrives in forgotten places and among forgotten people. Lovecraft’s inbred family lines, backwater villages, remote islands, and unnavigable swamps can easily be mirrored by early Punk’s communal dwellings and late Punk’s squats. Punks wander urban wastelands that might as well be as abandoned and forgotten as Dunwich or the Blasted Heath. Secrets can be written on loading dock walls in graffiti just as easily as they can be in a book in the Restricted Collection. Just as Punk finds new life in a rejection of modernity, cosmic horror can reject its familiar trappings in favor of something new. Punk can be a way to pass on the lore of Cthulhu, Azathoth, and Yog-Sothoth, as their disciples wait until The Stars Are Right.
ZINES: HOW PUNK AND TTRPGS SHARE MATERIAL CULTURE
I would be remiss if I did not point out one critical element of material culture that ties together Punk, horror, and the world of role-playing games in general: the importance of zines. These short, small print-run, and often hand-made creations are the descendants of pamphleteering culture. Beginning in the 16th century in Europe, most pamphlets were religious or political in nature, but over time the hand-crafted press approach was applied to wider interests. This included fandom starting in the early 20th century, specifically surrounding early science fiction and adventure stories. The cycle of zine publications did a great deal to expand and preserve interest in comic horror. The earliest Lovecraftian zines date back to the 1940s, while the 1970s and 80s saw a boom in independent, home-made publications dedicated to the Cthulhu Mythos that likely influenced most cosmic horror writers publishing today.
As for Punk, it emerged around the same time as photocopying technology. This allowed for zines that could be easily printed up from cut-and-paste layouts. Art and writing could be borrowed and reused, allowing for wider dissemination. If you are thinking of writing a horror RPG scenario that utilizes Punk subculture, a page or two from a zine would be an essential handout to help investigators piece together a mystery. Maybe the crossover between Lovecraftian horrors and Punk starts with a printing house error: some pages from a cosmic horror zine end up in the cover of Punk zine. Stranger things have happened. In any case, there are numerous examples online that can help you get the feel of Punk zine writing if you want to put together zine-based handouts.
Example: The DC Punk Archive Zine Library
The photocopy-style zine would also influence the first generations of role-playing fans, both formally through small-run fantasy and horror gaming zines, and informally through collections of photocopied rules, character sheets, and notes. I grew up in a small town during the Satanic Panic, and I can attest to the fact that photocopied zine-style constructions were what allowed young fans like me to take our games everywhere. We were able to get them into school, take them to scout camp, bring them on road trips, and even sneak them into households with parents (like mine) who forbade the role-playing hobby altogether.
Today the zine tradition has evolved again. E-publications and blogs enable those of us with something we want to say to create an audience, and add fuel to the sparks of our creativity that would otherwise burn out in isolation. My first opportunity to publish in the world of horror role-playing I love so much came from the e-zine Hypergraphia, and in the late stages of the COVID pandemic I decided to start writing down more of my ideas about horror role-playing with the aid of this blog.
Story Hooks
The Punk Rock of Erich Zann (1980s)
It’s 1982 and Benny Smash is the lead singer of Virus. The band has rented out an abandoned church property to serve as their crash pad and practice space. They’re supposed to be working on an album for a small record label that signed them, but instead they’re hosting small shows in the church’s nave to get donations for food and bills. The band is stretched to the breaking point, as Benny keeps insisting on these night-time shows and then sleeping through regular rehearsals and recording sessions. He’s also insisting on weird, experimental riffs and songs that devolve into chants and screaming. The church is in a backstreet of a forgotten LA neighborhood, but Benny’s impromptu shows are eventually going to get the attention of the cops. This actually scares Benny to death, because he’s not playing and singing to entertain people or make rent. He’s doing it to keep out what’s trying to into the church.
He can see It watching him nightly from the windows above the nave and It talks to him in his dreams, which is why he’s started using heroin again. He’s managing to keep it at bay with shrill guitar chords and rhythmic screaming, but every time he feels like it takes a little more of his broken will to push It back as it tries to reach through the void to claim him, his band-mates, and the world. But what if tonight is the night he breaks? What if his voice wavers and It comes through? What if tonight is the night that The Thing watching this church, this former home of the Hollywood Starry Wisdom Cult the cops put down in 1979, pushes Its way into our world and claims the members of Virus and their fans for Its own.
All the Investigators know is that Virus is putting on a show at their practice space the night of April 30th. Everyone’s going to be there.
The Punk Branch of the Family Tree (1990s)
Its 1996 and KayCee Blotch is putting on an intense display at the Showcase Theatre with her band Nothing But Abuse. The kids are angry, bloodthirsty, and drunk. She’s been plying them with Aklo for weeks, at every show: little hints of the otherworldly power she’s going to let loose. You see, KayCee’s been fighting the good fight since she was a teenager: abortion rights, the AIDS crisis, the environment, police brutality, corporate greed, genocide, and more. She’s finally had enough. Nothing ever gets better. Its just a new kind of Hell every time you turn around and no amount of screaming into a microphone or a bullhorn is making a difference. And that’s when KayCee finally understood that her grandmother was right: our words don’t have any power, but the words of Those Outside do. Because KayCee Blotch was born Cassidy Lavinia Whateley. Her family is old and well known to the Things Beyond the Threshold. Tonight, there will be an offering: a blood sacrifice that’s going to start with this douchebag in the mosh pit who came to her show and started showing off his new Rock Against Communism tattoo. She knows he’s got buddies in the back of the room looking to jump on the first person who tries to start shit. That’s going to start a brawl, then a riot, and the cops are just around the corner. But its not going to go down like it usually does.
KayCee’s going to sing The Hymn of the Black Goat next. She’s going to activate those little, otherworldly seeds she’s been spreading through her fans with words and signs for weeks. Its all going come out at once. What the nazis’ think is going to be a beat down and the cops think is going to be a riot is going to be something else entirely. Tonight, KayCee embodies the Black Goat, and she’s going to march her Thousand Young through the streets of Los Angeles and let them do the shouting and killing that they have always wanted to do.
The investigators are in the crowd. Can they stop the supernatural madness that’s about to turn a punk show into a horror show?
Mr. Corbitt Meets the Squatpunks (1990s)
***SPOILERS FOR “THE HAUNTING” BY SANDY PETERSEN***
Punk-themed Cthulhu Mythos role-playing can put a fresh coat of paint on Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition’s most well-trod scenario. In its original context, “The Haunting” pits a group of investigators against a supernatural antagonist inhabiting a piece of real estate, but by moving the timeline forward 70 years and using squatpunks as investigators you get a very different take on the Corbitt house. Even if the threats are the same: telekinetic attacks by furniture and cutlery, an undead horror, etc., the stakes are different. To a group of homeless punks, Mr. Corbitt’s creepy old house is not a job, but a home where they can have a modicum of safety and security. Maybe its gone unrented and the landlord leaves the lights and gas connected. If they abandon the house, its back to the streets where there are cops, nazi punks, and other very real threats are waiting for them. The investigative angles might have to change: perhaps the asylum-bound tenants are now some former squatters who vacated the house, but the events of the investigation could also take place over a single day and night. The squatpunks set up shop, weird things happen, a storm, a party, some mysterious deaths, and a bloody denouement.
Mythos Tome
A Collection of Punk Rock Cassettes DEMO TAPE
English, Inhumanoid, 1986
The band Inhumanoid consisted of Keith Derby (Vocals), David Steinnman (Bass), Hannah Nowakowski (Guitar, Vocals), and Jason Nowakowski (Drums) and was formed at Arkham, MA in 1983. Derby and his best friend Steinmann, whose father was a professor at Miskatonic University, joined with the Nowakowski twins Derby after they met at a local Punk show. The story goes that the Nowakowski’s had heard legends about Derby’s strange family, Steinmann used his father’s access to the university archives to verify details, and that led Derby to start hunting for answers and inspiration.
Derby discovered a notebook belonging to his Great-Great Aunt Asenath in a dilapidated steamer trunk his father kept in the shed behind the family’s home at the Horizon Trailer Park. Most of items taken from the old Crownandshield Estate were sold at auction decades before, but this trunk, built in Innsmouth in 1895, had never found a buyer and was in ruins now to the point it could barely be moved without falling apart. Derby was already an aspiring musician and song-writer; lyrical arts came easily to him. The notebook, which consisted of mainly of old alchemical recipes for cures and curses, with recitations and chants to be made alongside the brews, inspired Keith to compose the songs “Bury Them Upside Down,” “Witch Fingers,” “Maggot Meat,” and others.
Inhumanoid**: (From Left to Right) David Steinmann,
Jason Nowakowski, Hannah Nowakowski
(holding the band’s cat “Jenkin”), Keith DerbyInhumanoid played several underground shows in Arkham, Bolton, and Shrewsbury that ended in violent confrontations between attendees and the police. Rumors spread that Keith Derby’s lyrics were a catalyst for these near-riots along what must have been hallucinogenic drugs. Arrested parties who were interviewed stated they saw the cops as, “rotting, shambling corpse-horrors full of worms the size of sausages spewing forth in rivulets of fetid, white slime.” The band broke up after playing together for 3 years when Jason Nowakowski was discovered dead of an overdose. His sister said he’d started to have nightmares and took to using large amounts of downers to quiet his mind. Before the untimely break-up, Inhumanoid had just produced a Demo Tape intended for distribution to interested record labels. Ten copies were made with an accompanying insert containing lyrics and some drawings Derby copied from his Great-Great Aunt’s notebook. The Demo became something of an underground legend, and numerous full and partial copies can be found, though the hand-made booklets are exceedingly rare.
Sanity Loss: 1D3
Cthulhu Mythos: +1/+3
Mythos Rating: 11
Study: 1 week (3 weeks w/o accompanying lyric insert.)
Suggested Spells: None (w/o the accompanying lyric insert), Words of Power and Implant Fear (w/ the lyric insert and additional research/insight)
Punk Resources for the Cthulhu Mythos
Mythos-Inspired Punk Rock: Arkham Witch, Raukous, Rudimentary Peni , The Brains
Films: Call Girl of Cthulhu (2014), Zeckenkommando vs. Cthulhu (2015, German)
Scholarship: Heather Poirier. “Toward a Definition of Lovecraft Punk.” 2022 Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon. Providence, RI.
TTRPG Games and Scenarios
“The Voice of the Animals” Scenario from Worlds of Cthulhu Volume 4. (2006)
The No Future Scenario Series by Pent-up Press for Cthulhu Dark.
*Title image is taken from a poster for the independent German film Zeckenkommando vs. Cthulhu (2015)
**I am aware this a photo of the band X, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cast them as NPCs.
***Special thanks to Christine Morey, who previewed and edited this post. Thank you so much for supporting my work and sharing your journey through Punk subculture with me everyday. 💜🧷
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KULT: DIVINITY LOST Scenario
Over the course my last two articles on the psychology of fear, I have been teasing some Kult: Divinity Lost fan content and it is finally ready! Below are all the links you will need to download my Kult: Divinity Lost scenario “Welcome to the Rest Home.” This scenario is free fan content for readers. Please enjoy it and I would be delighted to receive feedback you have to offer. Thanks!
Content Warnings: Poor Conditions in Long Term Care, Implied Patient Neglect & Abuse, Poverty, Dementia, Incontinence, Blood, Implied Sex Acts, Implied Sexual Contact, Dead Animals, Corpses, Insects, Depictions of the Hell, Ritual Death Magic
This product is unofficial Fan Content for KULT: Divinity Lost permitted under the Helmgast Fan Content Policy: https://helmgast.se/meta/fan-content-policy
Scenario: WELCOME TO THE REST HOME-FULL VERSION
Scenario: WELCOME TO THE REST HOME-PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION
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THE WEIRD & THE EERIE
Games of Fear, Part 2.5
I left something out of the previous Games of Fear blogs I want to go over in brief, and that’s a distinction between the weird and the eerie. This is important as we’re discussing fear because the weird and the eerie are two things that can trigger fear responses and ultimately lead to experiences of horror. However, they are distinct in the way they trigger our fear and its worth knowing about how each of them work so you can utilize both in a game setting to achieve the results you want in the moment.
As Lovecraftians, the weird is something we’re familiar with; Lovecraft’s stories and the creations that follow from them are steeped in the weird. Lovecraft talks about the weird in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as, “breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces,” and a, “defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard.” These are distinctions Lovecraft draws that separate a weird tale from other types of horror. Writer and artist Mark Fisher describes the weird as, “the presence of that which does not belong,” his emphasis. I think this dovetails nicely with Lovecraft’s conception of the defeat of nature’s laws and it also moves the weird into familiar territory for me from my time as a graduate student in anthropology, where Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger defines dirt as, “matter out of place.” So collectively, what we get with the weird is something that is antagonistic to our sense of the normal, that does not belong where we find it, and elicits a sense of uncleanliness that leads to dread of something that is beyond the scope of our understanding.
The eerie is not defined in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” but given how Lovecraft uses it to define the works of Brontë, Poe, and other Gothic writers, we can gather he associates it with the Gothic literary tradition, which he describes as “horrible and fantastic.” He also describes the principal setting of the Gothic, the “Gothic castle,” in lavish detail we can pick apart for meaning. Words like “antiquity,” “distances,” “deserted and ruined,” “damp,” “unwholesome,” “hidden,” and “appalling” are on display, in addition to “ghoulish” and “spiritual fright,” that turn up in other mentions of the Gothic. For Lovecraft the Gothic has texture the reader can feel, and “eerie” is a part of that. Turning to Mark Fisher we get a more functional definition of the eerie. The eerie can either be the “failure of absence,” or the, “failure of presence.” Both factors center on expectations and those expectations resolving themselves wrongly. An experience can be eerie because you expect nothing and find something, a failure of absence, or you can expect something a find nothing, a failure of presence.
For example, a character can walk into what he knows to be an empty room and find someone or something there that wasn’t there previously: a person, an animal, or a perhaps a record playing on a phonograph that wasn’t playing earlier. This is eerie. At the same time, that character can hear a person talking, a cat meowing, or a record playing in a room, walk in, and find no such thing. This is also eerie. Its not quite the out of place, unnatural, or uncleanly interruption of the weird, but it can communicate similar thoughts and feelings in a more subtle manner.
Taken together, we have Fisher showing us that the eerie can be the presence or absence of something that fails to meet our expectations and Lovecraft provides us with the texture and/or sensation that elicited by the experience of failed expectations. Certainly the eerie will shock and surprise us, probably causing a fear response, but more importantly that response will attach itself to a wider set of experiences we have with time, distance, emptiness, unwholesomeness, and hidden things that provoke “spiritual fright,” perhaps not interpreted here having to do with the soul but “spiritual” as in our sense of self within our own construction of reality. The eerie jostles us in a way where we must suddenly reassess our place in world and our sense of self.
I think that can be useful in a role-playing game dedicated to cosmic horror. Sometimes you don’t want to horrify, gross-out, or aggressively harm your players’ investigators. Sometimes you just want to show them the world is bigger or different than they thought it was and let that feeling do the work of taking their SAN away from them slowly. That way when the monster, the inter-dimensional sludge, or the horrible truth about what the doctor was doing with all his patients turns up, the characters are that much more vulnerable to the hard hit from the uncleanliness and wrongness of the weird.
I’ll wrap up this short series of thoughts by providing three examples of the eerie I encourage you to explore. The first is Fisher’s spoken word and musical work with another artist named Justin Barton, and numerous other vocal contributors. The 45-minute musically accompanied essay is called “On Vanishing Land,” and its available on Youtube in a series of short chapters. Listening to it should provide you with some insights into the eerie as you follow the journey of some walkers on the beaches of Suffolk before they turn inland toward Sutton Hoo.
The latter two are things “On Vanishing Land” inspired me to think about, not because they have the same subject matter but rather the feelings I got from the musical essay touched feelings related to these two other works. The first was the 1972 BBC TV movie The Stone Tape and the second was a podcast I occasionally listen to called The Godfrey Audio Guide. Using definitions pulled from Lovecraft and Fisher, I can confidently say both have an eerie feel, as they play upon their audiences’ expectations of what will and will not be present in a given place or at a given time.
Finally, I’m going to go out on a limb and publish a short narrative I wrote about a month ago. When I finished it, I was unsure of what I’d written. This was based on an actual experience I had as a teenager, but it felt it came out in an almost Lovecraftian vignette. I wasn’t sure of what I had until I considered the distinction between the weird and the eerie. Its definitely the latter. I’m separating it from this essay because of the content, as it talks about my time volunteering in a nursing home and there’s discussion of the sights, sounds, and smells of the place, as well as content involving military veterans, advanced dementia, and PTSD.
Bonus Content- “Chester’s Roommate”
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CHESTER’S ROOMMATE
CONTENT WARNING: Nursing Homes, Incontinence, Offensive Language, Military Veterans, Dementia, PTSD
Chester used to say, “Some men seen things in the War.” Which War, I’m not sure. I didn’t want to ask. I was just a kid and I had never seen dementia up close.
My high school was one of those private Christian schools you see a lot now in the United States and part of its “Biblical Education” model included service projects and volunteer hours with every Bible course. The projects weren’t really all that clear cut in their methods or their meaning, it was just this thing we did once a week where we were supposed to help people and sometimes that meant bussing a group of freshmen from the Old Testament class to a senior care facility and throwing them through the doors to “volunteer.” The care home didn’t really have any chores we could do, since the physical work was all done by certified staff, so we just got paired up with some residents as “buddies” for an hour a week. There were no plans or instructions like, “Read to them,” “Get them to exercise a bit,” or, “Ask them to play games.” We were just supposed to hang out in their presence. Thing is most of the folks at the Westgate Care Home were kind of beyond activities of any sort. There were a lot of severe strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, and, as it turned out, a lot of undiagnosed PTSD behind the doors of that place.
So every Tuesday I get on a bus, ride a few blocks to Westgate, brave the smell of bleach trying to cover up shit, piss, and lack of bathing, and sit down with my charge. Now my story isn’t about the guy I got assigned to hang out with–Chester–though I do have a couple stories about him I might share someday. I’m going to talk about the guy in bed next to him. I don’t recall his name, so I’m just going to call him “Chester’s Roommate.” I do recall the name of the kid who got stuck with him though: Josh. Within a week or two it became clear that Josh did not know what to do with this guy and this guy didn’t want anything to do with Josh. Chester’s Roommate didn’t really need a teenage buddy. He never asked for help wheeling out to the dining hall for snack time, he didn’t want to read, or play cards, or even hear dirty jokes. He just laid in bed every morning evacuating his bowels and having nightmares.
“Some men seen things in the War.”
Once Josh figured out Chester’s Roommate wanted nothing to do with him and started to hang with Chester and I, the guy was just sort of this background nuisance. He’d lay in bed, the privacy curtain halfway pulled and we’d either smell him shitting and pissing himself or we hear him quietly muttering, “No,” then a beat, then, “No,” and then he’d shit and piss himself. Josh and I would usually take that opportunity to exit the room with Chester, tell a nurse Chester’s Roommate needed help, and wander over to the dining hall for mid-morning snack time. After a while we kind of realized something was happening with Chester’s Roommate beyond incontinence.
We could see his silhouette through privacy curtain, and he wasn’t just saying, “No. No.”
He was having a dream.
His arms and head would thrash on the pillow, and he’d lift his arms up to the sky as he said the words. We figured this out because, for the entire school year of Tuesdays we watched him have the same dream every time we were there. We even asked Chester about it. He made a passing comment, “He’s been like that for two years since we been bunkin’ together,” He didn’t want to say anymore than that. They were paired up as roommates because they were veterans. Chester went to Korea when he was little older than Josh and I, he told us as much. I never got the details on his roommate. Given the way he thrashed around, 14-year-old me didn’t really want to ask.
So it goes on like this through Fall and Winter, and in Spring around the time all the goofy St. Patrick’s Day decorations are up, their glittery green and gold cardboard sparkling in the Westgate morning miasma of bleach-blanketed shit, piss, and body odor, Josh and I get a full taste of what Chester’s Roommate’s nightmare is all about. Events happened out of sequence one day, you see: Josh and I get there a little early and Chester is in the little double room’s-closet sized toilet stall. The door isn’t all that closed because its blocked by Chester’s wheelchair, so we try to give our charge a bit of privacy and we end up standing just inside the range of the half-closed privacy curtain where we get a full view of Chester’s Roommate sleeping. Suddenly the nightmare starts.
“Some men seen things in the War.”
His face twitches and grimaces, wrinkles upon wrinkles, some of them clearly etched in his face over years of trying to repel whatever it is he’s seeing in his mind’s eye. The head starts to thrash, I think I can see a sheen of sweat forming. His arms are moving, but he isn’t just raising up his arms, he’s shifting them like he’s fighting off someone or maybe more than one someone trying to hold him back. He’s horizontal because he’s lying in bed but whatever is happening in his mind is happening on the vertical. He’s standing, crouching almost, trying to push through being held back as he sees something so horrible to his psyche that he’s got to intervene. Maybe he did intervene in something when his country shipped him off to the other side of the world, or maybe he didn’t intervene and so this guilt haunts him every time he closes his eyes and desperately tries to make it happen another way.
The familiar litany began. He was actually saying, “No! No!” more than the two times we typically heard. Half a dozen at least. He just wasn’t fully awake at first, so he was mouthing it. Screaming it in his mind really, from the look of panic and strain around his wrinkled brow and cracked lips. His face was half paralyzed, so it looked like half of his head was trying to tear itself away just to be heard. And then his eyes opened and the verbal, “No! No!” began but this time instead of staring at a blank white wall, two weirded out, grungy teenagers were staring back at him, and maybe that’s why he lunged forward. He didn’t get far, but as he groped out at us out with his gnarled, violent fingers and yelled toothlessly from the functional half of his mouth, he carved his words on my mind in stone.
“No! No! Stop! What are you doing!? You can’t do that to him! That’s not a Christian way to bury a man!”
What awful thing do you have to see to want to say something like that every time you close your eyes?
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UNCERTAIN DIMENSIONS
GAMES OF FEAR, PART 2
BE ADVISED: This blog contains some summary discussion of child abuse, rape, racism, and antisemitism. I have made every effort to minimize talk of these subjects where possible and to treat them with the seriousness they deserve where they cannot be avoided.
We’re now going to wrap up our discussion of Joanna Bourke’s Fear: A Cultural History by moving from internal thoughts and feelings that can generate fear to some sources that are a bit more external. In particular, we are going to discuss fear of DISASTER, SOCIAL HYSTERIA, and fear of STRANGERS. As always, the goal is to show you how you can use the psychology and cultural construction of these ideas to benefit your horror TTRPGs like Call of Cthulhu, KULT: Divinity Lost, They Came from Beyond the Grave, and others. As with internalized sources of fear, we will go over Bourke’s historical examples as some of them can be useful if you enjoy setting your games in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. I’ll bring in some additional information, both historical and contemporary, where relevant.
DISASTER
Bourke begins her discussion of disaster with the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago. The December 1903 disaster killed close to six hundred people, trapping them inside the building as it burned and crumbled around them. Ironically, the theater was advertised as “fireproof,” perhaps reassuring patrons of the “standing room only” matinee they would be safe despite the fact over two thousand people were crowded into a multistory building with less than half as many seats. While the structure of the building was solid and resistant to flame, the draperies and wood paneling adorning the interior certainly weren’t, and the whole inside went up quickly when an oil lamp set a curtain ablaze. The flames, smoke, exits covered by sumptuous draperies, and unusual locks on the doors led to a stampede inside the walls of the structure. Patrons were trampled and crushed against walls and banisters. Those who managed to get out of the building on the upper floors plunged to their deaths when they were met with rickety fire escapes iced over by winter weather. Jumpers had to guess where to fall, as smoke pouring out of the lower levels obscured fire fighters with nets on the street below.
The Iroquois Theater 
The Aftermath The Iroquois Theater disaster would cause Chicago city officials and architects to start rethinking the way public buildings were designed and emergency services were distributed across the urban landscape. It was clear there were not enough fire fighters and police to help with the situation, too few accessible exits, and too many people inside the building. But the Iroquois Theater fire was far from the first disaster of its kind.
Disaster is of particular interest to people living in the nineteenth century because it represents a confluence of societal changes. There are a lot of factors at play when a public building burns to the ground and/or falls over and kills hundreds of people, and I’ll attempt to list a some I feel are most important, but I’m sure people with more familiarity than me will see issues relevant to the Iroquois Theater fire I’ve missed. Firstly, I think its important to note that the destruction of a public building and the deaths of people inside it have a way of testing the resolve of a society. After all, public spaces and edifices belong to all of us and so if something goes wrong in a public space the public is going to feel that loss collectively as opposed to witnessing private property being destroyed. And while its true that the theater was not part of a public works project and it had private owners, theater itself is something that the public can take ownership of. A people’s means of entertainment represents who they are as a society, and damage to such spaces can feel like damage to the society.
I think we also need to consider how professional journalism was critical to the nineteenth century. Newspapers were early tools for bringing information from around the world to everyone who could afford a nickel to read them. Yet to compete for those nickels, publishers needed to draw in an audience and quickly discovered that stories of gore, violence, and disaster kept the presses running and the reporters paid. By the 1903 fire in Chicago, attention-grabbing headlines were a well-practiced art. “False Exits in Iroquois Theater Plunge Audience into Death Trap” wrote the San Francisco Call when reporting on the disaster. The Chicago Daily Tribune entitled its illustration of the fire, “In the Alley of Death and Mutilation” and grabbed the eyes of readers with graphic titles like, “Women and Children at Holiday Matinee Audience Sacrificed to Flame and Panic.” These practices of making spectacles out of things people fear are still around today in the form of the 24-hour news cycle, true crime literature and podcasts, and political punditry. Our society has a habit of repackaging our fears and selling them back to us.
The San Francisco Call Sensationalizes Disaster Its worth examining why we do this to ourselves. So far, the theories I have seen have to do with preparedness and familiarity. Often our fears come down to lack of information–as we will see when we talk about social hysteria and strangers below–and we are left to fill in the gaps with our own darkest dreams: the shadowy spot on the street where the lamp has fizzled out probably contains nothing, but it could also contain an open manhole through which you could fall to your death. We are certainly more likely to dwell on the latter possibility rather than assume the former. To soothe these gaps in our knowledge we encounter every day, we practice, prepare, and become familiar. Reading about a disaster or a crime is a form of self-soothing, as it gives us those missing pieces of information of what its like to experience a violent attack or a burning building.
Finally, when it comes to disasters specifically, there is something of a leveling effect that gives us catharsis as well. It is said that the rain, “falls upon the just and unjust alike,” so is it the case with hunks of ceiling in a burning building. Everyone is equal before a fire in a crowded theater. Your titles and bank accounts won’t save you from the flames. The nineteenth century was one of extreme changes to the urban landscape, to industry, and to wealth inequality. It would not surprise me if a small portion of people reading about the Iroquois Theater fire or a similar disaster would read a story like that with a sense of self-satisfaction, especially if they were too poor to afford a ticket to the show.
Herd Mentality (In Society & Crowded Venues)
The confluence of transforming urban culture and the rise newspapers and magazines competing for the public’s money tapped into both personal fears about one’s survival and well-being and more complex fears about how change in society leads to chaos. We humans are social animals, but over time we have proven we don’t do so well in large herds. The way we physically manifest anxiety means we cannot coordinate our efforts well in a panic situation. You can’t really stop to talk and strategize when your body’s fear response creates tunnel vision and diminishes your hearing. We also spread panic very easily in groups. Its possible that there were people in the Iroquois Theater who never saw the fire, but just started to panic because people around them were panicking. Our capacity to care for one another also diminishes in a situation of mass panic. Self-preservation is the default mode for a panicking human being. We spend vast amounts of money and effort to train people like emergency responders and medical personnel to ignore their instincts and culturally ingrained reactions with, at best, mixed results. A disaster like the Iroquois Theater fire is the sort of event that can make anyone, or everyone, fall apart psychologically. In game terms: you are surrounded by SAN checks: burn victims, people trampled and crushed, the screams of the falling/dying/lost, and that’s before you even consider your own fight-or-flight response.
Fear is a naturally conservative instinct, just like horror in a lot of ways. The familiar is safe and predictable, making the unfamiliar dangerous and uncertain. The professional press, a modern method of storytelling, latched onto urban disasters and played into both the fear of physical harm and the fear that the direction society was moving was dangerous. As we write and run horror scenarios for our players, we can learn a lot by inhabiting the various facets of the social and psychological conflict between the changing urban landscape, the professional press, and the people caught in between. Consider this when your players’ investigators are interviewing witnesses, when you are creating handouts, and when you are role-playing NPCs from different social and economic classes. All these facets of a game scenario might offer different opinions on the same disaster, whether or not it’s source is a cosmic or supernatural horror.
Blending the Alien & the Familiar
You can certainly present the struggles of the changing urban landscape to your players in a historical game to help them inhabit their characters; maybe some of whom might have seen a very different world when they were children. The four-story Iroquois Theatre was a new construction in a shopping district that had existed since the 1870s, and before that, this district called “The Loop” was leveled by the Great Chicago Fire. A Chicagoan investigator playing in the 1920s who is forty or fifty years old would remember three different versions of this landscape before the current one they know in the game’s “now.” No doubt you will have people at your gaming table who can relate. Very few people reach adulthood without seeing stark changes in familiar neighborhoods and pointing this out might serve to help players better connect with and role-play their historical characters.
If we take a wider angle on this “fear of change in the landscape” though, we might find other ways to reach our players through their characters. Cosmic horror does not have to be an alien monster or god introduced to a familiar world. It can be an alien landscape as well. This could come from moving the investigators to a different dimension or interposing the architecture of a different planet on a familiar skyline, something that causes the players to recognize familiar sights but to see them in different ways. Examples could include non-Euclidean angles in stairs, columns and doorways; a shadow version of a familiar city that foregrounds grotesque features of the familiar architecture; an alien shape like a basalt tower or pentagonal plaza that gives the vaguest suggestion of the creatures that built it understood what a city was but had their ideas about it. Give the players a familiar environment, but with enough change to know it is different and wrong and the player’s own internalized fears of change will manifest. You could do this with non-urban environments too: a forest where the leaves are deep purple and the tree sap has the color and flow of blood will make players second guess their normal assumptions about hiking in the woods. They will be set on edge, not knowing what is safe, despite seeing things that are familiar.
Alien Landscape from The Endless 
Another Dimension/World from The Void Dice Rolls & Disasters
A final thought I’ll add when it comes to fear of disaster is its important to recognize it in your players. From our previous discussion of fear we know that players and their characters can feel fear independently from one another and that, while fear sensations and feelings can travel between the two, they are not going to manifest in the same way. A player whose character is trapped in a burning building with flames closing in around them is going to have a fear/panic response if they feel a connection to the idea of their character, but it could manifest as frantic decision-making and a rush to roll dice, frustration or low-grade anger, or perhaps even feeling despondent if they think the situation is futile. The change in mood may be as subtle as a shift in tone or body language. Be on the look-out for these cues, especially in games like Call of Cthulhu where characters are fragile. As a Keeper/Director/GM, it may be worth it to ask your players what they need from you to help deal with these peaks and troughs of emotion. Depending on what your players say, you might want to break immersion at these tense moments, enhance the immersion, or take a breather after its all over to reset and mourn any losses at the table.
SOCIAL HYSTERIA
Bourke calls the mass panic that occurs when indirect hints of threat or danger to a community get out of hand “social hysteria.” In folklore studies we use the term “rumor panic.” A rumor is a specific kind of “belief,” which I would define based on folklorist Linda Dégh’s book Legend and Belief as, “culture specific, religion specific truth.” A rumor is information the teller understands to be truthful that is shared in the moment and often based on inaccurate or incomplete knowledge. A rumor can border on the legendary, where people activity debate the truth or falsehood of the rumor, or it can be woven within a larger piece of cultural information that is factually accurate. Rumor information tends to spread fast and it also can change from carrier to carrier. Often a rumor is partial information we obtain and then fill in the gaps with our own suppositions or biases.
We can naturally find ourselves in a state of fear when we are uncertain. If we don’t know what is happening, our fight-or-flight response defaults to danger and the familiar physiological symptoms start to creep in. Say you heard your neighbor scream at the top of their lungs. They could be screaming because there’s an intruder in their house or because they won lottery. Without context, all you have is the scream and your mind is going to assume the worst possibilities until you can prove otherwise. This is the moment we open ourselves up to rumor panic. All we have to do is assume our neighbor is being attacked by an intruder and share that assumption with someone else.
Bourke points to two rumor panics or periods of social hysteria from the early twentieth century that show a collision between new technology and the human capacity to absorb and spread rumor. Broadcast from the Barricades and War of the Worlds were both radio plays that framed their storytelling around fictitious news broadcasts. The problem with this method was that not all listeners tuned in at the beginning of the shows and heard the introduction identifying their fictitious natures. Some late arrivals to Broadcast from the Barricades thought London was being overrun by mobs of angry factory workers bent on a violent strike and some folks who missed the opening to War of the Worlds thought the US was being invaded by conquering aliens. Word spread quickly in both cases and before long neighborhoods and communities were arming themselves and preparing for the worst. People fled their homes and injuries occurred in some cases. These experiments in storytelling led to real consequences for people who misinterpreted the message or only heard part of the information because the natural and fear-guided reaction was to fill in the gaps and then act in favor of self-preservation.
Bourke points out that also, in each case, there were very real concerns that helped people turn these radio programs into full-blown rumor panics. In the case of Broadcast from the Barricades, which originally aired in 1926, people in Britain were already tense. The guns of the Great War went silent less than a decade prior, and most families were connected to someone who was wounded on the battlefields of Europe or who never came home at all. What’s more, the Russian Revolution at the end of the Great War had started as just the sort of worker’s revolt that was being discussed in Broadcast from the Barricades. A general strike or worker’s revolution was a fearful possibly in the minds of many radio listeners, so they didn’t have far to leap when they heard a radio announcer saying that workers had bombed the House of Commons.
In the case of War of the Worlds, the premise was a little more far fetched, but it was broadcast in 1938, at the height of American anxiety over recovering from the Great Depression and the looming possibility that the Germans or Japanese might decide to bring the US into the Second World War with a surprise attack. Many people who heard rumors of “meteors” and “Martian invaders” on the radio jumped to the conclusion these would turn out to be cover stories for Japanese bombers or German Zeppelins. And this is not to suggest a real thought of Martian conquerors didn’t occur to some people. Society’s understanding of space had been transformed by science and science fiction in the previous decades. New planets had been discovered in our solar system, Einstein had proposed faster than light travel, and a man named H.P. Lovecraft had died a year before after a life of writing about alien horrors in the cold void of space who regarded human beings as little more than ants or fleas to be stepped on or swept away. Lovecraft’s tales already had people wasting time looking for The Necronomicon in book shops and libraries, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were readers of Weird Tales amongst the panicking masses when War of the Worlds was broadcast.
Broadcast from the Barricades 
War of the Worlds Blood Libel: Hysteria Repeats Itself
There are a lot of first and second-generation D&D players who vividly remember the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s. Many of us are now looking at the QANON panic of the last decade or so and wondering how people have managed to fall for the same rumors twice in forty years. In both cases, cultural conflicts, undercurrents of antisemitism, and changes to technology stretched the psyches of religious conservatives to the breaking point. Some scholars suggest the Satanic Panic of my childhood started when the social sciences revealed that the overwhelming majority of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse children endure takes place in the home or around trusted family members and authority figures. Unable to reconcile the reality that their homes, families, and religious leaders were they first place they should look if a child was abused, religious bigots sought an new enemy to blame. Popular music, television, horror movies, gay rights advocates, role-playing games, and so many other cultural touch points attracted the attention of zealous mobs. However, the symbology of the enemy these fearful fanatics sought to purge was an idea older than the Middle Ages: the blood libel, an antisemitic supernatural conspiracy theory that held Jewish outsiders were responsible for the kidnapping and ritual murder of Christian children.
The symbology is even more obvious in the QANON conspiracy: where “coastal and liberal elites” are accused of trafficking children to ritually torture them and then drink their blood as a potion conveying immortality. It is just the latest iteration of the same moral panic story: Satanic heavy metal fans ritually sacrificing children to praise the devil, old crone witches feasting on stolen babies to maintain youth and beauty, a black mass performed by anti-Christians with the blood of children to stand in for the eucharist, or the blood libel against a Jewish minority approved of by the Church while the local nobility look the other way. Every time our society is confronted with new technologies and the expansion of human rights, a rumor panic ensues as a portion of the population reaches back to the oldest suppositions and biases they can get their hands on to confront cultural truths that reduce their relevancy. Observable truths like access to abortion and birth control make societies healthier and happier, sex education successfully controls the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, the LGBTQ+ community is a sizable minority that deserves marriage equality, and Transgender people deserve the right to exist with dignity and with access to the same public spaces as everyone else. With each cultural move forward come the rumors of the theft of children’s blood. One hopes, with time, more and more people will realize just how out of step the fearful bigots are with cultural development and we can leave these rumors back in the Dark Ages where they originated.
The Blood Libel 
Again 
…And Again PANIC! At the Game Table
So now that I’ve had my moment to rant, lets talk about using rumor panic and the fear it produces in a horror role-playing setting. I think the key takeaway from Bourke’s social hysteria discussion is the importance of anchoring the mass fear and panic to something socially relevant. If your cosmic horror investigators encounter a torch and pitchfork-wielding mob, the mob doesn’t need to be aligned against cosmic horror to impact the story. A mob organized against a village or neighborhood of Deep One hybrids probably won’t be calling for blood because “Those weird and smelly Innsmouth folk are fish people here to conquer the land-dwellers!” unless you’re running a very pulpy game of Pulp Cthulhu. More likely your mob is taking up arms because, “Those weird and smelly Innsmouth folk are no good commies who hate America!”
At the same time, conspiracies rooted in the blood libel like witch panics, the Satanic Panic, or even QANON could make for opportunities to accidentally stumble upon “real” in-game supernatural cults, conspiracies, and cosmic horrors. Tread carefully when using these ideas though, especially if you aren’t familiar with your players in a convention or online setting. You never know what people have endured in their lives and we have all been through at least one rumor panic by now. When carefully utilized, modern rumor panics might provide good cover for delivering clues or even origins for investigator characters. It might be entertaining and edifying to consider what a group of modern conspiracy theorists might think and do if their “breadcrumbs” and late night web research led them to the King in Yellow, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, or the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. Also, your investigators’ affiliations and/or interest in the occult might make them targets of an ongoing rumor panic. A game could turn out very different depending on what end of the rumor panic your players’ investigators find themselves.
STRANGERS
Bourke begins her discussion of the cultural fear of strangers with a look at artist and essayist Nancy Venable Raine. I’m not going to attempt to tell Nancy’s story, as I don’t think I’m able to do it justice. Her experience was one of home invasion, torture, and rape at the hands of a stranger. She survived and went on to produce very deep and impactful art and writing. Here is a link to her book, and you can google her name to find interviews and literary reviews. I think Bourke utilizes Raine’s story to set a serious and solemn tone for one of her final chapters of Fear: A Cultural History. I’m sort of doing the same, as we are going to a dark, but important place and its worth marking the boundary between the fear of strangers and other kinds of fear we discuss.
Masked 
Faceless And Best Kept Out From my own perspective, I would say that fear of strangers has its roots in the physiological reactions our human and pre-human ancestors utilized to avoid predators. We were not always the dominant species on this planet and since cosmic horror is the centre piece of what we examine here, I think we need to remind ourselves of that from time to time. The best data from physical anthropologists these days indicates our species started out as scavengers. We obtained our sustenance by picking through the leavings of our prehistoric world’s apex predators. When you are in the business of scavenging you need to be on your guard. Opportunistic feeding means competition feeding so, while we were knelt over the carcass, we learned to watch for others with the same goals as us or with the intent to lay our carcass down right beside the one we were picking through. Strangers were, at best, competition and, at worst, fond of the taste of our vulnerable flesh.
As we’ve been learning form Bourke and others, physiological responses are not fear. Fear is a cultural construction, but there’s some roots that go back to those physiological responses when we look at how humans formed their first cultures: grouping themselves into families, bands, and tribes. We have a long cultural history of making a point to know who is a friend and who is a stranger. To this day, our social and physical worlds are still defined by who is in our group and who is outside our group. At the root of this is the psychology of risk assessment: when we are caught alone and vulnerable and we see someone unfamiliar at the edge of our field of vision, our instincts and our cultural knowledge tell us to avoid that person until we can better assess the risk. Our bodies and cultural knowledge do not assume a stranger is harmless by default.
If you like your horror with a side of the supernatural—and what Lovecraftian doesn’t—this is where fear of strangers gets interesting. Cultural knowledge of stranger fear gets handed down to us as tales of the supernatural. The roots of supernatural legends, fantasy, ghost stories, monsters, demons, witches, vampires, the occult, aliens, and everything else you can fit between the pages of Weird Tales magazine are in warnings against strangers; just in case you’re instincts didn’t kick you hard enough when you encountered one. So if you are ever stuck, whether you are writing a scenario or running it, if your players ever look bored or restless at the table, show them the stranger at the end of their field of vision. Set a fire under those physiological reactions embedded in their nervous systems and then add the cultural layer. Make sure they are exposed, alone with this unknown factor. Is it watching them? Does it mean them harm? How could they possibly know? Not without exposing themselves further. Not without that calculation of risk.
With Stories, the Stranger Evolves 
Into the Supernatural 
And the Alien After reading Bourke and others I’m convinced that the fear of strangers is probably the closest we can get to the cultural root of human fears. The stranger encompasses so much we’ve already discussed: death, childhood, nightmares, and phobias. The stranger could do violence to our body or infect it. The stranger can be the catalyst for disaster. The stranger’s presence can cause panic and hysteria, as no one knows their purposes and rumors will flourish under those conditions. The stranger is cosmic horror: we have no reference with which to understand them, they occupy a different part of a universe we only just realized we share with them, and they care nothing for the things we build and value.
Strangers vs. Others
I would be remiss if I didn’t take some time to consider H.P. Lovecraft’s contempt New York City, how it thoroughly informed his particular fear of strangers, and how that fear became a critical component of the Cthulhu Mythos we know today. Lovecraft lived in New York City from the Spring of 1924 to the Winter of 1926. From 1925 onward, he was living alone in Brooklyn, as his wife Sonia Greene had moved to Cleveland. It’s pretty clear that the Lovecraft-Greene marriage was not a successful one and it left HPL in a stressful emotional and financial predicament. According to biographer W. Scott Poole, he had been coaxed to leave his childhood home in a time of grief and confusion following the death of his mother, the codependent companionship he sought to replace his mother’s presence in his life didn’t work out, and he was left to fend for himself in an alien place full of what he interpreted as alien people. He took the only bedroom he could afford on his meager earnings as a freelance writer and editor. He was plagued by rats, neglected as a tenant by the building owner, and spent most days starving. He was embittered, hateful, and without intimacy, but behind all the vitriol was an intense fear and homesickness. When with his circle of friendly writers he largely acted like a tourist and tour guide, but his letters continually show his friends drifting away to start new lives, jobs, and families. With fewer opportunities to act the part of the tourist, HPL was left alone, bitter, and fearful. So he lashed out with his writing.
HPL’s Red Hook as It Was (Clinton Street Apartment Building) 
Red Hook as HPL Imagined It (Cover from HPLHS The Horror at Red Hook) However no amount of personal psychological pain is an excuse for doing harm to others. Lovecraft took his pain and created The Horror at Red Hook, a professional work of fiction that foregrounds his racism and xenophobia to an extent few other stories of his do. We can attempt to contextualize it as a shaky step in the direction that would eventually lead to the Cthulhu Mythos we know and love and we can acknowledge that HPL altered his messaging in later works, but the damage was done. Lovecraft lived in a working class New York City neighborhood surrounded by cultures and people from around the world and turned his experiences into a racist screed that maligned immigrants and the children of slaves as dull-witted, corrupt, and dangerous to people like him. In the social sciences we call this practice “othering.” It is a way of drawing a line in the sand between your human group and other human groups, simultaneously distinguishing your human group as better by attributing sub-human qualities to those others.
So what are we to do? How do we press on as Lovecraftians knowing that one of HPLs first forays into the fear of strangers ended in “The Horror at Red Hook?” For my part, I take it as a lesson and I chose to press on. I will continue doing as W.H. Pugmire suggests, “Writing stories influenced by Lovecraft,” that are, “uniquely my own thing.” That is what being a Lovecraftian is. We do not copy HPL. We grow in our own creative directions. From “The Horror at Red Hook” I learned that the fear of strangers is like a lot of tools in the horror writing tool box: it is useful, but also dangerous if not used carefully. So, when I write a scenario I ask myself, “Who am I othering?” and I know if my answer is a group of people who share an identity rather than an individual or individuals with specific behaviors I can point to as reprehensible, I need to rethink the direction of my writing. I want to sculpt my NPCs, especially my human or partially-human villains so that my players feel the fear of strangers but don’t receive the message that a particular human group is dangerous or corrupt.
And it actually leads to a deeper level of storytelling. To return to the Deep Ones pursued by our angry mob above, what if not all of them are unsympathetic? What if some took the Oaths of Dagon when they were children and are now stuck with their transformation and/or obligations? You can put an investigator in peril by having a monster hunt them, but you can also create peril by putting a person who wants to help in a situation where they can’t help someone for whom they feel sympathy.
BONUS CONTENT-Monsters of Fear: Betty Seaver
Keep in mind that while the fear of strangers begins with human physiology and is nurtured by cultural psychology, we are not bound to it when we write and play games. We can transcend it and change it for our purposes. After all, its extremely doubtful our primate ancestors had cosmic horror in mind when they developed their fear of strangers as an instinctual tool to avoid predators and competition for food. It was meant for encounters with the stranger, not the alien. We don’t necessarily need to describe the alien as corrupt or malicious. If something is truly alien, then its goals–such that they can be understood–don’t have to be malicious to be harmful. An alien can have perfectly reasonable goals that are incongruent with human life, that is the horror of cosmic horror.
Coming Up…
Now that we’ve completed our look at Bourke’s Fear: A Cultural History we’re going to take a stab at updating the playbook. 2023 is a very different world from the one of 2005 in-which Bourke was writing. We’re going to examine contemporary psychology and get a feel for the fears and anxieties that are unique to our current social, cultural, and political climate. Light a candle, because its only going to get darker from here. We’re going to look at exploitation, isolation, trauma, and catch up with your old friend death. There might even be a KULT: Divinity Lost scenario at the end of our journey.
I’ll see you at the REST HOME. -
Monsters of Fear: Betty Seaver
A 1950s NPC for Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition
At twelve years old, Betty is the oldest child at the Black Kettle Orphanage, sometimes called “The Cottage.” Black Kettle Orphanage is the last facility of its kind in rural Oklahoma. Like most US States in the 1950s, Oklahoma is opting for a foster care system in order to decrease the rising costs of child welfare services. But the foster system functions on voluntary participation and there are still children no one is inclined to take in and care for due behavioral issues, the medical care they require, or some other trait that makes them unwanted or undesirable.
She was never a particularly attractive child, and perhaps it was this prejudice that led folks wanting to adopt to overlook her. Her thin lips, bloodless and bluish complexion, and thin, wispy yellow hair just didn’t appeal to people. She’s always had problems with her large, watery eyes that are more circular than almond shaped. She wears heavy prescription glasses everywhere except when swimming in the local pond, which she loves about as much as anything. She’s fast swimmer too, and strong–frighteningly strong at times. She is big for her age. She can easily be mistaken for a full-grown, if small, woman at a distance.
Betty’s kept her baby teeth for a long time, but some are finally starting to fall out. The adult teeth replacing them are misshapen though; peg-like and sharp. She’ll probably need significant prosthodontic work when she’s older to have a smile that isn’t frightening. It would be helpful to know if this is a congenital issue. Perhaps there’s some archive or government bureau that has photos or dental records of her father and mother that could be used for comparison.
Not much is known about her parents. Its possible they shared a criminal background. Betty was transferred to the orphanage from the El Reno federal prison camp after she was born. Her father was said to have died is some sort of boating accident off the coast of southern Massachusetts. He was a sailor from some dreary port town and probably involved with smuggling. Her mother was incarcerated for espionage just before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and after being moved from El Reno, she went to an obscure women’s detention facility that disappeared from federal records after World War II.
Betty is particularly fond of country fairs and carnivals and looks forward to the orphanage’s annual trips to the traveling shows that pass through Black Kettle and nearby towns. She especially enjoys cotton candy and riding carousel horses. When not assisting the volunteers and social service workers at The Cottage with the younger children, she typically plays by herself. Most of the younger children seem to shy away from her if given a choice. They complain she smells and makes odd sounds in her sleep. Then again, a lot of the children at The Cottage are troubled by bad dreams these days.
When playing alone, Betty has a habit of singing softly to herself. The songs are mostly nonsense words, but are consistent and repetitive, almost like a chant or soothing prayer. When asked about this she claims to be singing to her “friend,” named “Clooy.” “Clooy sings back sometimes,” Betty says, especially in her dreams. Such fantasies are common for children in Betty’s situation, where social and emotional development is somewhat stunted. Her fixation on her imaginary friend is somewhat concerning though. When a social worker recently asked if she’d like to have a mommy and daddy in her life someday, she shook her head and told the woman, “Clooy’s coming to get me. He promised to take me home.”
Betty Seaver, Orphaned Deep One Hybrid
STR 80
CON 65
SIZ 45
DEX 60
POW 50
INT 40
APP 25
HP: 11
Damage Bonus: 1D4
Build: 0
Magic Points: 10
Move: 8 on foot/8 swim
ATTACKS
Attacks per round: 1
Fighting: 45% (22/9), damage per weapon type + damage bonus or unarmed (1D3) + damage bonus, Betty’s bite will Impale on a critical hit.
Dodge: 30 (15/6)
Armor: none
Skills: Jump 45%, Listen 50%, Stealth 40%, Swim 60%
Spells: “Mama’s Lullaby” Contact Deep One, “Clooy’s Song” Contact Deity: Cthulhu
Sanity Loss: 0/1D4
“The Cottage,” Black Kettle Orphanage 
Photo Labelled “Emily Seaver 1934” recovered during recent record search for Betty’s parents’ medical history. 
Young Betty Playing “Hide-and-Seek” in the woods near The Cottage. -
Games of Fear
The Psychology and Cultural History of Fear for Horror Role-playing
There are lots of places I can direct you to if you want to understand horror. We could talk about Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” we could read through Stephen King’s Dance Macabre, or we could look up genre resources for writing horror like I’ve used in other blogs. Where the resources get a little thin is when we want to talk about fear.
Fear isn’t horror. It’s a part of it though, and it’s an emotion that horror shares with a lot of its cousins: dread, terror, revulsion, disgust, etc. Fear has to be present to achieve horror’s definitive wrongness that overwhelms the senses, otherwise we might pity a thing rather than be horrified by it. Fear is also an emotion that wells up before the horror strikes. Its a negative form of anticipation, the promise that something bad or dangerous is coming. We are always afraid that something is going to happen, as opposed to being terrified or horrified when something happens. Fear is about the build-up to a reveal. It sets mood and tone, drawing out an experience. Fear in a TTRPG is the difference between kicking open a door and finding a sword-wielding orc waiting for you and listening closely at the door, hearing the orc’s ragged breathing, the ringing steel of it draws its notched and pitted sword, and the sounds of its slavering tongue questing for the taste of human flesh.
It would certainly be ideal for this exercise if I could just explain how to inflict fear on your players from behind the Game Master’s screen but–unfortunately for us–professional psychology puts its resources and focus toward overcoming fear or healing from the trauma fear instills in us[1]. Vital information, to be sure, but it means we’ll have to come at the subject from an oblique angle. Our territory will be the last two centuries, a time when society has taken an active interest in how people think and how their minds develop through different stages of life. Fear is part of that. We’ll look at some cultural history[2] as well; how societal changes have shaped and reshaped the ways we understand fear, and I’ll add in anecdotes that reflect my own experiences when I can. My hope is that the more we understand how fear has changed over time, the better grip we’ll obtain on what we need to bring to our horror-driven TTRPGs to take advantage of fear as a part of storytelling.
When we think of fear, we often think of an instinctual reaction or a primal emotive response. Lovecraft certainly thought as much.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927This is probably one of the most well-known quotes by HPL and it manages to do a lot with few words. It’s a complete thought, it authoritative, and it tells us a lot about who he was as a writer of imaginative fiction. But here’s the kicker, HPL is actually dead wrong. He was perhaps correct for the time and cultural context in which he wrote Supernatural Horror in Literature but, like so many things we hold onto as a society, his idea has been preserved beyond its relevance. Fear isn’t primal, its cultural. According to modern scholarship, particularly cultural studies, history, and psychohistory, we have come a long way from HPL’s interpretation of fear. If we want to write things that are impactful, we need to catch up to what fear is doing today.
Even Lovecraft would agree its important to keep with the times when writing:
It is necessary to be modern – to catch the trend of modern thought, expression, and interpretation. By depicting the everyday life and thoughts and motives of the present, one can more effectively touch the popular fancy and awaken the deepest and most hidden of human sympathies.
Letter to Robert E. Howard, August, 1930To be clear, this is not an indictment of the Lovecraftian community, writers, and/or to game publishers. I just figured it would be worth it to say something radical to get your attention, because this is a call to adventure! We’re time traveling. We are going to tour a bit of cultural history and see what fear has been all about for the last couple centuries, and then we are going to start trying to put together what fear means to us nowadays. All the while the goal will be to support writing, particularly the production of authentic-feeling horror role-playing games.
Our main guide for this journey will be Joanna Bourke’s Fear: A Cultural History. Most of the information exploring the physiological aspects of fear comes from Margee Kerr’s Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear. Some other texts I’ve used including Nick Groom’s The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction and Darryl Jones’ Horror: A Very Short Introduction. They are part of the Oxford University Press “Very Short Introduction” series, good beginner texts that can give you definitions and act like sign posts for doing more detailed work on a given subject. I’ve also looked at Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, which is another good introductory book that takes the reader through literature and film and has a through-line discussing those qualities of the alien and the unknown that are integral to Lovecraftian media of all types. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the importance of W. Scott Poole’s biography In the Mountains of Madness: the Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft. While not as thorough and detailed as S.T. Joshi, I think its a good introduction to Lovecraft’s life, work, and legacy that correctly assesses and critiques the staggering influence of racism and xenophobia on the author’s sense of self.
Starting with the Body: The Physiology of Fear
Magee Kerr notes that fear begins with certain physical reactions our body has to outside stimuli, particularly our fight-or-flight response. We feel our blood rush and our heartbeat quicken. We can become dizzy and disoriented as control of the body moves to the parts of our brain that react rather than think. The fight-or-flight response shuts down certain bodily systems: digestion and sexual arousal are put on the back burner in favor of heart rate, respiration, and conversion of energy for muscle movement. Blood pressure increases to rapidly bring in oxygen and circulate it to muscles. Hearing is diminished and we get tunnel vision as the body reacts to perceived danger, rather than allowing us to think about it. It can feel like waves of heat are moving across our body as the prefrontal cortex shuts down, blood pressure changes both body temperature and skin sensitivity. In extreme cases, the bladder lets go of whatever its holding onto in order to direct more energy to engage critical muscles.
It pays to remind your players of the physical symptoms of fear. These sensations associated with the fight-or-flight response are objective. They can be measured and tested. They are the naked truth of the human condition. Everything that happens outside these sensations is subjective, cultural phenomena. How we fear and what we fear is entirely dependent on things like where we were born, what our family and society have taught us while growing up, and the ways we have learned to fit in with others around us. Kerr observed these cultural expressions of the fight-or-flight response by looking at haunted houses and similar scare-themed attractions around the world. Every cultural group has set patterns of acceptable reactions to fearful stimuli: some try to create space, some huddle together, some vocalize and wave their arms, and others go quiet and get low to the ground. These are learned reactions, not instinctive responses.
So what this tells me is that, when I’m running games with events that might scare player characters, or writing descriptions of NPCs expressing fear, I should start with the body, because the fight-or-flight reactions are going to be those universals that my players will grab onto, no matter their background. Things like heart rate, dizziness and disorientation, respiration, diminished and tunneling senses, changes in body temperature, and loss of bladder control are the first thing I want to describe when my investigators encounter some sort of alien or demonic horror–or anticipate such an encounter. After that, I can turn to the how’s and why’s of the sight or suspicion being fearful, and know that I’ve established a baseline to which every person playing my game will be able to relate.
Distinguishing Between Fear and Anxiety
We might also think about the difference between fear and anxiety, as both can excite the fight-or-flight response, but the triggers and results are very different. We typically think of fear when there is a subject we can point to and say, “that person/place/thing over there is scary.” With anxiety, the feeling is more nebulous. We cannot identify a specific something that frightens us, but often we can relate it to a category of things.
Keeping this distinction in mind while writing and running games will allow us to vary sensations. There may be moments in a game where you want your players to be worried, but you don’t want them to focus their concern on something singular. You want that ominous feeling that comes with a panic attack; something I can turn to in my own life and describe to others. It begins with the fight-or-flight response, only the heart-rate, breathing, disorientation, etc. is set off by something you are not aware of. If could be a sound, a lack of sound, a stray thought, or just noticing the time of day. Your players could encounter these feelings in a part of your setting: the body knows something is wrong in the woods, the cave, or at the bottom of the well, but the mind can’t process the alien qualities of the place, so anxiety sets in rather than fear.
Like a fear reaction, a panic attack stirs you to action. Suddenly the body feels like running, but in this case there’s nothing to run from so you don’t know what direction you need to run. When you can’t figure out where to run, you turn inward, and you try to find what in your body is causing this sensation. Your mind wants to fear something, so it fears the body. You begin to fear some sort of malady. Lots of people who have panic attacks describe heart attack-like symptoms because we’ve heard about these all our lives and the mind wants a solution to this fight-or-flight sensation, even if it’s the wrong one. The mind wants a “something” to go with its fear sensation.
We can turn inward and feel fear just as easily as we can feel fear for something outside of our bodies. Keep that in mind. Bourke comments that fear is both “panoramic and indeterminate.” We can feel a threat of fear everywhere and also feel the fear (or anxiety) and not know where it is coming from. If we vary the source or scope of fear and anxiety as we write and run horror scenarios we can keep players guessing and/or guide them in a particular direction without a more obvious method that breaks immersion in the story.
For example, if I want my monster to sneak up behind my players, I can say that the path ahead through the dark woods narrows in their vision. The blood starts to rush in their head, diminishing their hearing. They can feel their heart beats in their throats now. Muscles tense as something ahead is dangerous. This is fight-or-flight. Their bodies want to flee. They will head back the way they came, and right into the waiting arms of the creature watching them as they turn around.
How Players and Characters Experience Fear
Let’s also consider who is feeling the fear when we talking about horror TTRPGs. As much as we want our players to play their characters, they are not going to feel the same sort of dread these imaginary constructs from different times and places with different experiences feel. So we have to help our players find their fear-based motivations when we write scenarios and run them. At the same time, our players will feel their own kind of fear. If our players are invested in their characters, they will have fear responses when those characters are threatened or their survival is uncertain. It is not the same sort of reaction the characters should be having, as for them its a matter life and limb, but it is an attachment that we can cultivate and use from behind the GM screen.
Cosmic horror can be useful for allowing fear to travel up the attachment forged between TTRPG character and player. Its an existential horror based on thoughts about how the universe works and our place as human beings within it. If you ask a very human TTRPG character to ponder the meaninglessness of their own existence, some of those existential thoughts are going to travel up the line to the player. Maybe its not a one-for-one exchange but think of it like sitting down to tea with a friend and exchanging unpleasant thoughts about what happens when life ends. You both know you are objectively safe in the moment, but those thoughts will leave you unsettled and considering your choices in life. Psychologist Irving Yalom talks about how we tend to regard too much existential conversation as the equivalent of “staring at the sun.” We typically avoid the practice in day-to-day life because its not suitable conversation, but a horror role-playing game allows for a context where you can safely “stare at the sun” as you face the horrors of the setting through the proxy filters of player characters and NPCs. I think this is why, when I recently mentioned setting a KULT: Divinity Lost game in a grim and lonely low-income long-term care home, my regular players were eager–downright excited–to get involved. More on that in a later article…
I suppose the best way to achieve this trickling-upward effect from character to player would be to impose up-close conversation on your player with an NPC that forces them to confront the existential questions about your chosen cosmic horror. This might be a villain, someone who will become a villain, or even a mentor figure. In any event, they should be more experienced with the source of cosmic horror in your game setting so they can guide the player characters through the important questions: “What is the value of humankind in the universe?,” “How do you live your life knowing your are less than nothing to the giants that walk across the stars?,” “How do you face monsters knowing only black emptiness awaits if you die at their hands?,” and so on. Allow the players to talk through their characters though, to avoid turning the experience into a info-dump. It might be appropriate to reward players with something like a small percentage increase in the CTHULHU MYTHOS skill, a spell, or a similar benefit depending on the game system you are using, especially if they have made an effort to role-play through their experience of existential dread.
Fear and History
For the benefit of those writing and running CALL OF CTHULHU games, I’m going to go through the historical transformations of fear in Bourke’s recounting because there are some lovely nuggets of information you can bring into your historical games set in the Regency Period (early nineteenth century), the Gaslight Era (middle to late nineteenth century), and the 1920s and 30s (early twentieth century). Despite being only a period of a hundred years, there are radical transformations happening regarding what people are taught to fear and how they are taught to fear. For example, a Regency investigator may not need to make a SAN role on discovering a corpse, where a 1920s investigator might, just due to how death is dealt with culturally. At the same time, disfigurement of the dead is going to torment a Regency or Gaslight character in ways that won’t occur to someone in the 1920s. Its fascinating and horrible. Enjoy!
On Death
In Britain in the early nineteenth century the most fearful thing, more than war, disease, and crime, was dying poor. Not only was it unpleasant to live in such a state and to have little you could leave behind for your loved ones, but if you died poor the sanctity of your remains was at risk. People had very different relationships to their bodies and religion at the time. When you died, your family buried you, paid a priest to say the proper prayers, and you lay in the ground awaiting the return of God and your inevitable resurrection. “Going to Heaven” is a actually a very modern concept. So imagine you are a poor Victorian and you get word that there’s a new law on the books: if you die and no one claims your body in four days, the anatomists will take care of your burial.
Grave-robbing and corpse-thieving had been the primary means by which scientists learned about the inner workings of the body for decades beginning in the eighteenth century, but in the early Victorian era the scientists finally got through to the government and convinced them they needed a steady supply of corpses to train up new doctors and develop cures for illnesses. At the same time, class struggles and the end of feudalism had created a surplus of poor people in cities who had a habit of dying with no one to clean up the mess. The powers that be decided to solve both problems at once in the most Victorian way possible: if you couldn’t pay for your burial, you’d get a free one, after donating your body to the dissection table.
And, oh, the bleak, horrible stories people did tell about the playful antics of anatomists and their students as they carved the bodies up for study! A piece here and a piece there! You get a hand, you get a foot, he gets heart, and the kidneys go to the guy across the room. Whoops! One fell on the floor! Oh well, sweep it the refuse pile with all the other unclaimed blood and guts! And in the end, it all gets put in a mass grave and covered in quicklime so it will decompose fast. For centuries, priests had been telling rich and poor alike that God would come down to Earth and raise up your body from the dead at the end of things, and this left poor people fearful that God would not recognize them if they were hacked up beyond recognition. What would they look like in the hereafter? Will God find all of their parts? Will God even care? Will they go to Hell if their Catholic head is tossed in a hole with a protestant body? We might laugh at these concerns now, but to the early Victorian poor this existential dread weighed on their minds daily.
The Medical Breakthroughs of Tomorrow 
Made with the Dissections of Today 
At the Expense of Yesterday’s Dead. BONUS CONTENT- MONSTERS OF FEAR: The Dissected
By the end of nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, we were starting to see death a bit differently. Our earlier ancestors had been close to death, present when it happened to their friends and relatives, but then the medical specialists came along, and suddenly death was different. It stopped happening in the home, and instead of granny making her death rattle in the room next door she was off to the hospital, where only doctors and nurses got to see her die and you just got told about it while her mortal remains were being covered with a sheet and packaged for delivery to a kindly mortician. Or better still, why deal with a body at all, when cremation is all the rage? Instead of a messy body with all its fluids, decay, and the expense of a casket, you can get your loved ones to-go in a neat box or a shiny jar. No more graveyard miasma, which the doctors say is bad for your health. No more breathing the last breath of the dead, which folklore says can curse you with sickness and misfortune. Death is neat and tidy, and behind a veil, and we everyday folks never need look upon it.
As our society separates us from the processes of death, death becomes strange and alien and exploitable in new ways to someone looking to write a horror scenario. Suddenly its not just anatomists and dissectionists who are creepy. Moriticians, graveyard attendants, and everyone else in this newly formed industry of death are suspicious. As the same time, these professionals would have no one to turn to other than each other if the corpse they were embalming decided to get up and walk out of the workroom. Apart from the weirdness of the situation, who is going to understand the esoteric natures of all the fluids, tubes, cutting, and stitching they do? Sounds like a ideal group of investigators with a little preparation and research.
On Childhood
Coming into the nineteenth century, fear was a tool used to teach children about their world and protect them from serious harm. Child mortality was high in those days and teaching kids early, and by any means necessary, to keep away from open hearths, not to wander off into the woods alone, and to avoid walking behind horses had a statistical impact on whether they made it to adulthood. It is easy to forget in our contemporary world that our ancestors living four or five generations ago had very different relationships with fire, nature, and livestock, among other dangers. As the Victorian Era brought gas lighting and households that didn’t bring the sheep into the living room at night for warmth, the relationship between children and fear changed. A fearful child was regarded as a weak child and efforts focused on finding a source for this weakness or casting blame for it. Mothers were an easy target, as doctors hypothesized that fearful events happening to a pregnant person might poison the baby in the womb. Fathers were also singled out, as it was frequently the case children’s fears often resembled the most aggressive and violent person in the household: the father. Meanwhile, fearful children of wealthier parents were thought to be afflicted by too much time with a foreign nanny who told them weird peasant stories about goblins and witches that were inappropriate for the modern youth of the British Empire.
Much is made of where childhood fears come from. As an evolutionary origin of humankind found its way more fully into the cultural zeitgeist in the early twentieth century, fear became understood as a primal or instinctual reaction. When a child was a afraid, they were reaching back into deeper parts of their prehuman brain that protected their prehistoric ancestors from threats. Primal fears were something to break through and to get past, in order to appreciate a modern world and all that modern society had to offer. Its no surprise that here we see H.P. Lovecraft making his statements about the primal origins of fear at this stage of cultural history. They fit the timeline perfectly.
One of my academic mentors told me that, when we distill Freud down to what’s useful, we come away with two concepts: desires we repress find ways of expressing themselves in our lives; and things that happen to us in childhood follow us into adulthood. As Freud’s theories and therapies gained prominence, childhood fears became less about general weakness or primal instincts and more about individual experiences. Things that children saw, heard, or felt could become obsessions, fixations, and fetishes in their adult years. Behind every account of monstrous behavior, there is a childhood experience that has twisted and warped a fragile mind. It begs the question, how is a mind twisted when it is exposed to cosmic horror in childhood? What of chance encounters in childhood with ghouls, the mi-go, or the strange books bound in human skin that father hides in his private library?
On Nightmares
Historically we have oscillated between experiencing bad dreams as something fundamentally physical and having symbolic meaning requiring interpretation. I recall a behavioral psychologist I met while I was an undergrad who referred to dreams in general as “mental garbage” and the process of dreaming as “taking out the trash.” This is actually somewhat in line with nineteenth century thinking, where being harassed by one’s own nightmares was considered a sign of physical ailment like poor digestion. Ebenezer Scrooge tries to taunt his phantom partner, Jacob Marley, in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol by saying, “There is more of gravy than of grave about you,” passing off the haunting as poorly digested cheese or mustard.
Scrooge and Marley The popularity of Freud at end of the nineteenth century and moving into the twentieth means by the 1920s, scholars of human behavior are starting to look at dreams as the place where the unconscious mind turns up to sort through thoughts and make sense of them. Suddenly the nightmare chasing you down a dark alley night after night is your feelings about your father or unresolved sexual tension, and sometimes both. The elements of dreams become symbols and allegories to be teased apart. A patient telling their dreams to a therapist in this way makes themself very vulnerable, as the professional is able to shape and transform them internally by deciding what a certain image or idea means to them rather than the patient deciding it for themselves. Aside from whether this is an effective therapy, we should be asking ourselves what it would mean if an amoral Freudian were to take advantage of this professional power. What about a Freudian under the influence of the Cthulhu Mythos? Perhaps a sorcerer capable of not just twisting the meaning of dreams but implanting dreams in a patient and then puppeting them through therapeutic solutions to the trauma? What if an investigator discovered their parent, sibling, or spouse was involved in such therapy?
It would be worth it here to discuss a little about how Lovecraft regarded nightmares and perhaps dreams in general. From his writings, one finds HPL was a vivid dreamer and troubled regularly as a child by nightmares. The rubbery, faceless Nightgaunt is one such monster born directly from Lovecraft’s childhood nightmares. Lovecraft as a child would have been living at the transitional point in behavioral and medical science where the culture was moving away from physical sources for the contents of dreams and toward mental/emotional explanations. We can easily see the monstrous encounters little HPL had from both sides of the fence. The Nightgaunts may well have been a sign of Lovecraft’s sickly childhood. Complaints of not faring well in the winter months and poor digestion dogged HPL throughout his life, and sickness ultimately lead him to drop out of school at a young age and pursue his self-taught educational program. At the same time, we can look at the sources of anxiety for a young Lovecraft and find plenty of inspiration for Nightgaunts. A black, rubbery, and faceless grotesque might have its origin in a young Lovecraft deeply absorbing the prejudices and suffering of his family members; an amalgam of fears of strangers, non-whites, Catholics, his attachment to his mother, his father’s madness brought on by syphilis, and the doctors and nurses who took care of his father until he died in an asylum.
The Nightguant: Nightmare Incarnate On Phobias
Prior to Freud, irrational fears were largely anecdotal. The first use of the term “phobia” to describe an irrational fear didn’t come along until the 1870s with the first diagnosed “agoraphobic.” The term didn’t see wide use until after WWI, at a point where a lot of soldiers came home emotionally scarred in ways that were very obvious like “shell shock.” At first, psychoanalysis was employed to determine if there was a childhood root to the irrational fear that could be accessed and resolved, thereby resolving the fear. Over time though, the psychoanalytic model was seen as ineffective for dealing with irrational panic reactions and doctors began to look at more dramatic options for resolving what was understood to be neurological problem: a damaged brain rather than a damaged childhood. In the 1930s Electroshock therapy would be employed to attempt to normalize brain function. The 1940s and 50s brought with them a radical cure for minds the didn’t function uniformly: the lobotomy. Surgically removing brain tissue in order to eliminate the problem of irrational fear and other disordered behaviors was looked on as popular solution both in the 1950s and in the 1970s. The 1960s saw a resurgence of psychotherapy and, fortunately, psychotherapy won out as a more popular alternative by the 1980s and has maintained itself as the ideal “cure” for phobias ever since. Lobotomies and shock therapy have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but the impact of such procedures has created lasting fear and distrust of psychiatric medicine.
Electroshock 
Lobotomy Early psychologists and psychiatrists have to be some of the best material for villains out there. Start with a mind that says, “Hey, let’s put a kid in a box for the first year of his life and see how it messes with his social and emotional development,” and then add the Cthulhu Mythos. They can represent a desire for conformity, locking people away who don’t fit into society and make everyone around them uncomfortable; or they can represent a desire for development of human potential, blending eugenics and behavioral conditioning to create super-humans or specialized castes of human beings to fulfill specific functions: workers, warriors, psychically gifted, etc. What’s particularly unsettling about such a villain is that their motivations are not to kill, feed, or gain power like a lot of Mythos adversaries, but rather they think they are helping. Worse still, people might believe them as opposed to believing the investigators. So when the police turn up, they might arrest the investigators rather than the person they’re accusing of being a mad scientist. Because yes, the mad scientist might to around sticking electric probes in orphans’ brains looking for psychic abilities, but he’s got a government grant, a research foundation, and he’s doing it for the good of humanity.
BONUS CONTENT- MONSTERS OF FEAR: Doctor Shockley
On the Body
Our bodies are vulnerable vehicles and diseases of various kinds have been a threat to human groups as long as we have had culture. How we react as a society to these diseases changes over time. Particular diseases are regarded with intense fear, making a person dirty or impure. Somehow they are the “fault” of the carrier rather than just part of a wider ongoing biological struggle. If you grew up like me in the 1980s, you would probably know HIV/AIDS as carrying the “dirty” symbolism, but Bourke points out that prior to the AIDS crisis it was Cancer that carried the social stigma. In the 1950s Cancer was largely understood as something a person caused in themselves through excesses like drinking and smoking. People would be afraid to share their diagnoses for fear of being ostracized or considered a bad influence. We can look back further to diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever to find examples of the “dirty” symbolism in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
You can use this fear of pollution or dirtiness to your advantage from behind the GM screen. I once ran a game where some investigators handled tainted fish at canning facility without gloves and then failed LUCK and CON rolls to become infected. The parasite took the form of blisters or pimples that appeared on the hands and forearms. The doctor in the group was forced to try to excise the little growths from his comrades and discovered wriggling little tendrils inside them. Suddenly all the investigators were weary of touching any marine life or each other for fear of spreading the corrupt. It was first triumph of body horror.
We might have moved on from considering things like cancer and HIV/AIDS to be “dirty,” but the symbolic dichotomy of what is “pure” and what is “dirty” hangs over us still. It’s embedded in our cultural knowledge. Many of its aspects have been reinforced in the recent pandemic. If you’ve ever had a strange rash, a nodule, a boil, a cyst, or infection-related swelling you know the sensation I’m talking about. First there’s the question of, “What is this thing growing on me? That’s not normal,” and then as your fight-or-flight instincts kick in, you realize they can’t help you. You freeze, as there’s no where to turn, and you are just left to feel your heart race, alterations in body temperature, disorientation, and all the other familiar sensations. This is an unwanted passenger you can’t run away from and you can’t “fight” it either because it has made itself part of you.
We have way of marking people as “Dirty” 
“Dirty” people are dangerous 
They especially threaten people marked “Clean” Body horror is very effective in a horror game setting, but its important to think of it like a living thing you have to maintain and nurture. If you afflict your players’ characters with an unwanted passenger, make sure you remind them of it regularly, make it an obstacle they have to hide from the public, make sure they get plenty of time in front of the bathroom mirror getting a good look at themselves, and that it grows and changes with time, showing its going to overtake them and supplant everything that is “normal” about their body. Don’t let it affect their mind though, at least not at first. Let them be sane all the way through and observing the mass, the pustules, or the infection under their skin with a clear head. Once it takes over the mind, they character isn’t really themself anymore. I can say from experience, watching a foreign infection that starts at the extremities and expands toward the heart or toward the head has a way making your mind do somersaults through phases of fear, paranoia, deliberate ignorance, delusion, and hopelessness.
Cosmic Horrors, Inner Worlds
[Lovecraft’s] stories externalize psychological trauma as something monstrously inexplicable.
Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, 2012Groom’s knowledge of Lovecraft is not encyclopedic[3] and, knowing what I know from reading essays by S.T. Joshi and others, his approach leans heavily on certain tropes that have followed HPL posthumously due to a mixture of arguing over his literary estate, attempts to rewrite the narrative of his life, and attempts to psychoanalyze him based on his work and correspondence. As a Lovecraftian looking to write horror role-playing scenarios though, I’m not interested in whether Groom is correct in his assessment, I’m interested in whether it is useful. And to me, it is.
If our cosmic horrors are reflections of our inner worlds, our own minds become a playground of horrors we can turn on our players from behind the GM’s screen. I’ve been back and forth to therapy most of my adult life, so I know the inner workings of my traumas and hang-ups. Now, suddenly, Groom is telling me I can make monsters out of my psychological baggage. Fantastic! I’ve actually been doing this for a while and circling around ways to frame it, but Groom verifies that the idea isn’t all that original.
I published a scenario at the outset of the pandemic that is set in a reskinning of the little town where I spent some of my childhood. My theory was that children see scary things wherever they look because the adult world is large and unfamiliar, so if you want something scary, start with things you remember from childhood. I started to think about the dark, loud noises, threatening animals, strange people, or the sights, sounds, and smells that upset me when I was little. I thought about how the elderly people I didn’t know looked like monsters and witches, especially growing up in a rural foothill down, where lots of people had missing teeth, wore dirty work clothes, and either smoked or chewed tobacco. I remember the first time I saw someone limping along with a prosthetic leg, I remember the way my aunt’s hunting dogs used to chase me whenever I got a snack from her kitchen, and I remember when a wasp flew down my shirt at church camp and stung me half a dozen times. Every dark garage was a cavern full of chains and rusty saw blades. Every copse of trees and thicket was a dark forest. If I could transmit my child’s-eye-view of the world to my players, their characters would constantly be on edge.
If you’re a parent, you have a whole second perspective of those childhood fears, as you go through life with this little creature that doesn’t understand the world like you do and you have to do things that it considers contradictory to keep it safe. I’m thinking now about one of the first times I had to take my daughter to the children’s hospital for a severe respiratory issue. I remember her screaming and struggling as we tried to keep the little green plastic mask on her face to help her breathe in medicine that would clear her lungs. She was defiant and terrified, and no logic or pleading would get through to her because she only had enough words to say, “Ma-Ma! Da-Da! No!” I’ll never forget how she finally passed out from crying and screaming. I was terrified, and the doctor had to reassure me it was actually a good thing because she’d absorb more of the treatment while napping. Crying and screaming doesn’t actually harm you, but it looks scary under the right conditions.
Having children also gets you to think about life as fragile, as temporary. The existential dread grows as you start to see yourself and everyone you loved from your childhood get older. I went back to therapy just before the pandemic started because I felt like I was surrounded by oncoming death. It happened so fast I practically missed the transition. One day I had a baby and then another day that baby was in the fifth-grade writing book reports and doing math homework. How much sand is left in the hourglass for me? For the people who raised me? I could feel the fear this time, rather than just anxiety. I knew that “death” was the thing I was afraid of, but I couldn’t just run away. I had my own Mythos monster stalking me now and I had figure out how to live with that fear.
So I told stories about it. I used the people and places I absorbed as a child as NPCs and settings, I used the hurt and sadness I watched others feel as motivation, and made monsters out of my memories and traumas. Did my players understand exactly what I was talking about? Probably not, but they have their own memories and traumas they can relate to and, because we can share Lovecraftian horrors and investigators in peril across the table, we can communicate and play with those ideas in the dark wells of our minds and find some catharsis.
What’s Next
Fear is an extensive topic and in order to avoid bogging the reader down, I’m going to break up the discussion a bit now that we’ve discussed the fears that come from within our own minds. We will continue the discussion with fears that emerge from the world around us, looking specifically at Social Hysteria, Disasters, Violence, and what is, arguably, the origin of supernatural fear: Strangers. Following this, a third article will address our contemporary culture of fear and how to access it in order to create horror TTRPGs that are the stuff of nightmares unique to 2023. And we’ll talk about the KULT: Divinity Lost game I mentioned above.
[1] Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist or a psychotherapist. I don’t even play one on TV. My academic association with psychology is limited to what’s called “psychoanalytic theory” employed in disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and folklore studies. This branch of theory in the social sciences shares some common ancestors with the modern discipline of psychology; namely a great-great uncle named Sigmund we all try to pretend we don’t know when he comes to family gatherings. Like a lot of people I know, I’ve been back and forth to psychotherapy a number of times in my life. Sometimes it’s been helpful and at other times it’s been irritating. This is not a blog about helping people with their mental and emotional lives; this is a blog about horror TTRPGs and how to make experiences at the table reflect experiences in everyday life. If you are seeking insight into our own experiences, traumas, or struggles with mental illness, please look for a qualified resource.
[2] Another Disclaimer: This blog is written from a thoroughly western perspective, focusing on the cultural history of Britain, the U.S., and Canada, with which I am most familiar. If there are good resources out there that focus on cultural notions of fear in other parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, or among Indigenous groups, I would be delighted to receive recommendations.
[3] He actually falls for a misattributed Lovecraft quote in his description of HPLs life and work. According to the H.P. Lovecraft Archive, the quote: “All my stories, unconnected as they may be are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on the outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again,” does not belong to Lovecraft but is instead a friend paraphrasing him and taking liberties. It should not be seen as HPL’s opinion of his own work.
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Monsters of Fear: Doctor Shockley
A 1920s-30s Psychiatric Villain, for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition
Cold, calculating, and amoral, Dr. Rupert Shockley might have come to his psychopathy by birth or been led to it by his efforts to understand the way humans think. Perhaps too many people puzzled over the state of his mind as a young man, caught torturing birds, rodents, and family pets, and he learned to mirror back the state the inquiry with which the world addressed him. Or perhaps he delved too deeply into the study of esoterica until he found something so alien it changed him forever. In any event, he possesses both a handful of spells or “esoteric tools” aimed an enhancing his prowess with traditional hypnosis and a drive to unravel the mysteries of will, memory, and morality at any cost.
In the daylight hours he sees patients like any psychiatrist, at an asylum and/or his private office. At night, however, he visits a discrete venue situated in a warehouse or an old set of cellars where he conducts his experiments on victims in cages and shuttered crates: drugging them, torturing them, and performing experimental procedures to heighten or dampen their mental abilities.
He is not alone in this sanctuary. His favorite prisoners are subjected to a series of surgeries involving trepanation and the insertion of electrified probes into their frontal and parietal lobes at just the right angles. This procedure turns a thinking, feeling, and willful human being into a drooling automaton that will carry out its master’s commands with lackluster speed, but incredible strength. Any garden variety sorcerer would call these shuffling monstrosities what they are: zombies; but to Dr. Shockley they are the tools he needs to create a better world, one rewired brain at a time.
Your investigators might encounter Shockley in the course of unraveling a mystery, or while attempting to recover from SAN loss. No doubt, their experiences with the Cthulhu Mythos will draw his interest, and he will attempt to encourage, cajole, or manipulate them into telling him about where to find their collection of abominable tomes and artifacts. If the usual hypnotic tricks don’t work, there’s always a syringe full of soporific drugs in the pocket of his lab coat and, after that, a quick trip to his private laboratory, where the patient(s) can beat their hands against the bars of their cage or suffer inside a torture box until Dr. Shockley gets the answers he wants.
STR 60
CON 60
SIZ 70
DEX 60
POW 60
INT 75
EDU 80
SAN 00
HP: 13
Average Damage Bonus: +1D4
Average Build: +1
Magic Points: 12
Move: 8
ATTACKS
Attacks per round: 1
Fighting: Brawl 50% (25/10), damage 1D3+DB
Injection: Medicine 75% (37%/15), Hard CON roll to avoid passing out for 1d3 hours
Small Knife: Scalpel or Pen Knife 50% (25/10), damage 1D4+DB
.32 Automatic Handgun 40% (20/8), 1D8, 1/3 Shots, 6 rounds
Dodge: 40%
Armor:
Skills: Charm 40%, Cthulhu Mythos 10%, Hypnosis 65% Intimidate 40%, Listen 55%, Medicine 75%, Occult 50%, Persuade 50%, Psychology 75%, Psychiatry 60%, Spot Hidden 35%, Stealth 60%
Spells: Cloud Memory, Create Zombie (variant)*, Dominate, Implant Fear, Wrack
Sanity Loss: 0/1d4+1, as appropriate (Seeing normally kind and mild-mannered Dr. Shockley turn into an unfeeling torturer is unnerving.)
*Dr. Shockley’s “living zombies” have identical statistics to “shambling” zombies in the Call of Cthulhu 7E Keeper Rulebook, except the special rules for Armor do not apply. These zombies can fall unconscious if investigators inflict a Major Wound. Furthermore, “Living Zombies” can perform more complex tasks than cadavers raised by sorcerous means. For example: they can operate simple appliances to make their master toast and coffee, use handcuffs to lock up test subjects, and locate an object or item and bring it to Shockley if he describes it simply enough. Some can also perform complex tasks they used to perform in their previous life. A living zombie that was an auto mechanic can change the oil in a car or operate a garage’s hydraulic lift.
All it takes is Therapy Cages 
Electric Probes 
And the Wrong Kind of Scientific Mind -
Monsters of Fear: The Dissected
A Nineteenth Century Corpse Horror, for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition
What if the Bodies and Bones 
Medical Students Study 
Decided to Take it Personally This “ghost” represents both the solid nature of those returned form the dead in the tales of M.R. James and others coupled with the very Victorian fear of dying poor, being fodder for the dissectionists, and then being dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave. The miss-matched body parts rise and walk together. They are not attached together by thread or staples, but a binding of fragmentary wills that manifests as ectoplasmic glue. Arms and mouths act individually, so any individual attacks mercifully only carry the strength of a single person. Once the Dissected has a hold of a person though, it’s a different matter. The victim is ripped apart as the dissected search the body for their own missing parts. The inevitable failure produces a chorus of hideous wailing that can shock the nerves of anyone hearing.
The example below probably consists of 3 or 4 partial corpses and a handful of parts shuffling about in a collective mass. You could certainly have a corpse horror with more components or fewer–SIZ and HP should increase accordingly. A singular dissected seeking their missing internal organs or a fetus might make for particularly compelling or creepy storytelling.
STR 80
CON 60
SIZ 120
DEX 55
POW 65
INT 80
HP: 18
Average Damage Bonus: +1D6
Average Build: 2
Magic Points: 13
Move: 6
ATTACKS
Attacks per round: 2 (pummel and/or bite) and 1 (grasp)
Grasp (mnvr) If two attacks against a target land, the Dissected automatically grabs hold of the target with its many hands and mouths. The target may make a STR roll versus The Dissected to escape its hold. If the target fails to break free, The Dissected will attempt to Dismember the target if they are human. If the grasped target is not human, The Dissected will pummel and/or bite the target until they are dead.
Dismember (mnvr) A human target that has been Grasped has the complete attention of the dissected, as the individual and partial members of the pile work to tear apart the target so they can rebuild their own bodies. This is ultimately a futile effort, but The Dissected are dedicated to the task. The target suffers numerous attacks. Luck or a miracle is required to escape. Once they have dismembered a human target, the Dissected will spend 1D4 rounds in a screaming chorus of agony and frustration, covered the gore of their hapless victim until they realize the body parts don’t match and then they will move on to the yet another victim.
Fighting: Pummel and/or Bite, 55% (27/11) damage 1D3+DB
Dismember, 100% (40/16) damage 1D3 (per individual member of the Dissected)+DB
Dodge: The Dissected cannot Dodge
Armor: none
Skills: Listen 80%, Spot the Living 60%
Spells: none
Sanity Loss: 1/1D6 to see The Dissected, an additional 0/1D3 to endure its chorus of frustrated roars, plus a suitable amount for watching it dismember someone. Ex. 1/1D4+1 for a stranger, 1/1D6 for a friend.
This concept art from the 2017 short film Zygote has the right idea.
Delapore Media 