Today we're going to be going over one of the major inspirations for the horror genre, the nasty, squishy, slimy cephalopods of Mr. Lovecraft's wettest dreams.
The Call of Cthulhu RPG is notoriously lethal, and characters really aren't going to be living very long. For a horror RPG, there's not a lot of suspense within. It's kind of a forgone conclusion. That said, a lot of players miss the point. Call of Cthulhu isn't horrific because we want the PC's to live. It's horrific because the default state of the universe is essentially one where you suffer and die horribly.
The Alien
Mythos monsters are meant to be alien. They're literally extraterrestrials a lot of the time, but gone should be the Star Trek notions that aliens have to be even remotely similar to people. Lovecraftian aliens represent a way that life could have evolved, if it had come from somewhere deeply, intrinsically different to earth. While they are weird to the extreme, there should be a certain amount of sense in the way that they do look. A horrifying tendriled monster could in theory just be a wild, sea dwelling animal on whatever dimension it was called from. Regardless of what humans say about being comfortable that they aren't alone in the universe, there's a certain level of confrontation in coming face to face with a creature that isn't only different, but provably better. There's definitely a blow to the collective ego of humanity that fortune could have favored another species, and that really is the thing that hits a person's sanity. Humans are used to themselves being the 'main characters' of the universe. We're definitely not used to being a random encounter for a fourth dimensional crab on its way to work, and a pretty low level one at that.
Indifference
One thing to understand about Mythos monsters, or any monsters that are inspired by them, is that they kind of are the main characters in the Cthulhu Mythos. Deep Ones are worshipping Cthulhu, Insect-Creatures are busy sacrificing sponge-people from an empty asteroid to Azathoth, and preparing an invasion of Alpha Centauri. Humanity really isn't a very big part of the gigantic space opera that the Cthulhu Mythos is. In a very big way, humans are essentially a bunch of luddite aliens that still think in just three dimensions (the naive little things) that nobody really gives much thought to. Alien monsters are way too concerned with their extradimensional politics to really give that much of a shit about hairless monkeys crawling around on Cthulhu's kitchen floor. When the PC's encounter Mythos monsters, they really should feel out of place. Most of the time, aliens in the Mythos never go out of their way to mess with humans, if they even notice them at all. Encountering these creatures really should make humans feel 'out of the loop', which in a very existential way, is a terrifying thought. As mentioned above, humans like feeling special, and finding out that they aren't the star of the show, that even the evil cultist they've been fighting for five sessions isn't even noticed by his alien master, should be a massive blow to your players.
Defeat
A lot of people think that making Mythos monsters defeatable at all undermines the themes of the core material. While Mythos creatures should certainly be hard to defeat, I personally disagree. The main premise behind the Cthulhu Mythos is that NO ONE is special, not humans, not Great Cthulhu himself, they're all just different life-forms, destined to die cold and alone. I for one think that a millenia old plan by Lord Zagathor, Master of The Twenty Thousand Mouths being foiled because some random primate scored a lucky hit perfectly fits into the nihilistic themes of the universe. The point is that, while earth may be safe, by foiling said plan, you may have doomed countless other planets, asking the question if life is important and sacred even if it is different to us. Everyone is focusing on their own business, disregarding anything that doesn't serve their immediate goals, and humans really are no exception to that.
Finally, while Mythos monsters may be difficult to defeat, when portraying them, keep in mind that they are much easier to drive off. Remember that monsters don't go out of their way to antagonize humans. If a threat from an investigator becomes more trouble then its worth, the alien may just decide to leave. Why bother terraforming some insignificant blue speck when there are seven other planets in the solar system, which aren't inhabited by annoying monkeys with primitive projectile weapons? This is basically the best you can hope for in a Mythos game, along with the hope that the aliens will just avoid us out of convenience rather than wholesale exterminating us, but hey, I said they weren't antagonistic, not that they were necessarily nice.
Here are some neat examples of Mythos monster themes in fiction, to use as inspiration.
Predator Series: Bizarrely, the Predator series is one bunch of horror movies I think exemplifies Cthulhu Mythos themes better than those that actually try for it. In all these movies, it's clear that the aliens are in charge. Everything plays out on their terms, and they do view earth as a neat little hunting planet. Every victory the humans win in this series of movies are won by playing the game of the Predator, which fortunately for them, fits into the human idea of hunting. Predators are the perfectly indifferent aliens, and even when they do respect individual humans, they clearly don't see them as anything other than primitive animals. Later movies tried their absolute hardest to try and re-interpret them as Klingons and make them more relatable, but I do think that the movies that portray the Predators as bizarre aliens who's culture just happens to coincide with humans in one very specific way are more powerful.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem: An absolutely stunningly good survival horror game, Eternal Darkness perfectly shows what a Mythos chronicle can be like over several characters. The game itself essentially shows a war played out with several superpowered aliens, all who happen to be using earth as a battlefield. The humans in the game are often just unlucky shmucks who get caught in the crossfire. Ultimately, humans win the day, but only by being manipulated by ANOTHER eldritch horror, who took advantage of the other elder gods underestimating them. This is a really good example of alien monsters manipulating humanity for their own purposes, and how creepy it is to be caught in a situation that has no earthly context.
The Blair Witch Project: Bit of a small scale one, but I think this movie absolutely epitomizes what it feels like to be a protagonist in a Mythos story. The creature stalking the kids clearly has some kind of intelligence, and the weird shit it leaves behind definitely makes sense to it, but the kids (and viewer) have no context. It's very creepy to be stalked by an alien creature that is absolutely unrelatable, especially if you consider that it doesn't seem to view you as a person, more as a toy to be played with.
-Kephn
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