I like the Horrors. I really do. They're crafty, they're inscrutable, and they're, well, horrible. But the thing is, their fates are far too much intertwined with the fates of metahumanity. They actually have to feed off of us. Lovecraft wouldn't have approved.

You see, in Lovecraft, his horrors do not give a shit about humanity. They may in the end destroy us all, but it'll be just a cosmic shrug of their eldritch shoulders. One of them will think too hard, or one of them will burp after eating a grave planet, and we're just gone. We're tiny. Their goals are not suffering, and they are not even consumption 90% of the time, they just are/aren't/will be.

The horrors are supposed to make you insane just by thinking about them too much. Their statues are supposed to be unplottable in 3-d space. They are not shambling corpses in orichalcum cages, they are not masses of mouths and eyes. They are... well, Lovecraft was notoriously mum on this point.

So have you ever implemented Horrors in your games in the classical Lovecraftian way?

And if you really want to read up on his stuff, the complete texts of all his work is here.

well the Horrors are Lovecraftian but not the same as the Old Ones. I think that you are mixing up the feel of a genre and specific entities in that genre. There were several things that didn't cause instant insanity to see them. If you were to mix the Horrors with more Cthulhu mythos then have the Horrors as small scale fragments of the Old Ones. That would be disturbing in and of itself.

The other thing that you have to remember is that a character from Shadowrun or even Earthdawn sees fairly frightening things frequently. Most of the things that Lovecraft was thinking would cause instant insanity is knowledge that the assumption of his age were wrong. Our assumptions are constantly challenged in this day and age as a matter of course. We have been numbed to horror through TV and movies. There is a point at which we will become overloaded and do something stupid but the fact that it is so bizzare and impersonal actually neutralizes much of the long term terror. In his day and age Gay Marriage would have been on par with the Old Ones!

It's not "In Lovecraft we trust". The sutff he put out was good and creepy, but hell, go play the Cthulu game. Earthdawn needs stuff you can fight back against. Hastur doesn't really fall in to that category.

Moved to appropriate forum.

Right. Today, an alien monstrosity with giant sharp claws is scary because it can kill us. In the 1930s, such a creature would be scary simply because it was alien. A fish-man may have the gross-out factor, but things that don't give a flip whether you live or die aren't nearly as frightening as things that actually want to kill you.

I wonder how many PMs fistandantilus3.0 just got, reminding him that the Horrors are a Shadowrun-specific topic?

Lovecraft has never done much for me, mostly because he draws too wide a division between the self and the other in his stuff. Because his monsters lack anima, he might have as well have been writing about, I dunno, volcanoes that will blow up when the starts are right.

Of course, Earthdawn works best when the horrors get speaking parts. For example, the horror marks you, chew you around a little bit. Then promises you to stop (and maybe a pile of bonus karma) if you bring it some other victim instead.

Lovecraft rocks, but I don't think these two settings fit at all, least of all the Old Ones.

I would rather use aliens akin to those in X-files than to have "Super troll with PAC vs Great Cthulhu.

Good thing i accidently kept this page open and refreshed it... otherwise i wouldnt' have gotten to read it...

But, i dunno... Lovecraft's stuff seems kind of lame and teddy bear-like compared to the horrors. My group has been playing ED for the past 2-3 years now and SR for 4. The horrors, if done poorly, are just big scary things who are most likely gonna kill you. However, if done right, they are the things that your nightmares are made of. I can recall more than one occurance of people having nightmares from Horror-heavy ED sessions.

You do have a point; the Lovecraftian horrors just appeared in people's dreams and showed the odd scale. He didn't even describe them 90% of the time unless he was describing a statue or they took human form like Nyarlathotep. Otherwise, it was just some lame description like "His gibbous form oozed eldritch ooze all over the fine tile floor" or "I saw such things as would cause madness in a lesser man." He was never specific.

I guess it's good that the horrors aren't just big scaly things with non-Euclidean geometry and are actually tangible constructs of sewn-together flesh and misplaced eyes.

I'm not so sure, personally I think that there is more then enough room for both "Earthdawn' type Horrors and 'Lovecraft' type Horrors as well.

After all, a big bad monster that you can see is scary if it wants to eat your face.

But a monster that you can never get a good look at is far scarier because whatever you envision in your mind is 100 times more scary then anything I can show/describe to you.

The version that I remember comes from one of the White Wolf Vampire books, same basic idea though.

I haven't touched on anything close to the Old Ones in a proper Shadowrun game, however I'm running a free form, pre-SR/Planescape/Modern game with my wife which I take more liberties with. I have brought in some Lovecraftian stuff there, including -

The PC visits Montauk Island, where an experiment has apparently dragged creatures in that were not restricted to three dimensions, and so would phase in and out, but weren't especially interested in hurting her. She never went downstairs, so I didn't have to figure out what waited down there (she elected to nuke it, although not from orbit, so she may not be sure).

The same PC also went to visit the Yezidi, and while there, found a way to Caracosa. That was basically a 'run away and find an exit'. Whilst there, she did attract the attention of some unusual creatures, but managed to escape (barely saving her eyes in the process, thanks to a well timed 'blind' spell).

Eh, if you want to bring the Cthulu on you need to implement sanity loss for SR which is sensitive to both PTSD and also Things That Must Not Be. There have been a lot of discussions on ways to implement this on this board in the past.



EDIT: Since this is such a fun topic I went and did some research for you.



A search:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?act=...ite=sanity+loss


One good thread by Hyzmarca:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...&hl=sanity+loss

See, Emo, it doesn't matter in the end whether or not your Horrors care about humans. The most important thing to drive your point home is just to pick a sanity loss mechanic.

Perhaps another way to put it: is a discussion of the Shadowrun universe a discussion about Shadowrun?

Unless you answer no, anything but pure rules discussion of Earthdawn ought to be in the Shadowrun forum.

~J

Sanity Pool is a good idea, sounds cool and SR4 shows us that you can never have too many pools.
What isn't addressed is the effects of low Essence characters in these situations - while they are said to walk the edge of sanity would they be more or less prone to horrors (and the Horrors)?

Well personally I've always hated Sanity Points, ect, but I do agree that someone with 0.01 Essence should be more at risk to being Horror Marked, ect then someone who is almost whole, perhaps a simple reversal of the Magical Healing Rules with the Bonus for Essence Loss going to the Horror would work?

On the contrary! Someone with their full allocation of six points of vile, corrupting Essence should be vastly more Markable than someone who has replaced it with pure, unfeeling chrome.

~J

Yeah the almost cyberzombie has has already corrupted his pattern, the horrors like to prepare their food themselves... It's sort of like what happened in blood wood.

I don't know, from my admittly limited understanding of Earthdawn I thought that the only reason that Bloodwood worked was because the elves were already in too much agony for the Horrors to be able to inflict more, not that they had actually corrupted their patterns beyond usefulness.

Or am I mistaken and damaging your pattern actually protected you from the Horrors and if so why wasn't it a useful tactic during the last Scourge? (If I'm not misremembering things I seem to remember that one could suffer pattern fading or something from using too much Blood Magic, but I could very easily be completely wrong as well.)

GURPS Cthulhupunk !!

I remember a scenario from a magazine, that had good rules for Sanity in SR - basically treated as an attack of various levels, with 'damage' causing SAN loss results.


Just my thruppence..

This is what I created for my World of Shadows game

Sanity Rules

Relevant Attributes
Composure - This reflects your character's resistance to stress. It is a primary attribute. It is used as a sort of Body test for the mind. Anytime the character is faced with some sort of horror they make a composure roll with a TN designated by the GM. Each success reduces the trauma of the event.

Willpower This is your ability to control yourself in the face of horrors and mental disorders.

Sanity [Composure + (Essence + Willpower)/2] Sanity represents a character's mental well-being -- or, more accurately, his capacity for mental well-being. Sanity represents the upper limit of a character's health. A character can behave below his Sanity level but not above. Each Sanity score represents a certain stage in mental development. How a character acts at each stage is largely dependent on his own basic anxieties or fears, but certain distinctive behavior patterns typify each stage.

Sanity Behavior

HEALTHY LEVELS
11 or more LIBERATED. This character is free from basic fears and anxieties and has developed himself to his fullest potential.
10 SELF-AWARE. This character's basic fear feeds an inner desire, which he satisfies by developing a specific skill that gives him confidence and keeps him well balanced.
9 CONSTRUCTIVE. This character, acting to overcome secondary fears, defines himself through a social role and holds close to a characteristic identity -- quirky, perhaps, but still basically healthy.
AVERAGE LEVELS
8 IMBALANCED. This character has begun to succumb to a temptation that contradicts his best interest, taking a personality trait beyond its usefulness, but he still relates fairly well to the world at large.
7 DEFENSIVE. This character has reacted to his fears by trying to control himself or his environment.
6 OFFENSIVE. This character has overcompensated for his fears, resulting in selfish, extreme and usually objectionable behavior.
UNHEALTHY LEVELS
5 DISTURBED. This character has succumbed to his fears and has lapsed into defense mechanisms that create serious interpersonal conflict.
4 DELUDED. This character has opted to reconstruct reality rather than face up to it, often resulting in compulsive behavior. He can be considered fully neurotic.
3 PATHOLOGICAL. This character has become openly destructive to himself and/or others. He has only the barest, most tenuous connection with reality.
TOTALLY FRAGGING BONKERS
2 or less PSYCHOTIC. This character has cracked beyond hope of recovery. His psychological problems are compounded upon one another. Any defining traits are present to the most extreme extent possible.

System
Psychological damage is represented as trauma is a manner similar to physical damage. The power is resisted by the Composure attribute just as Body resists weapon power. Damage is noted as a flat amount of trauma. Each success reduces a point of trauma. Sanity tracks your character's mental health in general. Each level of sanity has a number of points of trauma each to the level value. (i.e. Imbalenced has 8 points of trauma) Once you lose all points in a level then you go down one level and start over at that level's amount. Every time a character goes down a level of sanity below 9 roll on the insanity tables from Palladium. The GM has final approval of any insanities rolled. If the sanity rating goes below the character's composure rating then the composure rating goes down with it until the sanity goes back up above the composure rating. This change in composure does not cause a recalculation of sanity. At character creation roll once on the insanity table for each level below 9. Insanities gained this way should be mild, just this side of quirks.
All insanities should be recorded with the amount of damage that was attached to it and the event that caused it. Write down a likely trigger based on the disorder and the cause. The damage level becomes the TN for Willpower rolls to resist acting on them when triggered. It is possible to increase the trauma level through repeated to exposure to the triggers. Mild disorders can become overwhelming.

Recovering Sanity
Characters can recover sanity one of three ways - therapy, shamanism or destroying the cause of the trauma. Therapy is measured in weeks, months, or even years. A shaman with the soul retrieval metamagic skill can potentially be effective in a single day but their methods are often very strange. They have been known to alter disorders to cause a person to be able to fight the cause of the trauma so that they heal themselves. Destroying the cause of the trauma will cause the person to recover some or all of the lost trauma. There might be a little residual trauma but they have overcome their own fears and come out stronger.
It costs 1 karma per point of trauma healed. The number of trauma healed is dependent on the skill of the therapist or shaman. The character can pay up to that amount or less if they choose (some people don't want to let go of their problems). [ i.e. this just means that nothing is free] As all the trauma in a level is healed then the sanity rating goes up by one. That level's insanity becomes mild and under control (i.e. the trauma rating stays at 2 even though the points have been paid for.) If the sanity level goes down then the disorder becomes active again and some of the trauma damage can go into that disorder as well as another depending on the GM's judgment.
GMs can also rule that a particularly enlightening event can call for a Composure roll and heal some trauma.
It is possible to raise your sanity rating above your starting amount with karma. If your sanity becomes a 9 you can pay 5 karma a remove a disorder starting with your lowest one on your sanity chart.

Note: The sanity table was taken from a Shadowrun online rule by Keith Ammann who modeled it on a book called Personality Types by Richard Riso and Russ Hudson.

That sounds like a very fun rule, actually.

I concur. If I decide to bring in really scary stuff regularly in my SR campaign, I think I'm going to use that.

Not bad, but I'd add a -Magic or -Magic/2 or -(Magic/2)-initiate grade to it. Maybe an extra -1 for being a shaman.

~J

Is it based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

Garrowolf..
..Looking at what you've written, how would that fare with Cyberpsychosis [as mentioned/used in various Cyber books/systems], as that usually involves a mind that becomes less able to function ??