The Culture: Lovecraft Is Played Out

"Oh no, Muh Sanity-Blasting Horrors!"

*sigh*

No, I don't think they are. Horrors? Yes. Sanity-blasting? No, and not for anyone at the time either, which is why I have long suspected that no one took the Sanity rules from Call of Cthulhu seriously because they didn't take the sanity-blasting seriously either. No, we have not gotten any better; it's only gotten worse.

Which is why I suggest, for those who still use it, to instead use it for running SCP Foundation games. No, they still aren't sanity-blasting horrors, but they are far more in line with what prospective players want out of such a play experience. Furthermore, since sweet fuck-all is going to happen if you just yoink from the Wiki and share videos like these all you need is the bare-assed bones--the literal technical manual--since COC is far more of a vibe, a vibe that SCP and similar stuff like the Backrooms does better and is easier to get folks to engage with.

We have, and have had, multiple popular videogame takes on the concept by now. Some are licensed; most are not. Some are serious; most are not. For all the high weirdness, folks still don't buy into Muh Sanity-Blasting Horrors, for no other reason than they can't engage with a game if they did take that seriously. There's been reams of studies by now, some of which actually got replicated, showing just how malleable "normal" is and thus how people can indeed adapt--even thrive--in radically changed environments.

TLDR: We are nowhere near as fragile as Mythos fans would like to believe. That should be the source of horror here.

And it is this fact that reframing COC to SCP The Game nails: how piss-easy it is for Le Normalfags to accept that the behaviors they otherwise would not do is necessary and thus normal to do when doing it for Foundation (or whatever) reasons. Delta Green tried to commit to this, but wussed out; Kult didn't have the language or the framework to make it successful. Normies in general don't buy the premise, nor should they, and savvy horror people don't even try; they do as I noted above.

And yes, COC as SCP-The-Game? Instantly playable as a Real Game with Total Non-Stop Braunstein in full effect- even a challenge, due to timey-whimey bullshit being on the table. Unlike Muh Cthulhu, you can actually get plenty of people to play! (Dibs on playing the Wandsmen.)