Going Insane – The Descent into Madness
Like its predecessor, ToC uses a Sanity score, and many events in the typical session will threaten the investigator’s fragile grip on reality and thus their Sanity score, driving them toward eventual post-traumatic stress or full blown insanity. However, unlike most other games, ToC actually breaks mental health into two separate stats: Stability and Sanity. Stability represents a PC’s resistance to mental stress and their ability to handle short-term, acute stress. Sanity, in contrast, is a measure of a PC’s ability to handle the mind-blowing revelations associated with the Cthulhu Mythos and remain in touch with ordinary human concerns – it’s all about the long-term spiral into madness associated with knowing “too much” about what’s really going on. While Stability returns after each adventure, Sanity, once lost, is never recovered.
Stability and Sanity also interact with other PC characteristics, specifically a character’s Drive (what motivates them to investigate the Mythos) and Pillars of Sanity (what ordinary things anchor them to their human existence). Drives function in a carrot or stick fashion, pushing the PC forward in certain situations and providing a bit of reinforcement for behaving in ways consistent with that drive or punishment when one goes against one’s primary motivator. Pillars of Sanity, of which each character has one or more, serve a similar type function, providing the character something story-wise to rely upon to maintain their own sanity as well as providing the Keeper with some character-relevant details to incorporate into stories or even threaten.
In my opinion, this dual mental health model is particularly ingenious since it allows for a PC’s mental health to slowly erode over a series of adventures via the Sanity stat, while allowing acute stressors within a particular investigation to be handled via the Stability stat. This does not mean your character can’t go insane during a single adventure – they most certainly can – only that running up against the Mythos in the form of creatures, tomes, or Great Old Ones results in accumulated stress that is tracked separately from your day-to-day, or more accurately adventure-to-adventure, stress levels. As such, ToC is geared towards a slower descent in to madness than Call of Cthulhu, which makes it better suited to long-term campaign play.
I also think the system models the “shock” versus “horrific realization” mixture of events that a typical Cthulhu investigation involves much better by separating “ordinary” bad stuff from cosmically mind-blowing revelations – these differing elements are part of H.P.L.’s writing as well (e.g., contrast the Shadow Over Innsmouth‘s narrator’s fear during his escape from the town versus his realization of his own patronage afterward) and thus I think the game captures this dichotomy very well. In addition, each character’s Pillars of Sanity and their personal Drive interact with these choices, making for a very rich system that really makes investigators feel “real” to me.
Of course, there’s a bit of a downside to all of this: the Stability/Sanity rules are easily the most complicated system in the game and take some effort to really learn because the two interact with each other – Stability losses caused by running up against Mythos encounters can also lead to Sanity losses and how these interact is a tad bit fiddly. However, like the weapon rules, these issues are quite minor when compared to other RPG systems. In addition, the ToC Keeper’s Screen is a valuable resource in these cases since it summarizes the Stability and Sanity loss rules on one of its panels, and thus is highly recommended.
Sample page
Explaining the Unexplainable
More than half the book is dedicated to explanations of the Mythos including its Gods, cults, monsters, and magic. This includes an awesome breakdown of the Cthulhu Great Old Ones in which Hite provides a variety of alternate explanations for each of the major “Gods.” These are based on the various Mythos stories, as well as some more modern twists, and provide the ability for the Keeper to tailor the Mythos to his or her own tastes and needs. All of the major Mythos creatures are also described in some detail, including game stats since these are the types of monsters investigators can actually fight.
Details on the spells and major tomes are equally excellent. The rules for using tomes and magic are fairly straight-forward and accurately represent what occurs in the literature that inspires the game and genre: magic is something that one delves into very cautiously and ultimately there is a price to be paid for its use. In particular I love the explanations of the various tomes since they’re both interesting and inspirational.
The Mythos section of the book wraps up with descriptions of the major cults associated with the Outer Gods, providing a description of each group, their locations where they’re likely to be active, and a set of hooks that a Keeper can use to incorporate the cult into their campaign. These are all well-written (and researched since most of them come straight out of the source material) and are there’s a lot of information that can be mined from this section as inspiration.
