The Cthulhu Mythos: One Christian's Perspective

It still amazes me how influential some people, organizations, and events can be, and yet be obscured, disregarded, and even forgotten. For instance, it surprises me how much of an impact Eli Whitney and the cotton gin had on the economic development of the South, even though most people now would not remember Whitney at all. I am also somewhat alarmed at how crucial Nicola Tesla was to the widespread use of alternating electrical current, yet it is only now that his name is receiving the recognition. A third name that has come to my attention is Howard Phillips Lovecraft, also known as H.P. Lovecraft, whose influence in horror and science fiction has largely gone unnoticed by all but the die-hard fans of a character and mythos called Cthulhu.

Cthulhu is a character from a short story written by Lovecraft in 1926 called The Call of Cthulhu, which tells the tale of a young intellectual turned investigator who learns more about a mysterious being called Cthulhu, the cult of dangerous individuals who worship it, and the madness that strikes anyone who dares to investigate this eldritch, alien horror. As the story progresses, the protagonist, whose thoughts and words are conveyed in first-person voice, discovers stories of strange effigies, weird dreams, mysterious deaths of those who also sought to uncover Cthulhu, and of a group of sailors who escaped the ravenous attack of South Pacific cultists to wash up on a non-Euclidean nightmare of an island harboring the legendary city of R'yleh, where Cthulhu supposedly resides (unbeknownst to the group of sailors). Not to reveal much more, the story ends with an ominous warning of insanity to those who choose to follow the author's footsteps. Indeed, for its time, The Call of Cthulhu must have been jarring... for those who happened to read it.

For much of his literary career, Lovecraft toiled in semi-obscurity, all the while churning out story after story, creating a fantastic tapestry of odd alien beings, ancient space conflicts, hidden invasions onto Earth, and the insanity that can only come from beholding creatures beyond human comprehension. I must admit that my knowledge of the Cthulhu realm is spotty, but I have come to realize that Lovecraft had intentionally or somewhat inadvertently developed a striking world of fiction that came to be regarded as a mythos of Cthulhu. Even a cursory scan of Lovecraft's bibliography suggests an impressive output of fiction even tangentially related to Cthulhu. As I have found, Lovecraft, though prolific in his fiction writing, garnered little financial gain from his work and died poor.

However, just as Van Gogh's work was more widely appreciated after his death, Lovecraft's work seemed to find an audience as knowledge and discussion of Cthulhu has crept ever so slightly into the mainstream as the years have passed. Even before now, the influence of Lovecraft's blend of the horror of the unknowable and of scientific inquiry and fiction can be found in television shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The X-Files, and Fringe; in horror movies that involve insanity and cosmic monstrosities; and, of course, in written fiction, as Stephen King himself has noted Lovecraft as a major influence. Furthermore, in the last several years, Cthulhu, and the intellectual property associated with that character, has steadily gained popularity in board gaming, which is one of my main hobbies. Much like the cultists in The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft's intellectual property is gaining social momentum, even seventy years after his death.

Cthulhu has become so prevalent in gaming that my interest was inevitably piqued regarding it. In the board gaming world, several games related to Cthulhu have garnered positive reviews and recommendations, such as Elder Sign and Mansions of Madness, but, until recently, I knew little about Lovecraft or his work. All that I had known about Cthulhu was based on what I had read about those board games. This led me to investigate what Cthulhu was (much like the hapless protagonists of Lovecraft's work), so I began at an odd point: I downloaded the card game Cthulhu Realms to my cell phone. The game was designed by Darwin Kastle, who used almost the exact same system of deck-building as in Star Realms, except that the art and terminology was changed to reflect Cthulhu. As I played this virtual card game (which is also available as a physical card game), I encountered character names, such as Dagon, Wilbur Whatley, and even The Shadow of Cthulhu. Knowing nothing of these characters, I proceeded to research on Wikipedia, which most people do, I'm sure. Then, I decided to go back to the source material: I found a free version of The Call of Cthulhu and downloaded it to my Kindle Fire tablet. Because it was a short story, it took only a couple of hours of reading to finish it. Unexpectedly, my interest has been further piqued and I am now reading The Mountains of Madness, which is another short story in the same world as Cthulhu, apparently.

As an aside, I should mention my impressions of The Call of Cthulhu as a literary work. Being an English as a Second Language instructor and a linguist, I can speak with some experience and authority about this short story, at least from a diction standpoint. In my opinion, Lovecraft's sentence constructions are outstanding with complex clauses, an extensive vocabulary, and a writing style that is both grammatically sound and lyrically pleasing. I reveled in his diction, as if I have been starved of this level of erudition for so long. Sure, some of his writing is, shall I say, outdated compared to current speech and writing patterns, but his work from a mechanical standpoint is beautiful.

Regarding the content, Lovecraft wrote the story in first-person voice, so the reader's connection with the material is immediate, as if someone were conveying a life event directly to the reader. Yet, there is a detachment that comes from Lovecraft's choice to recount tales of Cthulhu through second-hand stories shared with the protagonist. This detachment augments the mystery of the ever-increasingly horrific Cthulhu. However, though the story is told from a first-person perspective, there is a disjointed quality to the narrative in which time seemed to advance days, weeks, and even months with little more transition than a passing sentence. Conversations are also portrayed not as dialogue, but as reported speech. Because of this and the aforementioned detachment, characters are mostly name labels on victims and agents that advance the plot. Even the narrator, through whom the reader can sense and feel the curiosity and fear so inherent to current horror fiction, is a caricature, at best, who does not stand out as a living, breathing person with traits and tendencies beyond his inexorable inquisitiveness. Thus, The Call of Cthulhu is plot-driven, despite the first-person narrative.

Despite my criticism, I can understand how attractive the Cthulhu mythos is because of the mystery of the unknown and the imagined insanity of beholding an incomprehensible terror. There is something oddly exciting about imagining oneself as a paranormal investigator researching in libraries, interviewing eyewitnesses, piecing together creepy accounts, and globetrotting in pursuit of truth. Much like Mulder and Scully or the Ghostbusters or even a Van Helsing character type (which predates Cthulhu, of course), the danger and intrigue of the hunt for absolute evil is enthralling, engendering chills down one's spine and a general sense of foreboding.

As I finished The Call of Cthulhu and read more about Lovecraft, I started pondering some points that are directly relevant to Lovecraft's world in comparison to our world. One point that occurred to me was the godlessness of the Cthulhu world. In The Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu and his minions are extraterrestial, ancient beings from another part of the galaxy, another dimension, or both, with the near-godlike ability of instilling preternatural fear into a sad cadre of sailors. These beings are uncaring, ominous creatures that disregard humanity, maybe treating them as slave fodder, at best. These beings are somewhat analogous to Satan and his demons, except that Satan is hellbent to snatch souls while the Cthulhu demi-deities are only disdainful towards humanity. Another point that I considered was the godlessness of the character and how fright and hopelessness engender an ambient sense of doom. In The Call of Cthulhu, I felt that doom in the prose with the main character inexorably descending into a kind of self-conscious madness, as if he was perfectly aware of how his grasp of reality was becoming more and more tenuous, yet he was powerless to stop it. It caused me to think about people in the world today and how existential and nihilistic they tend to be, which in turn is reflected in a selfish, "you only live once" mentality. A third point that crossed my mind was how there was no sense of victory in the prose; there is not even a false dawn, so to speak. The force and pulse of the narrative is typified by a contrast between undying curiosity and impending, undeniable defeat at the hands of insanity. In other words, Lovecraft's work is neither joyous nor hopeful, which is what the world resembles when there is no sense of God.

Considering that Lovecraft was an atheist, it is understandable that the atmosphere that he creates and the characters in the narrative are driven by a thirst for knowledge and a latent kind of righteous indignation that seems to come from the feeling that Earth is being invaded. However, these characters are equally draped with a hopeless darkness that is exacerbated by the looming danger of rabid cultists and otherworldly visages with no regard for humanity. As I read The Call of Cthulhu, I experienced all of these feelings, and this is where Lovecraft was successful; his prose envelopes the reader in the story. Though the narrative is a distant kind of first-person perspective, I am in the room with the main character, looking through his eyes, yet fully myself. I imagine that this is the appeal of Lovecraft's work, and what makes horror as popular as it is. Yet, there is a melancholy that is repulsive to me, probably because Jesus is about a faith, hope, and love that conquers the darkness, and Lovecraft's world is the opposite: faithless, hopeless, and gloomy.

I am not sure if I am a Lovecraft or Cthulhu fan, and I am not sure how a Christian can reconcile his or her faith with Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos except that his writing, which is wonderfully descriptive and eloquent, speaks into the deepest, darkest parts of our souls. His writings remind me that without God, the world is bereft of hope and purpose; without God, our demons are ultimately unknown and unknowable, yet there are "cultists" in our world that elevate those demons -- demons of consumerism, hedonism, selfishness, greed, meglomaniacal power, and so on. In Christian circles, people talk of "idols" as anything that draws us away from God. Anything can be an idol, but in Lovecraft's world the idols are extraterrestrial beings who, at best, want to subjugate humanity or, at worst, sweep humanity aside to occupy our space for their own ends. That draws me to Lovecraft's prose because it elucidates me regarding the spiritual battle that rages around us each day, yet goes on ignored with a demonically-motivated misinformation campaign that dulls unwitting souls into a lifeless sleep riddled with personal ambition and acquisition of things. We are told everyday that God is dead, that self is everything, and that we should concern ourselves with our hobbies, our careers, and the betterment of ourselves, even despite others. We live in a world in which there are other-level events happening, yet we, as humanity, disregard it and focus on our own daily lives and desires. To me, Lovecraft weaves these frailties of the self into his narrative tapestry. When I read The Call of Cthulhu, the thought that dominated my mind was the desire to share Christ with others lest we all descend into a kind of Cthulhu-lite insanity, intrigued by the curiosities in the shrouded corners of this world to the point that we are obsessed with them until we are lost forever. If anything, I believe that, quite unintentionally, Lovecraft shows us a Satanic world which should compel us to look at our world and pray that our world would never go down that path.

Rules Discussion: Movement by Ruler or Template

Recently, I've been playing a bit of the X-Wing Miniatures Game, in which players move ships from point to point using pre-measured maneuver templates. For example, if you want to move a ship one ship-length ahead (it actually works out to be two ship-lengths), you use the 1-straight maneuver template to advance the ship by placing the back of the template against the front of the ship base and then sliding the ship base to the front of the template such that the back of ship base touches the template's front. In X-Wing, during the Activation phase of each turn, players move ships in order of pilot skill, which means that the lowest pilot skill moves first. However, after all movement and actions happen, the Combat phase begins and the highest pilot skill attacks first. Basically, this reflects the concept that the lesser pilots can fly wherever they want, but the good pilots hit first.

There are numerous challenges with this mechanic. One challenge is planning ahead to ensure that your ships do not collide with each other or opposing ships; in X-Wing, if ship bases overlap, then the ship that overlapped the existing ship is unable to perform an action, such as performing a barrel roll or a target lock on an opposing ship. This can be a major gaffe during a critical time in the battle because you may need that action to increase your chances of hitting a foe's ship. Another challenge is predicting where your opponent's ships will finish their maneuvers; in X-Wing, everyone decides what their moves will be in secret, locks their moves, but then announces and executes moves in order of pilot skill. This means that you don't know where your opponent's ships will end up. In my case, I often find my ships completely out of position to target anyone (which further reflects my inexperience with this game, while seasoned players would know how best to maneuver their ships to address the most probable attack vectors). Yet another challenge is the element of stress in X-Wing. Everyone uses a maneuver dial to decide which move their ships will execute; some moves are "green" maneuvers, which clear any "stress" tokens from a ship, but some moves are "red" maneuvers, which add stress to a ship, thus limiting the maneuvers a ship can complete during the next round to only green maneuvers. Stress constraints ships to a smaller subset of possible maneuvers, which makes your future maneuver choices more predictable. You have to balance stress clearing with stress accumulation, all the while trying to execute your own strategies and NOT be predictable.

Movement by ruler or template is nothing new in gaming, but what I have found to be most challenging is conceiving where my ships will conclude their supposed maneuvers at the end of each turn while trying to anticipate where my opponent's ships will end up. Of course, knowing the maneuverability of each individual ship type helps, as well as paying attention to stress tokens on each ship, but this level of two-dimensional spatial reasoning is one that is largely absent from board games. Typically, with most Euro games, pieces serve as markers or reminders of how much of each resource you have, or whether a particular action was taken or not, or of scoring. In miniatures games, though, the pieces are the attackers, with each piece possessing one or more defining and unique attributes; moreover, the position of one piece in relation to another determines attack range, hit probability, and damage intensity. There is also a fastidiousness to moving miniatures that further signals how important position is; in X-Wing, for instance, every inch counts because moving one way or another can be the deciding factor of if a desired target is in your firing arc. Even nudging pieces accidentally can trigger tableside heart attacks as all opponents argue over where your piece should really be. To me, it's a different way of viewing the tabletop... but it's a welcome difference because I am stretched as a gamer to understand and use game pieces with attention to table position.

The telltale mechanic of any miniatures game is movement by measurement, and it's a mechanic that I urge every gamer to dive in and experience at least for a few games. There are "easy" games that introduce gamers to spatial reasoning, such as Memoir '44 and Battlelore; though movement still happens hex by hex, range and position are crucial. Games like X-Wing, Wings of Glory, and Star Trek Attack Wing ratchet up the difficulty even more because you no longer have hexes -- you have to use maneuver templates. The ultimate miniatures game experience comes from actual use of a bonafide ruler, such as in Warhammer 40k. When you're measuring range by centimeters and being off by only a tiny few millimeters can affect an entire turn, you are truly feeling the headache and thrill of tabletop positioning. Of course, in a few months, I may change my mind and grow to loathe movement by template. I mean, I may rather place workers and accumulate resources than worry about whether I nudged my A-Wing accidentally or not.

Rules Discussion: Sanctioned Cheating

I haven't written anything for Rules Discussion in a while, but I do have a topic today: sanctioned cheating, which is the concept (not necessarily a mechanic) of being allowed to "cheat" within the rules of a game. I'm not talking about deception of an opponent with misdirection or baiting tactics that prevail in miniature and/or war games; to convince your opponent that you're attacking one region when you're actually targeting another region on the board is endemic to such games. I'm also not talking about using distraction or "table talk" to fluster or confuse an opponent, though some may consider this "cheating." Instead, I'm discussing the concept of breaking or bending rules in a game as being encouraged by the rules of the game itself.

One form of sanctioned cheating is outright lying, which happens rampantly in Sheriff of Nottingham (in which you are encouraged to deceive the Sheriff to smuggle contraband into Nottingham) and the classic Balderdash (in which you try to convince others that your false definition for a word is the "real" one). I'm very much on the fence about this topic because encouraging one's children to lie (even in a game) may send a conflicting message. Lying can happen to humorous effect, and the rules allows for it in these games, so it is actually "wrong" to do it? Hmm... As a Christian, I am truly conflicted by this idea, yet games like these can be fun if it is understood that lying is only "acceptable" when sanctioned by the rules... That's really confusing!

Another form of sanctioned cheating is the one on which I'm focusing: rules that allow you to break the rules, which is complicated, so I'll focus on one game to explain: Cheating Moth, or Mogel Motte in German. This game involves a simple objective of ridding yourself of cards to win. Each player starts with a hand of eight cards. Depending on the face-up card in the discard pile, each player places the appropriate card on top of the discard pile. For example, if there is a "1" card on the pile, you can place a "5" or a "2." There are several cards that incur special conditions, such as a "mosquito" card which requires all players but the active player to slap their hands on it; the last player to do so receives one card from each player's hand. Anyway, there isn't much to say about the hand evacuation aspect of this game... except that the rules allow players to not only rid themselves of cards in the conventional way, but also in any other way they see fit! This could involve, say, dropping one card at a time on the floor, or placing them up a sleeve, or playing each card on the discard pile out of turn, all the while convincing the other players that it's one's turn.

Of course, this sounds like anarchy, but there's yet another catch: at the start of each game, one player is the "Guard Bug," whose job is to catch cheaters. For instance, if someone drops a card on the floor and the Guard Bug sees the act happen, he or she calls out the cheater, who must then receive one card from each of his or her opponents. Then, that cheater becomes the Guard Bug. The Guard Bug is the only player in Cheating Moth who cannot "cheat," which is a huge burden because he or she has to rid themselves of cards the conventional way AND keep a wary eye on all the players to not only stem the tide of cheating, but also to get rid of the Guard Bug title for themselves!

Sanctioned cheating is a dynamic that doesn't necessarily interest me as a gamer, but it's an intriguing, also mind-bending paradigm to consider. In the case of Cheating Moth, the "cheating" is sanctioned in that you have a game "layer" in which there is a basic mechanic for getting rid of cards, and then there is a kind of social layer on the game layer that allows you to circumvent the rules in the game layer. This is when sanctioned cheating works in a game: if there is an elementary game mechanic and victory conditions in place, the rules can allow for a subset of stacked rules that let players get around the game mechanic. For games with simple objectives and rules, it would be easy to place a cheating social layer on the game. However, for complex games like Twilight Struggle or Agricola, cheating would confuse everyone and throw the game into chaos; can you imagine if players could steal sheep from the central area, or even the "bank?"

In order for sanctioned cheating to work, I believe you have to have a strong and direct core of simple rules and victory conditions. If goals and rules are complex, cheating actually works toward undermining the entire game, but with Cheating Moth, you have an easy goal (i.e. get rid of cards) which is dull if played in that way, but the cheating layer (and the "Guard Bug role) adds another layer to the game that doesn't undermine the rule layer. Sanctioned cheating is a difficult topic to broach because one may have strong convictions against cheating, and yet there may be a social layer that allows for cheating in a game. To be honest, this is not really my cup of tea, and yet Cheating Moth is quite fun because you are required to be creative with how you remove cards from your hand.

What are your thoughts?