Notes on "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" (and Call of Cthulhu Scenarios)

    Some time ago Jack Guignol made a post applying Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” to tabletop role playing game source books in which he emphasizes the importance of concision, method, and clarity or “unity of effect.” I find myself in agreement with most of his conclusions, though I will readily admit my weakness for overwrought (and overly long) flavor text in RPGs. But I digress.

    While listening to the Weird Studies episode “On Lovecraft” it occurred to me that certain insights from H. P. Lovecraft’s “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” could be applied to the process of writing scenarios and campaigns for Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu in much the same way. Around the half hour mark of the podcast, Phil Ford comments that what he finds most interesting about the methodology Lovecraft outlines in the short essay is “his insistence that the heart of the story is a basically atemporal thing--is basically just this flash of image or emotion, mood, that has no time. And yet for it to work as a story you have to kind of almost extrude it like a piece of taffy into a line.”

    Put differently, his narrators use language to animate what Lovecraft calls “the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.” The cyclopean ruins, nameless horrors, and bayou cults of Lovecraft’s fiction exist independently of his narrators, but are nonetheless dependent on these doomed souls if they ever wish to be expressed in a human idiom.

    In Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft’s narrators are replaced by player-controlled Investigators. It is these Investigators--with the aid of their Keeper--who “extrude” the scenario by playing through it. Thus, in a very real sense, Call of Cthulhu is more a simulation of Lovecraft’s writing process than it is any of his short stories.

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