There’s a “Cosmic Horror” sale on at DriveThruRPG. I was curious to see whether Bookmark Cthulhu made it on the list and am happy to see that it did.
As a designer, I fall into the camp that Lovecraft’s protagonists seldom go insane. Instead, their dread grows toward a breaking point. His secondary characters may be insane. His protagonists face terror.
Don’t get me wrong, the groundbreaking sanity rules in the Call of Cthulhu RPG do a great job of portraying the growing fragility of the human mind as it gains more knowledge of the mythos. But it seems to me that most Lovecraftian RPGs since have mimicked CoC sanity rules only as a sort of mental Hit Points, losing the cosmic horror.
I went with a growing dread that increasingly risks your abilities with each new shock.
It also seems to me that a bestiary of Lovecraftian creatures robs some of the horror—and I couldn’t fit a bestiary on a bookmark anyway. 🙂 So there’s a random table of Lovecraft’s most-used adjectives, resulting in creatures like “an accursed, spectral, fungoid nightmare” or “a blasphemous, irridescent, gibbering thing.” What do those conjure up in your mind’s eye?
Given that its a Bookmark HP RPG sourcebookmark, the more Traits, the more powerful the being as a matter of course.
So, though Bookmark Cthulhu is “merely” a bookmark, I’d suggest that it better conveys Lovecraftian horror than many longer works.