We’re back and we’re rolling to disbelieve. Honestly, the world around us just becomes weirder and weirder with every passing year. A lot of this is probably down to age, but we can’t discount some kind of breakdown of objective reality, right? Well, that’s assuming there was ever such a thing as objective reality. In order to determine this, we’d need to refer to objective sources, and then we’ll only get lost in recursion again. Compared such sophistry, all those sanity-blasting delusions in Call of Cthulhu feel like light relief.

Main Topic: Delusions in Call of Cthulhu

We thought we’d follow up last episode’s exploration of psychological horror by looking at the role of delusions in Call of Cthulhu. Psychological horror is filled with characters trapped in states of delusion, unable to tell what is real anymore. The game reflects this genre trope in its mechanics, and we delve into how it all works. We also discuss how such fictional delusions relate to real mental illness, what inspiration we might take from media, and just how much roleplaying we really want to see in our roleplaying games.

Links

Things we mention in this episode include:

News

A Weekend With Good Friends

Player signups are about to open for A Weekend With Good Friends and will remain so until the end of day on the 22nd of February.

A Weekend With Good Friends is the online gaming convention organised by our lovely listeners, taking place on the Good Friends Discord server between 1-3 March 2024.

If you are unable to commit to running or playing a game in advance, there will be pickup games running throughout the weekend.

There will also be a number of panels about different aspects of horror gaming. Details of these will be finalised within the next few days, so do check our Discord server for the latest news.

Key dates are: