I don't like Lovecraft. I never have.
There, I said it. The heresy is out in the world. I, a cis white man in his 40s who still plays roleplaying games does not like the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
It is not from a lack of trying, mind you. I have struggled with this since I was fourteen years old and played in my first Call of Cthulhu game.
That game was lots of fun and perfect for when you are fourteen. We made tough as nails Treasury Agents loaded with shotguns, tommy guns, and .38s. We roared through Chicago in our Studebakers, hunting cultist bootleggers. All so we could eventually put our guns in our mouths from the insanity of what we saw in a warehouse or something...
After that game, I rushed out to get an anthology of his short stories. I had to read them. My older friends I had just played with talked about the writings as if the words changed their lives. So off to Waldenbooks I went and returned with one of the many paperback anthologies of his work, to be devoured in the deep night.
Unfortunately, what I found bored the shit out of me.
It was sexless throughout and abstract in the wrong places. The writing was baroque but uninteresting to me. To this day I can't get my head around the idea of a "wrong angle" and roll my eyes deep into my head when I see another author use it in their work as a means to "describe" a horror.
I was clearly not the right audience for his work, and I have a theory as to why. Lovecraft is perfect for a certain kind of teenager. The kind who hasn't come into their sexual awakening. Who is smart and insecure about their intelligence. And importantly, one who isn't neck deep in the mythology of catholicism.
This is why I believe the best thing H.P. ever did was inspire Alan Moore to write his sexed up, intricately detailed, collaborations with Jacen Burrows. The man knows how to explore the underlying ideas in a way that is both horrifying and human. Together they tapped into deep waters.
When I fell upon the writing, I was already well on my way in my appreciation of sexual pleasure. The combination of my family and school had already secured me in my belief that I was smart as hell and that it was a good thing to be.
Lastly and importantly, I was not only raised catholic, but obsessed with the minutiae and horror of the catholic canon.
I believe that is why when I got my hands on Dark Ages Inquisitor, I felt like I found the horror game for me. Sure, it followed the same pattern as other White Wolf games with the "organization as class" and the golden rule/rule zero nonsense. But it also worked really hard to bring the horror only a former catholic could love.
It is a weird book, honestly. It is a sort of X-Files for the middle ages of White Wolf's mythos, living side by side with Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, and Fae.
Lord that is a lot of game lines...
It fills their need for a Hunter book. And I supposed, for a White Wolf super fan, it is unremarkable. The Hunter books are basically about super heroes, and this ain't exactly that.
As I mentioned previously, I came to this stable of games from being a fan of Tim Bradstreet, not because I thought the games were particularly systemically compelling. In fact, I spent a lot of effort trying to retrofit their system into something that worked better, with no avail.
But Inquisitor grabbed me in a way similar to how Werewolf grabbed me. The opening fiction was disturbing and divorced from the other games. The classes for the game were sad and hopelessly outmatched. The exploration of zealotry and piety as separate mechanical tools for play centered on the Church was and is a refreshing experiment.
It was the first honest horror game that I think I had encountered from White Wolf and the ideas behind it actually disturbed me. God is a horrifying master in this game for which the characters use ritual and canon as a means of trying to understand. These people are cursed by him, compelled to fight against a different set of evils, and know they will definitely die and likely end up in hell.
This addendum to the Dark Ages line of games accidentally became a real horror game. A horror I could appreciate. One filled with sex, body horror, and worse than the uncaring gods of Lovecraft, but a God who claims love, but actively inflicts pain. An abusive parent who beats you, manipulates you, molests you, and forces you to fight his war against an uncle who might be worse. Or not.
It is unclear and if you lose your faith it could kill you or save you. There is no way to know and because of that, you live in fear.
For decades I have wanted to remake this game that I played often enough to know that its mechanics didn't slide together nicely. To shed the White Wolf-isms in favor of something that explores the horror of that relationship with God and his Church. Maybe, one day I will.
Until then, I will continue to pull it down from my shelf from time to time to immerse myself in something horrific. Something that is both intimately human and utterly unknowable. Something with sex and emotion.
The stuff a puritan from New England had no idea how to explore.
