I have a futuristic scenario for CoC, where the last human empire thousands of years in the future is fighting a losing battle against the Yithian beetle-men for control of the planet, or at least survival. Various Lovecraftian monsters roam the Earth, but Cthulhu himself has yet to return. Would these future human be SAN 0 because of their proximity to the Mythos, or would they be able to maintain their sanity in the face of their coming doom?

Check out a Chaosium monograph called "The Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan." Might be up your alley.

So are lots of little monsters roaming the world, or some of the bigguns?

In Cruel Empire, humanity has gone full Crossed (apeshit murder kookoo bananas crazy) with the exception of a magically warded region.

If you can find a copy somewhere - it doesn't seem to be for sale online anymore - of Chaosium's "The Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan", I'd suggest looking through it. While the exactly hows and whys of the apocalypse are a little different, they have a pretty interesting take on it.

The answer they posit is "Very, completely, eternally," basically. Save only for a select group that had figured out (Well, been told) a method of shielding themselves from Cthulhu's dream. Most of the rest of the world is referred to as "dreamers", and... Well, a quote from Lovecraft sums it up best:

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

The dreamers aren't mindless, they're just absolutely, completely beyond any conception of morality, basically. They're savage, wild, massing in huge hoards to throw themselves against the few remaining humans, dying in thousands without care, sacrificing themselves to elder gods, killing each other in revelries of savage, orgiastic freedom... But they're not stupid. They can be subtle when they have to be. Individually they can even go undetected among normal humans, for a time. No, they're not stupid. Just... insane. But they can be very persuasive. They know what they are, and they like it. They feel free, free from all limits and boundaries, and they want that for everyone else, too.

It's implied the only thing that's really keeping the dreamers at all "human" though is just their physical bodies and the lump of tissue that is their brains. Basically what humanity they have is a hardware limitation that the software can't overcome. In the Dreamlands, the dreamers just appear to be nightmarish, fanged monstrosities, not human at all.

*edit* Ninja'd, I see, but I'll stand by my post.

Wouldn't all those crazies become extinct in 5-10 years? With all that sacrificing no child of a crazy would even come close to reaching puberty. I'm doubtful any would even reach walking stage.

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on March 14, 2023, 08:36:32 PM
I have a futuristic scenario for CoC, where the last human empire thousands of years in the future is fighting a losing battle against the Yithian beetle-men for control of the planet, or at least survival. Various Lovecraftian monsters roam the Earth, but Cthulhu himself has yet to return. Would these future human be SAN 0 because of their proximity to the Mythos, or would they be able to maintain their sanity in the face of their coming doom?

So AFAICT HPL's view is that modern, rational, Enlightenment humans go insane in the face of the incomprehensible truth of reality. But ignorant un-Enlightened Dark Ages humans would be fine. So I'd think the humans in your example would be fine, they'd simply frame the world something like the worldview of the humans in Warhammer 40K. The Emperor Protects!

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

SAN loss IMO models your growing awareness of the reality of the mythos and the natural alienation you feel as you can't stop seeing things the way they really are, rather than the way your fellow "normal people" see things. So I think SAN is relative to your worldview. 0 is the absolute zero value though. At 0, you've seen too much and can no longer relate or think like a human - you're effectively consumed by the mythos. I think it's reasonable to make the players start with lower SAN than normal because the gap between the player's starting worldview and the actual horrific reality of the cosmos in Lovecraft's works are narrower than the gap you'd experience taking a modern day person and putting them in the same situation.

So even the awful weird cult stuff the empire may be doing would not necessarily pose a SAN problem if routine enough. Confronting mythos monsters, experiencing strange magic or geometry, or having other weird insights about reality are a few examples of things that could cause problems though.

Eh. If there's one thing humanity has proven time and again it is that we pretty quickly adapt to "the new normal" no matter how horrific it is.

Who really thinks twice these days that you're carrying around a tracking device that records your location and every sound made near it and every keystroke you enter? Not only do we not think about it, we voluntarily use the thing to take and upload photos of our location and tag the people in the image for easy searching. We manage our money through it and use it to conveniently check in at events and for use of mass transit systems.

Orwell couldn't even conceive of something as expansive as our modern surveillance state and would recoil in abject horror. For us... it's a Tuesday.

Humans are hardwired for survival in ridiculously traumatic circumstances. People have amputated their own limbs in the process of saving themselves from horrific accidents. If the mental trauma isn't due to actual brain damage, most people will eventually pick themselves up and keeping going in some capacity.*

The point being, in such a scenario as described, I think you'd need to redefine what does and doesn't require a Sanity check, because many of the things are going to just be "Tuesdays" to the people in that situation. Maybe 10% of the population gets hit so hard they never get back up (an epidemic of initial suicides), but the vast majority would adapt soon enough to the new normal and what qualifies as "sane" would just adapt to the present environment as people get on with their lives (i.e. doing what work is needed to keep themselves and any loved ones safe, fed, clothed, and housed... it's amazing how the basic labors of survival can blot out larger existential concerns).

Then the next generation who has never known anything else grows up and tentacle monster dreams are just things that happen... like ubiquitous cell phone use (only slightly less annoying).

* Yes, some people so completely give up that suicide happens, but of the CDC estimated 12.2 million people who contemplate suicide each year, only 10% (1.2 million) actually make an attempt, and only 0.4% (46,000) go all the way. That's a lot of people committing suicide, but as a percentage of those afflicted enough to think about committing it, it's actually very small. This is why I suggested only a relatively small number of truly lost individuals (roughly the "attempted suicide after thinking about it" number as there would be far fewer trying to prevent the attempt or intervene to save someone in that situation."

Quote from: Bruwulf on March 14, 2023, 10:16:38 PM
"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

  So look out the window in the developed world and just extrapolate current trends by another generation or two? 

To try and give this post some content, answering the original questions means that you have to decide what Sanity is, or more generally, how humanity relates to the Mythos. If Sanity is just the ability to cope with radical challenges to a worldview, then generations of struggle probably means that humanity would have adapted. If the Mythos is essentially inimical to the human mind--"mental plutonium", as d20 CoC put it--then you're looking at the dreamers situation as described by Lovecraft.

Thanks, everyone, for the input!

I appreciate the recommendation, Thornhammer and Bruwulf. Yes, that's the kind of liveliest awfulness that merits inserting into the scenario.

I imagine a slow apocalypse where millennia of sacrifice partially awaken the Old Ones, collapses most of human society, unleashes nuclear war and minor monsters into the world en masse, which in turn produces mass insanity which produces mass sacrifices which in turn summon the Old Ones fully. The last empire of man is on the edge of extinction.

So, you've all provoked me to think of my take on the Sanity stat: I suppose it represents the breakability of one's faith in the compassionate greater good. Someone dropping to zero SAN realizes the absolute vanity of these things and either corrupts into purely a creature of the pleasures of power (e.g., a wizard or dreamer/slayer), or goes hopelessly dysfunctional (e.g. catatonic, schizophrenic, etc.) or retreats as per HPL into the ignorance of a new dark age. All three ways constitute defense mechanisms against the psychic pain of proof of absolute nihilism impinging on a normal, relatively noble (in Mythos terms), compassionate human mind.

A hypothetical empire that knew something about the Mythos and was compelled to fight against the darkness while safeguarding its sanity (morality) would be in a bind: it would have to keep its population ignorant while regularly refreshing its leadership as it went mad. But, it could take inspiration from the Elder Things: if they could make the leap to becoming a Lesser Independent Race, why couldn't we?

Quote
"Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!"
--H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

In the end, what is the "magic ingredient" that separates the Elder Things from homo sapiens? Could it be bred into us, or are we hopelessly flawed material, lacking certain key organs maybe?

I'm leaning towards this final quest built into the empire: to find that ingredient so that humanity can survive, such that the empire contains a schism: the SAN 0 faction and the SAN >0 faction, who contest with each other secretly to either make the empire totally in thrall to the Old Ones and bringing them forth through sacrifice, or become that Lesser Independent Race. Or would this end up flattening our SAN as well, such that men exist but cease to be men?

Actually just watched this today.  Had some interesting takes on it in video games (especially Darkest Dungeon).

Baseline matters I think.  If every person in the USA had to start digging ditches every day for 10 hours a day, it would kill a bunch of them.  But in a few months the people who lived would be surviving, many suffering, many getting through it and a few thriving.   Over a generation most would be getting through it and many more thriving.  I think once the stress is added there will be people who survive it and bring up kids with the new baseline to be "things we now know" instead meant not to know.  There will be a good deal more cult activity and general bat shit behavior, but most of the people in such an environment will have adapted to a degree where they don't just break instantly or maybe even at all.

There's a videogame based around this very premise. May be worth a look to mine for ideas..

"As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me, or everyone else." - Max
"Everyone has gone out of their minds. You're not the only one, Max." - Jedediah

Quote from: oggsmash on March 17, 2023, 05:16:59 AM
Baseline matters I think.  If every person in the USA had to start digging ditches every day for 10 hours a day, it would kill a bunch of them.  But in a few months the people who lived would be surviving, many suffering, many getting through it and a few thriving.   Over a generation most would be getting through it and many more thriving.  I think once the stress is added there will be people who survive it and bring up kids with the new baseline to be "things we now know" instead meant not to know.  There will be a good deal more cult activity and general bat shit behavior, but most of the people in such an environment will have adapted to a degree where they don't just break instantly or maybe even at all.

Maybe it's not that everyone will break as such, but that the survivors will be so psychologically alienated from the gentler, ignorant times, as to be unable to function were they drawn back in time to such an environment. Homo sapiens will survive, but people as we knew them might not.

The idea here is that if the entire world reinforces the idea that one is fungus, one will have a hard time not viewing oneself as fungus, too. People would devolve to pure survival mode, shorn of anything like civility, compassion, higher culture, or any sense of social progress. They might survive or even thrive, in the cracks and corners, but we wouldn't want to meet them.

Quote from: Itachi on March 17, 2023, 06:21:43 PM
There's a videogame based around this very premise. May be worth a look to mine for ideas..

Appreciated.