As informed, I spent last week assisting Derek move his things across the street. It was a labourous endeavor despite the assistance of a car and all parties involved were thoroughly exhausted afterwards. But fear not, intrepid followers, I did drop one of his boxes in my glorious rebellion against his tyrannical posting rules however I think that the point had been lost.

I shall strive to find some other method to communicate my displeasure.

While there, however, Derek felt it necessary to spend his government funding and award us with a delightful evening of a card game called Elder Signs.  It was flavoured and stylized after Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos which won me over. Derek was convinced by its 7.9 ranking on boardgamegeeks which is, apparently, rather good for the site.

The game is pretty fun, I have to admit. The flavour and mechanics really conjure the right feel for a Cthulhu game and I enjoyed the fact that it was a co-operative challenge that tested the players against the board instead of each other. My only complaint, and it would be a big one, is that the game is far too easy. Especially for something dressed up in horror trappings.

You see, there are certain expectations one has when they pick up a Lovecraftian game. Yes, we’re looking for weird, tentacled beasts and insane cultists. Alien worlds and indescribable horrors are a necessity. But there’s a certain feeling that we’re trying to conjure with all these unspeakable monsters. Lovecraft was and always will be a horror author and if you can fill your audience with a sense of dread then you are missing the point of Lovecraft’s writing.

Now, I feel that Elder Signs can be easily fixed with a few houserules and tweaks to its mechanics. There are elements in place that should work to build a sense of unavoidable doom. The aptly named Doom Track is perhaps the best mechanic and only needs more elements that move it along and force players to deal with challenges that they aren’t properly prepared for in order to work. Course, there are some other balance tweaks the game could use as well. Every player is dealt a random investigator and each possesses a unique talent or ability which they bring to the board. There is the Nun who ignores half of the ill effects of midnight cards and can’t be weakened by locations that lock away dice (dice are used to defeat challenges and resolve combat so each one denied makes each challenge more difficult). Other investigators receive greater rewards when completing challenges like the Magician who draws an extra spell when rewarded or the Scamp who gets additional common items.

But then you have the author who always rolls the extra dice when tackling an otherworldly challenge. Before we played, Derek and I thought she was perhaps the most useless. However, after a few rounds, it become quite clear that the otherworld challenges have the greatest rewards and the author essentially makes them a walk in the park, bring victory closer in great leaps whenever you draw a portal onto the board.

Deesis Range: The Saviour by Andrey Rublyov (1410)

And then there is the Scientist.

The Scientist is a curious investigator. She has a fairly balanced split between her health and sanity (because what is a Cthulhu game without the ability to be driven insane?). But it is her ability which makes her truly shine. She is immune to fear effects from any challenges which, arguably, didn’t play a great deal in our three games since we generally avoided them or threw the Scientist at them to complete them. But more importantly, she prevents monsters from spawning on her round allowing her to tackle the challenges which give a mix bag of positive and negative rewards since she removes the concern for accumulating additional elder signs (the quest coupon the players are attempting to gather in order to lock away the Old Ones) at the expense of making the other challenges more difficult.

I like the character as her special ability is both strong and very characterful. But Kate Winthrop brings to light a greater weakness in the overall Cthulhu world than just making balance in a card game difficult. It is her scientific skepticism which makes her such a good investigator against the Elder Gods and it is the same scientific skepticism which locks Cthulhu safely away in the 1920s.

For I think there’s more reasons why we don’t see a lot of Cthulhu stories beyond Lovecraft’s times and not just because other authors are paying respect to the grandfather of the style and the period he wrote in. Lovecraft was obsessed with the cosmic horror – an idea that life was wholly incomprehensible to human mind and that the plumbing of the universe’s secrets would ultimately lead to such revelations that would lead the explorer into madness. Forbidden knowledge is rife through his work and more than once scientific study and its failure to address the mystic and occult has led to a protagonist’s unavoidable defeat.

But this concern over science isn’t that surprising given that he was writing at the turn of the century. The world was undergoing a great upheaval in scientific thought. Einstein’s theory of relativity essentially upended the entire field of physics, tearing to shambles the established doctrines and leaving uncertainty in its wake. Furthermore, the coming of the World Wars were heavily influenced by technological developments and the machine gun’s use on the field of battle produced unheard of casualties to a population unprepared for modern war. In that day and age, no doubt technology looked like some horrific instrument quickly tumbling from man’s grasp and the further they delved the less anyone seemed to know.

This is, however, in stark contrast to our current age. Einstein’s relativity has become so widespread as to be taught in high schools. The breadth and depth of human knowledge is greater than at any single point in history. We understand more. We develop more. We research more. I feel that there is no coincidence between the rise of the Information Age and the apparently neglect of Lovecraftian horror. So much of Lovecraft’s creatures and world relied upon the unknown and the hidden that as we become more educated and enlightened we dispel the dark shadows that clung to the corners of our knowledge. Uncertainty washes away and in this new light we find not terrifying creatures to behold, the strings and fates of man wrapped in their tentacle appendages.

Which is a bit of a shame, really. Despite Lovecraft’s personal flaws, there is a source of wonder and excitement in his stories. True, they seem almost quaint in their crafting of horror. People driven mad by things that to the modern eye seem so much more manageable. What place does a wandering mountain of a monster with tentacles for a mouth when we live in a time when a single bomb can destroy an entire nation? A simple look at our own current media portrays science as this  indomitable  force capable of overcoming any obstacle that arises. In Pacific Rim, we had invaders from another world being thrown down before the mechanical might of giant exosuits. Independence Day saw the collapse of a technologically superior race through the application of a computer virus (a clever spin on War of the Worlds but nevertheless demonstrating that even technological horrors are brought down by our own scientific mastery).

Science isn’t something to be feared but embraced and there is seemingly nothing to fear from it save itself.

So, Kate Winthrop represents something rather curious in the Elder Signs. The game seems less about a group of investigators racing to lock away an ancient evil before it escapes and destroys existence. Instead, it almost feels like we’re looking back at a battle that was already fought. And this race was not between the investigators and the forgotten gods but between Cthulhu and Kate. It almost seems inevitable now that the Ancient Ones end would come.  And I can only begin to imagine what horror they must have felt as Ms. Winthrop turned her microscope upon them.