Call of Cthulhu

I've chosen a TTRPG to branch out into. And while I'm sure it would be interesting to see heroic fantasy from a Pathfinder perspective (one of my friends says she likes it better than 5E, and she and I are both eager DMs, running ongoing campaigns with one another in them, so maybe I can convince her to run a Pathfinder one-shot or something) I've always been intrigued by Call of Cthulhu.

I think Cosmic Horror was one of those things influencing me long before I knew it for what it was. Twin Peaks, for example, was something I didn't actually watch when it was on the air (I was almost 4 when it premiered) but its effect on 90s pop culture was definitely strong. And Stephen King, whose horror is more grounded than Lovecraft's but still definitely plays with ideas of otherworldly, incomprehensible threats, got his hooks into me my senior year of high school with the Dark Tower series.

My fiction errs on the side of humanist optimism (Star Trek was also a big influence on me) but I definitely go to the well of Cosmic Horror for antagonistic forces.

So running a game based on Lovecraft sounds pretty cool. I have a lot of Cosmic Horror elements in my homebrew D&D setting, but player characters in that game are naturally quite powerful (though I haven't hit them with Star Spawn yet. Thankfully the Paladin just got high enough level to cast Revivify, so I might feel less guilty about taking the gloves off now!)

Here's the other element:

I grew up in New England.

So, the Cosmic Horror genre clearly extends beyond Lovecraft himself, and old Howard Philip has a problematic legacy. While he conceived of some of the most iconic elements of the genre - there's a reason we often call it "Lovecraftian Horror" - the man was also considered racist even for the 1920s.

And indeed, it colors some of the ideas he was working with in his fiction. Most basically, his assumption that the "other" and "alien" was inherently monstrous applied not only to be-tentacled creatures from beyond the stars, but also to, you know, people who didn't look like him. This manifests in a pervasive theme in a lot of his writing that people of other cultures are seen as evil, sometimes implying that they are corrupted with taint from these alien beings.

The notion that the same kind of existential, "pulling the rug from under you" horror from witnessing these cosmic entities at work could also come from a racist merely contemplating, say, having nonwhite ancestry, deflates a lot of the fun to be had by walking up to that scariness in a safe, fictional manner.

So from the beginning, there's a certain question of how we can explore the quite real and potent fears of humanity's tininess in a universe we only barely understand without employing outdated and hateful tropes. I think that we can, but it does take mindfulness.

Bearing that in mind, the fact that Lovecraft was a New Englander means that the areas he was talking about are, actually, very familiar territory to me. I grew up in a suburb of Boston, and so Eastern Mass. is home to me.

Likewise, I was a scared little boy growing up. I didn't have a traumatic childhood or anything - far from it - but I had an active imagination and I grew up in a creaky old Victorian house.

In my childhood, I populated most of the rooms of that house, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, with all manner of monsters. I knew which walls would stretch out with ghastly figures to grab you, why you should never use the bathroom with the shower curtain drawn, and that one tree you had to be sure to look at only an even number of times. (Incidentally, Stephen King's novella "N" really worked for me.)

Given that Lovecraft's Arkham is meant to be the fictional equivalent of Salem (infamous of course for its witch trials, though it was also a major port that briefly rivaled Boston) it occurred to me:

If you're going to run a Call of Cthulhu game, why make up a fictional setting? Why not use the city you know better than any other?

Therefore, I'm intending to run a Call of Cthulhu game set in my own hometown, probably using my own childhood home as a major location for it.

Bonus points: one of my best friends out here in LA is someone I've known since high school, and he actually went to the same elementary school (he's a year older, which is why I didn't know him until later.) I went so far as to actually look up an old 1920s zoning map of our hometown and found that, where his childhood home is, there was undeveloped land with a little stream running through it.

Given that he'll almost certainly be playing in the game, I'm for sure going to have some monstrous thing precisely where his house would later be built.

I am, of course, not yet totally familiar with the rules of the game or how to build adventures as the Keeper of Arcane Lore (the game's equivalent of DM) but I really hope I can pull this off.