Lovecraftian Campaign has no Cosmic Horror, just Racism

Jean Artio decided to leave the horror game he had joined during the very first session, after realizing that the Game Master and other players were fans of H.P. Lovecraft, not his Cthulhu Mythos. “I was coming in expecting strange and unknowable monstrosities that our mortal minds could barely comprehend,” said Artio. “But instead the GM started to describe monstrously racist beliefs that were too easy to understand.”

“I started to get a little uncomfortable when the players started to describe what they were going to do to the dark hordes invading our shores. Then as they started to get into it, I heard some of the most ugly and vile things I’ve ever heard about other human beings. And that’s just what they were saying about people with Welsh ancestry. I didn’t want to stick around and find out what would happen if they went any farther south.”

Artio said that this wasn’t the first time he had played with the GM, which is why he wasn’t expecting the sudden prominence of early twentieth-century race science. “Now that I look back on our other games, there were definitely signs. I probably should have noticed that the tool he was using to measure out movement was a set of phrenologist’s calipers. I thought it was just an old-timey drafting compass.

When we asked what system the group had been playing, he said he wasn’t sure. “Some game with a long acronym that stood for something stupid. In theory, it sounded interesting, and the GM kept talking about how in-depth the character creation could get with the details of body dimensions. It was only as the bigotry started to build up that I realized why they cared so much about body type, and I decided I had had enough. Which is a shame, because I’m sure if the table hadn’t been so virulently racist, I would have had a chance to fall in love with FATAL.”