# RPG a Day 2026 - 16: Composure tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] We are almost there. Get this in tonight, and I will be up to date with only one a day to do for the rest of the month. This is assuming that nothing gets in the way of me actually doing any for the rest of the month, which is a pipe dream, and we all know it. That aside—composure. I feel like this would be the obvious place to put in a definition right out of the dictionary again, but you all know what composure means: the ability to keep your wits about you when all those around you are losing theirs. What are you maintaining? Composure. Those of you reading from the Far East and those who know my tendency to indulge in themes that are of a darker nature are already thinking about the same thing: isn't insanity the opposite of composure? You would be absolutely correct. Where do mechanics for insanity usually pop up? You are correct again: games that are rooted in the Cthulhu Mythos. (Elsewhere as well, but we'll talk about that later.) Let's make a brief tour through the games that leverage the Cthulhu Mythos that I have at hand, and we'll talk about strengths and weaknesses. ## Call of Cthulhu This is the granddaddy of them all, the source and the core. **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** made sanity an important discussion within the context of tabletop role-playing games. Not only did it make the discussion manifest, but it also compelled the creation of actual mechanics to describe sanity and what happens when you lose it. For the three people in the audience who have never read **Call of Cthulhu** and devoted themselves to its study, here's the short version: Sanity is rated 0 to 100 as a percentile. When you are exposed to sanity-shaking horrors, nightmarish experiences, or vistas beyond human comprehension, you roll against your current Sanity rating. Roll under it and you're fine. Roll over it, and you go a little insane. In 6th Edition, if you lose more than 5 Sanity in a single incident, you automatically go temporarily insane. If you lose more than 20% of your Sanity in a single day, you go nuts in a more long-term manner. The more about the Cthulhu Mythos that you learn, that is, the higher your Cthulhu Mythos skill, the lower the cap on your Sanity. Straightforward, static, quite frankly a little bit boring as insanity goes. 7th Edition requires you to succeed on an intelligence roll to comprehend the nightmares that you have seen, which at least gives some comfort to all of those ex-soldiers and thugs in the character pool. Comprehend what you've seen, and you go temporarily insane for 1d10 hours. But if you fail it, you're fine. You've just got some repressed memories. You're going to be okay, I promise. Go temporarily insane, and the Keeper takes over your character, rolls for what kind of madness you're exhibiting, and keeps you for about 1d10 rounds. After you recover, you're still mentally fragile, so take some more SAN damage, and you're back in the crazy. Plus, the Keeper can now play to your delusions because after all, you're going a bit crazy. In seventh edition, as opposed to sixth, actually triumphing over the nightmares of the Cthulhu Mythos by killing monsters doesn't give you any ability to recover Sanity. Hit zero SAN and you're off the deep end, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. You've lost your mind and you're done as a character. Your brain's HP have gone bye-bye. Is this a good system? Well, it's straightforward. I have to give it to 7th in that it is clearer what you should do at any given time as the Keeper. Is it exciting? Not really. As I said, it's basically HP for your brain. HP is not the most exciting method of tracking wounds, damage, or impairment for your body.[^1] It doesn't get any better if it's for your brain. This is, however, the baseline for RPG insanity maintenance. ## Trail of Cthulhu Let's get away from the old BRP percentile and look at how **[[Trail of Cthulhu]]**'s Gumshoe approach changes things, like all Gumshoe mechanics. It relies more on having a pool of resources to spend (in this case, Stability) rather than a ticking time bomb that is affected beyond your ability to control. Effectively, characters have two mechanisms for interacting with their psychological status. On the one hand, you have Drive, your motivation for pushing beyond and looking into things normal people have absolutely no interest in. It's also the thing that brings you more Stability. Do what you're driven to do, and you increase your Stability resources. If some sort of mythos revelation cuts the legs out from under your Drive, you're in a bad situation. You're not going to be able to regain Stability from it. Speaking of how your Drive gives you a reason to live, if you act *against* it, you lose Stability. Stability, on the other hand, is the short-term meter. That's your pool of points that you can spend out of when you need to make a Stability test. Blow a Stability test and you lose Stability points. Going along through your house and you discover a friend's corpse? That's 5 points right there. Get jumped by a Mi-go? That's 5. Murder someone in cold blood? Also 5.[^2] See your friend get gruesomely killed? That's 8 points. Things just go up from there. Stability goes negative, and you start to get penalties to functioning. You develop mental illnesses, and if you take it down to -12, you go permanently insane. On the positive side, stability is fairly easy to get back. Act in accordance with your drives, and you will feel much better in almost no time. However, there's also one more stat: Sanity, predictably enough. Sanity erodes from contact with the Cthulhu Mythos — unwise research or *literally touching bits of it directly* — and it will drop like a rock. For every 3 points of Sanity, you have a Pillar of Sanity. It's an absolute belief or moral stance, sort of like your drive, except bigger and more central to your concept. It might be a place; it might be a thing. Start losing your Sanity, and your Pillars get broken, giving you fewer ways to pull yourself together between episodes. Unless you're playing in Purist mode, in which case Sanity is *never* recovered. It just erodes until you're completely gone. Set the dial to Pulp, and you can get Sanity back for completing scenarios. Do I think this is better than the way **Call of Cthulhu** handles insanity? In almost every way possible, the answer is *yes*. Is it still a little mechanically heavy? Yes, it is. I would prefer much lighter mechanics in general, but we will get there, I promise you. Does it capture the erosion of your ability to maintain composure over time and give the player enough information about what is going to happen, what is likely to happen, and why things are as they are to let them make decisions about the risks they want to take? Very much so. The point pool resource system that Gumshoe uses is great for this. I consider it a far better choice than BRP mechanically in general. ## Cthulhu Dark You know what the problem has been so far? Everything's been too upbeat. But let's subvert that concept by going with **[[Cthulhu Dark]]**. The key thing here is that you don't really have sanity in the sense that we've been talking about, mechanically represented in CD. Instead, you have Insight, which rates how much you understand about the universe. How do you get Insight, you may ask? Well, it's very simple. You make an Insight test any time you see something deeply wrong: a dismembered body, a horrible mythos creature, your mom and dad having sex, whatever it is. Make your Insight roll, and if it comes up higher than your current Insight, your Insight goes up by 1. If you roll equal or lower, nothing happens. However, when your Insight reaches 6, you're permanently, irrevocably insane, and the character is removed from the game. You may wonder outright why in the name of electric fuck would you want to roll your Insight deliberately? That's a really good question. The answer is because you may want to add an extra die to any other check. All you have to do is risk your sanity. By the way, did I mention that an investigation skill is guaranteed to succeed in the sense that it's going to give you the information you're looking for? But the question is, are you going to learn too much? > - **1** — you technically succeed, but barely; the universe mocks you. > - **4** — a standard success. > - **5** — a brilliant success; you learn everything humanly possible. > - **6** — you learn *too much*: you glimpse the truth of the cosmos. It counts as a success, but it forces an **Insanity roll**. Yes, that's the investigation skill outcome table. You get the idea. You want to know more about the strange bite marks on that corpse? Look a little closer. Feel like you want to have a better-than-average success? Maybe you should risk your sanity on the check. Go ahead. It'll be fine. What are the odds, right? It's worth noting that in CD, it has a very clear and direct stance toward combat—"if you fight any creature you meet, you will die." There are no hit points, and there are no initiative rolls. If you fight, you're going to die. There might be something that you missed in that mechanical setup back there. If you think about it, any of your skills and traits that make you more competent also make you more likely to roll a 6 anytime you test them. The more you know, the closer you are to madness. It doesn't matter what kind of knowledge it is. The more you know, the more likely you are to figure out one of the terrifying inner workings of the cosmos, and you're that much closer to going mad. I love this. It's super lightweight. It's super high speed, low drag. It's extremely stripped down, and yet the player at every step is given enough knowledge to know that they're risking things anytime they do something. To suggest the outlook is bleak undersells it by half. Oddly enough, the Cthulhu Mythos story that this reminds me of the most is **[At the Mountains of Madness](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx)**. Frankly, it's a perfect system for that. ## Cthulhu Unleashed Believe it or not, **[[Cthulhu Unleashed]]** basically takes the old-school BRP mechanics and gives them a little bit of streamlining. Not a lot, but enough to be meaningful and to drop the size of the book from a 400-page monstrosity to something considerably easier to deal with. Nowhere near as super lightweight and ultrafast as Cthulhu Dark. If you like the way **Call of Cthulhu** resolves things in general, then checking out **Unleashed** is worthwhile. It won't shock you to find that CU effectively uses the same sanity mechanics as CoC. It's rated 0 to 100. You want to roll under it when you make a sanity check. If you don't, you take whatever sanity damage is presented by the creature or situation. If you take a tenth of your willpower, then you have a psychic break and you get to roll on a d10 table. Take three mental strain episodes (which is what the short-term psychic disturbances are called) and you develop a psychic fracture. This could be permanent, or you might get over it after a lot of work. It's hard to say. Every character starts with three anchors: people, objects, or memories that they consider vital to their emotional, mental, and intellectual health. When you take sanity loss, you can shift that over to your connection with your tether. What are tethers for? Well, aside from being really good motivators for your character, they help restore willpower by interacting with them. Dump some of the horrors that you're experiencing into your tethers. You're going to be roleplaying out how your relationship with your daughter begins to break down because you just can't keep it together when you're spending time with her. Or maybe you just lose a little bit of control, and she starts to be afraid of you. When the tether breaks, that's one less way for you to regain willpower and thus control over yourself and the outcomes of your choices. One of my favorite things about CU is that there is a global anti-mythos organization, AEGIS. They are unconcerned with such petty things as human rights, privacy, even freedom, because they have larger things in mind: keeping humanity out of the nightmarish endgame where Great Old Ones rise or humans trade power for sanity to the mythos. As you lose sanity, AEGIS begins to notice you. Maybe they start surveilling you after that first run-in with the ghoul in the basement. Things go bad a little bit more, and they start actively tracking you. Learn too much about the mythos and you might have a visit. The 3 AM knock on the door, or maybe they just black bag you on the way out to the grocery store. I love this because it really drives your state of mind back into the setting. Things change because you're losing your sanity; not just in your relationships, but as an active, actual threat to your day-to-day life. Would I play this game as a great mythos representative? No, I think it's a little too heavy and crunchy. The remnants of BRP are still strong with this one. Would I suggest it to anyone who's currently playing **Call of Cthulhu** and thinking of getting into something a little bit different but wants to keep one foot in a similar grave? Absolutely, without hesitation, every day. ## Elder Mythos I don't know if you have noticed or not, but I really love the Cthulhu Mythos. I've always found there's a gaping hole in my experience. I never get to play the Mythos horrors, right? Primordial creatures beyond the understanding of humanity that extend transdimensionally and understand things well beyond the ken of mortal men. That's my kind of game; that's what I want to do with my life. Luckily, we have that option now with **[[Elder Mythos]]**. The problem for our discussion right now is that while there is a madness stat, it's not something that you can suffer. It's something you can do. You can think of it like a weapon stat or your potency in a certain form of aggression. Inflicting madness is what you do; you don't take it. You are it. As such, it's sort of irrelevant to this particular article, but there was no way I could write something about the Cthulhu Mythos without getting to bring it up. It's not for everyone. It is a very particular kind of game, as you can see from my other mentions of it.[^3] Maybe it's for you, maybe it's not. Check it out, decide for yourself, get back to me. Let me know how that worked out for you. ## Loner: Cthulhu I talk about **[[Loner]]** a lot, and I know that. It's not lost on me. It's not a mystery. I'm aware that it comes into my discussions more often than perhaps is sane. The thing is that it is so super lightweight and easy to explain that it is always at the tip of my tongue for using for examples, building something off the cuff, and showing people that you don't need a bulky set of mechanics to have a good game that's grounded in a real setting. LC is a great example of all of that applied to a world that almost everybody on the planet has played or knows somebody who's played. For our purposes, what we want to talk about is sanity. Here we have a very simple, small, lightly structured way to approach sanity and maintaining composure. You essentially have a three-segment track that keeps up with how sane you are. With nothing on it, you see the world just like everyone else does. You take one mark on that track and you become unsettled. You start questioning whether what you see is really what reality is. You gain a tag: Unsettled, which can work both as an advantage and a disadvantage depending on what you're trying to do or what you're exposed to. Take two marks and you're now disturbed. Unsettled becomes disturbed on your sheet, and you roll on a six-slot mental state table. Are you hypervigilant? Do you have altered perception? Have you picked up emotional detachment? Again, this has a direct impact on future mechanical checks. Now that you have an actual disturbed mental state, each of them is associated with a clearer set of advantages and disadvantages. Should you make the unhappy discovery of what happens when you reach three marks and fill up your Sanity track? You'll find out that you're now broken. The investigation is over for you. You could live through it, of course, with some permanent psychological changes. There's a table for that. Maybe you have selective amnesia, and the whole period is wiped out of your mind except for terrible nightmares and things that remind you of stuff that you would rather not be reminded of. Maybe you picked up prophetic madness, and you have dreams or automatic writing, which gives you some idea of what's coming in the future. Almost always things you'd rather not know. Perhaps you picked up a protective delusion. I'm sure it's all a game. You're sure it's all a game. Everybody's happy, right? Roll the dice and smile. Unlike every other sanity example that we've touched on so far, losing your composure in LC isn't treated like a punishment for seeing too much. It's a transformative experience. You are no longer the same person you were. Your mind is no longer the same structure that it was. You may have trouble understanding the world as the rest of humanity sees it now, but that's a token of the fact that you've seen and understood what's really going on. You might wonder if there are ways to recover the Sanity track. The answer is yes. Have a nice quiet scene, spending time with people who accept who you are and what you know. Maybe spending time helping normal folk with things that have nothing to do with the mythos. Finding a moment of joy in connection, alone or with someone else. Or you can just destroy evidence of the cosmic horrors beyond the bounds of sane men. That also helps stabilize you. Want to get yourself a little more straight and remove two steps of that track? Take out a cult. Actively save people from an active mythos threat. Form a bond with someone who stays despite knowing the suffering that you've experienced and the terrible knowledge that you carry. Make something beautiful that affirms life and your connection to it. This may be my favorite of the Cthulhu Mythos game approaches to sanity. First, because it's extremely simple, straightforward, and interpretive. But also because the way you recover from it is laid out clearly as reconnecting yourself to normal life and protecting others from your own knowledge. By the way, if you've ever reached broken on the Sanity track, you can *never* remove the disturbed condition tag. You will always be disturbed with both the advantage and disadvantage it conveys. If you've ever wondered how [Adrian Monk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monk_(TV_series)) could come about in a setting within the Cthulhu Mythos, LC is the game to do it in. ## Honorable Mentions Games directly associated with Cthulhu Mythos are not the only ones that have sanity mechanics or mechanisms that help gauge your composure. We'll run through a couple of additional also-rans here. ### Alien: The Roleplaying Game **[[Alien - The Roleplaying Game|Alien: The Roleplaying Game]]** is probably the most obvious and well-known. You don't have sanity; you have Stress. You accumulate Stress by pushing rolls, getting pinned under fire, or seeing something horrible. As you accumulate Stress, you throw more dice onto your skill checks. Sure, you get closer to freaking out, but you also get sharper, better under pressure, right up until you roll a facehugger (1) and you freak the fuck out. You panic, and then you may drop an item, freeze, or dive for cover. As your Stress+d6 roll gets higher, things can get really ugly. Hit 13+, and you're getting permanent mental trauma. Managed to find your way to a safe area for a turn, and you relax a little bit. Drop a point of Stress. Interact with your signature item. You can also drop a point of Stress. ### Those Dark Places **[[Those Dark Places]]**, being *inspired*[^4] by **Alien**, slimmed down, trimmed back, and made sleek with suffering, just gives you a Pressure level. Mechanically, it's handled almost identically to Stress in **Alien**. But when it goes up, you roll a d6 versus your pressure, and if you roll under it, you have *"an episode"* (which is never good, for some reason); it might reduce core stats or leave you rigid, locked in fear. Oh yes, and you can't drop Pressure during a mission. ### Pressure **[[Those Dark Places|Pressure]]** is **Those Dark Places**' **Aliens** equivalent to the first's claustrophobic **Alien**. It takes that mechanic and turns it up a bit. Long-term psychological scars are part and parcel of the game. Good luck with that. On the positive side, androids never make Pressure rolls! They've got other issues. ### Unknown Armies Very few people seem to remember **[[Unknown Armies]]**, but if you're looking for a sanity system that takes into account the kind of horrors you've been exposed to, this is it. There are five independent madness meters that you can gain but rarely lose points in: Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self. Each of them is rated 1 to 10, and each of them has a list of things that set them off. For example, having a weapon pointed at you is Violence 2 to 4. Deliberately killing a helpless target, on the other hand, is Violence 7. Have one of them triggered, and you can develop a notch. Get exposed to a stressor, and you'll make a check. Succeed, and you become more hardened to that kind of stress. Fail, and it gets the better of you, and you have a momentary freak out. If you get hardened to a particular kind of madness, you're desensitized—but not healthy. You're closer to sociopathy. Collect too many failures, and you go completely insane in a particular kind of way. Of course, going completely insane or becoming a sociopath isn't necessarily the end of the game in **Unknown Armies**. Frankly, it's a lot of fun.[^5] ## Exeunt That's it for our tour through sanity. I hope you kept your composure. It's been a long ride, considerably longer than I expected. I wasn't expecting to crank out a 4200-word article tonight, but here we are. Some subjects just consume you. By the way, I'm going to need you to make a 2d10 SAN check for having read this article. You're probably now Disturbed. Go do something to reconnect with humanity, or burn down an occult library. You'll feel better when you do, I promise. [^1]: I've talked about this elsewhere in the garden. The full argument that HP-as-pool is a broken damage model lives in [[D&D HP Considered Unhealthy, News at 11|D&D HP Considered Unhealthy, News at 11]] and [[Clay Golem vs Tarresque - FIGHT|Clay Golem vs Tarrasque: FIGHT!]] — the latter puts it bluntly: hit points *"do a shitty job"* at representing ongoing damage. When I want injury to actually mean something I prefer conditions and impairment over a shrinking number; see [[dnd-converted-to-useful-fiction-first|D&D Converted to Useful Fiction First]] and [[The Real World - FU RPG Hack|The Real World: A FU RPG Hack for the Mundane]]. Even a damage *track* beats a pool in my book — [[Dungeon Crawler Carl May Be Best Left in Space|Dungeon Crawler Carl May Be Best Left in Space]] and my [[Character Creation Challenge 2024 - Day 26 - On Mighty Thews|On Mighty Thews]] post both land there. [^2]: You know, I have to admit, murdering someone in cold blood really doesn't destabilize you all that much. Maybe that's because you already have to be a little bit crazy to go around stabbing people. Any applicability to current day politics, I leave as an exercise for the reader. [^3]: The full dive is in the [[12 - Elder Mythos|Day 12: Elder Mythos, Hastur]] character-creation post; the giddy *"what if I were one of the Outer Gods"* musing lives in [[Give Them a Nuke]]; the war story about the publisher's PDF policy is in [[Caveat Emptor With Mana Project Studio]]; and it keeps resurfacing in [[The Division TTRPG - Wait Wat]]. [^4]: We're going to say *"inspired"* here out of an abundance of politeness, and also because I really like this game. The authors of **Alien** must have as well, since they hired him to write for the new edition. [^5]: That came out way longer than I intended for an honorable mention, but dammit, the game is just so much madness in a bucket. How can you resist it?