The Good Friends of Jackson Elias is an irregular podcast devoted to the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, horror movies and horror gaming in general. It is hosted by Paul Fricker, Matthew Sanderson and Scott Dorward, three freelance writers who have worked on the new edition of Call of Cthulhu and other horror roleplaying games. Episodes are usually built around a particular theme, always centred on our shared love of all things dark and horrifying.
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Delusions in Call of Cthulhu
We’re back and we’re rolling to disbelieve. Honestly, the world around us just becomes weirder and weirder with every passing year. A lot of this is probably down to age, but we can’t discount some kind of breakdown of objective reality, right? Well, that’s assuming there was ever such a thing as objective reality. In order to determine this, we’d need to refer to objective sources, and then we’ll only get lost in recursion again. Compared such sophistry, all those sanity-blasting delusions in Call of Cthulhu feel like light relief.
Main Topic: Delusions in Call of Cthulhu
We thought we’d follow up last episode’s exploration of psychological horror by looking at the role of delusions in Call of Cthulhu. Psychological horror is filled with characters trapped in states of delusion, unable to tell what is real anymore. The game reflects this genre trope in its mechanics, and we delve into how it all works. We also discuss how such fictional delusions relate to real mental illness, what inspiration we might take from media, and just how much roleplaying we really want to see in our roleplaying games.
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Things we mention in this episode include:
* Psychological horror
* Insanity in Call of Cthulhu
* Walker in the Wastes
* X-Card
* The Two-Headed Serpent
* Pulp Cthulhu
* Shutter Island (2010)
* Fight Club (1999)
* Joker (2019)
* Mr Robot
* The Matrix (1999)
* The King in Yellow
* Daoloth
* The Total Perspective Vortex
* Oculus (2013)
* Nyarlathotep
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