THESIS CALL OF CTHULHU AND VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: INVOCATION, SPATIALITY, AND RITUAL TRANSCENDENCE IN TWO TABLETOP ROLE-PLAYING GAMES Submitted by Tyler Brunette Department of Communication Studies In Partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Fall 2015 Master’s Committee: Advisor: Scott Diffrient Greg Dickinson Jeffery Snodgrass Copyright by Tyler Brunette 2015 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT CALL OF CTHULHU AND VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: INVOCATION, SPATIALITY, AND RITUAL TRANSCENDENCE IN TWO TABLETOP ROLE-PLAYING GAMES In 1974 the world’s first Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TRPG) was published, Dungeons and Dragons. Since that time hundreds of TRPGs have been published in multiple genres. In this thesis I explore the rhetoric of two of the most popular horror-themed TRPGs: Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade. I focus on explaining how these games came to be, how they serve their players as equipment for living, how they rhetorically (re)construct real-world places and spaces, and finally, how they encourage transcendence and jamming through ritual play and participation. This thesis hopefully helps to show the complex multi-layered rhetoric taking place in a relatively ignored form of media. Additionally, I introduce the concept of textual invocation as a complimentary theoretical construct to that of textual poaching as an explanation for how players and designers engage in a give and take of authorship. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank each of the members of my excellent committee, Dr. Diffrient, Dr. Dickinson, and DR. Snodgrass. Each of you has helped immeasurably with the creation of this project which would have absolutely been impossible without you. I would also like to thank the members of my graduate cohort who helped me to finish this document, you know who you are. Additionally, I would never have been able to come up with some of the ideas in this thesis without having my partner Danielle Reimer to bounce ideas off of. Finally, I would like to thank the fantastic authors and employees of Chaosium, White Wolf, and Onyx Path. Thank you all for making such wonderful, moving, and engaging products which have inspired me to finish this project. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………iii INTRODUCTION…….…………………………………………………………………………..1 EXIGENCY AND EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING………………………………………………..25 TAKING PLACE AND MAKING SPACE…..…………………………………………………51 TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH RITUAL PLAY…………………………………………….71 CONCLUSIONS...………………………………………………………………………………91 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………………….100 iv CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ...I feel quite justified in believing that games and sports ought not be ranked among the major phenomena of life. H.P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, October 3-5-7, 1932 While I adore his fictional works and their contribution to American literature, I could not disagree more with Howard Phillip Lovecraft. I believe games and play are fundamentally important aspects of the human experience. Games, such as the Olympics, can inspire a nation, speak volumes about a culture, and, in the case of role-playing games, open new worlds for exploration. Like many role-players, I remember the exact moment when I became “hooked’ on gaming. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school and I was playing my third or fourth session of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Within the game, our adventuring party was travelling to a nearby city so that the paladin in the group could compete in a sword-fighting tournament and win glory for his god. As dusk approached a thunderstorm began and our party was forced into the woods seeking shelter. Eventually, we found a man- made entrance carved into the rock wall of a cliff. On either side stood two large onyx statues depicting a minor deity worshiped by vampires in the area. The entrance looked deserted so, after much debate between members of our adventuring party, we entered the cave. As the last of us passed the threshold, entering the long hallway before us, the statue groaned and crumbled to the ground, blocking any avenue of retreat and leaving us shrouded in darkness. At the moment when our Dungeon Master (DM) described the statues crashing down behind us, I as a player felt 1 a shiver of fear that literally shook me. I could feel anxiety building, and as I looked around on the other players faces, I could see they felt it too. My fellow players and I had all experienced a moment of very powerful immersion, and had a physical, bodily reaction to it. It mattered little that we were a group of teenage boys sitting around our friends’ kitchen table at two in the morning. It mattered little that we were far from any caves or any danger (apart from running out of snacks and soda); we all experienced a moment of shared and constructed fear, brought about by nothing other than our friends’ masterful storytelling and our own investment in the game of storytelling. Ever since that morning I have found myself fascinated with tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). I have been playing and running them for years, trying to achieve those rare moments of full immersion, trying to help others find them, and generally enjoying the opportunity to exercise my imagination with good friends, while creating a memorable story. For the most part, my own experiences with playing and running TRPGs have focused on horror-themed games, thanks, most likely, in no small part to the previously mentioned story. Aside from the sheer joy of play, I have always had a bit of an academic interest in TRPGs. I have been fascinated by the notion that people can jointly tell a story to which none of them know the conclusion. I have been interested in how TRPGs have encouraged other players and myself to look at the world differently, and I have found myself fascinated with the levels of immersion achievable through the ritualized activity of play. In an attempt to answer these questions I will examine two horror- themed TRPGs which have been highly influential over the years, Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade. First being published in 1981, the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game is one of the longest running role-playing game lines in the industry. Call of Cthulhu was published a scant seven 2 years after the first printing of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax’s industry-founding Dungeons and Dragons.1 While Call of Cthulhu has never achieved the popular media exposure or industry popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, it has nonetheless endured and thrived. Call of Cthulhu has won numerous industry awards over its thirty years and many editions.2 Award highlights include: 1981 Game Designer's Guild Select Award, 1982 Origins Awards Best Role Playing Game, 1985 Games Day Award Best Role Playing Game, 1986 Games Day Award Best Contemporary Role Playing Game, 1994 Gamer's Choice Award Hall of Fame, 1995 Origins Award Hall of Fame, and in 2003 GamingReport.com readers voted it as the Number One Gothic/Horror RPG.3 As plainly acknowledged in the sixth edition of Call of Cthulhu, “This game was first published in 1981. At that time, three major national awards were issued in the United States for excellence in game design. Call of Cthulhu won all three”.4 Based on the collected works of celebrated American horror and science-fiction writer Howard Phillip Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu encourages players to play the roles of investigators looking into the supernatural horrors lurking in the shadows of its fictional version of the real world (Circa 1890’s, 1920’s and the modern day). Unlike many fantasy-themed TRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, the focus of Call of Cthulhu is not fighting monsters but instead uncovering their secrets, retaining character’s sanity, and preventing the return of ancient god- like beings called the great old ones.5 As presented in the Introduction to the core book: If you have ever been enthralled by a ghost story or spellbound by a horror movie, you are in for a treat. Part the veil that separates frail humanity from the terror that lurks beyond space and time. Investigate forgotten ruins, haunted woods, and nameless menaces.6 This theme of investigation into the unknown and unnamable can be seen beyond the Call of Cthulhu game. The gaming themes first developed by Chaosium Inc. have spread to many other games, coinciding with a greater popular culture awareness of Lovecraft’s works. 3 Chaosium Inc. has agreed to license the core concepts of their game system to other TRPG companies ( as evidenced in Wizards of the Coast’s 2001 d20 Call of Cthulhu, Green Ronin’s 2008 Shadows of Cthulhu, Pelagrane Press’s 2008 Trail of Cthulhu, and Pinnacle Entertainment’s 2009 Realms of Cthulhu). Chaosium has used the popularity of Call of Cthulhu to engage in horizontal integration as well, with brief forays into the ancillary markets of collectable card games (Mythos and Call of Cthulhu Living Card Game), portable and non- portable videogames (Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, Call of Cthulhu), Live Action Role- Playing Games (Cthulhu Live) and miniature figurines (produced through Grenadier Models). Furthermore, the Cthulhu mythos has seen a recent explosion of exposure in several other markets with the release of stuffed animals, re-printings of Lovecraft’s original works, films such as Andrew Leman’s The Call of Cthulhu (2005), board games such as the award-winning Arkham Horror, and a host of other merchandise. While it would be foolish to claim Call of Cthulhu as solely responsible for this resurgence in Lovecraftian horror, its success did provide an early showing of the sustainability of a Lovecraft niche market.