Casting Shadows

This is the twentieth day of #RPGaDAY2025 and today the prompt on the shelf is the word enter. Another movie memory surfaced with this prompt – not immediately upon finalizing the list of prompts like with the Princess Bride and Fezzik, but just today as I sat down to learn what was in my mind to type.

It shifts the prompt a little bit from enter, to allow to enter, but in this campaign – as we alluded to earlier – the struggles ahead of the characters will be moral and ethical, not just physical or supernatural. Once the characters step from the light of the normal and safely lit confines of polite society into the darkness of the unknown, the hidden, the corrupt, and the unknowable – what will those new circumstances change about them?

Day 19: Enter

In Harrison Ford’s sadly short Bogart period, he did a film in called Witness which was released in 1985. In the clip above, we are told compassionately as a warning, that “…What we take into our hands, we take into our hearts.”

The tools we use change us.

Once across the threshold and through the gate of what we conceive of as part of us, how can we ever easily discern it as different from us again? That hitherto alien idea has taken up residence inside the gates of our hearts and united with what was there before. If that idea is a corrupting one…?

How does a heroic and stalwart hero, dedicated in the battle to protect innocence and keep good people safe without resorting to tactics which separate them from those people?

It is said, though things like popular fiction and film goad us to forget that in the contest between the clean and unclean thing, it is the touch of the unclean which triumphs. When good soldiers on into hell to do battle with evil… does it return as good soldiers when the fighting is done?

In pulp heroics, of course, the answer is yes. Resistance to evil is a tide of rolling back the spread of it, guarded by faith and unflinching principle. The dark thing never enters the hand. It’s an abstraction to prove a point – and a powerful one – that we can and indeed must oppose evil where it lives and breeds.

Away from that simple abstraction, however, everything is harder to see – especially without practice. It is easy to be deluded into using the tactics of the enemy to strike a blow, and in so doing become the thing you opposed in the first place. Eventually, nothing and no one could tell you apart. The further from this abstraction of heroics we go, the harder it is to ‘go ye out from among them and be ye separate.‘

In cosmic horror…?

In cosmic horror all that we are is undone in the face of a universe in which we are incidental accidents. In our opposition to the forces barely constrained by that universe, we become as meaningless as any notion of understanding we seek to layer over the ineffable forces at work around us.

In cosmic horror, we must find the way to assert what we are, at the point where we can matter, in ways that only we can matter, and for reasons which matter only to us – otherwise we contribute to and realize our own negation.

In Leagues of Cthulhu, a healthy part of this question can be explored with the Corruption mechanism, if the actions taken by a character align them with the darkness and inhuman and inhumane ideals.

When we enter the darkness, will we carry light within us, or will we allow that darkness to enter us in turn to snuff it out?

See you tomorrow for Day 21: Unexpected