Caveat 1: This is version 0.0001a of this document. Not only is it massively incomplete and fragmentary, but what text there is could change at any second.
Caveat 2: Lovecraft Country is derivative of TFOS, Mythos, and Call of Cthluhu in many ways, so familiarity with those games is essential to understanding LC. A general grounding in anime and the works of HP Lovecraft and imitators won't hurt either.
Caveat 3: This document is written in second person, with "You" referring to both the player and the character, and sometimes even to the GM. If you (the reader) can't reliably make this distinction, please replace all your (the reader's) gaming material with Bible commentary and your (the reader's) CD collection with Amy Grant so that you (the reader) don't make the rest of us (depraved gamer weirdos) look bad when you (the reader) snap.
Caveat 3a: Where characters are referred to in the third person, female pronouns are used, and where players are referred to in the third person, male pronouns are used. This is because the designer honestly expects that all players will be pimply teenaged nerdboys playing top-heavy cheerleaders.
The premise of the game Lovecraft Country is simple to state: you are a student at a special high school intended to teach teenagers to deal with the unspeakable alien horror lurking behind the thin facade of sanity and normalcy the human mind uses to plaster over the truth of a universe in which humanity has no more power or importance than the hive of small ants currently colonizing your kitchen. The name, obviously, is a reference to the famous 1930s horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who is probably spinning in his grave at the way we're playing his works for cheap laughs.
Within the game, the phrase "Lovecraft Country" is a bit of Miskatonic University slang that has escaped its pentacle to ravage the countryside. People not in the know use it incorrectly to mean the part of Massachussetts around Arkham and Innsmouth, but they don't get it. Lovecraft Country is not a place on any map, not even Professor Waturin's charts of the higher exo-dimensions. It's a phenomenon, the crumbling of the aforementioned facade of sanity (which, in practice, has about the strength of wet papier-mache), and a state of mind, the realization that the facade has crumbled. Anywhere you go, from the darkness of the New England forests to the glittering center of Los Angeles to the extra-dimensional analogues of distant planets, you can be in Lovecraft Country while someone standing next to you is completely oblivious. (Okay, maybe not in that last case.)
As a student at Howard Phillips Lovecraft Memorial High School, you get to be a permanent resident of Lovecraft Country. Just sign this waiver, please.
HPL High is the creation of a bunch of tenured lunatics at Miskatonic University. Miskatonic U has always been at the forefront of exploring the abnatural and foiling its threats to humanity, but that gets a bit hard on the researchers. Even if an investigator manages to avoid being dissolved, impaled, buried alive, incinerated, drowned, or just plain eaten, she's usually completely bonkers by the time she reaches a full professorship. This, obviously, is because by the time someone is old enough to be a grad student, her brain has already fossilized too much to deal with the horrors of Lovecraft Country. So (reasoned the old geezers) future investigators should be trained from an age early enough to retain mental flexibility, but old enough to carry their elders to safety. After some experimentation we'll gloss over, they decided that means teenagers.
That means you.With the assistance of the Arkham city council (loyal Miskatonic alumni, all), the juggernaut of secondary education that is HPL High was set in motion, crushing all in its path. The students, drawn from all walks of life (but primarily from families unwilling to go through the formality of disinheritance proceedings), are to be instructed by hand-picked faculty in the wide array of abstruse arts and sciences necessary to a full understanding of the abnatural, thus adapting their still putty-like brains to Lovecraft Country. It is assumed that the natural rigors of high school life will acclimate you to the impalment, drowning, and so forth.
Despite the allegations cast by some, HPL High is not a "school full of monsters". Almost all of the students are human. Maybe kind of funny-looking, definitely eccentric, but human.
A few are perhaps not quite as human as the rest: tainted by Deep One or Serpent People ancestry, mutated by their parents' exposure to the abnatural, or rebuilt as an AP Biology project. But they're still mostly human. Really.
Only a tiny handful of HPL High students are actually blasphemous abominations. To even grasp the concept of high school, an abomination would need to be highly corrupted by human ways of thought, and Vice-Principal Marks keeps a sharp eye out for insidious infiltrators, so the monsters that make it through the enrollment process often act more normal than the allegedly human students!
It's important to remember that "human" doesn't equal "boring". Even if you were normal as a frosh, you won't be by your sophomore year, and most HPL High students aren't normal when they enter. They come from all over the world, and, mentally speaking, from way beyond that. Many of them have been raised by experienced (read: loony) investigators who may have been exposed to bizarre alien radiations and chemicals. Others come by their quirks and obsessions naturally (if that word has any meaning). It's true that some rebel against all the weirdness around them by becoming insanely square and vanilla, but those are often the scariest ones. Especially when they snap...
The broad outlines of student life at HPL High are the same as at any American high school: schedule regimented by clangorous bells, free expression quashed by an uncaring staff, bizarre locker mates, sadistic PE teachers, detention, social cliques everyone except you gets to join, homework, violent team sports, pop quizzes, incomprehensible teachers, those silly little desk-chair things, Homecoming, and more detention. It's the details that are different, especially the unpleasant ones.
All high-school students have problems, of course, and it's a good thing they do: overcoming adversity is most of the fun of a game. However, the problems faced by students at HPL High are slightly different than those afflicting students of other schools. Here are a few examples to illustrate the differences.
| Normal High School Student Problem | HPL High Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Cafeteria food is nauseatingly repulsive | Cafeteria food turns students into brain-sucking zombies |
| Homework assignment requires you to go to library to do research | Homework assignment requires you to go to the lost city of G'harne in central Africa to do research |
| Freshmen reviled and abused by upperclassmen | Freshmen used for target practice, blood sacrifice, and biology experiments by upperclassmen |
| Weird icky geek has crush on you and keeps asking you out | Blasphemous horror from the deeps of space has a crush on you and keeps asking you to host its larvae |
| Advanced classes cause hair loss and sleeplessness due to stress | Advanced classes cause hair growth and nocturnal behavior due to genetic mutation |
| Thugs beat you up behind the gym and steal your lunch money | Thugs in powered armor blow up your car in the parking lot and steal your Shining Trapezohedron |
| After-school job exposes you to toxic levels of grease fumes | After-school job exposes you to lethal levels of ionizing radiation |
| Attendance at boring pep rallies mandatory on penalty of detention | Attendance at terrifying ceremonies mandatory for protective spells to take effect |
| Parents want you in the house by 10pm on school nights | Parents want you in protective pentacle from dusk until dawn every night Aldebaran is in the sky |
| Boyfriend pressures you to have sex | Boyfriend pressures you to participate in orgiastic rites to lure Outer Gods down from interstellar space |
| Jocks stuff you into trashcan | Sorcerors stuff you into dimensional gate |
| Popular, rich, goodlooking students form snooty cliques and look down on everyone else | Some things are universal |
This is not to say that attending HPL High doesn't have significant benefits. For the academically-minded, there is the opportunity to study subjects not taught in more staid institutions, such as Quantum Theurgy, Ancient Akkadian Literature, Xenobiology, Speculative Civilizations, and Applied Hyperdimensional Geometry. For the not-quite-so academically-minded, HPL High has exotic lust objects to appeal to even the most perverse set of hormones, drugs the DEA would quake in fear at, and music to fracture the walls of reality. How can you lose?
This file was last modified at 0948 on 13Dec99 by trip@idiom.com.