ABSTRACT
Chaosium’s role-playing game Call of Cthulhu marks a further point of departure of the “Lovecraftian” from H. P. Lovecraft’s work by asking players to create their own adventures in the heterocosm. This chapter explores the use of space in Lovecraft, and the mental conditions encountered by his characters, which will later be relevant in thinking about the player experience of dungeon-crawler games. It compares these games to a selection of Lovecraft’s short fiction, demonstrating their engagement with the same “primal” causes of fear. Lovecraft produced a body of fiction that reaches imaginative heights but spends a lot of time in thematic depths that continue to resonate with readers and authors. Lovecraft’s stories frequently employ the recurring trope of madness within, maintaining a consistent link between inner and outer forces, and the ways that the latter can impact the human mind. Crawl’s mechanic of becoming the monster is also an articulation of Lovecraft’s fears.
