Awe-ful

There is a particular kind of emotion that, in my experience, is easily forgotten in our world of algorithms and explanations but that once held a central place in human experience. I’m speaking of awe, not merely in its diluted modern sense, but in its original meaning: a mixture of wonder and fear in the face of something vast, strange, and beyond human comprehension. It’s a feeling that borders on the religious and it is the lifeblood of the weird and the uncanny.

H.P. Lovecraft understood this, perhaps better than most writers of the last hundred years. Through his work, he attempted to refine the weird tale it into a kind of secular mysticism, in which the cosmos itself becomes the site of both revelation and terror. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, he famously wrote that 

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” 

However, Lovecraft’s best stories do more than simply terrify. They evoke awe in its fullest sense, what he elsewhere calls a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” When he describes beings whose very geometry defies human perception or ancient truths that shatter the minds of those who grasp them, he is evoking something far deeper than mere fright. He is pointing toward the sublime.

Sigmund Freud distinguished between the "uncanny" and the "familiar," noting how the former is not simply the unknown, but the strangely known, the familiar made alien. Lovecraft seized on this psychological dissonance and expanded it to include the entire cosmos. His monsters are not just unknowable; they are that which we once knew in some long-buried dream of pre-human memory. The sense of uncanny recognition is part of the horror. It is this effect, more than mere violence or gore, that marks the best weird fiction.

Of course, horror is only part of the equation. What often goes unspoken is how beautiful the weird can be. The shimmering city of the Elder Things beneath the ice of Antarctica; the dream-haunted vistas of Kadath; the mind-transcending journey of Randolph Carter through the stars. These are not scenes of mere terror. They are awe-inspiring in the truest sense – sublime and strange, but also profoundly glorious. Lovecraft understood that what we call horror and what we call wonder are not always distinct categories. The numinous is a threshold. The emotion it provokes may be colored by fear, reverence, or ecstasy or some combination of the three.

Naturally, this brings me to roleplaying games.

When I think back to my earliest experiences with RPGs, what strikes me most is how often they trafficked in awe. I'm not talking about desperate combats or puzzles to be solved, but fleeting and fragile moments when the game evoked something stranger and deeper. A mysterious door that could not be opened. A statue with eyes that seemed to follow you. A creature whose motives and nature eluded simple categorization. In those moments, even the purple prose of boxed text or the improvisations of a teenaged Dungeon Master could occasionally brush up against the ineffable. 

This is, I think, one of the great potentials of the roleplaying medium: its ability to resurrect feelings that modern life has largely anesthetized, like wonder before the uncanny. These feelings are not mere tropes to be mined, but modes of perception, ways of seeing the world as something deeper and more alive with meaning and strangeness.

Lovecraft feared the loss of these feelings in modernity. It's ironic that he is most famous for his fiction, because Supernatural Horror in Literature, an essay of literary criticism, is undeniably one of his greatest works. There, he laments the triumph of the merely rational in fiction and calls for a return to cosmic awe, a feeling that transcends individual psychology and touches something vast and impersonal. He believed that the weird tale could restore "the stimulation of wonder and fancy." It's no surprise, then, that his own work (and the many games it inspired) have done exactly that for generations of readers and players.

Perhaps that is the true function of the weird tale (or the weird game): to break through the crust of the mundane and let in something ancient, fearful, and magnificent. Weird tales remind us that the universe is, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine and that, in the face of that strangeness, we are still capable of awe.