The Necronomicon does not cause insanity.

[Geoffrey]

The following are all of the stories by H. P. Lovecraft that mention and/or quote from the Necronomicon:

1. The Nameless City
2. The Hound
3. The Festival
4. The Call of Cthulhu
5. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
6. The Dunwich Horror
7. The Whisperer in Darkness
8. At the Mountains of Madness
9. Dreams in the Witch-House
10. Through the Gates of the Silver Key
11. The Thing on the Doorstep
12. The Shadow Out of Time
13. The Haunter of the Dark

Nowhere in any of these stories does reading the Necronomicon make the reader go insane. It makes them shudder and recoil from the blasphemous truths contained therein, but they do not go insane. I do not doubt that other authors write about characters going insane simply because they read the Necronomicon, but Lovecraft never did that.

CoC gamemasters who wish to more closely approximate Lovecraft’s stories might want to consider dropping the sanity penalty for reading the Necronomicon.

 

[Tom Cashel]

Except that none of those characters actually reads the Necronomicon from cover to cover. And just because your PC loses sanity points doesn't mean that the character is "insane."

It just means that the character is a little more unstable, a little more twitchy...which is what happens in just about all of those stories.

 

[jrients]

The following are all of the stories by H. P. Lovecraft that mention and/or quote from the Necronomicon:

You must understand that Lovecraft himself never read the Necronomicom. He merely had a description of it in his father's papers, who himself only briefly saw a copy a high-level meeting of the Ancient Rite of Mizraim & Memphis. The CoC stats are more accurate than Lovercaft's story in most respects.

 

[trancejeremy]

Well, none of the books actually cause you to go nuts, it's just they lower the sanity. If your nerves are already frayed, it could cause you to snap further. But not the average person.

 

[Tom Cashel]

Some sources claim that the copy of the Necronomicon which Adam Weishaupt owned was the von Junzt German translation; this, however, is unlikely, as von Junzt lived in the nineteenth century. The Necronomicon involved was probably either Olaus Wormius' Latin edition or the original Arabic, as the details of the illustrations would attest.

And we all know what reading the Necronomicon caused Adam Weishaupt to do...

 

[Henry]

Tom, that link is awesome...

...Excuse me, I'm going to go burn some CD's now (with A TORCH)...

 

[Yellow Sign]

From a letter from H.P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith (1930):

Mention of Clark Ashton Smith's ghoul [?], and his adventures. But some timid reader has torn out the pages of the Necronomicon where the Episode of the Vault comes to a climax -- the deletion being curiously uniform in the copies at Harvard and at Miskatonic University. When Lovecraft wrote to the University of Paris for information about the missing text, a polite sub-librarian, M. Léon de Verchéres, wrote to him that he would make him a photostatic copy as soon as he could comply with the formalities attendant upon access to the dreaded volume. Unfortunately, it was not long afterward that Lovecraft learned of M. de Verchéres' sudden insanity and incarceration, and of his attempt to burn the hideous book which he had just secured and consulted. Thereafter Lovecraft's requests met with scant notice.

 

[Wombat]

Just accept it as one of the many differences between Lovecraftian literature and the game CoC.

 

[Desdichado]

Errr, only a difference in Geoffrey's interpretation. Aren't you the guy who started that thread a few weeks ago about only allowing like half a dozen spells as "canonical" mythos spells too?

 

[shadow]

Well, I'm not so sure of the necronomicon, but I do know for a fact that reading Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time can cause insanity. (I'm actually serious about this! Have you ever known anyone taking a high level physics course? They're all a little freaky - like they've learned the horrible cosmics truths!)