cosmic-horror-register

name

cosmic-horror-register

description

Tone, diction, and sensory palette for cosmic-horror game narrative — Lovecraftian, weird-fiction, eldritch, Arkham-adjacent, deep-time or deep-space dread. Use when writing or reviewing in-game text, story bibles, item descriptions, or interstitials for a cosmic-horror game; when horror prose reads as generic spooky rather than cosmic; when the mystery is being over-explained; or when a draft is leaning on words like eldritch, unspeakable, or indescribable to do the work. Also the worked example of the six-slot register template — read the Register template section to build folk-horror, noir, comic, or any other tonal register the same way. Layers on top of game-narrative-craft, which supplies the structural rules; this skill supplies only tone.

Cosmic Horror Register

Purpose: Supply the tonal layer for cosmic-horror game narrative — what the prose sounds like, what it may name, and what it must refuse to explain.

Sources: The tradition is Lovecraft, Blackwood (The Willows, 1907), M. R. James, and their modern successors — see Slot 6 for the reading list, which is the citation. The technique claims below are derived from close reading of the Arkham Horror LCG: Edge of the Earth campaign guide (FFG, 2022), measured alongside game-narrative-craft's corpora; they are observations of practice, not sourced findings. The trap-word budget is posture B under the Numbers Policy.

This skill is tone only. Passage length, choice construction, branching, the information-state ledger, and the AI-tell blacklist all live in game-narrative-craft. Read that first; this is the coat of paint, and a coat of paint over bad structure is still bad structure.

Also a template. This is instance one of a six-slot register format. The final section shows how to build another.

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Slot 1 — The scale rule

The defining structural fact of cosmic horror, and the one most drafts miss.

The threat is cosmic-large. The payoff is human-small.

After an Antarctic expedition nearly ends the world, the published epilogue gives you: two scientists awkwardly arranging dinner, two men planning a vacation, a mechanic and a pilot bickering about a cloth. Not one line of it is about the horror. Every beat is conditioned on who survived, so the player's losses are what make the surviving pairs mean anything.

The cosmic supplies the pressure. The human supplies everything the player actually feels. A draft where the climax and the resolution are both cosmic has no resolution — it has two climaxes and a reader who has stopped caring.

Rule: scale the threat up and the payoff down. If the ending is as large as the middle, the ending is missing.

Test: name the smallest human thing the player gets back at the end. If there isn't one, or if it's "humanity survives," the payoff hasn't been written.

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Slot 2 — Ineffability, dramatized

Cosmic horror turns on things that cannot be described. Almost every draft handles this by asserting that they cannot be described, which is the one move guaranteed not to work — the reader is told a fact about the author's vocabulary instead of being shown a thing.

Never assert ineffability. Dramatize a specific representational failure.

The horror is not "an indescribable shape." It is a drawing whose lines "disintegrate into a tangle of light strokes and splotches of ink." Concrete artifact, concrete failure, and the reader does the rest.

Working forms, in rough order of reliability:

form	what breaks	example shape
The failed record	a drawing, photograph, recording, map	the sketch dissolves into hatching
The failed witness	a person's account	he describes it three times, differently, and does not notice
The failed instrument	a compass, thermometer, film, clock	the exposure comes back fogged in one corner only
The failed language	a translation, a name	the word has no verb form; the transcriber left a gap
The failed body	involuntary physical response	your hand has already put the page down

Rule: the reader must be told what specifically broke. "He couldn't describe it" is an assertion. "He described it three times and each account contradicted the last, and he did not notice" is a scene.

The vocabulary trap

These words announce the genre and then do no work. Each one is the label on a feeling the prose was supposed to produce.

eldritch · unspeakable · indescribable · unknowable · maddening · cyclopean · non-Euclidean · gibbering · blasphemous · unnameable · squamous · abhorrent · the void · ancient evil · primordial darkness

They are not banned — Lovecraft used them and the tradition carries them. But each costs one, and the budget is roughly one per thousand words. If two appear in a 200-word vignette, the vignette is describing its genre rather than its events.

The test: delete the word. If the sentence loses nothing, it was doing nothing. If the sentence collapses, the sentence was resting on it, which is worse.

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Slot 3 — Sensory palette

What this register notices, and in what proportion. Cosmic horror is cold, quiet, and wrong in the details — not loud, not gory, not fast.

Leads with: temperature, silence and its interruptions, texture, geometry that doesn't resolve, smell (badly underused and highly effective), duration and deep time, scale mismatch.

Underuses: colour (except where it is wrong — a wrong colour is worth ten adjectives), sound as volume, blood, speed.

Signature moves:

• The detail that is almost right. A five-pointed snow grave. Doors sized for something with a different number of limbs. The wrongness should be specifiable in one clause and never remarked upon by the narrator.
• Deep time as pressure. The horror is old, was here first, and will be here after. Convey through evidence — strata, wear, a city's plan — never through a character saying "aeons."
• Absence over presence. The empty camp, the interrupted meal, the equipment still running. What is missing beats what is there.
• The instrument that disagrees. Two measurements that cannot both be true, reported flatly.

Physical vocabulary that carries weight without announcing the genre: strata, hoarfrost, aperture, articulation, specimen, provenance, subsidence, attenuation, telemetry, remains, interval, the wrong number of.

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Slot 4 — What is never explained

Cosmic horror is the genre most damaged by resolution, and AI drafts resolve compulsively — the model has the design document and wants to be helpful.

Never explain:

• What the entity wants. Motive is a human category and applying it shrinks the thing to a monster.
• Why the protagonists specifically. Cosmic indifference is the genre's thesis; "you were chosen" is a different genre.
• The full mechanism. Partial mechanism is dread; complete mechanism is engineering.
• The callback, ever (see game-narrative-craft).

Do explain, precisely:

• What physically happened, at the level of what a camera would record.
• What the rules are, when they are mechanics the player must play against.
• What each character believes, including when they are wrong — especially when they are wrong, and when two of them are wrong differently.

The seam matters: fog the ontology, sharpen the events. A reader who cannot follow the sequence of physical events is confused, not unsettled. Confusion reads as bad writing, because usually it is.

The explanation ratchet

Once explained, permanently spent. Design the campaign's reveals as a one-directional budget and write down, before drafting, what will still be unexplained at the end. If that list is empty, the ending will disappoint no matter how well the last passage is written.

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Slot 5 — Register and period

Default: 1920s–1930s educated Anglo-American, lightly formal, unhurried. Scientists, academics, professionals. Complete sentences. Understatement under pressure — the register does not raise its voice, which is what makes the moments it does raise its voice land.

Failbetter's rule transfers exactly: period style is seasoning, not an ingredient. A few period-correct nouns and one syntactic habit will do more than sustained pastiche, which reads as costume and slows the reader down.

Practical calibration

• Sentences run longer than modern prose, but clauses stay short. The rhythm is accumulative, not tangled.
• No modern idiom. Okay, guys, deal with it, freaked out break the spell instantly.
• Contractions in dialogue, sparingly in narration.
• Professional vocabulary is period-accurate and used casually — a character who says "specimen" without explaining it is more convincing than one who lectures.
• Dialect rendered phonetically for one character maximum. One is characterization; three is noise.

The inherited problem. The tradition this register descends from carries explicit racism, and its prose encodes it — "degenerate" bloodlines, horror located in foreign or non-white bodies, dread of the coastal outsider. That material is not neutral genre furniture and reproducing it uncritically means shipping it.

Keep: cosmic indifference, deep time, the failure of knowledge, the insignificance of human scale. That is the actual engine. Drop: heredity-as-corruption, the outsider as contaminant, physiognomy as moral evidence. Locate horror in place, time, and knowledge — never in ancestry. Modern work in the tradition does this routinely and loses nothing; the genre is stronger without it.

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Slot 6 — Tuning forks

Short passages read immediately before drafting, to set rhythm. Not for quotation — for cadence.

• Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness — opening paragraphs. The reluctant-witness frame and the accumulative sentence.
• Blackwood, The Willows — the best in the tradition at dread from landscape alone, with no creature on the page.
• M. R. James — for restraint and for how little is needed.
• Ligotti, Kiernan, Jemisin's deep-time material — modern register without the inherited freight.

Published campaigns use these structurally too: an attributed epigraph opens the campaign and another opens the designer's notes, bracketing the whole. It is a cheap and effective way to declare register before the first line of your own prose.

Rule: read one page of the fork before drafting; quote it only where the fiction gives you a reason. An unattributed borrowed cadence is influence. An unattributed borrowed sentence is a problem.

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Review checklist

Run after the game-narrative-craft checklist, not instead of it.

• Is the payoff human-scaled while the threat is cosmic?
• Is any ineffability asserted rather than dramatized as a specific failure?
• Vocabulary-trap words: more than one per thousand words?
• Does each trap word survive the deletion test?
• Is the wrong detail specifiable in one clause, and left unremarked?
• Can the reader follow the physical sequence of events exactly?
• Has anything been explained that the ratchet budget wanted kept?
• Is deep time conveyed by evidence rather than by a character saying so?
• Any modern idiom? Any sustained pastiche?
• Is horror located in place, time, or knowledge — never ancestry?

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Register template

To build another register — folk horror, noir, comic fantasy, hopepunk, techno-thriller — fill the same six slots. deadpan-institutional-register is the worked second instance: it shares nothing with this one but structure, which is the evidence that the slots are the reusable part. The slots are the reusable part; everything above is one filling of them.

slot	question it answers	what a filled slot looks like
1. Scale rule	What size is the threat, and what size is the payoff?	Cosmic horror: threat large, payoff small. Noir inverts it — small crime, civic-scale rot. Folk horror: the threat is local and the payoff is escape or absorption.
2. Signature move	What is this genre's central technique, stated as a procedure?	Cosmic: dramatize representational failure. Noir: the detail that indicts. Folk horror: the ritual described as ordinary.
3. Sensory palette	What does it notice, what does it underuse, what physical vocabulary carries it?	Lead senses, deliberately underused senses, a word list.
4. Never explained	What must stay dark, what must be sharp, and what's the reveal budget?	The fog-ontology/sharpen-events seam, plus a ratchet.
5. Register and period	Diction, sentence rhythm, era, dialect policy — and what the tradition carries that shouldn't ship.	Calibration bullets and an explicit inherited-problem section.
6. Tuning forks	What to read for cadence immediately before drafting.	3–5 short sources, with a rule about quotation.

Two constraints on a new register:

1. Every slot gets a falsifiable test. A slot that says "capture the atmosphere of the moors" is a weak ask — free to comply with, changes no decision. Slot 1 above has "name the smallest human thing the player gets back"; slot 2 has the deletion test. If you cannot write the test, you have not understood the slot yet.
2. The vocabulary trap list is mandatory and specific. Every register has words that announce the genre and do no work. Name them and set a budget. For noir: rain-slicked, dame, the city never sleeps. For folk horror: the old ways, wicker, the harvest. This list is the single highest-yield part of a register skill, because it is the part that converts a vibe into a check.

Ground a new register in at least two sources of opposite temperament, the way game-narrative-craft does — see ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/game-narrative-craft/references/source-analysis.md. One source produces a house style and mislabels it as a genre.

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Cross-references

• game-narrative-craft — structure, compression, the information-state ledger, AI tells. Read first; this skill assumes it.
• narrative-design — quest architecture and branch budget.
• game-vision — whether cosmic horror is the right register for the game at all, which is a question this skill does not ask.

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Cross-References

Three tight links. Everything else routes through the map, so adding a skill touches one file rather than twenty: references/routing-map.md (in game-design).

• game-narrative-craft — Structure; read it first, this assumes it
• narrative-design — Quest architecture and branch budget