Grotesque, gruesome, gory, gooey, glistening, gross. These are all lovely G words that can describe a certain type of horror. Not just body horror, but the kind of horror that sits in your stomach and turns it in knots. The kind of horror that gels in you and makes you shudder at the same time that it makes you want to vomit. It's disgust in its purest and most vile of all forms, and I don't just mean of death, slimy and squamous rugose terrors, or things with too many eyes and teeth and tentacles, either.
To qualify for this list, they have to have personally gotten under my skin or have a general hive-mind consensus amongst fans that they are considered disturbing, stomach-churning, and altogether just plain nasty. This is not just your bog standard dead bodies, fates worse than death, and terrible secrets either - this is stuff that anyone would have a hard time keeping their lunch down over, or would make any player look at the Keeper in abject horror and shock that they'd ever go there. Just being twisted is not enough, it also has to be gross - after all, plenty of CoC games are twisted without blood and viscera. Nor is it enough to get visceral - ghouls eat human corpses all the time, and finding dead bodies, cannibalism, and other such things are pretty standard for CoC. No, it need to have something... else going for it, something a bit more special, something that by its very concept is more disturbing than average. The scenarios chosen for the list may or may not offend, and may or may not deal with darker than average themes, but one thing is certain - after reading or playing these giblets, you're not going to wanna eat any time soon.
Off the table as usual are the MULA and fan made scenarios. Sure, plenty of those exist, and many of them are pretty gruesome and disturbing, but we are strictly scouring for polished things that have been professionally published. Companies other than Chaosium are allowed as are supplements and source-books, but if there's not a playable scenario in there, it doesn't count. That means that no matter how disturbing Carcosa is or how grotesque things are under the King's mask, a source-book about the City on Lake Hali with no playable material included wouldn't make the cut. Big campaign chapters or modules for big campaigns are allowed, but not whole campaigns, otherwise this list would just read as a list of campaigns Gen likes. All eras of play, all settings, and all stripes are allowed so long as it's feasibly disturbing. Also, bear in mind this is only my silly little opinion. You may well find these not disgusting at all, or may believe others should go on this list. Be advised as well that spoilers do abound for almost all of these scenarios - you have been warned.
8. Bloody Botany, Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion: And my obsession with the Crawling Chaos continues. Masks is popular for many reasons, and the fact it's an epic length tale is one of them as is the fact it's Pulp. This makes a fun cult conspiracy mix, but oh lord does it put the players in some unenviable, gross situations that are very memorable. In the first 20 minutes of the campaign, you find your friend Jackson Elias hacked to death in a hotel room. Then there's the sex ritual involving Lesser Other Gods in London at Misr House! Still not enough for you? Fine, how about Kenya's Mountain of the Black Wind, where you not only meet the Bloody Tongue God, but find poor Hypatia Masters turned into a womb-sack for Nyar's terrible progeny? And then, if you aren't fast enough or do the wrong thing, she explodes as it is born, spraying you with vile fluids and gore, and making your job that much harder? Not to mention the squicky implications of getting it on with a Chaos Deity, APP of 90 be damned!
A tough guy, huh? Well bitch, let me introduce you to Shanghai. Oh good lord, Shanghai. You know what Mask calls Shanghai home and makes its cultists squick central? I got three words for you, kid: The Bloated Woman. Even her name sounds gross, evoking images of a bloated corpse floating in a river. She hides behind a black fan, but when she drops it she's got a serious case of Butterface going on, as well as the rest of her. Might as well call her a Buttereverything, and no, sorry, but your acid-weeping Masked Messengers and malformed Skeletal Horrors got nothing on that. Oh, and in the poem dedicated to her you can find in the game, she is the kinkiest perv into some of the most horrific forms of sexual congress known. Now, there's nothing wrong with some kinky sex, but it's also not hard to turn squee into squick, and I'm sure you can think of a few instances of that. If that's not enough, there's her cult. Dear God, her cult. They are some sick motherfuckers that let Deep Ones rape people, cut off people's arms and offer them to their goddess, and probably are every bit as sexually depraved as she is.
Oh, but it gets worse. In the MoN Companion, there's a lovely little scenario called Bloody Botany, which could make this list all on its own. What's it about? Oh, a torture garden of flayed cult victims feeding the plants, meat grinders used to make human fertilizer, people who have been colonized by poison mushrooms the cult uses to kill victims in terrible ways, and more that the Investigators will need to discover for themselves. Oh, and "Torture Garden" is not my name for it, that's actually what the scenario calls it. There's even an option to get the Investigators kidnapped by the cult and sent here for "disposal". It's hideous, stomach-churning fun, and that's without the crime rampant streets of Shanghai in the 20's. The main reason Bloody Botany is this high up on the list is because all things considered, it's still not as sick all the way through as some other scenarios. There's simply more grotesque things that an Investigator can deal with than the awful experiments of the cult of a Butterface Goddess. Welcome aboard your slow boat to China, motherfucker, and remember - anything goes...
7. Mr. Corbitt, Mansions of Madness: Mad science? Check. A Dunwich Horror style Yog-Sothoth spawn? Check. Disturbing implications in a plot that is basically Rear Window but set in the 1920's with more Mythos? Check, check, and check. This scenario starts out like your typical Call of Cthulhu tale, but it quickly gets vile when the Investigators get nosy. See, the kind gardener neighbor, Mr. Corbitt, isn't who he seems to be. He's been affected by Yog-Sothoth, and has gotten his wife to give birth to a half-formed child-thing as a result. It must be finished before it can act as the bridge for Yoggy to cross over into our world.
So, what is a mad doctor trusted by the community to do? Simple - kill children and sew their body parts onto the child-thing to finish it, oh, and maybe create some flesh abominations from leftovers as you experiment, too. What about the ones that die? Just bury them in your garden as fertilizer. Your neighbors won't know, and besides, they've been happily eating your corpse-fertilized veggies for years now. If they decide to snoop, well, your greenhouse's curiously intelligent plants will stop that, and if not, the child can feed itself now...
Oh, and about that child-thing: it's essentially a wandering, walking flesh mound with childrens' arms and legs, and its mouth is on the bottom. Where does its digestive tract terminate? In way too many anuses on the top of its body, which are constantly oozing excrement just like any other baby. And of course it coos like an infant too for that extra disturbing factor, can't forget that lovely detail, can we? It's a really good scenario and very much recommended, is what I'm saying, but I really hope you don't like kids, because this scenario is absolutely going to make you never want to procreate again, just because. Fuck everything about babies, man, especially ones made of eldritch terror and human body parts created by a mad doctor. Kill it with fire, nuke the area, salt the earth, and never speak of it again or let anyone or anything near you or your female companion's womb. Ever.
6. The Blood Red Fez, Horror on the Orient Express: Someone kindly tell me why Nyarlathotep likes dealing in squick so much, because I would really love to know. HotOE is another one of those amazingly complex, long, epic campaigns that likes to have disturbing scenes in it, and unlike MoN, it's a disturbing implication the whole way through. See, there's this cult called the Brothers of the Skin in it that do... very gross things with flesh. Not only is their name disgusting and not only do they flay people to death, their trademark spells are horrific. They can warp their appearance to be anyone or anything. They can make all your skin rip itself off your body. They can skin your body and use your flesh as armor. They can make your flesh melt off your bones. They can flay your face off and use it like a mask and become you. And, if you're really unlucky, they skin your corpse and use it as the vessel for The Skinless One, the Nyarlathotep avatar du jour they worship. And of fucking course it has a gross name, it's a walking, talking, skinned corpse. What else are you going to call it?
Even that however pales in comparison to a little scenario for this lovely campaign known as The Blood Red Fez. The titular fez is an accursed thing, not only does it provide the right wearer great power, but it does something terrible to the wrong wearer. It's basically a parasite that latches on, slowly drains your energy and vitality, and then turns you into a horrific monster with a barbed tongue that feeds on blood. The blood, of course, gives the fez itself its lovely red hue. I don't know about you, but if I saw someone I knew wither into a stretched-skinned horrific husk of themselves before becoming a barbed-tongued monstrosity out to murder me, I would never trust any fezzes again. It gets even better though, there's multiple copies of the damn thing floating around once the Investigators get on the train; it's a situation just guaranteed to get the players frightened by anyone wearing a fez for the rest of their lives. I just... what monster came up with this scenario? Who the fuck hurt you? What fez-wearing madman infested your nightmares to the point you had to make everyone else terrified of a hat, too? I have no idea, and I don't want to know. All I know is that the Eleventh Doctor was absolutely fucking wrong. Fezzes are not cool, not cool at all, and I am never going to trust anyone who says they are again.
5. Sacraments of Evil, Sacraments of Evil: Now here's a Gaslight scenario that puts Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel murders to shame. The gist of this one involves a lloigor speaking to a man of the cloth through a statue of Jesus made with limestone that has a special clay impregnated into it. The lloigor wants power via worship to rise up and continue its reign of terror. How's it do this? Why, by convincing the weak-willed priest with some medical skill to kill people in the name of god, then extract and consume their pineal glands, of course! Said victims are usually women and often, the bodies happen to have cockroaches stuffed in the wounds as a macabre touch. Gruesome enough, isn't it, and gives new meaning to the phrase "God spoke to me". Imagine cockroaches crawling from the mouths of corpses, creeping free from bloody stab wounds, escaping from every orifice of the gore-slicked body of some prostitute victim found destroyed and carved up on the cobblestones outside the nearby church. Tasty.
Oh, and of course that's not all. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the complication of the weak-minded copycat killer in the scenario who is inspired by the aftershocks of lloigor-induced psychic interference to also start murdering people. His marks of choice? Why, young boys of course, who he just loves to rape, kill, remove the pineal glands of in the roughest and crudest manner possible, and then keeps them as trophies. Of course, the Investigators can find these and it's pretty damn horrid. So, pick your poison - who's worse? The child rapist and murderer who collects pineal glands, or the wolf in sheep's clothing that eats pineal glands? I know, I know... hard choice, isn't it? But believe it or not, there's one even worse than this one with a somewhat similar concept...
4. I Did What The Virgin Asked Of Me, Arkham Now: The Shan. Fuck absolutely everything about the Shan. They're body-snatching bugs that are into torture and horrible hedonism, and quite frankly, they are the Keeper being cheap and mean all at once if you ask me. You get precisely one Dodge roll against them, and if it fails, welcome to being body-snatched. But for as lame and overpowered as they are, there is one thing that they have going for them - the fact that parasites in any part of you, let alone your brain, are fucking gross and scary. You know what else is fucking gross and scary? Pedophile priests being covered up by the church. Now let's mix the two for extra squick. Welcome to the concept behind this scenario. Yes, this is a Modern Day scenario that Chaosium actually fucking published in a sourcebook, and it's about how the Insects from Shaggai have a portal through an image of the Virgin Mary that causes whomever looks on it to become infested by a Shan. What does this Shan do once in your head? Proceed to slowly make you into a pedophile and torture you the whole time with it, for the sake of sick thrill and satisfaction in the suffering of multiple others.
Holy fucking shit, even for Call of Cthulhu, that is dark. This is 100% an approved Chaosium scenario. Someone sent in a story about pedophiles taking children from the nearby orphanage to a small underground room called Little Hell where they rape the poor kids in increasingly sadistic ways, and the church covers it up, and nobody knows Shan are involved because who the fuck expects brain-snatching bugs to come out of a portrait of the Virgin Mary and take people over? Too real, Chaosium. Too real, and way the fuck too disturbing for this Keeper's comfort. Oh, and this isn't the last or the first time Chaosium or other companies have accepted scenarios about priestly rapists either. Honorable mention and serious list contender Those Poor Lost Souls Who Dwell in the Light, from Cthulhu Britannica, has another lecherous priest knocking young women up with modified Elder Things that came out wrong and eat their way out of you. Jesus fucking Christ, authors, what is with your fetish for rape in these scenarios, anyway? Even the Blood Red Fez guy wants to know who hurt you and why after seeing shit like this as your creative output, and we all already know about how terribly disturbing fezzes can be.
3. Love's Lonely Children, The Stars Are Right!: From eldritch horrors to mundane ones, this scenario's a long, seedy look into the underbelly of a large city... perhaps even your own hometown. But hey, what else can you expect when Y'golonac is your eldritch horror of choice? I mean, seriously, this one's pretty vile - it begins with the finding of the mutilated remains of a barely legal young prostitute. Then it turns out she was a runaway from an abusive home and was a heroin addict, according to her squatter friends in a dingy crack-house you end up visiting. Then, you find out she was the daughter of an adult bookstore owner, who is into BDSM and actively engaged in sexually abusing his daughter with it and took fucking photos from the time the girl was 5 years old, let alone his wife getting in on things. Then when exploring that den of kink and sorrow, it turns out the guy is possessed by Y'golonac, there's a temple to the bastard in their store/house, and of course they sacrifice and abuse kidnapped people in the thing's honor. It of course can manifest at any point to mentally scar the Investigators, and if killed as the male cultist it possesses the female cultist. Can you say, "vagina dentata"? Then there's the little matter that reading or speaking this entity's name can open an Investigator to possession, too, so that's even more fun.
Oh hey, and there's of course rape involved. Rape of a drugged and unconscious 17 year old girl who's this guy's fucking daughter, rape of a drugged and unconscious prostitute before she is killed, potential for kidnapping and rape of a female Investigator should things go really badly, ritual sexual abuse. Sure, a lot of rape as horror for cult rituals happens in Call of Cthulhu, because it's inherently horrible and way too real, but it's not normally important to the plot and can be ignored. Hell, MoN has plenty of actual and implied sexual assault, but the Keeper doesn't have to use it - I sure as hell didn't because I thought it was tasteless. But this level of it is just appalling, because it is so damn important to the plot. Why is Love's Lonely Children at number three? Because one, it's Y'golonac, the god of perversity; two, the Investigators can find actual, literal child pornography in the house in it - it's not implied to be there like with the Beasley Brothers in The Spawn, it's literally there; and three, it upsets the unique and odd, but still lovingly kinky, normal order of a BDSM relationship by having two practitioners of it be more depraved than even the kinkiest and most open-minded person would dare to ever be. I think all three of those combined outweigh the Shan, cult rituals, and your bog-standard child molesters of the previous mentioned scenarios. Seriously, what is wrong with you, Chaosium? There surely can't be anything worse, can there?
2. Behold the Mother, Dead Reckonings: Mother of Pus. There, now that I have your attention and have made you lose your lunch at the same time, let's discuss Shub-Niggurath and the nature of sexually disturbing horror for a second. Shubby's an enigma and simultaneously a great font of body horror. Lovecraft doesn't go into much detail on her himself, leaving the fanbase and authors to detail it nearly a century later, and oh what gruesome detailing it's been. As a perverse fertility deity, countless authors, artists, and Keepers have had fun with this Bad Mother, and to be honest she's even grown on me a bit. The amount of clever and uniquely disturbing creatures that call Shub-Niggurath their own is astounding, and worthy of note itself, but none is more grotesque in any scenario I have ever seen than the Mother of Pus in Behold the Mother.
First off, this scenario starts off once again with rape, this time by an eldritch abomination spawn of the Black Goat With a Thousand Young. It knocks up an NPC Dunwich Horror style, the NPC develops a split personality to deal with the trauma, and she gives birth to a creature that starts out weak but will eventually become a monstrous, pus-spewing, disease-causing horror that heralds the end times. This lovely entity is known as the Mother of Pus, which is a name so fucking gross I have to gag every time I read, hear, or type it. I'm a Cell and Molecular Biologist, guys. Pus and infection don't bother me in the slightest, gore doesn't bother me, I could watch videos of abscesses draining all day while eating lunch, and the things I've smelled and touched in the course of my schooling and work experience are honestly best left not described. The Mother of Pus still turns my stomach to think about because I am probably the most hypersensitive person involving not spreading infectious disease you will ever meet, and I can only imagine how it must make your Average Joe feel.
So yeah, the theme of sexual perversion and disease is established early on in this one, with other NPCs insinuating the affected NPC is pretty much the town bike. The inversion of fertility and birth is pretty damn gross, but then again birth itself ain't exactly pretty - now add disease and pus to the mix. Oh, and if the investigators can stop the Mother of Pus (shudder) from becoming its true powerful self, the world is probably going to end. No pressure. Do not envy the life of your average Investigator, friend, for it is one filled with grotesqueness and awful, awful things. Things that have names like "Mother of Pus" (hrk).
1. Forget Me Not, The Things We Leave Behind: Question, what's a wonderful way to get under your poor players' skin? Affect their Investigators personally with Mythos horrors, of course. How do you do that? Well, you very well could just make them secretly part Deep One, but where's the fun in finding out you're a badass fishman? You could affect them with some sort of horrific spell, but where is the fun if it's not a permanent, insidious thing, or if they lose their Sanity too fast and don't get to relish the terror? No, there's a much more horrific option, and a darker way to do it as well as to get very personal, very fast. Let me introduce you to Eihort, his bargain, and his spawn that tunnel through flesh and bone as you slowly become a hole-riddled husk. It's that or he kills you, of course, but nobody in their right mind would let eldritch parasites infest their body by choice. But what if you didn't know? What if, in a moment of mental weakness, you took the bargain, and then had your memory wiped of the incident, say by amnesia induced by a crash as you fled in terror? What if you only later discovered your condition, slowly, bit by bit as your mind is tormented by dreams dark and disturbing? What if you couldn't tell anyone, and had no recourse, and only the person who got you in this situation to start with had the answers?
Welcome to the screaming nightmarish waking terror that is Forget Me Not from Stygian Fox's excellent compendium, The Things We Leave Behind. When I played this gem of a scenario, my god was the terror real. I have a very real fear of and visceral disgust for parasites, even the idea makes me nauseous. Finding out my poor, innocent character was infested with a death sentence just made me all the more horrified. I literally had nightmares about this scenario long after I finished playing through it. It's simply a nasty as all hell trick to play on your players and their Investigators, because nobody ever expects this sort of nightmare to hit them that personally in any RPG. And of course, they get there by what is basically modified rape, because we can't have a disturbing Call of Cthulhu sceneario without something resembling personal violation, can we? It hits every single terror button for me, jangles every single nerve, and sticks with you for a long, long time after it ends - whether you survive or not. Thank every God we did survive, barely, even after making mistakes and nearly ending with us all killed. And, it's absolutely fucking brilliant horror designed to make anyone squirm.
You can keep your Behold the Mother and your Love's Lonely Children, Forget Me Not is simply the most vile, the most stomach-churning, the most horrifying supplement I have ever come across for CoC, ever. How much more dark and depraved can you get than pseudo-rape infesting Investigators with parasites and putting them on a time limit to save themselves? Y'golonac can only dream of getting this depraved. Even ghouls wouldn't touch this festering pile of awfulness with a ten foot pole. Shub-Niggurath is going to have morning sickness over this, and even Nyarlathotep is asking you to please stop, this is too fucking devious even for him. Maybe it's not the most vile thing you've ever played, or even the most disturbing, but for me it's definitely the number one pick for the most sick, the most twisted, the most horrifically disturbing Call of Cthulhu scenario ever published.
Is there a sick and twisted scenario I forgot to add to the list? Leave a comment and explain why it's deserving of a spot here! Now, someone pass me the seltzer water, I think I might spew...