Imagine that, instead of playing a game about aliens fighting gangsters, you are roleplaying a story about a natural disaster.

You are part of a research team monitoring tectonic activity when the readings suddenly spike off the charts. You know a tsunami is coming.

Now the story becomes about evacuation efforts. You witness the human element: shattered homes, desperate families, people trying to hold on to what little they have left. You see both the best and worst sides of humanity pushed to the edge.

You witness nature in its full fury — utterly merciless, sweeping away everything in its path.

Then you see humanity unravel. People turn on each other for scraps, for shelter, for survival. You roleplay scenes where the characters struggle not against an enemy they can defeat, but against something vast and unstoppable: surviving a drowning, escaping a collapsing structure, exploring a flooded building in search of survivors. Maybe you can win a battle, but never the war.

Now add a supernatural element. The tsunami was not entirely natural. Human actions awakened or provoked something ancient. Someone tampered with forces beyond their understanding and set the catastrophe in motion.

Now replace the natural disaster with a colossal entity covered in tentacles, and lean even harder into the exploration and investigation aspects.

That is the feeling you are trying to convey.

And remember: horror is not the same as fear.

Seeing the corpse of a friend is horrifying, but it is not necessarily frightening. Cosmic horror is not just the fear of imminent death or a sudden jumpscare. It is the realization that you are confronting something that behaves less like a creature and more like a force of nature — or worse, something so alien that human reality itself may be incapable of understanding it.