I loved the idea of Insylum from the very get-go. I loved the Hastur Mythos from its rough inception in the pages of The Unspeakable Oath all the way through Alone on Halloween and into its expanded description in Delta Green: Countdown. As a matter of fact, you could make a drinking game out of my reviews by drinking every time I refer to the Hastur Mythos. You'd be quite drunk by the end.

So I was really happy when I got ahold of Insylum, happier still when I got a group and started playing it. But then something funny happened: I realized just how limited Insylum actually is.

The game's set in an insane asylum – the Carlsbad County Schizophrenics Annex – in which the characters have been imprisoned, without a specific memory of how they came to be there or why. Every night, a door opens up into the Night World, which the inmates explore in order to try to recover their memories. They're essentially being kept as feed cattle for the Facilitator, who's using the characters in an attempt to understand what he lost when he read the King in Yellow himself. The Night World itself is Carcosa, a constantly shifting series of vignettes designed to freak the characters out. (CAlifornia COunty Schizophrenic Annex – get it?)

Because the characters are amnesiac – and more than a little insane – the game's stats revolve around the character's mental stats. They've got a single physical stat in the form of Fatigue, and Lucidity and Memory as their mental stats; that's all. Fights are accomplished by blind-bidding Fatigue or Lucidity, depending on the nature of the threat; by spending a point of Memory, you can remember something about your life before you came to the Asylum. You increase your Lucidity by burning five fatigue points all at once; you gain Memory by burning five Lucidity points. Once you hit twenty Memory points, you can spend them all at once and transcend the game.

That's the basics of the game. The particulars get a little more sticky. In a big hurry.

It's worth pointing out that this is one of the few games that I've actually been able to play-test, and so I have hands-on experience with the game's mechanics. Unfortunately, they really didn't measure up to my expectations for a game.

For instance: The blind-bid system for Insylum allows the characters to bid a certain amount of their Fatigue in order to win a fight. In my play-test, a major problem surfaced in that there's no description of what happens if two people happen to bid the same amount – and given that most Fatigue bids will be in the 1-3 range, that's a really odd thing to leave out of the formal rules. It's possible to read it as the Defender failing to outspend the Attacker's bid, but that doesn't explain things much further – who loses Fatigue? A system in which a tie can't exist is a system that's broken out of the gate.

I will admit to making a fairly major mistake in my playtest in the aspect of Whalesong, a fellow inmate whose central interest was in suffocating the other inmates with his massive bulk. (He was only able to make odd howls, rather than speak; hence the nickname.) I figured that I'd double the amount of Fatigue that he had in order to represent his experience at being a sadistic son of a bitch. Here's the problem: One of the toughest monsters, the Paper Lion, has a Fatigue that tops out at ten. As a result, characters fighting Whalesong swiftly found themselves crushed by his three-point bids, resulting in a fairly savage beating at his hands. It was my fault for giving him those stats, but there's no wiggle room for weaker players to potentially overcome stronger ones. It's a death spiral in which the stronger player wins. (There's also not a lot of help provided for people ganging up on a stronger opponent, which is going to happen all the time.) The lack of granularity in fights also nonplussed some of the players – one of them compared the system to holding up a random number, and then asking “Do I win?”

Another problem occurred with the sudden-death nature of fights. Fights in Insylum tend to be really lethal, which is understandable – except that there's not a whole lot of wiggle room when you only have five hit points, some of which you have to spend just to attack. In a claustrophobic environment like an insane asylum, complete with pushy inmates and potentially brutal orderlies, fights aren't something that you can't necessarily avoid – and yet, Insylum doesn't offer much of a cushion in terms of lethality. At one point, I had a character in a fight get killed because he bid one to Whalesong's three – I was left with a dead character in a fight that was meant to end in somebody's crippling at worst, rather than in the character's death. I had to step in and declare that the character was knocked unconscious, rather than being dead. (I will say that there's some really nice fiction in the combat examples, the kind of fight description that makes you realize where the Pagan Publishing guy's heads are at – but it's not enough to make up for the system.)

The system has another major quirk that really drives me up the wall. Played straight, you're essentially using a scaled ladder for experience – five points of Fatigue buys you one point of Lucidity; five points of Lucidity buys you a point of Memory. Extra Fatigue capacity costs you five points of Fatigue, spent all at once. Since characters start out at five Fatigue, however, they can only achieve an extra point by spending a point of Fatigue – which means that they'll drop to zero, knocking themselves out. A game in which your first measure of character progress is your sudden drop into unconsciousness is not a good sign, unless you're playing a 19th century upper-class girl who's into the whole fainting craze thing. On top of that, it isn't specified when it's permissible to spend those points – can you fall asleep, spend the Fatigue then, and wake up refreshed and tougher? I eventually switched over to the new World of Darkness system in order to keep the game flowing along.

There's another major problem with the game as written: The glacial pace of character advancement. It takes 25 Fatigue points to gain one point of Memory; the eventual point of the game is to reach 20 Memory. That's – let's see, 20 x 25 = 500 Fatigue points that have to be spent in order to “win” the game. You can gain Lucidity points by fulfilling the desires of Creatures, a particular type of entity within the Asylum, and you can gain Memory by escaping the traps of Repeaters. However, the game doesn't specify how much Lucidity characters should gain from defeating Creatures, and grants only a single point of Memory from defeating a Repeater.

On top of that, the only way to establish who your character really was in a therapy session is to spend a Memory point to “solidify” what they remember. Since most people don't like playing blanks, they'll likely be spending points of Memory in order to fill in the holes where their characters should be. The odds of ever attaining twenty Memory – in exchange for a nebulous event which will remove their characters from the game – are very slim. This results in a game which is built entirely for long-term campaign play, unless you want to have the character explosively remember everything about themselves by spending 5 points, instead of 20.

Memory also creates another issue with the game which may throw less experienced GMs off their game. Essentially, the creation of the character's past takes place through the therapy sessions that take place every now and then throughout the game; by asking leading questions, the GM can encourage players to add stuff to their character concept. Besides asking about the regular stuff, there's also stuff like “How many times did you do heroin before you overdosed?” or “Why did you saw the boy's head off?” or “How many times did your father molest you?”

There's a couple of problems with this. First off, it's difficult to think of good questions that lead the characters into shocking revelations about what's actually going on. While the Facilitator has the ability to suggest things that may or may not have happened to the character, the player has the say in whether or not that thing actually happened. Suggesting a string of things that the player nixes as not appropriate to their character is going to make the Facilitator seem less like somebody who's actually got hidden information and more like somebody who doesn't have the faintest idea of what's going on, and who is swinging in the dark hoping to hit something at some point. It's like two men trying to agree on a shape of an imaginary object without being able to discuss its characteristics; it takes a lot more time than it's actually worth.

It's also worth noting that there's potential to hit spots in your players that you may not have known you had; a question like “how many times did your father molest you” is a potentially triggering question for somebody who's actually undergone abuse in real life. On top of that, since you're meant to be asking disturbing questions, it's possible that you'll hit something that you didn't even know they had. On top of that, if the players don't know anything about the Cthulhu Mythos at all, they'll wind up creating backstories that don't fit the tone of the game – making their characters strong and optimistic, making it odd when they wind up as hollow shells in the Insylum. I had to take my players off one by one and explain roughly where I saw their characters going, building off some of the stuff that they'd said about their characters – this one's cult membership, this one's love of dolls and so forth. I'm not sure if the creation of a backstory is supposed to be a spontaneous event or a carefully tailored interaction between player and GM, but either way, I'm kind of mystified as how to it's supposed to work.

The Night World is an interesting concept, but it leads to another problem. The original Night Floors scenario, in Delta Green: Countdown created pretty much the standard archetype for the Night Floors – a relatively normal setting, a hotel, that felt like the setting for a play that you only got to see a small part of. Without the proper context, the investigators could only stumble back and forth like trapped rats in a maze, trying to figure out what was going on from the small hints that they got. The final revelation was that there was no solution, that to understand the Night Floors was to be trapped in its insanity, and that the proper course of action was to get the fuck out and stay the fuck out.

The Night World, in Insylum, is differnet. Instead of going in to discover where somebody's gone, you're supposed to derive information about what The King in Yellow is about, and what made your character the way that he is. The various areas which the players can visit are nicknamed Sets, as in theatrical sets, which the characters can move through and interact with.

Unfortunately, the Sets themselves don't really offer anything to do. Some of them are direct homages to the Hastur Mythos, like a visit to Carcosa, the MacAllister brownstone (where the Night Floors exist), the lake of Carcosa and so forth – there's not a whole lot that hasn't been seen in previous works. None of them offer advice as to how the characters are supposed to understand what's going on – they're fun to look at, and to move through, but they don't offer any particular insight into the character's minds and don't offer them much to do after they're done exploring. There's nothing to do within them besides gawk at the cool stuff and maybe bicker with each other. If they want to leave, then they have to burn either five or ten points of Lucidity – the .pdf offers both values within a paragraph of each other – or a point of Memory, which means that the GM has to come up with new stuff while they search around for a way to get out. I always asked the characters if they wanted to spend Lucidity when they made some kind of personal identifying mark on the setting, which I would then keep track of to establish when they could leave; telling them flat out that they needed to spend X amount of Lucidity to leave felt too metagamey to me.

That rules, however, leaves the GM to come up with stuff for the players to do within the Night World before they can leave. I had a titanic concrete wall on which thousands of personal confessions had been scrawled, complete with blanks left for the players to write what they'd done; a city that had apparently been taken over by the King in Yellow, complete with a single inhabitant who whispered cryptic clues; and, eventually, a party in which a family had turned in on itself in a fratricidal frenzy, leaving behind – guess what – cryptic suggestions as to what had happened.

Now: My players weren't particularly used to the Call of Cthulhu play style, and they eventually grew bored with the various setpieces that they could look at, but never really interact with. That's one of my failings as a GM, but I can claim that I wasn't sure what the point of going into the Night World was in the first place; the book doesn't say. You're supposed to derive something from your visits, and I was leading up to the revelation that the inmates were acting as the scouts for the next invasion of the Hastur Mythos, but it was slow enough – and lacked enough creepiness – that my group wound up getting bored and eventually quitting.

I couldn't really blame them, to be honest. Besides playing with an experimental – and obviously untested – game system in a setting that they were fairly unfamiliar with, we also had too many people in the group to maintain the proper attitude of horror and played in a noisy student lounge. When they passed on the next session because it wasn't going anywhere, I had to agree. Eventually. There was some cursing involved.

On top of that, the game doesn't really offer anything new to the Hastur Mythos. The idea of an institution where a mysterious Facilitator uses insane asylum patients to explore the Hastur Mythos is a good one, but that's all of the new stuff that fans of the Hastur Mythos will get. I was halfway to writing up some new Sets and perhaps publishing them online until I realized that they were, in the end, just excuses for the GM to talk to himself while the players sit around appreciatively enjoying the weirdness. I could work them out, but making them a part of Insylum essentially builds them on somewhat rickety foundation.

Insylum offers an interesting premise, but – let's face it: It's broken. Unless I missed a lot of discussions on the Forge where this kind of play style is laid out and explained, Insylum is a game that you can't play without – well, I don't even know what you'd need to make it work. That's the problem. It is a free product, but it was bought on the ransom model, and I wouldn't mind seeing a slightly more solid return for my investment.

-Darren MacLennan