TheRPGSite

The recent death of one of the guiding lights of the CoC RPG got me thinking... is Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) completely spent as an adventuring concept.. .or is there something that could be done with a mythos campaign (be it fantasy, medieval, roman, 1920s, modern, futuristic or other) that would still actually be novel?

If so, what?

RPGPundit

I feel that, in as far as horror gaming is concerned, that Cthulhu and the Mythos is something of a joke.  This is as opposed to current writers using the mythos for non-RPG writing, which from what I understand is very vibrant in the fan scene.  Whenever I hear gamers joke about insanity, squamous horrors and how many Investigators Cthulhu can eat in a round, I kind of cringe.

I've always wanted to see an RPG exploration of later horror genres, such as Clive Barkers early work (Tale of the Hellbound Heart, Cabal).  Old World of Darkness tried to touch some of this but become more about supernatural adventure as opposed to stark horror.  I'd also like to see expansion of some of the work in the hobby which emulates newer horror genres (J-Horror like The Ring, etc).  I know there have been a few stabs at more modern work (Kult, Unknown Armies), but these are few and far between.

Newer work in the Mythos I hope would make use of the principles of newer horror genres while retaining the Mythos' own unique flavor and vibe.  The Mythos was always changing and being added to, and I see no reason for gaming not to take care of this crowd-sourcing of the dark fantastical.

I think the thing to do, is to take the concepts and build from there - hostile universe, the emptiness of realizing there are powers as far above you as you are above insects, etc - and start there, rather than "Now, what can I have the Cthulhu cultists do this week?". You can build a lot on that chassis, without needing to go down the "how many tentacles?" route.

Seeing as Pundit is a Cracked fan, I'd suggest reading John Dies At The End for one example of what you could do; cosmic and body horror, with dick jokes, but it all works together brilliantly. The Laundry Files stuff also seems to work pretty well, although I've only read one book and played the RPG, so it could all fall apart later on.

It'd require a more prevalent reading of current Mythos-related explorations in the speculative fiction market. Basically it'd need something new becoming culturally popular to spawn an RPG.

Most RPGs tend to have an Appendix N in mind during development. What sort of modern cult classics can you name that'd expand the genre?

At the easiest I'd say re-packaging of CoC & Ghostbusters would be perfect with the current "ghost/cryptoid/ancient aliens explorers" popularity.

The easiest meld of that subcultural popularity to RPGs? Either: a) blur the line between real life/fiction, so instead of CoC Mythos you use currently explored Earth mysteries, or b) Reality TV explorers the rpg. One could easily do both combined.

Edit: To make it strictly CoC? You'd have to re-skin current mysteries as Mythos, which CoC has been doing since forever. Easiest then would be Reality TV CoC.

It could have a combat minigame built for mounting tension (without gimmicks though... I'm talking more about carefully calibrating everything from reloading times and clip sizes to how you handle light sources to wounds here).

It could focus on the investigative aspect, even eschewing the really horrific side of the horror most of the time. I think there are likely better (or at least other) ways of doing this than the Gumshoe route.

It could give more thorough rules for occultists fighting on (nearly) equal footing with the monsters, or something BRPDish.

I think there's a lot that could be done.

Since speculative romance is the hottest thing currently, I just realized you could do an embedded Cold War version, with varying degrees of horror/comedy. Anything can be done, but it'll definitely not be the teen heartthrob type of love, more an ugly love. Could do things from the growing horror of discovering your spouse is a child of a Deep One, and torn between love and revulsion, or comedy like ALF, where you get "My Life with Mi-Go!"

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;621537I feel that, in as far as horror gaming is concerned, that Cthulhu and the Mythos is something of a joke.  This is as opposed to current writers using the mythos for non-RPG writing, which from what I understand is very vibrant in the fan scene.  Whenever I hear gamers joke about insanity, squamous horrors and how many Investigators Cthulhu can eat in a round, I kind of cringe.

I think this happens to any horror genre as soon as you put it into the context of gaming.  This happened as soon as people picked of the original Call of Cthulhu in the 1980s, and if you start a Clive Barker horror game, then pretty much instantly the same players will be joking about kinky monster sex and other such.  Gamers joke about what they play.  

I think there is still plenty of room for Lovecraftian horror.  In my campaign a few years ago, I delved more into Lovecraft's common themes of more personal horror like tainted ancestry (i.e. the Innsmouth look).  This is still something I don't see in Lovecraft games, where the horrors are alien things to be fought.

Ok, i admit, most of the Mythos as is do not suit me, but by now, CoC is essentially an institution in the horror genre,  so it would very well lend itself to "play fast and loose" with.

Scenarios i find possible:
* Cultists think the Mythos is real, and tries to revive Cthulhu.
The Players play some "fringe team" or NCIS-style types aiming to capture them.... or kill them.
* Like above, but the Cultists manage to summon something that isn't Cthulhu, but it is "bad enough".
To mess it up, it may even look like a small version of "Big C" ....
* Like the above, but the Cultists do not belive in the Mythos ... but manages to summon "Big C" anyway .... or something looking the part.
* FBI-style investigators and a SWATeam investigates and area prepared to meet a homicidal cult ... thriller-style, but it may or may not turn into horror as per the examples above.
* "The King in Yellow" is made into a movie ....
* Let the Players play Paranormals themselves, both trying to stop malign portals from opening and gruesome beings from murdering, at the same time as they're either keeping up a pretense of "normality", or is living among subcultures such as Otherkin and similar.
* Like the above Paranormals, but the Players may also play as regular humans that may or may not belive that they are Paranormals .... to begin with.

Quote from: jhkim;621594I think this happens to any horror genre as soon as you put it into the context of gaming.  This happened as soon as people picked of the original Call of Cthulhu in the 1980s, and if you start a Clive Barker horror game, then pretty much instantly the same players will be joking about kinky monster sex and other such.  Gamers joke about what they play.

This is pretty much how I see it as well.
For one thing, I won't even try to play horror RPGs with players who are not fans of horror. They do not enjoy being scared, do not want to be scared... instead they subvert the scares at every turn by making jokes.
The fellows I currently game with, they quote Terry Pratchett and Monty Python and The Princess Bride a lot... but I don't think any of them have ever read Lovecraft or Clive Barker.

I also think Cthulhu itself should pretty much NEVER turn up in-game. Most of the COC games I've run have been much less epic than Masks Of Nyarlathotep... more along the lines satan/witch cult films like City Of The Dead, The Crimson Cult and Spellbinder.

QuoteI think there is still plenty of room for Lovecraftian horror.  In my campaign a few years ago, I delved more into Lovecraft's common themes of more personal horror like tainted ancestry (i.e. the Innsmouth look).  This is still something I don't see in Lovecraft games, where the horrors are alien things to be fought.

Agreed. Too often 'horror' games are just seen as a new set of monsters to be killed. This was one of my main gripes with Kult... that despite the disturbing cosmology and implications and just plain weirdness it's mechanical focus seemed surprisingly heavy on gun porn and combat.
Maybe 'horror' and RPGs aren't such a good match. I love COC and have gotten scares as both player and GM with it... but I think the wargame aspects need to be downplayed to get at that sort of atmosphere. It's less about the rules than it is the people playing the game IMO.

Quote from: Simlasa;621641Maybe 'horror' and RPGs aren't such a good match.

Most people playing RPG's like the adventuring aspects: meeting evil, killing it, and taking its stuff. It's fun.

Not all people enjoy horror as much. As you note, its down to the players.

Thus, the rule: Like drama and romance, horror works best as a light addition to an adventure. A touch of flavor, not the whole meal. Soy sauce, in other words.

This is true for most people, though not true for all.

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534The recent death of one of the guiding lights of the CoC RPG got me thinking... is Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) completely spent as an adventuring concept.. .or is there something that could be done with a mythos campaign (be it fantasy, medieval, roman, 1920s, modern, futuristic or other) that would still actually be novel?

If so, what?

RPGPundit

i think that there's still promise. i ran a well received game of aging pulp heroes (the spider, the shadow, doc savage, etc) mentoring new heroes in the 1950s who would take up their mantles to combat the red menace and specifically cthulhu-esque threats.

I think there's plenty of room for cosmic horror, albeit perhaps not in the form of Cthulhu. I think that Lovecraft's works have become parodied just as much as they are aped, and have been devalued somewhat in the process.

That doesn't mean they can't be funny, though. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tTHn2tHhcI) :D

That said, games like Delta Green offer a really good take on the Cthulhu Mythos.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;621537I've always wanted to see an RPG exploration of later horror genres, such as Clive Barkers early work (Tale of the Hellbound Heart, Cabal).  

Have you looked at Rafael Chandler's Scorn or Spite?

Cthulhu itself has been a bit overmined, as have many more 'pop culture'-favoured parts of the Mythos.  The City Under Waves Where He Sleeps wasn't honestly that great of a setting schtick to start with, and less so now when we've dropped atomic bombs down there, had NuclearCthulhu stomp Japan in a bad rubber suit, and then blew him up again.  When you drop the names themselves out of the picture, however?

There's still a lot left undone.  The metaphors of alien, incomprehensible, and tremendously powerful entities only becomes more compelling over time, and are underexplored in active horror settings.  ((I'd argue that no one's truly achieved that nominal theme of the work: it's tricky to write or work with alien forces of nature beyond human ken or impact, and as a result we tend to have the viewpoint character die or go made before Cthulhu does his schtick, or build giant robots to deck Cthulhu in the snooze.  There's more of that in Eclipse Phase than even much of the original Mythos, and not much of it in EP.))

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534The recent death of one of the guiding lights of the CoC RPG got me thinking... is Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) completely spent as an adventuring concept...

No. Fuck no. Of course not. That's absurd.

Quoteor is there something that could be done with a mythos campaign (be it fantasy, medieval, roman, 1920s, modern, futuristic or other) that would still actually be novel?

If so, what?

RPGPundit

Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea.

Pushing further, however, the idea that the Mythos is confined to a set of specific creatures or Entities or IPs contained within this or that story, this or that supplement, basically demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the Mythos itself. It's mindbogglingly dumb. On its face. Only morons who bought way too many Cthulhu plushes would buy into it.

Quote from: Benoist;621673Pushing further, however, the idea that the Mythos is confined to a set of specific creatures or Entities or IPs contained within this or that story, this or that supplement, basically demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the Mythos itself. It's mindbogglingly dumb. On its face. Only morons who bought way too many Cthulhu plushes would buy into it.

It is odd that even going way back there were Lovecraftian pastiche stories that sought to do nothing more than detail the family tree of Hastur and add in Cthulhu's second cousin twice-removed. Awful fan fiction before such a thing had a name.
Compare that to some of the works that Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, etc. have done on those themes... terrifying stuff that, while thoroughly in that realm somehow manages to not run lists of entities and old books and other Mythos touchstones.

I'm not sure how I'd put Campbell's 'The Voice Of The Beach' into RPG terms... but Ligotti's 'Purity' gave me some nasty ideas that will turn up next time I run COC.

Walmsley's Stealing Cthulhu goes back to the sources and presents unique takes on the Mythos, plenty enough to freshen the palates of gamers jaded by repeated seaside dinners of Deep One calamari. (Review here (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15498.phtml).)

The method is also presented so that you can apply it to stories that Walmsley doesn't have the space to examine.

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534The recent death of one of the guiding lights of the CoC RPG got me thinking... is Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) completely spent as an adventuring concept..

Yes, as a source of cosmic horror, it is done (and how I hate those geek chic products!). It still has some potential in other game styles, but it is no longer scary.

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534.or is there something that could be done with a mythos campaign (be it fantasy, medieval, roman, 1920s, modern, futuristic or other) that would still actually be novel?

If so, what?

Put it on ice for 40 years until it becomes effective again. It will never happen, though.

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534The recent death of one of the guiding lights of the CoC RPG got me thinking... is Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) completely spent as an adventuring concept.. .or is there something that could be done with a mythos campaign (be it fantasy, medieval, roman, 1920s, modern, futuristic or other) that would still actually be novel?

If so, what?

RPGPundit

Downton Abbey!!!

...I'll get my coat.

I think you can get plenty of mileage still if you take the essential premises of the Mythos - humanity is insignificant in the cosmic order of things and there are forces out there which can squish us like bugs if they notice us, true appreciation of wider reality outside of the island of calm we exist in brings insanity, that sort of thing - but ditch the specifics. The standard Mythos monsters and Old Ones and deities and all the rest have been wheeled out so often that all the surprise is gone. Instead, ditch all that stuff, come up with your own mythology, and go to town with it. It worked for Ramsey Campbell in his writing - many of his later dips into cosmic horror like The Grin of the Dark haven't involved any specific namedropping of Mythos touchstones, for instance - and it can work in gaming.

In fact, arguably these days it's necessary for a good CoC game. If the thrill of uncovering mysteries and the fear of the unknown is going to be communicated to the players you really don't want to have them working out what's going on OOC long before they do IC, and using a homebrewed mythology is a big help there.

Quote from: Opaopajr;621555Basically it'd need something new becoming culturally popular to spawn an RPG.

Charles Stross, surely.

I'm not sure I get the OP. I see no reason to stop playing CoC because Cthulhu is muscling into mainstream pop territory or deconstructed or the object of satire.

As for publishing your "X, plus Cthulhu!" game, well, the formula is not exactly the most original thing anymore, though if you dream of publishing your Ninjas vs. Cthulhu game, who am I to judge. The more the merrier, I say. Publish it and I'll vote with my wallet.

Quote from: Benoist;621673No. Fuck no. Of course not. That's absurd.

Pushing further, however, the idea that the Mythos is confined to a set of specific creatures or Entities or IPs contained within this or that story, this or that supplement, basically demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the Mythos itself. It's mindbogglingly dumb. On its face. Only morons who bought way too many Cthulhu plushes would buy into it.

Agreed on both counts. I have yet to check out AS&SH, though.

Quote from: misterguignol;621662Have you looked at Rafael Chandler's Scorn or Spite?

Better still, have you seen Mr. Chandler's OSRIC conversion of the Barkeresque demons from his Pandemonium RPGs (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/110459/Teratic-Tome)? I am sorely tempted to pick it up.

Also, Kult. OOP and nearly impossible to track down, but our go-to game for Hellraiser-like horror back in the day.

To answer the question a few times:

1. CoC has timeless play value in the way Casablanca has timeless entertainment value. Especially true of the very best of the commercial campaigns (I loved Fungi from Yuggoth).

2. The Mythos is a particular sort of nihilistic horror about nasty things that happen to humans caused by uncaring forces beyond their comprehension or control, and the way humans react to them. It's not a monster manual.

3. New authors are finding new ways to approach the mythos, from the aforementioned Graham Walmsley to John Snead's Eldrich Skies (haven't read it, but it appears to cover the alternative space travel aspect of the Mythos which I find very appealing). Also, LotFP.

4. The capital-M Mythos is all CoC. The small-m mythos is the cosmic horror approach to horror, and arguably goes beyond Lovecraft, Derleth, Lumley etc. The sense of dread, of unpicking ordered reality and finding something vast and dangerous and amoral--that will always have an appeal.

5. And if you can't game with a straight face any more, there's always parody, such as Cabin In The Woods

Quote from: Warthur;621735using a homebrewed mythology is a big help there.

I whipped up a homebrew mythology Mythos-inspired cosm for Torg: Dharkuul, The Xenohorror Reality (http://stormknights.arcanearcade.com/realities/dharkuul.html).

I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but it does take Mythos-inspired RPG's in a different direction.

Quote from: misterguignol;621662Have you looked at Rafael Chandler's Scorn or Spite?

No, got some links? Interested!

I'm also a fan of the old Whispering Vault.

I think the mythos is a flavor of horror that is a bit like tolkein. So it is so deeply ingrained in gaming (whether because it is a natural fit or its just been there for so long in the community is its own discussion) that I think these variations we keep seeing could go on for some time (though I think the combo of cthulhu+X=success will wind down soon, if it already hasn't). That said, nothing like classic Cthulhu.

Quote from: jhkim;621594I think this happens to any horror genre as soon as you put it into the context of gaming.  This happened as soon as people picked of the original Call of Cthulhu in the 1980s, and if you start a Clive Barker horror game, then pretty much instantly the same players will be joking about kinky monster sex and other such.

It's not just gamers, pretty much any 'horror' will be reduced to a joke by people in 10 min, its how most people cope with it.

Quote from: jhkim;621594I think this happens to any horror genre as soon as you put it into the context of gaming.  This happened as soon as people picked of the original Call of Cthulhu in the 1980s, and if you start a Clive Barker horror game, then pretty much instantly the same players will be joking about kinky monster sex and other such.  Gamers joke about what they play.  

.

I think horror is one of those things where you really will be dissappointed if you have high expectations all the time. I am a horror movie buff and if you watch enough horror movies, it is pretty hrd to be scared by them all the time. Itis a bit of a two way street and takes a willing lowering of the viewer's defenses. Its great if a movie scares me, but I don't need that to enjoy them. And I would be frustrated if I expected every horror movie to frighten. Same with RPG horror. I can enjoy a game of cthulhu or ravenloft, even if I am laughing at some of the cheese. Sometimes this even helps set me up for being spoooked.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;621766I think horror is one of those things where you really will be dissappointed if you have high expectations all the time. I am a horror movie buff and if you watch enough horror movies, it is pretty hrd to be scared by them all the time. Itis a bit of a two way street and takes a willing lowering of the viewer's defenses. Its great if a movie scares me, but I don't need that to enjoy them. And I would be frustrated if I expected every horror movie to frighten. Same with RPG horror. I can enjoy a game of cthulhu or ravenloft, even if I am laughing at some of the cheese. Sometimes this even helps set me up for being spoooked.

I agree with this.

And anyway, I never thought that Lovecraft's real strength was "horror".

He generates great atmosphere and a sense of deep time. Also, the idea of human magical traditions as cargo cult alien science is a very useful one both for fiction and gaming.

I think a big strength of the mythos is that it's compatible with many different genres, so it is a kind of spice of which you can add a dash or two to a swords and sorcery game, or a modern spies game (hello Delta Green!), or a hard boiled 30s detective game and etc. Sure it can be overdone (you don't need Cthulhu in everything), but works well when judiciously used.

Plush Cthulhu dolls and the various other mythos jokes never much bothered me.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;621753No, got some links? Interested!

I'm also a fan of the old Whispering Vault.

Scorn: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/107651/Scorn-%28Playtest-edition%29
Spite: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/61050/Spite%3A-The-Second-Book-of-Pandemonium

Both free as Chandler has released them OGL, and compatible with each other.

[edit] For reference, Scorn used to be called "Dread" and was eventually renamed so as to stop causing confusion with the Jenga "Dread."

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;621537I've always wanted to see an RPG exploration of later horror genres, such as Clive Barkers early work (Tale of the Hellbound Heart, Cabal).  Old World of Darkness tried to touch some of this but become more about supernatural adventure as opposed to stark horror.  I'd also like to see expansion of some of the work in the hobby which emulates newer horror genres (J-Horror like The Ring, etc).

Yes, these would be excellent, I'm a huge Barker fan. I think they did a Necroscope RPG but it never went anywhere - there is huge potential in that setting, or at least in those powers. They could be slotted in anywhere, from medieval fantasy to high tech space opera.

Quote from: Opaopajr;621559Since speculative romance is the hottest thing currently, I just realized you could do an embedded Cold War version, with varying degrees of horror/comedy.

Have a read of A Colder War (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm), one of my favourite Mythos stories.

There's really two things going on, Cthulhu and Cosmic Horror.  The way to keep Cosmic Horror "fresh" obviously would be to do it without Cthulhu.  

Keeping Cthulhu fresh...do it without Cosmic Horror? Hmm. In just about every incarnation, the Mythos seems to be the Truth™, the secret history of everything, and all of humanity's religion, magic, etc are a result of the Mythos.  Change that maybe.

Have the Moorcockian or Warhammer Mythos be the base cosmology and fit Cthulhu into that.  Or have a Christian God/Devil Mythology with Cthulhu & Co. being part of that or simply being aliens.  Don't make them the uncaring cosmic nihilists that drive you mad with the crushing power of your own insignificance, make them actively malevolent, at war with the christian God and even the fallen angels.

Or make Cthulhu a good guy.  The reason people get driven mad is because they become aware of his nightmares, he's in torment due to his imprisonment, and the decrepit cults that worship him, while insane and evil, are actually doing what needs to be done because Cthulhu is the only thing that can prevent the Old Ones from awakening.

As a player, though, I find a good Cthulhu adventure can still be scary.

Quote from: Ladybird;621550I think the thing to do, is to take the concepts and build from there - hostile universe, the emptiness of realizing there are powers as far above you as you are above insects, etc - and start there, rather than "Now, what can I have the Cthulhu cultists do this week?". You can build a lot on that chassis, without needing to go down the "how many tentacles?" route.

I like this a lot. Go this way and before you know it, you're working up the next Delta Green. Which is probably almost due a revolutionary update in a few years....

Observation: CoC mashes up the "they're highly advanced aliens from space" and "they're aliens, but from another dimension instead of space" and "they're actual gods" aspects of a Mythos into a creamy mush. Lovecraft himself never actually did this: in some stories the Old Ones where decidedly material, in others quite the opposite. (This was on purpose because he wanted to emulate the sort of irreconcilable inconsistencies you get in any sufficiently ornate mythology).

So, one way you can rejuvenate the Mythos in general is to pick one of those themes and stick with it for the campaign, trimming away all the monsters or deities which you can't make fit. Are the cultists possessed of real magic, or have they been duped by the Mi-Go's sufficiently advanced technology? Are the Old Ones dreaming buried in the deep places of the Earth, or decidedly active forces existing in another dimension, or an extinct race from the Antarctic whose Shoggothy minions walk among us in human shape? Cthulhu is called the "High priest of the Old Ones" in the story - does this mean Cthulhu was a creature that worshipped the Old Ones, or does this mean that Cthulhu was an Old One who led them in the worship of other beings who may or may not actually exist? Decide whether you're going to go for an approach to the Mythos based on alien incursions, otherdimensional weirdness or dark gods of old, and then make some tough decisions based on that, and I think you'd have something which feels much fresher than shrugging and saying "well, it's kind of all of these and none".

Warthur speaks wisely.

Another thing is to forbid any OOC talk about the mythos during game sessions, except as directly affects game play - players may not trade stories, jokes, or anectdotes.  Often, I find fan humour concerning the mythos during CoC games to be off putting.

Horror, in RPGs, is serious business (unless you are running a distinctly humorous game), and I ask my players to keep chit chat and such to a mininmum.

Also -

Props help. A weathered knife, fake manuscripts, handouts created in InDesign, for GMs who have the time for these things.  Really lends to the immersion.  CoC did a fantastic job of these things and these are examples to be emulated.

Lowering the lights a little and putting on moddy music is great for horror games.  I've seen this used to great effect in Wraith and CoC games.

Quote from: The Traveller;621795Have a read of A Colder War (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm), one of my favourite Mythos stories.

Actually just to emphasis that there's still life in the thing yet, a quote from that (free) story:

Quote"No,'' says the colonel, and this time Roger knows he's lying. Mission four, before the colonel diverted their payload capacity to another purpose, planted a compact radio telescope in an empty courtyard in the city on the far side of the gate. XK-Masada, where the air's too thin to breathe without oxygen; where the sky is indigo, and the buildings cast razor-sharp shadows across a rocky plain baked to the consistency of pottery under a blood-red sun. Subsequent analysis of pulsar signals recorded by the station confirmed that it was nearly six hundred light years closer to the galactic core, inward along the same spiral arm. There are glyphs on the alien buildings that resemble symbols seen in grainy black-and-white Minox photos of the doors of the bunker in the Ukraine. Symbols behind which the subject of Project Koschei lies undead and sleeping: something evil, scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor. "Why do you want to know where they came from?''

...

Roger realises that Professor Gould is staring at him. "Do you have a question for me?'' asks the distinguished palaeontologist.

"Uh -- in a moment.'' Roger shakes himself. Remembering time-survivor curves, the captured Nazi medical atrocity records mapping the ability of a human brain to survive in close proximity to the Baltic Singularity. Mengele's insanity. The SS's final attempt to liquidate the survivors, the witnesses. Koschei, primed and pointed at the American heartland like a darkly evil gun. The "world-eating mind'' adrift in brilliant dreams of madness, estivating in the absence of its prey: dreaming of the minds of sapient beings, be they barrel-bodied wing-flying tentacular things, or their human inheritors. "Do you think they could have been intelligent, professor? Conscious, like us?''

How about something where the Mythos is the good guys.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;621944How about something where the Mythos is the good guys.

"He's a primordial idiot god at the centre of the universe. She's the black goat of the woods with a thousand young. They fight crime!"

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;621944How about something where the Mythos is the good guys.

I like this idea.  I'm just not sure who the bad guys would be.  I guess a world-wide conspiracy of terrorists who keep trying to "investigate" - which generally means blow up or burn down - people who are different than normal.  

It might come across a bit like Mage: The Ascension or Changeling.  You're people with magical ties, and there are extremists trying to destroy you all.  

There's probably more interesting ways to do it, though.

I'm generally done with the idea of the Cthulhu Mythos as scary, largely because the notion of a cold and uncaring universe as exemplified in the Mythos is sort of my default understanding of the way things work, sans tentacles.

More upsetting to me would be something like the opposite state, wherein the universe does care about humanity - but it hates us, and boy do we deserve it.

Quote from: This Guy;621991More upsetting to me would be something like the opposite state, wherein the universe does care about humanity - but it hates us, and boy do we deserve it.

Somehow it's still more comforting to have some awful thing that hates me, knows I exist and wants to kill me... vs. something that anonymously crushes me without realizing I ever existed.

If I run a horror game where mankind matters, has some import, then it's going to be something like The Whispering Vault, Kult or Noumenon... which are frightening but not quite as nihilistic.

Another take on Lovecraft might make for a very weird/wild science fiction game... moving about spacetime in a strange 'clock' (a darker shade of Dr. Who), mental projection into alien bodies, disembodied brains in canisters conversing with sentient gases and minds from the far future... all trying to avoid the notice of Nyarlathotep and its masters.
Eldrich Skies doesn't strike me as doing much with those potentials though, based on what I've read it just seems to shove ghouls, deep ones, Mi Go and whatever into a relatively generic space fantasy setting. I might be wrong though.

Quote from: Simlasa;621996Somehow it's still more comforting to have some awful thing that hates me, knows I exist and wants to kill me... vs. something that anonymously crushes me without ever realizing I ever existed.

If I run a horror game where mankind matters, has some import, then it's going to be something like The Whispering Vault, Kult or Noumenon... which are frightening but not quite as nihilistic.

Yeah, different fears for different folks, etc.  I'm comforted by the impersonal since I know it's impersonal, is all.

Could go all hard sci-fi with it.  Use the 23K ruleset, but Mi-Go and Elder Things instead of Kafers and Pentapods.  (I sort of like this because the default 23K aliens seem to be made of one gimmick each; the Cthulhu badguys are weird and disparate.)

Quote from: P&P;621999Could go all hard sci-fi with it.  Use the 23K ruleset, but Mi-Go and Elder Things instead of Kafers and Pentapods.  (I sort of like this because the default 23K aliens seem to be made of one gimmick each; the Cthulhu badguys are weird and disparate.)

I had pretty much the same thought. The Cthulhu Mythos as a hard/military sf setting along the lines of Aliens (which, per the GDW folks' admission was the primary inspiration for the look and feel of the 2300 universe) could be pretty cool.

Quote from: T. Foster;622003I had pretty much the same thought. The Cthulhu Mythos as a hard/military sf setting along the lines of Aliens (which, per the GDW folks' admission was the primary inspiration for the look and feel of the 2300 universe) could be pretty cool.

Isn't that pretty much what Cthulhu Rising (http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/49559/cthulhu-rising) is meant to be?

Quote from: Simlasa;622007Isn't that pretty much what Cthulhu Rising (http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/49559/cthulhu-rising) is meant to be?

Could be, this is my first time ever hearing of Cthulhu Rising. However, from the description at the link, I think what I had in mind has more of a military orientation (a la GDW's 2300) - not so much investigators trying to discover the truth about Mythos stuff in space as "we know what's out there and we're in a fight to the finish against it." Which may well be an aspect of the CR setting; I wouldn't know.:idunno:

Quote from: T. Foster;622003I had pretty much the same thought. The Cthulhu Mythos as a hard/military sf setting along the lines of Aliens (which, per the GDW folks' admission was the primary inspiration for the look and feel of the 2300 universe) could be pretty cool.

I'm pretty sure John Ringo wrote a novel or two about just such a setting. Might be worth checking out.

Quote from: jhkim;621988I like this idea.  I'm just not sure who the bad guys would be.  I guess a world-wide conspiracy of terrorists who keep trying to "investigate" - which generally means blow up or burn down - people who are different than normal.

Hm... how about :

The Mythos is about grand and alien systems, and about interaction, and about Revelation in the Apocalypse or Ragnarok sense.  Mage, where the Technocracy was doomed and outnumbered and damned and all the more dangerous for it.  Changeling, where the True Fae were terrific and oh-so-certain to arrive instead of merely terrible.  The Bees and especially the Dragon from The Secret World, especially where it's suggested there are a lot of active Bees in the world.  Changing and leaping across the world in ways that don't really make sense except in retrospect and metaphor, faster and greater than anyone has a right to be.

In turn, enemies don't need that.  There shouldn't be a New World Order, or Vast World-Spanding MegaCorp, or righteous hand of God, or any other odd conspiracy theory or religious belief.  It's not the UN, or the Country, but Fox Mulder who wants to stop you, except the local police actually believe him and are willing to let him use the local SWAT team.  Titus Crow is a smooth-talking betrayer who knows just enough to make things miserable for your team, and has enough powerful artifacts that stopping him is a Big Deal. Some complete jackass keeps summoning the Byakhee, but we don't want to shut him or her up in too obvious or too messy a manner.  Great Forces will eventually take these individual down if the player characters don't, but bringing a pile of Ghouls into things isn't a good fix, while your players can come up with a good fix and improve themselves at the same time.

Other enemies shouldn't be human, or even comprehensible to the uninitiated: you might fight Saturn and the Moon while in the Dreamlands, or need to take a malfunctioning antitime-tool-artifact-being of Xexanoth, or need to distinguish if a Shoggoth is malfunctioning or if it's actually got a point.

And then there's themselves: the player characters are constantly experiencing things beyond what humans are design to know, and growing beyond what humans were meant to be.  Not a full insanity system, because those tend to be done very poorly, but instead obsession and revelation and understanding dragging the characters further from societal and cultural norms.

Well, there's the other aspect of Mythos that's often ignored -- playing the evil guy and loving it. Even in the literature, Mythos gleefully prophesies of the glorious time it'll come to ravish the earth in apocalyptic holocaust, and teach us to love it. Turn humanity into a great intergalactic lottery contest for "Who Wants to be a Great Old One!"

Then it'll be about the sick personal horror of role playing the psychopaths who want to win the prize before everyone else. Keeping things secret only makes good sense because who wants more competitors? The idea of human progress becomes a mixed bag of enabling new competition, while furthering your goals of a) establishing your right as humanity's preeminent representative among galactic bullies, and b) more victims to entertainingly slaughter when the stars are right.

The reason Kult and In Nomine are fondly remembered for their depravity is because as a player you find yourself willfully and gleefully immersed in evil acts. The horror of your sick in-character choices ended up being far more morally horrifying to the players than any set up the GM devised. Bring back the greatest of prizes CoC can offer a character, to be an immortal bully serving the universal malice of the Outer Gods, and make it a contested goal for players.

Sure it may evoke vomiting from revulsion, but the paranoia and self-loathing should dredge up an oft untapped dimension of Mythos horror. "Cthulhu isn't a bad guy, he's my buddy! It's just too many other damn people who don't deserve his wisdom get in my way! I'll make them get out of my way..."

:eek:

Quote from: Simlasa;621705It is odd that even going way back there were Lovecraftian pastiche stories that sought to do nothing more than detail the family tree of Hastur and add in Cthulhu's second cousin twice-removed. (...)

It was HPL himself, in a letter exchange with Clark Ashton Smith, who started the family tree thing, though it was obviously not to be taken too seriously since they included themselves.

Quote from: Simlasa;622007Isn't that pretty much what Cthulhu Rising (http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/49559/cthulhu-rising) is meant to be?

Cthulhu Rising, which, apparently, will be in print again from D101 Games, using the OpenQuest rules, by the way:

Cthulhu Rising | D101 Games (http://d101games.com/books/cthulhu-rising/)

I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos, except as open satire; e.g. using the Derlethian geneaology of the Old Ones and Elder Gods as the basis for a game of familial backstabbing and one-upmanship, basically Amber with tentacles tacked on. Or a Kobolds Ate My Baby-esque game of cruel but hilariously inept cultists.

What I still want to do with the Mythos is a "Cthulhu in Space" game. I think the two go really well together, if you stick to gritty, low-key SF a la Aliens (a cosmic horror movie if there's ever been one). I've been looking for non-outrageously-priced hardcopies of both Cthulhu Rising and Cthonian Stars to no avail.

Quote from: The Butcher;622133using the Derlethian geneaology of the Old Ones and Elder Gods as the basis for a game of familial backstabbing and one-upmanship

I have played that game, though not quite as sophisticated; nameless horrors with randomly assigned features competing to bring around their own version of the apocalypse before their siblings do, dodging wave after wave of investigators with shotguns.

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos...

As good guys: a lot of the Mythos is old, in the same way that a piece of bread that fell behind the fridge is old.  It's stale, moldy, possibly developing new forms of civilization, and I think this is also from a loaf that was recalled after some contamination scare.  Even by the standards of his time, Lovecraft was a racist crazy git who almost had a psychiatric break when his secret shame of Welsh blood.  A lot of the Mythos, especially the part of the Mythos that's reached the popular culture, is happy to declare things Evil without spending much effort on explaining why the viewpoint character knows that to be a thing.

As villains: sometimes cackling evil is fun, although I do agree it's best done as parody.

I run Call of Cthulhu often  but veryvery rarely use any Mythos stuff. Its kind of a special event, like Vader or Jabba the Hutt showing up in a Star Wars game. Those creatures are celebrities now, so they don't work any better for a sense of "unknowable horror" than Freddy Krueger thses days. Instead, I tend to research the folklore of a given area. Especially in Scotland, every square mile of that country has some sort of horrific creature associated with it, many of them more bizarre and f-ed up than anything Lovecraft or his sycophants dreamed up (give me a Nuckelavee or Black Annis to throw at players over Hounds of tindalos or Deep Ones anyday)

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos,

Wasnt that the premise of the game that one guy who got banned from RPG net for casting spells on other posters did?

QuoteWhat I still want to do with the Mythos is a "Cthulhu in Space" game. I think the two go really well together, if you stick to gritty, low-key SF a la Aliens (a cosmic horror movie if there's ever been one). I've been looking for non-outrageously-priced hardcopies of both Cthulhu Rising and Cthonian Stars to no avail.

I ran a really great Call of Cthulhu in space adventure a bit ago, based on a heavily modified All Flesh Must Be Eaten scenario, that was something like a cross between Event Horizon and Alien. It was pretty damn awesome, and achieved a somewhat elgendary status among my players as one of the best of the Cthulhu one-shots (outside of this one that featured Vampire cannibal priests vs Gypsy werewolves. Thats considered the apex thsu far of all our adventures).

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos

They might not be the worst of the villains to be found but I've had a fair amount of success running games where the players were not innocent do-gooders out to save the world (as if they could) but instead were grave-robbers and occultists and antiquarians looking to find and use ancient knowledge and relics for their own gain.
More like the two fellows in HPL's 'The Hound' than the academic saviors in 'The Dunwich Horror'.
I think there were examples of campaigns like this in The Unspeakable Oath as well.
So on the one side, they've got cultists to steal from and fight off... but also nosey investigators who feel strongly they should not be allowed to own a private copy of the Cultes des Goules.
They're not trying to call up any of the Big Bads but they're not beyond making deals with Deep Ones in exchange for some interesting rumors or a bizarre bit of treasure.
It all ends up feeling a bit like Cold War cloak and dagger or underworld gangs... all moral shades of gray, enemies and friends trading places frequently.

If they by chance run across a group of nutters who might actually be close to bringing off an evil world-threatening conspiracy they'd let some group of white-hat investigators know about it... but they'll probably stay out of it themselves, if they could.

Quote from: gattsuru;622437As good guys: a lot of the Mythos is old, in the same way that a piece of bread that fell behind the fridge is old.  It's stale, moldy, possibly developing new forms of civilization, and I think this is also from a loaf that was recalled after some contamination scare.  

Even by the standards of his time, Lovecraft was a racist crazy git who almost had a psychiatric break when his secret shame of Welsh blood [came to light].  A lot of the Mythos, especially the part of the Mythos that's reached the popular culture, is happy to declare things Evil without spending much effort on explaining why the viewpoint character knows that to be a thing.

As villains: sometimes cackling evil is fun, although I do agree it's best done as parody.

That bolded central bit is key.

What gives horror to Lovecraft's work is an alien offense to one's sensibilities. It is literally an issue of The Other invading and not caring a whit about the correct order of things. Without that his work reads like a dime store Weird Detective comic ate a thesaurus -- more titillating action than eldritch horror.

This was a guy who honestly believed in a Neoclassicist world filled with Progress!, and rationality, and all the Western bigotry that sustained the illusion why they couldn't find the "same" among other "races." By the time he was in his middle age he was already out-of-date with his contemporaries; Impressionism and Romanticism were already old hat. In his lifetime he saw Expressionism and Art Nouveau turn from the publicly degraded perversion of sick minds into being positively mundane compared to all the -isms like Fauvism, Abstractionism, Modernism, Cubist, Dadaist, etc. He was a dinosaur screaming out what he thought was the final horrific culmination of such a societal direction.

He liked the weird like Reagan Era America liked splatterpunk and slasher flicks. Something about the whore always getting ripped apart and the virgin being spared (after a night of hell) agreed with him. The state of the world shocked him -- he literally says he could not function in New York from all the cosmopolitan diversity -- and he crafted bombastic moralist plays with eternal hellfire licking at mankind's toes. Except he supplanted his modern version of hellfire.

Why is all this important? Because when people say, 'everyone playing a horror game has to be on the same page,' it means something. Sure you can play it as action detective + tentacles, in fact HPL would probably love that as it's reinforcing what he sees as a wholesome aesthetic against its corresponding horrific antithesis. Hopefully emulating upstanding examples of humanity would accord the player to such virtues, and thus its antithesis should properly horrify, and a rousing defense of mankind ensue.

But it's hard for modern players to see why an uncaring universe filled with bully aliens is offensive and frightening as a mere thought. Just as we can readily accept a psychopath skinning humans to wear their skins as hazard of human existence, we can readily accept we are meaningless, infinitesimal specks in an uncaring universe.  It doesn't shock anyone to their core anymore. It's just another tragedy in crapsack world, where Progress! is dead.

And if you can't shock anyone to their core, or have them suspend their belief enough so that the simulation of "being there" carries emotional weight, all that effort at horror comes crashing down. You gotta buy what the GM is selling, or might as well run something with less tentacles. But in a post modern world, what's offensive and scary anymore?

So I say reverse the situation. Let the players play evil until they scare themselves. It's easier for their imagination to make horrors in the dark than for me as a GM to tease out what really scares them. First let them invest in the rpg world, later watch as they invest deeper and find their own disturbing personal abyss. It's a lazy form of genre interrogation, but it does give an insight into what actually gets to them.

Monsters aren't impersonal, no matter how much we say they are. In the ends, we're killed at the tentacles of some squamous thing, which is a personal end. There's some hope we can avoid it if we shoot enough bullets or chant the right incantation.

In space, as an example, physics and vacuum are utterly impersonal. They will kill you, and your death means nothing.

Which is why I think a space setting could embody the "potential victim of a hostile and uncaring universe" aspect of the mythos better than a monster hunt does. Not as the entirety of the setting, mind, but as one aspect of it.

Space travel, in a Mythos-informed universe, is dangerous, dirty, and not at all easy. Just like the real world.

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos, except as open satire; e.g. using the Derlethian geneaology of the Old Ones and Elder Gods as the basis for a game of familial backstabbing and one-upmanship, basically Amber with tentacles tacked on. Or a Kobolds Ate My Baby-esque game of cruel but hilariously inept cultists.

Better still, go with something level-based and model the ascension of utterly inept cultists/scholars/antiquities dealers/astrally projecting dreamers into the ranks of the mythos baddies.

Quote from: gattsuru;622437.  Even by the standards of his time, Lovecraft was a racist crazy git who almost had a psychiatric break when his secret shame of Welsh blood.  

Yeah, it always cracks me up because I'm 25% basque, one of the tcho-tcho derived "look human but aren't actually human" races; and certainly that's a big part of lovecraftian horror: things look normal at first and then you realize they aren't.  Of course, in my own campaigns of CoC I love to play up the whole "Beware the Basque Menace" thing.

QuoteA lot of the Mythos, especially the part of the Mythos that's reached the popular culture, is happy to declare things Evil without spending much effort on explaining why the viewpoint character knows that to be a thing.

That's kind of the point; true evil is something you can feel, a wrongness that is absolute and needs no explaining. It is evil by its very presence.  
And of course that doesn't jibe well with our post-modern decadent values where we want to explain that hitler just had a bad childhood and its not his fault and people are campaigning to save the endangered pubic crab because its a living thing too; but in a way that makes it even MORE impacting, if you can get the sensation across.  In Lovecraft's time, people knew there were absolutes of wrong and right, true and false; but in our time, if a complete relativist can be made to feel that everything he believed was just so much pretentious bullshit, that in fact there IS something that is objectively true and it will crush you like a meaningless insect, then that could be powerful stuff.

So yeah, I think that the Mythos CAN be saved, by turning it on its head: it used to be about finding out that the things you thought were real didn't turn out to be so; now it has to be about finding out that there ARE real (inescapable, objective and absolute) things, when you thought nothing was.

RPGPundit


As villains: sometimes cackling evil is fun, although I do agree it's best done as parody.[/QUOTE]

Quote from: Ladybird;621550I think the thing to do, is to take the concepts and build from there - hostile universe, the emptiness of realizing there are powers as far above you as you are above insects, etc - and start there, rather than "Now, what can I have the Cthulhu cultists do this week?". You can build a lot on that chassis, without needing to go down the "how many tentacles?" route.

I am working on something along those lines - still in lots of pieces, but Im hoping to have a beta document ready to go before the summer.

Call of Cthulhu (the RPG) being the grandmaster of Lovecraftian rpgs not only set expectations of game players towards Lovecraft (for those who gamed first before reading), but an entire generation of Lovecraftian writers. There are folks who wrote gaming materials for Chaosium or the other third party publishers who went on to write their own stories. ST Joshi commented on this at one of the HP Lovecraft Film festivals I attended.

Lovecraft had themes which transcend both the expectations and limitations of both the RPG and Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft was also an extremely well read, literate guy who, like others of his time and earlier, made use of third party sources which were limited or unreliable. His small New England world was pretty much "the world" to him, as were his own foibles. But even the stuff he gets wrong is facinating.

Quote from: RPGPundit;622962That's kind of the point; true evil is something you can feel, a wrongness that is absolute and needs no explaining. It is evil by its very presence.  
And of course that doesn't jibe well with our post-modern decadent values where we want to explain that hitler just had a bad childhood and its not his fault and people are campaigning to save the endangered pubic crab because its a living thing too; but in a way that makes it even MORE impacting, if you can get the sensation across.  In Lovecraft's time, people knew there were absolutes of wrong and right, true and false; but in our time, if a complete relativist can be made to feel that everything he believed was just so much pretentious bullshit, that in fact there IS something that is objectively true and it will crush you like a meaningless insect, then that could be powerful stuff.

So yeah, I think that the Mythos CAN be saved, by turning it on its head: it used to be about finding out that the things you thought were real didn't turn out to be so; now it has to be about finding out that there ARE real (inescapable, objective and absolute) things, when you thought nothing was.

RPGPundit

Absolutism is kind of an obvious boogeyman for a relativist worldview isn't it?

Also moral relativism and fatalism and the notion that there is no such thing as originality and progress... these ideas are extremely old. Ecclesiastes old at least.

I don't think the mythos needs saving anyway because I think its basic premises are still fertile ground. If it has suffered it has suffered from overuse, and the only cure for that is an audience who hasn't heard this stuff yet.

Quote from: Opaopajr;622607Something about the whore always getting ripped apart and the virgin being spared (after a night of hell) agreed with him.

It apparently agrees with much of modern Hollywood horror as well.

In fairness to Lovecraft, I believe he began to change his tune a bit towards the end of his life. However I wouldn't be unduly concerned, he was to a great exent a product of his times. Like Charles Dickens, champion of London's downtrodden and vocal advocate for the genocide of every Indian on the subcontinent.

What we take from these ideas today is more important than the context in which they first appeared, so cosmic horror still has a place. I don't agree with the hopelessness angle, I think that's an expression of something far less pleasant (once in the distant mists of time, I calculated the global production rate of nuclear weapons versus the time it takes Cthulhu to regenerate after a direct hit, turns out we could do it, pass the lead lined living suit fellow spawn campers), but the idea of terrifying sorceries and secrets too abominable for man to know has a cachet.

Quote from: beejazz;622976I don't think the mythos needs saving anyway because I think its basic premises are still fertile ground. If it has suffered it has suffered from overuse, and the only cure for that is an audience who hasn't heard this stuff yet.

I agree and think that the 'overuse' has been primarily along a very narrow line of 'smash the cult, save the earth' type adventures... as compared to the wider variety of stories written by Lovecraft and those who draw inspiration from him.
There are variations within Lovecraft (and horror in general) that I think are better served by 'one-shot' adventures with isolated/pre-fab PCs. The concept of stretching stories out over long campaigns deflates certain sorts of atmosphere I think (not that I haven't enjoyed wonderful long campaigns of COC).

Quote from: The Traveller;622985In fairness to Lovecraft, I believe he began to change his tune a bit towards the end of his life.

I was surprised to read that Lovecraft favored Roosevelt and considered himself a democrat. Nothing to do with his racism but he always struck me as being very conservative in his views, I would have thought him a staunch opponent of anything smelling of 'socialism'.
The guy was complicated. I don't think he can be written off as merely 'racist'. Like anyone else, I think his viewpoints changed over time... as seen in  some of his later stories such as Shadow Out Of Time where the aliens grew less overtly malevolent. Still, his brain-stealing MiGo aren't any more prejudiced than our modern surplus of cannibalistic rural folks.
Lovecraft's experiences in Red Hook (and the story they inspired) reminds me of a Bulgarian grad student friend who moved to the U.S. a few years ago to get her PhD... and after a few short weeks in St. Louis she was going on about how 'the niggers are worse than the filthy gypsies!'. A VERY smart girl with, at that point, a very narrow view of the world.
Speaking for myself I know that I've said and done horrible things that my current persona is shocked to recollect.

Quote from: Simlasa;623002I was surprised to read that Lovecraft favored Roosevelt and considered himself a democrat.

Eh the early democrats were sponsors of the KKK and related groups, I think the Republicans only started courting the red states post war. Your point is good and still stands however.

Quote from: The Traveller;623011Eh the early democrats were sponsors of the KKK and related groups, I think the Republicans only started courting the red states post war. Your point is good and still stands however.

yeah, I corrected that because I didn't mean to associate Republicans with racism, more that I always thought of Lovecraft as being an arch-conservative... but was surprised to find he wasn't. So saying he was 'racist' is likewise not the whole of his persona and can't remove from him the promise of eventual enlightenment and weakened prejudices (or at least trading them in for new ones).
I think it's easy to read 'fear of the other' into just about any horror story... just as fantasy RPGs often get slammed for their wanton slaughter of 'orcs'. HPL had racist thoughts but I think it's a stretch to translate that to the entire mythos being some sort of overlay for Lovecraft's fears of miscegenation.

Quote from: RPGPundit;622962So yeah, I think that the Mythos CAN be saved, by turning it on its head: it used to be about finding out that the things you thought were real didn't turn out to be so; now it has to be about finding out that there ARE real (inescapable, objective and absolute) things, when you thought nothing was.

Yeah, there could be mileage in this. Cultists as glassy-eyed zealots determined to open people's eyes to realities they've never even contemplated, Mi-Go and Deep Ones and other aliens as aloof and superior beings privy to a secret you'll never know and couldn't comprehend if you did know, the Old Ones as the rightful rulers of the Earth with humanity (and all the other mundane species) as the cosmic equivalent of vermin who've built cobwebs in the corners of the house whilst the owners have been on an extended holiday...

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;621944How about something where the Mythos is the good guys.

I proposed a setting where God was the bad guy trying to destroy the world and "the Mythos" (serial numbers filed off for public safety) reached out across the stars to save humanity. Heroes empowered by the whispers of the Old Ones to fight against the angelic hoards...

In this design contest (Warning, TBP alert);  http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?623604-TRO-Challange-Game-fu-9-You-cannot-Defeat-my-Resplendant-Pheonix-Style

My post (Again, on TBP) (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?623604-TRO-Challange-Game-fu-9-You-cannot-Defeat-my-Resplendant-Pheonix-Style&p=15356808#post15356808)

I have more of the setting written up somewhere I can post if anyone's interested.

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534The recent death of one of the guiding lights of the CoC RPG got me thinking... is Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) completely spent as an adventuring concept.. .or is there something that could be done with a mythos campaign (be it fantasy, medieval, roman, 1920s, modern, futuristic or other) that would still actually be novel?

If so, what?

RPGPundit

To answer the original question...

For me. Yes. It's boring. I really dig Delta Green as a RPG product. So much detail, great ideas, well polished stuff. The fan made supplement for Cthulu space was well done. The detail found in many CoC supplements is good (I own a bunch). I feel like the classic interpretations of the The Mythos are getting tired. Now, not saying "it sucks", because that's not accurate. It's just a personal taste thing. EDIT: Just because it's not my thing right now, doesn't mean years from now I won't change my mind... :-)

Quote from: RPGPundit;622962That's kind of the point; true evil is something you can feel, a wrongness that is absolute and needs no explaining. It is evil by its very presence.  
And of course that doesn't jibe well with our post-modern decadent values where we want to explain that hitler just had a bad childhood and its not his fault and people are campaigning to save the endangered pubic crab because its a living thing too; but in a way that makes it even MORE impacting, if you can get the sensation across.

Objective and absolute evil can be a great thematic tool, and useful setting tool. It does have to be handled well, however, as contrasted to earlier Dungeons and Dragons or especially Blue Rose.  The Mythos needs a pretty hard tweak to avoid having similar problems: the constant themes of inherited guilt (see The Shadow over Innsmouth) and outside compulsion  (almost the entire Mythos) are pretty repulsive when mixed with obvious and fundamental evil, in addition to being mechanically obnoxious in a game.

QuoteSo yeah, I think that the Mythos CAN be saved, by turning it on its head: it used to be about finding out that the things you thought were real didn't turn out to be so; now it has to be about finding out that there ARE real (inescapable, objective and absolute) things, when you thought nothing was.

That'd be an interesting take.

Quote from: Simlasa;623002Still, his brain-stealing MiGo aren't any more prejudiced than our modern surplus of cannibalistic rural folks.

That says more about the modern surplus of cannibalistic rural folks, rather than the MiGo.

QuoteSpeaking for myself I know that I've said and done horrible things that my current persona is shocked to recollect.

The only way to avoid regretful mistakes, is to either never act, or never learn better.

Quote from: The Butcher;621739Better still, have you seen Mr. Chandler's OSRIC conversion of the Barkeresque demons from his Pandemonium RPGs (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/110459/Teratic-Tome)? I am sorely tempted to pick it up.

Also, Kult. OOP and nearly impossible to track down, but our go-to game for Hellraiser-like horror back in the day.

Heh, seen it?  Check the credits.  I edited it, and it is awesome.

Quote from: beejazz;622976Absolutism is kind of an obvious boogeyman for a relativist worldview isn't it?

Yup. The idea that there can be absolutes is absolutely terrifying to anyone who is firmly entrenched in the post-modern relativist paradigm; which includes most semi-educated people in western civilization.

There's no greater coward than the person who wants to desperately believe that "you can't really know anything"...

RPGPundit

I guess one thing to consider is that Lovecraft himself was not working with a tidy "mythos". If the broad themes still inspire ideas -- as they have for many writers besides HPL -- then, yes, there is probably about as much new to be done as in any other perennial field.

What is there, really, that is new under the sun, except in the approach of yet another unique person?

Quote from: Phillip;623309What is there, really, that is new under the sun, except in the approach of yet another unique person?

Yes, I think saying 'I'm bored of it' is basically 'I've run out of ideas'... which doesn't mean the source concepts themselves are boring... just that person.
 
I mean, are goblins 'boring'? They're in practically every fantasy game since when... but I still think there are creepy/nasty/horrific things to be done with small supernatural humanoids.

Quote from: Simlasa;623313Yes, I think saying 'I'm bored of it' is basically 'I've run out of ideas'... which doesn't mean the source concepts themselves are boring... just that person.
 
I mean, are goblins 'boring'? They're in practically every fantasy game since when... but I still think there are creepy/nasty/horrific things to be done with small supernatural humanoids.

Good point.

Quote from: RPGPundit;623307Yup. The idea that there can be absolutes is absolutely terrifying to anyone who is firmly entrenched in the post-modern relativist paradigm; which includes most semi-educated people in western civilization.

There's no greater coward than the person who wants to desperately believe that "you can't really know anything"...

RPGPundit

And really, who doesn't play RPGs to confront truths they've been denying?

Quote from: This Guy;623356And really, who doesn't play RPGs to confront truths they've been denying?

Not sure if you're being serious here or not... but hey, usually I'd say this is stupid, but in a horror game worth its salt there better be at least a little of that factor...

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;623567Not sure if you're being serious here or not... but hey, usually I'd say this is stupid, but in a horror game worth its salt there better be at least a little of that factor...

RPGPundit

I don't think all horror needs to necessarily involve the breakdown of one's worldview.  It can, but it can just as easily rely on reaffirmation - moreso, I'd argue.  It's a pretty conservative genre like that.  And I've seen a bit too many GMs who take the former method of applying horror as license to try and directly challenge player beliefs through their character to be automatically comfortable with it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534. . . Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) . . .

Preschool of Cthulhu.


Beware! If you think about this too long, it actually starts to sound like a fun campaign. If you value your sanity, forget you ever read this!

Quote from: Black Vulmea;623750Preschool of Cthulhu.


Beware! If you think about this too long, it actually starts to sound like a fun campaign. If you value your sanity, forget you ever read this!

Cthulhumaid. With tentacles this time.

Quote from: Benoist;623804Cthulhumaid. With tentacles this time.

That's just what Maid needs... another Japanese sexual fetish.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;623808That's just what Maid needs... another Japanese sexual fetish.

Tragically that fetish is at least as old as Ukiyo-e, and I'd be surprised if Maid doesn't already have rules or genre comments on that.

Did you know Otus was into Hentai?

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HPQou-R6PDE/SgRBwluSzjI/AAAAAAAAANI/u7zpoAV-qX4/s400/ErolOtus-RoguesGallery-02.jpg)

Seriously though, the guy was one of the best Cthulhu artists.

Why must every discussion on this forum about tentacles end up turning into something sordid?!

RPGPundit

Cthulhu is just like King Arthur and Dracula. Mostly overdone, and sometimes best left alone for a while after a glut, but every once in a while someone will come up with a new or brilliant interpretation and every few decades or so the original will inspire a new generation. So, yeah, Cthulhu is overplayed right now but its a strong enough archetyope that I'll think he'll sustain through time for quite a while.

Quote from: RPGPundit;624100Why must every discussion on this forum about tentacles end up turning into something sordid?!

RPGPundit

Actually that one kind of started with you.  
You brought the plushies.
Black Vulmea took that to school.
Ben got us to japanese school and Maid.  
Warpig made sure we were all on the same page, by calling out sexual fetish.
I remembered that Erol Otus, an awesome Cthulhu artist, also drew at least two pictures I can remember of hot chicks getting grabbed by tentacles, so I brought it home.

Welcome to the internet, where memes roll downhill. :D

Yeah I know you didn't mean literally how did we get there, but really, Lovecraft's Mythos, as worshipped by all those degenerate cultists, was pretty sordid.

Quote from: RPGPundit;624100Why must every discussion on this forum about tentacles end up turning into something sordid?!
RPGPundit

A lot of places, tentacles = food. Many Lovecraftian horrors would dare not to attack Japan or many Asian countries. First, the crowds disappear into buildings, only to emerge carrying chopsticks, small beds of vinegared rice and a terrifyingly hungry look...

Quote from: Lynn;624329A lot of places, tentacles = food. Many Lovecraftian horrors would dare not to attack Japan or many Asian countries. First, the crowds disappear into buildings, only to emerge carrying chopsticks, small beds of vinegared rice and a terrifyingly hungry look...

The Japanese sourcebook for CoC is very weird and rambling, and one of the things that the author rambles on about is how his boss (who was Japanese) saw one of his CoC books and found Cthulhu more amusing than anything else, and commented something like "We eat those things"

Quote from: Lynn;624329A lot of places, tentacles = food. Many Lovecraftian horrors would dare not to attack Japan or many Asian countries. First, the crowds disappear into buildings, only to emerge carrying chopsticks, small beds of vinegared rice and a terrifyingly hungry look...

Quote from: JeremyR;624332The Japanese sourcebook for CoC is very weird and rambling, and one of the things that the author rambles on about is how his boss (who was Japanese) saw one of his CoC books and found Cthulhu more amusing than anything else, and commented something like "We eat those things"

Unless you have kinetofayetophobia (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/94163/The-Void%3A-Opening-Fiction?term=void+fiction)

Quote from: TristramEvans;624183Cthulhu is just like King Arthur and Dracula. Mostly overdone, and sometimes best left alone for a while after a glut, but every once in a while someone will come up with a new or brilliant interpretation and every few decades or so the original will inspire a new generation. So, yeah, Cthulhu is overplayed right now but its a strong enough archetyope that I'll think he'll sustain through time for quite a while.

I agree.

RPGPundit

Quote from: TristramEvans;624183Cthulhu is just like King Arthur and Dracula. Mostly overdone, and sometimes best left alone for a while after a glut, but every once in a while someone will come up with a new or brilliant interpretation and every few decades or so the original will inspire a new generation. So, yeah, Cthulhu is overplayed right now but its a strong enough archetyope that I'll think he'll sustain through time for quite a while.

I agree.

But I also think that we need to keep in mind that the Cthulhu Mythos has not been 'overdone' for most folks, including most gamers.  Call of Cthulhu rarely is a group's main game, and I doubt that most D&D (or RuneQuest, or Pathfinder, or whatever) games include substantial Cthulhu content.

I ran some classic CoC adventures recently for some 'casual' gamers and they loved it.  One is even a great Lovecraft fan, but a guy who hadn't played CoC until I introduced him to it.  The Mythos seemed plenty 'fresh' (and terrifying) to them.

The Mythos seems 'overdone' only to the hardcore RPG addicts that hang out at places like this. :)

Also, I should mention that Dark Streets from Cakebread & Walton is pretty damn awesome.

It's essentially the Laundry (or Delta Green) in the 18th century.

Quote from: Akrasia;624629The Mythos seems 'overdone' only to the hardcore RPG addicts that hang out at places like this. :)

Hear, hear.

I don't know about "new", but I'm still using the mythos for gaming in my currently-running Cthulhubusters campaign (see sig).

So far, the PCs in my campaign haven't actually discovered much (except for torching a single "monster" and discovering a strange artifact) but my backstory is all about exploring how the classism, racism (or more accurately, immigrantism, since the races in question are all considered "white" these days), and eugenics beliefs of the cultists feed their plots with regard to interacting with the mythos.

Quote from: Akrasia;624632Also, I should mention that Dark Streets from Cakebread & Walton is pretty damn awesome.

It's essentially the Laundry (or Delta Green) in the 18th century.

Yes, damn good!

RPGPundit

. . . and Cthulhu officially jumps the shark (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?675050-Oz-invaded-by-a-Mythos-entity), courtesy of Big Purple.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;628017. . . and Cthulhu officially jumps the shark (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?675050-Oz-invaded-by-a-Mythos-entity), courtesy of Big Purple.

Why should I give a fuck about people who visibly don't understand squat about the Mythos to begin with? It certainly hasn't jumped the shark for me because some guy had fantasies about bringing Cthulhu to beat the shit out of the Winter Witch.

Quote from: Benoist;628020Why should I give a fuck . . . ?

You should't.

Fact is, it's no worse than my King Arthur v Cthulhu mashup, so I could lay a reasonable claim to a shark-jump myself.

So really, if I write up a campaign where Frodo uses LOTR's primary macguffin as a cock-ring... surely I'm the one flying over the shark, not Tolkien.
I'd figure the same goes for these various whatsits who want Cthulhu jammies and Yog Sothoth bath bubbles.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;628017. . . and Cthulhu officially jumps the shark (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?675050-Oz-invaded-by-a-Mythos-entity), courtesy of Big Purple.

That is just The Never Ending Story redux with Oz and Cthulhu plastered on for resale value.

Even as a deconstructive mash-up effort of two great fantasy works, it still is a poor derivative of an already extant work. The big purple is only a legend in its own mind. Like many things on the internet, it is not worth the effort to engage.

Quote from: Opaopajr;628039That is just The Never Ending Story redux with Oz and Cthulhu plastered on for resale value.

Even as a deconstructive mash-up effort of two great fantasy works, it still is a poor derivative of an already extant work. The big purple is only a legend in its own mind. Like many things on the internet, it is not worth the effort to engage.

Interesting to compare it to the first Neverending story-movie ...
Yes, i say the first, even though the second was rubbish, because, really, to someone that has read the book by Michel Ende, the world of Fantasia really holds its own mind-wrenching perils for possibly anyone with the ability to imagine ....

But i ... digress? The op in the link obviously has also seen the first movie of Neverending Story, by calling the corrupting power "the never" ....
However, it is obvious that those that has answered in the thread either did not make that connection, or completely ignores it, and comes with far better suggestions themselves.

As far as other ways to look at the Mythos, one could really do anything from an odd take on TORG, but with the Mythos sharing the world, ... or fighting over it? to ..
When i think of it, has anyone really thought of combining computers with the Mythos yet?
I mean, it could be anything from a "cheap but entertaining game" that ultimately leads a characters to unlock the portal to R'lyeh ... or however it is spelled, just to get sucked into the screen literally, since the screen has become a portal, .... or that a virus that is made on the play "The King in yellow" is spreading .... or someone hooks up a lot of weird contraptions to their computer, in an attempt to reach "the Master of Knowledge" ... and ending up summoning Yog-Sothoth .... again, through the screen.

My blog entry from a couple of days ago was actually about suggesting that CoC is in the process of a mini-renaissance of its own, thanks to stuff like the C&W books and "Achtung! Cthulhu".

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;621534The recent death of one of the guiding lights of the CoC RPG got me thinking... is Cthulhu (who has evolved to being the source of cutesy "hello kitty" drawings and plushies) completely spent as an adventuring concept.. .or is there something that could be done with a mythos campaign (be it fantasy, medieval, roman, 1920s, modern, futuristic or other) that would still actually be novel?

If so, what?

RPGPundit

I am reading a short story by Neil Gaiman called A Study in Emerald (http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf), which you can read for free at that link.  It was created as a mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and the Mythos.

Without spoiling it much, the story takes place 700 years after The Old Ones conquered earth.  The royals are beings from Out There, and there are clever marketing pieces sprinkled throughout the story that reference characters such as Vlad Tepes, Victor Frankenstein, Spring Heeled Jack, Dr. Jekyll., etc..  England has some scattered members of a seditionary 'restorationist' anarchist movement to restore humanity to self-rule.  

I think it could make for a very interesting Mythos campaign, and it feels like a "new" take to me.

Quote from: The Traveller;621795Have a read of A Colder War (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm), one of my favourite Mythos stories.

That was a good story.

Quote from: Mistwell;628960I am reading a short story by Neil Gaiman called A Study in Emerald (http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf), which you can read for free at that link.  It was created as a mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and the Mythos.

And that was a very good story.

Thanks to both of you.

Quote from: Mistwell;628960I am reading a short story by Neil Gaiman called A Study in Emerald (http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf), which you can read for free at that link.  It was created as a mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and the Mythos.

Without spoiling it much, the story takes place 700 years after The Old Ones conquered earth.  The royals are beings from Out There, and there are clever marketing pieces sprinkled throughout the story that reference characters such as Vlad Tepes, Victor Frankenstein, Spring Heeled Jack, Dr. Jekyll., etc..  England has some scattered members of a seditionary 'restorationist' anarchist movement to restore humanity to self-rule.  

I think it could make for a very interesting Mythos campaign, and it feels like a "new" take to me.

I didn't actually read the story, but from your description this doesn't sound like the Mythos to me at all... because one of the premises of the Mythos is that if the Old Ones do arrive on earth, whatever happens after won't be recognizable to us. If humans survive, they will look both inhuman and totally insane to us.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;629127I didn't actually read the story, but from your description this doesn't sound like the Mythos to me at all... because one of the premises of the Mythos is that if the Old Ones do arrive on earth, whatever happens after won't be recognizable to us. If humans survive, they will look both inhuman and totally insane to us.

RPGPundit

They look inhuman and totally insane.  Few people are ever exposed to royalty, and royalty drive humans insane and feed off their madness...or so the Restorationists claim.  The story begins with an encounter with an old one, and the one human who survives is a shriveled wreck driven nearly mad by the mere site of it.

It's definitely the Mythos.  You should read it.  It's a good story.   It won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story (and the Locus), and was published in the collection New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird.

Quote from: RPGPundit;629127... whatever happens after won't be recognizable to us. If humans survive, they will look both inhuman and totally insane to us.

It's worth reading.  I don't want to spoil it, but Gaiman makes a very good argument by the end that the protagonist is glossing over a lot of things that are incredibly incompatible with what you'd expect or consider sane.

Quote from: gattsuru;629207It's worth reading.  I don't want to spoil it, but Gaiman makes a very good argument by the end that the protagonist is glossing over a lot of things that are incredibly incompatible with what you'd expect or consider sane.

In particular, since it's first person it has an unreliable narrator. He glosses over a lot of things.

The story is a real kick.

Quote from: Mistwell;628960I am reading a short story by Neil Gaiman called A Study in Emerald (http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf), which you can read for free at that link.  It was created as a mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and the Mythos.

Without spoiling it much, the story takes place 700 years after The Old Ones conquered earth.  The royals are beings from Out There, and there are clever marketing pieces sprinkled throughout the story that reference characters such as Vlad Tepes, Victor Frankenstein, Spring Heeled Jack, Dr. Jekyll., etc..  England has some scattered members of a seditionary 'restorationist' anarchist movement to restore humanity to self-rule.  

I think it could make for a very interesting Mythos campaign, and it feels like a "new" take to me.

Yeah that was part of a collection called Shadows Over Baker Street from about...'04? I think. It was pretty good.

I think it has plenty of mileage yet.

Someone has already mentioned Cthulhu Rising, Clockwork and Cthulhu and the Cthulhu Britannica IIRC.

Babylon 5 I thought was great for showing how small humanity actually was; and EU Vorlons are pretty damn terrifying. Doctor Who is good as well showing that alien menaces invade the Earth and were it not for outside help we'd be long dead already.

In a way Elric tried to imitate that with the Lords of Order and Chaos. Two incomprehensible forces beyond human-ken.

Fiction-wise a Xeelee would be perfect Lovecraft material, a 19th Century person seeing one run off screaming.

So yeah, the mythos has a lot of life left in it, as long as it is approached the right way.

Quote from: Opaopajr;628039The big purple is only a legend in its own mind. Like many things on the internet, it is not worth the effort to engage.

I wouldn't conflate the site, admins and objectionable inhabitants with everyone who frequents rpgnet though, there are still loads of decent posters over there for some reason. One of my favourite creative threads is this one (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?294175-Sci-Fi-Setting-Riff-Counting-to-Infinity). Rpgnet doesn't do much right but riffs it is good at.

Quote from: The Traveller;629422I wouldn't conflate the site, admins and objectionable inhabitants with everyone who frequents rpgnet though, there are still loads of decent posters over there for some reason.

I agree. I've slowly learned how to navigate the place and not let myself get steamed over the stupid stuff... just sift out the gold instead... and there's a good bit of it, enough to justify going there.
It's similar to The Miniatures Page, which is full of quasi-Fascists but also loads of good information and ideas. I just need to ignore the political baiting and arguments about what color Napoleon's shorts were.

Fair enough, but engaging is not the same as sifting. ;)
Not everything needs a response, even here. :p

Quote from: Opaopajr;629588Fair enough, but engaging is not the same as sifting.

Oh, I'll happily engage over there as well... if the thread seems lively and creative... vs. some form of do-it-yourself rectal exam.

There have been many good threads about CoC over there that I've participated in happily... as long as they're about ideas and actual gaming vs. 'why this game is broken' or 'why this would be better if it was FATE'.
I pretty much avoid the 'Industry Analysis' threads here the way I avoid the 'Stat my transgender snowflake' over there.

Quote from: Simlasa;629593There have been many good threads about CoC over there that I've participated in happily... as long as they're about ideas and actual gaming vs. 'why this game is broken' or 'why this would be better if it was FATE'.

Seems to me that there's way more of the latter, and that the former eventually turn into the latter as soon as someone claims that CoC is a useless system and that RPGnet Darling of the Week #5859 is a "much better fit" for the mythos stories (with said poster usually completely misrepresenting what happens in the actual literature in the process).

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;629793Seems to me that there's way more of the latter, and that the former eventually turn into the latter

Well, yeah... there's a certain inevitability about the place... given how many folks frequent it. But until Johnny Fuckwad shows up some good/useful conversations can be had.
The thread I started tonight got to two whole pages before people started attacking me.

Quote from: RPGPundit;629127I didn't actually read the story, but from your description this doesn't sound like the Mythos to me at all... because one of the premises of the Mythos is that if the Old Ones do arrive on earth, whatever happens after won't be recognizable to us. If humans survive, they will look both inhuman and totally insane to us.

I love Neil Gaiman's writing, and find "A Study in Emerald" a great read, but I'm inclined to agree with Pundejo here. Eldricht abominations holding public office doesn't feel true to Lovecraft's Mythos (though it did make for an entertaining yarn in this case, that's less horrific than intriguing).

I found Charles Stross' "A Colder War" both a better Mythos story and a more satisfying horror story.

Quote from: The Butcher;629940I found Charles Stross' "A Colder War" both a better Mythos story and a more satisfying horror story.

Likewise, the almost offhand punchline was a toe curler, it remains one of my all time favourite pieces of fiction.

On the subject of Mythos figures as good guys, I was just re-reading Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I was struck by how the Innsmouth residents mostly seemed to want to keep to themselves and follow their own ways, and keep their secrets - and it sounds like the entire town was assaulted with genocidal fury once their secret got out.  

I'm pondering now if I could run a game of Deep Ones trying to keep their secret and hold off the genocidal threat to them.  How far would they go to keep a stranger from leaking their secrets?

Quote from: jhkim;630148On the subject of Mythos figures as good guys, I was just re-reading Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I was struck by how the Innsmouth residents mostly seemed to want to keep to themselves and follow their own ways, and keep their secrets - and it sounds like the entire town was assaulted with genocidal fury once their secret got out.  

I'm pondering now if I could run a game of Deep Ones trying to keep their secret and hold off the genocidal threat to them.  How far would they go to keep a stranger from leaking their secrets?

Well the thing about Deep Ones is that it is a genocidal threat, but on both sides.  Sooner or later one race MUST exterminate the other to survive.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;630636Well the thing about Deep Ones is that it is a genocidal threat, but on both sides.  Sooner or later one race MUST exterminate the other to survive.

What makes you say that?  I didn't see anything in the original story to indicate that.  

That's not to say that the Innsmouth people are particularly good, but for the most part both they and the Kanakys before them just tried to be isolationist.  They didn't attack their neighbors or otherwise cause harm except to protect their secret.  At the end of Zadok's story he raves something they're going to do, that involves bringing things up from the sea including a shoggoth - but he never says what.

Quote from: RPGPundit;630636Well the thing about Deep Ones is that it is a genocidal threat, but on both sides.  Sooner or later one race MUST exterminate the other to survive.

Charlie Stross's The Jennifer Morgue provides an interesting alternative view (one of the protagonists is a human/Deep One).

Quote from: jhkim;630652What makes you say that?  I didn't see anything in the original story to indicate that.  

That's not to say that the Innsmouth people are particularly good, but for the most part both they and the Kanakys before them just tried to be isolationist.  They didn't attack their neighbors or otherwise cause harm except to protect their secret.  At the end of Zadok's story he raves something they're going to do, that involves bringing things up from the sea including a shoggoth - but he never says what.

I say it because in the bigger picture of the Cthulhu mythos, all the mythos entities (including the deep ones) are utterly inimical to mankind, and many are trying to immanetize the eschaton.  

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;631167I say it because in the bigger picture of the Cthulhu mythos, all the mythos entities (including the deep ones) are utterly inimical to mankind, and many are trying to immanetize the eschaton.

The Deep Ones themselves don't seem that antagonistic; the problem is that the forces they worship probably are.

The Innsmouth ones seem to be suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. They were originally brought from the South Pacific, to dark, less sunny New England - no beautiful beaches, coconut trees or mai tais. No wonder they got all shut in....

Quote from: jhkim;630652What makes you say that?  I didn't see anything in the original story to indicate that.  

At least in the original Shadow over Innsmouth, the "fish-men" have a serious taste for human sacrifice, and the populace of Innsmouth have to provide it, in addition to racial intermingling and some material concerns, or the Deep Ones will rise and take those sacrifices.

Part of that is directly tied to the concerns of pagan human sacrifice that characterize blood libel, and you could certainly argue that the folk claiming it may be untrustworthy (indeed, the main source doesn't actually know what happens to the 'disappeared' or 'fallen off' folk, and Dagon was a Canaanite fertility deity not tied to human sacrifice).  At least with the text taken as accurate, however, long-term peace is not likely to be realistic, barring drastic changes to one group or the other's moral codes.

Quote from: RPGPundit;631167I say it because in the bigger picture of the Cthulhu mythos, all the mythos entities (including the deep ones) are utterly inimical to mankind, and many are trying to immanetize the eschaton.  

Damn you, Pundit!  That's just racist talk, judging the poor Deep Ones based on things they haven't done.  "All Mythos creatures are alike" ... Indeed!   :-)

But seriously, I sort of agree - although the idea of a unified mythos is really more an invention of later writers and not Lovecraft.  However, I think my take is a valid reading of the story itself - and could be a fun basis for a game.  

Quote from: gattsuru;631185At least with the text taken as accurate, however, long-term peace is not likely to be realistic, barring drastic changes to one group or the other's moral codes.

Understood.  I wasn't picturing humans and Deep Ones holding hands and singing kum-ba-yah, though.  If we go just by the story, then it seems like while the Deep Ones might have some nasty internal practices, they are capable of living in peace with their human neighbors for hundreds of years.  If they hadn't been found at that time, it is quite possible that Innsmouth's next hundred years would be much like its previous hundred years.  Not exactly hunky-dory, but not like a WWII or even a Soudan.

Quote from: jhkim;631218Understood.  I wasn't picturing humans and Deep Ones holding hands and singing kum-ba-yah, though.  If we go just by the story, then it seems like while the Deep Ones might have some nasty internal practices, they are capable of living in peace with their human neighbors for hundreds of years.  If they hadn't been found at that time, it is quite possible that Innsmouth's next hundred years would be much like its previous hundred years.  Not exactly hunky-dory, but not like a WWII or even a Soudan.

They were living in peace thanks to a large and regular tribute of young living humans, even in the days of the original natives, and otherwise culturally and genetically assimilating the above-ground populace.  The Deep Ones are isolationist enough that they'd not go to war as long as the human sacrifice continues, but they're still reliant on expansion and doing ultimately unacceptable things to those outside of their culture.

  If they hadn't been discovered at that time, they might have been found in ten, when someone they sacrificed had outside connections that cared -- it's not just long-term followers of Dagon they were taking, after all.  It'd nearly failed before, for that reason, with other Native American tribes decided the original fish-folk collaborators had stolen too many of their people.

It needn't necessarily end in war, but it would have to end in at least one society radically changing its values.

Quote from: gattsuru;631470They were living in peace thanks to a large and regular tribute of young living humans, even in the days of the original natives, and otherwise culturally and genetically assimilating the above-ground populace.  The Deep Ones are isolationist enough that they'd not go to war as long as the human sacrifice continues, but they're still reliant on expansion and doing ultimately unacceptable things to those outside of their culture.

  If they hadn't been discovered at that time, they might have been found in ten, when someone they sacrificed had outside connections that cared -- it's not just long-term followers of Dagon they were taking, after all.  It'd nearly failed before, for that reason, with other Native American tribes decided the original fish-folk collaborators had stolen too many of their people.

It needn't necessarily end in war, but it would have to end in at least one society radically changing its values.

Consider this situation then:
"Not all fishmen want sacrifices".
I'll elaborate:
In addition to the bad (fish)eggs that demands human sacrifices, there may be dozens of communities of them that dislike bullying, and that lives in peaceful coexistance with neighboring human settlements.

That kind of situation would lead to much the situation that jhkim has suggested, and even the odd situation of Deep ones against Deep ones.

Quote from: Catelf;631484Consider this situation then:
"Not all fishmen want sacrifices".
I'll elaborate:
In addition to the bad (fish)eggs that demands human sacrifices, there may be dozens of communities of them that dislike bullying, and that lives in peaceful coexistance with neighboring human settlements.

Oh, you can certainly do that.  The millions-strong Deep One army doesn't particularly make sense as a monocultural thing, and it makes even less sense that a millions-strong Deep One army cares about a handful of human sacrifices.

You can even do more, and not deviate too much from the written text.  Again, we don't actually know that they're killing the folk they take away -- the author tells us Deep Ones are murderous and obviously evil, and a couple crazy old people inform us that young humans keep disappearing or being taken away, but that sacrifice isn't shown 'on-screen' or from any reliable sources.  The Kanakys and Innsmouth peoples don't necessarily have to be a genocidal threat.  There's a lot of interesting takes on this story where the Deep Ones aren't fundamentally evil (whether or not they remain expansionist and alien).  I agree with jhkim that this is an interesting place to bring stories. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=622040&postcount=48)

The author wants us to believe those unreliable sources we hear, however, so the original text does mean that they're genocidal threats (or at least culture-reshaping ones), and it does require so deviation to change that.

Quote from: gattsuru;631470They were living in peace thanks to a large and regular tribute of young living humans, even in the days of the original natives, and otherwise culturally and genetically assimilating the above-ground populace.  The Deep Ones are isolationist enough that they'd not go to war as long as the human sacrifice continues, but they're still reliant on expansion and doing ultimately unacceptable things to those outside of their culture.

I would agree with you that the story implies this, but it isn't definitely said even if you take Zadok's story as 100% reliable.  While the Deep Ones did expand, it was an extremely slow expansion that only happened after they were deliberately courted and invited in.  The Deep Ones did attack the town after Obed and 32 others were thrown in jail - but that could be interpreted as defending their own, not necessarily raging for sacrifices.  While Zadok mentioned a number of times that people went missing and he used the word "sacrifice", he has no idea what happened other than one being taken alive out to the reef.  And I think there is room in the story for Zadok's tale to not be 100% true.  

I think a reasonable case could be made that when Obed and the others were captured and their secret threatened, the Deep Ones attacked to protect their own and their secret.  Some of the people who disappeared might have been voluntary to try for the Deep Ones' eternal life, and others might have been imprisoned or taken hostage to keep the secret from getting out.  

While it comes off bad, first contact between a lot of human cultures was far far bloodier than this in terms of body count.  As a game premise, I might have humans and Deep Ones living in a tense stand-off - like the Iron Curtain between the West and Russia, or the standoff between North and South Korea.  Each side thinks badly of the other, but not to the point of war and/or genocide.

Quote from: gattsuru;631502The author wants us to believe those unreliable sources we hear, however, so the original text does mean that they're genocidal threats (or at least culture-reshaping ones), and it does require so deviation to change that.

Of course the author wants us to belive those unreliable sources, that is because it is the kind of thing that causes worrying, fear, and horror.
But.
That do not mean that the unreliable sources are true, possibly even the contrary.
And if looking at how ... at least some parts of ... humanity has treated "different cultures" throughout history .... there is really no reason for most of those unreliable sources to be even the slightest true.

In a way, it can become even far more horrifying if the fishmen of Innsmouth really mainly is completely harmless ...
Because .... who is the "monster" then?

Answer: The humans, who fear the different so much, it has passed into hatred, and false accusations that has been told so many times that the humans think they are true.

To address the OP, I don't know if there's anything new that can be "done with the Mythos", but mix 1 part Yog-Sothoth with two parts Dionaea House (http://dionaea-house.com/) for a break in my regular AD&D game and I'll let you know...

The deep ones aren't "co-existing" or "living in relative peace", they're hiding out and biding their time for when they can destroy all of civilization.  

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;631860The deep ones aren't "co-existing" or "living in relative peace", they're hiding out and biding their time for when they can destroy all of civilization.  

RPGPundit

That is according to the regular scare tactics used for the mythos ....
But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....
A new take on the Mythos would be to see it for what it is ... a racism-driven nightmare that isn't really true.
Thing is, today, the tables have seemingly turned to instead pinpoint the racism as the bad thing.
,,, I say seemingly, because the heritage of fantasy and horror from tolkien and Lovecraft is still hard to shake off.

What do i mean?
Since Racism comes from the fear of the unknown, and a tendency to say "this one did this bad, then probably all do like that" ....

Ok, many blatantly ignore this origin and say "It is just Fiction".
Well, for the same reason one could then create a Fiction, where humans in a certain world were created by trolls in order to be servants, and that all humans that is disobedient, is also proven to eat their own children, when the trolls of course is the pinnacle of civilazation.....

What would people (humans) irl think of that kind of setting?
Several would think of proving to the trolls that the humans aren't child-eating murderers .... and that they aren't the slaves of the trolls.
Essentially, humans would not like to see humans in such a situation.
Some would agree on the premises, but say: That is not humans, it is human-looking aliens in a different world.
A notable few would use "it is just fiction" and stay with that.

However, other beings are fair game to be defined as cruel, murderous, child eaters, genocidal .... or even evil. ... and that is as a species, not as individuals.

So, my point is:
Racism and similar functions is the only thing that has defined the Deep Ones as genocidal as a species.
That do not mean that they are.
But, if you think that they must be in order for the Mythos to be "correct" .... then there is just no point in arguing this line of thought.

.... Perhaps i should just leave this thing here ....
http://jordangreywolf.deviantart.com/art/My-Little-Byakhee-297270473

Quote from: Catelf;631878So, my point is:
Racism and similar functions is the only thing that has defined the Deep Ones as genocidal as a species.
That do not mean that they are.
But, if you think that they must be in order for the Mythos to be "correct" .... then there is just no point in arguing this line of thought.

I don't know if you can really look at the Deep Ones or other antediluvian races as just another ethnic minority though. They do after all worship Cthulhu as well as a couple of other deities whose avowed goal is to eat humanity.

My own pet theory (after one too many eldritch tome consultations) is that Cthulhu was among the first intelligent species to arise in the chaos of the early cosmos, which evolved ultimately to draw both nourishment and knowledge from other intelligences, the last word in brain food.

"The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.''

Possibly this is the end result of all amoral species, merged into one entity, like a singularity, but across multidimensional planes. The ability to manipulate intelligence and minds for sustenance could be called "eating souls". This entity would have completely mastered technologies so far beyond our current understanding that it would make FTL drives look like banging two stones together to make fire.

Ah the joys of evolution across astrological time scales.

The Deep Ones would be a more recent species who while having mastered trivial stuff like immortality and many scientific advances are still very far from the level of singularity reached by the Cthulhu-mind, while recognising it for what it is, and make use of human "sacrifices" to study its means of assimilating intelligences in the hopes of some day being able to do the same. Similarly their merging people with their own species is another part of that process.

They walk a fine line between posing as ignorant supplicants and studiously building their knowledge over millennia of millennia in order to ascend to the next level, regardless of the cost - it is entirely possible that becoming such an entity requires conditions only found in the primal universe, so if need be they will destroy this universe to achieve their ends.

So while they would be amoral and utterly alien, as far as humans are concerned they should be treated with extreme suspicion and generally shot on sight. They might not have any particular problem with humans, but they'll wipe out the species without hesitation if it advances their agenda one iota.

There could be a compelling game about PCs as deep one researchers or as rebels when the order comes down to extinguish the human race as part of experiment nyugglathar'alnoan (X3482-A in English).

For me, I look at D&D through a somewhat OD&D lens, with the paradigm that we mash up Vance, Howard, Burroughs, Tolkein, Greek mythology, etc. and make an adventure game out of it.

The Mythos, just like orcs and Dracula, are perfectly good game pieces for D&D.

Quote from: Catelf;631878But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....
A new take on the Mythos would be to see it for what it is ... a racism-driven nightmare that isn't really true. Thing is, today, the tables have seemingly turned to instead pinpoint the racism as the bad thing.

Depending on where you live, that may have been happening for many decades.

The underlying themes of fear of the unknown, isolation, feelings of helplessness as the world changes about you to become a place you do not recognize, horror as changes occur to yourself that you have no control over - these themes are timeless.

I know I am risking opening a can of worms here, but taking the labels and descriptions of things - the tropes - from one milieu and then grafting them onto another produces something else entirely. Dropping Cthulhu, Hastur and Yog Sothoth on Monster Island is more Kaiju Smackdown than Lovecraft.

Quote from: The Traveller;631918I don't know if you can really look at the Deep Ones or other antediluvian races as just another ethnic minority though. They do after all worship Cthulhu as well as a couple of other deities whose avowed goal is to eat humanity.

There are three possible other points to this argument, still, that i can make:
One:
That they worship Cthulhu en masse is not nessecarily correct either, it is just another part used to make it horriffic.
After all, Witches were once belived by "christians" to worship Satan ... and they never really did.
Two:
For all their knowledge, the Deep Ones may not be immune to mob mentality or group preassure ...
Essentially, they might worship Cthulhu seemingly en masse the same way "all germans" supported Hitler during and before WWII ... wich is not very much at all, he just seem like a great leader, not fully understanding what it may lead to in a longer run.
Three:
The situation with Set.
You might not know what i mean with this ... but bear with me.
It seems Set originally was a fertility god, one of the good ones ...
But then, a cult with grusome practices started worship set, practically turning that divinity into a malevolent entity.
Perhaps the Deep ones used to worship a "good diety", but it was gradually replaced by Cthulhu, for some reason.

Again, i know this goes against the alleged "truths" about the Mythos, so it is not an option that seem usable by hardhore mythos fans.

Quote from: Lynn;632238Depending on where you live, that may have been happening for many decades.

The underlying themes of fear of the unknown, isolation, feelings of helplessness as the world changes about you to become a place you do not recognize, horror as changes occur to yourself that you have no control over - these themes are timeless.

I know I am risking opening a can of worms here, but taking the labels and descriptions of things - the tropes - from one milieu and then grafting them onto another produces something else entirely. Dropping Cthulhu, Hastur and Yog Sothoth on Monster Island is more Kaiju Smackdown than Lovecraft.

I agree about the Kaiju Smackdown, but ... when i think of it, is the Great Cthulhu really that much more than a giant monster that stinks immesureably?
It is said to cause Horror, insanity, but how much of that really comes from the size?
Imagine imagining a sky-scraper high monster in a time where not even skyscrapers existed ... would that not be insanity-like?
Then add to the fact, that that monstrum is the representant of most or all that you fear ....
It really would nearly cause insanity to even imagine that.
There is the "extra-dimensional" thing, perhaps, but that is really just another part of the things that are feared, not understood.

Today, we are so used to giant monsters and mecha in fiction, that we barely lift an eybrow at it, even thinking of things like "Kaiju Smackdown".
We understand enough of the idea now, it isn't horrifying anymore.
But, Remember that Godzilla is a God, and many monster-battling big mecha is also referred to as Gods in japanese.

My point?

It seems the Great Cthulhu isn't really much of a threat seen from a Kaiju perspective, it is more like all the things before that is far more terrifying.

Quote from: RPGPundit;631860The deep ones aren't "co-existing" or "living in relative peace", they're hiding out and biding their time for when they can destroy all of civilization.

Quote from: The Traveller;631918I don't know if you can really look at the Deep Ones or other antediluvian races as just another ethnic minority though. They do after all worship Cthulhu as well as a couple of other deities whose avowed goal is to eat humanity.

The above works as an interpretation of the stories, and is probably closest to what Lovecraft intended.  

However, I think that one can run a game with a different interpretation that still fit the text of Lovecraft's stories.  The easiest is allowing that narrators like Zadok could be wrong about things that they had no first-hand knowledge of.  Even without this, though, I think there is a lot of range.  The Deep Ones could worship Cthulhu in the same way that human religions would worship scary-seeming figures like Kali, Shiva, or the Horned God.

Quote from: Rogerd;629397Fiction-wise a Xeelee would be perfect Lovecraft material, a 19th Century person seeing one run off screaming.

Hell yeah, the Xeelee are perfectly Lovecraftian - an intelligent species as old as the universe, having nigh-omnipotent power and inscrutable motives (well a war against an antimatter universe basically) it doesn't talk about? Oh yes. That the Xeelee are basically benign, or at least non-evil, doesn't really change that, either. They're weird enough, and cosmic enough.

Also Xeelee is pronounced lots like "Seelie" wich got me thinking...

Machen. Arthur Machen. I love his works, wich while predating HPL are pretty Lovecraftian (the Deep Ones are basically HPL's take on the Little People, not to mention Dunwich Horror's debt to The Great God Pan), and think that say focusing on HPL's Dunwich Horror and its Old Ones, with Machen's works as an extra, would be an interesting take. This isn't entirely my idea. There was a TBP thread about making an alternative CoC setting - "Yog-Sothoth Mythos" - mostly based around Dunwich Horror, years and years back.

Quote from: Catelf;632314There are three possible other points to this argument, still, that i can make:
One:
That they worship Cthulhu en masse is not nessecarily correct either, it is just another part used to make it horriffic.
After all, Witches were once belived by "christians" to worship Satan ... and they never really did.
Two:
For all their knowledge, the Deep Ones may not be immune to mob mentality or group preassure ...
Essentially, they might worship Cthulhu seemingly en masse the same way "all germans" supported Hitler during and before WWII ... wich is not very much at all, he just seem like a great leader, not fully understanding what it may lead to in a longer run.
Three:
The situation with Set.
You might not know what i mean with this ... but bear with me.
It seems Set originally was a fertility god, one of the good ones ...
But then, a cult with grusome practices started worship set, practically turning that divinity into a malevolent entity.
Perhaps the Deep ones used to worship a "good diety", but it was gradually replaced by Cthulhu, for some reason.

Well what I'm saying is that it properly speaking isn't worship at all, except in that the actions of prayer and worship might create measurable scientific effects. To our eyes it might look like sacrifice when it's really a very advanced form of experimentation.

Even more entertaining is to consider how this works with older religions - Buddhism for example holds that it is the stress of death which creates the energy for rebirth. An entity that can capture the information structures we call spirits and cause them to die over and over again would be a thing fuelled by fear, growing ever more powerful with each civilisation it consumes. This has wider implications for beasties like vampires and those who feed on death as well of course.

It follows a kind of monstrous logic.

Quote from: Catelf;632314I agree about the Kaiju Smackdown, but ... when i think of it, is the Great Cthulhu really that much more than a giant monster that stinks immesureably?

Not to keep banging on about it, but the Cthulhu depicted in "A Colder War" causes whole continents to go insane simply by waking up. How this jives with the Cthulhu that was rammed by a steamship, maybe it wasn't fully awake then. I think the concept has evolved from the fragility of the human mind in the face of the incredible to a more general purpose cosmic horror.

Quote from: jhkim;632352However, I think that one can run a game with a different interpretation that still fit the text of Lovecraft's stories.  The easiest is allowing that narrators like Zadok could be wrong about things that they had no first-hand knowledge of.  Even without this, though, I think there is a lot of range.  The Deep Ones could worship Cthulhu in the same way that human religions would worship scary-seeming figures like Kali, Shiva, or the Horned God.

Oh sure you can do what you like, but the Dances with Wolves/Lolita/Avatar thing has been done to death in my opinion. For a change in this interpretation, humanity is the hapless native population at the mercy of a vastly superior species. Admittedly maybe not that much of change, but different strokes I guess.

Quote from: The Traveller;632375Not to keep banging on about it, but the Cthulhu depicted in "A Colder War" causes whole continents to go insane simply by waking up. How this jives with the Cthulhu that was rammed by a steamship, maybe it wasn't fully awake then. I think the concept has evolved from the fragility of the human mind in the face of the incredible to a more general purpose cosmic horror.

How old is the story "A colder war"?
The title makes me think of The Cold War, which would place it in a time when the definition "The Cold War" had been established, meaning King Kong and even Godzilla had gotten fairly known in the western psyche.

Ok, it may be notably older than that, but if it isn't, then it is obvious that that writer had understood more about the workings of horror, rather than just letting the climax be a giant monster ...

Quote from: The Traveller;632375Oh sure you can do what you like, but the Dances with Wolves/Lolita/Avatar thing has been done to death in my opinion. For a change in this interpretation, humanity is the hapless native population at the mercy of a vastly superior species. Admittedly maybe not that much of change, but different strokes I guess.

Different strokes indeed ...
It is like ... when the odd and the weird do something bad, they are worshipping an evil diety, but when humans, usually of the abramic beliefs, does exactly the same, they are "a few rotten eggs", or doing "what has to be done", or even worse: "doing what is right" ...
Really, if making a mirror-version(really?) of that, one could say that the actions at Wounded Knee (i think it was) really was instigated by white men that was bent on sacrificing women and children to whatever depraved god they was worshipping ....

Quote from: Catelf;632399How old is the story "A colder war"?
The title makes me think of The Cold War, which would place it in a time when the definition "The Cold War" had been established, meaning King Kong and even Godzilla had gotten fairly known in the western psyche.

Ok, it may be notably older than that, but if it isn't, then it is obvious that that writer had understood more about the workings of horror, rather than just letting the climax be a giant monster ...

You can read it for yourself here if you like, for free.

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Stross put that together back in 1997.

Quote from: Catelf;632399Different strokes indeed ...
It is like ... when the odd and the weird do something bad, they are worshipping an evil diety, but when humans, usually of the abramic beliefs, does exactly the same, they are "a few rotten eggs", or doing "what has to be done", or even worse: "doing what is right" ...
Really, if making a mirror-version(really?) of that, one could say that the actions at Wounded Knee (i think it was) really was instigated by white men that was bent on sacrificing women and children to whatever depraved god they was worshipping ....

You're thinking about them as just another kind of human, this is the problem. They really aren't.

As I said though, there's no consensus and no need for one, do what you like.

Quote from: The Traveller;632403You can read it for yourself here if you like, for free.

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Stross put that together back in 1997.

So it was done in -97?
That explains why Great C is far more powerful in that one than in any of the original stories ...

So no, i think the big C that was rammed by a steamship was fully awake ...
And by that standard, there has been a lot of Kaiju of far more direct power than Cthulhu ...

The one in "A colder war" is then a different version than the original.

Quote from: The Traveller;632403You're thinking about them as just another kind of human, this is the problem. They really aren't.

As I said though, there's no consensus and no need for one, do what you like.

You keep forgetting that ... darkskinned africans ... was long considered to not be humans .....

I look upon most beings as i look on humans .... they are not inherently evil.
If bad things are done, there is a good reason for it, but what is a good reason for one, may not be a good reason for another.
Also, if they doesn't have "broodmentality", there are at least individuals of differing opinions.... and even if they do, then differnt broods may have different mentalities, as well ...

Quote from: The Traveller;632403You're thinking about them as just another kind of human, this is the problem. They really aren't.

As I said though, there's no consensus and no need for one, do what you like.

Deep Ones aren't "really" anything.  

I think there is plenty of room for them to be distinctly non-human, and yet not be the stock villain interpretation that is most obvious.

Wait...what does Dances of Wolves and Avatar have to do with Lolita?



He must have for some reason mistaken Lolita with Ferngully.

which is kinda a creepy mistake, actually.

Quote from: The Traveller;632375Oh sure you can do what you like, but the Dances with Wolves/Lolita/Avatar thing has been done to death in my opinion. For a change in this interpretation, humanity is the hapless native population at the mercy of a vastly superior species. Admittedly maybe not that much of change, but different strokes I guess.

I was picturing something much more like the latter, where the Deep Ones establish a public foothold and there is a tense Cold War between the humans and the Deep Ones, possibly with some places on the borders.  I'm not sure how you read Dances With Wolves - because I mentioned old religions, maybe?

Quote from: jhkim;632518I was picturing something much more like the latter, where the Deep Ones establish a public foothold and there is a tense Cold War between the humans and the Deep Ones, possibly with some places on the borders.  I'm not sure how you read Dances With Wolves - because I mentioned old religions, maybe?

It's the same encroaching outsiders theme:

QuoteTen Bears: [in Lakota; subtitled] The white men who wore this came around the time of my grandfather's grandfather. Eventually we drove them out. Then the Mexicans came. But they do not come here any more. In my own time, the Texans. They have been like all the others. They take without asking. But I think you are right. I think they will keep coming. When I think of that, I look at this helmet. I don't know if we are ready for these people. Our country is all that we have, and we will fight to keep it.

Almost a quarter century, sigh. The way I would view Deep One sacrifices of humans is the same way rats might watch another rat being killed in a science lab. It's not possible to deal with such beings on an even footing, all you can do is kidnap their blacksmiths and metallurgists and hope that the braintrust can figure out any of it and turn it into industry before things go too far.

Quote from: The Traveller;632540The way I would view Deep One sacrifices of humans is the same way rats might watch another rat being killed in a science lab. It's not possible to deal with such beings on an even footing, all you can do is kidnap their blacksmiths and metallurgists and hope that the braintrust can figure out any of it and turn it into industry before things go too far.

I can't tell what you're saying here.  But it sounds like you're viewing Deep Ones as an evil that has to be attacked.  

That works fine as a view, and I've run it that way before.  

However, for this alternate approach to Lovecraft, I think I'd take them as an alien civilization that have their own reasons for things that aren't necessarily good for mankind, but also aren't predicated just on being as evil to humans as possible.  I'm still pondering what I would make of what Zadok described as sacrifices.

Quote from: jhkim;632582I can't tell what you're saying here.

...what?

Quote from: Catelf;631878That is according to the regular scare tactics used for the mythos ....
But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....
A new take on the Mythos would be to see it for what it is ... a racism-driven nightmare that isn't really true.
Thing is, today, the tables have seemingly turned to instead pinpoint the racism as the bad thing.
,,, I say seemingly, because the heritage of fantasy and horror from tolkien and Lovecraft is still hard to shake off.

What do i mean?
Since Racism comes from the fear of the unknown, and a tendency to say "this one did this bad, then probably all do like that" ....

Ok, many blatantly ignore this origin and say "It is just Fiction".
Well, for the same reason one could then create a Fiction, where humans in a certain world were created by trolls in order to be servants, and that all humans that is disobedient, is also proven to eat their own children, when the trolls of course is the pinnacle of civilazation.....

What would people (humans) irl think of that kind of setting?
Several would think of proving to the trolls that the humans aren't child-eating murderers .... and that they aren't the slaves of the trolls.
Essentially, humans would not like to see humans in such a situation.
Some would agree on the premises, but say: That is not humans, it is human-looking aliens in a different world.
A notable few would use "it is just fiction" and stay with that.

However, other beings are fair game to be defined as cruel, murderous, child eaters, genocidal .... or even evil. ... and that is as a species, not as individuals.

So, my point is:
Racism and similar functions is the only thing that has defined the Deep Ones as genocidal as a species.
That do not mean that they are.
But, if you think that they must be in order for the Mythos to be "correct" .... then there is just no point in arguing this line of thought.

.... Perhaps i should just leave this thing here ....
http://jordangreywolf.deviantart.com/art/My-Little-Byakhee-297270473

This notion that "they're just misunderstood" and that somehow we have to turn the Cthulhu mythos into a "moral" (and I use that term loosely) lesson in cultural relativism, is just absolutely absurd.

We're talking about a species that is utterly alien to us; they aren't human beings, they can only take a semblance of it as a PREDATORY METHOD, the way certain predators in nature can make themselves look like something else in order to hunt their prey.

The Mythos is about an absolute kind of inhumanity; its freaking ABOUT how the universe is not intellectually a fit to human ideas. That's its entire fucking point, that nothing is like what we assume, that all of our fancy ideas about reason, art, civility, goodness, even our basic assumptions about sentience are just FANTASIES.  

If all of a sudden the deep ones can be reasoned with, or have hopes and dreams like our own, or can be capable of anything we'd understand as goodness for the same reasons we would see these things as good, then you have completely lost the point of the Mythos, for reasons that have fuck all to do with racism.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Catelf;631878That is according to the regular scare tactics used for the mythos ....
But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....
A new take on the Mythos would be to see it for what it is ... a racism-driven nightmare that isn't really true.

Oh God. Fuck no.

What Pundit and Benoist said.

A good idea could be to read Machen (who inspired HPL a lot, especially the Deep Ones and Dunwich) and Howard (whose Worms in the Earth draws on the same Machen inspiration as the Deep Ones do). Machen's Little People and Howard's Worms in the Earth are way more human than Deep Ones are and they're still horrifying monsters w/o any kind of good qualities (but harder to get rid off, it seems, what with being subterranean).

Quote from: jhkim;632352The above works as an interpretation of the stories, and is probably closest to what Lovecraft intended.  

However, I think that one can run a game with a different interpretation that still fit the text of Lovecraft's stories.  The easiest is allowing that narrators like Zadok could be wrong about things that they had no first-hand knowledge of.  Even without this, though, I think there is a lot of range.  The Deep Ones could worship Cthulhu in the same way that human religions would worship scary-seeming figures like Kali, Shiva, or the Horned God.

Sure, except that it is a known fact in the game that Cthulhu exists, the Old Ones exist, and that their reality is so inimical to human logic that the worship of these beings drives anyone mad, by the human standards of madness.  So effectively, even if worship of Cthulhu is just like sunday service to the Deep Ones, that still makes them INSANE by human standards; with part of that insanity being that they seek the time when Cthulhu will rise and put an end to the human race.

Now of course, you could extend your "narrator biases" of Lovecraft further, and say 'well maybe the Great Old Ones don't make you insane and won't end all life as we know it' but at that point are you actually still playing CoC at all?  Haven't you just undermined the entire fundamental point of the Lovecraft stories?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;632820If all of a sudden the deep ones can be reasoned with, or have hopes and dreams like our own, or can be capable of anything we'd understand as goodness for the same reasons we would see these things as good, then you have completely lost the point of the Mythos, for reasons that have fuck all to do with racism.

So what?  My games don't have to adhere to the "true point of the Mythos" - they're games.  It seems like a new and potentially interesting direction that one can take the Mythos in, as per the original topic.  

I'm definitely warming to the idea.  I'm picturing now an alternate 1940s - where the Antarctic has been explored, some surviving Elder Things are being sheltered from the shoggoths by humanity.  The assault on Innsmouth being the opening salvo of a global war with the Deep Ones.  After a few years of fighting, though, an uneasy ceasefire is reached.  Hmm.  It seems like it definitely has possibilities.

Quote from: TristramEvans;632514Wait...what does Dances of Wolves and Avatar have to do with Lolita?



He must have for some reason mistaken Lolita with Ferngully.

which is kinda a creepy mistake, actually.

My guess is he was talking about stories where you can get very different readings depending on how you interpret Narrator Bias.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jhkim;632582I can't tell what you're saying here.  But it sounds like you're viewing Deep Ones as an evil that has to be attacked.  
.

What he's saying is that trying to view "deep ones" as just being human-like with human motives that can be understood and dealt with in human ways is a bit like rats at a medical lab telling themselves that the humans performing experiments on them are really just like rats with ratlike motives and can be comprehended dealt with in a ratlike way.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jhkim;632843So what?  My games don't have to adhere to the "true point of the Mythos" - they're games.  It seems like a new and potentially interesting direction that one can take the Mythos in, as per the original topic.  

I'm definitely warming to the idea.  I'm picturing now an alternate 1940s - where the Antarctic has been explored, some surviving Elder Things are being sheltered from the shoggoths by humanity.  The assault on Innsmouth being the opening salvo of a global war with the Deep Ones.  After a few years of fighting, though, an uneasy ceasefire is reached.  Hmm.  It seems like it definitely has possibilities.

I don't see that as new or interesting.  It just turns the Deep Ones into Doctor-who Silurians, or a D&D PC race, and removes all elements of horror from what is supposed to be a horror genre.
I mean, by the same stretch you could claim pokethulu or "My Little Cthulhu" would be "new and interesting", but I would take these, and yours and catelf's "deep ones are just the misunderstood victims of white privilege" notion, as signs of the genre being utterly spent (by some groups; fortunately others are doing more interesting stuff).

RPGPundit

Well, since several die-hard "Mythos fans" rejects or even misunderstands my points, purposefully or subconciously(because they may be afraid of what the idea really points towards) ... and i really didn't expect much of a change from the earlier reactions on my differing viewpoints ...
i'll see if i can just stop bothering about this thread.

After all, i have already said what i would suggest.
^_^

Quote from: jhkim;632582I'm still pondering what I would make of what Zadok described as sacrifices.

You've got a few options.  The first, and most obvious, it to treat them as the ravings of a madman.  Zadok kinda is a old crazy kook.

A more interesting possibility is to give him a grain of truth.  Innsmouth as a town is falling apart, and it is vastly underpopulated.  Folk might well disappear from Innsmouth.  That doesn't mean that they're being ritually slaughtered.

  Instead, focus on what it'd be like to actually live in that sort of situation, especially as a normal human.  Imagine living in a place where your childhood friends might well suddenly shed their skins and go to live forever beneath the waves, immortal, while you're increasingly alone in a dying town, set apart because you don't feel the call.  How long would you go before moving somewhere else?  Or imagine exposure -- rare, minor, just as radiation exposure might be rare and minor -- to deeper and unsettling truths, of things you can't even find the words to describe, other than 'pain' or 'hurt' or 'joy' or 'enlightenment'.  Or imagine the surface world of Depression-era rural Massachusetts, contrasted with an undersea realm of undying beings that have thrived for longer than all of human history.

The Deep Ones can, and should, still be terrifying beings.  They're a million-strong army with more knowledge than mankind can match.  They've got knowledge that doesn't fit into human patterns of thinking -- maybe knowledge that can't even fit into a human brain.  You definitely don't want to turn them into victims, since that's trite when you do it with vampires or zombies at this point, but just as equally you don't need to turn everyone else into helpless victims just to make the Deep Ones threatening.

Quote from: RPGPundit;632844My guess is he was talking about stories where you can get very different readings depending on how you interpret Narrator Bias.

RPGPundit

Actually no, I said Lolita when I should have said Pocahontas, the daughter of a Native American tribe chief and English soldier who lived at a time when English colonists invaded 17th century Virginia. Not being a particularly great scholar of such works the two were conflated in my mind for some reason. Mea culpa, well done to those more familiar with that kind of artistic expression.

Quote from: Catelf;631878That is according to the regular scare tactics used for the mythos ....
But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....

Nah, this is the fuel for the Mythos, as very nicely encapsulated by Carl Sagan:

Quote from: Carl Sagan"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Lovecraft wrote that people generally ignore this immensity of the universe, and its uncaring, amoral nature with regard to humanity, because if they could see the REAL big picture, see that our planet, our history and our entire species is just a mote of dust on the galactic wind, and more importantly, encounter the entities that really do perceive our world as that dust mote, everyone would go stark staring mad with the revelation.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

That Lovecraft was racist is really incidental to the whole thing. You could remove every scrap of racism from his stories and they'd remain pretty much the same.

Quote from: The Traveller;632911well done to those more familiar with that kind of artistic expression.

You mean....books?

You're still on ignore tristram, and you aren't coming off it.

Quote from: The Traveller;632931You're still on ignore tristram, and you aren't coming off it.

If you're not ready for the adult swim thats not my problem. Just means I can say what I want with less tantrums about it.

Of course, my experience is that people who put other posters on ignore tend to read those posts even more voraciously. The fact that you've responded here to tell me you're ignoring me only really reinforces that.

Good luck.

Quote from: gattsuru;632853The Deep Ones can, and should, still be terrifying beings.  They're a million-strong army with more knowledge than mankind can match.  They've got knowledge that doesn't fit into human patterns of thinking -- maybe knowledge that can't even fit into a human brain.  You definitely don't want to turn them into victims, since that's trite when you do it with vampires or zombies at this point, but just as equally you don't need to turn everyone else into helpless victims just to make the Deep Ones threatening.

I'd agree with the general conclusion.  I pondering about how to make the Deep Ones more threatening to an army with bombs, torpedoes, and machine guns - since by the story they don't display much in the way of tech.  What would a war with them be like?  I'm thinking about tech toys to give them while still seeming Lovecraftian.

Quote from: Catelf;632851Well, since several die-hard "Mythos fans" rejects or even misunderstands my points, purposefully or subconciously(because they may be afraid of what the idea really points towards) ...

(http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/Miyamoto_Middle_Finger.jpg)

:)

Quote from: TristramEvans;632926Nah, this is the fuel for the Mythos, as very nicely encapsulated by Carl Sagan:

It's a bit frustrating to see Sagan mixed up with a confusion of Lovecraft and his narrator. Lovecraft believed no such thing as said in what you've got bolded there - his narrator for "The Call of Cthulhu" did. Lovecraft believed that we would continue going on discovering more and more of the universe without issue, barring the occasional risk of self-destruction from advanced technology.

QuoteThat Lovecraft was racist is really incidental to the whole thing. You could remove every scrap of racism from his stories and they'd remain pretty much the same.

I wouldn't go so far as to say its incidental, or that it could be removed from his works without harming them... I would say it's unfortunate, but was how he expressed some elements of the cosmicism that he wanted to get across. Xenophobia and horror pulled out onto the page as only a truly racist man could do.

To answer the question that kicked off this thread... I think there's a lot that can be done with the underlying philosophical and aesthetic points that Lovecraft developed his cosmic fiction to express. The latter period of his life, when (as we seen in At the Mountains of Madness) the 'outsiders' were represented as both analogous and inimical to humanity points to where he wanted to go with his work prior to his untimely death.

The thing is, the "Mythos" has been misunderstood and misapplied effectively since it was first named. There was no "Mythos" per se during Lovecraft's life - the codification of his settings, creatures, and anti-gods came about due to Derleth's efforts (and he drastically misrepresented the work of his friend for a very, very long time even as he saved it from obscurity). Even after Derleth's pernicious lies were revealed for what they were, the focus on the "Mythos" persisted. That is to say, the trend to focus on the window-dressing of Lovecraft's writing eclipses everything else.

Which isn't necessarily bad! I do enjoy my plush Haunter of the Dark, after all, and I can't say I haven't had a Hell of a lot of fun with Cthulhu Fluxx. But it does mean that people get distracted too easily by the form rather than the substance. This is why most pastiches of Lovecraft - those that focus on the monsters and the myth-cycle rather than the mood - tend to fade away, or at least are accepted as being not exactly high watermarks in literary history. It's the non-pastiche work that really persists, and I think that's where the "Mythos" (as it were) remains the most explorable.

Authors like Ligotti who work on a Lovecraftian mood, attempting to grapple with philosophic and aesthetic concerns that are expressed through a lens of cosmicism - those are the people who will carry the "Mythos" onwards and continue keeping it relevant. Surely, the window-dressing of anti-gods and monsters will be with us as well... But the window-dressing isn't the vanguard any more, and the tired old ground isn't the whole of the territory open for exploration.

Quote from: jhkim;632943I'd agree with the general conclusion.  I pondering about how to make the Deep Ones more threatening to an army with bombs, torpedoes, and machine guns - since by the story they don't display much in the way of tech.  What would a war with them be like?  I'm thinking about tech toys to give them while still seeming Lovecraftian.

Too much tech might humanize them too much.  Especially battlefield tech, since that's where they need to be the most horrifying.  Subterfuge is the easy angle to play up : they've got a lot of knowledge of the world, and have a sizable number of normal-looking people who are yet fundamentally tied to the Deep Ones over the long term, and real-world military of the 1930s were very underprepared for sea combat and very weak to targeted leadership strikes.

But if you're operating in the time period between the World Wars, you probably want land, or at least shore, battles.  Chemical and biological weapons would be the first to come to mind, but those had become human things by World War I.  The Mythos is filled with attacks on the mind, made all the more terrible by being impossible to detect, but that can be tricky to pull off in a game, and it's not really part of the Shadow over Innsmouth bit.  Another option is to do the impossible.  Deep One defenses and weapons don't need to follow conventional logic, and that incomprehensible nature can make them terrifying.

If someone points a ray gun at you, you can dodge and you can know that you should dodge.  If a Deep One can make water act like a wall of steel, or step from one shadow to the next, or ignite gunpowder from a distance, that can act on player characters in tricky ways while only limiting, rather than killing or disabling, that character.  If you go this way, though, it does need to act on at least a degree of fairy tale logic.

Canonically, Shadow over Innsmouth involves a torpedo run on Y'ha-nthlei, an underwater city over 80,000 years old, with only limited success as the city.  That's probably the point to start with : surface world attacks meeting against strangely indestructible underwater features, responded with infiltration or strange 'accidents' befalling a city's defenders until the city, in turn, is consumed -- until the surface world retakes that above-water city.

Quote from: Géza Echs;632972Lovecraft believed that we would continue going on discovering more and more of the universe without issue, barring the occasional risk of self-destruction from advanced technology.

He kinda flip-flopped on the matter.  In The Silver Key and other Dreamlands cycle stories, scientific knowledge actually removes possibility and opportunity, at least from the story-as-single-story reading.  In other stories, such as The Colour out of Space, scientific knowledge is simply unable to handle the nature of the outside universe -- though that, at least, might have been a limit of men or of tools.

Those are his fictions, though, and they don't represent the man himself. Lovecraft was unwaveringly science-positive throughout the whole of his life; his surety in the safe and continuous expansion of human knowledge would put Sagan's to shame.

Quote from: gattsuru;632991But if you're operating in the time period between the World Wars, you probably want land, or at least shore, battles.  Chemical and biological weapons would be the first to come to mind, but those had become human things by World War I.

It is time to stretch the mind.

A weapon that awakens all animal life, and makes it inimical to humans. Dogs, cats, insects: all suddenly filled with a terrible intelligence, and a malignant and implacable will to harm. (Surely a Lovecraft-tale-in-waiting, all by itself.)

A weapon that fills your mind with images of places far removed from the here-and-now, places the human mind wasn't meant to see and isn't prepared to understand. Suddenly, the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of a city fall down and are struck dumb. They live, but their eyes are focused on other time and other dimensions. (The only ray of light, they may speak of what they know and hints may be gleaned from their babbling.)

And then, in defiance of rationality and the laws of physics, the waves rise and inundate a land. Suddenly, Manhattan Island is under water, and only the peaks of the skyscrapers remain above the waves. People crowd the tops of the buildings, hoping against hope for rescue, while others drown beneath the deep, green sea and Deep Ones enter the city and begin climbing the towers.

Surely those are the weapons of a Lovecraftian World War.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;633000And then, in defiance of rationality and the laws of physics, the waves rise and inundate a land. Suddenly, Manhattan Island is under water, and only the peaks of the skyscrapers remain above the waves. People crowd the tops of the buildings, hoping against hope for rescue, while others drown beneath the deep, green sea and Deep Ones enter the city and begin climbing the towers.

Surely those are the weapons of a Lovecraftian World War.

I love the flooding weapon - very Deep-Ones-y, plus it brings up horrific recent imagery of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and Superstorm Sandy.

Quote from: jhkim;633019I love the flooding weapon - very Deep-Ones-y, plus it brings up horrific recent imagery of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and Superstorm Sandy.

Thanks. :)

I picture a permanent, free-standing tidal wave, just beyond the city being attacked. A giant, blue-green wall of water, capped with frothing, churning surf, towering over buildings and people.

Even if you do destroy or nullify the weapon — what happens when that wall of water collapses? (A flood. And not a small one.)

Also, fourth weapons: Hurricane "nukes". A weather control weapon that sends hurricanes when and where the Deep Ones will.

The Deep War

This is the age of science, of rationality. The age of discovery.

The age of ignorance.

The War to End all Wars had come and gone, and there was peace. (There were rumblings in Europe. There were always rumblings in Europe.) But there was a war brewing, another Great War, against an enemy ancient and implacable. An enemy safely ensconced in glass cities deep beneath the waves, while on land we were fat, happy, and vulnerable.

It was the Deluge. And in the age of reason, we found that the Bible had it right.

There was a Noah. There was an Ark. And there was a Flood that buried all lands.

And it was the work of the Dwellers in the Deep.

Below the surface world, deep in the crust of the Earth, are vast pockets of fresh water*. More water than is found in all the oceans of all the world.

Genesis 7:11 — "On the same day all the fountains of the great deep were burst open, and the sky's windows were opened."

On that dark day in 1939, the fountains of the deep, buried miles below in the crust, were opened up and the waters therein poured out and the oceans began to rise. Across the whole of the Earth, the oceans began to rise.

And the Dwellers in the Deep came after, and made war with a bloody vengeance.

(*This is actually true, according to my Geology professor. :))

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;633000It is time to stretch the mind.

I wish this forum had a like or +1 button.

((Not sure I'd bring Biblical quotes, though it depends on the tone you're aiming for.))

Quote from: gattsuru;633048I wish this forum had a like or +1 button.

:hatsoff:

Quote from: gattsuru;633048((Not sure I'd bring Biblical quotes, though it depends on the tone you're aiming for.))

It is Lovecraftian though: all the world's myths are untrue, but they relate to deeper truths. Dagon, for example.

In The Deep War, there was a Deluge. Not because the Christian God is REAL, but because the Deep Ones made war, and sunk the whole of the Earth beneath the waves.

The entire Bible isn't true, but the Flood actually happened. Just not for the reasons that the Bible said it did.

Which fits in with how "real world" myths were depicted in the Mythos.

For my own scenario, I was picturing a little different - where basically there was a war with the Deep Ones *instead of* WWII.  The result was somewhat more devastating than WWII, but not a total apocalypse.  The war with the Deep Ones resulted in devastating losses for both sides, and after it ground on for years, eventually both sides came to a ceasefire.  

Now there are a bunch of island and/or coastal territories under Deep One control - a Watery Curtain instead of an Iron Curtain, but both sides are holding off from outright war.  

I'm also picturing that a few other elements could be included as well, like maybe Antarctica being explored more.

Quote from: jhkim;633054For my own scenario, I was picturing a little different - where basically there was a war with the Deep Ones *instead of* WWII.

Right. Sort of the aftermath of the Deep War, where the Deep Ones were beaten back, but not wholly eradicated.

I just like the idea of playing in an alt-WW II, where the waters are continually rising, and the humans are fighting like mad to save the surface world from being inundated forever. (Or making a hundred thousand arks, to save the human race.)

If the war ended in a stalemate, where a lot of the planet was inundated and occupied, but a lot was still above the waves, that could result in a situation like you're describing.

Interesting, i'm starting to notice a difference between people on this site ...
The ones that tend to show off the most with their knowledge and brilliance often also seems to be the ones that, when faced with opposite viewpoints, first just says "No, it is not like that", but as the argumenter of the different viewpont goes on, they sadly lose all arguments, and resorts to troll-behavior, or similar.

I was wondering if perhaps Rpg.net might be better anyway, and then i read the responses from gattsuru, Géza Echs, and jhkim, people who both nuance the ideas, and at least partially, if not fully, understands my viewpoint.
.... And so, i decide to stay ....

Now back to the real Topic here ...

Daddy Warpig, i like how you take that piece of scientific piece on the deluge, and runs with it.
However ...
If the deep ones were responsible, then how could a HUMAN get a warning well in time to build the Ark?

There is also something about ancient Egypt having 2 Different deluge legends ...

Personally, i really think the reverse of the "Mythos":
It is a mockery of ancient myths, only designed to strike fear and terror into the hearts of Allies and Enemies alike.
.... And it does that pretty well.
The fact that it includes more truth than the earthen myths only helps further its reliabilty.
And since we are talking about Deluge and the times of the Ark here, you could even weave in Marduk as a powerful (and powerhungry?) ruler that perhaps even caused the Deluge in the first place, instead of fighting against the water-dwellers, which the Earth-myth claims he did.

However, even though it holds more true info than the earth-myths, It is still not the truth.

Quote from: Catelf;633104Daddy Warpig, i like how you take that piece of scientific piece on the deluge, and runs with it.

Thanks for the compliment.

Note: I'm not claiming a scientific basis for the Biblical Flood in the real world. That part is there to fit into the "Earth myths, but not really" aspect of the Mythos.

I'm just pointing out a peculiar geological feature, and what-iffing it. The Deep Ones undoubtedly know more than us about geology, including the (to coin a term) Deep Wells. So, they open up the Deep Wells, to flood the surface.

Come on, if you were a Deep One, and wanted to conquer the world, how else would you do it?

Deluge it is.

Quote from: Catelf;633104If the deep ones were responsible, then how could a HUMAN get a warning well in time to build the Ark?

That's the question, around which the campaign would revolve.

What really happened 5000 BC? How did "Noah" figure out how to survive?

And why did the Deep Ones' plan fail?

And how can we use that information to make it fail again?

That's the spine of the campaign.

If the Mythos is reduced to tentacle monsters, then yes it has run its course. If, however, it remains about "everything you know is wrong" and "humans are meaningless" and hopeless madness, then there is a lot of life left to it.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;633108Thanks for the compliment.

Note: I'm not claiming a scientific basis for the Biblical Flood in the real world. That part is there to fit into the "Earth myths, but not really" aspect of the Mythos.

I'm just pointing out a peculiar geological feature, and what-iffing it. The Deep Ones undoubtedly know more than us about geology, including the (to coin a term) Deep Wells. So, they open up the Deep Wells, to flood the surface.

Come on, if you were a Deep One, and wanted to conquer the world, how else would you do it?

Deluge it is.


That's the question, around which the campaign would revolve.

What really happened 5000 BC? How did "Noah" figure out how to survive?

And why did the Deep Ones' plan fail?

And how can we use that information to make it fail again?

That's the spine of the campaign.

Well, from what i know, and i'm not a "bible-faith type", geologists has found a layer of "flooding", at least in the midterranean area, and there are deluge legends practically in myths all around the world.

Hm ...
One part of the Marduk legend is that he somehow dragged up the Moon from the ocean ....
The moon is known to cause flow ...
However, the moon's name in that case was Chandra, i think, and i once envisioned CHANDRA as an advanced scientific reseach-station in space, rather than as a "moon".
Feel free to work with that idea, too :)

Hm ....
According to a book i have on myths ... in one Celtic Deluge legent, there was supposed to have been a big red moon ... that then exploded ...

I do think extradimensional/extraterrestial forces must have helped the humans, if it really was the Deep ones that were responsible for the Great Deluge ...

It can be combined with a typical adventure though, like:
"A couple of orbs around the world has been placed so they manifests a giant red sphere, and this sphere is what is causing the Deluge.
Find the orbs, and destroy them."

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;633000And then, in defiance of rationality and the laws of physics, the waves rise and inundate a land. Suddenly, Manhattan Island is under water, and only the peaks of the skyscrapers remain above the waves. People crowd the tops of the buildings, hoping against hope for rescue, while others drown beneath the deep, green sea and Deep Ones enter the city and begin climbing the towers.

Surely those are the weapons of a Lovecraftian World War.

That is completely epic, as mythos weapons should be, the combination of mind bending flood physics and the visceral image of Deep Ones physically climbing the skyscrapers, perfect. You need to think on a different scale with these guys.

Quote from: The Traveller;633157That is completely epic, as mythos weapons should be,

Thank you, sir. :hatsoff:

Quote from: TristramEvans;632926That Lovecraft was racist is really incidental to the whole thing.

The racism of Lovecraft, and R.E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burrows and arguably even the Good Professor Tolkien was largely a product of the society which produced the men. It was even backed by the "popular science" of the day.

In any event, in the same way it should be possible to read Lovecraft, Howard, Burrows, and the Good Professor Tolkien and cope enough with the either implicit or explicit racism to still enjoy the stories, it should be possible to employ the Mythos without racism.

Except for the Deep Ones. They really are a bunch of horrible fuckers.

Quote from: GrumpyReviews;633207The racism of Lovecraft, and R.E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burrows and arguably even the Good Professor Tolkien was largely a product of the society which produced the men.

As are the standards today - what constitutes racism seems to evolve as well.

Quote from: GrumpyReviews;633111If the Mythos is reduced to tentacle monsters, then yes it has run its course. If, however, it remains about "everything you know is wrong" and "humans are meaningless" and hopeless madness, then there is a lot of life left to it.

It seems to me that Cthulhu gaming has been about fighting monsters for a long time.  Just about every Call of Cthulhu scenario has that you use some combination of firearms and spells to kill monsters and cultists and thus prevent their outbreak.  The rule is simple - if it is a monster or strange artifact, you have to destroy it or bad things will happen.  I don't think that is completely in line with Lovecraft's stories, nor does it really represent either of "everything you know is wrong" or "humans are meaningless".  

I like the idea of breaking out of this pattern.

Quote from: jhkim;633221It seems to me that Cthulhu gaming has been about fighting monsters for a long time.  Just about every Call of Cthulhu scenario has that you use some combination of firearms and spells to kill monsters and cultists and thus prevent their outbreak.  The rule is simple - if it is a monster or strange artifact, you have to destroy it or bad things will happen.  I don't think that is completely in line with Lovecraft's stories, nor does it really represent either of "everything you know is wrong" or "humans are meaningless".  

I like the idea of breaking out of this pattern.

I completely agree. I am working on a system right now that stresses those themes.

For the last several years, Ive run a game at PaizoCon called Failed Sanity Check. It is a direct sequel to one of HPL's most famous stories. The game starts with everyone getting a picture of a crazy guy in a straight jacket (you can pick your crazy). You figure out who you are as time goes on. Its canned 4 hour event, but having run it several times, Ive gotten feedback on how to make it more like a real RPG.

Ive used Don't Rest Your Head as a system for this, but its insufficient for defining details of your character, or the psychological elements. CoC's sanity system is just too linear and artificial, whereas something like UA's Madness Meters have no effect on each other. Ill be posting a free something within the next 1-2 months. Tentacles are optional. 1920s is optional.

Personally I'm more disposed towards having Lovecraftian tendencies in my Games - "Lovecraft lite" - than full on CoC. Hellboy and Kane type stuff basically. Wich would mean, monsterkilling with cosmic background, but not full on HPL Horror.

Again, the Deep Ones without the reality-warping otherness are no longer the Mythos.. they're just the Sea Devils/Silurians from Doctor Who.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Géza Echs;632972It's a bit frustrating to see Sagan mixed up with a confusion of Lovecraft and his narrator. Lovecraft believed no such thing as said in what you've got bolded there - his narrator for "The Call of Cthulhu" did. Lovecraft believed that we would continue going on discovering more and more of the universe without issue, barring the occasional risk of self-destruction from advanced technology.

Yes, Lovecraft didn't believe in Cthulhu either, but we're talking about the basis for his Mythos and "Lovecraftian Horror", not the man's personal convictions.

Quote from: TristramEvans;633541Yes, Lovecraft didn't believe in Cthulhu either, but we're talking about the basis for his Mythos and "Lovecraftian Horror", not the man's personal convictions.

Then the quote I was responding to shouldn't conflate the beliefs of HPL's narrator for HPL's own, should it?

Quote from: Géza Echs;633687Then the quote I was responding to shouldn't conflate the beliefs of HPL's narrator for HPL's own, should it?

You mean the quote by Carl Sagan, or the quote by Lovecraft about his own Mythos?

Quote from: TristramEvans;633773You mean the quote by Carl Sagan, or the quote by Lovecraft about his own Mythos?

The one that conflated the voice of HPL's narrator with HPL's own beliefs, to make it seem as though there's variance between Sagan's thinking and what Lovecraft thought. Again, Lovecraft was as science-positive as a person can possibly get, and his view of his "Mythos" (it wasn't thought of as such until after his death) was also distinct from his narrator's.

But the long and the short of it is that, yes, there's much new stuff that can be done with the "Mythos" along with the fun kitchy stuff that gives us our Derleths and our plushies.

Quote from: GrumpyReviews;633207The racism of Lovecraft, and R.E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burrows and arguably even the Good Professor Tolkien was largely a product of the society which produced the men. It was even backed by the "popular science" of the day.

It certainly was. I always find it odd how few people understand how popular and widely-accepted eugenics was back in that day. You had situations where inter-racial marriages were legally prohibited and sterilizations legally forced all over the place based on scientific paper after scientific paper about how the human genepool was breaking down because of the birth rates being higher for certain immigrant groups (sadly, that particular moral panic still seems awfully familiar after nearly 100 years...).

Michael Crichton had a very good discussion about it in one of his novels (State of Fear) where he used it as an example of how combining science with politics can be a very bad combination.

The racism of the day is actually quite a large part of the backstory for my campaign. The gang-part of the storyline is all about different ethnic gangs slaughtering each other for power in the streets while the real movers and shakers of the city are all "assimilated" rich white men and the mythos part is all about cultists using the power of the old ones as a way to further the cause of eugenics.