Hello, everybody! I've lurked on these forums for a bit, but I've decided to take the plunge and start posting. (Warning: This post contains possible spoilers for Neil Gaiman's American Gods and the one-page dungeon Cave of the Hunted by OtspIII)
I'm looking for ideas for minor gods that evoke a sense of the weird to flesh out my campaign world, but I'm pretty burned out on Lovecraftiana. I'm looking for something a little different. The problem is that I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.
There have been some deities that have captured my imagination recently.
There's Hinzelmann from American Gods, a small child that a prehistoric Black Forest tribe murdered as a sacrifice, smoked, and turned into a totem. Then there are the Gods of Lankhmar, the mummified founders of the city sleeping in their squat black temple-tomb with its silent bell tower, surrounded by offerings Lankhmarts toss hastily through the entrance. Reading through the one-page dungeon Cave of the Hunted, I came across the Hunted One, a demon-god of prey that manifests in the form of a rabbit and surrounds itself with hanging rabbits that are dead but still kick, drowned rabbits that stare out from still pools, and kennels of screaming rabbits. In the first issue of Vacant Ritual Assembly, I came across the UFO-like firefly goddess Luminari, with her six human arms and a proboscis she uses to drink funeral pyre flames to sustain her glow.
I don't know what I don't know. Since I only have a vague sense of what I'm looking for, I'm not sure what to ask for beyond suggestions that are more or less weird but non-Lovecraftian.
Great stuff! Subbed.
The presence of unique mysterious alien mythologies are not exclusively a Lovecraftian concept. Lovecraft simply started the most popular modern widespread expression of such a mythology. You don't have to use anything like the Cthulhu Mythos. If you don't want to.
It's okay to make up your own. And honestly? I think it would give your setting more character if you did just that.
It's all in how your present it ultimately. A key to a successful alien or foreign mythology is to make it mysterious. Something to tantilize the imaginations of seekers of the arcane and the occult. Give them unknowns to chase.
From Qelong, which I'm currently running: the Naga, Qelong, river/mother goddess/chaos demon, bound into slumber with temples and ley lines at the beginning of this current age, now freed after too many temples and ley-line canals were destroyed in a war. Also an actual physical river. Sometimes an actual physical monster, but that's only a manifestation; beating the monster doesn't beat the goddess.
Now opposed by the Lotus, a powerful but alien extradimensional intelligence or force of Law. Physical [fantasy] lotus flowers were used by the old monks in moderation for healing and meditation, but overuse merges users' will with the Lotus, which is now served by an odd mix of fanatical monks and drug addicts.
Neither are exactly minor in the original setting, but they're easy to tone down. A river that's also a goddess/demon, and an extra-planar force of Law that would be a god if it even thought that way, which it doesn't quite, so it's inscrutable ends are advanced by consumed drug users and a few fanatic meditating monks rather than by a conventional religion.
The OP may wish to check out Petty Gods (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/149434/Petty-Gods-Revised--Expanded-Edition). It's garnered some praise, to the point I found it overrated. There's a lot of joke entries, and a lot of overlap given the multiple submissions. But at free you can't beat the price, and I'd be surprised if there's not something you can use.
Arguably Mordiggian, from Clark Ashton Smith's "The Charnel God (http://eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/22/the-charnel-god)". Not a Lovecraft creation, but, with all the cross-pollination of the era, a lot of people classify Mordiggian as part of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Personally, I disagree, but I'm no academic scholar, so what do I know?)
If you're in a DIY mood, Silent Legions (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/145769/Silent-Legions) includes a couple chapters on creating your own Lovecraftian-style-but-not-Lovecraft mythos to use in your game, complete with gods, aliens, alternate dimensions, cults, and artifacts.
You say you don't know what you're looking for, but do you know what you want to avoid? Is the Cthulhu mythos just too well-known and "standard", so you're bored with it? Or are there more specific characteristics that you want to avoid?
Then just make up weird alien god thingies. The idea isnt tied to Lovecraft. What happened was him and a bunch of writer friends were having fun sharing their ideas or drawing inspiration from nightmares, older works, legends and so on.
Look up some examples like Coatlicue, Tiamat, Typhon, Nekhbet, etc. Theres quite a few.
(this is going to be a long post. Buckle up!)
Quote from: nDervish;951871If you're in a DIY mood, Silent Legions (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/145769/Silent-Legions) includes a couple chapters on creating your own Lovecraftian-style-but-not-Lovecraft mythos to use in your game, complete with gods, aliens, alternate dimensions, cults, and artifacts.
I'll second that! It's basically an OSR version of Call of Cthulhu, but with a lot of tools and random tables for making your own weird horror/sci-fantasy mythos stuff. Really good spring board for ideas if you're stuck, and I'm not even a fan of the game.
You might also look into GURPS The Madness Dossier and JAGS Wonderland (http://mchacon8.wixsite.com/jagsrpg/books) for more tools and inspiration on what a prebuilt original mythos might look like. I feel Nights Black Agents and Esoterrorists may also prove inspiring for building cults and monstrous mythologies. Finally, Champions in 3-D had a great bit about a world overrun by an original mythos you can find here (http://www.allenvarney.com/anopheles.html), and there are a few other games out there that might prove inspiring if you want a more post-apocalyptic approach to the mythos. And you could do worse than to run a game set in the modern world, where the PCs slowly come to realize they're facing an apocalypse from Warhammer's Chaos Gods.
Anyway....
In the Cthulhu Mythos there seems to be three recurring themes: the irrelevance of humanity, the unavoidable doom of all, and the horrors of miscegenation. A century later, and the actual stories have lost a lot of their horror ("so his ancestor was a monkey in Africa? And why does Lovecraft seem to hate all these European immigrants and poor country folk?"). Fortunately for modern audiences, "there's nothing we can do to stop the alien monsters from driving us into barbarous extinction" is -still- a pretty scary concept that a lot of people have since run with to varying degrees of success.
My advice is to think of some things (in the plural) that disturbs you or your friends. Now, think of how you could make those things so powerful that a person couldn't feel anything but helpless to stop them. I mean -really- stop them. Sure Cthulhu gets knocked back into R'lyeh when an adequately-sized boat hits him, but by the same token the stars were -not- right and Cthulhu probably shouldn't have been out and about anyway (and also, Cthulhu is just one Great Old One among a seemingly endless number stuck on Earth/in the Universe). The Laundry RPG (based on the novels) has the awesome idea of telling you that the stars will be right in the next decade, and there's nothing you can do to stop it; the game is basically one of holding the fort for as long as you can, while in the background the government makes preparations for the end times and tries to minimize damage as much as it can (and you thought the security cameras in the UK were just to monitor things).
Anyway, scary things that make people feel helpless.
But not -so- helpless that the game is just an exercise for a sadistic GM to bully and disempower a bunch of PCs/players.
Let's say you don't know what sounds scary? I went to a random fear generator online (found here (https://www.randomlists.com/random-phobias)) and got the following:
1) Biphobia - fear of bisexuality
2) Erythrophobia - pathological blushing
3) Ipovlopsychophobia - fear of being photographed
4) Trypanophobia - fear of needles or injections
5) Nosocomephobia - fear of hospitals
Okay, so let's roll with what we got....
2, 4, and 5 all feel related. This isn't a bad thing. The Esoterrorists actually has a collection of ancient, immortal, otherworldly "medical" monsters in it's Book of Unremitting Horror. We could just port them in straight into the setting as is, but that feels kind of limited. Perhaps The Practice (as it's known) is actually reflective of just one part of a greater whole. Perhaps there are other aspects of this grouping that covers architecture, engineering, and so forth. The push back against science through things like religious oppression, future shock, and so forth is an instinctual one. We fear these Prometheans, because we know we stole their "fire" and now they have come to take it back from us. So now they come in increasing numbers, silently and hidden at first, but then braver and bolder.
1 and 3 seem kind of silly perhaps. "Fear of bisexuals" is probably a trigger for somebody, and "fear of having your photo taken" almost begs for someone to start talking about indigenous cultures and their superstitions. But wait! The fear of being photographed is usually said to be a fear of having your soul stolen. Whether or not that's what indigenous people thought, soul theft through technology sounds pretty cool! And fear of bisexuality works better if it's just part of this soul theft. So what we have here is some force, hidden in technology, going around and doing psychological/spiritual mashups of people. You go to bed a happily married white woman with kids in New York, and wake up a Japanese salaryman who no longer speaks in English, and can't begin to explain to your husband what's going on as he screams and chases you around the room. Funny right? Yeah, but this is a global pandemic.
So let's add some more.
1) Nyctophobia -fear of darkness
2) Atychiphobia - fear of failure
3) Agrizoophobia - fear of wild animals
4) Zoophobia - fear of animals
5) Automatonophobia -fear of humanoid figures
2 doesn't work for me. It's a strong fear to be sure, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head to do with it.
3, 4, and 5 practically beg for some sort of beastmen, but that feels a tad cliche. And 1 feels overdone as well. But what if we mix all 4? So now we have a race of shadowy beastmen, insubstantial except when they're attacking, slowly hunting and killing people. And to top it all off, we go back to 1 and say the world is... dimming. Nights seem longer, increasingly foggy weather is becoming the norm across the globe, and the beastmen hunt just out of sight.
Okay, so what does the one have to do with the other? It doesn't matter. Just as there's no obvious connection tying Y'glonac to Cthulhu, you don't need a connection tying these things together. In fact, if nothing sings to you, don't even try. Let your players brainstorm and try to figure it out on their own. If they say something good, smile and nod sagely at them. This is GMing 101, but applied to cosmic nightmare mythologies.
That said....
The world is changing. Something is broken, and everything is fading away. The beastmen come to claim the world from mankind, clearing the slate of us before they start a new world. The Prometheans have come to reclaim what was theirs while they still can. And the souls of the dead have no place left to escape to, and so they try to buy a few more precious moments of existence by hiding in us, throwing away some part of who and what we were in the process. There is no Big Bad to defeat and fix everything, but some people hope that if you can hold out just long enough... just long enough... maybe you can find a place in whatever world is being born.
The Lovecraftian gods are larger than life aliens that humans (and various other entities) have built up mythologies around (with some oddballs like Nyarlathotep). These beings have nothing to do with the sort of thematic classifications of gods in human mythologies.
On the other hand, you have the archetype beings in Unknown Armies, which are modern / urban personifications of various human themes / memes.
What you might want to consider is where the 'root' of your weird gods is - are they things-from-other-places, or are they cast-off reflections of human narratives? Start with the root, then tack on X amount of time of various traditions.
Quote from: san dee jota;951884In the Cthulhu Mythos there seems to be three recurring themes: the irrelevance of humanity, the unavoidable doom of all, and the horrors of miscegenation. A century later, and the actual stories have lost a lot of their horror ("so his ancestor was a monkey in Africa? And why does Lovecraft seem to hate all these European immigrants and poor country folk?").
I don't think Lovecraft's better stories have lost their horror so much as later writers have drowned us with weak pastiches... seeing 'Lovecraftian' as nothing more than some ookey monsters and a lot of name-dropping. There have been some better writers who have gone beyond that and expanded in new directions... Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco... but there's been a LOT of garbage.
Just like how Night of the Living Dead is still scary/creepy to me, but the deluge of uninspired zombie movies mostly aren't.
Werewolves and vampires are still scary too... when the right person is telling the story.
People mating with non-humans is still a creepy subject... or am I wrong that that is an aspect of movies like Alien, Species, Rosemary's Baby, Possession, Splice, and House of the Devil?
We're still plenty afraid of weird foreigners and poor country folk as well... and not just in the xenophobic corners of the U.S... again, based on modern horror movies I've seen, like Hostel, Sheitan, Wrong Turn, and Calvaire. Those fears are still firmly in place.
Not that the OP is looking for horror...
One gaming book that pops to mind is
Fire on the Velvet Horizon... a book of very strange creatures by Scrap Princess and Patrick Stuart. I'm don't remember seeing any game stats in the book... and while these are 'monsters' I think a number of them are also well suited to be weird gods. They're certainly not just there to be killed for XP.
Also, some of the Patrons that have been written up for Dungeon Crawl Classics are pretty strange and could easily inspire their own cults.
Thank you for the replies so far, everybody. There are several things I'd like to get back to and some things I'd like to mull over, but it's great to see different perspectives.
Quote from: nDervish;951871You say you don't know what you're looking for, but do you know what you want to avoid? Is the Cthulhu mythos just too well-known and "standard", so you're bored with it? Or are there more specific characteristics that you want to avoid?
Like I said in my original post, I don't know what I don't know. Right now I am at the front end of a new campaign, so there's that, but I am also bouncing around creative and aesthetic considerations that go beyond my current campaign. I'm at the beginning of a journey and I don't know where it'll take me or where I'll end up.
Part of it is because the weird is more of a sensation than anything else, and I don't necessarily know what creates it, even in myself. At the end of his introduction to
Supernatural Horror in Literature, in which he attempts to define the weird, Lovecraft writes, "The one test of the really weird is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim."
The problem is that Lovecraft's own work doesn't do that for me anymore, and neither do works by other authors in the Cthulhu Mythos. People have found ways to shoehorn more or less Lovecraftian elements into just about every conceivable genre and medium, to the point where it's like a
Portlandia skit --"Put a tentacle on it!" That familiarity has rendered what was once weird mundane. Put something that smacks of the Mythos into a campaign, even if it's not actually Cthulhu or the Necronomicon, and most modern players will feel anything but a "a profound sense ... of contact with unknown spheres and powers."
What I'm looking for are things that capture my imagination in that way, because there's a good chance it'll work similarly on my players.
Does that make sense?
Quote from: The Scythian;951948People have found ways to shoehorn more or less Lovecraftian elements into just about every conceivable genre and medium, to the point where it's like a Portlandia skit --"Put a tentacle on it!" That familiarity has rendered what was once weird mundane.
See, I think that's part of the unimaginative Lovecraft glut... just putting tentacles on something or having Cthulhu show up in the final act (and how many of Lovecraft's stories actually feature tentacles?).
Have you read the comic Uzumaki? It's very 'Lovecraftian' to me but has none of those familiar tropes. It's very 'weird'... and absurd... but horrific.
I think a big part of it, as others have mentioned, is maintaining the mystery... for as long as you can... even to yourself. The mystery is what draws them in and keeps them. The Cthulhu Mythos has been rendered inert by people wanting to give it a taxonomy and numerical stats. To explain it.
Maybe, try not writing anything... use images and sounds and odors instead. What comes to mind from a red ball, the clang of iron, and the smell of old leather? What is the essence of loneliness and sorrow? What being manifests its obsessions over the shadows at the end of long hallways? or the particular color of green that new leaves on a orange tree show? Light reflecting off of water?
My DCC Cleric PC has a god that the GM just made up, has no real details except a picture. I started to write up more about it... then stopped myself, because that's boring. Instead I've created rituals and sacred sites... the human end of the relationship... but no more details about the god itself except for some competing notions about what it wants from its followers.
Petty Gods is good, and cheap considering how chunky it is.
I like Gark the Calm, the Gloranthan god of Peace and Contemplation. He makes but one promise to his followers, that they will have an eternity of calmness and contemplation in which they can meditate on the secrets of the universe. When worshippers of Gark the Calm meditate, they can die and immediately return as a zombie with the desire to sit and meditate forever in a state of blissful calmness. Temples and holy places of Gark the Calm are full of circles or groups of worshippers, sitting and meditating on the grand secrets, Investigators would see hordes of zombies sitting and mumbling, surrounded by the stench of death.
Quote from: Simlasa;951918I don't think Lovecraft's better stories have lost their horror so much as later writers have drowned us with weak pastiches... seeing 'Lovecraftian' as nothing more than some ookey monsters and a lot of name-dropping. There have been some better writers who have gone beyond that and expanded in new directions... Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco... but there's been a LOT of garbage.
Fair enough.
I think the argument against Lovecraft though is that the horror of his stories is rather dated. A nihilistic atheist view of the universe is less disturbing for modern audiences than it was for people still coming to terms with the end of WW1. That and it's hard to read his works the same way when you realize how they were metaphors for his elitisim, racism, and xenophobia.
Quote from: Simlasa;951918People mating with non-humans is still a creepy subject... or am I wrong that that is an aspect of movies like Alien, Species, Rosemary's Baby, Possession, Splice, and House of the Devil?
Rape and Lovecraft are debatable subjects, but otherwise agreed. I will say though that -consensual- reproduction is what sets off a lot of Lovecraft's stories from the ones you list.
Quote from: Simlasa;951918We're still plenty afraid of weird foreigners and poor country folk as well... and not just in the xenophobic corners of the U.S... again, based on modern horror movies I've seen, like Hostel, Sheitan, Wrong Turn, and Calvaire. Those fears are still firmly in place.
True.
But, and this is the problem, we're not talking about modern takes on these themes but "the actual stories" written by Lovecraft. Are some people still scared by them? Sure. But others find them tame (and filled with stilted purple prose) by comparison; then again, Lovecraft was writing for audiences almost a century ago.
Quote from: san dee jota;952130I think the argument against Lovecraft though is that the horror of his stories is rather dated.
So is that of Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelly... in their way. Big deal if People can still enjoy reading it?
QuoteA nihilistic atheist view of the universe is less disturbing for modern audiences than it was for people still coming to terms with the end of WW1.
I'm not convinced of that. I sense most folks, in the U.S. at least, still cling to some belief that there is meaning and justice balancing out the impersonal cruelties of life. They prefer comforting illusions.
QuoteThat and it's hard to read his works the same way when you realize how they were metaphors for his elitisim, racism, and xenophobia.
It's always a choice, once you get to know a lot about an artist, whether you let that knowledge impede your enjoyment of their work. Lovecraft had some bad notions... but as far as I know he never directly harmed anyone, which is more than I can say for a fair number of other artists I continue to admire, while still recognizing their crimes. Roman Polanski, for example.
I mean, big deal, Lovecraft was a racist in the 20s. Here's a gold star for calling that out. Now go do something relevant to racism in our present moment.
QuoteRape and Lovecraft are debatable subjects, but otherwise agreed. I will say though that -consensual- reproduction is what sets off a lot of Lovecraft's stories from the ones you list.
Why do you assume it was all consensual? Why do you assume modern audiences are just fine with men fucking gorillas or women fucking alien fish-people? I know there are porn sites for that stuff, but even they generally make the fishmen a lot cuter than the average Deep One.
QuoteBut, and this is the problem, we're not talking about modern takes on these themes but "the actual stories" written by Lovecraft. Are some people still scared by them? Sure. But others find them tame (and filled with stilted purple prose) by comparison; then again, Lovecraft was writing for audiences almost a century ago.
So your complaint is that old books... seem old?
Is nothing in your library older than five years? A strict cut-off to remain thoroughly modern?
I suspect you just don't like the guy's writing... and I just DO... primarily just matters of taste that neither of us will be argued away from. That's perfectly fine.
Quote from: Simlasa;952138I mean, big deal, Lovecraft was a racist in the 20s. Here's a gold star for calling that out. Now go do something relevant to racism in our present moment.
:) You're preaching to the choir here.
Quote from: Simlasa;952138Why do you assume it was all consensual? Why do you assume modern audiences are just fine with men fucking gorillas or women fucking alien fish-people?
Honestly, I figure there was a -lot- of rape going on, just "off screen". But that's not a universally agreed upon view (seriously, go look into it if you want). I'm not sure if it's because people can't imagine the "Old Gentleman" thinking in those terms, or if he really didn't.
Quote from: Simlasa;952138I suspect you just don't like the guy's writing
You're probably right. When I was younger I thought he was really talented and read pretty much everything he did. I still like some of his works (The Old Man in the House), but generally I think he's more noteworthy for his impact on others than in terms of his own writing. That and helping to create an IP that isn't locked down by Disney.
Lovecraft was notably racist even for the 20s but I agree that the obsessing on his racism is played out. I find many of his early stories are too derivative of Poe or they suffer from drawing out a 'twist' that the reader sees coming from miles away (The Whisperer in Darkness is the best/worst example of this).
He was his own best critic, in his letters he identifies his weakness both in structure and in a slightly antispetic tone at odds with much of his material. He really improved once he started to integrate more overtly sci-fi elements into his writing and you get his best work like The Colour Out of Space, Shadow Across Time and Mountains of Madness. Notably the last two are among the last things he wrote, it's a shame that he died just as he was finding his voice imo.
For Lovecraft but not try reading some stuff that inspired him like The White People by Machen or The Repairer of Reputations by Chambers. Two great stories from the turn of the last century but nothing either of them wrote is anywhere close to as good.
The White People is a truly visionary piece of writing. Even after reading all the praise for it from Lovecraft, Alan Moore and T.E.D. Klein building an entire very fine horror novel around it, it exceeded my expectations.
Might be worth checking out Monte Cook's Galchutt (which can be found in his Chaositech and Ptolus books). Clearly Lovecraft-inspired, but not in the "I called my face-tentacle giant by a different name" way.
My favorite is probably Dhar Rhys, which is a hole in space that opens on a dimension of writhing, worm-like creatures. The worms are not Dhar Rhys -- Dhar Rhys is the hole; the fundamental tearing of reality.
Deathbird by Harlan Ellison. :p
You can do weird shit with "real" human mythologies.
Humans have believed a lot of kookie stuff.
What if...there was a Catholic cult were the bread and wine DID turn into the flesh and blood of Jesus during their rituals...and the cultist were empowered by eating the flesh of God?
...and what if eating pieces of God isn't a good idea, not just for the cultists, but for the entire universe? AKA, they are literally devouring God and there isn't much left of Him!!
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;952080Petty Gods is good, and cheap considering how chunky it is.
Agreed. There's lots to mine there.
Quote from: Simlasa;952138I know there are porn sites for that stuff, but even they generally make the fishmen a lot cuter than the average Deep One.
Finally! I knew I wasn't the only connoisseur of Dagon porn on this site! :D
Quote from: Spinachcat;952751What if...there was a Catholic cult were the bread and wine DID turn into the flesh and blood of Jesus during their rituals...and the cultist were empowered by eating the flesh of God?
...and what if eating pieces of God isn't a good idea, not just for the cultists, but for the entire universe? AKA, they are literally devouring God and there isn't much left of Him!!
Nyarlathotep approves of this post.
Or if you did want to mix up Catholicism and Lovecraft, have Azathoth with his servants and idiot pipers actually be God in Heaven, it's just as humans in our post-lapserian state, without Grace we are so corrupted and desecrated that it looks horrific to us. All the Cthulhu Mythos nonsense is really just Satan putting a new spin on things in order to pull us further away from God.
Again, I want to thank everybody for responding. I appreciate the time everyone took. I've been busy the last few days and it could take me a while to work through all of the responses and I'm going to cut some of them up so I can respond more or less efficiently, so please bear with me.
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;951837The presence of unique mysterious alien mythologies are not exclusively a Lovecraftian concept. Lovecraft simply started the most popular modern widespread expression of such a mythology. You don't have to use anything like the Cthulhu Mythos. If you don't want to.
It's okay to make up your own. And honestly? I think it would give your setting more character if you did just that.
Quote from: Omega;951877Then just make up weird alien god thingies. The idea isnt tied to Lovecraft. What happened was him and a bunch of writer friends were having fun sharing their ideas or drawing inspiration from nightmares, older works, legends and so on.
I'm pretty comfortable with the history of weird literature, especially horror literature, and I have a pretty good sense of how the Cthulhu Mythos developed. This is less about what Lovecraft invented or didn't invent and more about wanting to stay away from gods that feel Lovecraftian, largely because overuse has changed the impact they have and I don't think they will evoke "a profound sense ... of contact with unknown spheres and powers" in my players.
As far as making things up goes, I don't intend to drop the temple-tomb of the Gods of Lankhmar in the hills outside town. I'm looking for ideas that excite my imagination so I can either play magpie and borrow aspects of them, or pick them apart to figure out why they work for me. As Lovecraft points out in
Supernatural Horror in Literature, the weird is about atmosphere and the feelings it evokes more than anything else. I know the weird when I feel it, but to a significant extent I don't know it
until I feel it.
As far as real life gods (and cult practices) go, of course I hit them up for inspiration!
Quote from: Dave R;951862The OP may wish to check out Petty Gods (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/149434/Petty-Gods-Revised--Expanded-Edition). It's garnered some praise, to the point I found it overrated. There's a lot of joke entries, and a lot of overlap given the multiple submissions. But at free you can't beat the price, and I'd be surprised if there's not something you can use.
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;952080Petty Gods is good, and cheap considering how chunky it is.
Thanks for pointing this out! I downloaded it and paged through it. It's uneven, but there's also some good stuff.
Quote from: nDervish;951871If you're in a DIY mood, Silent Legions (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/145769/Silent-Legions) includes a couple chapters on creating your own Lovecraftian-style-but-not-Lovecraft mythos to use in your game, complete with gods, aliens, alternate dimensions, cults, and artifacts.
It looks interesting, but it's just a little more expensive than I'd like to pay for something sight unseen. It looks interesting, and if I feel like gambling, I'll pick it up. Thanks!
Quote from: Dave R;951862From Qelong, which I'm currently running...
I like both of those ideas, especially the river that is also a goddess/demon/whatever and
Qelong seems like it's worth picking up more generally. (LotFP stuff has been a little hit or miss for me so far, but that one seems particularly interesting and it's by Kenneth Hite, so there's that.) Thanks!
That's all I have time for right now. I will try to get to more responses in my next post.
Quote from: Voros;952518The White People is a truly visionary piece of writing. Even after reading all the praise for it from Lovecraft, Alan Moore and T.E.D. Klein building an entire very fine horror novel around it, it exceeded my expectations.
It's such a great story. Then I read story after story after story by the same author and none of them came anywhere close. Just some critters in tunnels and "it was so horrifying that I can't describe it at all" bullshit. Just read like Lovecraft with the funky prose and the interesting details stripped out. That's interesting because it predates Lovecraft but makes for such boring reading.
But The White People is probably the best weird fiction I've ever read.
I liked The Great God Pan but it lacks the intensity for sure. I'd say he is a stronger prose writer than Lovecraft though.
China Mieville's work often has weird outsiders and extraplanar entities.
Weavers, the Avanc, and the Grindylows are all pretty bizarre.
This is somewhat relevant (http://www.break.com/article/weirdest-ancient-gods-in-history-3060822) here.
Quote from: The Scythian;953193As far as making things up goes, I don't intend to drop the temple-tomb of the Gods of Lankhmar in the hills outside town. I'm looking for ideas that excite my imagination so I can either play magpie and borrow aspects of them, or pick them apart to figure out why they work for me. As Lovecraft points out in Supernatural Horror in Literature, the weird is about atmosphere and the feelings it evokes more than anything else. I know the weird when I feel it, but to a significant extent I don't know it until I feel it.
If you don't already read D&D with pornstars you should check out this one post (http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-three-shadows-escalating-inventions.html). It's nominally about horror scenarios but I think it would apply to introducing weird gods in play.
I'm reading The Atomic Sea series by Jack Conner. I'm about a third into the 10 book set and a lot of it reflects stuff that is discussed here.
Spoilers:
Spoiler
The "gods" in the book are different kinds of extra-dimensional beings that have an amoeba-like form with pseudo-pods and tentacles.
They are modifying the Earth to fit their needs starting with the oceans.
Feeding humans seafood from the modified oceans infects them with extra-dimensional energy and mutating them.
Turning the humans into food for the gods.
Combine this with the creation of a religion that worships the extra-dimensional "gods"...
Quote from: Tod13;953828I'm reading The Atomic Sea series by Jack Conner. I'm about a third into the 10 book set and a lot of it reflects stuff that is discussed here.
I just bought a copy of the first book based on some recommendation I read... I can't recall where.
As with Lovecraft's cults, it sounds like 'gods' being worshiped by people who are largely mistaken about the true nature and intent of the beings they're propitiating... but based on direct evidence/experience of some god-creature... rather than being an imagined personification of natural forces.
Quote from: Simlasa;953851I just bought a copy of the first book based on some recommendation I read... I can't recall where.
As with Lovecraft's cults, it sounds like 'gods' being worshiped by people who are largely mistaken about the true nature and intent of the beings they're propitiating... but based on direct evidence/experience of some god-creature... rather than being an imagined personification of natural forces.
Pretty accurate--especially for just the first book. I found it when I was looking for steampunk stuff that sounded good. Most of the stuff just sounded bad or the preview turned me off. The Atomic Sea has interesting characters, good writing, and an interesting storyline. YMMV.
If you read on Kindle and have Prime, the entire series is available on Unlimited.
A few ideas:
Try Lord Dunsany, if no one mentioned it yet.
There is also Raphael Chandler's Pandemonio for an awesome look at demons., gods, etc.
And here is my take on a lawful-but-not-nice deity generator (http://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com.br/2017/01/1000-lawful-religions-random-table.html).
Although it features profoundly unweird gods the Curse of Chalion books by Bujold might still be useful as they're the best treatment of bog standard fantasy I've ever seen, by miles and miles. The thing that could be useful here is just how different the priorities of the gods are from human priorities. Basically, they care about the proper life cycle of souls and flip out when that's disrupted but they fundamentally don't give a shit about plagues, famines, war etc. etc. Making sure that gods have different priorities than humans works wonders to make them seem otherworldly. The other bit that could work from that series is what saints are. They basically are people who for one reason or another have a big gaping whole in their ego which leaves and empty spot for the god to feel up with their presence. That could be the reason why fucked up people are the ones communing with their gods. They're fundamentally lacking something that normal humans should have and that leaves space for the divine. The entropy demons from hell are pretty cool too.
The Chalion gods are pretty benign but the same stuff that makes them work well in that series could be used just as well for more fucked up gods.