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Author Topic: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?  (Read 3113 times)

jhkim

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What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« on: February 04, 2023, 01:51:39 PM »
So, talking some about Call of Cthulhu or other adaptations. This came to mind as I've just skimmed through last year's Fate of Cthulhu. It follows in the mold of a number of previous adaptations in the pulp style - like "Pulp Cthulhu" and similar. There's an apocalypse coming, and the PCs are flawed heroes who try to stop it.

I'd say first and foremost that I have nothing against this. I enjoy a lot of pulp style gaming, and I enjoy mashing different genres together. I've never tried it, but Ken Hite's "Adventures into Darkness" that mashes up Golden Age superheroes and Lovecraft sounds fun and hilarious.

But there's also a more Lovecraftian mode of adventure, and I think it's tricky but rewarding. I think the first big question is, what is "Lovecraftian"? Lovecraft only wrote short stories, and they rarely had any direct connection to each other. And he almost never had a team of investigators. So in some sense any campaign and/or party-based play is going against Lovecraft's style.

Still, there are degrees. What are the parts that you keep to make things still convey a Lovecraftian style? I might draw in from some of my campaigns in later posts, but I'd bring up the topic first and see what people think. What adventures or campaigns do you consider more Lovecraftian? How do you make your adventures more Lovecraftian?

I

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #1 on: February 04, 2023, 05:38:07 PM »
As many have noted before, the Call of Cthulhu game is really more like "H.P. Lovecraft meets Robert E. Howard" than it is pure Lovecraft.  A pure Lovecraft game would be pretty boring... characters investigate, then they run screaming or go insane.  The end.  That can make for a good horror story, but as a game it would be pretty pointless.  I think the game, and most of its published scenarios really, do a pretty good job of balancing these two.  Lovecraft's mythos and his cold, uncaring universe are preserved, but characters can fight back and make a positive difference, even if only temporarily.

Personally, I've never liked adding ghosts, vampires and werewolves to CoC games.  I also personally don't like mashing up other genres, with it, but that's just me.  But the fact that investigators might team up and go after cults or do what they can to combat the Mythos doesn't bother me too much, even if it's not what Lovecraft wrote.  If the Mythos and its cults were real -- and that's what we're pretending when we play one of these games -- then not everybody who encounters it would be a high-strung, nervous, solitary academic or antiquarian like Lovecraft's protagonists.  What if Lovecraft's protagonist was a tough P.I. ex-combat soldier?  What if he was a reporter, used to hanging around gangsters?  What if the protagonist was a woman (of any stripe, since HPL never used them as main characters)?

The only unbreakable rule for me in a "Lovecraftian" game is the preservation of his view that the universe doesn't care, humanity is insignificant, and the only gods that exist either do not care about us or consider us as pests to be cleared off the Earth.

Grognard GM

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #2 on: February 04, 2023, 06:08:18 PM »
The threat should be beyond the merely physical. Your soul or very personhood should be at stake, existential horror layered under the grotesque.

The threat can not just be defeated. At best you just survive, or delay the inevitable for another generation or ten.

Some aspect of man's supremacy over nature proving hollow and pathetic. Be it our weapons, or our scientific marvels. We're just chimps waving a burning stick around and thinking we're somehow advanced.

The threat is faced by an individual, or a small group.

Bonus points if you include a tentacle.
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Grognard GM

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #3 on: February 04, 2023, 06:19:56 PM »
A pure Lovecraft game would be pretty boring... characters investigate, then they run screaming or go insane.  The end.

The Dunwich Horror
The Lurking Fear
The Shunned House
The Alchemist
EDIT* The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward

Five* Lovecraft stories off the top of my head where the heroes win. In 3* of them, dangerous entities are actually permanently destroyed by human endeavour.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2023, 02:28:22 PM by Grognard GM »
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Bruwulf

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #4 on: February 04, 2023, 06:32:56 PM »
A pure Lovecraft game would be pretty boring... characters investigate, then they run screaming or go insane.  The end.

The Dunwich Horror
The Lurking Fear
The Shunned House
The Alchemist

Four Lovecraft stories off the top of my head where the heroes win. In 2 of them, dangerous entities are actually permanently destroyed by human endeavour.

It's interesting that only one of those is considered one of the "quintessential Lovecraft" stories, though.

Grognard GM

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #5 on: February 04, 2023, 06:40:33 PM »
A pure Lovecraft game would be pretty boring... characters investigate, then they run screaming or go insane.  The end.

The Dunwich Horror
The Lurking Fear
The Shunned House
The Alchemist

Four Lovecraft stories off the top of my head where the heroes win. In 2 of them, dangerous entities are actually permanently destroyed by human endeavour.

It's interesting that only one of those is considered one of the "quintessential Lovecraft" stories, though.

I consider The Shunned House to be top-notch. The Lurking Fear is pretty good too.

The Alchemist is just Lovecraft channelling Poe.

Also, the 'Quintessential' story is the greatest win in the Mythos.
« Last Edit: February 04, 2023, 06:42:43 PM by Grognard GM »
I'm a middle aged guy with a lot of free time, looking for similar, to form a group for regular gaming. You should be chill, non-woke, and have time on your hands.

See below:

https://www.therpgsite.com/news-and-adverts/looking-to-form-a-group-of-people-with-lots-of-spare-time-for-regular-games/

jhkim

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #6 on: February 04, 2023, 06:50:40 PM »
If the Mythos and its cults were real -- and that's what we're pretending when we play one of these games -- then not everybody who encounters it would be a high-strung, nervous, solitary academic or antiquarian like Lovecraft's protagonists.  What if Lovecraft's protagonist was a tough P.I. ex-combat soldier?  What if he was a reporter, used to hanging around gangsters?  What if the protagonist was a woman (of any stripe, since HPL never used them as main characters)?

The only unbreakable rule for me in a "Lovecraftian" game is the preservation of his view that the universe doesn't care, humanity is insignificant, and the only gods that exist either do not care about us or consider us as pests to be cleared off the Earth.

I agree that vampires, werewolves, etc. break away from Lovecraftian for me. As I said, I can enjoy mixing genres, but it isn't Lovecraftian.

While I agree about having a mix of protagonists is fine, I feel there should be some representation of academics and antiquarians, or at least some equivalent.

Especially, there are a lot of published Call of Cthulhu adventures which effectively encourage the characters operating like a tactical military squad - and I find that breaks from Lovecraftian feel. In other words, when dilettantes come in and ask questions and read up at the library, they mostly just turn up useless background information and expose themselves to enemy view. By contrast, camping out and making midnight raids with shotguns and dynamite is still dangerous but more effective.

Even if a bunch of the characters die, that makes it like a tough dungeon crawl or wargame, but not Lovecraftian horror.

Persimmon

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #7 on: February 04, 2023, 08:21:27 PM »
For me, the ultimate Lovecraft backdrop for a campaign was the short-lived "Friday the 13th" the series TV show.  See here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092357/?ref_=ttep_ep_tt

Nothing to do with the films.  The basic premise is that a pair of cousins inherit a cursed antique shop from an evil uncle who made a deal with the devil.  With the help of their uncle's friend, who is the quintessential Lovecraftian hero, they track down the cursed antiques, facing all manner of horrors and nasty people in the process.  When I ran a Cthulhu campaign way back in the 1990s we used this as the premise for our campaign, just changing the temporal setting from the 1980s to the 1920s.  So I think you can make the campaign thing work.  And of course CoC features some of the coolest campaigns ever created for any RPG.

Valatar

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #8 on: February 04, 2023, 08:29:26 PM »
Rule 1: People can only have the vaguest idea what the fuck is going on.  The more you understand what's going on, the more insane you likely are.
Rule 2: Players must be hard-pressed to do more than delay whatever hellish events are occurring.
Rule 3: Direct confrontation should not be particularly effective.

When it comes to examples of Lovecraftian with groups who are not a fainting-prone college student from the 1920s, I think of In the Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon, Eternal Darkness, System Shock and Dead Space.  For the videogames in particular, the characters could absolutely gun down individual monsters, but doing so netted basically no advantage, as they were just moaning horrors and not instrumental for whatever was going on.  The actual entities behind the problems were outside of the characters' reach.

Thornhammer

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #9 on: February 04, 2023, 09:39:56 PM »
For me, the ultimate Lovecraft backdrop for a campaign was the short-lived "Friday the 13th" the series TV show.  See here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092357/?ref_=ttep_ep_tt

I loved that show.

Fheredin

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #10 on: February 04, 2023, 10:18:35 PM »
It's worth noting that Lovecraftian has grown a fair bit beyond Lovecraft, but Lovecraftian is usually applied Nihilism. As presented in Call of C'thulu (the roleplaying game, not the short story), the antagonist is fundamentally incomprehensible (a breakdown of human epistemology), and a bad outcome for the universe is all but guaranteed, whether that's through the Elder God succeeding or the investigators achieving a Pyrrhic victory where they stop the Elder God and most of them spend the rest of their lives as lunatics. This isn't even a world where Lex Luthor can flex his existentialist muscles and create meaning for himself with an act of the will; the universe will destroy that meaning.

The universe is hopeless. It has no sense of morality and is unintelligible.

While I admit to taking some inspiration from Call of C'thulu from time to time, I confess I don't actually have any love for the setting and view Call of C'thulu as something of an anti-RPG. I think the best viewpoint I can take of the the Lovecraftian mythos is as a metaphorical homeopathic remedy for depression in the form of a game; the players playing characters in such a universe should develop a distaste for the ideas and eventually shrug them off and seek more positive ideas. But I've seen plenty do the exact opposite and embrace the emptiness.

I

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #11 on: February 04, 2023, 11:34:58 PM »
A pure Lovecraft game would be pretty boring... characters investigate, then they run screaming or go insane.  The end.

The Dunwich Horror
The Lurking Fear
The Shunned House
The Alchemist

Four Lovecraft stories off the top of my head where the heroes win. In 2 of them, dangerous entities are actually permanently destroyed by human endeavour.

OK, I'll grant you "The Dunwich Horror."  I forgot about that one.  I'd like to add "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," as that is a cracking good adventure/chase story full of suspense and action.  Its protagonist arguably fails (it depends on one's point of view), but the story really lends itself to RPG material, and of course was the basis for one of the absolute best supplements for the game ever produced -- "Escape from Innsmouth."  I still wouldn't count the other three stories, though -- not core enough to his concepts and too prosaic (prosaic for HPL, that is).

You shouldn't take what I said as criticism of Lovecraft, though.  He was writing horror stories and evoking fear, not writing kickass adventure stories full of fighting.  His creations make a fantastic setting for an RPG.  I've played more CoC than any other RPG and own more material for that game than I do for all other RPGs combined, so obviously I think very highly of his work and gaming based off of it.  It's like this -- "At the Mountains of Madness" is a great horror/SF story but it would make a lame adventure (two guys wander around exploring, see a shoggoth and run away from it, the end.  But the setting and concepts HPL invented for that story make a superb basis for role-playing adventures with other characters, as Chaosium's "Beyond the Mountains of Madness."

I

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #12 on: February 04, 2023, 11:46:45 PM »
If the Mythos and its cults were real -- and that's what we're pretending when we play one of these games -- then not everybody who encounters it would be a high-strung, nervous, solitary academic or antiquarian like Lovecraft's protagonists.  What if Lovecraft's protagonist was a tough P.I. ex-combat soldier?  What if he was a reporter, used to hanging around gangsters?  What if the protagonist was a woman (of any stripe, since HPL never used them as main characters)?

The only unbreakable rule for me in a "Lovecraftian" game is the preservation of his view that the universe doesn't care, humanity is insignificant, and the only gods that exist either do not care about us or consider us as pests to be cleared off the Earth.

I agree that vampires, werewolves, etc. break away from Lovecraftian for me. As I said, I can enjoy mixing genres, but it isn't Lovecraftian.

While I agree about having a mix of protagonists is fine, I feel there should be some representation of academics and antiquarians, or at least some equivalent.

Especially, there are a lot of published Call of Cthulhu adventures which effectively encourage the characters operating like a tactical military squad - and I find that breaks from Lovecraftian feel. In other words, when dilettantes come in and ask questions and read up at the library, they mostly just turn up useless background information and expose themselves to enemy view. By contrast, camping out and making midnight raids with shotguns and dynamite is still dangerous but more effective.

Even if a bunch of the characters die, that makes it like a tough dungeon crawl or wargame, but not Lovecraftian horror.

Agreed.  I personally prefer playing academics and such.  I've played elderly and physically-impaired investigators, too.   But the fact that characters use weapons and fight back is what I mean by the Robert E. Howard element.  It's like in REH's most famous horror story, "Pigeons from Hell" -- when the Sheriff hears about horrible doings at the old plantation house, he draws his revolver and heads right in, and the young protagonist goes with him.  I don't think your average Lovecraft protagonist would have done that.  It's still a horror story, but there's certainly more action to it.  I think it's just necessary to mix a little of that in if you're going to have a game.  If the GM is just reading a horror story to the players, and they have no agency or can't fight back in any way, you're not going to keep your players for very long.

I

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #13 on: February 05, 2023, 12:12:39 AM »

The universe is hopeless. It has no sense of morality and is unintelligible.


Well, that's kinda what all atheists feel, and Lovecraft was a dedicated atheist since the age of four.  I'm not an atheist, but even I don't see their worldview as necessarily depressing -- it's just kind of an "it is what it is" situation.  Unless you believe otherwise due to your religion, the Earth WILL end one day.  The sun will swell into a red giant, but the Earth will have lost practically all of its breathable oxygen before then, anyway.  And that's assuming a comet or asteroid strike, gamma-ray burst, ice age or something else doesn't destroy the planet long before that.  I think Lovecraft just accepted the scientific reality of this, but that doesn't necessarily make him a nihilist.  In "The Shadow Out of Time" something has wiped out humanity, but we've been replaced by intelligent beetles as the dominant species.  So obviously the Great Old Ones haven't destroyed the planet (perhaps because some intrepid CoC investigators kept killing their cultists and messing up their rituals). 

Lovecraft just added, to the concept that there is no God, the concept that there might be other gods who mean us ill.  But brave humans can stymie their plans.  This concept if really no more depressing that J.R.R. Tolkien's in a way, because Tolkien also believed that "evil never dies," life is just one long struggle against it and you never win an ultimate victory this side of the grave.    "The Long Defeat," he called it.  Tolkien just believed in an afterlife free of all that, whereas Lovecraft probably believed that death is simply a state of total unawareness.  So Tolkien's view is more hopeful, but humans have to die in order to achieve that hope (and in a state of grace, at that), elves have to get to Valinor, etc.

But Lovecraft was writing horror stories, and a large part of their effectiveness is that the characters in them learn that the universe is not the safe, sane, orderly place they believed it to be.  If you find that scary, the author accomplished his mission.

Grognard GM

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Re: What makes an adventure or campaign "Lovecraftian"?
« Reply #14 on: February 05, 2023, 12:36:44 AM »
I like CoC because any victories are small, and the heroes know they are ultimately doomed, but resist anyway. There's something painfully human in that.

I thing an Antiquarian losing his sanity disrupting a spell that gains the human race another 100 years of reprieve wwaayy more heroic and interesting that the standard Avengers "We defeated the badguy who made the swirly thing that was going to blow up the universe, HOORAY!"
I'm a middle aged guy with a lot of free time, looking for similar, to form a group for regular gaming. You should be chill, non-woke, and have time on your hands.

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