Quote from: Simlasa;443934It's similar to the argument I hear that modern people wouldn't be as frightened by Mythos critters because we've all seen myriad CGI horrors on movie screens... which I think is bullshit.
Watching a war movie doesn't prepare you for being in a firefight, seeing movie gore doesn't equate with seeing a real corpse or having the friend next to you eviscerated.

It's like seeing stuff like hurricanes, powerful storms, floods, tsunamis, earthquake etc. You can see some of those in movies with CGI, as well as "the real thing" by watching news networks. Watching the pictures has NOTHING to do with actually living through any one of those calamities in the flesh, for real, being afraid for your life, the integrity of your house, your loved ones, being in the dark... yes. Even "mundane" things like darkness still hold power over our psyches. We always have street lights and TVs and luminous bullshit around us. Now take ALL that away. Say you live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, and the power goes out for a few days. And there are wolves around. And the dogs bark at the woods. Not a star to be seen. The sound of the waves in the distance. Oh yeah mate. That grabs your imagination, that's for sure.

What if you take it the other direction, to the future? Would Cthulhu critters be as imposing and dangerous to, say, the Federation? I would think so, but it might be trickier to keep the same level of impending doom, horror, and suspense when you have tricorders that can tell you when someone moved through a field 8 hours before by the displacement of air molecules.

A good example of this, I think, would be "Forbidden Planet" - many parts feel kinda mythos-y to me. Maybe just have the creature not be generated from super-technology, but just "be".

Quote from: RPGPundit;443927I was thinking that what could more or less resolve this would be to switch from just having a straight sanity mechanic to having a "rationality/irrationality" mechanic in the style of the spanish game Aquelarre.

RPGPundit

Sounds interesting. Maybe for characters drawn from the Greek educated higher classes.

I think a Sanity/Stability mechanic would work well. Doesn't the French edition of CoC edition use one?

Quote from: Simlasa;443934Like others have said, I think you'd have to redirect the sanity blasting horror to a context that would horrify people of that era...

But I don't think that just because someone believes in gods and all sorts of supernatural creatures... is full of superstition... means they are ready and able to meet such horrors in the flesh. ...

I agree. That a superstitious person would somehow be inured to the horrors of the supernatural seems implausible. Though if it were true Psychic Fairs and Conspiracy Conventions maybe the safest places to be when the Old Ones return.

The more I think about it the more Cthulhu Invictus makes sense. When Romans have had their dominance of and significance in the world questioned they typically did not reacted well.

Quote from: Benoist;443936... Say you live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, and the power goes out for a few days. And there are wolves around. And the dogs bark at the woods. Not a star to be seen. The sound of the waves in the distance. Oh yeah mate. That grabs your imagination, that's for sure.

Sounds like home. Except my dogs bark at the woods for a few minutes then run inside, under the bed whimpering. My outhouse is in the same woods, which is why I never go to the bathroom without a shotgun.

Quote from: hanszurcher;443953Sounds like home. Except my dogs bark at the woods for a few minutes then run inside, under the bed whimpering. My outhouse is in the same woods, which is why I never go to the bathroom without a shotgun.

I'm first generation off the farm, and did a fair share of farm time as a kid; I yern for the country life, but I must admit, I do not miss outhouses!

Quote from: hanszurcher;443953Sounds like home. Except my dogs bark at the woods for a few minutes then run inside, under the bed whimpering. My outhouse is in the same woods, which is why I never go to the bathroom without a shotgun.

I can understand that. I was actually describing the place where I live.

Richard L Tierney has done a whole series of mythos stories based in the Roman period of and around the biblical character of Simon Magus. These are an excellent example of how mythos horror can be transferred to differing historical periods. Also, the idea of Jesus as a Wilbur Whately-esque half human son of Yog Sothoth is outstanding.

Hello all, new poster here!

I think you can make a case for Cthulhu in the pre-rational era.  The terror really comes from "everything you think is true about the universe isn't" and "you aren't as important as you think you are."  That can completely be said to be true during the Roman era.  Imagine being a Roman, growing up trusting that there are gods, that proper behavior is required to have a harmonious relationship, and (if you're a Stoic, anyway) that there is some sort of moral order to the universe.  I'm sure that when it's discovered that almost all those things are lies, that can be just as sanity busting, no?  Loss of sanity is really about your world view being shattered as it becomes clearer it doesn't match reality.

Even in the 1920s or the modern world, most people believe in God, and it's -that- part of them that is most psychologically susceptible to a Lovecraftian revelation.

Quote from: Eugene;444034Even in the 1920s or the modern world, most people believe in God, and it's -that- part of them that is most psychologically susceptible to a Lovecraftian revelation.

Even if a person has no specific beliefs it's hard to let go of the idea that there some sort of meaning and purpose to our lives... to human existence and the universe in general.
But how do you use the Mythos to show that absence of ultimate truth to people who have grown up surrounded by the certainty of meaning? How do you show a religious man that the monsters aren't merely 'demons'?... terrifying, but in the long run reinforcing his faith... rather than tearing it apart?
I'm thinking some scenario like in 'The Exorcist'... where the younger priest... fighting a crisis in faith... has that faith bolstered by witnessing an actual instance of possession.
Would he have reacted differently if the thing inside the girl had been 'Bob' from Twin Peaks? Or if instead of doing supernatural magic tricks and having a potty-mouth it had explained to him (in a rational if condescending manner) how everything he believed was a lie?

IIRC there was a bit of outrage in the 'christian' community wayback when over the scene in Dragonslayer where the priest confronts the dragon with prayers and upraised crucifix and gets barbecued for his troubles.

Quote from: Eugene;444034Hello all, new poster here!

I think you can make a case for Cthulhu in the pre-rational era.  The terror really comes from "everything you think is true about the universe isn't" and "you aren't as important as you think you are."  That can completely be said to be true during the Roman era.  Imagine being a Roman, growing up trusting that there are gods, that proper behavior is required to have a harmonious relationship, and (if you're a Stoic, anyway) that there is some sort of moral order to the universe.  I'm sure that when it's discovered that almost all those things are lies, that can be just as sanity busting, no?  Loss of sanity is really about your world view being shattered as it becomes clearer it doesn't match reality.

Even in the 1920s or the modern world, most people believe in God, and it's -that- part of them that is most psychologically susceptible to a Lovecraftian revelation.

Welcome, Eugene! Good post!

Quote from: Simlasa;444043But how do you use the Mythos to show that absence of ultimate truth to people who have grown up surrounded by the certainty of meaning? How do you show a religious man that the monsters aren't merely 'demons'?... terrifying, but in the long run reinforcing his faith... rather than tearing it apart?

It's not just the demons. It's the combination of things. It's being confronted to the demons, seeing your friends becoming mad, having your own thought processes and logic and belief falling apart on the long run. It's the fact that you cannot slaughter these demons, you cannot kill the dragon like St. George: in the end, you are going to LOSE. And you know it. There's no resisting it. Evil is everywhere. This makes the whole universe a sick joke.  This leads to the dreadful revelation, some horrible moment where one realizes that there is no hope, there is no race chosen from God, the earth is not a garden we are tending to... it is all ashes to ashes, with nothing valuable in between.

It's just one way to react to this. Now, I think it's really important to not stereotype all atheists as one category with a single set of answers, and likewise with religious people. Each religious person will find his or her own answers, or react differently to the lack of answers.

Quote from: Eugene;444034Hello all, new poster here!

I think you can make a case for Cthulhu in the pre-rational era.  The terror really comes from "everything you think is true about the universe isn't" and "you aren't as important as you think you are."  That can completely be said to be true during the Roman era.  Imagine being a Roman, growing up trusting that there are gods, that proper behavior is required to have a harmonious relationship, and (if you're a Stoic, anyway) that there is some sort of moral order to the universe.  I'm sure that when it's discovered that almost all those things are lies, that can be just as sanity busting, no?  Loss of sanity is really about your world view being shattered as it becomes clearer it doesn't match reality.

Even in the 1920s or the modern world, most people believe in God, and it's -that- part of them that is most psychologically susceptible to a Lovecraftian revelation.

A lot of good points here. I was thinking also that, at least within recorded history roman religion is pretty abstract and also pragmatic. Even though a roman person might believe in the presence of the divine as part of the way things work, systems of belief popular among romans tend to be those that understand divine influence as something that manifest as the way the world works every day. romans were superstitious people, and treated with importance even rituals that the most learned had next to no understanding the reasoning behind, but in my opinion a roman is just not going to thing zeus is going to show up in the air and start shooting thunderbolts at anyone; the weather that is part of the natural process is the way that divine presence works. if you look at the discussion in Nature of the Gods by cicero you have thinkers from very different philosophical traditions but they are all understanding the divine pretty much through reason and the evidence of the lovecraftian mythos is just not compatible with those world views.

part of the horror of the mythos is that your knowledge is petty, your idea of how the world works is no defense or comfort against the way things are, whether it is epicurean physics or quantum physics, the mythos knowledge is a mocking affront to it; it's wrong, it doesn't help you, and drooling inbred retards living in huts are better equipped to "deal" with the way things really work than you are. and more learning makes you more fucked. Stoicism for example assumes a pervasive logic to the universal system - the mythos replaces that with "idiot chaos."

Quote from: Simlasa;444043But how do you use the Mythos to show that absence of ultimate truth to people who have grown up surrounded by the certainty of meaning? How do you show a religious man that the monsters aren't merely 'demons'?... terrifying, but in the long run reinforcing his faith... rather than tearing it apart?

I think whether you have a stoic who accepts a certain meaning of life or an epicure who accepts a kind of meaninglessness, the rub is that confronted with an outright mythos entity the fact that it's there invalidates the stability of belief or reason. it's not a matter of showing someone it isn't "just a demon," once it's there, it obviously isn't, and the human automatically recognizes that, hence the SAN roll. HPL describes hardcore mythos entities in a roundabout way and the point is that direct comparison to something familiar fails it - if the party encounters one of the race of cthulhu, remember it's not the same thing as seeing a comparably sized octopus, like what might end up on someone's dinner plate writ large, it's obviously made of matter that recognizably doesn't behave like matter, etc. the GMs description of course can't cause the SAN loss - but don't forget that something there is.

Where the problem lies in not that the roman character/mindset doesn't interface with the principles of lovecraftian horror, but, I suspect, that players are likely to be thinking not of the historical and mundane roman world, but basically of a  swords and sandals fantasy setting full of sorceresses and stop motion gods. you could probably get around this by a frank DM briefing, and it would be helpful to remember that the roman priests, etc. are not going to be loaded with magic spells and charms any more than the archdiocese of new york are going to be in a 20's campaign - they will be functionally more similar to the secular authorities really.

Also, while it might be a more traditional CoC campaign if the PCs are mostly merchants and philosophers and scribes, I don't think it's a real problem if the PCs are, say, a gladiator, a legionary, a bandit, and a praetorian any more than if the 20's party are a boxer, a WWI vet, a gangster, and a treasury agent. Being decent with swords, shields, and javelins might help against cultists and ghouls and deep ones, but do shotguns and dynamite and pickup trucks, things the PCs won't have, and the authorities are going to be just as ignorant and unhelpful in the modern day. the emperor Nero isn't actually a god-king any more than Warren G. Harding...

Quote from: Cole;444058Where the problem lies in not that the roman character/mindset doesn't interface with the principles of lovecraftian horror, but, I suspect, that players are likely to be thinking not of the historical and mundane roman world, but basically of a  swords and sandals fantasy setting full of sorceresses and stop motion gods.

This seems likely to me.
I'd be tempted to start off with some mundane city adventure... dealing with local criminals (or doing local crimes), family honor or some small political upheaval... something to establish what 'normal' is before letting the 'strange' loose.
 
I'm thinking the big Rome book for BRP would also be handy for guys like me that don't have much of a handle on the period except for watching I Claudius and the HBO series.

Quote from: Simlasa;444065This seems likely to me.
I'd be tempted to start off with some mundane city adventure... dealing with local criminals (or doing local crimes), family honor or some small political upheaval... something to establish what 'normal' is before letting the 'strange' loose.
 
I'm thinking the big Rome book for BRP would also be handy for guys like me that don't have much of a handle on the period except for watching I Claudius and the HBO series.

I have only skimmed it but it seems pretty good.

Also there's the "small" matter that unlike "the 1920's" "Rome" is certainly not one decade.

Quote from: Akrasia;443875I would very strongly recommend R. E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn story, "The Worms of the Earth," to anyone interested in running a CoC game set during the Roman era.  It is a Roman Cthulhu Mythos story.

One of my favorite REH stories! It strikes an almost perfect balance between Lovecraftian horror and Howardian S&S. Heartily seconded.

Quote from: Eugene;444034Hello all, new poster here!

I think you can make a case for Cthulhu in the pre-rational era.  The terror really comes from "everything you think is true about the universe isn't" and "you aren't as important as you think you are."  That can completely be said to be true during the Roman era.

Welcome, Eugene! Good post.

This is sort of how I handled my Medieval Cthulhu game. "Where is your God now?" was the sort of feeling I tried to evoke. Setting it in an isolated monastery only made it easier, of course...

Quote from: The Butcher;444107One of my favorite REH stories! It strikes an almost perfect balance between Lovecraftian horror and Howardian S&S. Heartily seconded.

Phew!  I was starting to think that I was the only one who had read any of REH's Bran Mak Morn tales here.