Tonight! 8pm Eastern, it's Inappropriate Characters!
Join me, Venger & Ryan as we talk Halloween, what makes good horror, & how overdone Cthulhu is, plus more!
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Someone mentioned Cthulhu becoming the main show in the conversation and I tend to agree with that.I think the first Lovecraft story I ever read, at least the first one I remember, is the Festival, and for me that always set the tone of Lovecraft. I think what I liked about it was how he was taking simple elements of New England life and Geography and making them horrifying. Kingsport is based on Marblehead, and if you know the area, it is an interesting choice for that particular story (Marblehead, at least when I was young, was one of these towns, where if you weren't from there, coming to it you would always feel a bit like an outsider). So he captured this provincialism, and captured the actual geography of the place (the church at the center is a real church), making it harbor this strange cult celebrating a kind of anti-Christmas. I feel like the image of Cthulhu doesn't quite capture why that story worked for me (a lot of his stories also don't follow a particularly clear story structure, many just feel like strange accounts of something odd, which is also why I think they worked for me). Even a story like Shadow Over Innsmouth, which gets into the mythos, I found more interesting because the horror (which weirdly turns into a kind of beauty in the end) seems to be Lovecraft's own fear of inherited mental illness and disease (which I suspect he had a dawning awareness of given the way in which he died six years later).

I am working on a New England Horror game and I had a reaction similar to Pundit, where I felt Lovecraft was so overdone (there is a kind of mindset in gaming of you just drop Cthulhu in and that magically makes the setting better, which I think diminishes the Lovecraft Mythos over time and turns it into something more like a parody of the source material). But I also found it very hard to write a New England horror game without some acknowledgement of Lovecraft, without incorporating some Lovecraft-isms into the setting (you just can't escape Lovecraft's influence on horror set in New England I think). Eventually I had to allow Lovecraft inspired elements (I just did it more from the perspective of living near places like Salem, that seemed to hold a particular fascination to him). But I did find leaning more on stories like Pickman's Model, where he does things like use Boston's weird geography to help make the story frightening, helpful.

Well, if there's any setting where it can make sense to stick with Cthulhu, it's New England Horror.

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 23, 2023, 09:26:37 AM
Well, if there's any setting where it can make sense to stick with Cthulhu, it's New England Horror.

It definitely fits IMO. I didn't incorporate actual mythos into the game but there are places where I think the inspiration from Lovecraft is obvious