Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 25, 2022, 05:37:30 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on February 25, 2022, 05:16:02 PM
Cosmic horror?

Try surviving as a species for a million years where everything wants to eat you and then get back to me about Cosmic horror.

Creatures with tentacles for a head better make their shot count when they come for the King.

Just unleash all the grievance studies profesors and graduates on Cthulhu, I bet he goes running under a rock to escape the screeching madness.

I always assumed they had already seen into the Abyss.

Quote from: Shasarak on February 25, 2022, 05:49:02 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 25, 2022, 05:37:30 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on February 25, 2022, 05:16:02 PM
Cosmic horror?

Try surviving as a species for a million years where everything wants to eat you and then get back to me about Cosmic horror.

Creatures with tentacles for a head better make their shot count when they come for the King.

Just unleash all the grievance studies profesors and graduates on Cthulhu, I bet he goes running under a rock to escape the screeching madness.

I always assumed they had already seen into the Abyss.

They are The Abyss, it's why there's no bottom to the crazy.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:49:26 PM

Quote from: Krazz on February 24, 2022, 03:38:14 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:11:42 PM
  Again, I am not making Conan out to be a huge monster here, but he is intent on raping her, now if its okay because she is not human, I can accept that.  As for not in control of himself, I think that is somewhat ambiguous after he kills the two frost giants. 

I'm not saying that it's OK to rape non-humans, I'm saying the statement that Conan tried to rape a woman can't be true if the person in question isn't a woman. That's of course independent of whether it was attempted rape. There's no mention of him coming to his senses after he kills the giants, and given how protective of women he is in the other stories, I find it hard to believe that Howard meant for us to read between the lines that he was intentionally out to commit rape.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:20:59 PM
  You know what?  I might be wrong about him actively selling them, the guy just mentions Conan slaying his brother and then the Stygians taking him into slavery... So maybe just murderous pirate and not a slaver? 

Yes, Conan was no paladin. To quote Howard, he was "a thief, a reaver, a slayer". Shades of grey indeed, but Howard avoided assigning some of the worst of human nature to Conan, giving him a rough chivalry which often leaves him looking better than some of his civilised foes.

  I do not see it as between the lines.  Atali is clearly in absolute terror as he chases her after killing her brothers.  And when he catches her and hugs her and tries to give her unwanted kisses...This is described and Conan obviously sees this.  He was around 17 in this story, and maybe he has not yet learned no means no.  Is it your position that her enchantment has caused him to be a rapist?  I could actually accept that as a case, but it is ambiguous given Conan's remarks throughout the chase and killing of her brothers certainly seem to be Conan being Conan.

In the Vale of Lost Women (i think thats the name) Conan explicitly says he'd never take a woman against her will, even in a quid pro quo like the woman set up in that story cause he felt she wasnt really attracted to him and just wanted to be free of her captors.

I see this tread has gone in interesting directions. I'll have to politely pass on discussing Conan because I have virtually no familiarity with that IP. Lovecraft I do know.

I know Peterson's work well enough to make an educated guess that the quote in OP is leaving something out. He's said both mind-blowing reductions of truth and a number of things which I disagree with, but the TL;DR is he's a smart and articulate guy. That said, the entire point of play is preparation, both physical and emotional. Horror as a genre exists because it is a form of play intended to prepare people for encountering horrific life events. A sadly real and disturbingly common phenomenon.

I seriously doubt Peterson would miss something so fundamental. It's possible--to my knowledge, he's not into tabletop games as a hobby and I am, so I may genuinely know more about gaming--but that seems unlikely and out of character.

WARNING: PHILOSOPHICAL TIRADE!

In my opinion, you can't really understand Lovecraft without understanding the philosophical problems mathematics was struggling with back in the early 1900s. Early in the 1900s,Whitehead and Russel tried to formally prove "1+1=2" only for an Austrian mathematician named Godel to use a liar's paradox to prove that couldn't be proven. It was a mathematical proof that math is broken.

This spawned many things. In Christianity, it is the ancestor of the transcendental argument for God's existence. In popular culture, it's the original reason for Postmodernism to exist. In this context, it makes perfect sense for Lovecraft to write about Elder God horrors who drive people insane because in a sense, that's what these mathematicians were doing to themselves by staring into set of all sets theory. The interesting thing is that Lovecraft likely sensed this without even being told; At the Mountains of Madness first rejection and Godel's Theorems' publication were both in 1931. The fact this was also the time period quantum mechanics was formally described is the cherry on the top.

This is why I don't think it's fair to describe Lovecraft's writing as having any notion of Evil, or even ascribing to such a label at the table. It's a scream of agony at how brain-meltingly unintelligible a seemingly intelligible universe can be if you give it more than a cursory glance. (And I would say that the universe is intelligible, although reaching a high level understanding of it is much harder than we once thought, and certain philosophies fail outright when trying to adventure too deep.)

Haven't read the thread, but my take is that "Lovecraftian" Call of Cthulhu has an inherently nihilist tone. And a nihilist would probably argue that such a tone isn't "good" or "evil," it simply is. Others might characterize the nihilist tone as "evil" according to their own worldview.

But I'd also note that Call of Cthulhu doesn't *have* to be played with a nihilist approach to the cosmos. You can take a more "pulp" good vs. evil approach to the game and that can work, too.

Quote from: Shasarak on February 25, 2022, 05:49:02 PM
I always assumed they had already seen into the Abyss.

I think that's almost literally true. Social Justice, like the other totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, is a reaction to the perceived meaningless of a Godless universe.

I don't understand why people like Cthulhu or anything Lovecraftian. The idea of playing characters that slowly go insane and mental is something I don't grok.

Quote from: RebelSky on February 26, 2022, 03:18:12 AM
I don't understand why people like Cthulhu or anything Lovecraftian. The idea of playing characters that slowly go insane and mental is something I don't grok.

It's a particular flavor of horror. It plays on our discomforts with uncertainty and insecurity (the world is so much weirder and more dangerous than we thought) and with no-win situations. As the protagonists learn the truth about reality, it destroys them from the inside out, but they have to press onward to accomplish what little they can. And anyway, there's no going back to the safe illusions.

In a sense, it's the same theme as Robert Browning's "Childe Roland To the Dark Tower Came" but with more tentacles and florid hallucinations:

Quote
For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.

I don't think you can place the Cthulhu Mythos in a religious context, without destroying what makes the Mythos effective. The ultimate nature of reality must be uncaring and indifferent, and religion is about imposing meaning.

But I do think you can get rid of, or at least bound, the sanity-breaking nature of the Mythos. One way to conceive of it is that humanity is a sheltered child, unaware of the harshness of the greater world, or cosmos in this case. It's a dangerous cosmos, and the path to adulthood is narrow and any missteps can result in destruction. The loss of sanity is the result of trying to grow up too quickly, or letting a foot stray from the path. The path from lesser servitor race to transcendent being is long and difficult, not something that can be completed in a single generation. But over time, humanity can become inured to the new way of thinking, learn to exceed its own mental limits, and become something else. Thematically, this is similar to Clarke's Childhood's End.

Quote from: Pat on February 26, 2022, 04:21:14 AM
I don't think you can place the Cthulhu Mythos in a religious context, without destroying what makes the Mythos effective. The ultimate nature of reality must be uncaring and indifferent, and religion is about imposing meaning.

Ah, but those aren't contradictory things! The fact that something's meaningless one some grand scale doesn't make it meaningless on smaller scales, and not all religions posit ultimate meanings. (What's the ultimate meaning of the Norse cosmology?) Also, the Greek god Hypnos is a canonical entity in the Mythos, isn't he?

Quote
But I do think you can get rid of, or at least bound, the sanity-breaking nature of the Mythos. One way to conceive of it is that humanity is a sheltered child, unaware of the harshness of the greater world, or cosmos in this case. It's a dangerous cosmos, and the path to adulthood is narrow and any missteps can result in destruction. The loss of sanity is the result of trying to grow up too quickly, or letting a foot stray from the path. The path from lesser servitor race to transcendent being is long and difficult, not something that can be completed in a single generation. But over time, humanity can become inured to the new way of thinking, learn to exceed its own mental limits, and become something else. Thematically, this is similar to Clarke's Childhood's End.

Another idea I've seen discussed is that our inability to withstand the truth about reality is something we did to ourselves: we shut our eyes to reality and created religious and rationalistic models to believe in instead.

Quote from: Cat the Bounty Smuggler on February 26, 2022, 04:37:04 AM

Quote from: Pat on February 26, 2022, 04:21:14 AM
I don't think you can place the Cthulhu Mythos in a religious context, without destroying what makes the Mythos effective. The ultimate nature of reality must be uncaring and indifferent, and religion is about imposing meaning.

Ah, but those aren't contradictory things! The fact that something's meaningless one some grand scale doesn't make it meaningless on smaller scales, and not all religions posit ultimate meanings. (What's the ultimate meaning of the Norse cosmology?) Also, the Greek god Hypnos is a canonical entity in the Mythos, isn't he?

The Norse and Greek religions are long dead. I think it's a safe generalization for all major modern religions. Though you're correct, the cosmology of the Mythos would get along fine with certain types of shamanism or animism, or gods as powerful but not omniscient beings that need to be appeased.

Smaller scale is an interesting take on religions. The Mythos is the big scale, and religions are just little things that give us comfort?

Quote from: Pat on February 26, 2022, 05:17:54 AM
Smaller scale is an interesting take on religions. The Mythos is the big scale, and religions are just little things that give us comfort?

Yes - and in my book that's just as true of a Great Old One or even Outer God* cultist, as a follower of an Abrahamic religion. They all seek meaning within meaninglessness.

*What actually are the Outer Gods? If they are actually transcendent (evil) beings, you do have an actual evil universe, and what I'd call an evil premise, like Midnight (which I played & disliked). I tend to think of them as pan-dimensional entities, like Star Trek's Q Continuum. They may even be far older than our young 13.8 billion year old universe. Maybe they routinely devour whole universes. But ultimately they're still just 'creatures', that originated 'somewhere' and 'somewhen'.

Quote from: Pat on February 26, 2022, 05:17:54 AM
The Norse and Greek religions are long dead. I think it's a safe generalization for all major modern religions.

I think it's clear that humans don't always and necessarily need Ultimate Meaning to exist, any more than a cat or orang-utan does.

Quote from: S'mon on February 26, 2022, 07:48:45 AM

Quote from: Pat on February 26, 2022, 05:17:54 AM
The Norse and Greek religions are long dead. I think it's a safe generalization for all major modern religions.

I think it's clear that humans don't always and necessarily need Ultimate Meaning to exist, any more than a cat or orang-utan does.

The single most developed trait in humans is the ability to consider abstractions beyond ourselves, which has led not just to science, art, and culture, but to religious thinking. Comparing humans to cats and orangutans in this area is like comparing a virus to a whale.

It's true that ultimate meaning isn't necessarily a requirement for humans. But meaning is; and ultimate meaning has been a driving force that's transformed the religious landscape in the last few millennia, until it's the near-universal paradigm today.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 25, 2022, 10:40:24 PM
At the Mountains of Madness first rejection and Godel's Theorems' publication were both in 1931.

Interesting correlation!

Sincerely,
A Philosophy Major