Quote from: The Traveller;632931You're still on ignore tristram, and you aren't coming off it.

If you're not ready for the adult swim thats not my problem. Just means I can say what I want with less tantrums about it.

Of course, my experience is that people who put other posters on ignore tend to read those posts even more voraciously. The fact that you've responded here to tell me you're ignoring me only really reinforces that.

Good luck.

Quote from: gattsuru;632853The Deep Ones can, and should, still be terrifying beings.  They're a million-strong army with more knowledge than mankind can match.  They've got knowledge that doesn't fit into human patterns of thinking -- maybe knowledge that can't even fit into a human brain.  You definitely don't want to turn them into victims, since that's trite when you do it with vampires or zombies at this point, but just as equally you don't need to turn everyone else into helpless victims just to make the Deep Ones threatening.

I'd agree with the general conclusion.  I pondering about how to make the Deep Ones more threatening to an army with bombs, torpedoes, and machine guns - since by the story they don't display much in the way of tech.  What would a war with them be like?  I'm thinking about tech toys to give them while still seeming Lovecraftian.

Quote from: Catelf;632851Well, since several die-hard "Mythos fans" rejects or even misunderstands my points, purposefully or subconciously(because they may be afraid of what the idea really points towards) ...

Quote from: TristramEvans;632926Nah, this is the fuel for the Mythos, as very nicely encapsulated by Carl Sagan:

It's a bit frustrating to see Sagan mixed up with a confusion of Lovecraft and his narrator. Lovecraft believed no such thing as said in what you've got bolded there - his narrator for "The Call of Cthulhu" did. Lovecraft believed that we would continue going on discovering more and more of the universe without issue, barring the occasional risk of self-destruction from advanced technology.

QuoteThat Lovecraft was racist is really incidental to the whole thing. You could remove every scrap of racism from his stories and they'd remain pretty much the same.

I wouldn't go so far as to say its incidental, or that it could be removed from his works without harming them... I would say it's unfortunate, but was how he expressed some elements of the cosmicism that he wanted to get across. Xenophobia and horror pulled out onto the page as only a truly racist man could do.

To answer the question that kicked off this thread... I think there's a lot that can be done with the underlying philosophical and aesthetic points that Lovecraft developed his cosmic fiction to express. The latter period of his life, when (as we seen in At the Mountains of Madness) the 'outsiders' were represented as both analogous and inimical to humanity points to where he wanted to go with his work prior to his untimely death.

The thing is, the "Mythos" has been misunderstood and misapplied effectively since it was first named. There was no "Mythos" per se during Lovecraft's life - the codification of his settings, creatures, and anti-gods came about due to Derleth's efforts (and he drastically misrepresented the work of his friend for a very, very long time even as he saved it from obscurity). Even after Derleth's pernicious lies were revealed for what they were, the focus on the "Mythos" persisted. That is to say, the trend to focus on the window-dressing of Lovecraft's writing eclipses everything else.

Which isn't necessarily bad! I do enjoy my plush Haunter of the Dark, after all, and I can't say I haven't had a Hell of a lot of fun with Cthulhu Fluxx. But it does mean that people get distracted too easily by the form rather than the substance. This is why most pastiches of Lovecraft - those that focus on the monsters and the myth-cycle rather than the mood - tend to fade away, or at least are accepted as being not exactly high watermarks in literary history. It's the non-pastiche work that really persists, and I think that's where the "Mythos" (as it were) remains the most explorable.

Authors like Ligotti who work on a Lovecraftian mood, attempting to grapple with philosophic and aesthetic concerns that are expressed through a lens of cosmicism - those are the people who will carry the "Mythos" onwards and continue keeping it relevant. Surely, the window-dressing of anti-gods and monsters will be with us as well... But the window-dressing isn't the vanguard any more, and the tired old ground isn't the whole of the territory open for exploration.

Quote from: jhkim;632943I'd agree with the general conclusion.  I pondering about how to make the Deep Ones more threatening to an army with bombs, torpedoes, and machine guns - since by the story they don't display much in the way of tech.  What would a war with them be like?  I'm thinking about tech toys to give them while still seeming Lovecraftian.

Too much tech might humanize them too much.  Especially battlefield tech, since that's where they need to be the most horrifying.  Subterfuge is the easy angle to play up : they've got a lot of knowledge of the world, and have a sizable number of normal-looking people who are yet fundamentally tied to the Deep Ones over the long term, and real-world military of the 1930s were very underprepared for sea combat and very weak to targeted leadership strikes.

But if you're operating in the time period between the World Wars, you probably want land, or at least shore, battles.  Chemical and biological weapons would be the first to come to mind, but those had become human things by World War I.  The Mythos is filled with attacks on the mind, made all the more terrible by being impossible to detect, but that can be tricky to pull off in a game, and it's not really part of the Shadow over Innsmouth bit.  Another option is to do the impossible.  Deep One defenses and weapons don't need to follow conventional logic, and that incomprehensible nature can make them terrifying.

If someone points a ray gun at you, you can dodge and you can know that you should dodge.  If a Deep One can make water act like a wall of steel, or step from one shadow to the next, or ignite gunpowder from a distance, that can act on player characters in tricky ways while only limiting, rather than killing or disabling, that character.  If you go this way, though, it does need to act on at least a degree of fairy tale logic.

Canonically, Shadow over Innsmouth involves a torpedo run on Y'ha-nthlei, an underwater city over 80,000 years old, with only limited success as the city.  That's probably the point to start with : surface world attacks meeting against strangely indestructible underwater features, responded with infiltration or strange 'accidents' befalling a city's defenders until the city, in turn, is consumed -- until the surface world retakes that above-water city.

Quote from: Géza Echs;632972Lovecraft believed that we would continue going on discovering more and more of the universe without issue, barring the occasional risk of self-destruction from advanced technology.

He kinda flip-flopped on the matter.  In The Silver Key and other Dreamlands cycle stories, scientific knowledge actually removes possibility and opportunity, at least from the story-as-single-story reading.  In other stories, such as The Colour out of Space, scientific knowledge is simply unable to handle the nature of the outside universe -- though that, at least, might have been a limit of men or of tools.

Those are his fictions, though, and they don't represent the man himself. Lovecraft was unwaveringly science-positive throughout the whole of his life; his surety in the safe and continuous expansion of human knowledge would put Sagan's to shame.

Quote from: gattsuru;632991But if you're operating in the time period between the World Wars, you probably want land, or at least shore, battles.  Chemical and biological weapons would be the first to come to mind, but those had become human things by World War I.

It is time to stretch the mind.

A weapon that awakens all animal life, and makes it inimical to humans. Dogs, cats, insects: all suddenly filled with a terrible intelligence, and a malignant and implacable will to harm. (Surely a Lovecraft-tale-in-waiting, all by itself.)

A weapon that fills your mind with images of places far removed from the here-and-now, places the human mind wasn't meant to see and isn't prepared to understand. Suddenly, the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of a city fall down and are struck dumb. They live, but their eyes are focused on other time and other dimensions. (The only ray of light, they may speak of what they know and hints may be gleaned from their babbling.)

And then, in defiance of rationality and the laws of physics, the waves rise and inundate a land. Suddenly, Manhattan Island is under water, and only the peaks of the skyscrapers remain above the waves. People crowd the tops of the buildings, hoping against hope for rescue, while others drown beneath the deep, green sea and Deep Ones enter the city and begin climbing the towers.

Surely those are the weapons of a Lovecraftian World War.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;633000And then, in defiance of rationality and the laws of physics, the waves rise and inundate a land. Suddenly, Manhattan Island is under water, and only the peaks of the skyscrapers remain above the waves. People crowd the tops of the buildings, hoping against hope for rescue, while others drown beneath the deep, green sea and Deep Ones enter the city and begin climbing the towers.

Surely those are the weapons of a Lovecraftian World War.

I love the flooding weapon - very Deep-Ones-y, plus it brings up horrific recent imagery of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and Superstorm Sandy.

Quote from: jhkim;633019I love the flooding weapon - very Deep-Ones-y, plus it brings up horrific recent imagery of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and Superstorm Sandy.

Thanks.

I picture a permanent, free-standing tidal wave, just beyond the city being attacked. A giant, blue-green wall of water, capped with frothing, churning surf, towering over buildings and people.

Even if you do destroy or nullify the weapon — what happens when that wall of water collapses? (A flood. And not a small one.)

Also, fourth weapons: Hurricane "nukes". A weather control weapon that sends hurricanes when and where the Deep Ones will.

The Deep War

This is the age of science, of rationality. The age of discovery.

The age of ignorance.

The War to End all Wars had come and gone, and there was peace. (There were rumblings in Europe. There were always rumblings in Europe.) But there was a war brewing, another Great War, against an enemy ancient and implacable. An enemy safely ensconced in glass cities deep beneath the waves, while on land we were fat, happy, and vulnerable.

It was the Deluge. And in the age of reason, we found that the Bible had it right.

There was a Noah. There was an Ark. And there was a Flood that buried all lands.

And it was the work of the Dwellers in the Deep.

Below the surface world, deep in the crust of the Earth, are vast pockets of fresh water*. More water than is found in all the oceans of all the world.

Genesis 7:11 — "On the same day all the fountains of the great deep were burst open, and the sky's windows were opened."

On that dark day in 1939, the fountains of the deep, buried miles below in the crust, were opened up and the waters therein poured out and the oceans began to rise. Across the whole of the Earth, the oceans began to rise.

And the Dwellers in the Deep came after, and made war with a bloody vengeance.

(*This is actually true, according to my Geology professor.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;633000It is time to stretch the mind.

I wish this forum had a like or +1 button.

((Not sure I'd bring Biblical quotes, though it depends on the tone you're aiming for.))

Quote from: gattsuru;633048I wish this forum had a like or +1 button.

:hatsoff:

Quote from: gattsuru;633048((Not sure I'd bring Biblical quotes, though it depends on the tone you're aiming for.))

It is Lovecraftian though: all the world's myths are untrue, but they relate to deeper truths. Dagon, for example.

In The Deep War, there was a Deluge. Not because the Christian God is REAL, but because the Deep Ones made war, and sunk the whole of the Earth beneath the waves.

The entire Bible isn't true, but the Flood actually happened. Just not for the reasons that the Bible said it did.

Which fits in with how "real world" myths were depicted in the Mythos.

For my own scenario, I was picturing a little different - where basically there was a war with the Deep Ones *instead of* WWII.  The result was somewhat more devastating than WWII, but not a total apocalypse.  The war with the Deep Ones resulted in devastating losses for both sides, and after it ground on for years, eventually both sides came to a ceasefire.  

Now there are a bunch of island and/or coastal territories under Deep One control - a Watery Curtain instead of an Iron Curtain, but both sides are holding off from outright war.  

I'm also picturing that a few other elements could be included as well, like maybe Antarctica being explored more.

Quote from: jhkim;633054For my own scenario, I was picturing a little different - where basically there was a war with the Deep Ones *instead of* WWII.

Right. Sort of the aftermath of the Deep War, where the Deep Ones were beaten back, but not wholly eradicated.

I just like the idea of playing in an alt-WW II, where the waters are continually rising, and the humans are fighting like mad to save the surface world from being inundated forever. (Or making a hundred thousand arks, to save the human race.)

If the war ended in a stalemate, where a lot of the planet was inundated and occupied, but a lot was still above the waves, that could result in a situation like you're describing.