Quote from: Simlasa;622007Isn't that pretty much what Cthulhu Rising is meant to be?

Could be, this is my first time ever hearing of Cthulhu Rising. However, from the description at the link, I think what I had in mind has more of a military orientation (a la GDW's 2300) - not so much investigators trying to discover the truth about Mythos stuff in space as "we know what's out there and we're in a fight to the finish against it." Which may well be an aspect of the CR setting; I wouldn't know.:idunno:

Quote from: T. Foster;622003I had pretty much the same thought. The Cthulhu Mythos as a hard/military sf setting along the lines of Aliens (which, per the GDW folks' admission was the primary inspiration for the look and feel of the 2300 universe) could be pretty cool.

I'm pretty sure John Ringo wrote a novel or two about just such a setting. Might be worth checking out.

Quote from: jhkim;621988I like this idea.  I'm just not sure who the bad guys would be.  I guess a world-wide conspiracy of terrorists who keep trying to "investigate" - which generally means blow up or burn down - people who are different than normal.

Hm... how about :

The Mythos is about grand and alien systems, and about interaction, and about Revelation in the Apocalypse or Ragnarok sense.  Mage, where the Technocracy was doomed and outnumbered and damned and all the more dangerous for it.  Changeling, where the True Fae were terrific and oh-so-certain to arrive instead of merely terrible.  The Bees and especially the Dragon from The Secret World, especially where it's suggested there are a lot of active Bees in the world.  Changing and leaping across the world in ways that don't really make sense except in retrospect and metaphor, faster and greater than anyone has a right to be.

In turn, enemies don't need that.  There shouldn't be a New World Order, or Vast World-Spanding MegaCorp, or righteous hand of God, or any other odd conspiracy theory or religious belief.  It's not the UN, or the Country, but Fox Mulder who wants to stop you, except the local police actually believe him and are willing to let him use the local SWAT team.  Titus Crow is a smooth-talking betrayer who knows just enough to make things miserable for your team, and has enough powerful artifacts that stopping him is a Big Deal. Some complete jackass keeps summoning the Byakhee, but we don't want to shut him or her up in too obvious or too messy a manner.  Great Forces will eventually take these individual down if the player characters don't, but bringing a pile of Ghouls into things isn't a good fix, while your players can come up with a good fix and improve themselves at the same time.

Other enemies shouldn't be human, or even comprehensible to the uninitiated: you might fight Saturn and the Moon while in the Dreamlands, or need to take a malfunctioning antitime-tool-artifact-being of Xexanoth, or need to distinguish if a Shoggoth is malfunctioning or if it's actually got a point.

And then there's themselves: the player characters are constantly experiencing things beyond what humans are design to know, and growing beyond what humans were meant to be.  Not a full insanity system, because those tend to be done very poorly, but instead obsession and revelation and understanding dragging the characters further from societal and cultural norms.

Well, there's the other aspect of Mythos that's often ignored -- playing the evil guy and loving it. Even in the literature, Mythos gleefully prophesies of the glorious time it'll come to ravish the earth in apocalyptic holocaust, and teach us to love it. Turn humanity into a great intergalactic lottery contest for "Who Wants to be a Great Old One!"

Then it'll be about the sick personal horror of role playing the psychopaths who want to win the prize before everyone else. Keeping things secret only makes good sense because who wants more competitors? The idea of human progress becomes a mixed bag of enabling new competition, while furthering your goals of a) establishing your right as humanity's preeminent representative among galactic bullies, and b) more victims to entertainingly slaughter when the stars are right.

The reason Kult and In Nomine are fondly remembered for their depravity is because as a player you find yourself willfully and gleefully immersed in evil acts. The horror of your sick in-character choices ended up being far more morally horrifying to the players than any set up the GM devised. Bring back the greatest of prizes CoC can offer a character, to be an immortal bully serving the universal malice of the Outer Gods, and make it a contested goal for players.

Sure it may evoke vomiting from revulsion, but the paranoia and self-loathing should dredge up an oft untapped dimension of Mythos horror. "Cthulhu isn't a bad guy, he's my buddy! It's just too many other damn people who don't deserve his wisdom get in my way! I'll make them get out of my way..."

:eek:

Quote from: Simlasa;621705It is odd that even going way back there were Lovecraftian pastiche stories that sought to do nothing more than detail the family tree of Hastur and add in Cthulhu's second cousin twice-removed. (...)

It was HPL himself, in a letter exchange with Clark Ashton Smith, who started the family tree thing, though it was obviously not to be taken too seriously since they included themselves.

Quote from: Simlasa;622007Isn't that pretty much what Cthulhu Rising is meant to be?

Cthulhu Rising, which, apparently, will be in print again from D101 Games, using the OpenQuest rules, by the way:

Cthulhu Rising | D101 Games

I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos, except as open satire; e.g. using the Derlethian geneaology of the Old Ones and Elder Gods as the basis for a game of familial backstabbing and one-upmanship, basically Amber with tentacles tacked on. Or a Kobolds Ate My Baby-esque game of cruel but hilariously inept cultists.

What I still want to do with the Mythos is a "Cthulhu in Space" game. I think the two go really well together, if you stick to gritty, low-key SF a la Aliens (a cosmic horror movie if there's ever been one). I've been looking for non-outrageously-priced hardcopies of both Cthulhu Rising and Cthonian Stars to no avail.

Quote from: The Butcher;622133using the Derlethian geneaology of the Old Ones and Elder Gods as the basis for a game of familial backstabbing and one-upmanship

I have played that game, though not quite as sophisticated; nameless horrors with randomly assigned features competing to bring around their own version of the apocalypse before their siblings do, dodging wave after wave of investigators with shotguns.

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos...

As good guys: a lot of the Mythos is old, in the same way that a piece of bread that fell behind the fridge is old.  It's stale, moldy, possibly developing new forms of civilization, and I think this is also from a loaf that was recalled after some contamination scare.  Even by the standards of his time, Lovecraft was a racist crazy git who almost had a psychiatric break when his secret shame of Welsh blood.  A lot of the Mythos, especially the part of the Mythos that's reached the popular culture, is happy to declare things Evil without spending much effort on explaining why the viewpoint character knows that to be a thing.

As villains: sometimes cackling evil is fun, although I do agree it's best done as parody.

I run Call of Cthulhu often  but veryvery rarely use any Mythos stuff. Its kind of a special event, like Vader or Jabba the Hutt showing up in a Star Wars game. Those creatures are celebrities now, so they don't work any better for a sense of "unknowable horror" than Freddy Krueger thses days. Instead, I tend to research the folklore of a given area. Especially in Scotland, every square mile of that country has some sort of horrific creature associated with it, many of them more bizarre and f-ed up than anything Lovecraft or his sycophants dreamed up (give me a Nuckelavee or Black Annis to throw at players over Hounds of tindalos or Deep Ones anyday)

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos,

Wasnt that the premise of the game that one guy who got banned from RPG net for casting spells on other posters did?

QuoteWhat I still want to do with the Mythos is a "Cthulhu in Space" game. I think the two go really well together, if you stick to gritty, low-key SF a la Aliens (a cosmic horror movie if there's ever been one). I've been looking for non-outrageously-priced hardcopies of both Cthulhu Rising and Cthonian Stars to no avail.

I ran a really great Call of Cthulhu in space adventure a bit ago, based on a heavily modified All Flesh Must Be Eaten scenario, that was something like a cross between Event Horizon and Alien. It was pretty damn awesome, and achieved a somewhat elgendary status among my players as one of the best of the Cthulhu one-shots (outside of this one that featured Vampire cannibal priests vs Gypsy werewolves. Thats considered the apex thsu far of all our adventures).

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos

They might not be the worst of the villains to be found but I've had a fair amount of success running games where the players were not innocent do-gooders out to save the world (as if they could) but instead were grave-robbers and occultists and antiquarians looking to find and use ancient knowledge and relics for their own gain.
More like the two fellows in HPL's 'The Hound' than the academic saviors in 'The Dunwich Horror'.
I think there were examples of campaigns like this in The Unspeakable Oath as well.
So on the one side, they've got cultists to steal from and fight off... but also nosey investigators who feel strongly they should not be allowed to own a private copy of the Cultes des Goules.
They're not trying to call up any of the Big Bads but they're not beyond making deals with Deep Ones in exchange for some interesting rumors or a bizarre bit of treasure.
It all ends up feeling a bit like Cold War cloak and dagger or underworld gangs... all moral shades of gray, enemies and friends trading places frequently.

If they by chance run across a group of nutters who might actually be close to bringing off an evil world-threatening conspiracy they'd let some group of white-hat investigators know about it... but they'll probably stay out of it themselves, if they could.

Quote from: gattsuru;622437As good guys: a lot of the Mythos is old, in the same way that a piece of bread that fell behind the fridge is old.  It's stale, moldy, possibly developing new forms of civilization, and I think this is also from a loaf that was recalled after some contamination scare.  

Even by the standards of his time, Lovecraft was a racist crazy git who almost had a psychiatric break when his secret shame of Welsh blood [came to light].  A lot of the Mythos, especially the part of the Mythos that's reached the popular culture, is happy to declare things Evil without spending much effort on explaining why the viewpoint character knows that to be a thing.

As villains: sometimes cackling evil is fun, although I do agree it's best done as parody.

That bolded central bit is key.

What gives horror to Lovecraft's work is an alien offense to one's sensibilities. It is literally an issue of The Other invading and not caring a whit about the correct order of things. Without that his work reads like a dime store Weird Detective comic ate a thesaurus -- more titillating action than eldritch horror.

This was a guy who honestly believed in a Neoclassicist world filled with Progress!, and rationality, and all the Western bigotry that sustained the illusion why they couldn't find the "same" among other "races." By the time he was in his middle age he was already out-of-date with his contemporaries; Impressionism and Romanticism were already old hat. In his lifetime he saw Expressionism and Art Nouveau turn from the publicly degraded perversion of sick minds into being positively mundane compared to all the -isms like Fauvism, Abstractionism, Modernism, Cubist, Dadaist, etc. He was a dinosaur screaming out what he thought was the final horrific culmination of such a societal direction.

He liked the weird like Reagan Era America liked splatterpunk and slasher flicks. Something about the whore always getting ripped apart and the virgin being spared (after a night of hell) agreed with him. The state of the world shocked him -- he literally says he could not function in New York from all the cosmopolitan diversity -- and he crafted bombastic moralist plays with eternal hellfire licking at mankind's toes. Except he supplanted his modern version of hellfire.

Why is all this important? Because when people say, 'everyone playing a horror game has to be on the same page,' it means something. Sure you can play it as action detective + tentacles, in fact HPL would probably love that as it's reinforcing what he sees as a wholesome aesthetic against its corresponding horrific antithesis. Hopefully emulating upstanding examples of humanity would accord the player to such virtues, and thus its antithesis should properly horrify, and a rousing defense of mankind ensue.

But it's hard for modern players to see why an uncaring universe filled with bully aliens is offensive and frightening as a mere thought. Just as we can readily accept a psychopath skinning humans to wear their skins as hazard of human existence, we can readily accept we are meaningless, infinitesimal specks in an uncaring universe.  It doesn't shock anyone to their core anymore. It's just another tragedy in crapsack world, where Progress! is dead.

And if you can't shock anyone to their core, or have them suspend their belief enough so that the simulation of "being there" carries emotional weight, all that effort at horror comes crashing down. You gotta buy what the GM is selling, or might as well run something with less tentacles. But in a post modern world, what's offensive and scary anymore?

So I say reverse the situation. Let the players play evil until they scare themselves. It's easier for their imagination to make horrors in the dark than for me as a GM to tease out what really scares them. First let them invest in the rpg world, later watch as they invest deeper and find their own disturbing personal abyss. It's a lazy form of genre interrogation, but it does give an insight into what actually gets to them.

Monsters aren't impersonal, no matter how much we say they are. In the ends, we're killed at the tentacles of some squamous thing, which is a personal end. There's some hope we can avoid it if we shoot enough bullets or chant the right incantation.

In space, as an example, physics and vacuum are utterly impersonal. They will kill you, and your death means nothing.

Which is why I think a space setting could embody the "potential victim of a hostile and uncaring universe" aspect of the mythos better than a monster hunt does. Not as the entirety of the setting, mind, but as one aspect of it.

Space travel, in a Mythos-informed universe, is dangerous, dirty, and not at all easy. Just like the real world.

Quote from: The Butcher;622133I can't for the life of me figure out what would be attractive about playing the "bad guys" of the Cthulhu Mythos, except as open satire; e.g. using the Derlethian geneaology of the Old Ones and Elder Gods as the basis for a game of familial backstabbing and one-upmanship, basically Amber with tentacles tacked on. Or a Kobolds Ate My Baby-esque game of cruel but hilariously inept cultists.

Better still, go with something level-based and model the ascension of utterly inept cultists/scholars/antiquities dealers/astrally projecting dreamers into the ranks of the mythos baddies.

Quote from: gattsuru;622437.  Even by the standards of his time, Lovecraft was a racist crazy git who almost had a psychiatric break when his secret shame of Welsh blood.  

Yeah, it always cracks me up because I'm 25% basque, one of the tcho-tcho derived "look human but aren't actually human" races; and certainly that's a big part of lovecraftian horror: things look normal at first and then you realize they aren't.  Of course, in my own campaigns of CoC I love to play up the whole "Beware the Basque Menace" thing.

QuoteA lot of the Mythos, especially the part of the Mythos that's reached the popular culture, is happy to declare things Evil without spending much effort on explaining why the viewpoint character knows that to be a thing.

That's kind of the point; true evil is something you can feel, a wrongness that is absolute and needs no explaining. It is evil by its very presence.  
And of course that doesn't jibe well with our post-modern decadent values where we want to explain that hitler just had a bad childhood and its not his fault and people are campaigning to save the endangered pubic crab because its a living thing too; but in a way that makes it even MORE impacting, if you can get the sensation across.  In Lovecraft's time, people knew there were absolutes of wrong and right, true and false; but in our time, if a complete relativist can be made to feel that everything he believed was just so much pretentious bullshit, that in fact there IS something that is objectively true and it will crush you like a meaningless insect, then that could be powerful stuff.

So yeah, I think that the Mythos CAN be saved, by turning it on its head: it used to be about finding out that the things you thought were real didn't turn out to be so; now it has to be about finding out that there ARE real (inescapable, objective and absolute) things, when you thought nothing was.

RPGPundit


As villains: sometimes cackling evil is fun, although I do agree it's best done as parody.[/QUOTE]