Quote from: Spinachcat;691849I know a wee bit of early 20th century occultism, but if you want to sell me another Cthulhu RPG, then it better give me lots of interesting toys.

Here's how I see it. If the Mythos existed, then almost all occultists would be drawn into their web of power and madness. And not just the serious ones. The noobie, casual at the parlor party occultist could accidently tap into something truly dangerous.

And that's why heroes need to stomp out all the monsters!

I don't exactly agree. Because of course, the dirty truth of occultism is that 90% of occultists don't do anything at all. I mean they don't even try. They just like to call themselves "magicians", "witches", whatever, but they never actually do any practice or ritual work whatsoever.  
Some of these read a lot of books and talk a lot about it, but do no practice at all; others are even worse, they barely read at all, and just put on airs or make shit up that they haven't actually done, they just want people to think of them as "magicians".

So these people, were the mythos real, would not have any real contact with it.

There's a tiny group of guys who DO start trying to practice because they want something, like quick and easy power, or to get rich or control over others, or whatever, and then quit when they find out there is no quick-fix for whatever they want, or that its too much work to get anywhere; sometimes they give up altogether and then declare that "magick is all bullshit" (because they can't do one ritual and become mind-controlling corvette-summoners overnight), others just fall back into the default of pretending to be evil and powerful wizards without doing anything ever again.

If the mythos was real, some of those guys MIGHT end up contacting something real that would promise them the power they seek, and make them prime fodder for a mythos cult.
But again, that'd be a small minority in an ocean of useless posers (useless even to the mythos).

RPGPundit

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;691969Yes.  Any source of magick that works would be from a mythos source.  The distinction I would draw is that such sources may not be what the practitioner of magick imagines them to be.  Indeed, the practice of magick, itself, is unlikely to be what the practitioncer imagines it to be.

I see the world of the Mythos as being very bleak.  Humanity is insignificant and not special, the cosmos cares nothing for us and does not operate in the paradigm we imagine or wish for.  Human religion is a dream.  Human science is infantile.  Reality is far more uncaring and complex and terrible than we could begin to imagine.  Et cetera.

A conception of magick as understanding oneself and one's condition in the world of the Mythos means successful magick is a direct and swift path to insanity.

A conception of magick as being an art or science of understanding in action, or of causing change in conformity with human will would be an error, a view of monumental hubris, and a dangerous joke.

Well, I can get where you're coming from there.  Of course, any practicing magician in the real world can tell you that the sources and practice of magick are very much "not what the (neophyte) magician imagines them to be" anyways.

And magick within the persona, within the idea most people have of their "self" is typically pretty weak and infantile.
Magick only starts to be impressive to the degree you can 'step aside' from your self (what Buddhists might call "ego") and connect to a higher level of your being (the Augoeides), and even that's just a mid-level step; at the highest level step (to become a "master of the temple") you need to "pour out" every bit of your being into the eternal (the "Cup of Babalon"), to stop being a 'self' in very much the same way Tantric Buddhism talks about the annihilation of the ego into "the feminine principle".

Of course, this is all still quite a bit different from the totally-nihilistic view that Lovecraft had; but it depends on whether you view the universe as presented in the mythos as being actively and intentionally hostile to humanity (which I think is a misreading of the intent) or simply this huge thing way beyond the understanding of our rational ego that really doesn't care at all one way or the other about our petty human concerns (which I think is both a more accurate way to understand the Mythos AND its closer to, without being exactly identical to, real-world magical understanding of reality).

RPGPundit

Quote from: Bill White;691202The Trail of Cthulhu adventure I wrote called The Big Hoodoo includes a kind of "placeholder" magic system intended to stand in for Enochian magic; it involves creating weird acrostic matrices (like the Sator square) in place of the crazy Enochian language.

The PCs in The Big Hoodoo are Bob Heinlein, his wife Virginia, sf editor Tony Boucher, and a young Phil Dick in 1952; they investigate the suspicious death of Jack Parsons--and a thinly fictionalized L. Ron Hubbard is a prime suspect.

I include bits of Crowleyana in the adventure, and sometimes players who take the occult seriously are a bit discomfited by that.

Bill

Oh fuck, I may have to impulse buy this. NOW.

Quote from: jeff37923;692659Oh fuck, I may have to impulse buy this. NOW.

It's a fun adventure, if a bit sprawling. I ran it at Pax East a few years ago for the fellas from the now sadly defunct Nerdbound podcast, but you can still listen to it here if that might help you decide.

Quote from: econobus;692627Rocket to the Morgue! You might have just sold another copy, Bill. Well done.

Nice to know that nuance isn't lost on everyone ;-)

I suppose this is a good moment to point out that I've already finished and submitted the section that will appear in Raiders of R'lyeh on setting material providing great details about what the occult-world was like in 1910.   We're still roughing out the edges of just how much of that occultism will have real effects, and what kind of effects.

One thing for certain is that none of the "real occultism" that isn't firmly connected to the mythos will be in any way more powerful than the Mythos magick, quite the contrary.  I think magicians will be able to do a few interesting and useful stunts as they build up their occult studies, but this will require a great deal of discipline and will pale in the face of what mythos cultists or sorcerors will be able to do (of course, the latter comes at a terrible price!).

RPGPundit

There's an excellent Cthulhu supplement on occultism in the Victorian era:

http://www.yog-sothoth.com/wiki/index.php/The_Golden_Dawn_(Supplement)

The question of whether "standard" occultism works seems to miss the point that in your game world, some kind of magic does work, and so all of the magic literature created over the ages in that world could contain at least a kernel of real knowledge.

The mythos tomes described in CoC are "occult" books that contain a more accurate glimpse of the horrific truth. (I think even The Golden Bough is rated as having one spell in it.)

If your occult magic is based on rituals that summon demonic forces to do your bidding, then they do work, right? But it's VERY hard to find an accurate description of the ritual. Most of what has been written since the beginning time is made-up guff, and even if it's based on a "real" bit of magic, it's lost enough detail in translation to be worthless now.

The Golden Dawn supplement was quite good, yes.

In Raiders of R'lyeh there'll be a lot of setting material that talks about what happens a decade or more down the road, after the original Golden Dawn broke up. Several of their members went on to start their own hit bands.

RPGPundit