If you wanted to make the Cthulhu mythos fresh again, how would you do it?

Here's how I would, reposted from an old TBP thread:

Quote from: BalbinusA good source for a new mythos, ironically enough, is in the stories of HP Lovecraft.

I'd go back to the source, but not all the source. Let's take just one story, the Dunwich Horror, and use it in isolation from the other stories as inspiration:

QuoteNor is it to be thought, that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They rule again.

What does this excerpt tell us about the Great Old Ones?

Well, it doesn't say anything much about tentacled horrors or giant beasties or indeed much of the stuff in CoC. Rather the Old Ones:

1. Are timeless, either outside of time or eternal. Yog-Sothoth at least is clearly outside of time and an atemporal entity.

2. Are invisible and immaterial (without sight or substance), but capable of affecting the material including by somehow warping genetic material to produce hybrids influenced to varying degrees away from the host species.

3. They can destroy whole forests or cities, not by stomping on them but as an unseen destruction which leaves that which is destroyed ignorant of what befell it.

4. Places that feel their influence are lost to us, unknown and unknowable.

So, what does that imply? If they are coterminous with time and space, by invoking them all manner of things might be learnt. Knowledge of the distant past and the future and of secrets today. Where did the Templars hide their treasure? What will be the results of tomorrow's lottery? Does the Pentagon keep ufos in Area 51? All these things, with the aid of the Old Ones, are knowable.

And beyond knowledge? If your son died in a war, could that be changed? If time is all one to them, could they reach back and retrieve him? Perhaps. Perhaps through their power you could peel back time and space revealing all, reach through and crush hearts within bodies and bring back the dead to walk and breathe again. With such power almost anything becomes possible.

Of course, in the process your own mind may stretch, knowledge once learnt cannot be unlearnt and that which the Old Ones show you may not always be useful or welcome. Once a man has witnessed dying suns, the first fish crawling out of the primeval sea, his own death and the bloody rituals of the Aztecs at first hand, he may not be quite the same as he was before. His power had a price and his sanity is not the sanity of other men.

However, he now sees the true reality, beyond the illusion of time and space. The Old Ones have given him this, he knows that they will return for he has seen that too but he no longer cares, for since time has no meaning it means nothing that our time will end. To see further, to understand more, perhaps he will even help bring about that time, as they move closer contacting them becomes easier after all and there is no closer than here.

The cultist could be an astronomer, so desperate to understand how the universe began that he will let it be destroyed to find out. A mother who lost her child and will let all others die to see it again. A man so fearful of his own ultimate death that he will kill us all to find some way of escaping it. A general in a conquered army, willing to call down a destruction on the cities of the enemy that their ballistic missile defence system will never prevent. An archaeologist, so desirous of seeing the lost places of the Earth that he will bring them all forth in place of our own cities and homes.

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.

Nothing about tentacles and physical horrors in any of that. HPL and CoC are not the same thing, the Cthulhu mythos is not HPL's mythos and he makes as good a source of a new mythos as any you might find.

Quote from: BalbinusIt can actually be quite revealing to read a story that an entity comes from and then the game description.

Most of the game description comes from Chaosium, very little generally comes from the actual story. Sometimes they even conflict, for example in the story CoC it specifies that Cthulhu cannot now be contacted.

Entities such as the Dark Young are taken from other writers (Bloch), Lovecraft never describes them.

Shub-Niggurath is never described. The gate spell as set out in Dreams of the Witchhouse does not work as in the game, rather you travel through a non-Euclidean space transformed into a hyperdimensional entity using senses we have no Earthly analogue for.

I think Chaosium did a great job, but it is very much one interpretation and significantly different ones which are equally if not more faithful to the stories are entirely possible.

Have you read any of Stross' Bob Howard books?

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalHave you read any of Stross' Bob Howard books?

No, what are they?

The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue.  The first is two novellas and the second's a novel with a short story.  They kind of build upon A Colder War but rather than be Tom Clancy meets Lovecraft, the AA is Len Deighton meets Lovecraft and the JM is Ian flemming meets Lovecraft.

I'm not a huge fan of JM (too clever and tongue in cheek for its own good) but the Atrocity Archive is a great couple of stories about a lowly civil servant who has to deal with occasional threats from the gibbering fiends form the beyond.  The stories have a kind of post-cyberpunk, Slashdot/BoingBoing frame of reference with great ideas such as possession being described as an alien AI "cracking the human mind like a walnut" but it does this great job of suggesting that the Lovecraftian stuff is all extra-dimensional Otherness that occasionally seeps into our world.  It's a lot closer to the stories than the more classically fantastical "hideous monsters" take on the mythos that the game took.

Definitely worth looking at, I review the JM on my blog if you want to take a look.

The Dunwich Horror is kind of an exceptional story, in that it's only one I'm aware of where the magical incantations etc. actually have an effect on a member of the Cthulu mythos. In later stories, books like the Necronomicon have a purely descriptive value, with the incantations being gibberish of no merit or use. That's the change I'd make. Less magic hocus-pocus, more cosmic antihumanism.

By the quote you posted, I'd say the Old Ones are the prototypical 4-dimensional beings. Just about every part of that description sounds like how 4-d critters would interact with our dimension. They could easily destroy or create in the blink of an eye simply by moving things in or out of our plane of reference. They can tinker with mankind's genetics by simply reaching into our cells and tweaking a few switches, so to speak. And of course, we can only perceive the smallest fragment of their true form, and even then only if they want us to.

Not surprised - I know Lovecraft was a big fan of "strange geometries" and such. I think "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott is a good read to see how higher-dimensional beings act and interact with lower-dimensional beings such as ourselves.

I allways enjoy William Hope Hodgeson's books. The Keep on the Borderlands and the two Night Land books say more to me on the effect the mythos may have on a human being than any of Lovecraft's stuff. YMMV.

The circumstances of my first reading of Keep on the Borderlands may have influenced me somewhat. It was one of those typically English autumn nights. It was windy and rainy, it was dark outside. I started reading it at about 11PM and finished it about 1.30AM. It fucking creeped me out.

I once tried to do a game based on House of Leaves.  That's still a project of mine, to capture that feeling.  The post-modern gobbledeegook is one thing, but there's a real good horror story in there, which has a non-human interest to it.

In a way, House of Leaves might be more Silent Hill than HP Lovecraft, but I still think it makes a good mythos for a horror game.  The House is silent, utterly creepy, and deadly.  But it never really shows malice, and it has no reason to exist.  It doesn't hunt people or anything.  It just is.  Just a huge, empty blackness, all consuming.  Everything else is whatever its victims put there.

Quote from: BalbinusIf you wanted to make the Cthulhu mythos fresh again, how would you do it?

Great story / quote.

I think that sometimes the Cthulhu mythos feels worn out because it's familiar and because so many of its trophes have become cliche.

The basic ideas are solid enough that when moved to a new context (e.g. Delta Green), they seem fresh fairly effortlessly.

If you wanted to go for something really unusual, maybe a post-apocolypse world where the stars finally aligned and no one was around to stop the monsters from waking up (but, for some reason, everyone's not dead).

I'm thinking of a gruesom, very over-the-top, surreal hell-on-earth style game with themes of externalized madness (reality's SAN has hit 0) and degeneration. Done well it would be shocking and wouldn't have much replay / long-term value... but it might be a nice Halloween one-shot.

A little closer to home, I think a key place to start would also be the cultists -- the standard, off-the-shelf cultist seems to be a murderously insane, but still somehow dull character; cannon-fodder at best.

I'd like to see a take on the Mythos that explained the attraction to worshiping the Great Old Ones (I think the reasons are there, in the source material, but most of the games I've been in don't really explorer that).

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: CodexArcanumI once tried to do a game based on House of Leaves.  That's still a project of mine, to capture that feeling.  The post-modern gobbledeegook is one thing, but there's a real good horror story in there, which has a non-human interest to it.

In a way, House of Leaves might be more Silent Hill than HP Lovecraft, but I still think it makes a good mythos for a horror game.  The House is silent, utterly creepy, and deadly.  But it never really shows malice, and it has no reason to exist.  It doesn't hunt people or anything.  It just is.  Just a huge, empty blackness, all consuming.  Everything else is whatever its victims put there.

My take on it was that the house *was* malicious: didn't it kill someone (the brother?) after kind of toying with him for a bit? It's been years since I read it, so I might be remembering wrong.

Either way, a game based on that could be very cool. My concern is, once the players have discovered the house, how do you keep it from becoming a very big, dark, empty (and therefore somewhat dull) dungeon?

Cheers,
-E.

Personally, I'd rather play trad Cthulhu than Delta Green Cthulhu.  Delta Green's just a little too close to the whole 90's X-files aliens thing to seem even remotely fresh to me.

Quote from: WerekoalaBy the quote you posted, I'd say the Old Ones are the prototypical 4-dimensional beings. Just about every part of that description sounds like how 4-d critters would interact with our dimension. They could easily destroy or create in the blink of an eye simply by moving things in or out of our plane of reference. They can tinker with mankind's genetics by simply reaching into our cells and tweaking a few switches, so to speak. And of course, we can only perceive the smallest fragment of their true form, and even then only if they want us to.

Not surprised - I know Lovecraft was a big fan of "strange geometries" and such. I think "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott is a good read to see how higher-dimensional beings act and interact with lower-dimensional beings such as ourselves.

Well, you know, that's tricky cause it's too easy to go from "OMG WTF!?!?!" to "oh, they're a bunch of aliens with freaky powers". This has happened already with CoC, IMO.

A problem with HPL gaming, is that most of his power is based on his prose style. Ignorant people criticise all the squamous stuff, but he worked very hard both studying the masters and working his own prose to produce the grwoing feeling of dread that distuinguishes his work. Shorn of this, the stories often do become "Oh, ok, it's a bunch of freaky aliens." (Whisperer in Darkness and Colour Out of Space, eg.)

Additionally, his stories relied on the horrific effect of the complete breakdown of our reality into something entirely unknowable. For HPL "non-Euclidean geometry" meant "something that cannot exist". Mathematics has now caught up with non-Euclidian geometry and so we can "Oh, yeah that's just a 4-dimensional entity shifting on it's la-z-boy" and that utterly deflates the creeping sense of irrational unreality that is important to HPL's work, IMO. It's no surprise that these kinds of entity have been absorbed into hard sf (eg, Greg Egan's Diaspora).

I'm not picking on you in particular, werekoala, but your post summed up something I wanted to bring up. To address the main point of the thread, I'd say that if you want to re-invent the mythos, you need to extend further into a realm where our rationalistic explanations breakdown. I was thinking about this today, as I am reading a book about the history of ritual magicians and in the chapters about the rennaisance and early modern periods it describes the way that mathematics and logic began to separate from ritual magic  and "the music of the spheres" etc.

As it developed, mathematics became a great way of describing the physical world and magic (ie, kabbalistic type stuff, summoning and chatting with angels, astrology and symbolism) were gradually revealed to be less useful at that stuff. However, the magical stuff began to take on a more psychological aspect (I reckon, I'm not that far through the book). It is there, perhaps, that your horror lies, although I guess all that chaos magic type stuff has robbed that of a degree of its menace, too.

So, erm...

Ned

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalPersonally, I'd rather play trad Cthulhu than Delta Green Cthulhu.  Delta Green's just a little too close to the whole 90's X-files aliens thing to seem even remotely fresh to me.

Less fresh than professors and flappers? I agree that DG's a little stale these days, but trad Cthulhu is bordering on camp.

That said, I have a vague idea for a DG scenario set in South London, taking in gangsters, the BNP, drug importation from the Dreamlands, the homeless community and social workers.

Ned

Quote from: Ned the Lonely DonkeyThat said, I have a vague idea for a DG scenario set in South London, taking in gangsters, the BNP, drug importation from the Dreamlands, the homeless community and social workers.

  Something autobiographical then?

  I think the problem with DG is something you pick up upon in your above post.  What DG does is it takes the Mythos and kind of loosely anchors it to another system of myth, namely the alien abduction stuff that was popular in the 90's.  My problem with this is that a) it deflates the Mythos by attaching it to something that has not only been picked over multiple times by all corners of the media, b) it is attaching the Mythos to a myth whose frames of reference are entirely scientific.

  If you want "Oh it's just a 5-dimensional alien passing through" then look no further than talk of the greys.  I don't think that the UFO myth is as interesting as the Cthulhu mythos and I don't think it's anywhere near to preserving that flavour of weirdness and Otherness.  DG's a textbook example of "yeah it's just freaky aliens".

  I think playing in the 20's at least has that going for it, even if you do then bungle the implementation of the mythos.

Yeah, it's tied up with a conspiracy theory myhtology that's very 90s (when was it published? 96 or so? and it was based on earlier work, of course). I do quite like the Fungi from Yuggoth/greys tie-in, though and the goals of the fungi remain pleasingly opaque. I think my pleasure at that, though, is certianly tied in with my OWN investment in that era of UFO stuff (in the pre-internet days I was very excited when my chum gave me a huge batch of photocopied "MJ12 memos" describing Roswell &etc, all now shown to be fakes - memories, eh?). Also, the fungi ARE just freaky aliens - they're from Pluto, after all.

Something I found very interesting in DG, though, is the stuff surrounding Hastur, which has a more "thematic horror" thing going on, although being overly rational I struggle to get my head around that. A few years back I picked up some fanzine that DGed the Dreamlands, and that's when stuff really began to click for me - I really like the idea of the Dreamlands as a non-rational place, influenced y the real world of dreams and nightmares. So, the men of Leng have uzis now and Kuranes prog-rock paradise is turning into an e-d up rave, or something. And sometimes stuff leaks through to our plane/realm/whatever. This can drift from horror to New Age flim flam, though, (a big prob I have with modern occult games and fiction*), so a balancing act is still needed.

I have to say that experience in play has coloured my opinion of 20s CoC - I think the 20s stuff is a distraction and too easily shifted into pulp and camp. It happens every time. I also think that DG answers the "what are we doing here?" question very nicely, as many people have observed before.

Ned

* EDIT: OTOH, I was helping a lady out with a story a little while ago which was set in a New Age bookshop, and everyone was a tarot reader or saw auras &etc, and she was nervous about over-playing those elements. On the contrary, I thought she should totally go for that as it's kind of fun to imagine it all being real and I think there's likely a good market for it. She could be a 21st century Dion Fortune!