Quote from: GrimGentThat could get muddled, actually. Hastur was originally created by Chambers in the 19th century and developed into a genuine Mythos critter by Derleth much later. As far as I know, even the name is only once or twice fleetingly mentioned in HPL's own fiction (as a brief homage to Chambers), and the creature itself makes no appearances at all.

I have friends who were looking into this; while the name or idea of an entity known as Hastur is public domain, the particular description and identity that Derleth assigned him probably isn't, but even that's muddy. (This is stuff a pack of US college students figured out, so take it with a barrel of salt.)

Quote from: LeSquideI have friends who were looking into this; while the name or idea of an entity known as Hastur is public domain, the particular description and identity that Derleth assigned him probably isn't, but even that's muddy. (This is stuff a pack of US college students figured out, so take it with a barrel of salt.)

The Yellow Sign, that was Chamber's though, right? Or was that and Carcossa both Derleths?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditThe Yellow Sign, that was Chamber's though, right? Or was that and Carcossa both Derleths?

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The yellow sign, the King in Yellow (the play), and Carcosa are all Chambers', not Derleth's.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe Yellow Sign, that was Chamber's though, right? Or was that and Carcossa both Derleths?

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In all seriousness: The eerie, memorable stuff is usually Chamber's.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe Yellow Sign, that was Chamber's though, right? Or was that and Carcossa both Derleths?

"Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali."

Robert W. Chambers, "The Yellow Sign"

that makes me all warm & fuzzy inside. . . :keke:

The key thing to bear in mind is that most gamers images of the mythos come from the CoC game, but relatively little of that is from HPL.

Seriously, go read the stories, the byakhee?  For a start they don't have that name, they're not linked to hastur, nothing that is in the rpg other than the physical description is in the original tale.

Elder Things become not monsters, but an alien race that we could quite possibly communicate with.

The great old ones, it varies story to story, but at least in some they are immaterial beings lurking at the thresholds of reality and not big tentacled dudes.

I posted the following back on rpg.net, in response to a request for a new type of Lovecraftian mythos, it is all taken straight from HPL but bears little resemblance to CoC or gamer perceptions of the mythos:

"A 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:


Quote:
Nor 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.
"

And from the same thread:

"It 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."

Quote from: BalbinusElder Things become not monsters, but an alien race that we could quite possibly communicate with.

"Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!"

great things to remember, B.  it's not what you say, it's what you leave out.  or, musically, it's not the notes, it's the spaces between the notes.

There's been a trend in comics recently to re-imagine the pulps and their predecessors ("League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", "Planetary", "Tom Strong", etc.).  Other than generic tentacles/squaimous beasties and HPL having a bit part in a Planetary story, the Mythos hasn't been touched.  At all.

I'd suggest this means that the rights issues are confused enough that no publisher in their right mind is going to touch them.  You wouldn't believe how messed up these things can get