Quote from: Grognard GM on February 05, 2023, 02:26:40 PM
For some reason I had a brain-fart about that one, and remembered it ending with the protagonist on his way to the Asylum to do the deed, but fearing being mind-switched. Which is weird, because I just re-watched the 80's movie adaption a few months ago.

That's "The Thing on the Doorstep", which always struck me as a good set-up for a sequel involving the investigators.

Quote from: markmohrfield on February 05, 2023, 04:18:12 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 05, 2023, 02:26:40 PM
For some reason I had a brain-fart about that one, and remembered it ending with the protagonist on his way to the Asylum to do the deed, but fearing being mind-switched. Which is weird, because I just re-watched the 80's movie adaption a few months ago.

That's "The Thing on the Doorstep", which always struck me as a good set-up for a sequel involving the investigators.

That's exactly it, they both have some similar plot elements, and my brain merged them.

That's what I get for posting while sleepy.

Quote from: markmohrfield on February 05, 2023, 02:12:01 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 04, 2023, 06:19:56 PM

Quote from: I on February 04, 2023, 05:38:07 PM
A pure Lovecraft game would be pretty boring... characters investigate, then they run screaming or go insane.  The end.

The Dunwich Horror
The Lurking Fear
The Shunned House
The Alchemist

Four Lovecraft stories off the top of my head where the heroes win. In 2 of them, dangerous entities are actually permanently destroyed by human endeavour.

I'd add "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" to that list.

Yeah, while things turn out bad for ol' Charles, the 18th Century raiding party kicked ass.  There's an 80s horror movie called The Resurrected based on this novella, and it's relatively faithful to it (though there are some changes).

I've always felt odd about Lovecraft in TTRPGs.

I've read all of the Lovecraft books as well as a lot of the apocryphal stuff from Derleth, Smith, Howard etc. And frankly, I never understood the draw to it in TTRPG's outside of shortish campaigns (by my standards). I mean I understand the tropes, and I've used Mythos stuff in my games to scare my players - and I absolutely obey the law that you never actually meet any of the real big-league entities for the obvious reasons.

I think the issue for me is that as a player I can't get into a setting where my character is DOOOOOOOMED to insanity or death or worse - at least in the long term. I want some means to deal with the threat beyond "Discover, find and eliminate the Cultist or whatever the Cultist hath wrote."

I was interested in Cthulhutech where at least you trying to fight the bad-shit head on. But I could never get myself to run it, much less sell it to my players. No I'm not looking to *kill* Cthulhu or anything, and I know I'm in the massive minority (I think) about it. I *want* to like it. I do like the fiction... but I can't find any "impulse" at all to play or run a long-form campaign in it.

Which kinda bums me out. I feel a little FOMO about it. I feel the same about Warhammer Fantasy.

Slithering, self-aware hubris, of which your comeuppance also dooms your world, accompanied by the sense that there is no means to overcome your grievous naivety; or at most, the purgatorial nausea of how close you came to such a fate, to always recount the price you paid for your own now pathetic survival. Despite anything you do, you will never know if it wasn't truly inevitable.

Quote from: tenbones on February 05, 2023, 06:28:21 PM
I've always felt odd about Lovecraft in TTRPGs.

I've read all of the Lovecraft books as well as a lot of the apocryphal stuff from Derleth, Smith, Howard etc. And frankly, I never understood the draw to it in TTRPG's outside of shortish campaigns (by my standards). I mean I understand the tropes, and I've used Mythos stuff in my games to scare my players - and I absolutely obey the law that you never actually meet any of the real big-league entities for the obvious reasons.

I think the issue for me is that as a player I can't get into a setting where my character is DOOOOOOOMED to insanity or death or worse - at least in the long term. I want some means to deal with the threat beyond "Discover, find and eliminate the Cultist or whatever the Cultist hath wrote."

I was interested in Cthulhutech where at least you trying to fight the bad-shit head on. But I could never get myself to run it, much less sell it to my players. No I'm not looking to *kill* Cthulhu or anything, and I know I'm in the massive minority (I think) about it. I *want* to like it. I do like the fiction... but I can't find any "impulse" at all to play or run a long-form campaign in it.

Which kinda bums me out. I feel a little FOMO about it. I feel the same about Warhammer Fantasy.

I kind of agree.  I love reading the modules.  Playing is fun in limited doses.  But I want my roleplaying to be a bit more heroic and hopeful.  And as a professor myself there's not much mystery or excitement in playing one in an RPG, though I fully appreciate the difficulty inherent in translating ancient languages.  And if I want to be surrounded by socially awkward, depressed, narcissistic Nihilists, I can just go to the office.

Quote from: tenbones on February 05, 2023, 06:28:21 PMI think the issue for me is that as a player I can't get into a setting where my character is DOOOOOOOMED to insanity or death or worse - at least in the long term. I want some means to deal with the threat beyond "Discover, find and eliminate the Cultist or whatever the Cultist hath wrote."

It's a personality thing. Some people legitimately find CoC heroics pointless, they want an enemy they can defeat, even if it takes a huge campaign and gathering the lost shards of Deathslayer. To other people, small temporary victories in the face of inevitable doom are very satisfying.

Quote from: Garry G on February 05, 2023, 12:21:59 PM
Lovecraftian has become a really broad term over the last 40 years. My pick is that the universe not only doesn't have a God that cares for us but is actually malignant to humanity. Not in a way that cares about us just that any contact is likely to destroy us individually and eventually as a species. It's atheism on steroids, it's not just that we're not special and loved it's that we are entirely unsuited to surviving in the universe without becoming something that's not human. Any gains are meaningless and any win is temporary and will ruin you.

You Sir, have hit the nail on the head.

QuoteI think the issue for me is that as a player I can't get into a setting where my character is DOOOOOOOMED to insanity or death or worse - at least in the long term. I want some means to deal with the threat beyond "Discover, find and eliminate the Cultist or whatever the Cultist hath wrote."

Well there is Pulp Cthulhu.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 04, 2023, 10:18:35 PM
It's worth noting that Lovecraftian has grown a fair bit beyond Lovecraft, but Lovecraftian is usually applied Nihilism. (...) This isn't even a world where Lex Luthor can flex his existentialist muscles and create meaning for himself with an act of the will; the universe will destroy that meaning.

The universe is hopeless. It has no sense of morality and is unintelligible.

I'm sorry for derailing the thread, but I genuinely laughed out loud at the image of Lex Luthor, of all people, as a Nietzschean Übermensch... I mean, you could certainly make the argument, but then probably only as a criticism of Nietzsche.

Quote from: I on February 05, 2023, 12:12:39 AM

Quote from: Fheredin on February 04, 2023, 10:18:35 PM

The universe is hopeless. It has no sense of morality and is unintelligible.

Well, that's kinda what all atheists feel, and Lovecraft was a dedicated atheist since the age of four.  I'm not an atheist, but even I don't see their worldview as necessarily depressing -- it's just kind of an "it is what it is" situation.

I don't think I would characterise Isaac Aasimov as a Nihilist, for example, so not all Atheists and all that jazz (full disclosure, I'm not an Atheist myself, either). None of my Atheist friends really think that — their default position is Secular Humanism, which generally posits a universe which, while not having an inherent morality, is definitely intelligible and also amenable to a consensus morality which humans have created for themselves.

In this sense, Lovecraft (at least through his stories) is not a model Atheist. In his horror there is always this theme that the universe is  so mind-bogglingly vast that it has space to contain entities so vast that they are as different from us as we are different from bacteria, and that contact with those outer gulfs is completely inimical to our world view. And this is very much not the standard Atheist PoV, which tends to be more materialist.

The Lovecraftian mythos comes from something other than atheism. It isn't nihilism, either.

Atheism is just the logical next step from Deism. Throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, students of natural law gradually discovered that miraculous phenomena had rather mundane explanations. This led them first to the idea that God had left long ago to pursue other interests, and then eventually to the conclusion that there never was a God after all. As they learned, they stopped seeing the machinations of a divine being.

Lovecraft's work has a very different tone. It's always seemed to me to carry an undercurrent of forbidden knowledge - things which Man was not meant to know. Highly educated academics are researching something, and eventually make a discovery that unravels their sanity or gets them killed. The very universe punishes them for seeking answers.

To draw a comparison, Lovecraft's mythos reminds me of the common citizen during the time of Benjamin Franklin - the ones who criticized him for thwarting God's will with his lightning rods. These sentiments have been ebbing and flowing within society since the Industrial Revolution. There's this idea that humans shouldn't be allowed to know certain things, and that we'll be punished by a cosmic force if we dare ask too many questions.

Now, Lovecraft himself might not have believed that. He was writing stories.

Quote from: Corolinth on February 09, 2023, 03:42:50 PM
The Lovecraftian mythos comes from something other than atheism. It isn't nihilism, either.

Atheism is just the logical next step from Deism. Throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, students of natural law gradually discovered that miraculous phenomena had rather mundane explanations. This led them first to the idea that God had left long ago to pursue other interests, and then eventually to the conclusion that there never was a God after all. As they learned, they stopped seeing the machinations of a divine being.

Lovecraft's work has a very different tone. It's always seemed to me to carry an undercurrent of forbidden knowledge - things which Man was not meant to know. Highly educated academics are researching something, and eventually make a discovery that unravels their sanity or gets them killed. The very universe punishes them for seeking answers.

To draw a comparison, Lovecraft's mythos reminds me of the common citizen during the time of Benjamin Franklin - the ones who criticized him for thwarting God's will with his lightning rods. These sentiments have been ebbing and flowing within society since the Industrial Revolution. There's this idea that humans shouldn't be allowed to know certain things, and that we'll be punished by a cosmic force if we dare ask too many questions.

Now, Lovecraft himself might not have believed that. He was writing stories.

Uh, that argument doesn't lead from Deism to Atheism — at best, it will lead to Agnosticism. For it to lead to Atheism you must start from Atheism: God doesn't exist, therefore miracles must have a naturalistic explanation. And the idea that Lovecraftian horror somehow has to do with Luddism is, perhaps, a premature conclusion. If it did, we would see more themes of alienation due to technology, rather than ancient and pre-Human forces. The theme of his stories is that humanity is insignificant and could be swept away at any time.

Whoa, I never said all atheists are nihilists.  I know I didn't say it, because I don't believe it in the first place.  I think they just accept that humans are intelligent animals, and when we die we completely cease to exist.  That's not nihilistic, it's realistic.

However, I will address the idea that many atheists believe in something they call  "morality."  They do, but I don't really consider these people atheists.  I don't know what they are, but "atheist" is the wrong word for them -- they don't believe in gods, but they believe in something they should consider to equally be a fairy tale.  They simply say they believe in a human-created thing called morality.  A morality which differs from culture to culture and even person-to-person.  There is no way to scientifically measure "morality" or even prove that it exists.  What's the specific gravity of morality?  How much does it weigh?   How much air or liquid does it displace?  Can they prove their "morality" exists any more than I can prove God exists?  No, they can't.  Because their belief in morality is just that -- a belief -- inherently unproveable, and strictly a matter of faith and hope that it exists at all.  Hmmm, sounds a lot like their criticisms of religion, doesn't it -- a human-created belief system that varies from culture to culture and is completely unproveable by scientific methods.

That's not to say that atheists can't act in a way that most people would consider to be good.  I have an atheist friend who's probably a better "Christian" than me or any other of our friends, based on his behavior.   But he doesn't act that way because he believes he'll go to Hell otherwise, or because he believes in some objective morality.  He acts that way because it makes him happy to do so.

However much people may think Lovecraft's fiction is nihilistic, the man himself wasn't -- his extensive correspondence proves that.  He saw value and positivity in all sorts of things in life.  The man wrote horror stories; of course they're not full of sunshine and rainbows!

Quote from: Corolinth on February 09, 2023, 03:42:50 PM
The Lovecraftian mythos comes from something other than atheism. It isn't nihilism, either.

Atheism is just the logical next step from Deism.

Atheism is a broad umbrella. The ethos of Lovecraft's stories is commonly called "Cosmicism". There's a Wikipedia article on it, which is roughly on point, though I'm less sure about specifics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmicism

I was under the impression that the current topic in the thread was, "From whence came Lovecraft's inspiration for <stuff>?"

I don't think it's his atheism, because atheists don't tend to think of the world in that way. I also don't think it's nihilism, as nihilistic as some of his stories can appear. Rather, as I presented, I think it comes from a "things Man was not meant to know" attitude that rises and falls over time. (For example, think back about thirty years to the uproar over cloning a sheep for the first time. There was definitely an undercurrent of, "Humanity should not have this knowledge," running through the criticism of the experiment.) I see a lot more themes of forbidden knowledge and academics being punished by the cosmos for their hubris than anything to do with God being dead or nonexistent.