So, talking some about Call of Cthulhu or other adaptations. This came to mind as I've just skimmed through last year's Fate of Cthulhu. It follows in the mold of a number of previous adaptations in the pulp style - like "Pulp Cthulhu" and similar. There's an apocalypse coming, and the PCs are flawed heroes who try to stop it.
I'd say first and foremost that I have nothing against this. I enjoy a lot of pulp style gaming, and I enjoy mashing different genres together. I've never tried it, but Ken Hite's "Adventures into Darkness" that mashes up Golden Age superheroes and Lovecraft sounds fun and hilarious.
But there's also a more Lovecraftian mode of adventure, and I think it's tricky but rewarding. I think the first big question is, what is "Lovecraftian"? Lovecraft only wrote short stories, and they rarely had any direct connection to each other. And he almost never had a team of investigators. So in some sense any campaign and/or party-based play is going against Lovecraft's style.
Still, there are degrees. What are the parts that you keep to make things still convey a Lovecraftian style? I might draw in from some of my campaigns in later posts, but I'd bring up the topic first and see what people think. What adventures or campaigns do you consider more Lovecraftian? How do you make your adventures more Lovecraftian?
As many have noted before, the Call of Cthulhu game is really more like "H.P. Lovecraft meets Robert E. Howard" than it is pure Lovecraft. A pure Lovecraft game would be pretty boring... characters investigate, then they run screaming or go insane. The end. That can make for a good horror story, but as a game it would be pretty pointless. I think the game, and most of its published scenarios really, do a pretty good job of balancing these two. Lovecraft's mythos and his cold, uncaring universe are preserved, but characters can fight back and make a positive difference, even if only temporarily.
Personally, I've never liked adding ghosts, vampires and werewolves to CoC games. I also personally don't like mashing up other genres, with it, but that's just me. But the fact that investigators might team up and go after cults or do what they can to combat the Mythos doesn't bother me too much, even if it's not what Lovecraft wrote. If the Mythos and its cults were real -- and that's what we're pretending when we play one of these games -- then not everybody who encounters it would be a high-strung, nervous, solitary academic or antiquarian like Lovecraft's protagonists. What if Lovecraft's protagonist was a tough P.I. ex-combat soldier? What if he was a reporter, used to hanging around gangsters? What if the protagonist was a woman (of any stripe, since HPL never used them as main characters)?
The only unbreakable rule for me in a "Lovecraftian" game is the preservation of his view that the universe doesn't care, humanity is insignificant, and the only gods that exist either do not care about us or consider us as pests to be cleared off the Earth.
The threat should be beyond the merely physical. Your soul or very personhood should be at stake, existential horror layered under the grotesque.
The threat can not just be defeated. At best you just survive, or delay the inevitable for another generation or ten.
Some aspect of man's supremacy over nature proving hollow and pathetic. Be it our weapons, or our scientific marvels. We're just chimps waving a burning stick around and thinking we're somehow advanced.
The threat is faced by an individual, or a small group.
Bonus points if you include a tentacle.
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
EDIT* The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward
Five* Lovecraft stories off the top of my head where the heroes win. In 3* of them, dangerous entities are actually permanently destroyed by human endeavour.
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.
It's interesting that only one of those is considered one of the "quintessential Lovecraft" stories, though.
Quote from: Bruwulf on February 04, 2023, 06:32:56 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.
It's interesting that only one of those is considered one of the "quintessential Lovecraft" stories, though.
I consider The Shunned House to be top-notch. The Lurking Fear is pretty good too.
The Alchemist is just Lovecraft channelling Poe.
Also, the 'Quintessential' story is the greatest win in the Mythos.
Quote from: I on February 04, 2023, 05:38:07 PM
If the Mythos and its cults were real -- and that's what we're pretending when we play one of these games -- then not everybody who encounters it would be a high-strung, nervous, solitary academic or antiquarian like Lovecraft's protagonists. What if Lovecraft's protagonist was a tough P.I. ex-combat soldier? What if he was a reporter, used to hanging around gangsters? What if the protagonist was a woman (of any stripe, since HPL never used them as main characters)?
The only unbreakable rule for me in a "Lovecraftian" game is the preservation of his view that the universe doesn't care, humanity is insignificant, and the only gods that exist either do not care about us or consider us as pests to be cleared off the Earth.
I agree that vampires, werewolves, etc. break away from Lovecraftian for me. As I said, I can enjoy mixing genres, but it isn't Lovecraftian.
While I agree about having a mix of protagonists is fine, I feel there should be some representation of academics and antiquarians, or at least some equivalent.
Especially, there are a lot of published Call of Cthulhu adventures which effectively encourage the characters operating like a tactical military squad - and I find that breaks from Lovecraftian feel. In other words, when dilettantes come in and ask questions and read up at the library, they mostly just turn up useless background information and expose themselves to enemy view. By contrast, camping out and making midnight raids with shotguns and dynamite is still dangerous but more effective.
Even if a bunch of the characters die, that makes it like a tough dungeon crawl or wargame, but not Lovecraftian horror.
For me, the ultimate Lovecraft backdrop for a campaign was the short-lived "Friday the 13th" the series TV show. See here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092357/?ref_=ttep_ep_tt
Nothing to do with the films. The basic premise is that a pair of cousins inherit a cursed antique shop from an evil uncle who made a deal with the devil. With the help of their uncle's friend, who is the quintessential Lovecraftian hero, they track down the cursed antiques, facing all manner of horrors and nasty people in the process. When I ran a Cthulhu campaign way back in the 1990s we used this as the premise for our campaign, just changing the temporal setting from the 1980s to the 1920s. So I think you can make the campaign thing work. And of course CoC features some of the coolest campaigns ever created for any RPG.
Rule 1: People can only have the vaguest idea what the fuck is going on. The more you understand what's going on, the more insane you likely are.
Rule 2: Players must be hard-pressed to do more than delay whatever hellish events are occurring.
Rule 3: Direct confrontation should not be particularly effective.
When it comes to examples of Lovecraftian with groups who are not a fainting-prone college student from the 1920s, I think of In the Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon, Eternal Darkness, System Shock and Dead Space. For the videogames in particular, the characters could absolutely gun down individual monsters, but doing so netted basically no advantage, as they were just moaning horrors and not instrumental for whatever was going on. The actual entities behind the problems were outside of the characters' reach.
Quote from: Persimmon on February 04, 2023, 08:21:27 PM
For me, the ultimate Lovecraft backdrop for a campaign was the short-lived "Friday the 13th" the series TV show. See here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092357/?ref_=ttep_ep_tt
I
loved that show.
It's worth noting that Lovecraftian has grown a fair bit beyond Lovecraft, but Lovecraftian is usually applied Nihilism. As presented in Call of C'thulu (the roleplaying game, not the short story), the antagonist is fundamentally incomprehensible (a breakdown of human epistemology), and a bad outcome for the universe is all but guaranteed, whether that's through the Elder God succeeding or the investigators achieving a Pyrrhic victory where they stop the Elder God and most of them spend the rest of their lives as lunatics. 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.
While I admit to taking some inspiration from Call of C'thulu from time to time, I confess I don't actually have any love for the setting and view Call of C'thulu as something of an anti-RPG. I think the best viewpoint I can take of the the Lovecraftian mythos is as a metaphorical homeopathic remedy for depression in the form of a game; the players playing characters in such a universe should develop a distaste for the ideas and eventually shrug them off and seek more positive ideas. But I've seen plenty do the exact opposite and embrace the emptiness.
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.
OK, I'll grant you "The Dunwich Horror." I forgot about that one. I'd like to add "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," as that is a cracking good adventure/chase story full of suspense and action. Its protagonist arguably fails (it depends on one's point of view), but the story really lends itself to RPG material, and of course was the basis for one of the absolute best supplements for the game ever produced -- "Escape from Innsmouth." I still wouldn't count the other three stories, though -- not core enough to his concepts and too prosaic (prosaic for HPL, that is).
You shouldn't take what I said as criticism of Lovecraft, though. He was writing horror stories and evoking fear, not writing kickass adventure stories full of fighting. His creations make a fantastic setting for an RPG. I've played more CoC than any other RPG and own more material for that game than I do for all other RPGs combined, so obviously I think very highly of his work and gaming based off of it. It's like this -- "At the Mountains of Madness" is a great horror/SF story but it would make a lame adventure (two guys wander around exploring, see a shoggoth and run away from it, the end. But the setting and concepts HPL invented for that story make a superb basis for role-playing adventures with other characters, as Chaosium's "Beyond the Mountains of Madness."
Quote from: jhkim on February 04, 2023, 06:50:40 PM
Quote from: I on February 04, 2023, 05:38:07 PM
If the Mythos and its cults were real -- and that's what we're pretending when we play one of these games -- then not everybody who encounters it would be a high-strung, nervous, solitary academic or antiquarian like Lovecraft's protagonists. What if Lovecraft's protagonist was a tough P.I. ex-combat soldier? What if he was a reporter, used to hanging around gangsters? What if the protagonist was a woman (of any stripe, since HPL never used them as main characters)?
The only unbreakable rule for me in a "Lovecraftian" game is the preservation of his view that the universe doesn't care, humanity is insignificant, and the only gods that exist either do not care about us or consider us as pests to be cleared off the Earth.
I agree that vampires, werewolves, etc. break away from Lovecraftian for me. As I said, I can enjoy mixing genres, but it isn't Lovecraftian.
While I agree about having a mix of protagonists is fine, I feel there should be some representation of academics and antiquarians, or at least some equivalent.
Especially, there are a lot of published Call of Cthulhu adventures which effectively encourage the characters operating like a tactical military squad - and I find that breaks from Lovecraftian feel. In other words, when dilettantes come in and ask questions and read up at the library, they mostly just turn up useless background information and expose themselves to enemy view. By contrast, camping out and making midnight raids with shotguns and dynamite is still dangerous but more effective.
Even if a bunch of the characters die, that makes it like a tough dungeon crawl or wargame, but not Lovecraftian horror.
Agreed. I personally prefer playing academics and such. I've played elderly and physically-impaired investigators, too. But the fact that characters use weapons and fight back is what I mean by the Robert E. Howard element. It's like in REH's most famous horror story, "Pigeons from Hell" -- when the Sheriff hears about horrible doings at the old plantation house, he draws his revolver and heads right in, and the young protagonist goes with him. I don't think your average Lovecraft protagonist would have done that. It's still a horror story, but there's certainly more action to it. I think it's just necessary to mix a little of that in if you're going to have a game. If the GM is just reading a horror story to the players, and they have no agency or can't fight back in any way, you're not going to keep your players for very long.
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. Unless you believe otherwise due to your religion, the Earth WILL end one day. The sun will swell into a red giant, but the Earth will have lost practically all of its breathable oxygen before then, anyway. And that's assuming a comet or asteroid strike, gamma-ray burst, ice age or something else doesn't destroy the planet long before that. I think Lovecraft just accepted the scientific reality of this, but that doesn't necessarily make him a nihilist. In "The Shadow Out of Time"
something has wiped out humanity, but we've been replaced by intelligent beetles as the dominant species. So obviously the Great Old Ones haven't destroyed the planet (perhaps because some intrepid CoC investigators kept killing their cultists and messing up their rituals).
Lovecraft just added, to the concept that there is no God, the concept that there might be other gods who mean us ill. But brave humans can stymie their plans. This concept if really no more depressing that J.R.R. Tolkien's in a way, because Tolkien also believed that "evil never dies," life is just one long struggle against it and you never win an ultimate victory this side of the grave. "The Long Defeat," he called it. Tolkien just believed in an afterlife free of all that, whereas Lovecraft probably believed that death is simply a state of total unawareness. So Tolkien's view is more hopeful, but humans have to die in order to achieve that hope (and in a state of grace, at that), elves have to get to Valinor, etc.
But Lovecraft was writing horror stories, and a large part of their effectiveness is that the characters in them learn that the universe is not the safe, sane, orderly place they believed it to be. If you find that scary, the author accomplished his mission.
I like CoC because any victories are small, and the heroes know they are ultimately doomed, but resist anyway. There's something painfully human in that.
I thing an Antiquarian losing his sanity disrupting a spell that gains the human race another 100 years of reprieve wwaayy more heroic and interesting that the standard Avengers "We defeated the badguy who made the swirly thing that was going to blow up the universe, HOORAY!"
Quote from: Persimmon on February 04, 2023, 08:21:27 PM
For me, the ultimate Lovecraft backdrop for a campaign was the short-lived "Friday the 13th" the series TV show. See here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092357/?ref_=ttep_ep_tt
Nothing to do with the films. The basic premise is that a pair of cousins inherit a cursed antique shop from an evil uncle who made a deal with the devil. With the help of their uncle's friend, who is the quintessential Lovecraftian hero, they track down the cursed antiques, facing all manner of horrors and nasty people in the process. When I ran a Cthulhu campaign way back in the 1990s we used this as the premise for our campaign, just changing the temporal setting from the 1980s to the 1920s. So I think you can make the campaign thing work. And of course CoC features some of the coolest campaigns ever created for any RPG.
Dude! That was a fantastic TV show. As the show went on, the characters even suffered a sort of PTSD. It's a great premise for a game. Back in the day, I even attempted to draw the floorplan of Curious Goods based on paying careful attention to the show, with an eye towards working it into a game. You could use it for CoC, but Chill or any other horror game would work well.
Quote from: jhkim on February 04, 2023, 06:50:40 PM
Especially, there are a lot of published Call of Cthulhu adventures which effectively encourage the characters operating like a tactical military squad - and I find that breaks from Lovecraftian feel. In other words, when dilettantes come in and ask questions and read up at the library, they mostly just turn up useless background information and expose themselves to enemy view. By contrast, camping out and making midnight raids with shotguns and dynamite is still dangerous but more effective.
Call of Cthulhu is more 'Cthulhu Mythos' as derived from the full gamut of the Lovecraft Circle and others, including August Derleth, and just too many scenarios that start with someone inheriting a house or a letter from an old friend inviting the party for a visit. I really enjoyed playing CoC but its kind of its own riff on Lovecraft.
You might want to re-read all of the Randolph Carter stories (including the revision Through the Gates of the Silver Key) for a more cosmic and not entirely pessimistic campaign.
"Lovecraftian" (the grimdark version) works best for one-shots.
Maybe there could be a sequel where Party 2 tries to find out what happened to Party 1, even gets to meet the sole surviving PC in the mental world...or worse.
If you're actually using the CoC Sanity rules-as-written, PCs are in bad shape after losing chunks of sanity and long term survival doesn't help long term sanity, so your PC is not long for this world either way.
It wasn't unusual for our CoC campaigns to run through several heroes per player before we reached the end of the storyline. A bunch died, the rest too messed up in the brain.
For a Lovecraftian feel you must create your own horror. If there is any chance the players recognize the thing it doesn't work as well. That's not the only thing that makes something Lovecraftian but I feel it's an essential element.
Quote from: Ruprecht on February 05, 2023, 10:08:05 AM
For a Lovecraftian feel you must create your own horror.
That means James Hausler and Byron Hall are the greatest CoC GMs in the history of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.A.T.A.L.
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.
Charles Stross A Colder War is a great modern example and a good read.
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm)
I'd probably put Graham Walmsley's Cthulhu Dark as the exemplifier of this style of Lovecraftian.
Quote from: Garry G on February 05, 2023, 12:21:59 PM
Charles Stross A Colder War is a great modern example and a good read.
Although the last couple Laundry Files books have gone a little off the deep end, I still consider Stross one of the best inheritors of the Lovecraft genre.
I do tend to tone down the sanity rules a lot when I run CoC. I've always felt the Chaosium take on sanity was too forced and artificially punishing, beyond what Lovecraft's actual stories justified.
Quote from: Bruwulf on February 05, 2023, 01:06:22 PMI do tend to tone down the sanity rules a lot when I run CoC. I've always felt the Chaosium take on sanity was too forced and artificially punishing, beyond what Lovecraft's actual stories justified.
I reduce both the sanity losses and the "on a roll of 85% or less 1d3 Investigators are devoured" aspect. I prefer a slow slide in to madness and corruption.
Of course if you stick your head in the attic, or go to investigate the noise on the foggy moor without waking your friends, then you're going to get eaten, long term plans be damned.
I had a player, in his second adventure, torn to shreds by a pack of gibbering creatures, because he thought re-reading the summoning spell he found
might unsummon them...
(https://media.giphy.com/media/QWIDyuEzsnYXu/giphy.gif)
Quote from: Bruwulf on February 05, 2023, 01:06:22 PM
Quote from: Garry G on February 05, 2023, 12:21:59 PM
Charles Stross A Colder War is a great modern example and a good read.
Although the last couple Laundry Files books have gone a little off the deep end, I still consider Stross one of the best inheritors of the Lovecraft genre.
I do tend to tone down the sanity rules a lot when I run CoC. I've always felt the Chaosium take on sanity was too forced and artificially punishing, beyond what Lovecraft's actual stories justified.
I prefer Trail of Cthulhu's sanity and stability rules myself. CoC's sanity rules never worked all that well for me and had a tendency to encourage annoying behaviour from players.
Has anyone ever played CoC just in the Dreamlands? That's how the game was originally conceived -- Sandy Peterson approached Chaosium with a proposal to do an RPG set wholly within the Dreamlands. It was Chaosium that wanted him to make it into the 1920s setting of HPL's most popular stories.
Quote from: I on February 05, 2023, 01:24:47 PM
Has anyone ever played CoC just in the Dreamlands? That's how the game was originally conceived -- Sandy Peterson approached Chaosium with a proposal to do an RPG set wholly within the Dreamlands. It was Chaosium that wanted him to make it into the 1920s setting of HPL's most popular stories.
Nope, I actually had the boxed set and didn't even crack it. The setting just didn't appeal to me.
Judging by 40 years of sales, I'd say Chaosium did 'ol Sandy a good turn.
Quote from: I on February 05, 2023, 01:24:47 PM
Has anyone ever played CoC just in the Dreamlands? That's how the game was originally conceived -- Sandy Peterson approached Chaosium with a proposal to do an RPG set wholly within the Dreamlands. It was Chaosium that wanted him to make it into the 1920s setting of HPL's most popular stories.
I did a short lived campaign (I think about 6 sessions, IIRC) of a setting that was a hybrid of Warhammer's Old World and the Dreamlands, if that counts.
Quote from: Grognard GM on February 05, 2023, 01:35:06 PM
Quote from: I on February 05, 2023, 01:24:47 PM
Has anyone ever played CoC just in the Dreamlands? That's how the game was originally conceived -- Sandy Peterson approached Chaosium with a proposal to do an RPG set wholly within the Dreamlands. It was Chaosium that wanted him to make it into the 1920s setting of HPL's most popular stories.
Nope, I actually had the boxed set and didn't even crack it. The setting just didn't appeal to me.
Judging by 40 years of sales, I'd say Chaosium did 'ol Sandy a good turn.
I think you are in the majority. Most of my players didn't care for them either and requested that I not use them. I love the Dreamlands so that was pretty disappointing to me.
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.
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.
Absolutely!
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.
I shall amend my list, good sir.
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.
QuoteThe Lovecraftian mythos comes from something other than atheism. It isn't nihilism, either.
Deists believed their rationality is mirror of Architect's rationality. HPL had no such delusion, so he noted that if that's how it is - then there is no reason to believe human mind is really attuned to understand how universe beyond their close proximity works - and further you go further even ability to comprehend ends. And as he was man of many fears, but also kinda admiring science - there there HORROR begin.
It's not really about seeking forbidden knowledge - plenty of HPL falls into HORROR without any hubris really leading them - and enemies are not failed science experiments, but if anything forces primordial. Horror lies in inherent inability of human mind to comprehend universe in it's essence.