RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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The Subtitle for this thread is: "How many XP for the Shoggoth?"
It's no secret that a lot of the Paizo development team are big fans of H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos writing, and have added monsters and thematic elements into Golarion, styled after Mythos creatures.
I'm not feeling it, truth to tell.
I think that effective Mythos implementation needs to be a Big Deal. It ought to take more than giving an aberration the displacement quality, or adding smelly ichor to a shambling mound. It ought to have ramifications throughout the campaign.
In the literature, contact with a Byakhee or a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath drives people wild with fear, and usually breaks their minds. I'm not calling for Sanity rules for this kind of thing in Pathfinder, but the Mythos creatures we've seen in Golarion so far have been nothing more than squamous bags of hit points and abilities, sometimes with agendas, but other times just hanging around old ruins.
I suppose you might argue that denizens of Golarion, especially professional adventurers, have seen too many other wonders and bizarre things to really feel the impact of the Mythos horrors. After all, Erich Zahn goes insane just looking out his window into another dimension; that should be commonplace to 7th Level Clerics. In which case, I'd reply, it's a mistake to stick Mythos elements in Golarion at all; the setting doesn't allow for them to have the impact they deserve. (See the subtitle of the thread.)
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I suppose you might argue that denizens of Golarion, especially professional adventurers, have seen too many other wonders and bizarre things to really feel the impact of the Mythos horrors. After all, Erich Zahn goes insane just looking out his window into another dimension; that should be commonplace to 7th Level Clerics. In which case, I'd reply, it's a mistake to stick Mythos elements in Golarion at all; the setting doesn't allow for them to have the impact they deserve. (See the subtitle of the thread.)
I think it's partly this, and partly that anytime you stat something out, some of the magic is lost. I have accomplished some Lovecraftian goodness in my games mostly through atmospherics- Think about how he described the ruins in "Mountains"- VAST, non- euclidean, etc. Think about the dun-duh-DUNNNN moment when people see the fish people for the first time, rising formt he surf, all slimy and WRONG. No, your PCs will likely not go insane, but you can drive the PLAYERS to the brink through stage setting and stymieing ALL attempts to ID the critters.
"I roll Know(Dungeonering), result 35, what do I know about these creatures?""Nothing"
"Nothing? I rolled a 35!!"
"I know, but you still know nothing about these creatures...."
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I pretty much agree 100% as I am a huge fan of Lovecraft.
Although I still like having that element around even if it doesn't have the sanity shaking effect that it should.
I think for it to have the full effect as which it has in the books/stories it takes a whole other game system like COC or TOC any of the other Cthulhu games that are out there, you have to take some of the "Fantasy" out of a fantasy roleplaying game. Things need to be toned down so as to create the proper mood and tone. Monsters should be rarely seen and even more rarely survived. The antagonists should me much more mundane making them that much more sinister. And a sanity/fear system should be in effect like COC or old school Ravenloft or even the WOTC COC.
You make really good points. On the other hand, having the Mythos pop up in a setting like Golarion feels like a sort of refreshing "cameo" of sorts... In other words, we do all learned to love to hate Shoggots and similar aberration from playing CoC, or to get scared through them by reading Mountains... but it is an interesting experiment to think, "well, could my 10th lvl Ranger, who beat a young dragon and some yetis, do something against a creature which should not exist?". So, it's some sort of cross-genre experimentation. I also think it works pretty well on a metagaming level. Men of Leng showing up on Earth and also having a space in Golarion gives a strange "multiverse" touch.
And, finally, you can really blend fantasy and cosmic horror pretty well... Lovecraft did not, besides some fantasy feel to his dream cycles, but some of his fellow mythos writers were quite apt at it... C.A.Smith is the first name which comes into my head, his Hyperborea stories (or the Zothique ones, though not obvious Mythos links there) do instill a good measure of the Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but they are also pretty "standard fantasy" settings. Similar things could be said of Howard. His Conan stories do have a Mythos dimension in his treatment of the supernatural and things from beyond (plus the ambiguity of deities). Certainly the feeling of impotence is reduced, but other elements of mythos, like alienness and mystery may be played upon...
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Yeah, it's tough to keep the Mythos' power in a world where magic exists. A big part of Cthulhu lit is that the heroes *aren't*. They're normals, with no relevant skills beyond perhaps research. The gap between a shoggoth and some guy from the 1920's is pretty big; the gap between the same shoggoth and a 10th-level wizard is much less so.
Thanks for the inspirnig bibliography, everyone - I haven't read much beyond HP himself, so I have some catching up to do!
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Yeah, it's tough to keep the Mythos' power in a world where magic exists. A big part of Cthulhu lit is that the heroes *aren't*. They're normals, with no relevant skills beyond perhaps research. The gap between a shoggoth and some guy from the 1920's is pretty big; the gap between the same shoggoth and a 10th-level wizard is much less so. I mena, throw a gnoll at your typical Lovecraftian hero and he'd probably panic as well.
Thanks for the inspirnig bibliography, everyone - I haven't read much beyond HP himself, so I have some catching up to do!
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Yeah, it's tough to keep the Mythos' power in a world where magic exists. A big part of Cthulhu lit is that the heroes *aren't*. They're normals, with no relevant skills beyond perhaps research. The gap between a shoggoth and some guy from the 1920's is pretty big; the gap between the same shoggoth and a 10th-level wizard is much less so. I mena, throw a gnoll at your typical Lovecraftian hero and he'd probably panic as well.
Thanks for the inspirnig bibliography, everyone - I haven't read much beyond HP himself, so I have some catching up to do!
I think that getting 'Mythos' style horror to work in a fantasy setting is largely a matter of style, not rules. For example, the haunted house in Rise of the Runelords is a good example of how it's done well. The Ravenloft setting also managed to convey the sense of horror and 'creeping dread' quite well.
The secret here is not how many XP you get for the shoggoth. The dread has to come from the question: "What, exactly, are we up against, and have we bitten off more than we can chew?" Once the party are faced with a foe, the dread goes away - the threat is in the open, they can deal (or not) with their abilities.
HPL was good at horror-writing not because he described horror but because he inferred it. Insanity is not compulsory to make a good horror game, but making the players worried is, and this is best done not by letting them know what they face but by keeping it concealed from them and keeping them guessing.
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Lovecraft's characters tend to go mad because their brains rebel against the reality of the situations in which they find themselves. It isn't so much that a byahkee or a dimensional shambler can't exist, it's the realization that they do exist that drives the character mad. Everything they know about science and religion and the history of the natural world has suddenly been disproved and madness is the only sanctuary their mind can use to cope. A Lovecraftian hero in a world where the existence of tentacled horrors from beyond the stars are an accepted danger isn't as likely to succumb to madness because it makes more sense for them to exist. Randolph Carter is a good example.
Carter was a man from 1890's-1920's America who grew to accept that the horrors of the Mythos existed so, when he visited the Dreamlands, it was much easier to deal with being chased by gugs and nightgaunts. Sure he was scared of dying, but he wasn't fainting every time a moonbeast tried to kidnap him or a cat from Saturn wanted to feast on his entrails. The people of the Dreamlands, in turn, were even less bothered by the presence of strange gods and monsters because it was the truth of their world. They may not have felt safe walking through certain forests or along certain roads late at night, but it wasn't driving them insane because it was natural for those creatures to be out there.
As you've pointed out, adventurers in most RPG worlds have at least heard stories of squid-headed psychic wizards and flesh-melting ambulatory slime even if they haven't encountered these things and that's probably the primary reason monsters like chaos beasts and froghemoths don't reduce even level 1 commoners to gibbering lunatics. In most fantasy worlds, even the wisest scholar in the tallest tower is going to accept that there are things about the universe he'll probably never be able to explain and that acceptance is his best defense against the unknown.
If you want to run a game where monsters are actually scary and threaten the sanity of the players, start off by putting them in a world where monsters are less common or completely dismissed as boogeymen and campfire tales. It makes more sense for people to react in typical Lovecraftian hero fashion (fainting dead away or curling up into a foetal position) when monsters "don't" exist. Heroes of Horror has some rules for incorporating Sanity Loss into your game and even includes recommended loss for standard monsters like owlbears, dretches and chimeras. Short of that, you could simply add an ability like Dragon Fear to any monster you deem suitably alien or strange and explain that the creatures defy the game world's acceptance of what can and cannot be. You'll probably also want to bump the CR of the creature up by, maybe, 1 if the effect does more than cause the shaken condition since fear effects can wreak havoc on an ill-prepared party.
Creative Director
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The Subtitle for this thread is: "How many XP for the Shoggoth?"
It's no secret that a lot of the Paizo development team are big fans of H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos writing, and have added monsters and thematic elements into Golarion, styled after Mythos creatures.
I'm not feeling it, truth to tell.
Look at it this way; in Lovecraft's stories, these monsters intrude upon the real world. Wouldn't, say, a giant spider or a nalfeshnee demon or a gibbering mouther or a stone giant or a dragon cause fear, madness, and mayhem if it appeared in the real world, just as much as would a mi-go, a deep one, or a shoggoth?
It's not really an intrinsic feature of Lovecraft's monsters that they cause fear and madness as much as ANY monster introduced into the real world can cause fear and madness.
In a fantasy setting, where goblins and giant bugs are relatively common and the knowledge of dragons is as well-established a part of reality as this world's knowledge of hurricanes or volcanoes (which can themselves cause fear and madness), the inclusion of monsters taken from Lovecraft's stories aren't as "out of place" and thus not so crazy. That said, you'll note that the shoggoth DOES have a method of causing madness with its maddening cacophony ability.
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I don't really have much of a problem with the lack of sanity loss for encountering the lesser entities of the Mythos. After all, adventurers in Golarion are used to encountering very weird creatures. What needs to be handled with care (or avoided altogether) is encounters with mid-level or greater entities of the Mythos. By which I mean (to steal terminology from Chaosium) Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. And for those occasions, the GMG has some rules for Sanity and Madness (Chapter 8, pg 250).
EDIT: Ninja'd by a T-Rex.
I consider Robert Howard as one of the seminal influences on D&D and by extension Pathfinder. There were mythos elements to some of Howard's stories, and he and HPL corresponded if not collaborated on such. Viola: instant credibility — perhaps more credible than a lot of other modern elements that people don't even blink at.
The game is about monsters and (in higher levels) travel to other dimensions. HPL himself even wrote fantasy that included elements of his mythos. Several of the outer gods and ghouls appear in a fantasy story together (Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath), this being the origin of the classic D&D creature the Ghast.
Mr. Jacobs put a sidebar in Pathfinder #4 that addresses his "rule" for delineating which creatures of Lovecraft Mythos could appear in Pathfinder. I think this is awesome. It goes to reinforce that the hobby borrows interesting creatures from everywhere, including even futuristic science fiction — but there are ground rules about what elements come along with the creature.
On the one hand, I understand the knee-jerk reaction... it does seem at first glance like crossing a genre line. But the more one investigates the background of the authors (and the more works of Lovecraft one consumes!) the more sense it makes.
Have you read Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath? the descriptions of the various city-states in that story remind me of Golarion more than anything else (certainly more than any other D&D setting) and that story goes a very long way to reconciling the two elements in my mind.
In the literature, contact with a Byakhee or a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath drives people wild with fear, and usually breaks their minds. I'm not calling for Sanity rules for this kind of thing in Pathfinder, but the Mythos creatures we've seen in Golarion so far have been nothing more than squamous bags of hit points and abilities, sometimes with agendas, but other times just hanging around old ruins.
This is something that Pathfinder represents through magical fear effects. Now, I have my own issue with the efficacy of those rules at the table, but it is in fact the best way to represent what goes on in the literature — if and only if you are stopping short of giving these monsters special treatment because of the author who created them.
That's an understandable impulse. But, viewed from another perspective, it is not unlike asserting that the displacer beast is not fun and shouldn't be in the game because it doesn't do coeurl justice.
The game should be inclusive. Knowing the background of the monsters should be an easter-egg. If you find the easter-egg and think that it isn't enough like the inspiration, it is your task, nay, your duty as a GM to run the creature in a manner faithful to original. I don't care if you have to break every rule in the game to do it!
If you're really going to go for Lovecraft, you need to change the feel of the game. You're moving from fantasy to horror. While there are some good resources in the Ravenloft stuff and, dare I say, other publishers horror RPG supplements, here's a few things to think about...
1) Establish mood. You have to talk to the players, and DEMAND that they act in character (no Monty Python jokes).
2) Establish mood some more. If Limerick vonSpikepants, halfling barbarian is a bad fit for the game, then don't let that character see the light of day.
3) Move to place-based encounters. If the players are brave/dumb enough to march into the heart of Demon Mountain, then they will run into a demon. Not a CR-appropriate enemy, but the demon you decided lived there during world-building was there all along.
Not ready for a demon? You should have listened to the old man...
4) Have the supporting cast react to things. Have the village blacksmith move out of town because of the cultists. Sorry, no where to buy new swords now. Have that contact they need go mad, because they saw the thing in the forest.
Dealing with terrified people tends to freak players out.
5) Finally, establish some more mood. Think about lighting and music, those are the easiest to control on a budget.
I suppose it works because the Mythos make use of black magic, dark gods, and monsters, already staples of the fantasy setting. Really, though, the main reason the two are combined with such frequency is that Robert E. Howard included references to them in his Conan stories and those stories were and remain a huge influence on the genre. Plus both (RPGs and Lovecraft) tend to be things you pick up a liking for in college.
I don’t personally think the Mythos are done much justice by the combo myself though. Adventurers are the anti-thesis of the powerless everyday heroes Lovecraft used and the Mythos monsters become just another kind of orc or demon in a setting where you can actually fight them with magical powers of your own.
Horror is so dependent on mood and a sense of danger and the unknown that it’s hard to do well in a fantasy setting. Danger and the unknown are both pretty much carefully codified and stat-ed out in a DND game and meeting and fighting monsters is everyday business for PCs.
But…people still love horror and so enjoy Ravenlot/Mythos DND games even if the fit isn’t a very good one.
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Not to sound too much like a douche here, but any one ever read Lin Carters essay about the Cthulhu Mythos? It lays out some important details that clarifies the difference between "Lovecraftian" and "Mythos" which are fairly simple:
Stories are only Cthulhu Mythos if they ADD to the mythos, not regurgitate already printed ideas. Lovecraft only wrote a handful of these stories, though he certainly had elements of the mythos in many tales.
Also key to ask is are you trying to capture the flavor of Lovecraft, or Call of Cthulhu the rpg? that game works because PC's have low HP, monsters intrude upon the 'real' world, and the over writing story is that mankind is pretty much helpless and screwed. Magic is alien and mostly harmful to dabble in, and the "horror" is layered upon investigating deeper and deeper into the "truth". Classic dungeon crawls take some of these elements from the dark of the unknown into the light of the mundane. fundamentally the amalgamation of settings doesn't work. But that doesn't mean its impossible.
so...to make something "lovecraftian" just add in classic elements of the stories; cyclopean structures, spooky tomes, and kooky cultists. yeah, not as Scary when PC's have huge spells or loads of HP, but thats the general flavor.
For "Mythos" tales, create some new monster that PC's have never encountered and can't seem to hurt, make an alternative history to a city or family that incorporates this new cosmic threat and let the PC's slowly learn about it. In the end, while the PC's may thwart the threat, they don't truly win.
For that Call of Cthulhu rpg flavor, add in lots of handouts, make PC death a very real possibility all of the time (add in insta-kill effects when PC's make a false move with auto fail saves. of course this has to be handled carfully to be scary and not cheap), don't describe monsters by name, rather by what they look like, and detail the sense of decay that surrounds everything.
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GM: ''Amongst the remains of the priest you find an old weathered book..''
Player: ''Is it a spell book?''
GM: ''Why don't you have a look inside?''
Player: ''Ok.. I look inside''
GM: ''You look inside and have a quick read..''
Player: ''..and?''
GM: ''..and... GO MAD! HA! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA ROFL LULZ!1!1!!''
Ex-Player: ''...''
''With a successful luck check your companions find enough of you to bury....''
I think Lovecraft's works are really wonderful for role playing for four reasons.
1. They really are well written and imaginative.
2. The descriptions and intense horror are very very powerful
3. I think the original writings are mostly beyond copyright
4. I think the monster power ramps so fast that the characters likely die before you have a conflict of game ideas between player and dm. Its generally not a question of if your character dies but when and how.
This was always the appeal of the Chaosium game where in spite of the technology of the 1920s the players were completely out gunned. TNT, machine guns etc... only gave you moments of satisfaction on a road to suicide and death.
Cthulu cameos are a great idea because of 1-3 but they tend to necessarily fail on #4. Players in 'heroic fantasy' just don't accept that their characters are powerless or even not in control.
Multiply player expectations by the number of players, include world development and myth building and heroic fantasy tends to br further developed but is eventually torn apart by differing aims and power levels. Horror generally doesn't develop as far and sometimes there is more cohesion after the bodies fall or run screaming into the night.
Velcro just said everything I was going to say, but especially THESE bits:
Lovecraft's characters tend to go mad because their brains rebel against the reality of the situations in which they find themselves. It isn't so much that a byahkee or a dimensional shambler can't exist, it's the realization that they do exist that drives the character mad. Everything they know about science and religion and the history of the natural world has suddenly been disproved and madness is the only sanctuary their mind can use to cope. A Lovecraftian hero in a world where the existence of tentacled horrors from beyond the stars are an accepted danger isn't as likely to succumb to madness because it makes more sense for them to exist. Randolph Carter is a good example.
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If you want to run a game where monsters are actually scary and threaten the sanity of the players, start off by putting them in a world where monsters are less common or completely dismissed as boogeymen and campfire tales. It makes more sense for people to react in typical Lovecraftian hero fashion (fainting dead away or curling up into a foetal position) when monsters "don't" exist.
In my longest running D&D game, monsters were a thing of the past. Sure, there were "strange beasts" that lived in the mountains, and the occasional tales of fairies in the woods, but by and large, the worst creatures on the face of the planet were people - Driven by politics, greed, and a lust for power.
Did magic exist? Surely! Did the gods exist? Absolutely!
But creatures of legend, like Dragons and Manticores and the like? Not ever seen in such a long time that no one could even agree on whether or not a Dragon had wings.
And then one of them woke up in the Grey Moors.
And another of them cracked through the ice in the ice floes of the Northlands.
And a third woke, blowing the top off of Mount Lendar. Nameless horrors started rippling up from the shadows of the world, some offering power and others offering nothing but death and misery as someone, somewhere, opened a door into the forgotten powers of ages long dead.
You have never seen player characters freak out as much as happened when I had a small, grey, slimy worm - just over a foot long - suddenly swallow their guide whole while on a mission to recover the Governor's son from the city sewers.
Did I stat it up?
No.
Did they fight it?
Nope.
Did it freak them out?
Oh, you bet.
After several levels of dealing with people - the motivations and means of which they could easily understand, they were suddenly dealing with grossly unnatural horrors and creatures of legend.
And if you really want to freak your players and their characters out, the best way to do it is to disassociate the idea that things like "monsters" are commonplace. "What the hell is THAT?!" should be a frequently used term. Moreso than "I hit it with my sword," I'd dare say.
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I consider Robert Howard as one of the seminal influences on D&D and by extension Pathfinder. There were mythos elements to some of Howard's stories, and he and HPL corresponded if not collaborated on such. Viola: instant credibility — perhaps more credible than a lot of other modern elements that people don't even blink at.
+1
I just finished reading the collected Kull & Bran Mak Morn stories, and you can really see mythos influences. Lots of the same themes (especially in the Kull stories, which focus heavily on the nature of reality) and similar style. The big difference between Howard's treatment of the material and Lovecraft's treatment is who the protagonist of the story is and how they handle the discovery of vile creatures from beyond time and space.
In a Howard story, there is normally a great sword involved....
Interesting thread. But Lovecraft/the Mythos was a direct influence on D&D and not just through REH.
if you own the campaign guide for pathfinder look in the back under organizations under the lesser groups section and read the one on The Old Cults. ;)
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In Conan d20 (the most Lovecraftian d20 game I know), monsters are very rare. Most enemy characters are human. But, monsters are remarkable - a large spider isn't just as big as your easy chair, it's as big as a house, with venom that destroys metal, who nests in a mound of bones, and can only be partially seen in the moonlight under which it hunts. Monsters aren't statted.
And wouldn't Call of Cthulhu (d20 version), by definition, be a bit more of a Lovecraftian game than Conan?
I think LilithsThrall talks in approval and personal recognition of Conan D20 rather than a bookish correctness.
You may be familiar with Call of Cthulu (d20 Version) but LT may be completely correct and faithful to his muse to talk of Conan and his own experience.
Truthfully, Howard and the D20 Conan have a much stronger framework of human civilization than Pathfinder. Against that framework monsters can be all the more alien -- a Lovecraftian necessity.
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Incidently, Lovecraft hated games, believing them to be a waste of time!
Lovecraft hated a lot more than games. He wasn't the most open-minded guy of all time..
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.....Incidently, Lovecraft hated games, believing them to be a waste of time!
..which is a good thing - he'd fail to comprehend the true horror of the situation at hand and keep his sanity score healthy!
As I understand it, HPL did not have many social skills and so preferred writing letters than to talking. Since he seemed to find actual social interaction awkward, I'm sure he didn't like games because they are part of the larger "dealing with people" element that he found distatseful.
I'd speculate that he would probably have been a huge WOW fan because it would have allowed him some outlet for his time and a framework with which to interact.
I can see it now..
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
..becomes:
WTF? FFS NERF ROGUES! REZ?
..and with noob aeons even death may die..? HAX!(..for the record, I love/loved WoW, madness n' all! :))
Just an idea
Anytime the PC fight a monster with more HD than themselves.
Will Save.
Success = Normal game play
Fail = Players choose. 1 round of standing there scared or 1 round fleeing as fast as they can, after which they regain their composer and act normally.
Players only roll the save once per day for that kind of monster.
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Are cthulhu and friends as powerful as demons or devils or even gods? Are Cthulhu and Lamashtu direct competitors in achieving the MEGA (most-evil-guy-award)in this multiverse? Or is the mythos just a small evil footnote only thought to appear in one or two modules?
The majority of the Mythos entities are not evil. In fact, of the ones Lovecraft himself wrote about, the only one that really qualifies as "evil" would be Nyarlathotep.
Are cthulhu and friends as powerful as demons or devils or even gods? Are Cthulhu and Lamashtu direct competitors in achieving the MEGA (most-evil-guy-award)in this multiverse? Or is the mythos just a small evil footnote only thought to appear in one or two modules?The majority of the Mythos entities are not evil. In fact, of the ones Lovecraft himself wrote about, the only one that really qualifies as "evil" would be Nyarlathotep.
This would seem to me to depend on how much you buy the idea of their being things beyond morality or beyond metaphysical good/evil. I buy the man's stories, not his metaphysics.
Well, let me ask, in what way is Cthulhu evil?
Well, he's going to 'clear off the Earth' of humanity (except for maybe a favoured few) when he awakens, and so far as I understand it genocide is evil, so in human terms, he's evil.
Of course he isn't human, he's an alien being of godlike intellect and enormous power, so maybe you could argue that his motives are not understandable and therefore not for us to judge, but it's deeds that matter in the D&D alignment system.
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Well, let me ask, in what way is Cthulhu evil?Well, he's going to 'clear off the Earth' of humanity (except for maybe a favoured few) when he awakens, and so far as I understand it genocide is evil, so in human terms, he's evil.
Of course he isn't human, he's an alien being of godlike intellect and enormous power, so maybe you could argue that his motives are not understandable and therefore not for us to judge, but it's deeds that matter in the D&D alignment system.
I don't want to get into a debate over good vs evil but wasn't there another "Mythical" Godlike being who tried to wipe all of humanity save a select few from the planet, I think he made a worldwide flood in a attempt to cleanse the wickedness off of the earth. I don't think most of humanity considered him evil.
I don't want to get into a debate over good vs evil but wasn't there another "Mythical" Godlike being who tried to wipe all of humanity save a select few from the planet, I think he made a worldwide flood in a attempt to cleanse the wickedness off of the earth. I don't think most of humanity considered him evil.Well, let me ask, in what way is Cthulhu evil?Well, he's going to 'clear off the Earth' of humanity (except for maybe a favoured few) when he awakens, and so far as I understand it genocide is evil, so in human terms, he's evil.
Of course he isn't human, he's an alien being of godlike intellect and enormous power, so maybe you could argue that his motives are not understandable and therefore not for us to judge, but it's deeds that matter in the D&D alignment system.
Depends who you ask. Most worshippers of a deity will insist he is the god of greatness and goodness, even if he tortures women and rapes livestock. In the case you site above, the worshippers declare that those who died were wicked and evil (even the newborn children) and deserved it, so it doesn't count.
Depends who you ask. Most worshippers of a deity will insist he is the god of greatness and goodness, even if he tortures women and rapes livestock. In the case you site above, the worshippers declare that those who died were wicked and evil (even the newborn children) and deserved it, so it doesn't count.I don't want to get into a debate over good vs evil but wasn't there another "Mythical" Godlike being who tried to wipe all of humanity save a select few from the planet, I think he made a worldwide flood in a attempt to cleanse the wickedness off of the earth. I don't think most of humanity considered him evil.Well, let me ask, in what way is Cthulhu evil?Well, he's going to 'clear off the Earth' of humanity (except for maybe a favoured few) when he awakens, and so far as I understand it genocide is evil, so in human terms, he's evil.
Of course he isn't human, he's an alien being of godlike intellect and enormous power, so maybe you could argue that his motives are not understandable and therefore not for us to judge, but it's deeds that matter in the D&D alignment system.
The trick to starting a religion is to say enough stuff that contradicts all the other stuff such that years from now your followers can pick and choose as is convenient for them to do so and still call themselves a member of your religion.
ie. "I bring not peace, but a sword"/"blessed are the peace makers" (unless, by "peace maker", he was referring to a hand gun?)
LOL, could be! Actually, the attraction of many religions is that they simplify things like moral dilemmas. Unfortunately many do this by the simple demarcation of 'us = good, them = bad' and things tend to go down hill from there, as anyone who believes they are right by definition soon starts to do whatever they want without restraint.
If you actually look at the various texts and works, and the words of various deities and prophets, they all come out remarkably similar - it's the religious groups that set themselves up to interpret these for everyone else that cause the trouble. Hence my personal conclusion is that if 'god' exists, he is obviously talking to all of us, but is so far beyond our ability to comprehend that no human can hope to understand more than a fraction of what 'god' is saying, and hence the differences (as well as the similarities) in what 'god' has said to different peoples. No religion, IMHO, can claim to have it exactly 'right', and therefore we should just get along with each other and tolerate the differences.
Edit: Anyway, this is off-topic, so let's get back on the Lovecraftian subject.
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Well, let me ask, in what way is Cthulhu evil?Well, he's going to 'clear off the Earth' of humanity (except for maybe a favoured few) when he awakens, and so far as I understand it genocide is evil, so in human terms, he's evil.
Of course he isn't human, he's an alien being of godlike intellect and enormous power, so maybe you could argue that his motives are not understandable and therefore not for us to judge, but it's deeds that matter in the D&D alignment system.
To be fair, the whole "except for a favored few" bit was thrown in there by a crazy guy. Nothing says dread Cthulhu won't eat everyone when he wakes up.
I mean, how is he going to know (or care) about which ants worship him compared to all the other tasty ants?
Allah Forgives
Jesus Saves
Great Cthulhu ...
... thinks you'd be good in a sandwich.
Much watch thread closely lest its contents escape.