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it's not that Count Chocula has rendered Vampires forever not-scaryYeah. Twilight rendered vampires forever not-scary.
It's just a different kind of horror.
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I don't think Cthulhu was ever a magic word that worked to make things scary. we can't rely on a threat of a powerful entity to instill horror because of the GM-Player contract that says you will set achievable challenges and allow me to win. Sanity and corruption etc are just ways of measuring something that needs to exist deeper in the storytelling of the game. A points system can't instil fear by itself.
It's the writing that makes the mythos powerful. The themes and techniques HPL and others used to create a sense of dread.
- Not being believed by the authorities and having no one else to turn to. The ultimate responsibility being on you to prevent horrible events.
- the Unknown, whether that is the scale of the threat, or not having a solution.
- Pressure of time and knowing that there is a clock counting down to doom.
- Lack of sanctity of the body, lack of control over your body.
- a sense of scale, immense lurking or sleeping terrors
- Not knowing if what you are seeing is really there or not.
- Lack of sanctity of your mind, lack of control over your own actions.
- Knowledge = power = corruption or drawing attention to yourself.
- Isolation due to technology or location.
All these themes when compounded and added to the right atmosphere and mood can bring a sense of cosmic horror. Just calling a monster a Mi-go in a regular game of Pathfinder isn't going to cut the mustard.
Other things are needed to
- The possibility that one of your ancestors had a relationship with fish-things.
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it's not that Count Chocula has rendered Vampires forever not-scaryYeah. Twilight rendered vampires forever not-scary.
Actually, there was Sesame Street's The Count well before either
there was Sesame Street's The Count well before eitherYou'll never look at the Count in the same way again.
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Yeah, think Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock when dealing with the Mythos in Pathfinder.
The Mythos creatures are catastrophically dangerous, but so are high level heroes.
If you want a more Lovecraftian adventure in Pathfinder, you should probably deliberately use something way out of your party's ECL range, and then have it mess with the PCs (or have some objective completely unrelated to the PCs) instead of killing them outright.
Make the monster more like a deadly puzzle to solve rather than something to take in a straight fight.
And hell, even in Lovecraft's own stories, humanity can take on Mythos creatures and win.
The Dunwich Horror was a CR 15 monster being challenged by a group of low level experts, after all. =P
Said another way, you can tell a "Lovecraft'esque" story with an Empyrean.
Older than mortal races. Works in mysterious ways. Direct rapport with the Gods. Knows secrets about the universe no one can even begin to fathom.
It's about the atmosphere.
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Getting hit by a boat had a rather dramatic impact on Cthulhu himself, he just got better.
Clearly, you just need to have a proper Mythic party if you want to hit him with a boat. And by hitting, I mean targetting him through the vastness of space, buffing up, and literally throwing a supertanker at him.
August Derleth's reframe/edit of the Mythos probably fits more to the Gamer approach. If your gamers are the type to draw inspiration from Southpark, then maybe you should avoid your players game themes requiring a more serious participant.
If the purpose of Cthulhu is laughing and killing, and reveling in joy, his understandable popularity is no problem.
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Chthulu is popular because we are the cultists, obviously.
Not sure if you said this as a joke or not, but my own opinion is (and has been ever since i read one of the Lovecraft Anthologies a couple years ago) that this is 100% correct.
The main difference between the cultists and the main characters in Lovecraft's stories is usually the fear of the unknown coupled with the basic assumption that it is right to fear the unknown. (Although many of the cultists are also outright murderers or other flavor of criminal, which is a separate issue)
Our society no longer holds that basic assumption to be true; the unknown is no longer something to be feared. The unknown is something to be studied and understood, the essential tenet of science can be stated as "make the unknown known". It's why Cthulu does so well as a pop-culture figure but the original stories he spawned from are much less well known.
So yes, because of our society's assumptions we would all be marked as cultists if we were to show up in Lovecraft's world today. He would be absolutely horrified and that should be a mark of pride for us all.
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Actually yeah I think Lovecraft would fit right in with those groups, at least judging from the way he wrote his sympathetic protagonists. He was racist, sexist, classist, and generally -ist towards anything that smacked of scientific advancement (in the stories, i'm not claiming to be an expert on the man himself). His stories praised ignorance as a virtue, most of the academics his stories focus on are considered to be inherently evil even if they aren't shown to be doing anything that would earn them that sort of stigma in today's world. He acknowledges that there are academics who are not evil, but they are almost never actually shown in the focus of the story.
Maybe I should have said "He His protagonists would be absolutely horrified and that should be a mark of pride for us all."
The main difference between the cultists and the main characters in Lovecraft's stories is usually the fear of the unknown coupled with the basic assumption that it is right to fear the unknown. (Although many of the cultists are also outright murderers or other flavor of criminal, which is a separate issue)Our society no longer holds that basic assumption to be true; the unknown is no longer something to be feared. The unknown is something to be studied and understood, the essential tenet of science can be stated as "make the unknown known". It's why Cthulu does so well as a pop-culture figure but the original stories he spawned from are much less well known.
I hate to say it, but you do understand that we are not in an overwhelming majority on enlightenment, even in the so-called enlightened western cultures. Granted that you won't find a lot of hate and fear around the gaming table, at least in my experience, well mostly, but it doesn't take any effort at all to find xenophobia anywhere. Honestly, how is the fear and hatred so many feel about Islamic worshippers any different than that in Gothic Horror genres.
The main difference between the cultists and the main characters in Lovecraft's stories is usually the fear of the unknown coupled with the basic assumption that it is right to fear the unknown. (Although many of the cultists are also outright murderers or other flavor of criminal, which is a separate issue)Our society no longer holds that basic assumption to be true; the unknown is no longer something to be feared. The unknown is something to be studied and understood, the essential tenet of science can be stated as "make the unknown known". It's why Cthulu does so well as a pop-culture figure but the original stories he spawned from are much less well known.
I hate to say it, but you do understand that we are not in the majority on enlightenment, even in the so-called enlightened western cultures. Granted that you won't find a lot of hate and fear around the gaming table, at least in my experience, well mostly, but it doesn't take any effort at all to find xenophobia anywhere. Honestly, how is the fear and hatred so many feel about Islamic worshippers any different than that in Gothic Horror genres.
Thats fair to say, I don't think the two are fundamentally different. Maybe we are a minority, but i felt comfortable saying it in this forum at least.
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If his city is a sort of trap, then using wish to straighten the skyline will free him to roam the planet destroying.
The horror of the great race, primordial ones, and snake people, is that they were once like us. What if cockroach people come back in time to take video of our doomed civilization? Someday, we may be the dinosaurs.
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What if cockroach people come back in time to take video of our doomed civilization?
Or worse...Crab People.
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I'm just saying... I'm an HG Wells fan...
Per the Mythos:
R'Lyeh is where Cthulhu's tomb is. The Mythos current reality would be the trap that keeps him (mostly?) Dead. When the reality of Death eventually goes away, Cthulhu will awaken from Death's Slumber. I would rule that the incarnations of Cthulhu in Golarian would be his troubled Dreams, much like the Dream Dragons in the Glorantha game setting.
Killing a Dream Incarnation would be good until he dreams again of Golarian. Problem is, killing him might reasonably engender a new dream of Golarian.
Edit/Add
The Horror of the Lovecraft (as opposed to Derleth) Mythos is that we are utterly insignificant. Even our natural laws, that all of our existence as we know it, are on the grand scale of things, ephemeral.
Actually, the fact that Cthulhu is stopped by crashing a ship into it means that it is preventable. it exists, you cannot kill it forever, the point of the Great Old Ones in Pathfinder is that you can prevent the summonings, the creatures themselves are combatable. they are merely arms of a much greater horror, and if you sever that arm, the other arms may or may not come to squash the animal that bit it
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OK, so, so tired of hearing how Cthulhu's Incarnation was defeated by getting run down by a ship. Here is the passage showing what happened when the remains of the "Party" fled to the Steam Yacht, the Alert...
...But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bow-sprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where --- God in heaven! --- the scattered plasticity of the nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst it's distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
Running the Alert through Cthulhu's head slowed him down long enough for the yacht to get away. Cthulhu was "defeated" because, for some reason, "off camera", the island sank again, presumably during a storm.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilent sailed over the spot after the April storm;...
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OK, so, so tired of hearing how Cthulhu's Incarnation was defeated by getting run down by a ship.
Even if he wasn't seriously harmed by the collision, he still doesn't come off as much of a world-threatening monster. He doesn't destroy the ship by breathing radioactive fire on it or anything like that. He seems to be too slow to get out the way, too soft to block it with his body, too slow to catch up with them after. Also, being under the sea somehow neutralises him?
If that's the extent of his powers, he's not too scary.
"In other news, US military spending has risen by 5% over the past year to cover the cost of the artillery shells used to repeatedly blow up Cthulhu every time he reforms. This has led to the creation of thousands of jobs in the munitions industry."
Getting hit by a boat had a rather dramatic impact on Cthulhu himself, he just got better.Clearly, you just need to have a proper Mythic party if you want to hit him with a boat. And by hitting, I mean targetting him through the vastness of space, buffing up, and literally throwing a supertanker at him.
I was hoping this would make an appearance! :D
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...
"In other news, US military spending has risen by 5% over the past year to cover the cost of the artillery shells used to repeatedly blow up Cthulhu every time he reforms. This has led to the creation of thousands of jobs in the munitions industry."
Build a wall, and make R'lyeh pay for it?
Tremendous.
Cthulhu's Incarnation
You mean that dream thing you mentioned earlier? What story was that explained in? I don't remember it.
EDIT: probably wasn't specific enough: wha story indicated that it was merely a dream/incarnation of Cthulu instead of the real him?
Actually yeah I think Lovecraft would fit right in with those groups, at least judging from the way he wrote his sympathetic protagonists. He was racist, sexist, classist, and generally -ist towards anything that smacked of scientific advancement (in the stories, i'm not claiming to be an expert on the man himself). His stories praised ignorance as a virtue, most of the academics his stories focus on are considered to be inherently evil even if they aren't shown to be doing anything that would earn them that sort of stigma in today's world. He acknowledges that there are academics who are not evil, but they are almost never actually shown in the focus of the story.
Maybe I should have said "
HeHis protagonists would be absolutely horrified and that should be a mark of pride for us all."Lovecraft's protagonists were frequently academics, so I don't think that he regarded academics as evil. From Wilmarth in "The Whisperer in the Darkness" to the trio of professors that fought "The Dunwich Horror", to the professors in the ill-fated expedition At The Mountains of Madness, the academics are the protagonists.
The theme of "dangerous knowledge" is definitely in Lovecraft's work, but the villains are usually cultists or sorcerers (like the Akeleys). In fact, I can't offhand think of an evil academic in Lovecraft's stories.
You could make the argument for Curwen from 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward'.
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Curwen was a cultist and sorcerer
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I actually think the feeling of "you are less than an ant to this being, and worth nothing to universe" and "the world is so much grander you could never understand it" just isn't that scary to most modern audiences because of how people view science and the universe.
"Okay, we're worthless. We knew that already" "The world is so much more than our minds can comprehend, so what? Most people don't understand how electricity works let alone something like high energy physics, and that doesn't exactly generate dread. As long as the toaster works, it's fine. As long as the planet keeps turning and gravity keeps pulling, it's fine"
Indeed, growing up hearing about quantum physics, and just of the vastness of the universe in general, tends to make one less sensitive to the whole "we are less than speckles of dust in this unthinkably vast and old and occasionally outright bizarre universe".
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Curwen was a cultist and sorcerer
Curwen was a philanthropist and trader who revitalized a small town.
OK, so, so tired of hearing how Cthulhu's Incarnation was defeated by getting run down by a ship. Here is the passage showing what happened when the remains of the "Party" fled to the Steam Yacht, the Alert...
when it says "sky-spawn, that kind of suggests to me that it was in fact not Cthulhu, but one of his/hers/its/their Star-spawn, not the Big C. I must greatly apologize, because I haven't read the complete Lovecraft since High School.
Indeed, growing up hearing about quantum physics, and just of the vastness of the universe in general, tends to make one less sensitive to the whole "we are less than speckles of dust in this unthinkably vast and old and occasionally outright bizarre universe".I actually think the feeling of "you are less than an ant to this being, and worth nothing to universe" and "the world is so much grander you could never understand it" just isn't that scary to most modern audiences because of how people view science and the universe.
"Okay, we're worthless. We knew that already" "The world is so much more than our minds can comprehend, so what? Most people don't understand how electricity works let alone something like high energy physics, and that doesn't exactly generate dread. As long as the toaster works, it's fine. As long as the planet keeps turning and gravity keeps pulling, it's fine"
It isn't that the universe is bizarre, it is that the Universe does not care. It's not a universal thing either, as many of the gods of The Lovecraft circle are not entirely in this dimension. what we see, or envision as the Great Old Ones might just be a pimple on the back of something that lurks beyond the veil of reality, and that is why it is considered a horror. you can pop the pimple, but the back won't even notice you.
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OK, so, so tired of hearing how Cthulhu's Incarnation was defeated by getting run down by a ship. Here is the passage showing what happened when the remains of the "Party" fled to the Steam Yacht, the Alert...when it says "sky-spawn, that kind of suggests to me that it was in fact not Cthulhu, but one of his/hers/its/their Star-spawn, not the Big C. I must greatly apologize, because I haven't read the complete Lovecraft since High School.
It isn't that the universe is bizarre, it is that the Universe does not care. It's not a universal thing either, as many of the gods of The Lovecraft circle are not entirely in this dimension. what we see, or envision as the Great Old Ones might just be a pimple on the back of something that lurks beyond the veil of reality, and that is why it is considered a horror. you can pop the pimple, but the back won't even notice you.Indeed, growing up hearing about quantum physics, and just of the vastness of the universe in general, tends to make one less sensitive to the whole "we are less than speckles of dust in this unthinkably vast and old and occasionally outright bizarre universe".I actually think the feeling of "you are less than an ant to this being, and worth nothing to universe" and "the world is so much grander you could never understand it" just isn't that scary to most modern audiences because of how people view science and the universe.
"Okay, we're worthless. We knew that already" "The world is so much more than our minds can comprehend, so what? Most people don't understand how electricity works let alone something like high energy physics, and that doesn't exactly generate dread. As long as the toaster works, it's fine. As long as the planet keeps turning and gravity keeps pulling, it's fine"
And the horror in that is very much story-dependant. It is only as powerful as the hope it destroys.
If someone writes a story that begins with the planet collapsing, and thus ending pretty much there, with everyone dead, it's not much of a "horror" story. If the story rather starts with a warning of the cataclysm, and the heroes undergo a long series of impossible quests, only to realize, in the end, that it was all in vain (or that, indeed, their actions are the cause), then that powerlessness can kick in.
The real world is full of stuff that could kill us all or, short of that, end our lives as we know it. From out-of-space asteroids, to nuclear Armageddon, to novel diseases, I think the last century has been quite rich in apocalyptic fiction. Diseases and asteroids don't "care" about us, doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible to have some so powerful that extinction would be plausible.
So what's an Old One to all that? With nuclear weapons, we kind of stop caring once we've got enough to blow the whole world over once. The capacity to blow it over many times over is not really any scarier, if anything, it might be less, as there's more people holding deterrent and each participant is more aware of his impacts ("send all our nukes" in 1945 didn't have the same implications as it would today). I have a hard time seeing something so powerful that it doesn't notice when you pop a pimple as being any scarier than something much weaker, who certainly would. There is bliss to be found in the knowledge that one is insignificant to such power.
Or mass surveillance. Most people find solace in the thought that while, yea, the government can probably mine a whole ton of info about you, odds are you are too insignificant for them to do so.
Different era, different fears. When those novels were written, Canada had a Prime Minister who liked to hold séances to speak with dead relatives. "Unspeakable knowledge that drives one mad" is very early 20th century, along with all the "spooky science" that was all the rage back then. One doesn't see much parapsychology in schools today.
I think that "the universe doesn't care" has been increasingly accepted as fact by newer generations, and that while it may have been a source of fear in more social earlier cultures, it has instead become a source of conform in more individualistic contemporary ones. Assuming you live in a western secular nation.
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"The universe doesn't care."
"Yeah, so? That's kind of science-philosophy in a nutshell."
"The universe is mind-bending."
"Yeah, so? That's kind of science-philosophy in a nutshell."
"The universe hates you."
"One: that's the opposite of what you said before. Two: self-evidently it does not."
Also, self-evidently, no matter the hype, those ancient things (or at least some of them) do care, in a very personal sense, 'cause some of them put a lot of effort into making sure people know how terrible and uncaring they all are.
Also,
sky-spawn
... why is this notCthulhu? But if you accept that the creature that was previously and explicitly identified as Cthulhu* is not, in fact, Cthulhu, you have no cause to accept any information within the text itself as evidence of anything, and, for all we know, they could have just faced down and perma-killed the creature known as Azathoth - just because they saw it start to reform, doesn't mean that it was either wholly successful, or that it left no lasting problems on the health of the creature.
I mean, it's a popular explanation - either from that snippet of text, or from "Well, Johanssn couldn't have known; it wasn't really Cthulu, after all, but some lesser creature, and he just assumed."
But... if we throw out his assessment of the situation, there's no reason to accept anything as fact, either that led up to it, or thereafter. Effectively, all we have as evidence is in-text hype that the unreliable narrator accepts as more-or-less true.
This is what I mean by "buying into the hype" - there is a text that tells us that Cthulhu is this cosmic force (minor for what it is) that can never be destroyed. Swears it up and down, and claims that there is history to prove it.
... a text that was created based on oral tradition** (good luck getting general agreement on said accuracy) and eyewitness testimpony (heavily called into question) by explicitly disturbed individuals.
So... it's not really that terrifying. There's nothing to be terrified of.
"Maybe it really is unable to be destroyed forever!"
"Well, yeah, but maybe we all just start phasing through walls and floors for no reason. Quantum theory is weird like that. Both of those seem goofily improbable, though, so I'm not going to let it worry me, much."
Again, the terror is almost entirely psychological (though it's occasionally very physical), due to the protagonists being unable to emotionally handle the revelations they are receiving - this is very different from these revelations being true.
Of course, once you question whether or not the stuff they receive is true, there is no reason to accept anything they tell you at all. It's all very possible that Johansen and friends, for example, were just hit by a trippy sort of psychic madness wave and had hallucinations of the whole island experience.
The thing is... either we accept that the text has correct elements to it (which means the things have defined limits and are not as disinterested as their press-people would have us believe - though some of them may be, but that's explained by a mental or moral flaw -, meaning the text has inaccuracies anyway), or we don't (in which case we just question everything about it).
There's a lot of awesome to Lovecraft stuff, though. I like it.
It's just been inflated by its own fanbase to nonsense levels. Which, I suppose, makes sense when you're talking about nonsensical creatures that don't really exist. But still.
The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
<snip>
Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency.
No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”