Is Cosmic Horror passé

I wouldn't call it passe, but it has become the default sort of religion/worldview for a lot of media. It makes since for games because it gives unlimited supplies of monsters to fight.

You don't have to fight against it. It's just sort of in the background. Just like in a normal fantasy game there are gods that are just in the background.

This is a really good analysis/ideas. I love reading things like this, that relate literary trends to society.

>Vermin in a great system that no longer requires his input to function. The alienation remains, but worse, the distractions are gone.
At first when I read this, I thought it reminded me of the looming promise of automation and AI, and the idea that mankind's tools will eventually render mankind obsolete.

However, I think I took things too literally. You don't mean a world where MANKIND is no longer needed - you mean a world where EACH MAN is no longer needed. In 1984, for example, the individual means nothing. Nothing Winston does or creates means anything. Even at the end, the reader gets the sense that it hardly matters to the Party if Winston lives or dies - and yet they keep him alive and break him, simply because they can.

Unfortunately, your take on modern cosmic horror makes it even harder to adapt things into a playable game. Robbing the players of a sense of meaning to their actions is typically the exact opposite of what you want to do in a game. What are your thoughts on balancing cosmic horror and player agency?

You want a combination of agency and cosmic horror. The players don't turn a corner and have to have a brief, friendly chat with a hole in reality and then turn into monstrous amalgamations of sapience and garbage from the exposure, they punch through layers of human detritus surrounding the cosmic horror, only to be exposed to something that cares as much about the cult/whatever as the players - not at all. Something that only responded to the cult as they managed to trigger something like an autonomic response, the way you get goosebumps. It's not a campaign type you can play routinely, or it looses the sting of "All is dust".

This story is a great example of how to build atmosphere. The temperature, the masks, the music, the notes... Everything comes together so well.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any more horror/CoC Veeky Forums stories (Old Man Henderson does not count). Got any others?

No, it's rare. For atmosphere, try D&D's Heroes of Horror - it's got a solid 'atmospheric' effects table to pillage. Failing that, ctrl-f for 'the staring woman' in this thread which is more 'cosmic' in a setting where the rule of science is paramount.
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12180900/

>You don't have to fight against it.

Even in the case they don't they'll tend to still burn out very easily. Most players really don't like being tossed around without understanding.

>and the idea that mankind's tools will eventually render mankind obsolete.

I always find it far more likely mankind will edit themselves int newer better and less and less understandable models. Which to me is far worse.

Is this something that happens normally to most people?

I've gotten this loads of time just walking around or while in the middle of something else. If I had to describe it, it feels like for two seconds my eyes go wide and I truly understand the vastness of the universe/the void of death or something similar and then my brain dumps those thoughts immediately and I snap back to normalcy.

It's rather unsettling.

I think I get what you're saying. The "cosmic horror" isn't the gameplay threat, it's the narrative threat. Players will spend the majority of the time rolling dice to shoot cultists and find clues. The Unspeakable Things are the plot device binding everything together, not something for the players to understand or conquer.

Yes. And when they do find it and the heart of everything, they realise that everything they've achieved, everything they've done - it's nothing. And so was what the opposition achieved and strove for.

The game starts mundane, and as things get deeper they get stranger. Using settings they aren't familiar with helps, or game systems. At most, the players should be able to get a finger or two on the corners of 'what X is', even with the mid-level stuff when the 'supernatural' comes into play. That empowered cultist that throws fireballs and eats anti-armour rounds isn't some cultist, it's a writhing mass of something that their brain refuses to comprehend and self-censors with a big red X. Blah blah blah.

You don't necessarily have to strip them of agency per-se, but like Call of Cthulhu, part of the horror comes from the inconceivable scale or depth (and indeed the fact that it is unknown/unknowable) of the system/event/universe that they are faced with.

I recommended Blame! because it was a good example of someone in this world who -did- have agency, they were trying to somehow stop it, but their chances of succeeding in that were so remote, and that what stopping it would even mean was so unclear, that it almost enhanced the grand horror of the environment.

In CoC, almost every protagonist either ends up hopelessly insane, dead, or left close to the breaking point of their sanity and hope at the end of the story. That's true in both the games and Lovecraft's original stories. That makes sense, but it doesn't mean that you can't also tell a story where a group of protagonists, however remote their chances, fight to try and lash out at the cosmos. There might just be a way (perhaps with the aid of some benevolent force) to make a difference.

Another good text to read on this subject if you have the patience for unbearably19th century prose is The Night Land, by Hodgeson. I recall that Lovecraft, despite saying basically that the guy talked like a fag and his prose was unbearable, complimented it on being just about the darkest and most horrible shit he'd ever seen written in the genre.

Opinions on Thomas Ligotti? I've heard some praise for him as a post-modern voice for cosmic horror. (Mostly seems like extra grumpy nihilism to me.)

I never felt that I played in a good Cosmic Horror styled game.

Every CoC game I played ended up being way too campy to be scary.

>Thomas Ligotti

One of my favorite writers. Most people try to put a chill on frighting ideas in some way in stories. Ligotti just charges straight on ahead without mercy.

Pretty much. They kind of screwed up in my view point when they stuck the sanity mechanic like they did. The horror is less you see something nonsensical and more you understand something that shatters you're life view. The "You look at this horrible indescribable thing and your eyes black out." Thing is too overplayed and makes game sessions not be nearly as scary.

Nihilism is a disease.

Strangely enough this entire thread kind of reminds me of GURPS:Illuminati.

>What are your thoughts on balancing cosmic horror and player agency?
Not that guy, but Blame! is an excellent example.
The core struggle is for humanity to reclaim control of The City. Functionally an impossible task, and certainly not one within the scope of a TTRPG.
But the players don't have to solve the larger problem. Simpler, more immediate goals are easy to imagine.
Find a source of food. Find a place safe from the robotic exterminators trying to wipe out all human life. Convince the humans 200km thattaway to share their macguffins.
And through all of these tasks, you can weave the thread of "this wouldn't be a problem if The City worked right", reminding the players of the larger, insolvable, problem.

tl;dr don't deny the players all agency, but do force them to solve the second-string problems while the real issue remains unsolvable.

>Is Cosmic Horror passé

nah, it's just done really, really badly most of the time, by people who don't really understand the essential elements

Meh just a dull railroad he was lucky the players bought into. None of their choices mattered and there were no rules to adjudicate anything so it was basically 'le random lulz space cthulu'

Never in my life have I felt this.
I've no idea what you're talking about.

Never? You never had that one time as a kid where you started counting in your head because you were bored and had nothing else to do, so you decided to see how high you could go, and after a few minutes suddenly realized that there was no end to how high you could count, and you caught a glimpse of the void of infinity, though you were too young to put what you felt into words, and the feeling went away almost immediately and then something else came along to distract you?

No I just counted to 100 and got really proud of myself because I was like 4 so told my friends who said I was lying about it because nobody could count that high and punched me in the stomach and spat on me.

Ah, that explains it. I lived in Wyoming as a kid. The town was basically an intersection of freeways leading to anywhere but there, and the school had maybe 300 kids, tops. Not a lot of friends to make there, thus not a lot of kids to beat me up.

Also it was really fucking windy.

I once wrote a short story along the lines of the second option. A girl stalked by a malevolent entity and driven into its dimension by its actions, only to find the creature was just a servant of an eldritch abomination that was making itself a physical form from the organs of its victims. The last piece needed was her heart (specifically hers, because she couldn't empathise with anyone) and her only option was to kill herself and rob the abomination of its final piece, stalling its rebirth. I always hated stories of Old Gods where the heroes can fight against it like anything else.

That feeling is exciting though. Why should people be afraid of infinity? The fact that the endless stars might one day be within our reach, the endless planets there for my children's children to touch with their bare feet, is absolutely amazing and beautiful.

Infinity is hopeful. Of course the universe is uncaring- nothing cares except people, but there's wonder and beauty in the great unknown. Humanity yearns for the new.

I guess the main problem, being that materialism and acknowledgement for much of western society to be a lack of transcendental purpose is that in a game format there is no player agency.

Let me reiterate. In cosmic horror there is often player agency (choices they make) but ultimately nothing matters in the long run, there is no great victory that is possible no matter the sacrifice so it might as well have no agency.

Maybe this is scary in real life (I suspect many of us will just shrug our shoulders and just say "well shit") but in a game this isnt fun or a particularly satisfying conclusion.

The trick to this as far as I can see, you can look at season 1 of True Detective. They got their guy and they saved some people but the greater conspiracy remained unsolved and implied will get away with it.

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

That's not infinity. That's taking the highest possible number you can comprehend and mentally assigning it as the infinity. True infinity is infinite times bigger than the highest number you can comprehend.

...

>Another good text to read on this subject if you have the patience for unbearably19th century prose is The Night Land, by Hodgeson. I recall that Lovecraft, despite saying basically that the guy talked like a fag and his prose was unbearable, complimented it on being just about the darkest and most horrible shit he'd ever seen written in the genre.
It's been rewritten so the MC doesn't talk like a fag.

>le cosmic horror passé
Real life cause of failed "show, don't tell". Most people know all kinds of horrible facts, but millions of dead remain mere statistics. Subconsciously they remain ignorant and distant, so bring it to their home and make it personal.

All that means is there will never be an upper limit on what we can aspire to as individuals or as a species.

That's not how infinity works.

And I'm quite sure nothing has ever been proven to be infinite anyway.

Thing I never understood with Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror was that it seemed that the gods actually needed humanity or were attracted to Earth or something. Like, all those cults and rituals to bring about the return of the gods; the sheer number of gods trapped in/on/around the Earth; their interest in Earth and individual humans.

Cosmic horror should have the "antagonist" entity completely divorced from humanity. It shows no interest towards them. Treat mankind like a midge that splats against the windscreen of a car, or incests that are killed as builders go about pulling up the earth at a building site.

They shouldn't even be killed because the entity wants to, or because it finds them irritating or amusing. Humanity should be beneath their notice utterly. I had several story ideas to this effect, except one was less actual "eldritch cosmic god" and more "very alien, very advanced race".

this was a pretty cool post, good work user

This is the problem with cosmic horror because its not really something you can put into words in a good way, if someone hasn't felt it then they probably never will, personally the idea of infinity doesn't bother me at all and I get a the feeling anyone who says it really does bother them is trying way too hard to sound deep

The main problem I think is certainty, you're never certain that death is the end or that the universe is infinite or uncaring you cant 100% know and that makes it easy to dismiss

>Cosmic horror should have the "antagonist" entity completely divorced from humanity. It shows no interest towards them. Treat mankind like a midge that splats against the windscreen of a car, or incests that are killed as builders go about pulling up the earth at a building site.
Then why would the plot require cultists/worshippers at all? You need something for the players to interact with, you can't just sit them down and lecture them on how horrifying it'd be if your an elder god happened to kill the world today.
I get that "requiring" sacrifices/worshippers/sacrifices/whatever trivializes the horrors, but what would be the cultists goal otherwise?

What if the idea of the cultists isn't to awaken the dark god or give them a bridge to our reality or whatever, but simply to do something that would get said god's attention? Like nothing we humans can do could affect such a thing, we're no threat or boon to it, but even a gnat can get a person's attention. Could be a matter of the cultists believe that the cosmic entity is benevolent and will usher in a new golden age for humanity, while the players are led to believe that said entity will wipe out all of mankind with but a gaze.

Course then the cultists' plot boils down to 'Senpai notice me!'

Or what if the cultists don't necessarily want to attract the god's attention, but merely to use his presence for personal gain? Like maybe the leaders believe they can harness a slumbering god's energy to receive prophetic visions or gain reality-rending powers or something, but the heroes learn that this creates a dangerous risk of awakening the god and fucking up everything. Like a gnat wanting to fly close to a human's skin for warmth, at risk of bothering the human.

Or maybe the cultists have no idea of the consequences or what they're even tapping into - they just want to learn some neat magic tricks to accomplish some personal goal.

Of course, then the entity is reduced to a plot device and could just as easily be substituted for a nuke or bioweapon or something. Although I guess

trying to imagine death without afterlife does that to me
i can imagine nonexistence for about a second before i come back to reality. it's really spooky

You now have infinity hitting a human brain and suddenly finding out that some people are just too stupid or stubborn to stop. Humans did not evolve to understand infinity they evolved to conquer, kill and survive. The more the better. Our brains allow us to do more but if you scrape the paint you'll find out that under it that desire to survive, thrive and make others to bow to our will.

Infinity is just a good way to satiate that hunger. Of course over time humanity may get tired of it. But it will need at least another 100k years of rolling through Universe before it has a chance to happen.

Well in order for cosmic horror to work the entity pretty much has to be a plot point any way. Once you stat an elder god, no matter how absurd the numbers are, players will start looking for a way to beat them.

Though if you really want to fuck with the players you could always decide what happens if the god awakens beforehand, then introduce a dozen or so NPCs with conflicting information. Like an ancient book that predicts doom for all mankind if the god awakens, then have a proff point out that if the doom applies to all mankind the god never awoke, since there's still a mankind around to tell the tale, therefore either the doom isn't as all encompassing as advertised, or the god hasn't woken up in man's history so how would the book know?

>Once you stat an elder god, no matter how absurd the numbers are, players will start looking for a way to beat them.

I actually want one day to do just that. Stat a cosmic horror level threat with carefully calculated attributes and more zeroes than one sheet of paper should probably have just to see what players will try to do.

>it's a writhing mass of something that their brain refuses to comprehend and self-censors with a big red X.
I think Google Deep Dream is actually a great visualization for this. It's the human mind trying to look at something and fill in the blanks with familiar things, resulting in a perverse, constantly-shifting imitation.
Here's an animated (with sound) example.

Cosmic horror is an interesting idea but very fucking passé right now. In nerd circles, it's past that saturation point that zombies hit a few years ago.

Key to making it scary or interesting is to actually build a plot beyond "uh oh the cultists are at it again! Kill kill kill until you all go crazy!!!!"

Put in some puzzle elements, old diaries, twisted characters, abandon notions of good and evil, reward players that dont play like overly cautious paranoid faggots who only want to survive, and CREATE A COHERENT MYSTERY AT THE CORE

>Key to making it scary or interesting is to actually build a plot beyond "uh oh the cultists are at it again! Kill kill kill until you all go crazy!!!!"
Exactly. Avoid cliches, subvert genre staples, keep the players guessing. And as an extension of that, avoid using words like "eldritch" or "cultist", because it immediately sets up expectations and reminds players that they're in a familiar genre.

cosmic horror ceases to be when you grow up and stop caring about utterly meaningless shit (space and everything beyond earth)

Whenever I think of Cosmic Horror, my thoughts always return to Ruby Quest. Part of what made Ruby Quest's slow descent into madness work so well was the fact that it so rarely explained... anything, really. You knew what the characters wanted, and you knew roughly what was stopping them, but so many of the hows and whys were left tantalisingly out of reach. The mutations were given a broadly logical explanation (some kind of mad science), but the specifics were never detailed. Even the final reveal in the Red Room just raised more questions than it answered. But it did leave one very important impression: that the heroes just got a glimpse of something utterly Other, something utterly beyond their means to defeat, and that they are lucky to have escaped with their lives.

So, that's my advice. Stop fucking explaining everything. The more you explain shit, the less lost and worried your audience will feel. This is what people mean when they talk about "the fear of the unknown". It's not the fear of things you don't know about - it's the fear of *not knowing*. Of suddenly being struck by the scope of your own ignorance. Of finding your ability to rationalise and reason breaking down before your eyes. Of having no clear path forwards. Of being paralyzed by the knowledge that the wrong choice right now could be fatal, and you have no idea which choice that is.

...what if we use internal inconsistency to frighten?
Explanations conflict with already established facts.
Analysis of the situation reveals gaping holes in your audience's theories, but every bloody guess they take contradicts something.
Logic simply takes a walk in the park.
The human brain loves coherent schemes, and detests the unfathomable. So, instead of making the unknowable immense from the start, beginning with a pleasant stroll through the uncanny valley appears to be a valid strategy.
But of course, I'm probably saying things that have already been done.
>pic

Happened too me a lot as a child either thing about what said or that recuring fever dream where I was in a scholl bus in which there was a nuclear bomb (don't ask how I know, I couldn't even see it but there was one). I would watch a timer going from minutes to secondes to deci ect, like if the time was infinitly divided/slowed but at the same time would be aware of everything happening in the surrounding. Weirdly everything outside the bus would accelerate in time to the point of starting to decay.

Doctor Cohen, is father Pucci messing with me ?

Half-dream state can be quite funny too. Ever spoke with characters you created for stories then suddenly going back to awake state and being WTF ?

Posted from phone to say nice post

your players should never be in the attention of a cosmic horror, cosmic horrors wouldn't give two shits about humanity or mortal beings, they are completely above us.

your interaction with them should be limited to weird shit happening in their wake, and mysteries made by their existence.

Sounds pretty bad. I wrote some shit when I was a teenager too though.

This reminds me of how something that is as nearly related, yet ultimately distant, as the Chimpanzee bears a >90% genetic similarity to us. But yet the average person views them as being entirely different, and most don't even recognize our relatedness.

In the age of genetic of modification or transcendence, how can we expect to recognize what comes 'next' as being human? Or will it view us as we view our closest relatives? If we do things to ourselves that make us unrecognizable, how will we react? Will 'we' care?

Unfortunately we can only feasibly reach the rest of the local group. That's not to say that the local group isn't huge, but there's no way we can get anywhere else, given that other galactic clusters are accelerating faster than we can reach them (dark energy yo).
Unless we develop FTL, which is probably impossible, we're trapped here

Cosmic Horror sounds utopian to me. I live in a society where an education costs so much that even if you get the job you studied for you're still in debt for the rest of your life, where getting sick or injured once is enough to ruin your financially for the rest of your life, where you can work 24 hours a day and the people that control all the money will call you lazy and degenerate while they snort coke off a 12 year old hooker's ass, where we have two party screaming in the streets ready to start a civil war when either way the same 12 people that run things are in no danger of being unthroned (and in fact the riots make it easier for them to control the populace). Cthulhu eating the world or driving the world insane is no longer scary because 21st century life is such an inane hell that it honestly would be an improvement if some elder horror kills everyone.

Too bad no such thing comes, there is no easy way out except suicide. And after almost 40 years of me watching people get into screaming arguments over stupider and stupider things and the lies on the news getting more and more farfetched and people buying it all that noose is starting to look real friendly.

youtube.com/watch?v=eCiFO7qV54E

Basically this

ow the edge

Cosmic horror, I think, depends heavily on context, which can alter how you approach things. The idealism and adherence to order/morality of yesterday needs to be shattered for it to work in historical settings. The nihilism, egoism, hedonism, and cynicism of today needs to be shattered for it to work in the modern age IMO.

Honestly, cosmic horror and pulp work together well specifically because the optimism provides a sharper contrast to the "true nature" of things.

I'd say it was the opposite. Look at all the effort a bunch of people go to to get one high priest of an elder god to wake up.

OP back after a day, glad to see this is still going and wow you have given me me some grade A shit to think about
>people talking about Blame!
mah nigga.png, never thought of it that way
>Cthulhu and lovecraft
I think I get it now Squid monsters are passe. Cosmic horror should be relateable. man is the greatest source of cosmic horror. we are living proof that a sentient species can be unfeeling and amoral and our decadence and head in the sand mentality conveys it.
>experiencing cosmic horror
I don't know, I honestly cant remember what it was like to feel afraid of something bigger than my self. my bigest fears are loneliness and failure of my goals which seem to translate but are more petty and self centered than the themes I postulated were no longer relateable. Are the things I mentioned or things like mass plagues still "cosmic horror" ?because I don't think so. my main point was I don't think cosmic horror can exist with out some sort of manifest destiny that extends for generations beyond our own. fear for the self in an unfeeling universe just seems like Thursday to me
>player agency
here's my problem and the fuel behind my post. players just don't get scared in a group setting. the art of the camp fire horror story seems lost. at the end of the night they go back to their lives we don't take the fear with us. we take hopes and dreams and story ideas but never the fear. we're all horror fans to some degrees and can appreciate how a good horror movie or video game (I would say Silent Hill is the gold standard for us but that's personal horror with cosmic undertones) can stay with you but when you're together it's naturally comforting and I like that, just not for horror games.

>we take hopes and dreams and story ideas but never the fear.
Maybe it's because I just played my first ever CoC session or because of the character I specifically played, but I'm still thinking about the consequences of the campaign on his otherwise idealist worldview. Especially since the character is directly lifted from a series with a drastically different tone than CoC

You just made me reread Ruby Quest. You're right though, I forgot how little they explained. It's heavily implied that they uncovered some weird occult shit while excavating a new part of the lab, and THAT's what ultimately led to everything. But you learn almost nothing about their findings or the experiments, only who authorized them.

I also liked how each "monster" was a uniquely horrific entity with a name and an origin. Some are explained more than others, but each one was unique.

>Players just don't get scared in a group setting. the art of the camp fire horror story seems lost.
I disagree. A few months ago we had a hurricane hit our city, and the power went out, so my roommates and I hung out in the dark living room with the wind howling outside. We passed around an old lantern and took turns telling stories about our experiences with sounds coming from beneath the house. We had a really great time, despite the group normally not being that into roleplaying.

The trick is getting in the mood. Horror is prone to "loudmouth in the movie theater" syndrome. One person in the group who's not willing to set aside their disbelief and immerse themselves can singlehandedly ruin the atmosphere for everyone else. In my hurricane story, for example, it only worked because the atmosphere was just right and everyone wanted to share scary stories.

See this post: to see an atmosphere-crafting master at work.

You. You are the one who speaks the words as they are. I like you.

A better word to describe Lovecrafts ideas on horror would be existential horror.

Remember the story about the man in the cave assaulted by some unseen monster. Nothing about that story is cosmic, but it still has that nauseating cosmic horror realisation just before the cave guide kills the cave beast.

Cosmic horror can only succeed if it draws the public into the realisation that the character has.

ur dumb

>But even mindless, live-in-the-moment hedonism isn't any sort of protection for claiming you had a valid life.

Define what a "valid" life is then, because a hedonist would say that living in the moment for pleasure IS a valid life, and since it is one of the few livelihoods actually achievable you don't have much room for counterargument from what I can see.

>The fact that the endless stars might one day be within our reach
They won't, because they are infinite and you are finite. That's the point; it is beyond us and will forever be so.

if you ever meet the cosmic horror it's game over, you might land a blow but never anything that can hurt it. The only way to fight it is to make shure it has no way of getting to you. The moment you can physically "fight" the horror is the moment that you kill off all the potential horror of it. This is the age old problem with rpgs, if it has HP points you can kill it and the players start trying to come up with combos that would eat through the horrors defence and hp thus killing all the suspense and scaryness of the campaing

Do what I do.

>get close to the cosmic horror
>unbearable heat/cold/pressure/gravity/radiation/whatever

Basically, make it clear to the players that getting even within a few miles of some cosmically old entity that uses the global energy output of the United States of America of 10 years on a minute basis for its metabolism is a very very bad idea.

Seriously, people. Read Ruby Quest. I may have given away one of the best surprises by telling you it's a cosmic horror story, but it's a great story even without the twist, and is well worth your time.

it's a coping mechanism and the fact that it is so popular today is frankly quait funny to me seeing how absurdist and existentialism ripped it a new one. But frankly, the moment you face the realization that indeed nothing that you do matters in the grand sceam of things, and humans will most likely die out within 200-300 years it's hard not to fall into nihilism

Lovecraft protagonists defeated/killed cosmic horrors all the time, often by incredibly mundane means

I just let the players know that interacting with that thing that is remembers the big bang and has reality bending powers is bad new via different books/messages. If they see a multiple-times underlined passage in all the books on said subject saying "do NOT in any way or form try to interact with -insert horror here-" and they still do it, it's not my fault they got disintegrated

For what it's worth, one of the few books that's been truly unnerving has been All Tomorrows.
It's not even meant to be a Cosmic Horror thing but it's so factual and uncaring and the entire thing depicts human evolutionary radiation, but they all don't matter in the end.
I remember someone in Veeky Forums having the pdf, but I've lost it.

they killed aliens, even cthulu was too much for humies and he's fairly low on the power scale of lovecrafts "higher beings"

Like what?

Cthulhu was never hurt by the steamboat, and it wasn't even awake. It was just sleepwalking around Rlyeh.

Willet would have never been able to defeat Curwen if Willet hadn't unknowingly unleashed the unknown cosmic horror that was imprisoned in Curwen's lab. You know, the unseen entity that immediately started killing sorcerers and necromancers all over the planet.

The only things that came to mind is Yog-Sothoth's halfbred twins, but I highly doubt that the metaphysical representation of the multiverse gives a fuck about that.

They just hit him with a boat and then left. They went insane mind you, but they fought and "defeated" him, for a time

>Yog-Sothoth's halfbred twins
Both of them were mortal and niether of them had any real special powers that i know of. They were just mutants

they did not defeat him, the stars wernt right so he just wokre up for a second, saw that he still can go back to sleep and fucked right off. The steam boat did nothing

Why have cultists at all? Just have a different kind of adventure and this thing in the background.

I like using cosmic horrors like volcanoes are often used in pulp stories.

>ooooh heroes and villains, you better run... the volcano is stirring... RUN YOU FOOLS!

Dishonored has some in game books for example talking about planet eating things out there.

This happens to me too. It only happens when I am alone thinking too much. It basically paralyzes me for a second as I feel like my brain can't comprehend the concept I am considering. Then it passes.

The problem with cosmic horror is less our apathy as our acceptance of the true nature of cosmic horror. In the past cosmic horror was a reaction to the belief that we'd understood the world. But what if we really didn't? What if it turns out all our science is lies, our knowledge has led us astray, and the universe is an incomprehensible madness where we're insignificant?

Nowadays we call that quantum theory.

For cosmic horror to be scary, it has to recapture that same fear - that everything you know is wrong, and that the true nature of the universe is horrifying and antithetical to your beliefs. And you have to do that without making it comedic, /pol/itical, or otherwise stepping on that dawning horrified revaluation of everything. Which is hard as fuck.

But giant angry cosmic squid is probably the worst way to handle it, because they ARE passé. Every hack who thinks they can do cosmic horror goes for calamari.

One of them was larger than a barn and was invisible, completely ignoring the fact that he was essentially a walking pile of spare organic parts.

I always bank on the "impossible geometries" part of Cosmic Horror. A big squid isn't scary. A SOMETHING that's all angles and has parts passing through itself as it moves is. Same with a monster that looks less like anything definable and more like an overenthusiastic Creator started slapping organs and limbs on and didn't know when to stop (even if it's to the detriment of the monster. ESPECIALLY if it's to the detriment: it helps convey that this is something that fundamentally DOESN'T BELONG in the world of Man that got here anyways.)

Great post. Thank you for your contribution

>It is not that we defeated the fear of the unknown, it is that we blinked, turned around, and turned up the music like the cowardly caged rats that we are, and now shudder in fear of civilization itself not perfectly reflecting the trite and hedonistic playthings we entertain ourselves with while awaiting death.
What exactly would've been the proper response?