Lorebuilding Thread: Friendly Eldritch Abominations

Sweet concept.

I recently played through Dragon Age: Origins and quite liked the concept of "Ages", in which each century is an Age and the name of an Age is determined by the omens that occurred at the end of the last age.

Maybe the hero that's raised up by the benevolent entity would end up being a phenomenon that's looked forward to by the entire world, to the point where it's considered era-defining? In that case, then 237 years might be a smidge too long of a gap, but I like where you're going with this.

What if society is so focused on the next coming of the hero, that they slip into terrible despair whenever the last one dies, being forced to wait decades for the next passing of the entity to "save" humanity? Essentially, they're so reliant on getting outside help to solve all of their problems that they grow lazy and let the world go to waste in the meantime.

Checked.

Speaking of this, what system would be best for a shaman king campaign?

GURPS.

>However if we stay with this analogy doesn't that mean that, just as there are humans out there who absolutly love ants, who are obsessed with learning about and observing ants and their ways, who care more about animals and their welfare than that of fellow humans. Then surely there is also the possibility of great Cthulhu-esque creatures out there who love us, are deeply interested in every little thing we do and even take pains to protect us from harm.

Nyarlathotep

Definitions of what constitutes harm may vary.

It's a great game!

If there's the whole "humans to ants" analogy, then that means there are some eldritch horrors that are scared shitless of us because we bite them and cause itches and get in their food
>Cyclopean being whose very existence makes men lose the will to live won't devour a planet because "there are humans all over it"
>Another one freaks out when a single astronaut unwittingly touches one of its multidimensional tentacles, causing solar storms and wormholes to jiggle the fabric of spacetime
This is getting silly

Y'all know that eldritch means spooky and not Lovecraftian, right?

These guys are pretty spook, mate.

Eldritch things:
Elves
Dwarfs
Gnomes
Fairies
Giants
Ghosts
Succubi
Kobolds
and
Liches

Yep, eldritch is just an antiquated word for weird. However, Lovecraft made such an extensive usage of the word that it's sort of just associated with his usage of it in the context of his works. Technically, it is being used right, since Lovecraft meant it to mean 'weird' and all, but I get what you mean.

I'd say a good way to put it now is eldritch means 'really fucking weird as balls'.

Fuck off, shithead. Building an interesting roleplaying setting is Veeky Forums.

Lovecraft's use may be iconic, but it doesn't make gibbous mean of the Lovecraft Mythos, it still means
>A lunar phase either side of the full moon when the moon's disc as seen from the Earth is larger than a semicircle.

>So from what I understand, the idea behind the cosmic horror genre is that there are godlike beings in the universe, its just that they don't particularly care about and can easily destroy you and everything you care about by accident and/or without meaning to. Much akin to you walking through a field and stepping on ants or anthills without noticing.

That's hardly the entire concept. The idea of godlike aliens who happen to have a negative effect on human beings is a cosmic horror idea, but it isn't the idea of cosmic horror.

Cosmic horror is existential, the idea pretty much is 'everything you thought you knew is wrong or isn't even a fraction of the full picture' and that humanity is incredibly limited. Remember, Lovecraft's earlier works hadn't yet looked up into the sky - horror came from under the earth, in far places, from the past. The Rats in the Walls is tied up about one man's heritage and maligned ancestral home and and is about the distant evil past welling up. The Outsider is a tale of 'you're wrong and everything you thought is wrong', it's pretty blatant about it. Then Lovecraft looked upwards and realized, fuck, the Earth and human civilization is nothing compared what other horrible bullshit is out there, older than even the EARTH itself. So we get told of old things in our planet not OF our planet, things that come from somewhere else where things aren't as they are here, people finding glimpses of the happenstance visitations unspeakable things made as they passed through our space. Earth isn't special, all his stories just happen to be what Earth has. If Lovecraft wrote stories on other worlds, there'd be ancient, awful things under Mars, under Titan, under extra-solar planets and moons.

Big tentacle monsters are just very convenient, if somewhat blunt tools to get across the idea of wrongess and human limitation. That's all. You can get it across with anything that challenges the scientific or cultural norm on a vast scale.

Yeah, I know. He just happened to be fond of some words and those words are popularly identified with the context of how he used them. Eldritch for a lot of people means cosmic alien spookiness and gibbous means some fat, horrible, unnaturally large moon, but these words haven't lost their original meaning at all.

>Cosmic horror is existential, the idea pretty much is 'everything you thought you knew is wrong or isn't even a fraction of the full picture' and that humanity is incredibly limited.
This.

God? Like the Christian God. He's supposed to be completely beyond physics and logic whose mere voice or image could drive people insane. And he has plans that are totally beyond human comprehension. But he's compassionate and loves everyone immensely.

Or a lot of the Hindu gods really

>Big tentacle monsters are just very convenient, if somewhat blunt tools to get across the idea of wrongess and human limitation. That's all. You can get it across with anything that challenges the scientific or cultural norm on a vast scale.
A color
An ancient temple under the sea
A mad friend or relative
An inspiration to a piece of art
A play
I should stop posting, all that comes out is lists.

>So from what I understand, the idea behind the cosmic horror genre is that there are godlike beings in the universe, its just that they don't particularly care about and can easily destroy you and everything you care about by accident and/or without meaning to
Wrong. Cthulhu very much wants to eat you like you do shrimp. He hates you with more passion than that which fuelled every war and murder combined. But that's because he recently(a bit over 400 million years ago) had to wipe out a very advanced time travelling psychic race, and that makes an old one a bit tired and cranky.
>However if we stay with this analogy doesn't that mean that, just as there are humans out there who absolutly love ants, who are obsessed with learning about and observing ants and their ways, who care more about animals and their welfare than that of fellow humans
Both the king in yellow and nyarlathotep are hinted to want to help humanity, however the king in yellow's vision of help makes humanity very, very inhuman, and nyarlathotep wants to keep us alive so he can smell our sweet, sweet suffering forever. Kind of like a lawnmower or a garden hand enjoying the fruits and scents of his labor.

Also, if you think about it, the evolution of humanity is most likely driven a bit by the old ones. A statue of cthulhu is described as part dragon, cephalopod, and man combined. The king in yellow wears a robe and sits on a throne. Nyarlathotep wuz a pharoah and shit in ancient Egypt(his role was more direct).

Hastur, aka the king in yellow or very closely related to the king, is a half brother to cthulhu. Whereas cthulhu is a very primordial intelligence and has cool ass psychic dreams, he is perhaps not as wise as his brother hastur, who delights in knowledge. And nyarlathotep loves cults and secret societies and whatnot(he has a thousand masks, after all), so it could be argued that he letting others do his work for him, ie a very primitive version of a society.

>So from what I understand, the idea behind the cosmic horror genre is that there are godlike beings in the universe, its just that they don't particularly care about and can easily destroy you and everything you care about by accident and/or without meaning to. Much akin to you walking through a field and stepping on ants or anthills without noticing.

It also implies that the impersonal, yet mind-bending forces of the universe don't privilege the elder things either.

I though Nyarlathotep just likes to mess with humans for the sake of amusement and isn't really considered benevolent.

Derleth pls go, you don't know anything about cosmic horror.

You're why people think Tentacles = Lovecraft.

So keeping up with this line of thinking, and making vague alliterations and pretending human evolution might have something to do with these old ones, it could be said that cthulhu's dreams influenced evolution to give form to animals somewhat similar to the sleepy fish-head himself. Maybe that eventually gave way to a creature that could think deeply, draw, build, ponder, and dream without being asleep.

Then there's nyarlathotep. He messed around with us for shits and giggles, giving us lots of differing half-truths about gods and the universe, and from that organizing the first few societies beyond tribes and families. This caused chaos and strife, as always happens when two different factions meet or when one person has undeserved and unproportional power without the skills to back it up.

The king in yellow, it can be said, is very much a renaissance man. He loves stories, books, libraries, all forms of knowledge.
But he also loves decay, and the slow march of time(Maybe. Nobody knows what the city of carcosa represents). He's also fond of uncomfortable, man-changing truths being confronted and accepted; "Taking off your mask", as it were. I'm not sure what to make of him besides being the yang to cthulhu's yin. A mind is almost a waste without knowledge, after all.

Who knows what it gets up to or why. It remains inscrutable. But it does interact with humans a lot, actively devoting attention. None of the other deities do, having an opinion about humans is for lesser beings like Starspawn, Deep Ones, or Mi-go.

OP doesn't know anything about lovecraft.
I'm trying to at least give him some form of reasoning that keeps it somewhat sane.
Old ones don't fawn over, care, probably don't even know about this backwater planet and it's 200,000 year old race of hominids.

Of course, I'm not implying cthulhu is a big cuddly bug or anything. I'm not saying the sole reason he hates us and wants to eat us is just because he fought dr.whos, but what we consider terrible, genocidal, torturous, impossibly cruel anger is just his Monday grumpies.
He's still going to eat our souls, Nyarlathotep wants to see us suffer forever, and the king in yellow wants us to join him in taking off our masks, which probably involves cutting a metaphysical hole in your soul and filling it with physical alien worms.

>I'm trying to at least give him some form of reasoning that keeps it somewhat sane.

Here's where you went wrong. user, horror isn't sane, it isn't reasonable, the entire point of cosmic horror, if not the genre of horror itself, is to present to us and challenge us with the unreasonable and 'outside', to present to us the notion that everything we believe about ourselves, our planet, our history, our universe, is wrong or ignorant. That's why Lovecraft is effective and interesting, he did it first and he did it harder than anyone ever has and why he's basically the foundation of half of modern pop culture's tropes.

I know I sound like a disgusting elitist purist shit, but you're really missing out on how rich cosmic horror can be. I could go into post after post after post about this, because damn it I am passionate about this and I really love Lovecraft and when I see stuff like 'He's still going to eat your souls' I wonder where the fuck that notion ever came from. Sit down and read The Call of Cthulhu. It's about 25 pages long and a genuinely cracking read. Nowhere in that story is what you describe mentioned. There's no soul-eating space Satan, no infinite hatred, no motive. In fact, what the cultist tells us might surprise you. In the story, we get a glimpse of the truth. That's all it is.

You're ascribing way, way too many human characteristics to something that by definition, by invention, isn't supposed to be relatable in way, shape or context. You're giving motives to things that for all we know don't have motives, and there's the key point: we don't know. It's as simple as that, it really is. Cosmic horror is the horror and ultimate bliss of ignorance. That simple notion is wrapped up in decades of abuse from people like August Derleth who just did not get it, and as a matter of fact, refused to get it, so hard that he warped how people got it even to this day. And that just makes me mad, to be honest, because Lovecraft deserves better.

>ENB

Kill yourself my man

Ok, ok, I'll stop contributing to what OP asked and fuck off.

Yes, I know Lovecraftian horror isn't supposed to make sense necessarily, but OP asked about fucking formless primordial mist having tea and biscuits with humans like it'll ever happen. I'm trying to reason it out on how and why in everloving fuck would that ever happen.

You want to talk about lovecraftian horror? Explain to OP why he's a faggot.

I made a post back here trying to give OP an idea of cosmic horror away from the whole big scurry tentacles that permeate the genre these days. It's no one fault, you can directly trace the whole influence back to August Derleth who singlehandedly, like some nameless terror himself, ruined the reputation of Lovecraft for whole decades.

OP mentions Bloodborne, something else I'm terribly fond of. In the game, it's mentioned that the Great Ones, alien entities residing in, or beyond a dimension we call The Nightmare, lose their children, and yearn for a surrogate. A lot of the time, people interpret this as the Great Ones being caring entities. Just why they want children, or if they are 'children' in the sense of what we think of as children, we never do find out. They just say children. You also encounter two alien creatures which are non-hostile when you meet them and only fight back once you attack, giving people further reasons to assume the Great Ones aren't malevolent. Ultimately, however, any involvement the Great Ones have, in any way, and the things the humans do for them, ends up bringing about a localized werewolf apocalypse, the death of countless people and some pretty nasty and weird fates for the player character. Bloodborne is many things, from tragedy and Gothic horror to cosmic horror and action. But it is undeniably horror, nothing that happens is in any way beneficial to anyone.

Honestly, what OP is describing, benevolent eldritch entities, isn't cosmic horror. It ascribes a motive and reasoning for the entity, which is by popular definition, generally pretty harmful for the people and environment around it. That's why it's cosmic horror. What OP is talking about sounds more like grounds for a sci-fi setting in which hyper-advanced alien creatures who happen to look spooky as fuck act benevolent towards man, and how that manifests is up for discussion.

What's wrong with ENB?

OP here. No I don't know a whole lot about Lovecraft's actual works. I've heard them described by others and read summaries of some of his stories. I think Bloodborne is actually the first cosmic horror story that I've really spent a lot of time with. Thanks for the info on the cosmic horror genre by the way.

Though if in real cosmic horror you can't ascribe human motives and reasoning and whatnot to eldritch entities, and in Bloodborne the Great Ones are established to be at least "sympathetic in spirit" towards humans, then is Bloodborne not really an example of cosmic horror?

So called "Luck" is actual an eldritch being from another dimension manipulating the world around their chosen subject. It has short attention span, though and will jump from person to person and seeing its corporeal body will send you straight to mental institution

I've never understood how thats supposed to work. Like yeah a creature's body being shaped in strange and weird ways might be disturbing or upsetting to some people but how the hell does that drive one to gibbering lunatic levels of insanity?

I'd go less the Jane Goodall route, and more the "outside scientist" route. An ancient outsider quietly watches humanity, poking and prodding it. Existing on a timescale far removed from our own, it's "day to day" routine means that every seventy odd years, a random place on the planet will experience some kind of bizarre happening, and countless dozens of people and local animals will disappear. Sometimes it results in good things, like the soil in the region becoming more fertile, and plants growing bigger than normal. Sometimes it results in bad things, like localized variations in otherwise constant variables such as gravity and air pressure.

One more bump before I go to bed.

bump for interest

are you the reincarnation of august derleth

Is that good or bad?

Nyarlathotep isn't totally inscrutable. Sometimes it has evidently human-esque plans. Generally there on such a large scale and for such arcane reasons that a regular person would never be able to guess but some wise enough people can suss it out.

The protagonist of Dreamquest even manages to foil one of his plans.

To quote the Call of Cthulhu

>They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter.
>In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
>He was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse

They're just not right, especially from a human perspective. One of those things is describing a door though.

Previous Veeky Forums effort:
1d4chan.org/wiki/Merlin_Township
Also present in sup'tg in dedicated threads and the occasional cute thread/

Good because he was the first Lovecraft fanboy.
Bad because he was a hack who butchered the work into a Judeo Christian compatible canon full of absolutes that to this day remains the idiot side of the Mythos.

To be fair, there were "friendly" things in the original Lovecraft Mythos. The Yithian's and the Elder Things were both essentially just people, but with a much bigger perspective.

Yes, but they weren't nailed down. There was no official truth, just the reports of unreliable narrators and their assumptions.

What about Ghouls?

They're also literally just people.

Or Zoogs, which are dangerous but a smart enough person can put them to good use.

Are there any particularly good threads you would recommend?

>Yithians

Genocidal supremacist maniacs with time travel powers. There's nothing friendly about them, they routinely kill off entire species' via mindswaps, leaving the swapees in a state of terror and encroaching doom. That's their entire modus operandi. Oh yes, very accommodating to the test subject of the story, but sorry, you are going to die and your entire species will probably go insane suddenly waking up in dying alien bodies, but we don't care.

>Elder Things

Ah yes, the negligent progenitors of all life ion Earth, creators of a monstrous slave race that destroyed them, who decided to let life continue here because they either didn't care, it was an oversight they would have destroyed otherwise, or they found it funny. Woke up, killed and dissected the scientists at the Antarctic base.

>Ghouls

Humans literally devolving/mutating due to what appears to be overconsumption of human flesh, they sound great, counting among their numbers a mad artist into who knows what else. Carter gets away with what he does because he's HPL's stand in OC.

>Zoogs

Bizarre forest fuckers, we learn basically nothing about them other than they like eating cats and are too curious for their own good.

Because while they do have a material form, that form does not necessarily have to conform to the fundamental rules of reality. It's not something you can really represent in an image or even in words because by their very nature these things is unimaginable to us. The Color out of Space is a good example of this, the color is described as completely novel and like no other color ever seen, we will never be able to properly represent such a thing because that color doesn't exist in reality.

You're not necessarily wrong. The Great Ones in Bloodborne are indeed sympathetic in spirit, but when men call upon them to help them with silly little men-problems, the Great Ones answer as a Great One would. What is your piddly little mind doing, comprehending so little? If we're even going to try to open a dialogue, you need more eyes.

Just because to the player it seems like having a mouth full of tentacles and eyeballs under your fingernails is an awful way to exist, to a Great One it may well be a gift, and the bearer of these 'gifts' has had their sanity buckle under the burden of these lovely treats. They're not capable of comprehending their predicament.

I think it's important to stress an inherent incompatibility between humans and Great Ones.

Remember, Brainsuckers are people who have been physically altered by being unable to handle forbidden, cosmic knowledge that go around mindlessly sucking out the eyes from your brain. Rom was once a person, is now a vacuous, mindless animal used to hide a monstrous ritual that is destroying a whole city.

Bloodborne says just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do it.

Absolutely, that's what I meant to imply but I didn't actually get around to saying it. The Great Ones may well be answering requests for more knowledge and silly problems, but really those aren't requests men should be making.

Do not confuse Bloodborne with the Lovecraft Mythos.

Do not confuse the Lovecraft mythos with Lovecraft.