Unaussprechlichen Schrecken - Call of Cthulhu Minus Cthulhu

I've been wanting to run a Call of Cthulhu game for a long time but I've got a problem: I hate Cthulhu.

Not Cthulhu himself, and not Lovecraft, Lovecraft is great. But the modern era I feel has diluted the horror, and the RPG hasn't helped. Too much showing, too comprehensible. The 7th edition seems to be aware of the path the RPG was on when it removed stuff like servitor races.

They actually wrote a whole supplement about it, Nameless Horrors, mentioning the tragic situation where a horrible monster appears behind the investigators and they're like "Oh it's a ghoul, they resist guns so we'll need melee attacks." But then they release a fucking Field Guide to "mythos" monsters with a dichotomous key, as if you're birdwatching or some shit. You can tell a blarp from a goob cause a blarp has an orange schmengle and a goob's is blue. Which I feel misses the point of Lovecraft so hard it's not even on the register.

So I kind of want to look away from Chaosium altogether. Anybody else in the same boat? This is a thread to share stuff that you've seen in media or came up with yourself that fits the Lovecraft/Call of Cthulhu themes and imagery, but isn't mythos. Stuff your investigators won't recognize. The greatest fear is the fear of the unknown, after all, and the mythos is the opposite of unknown at this point. Here's some of my faves.

Michael LaBossiere's adventures are good examples and I think they're all free now. Short, freaky, monster-a-week style scenarios that provide good ideas for stuff of your own if you don't like the format.

The Secret World's Filth is awesome - thesecretworldguide.weebly.com/filth-lore.html - and I'm cribbing some of the ideas for my own contribution to the thread: Something akin to the Filth leaks in a cave and links the minds of those exposed, forming an alien consciousness that gets smarter and more demanding with each new brain in its network.

And pic related, Rawhead Rex, the child-eating Irish Grendel.

Check out some Hellboy. Sure all he has to do is smack the bizarre things but that's because he's big mojo. Everyone else has a damn hard time dealing with it all, even if they know what hocus pocus is supposed to deal with the nonsense that's going on. It's often the case that there's some trick making the case complicated.

In my CoC one-shots, I always tried to come up with something completely new, that still evoked the atmosphere and feel of Lovecraft's works. Minimal explanation, few answers, just terror and frenzied attempts at survival and slap dash solutions. The entire genre is about fear of the unknown and unknowable, which basically precludes using established, familiar threats, unless you can angle them in a way that evokes the same response.

Kenneth Hite does some good work on both reinventing stale Mythos creatures and providing new or underused ones in his Ken Writes Anout Stuff work.

If you're looking for CoC with lovecraftian shit replaced with surreal horror that's extremely hard to predict on the player's side there's always Unknown Armies.

I don't get you at all.

In 20 years of playing CoC I have never once encountered old tentacleface. Most of the time the creature is elusive or vague enough to not be identifiable even on a meta level, and half the time it isn't even a creature but a book, a song, a building, or a dream.

I have also played games where the players immediately know what's up, but it's still fun to explore it all. Character knowledge and player knowledge run on separate levels, and as the keeper you can tease both individually.

The problem you describe is meta gaming, that is in no way specific to CoC. It is more harmful in a game about atmosphere and tension, but it's up to the keeper to break that pattern.

If you're looking for a good reinterpretation of the Mythos then read Delta Green.

>Unaussprechlichen Schrecken
What you used to open the thread is
>a Derleth quote
>misquoted
>grammatical nonsense
>pretty lame

>The name is due to an effort of Lovecraft's to come up with a German translation of Nameless Cults. The title Unaussprechlichen Kulten is due to August Derleth.

>Unaussprechliche Kulte would be the German for "unspeakable cults". The form Unaussprechlichen Kulten is the dative case, suggesting a full title of Von unaussprechlichen Kulten ("Of Unspeakable Cults", as it were de cultis ineffabilibus) or similar.

Yeah, I feel like Chaosium's RPG hasn't done much good for the Mythos. I wouldn't feel bad about ignoring most of the stats concerning the creatures. I mean, idealy players shouldn't really run into them often enough or end up in situations where their stats are relevant either way.

I feel the Mythos works best in games when it's something mostly hinted at. PCs shouldn't run into a pack of Ghouls in the sewers, but they might very well find evidence that strongly suggests that they do exist. Much the same way, the PCs shouldn't run into Nyarlathotep or Shub-Niggurath, but they might investigate a cult that worships one of them and once again find something disturbing that strongly suggests that the what the cult tries to call forth actually does exist.

are you the oxford english dictionary

Chaosium went from this...

...to this.

I prefer the name of the grimoire that shows up in Lovecraft's own writings: Unsprechlige Kultern. Which, while grammatically currect (although I may have misspelled it), does not mean "unspeakable cults" but instead "unpronounceable cults". Which, given the kind of names most Mythos entities have, is probably a perfectly fitting name.

You are making it worse. At least that's complete gibberish and not just a funny case implying lost context.

HPL mentions tentacles 43 times. So it's totally fine to use them.

It's not fine to mention tentacles and call it a day. It would be like mentioning a gun and expecting the story to turn into fast paced action just from that.

>the shoggoth extrudes a gun, pointing it at you.
>WHAT NOW MOTHERFUCKER?

And they did it for good!

Is this supposed to be a negative change?

Not at all. More of a FINALLY!

Just wanted to say that Rawhead Rex is fucking metal

>Rawhead Rex
what is a rawhead rex?

The dude in OP's pic.

I fucking love monsters. OP, I totally understand your frustration on meta-gaming in CoC. Have you ever tried making your players think that an encounter was just another tired old bestiary monster, but then totally pulled the rug out from under them? I love doing that...keeps them on their toes. I.e. a ghoul appears behind the PCs, they sigh and take out their melee weapons, and then all of a sudden the ghoul doubles over backwards and a previously-concealed pit where its lower abdomen should be disgorges a plague of ravenous otherworldly locust creatures? Whoops, looks like fire was the order of the day, better drop those melee weapons ASAP...

Rawhead Rex is an old god. Not a great god, with powers and magic and such, but just a creature that is a kind of god. what you might call genius loci, a god of an area. Basically, an unseelie creature of faerie, a monster that is because it is, no rhyme, reason, or method to it's existence.

I've seen some claims that somebody involved - Lovecraft or Derleth or another author I've forgotten - was floating around 'Unenbarran Kulten', but I'm pretty sure that's yet another case of complete gibberish.

Also he has a penis for a head and goes around pissing on old men and then making them give him blowjobs.

Metal as FUCK!

I can't post any more pictures of him from the comic because I'll either get banned for gore or banned for posting pictures of Rex's gigantic cock.

Metal as FUCK!

There's also this version if you prefer that instead.

In-story, he's also a scrawny, hungry skelly version of his species and is defeated by the Venus of Willendorf, the original THICK post.

Metal as FUCK!

It might be worth checking out Silent Legions, it's a CoC type game that has a decent section on how to create your own mythos. (Or generate it randomly, if you prefer.)

What was the creature that turned you into an elephant man? It seemed so stupid, that Lovecraft himself couldn't have thought it up.

A lot of the blame kind of falls on Derleth.

The whole Outer Gods/Great Old Ones/Elder Gods/Servitors split really takes away from the horror, treating everything like a fantasy pantheon instead of having each individual horror be its own unique, unknowable brand of Fucked Up.

Sandy Peterson certainly hasn't helped either. Hearing him talk about CoC does nothing but confirm that he understands the Mythos just about as well as Derleth.

I'd like to see a setting based exclusively on Lovecraft's work, when the material that would eventually be cthulhu mythos was still horror/sci-fi rather than horror/fantasy noir.

There's a project I've been meaning to get off my ass about starting, where I go through anything he namedropped in or held similar enough themes and getting all the stated truths from them to work out what the lovecraft setting might actually be, rather than how it is portrayed with the cthulhu mythos, because I am not so certain the two are synonymous. Would anyone here be interested in the results of such a task?

It is called Yog-Sothoth.com
That and Wikipedia gets you every mention of every creature, concept, and tome.

No, they use material outside of Lovecraft's writings exclusively for their breakdowns of the entities, subscribing to concepts and hierarchies added after Lovecrafts death or without his consent, and omit some details in favor of others. That's not what I'm going to be doing. Rather I'm going to be going through only Lovecraft's work, taking note of any details, encounters or descriptions, and linking similar concepts or statements as they come, and from that derive a hopefully more accurate setting structure to what Lovecraft was writing.
I'm sick of hearing about the Gods, Magic and Evils of the cthulhu mythos, and think a more interesting setting might be hiding in the material as it was without other writers trying to expand on the ideas they liked out of it with their own.

No no no.

You use them to find the text passages, and then reference the original works by HPL. I didn't mean the overviews, their bibliographies is what you're after.

ah, aight, I thought you meant yogsothoth.com's wikia had already done what I set out to do.
Ok, that's more helpful than expected, kudos!

The problem with HPL is that you can full text something like Eldritch to do semantics with, but to find all mentions of Ghoul you need to include the ghouls that weren't named such in their story.

HP Lovecraft loved other people using his setting for their own projects. It was common in pulp writing.

true, and I know for a fact that elder things were called Old Ones in their first, and only, story, which is kinda the point to why I'm doing this. I'd probably label them ghouls for convenience's sake, but would make note that they don't actually have a name as they appeared in his stories.
Might actually label them The Rats, but have to go over the story again in more detail to establish exactly if the people below in that should be lumped with other instances.

That's entirely fair, and I'm sure he got a kick out of the stories the others made using his characters. His enjoyment isn't what this is about, he is dead, this is about trying to work out what he actually made, if anything can be, rather than settling for the cthulhu mythos as the whole, all other authors included. I guess, like, trying to figure out what hell would actually be like by cutting out the Dante's inferno depiction and only using information from the bible. Grated, that has its own heap of edition, interpretation and translation issues, let lone issues between sects and schisms, but you know what I mean.

Original dick-head version is obviously superior. It ties in with the rest of the symbolism surrounding him, with him being a sort of avatar of masculine brutality which is "weak" to extremely feminine things like a chubby old lady or a woman on her period. That version just looks like some generic brute without any of the symbolism of original design.

which is probably why Barker disowned the film

>It would be like mentioning a gun and expecting the story to turn into fast paced action
It doesn't take much more, honestly.

Hiya Chuck. It's John.

I don't know man, I was pretty unimpressed by the art in the new field guide. So many of the creature designs in the new book look so uniform, like they're coming from the same trying-to-not-look-like-HR-Giger mold. I remember the art for Ghouls and a couple other monsters not even matching the description it was put next to. A lot of the monsters in the old book look kind of goofy in that cheap 80s art way but at least they looked distinct.

They bought the art. Some was created for the books, some was made before the books. Launet has had that Ghoul on his Goomicronicon for years.

...

We might be thinking of different books. I'm talking about the one that came out recently where an excerpt from a story describing ghouls and having canine faces and hooves is right next to a picture of what looks like a generic zombie/cannibal/mutant.

Ghouls can look all kinds of ways. From normal seeming people to Gollum or even Tetsuo. They are proto zombies, degenerates hiding in plain sight, and also the vaguely humanoid things crawling through cemetery soil.

I wish Stuart Gordon was still making Lovecraft movies.