/ysg/-Yog-Sothothery General

Lovecraftian Anatomy Edition

This thread is meant to discuss Lovecraft's Works and other related media like tabletop games, video games, etc

Previous Thread:
The Texts of Lore that Men were not meant to know:
eldritchdark.com
hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/

A good playlist about the gods and other entities of Lovecraft: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-aprpylMuCdnaFEYwTzAobqUZGxS1D5p

>The Black King watches us

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=qC_iOYvTBYM
houseofthenecromancer.blogspot.com/2012/01/demons-beyond-kadath.html
sa-matra.net/quotes/orz/
foxnews.com/tech/2012/02/03/missing-scientists-mystery-deepens-in-frozen-antarctica.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

The drawing in the OP is Lovecraft's original sketch of the Elder Things by the way

reposting from last thread:
I read some of lovecrafts works and I loved them, I also like this concept about madness letting one see things others normally can't, So I was thinking that for one character I am playing, on a non CoC campaing, he slowly starts going insane, at first hearing whispers he dismisses, then starts being paranoid about a lot of things, things get worse and worse, his dreams are not even nightmares, but a collection of random events, ranging from historical events, everyday situations to cryptic messages and or warnings, easiest way to visualize it: someone took a bunch of film rheels, cut them then mixed them into one big mess.
The character looks like it may never recover, then next day, he's calm and happy, as if every single one of his problems was magically solved overnight. Friends assume their help worked wonders, but in reality, the character realised insanity was a good thing, but at the same time, it was not for everyone.
Now the idea may sound stupid I know, but how would I expand on the last point, the whole "is still insane, but doesn't show it, character does best to pretend he recovered sanity"

>Has a habit of talking to himself
>Freaks out over rather mundane happenings

Prepare to cringe

You called?

What is it?

A mini for Yog Sothoth. ~150mm in size.

Have one for the Dunwich Horror.

Anyone have recommendations for a Call of Cthulhu game geared towards beginners? I've been GM a lot before but I've never actually ran a game for completely new players.

The Thing is looking great

Insane people don't think of themselves as insane, but I'm somewhat reminded of quite a few stories. The first one in the King in Yellow comes to mind in particular.

So, Lovecraft's account of Antarctica is fiction, right?

Right?

Everything in Lovecraft's works are real.

Of course, just look at the lack of mountains in Antarctica. There's no trace of any hidden mountain range.

Oh, right, the Gamburtsev... at least they're not near a giant high cold waste.

Oh right, Dome Argus is above them, the coldest naturally occurring place on Earth, and highest ice feature in Antarctica... well, at least there's no great Antarctic Sea for the city to be built near.

Oh right, Lake Vostok, located between the gamburtsevs and Dome Circe. An ancient undisturbed salt lake likely filled with specialised life (since they've found micro-organisms in the ice samples when drilling to it)... But at least it's not anywhere particularly Dyer, er Dire.

Oh right, it's the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility.

How do you guys feel about vaguely benevolent Lovecraftian beings? And I don't mean in a Derleth sort of way.

I'm thinking of a setting and I'm considering having the central deity of the largely benevolent religion be a horrible madness causing squiggoth. It's sentient but, like Azathoth, a 'blind idiot god,' not entirely comprehending the largely insignificant world it has created quite possibly accidentally - just like a human probably isn't going to find a great amount of significance in their own footprint or sneeze. Also like Azatoth, it's kept placid (possibly even happy - I want this thing to be horrifying but not evil or as completely, utterly, amorally alien as Lovecraft's outer gods) by the prayers, songs, chants and all other forms of worship aimed at it around the world.

The way magic works in the setting is that it's basically the equivelant of physics. You look really deeply into how the world is made and what it's made from, in order to gain control over it. More powerful magic requires delving deeper into the secrets of reality, and because all of reality stems from a squiggoth, there's a positive correlation between magical power and insanity. Divine magic happens when you manage to gain the squiggoth's attention or favour and it implements knowledge of the world into your mind in such a way that it doesn't cause harm, or it alters your mind to be able to handle the knowledge - so the church has some very powerful magicians, but they in turn suffer from a sort of Lovecraftian, cosmic amorality; they know so much and have so much power the rest of the world just becomes sort of insignificant afterwards.

You know, I like everything you said, but what I really love is that it's all a Squiggoth. That just makes the whole thing totally awesome.

If accurate, this is an awesome post.

Well, some of the distances are a bit off I must admit. Lake Vostok's not exactly close to the Gamburtsevs, 707km to be specific.

And of course they're subglacial, so Dyer'd have to have entered it by some kind of hole in the icea, so it's possible.

The Vostok Subglacial Highlands are presumably the actual mountains of madness and plateau where the Elder Things had their civilization, the Gamburtsev's are likely the even greater mountains beyond, where rose the Elder Pharos.

I likes it. I likes it a lot.

Have a smug Derleth as a reward.

Derleth might have been a hack but he was actually pretty handsome. No homo.

Not to crush your ideas or anything but you've described a typical CoC/DG character. Or at least what I think of a typical character to be

veemon/10

>A mini for Yog Sothoth
So a solid chunk of space-time?

youtube.com/watch?v=qC_iOYvTBYM

>there's a positive correlation between magical power and insanity.
I don't necessarily like doing Lovecraftian "insanity" as insanity. I see it as gaining a perspective or understanding on reality that is so fundamentally different from what everyone else accepts that you look insane from their perspective.

Let's say you're actually picking up the telepathic messages of alien beings. You try telling anyone about that and they'll call you crazy. Maybe you gain the ability to see extradimensional beings, but no one's going to believe you if they can't see them for themselves.

The truth of the matter is that you're not the crazy one, it's everyone else who's blind. Of course, they're never going to believe you unless you find a way to show them that you were right all along...

Antarctica really does have subglacial mountain ranges, and they recently discovered the largest canyon on Earth buried under the ice as well. There's also multiple subglacial lakes, out of which Vostok is the most famous, some of which have been sealed off from rest of the world for millions of years. The place is seriously as spoopy as in "Mountains", although presumably with less shoggoths.

Also, fun random fact of the day: the dry valleys of central Antarctica are by far the most imical place to life on the planet. It never rains, as the air is so cold and dry that any air mosture immediately turns to ice. They've studied soil samples taken from there in order to learn more about possibility of life on Mars (which has pretty similar conditions), and found them to be completely sterile. Nothing lives there, not even bacteria, something that's completely unheard of before. You find bacteria miles deep in Earth's crust, and in the Atacama desert (considered the dryest place on Earth, although in actuality the dry valleys of Antarctica are even dryer, as you literally never get non-ice perspiration, but Atacama has been around longer so it has a longer record of no rain), so to discover some place so completely devoid of life was actually shocking and borderline inexpliable.

>How do you guys feel about vaguely benevolent Lovecraftian beings? And I don't mean in a Derleth sort of way.

houseofthenecromancer.blogspot.com/2012/01/demons-beyond-kadath.html
It can work.

> vaguely benevolent

imma big up one of my favorite aliens again. extremely friendly and happy, the game does a nice thing with their language, where your handwavey scifi translator machine can't quite figure them out, so it peppers their lines with not-quite translations in asterisks, eg "hello *extremely*! i hope you like to *play*". they're introduced via a spoopy story where you find logs of some race's scientists going too far, various reality-warping shit, and that race now simply doesn't exist, all their planets abandoned - and then you meet these happy yellow freaks, who talk about how they are not *many bubbles* like us, and how smooth and comfy this place is, and how they've been searching for so long and they like it here. they give the impression that they genuinely are friendly, as much as that concept applies to them, but there's a jarring wrongness to them that's really well done imo.

sa-matra.net/quotes/orz/

This is actually how I like to see Lovecraft insanity myself

Are sufficiently intelligent super-computers good substitutes for elder gods in a CoC game?

Are we talking AM levels of reality manipulation?

These threads are awful and in no way Veeky Forums related.

I love HPL and play a lot of CoC, DG, Laundry, et cetera. This though...? It's cheap, derivative, missing the point entirely, and unrelated to games.

Stop this circlejerk until you have something relevant to contribute. This is even worse than "How Sunless Sea?" threads and SCP wankery.

Read a summary of the Laundry series.

If you don't like it, filter it. We just wanted a place to congregate. This is 5 hours later so I doubt you'll read this.

Kinda.

Man, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was good

>forgetting that Veeky Forums was created to circlejerk about Warhammer 40k

...

why is the Great Race of Yith the most based species in the universe?

Because you obviously have one squatting in your brain!

The much dreaded Shan-Yithian!

I'm a big fan of how the Yithians were described in DG Future/Perfect.

I figure I'll nick that version for my own games, even if I prefer the Laundryverse.

Holy fucking... a Yithian in the hands of the bureaucracy. This cannot end well. It's Torchwood level stuff.

>A level 4 containment grid, fed by 3 redundant thaumic generators, one plugged into the London subway, one on the London grid, one on an ancient dieselelectric locomotive, hidden in some abandoned tunnel under the Thames, all to hold.. what exactly?

>It's definitely a thing. It has organic parts and a shape and all that. And it isn't some dimension bending hocus pocus. But that creature held in that humming ward strong enough to hold the river above if it did happen to be external (there are rumors...) extends beyond that almost fragile shape in spacetime. It is said to be a member of the Great Race, which is to say the Wormhole Aliens from Deep Space Nine who gave The Sisko all those visions of the future and could never understand that his time was in linear progression. And much like Jake's mother they can slip into someone and awkwardly stalk through linear experiences for a while. Sorry for the spoilers. Being stuck on a powered grid is very awkward, even when you're used to linear time. They do it to you in training.

>Anyway, the thing seems perfectly content, as long as there's someone talking to it. And guess who has the next shift!

Great Race are superior to the Elder Things, right? Like the Elder Things are incredibly advanced but ultimately they still seem to be 'mundane' creatures.

I'm kind of working on a scenario involving the Yithians, the OVERSHOOT committee, and the establishment of a second TURNSTILE (the site for continuation of government in the case of a a disaster)

This goes back to the old scenario Bad Moon Rising from The Great Old Ones. In that, we're introduced to the British Lunar Expedition. Yes, the Brits had a space program long before anyone else, it was kind of on accident though.
Basically, they found an active gate at the bottom of a flooded coalmine, which led to an abandoned Yithian monitoring site on the moon.
According to another scenario (Blood Moon, in Strange Aeons) the expeditions continued throughout the 20th century.
In a Laundry supplement, the OVERSHOOT committee is designed to deal with all matters concerning the British Lunar Expeditions and its survivors.
With CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN fast approaching, the UK Government's going to need a new War Headquarters, and where better than the moon?

So yes, I'm working on a British Moonbase, and a shadow feud with the Yithians over its establishment.

Yeah, the Elder Things are probably the most "human" of the weird alien freaks out there.

They're made of the same kind of matter as us, have minds we can kind of understand, etc.

So, just came across this thread. Always liked Lovecraft, but never got around to reading the whole collection.

It's inspired me to work on a setting - something like Delta Green, I suppose - but I want to include more fantasy elements. Not like happy go lucky stuff - horror, because that's what the old tales, myths, and legends are all about: death, horror, 'don't do this or you'll be eaten'.

I was kinda aiming for this stuff to be the bigger evils in the setting. That sound interesting at all?

Yeah. Being a big fan of Lovecraft, I included mythos-like elements into my setting, although I haven't really done anything particularly original or interesting with it. Mostly the biggest antagonists in the setting are dark elves who worship the Outer Gods, and you occasionally have weird cults popping up. I did want to keep things in line with the mythos, though, so the Outer Gods or Great Old Ones themselves would not make an appearance (barring possibly Nyarlathotep in one of his many masks), and the threat comes motly from their mortal worshipers who try to summon them or wield their power for their own ends.

So are the Yithian's aren't they? They just understand differently advanced science.

bump

Bumping.

>Those who give themselves into madness see the lovecrafian horrors as cute girls
Now I see it all

Conical bodies (pic related) are most likely made of regular matter because they evolved on earth and lived here.

The minds inside these bodies which are the real Great Race come from another planet/galaxy/universe and are most likely nontraditional in their make up.

Although we cant be entirely sure.

To make matter even more confusing remember that the Great Race breeds in their stolen bodies and produces new members of their race. So how the hell does that work?

The new bodies become vessels for other Yithians to inhabit?

From a strictly naturalistic viewpoint, a mind is the way it is by the structural/chemical nature of the brain that it emerges from. When the Yithians inhabit a brain/neuronbundle/whatever, they likely have to physically change it in order for their mind to exist within. If they did this via genetic manupulation, it would mean that the traits that allow for a yithian mind to exist within the parent bodies would be passed down, and the resulting child would be, uh, yithian. It also means that anyone who's body has been inhabited by the yith technically meets all the prerequisites for being a "yith," unless they genetically tweak you back, which seems unlikely, because not doing so seems appropriately horrifying.

It also means that if you had been inhabited by a yith, your children would sort of be... half yith. Mentally, at least. It also means that Conical bodies inhabited by the human who has been transferred might technically be... part human, and offspring of yith inhabiting those bodies (unless they, again, genetically de-toxed the part of their brain structure that allowed a human mind to exist therin), would be part human.

Fuck.

Having Half-Yith children has happened before.

Cthulhu Live: Lost Souls has them relying on that to make hosts who'd have less effect on the time stream, at least before the native genetic engineering technology would allow them to make proper constructs.

And of course Harvey Walters in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

What exactly is Azathoth

It's the formless progenitor of the universe. A mind with no intellect, a creator with no goal.

The entirety of existence is merely the result of its thoughtless dreaming, and it is kept in that state only by the maddening lullaby of it's servants.

do those servants exist in this universe?

Yeah, they're kind of like a mostly formless mass playing a pipe of some kind (occasionally it's an Aulos)

How do they know they need to keep Azathoth asleep?

Er, whoops. Meant to reply to

Because if Azy wakes everyone dies.

It's not specified.

Given that when he does wake up, it is possible to send him back to sleep, that his brief awakenings can show them that the universe starts to unravel.

Then what is Yog-Sothoth relation with Azathoth?
Are they the same being but with a split personality?

Maybe, Maybe not. Yog-Sothoth is all of existence itself. He's always existed like Azathoth so it could be a possibility.

Very vague. Did Lovecraft have a plan in mind for both?

Lovecraft while being top tier never explained everything, he had a novel about Azathoth he was going to write but he never finished it.

No, Yog-Sothoth is different.

One likely suggestion is that Yog-Sothoth is the perimeter of the multiverse, given physical form. Its manifestation inside our reality, as a mass of spheres, is a representation of the fractal nature of reality.

There's some question if applying the term "entities" to Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth is even applicable, or if they're more deifications of natural processes.

Can you read this unfinished novel somewhere?

I always saw Yog-Sothot as omniscient, but ephemeral, and Azathoth as omnipotent, but retarded.

King of a duality type thing.

Well, there's many options as to what they are, what they are like, and how you portray them.

In fact, have a bunch of options crudely cut and pasted from Trail of Cthulhu.

A commonly accepted theory is that Yog-Sothot is the universe/multiverse. It exists simultaneously in every point of space and time because every point in space and time exists within it ("Yog-Sothot is all-in-one and one-in-all, past present and future are one in Yog-Sothot"), and is normally incapable of manifesting in our universe because that would require it to enter itself.

If Azatoth dreams up the universe, then Yog-Sothot is the dream.

>Nyarlathotep made up Azathoth
I actually love this one.

Or to go all Platonic on us, the universe is just shadows on the wall.
Yog-Sothoth is the wall.
Azathoth is the flame.

(Which actually has some fun when you consider the holographic theory of the universe)

That makes me cringe and smile at the same time.

Then my work here is done.

It's writen part has no relation to the big guy. I heard it was planned to be a journey of a dreamer slipping out of its boring grey world and unravelling the mysteries of the universe. In fact, It's so short I could write it here. Just a second.

Here it goes:

-----------------------Azathoth-----------------------

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into spaces whither the world's dreams had fled.

Of the name and abode of this man little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one leaned so far out and peered at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive a man to madness who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the tall cities. After years he began to call the slow sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existance no common eye suspected. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the close air of his room and to make him a part of their fabulous wonder.

(Part 2)
There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold, vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men's calandars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore fragrant with lotus blossums and starred by red camalotes...

--------------------------END-------------------------

Sorry for the format, the only thing I have is a .txt where I saved it long ago.

Thank you very much for posting this

imagine if George R.R. MArtin write this much from the next GoT book and then dies

More work for Brian Sanderson.

Lovecraft is my favorite hack

So, if Lovecraft writes romantic fiction about Conan and Krull, is that technically Hack and Slash?

If Lovecraft wrote a book on Randolph Carter learning about Computers from Nyarlathotep it would be a Hack Hacker

Randolph Carter vs Shodan-Niggurath?

I actually want this now.

Lovecraft writing Starcraft.
Just to confuse the everloving fuck out of people.
Actually, I think Lovecraft writing that kind of sci-fi would've been interesting. I mean, we probably wouldn't even notice that everyone's white in his future.

how it should be

...

But in Lovecraft's future, Chinese or someone else would crush the whites and take over to make it properly horrible.

Well, he did write (or at least rewrite and lengthen) some more standard sci-fi.

In the Walls of Eryx.

Some distopian Chinese overlords and a resistance of white freedom fighters.

That said, towards the end of his life he began to stop being so racist. Even regretting some of the overtones in his previous work.

Poor guy was just a scared little man in a world too big and scary for his own comprehension.

Ah, the Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan?

Also, it's worth noting that Australia survives relatively well for around 500 years at least.

So basically Flash Gordon is Lovecraftian.

>not Nyarlathotep's space Egyptians
Son, I am dissatisfied.

So ultimately we need the soundtrack to At The Mountains of Madness to be entirely made of Queen songs?

Just imagine the Shoggoth chasing Danforth and Dyer to the wonderful sound of Don't Stop Me Now.

Lake Vostok is spooky as to fuck.

foxnews.com/tech/2012/02/03/missing-scientists-mystery-deepens-in-frozen-antarctica.html

Or Bicycle Race