The Defiler Edition

No, I'm just a moron.

As a concept it's pretty neat. In practice? Eh... Makes it harder to spot at a glance and harder to search for(although the latter isn't a big deal as long as the OP contains key words such as lovecraft).

that explains why you don't like the idea

always cross link the threads at the end of the old one and at the start of the new one.
problem solved

That only kind of solves the problem for people who are obsessed with the topic, not for those with only casual interest.

if they are casually strolling on the board then they aren't the target audience of the thread so it doesn't make sense to put effort so they can find it easier.
If someone is interested in this then there is the search option. still

So wait, you're telling me, that Azathoth dreamed up all of the Yog-Sothothery and that the Dreamlands exist inside of the Dream. And didn't H.P L write this stuff based of of his dreams? So its a dream inside of a dream based of a dream.

The nightmare swirls and churns unending.

>yogception

Wait.. Is that the actual text or some fan rewrite? I chuckled eitherway.

>the "timeless world" is a metaphor for plagiarism

Yeah, the heavy laid in sexual shit makes it seem like some weird porno, I can't tell if it's serious.

>Is that the actual text or some fan rewrite?
It's Neonomicon, so it's both.

I'm trying to give my group a sampler of various lovecraftian horror games to try to find one that works best for us. So far we've gone Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, and Delta Green. Anyone have any other good systems to recommend?

New adventure idea: kill the pregnant lady.

Nemesis.

>Wait.. Is that the actual text or some fan rewrite? I chuckled eitherway.
Did... did you not read the issue before that where she jerks off a Deep One?

Currently re-reading The Laundry Files while waiting for The Nightmare Stacks.

Still as neat as it was first reading.

You can try Cthulhu Dark first, see if it fits the group.

I heard good things about Achtung! Cthulhu, a WWII setting with players from the allied faction fighting against a Nazi Cult that uses the mythos as weapons. For Savage World and CoC systems, although it include rules for FATE Core too.

Stepping out of the strict CoC formula, we got Cthulhutech (Cthulhu mechs and robots), Cthulhu Invictus (Call of Cthulhu during the roman imperium), and pulp games that can be played with a mythos background like Atomic Robo and Spirit of the Century.

I get that some Veeky Forums is based off of Lovecraft, but this thread is still off topic.

Veeky Forums would be better to discuss the works of an author. You can't slap on "other related media like tabletop games"at the end to try and make it on topic, especially if you're just going to continue on with "vidoegames, etc" in the same afterthought.

Like potentially you will just have a thread about a Lovecraft videogame. Will that still be on topic?

Most of this is just a /co/ dump anyway.

Thank you for your insights, self-appointed mod

are you on drugs right now?

You can't even try to explain yourselves?

Well we did just have an orc slave, elf slave, and kobold slave what do thread back to back where we justified each one with OP saying he'd be using all related replies ingame at some point. Blam. Suddenly and entirely bannable offense that mods crack down on is fine. At least this shits more interesting than thatgirl, cyoa, filename, and armor threads we have nonstop 24/7.

I'm trying to comprehend your stupidity because I give you the benefit of the doubt which means that you are clinically retarded instead of just a troll.

Speaking of which thats 5 CYOA threads, 2 paladin what do threads, another one about diversity dungeon where OP swears the author is serious. Again. , 2 MTG threads, an alignment thread, and another fucking That -insert- thread. All within the first 2 pages.

Oh and a blatant foot fetish thread. Yeah, our lovecraft thread is definitely THE cancer killing this board.

Never seen this before, I honestly thought it was some comic someone had rewritten the dialog for.

I'm kind of morbidly curious how the fuck one jerks off a old one though.

deep one, not an old one. Jeez, get your facts right

>swastika carved into head
>never been with a woman or a man
average /r9k/ user

So guys i’m creating my first campaign from scratch, tell me what you think about the rough idea, which i kinda like. That might be a bit out of the subject of the thread but there is no other Cthulhu themed one at that time and I don’t feel like opening a new one just for this, especially since all the interested people are probably here.

>Players are part of the crew of a small bulk cargo in south east asia seas just post WW1, pic more or less related.
>Contraband, transport of shaddy people and their untld cargo, a bit of piracy here and there, adventures on the high sea, a woman in each port, etc
>Captain takes passengers on board for free, seems incredibly anxious around them.
>Turns out they are separatists trying to rise the whole SEA colonies against the colonial powers post WW1
>is actualy infiltrated and framed by a group of cultists of the Red Flame, very wild avatar of Nyarlathotep, who plan to turn the whole region into an absolute bloodbath of pure insanity with the help of dreams and surpernatural encouragement of said avatar, for the glory of Nyarly, and usher the new era of the human race, wild and free of the fake construct of morality, etc, you know the thing. Captain being under their control which is why he is taking them on board, will end up being murdered one way or another which will give the players control of the ship.
>hopefully at that time the players will have a good idea of the fucked up things the cultists plan (though not necessarily of its supernatural part) and not be too enthusiastic about it
Cont.

>contacted by german agents who, of all people, plan to stop it
>member of the proto-Ahnenerbe (which didn’t exist under that name before 1935 so I will have to find some nice new one)
>ask them to help them in stopping the separatists’ projects
>aventures in the jungles of Cambodia, tcho-tchos hunting, naval pursuits, ensues
>end up canceling the apocalypse (hopefully)
>discover before the end the germans are actually cultists of the Black Man, other avatar of Nyarlathotep, who plan just as much as the Red Flame the destruction of the world, but think the Red Flame cultists plans will prevent WWII from happening as France and UK will not grow complacent in the interwar period, WWII that they expect will finish in a global nuclear end of the world as we know it. Which may or may not be the subject of another campaign, depending on the success of this one.

Verdict?

Misread, but honestly does it make the scene any less tasteless?

a deep one is humanoid but may or may not contain materials outside of human comprehension.
Old one is not humanoid, at all, but more or less flesh and blood. I mean they reproduce by spores and have an odd number of wings and a lot of tentacle like stuff but no hand or leg like stuff.
So yes it's a big fucking difference

>Veeky Forums
>ever welcoming something that isn't the meme trilogy

Namecalling and deflecting and no explanation to how this thread is Veeky Forums. I'm not attacking this thread or saying it's ruining the board, just asking for an explanation. But the responses are that it's off topic and you're flaunting it so I guess I got what I came for.

This general is here for the same reason we have a Star Wars general, gathering material for upcoming games and worldbuilding.

look, nowdays every second thread has someone who starts screaming that this or that isn't Veeky Forums. Because everyone has a very clear and precise idea of what is and isn't Veeky Forums but everyone has a different idea.

But apart from that here is the thing: nobody reads lovecraft anymore because it's boring. there are a lot of cameos in various media but those never go deep into the fluff.
But if you want to run a CoC or DG game you MUST know a fuckton about the fluff, otherwise you can't really create the atmosphere.
If you look closely the questions in these threads are usually very specific on how this or that work, how to make this or that work in X scenario or if an X scenario is viable or not. There is always some degree of noise but there are very little reason to talk about these stuff if you aren't interested in the CoC games.
So saying that it isn't Veeky Forums related because there are books about it is just so fucking retarded I have a hard time to comprehend it.
I mean that is like going to a /co/ thread about the batman comics and telling them to go to /tv/ because it has a few movies about batman so it belongs to /tv/

yeah Alan Moore's a weird guy

>Itt: Veeky Forums devouring its own guts with pointless bickering while ignoring the only guy bringing OC to the thread and asking for feedback.

Never fail to disappoint, Veeky Forums

I like the two aspects of same god fighting eachother and the "I accidentaly put WWII back on track". Plus, naval adventures.

Might have stolen it from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

Neonomicon is a truly awful piece of writing. OP wasn't kidding when they said they were sparing us.

However, The Courtyard, which is ostensibly in the same universe, is the best Lovecraft fan fiction I've seen. Pick it up if you can find it.

As I understand it, Moore isn't entirely responsible for this. He was contractually obligated to provide a story outline and he was in a real shitty mood. Somebody else did the awful dialogue.

>Verdict?

9/10 would play.

kat.cr/neonomicon-the-courtyard-2003-2010-digital-scans-nem-t12423949.html

>saying that it isn't Veeky Forums related because there are books about it
This not what I'm saying. This thread, in the OP description, is framed as a thread to talk about the books.

To use your own logic

>it's like going to a Veeky Forums thread about Lovecraft books and telling them to go to Veeky Forums just because there are a couple of games about it so it belongs on Veeky Forums

There's no need to call me a screaming retard because this isn't even close to that. If you have to resort to namecalling instead of even trying to justify your beliefs then there's really nothing more to be said. Enjoy your /co/ dump, buddy

Like, and obviously the direction. You can't tell me Alan fucking Moore would have that conversation just be talking heads with two weird Leng panels

you're a screaming retard. now hide this thread and let us talk about the games
our GM pitches
game mods
and inspirational material.

This thread is Veeky Forums as FUCK

...

So a while back I read an article on writing cosmic horror creatures/deities and it had an interesting method, you take the things which scare you the most, merge them together, then inflate it to end-of-the-world scale.

For instance my worst fears would be:
>a loss of individual identity
>my body slowly wasting away
>sentient things which cause harm for no purpose, they don't need to feed, you're no threat to it, it doesn't mean to do anything, just harmful by nature of existing

The results of my doing this can be seen in the last thread So Veeky Forums what cosmic horrors can you make from your worst fears?

damm linked pt.1 twice

...

Continued from the last thread: Lovecraftian space opera! Not quite happy with this section, but I've been meaning to cover it.

>THE FUTURE RACES OF MAN
Humanity is changing. This is inevitable; evolution pauses for nothing, and the sudden introduction of humans to such a wide variety of environments has kicked it into high gear. In the enclosed environments and low gravity, people grow tall, thin, and pallid. in the thin air of the Martian highlands. People are already beginning to speak of distinct Martian, Lunar, Station-born, etc. races, and the great debate is- what to do about it?
There are four general strains of thought. The first holds that the human form must be preserved, as close to the original as possible; that tampering with it will eventually lead down dark paths.
The second holds that humans should be adapted to the environments they find themselves in, pointing to examples as diverse as the 'new deep ones' of Ganymede and Europa to how well Tibetans do in the thin air of the Martian highlands.
The third argues that this will ultimately lead to the disintegration of humanity into warring sub-species, and argue for a gradual program of universal augmentation, to maintain humanity as a single race even as it changes.
The fourth advocates anarchy, every man pursing his own path to enlightenment; only barely an intellectually coherent movement, it is a thing of back-alley cybernetics shops and DIY geneticists, haphazard and often suppressed as dangerous and unwholesome.

And then, of course, there is the oldest method of becoming something more than human, still practiced by outcasts in the dark corners of the solar system.

I just want you all to know you're wrong and there's nothing new under the sun
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Duchamp_-_Nude_Descending_a_Staircase.jpg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroboscope

>it's a Veeky Forums argues about what's Veeky Forums thread
Anyway, I saw this and was thinking about picking it up. Concept looks neat; players are real-life surrealist artists (Dali, Bunuel, Magritte, etc.) in Paris in the 1920s, who enter the Dreamlands and change it through the power of their imaginations. I have two questions for the fine folks of /ysg/:
1. Has anyone played this? Does anyone at least own it? How is it?
2. I'm under the impression that Trail of Cthulhu is focused on investigation, but this game looks like the least investigative Cthulhu game ever. Is it?

>THE VACUUMORPHS
Mankind's first attempt at a servitor race, rushed and desperate. The Exodus demanded that an vast orbital infrastructure be built swiftly, and fragile non-vacuum-breathing humans were inadequate to the task. Thus, the vacuumorphs- intelligent, space-dwelling, sterile- were created, to perform the tasks which humans could not.
It worked, for a time. Then they began to hear voices.
The Vacuumorphs are, like Elder Things, immune to the mental influence of Cthulhu; when the remaining ones can be drawn to speak of it, they say that as creatures of space they are not beholden to the gods of Earth. No, they have their own gods; they say they can hear the stars speak to each other, in whispers carried on solar wind and cosmic ray. No human can hear it; even the Elder Things are lightly baffled.
They chose the moment for their rebellion well; in the latter stages of the Exodus, with Earth burning in madness below, any attempt to bring the entities maintaining the evacuation stations would have been insane and self-destructive. MAD held, and when humanity pulled out of cislunar space, they were happy to leave the Vacuumorphs to their own devices.
Now, they nest among the great space-reefs growing on the shattered debris of Earth orbit. They occasionally contend with the cultist-pirates scavenging in the same places, occasionally trading- but mostly they simply sit still, for days or weeks or months at a time, inside the machines they've built to listen to the million voices of the gibbering sun.

Would anyone like me to cover something in particular next?

These entries are all pretty fantastic. I reckon you could adapt Eclipse Phase pretty neatly to it.

Is there any life in Jupiter or Saturn? Not on the moons, but floating in the clouds, or down in the depths?

Well on Saturn there's Eibon and a wizard hunter, and a few old ones.

There's probably a few of these around as well.

...

Neonomicon is actually pretty dope if you read it alongside Moore's latest dip into the Mythos.

everything on Veeky Forums thats not 40k is off topic

civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Cynosure_(CivBE)

I feel like this is somewhat relevant, especially because I've seen a few anons asking about AIs as Mythos-type entities.

>The first Inquiry put to Cynosure was: "What is the shape of the universe?"
>To which Cynosure answered: "This question is not even wrong."
>Cynosure then terminated the connection with the Operator.

Eclipse Phase is my main secondary influence; as I said in the last thread, swap out 'Cthulhu' for 'Skynet' and you're halfway there. Now,
>JUPITER
Down. Down past the mere howling near-supersonic gales. Down past the vaults of clear air where you can see ten thousand miles without impediment. Down past the lightning-bolts the diameter of lost Earth. Down past the boundary where gas is crushed into metal. Down past the diamond continents. Down.
Of course there's something down there. The Lovecraft universe, no matter how it might look to crawling maggoty humans, is not one of chaos, it is one of order. There is no environment so hostile, no physical order so counter-intuitive, that it will not give rise to mind and hungry, hungry mouth. Azathoth dreams of life.
But humanity doesn't need to worry about the Thing in Jupiter. As far as it's concerned, anything above the metallic hydrogen is boring freezing void.
No, what humanity needs to worry about is all the life on its moons. Jupiter's sixty-four moons provide a great deal of space for Byakhees and stranger things to cavort and breed, in thrall to strange gods that have never known humanity. Their names, powers, and forms are uncertain, and exploration has largely been tentative. While the lesser creatures of Jupiter can generally be shot to death, few want to risk running into a god unprepared.
Despite all this, there is nearly human colonization on the moons of Jupiter, in that the colonists are nearly human.

>THE MARE INTERNUM- GANYMEDE, EUROPA, AND CALLISTO
Fat with blubber, those Deep One/human hybrids who elected to follow humanity offworld have taken to the vast subsurface oceans of these moons. These lightless abysses are hardly welcoming environments in human eyes, but then, the colonists aren't human.
Ganymede has already been detailed at . Now, I turn to Europa and Callisto.
(cont.)

I just like the idea of humanity having created something that's totally out of their control, but is also blessedly non-hostile. A giant artificial big brother.

>Lovecraft meets Schismatrix+
Neat.

Oddly, the same intelligences found on Ganymede also recur on Europa and Callisto. Parallel evolution has been ruled out by genetic analysis; current theories focus on 'physical movement through the Dreamlands', as the worm- and crab-men have significant Dream presence, and magical teleportation. Regrettably for the Deep One invaders, the natives of Europa and Callisto are not as helpless as those of Ganymede.
The colonization of Callisto has been complicated by the 'maws'- rifts in the water that soundlessly swallow up colonist and native alike. Their nature is uncertain; manifestations of a minor god? Extra-dimensional predators? Conventional warding is ineffective, as is duplicating the rites of the natives, but they almost never form in well-lit areas. Instead, they seem to cluster at the edges of the light, waiting for someone to come out, or the light to fail.
Deep One presence on Callisto is now limited to a handful of fusion-lit domes, whose inhabitants almost obsessively maintain the lighting, for fear of what will happen if they go out for even a second.
On Europa, the threat takes a different form. The inhabitants of Europa are expert Dream-walkers, and appear to be capable of physically entering the Dreamlands. (The population of Europa is also the largest and most genetically diverse, placing greater credence on the Dream migration theory.) More dangerously, they can attack targets in the waking world from the Dream, using knives of unknown make. These blows do not cause physical wounds, but instead cause the afflicted to fall into a coma. The Deep Ones of Europa have taken to sleeping in shifts, so that someone will always be on guard in the Dream. The Europan colony has also proven much more capable to trade and diplomacy with the natives than the Callisto colony.
While several knives have been captured, they have a tendency to vanish. They almost certainly were not made by the natives.

Are there artificial intelligences in this setting? What are they like?

Alright. This has been bugging me for a while.

Why the fuck does Wilbur Whately look the way he does?

Like, where does the lizard body, tail mouth, goat legs come from. What part of Yog-Sothoth is that. Did Yog-Sothoth evolve from something that looked like that? Did it then evolve into whatever Wilbur's brother is before becoming a conglomeration of spheres?

What would the children of other outer gods look like?

Fuck off. You are the people ruining Veeky Forums.

really hot

All the courtyard is, is the prelude to the Neonomicon.

Yog-Sathoth is everywhere and everywhen. When it takes form, it takes all forms. When it breeds, it breeds in all forms. What is birthed, is birthed as all forms. Genetics aren't really important to the Outer Gods. Existence is.

Think of the idea of him being Yog's son as poetic.

What basically happened was the touch of the Outer God mutated one of Lavina's egg cells into something amazing, constantly changeing and splitting until two viable offspring were born as twins.

One near human, but with limbs recalling more bestial ancestors.

The other totally inhuman, with only the vague facial features hinting at what progenitor they sprang from.

So Wilbur is just a jumble of random animal parts from all over time and space?

Alright, I can get behind that I suppose.

>ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI takes a number of different forms, depending on what it's doing. The first AIs created were built as research aids, and were known as Turing Oracles.
The thing is, the human brain just isn't capable of comprehending everything that's out there. When the human mind encounters incomprehensible stimuli, it tends to just slide off. Completely failing to resolve the picture in front of it into anything meaningful, the mind often just sort of blanks. The first AI were therefore created to collate information on objects that humans were incapable of drawing meaningful conclusions about. To be sure, Turing Oracles also broke down at a very high rate, but computers can be rebooted. People generally can't. The technology was swiftly extended into surveillance, searching for mind-affecting and invisible predators, and then censorware, as the rise of the internet demanded the constant monitoring of large quantities of information. From there, it spread to everything from exploration to economics.
Of course, none of these things really think like people; in fact, their not thinking like people is often the entire point. People already do a good job of thinking like people, the point of AI is filling in the gaps. AI is generally incapable of being deployed on its own; they supplement people, not replace them.
This is partly by design. Humans do not trust non-humans in sole control of vital infrastructure, and any AI is generally given a rigidly-specified single task. The Elder Things collapsed because they trusted their empire to a single type of independent bio-machine; that mistake, at least, mankind will not repeat.
Beyond that, a lot of things used in day-to-day living have AI of a sort; given the heavy use of nano/biotechnology, Anything from the roomba to life support monitoring could have at least a simple nervous system, and many computer systems use mixed biological and electronic components.

Coolio. I really dig this setting. Do you have it all written out somewhere, or are you writing it from memory? Just wondering if I should compile everything you've written somewhere or if you'd already done that.

I asked about AI because you mentioned Eclipse Phase being a reference point. I'm going to assume there are no AI as people or post-human Seed-AI types in this setting then?

Mostly humanity's genetic past. Lovecraft was big on the whole "genetic devolution" thing. If your genes used to code for chickens, lizards, apes, worms, and fish, it makes sense that there'd still be a few instructions tucked away in some disused file cabinet, right?

Partly writing it out from memory, partly making it up on the spot. That's the reason why I keep asking people what they'd like to hear about next, having specific questions to answer helps keep the creative juices flowing.

What's up with the Yithian's?

>THE GREAT RACE OF YITH
Before the Exodus, the Yith were one of humanity's four diplomatic contacts (the other three being the Mi-Go, the Elder Things, and the Deep Ones), and by far the most infuriating. It was with the Yith that humanity first really smashed into the fact that there are some things that are just incomprehensible. There are things out there whose angles form irresistible arguments for madness, things the shape of which slides out of memory like water off a duck's back, but it was the Yith that were the most annoying, all the more so since comprehension always seemed just around the corner.
Fucking time travel.
Nonetheless, there was trade, primarily of ideas and culture, but there was some trade of physical objects, carried out by burying hermetically-sealed time capsules, tagged with distinctive radioactive isotopes, in geologically-stable areas of the globe. Philosophy, astro-cartography, biological novelties from otherwise inaccessible epochs, macroeconomic theory, lightning guns; it was a massively inconvenient trade, but a fruitful one.
Communication with the Yith has dropped off since the Exodus; although not originally from Earth, their current(?) intellectual focus is one Earth's own deep past and deep future; the rest of the solar system is of limited concern to them. Perhaps, in some far-off solar system, contact might be re-established, but the Great Race, just before the Exodus, left mankind with this prophecy:
"Nothing that remembers being human shall ever again set foot upon the Earth."
It was a sombering moment.

What's the solar system look like? Is there a planet nine hiding out at the far edges as recent research seems to indicate? What's it look like?

I'm trying to stick to modern science relatively closely; Mercury, Venus a sulphurous hell, Earth, Mars usually cold and dry, etc. The one solar celestial body I've invented whole cloth is Yuggoth, out past Pluto, the possibly-artificial base world of the Mi-Go. Nobody's gotten a good look at it yet.
As for specific details of each world, well, I've detailed most of them in previous posts. If you want to hear about anyplace specific, ask me and I'll think of something.

That's an Elder Thing. Old Ones aren't made from matter as we know it.

Artificial Intelligence is not artificial sentience. There's a very, very good reason for that. Sentience is hard. People wrote stories about robots discovering emotions and learning about "love" and "beauty", but they really wanted computers that could tell them the fastest route to the nearest Alabama Fried Tacos, and then drive there.

So AI are really just "decent specialized software packages". There's an AI for identifying faces. Another for checking to make sure the angles of all visible polygons add up correctly. Another for monitoring water purity.

But they don't have personalities or desires or anything. They don't even /known/ anything, not the way we do. That would be pointless, and potentially, very very dangerous.

If you want something with a complicated mind you can relate to, take a human brain and mash it about, or do some fiddling with speed-grown embryos. Don't try and program it from scratch.

>dat bestiary
Azzy and Yoggy are so far above the rest of their tier it's ridiculous.

This. Sadly its a shit chart and it gets pointed out everytime its posted and it never changes. Like that 3rd game curse /v/ image i'm almost sure its just for trolling purposes and people occasionally mistake it for truth.

Y'golonac already covers mine

Ever read After Man?
And don't forget the Saturn Cats (Moon Cats)

Isn't Nyarly just as strong as Azathoth because he's an aspect of him?

This might be fanon that I've taken as canon.
Saturn and its Moon Cats or more seriously the city of R'yleh and its abundant cultists.