How would you go about making a campaign centered around systematically destroying nihilistic and cosmic horror?

Stupid enough to get laid pretty consistently.

His racism was less the 'gas em' variety and more the passive 'golly my race is just so good' from what I've been able to figure.

Yes but none of those events changed anything because humanity is fucked anyway. It's like in Hellboy; short term victories ultimately changing nothing. Also, there is a clear very obvious order of importance in lovecraft's work. The horror comes from humans only fitting in at the bottom-mid scale. Just like how, irl, a sun or moon has greater scale or more impact than a human.

He did say himself that he never had any interest in sex. Apparently when he was 6 or 7 he read about it all in a book and hearing it so scientifically ruined it for him.
>"When I was six or seven I was of course curious about the allusions which I did not understand in adult books, and about the prohibitions imposed by elders upon my conversation. Being of a scientifick and investigative cast, I naturally followed up the mysteries step by step in encyclopedias and other books - for with my temper no one dared seriously restrict my reading. Ending with the medical books of my physician-uncle, I knew everything there is to be known about the anatomy and physiology of reproduction in both sexes before I was eight years old; after which curiosity was of course impossible. The entire subject had become merely a tedious detail of animal biology."
They may or may not have actually fucked, but he likely didn't enjoy it.

That's not to say that humanity COULDN'T change things.
Again, just because they haven't doesn't mean they couldn't.
The Whateleys are a good example. They almost changed the fate of a god, and while they failed since that would have been super bad for everything NOT worshiping Yog-Sothoth, the fact remains they almost did something cosmically important.
Nothing is more important than anything else, simply more powerful.

Also, I hope I'm not stepping on your understanding of his works. I'm a big fan of his stories and writing and enjoy discussing it with other fans since my friends don't read him.

Lovecraft died too soon. I would have loved to see his reaction to the nuke.

>Cthulhu knocked the fuck out by a boat
See, this is how i know you're the kind of ignorant shitposting cunt who mouths off about shit they don't know anything about.
The boat did nothing. It passes through him and then he immediately rematerializes, because he's not really made of normal, solid matter.
You're the kind of cunt who endlessly whines about how much they hate a film they've never seen or a book they've never read. Or even googled. You're just idiotically spouting incorrect arguments you've seen other people make.
Get your head out of your arse.

Okay you fucking cunt-face, listen the fuck up.
I was civil. I was patient.
I fucking LOVE my Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
I read that shit since sixth grade. I read that shit when my aunt died. I read that shit when I was stuck in traffic with my father during a 17 hour trip across the country.
So let me address your shit piece by piece:

The boat does in fact hit Cthulhu and BURSTS HIS HEAD.
"The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern"
Because fuck you if you think I would resort to sitting on GOOGLE and talking without having any idea of the thing I have spent YEARS reading, here's the fucking passage from Call of Cthulhu.

YOU are wrong. Cthulhu is hit because he has fucking physical form you braindead bangel fucker.
You are right that he does reform after, but the fact remains that Cthulhu got HIT. He was solid. He was material.

After that, the world, which up to this point was basically designed to end the moment Cthulhu reawoke, doesn't. Keeps chugging.
The author then goes on a little rant about how cultists probably want his balls on a silver plate but that's beside the point: The boat did do something.

My head is firmly where it belongs.
Go fuck yourself.

Ant bite my finger. Ants as powerful as humans.

We absolutely lack the means to stop the ants spreading all over the USA.

You can die from being stung by a jellyfish smaller than your fingertip.

And the point was that everybody is unimportant in the face of the universe - ant, human, Cthulhu are equal.

Fatal allergies to ant venom are a thing.

user, was getting BTFO part of your plan?

In internet nobody knows you're a ant.
There is projects for destroying species.
Humans eradicated species in the past, but poison make us all equal.

Something something boat, no survivors

mean
not

The only reasonable weapon against nihilism is the power of friendship

So I'd run it like pic related. With lots of fucking laserbeams. Powered by friendship

Species get eradicated all the time in nature. Look any previous grand extinction events.

Oh, I'm not annoyed, just confused by how you're reading it.

The thing is, yog sothoth will wake up anyway. This is something that's going to happen and is well known by all races. Yes, humans do show the ability to use magic and ascend, becoming eldritch abominations themselves (see; the thing at the doorstep) but as can be seen from Wilbur, asenath, the Deep Ones and more, humans have to stop being human to acquir such power and even when they do have it, is is infinitesimal. Either slowing down or speeding up the clock minutely. No large changes will occur though;even the polyps, yithians, migo, elder things and the mound folk will despite their science and power, fall and fail.

Knowledge destroys you in Lovecraft due to its power but no matter what you learn, the highest powers will still be above you.

Also, Cthulhu and his star spawn children are both physical matter and something more exotic. Damaging his physical form still leaves the non-physical parts of him intact.

Aby irritation I have is purely towards yog sothothery + hfy fans. Honestly, what's the point?

>Species get eradicated all the time in nature. Look any previous grand extinction events.
And it's mean that humans and ants equal?
No. Humans can destroy ant, ants can't destroy humans.

NOT YET HUMAN, BUT SOON OUR DAY WILL COME!

Gentlemen.

Yeah I hated the ending, just give us a bone and let us kill the evil not go "lol nothing you did mattered because it will wake up anyways."

Get that shit out of here, pic related is how you take on the unknowing horrors of space.

I killed 32 heroes to get to here, I've spent countless fortunes, killed horrors from the abyss infinitesimal times, Dismas is carrying HIS OWN FUCKING HEAD FOR MORE DAMAGE AND I DIDN'T KILL IT FOR GOOD!?

To scream NO, FUCK YOUUUU at an uncaring universe

My interpretation was differant. It wasn't so much that it will wake up anyways, but rather our family must guard that place and eventually one of them will sucumb to the madness that stems from it and attempt to awaken the evil again before his descendant comes to stop it.

I thought the point was more that your family is trapped and can neither leave the evil alone nor permanently defeat it.

What would happen if he piloted it?

It would whimper and fail. Central is an idiot.

That would be fine but the humans always win in HFY. Interestingly, I think Ligotti + UA I'd the closest you can get to having both.

Ha no major spoilers ahead. The Earth is just a crust that was built on top of the egg. That's right, you are fucking one fucked up egg that hasn't hatched yet. When it does it will rip Earth apart like a wet sack of shit. Your quest is in vain but fitting your boot in your traitor of an Uncle's asshole just might be worth all that pain because fuck that guy.

>XCOM equipped with Gunmen
The aliens can see Shen's boner from orbit. Alternatively, Shen Jr is Niagara Falls.

Like fuck he is, you can only hope to be half the man Punished Bradford is. He will fuck you up and it will be by the numbers.

It depends what you are aiming for because by definition you cannot have a nihilistic and cosmic horror setting where everyone stays alright and also destroys all the cosmic horrors beacuse part of the point of nihilism is that you actions are functionally meaningless.

There are only three options: A. its not a real nihilistic cosmic horror setting. B. The protagonists cannot truely destroy the cosmic horror only hold it off for a time. Or C. where the players can destroy it but only by becoming quasi-cosmic horrors themselves.

HE. WAS. CARRYING. HIS. OWN. FUCKING. HEAD. FOR DAMAGE.

It never mentions if other family members before the Uncle fell before, it just seems that he was the first to finally crack. In fact it kinda seems that the family forgot about just what way way fucking below them as he did have to spend a fuck ton of time, effort, and money just to find the gate.

Besides it wasn't madness that drove him on, it was his lust for power and what he did to get what he thought he wanted only a sane man could set up all those plans and pull them off. That and your family can leave, you had to be called back remember?

It's both. In the ending it does mention that basically the stars will align (not sure if metaphor or not) and the heart will awaken shattering the earth.

But it also says
"So seek solace as one befitting our lineage" [Focuses on a pistol and letter]
"And take up your vigil, haunted by that sickening prose..."

So maybe that is just the game finding an excuse to relapse, but it infers that you guard the manor for so long before sending for another of your family to come guard it from what you ancestor awoke.

According to his wife he was a consciousness and thoughtful lover who was "more than adequate." His male friends figured he found it so unpleasant and took so long to climax that, by dint of perseverance, he always gave his wife an orgasm but she insisted that he'd taken the time to learn how to please her specifically out of husbandly duty.

>All these people implying I'm not gonna be waiting for the heart with several 16 pounders and enough TNT to make Hiroshima look like a gnat's fart
I do not like losing.

You are literally fucking retarded. It doesn't mean shit all that Cthulhu's head went pop because he's a Elder One. He doesn't care if he has to wait another hundred thousand years before he comes and wreaks our shit because time is something ignorant humans like yourself worry about. If you want to wank over something go to r/HFY. Maybe you can pick up some basic reading comprehension while you're there.

If you were expecting a victory in a game which literally screams out the pores about how Yog-Sothothory it is and then act upset you didn't win, you must have either no idea about the genre or just be entitled.

Why is there so much available information about Lovecraft's sex life.

I'd hate to know just how much is available about Tolkien's.

There's archives available of a letter he sent to his son in which he had the Talk with him.

Unfortunately Sonya burnt their private letters, so we'll never know how if he ever talked dirty to her.

That's Tolkien, not Lovecraft.

Tolkien, or Lovecraft? Because I hate to imagine either.

I meant Tolkien. Don't think Lovecraft had a son, did he?

Also who the fuck describes yog-sothoth as evil. This sounds like Derleth shit.

Not just her either. It's unfortunate a lot of Lovecraft's friends held really progressive views for their day, because a lot of them threw his correspondence out when they realized what a gigantic racist/classist he was.

The problem with that is that the story just turns into another dime-a-dozen Stop the Ancient Evil slugfest.

What makes cosmic horror horrifying is that the Ancient Evil doesn't really get stopped.

Tolkien's almost the polar opposite of Lovecraft. He and his wife were pretty much an OTP. They met as kids, and she eventually even broke off a prior relationship when he proposed. (Keep in mind he was Catholic, so they actually waited a long time before actually commiting)

Magicka.

Ants on this planet out mass all humans on this planet. And will definitely outlive us as a species.

He said of her that she was 'well assimilated'.

I was under the impression they all took the piss out of him for it? "Oh Howard you funny old racist" kind of thing?

That thing certainly need a bit of "If THEY fear me, what horror i become?"
Easy achivable through scene with mundane boring stuff like a line in a shop.

This is right. You can see it most clearly in works like Shadow out of Time.

Only the Great Race of Yith is great because they alone have conquered time. Everything else, eldrith horror or man, loses to time.

It's something I think he picked up from Dunsany. Time was depicted as the devourer of gods in Gods of Pegana.

>Boats

user, please. It's clear the big C got wrecked. He's described as reforming as he sinks back down but that's it. He lost. He's got to spend a few more rounds recharging.

He took it form Medieval descriptions of Satan. There were stories of Satan being struck by swords only for him to reform T-1000 style because demons were conceived of as being sort of like clouds and sort of like water. You can find it in the Malleus Maleficarum.

>knowledge destroys you

Unless you were an elite. It's something a lot of people miss when they read his work. Compare Dr. Armitage and especially Randolph Carter. There's a hierarchy. Doctors are able to banish away monsters like Armitage or befriend Yog-Sothoth (no seriously Carter does that in Through the Gates of the Silver Key). Then you have normal guys that freak out because man is but a mote in the eye of tentacled gods. And at the bottom you have racist caricatures who OGGA BOOGA ME WORSHIP the great old ones because.

The ultimate ignorance is in worshiping these creatures. The ultimate knowledge is in understanding how they work and making it work for you.

Lovecraft does NOT show that knowledge is dangerous. Only that one needs to git gud scrub.

Yog-Sothoth describes all thinking beings as being put facets of larger thinking beings and I believe this reflects Lovecraft's philosophy nicely. There's always something greater until you hit an absolute Aleph point of consciousness.

You I like. You get it.

I'm impressed that people rate Azathoth higher on the power scale than Yog-Sothoth. The key and the gate would totally kick the daemon sultan's ass.

He actually thought nonwhite people tended to be horrible almost always. That said, he became much less racist over time, probably at least partly because of his friendship with Robert E. Howard, who, while not necessarily NOT racist, was less racist than average for his time.

He had Conan lead a group of black pirates which makes him look like Martin Luther King against modern day /pol/.

>study the manuscripts, learning just until you feel like you're going to have a breakdown
>have someone else do the same, each of you filling in gaps in the other one's knowledge, adding people until collectively you have an understanding of the stars and how they must be aligned
>figure out which star is most essential for the Old Ones returning, and then just keep the cultists from resurrecting Cthulhu until we can develop FTL travel (which should be possible if we're ignoring physics enough for the Old Ones to exist at all and may someday be possible IRL lol idk)
>also make a weapon that can blow that star up
>blow that star up
>stars never align correctly
>old ones BTFO

I think the players just need to be more or less super heroes with access to something exra-ordinary that can harm, drive back, or counter the cosmic entities they face.

>Sound of a star blowing up awakens old ones
What now?

We use our secret weapon. Rocket propelled fishing boats

Years ago someone on /x/ posted an idea of how to deal with Cthulhu

>The stars are right and Cthulhu wakes up
>can't stop the motherfucker
>Humanity has a humanity fuck yeah suicide moment
>detonate all the world's nuclear arsenal on the same point (Cthulhu)
>Earth goes out of it's orbit, humanity is destroyed but that way the stars will never align again so Cthulhu is banished forever
>a small species of naked apes destroyed a god

Knowing where anything is on the scale kind of misses the point of HPL stuff.
The universe is meant to be murky,chaotic and too deep to discern real placement.

Azathoth is both all powerful but also an utter invalid
Yog-Sothoth is less powerful than Azathoth but he is everything

How the cosmic order works is not intuitive and the vast majority of it is hidden from mankind. It's a side of nature we've never encountered.

What the lasting impact of humanity is an unknown. Where we are is an unknown. We can fight gods one minute and get kicked in by petty imps the next. By the time we learn what our place really is we will be ether fundamentally different beings or dead.

Earth is just a small island on a dark sea.
The best any lovecraftian character can do is deal with shit as it hits the shore
Because mapping those waters is suicide

If I had to send a team of magical girls against a cosmic horror, I'd go with the Sailor Senshi. The final villain of the third story arc, out of five, was one, so they already have experience in that area, and have only got stronger since then.

Robert E. Howard seemed to be of the 'White Man's Burden' mindset, where he considered White Anglo-Saxon people to be the most advanced culturally, but not inherently better and just needed to act as a guide for other races, like in Africa. Also, a lot of Conan's fellows were foreigners of off-white shades who often had skills that were different, but still super useful, than the locals who were sort of germanic-slavic white people.

Fairly certain HP thought all black people were backwards savages until they were exposed to 'superior European culture'.

Yog-Sothoth's spawns, who are connected to him through unknown means but can hear his will, are evil and malicious.
I can only assume user was going the 'like weird glowy-orb space dad, like half-goiat cheese-smelling son' route.
Kinda like his morals are objectively bad for most things we consider good and therefore we can classify it as evil? idk, just trying to get into the mindset without, like you said, going full Dereleth.

That's not how it works. They cannot take physical form as long as the stars are out of alignment.

Also
>sound in space

Too vulnerable to train gropers, old men in caves, family friends, and tentacles.

youtu.be/8CT_txWEo5I
youtu.be/GWCJkG31h0c
not sound but...

If it was defeated it wasn't a cosmic horror. Those are the rules.

I believe it was more a wanting him to be remembered for his work, not for how ridiculously stupid his beliefs were sometimes. To the point where even Lovecraft knew how weird he was. He had an actual phobia of people of color, to the point where he could intellectually be aware there was no reason to be but emotionally he couldn't help himself.

Nyarlathotep confirmed for not cosmic horror. Good to know.

Cthulhu too.

Cthulhu wasn't defeated. They make that pretty clear in the story. The stars weren't right, he got woken up early.

Depends on what your definition of "defeated" is.

I mean, yeah. He was beaten in the sense that he got his head exploded and realized he had to go back to bed, but not in a preventing the inevitable apocalypse sort of way.

Ever lost in a sporting event or a specific contest, fight, or event? And yet here you are. You don't have to kill someone or make it so they can never try again to have defeated them.

Howard's writing can occasionally surprise you with a 'wow that sounds super racist', but it's a surprise and mostly comes off as dated sounding assumptions.
Stuff you get kinda used to if you read or watch most anything from the 1930s and back. Like even Lincoln will come off as racist in this matter sometime.
Howard was somewhat progressive for his time, though not very.

HPL was racist even for his time. I like some of his work, and think he made some very important contributions to the development of literature, but neither forgive nor forget his racism. It's present even is his stories.

This thread is still up? Damn, I guess competing with the Lovecraft general is easier than I thought

>It's a bunch of Cthulu-wank and whining about muh Inevitable death and muh purposeless universe

Figures.

>even Lincoln will come off as racist in this matter sometime.
Lincoln went on about how America should never break and he'll do anything to keep it together, then a year later tried to convince a group of black people that freed slaves and other black people should leave and form their own colony, He didn't even consider them "real Americans." Dude was pretty fucking racist, and I do mean for his time. And no, this isn't some Confederate apologia. Slavery is fucked up, and yes the Confederacy was concerned slavery and not "state's rights." It's just that for much of the Union, it wasn't about slavery. Howard was far more progressive than Lincoln.

Leiber is my favorite writer from back then, and most of the issues I see with him are occasional sexism that's pretty consistent with his time, but I get the impression that if asked he would've been expressly for equality for women and such.

>watching Community literally right now
>this post is made

To be fair, the game up until that point has a definite duality in nature; failures and losses get you lines about how desperate and overwhelming everything is and how failure is looming, but the victories and saving graces bring lines of hope, of a light at the end of the tunnel, of rallying and pushing back the darkness. Your guys can go crazy from the stress, or the pressure can bring out their hidden valor, making them act as heroes and turn the tide for the venture. The hamlet grows and recovers, your troops get stronger and more skilled, and though everything is still overwhelmingly shitty, there's always a sense of hope, that you only need endure the hardships so that you may press on and finish the task.
That was the appeal to me; it was a good mix of typical Lovecraftian horror, only with a system to fight back that didn't ruin the spirit of the horror. It was a scenario of "what if the Call of Cthulhu party was a group of people who were armed and prepared to deal with the eldritch from the start, rather than a bunch of average joes with no idea what was happening?" Stupidity gets your troops killed, but intelligent foreplanning and care can get you through to the end.
The ending lost that duality. It focused only on the despair and meaninglessness of the whole thing, without any of the hope, foolish though it may be, that had been present throughout the rest of the game. It abandoned it's own unique formula to pursue the same song and dance of every other lovecraftian derivative.

Said it far better than I ever could have.

I would say that 'the ending' applies to the entire last leg of the game. The Darkest Dungeon itself cheats and changes the rules constantly.

>Turns out human military is much more powerful than they expected

>"Well," O5-13 said, rubbing his head sheepishly, as the Nameless One, Devourer of Worlds, and the Terror of the Ancient Erekesh Civilization lay in a smouldering, bloody pile on the sands of the Ancient Desert of Reality. "I feel like a bit of a donkey. It turns out we've been panicking all this time and all it took was a couple of 105mm artillery shells to the head."
>"Do you think we should ever tell them that we had them running in circles sprinkling holy water and blood around for no reason?" O5-12 wondered.
>"Best not to let them know. Otherwise we'll look like idiots."

But what does it matter if every time he forms we smack his ass back down? He would never wreck our shit, humanity confirmed master race in space baby, hail to the king.

The stars were right. Its why the city rose out of the ocean in the first place. The whole build up throughout the story was because the stars were right

Big C got punked. He got wounded and went down and started regenerating. All that was missing was a "CURSE YOU POWER RANGERS I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME".

Also, remember Armitage and Carter. They won user, they won.

"the thing to remember heroes, is that for all its claims to the contrary the creature is merely powerful and strange. It is an alien and hostile mind embedded into the underpinnings of the universe, a malevolent wrinkle in the fabric of existence. To interact with our world and further its mad nihilistic agenda it has moved its anchors onto our plain. They are to it as your heart is to you, vital to the larger entity and vulnerable on there own. They are well protected and mighty in there own right, but if enough of them are destroyed quickly enough the creature's mind will unravel and it will be unmade."

PC's must overcome some number of dungeons within a reasonable timeframe. If they take too long the earlier slain anchors heal. If you're feeling motivated you could come up with a bunch of ideas and have the plays tell you which ones they think would be fun, and have those be the anchors the pc's go after.

"Field report, lieutenant?"
"Well sir, if I may be so frank, I feel like we may be the assholes in this situation."
"Lieutenant, you're walkin' on some thin ice there. I remind you that the enemy we are engaged in currently wants to devour civilization and destroy the human race. You startin' to sympathize with the enemy?"
"No sir. I just never thought I'd see it."
"See what, lieutenant?"
"The look on a god's face when they meet an A-10. "
"Do you have any regrets callin' in the air support?"
'No sir. Whole coastline smells like dead squid though, sir. Gonna take at least a week to clean up the mess."

Gods help the Gods if Russia gets in on this action full force...