/ysg/- Yog-Sothothery General

Wrong Town Edition

This thread is meant to inspire Lovecraftian Veeky Forums (like Delta Green and CoC) and discuss Lovecraft's works for inspiration along with anything else that fits into this genre or takes place in the Yog-Sothothery.
>Previous Thread:

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

>PDF Archive:

>Call of Cthulhu
mediafire.com/folder/h9qjka0i4e75t/Call_Of_Cthulhu

>Atchung! Cthulhu
mega.nz/#F!ywcHkIAA!ycphEhCOkbnjOvAQ4t7TBg

>Pulp Cthulhu
mega.nz/#!L9EFWSIT!o6clZxfdrVSOLkmcQz3wQ2Af9-hKsUxKc7214VynuY4
__________________
>Flash Gordon's Space Opera
docs.google.com/document/d/1LJ_beiUVa7mpeKJGPBvH2yQCMDVWXLGawz4K39Rea8Q

>AM1200
vimeo.com/102372269

>Recommend things to put in the next OP
>Please create a new thread when the Bump Limit has been reached and we are in the Lower Pages or if the old thread dies.
>If you don't, Nyarlathotep will shitpost in other threads

Other urls found in this thread:

amazon.com/s/ref=la_B0034Q9EL8_B0034Q9EL8_sr?rh=i:books&field-author=Thomas Ligotti&sort=relevance&ie=UTF8&qid=1469249258
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

We're Re-Animated baby!

>AM is in the OP
Damn good taste.

/ysg/ is deader than the cosmos, what gives?

At the rate things are going, I'm not sure the serum is as effective as it once was. We may have to try stronger stuff.

It's noon on a Friday?

What gives is that there's not enough new lovecrafty content to warrant a general - the liveliest I see it is people talking about how they interpret/use things in their own games or dropping in to share stories about their last/upcoming session. Obviously there's no new stories coming out of HPL, and even when someone shares a new piece of fiction (eg AM1200 or something from infinity plus) there's not a lot of talk about it.
I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, but generals move faster when there's fresh stuff to talk about, rather than going over existing stuff.
Plus Veeky Forums is a relatively slow board anyway (which is good).

For newcomers, there's a lot of requisite lurking while reading rulebooks or fiction, like I'm still doing. Any questions I have until I've finished reading seems pointless to ask if the answers could be already written down waiting for me.

Glaaki is disgusting and foul creature that I'd rather not go near, also I think we might dissolve in sunlight.

That only kicks in after 40 years or so.

On the timescales that we need to learn to think in, 40 years is nothing. An eyeblink.

Re-animator formula is the best, or we could all just make a deal with Nyarly.

Can somebody drop links to Ligotti's works? If he is truly Lovecraft's successor I must read them.

>>Recommend things to put in the next OP

Trail of Cthulhu should be there.

Curious if anyone here plays Cthulhu Wars

Also Pokethulhu.

From left to right on pic for my guess on who these guys are:

Nyarly?, Cthulhu, Hastur/?Y'golonac?, and ?Shubby?

Correct, third is Hastur/KIY.
I've played it once with my gaming group, was a lot of fun, would like to try the expansion which adds Yog-Sothoth

Noice.

(*Doots*)

Yes my group plays it semi-frequently

I'm thinking about starting up a Call of Cthulhu tabletop session with a few beginners. I'm used to tabletop, but anything I should know as a DM? Any way to help set up the horror?

Just don't have Nyarlathotep show up in your 1-5th session.

Have small time cultists instead.

Has anyone here read some of W. H. Hodgson's work. How do you feel it compares to H.P. Lovecraft?

>amazon.com/s/ref=la_B0034Q9EL8_B0034Q9EL8_sr?rh=i:books&field-author=Thomas Ligotti&sort=relevance&ie=UTF8&qid=1469249258

I'm partway through Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe now and Ligotti is fantastic. I wouldn't go so far as to say that he is a successor to Lovecraft, he's hardly defining a genre in the same way HP did, but the man just gets horror. I think his work should be studied by anyone who wants to write well crafted short horror fiction.

I realize this is more of a thread for HP Lovecraft/Eldritch Horror style games, but what Love Craft stories should I read? I just reread Call of C'thulu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow out of Time, The Dunwich Horror, and the Shadow over Innsmouth, but yeah, something else would be good, maybe something less well known.

The Color from Out of Space

Haunter of the Dark, Herbert West-Reanimator, Sweet Ermengarde

That spoiler

These so hard.

Also the Music of Erich Zahn

I read The House on the Borderland a couple of years ago. While I can't make a very precise comparison, I do remember that it was sufficiently eerie and had elements of horror, weird fiction and cosmic horror just like most of Lovecraft's stuff. So, yea, if you like Lovecraft, I recommend The House on the Borderland.

Have a rare suicidal Lovecraft my dear /ysg/

Random question: Would anyone watch a movie, or play a game, based on Lovecraftian mythos (and stays damn true to H.P. Lovecraft, even the racist bits) but all of the monsters/special effects are made by, or at least have the sign of approval of, H.R. Giger?

What would such an unholy union turn out to be like?

Are Lovecrafts like Pepes?

It was called Alien.

I fucking love those movies, but it was pure sci fi, I am talking straight up Cthulhu teir stuff.

Like a fusion of the Alien movies, and the ending of the Hellboy movie. Where he literally fights and kills a primordial God. (or at least the corporeal manifestation of one)

At the Mountains of Madness with art direction by Giger?
Were the fuck do I sign up?

Something, something Prometheus and del Toro

That seems a bit grandiose when most of Lovecraft is the monster was some inbred son of an eldritch horror.

>inbred son of an eldritch horror
New favorite insult.

I love you anons.

And we love you, random user!

God help me, I'm thinking of running a 1980s DG game in which drug cartels are dealing drugs that have side effects of intense hallucinations and a cocaine like high....as well as insanity, death and may move you through space/time. So what I'm going to be going for is some sort of unholy union of DG, Sicario, and Miami Vice.

Given the bending of space/time I figured I'll involve the hounds of tindalos at some point. I was wondering if anyone had some suggestions of enemies or events that could happen during the game to flesh it out.

Tcho-Tcho are always good for a DG enemy that is spookier than normal cultists while still being a manageable threat. Maybe the PCs have to look into a human trafficking ring and end up finding out a gang of Tcho-Tcho immigrants is behind it. They could be producing the weird drug on the side.

What you're describing is pure sci-fi, you don't win in Lovecraft stories, you just delay the oncoming threat for an unknown amount of time. While it may be several generations or thousands of years to the protagonists, such a span of time is insignificant to Things From Beyond the Realm of Man. That realization of the insignificance of the role man plays is a vital part of Cosmic Horror

Look up Tiger Transit in Delta Green Countdown, as that totally is a thing with a source of information on it. As everything is still kinda vague between Old DG stuff and new DG stuff you could write the campaign as the Tcho-Tchos in Chicago being taken down. There's also tie ins with Shub-Niggurath fertility cults that are assisting in production.

Or listen to episodes 4 and 5 of the RPPR Delta Green campaign: God's Teeth

Eh, his prose, narratives, experiments, theme usage and pontification of human consciousness and imagination are all far superior to Lovecraft.

I hesitate to put him down as another lovecraft successor because they're both doing their own, quite different things.

Also, Nethescurial, Dream of a Mannikin and Les Fleurs made me shit myself. Good luck trying to make a setting using his stuff though.

Base it off of Hotline Miami
youtube.com/watch?v=oKD-MVfC9Ag

They're far more valuable.

I love what you've got so far. My suggestions are that:
1) the drug is highly addictive.
2) an overdose causes the person to skip forward in time several days (but they're too high to realize it until they come down).
3) the drug doesn't actually kill anyone directly, but bodies are still being found full of the drug with strange unexplained injuries.
4a) Hounds of Tindalos notice and hunt down anyone that time skips in this way, feasting on their internals.
4b) Star Vampires are attracted to the drug (perhaps ground Tindalos powder to explain the effects) and are draining addicts of their lifeblood.

I recommend reading the HPL story "Hypnos" if you haven't already, as it in part deals with the use of drugs to travel to strange places in space/time.

but Yog-Sothothery is not full on horror. Later lovecraft tended more and more towards sci-fi and the dreamlands fantasy intertwines with it. True you can't change the insignificance of mankind but you can in a sense come to peace with it.

Two parts of reality, as expressed through the Pantheistic/Panentheistic godhead Yog-Sothoth turn the insignificance of mankind right on it's head.

First is that the past, present and future are all one in Yog-Sothoth. This signifies what physicists and philosophers call "eternalism", the belief that all moments in time continue to exist even after we have passed through them. Einstein's general relativity was a huge influence on lovecraft, arguably even more significant than Poe Dunsany. Einstein theorized that time was like space and just like space, does not cease to exist when you move away from it. Yog-Sothothery reflects this with it's non-linear notion of time. Why does this lessen the insignificance of our short time on earth? well you know that 2000 years of time you managed to buy stalling the great old one? it will never go away.

cont.

The second is the all knowing nature of Yog-Sothoth. Our human concept of "insignificance" is based on the idea that we have limited minds and limited time for us to focus on things too small to dramatically alter our lives, so we do not pay attention to things we deem insignificant. But to whom, on a cosmic scale might we be insignificant? To Cthugga perhaps, but Cthugga is in turn so big and so unchangeable as to not warrant our own attention, except for the portion that he might effect our lives, which is changed because it's insignificant to him. However, as long as Azathoth keeps dreaming there will be beings of the right amount of significance to try and appreciate us, such as the Yithians. Beings within Yog-Sothoth, and thus Yog-Sothoth itself, will always remember us and infact know us to a greater extent than we ourselves do. What can insignificance mean to if you are not forgotten? Not one atom is so insignificant that it's story doesn't play out with perfect attention to detail.

The universe is an initially scary and bleak place, but that's only because people tend to apply human metrics to things which are not human. In ancient days the whole universe was personified, and thus comfortable. In modern times we have a tension because we see that humans are not the center of the universe, but we still have human expectations of the universe. This tension is a large part of what cosmic horror initially expresses. But it is possible to overcome this tension by realizing that you are Yog-Sothoth, only hiding your infinite nature from yourself as you take on the mantle of humanity for a short time in a little space. The fact that you don't feel like Yog-Sothoth just means you are really good at not meta-gaming.

tl;dr: you should legitimately worship Yog-Sothoth

That sounds quite similar to the concept of the Godhead and CHIM in Elder Scrolls cosmology. Basically, the Godhead is the being who dreams up the universe. Usually if you somehow understand (as in truly understand and believe, not just have somebody tell you the universe is actually a dream), you zero-sum yourself from existence because you lose all concept of yourself as a distinct being and not just a piece in the Godhead's dream. CHIM is what happens when you're both perceiving yourself and all other things as part of a vaster pattern and still being able to maintain a sense of self. In essense, zero-summing is caused by you realising you don't exist (and thus disappear in a puff of logic), while CHIM is understanding that you, and everything else that exists, are simultaneously both yourself and part of the subconcious of the Godhead, which also means that you ARE the Godhead (or at least a small part of it). This gives you some degree of reality-altering ability, because you're now aware that a) the universe is a dream and b) your mind is part of the dreamer's mind, effectively making you a lucid dreamer (reality-altering ability likely limited by how much you can go against the consesus of the rest of Godhead's subconciousness, may result in erasing yourself from existence due to causing inconsistencies within the dream, consult Vivec before using CHIM).

Then there's Dagoth Ur (pic is one of his Ascendant Sleepers; that used to be an elf before altered by Dagoth Ur's will), who is an even weirder by-product of the same concept.

The West Records is a lovecraftian webseries that needs to be on here. /r/thewestrecords on reddit.

The more I read about the cannibalistic midgets, the more I realize they have to be a part of it. Was planning to have the drug be a part of the leftovers from the fall of delta green. Only makes sense to have the Tcho Tcho be the ones to bring the shit over from Vietnam.

Knowing my group, at least one of them will take this as inspiration for how they try to play.

Love the suggestions. Definitely has to be addictive, and I really like the idea of people being shot forward a couple of days. I'm personally hoping an investigator doubts themself in a situation where they have to take the drug to maintain their cover, only to be shot into the future a couple of days.

I was also thinking that prolonged use of the drug could lead to the user becoming more and more monstrous. While use wouldn't directly kill you, you end up going mad and being able to rip people apart with your hands.

Can't say I've read much about star vampires, but I'll give them a look. I'll admit I'm leaning more towards the hounds because it might make more sense with them being attracted to people who fuck with time.

Also, my bad if formatting is attrocious. On mobile at work and it's a bitch writing this out on the phone.

>playing skyrim and hearing about the elder scrolls for the first time in the dragonborn line I knew these guys were directly influenced by Lovecraft, even if the "clothes" were different.
I'm not as deep into it but that is literally how reality works, with one major difference, our Reality is so much larger (or ourselves so much smaller) that our reality altering is very feeble...at the same time people have observed very small examples of human minds directly altering reality.

This CHIM is they call it is a serious thing in our own reality. I couldn't really have described my own outlook better, and it's even closer to it than eastern religions (for whom a vast portion of enlightenment requires forsaking your individuality with the realization that you are part of the dream, rather than embracing the illusion).

Nyarleothep, Cthulhu and Shub are all beyond human understanding and not insignificant to humanity while they themselves find it insignificant. Please, don't forget how all pervasive the idea of cosmicism is in Lovecraft's work.

There's also Amaranth, which is the final step in that whole process.

That's why I made sure to differentiate between killing the actual God, and merely destroying his corporeal manifestation. Sure, it may take some time, maybe even a couple of centuries, but eventually the God will physically re-manifest itself.

Put some Rats in your Walls, friend.

Redpill me on Hastur, /ysg/.

May the Dark Gods bless you /ysg/, you guys are great.

So how about that Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones game

He's Jewish.

He likes the color yellow and shepherds.

Don't say the name thrice. As I understand it Bloody mary only picked that part up in more modern versions of the story, and could be considered a cautionary tale for a different name.

In universe, he has an avatar called the King in Yellow, and is related to the cursed play of the same name. His origin in our fiction is a bit complicated; Ambrose Bierce was the first to use his name, Robert W. Chambers made him sinister, and then Lovecraft added him to the menagerie of unspeakable gods.

This

He is hanging out near Aldebaran somewhere

Sorta sketchy but it could work.

Killing a monster should only succeed when the players have major advantages, and even then they should come out with casualties. Not necessarily deaths, but hurt in a way that makes them question if they should have fought the unnameable thing from beyond time in the first place.

...

Hastur is perhaps the least "definite" of all the Lovecraftian horrors, the one with a mess of conflicting accounts and imaginings. Is he a big scary alien? Is he a corrosive meme? An ancient god-king that supplanted an equally horrendous queen? An alternate reality parasitising our own?

Hastur being the King In Yellow is even up for debate, given that the names are often used to refer to other things. In Demoiselle D'Ys, Hastur is just the name of a guy, a falconer.

He's strong associated with art and especially decadence; the colour yellow, of course; madness, especially viral madness.

Adjectives are your friends. Remember that you're the narrator of the Lovecraft story your players are reading so try and make everything more detailed and interesting than "you're in a square room". The players will want atmosphere. Talk about how the wallpaper peels, how the building is an out-of-style design and creaks like an old man's bones.

Expanding on that a bit: Lovecraft was especially fond of using esoteric and recondite adjectives in order to build a sense of alienation and strangeness. Even mundane things were often described in this fashion: it's not just waves washing against against a cliff, it's the hideous grey immensity of the sea gnawing at the roots of the cliff with mind-numbing inevitability. Run-down tenements slump unwholesomely and gruesomely against each other, like gangrenous lepers struggling to hold each other up even as they slowly slough to maggot-ridden pieces.

Also, a suggestion I saw in some long-ago thread about the use of misleading descriptions: the eyes play tricks. Especially when dealing with eldritch horrors from beyond time and space, the first description should never be accurate. The players see a severed long green shirt-sleeve on the ground, then it resolves into a severed, broken arm on the floor, rotten and bent in ways no arm should, then they see they were wrong, it's a giant snake rearing to attack- /then/ it becomes into the manipulator-tendril of some extraterrestrial horror, already lashing out. Liberally seed your monster descriptions with false details- unless they get a good opportunity to take a long hard look at it, if they've killed or immobilized or just driven it out into the open in the final confrontation, they should not have a clear idea of what it looks like beyond the broadest details. Even those may be wrong. And, of course, you could have multiple antagonists, similar-looking but with wildly different capabilities, and if the players only ever see one of them at a time, well, it's not your fault if the players assume they're only dealing with one thing, and build up a wildly inaccurate picture of its abilities.

(cont.)

To quote the man himself: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." The players should have to work for even scraps of good information, work more to separate good information from bad. Ignorance should dog their every step, and even once they've won (or simply escaped) they may never answer all their questions.