No Lovecraft Thread on Halloween

So I used to write short little encounters with different fantasy monsters described as more alien beings in my best impression of HPL's style. Does anyone have any request/suggestions for creatures?

Inspired by Bloodborne to dive deeper into Lovecraft, I bought a collection of Lovecraft's stories. Read them and enjoyed some more, some less. Any other books you dwell guys would recommend to nurish my thirst for knowledge on?

I've got:
Dagon
Nyarlathotep
The Nameless City
The Music of Erich Zann
The Festival
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colours Out of Space
A History of the Necronomicon
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow of Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow out of TIme
The Haunter of the Dark

The ones I mostly enjoyed out of those are:
The Music of Erich Zann, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow of Innsmouth, The Dreams in the Witch House.

>The Music of Erich Zann, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow of Innsmouth, The Dreams in the Witch House
you my good user, have excellent taste

I'd also recommend the Outsider, it's short and doesn't really tie into anything else but I really like it (possible bias as it was the first of his stories I read), Pickman's model is also worth a look as is The Silver Key

Well, I like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which is sort of like Lovecraft's version of a fantasy adventure tale, but you and I disagree on what good Lovecraft is, so I'm not sure my recommendations mean much. The only one of your favorites I'm actually fond of is The Shadow Over Innsmouth, while you left off some incredibly good stories, like The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow Out of Time, and At The Mountains of Madness.

motherfucking Rats in the Walls

Nyarlathotep does it again.

Focus on the players' perspective. If you're describing an encounter with an eldritch monster, make it less about an objective description of the monster and more about what the characters can see, hear, and smell about it.

You might also introduce subtle inconsistencies in how the characters seem to interpret it. For example, you might say that a monster appears to have three talons on each hand, but if it gets a good hit in, describe it leaving four deep gashes across the target's chest. If the players spot the inconsistencies, play up the uncertainty that their characters feel and how they can't really be sure what they're looking at.

Only do this if you have a good reason, though; randomness for the sake of randomness seriously cheapens Lovecraftian horror.

probably my favourite lovecraftian tale

I should maybe clarify, I meant does anyone have ideas for fantasy creatures I could give this treatment to and I'll post what I come up with here

I love it because it's so down to earth compared to other things. No squid gods from space, no sentient colors, just plain and simple "the Monster is us"

Dream Quest is great, but the Dreamland stories as a whole are kind of different from the rest of Lovecrafts work. I find its better to read them after reading his other stuff first.

Thri-Kreen

Doppelgangers.

Listing creatures is the opposite of HPL, you Derleth.

This reeks of ysg. BAIL! BAIL!

>tfw enjoy Robert E. Howard's lovecraft elements more than lovecraft
It felt so right having Conan find form in the unmentionable lovecraft monstersand tear them to pieces

To be fair, he does show up more, just in other forms.

I like them both, along with Clark Ashton Smith, Howard and Lovecraft basically are the trifecta of my favorite writers of a certain age.

He both saved the Yog-Sothothery and killed it though. Because of him, people got and will now always have the wrong perception of Lovecraft. They'll focus on the tentacles, the memes, the idea that just looking at something drives you crazy, the overt focus of Cthulhu, good and evil existing in the Mythos, the idea that there's this grand high order of existence which is the exact opposite of what Lovecraft was saying.

You could argue that by rebranding and changing the focus of it in the stories that take after him, Derleth crippled and killed Lovecraft's work as thoroughly as time would have.

I can't stand Smith's take on Lovecraft. It just takes something highly original and makes it generic trash. The only two works of Smith I've liked so far are Nyctalops and The Mother of Toads.

I'm new to cosmic horror and Lovecraft in general, you basically described what I imagine Lovecraftian horror as. If that's the opposite of the original intent what was the original intent? Is it that the gods aren't higher level beings and are more like a sort of arcane/cosmic mycelium or something?

Yes exactly. the 'gods' of Lovecraft aren't even gods, just....other life. They do not care, they do not hold interest, they exist because they exist. Man's rational worldview is wrong, and nothing can fix that; the things that exist do not drive you mad, nor do they destroy your mind. The reason so many of his antagonists are in asylums and sanatoriums is because of ennui. They despair of their meaningless, pointless existence, and they do not have the mental fortitude to cope with the meaninglessness of human existence.

Even Cthulhu, who in the merest moment of wakefulness drove hundreds of artists, poets, and other sensitive souls utterly batshit insane, didn't do so on purpose. He was merely stirring in his sleep, and woke for a moment, then returned to sleep. And that's it. His presence caused mayhem and havoc, but it wasn't even intentional. It was only a side effect of his half-awake existence. All he was doing was brushing a few ants off his doorstep.

Human life is an accident, and for all our vaunte glories, we are just a happenstance collection of intelligent pondscum. That's all. There is nothing more.

THe key to understanding Yog-Sothothery is to understand cosmicism and how the word "mythos" was used by Lovecraft and his pals.

Now, people call Lovecraft nihilistic but that's not true. What he was however, was a believer in cosmicism which is the idea that everything in the universe has a worth to it...But because of things like stars, black holes and solar systems, humans have all the value of dust in this universe and we're as important as muck in a field. Not hard to make and essentially negligible if lost. So, in a way, you could argue that there is an "order" in Lovecraft's setting, it's just a lot looser and less defined then how Derleth made it sound.

Secondly was the usage of "mythos". Originally, Lovecraft's writing wasn't even a setting. He and his friends just used similar names to support certain ideas; phrases like the Necronomicon, Abdul, cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth appear but there's no real timeline to it and they're mostly just name dropping. In fact, early on, every Lovecraft story could happen in a completely different earth/setting and the only similarities are the references to the book. You'll find that most Yog-Sothothery races and Gods only get mentioned in a few stories.

This changed around "At The Mountains of Madness" where Lovecraft thought it would be fun to start explaining things more and tying them together. You can see this in the reference to Cthulhu and his Starspawn, the Elder Things, Mi-Go the explanation of how Shoggoths are made and so forth. The Shadow Out of Time and the Great Race of Yith, add to this.

Derleth however, made a much more regular pantheon of Great Old Ones, Outer Gods and Elder Gods and had alliances, marriages and children between the different factions. There was a clear scale of mortal to god and now, Lovecraft's creations are attached to elements, like fire, earth and water. Derleth tries to codify and layout all of Lovecraft's work because he thinks it makes it easier to (cont).

And why does this bother people?

understand but it actually just anthropromorphises the Gods, making them seem human in how they marry one another, care about one another or hell, even KNOW one another. It creates an implication that there's some kind of council of all the different gods when really, they may not even be aware of each other or even be sentient enough to care.

This kind user really nails it. In Lovecraft's world, they aren't really even gods. They are just higher forms of existence, like a red giant being a larger star then a white dwarf. To humans, they seem godlike but its quite possible many of them are as mindless as asteroids and just function how they function.

It ties right into the whole idea of cosmicism; yes, humans have a value but it's horribly small in a dark, empty universe and when humans find out their role on the proverbial totem pole, it takes out a horrible toll. The big scare, and horror, of Lovecraft is essentially this; you're an ant being squished by the boot. All you understand however, is the shadow of the boot covering you and about to land on you. The big scare however, is when you find out both the shadow and the boot are just tiny fragments of the much larger human form, an entity so other and so much bigger then you that you can't possibly know it, never mind understand it.

So, to summarize, cosmicism is why people go crazy; finding out how small and infinitesimal everything you ever knew, know or loved is. Derleth ignores cosmicism, ergo his works don't use Lovecraftian themes, ergo they arne't Lovecraft and make the wrong impression.

Empiric, objective proof of humanity's innate worthless helplessness. "I'm important!" screamed the ant and all that.

>Empiric, objective proof of humanity's innate worthless helplessness. "I'm important!" screamed the ant and all that.

A thing that we are all taught from an early age.

In childhood we are taught the vast and mind boggling scale of the universe and the tiny fragile fleck of dust we stand on and how there are any number of hilarious things that could end it all for us.

And the ant is important to the ant.

Well this was being written when those kinds of concept weren't common knowledge. And just look to the popularity of religion to see how many people still want to feel that they are "special" on a universal scale.

So the main danger of something like Cuthulu is now gone?

We now look at it and decide that yes indeed that's a big fish and then the Japanese eat it.

>then the Japanese eat it.
lol.
I wouldn't mind some Cuthulu sushi.

Yeah, but you're looking at this wrong. To you, finding out existence has no meaning means nothing because you already think that but in Lovecraft's time? Huge existential crisis.

In modern times, a more fitting comparison is either Roko's Basilisk or simulation theory. Both suggest massive, earth shattering changes to how humans see reality and both are relatively modern. Even watching flatland and picturing meeting a 4D being would be more apt.

Also, the ant is important to the ant but the ant is never in isolation and to act like it ever is is stupid.

It was a bigger deal in the 1920s, when people generally were much les aware of just how big the universe is compared to us. The idea that humanity is created in God's image and is the undisputed master of the world/universe was a lot more prelevant back then.

Even today, when most people are aware at least on some level of how insignificant humanity is in the scale of the universe, we still like to attribute value to ourselves. See how popular "Humanity Fuck Yeah" stuff is, and that basically build down to "sure, the universe is huge and humanity just one sapient species among others, but we're better than any aliens because of some vaguely defined "Human Spirit" or general badassness!".

Lovecraftian horror is at its hear "Humanity Fuck You". No, you're not imporant, or special, or extraordinary in any way. You're less than ants to a being like Cthulhu, and Cthulhu himself is utterly insignificant compared to the real movers and shakers of the universe.
All our great works and all our boasting of our accomplishments is nothing but defiance of a mortal in the face of darkness. And the darkness doesn't even give us the dignity of hate. In fact, it doesn't notice that we are there at all. And then it blinks, and when it opens its metaphorical eyes, all our work has long since turned to dust.

...Except grilled cheese.

I actually finished reading the complete collected works of Lovecraft just last night. Good times.

Thanks anons, that's really informative. I didn't realize that the hierarchy of the mythos was a post hoc addition. This is why Veeky Forums is my favorite board.

Ther's a kind-of hierarchical thing going on even in Lovecraft's own work (at least when he started to actually make it semi-coherent setting). Azatoth created the universe (or multiverse, as some of his stories imply our universe is not the only one, but Azatoth is still the source of it all), and below it you've got the Outer (or Other; he used both spellings) Gods: Yog-Sothot, Nyarlathotep and probably Shub-Niggurath, being that are very "close" to Azatoth in nature and for all intents and purposes akin to gods. There's also some "lesser" Outer Gods, ie. those things that float around Azatoth and doot their flutes (the sound of which is apparently what creates the natural constants), but we never learn anything about them other than that they exist.
Beyond that, there's not real "hierarchy", just a bunch of weird things. In an universal point of view, Cthulhu, humans and bacteria are all equally meaningless. They're just in different scales regarding to each other, but humans being bigger than bacteria doesn't make them any higher on some universal hierarchy.

Except you can't manage anything of that scale.

Even now, humans are so fixated on the things wqe are doing to the environment, the fauna and flora of the world, eco-friendliness and desperately struggling to save dying sdpecies. Even if we commit nuclear holocaust, the world will abide; right now our own efforts only barely manage to trouble us for a year or two. There is alswyas some new plague developing, some unbeatable disaease, some ecological disaster we cause, some horrible issue with the temperature of the world.

And that's all self-centered arrogance.

The world, the universe doesn't really care. Japanese comit suicide in the hundreds yearly. Africans rape, murder, and eat each other. China, Russia, Germany (because it isn't the Euyopean Uniuon, it's Germany pretending that others have a choice) and the USA play economic tug of war with Saudi oil, Israli terrorism, and Iranian zealotry as the rope for no real reason, so that the politicians can keep themselves in power.

And in the end, Cthulhu wakes, and all their struggles and efforts mean less than nothing. You cannot destroy Cthulhu. You can't even harm him. He barely exists in the same dimension as we do and he will wipe out our species by accident.

And he's not even an actual important figure - he's a priest, a simple pastor, a slightly glorified minister for his own people. He can actually MAKE a difference in the way the universe works. He can - and has! - made the other elements of the universe take notice long enough to lock him in the basement for a time out.

That's how insignificant we are - Cthulhu earned himself a time out by annoying the Elder Gods. He didn't even get smote or destroyed, just time outed for a few millennia.

Nothing we can do will make any difference to the universe no matter how great our technological achievements are.

I'd disagree about it being humanity fuck you. The other beings in the cosmos are always seen as degenerate, depraved, amoral and apathetic. They aren't evil but they're disgusting, without morals and do horrible things to further their own ends.

Humans, those who haven't abandoned their humanity anyway, are always shown in positive lights and are always smart, educated people willing to risk their lives for science, the truth or the human race.

Lovecraft also always argues from a human perspective, with the alien and other being argued against.

Eh, even that was really loose. It's hard to say who's lesser and who's greater; Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth are the two biggest deities but that's the closest to structure they have besides Outer Gods > Great Ones

>You can't harm Cthulhu
Tell that to the Norwegian guy who rammed him with his boat so hard that he fucked off back to sleep.

How do you know that was Cthulhu? Wasn't he said to have a bunch of spawn with him? Would the big guy really be the first one up and out?

Lily Chen is mah waifu and best girl in all Lovecraft-related media. Just had to get that off my chest.

arkhamhorrorwiki.com/Lily_Chen

But lovecraft himself is a hack with laughable personal neurosis that are the basis of all his writing.

...

>But lovecraft himself is a hack with laughable personal neurosis that are the basis of all his writing.
At least he went to prom.

Make a Jap captain of the the steamboat.

Cthulhu is weak to steam boats and the Japs have a racial bonus against kaiju and can take kamikaze feat for free at first level.

Additional evidence

>MFW I'm dating HP Lovecraft
>I have no face

It's important to keep in mind what the anons said about the public perception of the universe in the 1920s. Prior to then, learned Westerners believed that the Milky Way was the ONLY galaxy in the universe. When scientists in the 1920s started to discover that these "stars" were actually entire galaxies, it scared a lot of people because the real universe was much more vast than anything people had conceived up to that point.

In Lovecraft's mind, the physical laws of our galaxy only applied to our galaxy, as each of these other galaxies was seen as its own separate universe, with its own rules for existence.

Imagine if scientists tomorrow suddenly announced that not only do parallel dimensions exist, but they're full of terrible life and there's nothing stopping them from crossing over to our reality and eating us except for the fact that they haven't noticed us yet. That's close to the mindset that a lot of people had when they learned about these alien galaxies.

kek

Have you ever seen characters from JJBA statted up in any of the franchise rpgs or board games? Like seeing the Ghostbusters as investigator sheets for Arkham Horror

Think it would be funny and pretty likely since how 'popular' the series is. Hell Parts 2 and 3 were pretty pulp being continents-spanning journeys that in one case finished with facing an inhuman creature and its cultists in Egypt ending in most of the investigator party dying horribly.

It's probably the scariest thing Lovecraft wrote.

I loved it as a kid and I still love it now.

The real monster is race mixing

If we're talking about fan expansion content I'd rather see how someone would try to incorporate the content of the original Shadow Hearts into a game of AH. (The party as PCs, side characters as Allies, end boss as the Ancient One, the Gentleman in the Tophat as a Herald for it...)

I ahve always felt that people ignore the "tangible" aliens of Lovecraft in favor of Old ones

Mi-go show up all the time, but Yithians are pretty much ignored Shame, they are in my opinion far more terrifying than other Lovecrafts creations when you really think into The Shadow Out of Time.

That's pretty much the real monster in a lot of Lovecraft's work.

...

>story based on a flock of them hunting a group of people at night
I want this.

What the fuck is the point of the Flying polyps?

A race of semi-ethereal space conquerors they came down to ye olde Earth, got bitchslapped by the Elder Ones under the sea, built cities on the Land, got beaten down by the YiffYiffs and retreated underground then eventually came back to exterminate the Yithian who respond to being overwelmed by bailing from their bodies to another time-period using mental powers.... then the polyps proceeded to just sit in their hole and not do anything ever again instead of retaking their cities above ground.

pfffffft.... just read lovecraft's works and it dispels all of this.

Their essentially the Shoggoths mixed with Cthulhu.
A race of terrible monsters that fought and scared other aliens that we would considered more human/malevolent and will once again rise up to annihilate mankind.
They might have gotten beaten but its clear the Great Race hated their guts and lived in constant fear of them. So much so that they kept a huge army around despite never fighting anyone expect the polyps.

To be fair the Yithians arent tangible.
The Cone Creatures whose bodies they stole and trapped in their own dying corpses were tangible.

This Yithian is your FRIEND

He fights for FREEDOM

i call (partially) bullshit. they are timeless, undying and mighty. while not gods, they do not rank among us mortals either. main thing is: we are to them like flies. or delicious chicken.

No, that fails to explain why the race of space conquerors decided to just stop what they had been doing to multiple worlds after they had a chance to continue.
Before they had built cities anywhere they were unopposed but now despite beating the other side they just... stopped, for absolutely no reason.

Its aload of piss.

The Yith were stupid as well to just sit on their tentacle limbs and let the windbags build up their numbers again in their pit, instead of getting some proper lightning-nuke genocide on.

not to mention that there are numerous cults that revere them as gods.

Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my GIGANTIC KNEES

weaksauce

>The Yith were stupid as well to just sit on their tentacle limbs and let the windbags build up their numbers again in their pit, instead of getting some proper lightning-nuke genocide on.
I cant recall exactly but per-apse they saw their own demise in the future and just decided to get jiggy with it? I mean, could they even influence that ?

...

>He can - and has! - made the other elements of the universe take notice long enough to lock him in the basement for a time out.

Wait, what? How? What did he do? I thought he went comatose because he was dependent on energy somehow gathered through the alignment of the stars and going to sleep was inevitable.

Hah Lovecraft WOULD be a total shitposter if he was born in the modern age and a /pol/ack.

JJBA draws a lot from horror, but it doesn't fit the cosmic horror genre very well. It's a different, more immediate kind of horror, where dangerous monsters are coming after you and you don't know what they can do or how to stop them, and you have to figure it out before they get you. And while they all tend to look and act weird and different, nearly all of them are ultimately people with superpowers. In fact, pretty much all the important world-shaking events in JoJo are done by humans with superpowers; it's a very human-centered setting in general.

That said, the Aztec Gods of Fitness are pretty cosmic horror-ish in the way they're portrayed. They all look and act oddly human, but it's made very clear that they're not. They're a race of ancient superbeings who predated humanity, and humans are as irrelevant as ants except when they interfere with their own mysterious agendas. They could make a good Ancient One if you're doing Arkham Horror.

...

I'd add that it was a little under a century ago that we figured out that the Milky Way didn't encompass all the stars in the universe, and that, for instance, the Andromeda galaxy wasn't just a nebula.

Joseph Joestar as an old man seems like a pretty straightforward investigator, a wealthy real-estate Tycoon who is on a personal quest searching for a cure to the unnatural curse that is sapping the life from his daughter using the occult knowledge he learned during events of his youth (replacing his Ripple/Stand powers)

Come on, man, it's not ALL tentacles. Who doesn't love some Balls Deep Ones. Granted it's a lonely fishing town so no doubt the women are used to their menfolk smelling of fish, but you got to figure they must also be some pretty damn generous lovers to be as popular as they are.

How deviant are you Veeky Forums?

Existential Despair:
>Despair, in existentialism, is generally defined as a loss of hope. More specifically, it is a loss of hope in reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds his being-thing compromised, he would normally be found in state of despair — a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses the ability to sing may despair if she has nothing else to fall back on—nothing to rely on for her identity. She finds herself unable to be what defined her being.

Being confronted with the fact that humanity is entirely meaningless is a big blow.

>So the main danger of something like Cuthulu is now gone?
Lessened a bit, maybe, but I still don't think humanity is ready to be confronted with its meaninglessness. Sure, a good portion of us may know on some philosophical level that everything is meaningless, but that's different. That's an "at arm's length" sort of thing, and we really don't incorporate it into our behavior because it's not something we really accept on an emotional level.

Also, I think we deal poorly with things that lie outside of our accepted worldview (and Lovecraftian horrors fall far outside of this). One time my friends and I were in this little patch of woods near my house getting high and some small animal wandered onto the path and we freaked the fuck out because it was dark and we couldn't tell what it was (and, you know, we were getting high). Turned out it was just a Possum, but we just about crawled out of our skins. And it wasn't just a jump-scare thing. It was a "I don't know what the fuck that is and I can't deal with that" sort of thing. The unfamiliar is scary.

>we were getting high
Fucking stoner degenerates, you are even lower in mental fortitude than the most pathetic of Lovecraft's inbred subhumans.

The unfamiliar is scary.

But the shit that breaks down your basic beliefs? That can be devastating. Like, if you learned that all your vaunted belief in science was in question and that evil spirits lurked the darkness of the night, stalking unsuspecting fools to feast upon, that would have a much more profound affect than merely the danger it posed. If those spirits were tigers, maybe they'd be even more dangerous, but they would fit firmly inside our worldview--our understanding of the way things work. And once you accept that evil stalking spirits are real, you have to question how much of the other stuff you've been taught is wrong. Because that's a pretty big departure.

Or we don't incorporate it into our everyday behaviour because it has no practical application.

It's an incomprehensiblely big universe full of shit that can end everything we know instantly and unknowingly. Doesn't put food on table.

Ha ha ha! Now tell me the one about premarital sex.

On the other hand once you uncover a danger and begin to learn about the thing it becomes alot less 'scary' even if you still fear it as a threat, which Lovecraft failed to grasp due to his own flawed understanding and mental shortcomings.

How would Lovecraft feel about premarital sex? Would he be okay with it as long as it didn't involve any damned miscegenation, the gravest of disgusting sins?

The only campaign I ever played to the end was a homebrew WoD with some Hunter rules thrown in. I got Pleasure from Pain and I had a daemonic weapon, part of my soul. It was a dagger with a beautiful yet creepyass woman as the hilt who whispered to me, and I called her Y'golonac.

Good memories.

Wrong, re-read The Call of Cthulhu. The boat goes through his head, he reforms, but the stars ceased to be right, so he returned to slumber. Not because the boat hit his head hard.

So what you're saying is Cthulhu was hit in the heard so hard he was seeing stars and passed out.

I fapped to The Thing/The Mist crossover doujin.

My first experience with the Cthulhu mythos was the first Alone in the Dark.

I always thought Carnby was pretty badass for a tweed-wearing moustachio'D alcholic detective who has trouble paying his rent, but then in hindsight the mother faced a Cthonian, several Deep Ones and abathroom monster-mouth thing without blinking (cause they couldn't render eyelids) and only packing a table knife at times.

Did you shove her up your ass at any point?

Nope, but there were other ass-related activities. I played a regular dude who was turning into a demon, so I did what any repressed sicko occult writer would do when presented with superpowers overnight. He went full hedonist.

But then he mellowed out, which was really great character development. But the GM was a buddy who took particular glee in giving me all kinds of fun consequences on the fly for anything edgy my character decided to do.

I think this is the equivalent of you waking up in the middle of the night because there is a fly buzzing around your head. You're still half-catatonic but get out of bed with your eyes barely open and swat at the annoying fucker until you bang your toe on the door to your room and decide "fuck it; at least I chased the fucker out of the room" and stagger back to bed.

A recurring theme in Lovecraft, truly.

>Even Cthulhu, who in the merest moment of wakefulness drove hundreds of artists, poets, and other sensitive souls utterly batshit insane, didn't do so on purpose.
I think people take it that if a mere moment's stirring caused that much insanity imagine what he'd do once he had his coffee and dunkin donuts.