/ysg/ - Yog-Sothothery General

Well, you do get some Unnatural from the spell itself when you learn it. And, you usually learn Unnatural from the source of the spell, because it's usually a horrible blasphemous ancient tome.

With POW and WP added, assuming you know a single spell, you should have about 20-25% chance of success.

But yeah. Magic is hard. Don't fuck with magic. If you have to actually cast a spell and there's no other way, you have already fucked up and you're better off shooting yourself in the head before it's too late.

Also, there's the Half/Double rule that allows you to double your success chance if you do some extra stuff. Like sacrifice a virgin, or get some funny ingredients, or permanently burn a point of WP, or something like that.

>If you have to actually cast a spell and there's no other way, you have already fucked up and you're better off shooting yourself in the head before it's too late.

I actually agree, not because I think spells should have a high failure chance, but because a specific spell being the only way to succeed is a huge Deus Ex Machina that severely limits player choice.

Having said that, there are plenty of adventures from the old DG (Music From a Darkened Room is the first that comes to mind) where success at a magic ritual is part and parcel of the victory conditions, and with these new rules those scenarios take on a very different character.

I was referring more to in-game situation. In the sense that the Agents did not do their job properly and allowed the spooky stuff to happen, to the point where it became immune to conventional methods of containment. This is a failure in my books, and if the scenario reached this point, the best choice is leg it, saturation bomb the area and hope the A-cell is in merciful mood. But yeah, there should be more ways to succeed.

Thanks user

Planning a scenario for the new DG, though you could easily run it with CoC or Trail

The players are Scalphunters in 1840s Mexico. They ride off with a gang of mercenaries under contract with the governor of Sonora to deliver Apache scalps at 200 bucks a head. They fight with some Indians, slaughter a few, then when the player characters get sent to scout ahead they start coming across camps which have been massacred in peculiar ways, which disturb even the bloodthirsty bandits. Body parts severed cleanly and moving of their own accord, organs which pulse with mysterious blue energy, survivors driven mad, "out of phase" with reality or dying slowly of strange radiation as their bodies eat their own protein reserves. The culprits are a different sort of Indian: a trio of K'n-Yan, breaking their race's age old taboo and visiting the surface world for a "joyride", kidnapping, torturing, experimenting on and murdering surface-worlders. And, with the immediate area otherwise depleted of victims, they turn their attention to the players.

I call it "The Evening Redness in Yoth"

Sounds cool!

The sheet is great, but I'd remove the Computer Science bit entirely. And replace the SAN with something more innocuous. And then lure in some unsuspecting players with promises of western adventures.

What is your favourite part of the Mythos, /ysg/?

I really like the idea of characters gaining weird capabilities resulting from their knowledge of mythos magic, like the protagonist from Dreams in the Witch House

I absolutely adore Hastur-related stuff, specifically in the shape it's described in DG's Countdown.

It just feels like it's the Mythos in its purest form - it just exists and its existence is messing with the world. Or your perspective of it. Or both, no one can really know.
No ayyliens from deep space, no beings from the time before humans. You still go insane, not due to sudden revelations or bursts of primal terror, but to the force of entropy that is Hastur constantly unraveling the orderly structure that is the mind.
And if you snap and compare your current state to your past self, that's where the fear comes in - the subtlety and the fact that such drastic changes can go completely unnoticed, and the fact that you can't really rely on anything being constant is scary. Makes you wonder what else changed in the world and yourself that you, and others, didn't notice, and if you really see things as they are. They are not.
And the avatars of Hastur feel relatable, which makes them even better. It's much easier to fear something you thought you can understand, than something you never understood in the first place.

>It just feels like it's the Mythos in its purest form

Not to be contradictory, but ancient aliens and primordial races were core to the mythos at its inception, while the Hastur mythos, as much fun as it is, it largely the creation of modern authors.

You'll have to throw in a Judge Holden cameo at some point.

You're right, but I do agree with him that in terms of the "effect" the Hastur stuff feels more "pure mythos".
The problem with ancient ayys and the like is that it's very easy to go off the track with them (due to decades of overall terrible SF and aliens related media in pop culture, which is nested in the subconscious of the most of us), turning everything into pulp. The whole ridiculous "the mi-go fuck with us cuz our brains are special! the specialest these ancient interdimensional space-faring aliens have ever encountered in fact!!!!" and "the Deep Ones have 100000x our tech and could rek us easily but they never ever retaliate despite us destroying their cities" shit in DG is proof of this.
Lovecraft made his ancient ayys, even discounting the Old Ones, work quite well, but I think that was due to this area of fiction not being as polluted back in the day (he's one of the precursors after all), and also, of course, due to his talent. Maybe focusing more on less tangible things or threats is better for most writers today.

Just glancing through the case officer's book for the new DG, thought they suggested in some part to have the party primarily deal with the human followers of the ancient ayy lmaos, and only adding dashes of the weirder shit. When the weird shit does make an appearance it should be devastating to the party, which can only be dealt with through great sacrifice.

While that wouldn't necessarily fix the pulpy canon that you had mentioned, I would think following such a model would do a decent job of preventing the game from going off track and turning into a pulp adventure. Guess it is primarily up to the GM to not let it turn into that...they just need to keep the mysterious forces mysterious, rather than shining a light on them and letting the players hunt them down for sport.

Those can't be the real captions

Yellowdude adorer here. The bit about terrible SF is maybe right, but what I meant is with ayys there's a lot fewer ways to portray them as scary, and they basically boil down to "don't even give hints that it's the aliens, ever".
Because, if the theme of the game, or even other media is Lovecraft's classic "you're not alone and you're irrelevant", or a variation of it, the response will most likely be "golly, who would have thought?", or "yeah, we suspected that from the start". Sure, the ant is irrelevant to an elephant, that was all the rage in his time, but over the years the priorities shifted, we just accepted that and turned to each other. Because the ant matters to the ant. That's also why DG strongly advices having humans as opponents like pointed out.

With Hastur, it's different. In my view it's because it's an all-encompassing force that constantly affects and in time destroys all, and because of that and the fact that human nature is orderly, the doom is inevitable. Once you start dealing with it, it gets to a very personal level - it won't just abstractly end all reality, it will end you, personally, and you can do absolutely nothing about it, because you can't change your nature. That's cosmic horror in my books.

And, despite its abstract nature, it's relatable. Bear with me. It would be safe to say that manifestations of Hastur are not the results of his activity in the world, but rather defects in your own mind, caused by entropy constantly destabilizing its structure. Since it's your own mind, it would try to cover the gaping holes in your picture of the world with whatever pieces it has left, whatever pieces of experience YOU collected over the lifetime. But it fails to do it seamlessly or in a way that makes sense, because it's already defective. As with all things human-made, it's possible to relate with them, although in bizarre and strange ways.

Man, that was a long rant.

They aren't.

Tell me about your character

WHERE IS IT

Calm down. It's only feb-

OH FUCK ME, WHERE THE HELL IS THE GODDAMN BOOK

ALSO WHERE THE HELL IS IMPOSSIBLE LANDSCAPES AND THE FALL OF DELTA GREEN, I CRAVE THEM DESPERATELY

MY RAGE KNOWS NO BOUNDS

I like campaigns because usually there isn't enough time for characters to go insane in a one shot. Half of them might die each session but usually I have a couple of survivors who get a real fitting ending once the campaign is over.

How do you properly pronounce "Yhtill"? Just drop the "yh" and say TILL, like google translate does?

Or possibly WHY-TILL?

Why do so many Polish artists have this style?

Out of all the countries devastated by world war 2, Poland lost the greatest percentage of it's population. It also lost the greatest percentage of it's nobility (such as they were), clergy, rich folk, political and educated class in general. Following the war, they were occupied by the USSR and controlled by a puppet government for decades. Many of those people are very old or dead, but it still permeated the culture and art.

Typically you will find some very grim artwork, and and a strong taste for a lot of postapocalyptic and monstrous literature and art among the Polish.

(This was also the case to various degrees after the Spanish civil war for the Spanish, and after WW1 for the French)

Planning a holiday oneshot for Easter for my playgroup but I'm a little stuck on the monster choice this time.

The plot is that they have to somehow stop a creature the local children call "the Feaster Bunny" who has been eating local pets and, more recently, humans.

could a cult based on the rajneeshee work for a modern day setting? i get the feeling that ashram-centric feelgood eastern cults don't really play in the west anymore.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_attack

You could make it work, I'd say it depends on what your endgame with such a theme is. There's nothing very mysterious in cases involving violence or abuse committed in connection to sham guru cult ashrams, it's usually some of the most ignorant parts of humanity that's in display. So if it's just DUDE THEY WERE WORSHIPING NYARLO ALL ALONG, that's pretty stale and predictable IMO. If you can frame it as investigation of how people can be exploited in such settings or something like that, it could be interesting.

Is CoC 7e good? How does it handle modern scenarios?

You'll need to convert scenarios from any previous edition if you want to use them, since they changed the way stats work

I've heard it was shit.

good point. i was gonna loosely base it on the true story of how the leader's main girlfriend died mysteriously at a young age and was cremated by the cult before the police or coroner could investigate. then have evidence of previous cremations, and an illness (or stereotypical alien brain parasite, possibly shan-related) had cropped up there. some cult members would bre trying to spread the infection to the outside community, while others would be fighting the compromised/infected from within the organization. i was hoping i could keep my players guessing as to whether the cult leader is complicit in the evil or not, but i'm not sure if that would be leading them too much by intentionally giving them conflicting clues to build tension.

is an alien parasite arriving on a stray meteorite too cliched? i was gonna have the cult's actual beliefs have nothing to do with the "infection," just having the whole thing be a coincidence (but maybe keep the players guessing on that point for a while).

also, check out the comments on this article. that people still follow this cult is fucking creepy as hell to me. maybe i could make it the reformed remnant of a 70s-era cult that most people assumed died off after a big scandal or something. hmmm.

sannyasnews.org/now/archives/5566

Been playing it with my bro. The base game feels a little bare for the price and there's only one really good scenario in it. That being said, I'm still enjoying it. There is some replayability with the different possible resolutions and investigators. Looking forward to the longer campaign of Dunwich Legacy...just have to find a copy of the latest expansion for it.

forgot pic

Got the stuff made last year by some guy called Flash Gordon or something?

Is there anything else like A Colder War? It's one of my favorite non-Lovecraft Yog-Sothothery stories.

I do!

docs.google.com/document/d/1LJ_beiUVa7mpeKJGPBvH2yQCMDVWXLGawz4K39Rea8Q

Thanks

Cthulhu fhtagn!

The cult's motivation for carrying out mass murder:
>There's some kind of lovecraftian gribbly horror from beyond spacetime which has spent all of recorded history lying comatose.

>When it wakes up, it'll destroy the world.

>When someone is killed in a specific ritual, all the remaining time which they would have otherwise lived is added onto the amount of time before the abomination's hibernation ends.

>People figured this out and decided that a few victims dying as sacrifices is better than total obliteration. Hence, cultists.
>semi-good cult

>How do you even address this? Do it to criminals scheduled to be executed? Or would the time they would have otherwise lived only count the time until they would've been executed normally?
>The longer they would have lived = the more they'd be worth as sacrifices. So unfortunately, babies are best. Hence the "semi" part of "good cult." Extremely "semi."
>Well you could just kill like twenty criminals, or is there a necessary cooldown on the ritual?
>The thing is that sounds like it'd be too easy to game. One baby would give you enough juice for 40 years if we really want to lowball it, so it would end up as one cult lady doing pregnancy duty every couple of decades.

>You either need to harshen the exchange rate to something like 1 life = 1 day, or make the sacrifices require some really picky criteria like having lots of potential or some weird birth defect.

>Personally I like the idea of cultists using ritual sacrifice to create their own god to save them from the evils of the world without realizing their new gestalt god only gives a shit about its own power and pushes the cult to ramp up their sacrifices.

I think you might enjoy this short story by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's not too similar to ACW, but as a person who feels the same way you do about ACW I really liked this.
Originally included in Black Wings IV.

>Everyone has a squid in their skull. If it gets removed, they go brain-dead. The actual human brain doesn't contain the sentience, the symbiotic cephalopod does.

That's a level 7 secret. You're not supposed to be share that. The watchers have been informed.

>that people still follow this cult is fucking creepy as hell to me
It's not that surprising to me to be honest. The thing with Osho is that he comes across as pretty sensible in what I remember from reading a couple of his books years ago. If like the average Westerner with an interest in spirituality you felt like you knew enough about them funky Asian religions (while actually not knowing anything), then you could easily fall under his influence. I thought he was cool at one point too. That was when I also thought I knew stuff about Buddhism. A few years and counting of actual Buddhism later, I can't believe how huge a con artist he was and how he managed to bind all those people to him. Ignorance truly is the worst.
I can recommend a book called "Stripping the gurus : sex, violence, abuse and enlightenment" if you want to do some research on this subject. You might be able to find it online as well.

>is an alien parasite arriving on a stray meteorite too cliched?
Maybe, but it can still be effective. Or you could have it so that the cult digs something (meteorite?) up, which contains the parasite.

>So unfortunately, babies are best.

Taking this to it's "logical" conclusion, if babies are good wouldn't fetuses be better?

Think of it. Revealing to your players that the true "reason" for expanding abortion rights, Planned Parenthood, and all the rest is to keep all those Lovecraftian horrors asleep. Ditto Auschwitz, Pol Pot, the Holodomor, Rwanda, etc.

That would REALLY fuck with your players' minds.

(For the record, I'm a NARL member.)

Hi /ysg/. I'm here with kind of a niche question.

I'm making a costume for lovecraftian LARP. My first idea was to make the King in Yellow costume, but I couldn't find any yellow things and I suck shit at making things myself so I decided to combine a black long coat, a white smooth volto mask and a black hood. Worked great, looks good, tested it on bystanders in the middle of the night, they were spooked enough.

So, the question is, are there any "canon" entities that look sort of like that - black everything, white mask? I can always make shit up and say that it's a yet another minor avatar of Hastur or Nyarly-dude, but I'd like to do it as little as possible.

>couldn't find any yellow things
Should have dyed lad.

As for your question I'm pretty sure that in Lovecraft's own writings there's no such entity. Never saw anything like that in the "extended universe" either.

It still wouldn't fix the utter stupidity of "the killed person's lifetime gets added to the god's sleep" (unless you want to add the concept of souls to your Lovecraftian game, in which case kys), and would be extremely tasteless when used to "justify" the worst savageries we've seen for a century (and would also pretend that, somehow, all the demonstrable historical, social and economical etc. causes of such events are somehow merely cover).

>>utter stupidity

I don't disagree.

>>extremely tasteless

I don't disagree with that either. I will point out we're discussing a setting in which monsters want to want to enslave, devour, and destroy humanity and which the descent into insanity is a game mechanic. "Extremely tasteless" can be applied to CoC as a whole.

>>would also pretend that, somehow, all the demonstrable historical, social and economical etc. causes of such events are somehow merely cover.

You're already pretending that Lovecraftian entities exist, so what's the problem with a secret history in the vein of the Illuminati?

Were the fiends at the Wannsee Conference or in the Khmer Rouge know? Nope.

Did the demonstrable historical, social and economical etc. causes which led to the unspeakable evil of Auschwitz, Rwanda, and Cambodia already exist? Yup.

But what if those fiends and social forces were hijacked by someone with another agenda? What if it's a case of "This is going to happen no matter what we do, so we might as use those deaths for some purpose?"

It's tasetless, shocking, sickening, morally ambiguous, and fucks with the player's perceptions. In short, it's a CoC game.

Absolutely right. Twists like "the holocaust was just a cover to keep cthulhu asleep" or whatever is just tasteless.

Rather than doing the "their years get added to its slumber" schtick, maybe they could have cultists killing people as fuel for a ritual that allegedly keeps it asleep. Killing people or children during the ritual doesn't transfer a soul or whatever into the AO's sleep bank or whatever, it just helps in the casting of the ritual.

Say it requires a life to cast properly, and obviously the only people aware of this threat don't want to give their own life for the ritual. Even if it wasn't a horrible way to die, they need to sacrifice others to complete the ritual to make sure there is someone around to hit the snooze button on the AO's alarm clock. So they kidnap people and kill them to make sure the ritual works, but even this is not fool proof. Shit can go wrong, even with a sacrifice, and so they have to keep on killing people and trying to do that shit properly. Fuck, make it so the ritual doesn't actually do a damn thing, and let the investigators reveal that to the cultists who have devoted their lives to something that doesn't work.

Forgive me for punctuation or spelling errors. Typing this shit on mobile.

>Twists like "the holocaust was just a cover to keep cthulhu asleep" or whatever is just tasteless.

But a game centered on delaying the plans of alien entities threatening to devour our entire species isn't? Okay, whatever.

>Rather than doing the "their years get added to its slumber" schtick, maybe they could have cultists killing people as fuel for a ritual that allegedly keeps it asleep.

That's a nice wrinkle on the idea.

>>Fuck, make it so the ritual doesn't actually do a damn thing, and let the investigators reveal that to the cultists who have devoted their lives to something that doesn't work.

That's even better.

>"Extremely tasteless" can be applied to CoC as a whole.
No, it can't. Lovecraft is probably my favorite author and nearly all of his stories have some kind of dark beauty to them. Nothing to do with garbage shock horror fiction either in print or in film. Those things are extremely tasteless. When Lovecraft handles cannibalism, grave-robbery and other similar pleasant activities, the feeling is entirely different.
>But what if those fiends and social forces were hijacked by someone with another agenda? What if it's a case of "This is going to happen no matter what we do, so we might as use those deaths for some purpose?"
This changes everything though. In that case the cultists are like the eponymous nightcrawlers in the film Nightcrawler; they're doing something very tasteless (filming deaths and violence) but aren't the ones causing them. It's completely different from "these people committed genocide because they were trying to stop elder god to kill humans".
>I will point out we're discussing a setting in which monsters want to want to enslave, devour, and destroy humanity and which the descent into insanity is a game mechanic.
That's the pleb's interpretation of the Mythos. The Old Ones don't want to enslave, devour or destroy humanity; that would imply they give a shit about humans in the first place. What they actually want is never properly explained, but different explanations which might or might not be true are thrown around. The one people conveniently forget is what Old Castro explains in Call of Cthulhu - that humans will be shown new ways of "shouting, killing and reveling" and being "free" like the Old Ones. An encounter with Eldritch beings isn't scary because you're going to die, it's because at that moment you touch something you can't understand or relate to in any way. It's about sweeping the rug from under your illusion of reality without warning, and shoving your head into utter loneliness and insignificance.

If I want something about the destruction of mankind, I'll run something about nukes, bio weapons or chemical weapons. No need to look for tentacled monsters.

>make it so the ritual doesn't actually do a damn thing, and let the investigators reveal that to the cultists who have devoted their lives to something that doesn't work.
This is something Lovecraft would probably approve of. It's heavily implied in his stories (though maybe not in all of them, it's been a long time since I re-read Red Hook) that cultists who sacrifice to the Old Ones don't actually know what the hell they're doing anyway, they're no different than people who sacrificed animals to the Sun.

>When Lovecraft handles cannibalism, grave-robbery and other similar pleasant activities, the feeling is entirely different.

So as long as it's done with flair, it's not tasteless? Good to know.

>This changes everything though. In that case the cultists are like the eponymous nightcrawlers in the film Nightcrawler; they're doing something very tasteless (filming deaths and violence) but aren't the ones causing them. It's completely different from "these people committed genocide because they were trying to stop elder god to kill humans".

Then use that as an explanation.

>>pleb

And we're done.

While that doesn't match any particular avatar of his, it would fit Nyarlathotep's style. He's got the whole thing with masks (his avatars being generally called masks, and there's the line from "Whispers in the Darkness" about him putting on a waxen mask and coming down from the world of the sevn suns to mock mankind).
One of his known masks is the Black Man, who would be black everything (black robes, black skin, black eyes, etc.), so if you pain the mask black, it could probably work as that one. He also has cloven hooves, though, so if your feet would be visible you might need to get something to mimic the apprarance of hooves.

>as long as it's done with flair, it's not tasteless? Good to know.
Not necessarily.
There's an episode of the TV show Millennium which deals with child abuse and incest, and it's not tasteless despite not being done with flair (there's nearly 0 humor in the entire 3 seasons of Millennium, and no Lovecraftian aesthetics at all). Unpleasant is not the same as tasteless. The RPG that is not to be named is tasteless. The average Kult campaign is unpleasant.
>Then use that as an explanation.
What is the reason for this passive-aggressive shit? I criticized the use of atrocities as being actually done for the greater good, then you said that it's actually about making use of atrocities that couldn't be stopped anyway for the greater good, to which I said that it changes everything. Why are you pretending like I want to use anything like this in the first place?
>gets butthurt at "pleb"
So you actually thought cosmic horror is about OH MY GOD TENTACLE MAN IS GOING TO KILL US, or are you just scared of this big bad 4-letter word?

Thanks for the advice. The Black Man is cool and probably can work, but it seems bland a bit, and as far as I know his face in this form usually open.

Maybe I'll keep the white mask and paint my face black, without any explanation. Nyarly does love fucking with mortals, does he?

I've been thinking about running a sandboxish West Marchesish hexcrawlish thing using 7e or something lighter. Basically the point would be to solve mysteries, get artifacts, learn magic and stuff. They could run a PI firm and get buisness inquiries, hear rumors, and train skills, read books, and do civillian stuff between sessions. Instead of drawing a map between sessions they write a campaign diary. Between sessions they could say ooh I wanna go investigate the missing children, or any number of hooks, and decide a date and the party themselves. Might be a bit ambitios because you'd need a lot of prep.

It is rather ambitious, and you'll need to think of a way to structure it. I'd make the cases connected somehow, possibly being the work of one entity or organization or whatever. And you should have a clear picture of what exactly is happening in the region at all times.

Glad to see people still remember me. As it happens, I've just finished reading another work of Lovecraftian science fiction (Toxic Stars: the future of Humankind in the Mythos, if anyone is interested) and my creative juices have been recharged somewhat. Anything that you would like to see expanded on, while I'm in a writing mood?

I might want to hold a presentation on Lovecraft in a month or two for a course called "Dark Elements in American literature".

Of course there's the whole inverted pantheon and demiurgic aspect of his creation, and I'll pepper the audience with an explanation on horror that can't be understood, but what really interests me is Lovecraft as a character study.

A basement dwelling unorthodox man, I think fair comparisons to kafka can be made, although what I haven't quite understood is why Lovecraft turned out the way he did. Was there any childhood trauma? What goes on in the mind of a racist (I think Shadow over Innsmouth gives us a pretty good picture of that, dubbed "a low point" by Lovecraft himself)?

Should I touch on the capriciousness of (imagined) reality? What stories and deities from the pantheon are must haves?

Wasn't Hastur inspired by Chambers The King in Yellow? Thereby making it Pre-Lovecraft lore which he was inspired by?

Thinking of running that forest scenario included in the 7th edition rulebook. Any tips?

He was. But now he's part of the Mythos. Same as Cthugha, Ithaqua, Nyogtha, Nodens and other dudes from earlier and later works.

Right, I didn't respond to the one post I meant to arguing that Hastur was something modern authors came up with. Was just checking the facts.

>I haven't quite understood is why Lovecraft turned out the way he did. Was there any childhood trauma? What goes on in the mind of a racist
Buy or find a torrent for ST Joshi's "I Am Providence" and read all of it. You'll probably get your answer in a better way than anyone here can give.
As an aside, I'd say that that book is a must read for all people interested in Lovecraft.

>What stories
Call of Cthulhu, Rats in the Walls, The Outsider, At the Mountains of Madness, Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Picture in the House, Shadow Over Innsmouth, Colour Out of Space. Plus add stories you like and find think that they illustrate one or several aspects of Lovecraft's thought and horror aesthetics. Possibly include The Street as the example of Lovecraft at his worst, in terms of content and thought, and maybe Sweet Ermengarde & Ibid to show people that the man could be unexpectedly good at comedy.
>and deities
Cthulhu, Nyarlathothep, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth

Probably also talk about some of the main alien races such as the Mi-Go, Deep Ones, Yithians, Elder Things.

Yes, however like that user said Hastur/King in Yellow as known in the current state of the mythos is quite different from Chambers' creation. Chambers really has only 4 stories that are horror and deal with the King in Yellow in any meaningful way, while Hastur is a whole other deal altogether and not even related to Chambers IIRC.

That sounds great, thanks!.

Haven't even heard of The Street and Sweet Ermengarde & Ibid, good thing i still have a lot of time.

Considering Nyarlhotep (and others), what was up with Lovecraft's fascination with ancient Egypt? Did he ever read books about stories from that time?

Ibid is top tier comedy if you've read your good share of history academia papers. It might not be that amusing otherwise, but there's one small passage in which Lovecraft basically pokes fun at his own tendency to occasionally rant about "conquering Aryans" and the like that makes it worthwhile anyway, IMO.

>what was up with Lovecraft's fascination with ancient Egypt? Did he ever read books about stories from that time?
IIRC he never had an "Egyptian phase" (he had an Arabian phase and then a Roman phase as a kid), but read Egyptian mythology at that time and always retained some interest (his and the ancient Egyptians' shared fascination of cats probably also played a role). Under the Pyramids/Imprisoned With the Pharaohs was an Egyptian tale because it was written for Houdini and Houdini wanted it to be so, but Lovecraft did a ton of research as preparation anyway, he obviously enjoyed doing it.

Alright you've given me a ton to work with, I'm incredibly grateful.

You're welcome! Glad I could be of help.

> So as long as it's done with flair, it's not tasteless? Good to know.
It's not about flair bro, you put that word in other user's mouth. It's about artistic treatment, which yeah duh is what taste is about.

> Lovecraft is probably my favorite author
Ooh, other user, I agree with most of your post but pls read moar. Lovecraft's one of the greats but there are far greater - I'd say even within weird fiction some writers today like Ligotti are a step up artistically. Much of Lovecraft's greatness was as a creative originator (as he himself would agree), and even there it wasn't from nothing: read Dunsany, Chambers, & Hodgson and you see all the raw material was there for him to take to a new level.

I read a lot of Ligotti. He's very good, but also very different from HPL. I also read Chambers, he has some good stuff but I think he's overrated, and he unfortunately deserves the mantle of Fallen Titan HPL ascribed to him. Hodgson has some great imagination but actual subpar prose. Didn't delve into Dunsany yet.
Also read some of Machen (pretty gud) and Blackwood (another great). Joshi's Black Wings collections exposed me to a host of modern weird and specifically Lovecraftian horror authors as well, I would recommend them if you haven't read them (they sometimes contain a few abysmal stories though).
I can't really explain why, but I always find myself coming back to Lovecraft. When I first read him he struck some kind of mystery-history-outer space-horror chord (that I apparently had) so perfectly that nothing else had the same effect since, and I always re-reading him. I actually love his prose as well, but that's still not the main draw.

*I always enjoy re-reading him

>are you just scared of this big bad 4-letter word?

No, just tired of the condescending attitude behind it.

I'm in my mid-50s. I was reading Lovecraft before you most likely were a glint in the milkman's eye. Lecturing me on the Mythos is like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

I riffed further suggestions to an idea suggested to provides twists in a role playing GAME. Nothing more. A couple interesting idea came out of the give and take, but most of the discussion centered around whether the ideas were in good taste or not.

Good taste in a GAME where PCs and NPCs are routinely shot, dismembered, driven insane, set on fire, torn limb from limb, eaten alive or dead, and suffer other evils at the hands of mad cultists and/or the appendages of unknowable alien entities.

>I'm in my mid 50s
So what?
Even if I go along with this claim, so what? Does that magically bestow better understanding of the Mythos or of Lovecraft to you compared to me? It doesn't. I know more than enough people in my life who have the grandma suck eggs attitude and who claim they're experts on/very familiar with a certain subject (all of them are at least a decade older than the age you claim to be at) while being factually wrong. So for me this mention of age hurts your credibility more.
"pleb" is usually associated with a condescending attitude, yes, but that has nothing to do with anything because you've provided 0 arguments against why TENTACLE WILL KILL US is, literally, the "pleb's" interpretation of Lovecraft. That's what I have a problem with because that's simply not what the man's writing is about. You also haven't given any counter examples or arguments against the illustrations I've given for unpleasantness vs. tastelessness even though you keep talking about this issue.
>Good taste in a GAME where PCs and NPCs are routinely shot [...]
I can write scenarios that will scare my players and make them uncomfortable, but I don't want any of them to say "fuck this" and walk out. So yeah, even when characters are being driven to insanity, shot, injured, eaten etc., a line between these 2 concepts of unpleasantness and tastelessness exists.

There's not even a point to continue this discussion anyway. We actually already resolved the issues about the atrocities as story elements. Other people can judge the rest for themselves.

Rad as hell, thanks user.

I fell in love with A Colder War in high school. As a dirty millennial, the Cold War era is just very fascinating for me. Combined with apocalyptic endings, government conspiracy, and Lovecraft, it was just my weakness.

Have a second cult which incorrectly thinks the Great Old One is a more conventional god and when it wakes up it'll reward the faithful. They have a similar ritual which removes the equivalent amount of lifetime/hibernation exchange to wake the GOO up sooner.

>the apocalypse codex by charles stross

Trying to write out some baseline material for a game I want to run. It's my first CoC game and also first game I've ever run period. The idea I'm working with is 1920s passengers on a boat get stranded on Roanoke island. The boat was carrying something that reacted to whatever thing caused the original Roanoke disappearance and the survivors of the shipwreck are pulled into the ruined town. Beyond that I'm not really sure. I don't want it to turn into Silent Hill but I also want it to be compelling for them to stay and investigate rather than immediately try to build a raft and get away.

Any advice would be helpful, especially advice for first timers.

>EXOSOLAR STRUCTURES: THE GLASS CITIES OF MYARDET
The exploration of the world of Myardet is at once quite difficult and supremely easy. On top of the usual difficulties of interstellar exploration, the Glass Cities are, vast, dense, massively multileveled, and almost completely sealed from the outside world. On the other hand, they are also almost entirely transparent. While physically navigating to a given point within the vast arcology-structures is nigh impossible, visual observation is trivially easy. Thus, the few human explorers on the world set up telescopes on the tops of the structures, looking down.
What do they see? Machinery. Personal effects and the like. Far below, the ground- the Glass Cities seem to hover about a hundred feet above the ground, leaving the surface biology pristine. And corpses. Many, many corpses.
Their age is indeterminate; scavengers have no way into the Glass City, so they have simply desiccated and mummified. They are all gathered in richly decorated areas, lying down in uniform rows; whatever killed them, they had time to choose how they wished to die, to lay themselves down in their tombs. Assuming it was not a vast racial suicide.
What killed them is unknown; why they chose to make their cities transparent unknown. Nearly everything about them is unknown, and will remain so until some way is found inside; until then, the few explorers on the world content themselves with telescopes.

Thoughts? I like the idea of a transparent city, but I feel my execution here is lacking something.

That's cool user, I withdraw my objection: there are Lovecraft people who just haven't been exposed to much else but you're well grounded.

You on the other hand know a lot less than you think you do. You object to 'pleb' (even when the word wasn't directed at you) as condescending, missing that there's little more stupidly condescending than to dismiss a whole line of thought because someone used a word you don't like. That's okay: great thing about Veeky Forums is it's anonymous so you can make mistakes freely and learn from them.

The weather forbids getting away. They can build a raft, but it won't help.

The ruined town is shelter. Have it not be completely ruined, maybe there's one or two people who are slightly insane, but only slightly. They are to provide shelter, food and other necessities for one or two nights. Portray them as friendly, helpful and amiable as possible. Do everything to make your players like them.

During the day, rain ceases, but the wind doesn't, so let the players explore the island while they have nothing more to do. Drop whatever clues and leads you want, be they spooky or not so spooky. The island people refuse to talk about them and are visibly afraid. Not nervous or suspicious, mind you - they have to be afraid or your players will scream CULTISTS!!! and murder them.

Then, after a couple of days, they disappear. Now the players are on an island with whatever kidnapped their benefactors, some leads, and no way out. Adventure awaits.

Do players have fun when you make it actually scary and not just adventure or puzzle solving? I think I am up to the task of writing some unsettling stuff and executing it well in game, I just don't know if that is actually enjoyable to RP.

I was looking at maps and Roanoake is about a quarter or half mile from land on either side so it would be visible. Might need to make the tantalizingly close shore and the impossibility of reaching it part of the fun.

As far as characters go I could include other shipwrecked passengers, hermits, etc. That doesn't bother me much so long as they have a good purpose for being in the story. How about monsters, aliens, etc? What makes a Thing From Beyond scary in a game like this without it just killing you outright or manipulating you with some familiar intelligence/goals?

In general, you can't scare your players if they don't allow themselves to be scared. If you've got a decent party that actually gets into the mood and plays the genre straight, then you can just inform them that this is going to be a horror(-ish) game. If not, don't even bother. But, as long as everyone, including you, is on the same page, it's great. Read "Horror in Roleplaying" for some tips.

>Might need to make the tantalizingly close shore and the impossibility of reaching it part of the fun.

Do it.

The antagonist can be whatever you want. Maybe it's not even a being, but an incomprehensible force (see rant about Hastur above) or a completely strange and inscrutable effect (see "The Color from Space").

Making it scary is quite easy. Don't show it until the very end. Show its works and the effects of its presence on the world. Bodies, impossible footprints, disappearances, whatever - make it a trail, metaphorical or even literal, that becomes the more unsettling the further you go. Bonus poinst if you make the people following it wonder if it's worth to go further and if they really want to know what's in the end. The foundation for this is the sanity system, build on it.

I just read about the Mandela effect. Basically when a lot of people have a false memory of something and in reality it's different, if you check it.

What kind of scenario would involve it? I feel it has some great potential to fuck with both the characters' AND the players' heads, and I feel like it can even be a full campaign in its own right, but can't really give it a shape. Ideas? Advice?

My thoughts are, in a quite abstract form:
>multiple timelines and time travel shenanigans
>something fucks with memories for some nefarious purposes
>something fucks with memories involuntarily, just by existing
>the memories are real, the reality is not
>something something dreams and subconsciousness something
>lucid dreams
>non-lucid dreams, confusion between dreams and reality
>all of the above in various combinations

Maybe even combine it with the message of ETERNAL APOCALYPSES from DGML - modern society is detrimental to the sanity. This is possibly true IRL, but I can't be objective here.

Come on, let's think about it. Maybe a scenario about this even exists.

It's almost like quantum states and observers.

This can possibly be a plot point. Like when someone reads/hears/receives in whatever way a statement that contradict existing facts, they are shifted into the timeline where the statement is true, but with their memories intact. And, suppose that someone has a need for something to be constant, and has to avoid receiving statements that contradict the nature of that something.

This is getting complicated and I really have to sleep.

>No humanity, you are the body-stealing horrors?

Can people's squids be surgically exchanged? Also, how do baby squids get into the heads of baby humans?

When the biochemical markers of pregnancy are present in the mother's bloodstream, the mother's brain squid produces a microscopic squid egg specialized to pass through the blood/brain and placental barriers and attach to the developing nervous system of the embryo before the first trimester is over. The squids reproduce asexually but larval squids also exchange some genetic material with the new host as part of the attachment process.

This tight biological relationship has existed since shortly before the dawn of human history.

What do squids in male brains get out of it? They can't pass on their genetics.

ty