So I'm looking to maybe run a Cthulhu-esque game...

Either GURPS or Savage Worlds would be a good fit. Both are great for these types of settings, though GURPS leans more to the gritty side of things while Savage Worlds is more action packed. GURPS in particular has a very detailed pulp weapons supplement. Savage Worlds, meanwhile, has a whole pulp Cthulhu setting already built. Really, you can't go wrong with either.

Savage Worlds seems to be a very popular choice for this, yeah. The last edition was Savage Worlds Deluxe?

Isn't that the main theme of Ghostbusters?

Go dig up the good old WEG Ghostbusters game. It's piece of RPG history anyway given that the ruleset would later go on to be used for the celebrated Star Wars D6 game that helped shape a lot of the EU.

>I want to run a Lovecraftian setting, but with players able to fuck Cthulhu's shit up.

You do realize that this is the complete fucking opposite of Cthulhu-esque, right? If you wanna play Indiana Jones but with fishmen and tentacles instead of nazis, go ahead, but you have to realize that your twist completely changes the genre.

>Alan Moore's weird fish sex comic unrelated, but Google seemed to think it was

Do you even Innsmouth, bro?

I'm fairly sure most of Lovecraft's original creatures could be fought and killed, or at least defeated in some manner. The Great Old Ones, not so much, and don't even think about the Outer Gods.

Also, go GURPS.

You read any Lovecraft, or even the OP? Nothing there about killing Cthulhu, only "some of" the critters. And Lovecraft himself didn't shy away from letting humans get one over on Yoggy beings. Hell, some random professor kills Yog-Sothoth's son, and a fucking dog kills the other one.

Don't tell me you're a Derlethfag...

Sourcebook for 7e CoC, Pulp Cthulhu, is built with exactly this type of thing in mind.

The big thing is reminding the players that all their victories are temporary and humanity is ultimately transient and unimportant. They can kill any number of nasties, but in doing so all they really prove is that those nasties are just as unimportant as we are.

So we're unimportant. So we're temporary. So what? Everything is. All I'm doing is taking things that loom over us and dragging them down to the point where we can spit in their face.

THEY SAY THAT IF YOU STARE LONG ENOUGH INTO THE VOID, THE VOID STARES ALSO INTO YOU. I SAY "FUCK THAT SHIT". CHOKESLAM THE VOID.

Really?
Really?
chaosium.com/pulp-cthulhu-pdf/

I mean, trying to bring down Azathoth to your level would be a colossally bad idea. The worst idea even.

Some people (like you) are too stupid to understand cosmic horror.
Chokeslam the void all you like, you'd have better luck trying to chokeslam gravity or time itself.
And once you attempt to chokeslam the Void you've attracted it's attention which will annihilate all mankind in an instant. It might even unmake it's history killing the first human in it's crib.
Or maybe it creates an afterlife just for us, so that every human that dies is teleported to it's hell dimension to be tortured for all eternity. Because you wanted to feel like a "big man" when really your just an insect with a big ego.

That's the spirit. I GRAPPLE THE DARKNESS!

...

The difference in power levels is ONE OF THE MOST CRITICAL PARTS OF THE MYTHOS.

Anything can be made Lovecraftian if you crank their power levels up to max and apply the nessicary changes. A Tolkien dragon the size of a galaxy that's grown synonymous with galactic heat cycles.

If you take away the power levels then it's not Lovecraftian it's just a game about really large and ugly squids.

Are you all seriously telling me... you've never heard the tale of Old Man Henderson, He Who Murdered The Fuck Outta Hastur?

Oh. I have. I most certainly have.

Its fake.
Half the rules in it are made up and bogus.
It's also a completely unrealistic story staring a GM with a brain the size of a peanut.

My 1st level bard could kill a Red Dragon if my GM was as stupid and unversed in the source material as that GM was reported to be.

Don't point to a TRAIL OF CTHULHU meme on 1D4chan and tell me that makes fighting Shoggoths Lovecraftian.

Hastur ain't lovecraft famygdala.

Lovecraft spergs who shout down anyone who doesn't understand Cthulu the /right/ way are obnoxious but let's not pretend Old Man Henderson was anything other than an apocryphal joke story.

Well, there is the implication that fighting shoggoths is within human capability. The police/army that raided Innsmouth probably did it.

That said, Shoggoths and Gods are on entirely different planes. Shoggoths are down at our corporeal level and are made entirely of matter.

Yes but Veeky Forums hate Old Man Henderson now, because it used to like him.

An atomic bomb is made out of matter. I wouldn't want to wrestle it.

Your right that Shoggoths aren't as top tier as some creatures but they are still absolutely beyond human capabilities. They are a creature that can grow ANY kind of organ it wants.
>Ebola breathing lungs
>Eyes that focus x-rays
>Vocal cords that vibrate hard enough to shatter bone

Thats just off the top of my head. Shoggoths are walking Grey Goo mixed with a CRISPR. They would mess up everything we have on earth unless we nuked it.

I'm old Veeky Forums, mate. GET SHIT DONE Veeky Forums. "We're fucking churning out a new campaign setting idea every four weeks" Veeky Forums.

So I still love his fucking guts.

Not really. Shoggoths are pretty dumb, and mostly they just try to tear your head off. The main problem is how tough they are. Fire apparently works at least well enough to get to a point where a layman would think they're dead, so do particle beams and lighting guns like the Elder Things used. Guns, blades, blunt weapons, and other conventional arms would suck ass though. Biological weapons are probably out too.

I do understand what you mean, but there are far more dangerous mundane" threats in the Mythos than Shoggoths. Hounds of Tindalos would be a big one, given they are literally impossible to defeat.

99% of people who claim to love Lovecraft have never read Call of Cthulhu.

This thread is proof of it.

The stars weren't right user. If the stars were right, we'd all be dead. And we all do end up dead, the Yithians take control of a race that is seperated from us by at least one other sentient race going extinct.

There is never any "canon" that says Fire is good against Shoggoth.
So I assume your going off the game rather than the story. No problem in that but if you go by the story details and blow them up then Shoggotha could be hyper-intelligent, low tier reality warpers.

I read it all when I was a kid. I was already overloaded on horror books at the time so I didn't find it scary. It did however introduce me to the concept of Humanity Fuck No! Especially the one story about the time traveling body hoppers. Hmm, thinking back though, perhaps the one story that did come close to scaring me was the one with the guy who got lost in a cave.

That's the only proper way to run a Cthulhu campaign. Fuck the memers.

There's Innsmouth, where the police firebomb the houses with shoggoths in them and it kills them at least enough that they leave the place alone after.

Lovecraft is more about hopelessness than fear

It's never specified it's a shoggoth.
It's never specified where or what the shoggoth in Innsmouth is. It could have been anything or anywhere.

Call of Cthulhu is pleb tier. Dagon, Pickmans Model, Dreamquest of Unknown Kadeth... So many great stories and you pick the most common, and quite frankly overhyped of his tales. Go back to your basement.

That never happened. There were no shoggoths in Innsmouth.

What's that one round-robin story Lovecraft did with some of his friends that ended up being about a guy being turned into a shoggoth and going an fun sword and planet adventures killing space nasties?

No, Shoggoths are actually usually very limited in a lot of regards. Fire, Electricity, Plasma, any kind of high energy concentration fucks it up, so X-ray Beholder Laser eyes are so far out it's capability it's not even funny.
You're specifically thinking of the Great Old One that in it's slumber is the unwitting progenitor of all terrestral life, and it's literally Grey Goo.

Don't remember the name.
Something about a stone tablet imbedded in it's core.

When was the last time you read Innsmouth? Because even if Zadok is mistaken about seeing the Deep Ones bring a Shoggoth into the town, the main character definitely sees one in his dreams.

Your hand reaches out to grasp the edge of the inky black void that seems to light seems to bend around despite the overhead bulbs, which begin to flicker sporadically as your hand brushes the boundary of the surface. You see after images of your hand and arm, like it was moving in slow motion but your eyes can't keep up with its fluids motion. Youattempt to press forward but are unable to despite your best efforts, ayour arm frozen in space. Unable to withdraw your hand you instead feel abscense of light grasping your own hand and begin to expand. The light flickers more violently as the darkness claws its way across your frozen arm, but it feels like you are surrendering yourself to its sharp cold grasp. You are engulfed in the not-light in the end. The lights flicker one last time before going out permanently. There is only darkness

All it takes to kill a Shoggoth in a few seconds is a 55-gal Drum of homemade napalm, and that's not really hard to get if you live at any point in time past the 1920s.

Can't wait to see The Void movie that just came out.

Seriously, shit looks tight as fuck. When did it come out? I thought it was still a little while away?

Most folks have heard it so many times that it's stopped being funny.

>cover shoggoth in napalm
>shoggoth slides out of the layer of flesh that is on fire
>slightly smaller, much angrier shoggoth
>out of napalm
I don't think you really thought that through.

April 7th.

Wouldn't it just collapse under his weight? It's like saying that Godzilla climbs the Empire State Building

If they were impossible to kill, then there never would have needed be more than one rebellion. Lovecraft himself states that, morphology aside, they were "men."

Shouldn't just tossing enough explosives kill it? As far as I understand, a shoggoth isn't The Thing, it won't come back from a single cell or by infecting people. Damage it and rip it apart enough, and it'll eventually just stop moving.

Call of Scootaloo is hugely inferior to the Dunwich Horror.

He's talking about the Elder Things. Shoggoths are distinctly in-men by contrast.

You're right though.

Burns don't work that way user.
And Shoggoths don't "Molt" nor have the intelligence to do something like that.

There's a reason there's no Shoggoths in Vietnam anymore. Just those Earthquake causing Cthonians

Yeah, my post got mangled and I didn't check to make sure I'd typed what I mean. I mean the Elder Things were 'men.'

I like games how like Mansions of Madness do it. You can fight back but your sanity will suffer the more eldritch shit you encounter. A cultist? Not pleasant but fine. Starspawn? you better kill it quickly or run

Eh. I also believe in 'hardening' in systems with insanity. Like, you see a room full of corpses once, that's horrifying. After that? Less so. Same basic idea with space gribblies of doom, unless they have some sort of radiation of fear and insanity (like, say, a Greater Daemon in Warhammer Fantasy).

I also feel that a lot of systems just assume everyone is some sort of softie, when some people are going to be hardened by virtue of career or even class. Like, a bone-picker in a 16th century city is going to give precisely zero fucks about seeing a maggot riddled corpse if they've lived to adulthood.

I used to be like you, getting annoyed with the "I shoot the cosmic horror with my shotgun lol" crowd. Then I realized that everything is meaningless.

I've been here since 2007 and I've always hated the story.

Most insanity systems, even with a hardening mechanic, put way too much emphasis on immediate and short-term reactions on top of everything causing a complete mental breakdown.

Is this bro thing? Like, trying to reclaim man shit by violently overcoming nerd horror? You could maybe have some fun with the conflict between individualism and fatalism but I'm not sure I get choke slamming the void. It seems like totally missing the point. Explain please.

Nah, when you see things you're not used to you can take a minor sanity hit. But there are rules that seeing something too much dulls your senses to it and becomes business as usual.

You're not losing sanity to more than 6 zombies, after that you're fine. Well, if you saw all 6 at once you're probably a little shook. But there is a table to roll on for the sanity effects and emptying an entire magazine into a creature that works against might be what you roll, if you roll ANY effect.

The rules as written are way more forgiving than most people that never read them make them out to be. But the game also includes other wordly beastlies That are panic attack style sanity blasting. Like finding out what is basically a Xenomorph with wings is the 'friendly; butler of the creature half the greek pantheon is based on, and oh by the way half the greek pantheon is one guy that rides a space chariot. The layer of 'it's just fiction' may lead you to believe this wouldn't blast your sanity in real life, but you presently believe these things are not real and some people go crazy nuts over something as strange as things they already knew from a slightly different perspective.

Anyway, go with Call of Cthulhu 7e.

Lovecraft, and to be honest Cosmic Horror in general, is over-rated as fuck. On the Metaphorical level, it's just a bunch of "Oh no, we're all insignificant and our lives are meaningless. We're all too unimportant to make meaningful impacts on the universe!" Which, really, is quite tame as far as existential crises go. I mean seriously, a visit to /r9k/ is better at delivering the existential horror and futility of life.

And on the Surface level, it's just a bunch of Powerlevel wanking of his forces and "but it was just a temporary victory" rationalizations reminiscent of those used for the Non-Chaos victories during the Warhammer Fantasy's Storm of Chaos event.

If you want a campaign where you fight against evil, weird ass monsters and make progress rather than break down every time you see them, just run something in 40k, or take something like Fablehaven and throw in various amounts of Grim and Dark until you're satisfied.

>scoffs at 'muh temporary victory'
>suggests fucking 40k

puke

>make progress rather than break down every time you see them, just run something in 40k

>make progress
>40k

That's a pretty bad example as the Greek pantheon is legend and myth at this point and not an active religion. Even if you replaced with something like Christianity or Hinduism it's not exactly sanity blasting in the way the game wants it. It'd cause a deep religious and existential crisis.

I now Innsmouth had Shoggoths but it's never stated the feds killed them.

Your thinking of Ubbo-Sathla
And while it's much worse than a Shoggoth, Lovecraft never explains just how bad Shoggoths are. No except the GOO tier Elder Things had a chance at stopping them and even they eventually got mess up.

Lovecraft never shows us a Shoggoth get hurt by fire, electricity or plasma. That all stuff Sandy added in the game. If we go by Lovecrafts unreliable narrorators they can for sure spawn all sorts of crazy organs and are quiet powerful.

If your only looking at the RPG then sure. But i'm not talking about that i'm talking about story Shoggoths which are described as much more destructive than in the game.

>A race of cosmic super scientist who are more advanced than humans will ever be beat these monsters once and then got absolutely decimated by them.
>We can take them no problem.

"Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes - viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells - rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile - slaves of suggestion, builders of cities - more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and carve such things?"
-H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

Shoggoths are actually pretty smart. Lovecraft says how they got smarter and that was one of the key things that led to the Shoggoth rebellions in the first place.

The USMC does fight the shoggoth in the smugglers tunnels during Escape From Innsmouth. It doesn't go well.

Look if you want to Gurren Lagann giant space gods, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, but at the end of the day that's not Lovecraft, all you're doing is keeping the name and general appearances. Lovecraft wrote horror, and if you remove horror you completely change the fundamentals of his works.
It's like calling Zone of the Enders Egyptian mythology because one of the mech was named Anubis.

>"Oh no, we're all insignificant and our lives are meaningless. We're all too unimportant to make meaningful impacts on the universe!"

This is so surface level and inaccurate it makes me cringe. Universal impact has little to nothing to do with Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror.

We won't need eyes to see where we're going user.

The shoggoths only beat the declining Elder Things after they'd basically been reduced to cultural and technological chimps and left everything in the hands of the shoggoths, anyway.

>It's not sanity blasting the way the game wants it
Read the fucking rules.

See thats good Cosmic Horror.
The idea that our senses are inherently flawed and improvised. That we as creatures are so flawed that something as critical as our eyes is actually detrimental to our understanding of the universe. Thats good. Knowing our entire race was fucked the second a single celled organism grew eye balls instead of more usful appendages.

Yes the Elder Things declined but theirs nothing to suggest that they weren't still very advanced by our standards. We don't see their tech but the expedition sees evidence that they were still advanced.

I highly recommend listening it as an audio book. Didn't know how to pronounce 'Dunitch' untill I listened it.

Sadly, there's a copyright kerfuffle where the works should be in the public domain by now but some people have a tenuous and probably false claim to it.

It's one of his more mediocre Yog-Sothery pieces, honestly, except the 'psychic suicide dreams' and some sailor falling screaming into alien geometry.

I listened to a lot of Lovecraft as audio books while at work, just because I was working long shifts of drudge work on the overnight. I'd read it all, but it was nice to hear someone else give voice to it, and sometimes more effective, at least for me.

I enjoyed Solaris this way, too, and it's even kinda related to Cthulhu-y aliens.

carcosa was a nice place with thoughtful people and a wise king, it was just all very spooky. Old man Henderson was the one in the wrong, though the cultists were too.

That's the thing, in most Lovecraft stories the protagonist tries to go back to living his normal life but can't because he can't shake his memories of dealing with the Eldritch. It's not that seeing them drives you mad, it's that seeing them makes it impossible to close the door and go back to living your life like a normal person so you go mad. Lovecraft was essentially personifying an existential crisis as a tentacle monster from a different dimension.

Source: I've read a decent amount of Lovecraft.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I think Colour and Dunwich pull this off best, especially Colour.

>attempt to douse shoggoth in napalm.

Shoggoth reaches out, grabs napalm, and douses you with it while pretending to be grass or dirt.

>I'm not sure I get choke slamming the void. It seems like totally missing the point

It is totally missing the point of this particular genre of fiction, but one of the most powerful (if not the) human instincts is self preservation, the FUCK YOU I'M GONNA LIVE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA mentality. People like to indulge that.

*teleports behind u*

The Colour out of Space is my favorite major story in the Lovecraftian mythos (though to be fair I haven't read At the Mountains of Madness yet). It genuinely scared me far more than Dunwich or the Call of Cthulhu.

ITT cthulhufags prove that they're the edgiest "fanbase"

>All this Dunwitch horror and Call of Cuthulu
>No shunned house

It uses the same basic rules as the other BRP system. Pick up Runequest 6e (Also known as Mythras). It has a better combat system that is also deeply satisfying. Also, it's largely compatible with basically every version of Call of Cthulhu, BRP and Runequest. Tweaking to fit it in should be minimal.

Hi CC.

A bunch of college professors with a Necronomicon and a few airforce bombers fuck up the Son of Yog Sothoth in Dunwich horror.

The FBI and coastguard fuck up an entire colony of Deep Ones in Shadow over Innsmouth.

The terror in Reanimator is the human's own creation.

And Dreamquest stories aren't all that horrific at all.

That was the vidya, they Deep Ones never tamed them in the Books.
Wait really am I deleting a Shoggoth completely from my memory? I need to find that.

What book has vietnam?
They're nowhere near that powerful, and with no masters to emulate anymore they may have lost some of their intelligence from the rebellions. After all, they didn't spread out across the world and try to conquer things.

Oh, please. I have neither the time nor the inclination to waste on existential dread or crisis of mortality. Anything will die if it's pounded with enough ordnance. It's just a matter of finding the proper amount of megatons.

>That was the vidya, they Deep Ones never tamed them in the Books.

See Shoogoth T'wsha under the Deep One entry in Malleus Malificarum. Also, see Shoggoth T'wsha in Escape From Innsmouth, which absolutely features a Shoggoth controlled by a Deep One shaman vs the United States Marine Corps.