How do you manage to make a GOOD Lovecraft setting set in modern (2017) times considering a lot of the effect of horror...

>They all have smartphones with 3G, flashlights, headphones and all that shit any regular guy may have on their person at the time.
>They start getting cryptic test messages from unkown senders.
>they could swear there's soft crying in the background music they're listening to but no one hears it
>Error messages show up with "Invalid GPS, non-earth co-ordinates"
>The time is different on all their phones
>They get a voice message from one of the other PCs, the message is dated in the future. It's some sort of hysterical warning which is ended by abrupt screaming
>The flash lights refuse to turn on in some rooms, including the one where they hear the weird scratching noises
>Something something Yellow Sign something
>Phone starts leaking battery fluids that look and smell a lot like blood.

Modern-day lovecraft could be very possible, the trick would be to use technology to your advantage. I'm thinking strange beings that appear in photos taken, certain locations where gps software doesn't work and mapping programs don't show things right. Back alleys in cities twisted, seedier parts of towns and suburbs with strange goings-on. Anyone who thinks lovecraft isn't scary as soon as you can take a picture or call your friend is just being unimaginative, modern hyper-connectivity breaking down or being corrupted by the elderich forces adds even more to the horror, the shield of technology is a paper one in the face of the unknowable.
Then we have grander scale stuff, the more sci-fi parts of his works. What if a new planet or star system was found that utterly destroys any previously held scientific theories? What if quantum physics was fundamentally illogical and nonsensical to the human mind? What if humanity truly was incapable of understanding and harnessing the universe at large, destined to never be more than rats in the walls of greater beings?
"Modern times" doesn't mean snapchat and instagram, the world is still big and weird and terrifying, and another layer of familiarity and comfort to break down only heightens the terror of the unknowable.

>How do you manage to make a GOOD Lovecraft setting set in modern (2017) times considering a lot of the effect of horror is lessened due to the prevalence of technology?

The game is set in oonga boonga land or durkallahistan and the PCs are all members of the Peace Corps.

>as soon as you can take a picture or call your friend
Trying to remember the lovecraft story.
In it a guy keeps getting weird phone calls, with gurgling on the other end.
His friend is trapped, possessing a broken decaying corpse. He can force his body to dial the phone, but can't make coherent noises

>sent to do long recon after a convoy went missing
>Probably ied+ambush
>Violence is ramping down my ass
>get closer to last known broadcast
>natives are restless.jpeg
>Some old towelhead is begging and pleading
>Nobody speaks more than a few words
>Something about "the thing that crawls"
>Stupid towelhead.

>End of Days is coming
>Cult starts spraying QR codes all over the city
>Obviously, nobody can resist the curiosity of what it is
>Scan
>It's the Yellow Sign
>EVERYBODY'S GETTING POSSESSED.OPRAH.COM

Second dimensional shapes linked together into three dimensional animalesque vaguely demonic forms, that move in an unnatural segmented way and slowly turn the environment into more of themselves.

Better if you're civilian contractors with the actual military guys, maybe at most one military guy as a PC.

Keep in mind that Mi go are basically gods with technology.

You could say that they corrupt any technology simply by being near it. Want to dial for the cops, sure but your phone is now in Mi Go, screams at you and has no microphone

Why wouldnt the cultists just spray the Yellow sign to begin with?

Technology does not help.
We might boast that we "Become death, destroyer of worlds" and have solid arguments to back this claim.
We might glass the earth, poison the biosphere and unleash chemical destruction unknown to the man, and hide in shadow of great engines of war.
Maybe it would be enough to defeat great ancient horror.

But it does not matter.
Technology is useless. Because all of this in unavailable to normal people and so to people that come in contact with mythos.

You may have signal in your phone. So what?
You gonna call cops about eldritch horror from outer space?
Google "how to kill shoggoth in 3 easy steps" really quick?
Download Necromonicon.pdf from piratebay?
Post pictures on the net, just to have it branded as bad and shopped cgi?
Good luck wit getting anything useful of your flashlight, if you have that app in your phone.
You may live in modern society and it will not help you in any way. Any tech you have will not help you. Researchers are alone against beasts and they may run (if possible), die or try to fight and go mad and die.

You could make it even more strange, meteor lands, soon all wildlife and plants are weird. Later when the monster shows up, technology near it changes, flashlights change into a color you can't describe, phones only read in moonrunes, nothing works.

Also I think instead of stealing a lovecraft monster, you should make your own. All monsters become less scary once you know what you are dealing with

you dont have to know what thouse words mean, the problem is that lovecraft wrote for people who were not compleat nihilists. In our day this dose not work because 99% of the first world just dose not give a fuck, we are not scared by the imposible and absurd, we embrace it. Camus would be at the same time proud of us and terrifed by us, and nietche would kill himself because his greates fear came true

It's implied you have to be in possession of a copy of the sign for it to really have an effect. Everybody identifies their phone as theirs at worst, an extension of their identity at best so they would have it in their possession then.

Plus there's less chance of raising eyebrows with a QR code than a clearly-weird symbol. Most people would instantly think "satanic shit, best to stay away"

These places have internet today.

show them that beings following different/extended set of rules can easily subvert or destroy the electronic devices people rely on. hounds of tindalos can follow you over the internet. nyarlathotep can upload visual basilisks to Veeky Forums. containment gets hard after someone films something they shouldn't and uploads it on youtube. cultist forums sprout in their thousands on tor network.

If you assume all kinds of supernatural beings are real, and to that extension lovecraftian horrors that will fuck up your sanity just by snoring, what makes you think your 3G connected smartphone will save you from it?

Sure, you get a perfect signal on your phone but any page you try to load is written in strange script that makes your head spin.

This is a pretty strong point. While a lot of horror, and personally I think fun RPG shenanigans in general, are ruined by technology the true point of Lovecraftian horror is really immune to it. In fact all it does it probably get more people killed and/or driven insane.

If you think a cell phone and AR-15 will help you against otherworldly, reality shattering horrors, you may be missing the point.

Something like siren:blood curse can work in a modern setting.(not with the mansion example though)

General consensus seems to be that subvertin tech with lovecraftian themes is the best way forward. Honestly it actually adds a lot to creativity as most stories are told from a Ye Olde point of view where a lot of modern shit like smartphones don't exist, so it's fertile ground for lunacy.

Makes me wish there were good lovecraftian movies set in modern times that use this shit.

The aftermath could fuck them up.
No need to attack them to hard.

Let's use room with blood and gore in it, maybe some weir killer monster.
Normal reaction is to cal the cops and panic.
It would be handled in serious manner, after all human life is in danger.
Cops will arrive in 15 minutes at best. Enough to kill the guys if wanted.
Cops arrive and search for the room and there is no room, no killer, nothing, non Euclidean geometry fucked with you you won't find it.
At best you will get a warning, at worst they will get fined.

But if they wanted to press the issue or call them when room reappears in mansion or in their own bathroom at their own home, as spooky rooms does not give a fuck about our concepts of time and space.
If they made photos and try to use it as the proof, it may be criminal charge, for starting a process for shit and giggles and creating fake evidence(up to 3 years where I live).
But worse if guys insist that this really happened...
It is mental asylum for long time. They are crazy fucks that see things that not only did not exist but could never exist. They are insane and potentially dangerous and should be locked up.
Guys may be sure that they seen things, but most crazy people are sure that the are sane, while being insane.

Just take your generic videogame creepy pasta (A hacked Morrowind.iso that shows you your corpse! boo!) and add C'thulhu.

It's not reliable, though, and missing out in the sticks or in the heart of darkness. It's a convenient safety blanket to yank away.

First step is to kill technology

Dreamquest still works I think, because it presents a world where all of our modern understanding is not only useless but in a way fundamentally untrue.

I'm pretty sure Nietzsche's greatest nightmare came true with your spelling of his name (and overall grammar.)

Well, I mean, nobody can pronounce it either, and the majority of people only know the second half of "He who fights with monsters", think Kelly Clarkson came up with "That which does not kill me makes me stronger" (and only know the misquote), and think Nietzsche was a nazi who believed in social darwinism.

People say that, but drop a modern person in the middle of a dark forest with no contact to the outside world, and shit will get real.

I've spend a good time of my life in the countryside, in places were there isn't even electricity available, and I tell you, a nice fall evening by candlelight and the world will seem really small and there's a lot of darkness out there beyond the little light you have.

You could say that about any philosopher at any point in history. Most of them weren't having mental breakdowns over it. Nietzsche is a trash philosophy for trash people.

nigga, they already did this with the movie occulus.

You'd have the phone dead for a while. Then you'd have them start getting messages from the house and fromt heir future selves.

>Download Necromonicon.pdf from piratebay?

Yes.

All the technology in the world, and I'll tell you right now - being in the sticks, in the black of night, is spooky as hell.

You want Lovecraft shenanigans? I'd recommend you head on over to /k/ and look for an Innawoods thread. Yes, it's all probably made up, though I remain open to the possibility that there's crap we don't understand. /k/, if you by some chance were unaware, is full of absolute autists like myself who love guns and consistently overestimate their own skill and courage.

With that in mind, read the stories. H.P. Lovecraft is about fear of the unknown, and that is THE fear played on by the best of the stories. The Skinwalker/Goatman stories in particular really play on screwing with the perception of what's real and what's not. The creature is usually seen only in the distance (often at the tree line), if at all, and is frequently detected only by its stench. They're notorious as shapeshifters or mimickers of voices, and the story's protagonist often only realizes a monster is involved when they find its work or discover that their friend who just went to pee is acting really, really weird.

As for technology, /k/'s favorite spooks have an odd relationship with it. The theme seems to be that the monster is tangible and can be readily visible, but whether it can be harmed or not is totally up in the air. As far as I'm aware, there are no Skinwalker stories that involve a successful killing of one OR the certainty that it was unaffected by the bullets. Not knowing whether or not it's invincible actually heightens the mystery and fear, because no matter how visible it is, it leaves the Skinwalker as a complete unknown.

Tl;dr - Go to /k/, relearn why fear of the unknown is the cornerstone of Lovecraft's work

Skinwalkers can be hurt by bullets, but only killed by bullets dipped in white ash.

Though there is at least one story of an user killing a skinwalker by ODing it with heroin.

Also, forgot the ultimate point here. Technology can actually enhance the fear factor. So you've got a photo of the Skinwalker. Congratulations, it's just as spooky as all those trail cam photos of indistinct nighttime critters.

For your specific scenario, imagine they're stalked by a Skinwalker or a Skinwalker-like creature. Maybe they get a picture of it peeking around a door and text it to someone. Spooky, but it won't do them any good. Now separate them.

>But they'll just use their phones to link back up

EXACTLY. The Skinwalker kills and replaces one of them, and texts the others with his location. Maybe have some kind of giveaway that something isn't quite normal about the text (for instance, know the characters' normal style when texting), but don't spell it out.

As for the flashlights - what good will it do them? Let them know the beastie is nearby with its stench, or horrible rasping breathing, or whatever. They'll run.

Go full /k/ and say they have guns. Joe slams a .357 into the monster's chest, a sold hit. The monster reels back, screeches, slips away into the shadows. Leave open the -possibility- that it could be hurt, but do not confirm it.

In short, use technology to your advantage by letting it reveal more things that they do not know.

I don't think you understand what makes Lovecraft's stories work. It's not "eww icky tentacles", it's a sense of existential dread that quaint human morality may be irrelevant in the face of a rational, non-anthropomorphic universe.

Look at stories like Alien, A Colder War, and Blindsight. A degree of technological advancement doesn't make the ape wielding it any less out of place in the universe.

>Go full /k/ and say they have guns. Joe slams a .357 into the monster's chest, a sold hit. The monster reels back, screeches, slips away into the shadows. Leave open the -possibility- that it could be hurt, but do not confirm it.

See this shit wouldn't work with my friendgroup. When we go camping we've got enough guns to around. At least a rifle and a sidearm per person.

Bears and wolverines don't fuck around, and neither do we.

You could have all the guns in the world - ultimately, the point of that scenario is to let them have their shots, hit at least some of them, and leave it ambiguous as to whether or not the monster was truly harmed. Multiple guns might make that easier, in fact - "Who hit it? How many times? Which rounds hit it?" The possibility that it shrugged off a .308 would linger in their minds even as they tell themselves that the guy with the FAL totally missed and it just got grazed by a 9mm or .223.

>tfw your buddy is part of an NFA item trust

"Yo mason, let's go get the '34 and the Hotchkiss"

Or just cripple it by shooting it with 12 gauge and then bashing its head in with a bat or hack it with a machete.

Remember friends, if it's alive it can die.

>That is not dead which can eternal lie,
>And with strange aeons even death may die

Also, stop trying so hard.

I thought we were still talking about skinwalkers.

I dunno man, it's all magic. That quote is applied to a couple different things in the Mythos, including lizard people ghosts.

Most stories of skinwalkers have them being defeated somehow, usually through brute force.

My favorite is the one where user kills it with heroin

This one

That's odd. The vast majority of Skinwalker stories I've read ended with the protagonist surviving and escaping, but the Skinwalker's fate is left ambiguous at best.

The heroin story was pretty funny, and I remember one that involved a Molotov cocktail, but those are the only two I can think of that end in an unambiguous killing of a Skinwalker. Otherwise, they'd fit right into Lovecraft's style.

Most of the ones i've read end with skinwalker death, but I've always gravitated toward "beat the monster with brute force"

Well, in any case, the more ambiguous ones are the most relevant to this thread. Killing the monster is perfectly fine, but it would be difficult to do a horror campaign with the knowledge that you can brute force it to death, and OP's intent seems to be running a horror campaign.

I mean Aliens did it pretty well

Visit EU or any first world country that is not Merica, so you won't have your guns or will be branded as terrorist.
Then go to the forest at night. It is never nice.

Light of campfire or car reflector gives comfort and sense of safety. But what if it steps into the light, and your only shield vanish?

Alright I'll go to the Czech Republic where they also have a Right to Bear Arms

Or I'll just stay in the USA, because I don't want to be anywhere else. Everywhere else , for the most part, blows.

As a Southerner (and the guy citing Skinwalkers as examples), I can tell you from personal experience that guns do not make the dark in the woods any less frightening. It DOES give you the reassurance of being able to fight back, but that doesn't make the lingering fear of the demon-haunted darkness magically go away.

And I do believe the deep woods are haunted by forces we don't quite understand.

Oh fuck the south, you guys got gators and shit.

I'm from the north, and spend a lot of time up in the UP of Michigan, which is lovecraft country lite.

Honestly, Lake Superior scares me more than the ocean.

>you won't have your guns

How about Switzerland, which makes US look like the UK when it comes to guns?

I live in Scandinavia and I know a ton of people with guns. Just about anyone who lives outside of a city is packing a shotgun or a rifle or two. Sometimes even in cities. I got a friend who owns an AK. Another runs a gun shop and is constantly telling stories of people who bring him bags of old guns they've found when going through a dead relative's belongings or something. Fuck, even my dad owned a handgun and after he died I had to explain to the police that I had no idea he even had one or where the gun even is right now.

Aliens was also an action movie with horror elements rather than a pure horror moview

Yankeeland is spooky in its own right, but the Carolinas practically have jungles, and mosquitoes the size of a Masshole's ego.

Up in Yooper land we've got horseflies the size of your thumb. I'm honestly convinced they're tyranid vanguards.

>lot of the effect of horror is lessened due to the prevalence of technology?
I don't see how technology alters it. Our general aceptance of being a tiny fragment of the Universe matters more.

>They all have smartphones with 3G, flashlights, headphones and all that shit
That never helped me against regular human horrors, why would it matter against lovecraftian ones?

>What can happen to these dudes to fuck them up psychologically?
They have swellings growing on random parts of their bodies. Scratching those makes them see and hear things they can't otherwise, but which can affect them with no problem. But the more they scratch, the swellings become more defined into small humanoid creatures which try to separate themselves from you, grab your fingers and suck your blood. They have a mosquito-like head, but all six mouth needles are very visible*. They may make the connection: the things pursuing them want their spawn whose development is being disturbed by your use of them as monster-sensors. So, giving them will stop the creatures? But how to sense the creatures otherwise? Won't the spawn get out by themselves? If they do, will more people go through what you're passing? Is it possible to kill these parasites and doom the creatures somehow? Welcome to the Realm of Unknowns.

*
youtube.com/watch?v=rNEPTxWNadg

I've got a weird parasite? Well, just go to the doctor and have him cut it out.

>No! We're going to the doctor, I'm in charge!
>Do you *feel* in charge?
>I'm the host body.
>And this gives you *power* over me?
>What is this?
>Your body has been important... 'til now!
>What are you?
>I'm this world's reckoning. Here to end the borrowed time you've all been living on!
>You're pure evil!

If that is a reference, it sailed over my head

You're a big parasite

What if he runs his tests and tells you that you are all right and this are just stress related hallucinations?
Will you believe him or all of your senses that say that you have weird parasite growing on you?
Or he sees it but tells that it is impossible and you have to fuck off as he will not deal with it, or it is fucking beautiful for him and wants to study it?

>get a razor blade and run some of my own tests
>trust myself
>fine doc
>no fuck off doc

>Can we rid the world of mosquitoes?
>Do we want to?
>((Annah Rothchild))
Nah, couldn't be.

No, u.

Honestly, it's simple; a lot of folks say that, fundamentally, horror is at the 'dark unknown', and this is partly true. The other, more important part of horror, however, is at the corruption of something seen as stable or 'good'; Lovecraft wasn't scary because 'muh unknowable' (because, honestly, that shit was trite even then) but because the nature of the universe he made was fundamentally a corruption of a noble and godly universe.

So, take what the players see as good, and fuck it to death on an ontological level whilst parading the corpse.

>Nyarlahotep is a shitposter

>The other, more important part of horror, however, is at the corruption of something seen as stable or 'good'
Yog-Sothoth reminded of God, and the Holy Spirit in particular.

Aliens was a shit horror movie tho.

Alien was better.

Introduced an unknown lifeform into a closed environment where it could outpace you and sneak up at any point.
There's no real weapons on board apart from what is essentially deodorant flamethrowers and shitty cattle prods that are both ghettorigged from tools and generic supplies.
The creature gives no fuck about them ANYWAY outside of base instinct and can possibly just ignore them if it wants.
It just wants you dead/turned into more of it's brood.
You have 2 options to survive.
1 of those fails immensely when the creature falls for the trap but manages to escape due to a traitor. (cut scene from the movie where black guy trys to jettison the alien in the air lock and catches the aliens leg in a airlock door, ripping off it's arm/leg and causes explosive decompression hence why Ripley magically produces a nose bleed and is the first real moment they get a traitor vibe)
The other option leads to the others in the place being horrifically butchered and only the last survivor escaping, almost taking the creature with her to human space and wouldn't have known if the creature had just stayed dormant.

Alien was pretty mythosian.

Shame Ridley Scott gets credited with it and not the writer despite the movie being saved by editors.

>They investigate the mansion with nothing significant happening. Take a few shots, film a few clips, no real strange incidents, and upload all of these while inside the house.
>Once they get out/Next day, they find out that they actually uploaded Event Horizon Liberati Infernum level shit.
>The whole town is now on the manhunt for 3 deranged teenagers for gutting the mayor's daughter and posting the whole thing online.

That sounds too predictable. More of a standard "We were the crazy ones the entire time" style plot twist

That's the thing. They never did any of it. The mayor's daughter really is alive, somewhere, but they have no way of proving it.

Read Laird Barron's Mysterium Tremendum

The Thing on the Doorstep.

I think the best "modern day" Lovecraftian is still 1408, even if test audiences screwed up the ending.

The room in question, once it becomes "aware" of an occupant, essentially can make the occupant stay as long as it wants until they use the express checkout. It can alter it's temperature, it's interior however it wants. It can even disguise itself as places other then the room, leading to an extended sequence where the lead thinks he's escaped only for the post office he's in to transform into the room.

Ultimately, the victory the lead gets isn't due to technology, but the fact that the musty hotel room had the same weakness of a lot of old buildings: molotov cocktail.

The non-Euclidean geometric death cities actually still terrify me. They terrify me perhaps more than any other element of Lovecraft's stories though to be fair I have an obsession with architecture

Fuck you, he's the second most important philosopher of modern time behind Hegel you philistine

Come to Alabama, we've got giant ass mosquitoes, giant ass horseflies, and meth.

Bane posting

A couple of ideas I thought of from reading your posts. Rather than dark chanting or strange noises.

Let them complete the call and talk to their family or the police. Say they ask for help or to show up with reinforcements. Nobody shows.

When the investigators go to whoever or wherever to follow up on why they didn't come, they never got the call. To them it never happened. Or they got the call, but all they got was static.

Another option would be when the players make whatever call, they just hear their own voice repeating what they just said.

And the last thing I thought of was that they make the call to the police, and they are just having a conversation with themselves. Then have them realize that they had this conversation before, except from the other end. Or maybe try and work something out with the players on myself role playing as them from the future to help get them out. But there are no guarantees. Could just be a possible future self.

This is the type of stuff I plan on doing for my Delta Green game.

well Lovecraft didn't know what he meant when he said non-euclidean either.
Cyclopaean he probably meant according to it's actual meaning, but non-euclidean is a very broad term that refers to a lot of math that's pretty common.

Like the sailors he meantioned in his stories probably used non-euclidean math even if they didn't know that word. Because that's how you navigate on the surface of a sphere.

Hyperbolic geometry is weirder, but still used by normal humans.

I've personally worked using math on n-dimensional hyperspheres. It was to study bug butts.

>no way of proving it
how about her being seen in public you mong?

Get Delta Green man, it's pretty much modern Cthulhu done right.

if by 'modern' you mean the 17th through 19th century, maybe. Which is a use of the term, and is why the term 'post-modern' exists.
But if you mean modern as in resent or current, there are so many better.

And that's only Nietzsche before he actually had a nervous breakdown and went off the rocker.
Read the Genealogy of Morals, and maybe Thus Spake. The rest can be left.

Use those symbols I see posted on here sometimes,

You know the one for SCP things, with the symbol for the symbols have been compromised.

Make them puzzle out their meanings to keep their minds ordered then show them it was all just to trap them.

>post-modern philosophy
>good

if by 'post-modern' you mean those who would call themselves so, that's one thing.
If you just think philosophy stopped in 1900, that's a special type of stupid.

integrate mythos into technology.

The Yellow Sign gets shitposted all over /b/

creepypasta that might actually be a thing

>Yellow Sign
TELL ME ABOUT THE KING
WHY DOES HE WEAR THE MASK?
LOTTA LOYALTY FOR A HIRED CULTIST

>That pic
True to Lovecraft, surprisingly. According to him, the reason they're such lazy fucks in meatspace is because they're a race of powerful, noble warriors in the Dreamlands.

What a lot of people misunderstand about Lovecraftian horrors is that they aren't scary because they're a ball of nonsense tentacles squiggling around in the void of space. What makes them scary is what they represent. Cold, indifferent forces which don't even know nor care that humanity exists and whom we are completely helpless against.

That's the knowledge which drives Lovecraft's protagonists mad, knowing that their position in the universe is minuscule and helpless in the face of these unspeakable entities.

I just watched The Void. I recommend you try it.

Most people I've met have an arbitrary phobia — spiders, snakes, rats, whales (probably least common one I've heard), heights, claustrophobia, I even have mild trypophobia myself. These all work better in a visual medium, though, and have more of a revulsion-horror effect, rather than dread.

Another common strain I detect in contemporary western society is nigh-universal hypochondria, and since pathology (mental and physical) was a strong theme in many of Lovecraft's works, this could be effective if "modernized" as it were.

Conspiracy theories are also more popular now than probably any time since the 60s/70s, and that's (kind of) a common Lovecraft theme that could be polished and retailored for a modern audience.