How do you feel about settings that set up humanity to be the eldritch abominations, scaring the hell out of the more 'normal' people that inhabit the setting through our strange customs and weird rituals?
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Trite inversions born of moral relativism taken to it's logical end stage.
Humans as fae (eldritch is simuler but on average with what you describe it's not the word you should be using) Fae humans only become acceptable in a context of talking animal stories.
Warhammer 40k pulls it off pretty well as a sci-fi fantasy setting.
The only thing warhammer pulls off is its pants to raise its ass in the air and take a steamy shart on itself.
Humans in 40k, even their augmented variants, are viewed as barbaric sacks of shit by other sentient races. Nothing eldritch about that.
I mean, even secondaries can grasp that. What was your line of thinking?
They’re pretty Eldritch to younger races like the Tau
>be T'au
>find gue'la welding a flint knife
>lol primitive gays we'll put this shit on display to show how much better we are
>knife can tear holes in reality
You're not wrong.
That's why they are integrating them into the Empire?
That's warp, not humans. Moreover, the connection between other sentient races and warp is a relatively new phenomenon for Tau.
>That's why they are integrating them into the Empire?
Only the fringes of them. Stuff like psykers, Space Marines, astromancers, and navigators, don't get integrated. They also encourage humans to drop the emperor worship overtime and stop the more creepy stuff.
I like it when it's done well
Humans work better as lovecraftian horrors to animals than as elves in every way except in their relationship to us. Powers like creating openings in solid walls, manipulating light and darkness, understanding and performing incomprehensible signals and rituals to navigate a hostile world of their own design, travelling impossible and unnavigable distances, perception that seems to stretch across time and space and even into the future, twisting and reshaping matter at their will, the environment itself grows hot or cold at our mere presence.
If those little frickers werent raised around us from birth we'd be a nightmare
On the subject of food, yes. A lot of things humans share with wild animals is REDICULOUSLY overfeeding. Like, the equivalent of giving a human 20 big mac meals. Filling, but very unhealthy in the long run.
Plus, think of all the stuff we feed dogs. Rice and vegetables, pasta with meats. Etc. You think wolves EVER ate so well?
A Galah in captivity eats so well and lives such a good life, they have a life expectancy of 80 years. A wild Galah lives just 20 on average.
That lines up perfectly with the stories of humans going to the fae and coming back 'hundreds' of years later and as if they haven't aged a day. While everyone they knew is dead.
Again, thats really more of a
>yeah the sky is red now and cthulu mostly just kills us by accident but sometimes it sucks the entropy out of my phone battery.
Those animals arent free, they're maintained and managed as part of an urban ecosystem because it benefits us. They arent humans wandering from their villiage into a mysterious foreign land, they're the selected few fishlike humans who've lived a thousand generations in r'lyeh, who's comings and goings through the swirling streets are really just a churning sigil silencing the screams of the outer gods that may disturb cthulu's slumber. The non-fishlike humans are just wiped out, their lands barren and their air toxic. The few survivors hide high on mountaintops or deep in deserts not because they're truly safe, but because cthulu finds the dry air unplesant and cant be bothered to go there
Besides, fey are all about social rules and gifts and comsumable things, but that does nothing for the unknowable 4th dimensional terror of a dog stuck inside a duvet case. To maintain the relationship its not enough to command those forces through magical authority, its an interaction that is fundamentally beyond a human understanding. Its not enough that their world be dangerous, its actively hostile even to the select few with the skills to scrape out a living there, and its dangerous in a way that is totally beyond your understanding and entirely because they want it to be. A dog gets hit by a car because it didnt know any better. A human cant see forward in time so they look straight into the fractured rune floating straight through a solid wall and gets their soul annihilated because cuthulu was making a long distance call
The only way you're ever even mostly safe is if you're a pet, in which case being a show breed might easily be a fate worse than death
I like the idea of Humans being absolutely terrifying to some species and i think it can be a fun concept
Make your group into monsters and have them believe there is this ultimate boogie man that terrorises them and revealing in the end that the monster is humans
I really dont like how easily it can take the "the real monster was man all along tho" which i feel is a terrible trope
Only works in concept and doesn't work on an execution level because we are all human unless you take great pains to hide that the ones to be feared are human. Otherwise the end result will always just be people finding the non humans to be wimps and the humans still mostly seen as normal.
Works pretty well in 40k
I'm pretty sure one of the lore things in Mass Effect was that despite being relatively new on the galactic scene humanity was effectively oppressed because we're short lived compare to other races, but as a result we're far more ambitious and aggressive than any other sentient species. The other races were scared that humans, if given the chance, would steamroll over every other race by force of will and frick everything up.
I might have imagined that.
In any case. Imagine being a species that lives for a thousand years and is used to taking shit slow and then all of a sudden a bunch of weird, intelligent, hyperactive trolls turn up one day and start fricking with your shit and playing around with your lasers and there are billions of them. You wait 100 years or whatever to see if they'll go away but then there's twice as many and they've taken your lasers and made them twice as effective and more efficient. You start to develop something to counter them and a few hundred years you've figured it out but now there are trillions of them and they've invented some shit you'd never even conceived of. Now that I think of it, that's just 40k orks.
that just sounds like real life.
>humans are le bad
i hate catholics and ex-catholics
Given the entire consumer base today are also humans perhaps you could use a sci-fi/higher power level version of humanity. With the power differentiation comparable between irl humans and animals
>cars are normal. instead humans teleport around and move at lightning speeds
>normal conquest is easy. instead humans are an unstoppable tide who dont even see the other species as sentient. they might just set up shop on a planet by leveling a city and then just ignore any retaliation or anihiliate anyone who retaliates nigh isntantly
>most of the galactic region the setting takes place in is actually a giant nature reserve. where godlike human tourists appear every now and then to take pictures and gauke at the local fauna
>human war dwarfs the devastation of the locals. eg: the locals are interplanetary, the human war involve rearanging the stars themselves in massive games of billiards
I imagine in this interpretation humans would be represented in art as distant and in steriotypical 1950s clothes. Perhaps clashing with the more or less modern clothing of the normal inhabitants of the setting.
Even if that wasnt alien enough theres enough human history that you could find something that could clash with the aesthetics of the setting.
>I imagine in this interpretation humans would be represented in art as distant and in steriotypical 1950s clothes.
You’re describing G-Man, from Half-Life! He’s a pretty good example of an “eldritch human” interacting with normal humans. He even has a job!
I had such a game once. We were playing as sentient bugs in a wild west like bug town doing typical western shit for the first half of the game.Then we encountered like an endless mountain of food and sent an expedition only to be utterly destroyed by gargantuan monsters that controlled poisonous clouds. For the rest of the game we plotted to take revenge on some fricking tourists with a bug spray who had a little camp in our forest. It was surprisingly fun.
Sounds like it; also giving me slight looney tunes/old chip n dale vibes, I can easily imagine that as a cartoon script.
Artist?
>How do you feel about settings that set up humanity to be the eldritch abominations
Name one, slophomosexual.
Not OP, but AT-43 did this really neatly. Shame the game itself is no longer sold in my country 🙁
I think it would be interesting if there was a none human centric setting like oddworld, but humans show up as neither antagonistic/benevolent small scale colonists who are just considered extremely bizarre and unknowable/untouchable to the world’s denizens.
Did anyone else expect humans to show up in Redwall at some point? I was surprised to learn they weren't part of the setting.
Not sure why, but my brain wanted kept going back to Secret of Nimh.