>setting's cosmology is inspired by lovecraft

>setting's cosmology is inspired by lovecraft
When does it end?

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

Homeless People Are Sexy Shirt $21.68

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Lovecraft's got a good cosmology if you look into it beyond TENTACLE LOL memes, doubly so if you look into Derleth's expansion of the Elder Gods.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      you are very bold in assuming OP has ever picked up a book that didn't read right-to-left

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        They read Hebrew?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Are you implying OP is a weeb?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Absolutely

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I’m mixed on Derleth. He expanded the role of my favorite god, Hastur, and also sort of organized a lot of the lore into a cohesive universe but also added some weird Christian Good vs Evil aspects to it that don’t really go with Lovecraft’s works.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >but also added some weird Christian Good vs Evil aspects to it that don’t really go with Lovecraft’s works.
        I prefer them. I'm not into Lovecraft for any of the nihilistic aspects, which weren't always consistent in his own works anyway. At least one story has a ghost repelled by a crucifix too, though ultimately his stories weren't set in the same/a consistent "universe".

        I can definitely get why some people dislike him, but I think the subset of his critics who say he ruined Lovecraft as a personal attack or "hijacked" his work are just wrong, since Lovecraft and Derleth were good friends and he encouraged Derleth to write stories set in his world(s).

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          That’s fair. I totally get where you’re coming from. Again, I’m mixed on him because I like a lot of the work he did for the Mythos including the expanded roles of some of the figures and the organization itself, but I’m more privy to the “fear of the unknown.”

          Different strokes for different folks!

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            For sure. Thanks for being one of the reasonable Derleth critics too.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Christian Good vs Evil aspects
        If it was subjectively good and evil beings, some gods still being alien but friendly to humanity out of some kind of interest, it'd be fine but describing something like cthulhu as objectively evil shits on the entire point of the setting where the greatest beings do not give a single shit about humanity even existing. You can't define something like Yog-Sothoth as evil, he's beyond the concept as we comprehend it.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          IMO the "there's no good or evil" was never true of Lovecraft. Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu, etc. were all very plainly evil and villainous, to the point he describes them as such.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Sure some of them but introducing objectively good deities begins to demand classification of all of them as though its a great cosmic war instead of a collection of various spirits some of whom have personal interest in mankind

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              True, but I personally prefer that. "Nihilistic bleak universe" was never what I liked Lovecraft for. If it IS what you like then yeah, I can see how that cheapens it.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I'm not for complete nihilism but reducing them to good vs evil puts mankind on a bit of a pedestal imo. In my point of view you should have 4 or 5 who are directly helpful to humanity through their own cults and powers (though not necessarily good nor friendly with each other) with anywhere from 3 to 8 who either hate us or parasitize off us. Others can be in commensalism or mutualistic relationships but all have independent agendas for the most part and the evil either can't get as good a foothold or, in the case of Nyarlathotep, don't care to end the game just yet. Nyarla is the big filter, humanity is racing to find someway to stave him off or will be gone forever.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Typically I make it a matter of creation vs destruction the old ones and outer gods wants to destroy the universe (for the funny) and typical gods want to preserve the universe for obvious reasons. Does this mean all old ones are evil? Yes. Does this mean all gods are good? No.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >derleth making cthulhu a water deity
        God fricking damn it August

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >doubly so if you look into Derleth's expansion of the Elder Gods.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Derleth is fine. You can like him or not, totally fair, but he's not a malicious saboteur regardless of what his more unreasonable critics say, usually because they're just militant atheists. He was friends with Lovecraft, Lovecraft gave him writing advice, and he encouraged Derleth to write weird fiction.

        I myself think the Elder Gods are fine. If I do Call of Cthulhu games in Lovecraft's world, the tone is never bleak or nihilistic, at least on the cosmological level.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Also, Nodens, the deus ex machina human-caring god who rivals Nyarlathotep, was Lovecraft's making, not Derleth. The idea of cosmic wars and gods caring about mankind was already there before Derleth. Lovecraft had no single set idea for his stories or setting, just various varying ideas of "Yog-Sothery".

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            I never claimed it didn't exist at all in Lovecraft. Dagon legitimately cared about his followers, Yog-Sothoth was benevolent and the Mi-Go seemed to actually just want to show people cool shit(although that's debatable).
            But Lovecraft handeled it in a very different way. The benevolence was still utterly alien, and to us seemed almost identical to malevolence.
            I don't have a problem with you liking Derleth, but it's just... not for me.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Personally I disagree. I don't think any of that was ever shown in any way that's not plainly malevolent, but that's just my interpretation of Lovecraft and my personal fondness for Derleth's ideas.

              Typically I make it a matter of creation vs destruction the old ones and outer gods wants to destroy the universe (for the funny) and typical gods want to preserve the universe for obvious reasons. Does this mean all old ones are evil? Yes. Does this mean all gods are good? No.

              That's pretty much what Derleth did really. I need to read up more on him, but the gist is the Elder Gods entered the universe and created the Outer Gods to serve them. They wanted to create a peaceful realm to lord over, but the Outer Gods became extremely powerful themselves, made the Great Old Ones as their servants, and then rebelled against the Elder Gods. That cosmic war's continued and has basically stalemated, with Nyarlathotep and Azathoth wanting to either destroy or usurp what the Elder Gods have made (I think Azzy might still be mindless here though, I forget how that happened), while the Elder Gods just want to defend it. They're not wholly white hat good guys, just generally benevolent. Yag-Thaddag is very much a white hat benevolent god, but Nodens, while benevolent, is a "get in my way and I'll slap your shit" type of deity, with no time for nonsense or indecision.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                How was the Mi-Go removing people's brains and putting them in brain jars not seen as malevolent? Or Yog-Sothoth switching Carters body with a weird alien thing because he was curious about them? Or fish sex?
                Even if all those had good intentions and wanted to be nice to the humans, it still would seem absolutely fricking horrible to go through. Except for maybe the fish sex :^)

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                That's what I'm thinking. Different strokes but I really can't get why some people can read that or about Nyarlathotep's scheming and think that Lovecraft didn't intend there to be clear good and evil in his cosmology.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >that Lovecraft didn't intend there to be clear good and evil in his cosmology
                *to an extent at least

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Because good and evil are inherently irrelevant in his stories. It doesn't matter if the thing trying to show you the boundless mysteries of creation is doing it because it knows you can't handle them or because it thinks you can, if the end result is you going insane and ripping out your own eyes with a rusty spoon it really doesn't matter.
                And good and evil don't exist in his stories, malevolence and benevolence maybe, but good and evil are far too earthly to describe these things. Cthulhu hurting humans doesn't make him evil, just like how someone stomping an ant doesn't make them evil.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Cthulhu hurting humans doesn't make him evil, just like how someone stomping an ant doesn't make them evil.
                Disagree with this interpretation.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Well yeah, cos you're a human, and to you, the person getting stommped, Cthulhu must seem pretty evil.
                But to Cthulhu we're pretty much ants, so what he's doing is at most kinda cruel, but not exactly evil.
                >but ants aren't sapient nor sentient, and they lack consciousness!
                Well yeah, but the difference between the mind of an ant and the mind of a human is roughly the same as between the mind of a human and the mind of Cthulhu. Just like how ants build really cool and complex shit even though they literally lack a brain so do we build cool and complex shit from Cthulhu's POV, but that doesn't mean we aren't absolutely below him.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                All of that to me just sounds like faff trying to make it out to be deeper than it actually is, and it doesn't seem to have been entirely what Lovecraft was going for himself.

                I like Derleth either way.

                Derleth's positive contributions to Lovecraft Mythos were strictly archival, preserving the stories for future generations. His own cosmology was lackluster.

                >His own cosmology was lackluster
                It's not like Lovecraft put much detail into his. It's more because of Derleth that Lovecraft's own cosmology got fleshed out. Of course whether you like his addition of truly good gods and framing of cosmic creation vs. destruction is up to you.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It's not deep at all, it's rather simple. To an ant, us destroying an ant hill is evil. To us, it's not.
                To humans, Cthulhu ending all life on the planet is evil. To Cthulhu, it's not.
                The reason Cthulhu is presented as evil in the stories is because the people telling them are human. But from Cthulhu's point of view, what it's doing is really not particularily evil at all.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >But from Cthulhu's point of view, what it's doing is really not particularily evil at all.
                That doesn't make it not-evil.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It's evil from the human's point of view, yes, but that's it. It's not objevtively evil because that doesn't exist, at least to Lovecraft. And even if it did, that objectivity would be a lot closer to Cthulhu's subjectivity than to our own.
                Me stepping on a wienerroach is evil to wienerroaches but not evil to me. Cthulhu eating a human is evil to humans but not evil to him. And since the difference between me and a wienerroach is equal to that between me and Cthulhu, the comparasion is pretty apt.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I never claimed he was a malicious saboteur by any means, he's the sole reason Lovecraft is even relevant enough to have a tabletop game about him.
          But he made Cthulhu into a fricking water elemental. No writer after Lovecraft was able to replicate what made Lovecraft special, at least to me.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Mb then, I misunderstood you. I'm just used to talking about Derleth online and someone inevitably talking about how he sucks because he hijacked Lovecraft's work or something.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Nah it's fine, Lovecraft is a very polarizing person. People either hate him and want to shit all over him or love him so much that anything that's not exactly how he intended is seen as heresy.
              Lovecraft of course loved different interpretations of his works and encouraged people to use his stuff even if the tone of the works it would have been used on was completely different to what he was writing. It ez what it ez.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          August Derleth is gigantic hack and his only entitlement to fame was his proximity to Lovecraft. He can be credited with collecting Lovecrafts fiction and getting it published, but the Marvel-tier fan fiction he produced has done nothing but shit on the initial literary premise.

          You sound like a vapid c**t and I’m sincerely bothered that mouth-breathing simpletons like yourself are always the loudest with their shit opinions. The futility of man in relation to unknowable facets of reality is the appeal of Lovecraft, of which to say there are no modern authors or readers imaginative enough to explore that supposition.

          I’m sure you will condescend, because nothing can match the petulant arrogance of the unchallenged consumer. Everything today is made for valpid dumbfricks like you.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >The futility of man in relation to unknowable facets of reality is the appeal of Lovecraft
            For me it's the visuals he brings to mind and the blend of early 1920s sci-fi, horror, and mystery. The stories where hopeless futility in the cosmos is part of the theme are still intriguing, but that part specifically isn't what interests me about Lovecraft.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Derleth's positive contributions to Lovecraft Mythos were strictly archival, preserving the stories for future generations. His own cosmology was lackluster.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >setting doesn't have a cosmology, the gods all refuse to interact with mortals if they exist at all.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Inspired by Lovecraft
    Shit tier.
    >Using Lovecraft's cosmology
    Based.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    When you quit focusing on what other people do and make what you like.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    That's the beauty of memetic hazard. Just by thinking about someone thinking about Lovecraft, you've been rumbled. The taint from elder gods that *aren't even real* has spread because you're a weak-willed homosexual. Touch grass.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      You've said nothing

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >When does it end?
    When you actually find a game and start playing.

    I swear to god 99% of b***hing about the state of games is from losers that do not or can not play. It doesn't fricking matter if zoomers on the other side of the country are engaging in tropes you dislike because it has zero impact on you and your four buddies when you gather around the table on Friday nights to roll some dice and have fun. Seething over how someone you have never met and never will meet prefers to play pretend just seems like such a huge waste of energy.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >setting has sky
    >where does it ends?
    This is you. This is how vast the meaning of "lovecraftian" is

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Lovecraft cosmology is objectively cool
    You have
    >a primordial blight of unfathomable chaos from which all time and space emerges, but is completely unaware of the Universe it creates, surrounded by a court of daemonic gargoyles beyond imagination that play a melody that transcends sound to the infinite blind idiot God
    >an omniscient omnipresense that lays outisde of all creation, that knows all whcih was and is and shall and who is bith the gate and key to that dimension of infinite knowledge
    >the "heart and soul" of the outer gods, the will of those beings who are not bound by the rules of reality but instead dictate them made manifest into a sadistic and monstrous thing whi revels in the mandess and the death he causes
    >a hugh priest of these very other gods, spawned billions of years ago in a planet distant and strange, who came to earth to build a city of impossibility, awaiting for the cosmos itself to align and let him leave, so he may rule this world once more
    This shit is cool

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    LOOK OUT UR WINDOW NIQQA IT NEVER ENDS

    LOVECRAFT IS REAL. EVERYTHING IS REAL. JESUS, SEND ME MY PALADIN ARMOR I AM READY TO SLAY THE DARKNESS

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Read lovecrafts works. An no, i don't mean just the 10 most popular ones, read some of his smaller ones too.
    It's very cool and the issue is the 60IQ people shittily replicating mediocre replicas of lovecrafts works.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    When you play something else or join the 41%.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I blame shit like hellboy where it became accepted to just take other authors shit and apply it to your poorly thought out characters

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >setting is "inspired by Lovecraft"
    >Just tentacle monsters and sometimes a fish village
    >Never explores the themes of making humanity infinitely small and insignificant and often puts PC on parr with the horrors
    >Rarely even a weird building
    Every fricking time.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I agree that Lovecraft now = tentacles but it's not like
      >the themes of making humanity infinitely small and insignificant
      or
      >Rarely even a weird building
      were consistent themes of Lovecraft himself. Dude wrote a Frankenstein zombie story with a mix of horror and comedy.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Herbert West reanimator is considered, by Lovecraft, to be his worst work and he only wrote it by commission.
        Another work by commission of him, the Mound, was supposed to be a work about a haunted indian burial mound but he turned it into a story about an ancient city built by an elder alien race

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          He also wrote a ghost story, a story about Lilith the fallen angel, and a short about a traveler encountering an inbred cannibal.

          It's evil from the human's point of view, yes, but that's it. It's not objevtively evil because that doesn't exist, at least to Lovecraft. And even if it did, that objectivity would be a lot closer to Cthulhu's subjectivity than to our own.
          Me stepping on a wienerroach is evil to wienerroaches but not evil to me. Cthulhu eating a human is evil to humans but not evil to him. And since the difference between me and a wienerroach is equal to that between me and Cthulhu, the comparasion is pretty apt.

          >It's not objevtively evil because that doesn't exist, at least to Lovecraft. And even if it did, that objectivity would be a lot closer to Cthulhu's subjectivity than to our own
          That's fine if that's your interpretation anon, it's faff to me and it's not an interpretation of it I share. To me Derleth cuts this "well cthulhu can be evil but he's an alien so it's actually not evil" line and just says "yes, cthulhu is evil." It's not an interpretation you have to like, certainly, but it's the one I like.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >a story about Lilith the fallen angel
            Are you reffering to the horror at red hook?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Yep, which IIRC also has a bunch of other folklore shit mentioned. It's another story Lovecraft didn't like a lot, but still, it's another one he wrote.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Oh no anok, I never said you can't enjoy Derleth's interpretation. I just don't think it's particularily correct is all

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              I know, I'm just saying I feel the same way about yours. It's good to see a reasonable Derleth critic though who doesn't just hate him because he wasn't an atheist.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I have literally never seen anyone mad that Derleth was a christian, it's always "his stuff is juvenile fan fiction that lacks nuance and subtlety and gets major points of the mythos terribly wrong."

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I have literally never seen anyone mad that Derleth was a christian
                It's much more common than you think.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I suspect it's not, and it's more a "you stuffing other people into easily disregarded boxes" thing.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                When you see enough people talk about how terrible Derleth is and they're consistently people who describe themselves as things like "maoist dyke" you start to pick up on the pattern. One of the biggest Lovecraft scholars is a black marxist atheist who especially hates Derleth's writing, Joshi's his name I think.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                People can be atheists and yet also hate Derleth for other reasons. Seems like a motive fallacy.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Yes, but when you're something like a Marxist atheist, whose ideology revolves around aggressively attacking things that go against said ideology, it isn't a stretch to put two and two together.

                Not every critic of Derleth is like that though, some people just think his writing's bad, and that's fine, just as some people think his writing's good.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                You're a fricking moron. You're doing exactly the same thing as the people you're criticising by saying
                >uhh joshi is le brown skin who hates derleth for le christian values so we should just disregard him!!!
                when Joshi is a very prominent voice in saying that 'no Lovecraft was not actually a racist sexually repressed moron'.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    When everyone learns his best poem and the name of his cat.

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    GIVE ME DREAMLANDS STUFF

    DREAMLAND is the coolest Lovecraft setting.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      My brother of Egyptian decent.

      Dreamlands is a prime setting for any game.

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Well the cosmology may be a bit overused but I like the general theme of "dude you shouldn't meddle wi... Oh you did already yeah oh shits seriously fricked now I told you about the stairs man" that usually comed with it.

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Derleth is Black personific trash. No idea why people on this board recommend him.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      No one's saying you have to like it anon.

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Having a canon cosmology
    As for myself most of my religions are mostly historical because my setting is semi-historical (bronze age plus Atlanteans, Amazons, and Hyperboreans) for the others I use a mixture of blind conjecture (Amazons have more focus on goddesses with many gods vaguely similar to Greek gods, chief god of Atlanteans is “Posiden”, and Hyperboreans have an idealistic form of shamanism and ancestor worship). None of them are canonically true though and players don’t go to the afterlife and come back.

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *