How would one update the mythos to the 21st century? Tentacles

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You go back to the core of Lovecraft.
You see the shadows of Eldritch shit
You gain wisdom from seeing it.
But it also slowly drains you insane.

Bloodborne would be a pretty good game is Insight scaled to 99, instead of 30-40(and barely that)

>>43710066
But HOW?

Not OP, but what wisdom should they learn? The idea of other worlds and strange elder gods is old hat now. What knowledge is maddening?

>>43710165
Modern humans already go insane over the horizon of doom.
It doesn't take a lot.

The threat of non-being.

>>43710066

What sort of text can make a person insane? Just reading something can't turn someone into a frothing babbling idiot.

>>43710219
>horizon of doom

what is that?

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The treatment for madness isn't covered by your health insurance! WoooOOOoooo!!!

>>43710040
Time to get some Logotii in this joint.

>>43710273
Comic sans can probably do that

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>>43710273

> Just reading something can't turn someone into a frothing babbling idiot.

Oh. Really?

>>43710273
That doesn't really happen in Lovecraft. People don't just read books and go insane.

Seeing insane shit that shouldn't exist is usually what does it.

>>43710487

People haven't gone insane from seeing a platypus, even though it "shouldn't exist".

>>43710040
"People of the time were just underdeveloped, I'm sure modern man wouldn't have a problem with Lovecraft monsters" is the sort of thinking a Lovecraft protagonist would have.

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>He thinks a modern man from 1890s would not have ALL of the same stances as a 21st century fedora
>He underestimates how long "modern" has been around

>>43710473

What a load of HORSESHITE.

>>43710273
>>43710487
>>43710549
Keep in mind that the people in Lovecraft stories who "go insane" generally aren't insane in any actual medical sense; they've just become aware of the true nature of reality. Since the rest of the world remains in blissful ignorance, these character appear insane from the perspective of those who have not seen what they have seen, despite their actual mental faculties remaining mostly intact.

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OK anon, imagine you're sitting in your room. On the far side of the room, about ten feet from you, is an object on a shelf. You move your arm and feel it touch the object on the shelf, knocking it to the floor. Confused, you look at your hand and the object on the floor, still about ten feet away from you. You don't understand how it happened, but you tell yourself that it was just a funny coincidence and you imagined the sensation.

You move your hand again. This time, you feel it brush against the far wall, only something else happens. Your hand goes INTO the wall that's somehow both ten feet away from you and right next to you. You reflexively pull back, but your hand somehow severs itself from your wrist, and you are now staring at a bloody stump.

You call an ambulance, and when they arrive they ask how this happened. You tell them you put your hand into the wall and it got cut off. They look at the wall and don't see any holes where you put your hand through it, and you notice one of them writing something about "self-injury". They take you to the hospital and stop your stump from bleeding, but then a man comes in and wants to talk to you about the incident. You tell him exactly what happened. He thinks you're insane and prone to hurt yourself or possibly others. You find yourself involuntarily committed until you admit that you cut your own hand off. Records are made labeling you as someone who cut off his own hand.

Now instead of a passive wall not obeying the laws of reality as you know them, it's a giant amoeboid monster that doesn't seem to be bound by conventional physics or solid matter and it's slowly chasing you.

But please, continue telling us how you would be fine with this and not rattled at all.

>the idea that humanity is not the center of the universe is not really a big deal for most people.
I'd disagree with this, but assuming for a moment you're right: then what would the point of "updating" the mythos be? Pulling out the cosmic horror pulls out one of the more compelling parts. The pulp science fiction/fantasy setting that's left just seems boring to me. Eldritch Skies tried it and as far as I know nobody played their game.

Anyway, though I'm not a fan of Charles Stross, I found this to be a kind of interesting take on "modern mythos:" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/07/ia-ia-google-fthagn.html

>>43710870

I'm not advocating pulling out the cosmic horror bit, just making it more interesting to 21st century minds. To be honest I'm not sure what I'm looking for.

>21st century cosmic horror.

Read Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a first contact story that does a good job evoking a sense of insignificance.

>>43711087
Sense of insignificance is the key. The Lovecraft mythos was based around the fear that there is something much greater than us, something overwhelming that can't be understood.
Modern human society is too content. Too sure in the fact that we are the top of the food chain. You need something that makes us realize we are tiny and insignificant in the context of the universe.

>>43710473
Someone was very, very bored so he made this.

>>43711190
Very, very bored and very, very well-payed.

>>43711087
Nick Land's short story Phyl Undhu is similar, and good quality writing, but it's a riff on >>43710870's take.

>>43710040
Do we really need to? Even in stories like Innsmouth or Whisperer the Mythos was only cool fluff for the final twist which today still pulls off a nice shiver the first time you read it. The "shitbrixandgoinsanse" kind of Mythos is not really appicable anymore in the 21st century.

>and the idea that humanity is not the center of the universe is not really a big deal for most people
True but I still think there are some underlying aspects that would still work today.

The Mythos is always there. We're not the center of the universe and the universe is a materialistic place.
Grind the whole universe into atoms and you won't find the slightest trace of justice, success, friends, fun, beauty. They don't exist.
Even the slightly more real stuff like love or hate is just a transient electro-chemical thingy and none of them are of importance. Surely, love cannot be more important than boredom and all those hormones are the last nail in the coffin of our illusion of free will.
Sure, you can say all that's not real on a grand scale but on a human scale it definitely is but that leads to cognitive dissonance. Even more so if you're on the hand hand clinging to those human illusions and at the same time pushing them away from you - ever wondered how many people die while you're shitposting on 4chan? You're more worried about your cat that ran away than people starving, getting raped and shot all over the world at this exact moment?

Drop the charade and you become a sociopath. The Mythos and the knowledge of it compels you to lose your grasp on humanity. It's a memetic infection. Al-Hazred was the first to codify it. It's been growing exponentially ever since. The internet's made us voyeuristic and cynical beyond belief. The end-times are here.

Yeah, probably still not enough for the 21st century so just enjoy your weird tales.

>>43710273
Note how this never happened in Lovecraft's lore, this is 30 years of CoC corrupting our view on the source material.

>>43710760
>>43710770
>>43711176
Ok would it be better from a game play prospective if we swop sanity for drive? The more you understand about what's out there the slower you can regen it?
Now making it work in a story would be doable but hard to make money from as it relies on the protagonists slowly dying off (or quickly). I would do it by making understanding the mythos give you a bit of influence over it (very little, don't worry) by being noticed by it. I would use this to play with the question of is it best to hide in ignorance, learn what we can or go full worship and hope it doesn't do too much harm. As you would need to understand the mythos to answer that question and no one would worship without some explanation you have a logistics of knowledge problem to deal with.

>>43710165
>Turns out eating infants (especially your own) is the secret to super-humanity. Past forgotten civilizations understood this and eventually ascended to godhood. We are the goat-fucking descendants of those too weak to eat their own children.

>Turns out having a personality is the cause of death. Those who relinquish their individuality will live forever.

>Turns out the one dude is right: Racism is the only way. Life is nothing but a Highlander-esque death-match between races. You must devour the brains of your opponents so that your children may evolve. The only inferior race is the one that doesn't eat enough brains.

>Turns out science is fundamentally flawed and will lead to an agonizing end for all humanity. The true path is encoded in the Book of Mormon. You must give yourself over to Space God lest you ruin everything with your retarded mind. Shut the hell up about "human ingenuity" it works because Space God wills it. One day his mind will change and so will the rules.

>Turns out that man who molested you when you were eight was a savoir of mankind. He opened your soul so that that the Fingers of the Clouds could touch your true being. You must continue his great work awakening more souls for the final battle. However if they cannot accept your true masters you must make them fuel for racial evolution.

>Turns out the afterlife is the flesh of you progeny. The parent's consciousness lives on, totally aware but utterly powerless, in the body of the child. In each of us we have our every ancestor watching and judging us. Many have melded into a single, amorphous consciousness that tries to push us onto the path of "enlightenment."

Things that seem like they should be horribly wrong but turn out to be undeniably true. All of existence is an Orwellian nightmare of degrading and unintuitive principals. The best you can do is survive by following along as best you can despite the absurdity of your glorious new life.

>>43710273

It's not nescessarily that seeing something equals instantly going insane. What it is that the presence of the thing makes you question everything you ever understood about the world and it's just a spiral of doubt into crippling existential angst into insanity because now you have to deal with the fact that monsters can literally live in the shadow at the corner of your bedroom or that just beyond the reach is a monster walking around and all it takes is something, or someone, to do something that causes them to notice you and come after you. And why is it coming after you? Don't know but it wants to do things to you and you can't stop it.

>>43710040
Just show modern cults taking rational and reasonable people and turning them into monsters. It already goes on.

Show businesses crushing people beneath uncaring, unknowing tides of finance.

Show a government so wrapped up in secret but mundane wars that anyone could be a target.

Etc, etc. Basically, just take normal life, exaggerate it a bit, and then tale the tale of one man starting in ignorance, and slowly learning the terrible, mundane, depressing truth of the setting.

For someone with anxiety issues and depression every day is Lovecraft day.


Yay!

>>43710473
this is amazing

>>43710040
New Delta green

>>43710760
So they become /pol/? They were right again.

>>43710040
Cthulhu ISIS

OP confirmed corrupted by Derleth memes, good going.

Do you have any idea just how fragmented humanity actually is? The vast majority can't agree on anything. Take all Christian believers. Now you have Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant. You have countless different denominations of this religion. You have differing sects of EVERY religion. The same goes for other spiritual and moral matters, the same goes for politics, the same goes for fucking opinions on music and TV shows. To say that 'most people' don't have a problem not being the centre of the universe is a very large understatement. This isn't the discovery of a particle that the average layman doesn't understand within the framework of a specialist field of science, this is a very simple and concrete, far-reaching event that affects all life on the planet.

We might be more comfortable the concept of insignificance by virtue of it's mere existence, but the real truth of it would fuck over everyone. Just imagine first contact with alien life, how that'll go. Some people will want to reach out, others will want to cut contact, others will want to wage war, make alliances, some will want to fuck the aliens, others will want to eat the aliens and others will flat out refuse to believe there are any aliens. Religion and ethics and entire fields of theory and history will need to be created and re-written, it'll be fundamental shift in the psyche of the human species.

Now multiply that by ten million. Not only are you not alone, you were never alone and you never will be alone and your actual limits as a human being are full and clear. It's not what Cthulhu IS, it's what Cthulhu MEANS. Cthulhu is a symbol that's meant to convey the idea that everything you thought you knew about the world is wrong, that if THIS thing can exist, what else can? The limits of the human mind, what it can merely physically perceive or process only goes so far before it buckles under the stress of a total cognitive refutation.

>>43712343
If I remember correctly, a lot of his protagonists were emotional wrecks who let their curiosity destroy them.

>>43710273
Yes, it can. It has to get through several layers of defense mechanisms first, including blind aggression, but yes, it very much can.

Usually that kind of thing only works on fairly unstable people to begin with.

>>43710549
It's not a question of something that "shouldn't exist," it's a question of something bending your brain, step by step, inch by inch, curl by curl, until it goes pop.

Advanced mathematics is noted to do this to people. It's actually kind of fun, after the first few times.

>>43710273
This triggers me.

>>43710040
Tentacles are still good, when combined with other things. Shoggoths done properly, like faster-paced John Carpenter shit, would be great.
Inscrutable angles works like Ramiel in the Rebuild, about the best representation of a four-dimensional object rotating about the w-axis I've seen in any media. Make it a singular gribbly monster that essentially portaling around in addition to all that shit.
Then there's using just that higher-dimensional existence shit to transfer energy from one place to another in any significant quantity and you make that thing upgrade from tactical disaster to intelligent, persistent WMD.

>>43710473
>>43711190
>colanomicon.pdf

>>43710473
What the hell am I reading?

>>43710473
This feels like some weird cult manual.

>>43710273
>has never read manga

>>43717078
The result of spending tens of millions of dollars on a logo redesign.

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Read the Color out of Space.

Easily one of his best works and the best example of how to do eldritch horror without it just being "spooky fish tentacle blob thing". Which is, also, just an approximation. It's what your mind is able to pick out of the sidereal monstrosity made of angles you can't compute.

>>43717129
Hmm. Yes. Nothing seemingly too out of the ordinary with manga, but for some reason it turns some people into complete frothing madmen. I have this theory that anonymous imageboards would be a perfectly reasonable discussion method if it hadn't sprung out of the diseased snatch that is the Anime/Manga community. This gives me the idea of using Nyarko-san as a mythos tome of sanity rending capabilities second only to the necronomicon.

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>>43717254
Visual representation.

>>43710473
>brand identity is dimensionalized through motion

Just a second while I catch my breath.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH

>>43712068
Dude

Moar?

>>43710040

Yeah, everyone is already so nihilistic that "you're going to die and mean nothing" is just part of getting ready in the morning, y'know? That's why I prefer "you're going to live forever and it's going to be terrible" as a spin on it that is actually terrifying to imagine.

Consider a universe with more than three spatial dimensions. Now consider that mind-body dualism is partially correct, except that instead of your mind being some immaterial thing it is actually just existing on another fold of space and anchored by some physical law too complex for you to understand. When your body dies the connection is broken but the mind remains, and that mind then slides through space to the incessant gravity of the Azathoth stand-in. And when you get there you fall into that churning mass of incomprehensible matter, eternally being crushed and reshaped along with all of the other minds of lesser sentient beings that have ever existed since the universe began, all these voices alien to one another screaming forever in the same understanding of sublime, ceaseless suffering.

Now imagine that you have found irrefutable proof that this is the universe you live in and that there is no escaping your fate. Wouldn't you crack?

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>>43710473
>Now as you can see in this runic line graph, by investing magic into imprinting advertising into our DNA, we innovate in a multidimensional way, allowing us to market to our dreamland selves, which innovates in a non-euclidean way and allow for further investment into inbreeding to reinvent ourselves in the image of our great cthulhu, and spreading social norms and the value of conformity.

>>43717785
Ah fuck, Apparently I repeat myself, apparently. Fuck.

>>43717679

Thinking about it some more and to touch on a larger issue about horror in general, one of the biggest obstacles is getting the audience to suspend their disbelief. Something like this is only going to scare you if you actually get into the mindset that it is real. A sentient french fry that stalks you and tries to kill you slowly by filling your body with tiny needles would be absolutely horrifying in real life but if you ask anyone if that is scary nine times out of a ten they're going to say no because they aren't honestly putting themselves into the situation, they get stuck on "that's dumb" rather than "holy shit it's going to find me again tonight, I'm going to lose my other eye." Certainly some people are going to have a natural talent for drawing others into a work of fiction but at the end of the day a lot of it is on the audience to actually make an effort to seriously consider the material being presented to them.

This is why horror campaigns can be so difficult to pull off. All it takes is a single person not giving it their full effort and saying "dude, it's just a whispering book, that isn't creepy, we just killed two dracoliches in Jeff's campaign the other night" to ruin the atmosphere for everyone. So essentially there's no trick to getting horror to work for a modern audience, you just need an audience that is willing to be unsettled.

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>>43710473
>>43717785

>>43710040

OP here. Thanks guys. Got some good material for my Delta Green campaign. the OP was really just bait to get people to correct me, I was only pretending to be retarded. I mean, I am retarded, but I was also pretending to be as well.

>>43714221
Except for Prof Armitage in the Dunwich Horror. That guy was a total badass.

>>43710273

http://www.timecube.com/

there you go.

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>>43719411
One of these days I'll actually start to make sense out of time cube. Today is not that day.

Toynbee tiles too

>>43710473
So are you guys aware of the concept of The Armitage Files or The Dracula Dossier? Basically they are campaigns designed to be half-improvised based on what the players take out of huge handouts full of too many weird things and clues to have time to get to all of them.

Anyway, since I saw this the first time a couple weeks back, I've been thinking, maybe I could use this as a free version of a campaign like that. Some modern setting, Esoterrorists or Delta Green or The Laundry. Probably need a few more things for people to actually grasp onto, which could be done by annotating the pdf, but then could just pair that with a list of NPCs and whatnot and have an easy campaign out of it.

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>>43710040
I remember when someone asked for a way to combine Time WIzard and CoC, and I think the resulting concept applies to this situation

The investigation starts off alien, but humanizes and becomes more personal as they go deeper. Eventually, when the veil is lifted, the truth is much simpler than you ever expected, and the "eldritch horrors" were more theatrics than anything else. The truth is, we ARE alone in the universe. There IS no higher purpose, or higher intelligence, only us. Eventually, humanity will progress to near omnipotent transhuman levels of power, along with time manipulation, and they just don't give a fuck anymore.

The existential horror doesn't come from coping with being an insignifigant speck in a sea of horror, but from being the only speck of actual significance in an impossibly empty sea of nihilism, and coming face to face with the true empty inhumanity and inanity of humanity when there are no more arbitrary goals to achieve and it's forced to face the universe with its true nature unveiled. We are the only unnoticeable speck of existence that means anything, and even that doesn't REALLY mean anything when you think about it.

It don't matter

None of this matters

Give in to it and just play along for the amusement of humanity's true face

>>43711337
>Note how this never happened in Lovecraft's lore, this is 30 years of CoC corrupting our view on the source material.
This.

And the funny thing is, it's all the worst CoC scenarios that seem to have the biggest impact. The stuff that CoC gets right (admittedly often the later stuff) seems not to be remembered as well.

The whole point of the book "Stealing Cthulhu" is that by going back and imitating Lovecraft, you can appear to have fresh ideas because the game and prewritten scenarios have largely moved so far away from it.

Treatment of less powerful beings like Serpent Men, Deep Ones, Ghouls, and Mi-Go bug me the most, they get thrown around as mooks and always shown face-to-face and forced into fights rather than being hinted at and half-glimpsed.

>>43710165
Lovecraft's horror was all about discovering horrifying truths.

Actually, go read Oedipus. Throughout the story, tons of characters keep telling him that, if he continues on the path he's going down, he won't like what he discovers, and when he does, lo and behold, he ends up gouging his own eyes out at the revelation.

Realizing something that's been true all along, and changes the scope of everything you remember, is what's truly terrifying. Think of discovering that you're not your original self, but an artificial copy of that person's mind, ala SOMA. That's a good example.

>>43720062
To be fair, a game based directly on most of Lovecraft's writing would be boring as hell to play.

>Yay we just spent four hours hunting down old journals and interviewing that creepy dude that lives in the bog and all we found out was that Steve's great grandmother boned a skeleton. Sorry Steve but you're too spooky to be in the party anymore.

>>43720145
This is why I think Trail of Cthulhu does a far better job than CoC at playing those purist 'everyone goes insane', 'skill development? lolno!' kind of one-shot scenarios straight out of the box.
Pillars of Stability and Drives offer a plethora of narrative hooks to tailor creeps around the investigators and sucker punch them in the gnads. And the 'get a free clue' mechanic actually serves to reduce playtime and the crunchiness when everyone at the table doesn't really care about dice rolling when you know you can throw your character in the trash afterwards.

>>43720226
I've never seen CoC as being designed for campaign play in the first place. It's best for single adventures or sessions.

Every CoC campaign I've been in has basically turned into a cross between Buffy, Supernatural, and that Mummy movie with Brendan Frasier. Fun, but definitely not scary.

>>43720145
Steve's great grandmother either boned an ape, a merman, a dutchman, or an eskimeaux.

Skeletons are way too spooky for sexing.

Also, theres a reason no one bases scenarios on Arthur Jermyn. But most of the other stories work a lot better, and the research focus is really nice and something that already appears in the most fun CoC scenarios anyway. (See especially most of the ones in New Adventures in Arkham Country, New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, Tales of the Crescent City, Tales of the Sleepless City.)

>>43720248
>Every CoC campaign I've been in has basically turned into a cross between Buffy, Supernatural, and that Mummy movie with Brendan Frasier.
Pretty much, yeah.

I have all the Delta Green sourcebooks just for reading purposes. I don't want DG to turn goofy by playing it. ;_;

>>43720248
I really like CoC for campaigns, it's the one area I think it does noticeably better than Trail or Cthulhu Dark, or any of the others. Not because of the written material so much as the way character advancement works and the fact that the larger campaign structure tends to be more robust anyway, lots of room to work in other ways to find the same information easier than in one-shots.

But you're right, for whatever reason, it seems a lot of GMs, especially on the internet, can't manage the horror for whatever reason. The Yog-Sothoth.com guys do a reasonably good job of it though. Anyway, I think you're correct, but that's not an inherent truth, just a very common GM failing.

>>43720271
Man up, you can run it well if you are good and you train yourself a good group.

Just need to beat the pulp out of them first.

>>43720034
The one thing I'll never give in to is despair.

A long time ago I promised myself that no matter how bad things got, I'd never give up.

That's what makes humanity worth living for. Even if everything is hopeless, even if we're all alone, we'll never stop searching, we'll never stop dreaming of a better future.

>>43720378
>we'll never stop dreaming of a better future
The inverse is true as well: when the Great War smashed the hitherto unbroken spirit of progress and optimism in four years of shells, gas and mud and killed an entire generation it drove some countries collectively mad. And even those that escaped madness were scarred and timid for the years to come.

>>43710473

>The Pepsi Ratio is aesthetic geometry
Lost my shit right there.

>>43720448
Yeah, WWI messed up a lot of people. Too bad the next generation missed the memo.

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>>43720300
personally I'd rather just go full pulp, and only include the barest minimum of spookiness, cause it's incredibly hard to actually pull off horror even remotely well, of course the BRP system is completely awful for this sort of thing so I'd have to use another system, probably Savage Worlds or something

that or go full Dreamlands Fantasy campaign

>>43717886
This.

>>43720074

SOMA is not a good example of anything, well, it's a good example of the average person being fucking retarded.

God damn; soft data transference = Copy+Paste / Copy/Cut+Paste is fucking simple, I got Ultra-mad reading people having "Discussions" about the game and the amount of fucking retards that didn't grasp this Pre-school level shit, the entire fucking point of the game could have been resolved by Catherine doing Cut+Paste and no one would have been the wiser, Simon would have still been a copy, but the instances in the bodies he's leaving behind would have been fucking deleted and he wouldn't have questioned it.

>>43710473
I fucking love this PDF. This is why you don't let Marketing anywhere near Design's computers.

>>43716230
Speaking of John Carpenter, In the Mouth of Madness is highly relevant to this conversation.

>>43719385
Professor Armitage and his friends are the archetypes for CoC PCs.

>>43720001
I want the Dracula Dossier. I don't even have anyone to play it with, I just want to read it.

>>43717254
>anonymous imageboards would be a perfectly reasonable discussion method if it hadn't sprung out of the diseased snatch that is the Anime/Manga community
You don't actually believe this, do you?

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>>43720287
A CoC campaign can fluctuate in horror, it has lulls and peaks at its climaxes and what not.Horror is more up to the players and how much they get into the mood rather than any fault of the GM.

Sorry to crash the thread on an unrelated note, but I'm looking to read a few Lovecraft tales but I need to know first, as they set in third or first person perspective? I cannot read first person at all. Bores the hell out of me, no matter how good the author

Simply return to the basic idea of Lovecraft: there is something living completely out of our reach that we have no way of hurting, it's currently sleeping, if it rolls over in its sleep we all die. Basically imagine if every nuclear arsenal in the world was hooked up to a random number generator and was going to all launch at once (or maybe not) at some indeterminate time in the future.

>>43717344
Good God. Not that guy. But I heard he gets a lot of hot/qt animugrills because he's got quite some dosh

>>43723087
So basically the Cold War from the point of view of anyone with even the slightest spark of imagination.

I'm not going to say that we all remained sane and happy waiting for the Yankies and Russkies to end the world over an ideological dick measuring contest but we did remain functional.

>>43723145
There's a big difference between the ability to destroy the world being in human hands and just being completely random, in the cold war there was an enemy to oppose, what's the point of opposing something our entire species could do nothing to, although it's similar to the scenario that you said these are important differences.

>>43723177
>There's a big difference between the ability to destroy the world being in human hands and just being completely random
There was seemed no difference at all at the time

>in the cold war there was an enemy to oppose, what's the point of opposing something our entire species could do nothing to
If you weren't a Yank or a Commie there were 2. Each inhuman in their own way. Each unassailable to the common man.

>>43723208
>each unassailable to the common man
I didn't say to your average person I said to the combined power of our entire species.

I think the main difference was while almost everyone couldn't do anything about the cold war there were people who could, the leaders of the USA and USSR had their fingers on the buttons, whereas with any of the old ones not only can you do nothing about it but no one can do anything about it nor could your entire planet if it worked together to the pinnacle of its ability.

>>43723060
There's a mix. Many are set in first person, some others are not.

I think the majority of The Call of Cthulhu switches between modes, as does At the Mountains of Madness.

The Colour out of Space is 99% third person with a first person framing and honestly his best story.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is totally third person, as is Dreams in the Witch House, The Dunwich Horror, The Haunter of the Dark and a few others.

You're missing out on a lot not reading the first person narratives.

>>43723208
You're being intentionally dense if you can't appreciate the difference between a war and a gamma ray burst.

>>43710273
One of the short stories put out in Living Anatomies for Delta Green talks about this group of scientists trying to unravel the secrets of a foreign rune able to exert gravitational power merely by existing. One of the scientists starts to make breakthrough after breakthrough relating to it and eventually inscribes the rune on something and gets crushed by the force exerted by it.

The MC is writing this years after as a memoir because he eventually figured it out to. They way he described it was more or less this: physics, mathematics, and every related science we have is only the way it is because of how/where we exist in space time. The framework of physics and all that is like multiple pieces of latticework moving in different directions and we just happened to discover it at a time where all the pieces fit. But to other beings out in the world its a totally different system, ever so slowly changing.

Its these sort of groundbreaking enlightenments that can sometimes destroy a mind with their magnitude or make someone whos accepted it seem insane to everyone else because of it. Also, Im not doing the story justice. If you search the delta green threads theres like four audio stories to listen to and its one of the bottom couple. Was definitely worth listening to.

Demon: the Descent has plenty of horrible shit happening to humans because of the PCs. When you describe what you did during your campaign, and imagine being at the receiving end of that, that's where the horror shows. And the demons are the NICE GUYS.

Everyone thinks theyre ok with the underlying message of humanity is not the center, but then they make a thousand facebook posts about their vacations with photos and whatever, because theyve put themself at the center instead of humanity.

Coming face to face with something that overwhelms you and irrefutably shows that you dont matter is enough to break them. To show them that this being could kill you, the center of the universe, not out of malice but indifference, like stepping on a blade of grass, will break you.

People think theyve already acceptes this as true, but thats a lie. We dont have a nihilistic society, we have a narcissistic society, which is still prone to breakage.

>>43717144
You know it's not real, right?

It goes into speculation on Pepsi universes.

>>43723703
Nihilism is flawed in the sense that realizing there is no inherent meaning in things does not bring about a lasting feeling of meaningless. Not in well-adjusted people at least.

Nothing you do will last forever but it will have repercussions for you for as long as your stream of consciousness seems to run uninterrupted (this is an illusion but that is irrelevant because you experience it being just true as anything else).

Constructing meaning, struggling with the absurd of it all, are themes in existential and absurdist works.

You only care because you haven't come to terms with the void yet. Only when you do will you begin to fill it.

>>43710564
The question is if the protagonist is right in that respect or it is just his hubris speaking.

>>43726414
This.

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>>43710040
As someone on anti psychotic meds I think there should be rules for "forced sanity".

>Madness is a kind of mercy

>>43726223
>You know it's not real, right?

It's a real document. It was really produced by an ad agency with funding from Pepsi.

>>43710040
Delta Green.

I honestly don't think you can. I've read all of
lovecraft and it was interesting and entertaining, but the vast majority of it is silly and not very scary at all.

I think Cosmic Horror can only be scary in very small chunks. After a while, it just becomes a "we get it".

Honestly, I preferred the Dreamlands and traditional spooky stories to his cosmic horror stuff. A cannibal old man living in a mansion was much scarier to me than half the nonsense about space amoebas in From Beyond for example.

>>43711087
>>43711176

Also, Blindsight confronts us with a notion that goes against all our conceptions of reality. Namely, that aliens think like us. In Blindsight, the aliens aren't sapient as we understand it, and sapience seems to be some kind of threat to them, because they don't actually have the ability to understand why we do the things we do.

It's strongly implied that this is the borm in the universe, and that in fact humanity are some weird outlier that are doomed to provoke a vastly more powerful alien being by our very existence.

>>43712068
>Things that seem like they should be horribly wrong but turn out to be undeniably true.
Isn't real life bad enough then?

>>43710040
You dont really need to. Most people still think of humanity as the center of the universe, they cant imagine things more powerfull then us because they never met them. What you are missing about the lore is the fact that the creatures aside from a few instances are always unknowns, something that still plays. If you want to update the mythos to the XXI century all you need to do is create creatures that are not know to us and put them in. The reason we no longer fear lovecraft's work is that we destroyed the very premis of it, we have put a picture, description and stats to the creatures. In short, take the premis but make the things lurking in the dark depths of the cosmos new, give them new names, dont describe them.

>>43726414

Exactly. The idea we don't have free will is irrelevant because any consideration of it leads to an infinite loop of second guessing yourself. The only way to deal with it is to acknowledge that while you might not have free will, it doesn't matter because you can't disentagle your conciousness from itself. Learning you don't have free will won't, logically speaking, cause you to make different decisions. You can only act as if you do have free will because that's what any and all of our actions are.

>>43728525
You mean like how we fear the unknown of foreigners coming into put Country? Then again, Lovecraft did too.

>>43728545
100% correct

>>43726414
Nihilism isn't meant to "bring about a lasting feeling of meaninglessness." Nihilism does not equal fatalism. They can coincide, but are not the same.

The constant attachment of nihilism to pessimism annoys me to no end.

>>43731311
Say what you will about national socialism, but at least it's an ethos.

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>>43731585
>Say what you will about national socialism

Anyone who finds it attractive should first get mandatory mental health counseling, to be followed by the choice of a proper education or nerve stapling.

>>43721367
With d&d as the system.

>>43717458
Okay. I made a thing just now.

>Shadow People
A child will find that it is stalked by a shadow person. They don't always look the same and often they leave by the time the child matures.
Shadow People rarely speak or pull at their children. However they can be a significant influence on the little-one's development. Often they are an object of fear or anger. It has been suggested they are a construct of an archetypical adult which the child then projects their id upon. The primal emotion this construct evokes causes it to become a reality for that child, manifesting as clear but ultimately unfinished “shadow person.”
Of course there are some that say Shadow People come out of pumpkins. Which is obviously bunk.

A German boy was once treated for what his parents called “maddness.” The boy had developed a sexual attraction to a shadow person. He had hoarded and hid boxes full of semen stained drawings and notes related to the shadow person and it's "Shadowland." He had no history of being abused, sexually or otherwise and showed to be quite intelligent and relatively normal, umbral paramours aside.
He seemed to understand how odd his behaviour was. Loneliness was the source of this fantasy, the boy claimed. Isolation, a sense of separation from his kind that led him into a “world that seemed warm and dark.” The child was medicated and put into sports.

>>43732614
>Birth of Man's Champion
I regret everything
Way up here is like hell
There is nothing to do but remember so clearly
Its too hot here and I'm never alone
I can see a place I don't live in any more and every day I live there no more
That place stays clear while I get mucky every day
I can't see here
The sun is loud
The others tell me things I don't like, things I should have done

I want to go back
I'll do better if I go back

>>43732641
>The Heat Delta
Like most of the other earthly realms little is know of the Heat Delta. Medieval scholar's describe it as the lowest and most convoluted rung of Azathoth. It is land composed of all the heat of the planet Earth. I feel the best explanation of the place is as back end of the primordial soup. Any complex thing may find itself transferred to the Heat Delta where it is stripped and morphed into a proper element of the place's thermal order.

As it is an element of “Azathoth” all aspect of the Delta are alive. Each moving, behaving, acting and reacting to every other element. It constantly re-balances itself as new forms emerge or disappear. A modern scholar theorized the plane would “be like a mating ball of snakes. Each being sliding over the next in unending movement.” He continues the comparison between the plane's denizens and snakes: “The form of each entity entering it would eventually adapt a elongated shape for maximum spacial efficiency and maneuverings.”

>>43732712
>The Kind of Man Who Does Things
Gustav Basteau was haunted by waking nightmares from a young age. While he was terrified of the thing he saw in them they also sparked his imagination. He took up genealogy as a hobby, believing the visions to be the ghosts of his ancestors trying to speak to him. Later he would turn to the study of theology, becoming a devote catholic in his teen years. By the age of twenty he would cast of faith in exchange for hard scepticism and the college of biology. This too he grew tired with, refocusing on physics and psychology before finally settling on the study mathematics.

Despite his intensity, eccentricity and apparent flakiness, Gus was well liked. He was tall and handsome and possessed a wit and charm that more than made up for his unhealthy fascination with dead relatives. When things looked darkest he was always the first to crack a joke. Among his academic peers he was seen as something of a clown, a wonderful man to have around but no one to take seriously in any respect. His madness and eventual disappears were saddening if not surprising to those who knew him.

The last time his mother saw him he appeared happy. He had smiled, say that everything came together, that he was pure of heart. that night he left for America.

>>43710487
This anon's got it right. Hell, Miskatonic University keeps a copy of the Necronomicon in the library. Authorized individuals are allowed to read it and they aren't driven to insanity. Not until they actually encounter something.

>>43732752
>Heaven
You'll see your dog but not your dad. Course neither would be recognizable by the time you get there. Won’t matter anyway. That's how it goes when you tear the Barrier Biologic.
Everyone remember: The Badasses and the Pure will see ONE GOD and TWO LORDs! The slackers will try again!

God makes his house in all living things, that's the word. When I say “the kingdom of heaven is in you” I fuckin' mean it. He is literally in your flesh and bones, holding you up, giving you the energy to keep on keeping on.

“B-but if Gods inside me then w-why am I soooooo unhappy” I hear you whine like the unenlightened bitch you are.
The answer is simple: The Barrier Biologic. That's the code written in your body that keeps the divine on one side and the meat on the other. Some ancient Gnostic cats called it Sin, the imperfect stuff made by the demiurge to trap us in the physical realm. SIN is natural, SIN is okay. That is the word!
God pokes at this sin. He makes shapes like finger puppets. He makes the set. He makes the plot of this pupet show. He makes us.

WE ARE HERE FOR HIS AMUSEMENT PEOPLE

He puts in the fucking effort to make you part of his vision so ya better put on the best damn show you can!
If you find yourself in need of a script that's what the Tear is for. It's the true test of the faithful. If you know the twirling tricks of the DNA you can make yourself a door out of the cellular angles of a tree or something like that. It'll let you take a sneak peak at heaven. Spend a night with an angel and she'll give you the scoop on all that's been and whats coming up. It's a rough, sweaty. A hell of time children, a hell of a time.

You'll want to stay but don't. Heaven is a place for guys with winners eyes. If end up there without winnin you'll go blind.

>>43732871
>Mr. Love
Apprehended in 1983, Mike Aflegustab was serial rapist and perpetrator of what would later be called a "series of vile and unforgivable hate crimes." He was taken into custody without a struggle, however he refused to answer any questions. Early the next morning what is believed to be his body was found incinerated in his cell.

During his active years the criminal that would be know as Mr. Love terrorized Habor county. Victims report a figure who would appear in their rooms seemingly out of nowhere. He was lanky and smelt strongly of gasoline. He would whisper to them in a harsh, high pitched voice in a language that some said sounded like Latin. The sureal nature of the crimes and the fact that he left no evidence of break ins lead many victims to believe they had dreamt the experience.

He is thought to be behind the rape of over 37 women in Habor County between 1979-81 as well as the murder of 18 men and women who were later revealed to be homosexuals. Apparently autobiographical writings found in his apartment contained homophobic and quasi-religious rants which pointed to the possibility of more murders out of state. Most of this material was, however, pure fantasy. Many of the events he elluded to took place ether in the future or on other planets. Very often he seemed to beleive himself to be multiple people.

In one of his Journals Aflegustab admits to the bombing of an abortion clinic in Habor despite the fact that none where built there until 2001. The mysterious explosion of the clinic in 2002 has lead to the belief that Aflegustab may still be at large.

>>43732978
Aaaaand that is all.

>>43717679
>>43732712
This?

Think Pak Protectors. Fleshy humans are the Breeder stage.

Lichatron is the Protector stage and our afterlife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/3060768/

>>43721367
I've tried both, and BRP is much much MUCH better for horror than Savage Worlds. Realms of Cthulhu is really only good for pulp. The thing about BRP is that it fades into the background and doesn't matter most of the time. Also combat is short and deadly and best avoided.

But mostly it's the ability of the rules to get out of the way and allow you to focus on the horror.

>>43722811
>Horror is more up to the players and how much they get into the mood rather than any fault of the GM.
I mean, the players can sure as hell ruin it, but reading some of the people in this and other threads, some of it really is the fault of people being shit GMs.

>>43723060
Well you're retarded, but you already knew that.

As the other guy said, it's a mix. But since all of Lovecraft's work (besides the collaborations I think) is in the public domain, you can just skim the start of them online and decide what to read. It is not hard to tell first and third person apart quickly.

Also, don't start at the beginning. Like a lot of writers, all of Lovecraft's worst stories are early in his career, but for some reason, maybe because they're available, people seem to like to start "at the beginning" and get burned out fast. Read the highlights first, deep cuts if you love it.

>>43710040

>Tentacles are boring
They aren't supposed to be exciting, just a kind of representation of how alien something is.
>Muh inscrutable angles
Not inscrutable, but indescribable. They make no sense despite being real and defy human logic or understand.
>Humanity isn't the center of the universe
Not the point. The point is that we aren't even a big deal at all to other living life forms. There are things that exist, even on our own planet, that view humans in the same way we view mites. The mere presence of such things existing near us fucks with our minds.

Not a force of nature, but a living being is so far beyond us and above us that we are absolutely nothing. They aren't gods, they are just that much bigger, stronger, and better than us and the way they think and behave are utterly beyond our grasp because we are stupid bugs to them. Our brains, our logic, our ability to figure out how things work and then manipulate them using that same brain power is absolutely worthless to this other beings. Their existence removes the core things about us that made us what we are and proved that evolution doesn't matter. God doesn't matter. Your faith is a lie as no being would allow such things to exist.

You are nothing to these beings and there is nothing you can do to ever being anything to these beings and you will never figure out what drives them to do what they do or even the WAY they do what they do.

We are not the center of the universe. That is fine. We are less than nothing to things that inhabit the same world we live on? That's a different ball of wax.

Also of note: Lovecraft didn't actually use tentacles very much at all.

>>43720260
Man, fuck Arthur Jermyn. Dumbest thing Lovecraft ever wrote, and I read Red Hook.

>>43731777
Oh yeah? Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

>>43735140
Not knowing the difference between opinions and informed opinions is probably why you're so susceptible to fascist fairy tales in the first place, precariat drone.

>>>/pol/

>>43717196
Color out of Space and the Music of Erich Zann are my favorites by far.

>>43735163
...8 year olds, dude.

>>43710040
You know, it's mostly about point of view.
For example, as a lighting designer, i know perfectly well how mirrors work. I know that there's no magical reversed dimension filled with evil clones of ourselves.
But i'm still terrified of mirrors. Why? Because i'm scared of that slight, neglegible sliver of a chance that i may be wrong, that my view of the world is fundamentally wrong, that mirrors are more alien than i think they are.

>>43722167
>In the Mouth of Madness is highly relevant to this conversation.
I was going to mention this.

>>43735163
You're not wrong, you're just an asshole.

[spoilers]christ dude watch some coen brothers you're being played like a fiddle here.[/spoilers]

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>>43736546
>implying I haven't seen The Big Lebowski

I'm supposed to be impressed that he posted a quote that gets used about 9,001 times an hour? Kiddie fascists fuck off to /pol/ pls; if you get picked for the master race, we'll let you know. Don't call us, we'll call you.

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>>43710040
I still recommend the Laundry for this stuff.

It may be black comedy, but I really like it's spin on the mythos.

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>>43712068
Ao visit Pol while roleplaying as Jared from subway. Got it.

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>>43732614
>A German boy was once treated for what his parents called “maddness.” The boy had developed a sexual attraction to a shadow person. He had hoarded and hid boxes full of semen stained drawings and notes related to the shadow person and it's "Shadowland." He had no history of being abused, sexually or otherwise and showed to be quite intelligent and relatively normal, umbral paramours aside.
>He seemed to understand how odd his behaviour was. Loneliness was the source of this fantasy, the boy claimed. Isolation, a sense of separation from his kind that led him into a “world that seemed warm and dark.” The child was medicated and put into sports.

>>43717344
interesting hat.

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I am tempting to write something up for this thread, but like one anon said, horror is very difficult to impart on an unwilling audience, cosmic horror even more so.
Anything I write could be read by some anon in a brightly lit room listening to j-pop, who'll reply, "Nah, that's not scary."

I am not an expert of Yog-shoggothery, but many of those considering cosmic horror out of date and unimpressive are likely suffering from a lack of perspective.

It reminds me of that old story of the DM who describes the PCs encountering a small swarm of foot high spiders.
The players shrug and say they attack.
The DM questions that their characters would be so fearless.
The Players assert it is no big deal.
The DM uncovers a tarantula he had placed in the middle of the table.
The players scatter and concede that they might have underestimated how affected their characters would be.

I have repeatedly seen those on /tg/ casually assert that they would not be even slightly be affected by epic, ancient, and horrifying.forces that inevitably disregard our entire existence like an ant under a boot.

OP's pic is a fine place to start.
It is just a physical impression of Cthulhu.
Anon sees the image, recognizes it, and thinks nothing much of it.
But if anon were standing under the dwarfing, undulating, and impossibly massive form of a dark elder god, he would be less likely to shrug it off.

Getting past all that, the challenge remaining is to present the concepts in a way that has not been overly exposed.
I suspect that the trick of it is to sidle up alongside the reader, leave them confidant that they know exactly what they were looking at, and then quietly whisper in their ear that they should have been looking behind them the entire time.
This pic is related, at least the first time you saw it.

>in before j-pop is cosmic horror

>>43710473
This PDF was even put to music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qImHuiYnVQ0

>>43733004
>>43732978
>>43732614
>>43732712
>>43732641
>>43732871
>>43732752
This thing you made just now?
You did well.
It's not perfect and at points a little hard to understand, and that it is a good thing.
Unsettling anecdotes on the path towards enlightened end.

>>43710165
>What knowledge is maddening?
Facebook will dissapear some day.
That. Most normies will go into epileptics if you imply it.

The problem nowadays is that no one has imagination. Why, when you can have a '99 inches monitor replacing it?
You need imagination to truly feel dread of these things.

>>43742343
>You need imagination to truly feel dread of these things.
This is the truth of it.
What frustrates me is those that consider their lack of imagination a strength.

I believe the solution is to first capture the readers attention, then their imagination, then their disbelief will be held at bay long enough to deliver the horror.
No small feat.

>>43742709
>>43742343

What's the point of imagination if everything you can imagine has already been imagined? It's not like you're adding anything new or worthwhile. Why not take the option that keeps you sane and safe?

>>43742926
What's the point of hands if this nice guy in a black suite hands me everything I need? It's not like you could want anything important or worthwile. Why not take the easier option?

>>43743029
Well, why not?

Were you trying to make a point there?

>>43743060
Oh.
Didn't realize you were baiting. I'll be on my way.

>>43734649
Do you happen to have a pdf for BRP on you?

>>43736602
>I know he was referencing something
>That's why I treated him completely seriously about it, duh.
??????

>>43743069
So it's bait if the idea of "all of your needs are cared for without any intervention on your part" pings as a "why would I complain?" to me?

I bet if someone got a fantasy realm that was literally everything they ever wanted out of life by reading a magic book, you'd go in, kill everyone, drag the wisher back out kicking and screaming, and burn the book because their happiness wasn't "real." Because they didn't "earn" it.

>>43710473
This reads like the Book of Latter Day Saints of Space Mammon.

What the fuck?

>>43743115
Marche did nothing wrong.

>>43743115
>>43743060
Bait or not, I will give your answers.

>>43742926
>What's the point of imagination if everything you can imagine has already been imagined?
Imagination enriches one's existence in innumerable ways.
Being the first to originally imagine something is irrelevant.

>It's not like you're adding anything new or worthwhile.
This statement appears to assert that imagination only has value based on the direct production value correlated with that particular instance of imagining.
The view behind that assertion seems to suffer from great limitation, perhaps due a lack of, well, imagination.

>Why not take the option that keeps you sane and safe?
Choosing safety and sanity is always wise.
However, the idea that you cannot have imagination and be sane and safe is a strange one.
Imagination has saved many peoples lives and sanity.

Your questions have been answered. I bid you good day.

>>43711337
>Note how this never happened in Lovecraft's lore
Yeah, but The King In Yellow is generally considered "Lovecraftian" anyway.

>>43744605
>The King In Yellow
Isit actually worth reading? I tried to and the constant "American magazine", "Japanese sandals", "Argentinian curry", "English hot dogs" thing irritated me to no end.
Then again most french literature shooes me away for that same reason.

>>43742343
>The problem nowadays
Is so a phrase so vague it proactive ruins anything else that could follow.
>is that no one has imagination
Just say what is in you heart faggot. Call them Sheepeople. Do it, get it off your chest, no one could possibly think any less of you.

But seriously Anon, go out and meet people outside your social group. Watch and read shit you normally wouldn't. Head down to the rec centre and take a random class. Expand your fucking boundaries.
Ninety percent of the time, when I hear "no one has imagination any more" it's from some normy that doesn't really care enough to seek out new experiences themselves. They just sit back and take whatever's given and, for some fucked up reason, get mad when their accessible mass-media is shiny recycled material.

Really crazy and original stuff is not and has never really been a common element of the main stream. It's not a bad thing, it's just the way it is. Common people like common things, things that can be easily digested. Original imaginative stuff is kept alive by people who genuinely love it. The kind of people more concerned about supporting the shit they like than whining about it not being accepted.


Lovecraft was never mainstream, most of those pulp authors weren't. We only know about them because we care. It's the caring that's important you dumb asshole.

>>43745043
Dude what?
Most pople lacks any kind of suspension of disbelief (Unless there is CGI involved) and will watch a theater play pointing out at the cables thinking they are clever instead of watching the actors.

>>43744834
It's okay. There's a reason it's popular.

>>43745043
Not him, but you are aware that imagination and originality are not the same thing, right?

I believe this anon >>43742343 was referring to people not thinking and using their imagination, not that they are not coming up with imaginative ideas.

Anon might have made a vague and hyperbolic post, but you seem to be assuming much and might be even projecting a little.

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>>43719411
It is a good pain?

>>43745080
Have you ever met people?

>>43746163
Yes. I wouldn't be saying this otherwise.
I am not saying that everyone is like this, only most normies.

>>43710549
>Actually, this happened in a CoC game I was in once. See an impossible creature, roll for sanity loss, critfail.

>>43710165
It's just psychodelic drugs. You get high, you slip into stupid addled logic where your brain starts associating shit at random, the circumstances trigger otherwise normal brain functions to register it all as revelations. You sober up and try to explain how it all made sense and you're a raving lunatic, because at some point you failed to distinguish between the addled bias and the significantly less biased but still biased normal lens of reality. The trick is there were no drugs and the drug logic is real and other wordly monsters. So John Dies At The End.

>>43746193
Here's an unsettling truth for you:

There are no normies.

>>43710473
>There are people who get large paycheques to write this timecube tier bullshit

I don't even know anymore.

>>43752943
The universe is a weird, disturbing place.
Patton Oswald told a story about how he got paid more than he ever has for anything, enough for a year of college for his little girl, for a half hour of having drunk people shout his career at him.

>>43743285
Top underrated post 2015

>>43710549
Playypi are cute & tiny.

Imagine you stand on the cliff of a completely alien landscape, populated with misshapen flora that could have evolved nowhere on Earth. Over a meager distance, you see something stir--well, you feel it first, because the ground shakes like s baby in a nigger crib because its mammy doesn't know shit about how to make it stfu because she's 13.

You realize in sudden horror that the earthquakes you experienced are correlated to the shifting of the mass just beyond the cliff--like a mountain, but somehow moving and ohgodhowcanthatliveit'stoobignothinglikethatcanexistjesusFUCK. You realize suddenly that what looked like shifting stones is the living mass moving beneath a skin of sorts, & it is larger & more terrifying than anything you've experienced in life so far; you've personally seen planetoids through telescopes smaller than this mass you mistook for a mountain & are aware of no concepts of biology or physics that could allow such a thing to exist at all, let alone grow & change & move. You can't recognize the shape isn't that funny for all that you know nothing about this is familiar you have no analogous understanding of this living mass and it's just silly, isn't it that something like this could casually exist & nhttp://exhentai.org/g/560280/9e1a8a6e52/so huge & oh god the smell & the sounds of its rumbling mass shifting is about to shatter your eardrums and it's so funny how something that can't exist is shifting the very stone foundation beneath your feet & toppling mountains like anthills & you've never seen or heard or experienced anything like this yet here it is its so funny & what else could be Out There like This Thing ahahahahahaaahaha look you can still see it shifting around to stand up even though it has no legs & its fuzzy like bad cable reception & hurts your head & that's funny too because HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHGHGHGHHHHMLPKDNIDIHDNKDODIDLDKMGGFFFFFKKKK

>>43753963
>>43710549

And when the last few dwindling shreds of your humanity & understanding drift away like the cliff did when you thought it was all so solid & certain, you see that the mass is just the eye of the Thing.

Sorry for being a weeaboo but....

Angels in Evangelion are a pretty good update of cosmic horror. They have enough gore, one drop of almost human and are overall fucking weird and impossible to comprehend.

Lovecraft was scared of the discoveries in astronomy and marine biology of his age, but today that isn't as scary (even tough there is still much to discover) but i think that todays discoveries and fears are very different, more to do with

>>43753963
>http://exhentai.org/g/560280/9e1a8a6e52/
sh-should I open this?

>>43755717
Depends. Where's your sense of adventure?

>>43755717
It's full color western futanari incest, according to the tags. If you're into that, go for it.

>>43710165
>not knowing actual horrific eldritch secrets and incorporating them into your games

For what purpose?

>>43757085
Where can I find stuff like that? /x/ is just mediocre creepypasta and logs of endless failed attempts at summoning succubi.

>>43757085
Mostly because if I knew actual horrific eldritch secrets, I'd be a gibbering lunatic in a padded cell and therefore not allowed to access the internet.

>>43746113
It is not a good pain.

>>43726890
Yeah I remember reading about a schizophrenic man who had ended up killing someone because of his delusions. He constantly tried to avoid taking his medications because he was lucid enough to be horrified and guilty over it when he was medicated.

>>43757853
>and therefore not allowed to access the internet.
Unfortunately, the internet doesn't work like that.

>>43710040
I'd like to see something like metachaos but on steroid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UPUhn9hpTU

>>43758227
>Helmet cam footage from someone on Eclipse Phase earth.

>>43710317
I think it's a bankruptcy thing. He's probably referencing the large numbers of suicides etc from people who are seriously in debt/have money problems.

>>43758227
Try Salvia while listening to this.

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>>43759592
>Salvia

>trip like a motherfucker for 2 minutes
>my friend is just a t-shirt with sausages
>literally all the flesh in now sausages
>laughing like a maniac the whole time while Mr.wiener is trying to communicate

>>43759729
Read a story somewhere about a guy who tried salvia and after it wore off he still thought he was in the wrong reality. Something about the frogs and rocks being the wrong color. Tough stuff.

Someone on /tg/ once summed up what "Sanity loss" in Lovecraft stories really mean so well that I saved it:

>"It's a bit like being the lone programmer in a congress full of congressmen. Anything you say on the subject of technology either comes out as incomprehensible gibberish far beyond their understanding of reality, or sounds hostile to whatever common sense lobbying has installed into their brain."

>>43735171
Seriously, people really need to check out both of these if they haven't. They're some of his best works.

>>43760687
I don't find Lovecrafts writing scary at all, except for Color out of Space. That unnerved me something fierce, the only time I've ever had trouble sleeping for being terrified. Of course, I was pretty young then, might not be as scary as I remember it.

>>43760667
Maybe in the RPG, but in the stories it's more like being told you're wrong, you're fucking wrong, in the harshest and plainest way possible. That's the whole point, what you thought you knew about the world and life and maybe even your own hometown or family is wrong.

The whole point of Cthulhu is to say 'If that thing can exist, what else can? What else exists that I thought didn't or had no idea could exist in the first place?'. It's the same for EVERYTHING. Mi-Go? Fuck me, shit's been living in the Vermont hills for YEARS. The Colour out of Space? There's shit out there in the universe that makes no sense to my tiny fraction of nature and senses evolved to handle only my planet. Yithians and Elder Things? There were advanced civilizations aeons before my species existed and didn't even come from this planet?!

>>43760728
I think he was trying to get across more a concept that create visceral horror. Remember, he was writing at a time when evolution wasn't even an accepted theory. The general consciousness was a bit different back then and people would find certain concepts more strange or outlandish than stuff we think of now.

But he wrote some fantastic pieces of description and atmosphere, because that's what he was about more than plot and character. The Picture in the House is another great one, From Beyond and The Music of Erich Zann have some great freaky imagery and there's so much good shit sprinkled throughout. Even in a bad story, there's at least one golden nugget you can take away.

>>43710760
>Keep in mind that the people in Lovecraft stories who "go insane" generally aren't insane in any actual medical sense; they've just become aware of the true nature of reality

So they become comedians?

>>43736602

I honestly do not see the problem with National Socialism; out of the original party platform of the NSDAP in the era of the Strasser brothers, only one or two make mention of race - the rest discuss the implementation of a socialist state bound by rules specifying that only *citizens* should benefit from the state's wealth.

National Socialism, with a de-racialised platform of citizenship, is alright. You literally make your populace swear fealty to the nation, and in exchange they get all the benefits of socialism.

>>43760911

you realize alien abduction as a concept comes from mi-go, right?

>>43762154

the problem with strasserism is that a lot of their ideas were just unworkable, "Ruralizing" urban sophisticates would have been Germany's own "great leap forward," and decentralizing is counter to the strong shared identity that makes nationalism viable. Also the soviet wolf was at the door and germany was hurting as it was.

Though i do wonder how a Strasserite society would have adapted to the social changes and viscissitudes of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially secularization and religious fundamentalism

>>43754497
>Impossible to comprehend
They're just the stuff Adam created out of guff space when the lance sprung him from the black egg, right?

They're really no weirder than humanity which are Lilith's kids. They probably see humanity as weird lovecraftian people. Endless in number, piloting lobotomized golems in the shape of mommy and daddy, etc.

The Angels were just Arno adding edge to the weirder stuff Ultraman fought anyway.

You want Lovecraft to work in a modern setting? Just stick to basics.

>Tentacles are boring
Then don't use tentacles. Focus on other aspects. The Big C was described as a blob like frog that turned to mist when gutted by a ship. Maybe you could do something with fears of nanites/black goo.

Weird geometry is always cool when done right. Think that one short from the Animatrix. Except the glitches are here to hurt you. Bad.

>Muh inscrutable angels

Lovecraft had two flavors of threat-the intellectual and the immediately physical. And he liked to couple them in stories. In Mountains of Madness you had the Elder Things. They represented intellectual terror--the terror that humanity was a by product of their experiments to make servitors. But you also had the invincible shoggoths as the physical threat. They're old and insane and want very badly to do horrible things to the stuff on the surface.

You see the same thing in Shadows out of Time with Yith and the Polyps.

If the intellectual stuff doesn't scare man anymore, try the physical. Old, insane, invincible chtonic animals coming out the ground wanting to hurt us forever. Their motivations are not vague and alien. They're animals. And they're insane.

>The idea that humanity is not the center of the universe is not really a big deal for most people

Its a bit worse than that in a few stories.

Remember what the Yithians do to races. Imagine being that poor race that got mass-mindswapped with them just as the polyps broke free.

The true terror of Lovecraft isn't that humanity is irrelevant. It's an older, more pagan fear. Its the fear that humanity might suddenly attract the notice of things it should not.

I recommend reading Gods of Pagana. It was a big influence on Lovecraft and demonstrates how to do Lovecraft elements "right".

>>43760992
>Music of Erich Zann

One of my personal favorites

>>43710040
>"muh inscrutable angles" is hard to pull off

That's like the entire point, lad.

>>43710040
VR or AR gets invaded by eldritch horrors and cause halucinations or freddy krugger style shenanigans

>>43763238

"alien abduction" comes from sleep paralysis

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>>43768449
>"alien abduction" comes from sleep paralysis
So does some forms of romance

>>43710165
>what wisdom should they learn?
None let the mystery alone drive them insane
>What knowledge is maddening?
A lack of Knowledge

Ever see a grognard who cant find a rule to support an argument?

That is the kind of madness you want to induce in your players

The best way to use the mythos is as misdirection.

Wow this thread has come a long way since the time i first stumbled upon and was more akin to a ghost town.

Also it is a very good read and I find pretty depressing that the brief blurps that anons post here are a million times more interesting, inspired, creative and philosophical than any of the published crap in both rpg form and literary works that are out there written by supposedly "professional" people.

No moving on to an actual contribution to the discussion.
You don't have to update anything for the mythos to work in any historical time period, you just need to dissect and understand a little better.
Attempts to "modernize" the myth like the blog post an anon posted a while back, can be an interesting read but usually are just pretentious crap by unimaginative people playing "writer".

The myth is time less all consuming and all permeating, it is not the truth of the world, IT IS THE WORLD.

Some anons here have the valid concern that it is very difficult to scare someone who "doesn't want to be scared" especially through literature that lacks the immediate and fadasmagoric impact that mediums have at their disposal.
I admit I had the same concern and there many solutions to this problem, but the thing is that creators of all mediums are playing with kiddy gloves on.

The challenge here is not to evoke true horror, but scare people enough to entertain them instead of sending them to the hospital and a psychiatrist, and therein lies the difficulty.

So with all that in mind, to help you better understand how to capture lovecraft's horror, try to imagine and put yourself in the place of the unsuspecting people who in a sunday morning october 30th 1938, tuned in to the CBS radio network, just in time to listen that our planet was being invaded by aliens from mars.
My point is that when fiction melds indistinguisably with real word it becomes the place where true horror dwells.
This is something that Lovecraft understood all very well.

>>43772712
Wow my post came out pretty messed up, unfortunately you can't edit 4chan posts. T_T

So please guys bear with me.