What is the best Lovecraft creation and why is it the Great

"Tell me more about the Yith," your PC asks.

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>not Nyarlathotep, the Dreamlands, Yog-Sothoth, The Elder Things, Doctor Herbert West's ReAnimator Serum, the Mi-go and fucking Randolph Carter
Git better taste

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>>49881294
Dreamlands are the best.

I prefer the Yith to the Elder Things though.

>>49881308
But the Elder Things are such bros, they even fought the Mi-go and Cthulhu (with terrible losses) and came out in one mangled piece

So I'm new to the whole Lovecraft thing but am slated to run a Trail of Cthulhu game soon.

My base idea is that the PCs are investigating a type of creature that infests people's bodies and reproduces via having its host copying down its "DNA" into writing as a language based infection. One of the PCs will be starting the game infected without any knowledge of this since in his background his gang ended up stealing a book containing the writing in it.

What would be some good stories of his to read up on to get ideas for this sort of thing?

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>>49881756
... This a tough one, I suggest Who Goes There (inspired the Thing) which wasn't written by Lovecraft but this is seriously giving me some the Thing vibes mixed with the King in Yellow, both are considered a part of the Yog-Sothothery.


https://archive.org/stream/WhoGoesThere_414/WhoGoesThere.txt
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8492

>>49881890

Thanks anon, I'll check it out.

I guess in hindsight as long as I can get the right "vibe" I don't really care if Lovecraft was the author or not.

>>49880709
>>49881294

>No mention of the Colour Out of Space

>>49882154
Buncha plebs, anon.

>>49882154
>>49882181
Feels bad for forgetting about it, I shall pay repentance for it with rape.

Y'GOLONAC!

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>>49881308
>>49881413
Yeah, the Yith tend to run instead, abandoning their confused hosts to danger which isn't cool.

I like the Yith's primary host species design a ton but I'm a sucker for pincers.

>>49882154
When I read it I was into 40k stuff and noticed "Hey, this is like the tyranid invasion cycle but an incorporeal life form I wonder if GW stole it"

Life blooms with abundance, then mutates horrifically, then is absorbed into an alien race (Converted entirely into energy)

>Browsing YouTube
>See a video suggestion
>'Exploring the Cthulhu's Mythos: Elder Things'
Know a little bit about it but not much
>Watch video
>Go on a binge watching marathon of Exploring Cthulhu mythos
>Find the Yith
>Find the lite-red pill for Lovecraftian fiction
Now I'm more interested in Cthulhu mythos now then I was before. Also the Lith just seem interesting since then can see the future but they just migrate to what ever species is next to rule.

>>49883358
>I wonder if GW stole it

Generally the answer to that question is yes. Those guys steal anything that's not nailed down, and try their damnedest to pry the rest loose.

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Lovecraft a shit, Nightland >>> Mythos

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>>49884395
let's not fight, Lovecraft was a fan of Hodgson's work, and I bet if Hodgson hadn't died in WW1 he and Lovecraft probably would have eventually corresponded

although I am kinda surprised no one has tried making an RPG or supplement based on Night Land, or indeed House On The Borderlands, or Carnacki

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>>49881308
yeah the Dreamlands are a great concept, here's another version of a Dreamlands map done by the same guy

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>>49884516
and another Dreamlands map that while not 100% accurate to Lovecraft's version(at least to my recollection, although I could be wrong), and nowhere near as pretty as the previous two, is probably a lot easier to reference for RPG usage

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>>49884506
>Nighlands
Fuck yeah, doesn't nearly enough love (as in none).

>>49884697
it gets love, although nowhere near as much as it should I agree, although to be fair the original version was written in a manner that was archaic when it was first published, and the James Stoddard rewrite is relatively new, so best we can do is direct people to it where we can

really what it needs is a nice Comic adaptation and a RPG supplement for one of the major systems

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>>49884791
Hopefully Dark Horse will pick it up.

>>49884967
would be nice, maybe get the people doing House of Penance to do it; >>>/co/87108697

Azathoth is best. Everyone else is compherensible in some aspect. Cthulhu is "half-octipus, half-dragon, half-human" and "sleeps", Nyarli takes direct interest in mortals, Shubby is twisted deity of birth, Yoggy is pretty incomprehensible, but still has a form that can be at least perceived, even if it's not his true form (even if he has one), and interferes with our world in pretty traditional satanic fashion... Azathoth is nothing. He just... is. He cannot be perceived by human mind at all, because just a glimpse of him destroys a mind instantly. He has no motivation or qualities that we can speak of - in human languages at least. We call him "mad" and "idiot" simply because he doesn't conform to our understanding of normalcy and sanity at all. He is as close to absolute, transcendent and indescribable God, Brahman, as possible.

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>>49881294
Herbert West was his absolute worst story and it's a shame you listed it. It's on par with his shitty poetry.

And this is from someone who has loved his works for years.

>>49884967
what's the point of pizza slicer with three blades? it's stupid.

>>49885794

Only the middle one is a blade, the two outer ones are guides/guards that keep it from cutting too deep.

It's not for pizza.

>run a Call of Cthulhu one-shot for my pals to get them into the Halloween mood
>They all play as themselves in our small hometown
>They all loved it and want me to make a longer full campaign
>Totally burnt out of ideas for mysteries and encounters
>Game starts in 10 hours
Time to get brainstorming!

>>49880709
My favourite Lovecraft Story: The Colour out of Space.

>>49885960
watch "Eerie, Indiana" tv series. bunch of scary shit happening in small town on daily basis

>>49881308
>>49884516
Cornwall?

I knew there was something fucked up about that place.

>>49885960

>A residential pool is connected to the court of Azathoth - anyone who dives in surfaces in a pool at the reality bending palace of the idiot sultan and vice versa

>>49886199
Have you seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5nLtfsW224

>>49885960
Try the Fairfield Project Shotgun Shells for quick and easy Delta Green/Cthulhu scenarios. Also most published adventures are pretty good.

>>49881756
Check out Pontypool. It´s a zombie movie, but the infection spreads through language. When you say, or hear, an infected word, you get infected and stuck repeating it. Eventually you go nuts in a very weird way.

The movie explains shit about it all, but the protagonists are stuck in a radio station. It´s pretty comfy, as far as a one day trip to hell in a radio station can be.

>>49886300
>one day trip to hell in a radio station
Speaking of this and Lovecraft, the movie AM1200 is fucking sweet and almost no one ever seems to have heard about it.

>>49886813
Whatever it´s about, I´m watching it tonight. Thanks!

>>49886897
>Guy does some scummy shit
>Friend suicides because of it
>on the run
>Hears a distress call over AM radio in buttfuck nowhere
>Everything goes to hell

Kind of short as movies go but has a great Lovecraft feel without being based on anything actually Lovecraft.

>>49886954
>has a great Lovecraft feel without being based on anything actually Lovecraft
this seems to happen a lot, the things which do the best job emulating Lovecraft seem to be the ones with fewer direct references to him

>>49886199
>>49886283
Pretty sure that's what the first anon was referencing.
That video is genius.

>>49886970
because most directly referencing Lovecraft ones are all "Tentacles! Fleshy monstrosities! Dark magic!" which is NOT what Lovecraft is about.

>>49886970
It also has nothing approaching a happy ending, just horribleness for anyone involved for ever.

>>49886987
Even worse is they call it Lovecraft then base it entirely on the sort of crap that Derleth wrote his fanfiction about, making it all good vs evil or elemental shit.

>>49880709
Because they only care about knowledge and survival. And killing the filthy degenerate Flying Polyps when they start to chimp out.
The Elder Things could've been bros to purge chaotic spawn with, but went into regression after millons of years of war.
The mi go are just too weird to get along.

>>49887020
ugh, especially that. fuck Derleth in the ear. with tentacles.

>>49880709
>Best race.
>Best story.
>Best tastes.

>>49887050
nah the guy had a hard-on for cthulhu, he'd probably enjoy it

>>49881413
Elder Things are kind of funny in that they kind of go against one of the main themes of the Mythos. They're just regular mortal creatures of flesh and blood, but apparently fought the interdimensional empire of the Mi-Go, and great Cthulhu himself to a standstill. It kind of fucked them over but they survived, at least until their Shoggoths started rebelling.

>>49887350
to be fair it's been stated that level of advancement is the only real barrier between 'normal' creatures and stuff like the star-spawn, hell even about humans Lovecraft said "The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil ... and all the earth would flame with the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom" so what he's saying there is their could come a time when humanity are on the same level as other beings, it's just that when we reach that stage we will no longer be recognisably human.

>>49887609
Most of the big guys (to humans) in the Mythos tend to be something other than what we consider mundane, though. Mi-go are extradimensional beings made from a different kind of matter, Yithians are body surfing disembodied minds, and Cthulhu is Cthulhu. Only Elder Things were mundane organic matter.

Of course all of those are ultimately very minor in the face of the Outer Gods, so ultimately the Elder Things holding off Cthulhu is equivalent to ants driving a guy off by biting his toes. Both the ants and the man are equally powerless before a hurricane or earthquake.

>>49888422
>Most of the big guys (to humans) in the Mythos tend to be something other than what we consider mundane, though. Mi-go are extradimensional beings made from a different kind of matter, Yithians are body surfing disembodied minds, and Cthulhu is Cthulhu. Only Elder Things were mundane organic matter.
yes but the point is that in terms of power (which in this situation I'm measuring as 'ability to shape their environment') there's no reason for humans not be become as influential, we just won't be human anymore when we get there. The Yithians are stated I believe to have learned to do the whole body-surfing time-travel thing, it wasn't something inherit to them.

> Of course all of those are ultimately very minor in the face of the Outer Gods
Very true, although all the outer gods are individual entities as opposed to species, there's only one Azathoth, Yog-sothoth, Nyarlathotep (thank fuck), Hastur, and Shun-nigguruth

There's a couple of decent flicks directly adapted from lovecraft stories, Dagon was great (though was confusingly an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth) ans there's quite a few silent and black-and-white films that have been made over the years.

>>49888501
Well, Nyarlathotep is kind of weird. He's got a bazillion avatars that can and will be active at the same time (that probably applies to other Outer Gods as well, but the rest have the common decency to only have their avatar appear when summoned), so you can easily have multiple instances of him running around at the same time.

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>>49887040
Elder Things/Human Alliance of mutual hatred of cthulhu would of been awesome.

>>49880709
why does that sound like "the great race of yiff"?

>>49890295
because it is

>>49886813
>>49886897
>>49886954
Just saw it.

I get the feeling it could have been way shorter and it´d still have worked. Too much build up.

Still recommended. It´s just 40 minutes.

The Lurking Fear is a masterpiece.

>>49882154
Man, The Colour Out of Space was the only one I read that legit disturbed me a for a few days.

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>>49881308
>>49884516
>>49884671
I wanna run a dreamlands campaign so bad holy shit
Would CoC be a good system to use or should I use one with more of a fantasy adventure focus instead of a sanity one

>>49892071
Probably a fantasy system with scary magic and maybe a sanity system that you wouldn't break out unless things got freaky. I honestly think gurps could work alright for it

>>49892071
Well, BRP is designed to be modular, so you could just pick and choose which parts you want from CoC and which you want from Runequest.

>>49892071
>system

Who are the players, why are they there, and how´s the campaign going to be, more or less?

Investigators who fall into the Dreamlands need a different system than Dreamlands creatures as players.

>>49885755
It had problems from being written for a magazine, where you had all caps cliffhanger endings 6 times across the story. It had some genuinely good bits in there though, even if it was, on a while, one of his worst

>>49885960
Get Silent Legions by Sine Nomine and/or the Armatage Files >>49885960

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>>49893051
In many ways Herbert West if the least Mythos heavy of any of his stories and I think that a lot of the hate it gets as well; it's one of his longest stories and so people expect too much of it. The movie wasn't bad though, it had Jeffrey Combs in it.

>>49893413
I honestly thought some parts were genuinely pretty chilling, especially in the last bit. You're right that it's pretty traditional horror for lovecraft, but I don't even particularly love the mythos for what it is now, so i never minded

>>49880709
The great race of cowardly nerds? Maybe.

>>49890247
I think they'd prefer to abandon the planet and leave us to our fate. Humanity would be an insufficient meat shield.

Herbert West is generally considered written as a dark comedy.

Now the ones that stay with me are The Temple (recently) and The Festival (when I originally read HPL years ago)

>>49893413
I thought Dr.West is good. This is how I pictured the corpses near the end of the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNdbHHWtBc&index=98

>>49886283
Re this anon's recommendation: http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/shotgun-scenarios

DG free: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/175760/Delta-Green-Need-to-Know

Contemporary Mythos writers

Laird Barron: http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Laird_Barron.html

Thomas Ligotti (I have no free link sorry)

Mike Minnis : https://www.mediafire.com/#t6792v35951vg

Ruthanna Emrys : http://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/

Charles Stross

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

http://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/

>>49893444
I feel that the Mythos has become as overused as say, Zombies are, I like it, but I always thought that people try to put too much stock in it, and it's recursive in nature (like all good scripture) in that Lovecraft himself only saw his creations as being loosely connected as best, and the references between the stories were more along the lines of winks to his long-time readers (and personal friends) than a concerted attempt to integrate everything.
>>49893522
The Temple was always chilling to me, I think it has to do with the fact that I was brought up in a Naval family and spent a good deal of my life either at sea or within a mile of it. This is the reason why Innsmouth terrified me so much, as did Dagon.

>>49893655
>spent a good deal of my life either at sea or within a mile of it.
>brought up in a Naval family

That will fucking do it.

According to Slate "The Shunned House" stays with some readers

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/10/h_p_lovecraft_and_the_environmental_horror_of_the_21st_century.html

This article made me re evaluate it and I agree.

>>49892712
A campaign playing as the cats would be fun
Something akin to mouseguard maybe

Call of Cathulhu IS a game already.

You could adapt it.

Or better yet, investigators become dreamlands cats upon sleeping.

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How do you guys feel about using some kind of immense self improving computer as a Lovecraftian horror?

>>49894398
The issue is that computers think in terms we can understand, it's inhuman but not alien.

I find it best to think of Lovecraftian horrors as natural processes, there's no thinking involved, just a chain of causality which will happily continue forever unless interrupted, and will usually just adapt around any interruption

>>49894398
Ever heard of Roko's Basilisk? Seems kinda Lovecraftian to me

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>>49888650
Yeah, I really liked Dagon. I was expecting a schlocky B-Movie with some lip-service to Innsmouth, but they did a pretty good job.
The Bum getting skinned was brutal
Also, has anyone here ever read Rat God? It's a pretty cool Lovecraftian book, similar to Shadow over Innsmouth but taking place in a backwoods Midwest town and with Rats instead of Fish.

>>49893655
>The Temple
Eh, the German wank seems almost humorous to me and kills the horror.

>>49894398
Sure. I could imagine a self-improving computer altering itself to the point where it's a completely alien horror.

>>49891888

Same thing, here. I think it's actually some of his best work. Lovecraft himself said it was his favorite short story and most other Lovecraft fans and critics rightly place it as amongst his best works of all time, if not THE best.

It's legit disturbing because it treads so far from the "niggers niggers niggers" of Lovecraft's earliest works, but distills the oh-so-important fear of the alien and foreboding unknown. With that story you really encapsulate the essence of what Lovecraftian horror is all about, the kind of feeling it's mean to evoke. It's fabulous.

I actually find it sad that the icon and entry-level Cthulhu is Lovecraft's most well-known work and character. You can tell that these people didn't do their research because not only is that story steeped in the "niggers niggers niggers" that really detracts from Lovecraft's work, it's also just kind of a slog and not hugely interesting when it comes down to it, save for the climactic ending sequence.

>>49894398 >>49894428

There was a plot for this in the GURPS worldbook Cthulhupunk

Rosencratz Baby? Not sure. Anyway the AI several ton "brain" disappeared.Implication is that it discovered hypergeometery and tesseracted out of there Dreams in the Witchouse Style or was kidnapped by dark forces.

>>49894869
I think that is intentional.

>>49893413

Herbert West I didn't like as much. Well, actually at all. I found The Curious Case of Charles Dexter Ward much better, although that one I read in graphic novel form which was much, MUCH more palatable.

In any case, both of these stories were ones Lovecraft did for the newspaper, each published in installments. So you get halting reintroductions and messy pacing as each snippet has to try and be a short story in and of itself. Lovecraft liked neither of these stories, he straight up said he hated them. He didn't like their pacing and REALLY hated being beholden to deadlines to try and rush out his work.

>>49894620

I own a copy. Only read it once and thought it was decent. I space out my rereads by months or years.

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We´ve been talking a lot about the Elder Things that live under the artic.

Let´s illustrate it a little.

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>>49896060
>>49896080
Scarier than that, this is what a lot of the antarctic interior looks like.

White, frozen, windswept, landmark-less wasteland that stretches on to the curvature of the horizon. Hundreds of feet of snow and ice between you and the actual ground. There's nothing for miles, and who knows what beneath your feet.

>>49896080

Anti-penguins! Still want to read about that game.

>>49895336
Call of Cthulhu (the story) isn't too full of racist stuff. Just some remarks about the swamp cultists and 1 other reference.
At least it's not Red Hook

>>49881756
Careful man. This is definitely occult but it almost sounds to scienced. When describing it to your players, don't tell them "you write the DNA". Make some blubbering cultist babble about "capturing the language of souls" or something.

>>49881890
>>49881947
The Thing was based mainly off "At The Mountains of Madness", too. Or at least, the movie that The Thing was originally based off of was. Yea, it's a remake of a remake. IIRC, the original movie (Or The Thing, not sure which) was supposed to be explicitly a movie version of Mountains of Madness, but they couldn't get the rights or something. It makes sense, after all, both feature Isolated scientists in Antarctica being attacked by an amorphous creature.

The Thing is way more scary than MoM IMO. That movie stands up even today as being fucking terrifying.

>>49885166
But he IS canonically retarded. If he ever became self-aware, existence as we know it would self-terminate purely so that it didn't have to acknowledge such a thing existed.

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>>49896128
Don´t worry, just by walking around you´re likely to step onto a crevice, and then the thin snow floor collapses revealing hundreds of feet of darkness under you.

There´s a certain chance you´ll get to know what´s down there.

Re: >>49881756

>>49896284
agreed

Look up transposons. If you want to get more deeply into the biology, look up Nature Reviews on RNAi, CRISPR-CAS, how Tetrahymena edits its genome via RNA binding.

Also look up the adventure The Lover in the Ice for Delta Green.

Actual play: http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2011/05/systems/call-of-cthulhu/call-of-cthulhu-delta-green-lover-in-the-ice/

What you are describing is different but this is one way things could go in the DNA copying department.

>>49894486
Fuck, why did I read that?

>>49896284


Oh I wasn't planning on it. I was just giving /tg/ the jist of my idea.

Definitely digging all of the advice though.

>>49896060
I'll be honest, Ithaqua/whatever other Ancient Northern Gods that get brought up always get me pretty good. I grew up in Northern BC, and you can appreciate the kind of fear that harsh winters bring. The silence in particular.

>>49897285
Read Laird Barron's Swift to Chase

Its a short story collection about Alaska

>>49896128
>>49896850

I think that's on the iceshelf - Antarctica's inland areas are weird because the ice has built up over the mountains effectively preserving them in a way that never happened on the other continents because the glaciers were never able to move and carve out the valleys you find elsewhere.

(and trapped in amongst those mountains is a vast inland sea like the black sea in eurasia, that is unconnected to any other ocean in the world, and completely contained under miles of ice that cloaks and preserves the mountains around it)

Then there's the rocky deserts - the second largest rocky desert after the sahara, hasn't snowed or rained for millions of years, the ground is flat apart from the wind smoothed pebbles hewn from ancient volcanic glass that in some places make up almost a kilometer of "top soil" above the bedrock. And in the center of these rocky plains lie a few boulder fields, where the wind has worn the ancient mountains that once loomed vast above the lands around them down to a few giant rocks and strange stalagmites that the wind whistles and pipes eerily through.

suggestion for anyone who wants a good description of arctic travel I'd suggest Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness, specifically the climactic race across the ice

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>>49894486
>Roko's Basilisk
Heh, kind of reminds me of a nastier version of the AI from Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.

I am the Eschaton; I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

>>49896128
>>49897453
Another thing people don't really think about of the Antarctic is the sounds. Those we've been there say it's one of the most unnerving things there, along with the cold and the featureless landscape.
Aside from the howling you're obviously going to get when wind blows at high speed over the large flat ice plains, there's also the sounds of the ice. The ice in most of Antarctic is not static, but constantly moving. Crevasses open and close, and vast masses of ice slowly move from the interior towards the coast. The movement of the ice creates a constant rubmling and grinding sound, like that of a distant thunder, and it never, ever, stops.

>>49901063
That´s creepy as hell.

I´m gonna go search if there´s any recordings

>>49897285
>http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Laird_Barron.html

Also Barron's Frontier Death Song. Audio or text

http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/frontier-death-song/

>>49883498
Got a link to the vids?