Lovecraftian Apocalypse

>>50941924
You wouldn't be able to understand what you were seeing.

You don't survive it.

When Cthulhu truly wakes, everyone will go mad. His psychic presence while still sleeping disturbed and destroyed the psyches of hundreds of artists and dreamers across the world, and gave nearly everyone nightmares.

If the stars were truly right, he would rise, and your brain would be altered, but it would not be because of Cthulhu. There would literally be full onset total schizophrenia, and everyone would be suffering a different version of it. Nyarloahotep would finally take the world, and the world would end in madness and howling laughter as the Great Old Ones took their places across the world and no longer concerned themselves with sleep.

Cthulhu is merely their high priest. He's not a god.

The Outer and Other Gods are what he would call down to earth. THEY are what would drive you mad, not Cthulhu himself.

>>50941924
>What would one look like?
The Mist

>How would it be survived?
As Yog-sogothery serpentine, betentacled arachnids.

>>50941961
This is a fairly apt description of it, but given that such large-scale insanity probably wouldn't be fun to write or roleplay through, we can assume that on the opposite end of the scale from the 'hundreds of artists and dreamers' who are most psychically susceptible, there are probably a number of people (sort of like 40k nulls, perhaps?) who are a little bit more resilient to the worldwide mindfuckery that Cthulhu's awakening would create.

As a result, you probably have slavering hordes of madmen and cultists participating in widespread orgies of slaughter and looting, with the more lucid ones organising to worship their new masters and many people simply becoming feral.

The idea of the last sane men and women in the world struggling to eke out an existence in the ruins of civilisation and evading the attentions of maniacs and their otherworldly masters is actually a really interesting jumping off point for a setting.

>>50941961
Another anon with another question:
How far away would a human space colony need to get in order to ensure probable survival?

>>50941924
>http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/cthulhu-apocalypse-the-dead-white-world/

>>50942013
Theoretically you could manage in system, perhaps even as close as Mars (but unlikely). Past the astroid belt is probably safest. As long as the Mi-go and Star Spawn ignore you, you're fine.

The unfortunate part of that is the Mi-Go DON'T ignore humanity. They will have been watching you. Heck, they may even try and help your poor dying race survive their apocolypse.

>>50942013
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

>>50942013
Probably just outside of immediate Earth orbit. The Moon would be far enough.

Of course the Moon has monsters of its own and most of the major lovecraft monsters can fly in space so nowhere is truly safe.

>>50941924
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw_HKzo9Ync
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV0I-iA5lJU
both work for inspiration.

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>>50941987
And imagine if those people were the polar opposite of Artists and Dreamers - the most boring, grounded and stubborn people.

Imagine Vernon Dursley being a party leader

>>50941924
Not sure what it would look like, but it would probably sound like, " "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

>>50941961
or yer mum fucked yog soggoth and your just waiting for dad to visit.

You don't survive it. Because by the time the stars are right - you are already millions of years extinct.

The Shadow Out of Time features a future prediction about when Cthulhu will wake up.

Cthulhu wakes up long after mankind has gone extinct - due to their own mistakes (I guess Lovecraft wrote this during WW1), and after IIRC either bird or lizard people have evolved and gone extinct already. Cthulhu will eventually wake up and cause the extinction of some kind of insectoid people.

>>50941987
Actually, given how Lovecraft's stories work, it would be the sane people that would die first and the insane people that survived.

The sane people would just stand there and die to the horrors, while the insane would have already been prepped by their psychich dreams on how to survive.

I like BPRD's take on it

>>50942142
Spin it another way then: being exposed enough to and unhinged by your psychic dreams to have a comprehension of what's going on and an ability to prepare and defend yourself against what's coming next, but somehow avoiding the brain-liquefying incoherent insanity that befell the rest of humanity.

>>50942104
I love this idea too much though.

>>50942180
It is important to remember than in Lovecraft's writing, the coming of the Old Ones is said to not just be a time of chaos and slaughter.

The humans that survive will be uplifted, and are taught to transcend their mortal forms - they become Old Ones.

So yes, only the "sane insane" would survive the slaughter.

The truly insane would murder the sane, and only the sane insane would hide for long enough to survive and transcend their humanity.

Funny, I'm writing this as I'm posting in the Bloodborne general in /vg/. Hahahahha.

>>50941924
The best way to survive a lovecraftian apocalypse is to kill yourself while your soul is still a human's soul.

Or be the first guy to walk up to the horde and let them speak using your body as a puppet, though you'll probably end up horribly twisted after that.

>>50942210
>The humans that survive will be uplifted, and are taught to transcend their mortal forms - they become Old Ones.
Neat. What do I gotta fellate to ascend my mortal form?

>>50942210
>>50942249

Bloodborne looks fucking delicious and I am so salty I don't have access to a PS4. Good taste, friendo.

This is an interesting point, though, and one that'd escaped me (although admittedly I haven't actually read OG Lovecraft stuff since 2009 in high school).

How quickly do you think the process of transcending into becoming Old Ones would take? Would they be aware of it? This could be a campaign plot hook in itself. I'm getting a sorta Homo Novus from Metro 2033 vibe.

>>50942264
Well, given how even just studying math or looking at ancient stone tablets can make people "see forever", I doubt that turning people into Old Ones is difficult.

Just a matter of making their biology fit the knowledge they have accumulated.

Of course, as Bloodborne suggests, a human transcending into an Old One would still be a babby Old One having to go through a new childhood in order to become an adult.

>>50942333
>I doubt that turning people into Old Ones is difficult.

As in, not difficult for an Old One. It's important to remember that the biology of Old Ones isn't just purely biology, it also features a strong physics component, with their biology stretching beyond the limitations in time and space that our human biology has.

>>50942333
>>50942348
This would be a really interesting process to drag a group through. Maybe substitute or supplement a sanity mechanic with a stat that represents the PCs' growing extraspatial perception of reality as they become acclimatised to Mythos fuckery without degenerating into loons.

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>>50942455
Just rip off Bloodborne and you're good.

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>>50942478
>it transforms into a toyota with legs

>>50942486
When you posted this i hadn't seen the webm, so the harnesses from GYO, it turns out to just be an acid trip

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>>50941924
With a Lovecraftian apocalypse, there's a lot of potential answers, given how many aliens, gods and godlike aliens fall under that umbrella.

BUT, we can generally bracket them in two separate camps- I'll take Trail of Cthulhu's approach and categorize them as "Purist" and "Pulp"

The pulpy sort of apocalypse is the one that probably comes to mind first. The Eldritch threat is a big dangerous monster whose very presence fucks with time, space, and causes madness.

If you could survive a pulp apocalypse, it's at grave cost. Our civilization as is could probably fend off rabbling monsters and spawn, but confronting the Eldritch source and it's anomalies would require fighting fire with fire. This might include bargaining with another God to help or dabbling in sorcery and forbidden knowledge that would leave the survivors forever changed. Countless lives would be lost, but humanity would be on a higher level afterwards- more powerful, more dangerous, closer to eldritch than they might like to think.


Purist on the other hand, follows the precedent and general structure HP used in his own stories. Here there is less a tangible apocalypse and more a gained perspective, as though chickens suddenly understood that they and their offspring are fated to be nothing but livestock.

You're not actually going mad because something looked so tentacley , but the bigger picture you have glimpsed brings about a worldview that those still blessed with ignorance would think madness.

Here, it's very possible humanity could survive in the physical sense, but that's of no comfort. The best you can hope for in this a hobby or obsession that can allow you to hold on to a fragile illusion of normalcy where you go on living, forever trying to dodge the elephant in the room. But it will always be there: humanity is small, and you're even smaller. Nothing you do matters, and anything out there that does will never notice you were ever gone.

>>50941924

Go read "A Study in Emerald". Really fucking good.

>>50942013
There's a pdf floating around called 'End Time' dealing with just this scenario.

>>50942644
http://neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf

Here's a link I just dug up because this friendly anon reminded me. It's fucking A, especially if you're a Doyle fan, but it's enjoyable in its own right.

I would say this and Charles Stross' A Colder War linked above are two really good stories of how a historical Earth setting would get to grips with mythos realities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBUGumPc4s

>>50942713
Groovy

>>50942793
>tfw I'm really loving this game and don't want to spoil the ending for myself but want to see how it relates to this thread in gratuitous detail

>>50942127
>so insignificant you're already twice-over extinct by the time Cthulhu awakens

Now THAT is true cosmic horror.

>>50942719
>that corpse

I'm suddenly reminded of a Lovecraft inspired Dutch horror story (before I even knew Lovecraft's stories) that I read as a child.

It started out as a normal paranormal horror detective story, then halfway through the villain pulled a Ozymandias and the Old Ones begin influencing Earth. The hero returns home to pick up his daughter from school and every dog is replaced with a little shoggoth. His daughter spends the entire trip begging her dad to buy her a shoggoth. The hero turns on the news and sees American terrorists proclaiming that the great Satan Saudi-Arabia must be destroyed, everything became warped over the course of just a few hours.

>>50943074
That sounds so dope. A modern horror campaign I'm working on involves a lot of distortion of media, TV/radio broadcasts and fuckery with GPS satnavs, so I might have to borrow that particularly striking image of Muricans burning Saudi flags. My compliments to the heroic Dutchbro who came up with it.

>>50942888
Better start delving into that final dungeon, then.

>>50943259
nigga my guys are all level 3 I just got it

>>50941924
I've always imagined it like a cross between Evangelion and Mad Max. The lucky humans become entities made from the combined consciousness of thousands, waiting for their gods to lift them up, with the unlucky ones split into gangs of murderous cultists and the bare-sane survivors.

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>>50942013
You could emigrate to another solar system...
Like the one with Polaris.

>>50941924
Would depend heavily on the kind of Lovecraftian entity in question. The Great Old Ones wake up and civilization is fucked because you got giant invisible supermonsters running around ruling the world now, plus you've got Cthulhu and friends spamming your mind with psychic messages 24/7, which will probably drive most people mad eventually. One the other hand, individual people may survive, and the Cthulhu cultists believe the survivors will learn from the GOOs and transcend the limitations of humanity. So probably 90% of humanity ends up dead or insane, and the rest aren't really going to be human anymore.
If, on the other hand, the apocalypse comes due to Nyarlathotep attracting Azatoth's attention on the world, everything is fucked. Earth itself probably gets erased from existence, or at least everything on the surface gets incinerated. Crushing what he chanced to mould in play, the Idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away, and all that.
Yog-Sothot- or Shub-Niggurathocalypse would probably be even weirder.

>>50942607
Interestingly, Lovecraft's own Dunwich Horror is a very typical "pulp" Church story, following pretty much exactly the plot outline you gave (there's a big nasty monster that's going to bring about the end of the world, a bunch of college professors stop it using stuff they picked up from books of eldritch lore).

>>50943650
Also, my autocorrect seems to want to replace "Cthulhu" with "Church".

>>50943650
Well, to be honest, Dunwich Horror is pretty much the story of Jesus Christ, retold in cosmic horror.

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>>50941924
When the stars go right, we'll see the gods returning, rising from the ocean, descending from the skies. The people will howl and wail, as all their legends are proven false and true. Cities and kings shall fall, people will turn away from the faith of their fathers, and turn to worshipping the reborn gods. You will get small hold outs of people, hiding in the wilderness. You will have large armies marching to take and to maim; wild and free like the gods.

The gods will ignore humanity, as they dance and fight and play with each other... our world trampled in the dust. But some, some poor souls may be noticed, and they will bear within them the children of the gods.
These monsters will be born, to rule and to destroy the world, and none will be safe.

And then the stars will stop being right. And civilization will rebuild.

Just like last time.

After all, the universe is not made of straight lines, but of cycles and loops. What was, shall be again.

It was just over three millennia ago that the stars were last right.The kingdoms and empires crumbled, demigods roamed the world, it was a time of savagery, when people came from the sea to destroy and to plunder. And it lasted for fifty years.

And we barely remember it now. the great city of Troy was believed a myth until a madman and looter discovered the site.

We remember stories of the men who walked with gods, but we cloak them as heroes. Because the truth of Heracles is not one we wish to know.

>>50942065
Tbh, I came here to post 'Masada'.

>>50943556
You're mroe likely to end up with Solaris.

>>50942607
>nothing you do matters
Yeah, not to you, maybe. Nothing intrinsically matters but that doesn't mean nothing matters. There's absolutely nothing scary or crazy about crossing the threshold of nihilism.

Tentaclefags btfo

>>50944001
You sound like a reaaaal fucking faggot, man. Don't try writing or GMing.

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>>50944169
>>50944210
Oh, look. The angry christfag has returned to shit on another thread.

>>50944210
Sorry, I've been working with religious texts recently. It tends to colour my writing slightly in the process.

Still, my point is that the Bronze Age Collapse could have been another period of the stars coming right. With the Sea People's invasion, you'd end up with something right out of Castro's metaphorical book: "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, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

>>50944555
>sea people
>they weren't real people
>but they were from the sea

Fucking brilliant, mate.

>>50942127
>Cthulhu will eventually wake up and cause the extinction of some kind of insectoid people.

Hijacking this thread for a moment. Assuming a race operates in a hive mind, would they really be susceptible to Old God whispering in the same way as individually intelligent creatures? Rather than being driven insane, I would think that they would end up involuntarily doing the bidding of the Old God in question, i.e. the OG would take over the hive mind and the individual would be none the wiser.

>>50941961
>gave nearly everyone nightmares.
Most people were not affected and seeing Cthluhu doesn't give you schizophrenia or anything like it, albeit the sheer size and otherness might do something a little bit fucky with your head.

>>50941924
Read Neil Gaiman's "A Portrait in Emerald" for an interesting take. It's essentially a different version of the Sherlock story, except it's Moriarty is the good guy and centuries ago the Old Ones arose and have carved out their own empires, keeping humanity around instead of wiping it out.

>>50947780
It might be worse. Schizophrenia dialed all he way up because it's hitting all the individual pieces slightly differently.

Or not. If the hive mind has a mechanism for dealing with fragments that go bad (which seems reasonable given how likely that is to occur over time) then you could be looking at a situation where it hammers that reflex and is as much of a direct physical threat as a mental one (I guess the closest approximation is something like radiation poisoning?).

>>50941924
>What would one look like
Worst case scenario, it wouldn't look like anything. All of reality, including light and the laws of physics, would blink out of existence as its dreamer Azathoth wakes up.

>and how would it be survived?
Get that anthropocentrism out of here. Mankind is already doomed to transience.

>>50941987
>widespread orgies of slaughter and looting
>and many people simply becoming feral
>The idea of the last sane men and women in the world struggling to eke out an existence in the ruins of civilisation and evading the attentions of maniacs
Isn't that just Crossed?

>>50942225
>The best way to survive a lovecraftian apocalypse is to kill yourself while your soul is still a human's soul.
>soul
>in a materialist Lovecraft setting
Anon...

>>50948439
Did Crossed have Lovecraftian horrors in it or just rabid rapists? I got bored with it pretty quick.

>>50941924
The closest thing I know of would be Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

It's an apocalypse of Lovecraftian, Terminator Skynet (security robots gone evil and shit), and zombies.
IIRC you can disable specific factions and only leave the lovecraft stuff.

>>50941924
>Surviving a Lovecraftian Apocalypse
Cute

>>50948523
Just the latter. I was mostly talking about the "crazy people apocalypse" part of it.

And yeah, it's not great. Occasionally decent depending on the writer, but never great.

>>50942065

This is probably my favorite piece of short fiction.

>>50941924
.don't one lOok no
survves. tHey

>>50944210
don't listen to him anon, I enjoyed your short thing

>>50950024
heh

>>50942607
>Here, it's very possible humanity could survive in the physical sense, but that's of no comfort. The best you can hope for in this a hobby or obsession that can allow you to hold on to a fragile illusion of normalcy where you go on living, forever trying to dodge the elephant in the room. But it will always be there: humanity is small, and you're even smaller. Nothing you do matters, and anything out there that does will never notice you were ever gone.

Whelp... you just described my life.

>>50948439
>soul
>in a materialist Lovecraft setting

Lovecraft had some definite ideas about the soul. Just read: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/tgsk.aspx

>>50941924
>Lovecraftian Apocalypse
The second half of the Nyarlathotep short story is literally that.

>>50943074
Sounds kind of similar to Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas, it gets wierd quick and then just continues to get stranger.

>>50943074
What's the title?
>>50943099
>That particularly striking image of Muricans burning Saudi flags
And the problem here is? The Saudis deserve worse.

>>50956235
Nnnot what I'm talking about, just that weird fucked up role reversal of Americans in this weird fucked up lovecraftian parallel universe using the same language and tactics as Islamist fundamentalists is such a cool image.

>>50941924
There's a space opera dedicated to it. Ask anons about it.

Anon, Lovecraft IRL was a strict materialist. Only those who accessed the Dreamlands and such were ever afforded any semblance of spirituality--even then, they inhabited physical bodies. No soul ever flew around free of madness in any happy eternal afterlife.