Is Cosmic Horror passé

>>53812152
Real cosmic horror is, well, real. We could be seared to dust by a gamma ray burst in an instant, and we wouldn't even know it was happening. And every single thing every human has ever done for any purpose would be meaningless.

the true horror of the indifferent universe is that it truly is indifferent and that no future exists. But even mindless, live-in-the-moment hedonism isn't any sort of protection for claiming you had a valid life.

We have, essentially, become too comfortable. So comfortable that our inability to imagine our own nonexistence is bleeding into being unable to truly understand that void enough to be afraid of it.

>>53812381
This, pretty much. Do you remember, when you were a kid, when you had that that one epiphany or dream where you managed to actually conceive the concept of infinity, or endlessness? Remember that slight twinge of fear and awe you felt before your perspective snapped back into focus, and the world became solid again? That's what Cosmic Horror is.

>>53812152
Bruh cosmic horror as a concept will always be scary. But that shit doesn't translate well to games without losing some of what makes it "cosmic horror" because good cosmic horror lacks the potential for meaningful conflict. Personally, I don't even think there's an option 2, but that's just because I've always looked at cosmic horror as more of a force of nature than as an antagonistic force that can be affected in any way. The point of cosmic horror is to remind us of our place in the universe--and in my mind that means quickly and definitively crushing any and all hope for a happy ending. Naturally, this means that any good cosmic horror game shouldn't really be about the cosmic "whatever," but rather about each character in the story develops once their previous understanding of reality is shattered, and they're left alone to find their way in a strange and uncaring world.

>>53812381
I respect this, and completely agree with you. But how do you translate this to gameplay? What actions can the players perform that force them to think about these things, while still allowing them agency?

Also, most "Lovecraftian" games are exactly the same as regular games, except that you fight robed cultists and squid monsters, and have a second health bar for your brain. It's been reduced to a cliche, which is very easy to mentally digest - the exact OPPOSITE of cosmic horror. I think that a good cosmic horror campaign needs to avoid familiar cliches as much as possible. It's not the sole key to successful horror, but I think it's worth mentioning.

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Whenever someone says it's 'passé' - or that anything is - it's that they're not exposed to good quality media on the topic. Something done in such a way as to be interesting and rich, wether it's about Lovecraftian horrors, the uncaring emptiness of space or the utter futility of being alive.

Unfortunately, you used the open accent e, which makes you a fart wafter, so go fuck yourself.

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>>53812152
Cosmic Horror is fundamentally about the fear of the irrelevance of the human species and of human achievement. The reason it seems passe now is that in the early 20th century that irrelevance was frightening and horrific because humanity was considered to HAVE a purpose beyond wallowing in its own filth and squabbling over fancies and memes.

Now that irrelevance has become normalized and is frankly used as a convenient excuse to strive for nothing except material excess or inane achievements of social and economic justice. The idea that there might be (is definitely, frankly) something out there in the void that is terrible and overwhelming and unknown, and dwarfs us in every regard is no longer relevant, because our fears now are not of things bigger than society, but merely of things bigger than the human animal--like society.

It is not that we defeated the fear of the unknown, it is that we blinked, turned around, and turned up the music like the cowardly caged rats that we are, and now shudder in fear of civilization itself not perfectly reflecting the trite and hedonistic playthings we entertain ourselves with while awaiting death.

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>>53812932
So if you want to capture the same feeling of cosmic horror--which is ultimately the fear of your values being rendered inert and moot, you must instead tap into the same part of the brain which has been repurposed by our social conditioning to distract us from the fact that our lives no longer hold meaning: Tap into the fear of having those toys, those distractions, stripped away.

This requires different tools, different literary devices to achieve the same end, but one thing that commonly works is to unseat humankind from his place of decadence and comfort, and place him instead in an environment where he is no longer the center of the universe, but a pest. Vermin in a great system that no longer requires his input to function. The alienation remains, but worse, the distractions are gone.

1984 served this function adequately, dismantling the values of human progress piece by piece and laying bare the cold brutality of a very real, very possible future in which every piece of everything everyone believed had been rendered equally irrelevant in the face of mindless barbaric cruelty.

The Manga Blame! does the same thing, by showing a universe that has simply moved past human trifles into a realm of grotesque, pointless, amoral horror in which man is little more than rust to be expunged from the gears of a great, mindless, pointless machine.

In medieval times, one might imagine that the Mongol Invasion evoked a similar sensation of dread.

>>53812152
Cosmic horror is nigh-impossible to do right in a roleplaying game. Mostly because great cosmic horror means fighting against impossible to understand forces of reality that don't even notice you exist or do and are fucking with you like some kid screwing with ants. It's easy enough to do that in a story where you plan everything out. But most players will just rapidly burn out once things get too freaky for them.

>>53813184
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12130366/

Low cosmic horror, but a good example.

>>53812152
I wouldn't call it passe, but it has become the default sort of religion/worldview for a lot of media. It makes since for games because it gives unlimited supplies of monsters to fight.

>>53813184
You don't have to fight against it. It's just sort of in the background. Just like in a normal fantasy game there are gods that are just in the background.

>>53812932
>>53812995
This is a really good analysis/ideas. I love reading things like this, that relate literary trends to society.

>Vermin in a great system that no longer requires his input to function. The alienation remains, but worse, the distractions are gone.
At first when I read this, I thought it reminded me of the looming promise of automation and AI, and the idea that mankind's tools will eventually render mankind obsolete.

However, I think I took things too literally. You don't mean a world where MANKIND is no longer needed - you mean a world where EACH MAN is no longer needed. In 1984, for example, the individual means nothing. Nothing Winston does or creates means anything. Even at the end, the reader gets the sense that it hardly matters to the Party if Winston lives or dies - and yet they keep him alive and break him, simply because they can.

Unfortunately, your take on modern cosmic horror makes it even harder to adapt things into a playable game. Robbing the players of a sense of meaning to their actions is typically the exact opposite of what you want to do in a game. What are your thoughts on balancing cosmic horror and player agency?

>>53813419
You want a combination of agency and cosmic horror. The players don't turn a corner and have to have a brief, friendly chat with a hole in reality and then turn into monstrous amalgamations of sapience and garbage from the exposure, they punch through layers of human detritus surrounding the cosmic horror, only to be exposed to something that cares as much about the cult/whatever as the players - not at all. Something that only responded to the cult as they managed to trigger something like an autonomic response, the way you get goosebumps. It's not a campaign type you can play routinely, or it looses the sting of "All is dust".

>>53813347
This story is a great example of how to build atmosphere. The temperature, the masks, the music, the notes... Everything comes together so well.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any more horror/CoC /tg/ stories (Old Man Henderson does not count). Got any others?

>>53813491
No, it's rare. For atmosphere, try D&D's Heroes of Horror - it's got a solid 'atmospheric' effects table to pillage. Failing that, ctrl-f for 'the staring woman' in this thread which is more 'cosmic' in a setting where the rule of science is paramount.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12180900/

>>53813408
>You don't have to fight against it.

Even in the case they don't they'll tend to still burn out very easily. Most players really don't like being tossed around without understanding.

>>53813446
>and the idea that mankind's tools will eventually render mankind obsolete.

I always find it far more likely mankind will edit themselves int newer better and less and less understandable models. Which to me is far worse.

>>53812415
Is this something that happens normally to most people?

I've gotten this loads of time just walking around or while in the middle of something else. If I had to describe it, it feels like for two seconds my eyes go wide and I truly understand the vastness of the universe/the void of death or something similar and then my brain dumps those thoughts immediately and I snap back to normalcy.

It's rather unsettling.

>>53813446
I think I get what you're saying. The "cosmic horror" isn't the gameplay threat, it's the narrative threat. Players will spend the majority of the time rolling dice to shoot cultists and find clues. The Unspeakable Things are the plot device binding everything together, not something for the players to understand or conquer.

>>53813627
Yes. And when they do find it and the heart of everything, they realise that everything they've achieved, everything they've done - it's nothing. And so was what the opposition achieved and strove for.

The game starts mundane, and as things get deeper they get stranger. Using settings they aren't familiar with helps, or game systems. At most, the players should be able to get a finger or two on the corners of 'what X is', even with the mid-level stuff when the 'supernatural' comes into play. That empowered cultist that throws fireballs and eats anti-armour rounds isn't some cultist, it's a writhing mass of something that their brain refuses to comprehend and self-censors with a big red X. Blah blah blah.

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>>53813419
You don't necessarily have to strip them of agency per-se, but like Call of Cthulhu, part of the horror comes from the inconceivable scale or depth (and indeed the fact that it is unknown/unknowable) of the system/event/universe that they are faced with.

I recommended Blame! because it was a good example of someone in this world who -did- have agency, they were trying to somehow stop it, but their chances of succeeding in that were so remote, and that what stopping it would even mean was so unclear, that it almost enhanced the grand horror of the environment.

In CoC, almost every protagonist either ends up hopelessly insane, dead, or left close to the breaking point of their sanity and hope at the end of the story. That's true in both the games and Lovecraft's original stories. That makes sense, but it doesn't mean that you can't also tell a story where a group of protagonists, however remote their chances, fight to try and lash out at the cosmos. There might just be a way (perhaps with the aid of some benevolent force) to make a difference.

Another good text to read on this subject if you have the patience for unbearably19th century prose is The Night Land, by Hodgeson. I recall that Lovecraft, despite saying basically that the guy talked like a fag and his prose was unbearable, complimented it on being just about the darkest and most horrible shit he'd ever seen written in the genre.

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Opinions on Thomas Ligotti? I've heard some praise for him as a post-modern voice for cosmic horror. (Mostly seems like extra grumpy nihilism to me.)

I never felt that I played in a good Cosmic Horror styled game.

Every CoC game I played ended up being way too campy to be scary.

>>53813712
>Thomas Ligotti

One of my favorite writers. Most people try to put a chill on frighting ideas in some way in stories. Ligotti just charges straight on ahead without mercy.

>>53813728
Pretty much. They kind of screwed up in my view point when they stuck the sanity mechanic like they did. The horror is less you see something nonsensical and more you understand something that shatters you're life view. The "You look at this horrible indescribable thing and your eyes black out." Thing is too overplayed and makes game sessions not be nearly as scary.

>>53812381
Nihilism is a disease.

Strangely enough this entire thread kind of reminds me of GURPS:Illuminati.

>>53813419
>What are your thoughts on balancing cosmic horror and player agency?
Not that guy, but Blame! is an excellent example.
The core struggle is for humanity to reclaim control of The City. Functionally an impossible task, and certainly not one within the scope of a TTRPG.
But the players don't have to solve the larger problem. Simpler, more immediate goals are easy to imagine.
Find a source of food. Find a place safe from the robotic exterminators trying to wipe out all human life. Convince the humans 200km thattaway to share their macguffins.
And through all of these tasks, you can weave the thread of "this wouldn't be a problem if The City worked right", reminding the players of the larger, insolvable, problem.

tl;dr don't deny the players all agency, but do force them to solve the second-string problems while the real issue remains unsolvable.

>>53812152
>Is Cosmic Horror passé

nah, it's just done really, really badly most of the time, by people who don't really understand the essential elements

>>53813347
Meh just a dull railroad he was lucky the players bought into. None of their choices mattered and there were no rules to adjudicate anything so it was basically 'le random lulz space cthulu'

>>53812415
Never in my life have I felt this.
I've no idea what you're talking about.

>>53814243
Never? You never had that one time as a kid where you started counting in your head because you were bored and had nothing else to do, so you decided to see how high you could go, and after a few minutes suddenly realized that there was no end to how high you could count, and you caught a glimpse of the void of infinity, though you were too young to put what you felt into words, and the feeling went away almost immediately and then something else came along to distract you?

>>53814359
No I just counted to 100 and got really proud of myself because I was like 4 so told my friends who said I was lying about it because nobody could count that high and punched me in the stomach and spat on me.

>>53814380
Ah, that explains it. I lived in Wyoming as a kid. The town was basically an intersection of freeways leading to anywhere but there, and the school had maybe 300 kids, tops. Not a lot of friends to make there, thus not a lot of kids to beat me up.

Also it was really fucking windy.

>>53812152

I once wrote a short story along the lines of the second option. A girl stalked by a malevolent entity and driven into its dimension by its actions, only to find the creature was just a servant of an eldritch abomination that was making itself a physical form from the organs of its victims. The last piece needed was her heart (specifically hers, because she couldn't empathise with anyone) and her only option was to kill herself and rob the abomination of its final piece, stalling its rebirth. I always hated stories of Old Gods where the heroes can fight against it like anything else.

>>53814359
That feeling is exciting though. Why should people be afraid of infinity? The fact that the endless stars might one day be within our reach, the endless planets there for my children's children to touch with their bare feet, is absolutely amazing and beautiful.

Infinity is hopeful. Of course the universe is uncaring- nothing cares except people, but there's wonder and beauty in the great unknown. Humanity yearns for the new.

I guess the main problem, being that materialism and acknowledgement for much of western society to be a lack of transcendental purpose is that in a game format there is no player agency.

Let me reiterate. In cosmic horror there is often player agency (choices they make) but ultimately nothing matters in the long run, there is no great victory that is possible no matter the sacrifice so it might as well have no agency.

Maybe this is scary in real life (I suspect many of us will just shrug our shoulders and just say "well shit") but in a game this isnt fun or a particularly satisfying conclusion.

The trick to this as far as I can see, you can look at season 1 of True Detective. They got their guy and they saved some people but the greater conspiracy remained unsolved and implied will get away with it.

>>53814380
Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

>>53814780
That's not infinity. That's taking the highest possible number you can comprehend and mentally assigning it as the infinity. True infinity is infinite times bigger than the highest number you can comprehend.

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>>53814044

>>53813680
>Another good text to read on this subject if you have the patience for unbearably19th century prose is The Night Land, by Hodgeson. I recall that Lovecraft, despite saying basically that the guy talked like a fag and his prose was unbearable, complimented it on being just about the darkest and most horrible shit he'd ever seen written in the genre.
It's been rewritten so the MC doesn't talk like a fag.

>>53812152
>le cosmic horror passé
Real life cause of failed "show, don't tell". Most people know all kinds of horrible facts, but millions of dead remain mere statistics. Subconsciously they remain ignorant and distant, so bring it to their home and make it personal.

>>53815276
All that means is there will never be an upper limit on what we can aspire to as individuals or as a species.

>>53815929
That's not how infinity works.

And I'm quite sure nothing has ever been proven to be infinite anyway.

Thing I never understood with Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror was that it seemed that the gods actually needed humanity or were attracted to Earth or something. Like, all those cults and rituals to bring about the return of the gods; the sheer number of gods trapped in/on/around the Earth; their interest in Earth and individual humans.

Cosmic horror should have the "antagonist" entity completely divorced from humanity. It shows no interest towards them. Treat mankind like a midge that splats against the windscreen of a car, or incests that are killed as builders go about pulling up the earth at a building site.

They shouldn't even be killed because the entity wants to, or because it finds them irritating or amusing. Humanity should be beneath their notice utterly. I had several story ideas to this effect, except one was less actual "eldritch cosmic god" and more "very alien, very advanced race".

>>53812381
this was a pretty cool post, good work anon

>>53814359
>>53812152
This is the problem with cosmic horror because its not really something you can put into words in a good way, if someone hasn't felt it then they probably never will, personally the idea of infinity doesn't bother me at all and I get a the feeling anyone who says it really does bother them is trying way too hard to sound deep

The main problem I think is certainty, you're never certain that death is the end or that the universe is infinite or uncaring you cant 100% know and that makes it easy to dismiss

>>53816960
>Cosmic horror should have the "antagonist" entity completely divorced from humanity. It shows no interest towards them. Treat mankind like a midge that splats against the windscreen of a car, or incests that are killed as builders go about pulling up the earth at a building site.
Then why would the plot require cultists/worshippers at all? You need something for the players to interact with, you can't just sit them down and lecture them on how horrifying it'd be if your an elder god happened to kill the world today.
I get that "requiring" sacrifices/worshippers/sacrifices/whatever trivializes the horrors, but what would be the cultists goal otherwise?

>>53818541
What if the idea of the cultists isn't to awaken the dark god or give them a bridge to our reality or whatever, but simply to do something that would get said god's attention? Like nothing we humans can do could affect such a thing, we're no threat or boon to it, but even a gnat can get a person's attention. Could be a matter of the cultists believe that the cosmic entity is benevolent and will usher in a new golden age for humanity, while the players are led to believe that said entity will wipe out all of mankind with but a gaze.

Course then the cultists' plot boils down to 'Senpai notice me!'

>>53819959
Or what if the cultists don't necessarily want to attract the god's attention, but merely to use his presence for personal gain? Like maybe the leaders believe they can harness a slumbering god's energy to receive prophetic visions or gain reality-rending powers or something, but the heroes learn that this creates a dangerous risk of awakening the god and fucking up everything. Like a gnat wanting to fly close to a human's skin for warmth, at risk of bothering the human.

Or maybe the cultists have no idea of the consequences or what they're even tapping into - they just want to learn some neat magic tricks to accomplish some personal goal.

Of course, then the entity is reduced to a plot device and could just as easily be substituted for a nuke or bioweapon or something. Although I guess

>>53814359
trying to imagine death without afterlife does that to me
i can imagine nonexistence for about a second before i come back to reality. it's really spooky

>>53815968
You now have infinity hitting a human brain and suddenly finding out that some people are just too stupid or stubborn to stop. Humans did not evolve to understand infinity they evolved to conquer, kill and survive. The more the better. Our brains allow us to do more but if you scrape the paint you'll find out that under it that desire to survive, thrive and make others to bow to our will.

Infinity is just a good way to satiate that hunger. Of course over time humanity may get tired of it. But it will need at least another 100k years of rolling through Universe before it has a chance to happen.

>>53820832
Well in order for cosmic horror to work the entity pretty much has to be a plot point any way. Once you stat an elder god, no matter how absurd the numbers are, players will start looking for a way to beat them.

Though if you really want to fuck with the players you could always decide what happens if the god awakens beforehand, then introduce a dozen or so NPCs with conflicting information. Like an ancient book that predicts doom for all mankind if the god awakens, then have a proff point out that if the doom applies to all mankind the god never awoke, since there's still a mankind around to tell the tale, therefore either the doom isn't as all encompassing as advertised, or the god hasn't woken up in man's history so how would the book know?

>>53821038
>Once you stat an elder god, no matter how absurd the numbers are, players will start looking for a way to beat them.

I actually want one day to do just that. Stat a cosmic horror level threat with carefully calculated attributes and more zeroes than one sheet of paper should probably have just to see what players will try to do.

>>53813671
>it's a writhing mass of something that their brain refuses to comprehend and self-censors with a big red X.
I think Google Deep Dream is actually a great visualization for this. It's the human mind trying to look at something and fill in the blanks with familiar things, resulting in a perverse, constantly-shifting imitation.
>>>/wsg/1739039
Here's an animated (with sound) example.

Cosmic horror is an interesting idea but very fucking passé right now. In nerd circles, it's past that saturation point that zombies hit a few years ago.

Key to making it scary or interesting is to actually build a plot beyond "uh oh the cultists are at it again! Kill kill kill until you all go crazy!!!!"

Put in some puzzle elements, old diaries, twisted characters, abandon notions of good and evil, reward players that dont play like overly cautious paranoid faggots who only want to survive, and CREATE A COHERENT MYSTERY AT THE CORE

>>53823139
>Key to making it scary or interesting is to actually build a plot beyond "uh oh the cultists are at it again! Kill kill kill until you all go crazy!!!!"
Exactly. Avoid cliches, subvert genre staples, keep the players guessing. And as an extension of that, avoid using words like "eldritch" or "cultist", because it immediately sets up expectations and reminds players that they're in a familiar genre.

cosmic horror ceases to be when you grow up and stop caring about utterly meaningless shit (space and everything beyond earth)

>>53812152
Whenever I think of Cosmic Horror, my thoughts always return to Ruby Quest. Part of what made Ruby Quest's slow descent into madness work so well was the fact that it so rarely explained... anything, really. You knew what the characters wanted, and you knew roughly what was stopping them, but so many of the hows and whys were left tantalisingly out of reach. The mutations were given a broadly logical explanation (some kind of mad science), but the specifics were never detailed. Even the final reveal in the Red Room just raised more questions than it answered. But it did leave one very important impression: that the heroes just got a glimpse of something utterly Other, something utterly beyond their means to defeat, and that they are lucky to have escaped with their lives.

So, that's my advice. Stop fucking explaining everything. The more you explain shit, the less lost and worried your audience will feel. This is what people mean when they talk about "the fear of the unknown". It's not the fear of things you don't know about - it's the fear of *not knowing*. Of suddenly being struck by the scope of your own ignorance. Of finding your ability to rationalise and reason breaking down before your eyes. Of having no clear path forwards. Of being paralyzed by the knowledge that the wrong choice right now could be fatal, and you have no idea which choice that is.

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>>53823139
...what if we use internal inconsistency to frighten?
Explanations conflict with already established facts.
Analysis of the situation reveals gaping holes in your audience's theories, but every bloody guess they take contradicts something.
Logic simply takes a walk in the park.
The human brain loves coherent schemes, and detests the unfathomable. So, instead of making the unknowable immense from the start, beginning with a pleasant stroll through the uncanny valley appears to be a valid strategy.
But of course, I'm probably saying things that have already been done.
>>53823469
>pic

>>53814359
Happened too me a lot as a child either thing about what >>53820837 said or that recuring fever dream where I was in a scholl bus in which there was a nuclear bomb (don't ask how I know, I couldn't even see it but there was one). I would watch a timer going from minutes to secondes to deci ect, like if the time was infinitly divided/slowed but at the same time would be aware of everything happening in the surrounding. Weirdly everything outside the bus would accelerate in time to the point of starting to decay.

Doctor Cohen, is father Pucci messing with me ?

Half-dream state can be quite funny too. Ever spoke with characters you created for stories then suddenly going back to awake state and being WTF ?

>>53812381
Posted from phone to say nice post

your players should never be in the attention of a cosmic horror, cosmic horrors wouldn't give two shits about humanity or mortal beings, they are completely above us.

your interaction with them should be limited to weird shit happening in their wake, and mysteries made by their existence.

>>53814729
Sounds pretty bad. I wrote some shit when I was a teenager too though.

>>53813593
This reminds me of how something that is as nearly related, yet ultimately distant, as the Chimpanzee bears a >90% genetic similarity to us. But yet the average person views them as being entirely different, and most don't even recognize our relatedness.

In the age of genetic of modification or transcendence, how can we expect to recognize what comes 'next' as being human? Or will it view us as we view our closest relatives? If we do things to ourselves that make us unrecognizable, how will we react? Will 'we' care?

>>53814780
Unfortunately we can only feasibly reach the rest of the local group. That's not to say that the local group isn't huge, but there's no way we can get anywhere else, given that other galactic clusters are accelerating faster than we can reach them (dark energy yo).
Unless we develop FTL, which is probably impossible, we're trapped here

Cosmic Horror sounds utopian to me. I live in a society where an education costs so much that even if you get the job you studied for you're still in debt for the rest of your life, where getting sick or injured once is enough to ruin your financially for the rest of your life, where you can work 24 hours a day and the people that control all the money will call you lazy and degenerate while they snort coke off a 12 year old hooker's ass, where we have two party screaming in the streets ready to start a civil war when either way the same 12 people that run things are in no danger of being unthroned (and in fact the riots make it easier for them to control the populace). Cthulhu eating the world or driving the world insane is no longer scary because 21st century life is such an inane hell that it honestly would be an improvement if some elder horror kills everyone.

Too bad no such thing comes, there is no easy way out except suicide. And after almost 40 years of me watching people get into screaming arguments over stupider and stupider things and the lies on the news getting more and more farfetched and people buying it all that noose is starting to look real friendly.

>>53826570
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCiFO7qV54E

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>>53826570
Basically this

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>>53826570
ow the edge

Cosmic horror, I think, depends heavily on context, which can alter how you approach things. The idealism and adherence to order/morality of yesterday needs to be shattered for it to work in historical settings. The nihilism, egoism, hedonism, and cynicism of today needs to be shattered for it to work in the modern age IMO.

Honestly, cosmic horror and pulp work together well specifically because the optimism provides a sharper contrast to the "true nature" of things.

>>53816960
I'd say it was the opposite. Look at all the effort a bunch of people go to to get one high priest of an elder god to wake up.

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OP back after a day, glad to see this is still going and wow you have given me me some grade A shit to think about
>people talking about Blame!
mah nigga.png, never thought of it that way
>Cthulhu and lovecraft
I think I get it now Squid monsters are passe. Cosmic horror should be relateable. man is the greatest source of cosmic horror. we are living proof that a sentient species can be unfeeling and amoral and our decadence and head in the sand mentality conveys it.
>experiencing cosmic horror
I don't know, I honestly cant remember what it was like to feel afraid of something bigger than my self. my bigest fears are loneliness and failure of my goals which seem to translate but are more petty and self centered than the themes I postulated were no longer relateable. Are the things I mentioned or things like mass plagues still "cosmic horror" ?because I don't think so. my main point was I don't think cosmic horror can exist with out some sort of manifest destiny that extends for generations beyond our own. fear for the self in an unfeeling universe just seems like Thursday to me
>player agency
here's my problem and the fuel behind my post. players just don't get scared in a group setting. the art of the camp fire horror story seems lost. at the end of the night they go back to their lives we don't take the fear with us. we take hopes and dreams and story ideas but never the fear. we're all horror fans to some degrees and can appreciate how a good horror movie or video game (I would say Silent Hill is the gold standard for us but that's personal horror with cosmic undertones) can stay with you but when you're together it's naturally comforting and I like that, just not for horror games.

>>53828388
>we take hopes and dreams and story ideas but never the fear.
Maybe it's because I just played my first ever CoC session or because of the character I specifically played, but I'm still thinking about the consequences of the campaign on his otherwise idealist worldview. Especially since the character is directly lifted from a series with a drastically different tone than CoC

>>53823682
You just made me reread Ruby Quest. You're right though, I forgot how little they explained. It's heavily implied that they uncovered some weird occult shit while excavating a new part of the lab, and THAT's what ultimately led to everything. But you learn almost nothing about their findings or the experiments, only who authorized them.

I also liked how each "monster" was a uniquely horrific entity with a name and an origin. Some are explained more than others, but each one was unique.

>>53828388
>Players just don't get scared in a group setting. the art of the camp fire horror story seems lost.
I disagree. A few months ago we had a hurricane hit our city, and the power went out, so my roommates and I hung out in the dark living room with the wind howling outside. We passed around an old lantern and took turns telling stories about our experiences with sounds coming from beneath the house. We had a really great time, despite the group normally not being that into roleplaying.

The trick is getting in the mood. Horror is prone to "loudmouth in the movie theater" syndrome. One person in the group who's not willing to set aside their disbelief and immerse themselves can singlehandedly ruin the atmosphere for everyone else. In my hurricane story, for example, it only worked because the atmosphere was just right and everyone wanted to share scary stories.

See this post: >>53813347 to see an atmosphere-crafting master at work.

>>53812381
You. You are the one who speaks the words as they are. I like you.

A better word to describe Lovecrafts ideas on horror would be existential horror.

Remember the story about the man in the cave assaulted by some unseen monster. Nothing about that story is cosmic, but it still has that nauseating cosmic horror realisation just before the cave guide kills the cave beast.

Cosmic horror can only succeed if it draws the public into the realisation that the character has.

>>53814359
ur dumb

>>53812381

>But even mindless, live-in-the-moment hedonism isn't any sort of protection for claiming you had a valid life.

Define what a "valid" life is then, because a hedonist would say that living in the moment for pleasure IS a valid life, and since it is one of the few livelihoods actually achievable you don't have much room for counterargument from what I can see.

>>53814780
>The fact that the endless stars might one day be within our reach
They won't, because they are infinite and you are finite. That's the point; it is beyond us and will forever be so.

>>53812152
if you ever meet the cosmic horror it's game over, you might land a blow but never anything that can hurt it. The only way to fight it is to make shure it has no way of getting to you. The moment you can physically "fight" the horror is the moment that you kill off all the potential horror of it. This is the age old problem with rpgs, if it has HP points you can kill it and the players start trying to come up with combos that would eat through the horrors defence and hp thus killing all the suspense and scaryness of the campaing

>>53833119
Do what I do.

>get close to the cosmic horror
>unbearable heat/cold/pressure/gravity/radiation/whatever

Basically, make it clear to the players that getting even within a few miles of some cosmically old entity that uses the global energy output of the United States of America of 10 years on a minute basis for its metabolism is a very very bad idea.

>>53828904
Seriously, people. Read Ruby Quest. I may have given away one of the best surprises by telling you it's a cosmic horror story, but it's a great story even without the twist, and is well worth your time.

>>53813846
it's a coping mechanism and the fact that it is so popular today is frankly quait funny to me seeing how absurdist and existentialism ripped it a new one. But frankly, the moment you face the realization that indeed nothing that you do matters in the grand sceam of things, and humans will most likely die out within 200-300 years it's hard not to fall into nihilism

>>53833119
Lovecraft protagonists defeated/killed cosmic horrors all the time, often by incredibly mundane means

>>53833153
I just let the players know that interacting with that thing that is remembers the big bang and has reality bending powers is bad new via different books/messages. If they see a multiple-times underlined passage in all the books on said subject saying "do NOT in any way or form try to interact with -insert horror here-" and they still do it, it's not my fault they got disintegrated

For what it's worth, one of the few books that's been truly unnerving has been All Tomorrows.
It's not even meant to be a Cosmic Horror thing but it's so factual and uncaring and the entire thing depicts human evolutionary radiation, but they all don't matter in the end.
I remember someone in /tg/ having the pdf, but I've lost it.

>>53833200
they killed aliens, even cthulu was too much for humies and he's fairly low on the power scale of lovecrafts "higher beings"

>>53833200
Like what?

Cthulhu was never hurt by the steamboat, and it wasn't even awake. It was just sleepwalking around Rlyeh.

Willet would have never been able to defeat Curwen if Willet hadn't unknowingly unleashed the unknown cosmic horror that was imprisoned in Curwen's lab. You know, the unseen entity that immediately started killing sorcerers and necromancers all over the planet.

The only things that came to mind is Yog-Sothoth's halfbred twins, but I highly doubt that the metaphysical representation of the multiverse gives a fuck about that.

>>53833220
They just hit him with a boat and then left. They went insane mind you, but they fought and "defeated" him, for a time

>>53833254
>Yog-Sothoth's halfbred twins
Both of them were mortal and niether of them had any real special powers that i know of. They were just mutants

>>53833260
they did not defeat him, the stars wernt right so he just wokre up for a second, saw that he still can go back to sleep and fucked right off. The steam boat did nothing

>>53818541
Why have cultists at all? Just have a different kind of adventure and this thing in the background.

>>53833379
I like using cosmic horrors like volcanoes are often used in pulp stories.

>ooooh heroes and villains, you better run... the volcano is stirring... RUN YOU FOOLS!

>>53833391
Dishonored has some in game books for example talking about planet eating things out there.

>>53813602
This happens to me too. It only happens when I am alone thinking too much. It basically paralyzes me for a second as I feel like my brain can't comprehend the concept I am considering. Then it passes.

The problem with cosmic horror is less our apathy as our acceptance of the true nature of cosmic horror. In the past cosmic horror was a reaction to the belief that we'd understood the world. But what if we really didn't? What if it turns out all our science is lies, our knowledge has led us astray, and the universe is an incomprehensible madness where we're insignificant?

Nowadays we call that quantum theory.

For cosmic horror to be scary, it has to recapture that same fear - that everything you know is wrong, and that the true nature of the universe is horrifying and antithetical to your beliefs. And you have to do that without making it comedic, /pol/itical, or otherwise stepping on that dawning horrified revaluation of everything. Which is hard as fuck.

But giant angry cosmic squid is probably the worst way to handle it, because they ARE passé. Every hack who thinks they can do cosmic horror goes for calamari.

>>53833262
One of them was larger than a barn and was invisible, completely ignoring the fact that he was essentially a walking pile of spare organic parts.

>>53834475
I always bank on the "impossible geometries" part of Cosmic Horror. A big squid isn't scary. A SOMETHING that's all angles and has parts passing through itself as it moves is. Same with a monster that looks less like anything definable and more like an overenthusiastic Creator started slapping organs and limbs on and didn't know when to stop (even if it's to the detriment of the monster. ESPECIALLY if it's to the detriment: it helps convey that this is something that fundamentally DOESN'T BELONG in the world of Man that got here anyways.)

>>53812932
Great post. Thank you for your contribution

>>53812932
>It is not that we defeated the fear of the unknown, it is that we blinked, turned around, and turned up the music like the cowardly caged rats that we are, and now shudder in fear of civilization itself not perfectly reflecting the trite and hedonistic playthings we entertain ourselves with while awaiting death.
What exactly would've been the proper response?

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>>53816960
I'd assumed that was just because Elder Gods were evenly distributed throughout and fairly common in the universe. Earth didn't have a higher concentration of them than any other chunk of space rock.

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>>53813712
While I have a total different outlook in live I think his ideas are fascinating.

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>>53833260
I made this just for you. Because this boat shit needs to die.

>>53813846
Just like religion

>>53833186
>absurdist and existentialism

I wouldn't call most of the arguments either of these two schools use very compelling personally. I may be a tad pessimistic though.

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I think another major issue with the whole concept is how difficult it is to put into play outside of literature.
Visual media like games and movies can only present so much, and that's without acknowledging the directors organizing them who tend not to take creative risks or think outside the box, and those who do don't always succeed.. And with tabletop games there's an element of interaction that needs to be properly handled so that something feels (as someone put it earlier) Other, without making it either utterly pointless or trite.
With literature you simply present an idea and prompt the reader's mind to twist itself to tatters trying to fully conceptualize it. Or you just twist the bounds of the medium itself, like House of Leaves does.

>>53826570
Humanity is a garbage fire and it always has been, nothing has changed.

>>53836657
Thank you mate. Great work.

What if a party member is... off? Just enough to put some doubts in the merry band.
No one knows if the given name is true.
Records (or even memories) of their first encounter are vague or dubious at best.
Any emotions shown seem fake, or exaggerated, and their behaviour would be acceptable in a cheap "How to appear human" manual.
Their capabilities make them vital to the group, but their routine, their notes, and the methods they use are unorthodox to the point of incomprehensibility.
They alternate moments of almost total isolation to ones of constant interaction with others.
Their sense of humour is unsettling at best.
How does one portray such a character properly?
Forgive me for my horrendous writing and probably overused ideas.

The crux of cosmic horror is an intense, psychedelic experience of ultimate insignificance and ignorance. This is quite difficult to achieve through writing or art. Maybe try dosing your players with psilocybin first, and leading them in a guided meditation.

Kind of. We live in the wake of philosophical projects such as existentialism and absurdism, meant to make peace with the fact that we wont be around forever.

>>53812381
Weak post. Whether you lived a valid life in an intrinsic sense or not is a completely inconsequential matter; what ultimately matters is that you find your own life valid.

>>53833186
Neither of them really ripped nihilism a new one, since they are both at their core nihilistic philosophies. They just build upon the basic conclusions of nihilism.

>>53840330
Nihilism isn't a philosophy. Nihilism is the absence of a philosophy.

Nihilism is the crying of retarded uneducated religious people realising that they spend all their lives believing in a fairytale, and now they're all sad that nothing they did in life has any value.

>>53840874
No, nihilism is a set of specific doctrines of whether certain ideas (morals, existential purpose, knowledge, political ideologies, parts of things; representing moral, existential, epistemological, political and mereological nihilism) have intrinsic worth or not. Existentialists and absurdists argue that life does not have intrinsic meaning, meaning they are fundamentally nihilistic.

>>53812152
>Cosmic Horror is a monster you fight
You dont understand. Cosmic Horror just happens to you and it doesnt care about you.

The best you can arguably do about Cosmic Horror is survive it.

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>>53834654
[Screams Geometrically]

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>>53841922
Just gonna dump CoC Stuff

>>53840874
>Nihilism isn't a philosophy. Nihilism is the absence of a philosophy.
Making the conscious choice to follow no philosophy would still be a philosophical choice.

>>53840319
>Whether you lived a valid life in an intrinsic sense or not is a completely inconsequential matter; what ultimately matters is that you find your own life valid.
Some people think like you, some think like >>53812381, and neither side can understand the other on that particular matter, because those points of view a so fundamentaly different.

>>53812852
Maybe he has a french keyboard.
Maybe he's french.

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>>53841971

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>>53842019

>>53812415
I have had precisely this feeling, except instead of horror, it was relief, wonder, and possibly sexual stimulation. All about perspective I guess.

>>53826570
>where getting sick or injured once is enough to ruin your financially for the rest of your life
i think this might be a lot better than when getting sick or injured once was enough to kill you

>>53824607

Weak bait.

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>>53834475
honestly and I know I'm a fedora-lord for saying this but the scariest cosmic horror is The Bible. the universe isn't an unflenching uncaring beast you don't end with death. Worse yet death only makes things worse unless you live by a very stringent code and honestly believe it, not simpely react out of fear. what if all of science is wrong and the only path to salvation is through self deprival and ritual castigation.

>>53818541
>You need something for the players to interact with, you can't just sit them down and lecture them on how horrifying it'd be if your an elder god happened to kill the world today.

Having cultists and worshippers clawing at their faces while screaming purple prose is still just one step away from explaining it directly.

Imply it. There are plenty of ways. Read Roadside Picnic.

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>>53841871
>impossible geometries
>posts ramiel
bruh

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>>53843163
yup

>>53812152
No. It's just the 'horror' element has passed from 'god is real and you are irrelevant to him' to 'all of your science and understanding is meaningless, you don't know JACK SHIT'

>>53843314
Science acknowledges we don't know jack shit and philosophy tells us to live our lives regardless. can we stop repeating this argument.

>>53842002
copy pasted it actually, and wow this is long thread gotta catch up /tg/ gets shit done as always

>>53842854
I mean not really... it's the life in servitude vs. freedom in death debate. also only applies in the third world and Burgerstan

>>53843489

No, because 'belief' in science has become a form of secular religion, and nobody reads philosophers.

Whether you like it or not, those are broad cultural realities.

>>53843489
>Science acknowledges we don't know jack shit
Except it still flaunts concepts such as 'laws' of physics, and 'rules' of the universe which is uses as a basis to gain further understanding.

Cosmic Horror is in understanding there is no understanding, everything you based reality on is a lie, your simple human mind is incapable of ever really understanding, and you will perish and cease to exist like the monocellular slug you are while giants stride across planets contemplating dimensions you cannot even conceptualize.

>>53812932
>Cosmic Horror is fundamentally about the fear of the irrelevance of the human species and of human achievement. The reason it seems passe now is that in the early 20th century that irrelevance was frightening and horrific because humanity was considered to HAVE a purpose beyond wallowing in its own filth and squabbling over fancies and memes.
>Now that irrelevance has become normalized and is frankly used as a convenient excuse to strive for nothing except material excess or inane achievements of social and economic justice.
>>53812995
>if you want to capture the same feeling of cosmic horror--which is ultimately the fear of your values being rendered inert and moot, you must instead tap into the same part of the brain which has been repurposed by our social conditioning to distract us from the fact that our lives no longer hold meaning: Tap into the fear of having those toys, those distractions, stripped away.

IOW, the latest variant of horror is objective morality.

Imagine [religion x] was right. Not the easy to hate crazy fundamentalist version, but the vanilla form stereotyped hard-working farmers or such somewhere out there believe - iconic neutral good or lawful good people.

Gods that genuinely care about you without loopholes or twists. Gods that will wreck your shit like a flamethrower torching wasps if you aren't objectively LG for the rest of your life.

Being nice won't save you. Going with the flow won't save you. Being a good liar won't save you.

Give up your values and face to righteousness.

>>53843934
most people get philosophy second hand and most people are agnostics in practice. anyone who's remotely a scifi/fantsy fan has heard the tropes and is jaded to them. yeah maybe lovecraft still scares "normies" but normies don't typical play horror ttrpgs
>>53844058
all you're saying is we are never going to understand life, thats a given people have been searching for meaning for years but no one has found it. we're in an age we're we either accept that, be sad about it, die, or continue despite it (paraphrasing Camus). it's not scary its just life and the being crushed part is death we don't understand that either and ceasing to exist sounds like the least painful option compared with religion. death is still scary but complete oblivion is always a possibility and we're numb to it. shit I remember as a teen being terrified of CERN, which actually is pretty lovecraftian like the machine in Narlythotep.

>>53844198
THIS. In the age of science the scariest thing is there being a man who controls your every whim. if he is beyond you why care? I could see bring back the cult like elements like yeah that fishing town you love? they're sustained by mutilating children and that's the only answer. sure you can stop the cult but you damn the town and all the innocents who don't know about the dark truth.

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>>53840874
That's where you're wrong kiddo

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>>53812932
>It is not that we defeated the fear of the unknown, it is that we blinked, turned around, and decided to go on with our existences anyway because there's nothing we can do about it anyway

FIFY. It's faggots like you that make faggots like >>53813846 believe nihilism is all gothy emo trash. Fuck you. Yea, existence is more or less meaningless and we could be erased without the universe giving a shit. Fucking so? What should we do? Commence with weeping and gnashing of teeth? Break down society utterly and devolve into Mad Max shit? Or how about we accept it and move on with our lives? Because that's what the human race did. If everyone was just 'turning up the music' and ignoring it, Cosmic Horror would still be just as effective as it was before. But it's not. No one gives a shit about how humanity is a tiny little speck of dust. Acceptance is not willful ignorance, you little shit.

>>53844942
Yes, it is known you have the mind of a petulant teenager. No need to flaunt it.

>>53845778
I mean you're the one angsting over it

The internet, of course, is plagued by the chest-beating of ennui-plagued hipsters and over-stimulated wannabe aesthetes whose internet credibility hangs on well they think they can convince each other that they've seen and done everything to boredom.

They're usually followed closely behind by a smaller, but still closely-related, horde of dedicated internet kiddies who bravely brag to each other that they don't see what the big deal behind horror is, because if anything scary were to happen to them they'd simply have no curiosity about it, and if they found out they bought a haunted house they'd simply throw it away and buy a new one, and if horror insists on coming to them they'd just close their eyes, pull out a gun, and shoot everything, before running away (eyes still closed!) having seen nothing to be terrified about. "That's what I would do - it's just common sense!"

1/3

>>53846884
As for the Shoggoths, in addition to the things already mentioned, there's also the Shoggoths' remarkable ability to imperfectly mimic and imitate intelligent beings, as the imperfect creation of alien beings Shoggoths understand even less than they understand human beings. People who are dealing with Shoggoths disguised as humans are dealing with a horror from the Uncanny Valley: something close to human, but not close enough, saying things in poorly-grasped human words that approximate human thoughts and ideas, but fail to be close enough to be right. The scientists exploring the city of the Old Ones in "At the Mountains of Madness" were able to detect just how far off the Shoggoths' ability to imitate the Elder Things was by looking at the Shoggoths' best imitations of Elder Thing writing, art, and architecture, and the imperfection was unsettling... one is left only to imagine what an imperfect, shocking, and thoroughly demoralizing mockery the Shoggoths would make of trying their best to form themselves into imitations of the Elder Things themselves... or if they were to try to imitate human literature or art, or human beings.... I think people in general tend to underestimate how sensitive they are to a sense of something being wrong when they are exposed to The Other or The Outsider (it's an important survival mechanism, and lacking that survival mechanism is a weird thing for so many Internet Tough Guys to brag about....)

>>53846906
Lovecraft's characters were also extremely sensitive, perceptive, and intelligent people who happened to already have access to several pieces of a mind-shattering puzzle, by way of some circular hints found in their mutual reading of the Necronomicon. Seeing a Shoggoth in person supplied additional pieces of that puzzle, which toppled those characters' perception of the world to its foundations, and revealed an alien ruin in its place. That is something that might not translate very well to a general audience: I think that those who truly believe in something may have some grasp on what it would be like to have that belief genuinely threatened, and those who are deep thinkers with a pretty good grasp on reality can understand what it would be like to have that grasp revealed to be an illusion, but I think a general audience with a more malleable sense of reality and little faith in the reality or objectivity of anything in particular may miss the significance, or even struggle to grasp it.* (And again, not being able to see a different point of view is a strange thing for so many InternetTough Guys - especially Internet Tough Guys into Role Playing - to brag about!)

>>53846912
*(To put it another way, Lovecraft's characters in "At the Mountains of Madness" were almost certainly atheists with a firm and objective belief in evolution with white Anglo-Saxons as the pinnacle of evolutionary development, and their descent into the city of the Old Ones tore down every belief those men held sacred, until at last they were faced with a monstrous version of truth, a truth in the form of a whole series of revelations that just begins with the realization that, after all, "God" actually did create life on Earth, and "God" was/is/shall-be-again a walking, talking, winged, radiate carrot from another dimension. And that's just the start of the joke - the punchline didn't come until after many pages of other such revelations!

A post-modern role-player who has no idea what it's like to believe in anything may very well be incapable of understanding the horror and madness of having his/her beliefs stripped away, and replaced with one of Lovecraft's little cosmic jokes, and perhaps might even have trouble understanding that in "AtMoM" a Shoggoth is as much the punchline to a pile-up of cosmic jokes as it was a nightmare from the pits of horror... a hideous joke on mankind, a joke on Shoggoths, a joke on the extinct Old Ones, a joke on the revived Old Ones....)

I think elder scrolls actually does some cosmic horror right
when souls inside soul gems are used, the soul is sent to the soul cairn. iirc, the souls there are collected by alien entities that then use your soul as currency. currency for WHAT, it never gives any information for. i imagine having your soul traded by an alien entity to an even MORE alien entity in an EVEN MORE alien place is pretty cosmically horrifying

>>53844198
>objective morality as bad

Nigga wat. Moral relativism should've been educated out of you by philosophy 104.

>>53847540
Objective morality is philosophically unsustainable, since moral judgments don't refer to anything within the real world (something happened, its moral status exists nowhere but in your head).

>>53843163
The Book of Revelation is some cosmic horror shit, that's for sure.

Though one could make an argument that it does end at judgment, certain sects believe in annihilationism.

>>53846884
>>53846906
>>53846912
>>53846944
>being this asshurt that someone doesn't find your form of horror scary

Do you consider it a sign of social decay that people don't dig slasher films anymore?

>>53841467
You are retarded. Existentialists and absurdists state that the only meaning in life is whatever you find meaning in personally.

Existentialism and absurdism are violently opposed to nihilism.

>>53844728
'nihilistic' hedonism falls under absurdism.

>>53846884
>>53846912
>>53846906
>>53846944
all that projecting you're right about the a malevolent strange god is scary bit but the other things are just expies for lovecrafts fear of "other" people and that they were gonna consume his culture. I mean it sort of exists today but we acknowledge that the ideologies are human not some far off creation. Yes I'm being vague cause we've gone so far without mentioning *that* part of his work but you kind of have to acknowledge it. IMO cosmic horror has changed Lovecraft remains a progenitor and is to be respected but he's no scarier than Poe at this point.

>>53812932
Fuck off and go complain about SJWs on twitter or something Jimmy

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>>53844728

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>>53850804
Yes Lovecraft was racist I freely admit it.
But just because he used race for the Other and we live in a world where race mixing isn't a sin doesn't mean we can't use his work and themes. We just need to find new things to replace the "Other".

Poe and Lovecraft haven't become less scary we have become a society that refuses to enjoy horror in the same way we used to.
See >>53812932

>>53847832
I consider it a sign of social and intellectual stagnation yes. People deliberately limit the kinds of art they can interact with by putting of mental barrier to create an image. Rather than enjoying a horror story, people try there hardest NOT to enjoy horror because they're afraid it makes them look weak. They don't consider the deeper implications and don't read things that challenge their philosophy too.

>>53812152
>what can we do to make cosmic horror scary again

Cosmic horror is still scary. We just choose to not look at it.

In order to introduce cosmic horror to a game insert the following:

-An infinite universe.
-Most of the universe is beyond the players' reach and understanding.
-Eliminate resurrection, raise dead, afterlife, the concept of a soul. If a creature dies, it never comes back. Death should be the ultimate rival to your party. Not death from damage, but certain death from old age.
-There are no gods, or the gods are just evolved players or another kind of powerful beings.
-Slowly disintegrate any notion of good or evil in your campaign. The universe is indifferent to petty ethics and morals. Most people are just defending their ego.
-Introduce cultists, government over reach, powerful ancient secrets and let them escalate. Then show how small they are when they are viewed within a limited existence. Death is the ultimate equalizer.
-You should give your players the ability to evolve their characters beyong humanity in order to reach immortality (long term goal).
-Briefly let the players get in touch with an indifferent universe that would kill them without hesitation. Teach them that they should choose their battles wisely. If they try to confront superior powers, kill them instantly.

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>>53813712
Love his short stories for their moodiness and originality, love his one novel which is *hilarious*, so I was quite looking forward to his philosophical treatise but found it disappointing.

Seems like it would be impossible to adapt Ligotti into a roleplaying game, but damn I would love for someone to try.

>>53836324
Devastating evil. Love it. But fuck if I can imagine how to make a game of it.

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>>53812152

It bothers me that all these ammoral gods are so obviously dark looking. Almost like the authors wanted us to think they are evil and satanic.

Give us a divine looking, uncaring or zealous being. That is cosmic horror that is actually efficient

>>53826570
I'm just imagining something me Medieval peasant or modern resident of Mogadishu reading this and going "Awww... the poor baby..."

>>53847540
Not bad. Alien.

People inside the modern hugbox freak the fuck out upon hearing their preferred lifestyle might not be the best for civilization's success.

A discovery that god [or at least morality] is real would result in mental breakdowns that make Lovecraftian protagonists seem iron-willed by contrast. Imagine the inevitable "we must kill god because he hates gays! HFY!" and the inevitable crushing failure...

>>53855441
this. I think the new cosmic horror for many people might be that a judging god exists.

>>53855441
>>53855662
The problem is, a story using that isn't going to be as successful (in the sense of evoking fear) in this age as Lovecraft's work was in his. When Lovecraft was writing, we were learning how vast the universe is, and how we could disappear in the blink of an eye. Obviously, learning about that sort of thing when you don't know about it is going to make people anxious, which he was able to play on in his stories. The sort of people that would feel that anxiety from an objective morality are the people who accept it as true already, and they'll be thinking that because they're following the "right" one, there's nothing to worry about.

Now, if the Ten Commandments were found carved into the surface of one of Saturn's moons in Hebrew, or we made contact with a species that practiced Buddhism, that would definitely get the popular imagination turning for it, but I don't imagine that happening any time soon.

>>53853729
Or, OR, maybe, just maybe, it doesn't scare them because our culture has changed.

>>53844942
But the vast majority of people are turning up the music and ignoring it - if they're not actively denying it altogether. The reason why cosmic horror has become less effective over the years is that we've developed and refined our delusions and denialism and thus have grown more resistant to cognitive dissonance.

That said, you're not wrong about nihilism being more than a gothy emo trash phase... albeit with the caveat that in my experience, it's healthier both for yourself and your peers to contrast the reality of a nihilist universe with our ability to create meaning at a personal or, arguably, interpersonal scale. Just because the universe doesn't care doesn't mean that we can't, after all.

>>53849175
Do they believe life has an intrinsic (inherent to itself and objectively valid) meaning? If no, they are existential nihilists. This is basic shit.

>>53856118
Provide some evidence for you first assertion.

>>53849175
But that's the whole end goal of nihilism according to Nietzsche who believes the ubermensch is able to transcend nihilism and create their own meaning.

>>53813347
It seems obvious to me that the real culprits were kobolds.

>>53845778
What is so 'petulant teenager' about enjoying life despite the absolute truth that we could die in the next few seconds and there'd be nothing we could do about it?

Enjoying life in the face of oblivion is honestly the most mature reaction possible.

>>53856118
No, you're still pretty much wrong, news at 11.

Unless you can tell us why you know it's one thing and not the other. We're waiting, faggot.

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>>53849175
Existentialism and absurdism are both answers to the premise defined by nihilism. They're not violently opposed to it as much as they simply deem nihilism to be incomplete (absurdism less so than existentialism).

>>53856253
How about pic related, for starters? The whole purpose of practically any religion out there is to protect the human mind from all sorts of existential angst and to provide them with the moral framework that they fail to find in the material world.

>>53856919
Pretty much. Nietzsche is frequently written off as elitist, but I'd argue he's lonely rather - his works consistently encourage others to join him in his quest for meaning.

>>53856008
Our culture has not changed so much that we lack the ability to have existential fear.

>>53812152
>what can we do to make cosmic horror scary again
what can we do to make the steam engine impressive and relevant again?

>>53816960
I'm not sure what makes you think that the color out of space cared about those farmers
The ayylmaos at the southpole weren't particularly interested on humans either, they were extinct by the time we found them after all, it was their legacy and it's implications that were scary. And the ayylmaos were only interested in us because they're history nerds. The scary thing about them is what happens during their mass exodus across spacetime, and what happens to the natives.

>>53833510
>>53813602

Holy shit, I get this multiple times a day. I thought I didn't think it's this common, but for me it's usually followed by intense panic.

>>53859821
It probably isn't that common, since we have had like three people in this thread post about it. As one of them it has only happened maybe three times in my life, but each moment was intensely memorable and the kind of thing that made me feel a need to go lie down and think for a bit.

I can't imagine experiencing it multiple times a day. That sounds like an actual hell.

>>53854060
Would be nice to see

>>53858756
No, but it has changed so that these things that used to captivate our imaginations do not. We're inundated in messages that our lives are short, meaningless, and can end at any time. The cultural conditions are not the same now as when Lovecraft was writing, just as they are not the same now as when slasher films were riding a wave of media hysteria over high profile serial killers.

I know you're butthurt that your pet author isn't considered scary anymore, but the fact is his work isn't timeless.

>>53858554
>The whole purpose of practically any religion out there is to protect the human mind from all sorts of existential angst and to provide them with the moral framework that they fail to find in the material world.

Religion does a whole lot of things, trying to boil it down to a single thing is idiotic. Many people join a religion out of simple cultural inertia, and maintain it due to social pressures; in the largely secular west, many of them are declining.

>>53861551
You're not wrong, but I don't see anything in your post that contradicts what I've said - I maintain that religion's primary purpose is to deflect the implications of a nihilist universe, but I'd be an idiot indeed if I claimed that this is the one single thing that religion has on offer.

>>53846944
I think a decent way to do this in modern context is to have agency be taken away. Nothing you did mattered, instead some "thing" made you to fit a purpose you achieved.

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>>53844058
That's not really horrifying at all; we've mostly come to accept it.
Sure; let's say the "laws" of physics fall out from underneath us tomorrow when we find out particle–wave duality is just the surface manifestation of some spooky space magic perturbations.

Who cares?

Everything we've built still works, because they're based on approximations that work well enough for the job. We work with Newton's "laws" every day even though we know they're technically factually incorrect. The economy will still run, and economists will still fail to understand it, because at that level of detail it doesn't matter whether people are made of stardust or an Elder God's pocket lint or patterns of electrons in a simulation.
And, sure, in the grand scheme of things, life is pretty insignificant, but that sort of existential dread is blown away in an instant by the much more concrete dread of a missile crisis, and that in turn by the dread of being called into your boss' office during an economic recession.
It's fine and dandy to talk about "dimensions you cannot even conceptualize" but at some point these are just chains of words that no longer carry any meaning to us, and you remember that this was all written by some guy who probably doesn't know what he's writing about himself, and it kills the whole illusion.
If you want proper cosmic horror, look the other way. Look down. Stop and think about how exactly pic related leads to good and evil and free will and democracy and all the things we hold near and dear to our hearts—
—and then realize that it doesn't, except in the strange little viewport of the faulty fuzzy-logic machine made of meat inside your skull, and just what the fuck exactly are you living for?

Then move on with your life because it's the weekend and it's nice and sunny outside and you're feeling a bit peckish.

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>>53826570
>cosmic horror is a utopia because even though I'm objectively among the richest of the rich both planetwide and in history, I'm aware of these other people who are richer than me!!
You can make an improvement right now. Don't wait for the elder horror.

>>53848010
ebin :DD